It was no April Fool’s joke.
Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.
Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.
Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.
I sincerely doubt she hates women. She’s been supportive of women’s causes for a very long time afaik. Based on what I’ve read she seems to feel extremely weak and vulnerable among men due to her experiences, especially when she’s alone with a man or men, and it’s very likely she ascribes that “weakness” to all cis women. But that doesn’t mean she thinks men are better, it’s that she thinks men are dangerous to cis women. Seriously, she’s written things that made it seem like a legit phobia, like breaking down and crying and hyperventilating because she happened to end up in a room with some random man in the middle of the day, and he didn’t even interact with her iirc. I’m guessing her broken brain sees trans women as if someone put a hat on a tiger and called it Bob and let it near her. She’s a bit messed up and the small window of slight opportunity to maybe help her see straight was obliterated by counterproductive behavior based on understandable emotions. Something that happens all too often these days.
But with all that said, it’s been a long time since I heard or read anything from her, so she could have gone off the deep end and I don’t know it.
But that feeling of vulnerability is part of what informs the misogyny, which they compensate for with an essentialist fairy dust woowoo articulation of ‘the divine feminine’ or some shit, never clearly defined, which requires hating trans people, because trans people are walking talking de/re constructions.
And since you’re (hypothetical terf you. Also has terrible hemorrhoids and a crippling tobacco addiction, wanna go beat the shit out of them later? Would feel weird without you on side.) already misogynist and essentialist and a bigot, and tge only things you care about are completely made up; nazis are your natural allies.
Just out of curiosity, since I haven’t seen or read anything from her in a very long time, can you give examples of what misogynistic things she’s said? And I have to say it feels rather convoluted, the notion that she, a woman who’s been supporting women’s causes for a long time, hates women, so she boosts herself with undefined ‘divine femininity’, which in turn means she has to hate trans people because they present something different. It’s too high level and fluffy. I mean, hey, I don’t know what’s going on in her head (neither do you btw), but I find it a much simpler, more logical, foundational and believable explanation that she’s just scarred from her trauma related to men and therefore is also scared of trans women because with her phobia she doesn’t trust them to not behave like men at some point. And she probably has built a whole structure of beliefs, opinions and arguments on top of that, that gets bigger (and thereby expands further away from the core) and more reinforced with every argument she has online. And somewhere in that structure might sit ‘divine femininity’, as a coping argument.
I haven’t read her shit in years, but I remember reading something like a decade ago, and there’s a straight line from the ‘goddess feminism’ of the 80s, which seemed like her thing, to terf shit. Please don’t make me look it up; only one of us has to see this to convince you.
I’m sure she doesn’t think she hates (cis)women. None of them do; not even dudebro Nazis.
I’m not putting it on you to prove it or convince me, but just as a general statement, I need solid and concrete proof before I ascribe a feeling to someone else contrary to their own claims. Something that’s generally a bit of an asshattery thing to do imo since they’re the one feeling their feelings and I can’t actually know.
Generally valid, but fascists are kind if an exception, because they’re never honest, and taking them at their word is rude to everyone else.