I see JK Rowling is being cruel again. Her nasty streak is off its leash. She’s bullying random people and engaging in ‘unedifying’ behaviour. What monstrous utterance has she issued this time? What fresh bigotry has spewed from her tweeting fingers? Brace yourselves: she called a man a man.
Yes, hold the front page: a woman has accurately described a member of the male sex. I’m old enough to remember when a public figure had to crack a racist joke or say something nice about Hitler in order to hit the headlines. Now they just have to use the word ‘bloke’ about a bloke.
Rowling is actually pushing back against cruelty
It was over the weekend that Rowling committed her blasphemy. She was responding to the news that Lucy Clark, a man who identifies as a woman, has become ‘the first trans manager in the top five divisions of English women’s football’. With epic pithiness, Rowling tweeted: ‘When I was young all the football managers were straight, white, middle-aged blokes, so it’s fantastic to see how much things have changed.’
There it was, the B-word – bloke. The noun that must never be spoken in the presence of a ‘trans woman’. The unutterable truth of biology. Rowling compounded her moral error with a follow-up tweet in response to the Daily Mail. Rowling is in hot water for comparing Lucy Clark to a ‘straight, white, middle-aged bloke’, cried the Mail. ‘I didn’t compare him to one. He IS one’, shot back Rowling.
It didn’t take long for the digital mob’s thousand fingers of judgement to point Rowling’s way. She was denounced as mean, branded a bigot. ‘You’re punching down’, said every midwit with a web connection. Rowling, who’s clearly had enough of all this bilge, fired back: ‘Calling a man a man is not “bullying” or “punching down”. Crossdressing straight men are currently one of the most pandered-to demographics in existence, and women are under no obligation to applaud the people caricaturing us.’
Preach, JK. It isn’t cruel to accurately describe the world and its contents. Truth isn’t bigotry. The right to tell the truth is essential to the healthy functioning of public life. A society that forbids truth-telling, on the basis that it might hurt someone’s feelings, is a society that has abandoned reason for delusion, sacrificed science to sensitivity. To elevate a minority’s emotional needs over the majority’s liberty of observation, our fundamental right to describe what we see, is to chip away at the very foundations of Enlightened society.
Even one-time sympathisers with Rowling and her valiant crusade for women’s sex-based rights have been tut-tutting at her of late. Debbie Hayton, in these pages, accused her of ‘unedifying’ behaviour. Elon Musk recently tweeted at her: ‘While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex / gender, may I suggest also posting interesting and positive content on other matters.’ It rather brought to mind those boors of old who would say to women: ‘Smile, love, it might never happen!’
Here’s what is most infuriating about the shrill denunciation of Rowling as ‘cruel’: she’s actually pushing back against cruelty. Tell me, what’s more ‘cruel’: JK Rowling calling a man a man or government policies that permit men to waltz into women-only spaces? Rowling saying the word ‘bloke’ or blokes stripping off in a women’s changing room? Rowling using a phrase like ‘crossdressing straight men’ or crossdressing straight men invading women’s sports and taking their medals?
In my view, what’s really ‘cruel’ is depriving young women of sporting glory. And risking allowing biological males to mingle in rape-crisis centres. And putting literal rapists in women’s prisons. That last one is literally cruel – it is the very definition of a ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ to force female criminals to live with male sex offenders. And you want us to lose sleep over Rowling’s firmly worded rejection of such lunatic developments? Listen, if you are more outraged by a woman’s tone of voice as she criticises society’s betrayal of women than you are by the betrayal of women itself, then the problem isn’t Rowling: it’s you.
This is always the way with the culture war. The elites shove all shades of authoritarian nonsense down our throats, from men in women’s spaces to the rebranding of British history as one crime against humanity after another. Yet it is those who stand up and say ‘Hold on, what’s going on here?’ who are damned as mad, obsessed ‘culture warriors’.
Apparently the elites’ ceaseless culture war on decency and common sense is just normal politics, whereas our resistance to such dangerous bunkum is hysteria, bigotry, cruelty, etc etc. This is exactly what’s happening with Rowling. ‘Why are you so obsessed with this issue?’, ask the people who’ve obsessively been dismantling her rights and every other woman’s rights for the past 10 years.
Rowling isn’t an ‘extremist’ – on the contrary, she’s countering the extremism of those who wish to erase entirely the distinction between men and women. She isn’t ‘punching down’ – she’s punching up against an ideology that puts men’s feelings ahead of women’s rights and which has the backing of virtually every wing of the elite. She’s not a bigot, she’s fighting bigotry – the bigotry that says women must give up their privacy and dignity and which defames any woman who says ‘No’ as a transphobe, a TERF, a harridan unfit for polite society.
Bullies calling their victims bullies – it’s the slipperiest trick of the new left.
JK Rowling is no bully
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13.05.2024
I see JK Rowling is being cruel again. Her nasty streak is off its leash. She’s bullying random people and engaging in ‘unedifying’ behaviour. What monstrous utterance has she issued this time? What fresh bigotry has spewed from her tweeting fingers? Brace yourselves: she called a man a man.
Yes, hold the front page: a woman has accurately described a member of the male sex. I’m old enough to remember when a public figure had to crack a racist joke or say something nice about Hitler in order to hit the headlines. Now they just have to use the word ‘bloke’ about a bloke.
Rowling is actually pushing back against cruelty
It was over the weekend that Rowling committed her blasphemy. She was responding to the news that Lucy Clark, a man who identifies as a woman, has become ‘the first trans manager in the top five divisions of English women’s football’. With epic pithiness, Rowling tweeted: ‘When I was young all the football managers were straight, white, middle-aged blokes, so it’s fantastic to see how much things have changed.’
There it was, the B-word – bloke. The noun that must never be spoken in the presence of a ‘trans woman’. The unutterable truth of biology. Rowling compounded her moral error with a follow-up tweet in response to the Daily Mail. Rowling is in hot water for comparing Lucy Clark to a ‘straight, white, middle-aged bloke’,........
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