Why J. K. Rowling is Not Our Ally

If any of you reading are fans of the Harry Potter series, supporters of the LGBT+ community, or just followers of book-related news generally, you are most likely aware that there has been something of a controversy surrounding HP author J. K Rowling in the last month or so. Essentially, Rowling has recently taken to Twitter to air her views on trans rights, which have been criticised by many as transphobia masquerading as feminism. As an LGBT+ person who has long been a fan of Rowling and has previously written about the importance of the Harry Potter books in my life, I wanted to write a post explaining my views on the situation.

First of all, I would like to stress that while it has only been recently that Rowling's anti-trans Twitter tirades have hit mainstream news, people in the LGBT+ community have long suspected her of holding transphobic views. As far back as March 2018, Rowling was liking tweets that referred to trans women as "men in dresses" - an action which her representatives blamed on a "middle-aged moment" at the time. Many of us had been keeping a sceptical eye on Rowling's social media activity since then, and we watched as she slowly began to move from liking transphobic tweets, to retweeting them, to finally writing her own.

This eventually culminated in Rowling publishing a post on her website, explaining her "reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues". I'm not going to link to the post here, but it's easy enough to find if you want to read it for yourself. The purpose of the post, I imagine, was three-fold: to justify Rowling's recent statements regarding trans issues, to elaborate on her "gender critical" views, and to condemn critics who correctly identified her views as those of a TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist). It also showed many of us why Rowling has historically stuck to fiction writing, although I doubt that was one of her goals in writing the essay.

I am not going to explain, in detail, why the things Rowling said are transphobic and harmful. This is not only because many other people, including many trans activists, have broken this down far better than I could, but also because her views are hardly unique. The ideas that trans women are a danger to cis women's safety, that acknowledging the difference between sex and gender will diminish the importance of reproductive rights, and even that supporting transition is in some way supporting a new form of conversion therapy - these are nothing new. Yet the fact that these views are being espoused by someone as influential as Rowling is worrying. Still, as I said, I am not going to get into much detail about that here. I am linking to other informative articles throughout this post, and I will leave a number of links for further reading at the end of it.

All of that said, there is one aspect of Rowling's vitriol which I would like to address, and that is the way she has been referring to queer women. When Rowling mentions cis queer women, she leaves the "cis" unspoken, despite the fact that trans people are more likely to identify as non-heterosexual than those who are cisgender. Rowling's exclusion of this is crucial, as she has recently taken to using cis queer women as human shields in her one-person war against trans people. The first example of this naturally took place on Twitter, on 7th June, when Rowling wrote a post claiming that "If sex isn't real, there's no same-sex attraction", which she soon followed by sharing an article by a lesbian woman who claimed that the LGBT+ community's support of trans people was leading to lesbians being "shouted down" and ignored.

Now, I'd like to quickly point out two things. First, I don't know of a single trans activist who claims that "sex isn't real". All I have ever seen trans activists advocate for which Rowling could possibly be confusing for this is the idea that we should update our perceptions of sex and gender so that they are in line with the most current scientific understanding: that sex is not binary and it is not the same as gender. Secondly, while there are small numbers of queer women who are indeed TERFs (though they apparently don't like to be labelled as such) and don't support trans people, I believe that the majority of us understand that trans people have historically been and continue to be integral to our community. So why, if she has studied trans literature to the extent that she claims, would Rowling choose to focus on a fringe branch of the community despite it not being reflective of the broader group?

The reason, to put it idiomatically, is because Rowling wants to have her cake and eat it too. She wants to be able to continue claiming she is an LGBT+ ally while still promoting her transphobic agenda, and the way she has decided she can do this is by presenting the conflict as lesbians vs trans people, with her on the side of the former. This is terribly convenient for Rowling, who can then deflect any criticisms from the LGBT+ community with quotes of one of the few queers who agrees with her or tweets referencing one of her "best mates" who is a "self-described butch lesbian". The shallowness of it all is almost comical. "I'm not homophobic," she might as well have said, "I have a gay friend."

