Tons of ways to enjoy the fandom without giving her any money.

Why not sail the high seas?

Last time I checked it was a little more complicated than that. I think the Wizarding World is now owned by WB, whereas Harry Potter is where Rowling gets royalties. That’s where the distinction between the two lives, which is why there are so many things being spun up lately.

Political organisations like Remain

If they’re a reader of fanfiction that is typically one of the major changes to the story that’s done. Fanfiction has effectively rewritten the entire series to be more palatable at this point. Bonus points that you can read it without giving Rowling any money too.

None of that is correct.

• The slave thing was about brainwashing and exploitation, and how it’s wrong.
• I don’t know what you’re referring to with the apartheid thing.
• The goblins are antisemitic because they have big noses? That’s been a staple of goblin anatomy since they were created.
• The main character becomes an anti dark sorcerer guy, like counterterrorism, so nothing to do with enforcing all that gubbins anyway.

Oh, and thanks for the ‘/s’. You know, otherwise I really would’ve thought you were giving it a compliment after a full paragraph of invective.

apartheid is right because the other sentient people look different

This is what the fucking bad guys believe, it’s not like the books are advocating for apartheid. What the hell kind of criticism is this.

While I agree with you in most things (especially the jewish stereotype, yikes) I must call you on the defense of slavery. I always got the impression we weren’t supposed to agree with the magic world view of house elves. I think the only point of Hermione going over the top was showing how something so hideous had become so normalized and accepted by good people in the magic world. Hermione being an outsider sees how fucked up it is and calls it.

Things are not black white. As fucked up as JK Rowling is, it doesn’t mean everything she says is bad. She tried to make some good points…others sucked ass. It is what it is.

Anyone who thinks “shacklebolt” is some sort of callback to slavery need to have their brain rebooted. That’s Qanon levels of pattern-finding.

They instance they’re on automatically censors certain words the admins consider slurs. “Bitch” is one of them.

[EXPLETIVE DELETED]

I don’t have to imagine. I’m a bald white man. People think I’m a cop or a Nazi. I’m the opposite. My only tattoo turns out to be used by Nazis as a symbol. Not commonly but I have seen it.

I go to Lowe’s a lot for work supplies. Workers there commonly tell me I’m forgetting my veteran’s discount. I have never been in the military. It’s crazy how people just try to put you in a bucket.

It’s not that deep. It’s a fantasy world that people can suspend themselves in and each person has their own self made story. If we start nitpicking which fantasy worlds have done something politically motivated we would be left with literally nothing to read/watch.

JKR is an absolute cunt who has indeed damaged the image of the HP universe but for those who just care about that fantasy world because magic is cool that’s their get away from the hell that is real life.

This is why I said I don’t trust their opinions on media. This group lacks any media literacy and just looks for “roller coaster” type experiences. There’s so many better children’s/YA fantasy out there, many a direct response of HP, but to them, they’ll just be imitations to the sort of people who can’t read subtext.

Ching Chong

This is so absurd I can’t help but laugh.

Great compassionate discussion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/harrypotter/comments/gvkjz2/can_we_just_acknowledge_that_the_main_irish/fsqlrh8/

It’s not so much that he’s INTO blowing things up, more so that his spell work is often atrocious enough that things just explode.

I actually have a headcanon to explain this. We can sort of weakly infer that magic is influenced by the caster as well as just the incantation. Lily did a lot of stuff with flowers (even before she could control it properly), Hermione’s magic is always particularly detailed, Ginny seems to have a penchant for nasty hexes, Lockhart is inexplicably good at memory charms. Maybe something about Seamus’ magic just naturally gravitates towards exploding?

Never have I identified with Seamus as much as I do now

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/09/jk-rowling-under-fire-for-appropriating-navajo-tradition-history-of-magic-in-north-america-pottermore

And his spells blowing up is just the films.

Wait, wasn’t there explosion by Seamus somewhere in first book?

I disagree in principle as i am biased against alcoholism, but yeah. Limits of tolerance aren’t the same for everyone.

Seeing someone deny the womanhood of two women who aren’t white and calling that racist only seems like a smear if you aren’t familiar with the long history of associating femininity with whiteness, and more specifically associating black women with masculinity. Black girls and women are consistently viewed as more masculine and less innocent than white girls and women.

Waiting for JKR to say “I’m doing a racism” before calling things she’s said racist essentially means never calling her racist.

There is a history of racists denying non-white women their womanhood. See Michelle Obama.

I hate that the tankies have stolen the phrase “blue MAGA”, because I came up with it to describe them and I thought It was pretty eloquent. They have very similar thought processes, just support different things.

That’s probably why they started using it, actually, to rob it if its descriptive power.

You mean imply, not infer. If you’re going to use big words you don’t understand to try and sound smart, look them up in the dictionary first.

thank you

It’s true, for every bra I own, ciswomen everywhere collectively own one bra less. For every estrogen pill I hope, testosterone starts to form in ciswomen… I actually kidnapped a TERF off the street and grafted my penis onto her in order to have my vaginoplasty!

(I am being VERY sarcastic)

“I support trans people’s rights to live as they want, but I value womanhood and take pride in my womanhood. As such, I want trans people to live as they want, but I want to keep the idea of womanhood separate because I value it as a space for women.”

If that was what she was saying it’d be fine. You would likely need to do a little more than 5 minutes of searching to understand what all the commotion is about but I might be able to provide some context that would help. If you actually want to read all of this.

