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The first two episodes of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling dropped, and I've got to say, I'm a bit disappointed. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but Megan Phelps-Roper seems to be saving the "juicy" stuff about J.K. Rowling's statements about gender and sex for later episodes. Instead, the first episode is basically the biography of J.K. Rowling that I'm sure everyone has heard a thousand times by now - though with a special emphasis on her status as an abuse survivor, and the second episode focuses on the Evangelical Christian backlash against Harry Potter as it was being released.
This does make the podcast more comprehensive, and allows Phelps-Roper, who is an ex-member of the Westboro Baptist Church, to leverage her knowledge of Conservative Christianity to fill out her subject, but aside from the implicit message that she seems to be developing that Evangelical Christian censorship and Woke Progressive censorship are two sides of the same coin (hardly a novel take), I didn't really feel like I needed a retread of the Evangelical Christian backlash to Harry Potter, which I lived through and was very conscious of thanks to my coming up in New Atheism over the relevant time period. (And it goes without saying that the Rowling biography was a waste of time as someone who went to several midnight releases for the Potter books and movies over the years.)
Notably, trans video essayist Natalie Wynn (better known by her Youtube handle ContraPoints) tweeted recently that she has been interviewed for the project, and felt that Phelps-Roper had misrepresented the nature of the podcast before the interview. Wynn believes that Phelps-Roper's status as an ex-bigot makes it easier for her to empathize with bigots, and forces her to believe deeply in their ability to reform, but the result is that her worldview is overly simplistic - leading her to believe that trans activists are just as bad as the transphobes they argue with.
It's hard to say if Wynn's criticisms are 100% correct yet. I will be very interested to see how Phelps-Roper frames that interview (if it ends up being included at all.) The best hint of the eventual direction of the podcast so far, seems to be a statement in the second episode about censorship efforts surrounding Huckleberry Finn, where it was first criticized by racist bigots for showing the races mixing, and later criticized for anti-racist progressives for depicting black people in a negative light.
You might not have, but certainly there's bound to be a lot of people who weren't aware of this context. I mean, god, surely the current crops of college students now were born after 9/11 and were far too young to understand the environment they were growing up in, just for example.
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I guess this is as good a place as any to ask: to what degree is Rowling hoisted by her own petard?
Let me explain. I have been following the TERF wars with quite a bit of Schadenfreude because they consist of feminists being subjected to the exact same tactics they have used for decades to demonise men and extract unfair advantages, privileges, and resources for their identity group. To see TERFs complain about this is, quite frankly, music to my ears. The total lack of self-awareness is just the cherry on top of the justice Sundae.
Now, to what extent is it fair to apply this logic to Rowling herself? I know she is an outspoken feminist and she never tires to style herself as a survivor of abuse. But is she the kind of identitarian feminist I describe above?
I don't know how much of a feminist, more that she was the sort of ordinary liberal type - remember the fuss about making Dumbledore gay? And now the people who were on the vanguard of being on the right side of history about women's lib, gay rights, etc. are finding themselves left stranded by the receding tide, and are being shifted to the centre and even to the right by the new crop of college student activists coming up. Not that I think Rowling was very far left, but what was left/liberal even ten years ago has now been overtaken by the "if you can't name all sixty new Pride flags you are a bigot right-winger" types.
How did she treat people who objected to the retconning of that character as gay? Or, now that I think about it, the people who objected to the whole "Hermione is black" kerfuffle?
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I would argue that pretty much all the activists involved are hoisted by their own petard. That this is something that simply can't be actually resolved through Progressive structures based on Critical concepts of power, and that at every single level, these models of power/culture/identity are the cause of the conflict.
That's a bit like saying that swords are the cause of conflict. Sophistic arguments about power structures etc. are weapons. The cause of conflict is a personality type that enjoys lording their moral superiority over others and bag some gravvy in the process.
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My understanding of the term TERF is Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Nothing about my observations of Rowling pattern matches with "Radical Feminist". She doesn't even seem like a normal feminist except when its useful for her ambitions or some other instrumental goal. On second thought maybe that is a description of a normal feminist.