For anyone who doubts that Rowling's supposed LGBT+ (minus the T) support is anything but self-serving, I would like to ask this: would a true ally have written an entire seven-book series without including a single openly-LGBT+ character? Would they have sloppily claimed, post-publication, that one character had actually been gay? Would they have then later, when given the opportunity to make this queerness explicit in film adaptations featuring said character, have chosen to reference it only in vague allusions that would easily be ignored or censored by homophobes who preferred to pretend they hadn't seen it? If Rowling is such a supporter of lesbians, where were the lesbians in Harry Potter? I could be wrong, but I don't recall a single one.

But perhaps, you might argue, she can be an ally without necessarily putting representation in her work. To which I would say, we do not owe Rowling our support as an ally. She does not deserve it simply for claiming she has a gay best friend or once sharing a shallow, rainbow-tinged reference to Harry Potter on social media. If she truly cared about us, she would have put us in her books. She would have donated to charities which supported us. She would have promoted books by other LGBT+ authors. Has she ever done any of these? Furthermore, if she has, has it ever been on anything close to the scale at which she has voiced such disrespect for trans people? The answer is no, because Rowling doesn't care about LGBT+ voices unless they are speaking up in support of her.

I have hesitated to write this post for a while, feeling that adding my voice to those who are speaking out against Rowling was unnecessary at best or speaking over trans people at worst. It was one comment, among many which angered me, that infuriated me to the point of wanting to finally write this. It was Rowling's assertion, which she has in fact made a number of times now (as many other TERFs have done before her), that transitioning is akin to conversion therapy. Her idea seems to be that young queer people are being forced to transition rather than being allowed to accept their queer identity. This idea is absolutely ludicrous. If trans people, as we have established, face transphobia even within the LGBT+ community, then how do you expect us to believe that trans people are now magically more accepted than queer people? I have never in my life met a person who accepted transness but not same-sex attraction; far more often I have met people who supposedly support the LGBT+ community, but who don't accept the T part of the acronym. For Rowling to then make this absurd claim is not only silly, it's disgusting. It is repulsive to me that she would take an experience which has caused so much harm to so many young queer people (and, yes, trans people too!), which she as a cishet woman knows nothing about, and use it to support her own hateful position. A true ally would never do something like that, and the fact that Rowling would shows to me that she never truly supported us at all.

Let me make this very clear. Rowling does not represent the views of queer women. She is not our ally, and she certainly does not have the right to be using us to deflect from criticism of her transphobic agenda. Our trans siblings have more in common with us than a self-serving, cishet faux-ally like Rowling ever will. I am disgusted at Rowling's attempts to co-opt queer women's struggles. What I see in these attempts is that Rowling will go along with a tide of LGBT-phobia as long as she can position it as feminism. I am not oblivious to how much of the anti-trans discourse mirrors old-fashioned homophobia - does Rowling think we don't remember hearing that queer women were threats to straight women, that we shouldn't use the same bathrooms because of our inherent perversity, that we were harmful to the feminist movement? I've heard it all before, and changing your target from cis queer women to trans women has not deceived me. I know that if J. K. Rowling were a prominent feminist only a few decades earlier, she would have directed this same hate at the queer women she claims to support. I hope that every other cis queer woman sees her fake support for what it is: a flimsy attempt to keep herself from being seen as the LGBT-phobe she is.

So, what now? Where do those of us who have spent large parts of our lives loving the HP books (and even, as in my case, Rowling's post-HP writing) go from now? Personally, I will no longer be supporting J. K. Rowling. I have many happy memories connected with Harry Potter, but I know that these are not solely because of the books themselves. I mentioned in my previous post about HP that the books reminded me of home and of my family. I still have those things, and I don't need Harry Potter to maintain their importance to me. Privately, the characters and their stories will likely always hold some sentimental value for me of course, but I will no longer be promoting the books to new readers, buying Harry Potter merchandise, or reading any of Rowling's new books. Instead, I will be trying to support writers of fantasy and children's fiction who don't have Rowling's influence, especially those from marginalised groups, such as trans authors. I will try to lend my support to those authors who deserve it, who will use their influence for good instead of causing harm. Harry Potter has indeed been important to me, but supporting my friends in the LGBT+ community is more important than that. I hope that those of you reading feel the same.