Let’s take the essay she wrote on her website.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

You can read that court case ruling and see examples of what comments Maya made, through tweets, slack, and otherwise. JK puts transphobic in quotes and words her comment in a way that is implying that she does not agree with that label. This example from the document is pretty on the nose though:

I believe that it is impossible to change sex or to lose your sex. Girls grow up to be women. Boys grow up to be men. No change of clothes or hairstyle, no plastic surgery, no accident or illness, no course of hormones, no force of will or social conditioning, no declaration can turn a female person into a male, or a male person into a female.

Then the essay says:

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

Magdalen Berns wasn’t “a great believer in the importance of biological sex”, she was openly transphobic and compared it to blackface.

So twice JK is defending clearly transphobic people and downplaying it to things like, oh they just tweeted something or just believed in biological sex (whatever that means) and were canceled by activists online.

Then later in the essay she says:

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

That does happen when there’s an increase in awareness, access, and acceptance of something.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

With this, JK is pushing the idea that trans people (especially teens) are confused, or are just following a trend, or being persuaded to be trans. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is a made up term implying people wake up one day and decide to be trans, minimizing what is, for many trans people, years of hiding their identity from their family and friends. The study she’s mentioning from Lisa Littman did not involve trans people, and is actually only a survey of 256 parents of trans people. Here’s a bit from the paper:

[…] Most of the parents (80.9%) answered affirmatively that their child’s announcement of being transgender came “out of the blue without significant prior evidence of gender dysphoria.” Respondents were asked to pinpoint a time when their child seemed not at all gender dysphoric and to estimate the length of time between that point and their child’s announcement of a transgender-identity. Almost a third of respondents (32.4%) noted that their child did not seem gender dysphoric when they made their announcement and 26.0% said the length of time from not seeming gender dysphoric to announcing a transgender identity was between less than a week to three months. […]”

So she’s basing this entire section of her essay on a survey of 256 parents from various groups online like the “Parents of transgender children” facebook group and making it seem like there’s a trend of teens, again, waking up one day and deciding to be trans. This “republishing” that JK mentions made corrections to the paper and included an apology from the editor. But, JK represents it as just outrage from activists online.

Then she pulls out this classic:

[…] The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.

No, you probably wouldn’t have tried to transition to escape womanhood. Being a Trans Man is not some vacation from the struggles of being a woman. She even acknowledges some of their struggles later.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60–90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria

I’m going to quote another site I read for this one:

Some studies do show that prepubescent children showing signs of Gender Dysphoria will likely “grow out of it” (though these studies have had their methods, data and analysis called into question), they also show that if Gender Dysphoria persists into adolescence that “it is almost certainly permanent”.

Then the meat and potatoes of this, natal women’s safety:

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman — and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones — then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

Trans women have been using women’s spaces for decades, this certificate process makes no difference. If this was going to be an issue it would’ve already been one by now. Instead she’s fearmongering this idea that Men will all of a sudden with no other effort just claim to be a woman and start sexually assaulting women. The truth is trans women face many of the same threats of sexual violence and in JKs world they would have to use the same facilities as men.

This is, in part, why she’s receiving all of the hate. Death threats and all of that are over the top but that’s not an issue that’s specific to her, people suck. However, despite the polite way she words everything, she defends other transphobic people and is pushing to deny trans people rights and healthcare in the interest of Women’s safety using unfounded claims based on misinformation and bad data.

She said much worse, and even that statement is terrible because it translates to…

“I support Transpeople as long as they agree not to exist, because that makes my womanhood inherently less valuable.”

She has also likened us to rapists and abusers, claiming that we are only “pretending” to be women to attack the “real” women

And I believe you were the first person to say anything about wanting her dead.

Nope its just that. You for some reason seem to put it in the nicest light possible, but thats your perspective.

I think its easy enough to show how she is trying to actually harm certain people, which is absurd to worry about for a writer but here we are.

Nope. That’s it. This is literally what people want her dead for.

Draw your own conclusion on who’s crazy, but this is all she has ever expressed - that she takes pride/has suffered in being a woman, and also she is kinda gatekeeping the title and saying trans women don’t know that suffering. Which is actually true when you think about it - trans women presumably grew up as boys, and were not forced to adhere to the womanly gender roles or told they would be shit at career x or y, were never afraid of being raped in a dark alley, were never afraid of how much they had to drink or if they left their drink unsupervised for a moment…

Of course trans people aren’t getting the right treatment either, but all this lady has ever said is that her experience as a woman is fundamentally different from theirs, and wants it acknowledged that women have these issues. This is what everyone is attacking her for.

You’re welcome. I am disappointed by all the downvotes floating around. I feel like your question was sincere and my answer is the cleanest cut through the flak of all of these. A reminder to everyone: downvotes are not for disagreements.

The remarks she makes have actual political sway, especially in the UK. She often talks of how “young women” will be permanently deformed by HRT and how we must stop this threat to womanhood. Well, they recently banned puberty blockers there, and I am sure that her influence had a real effect here. Politicians don’t just listen to other politicians.

Something else that I could mention is that despite being only like 50% extreme in what she is saying, she has written a book featuring a transvestite serial killer. On it’s own, that wouldn’t be so bad – I mean, in fiction anyone is allowed to be a villain, not just cis straight white men – but when combined with everything she’s been doing with her anti-transgender activism, it’s kind of telling that she has some actual hatred, it’s not just polite logical arguments. It really makes you wonder what she isn’t saying.

Consensus reality is a social construct, and nowhere is this clearer than in gender. Whoever has the social power to enforce their beliefs on others decides reality. This will continue as long as we have powerful groups, and/or the construct of reality