Forget Hogwarts Houses. Which Pokemon Type Are You?
It’s time for a new personality test, based on a far less problematic franchise.
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For the past few years, progressive Harry Potter fans have looked on with alarm as the series’ creator JK Rowling has tweeted increasingly worrisome things.
I’m not talking about her strange, retconny tweets about Hufflepuff kids having orgies and Dumbledore and Grindlewald hooking up, by the way. Those tweets, while bizarre and sometimes in poor taste, are more annoying than they are harmful. No, what I’m referring to is Rowling’s slow, steady progression toward public transmisogyny.
Eagle-eyed Rowling fans have seen it coming for a long time, of course. The author has been favoriting tweets by trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) for years. Her first book written for an adult audience, The Casual Vacancy, featured a predatory trans woman character than many have rightly critiqued as a hateful and dangerous portrayal. Still, for a long time many of us have tried to explain the ignorance away. Some of us hoped she was just a little misinformed, or didn’t fully grasp the implications of what she’d written.
As of Dec 19, 2019, that comfortable denial is no longer possible. JK Rowling has now publicly and vocally come out in defense of TERF ideology, tweeting the following:
Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
Rowling is referring to the firing of Maya Forstater, a former fellow at the Centre for Global Development (CGD), who was let go for repeatedly using offensive, exclusionary, and transphobic language. Forstater’s case has become a lightning rod for anti-trans bigots, who are attempting to portray her firing as a case of “radical trans activists” attempting to control how people speak about us. In reality, of course, Forstater was fired for repeated instances of outspoken, needless hate. Hate that JK Rowling agrees with and and is seeking to defend.
JK Rowling has been a problematic creator for a long time, in a lot of other ways. And I don’t personally believe we have…