***

As I mentioned earlier in the post, I think that the people we need to be listening to most at the moment are those most affected by the situation: trans people. To that end, here are some links to content by trans creators on this subject which I have found informative. I would encourage you to explore these and seek out more perspectives by trans people wherever you can.

• Why What JK Rowling Said is Transphobic
• Addressing The Claims In JK Rowling’s Justification For Transphobia
• Is J.K. Rowling Transphobic? A Trans Woman Investigates
• J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is a product of British culture
• Responding to JK Rowlings Essay | Is It Anti-Trans?
• Where J.K. Rowling’s Transphobia Comes From
• So... Let's Talk About JK Rowling's Tweet | Kat Blaque
• J.K. Rowling wrote a controversial statement about transgender people in response to being called a 'TERF.' Here's what that means.
• JK Rowling is Transphobic... So What? | Kat Blaque

My Favourite Book of All Time // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 30

Today is the thirtieth and final day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I have been writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "your favourite book of all time".

We did it. We've made it to the final "day" of the 30-day book challenge, which thankfully was not unambiguously called the "one-month book challenge"; if it had been, that might have prevented me from shamelessly dragging out these 30 days over the course of several months, only posting if and when I felt like it. But that is indeed what I did, and while you can say what you like about my lack of commitment to the exact goal of the challenge (to write a post every day consecutively), I'm still very happy with the result that I did eventually complete the challenge in some form, and I now have 30 more posts here on this blog than I did previously.

So, in this final post, to celebrate the fact that I got here in large part due to interpreting the general challenge in a way that was most convenient for me, I am also going to cheat on today's prompt.

I don't really have one specific favourite book. What's more, most of the books I would consider naming or would place in my Top 10 Favourite Books, I have already mentioned in other posts throughout this challenge. So in the interest of not repeating myself or forcing myself to pick one book when I really don't want to, I'm going to use this post to talk about my favourite book that I've read recently: Severance by Ling Ma.

Severance is one of three novels I checked out of my local library the day before the coronavirus pandemic sent my city, Paris, into total lockdown. That sequence of events was almost eerily appropriate, as Severance is also a novel about a fictional pandemic.

As usual, here is your Goodreads summary of the plot:

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. So she barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies halt operations. The subways squeak to a halt. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers?

So I should admit, perhaps my checking out Severance merely a day before lockdown wasn't so eerie, as I chose to borrow Severance specifically for its subject matter. Some people want escapism during times of crisis; I wanted a roadmap. I hoped that if I saw similar events to what was currently happening play out on the page, it might give me some idea of what to expect. 

As I had sort of perversely hoped, Severance's story seemed almost prophetic. The novel's story focuses on the impact of a global pandemic and its aftermath on one person, and while not every aspect of the book's events mirror coronavirus (for example, while Severance's Shen Fever also originates in China, it doesn't lead to widespread anti-Asian racism in the way that COVID-19 has), it is nonetheless incredibly resonant. 

The book jumps back and forth in time, between Candace's life pre- and post-apocalypse. While the latter veers into dystopian territory that, thankfully, is not quite so reflective of real life yet, the pre-apocalyptic chapters were very, very relatable. In Candace's world, the impending pandemic lays bare the hollowness of everyday life, the inertia of which forces it to continue all the way up to the brink of global catastrophe. We see its repetitiveness and its loneliness, and how the pandemic both solidifies and threatens society's commitment to this quotidian lifestyle. 

