J.K. Rowling is embroiled in a fresh row with another Harry Potter actor over transgender rights.
Following exchanges of fire with Daniel Radcliffe and others, Rowling has blasted David Tennant after the Goblet of Fire star voiced strident views on those who speak out against trans rights.
During an appearance at the British LGBT Awards over the weekend, he called on British equalities minister Kemi Badenoch to “shut up” after she advocated for banning trans women from entering women’s toilets and sports teams.
In an interview at the same event, Tennant called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon.”
Earlier in the week, Rowling branded people like Tennant the “gender Taliban.” In posts on X (once Twitter) on Friday, she expanded her comments to address Tennant’s “wrong side of history” quote.
Rowling wrote: “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders.”
She added: “For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist.”
advocated for banning trans women from […] sports teams.
What do people here think of this?
It’s an incredibly complicated issue, even if you look at individual cases (like Caster Semenya) and there’s almost no easy way to define what you mean by a woman. Ultimately it’s down to the individual sporting organisations to decide how to call it based on expert advice and any decision is going to disadvantage some athletes. If they think the decision is wrong, then there should be a way to appeal decisions because it can come down to difficult analysis based on each individual’s life history.
A compelling argument I’ve heard is that the greatest performance enhancing drug is being exposed to testosterone during puberty and that seems to be the base line a lot of the sporting organisations use. However, even then it is difficult to call for individuals and would need expert testimony on each individual case.
A compelling argument I’ve heard is that the greatest performance enhancing drug is being exposed to testosterone during puberty and that seems to be the base line a lot of the sporting organisations use
It might be compelling, but that doesn’t make it true (the testosterone in puberty part, not the sports organisations using transphobic rhetoric part, though as you can see bellow, even the International Olympic Committee, arguably the biggest global sports organisation, doesn’t advocate this thinking)
several key conclusions coincide with findings from the IOC funded study, including…Testosterone levels do not predict athletic performance or overall athleticism.
Well, either expert testimony or a transphobic bore screeching about it on Xitter.
Most people agree with here because her stance on this is, for the most part, objectively true. This is reflected by the ever increasing number of sport organizations banning trans women from competing in women’s sports. This is the default opinion in society and the world at large. The only people who think otherwise are secluded online echo chambers.
I’m so glad I pirated the harry potter audiobooks and didn’t give a cent to this bigot
I’m so glad I stopped giving a shit about Harry Potter and accepted that just because a zeitgeist happened in my childhood doesn’t mean I should cling to fictional fantasy that hadn’t actually done anything novel in the genre or touched upon topics that aren’t handled in better novels elsewhere
Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.
The moral of Harry Potter is that the status quo is correct and should never be questioned, and nobody should ever try to change anything.
Harry doesn’t defeat Voldemort or change any of the issues inherent in the bumbling bureaucracy of the wizard world. Voldemort kills himself on a magic technicality, Harry becomes a magic cop and helps to ensure that magic is never used to help the undesirables of society (Muggles), and Hermione is ridiculed for being a girl with blue hair and pronouns who tried to end the chattel slavery system before she “grew up” and became a much more sensible person who realized that the slaves actually want to be oppressed, and it’s for their own good.
You can see Rowling’s morality change practically in real-time as the books go on, from criticizing the system to defending it as she began to benefit from it as her wealth grew. And underneath it all, you can see her discriminatory opinions of people. That was always there. When she wants you to hate a woman, she makes them fat or gives them masculine features. If I have to read the phrase “mannish hands” one more time, I might vomit.
Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.
Good call, here is a link.
Dude I’m saying! Harry Potter was never good, it was just popular
And yeah I read them and watched them, at least the first few. I’m not talking out of my ass. It’s a series with a few imaginative ideas sprinkled throughout otherwise super typical schlock with casually racist seasoning.
Fuck Harry Potter
I unfortunately had to watch all the movies because I had a child of the appropriate age range that wanted to watch them. Every last one was boring as all hell. Some of them were even in the theater so I added a little to them being popular. But they were not good.
Yep, I never understood the appeal besides making kids feel special. It seemed like a water down fantasy which when I criticized people just said read the books.
Ironically I did read the first one before the movies became a big hit. It was an okay children’s book at best.
For some reason we have these unwritten social rules that say you can’t critique certain pop culture icons once they hit critical mass.
Harry Potter is sort of the Classic Lays potato chip of the children’s book world. Dependable, reliable, not the most exciting in the world but any stretch, but easily snackable all the same.
