Picking A Fight With J.K. Rowling Ought To Be The Moment The Trans-Rights Movement Winds Its Neck In

Ah, this business.

Over the last seventy two hours, it has not been a very good advert for what we’re fast becoming – competing groups of smug self-satisfied zealots.

Can everyone please take a big deep breath and start maybe, just maybe, learning to agree to disagree more?

Yes, Rowling’s outburst is dubious – but not, repeat not, because anything and everything to do with trans-rights is sacrosanct.

There’s no point in some pretending they do think anything trans-related is beyond any critique, because the evidence of the last few years speaks for itself, not merely the last few days of petty bile on J K Rowling’s Twitter page and elsewhere.

The Jessica Yaniv case in British Columbia in particular ought to have been the moment when the trans community – like the gay community before it – started making it crystal clear the fight for legitimate rights was not a shakedown. The silence however from trans activists was not merely deafening, but horrifying.

Faced with what now appeared a horde of cynical opportunists masquerading as human rights activists, it’s no wonder matters are now turning sour between them and those very celebs whose patronage earned them the opportunities to air their cause beyond the media fringes to begin with.

Rowling may be influenced by her locality’s history

J.K. Rowling has been at such pains to be as politically correct as possible as to lapse into self-parody as the worst revisionist since David Irving – thankfully however confined to her own past and her own literary output.

(What’s that J.K? You’re saying that Buckbeak is gay? He always was and it was hinted at in the books? Okay, fine, whatever … oh and you have a new book/movie/both out? Hey, what a coincidence you should mention this now!).

That the trans rights movement is now compromising those who were on their side (or at least felt there was a valid point to be made) to the extent people like Rowling are now openly starting to see them as more trouble than they’re worth ought not to be the cue for the usual screams of ‘TERF!’ – but a bloody big wake up call to the so-called ‘woke’.

Rowling lived for a long time in Edinburgh. This is a city you cannot live in for any length of time without learning the history of the Covenanters: the textbook example of blinkered zealots whose bullying micro-management of the way people were allowed to think, never mind act, proved their undoing.

They had started out demanding justice to be free to worship their way. Except pretty soon they weren’t happy until they started to demand everyone else did the same – and as their liberties increased, and their numbers grew bigger, they showed less and less qualms about the use of force to impose their way and decrease everyone else’s liberties. The point wasn’t lost that they saw others attempts to be accommodating to them as weakness to be exploited.

By the time Oliver Cromwell came up and smashed them at Dunbar, rounded up the survivors and locked them up in Greyfriars Churchyard (that of Greyfriars Bobby fame later – and which played a significant influence on the Harry Potter series) largely to die of exposure to the elements, there wasn’t a single person left in the city who cared a damn for them – forget the revisionist lies of Robert ‘Old Mortality’ Paterson.

All because they refused to agree to disagree with anyone who did not believe in ‘Sound Doctrine’. Their doctrine.

The trouble with trans-warriors

Its advocates are displaying an increasing suffocating narrow minded attitude to anyone not ‘on message’. Indeed, there’s some who clearly won’t be happy until they’re made themselves this generation’s Roland Freisler.

If you don’t get the point as to what they have become, for homework, watch ‘Donnie Darko’ this weekend, and see if you spot the analogy Richard Kelly was trying to make about zealots and what happens when you give them an inch. Doesn’t matter what the message is, they all go the same way – not content until their jackboots are on every neck.

Or perhaps have a look at the output of Titania McGrath or Jarvis Dupont.

This is someone who like Dupont was from the outset clearly taking the piss, yet it took the author, comedian Andrew Doyle from Spiked! to come clean before this was accepted – and a large number to a frightening extent took her hate filled gibberish at face value much the same as older generations took Alf Garnett’s.

No one has a monopoly on truth, or insight, or anything else, any more than the Pharasees, the Vatican, the Inquisition, Star Chamber or anyone else in the history of what’s laughable referred to as human civilisation does.

So please, please, please, start getting the f**k over yourselves. Start learning how to agree to disagree.

If you want to know where your zealotry gets you, look no further than the case of Will Johnson, a Canadian literary editor, at the Humber Literary Review, who was so exasperated at the behaviour of trans-rights activists towards Chief Librarian Vickery Bowles for allowing feminist writer Meghan Murphy to rent library space (Murphy regards the trans movement as ‘misogynist’ – in much the same way she’s accused of misandry), he said:

Five days later the Humber Literary Review fired him – they were receiving so much harassment over Johnston’s employment it was easier to let him go. They can hardly deny it, after officially firing him due to ‘internal restructuring, they forgot their own story weeks later when on 12th December they posted a request for him to remove any references to themselves on his internet pages.

This is someone who was a trans-rights supporter was treated by trans-rights activists.

If this is the way they treat their friends, are you surprised they’re beginning to run out of them?

Transphobia

Let’s view things another way. Let’s play in their ball court for a moment. Their over-simplistic, judgemental Hanna Barbera cartoon world of right and wrong.

You consider those not agreeing with you as being ‘transphobic’, right? Every little disagreement, every negative moment, is motivated by it.

Okay, based on that premise, if you knew someone was arachnophobic, you would accept that it would be counter-productive to the point of batshit stupid if you tried to change their sense of fear and loathing of arachnids by screaming every chance you get:

‘WHAT THE F**K IS WRONG WITH YOU, YOU ARACHNOPHOBIC PIECE OF SHIT? YOU START ACCEPTING SPIDERS AND THE VALUABLE CONTRIBUTION THEY MAKE TO OUR WORLD AND CULTURE YOU F**KING NAZI SCUM OR WE’RE GONNA F**K UP YOUR LIFE EVERY DAY FOREVER!’

Yeah?

So why in the name of plumbob do you think a reflexive hyper-aggressive stance towards anyone taking a negative view of trans-rights or transgenders is going to solve anything?

All you are achieving is further alienating yourselves – no one else.

Now you’re picking a fight J. K. Rowling. This is not going to go well for you. Just ask the people who did the Harry Potter Lexicon.

If you think yourselves to be ruthless and pitiless in the pursuit of your own goals (with a lot of self-justification for it in the process to the point of absurd), Joanne Rowling is someone who makes Cersei Lannister look like some soppy Church of England vicar.

She and her lawyers will shut down your websites, sue the arse of all those they can (and find reasons to do so that may have nothing to do with the trans debate). She will be the one fucking up your lives, not vice versa. That’s before her business partners – who do not wish to see anything or anyone harming the returns on their long term investments into business ventures with J.K.R. – get to work on you.

So don’t go starting a fight with someone who will be finishing it – and be cheered on the sidelines even by those who despise her and her associates because to an increasing number of people and organisations on planet Earth it will be worth it to see your little reign of terror toppled.

‘Cos if you think picking a fight with an author that – for all her faults – has made a lot of people, very, very happy with her contribution to the entertainment world, here’s your big dose of reality – she’s gonna come out from this far better off than you will.

To make a Harry Potter analogy, if the trans-rights brigade try to turn this into some McGonagall and Slughorn ‘the time has come to choose sides, Horace!’ moment, you’re about to find out the hard way your level of support in the big wide world beyond your echo chambers and multiple accounts on the interwebs doesn’t amount to diddly-squat. It was always on loan from people who like other people who like you. That’s how the world works.

You’ve got as far as you have in a very short space of time mainly because – and it’s time you accepted this – people in the First World (bar a few arseturnips, and you can find them anywhere) are in general nice, tolerant and willing to live and let live. If you blow it now, you’ll have no one to blame but yourselves.