padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
to go back to Silence of the Lambs, the backlash against its trans killer of women was so strong that Demme made Philadephia as an act of contrition

(Philadelphia being a film with its own issues but at least a good faith effort to represent queer people to a mainstream, largely straight audience)

and that was 30 years ago

no one gets to be surprised when people are rightly angry with a trans presenting violent killer of woman in goddamn 2020

at the very least Rowling should have seen this coming and got ahead of it with a disclaimer of some kind
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
to make my own disclaimer, which I have to every time we get back to this nonsense

I don't cosign the tone or wording of everything everyone says about her on Twitter. news flash: Twitter is toxic.

and there's almost certainly some amount of sexism in the discourse, as there is in any discourse about any female public figure

news flash II: a person can be the victim of one kind of systemic discrimination while perpetuating another

that's one of the reasons you need intersectionality
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
to explain to anyone not familiar

@Benny B is committed to defending Rowling, and pushing the TERF line in general, for ideological reasons

the obviousness or cogency of arguments doesn't matter
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
she, for example, has literally compared gender-affirming therapy to conversion therapy - about as ugly as it gets short of actual slurs

so when her alias turns out to be a literal pioneer of conversion therapy, of course it raises eyebrows

she doesn't get the benefit of the doubt in this situation, either
Yeah any argument otherwise, as far as I can tell, does seem to be non-starter, dialectically. That is, to advance any argument otherwise would necessarily involve disregarding some truly visceral stuff, which is not only poor ethics, but poor dialectics - again, as far as I can tell.

You've laid out a solid case there.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
ok, I'll bite, who's JK Rowling?
Just in case this isn't a joke; she's an author who became a famous billionaire by writing about a boy wizard called Harry Potter. Since then she has disappointed countless fans who read her stuff as kids - and lots of other people - with a load of transphobic stuff on Twitter. She also writes adult fiction (I don't intend that to mean porn) under a secret name that everybody knows.
 
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Benny Bunter

Well-known member
...
to explain to anyone not familiar

@Benny B is committed to defending Rowling, and pushing the TERF line in general, for ideological reasons

the obviousness or cogency of arguments doesn't matter

Lmao have you heard yourself? Genderism is an ideology.

You could just block me if what I've said bothers you that much?
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
You could just block me if what I've said bothers you that much?
lol it doesn't "bother me". I'm just explaining what you're doing.

that's always the line, of course, some variation of "if you're so easily offended"

I don't believe in creating a personal echo chamber for myself, in any event

it's not like you're some intellectual powerhouse, anyway. you harm your own cause every time you open your digital mouth.
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
It seems like one of the major cruxes in these matters is that a message can have unintended interpretations, interpretations that are no less valid than the intended interpretation. If you are offended by something that wasn't meant to be offensive, that doesn't invalidate the offense, no?

And yet, it seems as if we often handle these matters as if they were more straightforward than they are. It can be difficult to bear in mind the myriad of potential interpretations of your message before you send it out - but this difficulty doesn't necessarily excuse a lack of consideration. And all of that is assuming that the person sending the message has no intentions to offend.

Not saying any of this specifically about Rowling, and how her intentions compared to interpretations. Just in general, it seems like much of this can be resolved if we look at it as signal error.

However, it can be more than signal error if the message is diffracted across ideological lines, no? In that case, speaking in practically different languages, the signal error can have a much greater offensive potential, intentional or not.

For the record, I am literally sitting in an armchair now.
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
it seems strange to imagine that Rowling would deliberately pick a nom de plume designed to set her worst critics off, but also deny doing it
sure, it's possible that she's only guilty of a ridiculous neglect of due diligence in the case of her pen name

you'd think anyone choosing a pen name, let alone JK Rowling, would take 5 minutes to do a Google search

especially as she almost certainly has people specifically devoted to helping her avoid PR fuckups

it's also possible she chose it knowingly, she or some employee or consultant realized how bad the backlash would be, backpedaled

admittedly I think it's probably an innocent gaffe, never assume malice when incompetence suffices

no one said she certainly chose it deliberately - how could we know - just that in the context of everything else, it's a particularly bad look

her words - on Twitter, in her books, etc - are definitely not innocent gaffes
 

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
why are you offended? bc her pen name is similar to someone's name who you dislike?
let us get away from the word "offended", please, first off

the issue isn't whether or not I like Robert Galbraith Heath

it's that he was a pioneer of gay conversion therapy, a thoroughly discredited pseudoscience that has done serious harm to many people

if she knowingly picked a name in homage to him - which again, I don't say she did - it would be a serious problem

imagine an author with a history of dubious comments about Jews choosing the pen name "Aribert Heim"
 
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