They’re easy to read, not super deep, and because of that, probably got a lot of kids into reading who otherwise wouldn’t have, and there’s something to be said for that. It’s unfortunate that the author turned out to be a bigot the whole time.
I am/was likely far too old to be in the target demographic for Pottermania but they never worked for me. They always felt a little… safe, reactionary even as they drew on a long tradition of British boarding school books without really addressing or undermining the genre tropes or even using it as a means to examine that culture. It then wasn’t a surprise to find out the author had some questionable views didn’t seem a great surprise to me.
I had the first 4 books and read them around ages 11-13, reading the first two before the first movie came out. I think because none of my classmates at the time had read or watched anything relating to HP, I never really talked about it, so I set it aside after finishing Goblet of Fire, which coincided with the Lord of the Rings movies.
To me, it felt like I was leaving behind a story for kids and getting in on the “real good stuff for adults”
It came out when I was 9, so I was part of the target demographic, though I didn’t pick it up til I was 12 or 13 because we read it at school, though by that point I had read most of the Animorphs books, so potter came across as very tame and a bit too childish. I was already dealing with themes of war and genocide and existential crisis and everything else Animorphs threw at you.
This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders.
It’s hilarious that she’s making these seem like widespread issues when most of them are literally just one incident, or aren’t happening at all. These are the best examples she can come up with of legitimate grievances against trans people?
How about “bullied to suicide, denied medical care, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and getting violently hate crimed at enormous rates” for the other side of this issue? Even if you think trans identities are invalid, at least pretend to treat them with the same respect you would other human beings. But no, trans people who are just trying to survive day-to-day are nonchalantly grouped in with pedophile rapists, as if those two things are in any way equivalent.
It’s easy to hate someone when you just ignore what they really are and supplant it with something else entirely.
I 100% agree with your post. The issues she raises are nonexistent or extremely rare. In my personal life I believe and practice “trans-women are women” as for all intents and purposes it’s true.
I am however concerned that I don’t really have a response to anyone who doesn’t believe that, particularly women with some sort of past trauma that gives them an instinctual fear response. It feels insensitive to tell them to get over it or go to therapy. Particularly if they’ve been exposed to one of the extremely rare examples Rowling has presented. But I think going to therapy is probably what needs to happen.
My other conflicting thought is that therapy or condemnation it is what we would say to people being racist, but there seems to be a societal agreement that we need women only spaces. And we don’t say “get over it” in regards to men trying to enter a women’s shelter, we offer an amount of sympathy and understanding to the women and allow them that space. Which means there is some amount of gender discrimination is desired/needed. This also indicates there there should be a line or set of fuzzy criteria that determines if we treat trans-women as women or not. But this obviously also feels wrong, and I hate it.
Sorry if this was insensitive, I mostly just want to gather thoughts as I’m not confident in my thinking. I don’t think these issues deserve the amount of attention transphobes are giving them, but we’re here now, so I want to try and figure out a solution or response to more “reasonable” transphobes that I could potentially change the minds of
I appreciate this comment.
particularly women with some sort of past trauma that gives them an instinctual fear response
Surely the answer to traumatised women is to give them accommodations and special treatment, not to punish anyone who sets off that trauma response because of perceptions about that person’s race or gender.
As a cis female rape survivor I would choose the care of a compassionate trans woman over a judgemental TERF anytime!
She added: “For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist.”
What a dumb cunt she is
How can she not see the projection? Do people get their ability to not tell on themselves removed when they cast that magical first Tory vote?
It turns out she’s just a very uninteresting person. Infinite money and somehow can’t find something better to do with her time.
Could the witch woman please shut up.
J. K. Rowling is a knob.
She wishes she had a knob.
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. 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.
When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’
As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.
Joanne is bitter because others are having what she didn’t get.
Classic “Homosexuality is a choice because I’m gay and chose to deny it” energy.
Tennant: TERFs are whiny fucking babies
JK Rowling, Court Jester: whines like baby
Extra Fabulous on It as usual
How is it that every time we hear from the TERF in the high castle, she’s somehow even more unhinged?
When you have that much money reality ceases to exist. Rich people live in the ultimate echo chamber.
reality ceases to exist
Uh… wut?
They become completely disassociated with how the world actually functions because they are surrounded by people who tell them whatever they want to hear so they don’t lose their jobs.
That’s not reality ceasing to exist. Or like it.
I think you wandered into the wrong room. The Department of Taking Everything Literally is down the hall.
I mean it doesn’t work as an analogy.