"Radical feminism" is an old term, though, emerging in the 60s. It may not sound that radical to you, because it's been completely normalized in feminism. Basically any type of feminism that talks about patriarchy is radical feminism. Or, as I've heard someone say once, radical feminism means that it's the type of feminism in which they blame men for everything and/or think men are evil. I'd definitely say that from what I know about Rowling, she's frequently going on about how terrified she is of men, and how women need to be protected from men all the time. That sounds like radical feminism to me.
Radical Feminist believe that gender is a social construct, created by the patriarchy. From this article in the New Yorker, titled "What Is a Woman? The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism.":
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The usage is misleading. It started as a term coined by radicals to distance themselves from other radicals and eventually became the descriptor for anything to the right of Laboria Cuboniks.
Basically nobody being called a TERF today is a radical feminist.
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I never got those vibes of identarian feminist from her. Not that I have ever read anything she's written outside of the Harry Potter books, but the books are completely bereft of anything that smacks of that (besides the occasional joke about how boys are sometimes emotionally uncomplex)
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Personal anecdata - I have not. The content of the first episode was new to me and the content of the second episode reminded me of many things I had forgotten. I found the retread and setup helpful. I listened while walking to the library and doing some grocery shopping, so it being longer than strictly necessary was completely fine for me. Even the retread part that I was familiar with had more than a little bit of, "wow, I forgot that people were dead ass upset about divination classes".
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The thing is, there isn't any "juicy stuff". If you believe the online foofaraw, then Rowling has been calling for forced conversion camps and public executions of trans people. That isn't so.
Given that one little flower had to back down with a grovelling apology on Twitter (because it's clear he did go to a lawyer who went "You said what online? Dude, beg on your knees before this can go to court because she'll destroy you"), then yeah - some trans activists and allies are as bad as the transphobes.
As I understand it, he apologized not because he went to a lawyer, but because Rowling went to her lawyers who served him a notice. It is my understanding that it is extremely easy to prove libel/defamation under UK law, so he made the (wise) decision to apologize and retract in response to that.
If he were really as sure that his words would only be taken as hyperbole as he claimed, then Rowling sending him a solicitor's letter would do nothing to change his brave, bold, stance. I think he did take legal advice and was told "You dug this hole for yourself" and so he has had to apologise because if it went to trial he wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
In what other circumstances would "When I heavily implied I'd burn you at the stake, that was only meant as exaggeration" be accepted, when it came to making threats? If someone said the same about this self-identified drag queen, what would be the reaction?
why would this be the case. i'm not familiar with this person, but just by going on twitter followers, this guy has like 9000 while JKR has well... millions and is verified. now this isn't proof that the guy has more power but... i extremely doubt that JK Rowling has less or even similar power to this guy.
i can see very well how a large legal team may seem threatening even if you really do believe you're in the right. and honestly i find it less likely that someone randomly went to their legal team about this content and then decided to retract it then and there instead of this being a reaction.
if he had the foresight to go to his lawyers before hand... he probably wouldn't have made the comment in the first place.
that's a lot of the problem with the lack of free speech. if a lawyer or few can send a few threatening messages, it can spook someone who has fewer resources than they do. we see attempts at it too in america (even if the it is difficult to prove libel or slander in american courts). power imbalances can be frightening and it is easy to be intimidated by such a tactic even if you truly believe in your own statement.
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You could just word replace "against" with "by" and it would be a lot more accurate. For a guy who has experienced internet hate mobs to fully support them against his chosen victim just shows that all of the crocodile tears about it were strictly "no bad tactics, only bad targets."
I think something different about today's moralism, or why youth are no longer suspicious of it, is because they see it as largely enforced by themselves. Enforced horizontally rather than vertically. While it is also wielded vertically, it doesn't seem like that's where it finds it's legitimacy.
Youth of the 80s and 90s felt the power was being wielded vertically and in an illegitimate fashion they couldn't agree with, fundamentally. They were also less consumed by credentialism, theory and, well, words. So while they had a vague sense of their own moralism it's nowhere near as self-conscious and cohesive as that of Gen Zs and Millennials. Not to mention reinforced through documentation everywhere they look within the new information environment.
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