This isn’t even a slight exaggeration. JKR has openly given at least £70,000 to For Women Scotland to campaign against trans rights and fund this exact supreme court ruling. xx
Her anti-trans Crisis Centre in Edinburgh has the director of For Women Scotland on the Board of Directors. x
We can presume she’s given more (financial) support off the record or in other ways.
Rowling consistently makes passive income on all Harry Potter products. Multiple sources have cited that Rowling earns anywhere between $50 million to a $100 million each year from royalties. Forbes estimated she earned $95 million in 2017 alone. xxx
It is a well-known fact that she earns net profit percentages on all her IP. Every time you buy any HP merch, from anywhere, she gets a cut. Every time you watch one of her films, even streaming or just on the tv, she gets a cut. Every time you visit Universal Studios or Harry Potter World, she gets a cut.
And she uses that money to do this. To strip trans rights at every opportunity.
Jk rowling (who is chronically online) has not make a tweet in 4 days. I don’t know if she’s taken a break that long before but it’s fun to imagine that her legal team has literally locked away all of her technology.
What’s distressing, but also important to understand, about JK Rowling hitting the “Denying trans people were targeted in the Holocaust” point is that it’s kind of the last stop before she just goes full alt-right weirdo.
Joanne is denying the Holocaust (if a group was targeted, denying they were targeted is Holocaust denial) and that’s going to lead to pushback from historians and experts. But Joanne is too deep in to believe what anyone who disagrees with her says, so she’s just going to dismiss what those historians and experts tell her. And once she’s disbelieving them about that one thing, well it’s just a tiny step to start disbelieving them about other things.
This isn’t by accident either, transphobic circles are swarming with far right agitators, ready to use hatred of trans people as an in to recruit people into their causes. They have handbooks for this sort of thing and they are, unfortunately, good at it. I suspect Joanne will be spouting coded versions of Great Replacement stuff by the end of the summer.
This is not a plea to try and pull Joanne out. She’s too deep in, and even if she wasn’t, she’s already demonstrated an inability to examine her own prejudices, an unwillingness to hear criticism and a weakness to flattery. She is perfect recruitment bait for people who know what they’re doing, and my impression is she’s surrounded herself with people like that.
No, this is to understand two things: First is to use her as an example, to understand how a well meaning liberal can chase their own prejudices down a very dark rabbit hole. We are none of us immune to propaganda and even if we can’t change what’s happened to her, we can at least use it to protect ourselves.
And second is to understand that one of the main reasons you can’t pull Joanne out of the transphobic pipeline is cause she is the pipeline now. She is the transphobic banner bearer now, she is funneling money and attention to these groups, she is their most famous celebrity and she is helping recruit people. Being able to show people how far she’s gone, how deep into the right wing rabbit hole she’s going, is important to help other people who still think she just “Had some concerns” know where her path leads.
It makes me think of that (apparently unattributed?) quote, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. It also makes me think of this picture I saw in a history book in high school while we were studying World War II. It showed a father and son walking past a huge heaped pile of coal behind a locked gate. Son says in German something like, “Why do we freeze when coal is piled up here?” Father answers, speaking of who he believed controlled the distribution of coal and thus Germany, “Because the hand of the Jew lies heavily upon the people.”
Last month on here I reblogged an article about Dr Gary Jenkins, who was murdered in a homophobic attack and then essentially victim-blamed. J.K. Rowling has now weighed in on the aftermath of that murder and the police outreach campaign around it:
She’s certainly signalling something, but it’s not virtue.
J.K. Rowling and Julie Bindel dropped this yesterday:
…and it’s a joke, of course it’s a joke, and a pathetic one at that, but as someone with a mental illness I find this sort of thing so frustrating. (‘Section’ refers to being sectioned under the Mental Health Act.) I’ve gathered from retweets that these two are making fun of one particular person, who I do not know, but it doesn’t matter because if you’re making fun of someone’s X characteristic you’re also making fun of everyone else who has X characteristic.
I mean, I’m long past the days of expecting better from the British TERF society, but… yeah. Uh, happy international women’s day.
No, actually the “question at the heart of this debate” is, why do YOU (essentially just a rich person with opinions) merit being listened to as though you’re an expert here? https://t.co/f6UKe9gcTj
He got a lot of shit for this from the usual suspects (maybe… don’t click through to the whole thread), but I’m so proud of him for standing up to JKR and her constant slow drip of bigotry. It’s nice when actors you admire turn out to be good people.