You are correct! Because analogies are for comparing things and I wasn’t comparing anything.
succumbed to the terf madness, many such cases. see also: graham linehan
shes starting to talk like a final fantasy villain so shes being very normal right now
So much Love for David Tennant<3
The irony is that the Taliban agrees with JK Rowling on matters of gender and sexuality lol.
Conservatives & Projection
Headline blasted by grammar “Nazis” for having “too many” quotes to be taken serious
I would love to see a Gender Taliban declare war on JKKK Rowling. Like 20 years of protracted insurgency which reduces her to poverty before it wins.
Tennant called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon.”
Is the real headline here. And good for him.
I’d rather not give what’s her name any more attention over this crap.
Also, calling Tennant a “Harry Potter actor”, while true, feels like a calculated insult to a man who has played Doctor Who, The Purple Man, and Crawley.
Also, calling Tennant a “Harry Potter actor”, while true, feels like a calculated insult to a man who has played Doctor Who, The Purple Man, and Crawley.
I’m not sure it’s a “calculated insult” but it did read a but oddly (I assumed initially that it was referring to someone else). I presume the writer or their editor went with that angle because because his having appeared in the Harry Potter movies is relevant to an article and fitted the wider context of JK Rowling falling out with HP cast members. I’m not convinced it was the right approach.
I’m not sure it’s a “calculated insult” but it did read a but oddly (I assumed initially that it was referring to someone else).
Yeah. My choice of words was a bit unnecessarily inflammatory. I struggled to find the words for how weird a choice of introduction it is, but don’t mean to actually assign malice.
I don’t really think the article author meant anything by it necessarily.
Your point about the context of the cat relationships makes sense. Probably why they went for it.
Tennant, who once lowered himself to appear in a Harry Potter film, stated…
Better?
He was also barely even in Harry Potter, if we are going by screen time pretty sure Harry potter is the least relevant part of his career.
I wasn’t even aware that he was in there.
He was in Goblet of Fire. Showed up briefly at the beginning and end of the movie, certainly easy to miss. More of a cameo appearance for David Tennant fans.
It’s the first time I learned who he was and I was so impressed with his performance, however short, that when I caught a Doctor Who episode and recognized him, I kept watching and became an instant fan.
Another great show he’s in is Good Omens. Highly recommend if you haven’t watched it.
Highly recommend the book, much more than the show.
No worries if you haven’t had a chance to read yet…
I read the book at least 10 years ago, want season one of the show when it came out.
It’s a good adaptation but man, it just doesn’t hit quite the same as the book.
S2 is better than S1.
Some of the best tongue-based acting I’ve ever seen
There’s a few butt-hurt TERFs here downvoting. I wonder if the endorphin rush from such a rebellious act will carry them through the day.
Transphobes are half the reason we got rid of downvotes over here. They’re simultaneously blowhards and too cowardly to speak.
too cowardly to speak
Have you considered making an effort to be a person they would like to speak with?
lmfao, who the fuck cares who TERFs like to speak with? I don’t like speaking with TERFs, all the better if they don’t speak to me.
who the fuck cares who TERFs like to speak with?
They should make the effort to be worth talking to.
That works both ways.
It really doesn’t.
I disagree.
As is your right.
How about being a compassionate human being who tries to understand the conversation partner’s fears without bowing down to misinformation? If that’s not enough for them because they see debunking their bunk as personal attack, I don’t think anyone from outside of their cult is an acceptable conversation partner for them.
That works both ways. Everything you’ve said could be seen as applying from the perspective of either party.
Yeah, everyone is the hero in their own story, so from their perspective, they surely feel like they know things until they meet an actual biologist challenging them.
TERFs invoke half-remembered high-school level biology as if it was mathematical fact. In actual biological reality, nothing is binary or absolute. I don’t need a PhD in computational biology to know that, but if surely helps.
until they meet an actual biologist challenging them
I’m curious (perhaps against my better judgement) what you think a biologist could tell Rowling that would challenge her?
We could maybe give people like her a glimpse into the sheer defiance that nature has against all attempts to fit into tiny categorical boxes.
It’s not just the topics that she doesn’t understand (especially the intersection of gender with endocrinology and neurology), but everything.
If you are a biologist and think you have found a rule that applies to some part of biology, you will feel deeply uncomfortable until the inevitable exceptions start cropping up that tell you that while the theory is still statistically sound, it’s not unnaturally strict and therefore plausible.
Obviously trans people exist and are valid. Thinking otherwise would be ignoring mountains of biological patterns and data that tell us that every binary in biology isn’t actually clean-cut.
This picture makes me think that David Tenant is actually trans JK Rowling.