I don't want to spoil too much of the novel, as usual, because I would strongly recommend reading this book yourself, especially given its relevance to the current global situation. However, I would like to share a quote from Severance which I have actually previously shared on my Instagram. This section of the book is from just before a storm hits New York City, after which the Shen Fever pandemic will fully take over the country. I find it rather haunting, not just for the way it mirrors how many of us felt before COVID-19 properly hit, but because of what it says about our daily lives even beyond the pandemic:

I was like everyone else. We all hoped the storm would knock things over, fuck things up enough but not too much. We hoped the damage was bad enough to cancel work the next morning but not so bad that we couldn't go to brunch instead. 

Brunch? he echoed skeptically. 

Okay, maybe not brunch, I conceded. If not brunch, then something else. 

A day off meant we could do things we'd always meant to do. Like go to the Botanical Garden, the Frick Collection, or something. Read some fiction. Leisure, the problem with the modern condition was the dearth of leisure. And finally, it took a force of nature to interrupt our routines. We just wanted to hit the reset button. We just wanted to feel flush with time to do things of no quantifiable value, our hopeful side pursuits like writing or drawing or something, something other than what we did for money. Like learn to be a better photographer. And even if we didn't get around to it on that day, our free day, maybe it was enough just to feel the possibility that we could if we wanted to, which is another way of saying that we wanted to feel young, though many of us were that if nothing else.

I don't know if you get that though, I said.

***

On that note, we have finally reached the end of the so-called 30-day book challenge. I hope that it has been of some entertainment or interest to those of you who have read any or all of the 30 posts. Whether you have read 1 or 30, I appreciate your reading what I've written and letting me know what you thought of it. I hope that some of you will continue to read future posts on this blog, too. If you think you will, I would love to know if you have any preference for what I write about next - perhaps you have a specific topic you'd like to me to give my thoughts on, or some recommendations you'd like to hear. Either way, fingers crossed it won't be too long until I'm back here with another post. Until then, thanks for reading!

A Book Everyone Hated but I Liked // 30-Day Book Challenge - Day 29

Today is the twenty-ninth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "a book everyone hated but you liked".

[Note: So I actually wrote this post about a month ago and was ready to post it, but given everything that has been happening around the world lately, it didn't seem quite right to post my frivolous book posts at a time when far more important things needed people's attention. That's why this post is so late and also why it lacks a proper introduction, as I had to delete the original, now-irrelevant one.]

Fun fact: This post marks the third in a row which focuses on a book with LGBT+ themes. Previously, we had the twisty novel Fingersmith and the poignant essay collection Sister Outsider. Today these two are joined by another novel, My Education by Susan Choi.

The plot of My Education, as explained by Goodreads, is as follows:

Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He’s said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He’s condemned on the walls of the women’s restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty—or his charismatic, volatile wife.

My Education is the story of Regina’s mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end—if they do—fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina’s misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

So before I get into why I liked the book, let's address the first half of this prompt: why everyone hated it.

My Education seems to be nothing if not contentious, and not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. On a certain online shopping website that shall remain nameless but which you definitely know of and definitely begins with an A, My Education has an average rating of 3.4 stars out of 5. The distribution of reviews for each star rating is as follows:




Its ratings on Goodreads are a similar story, albeit with a greater proportion of reviews sitting around the middle of the scale, around 32% of these being rated 3 stars out of 5. Here is a chart of these ratings which I shamelessly stole from the Goodreads website:



So why the dislike? To get an idea of what people don't like about My Education, I have selected a few choice quotes from online reviews of the novel:

• "boring inarticulate book"

• "UNINTERESTING COULD NOT FINISH AS COULD NOT CARELESS WHAT HAPPENED"

• "how did this get published?"

• "one of the most boring and distasteful books that I have ever had the misfortune to read"

• "too wordy"

• "None of the characters are likable or sympathetic"

• "achingly dull"

• "overwrought [...] exaggerated and pretentious"

• "Hated, because annoying inconsistencies. Annoyed, because grammatically complex and faddy."

• "spectacularly bad. Overwritten, barely sensical in its flow, frivolous."

• "selfish, self-absorbed, whiney characters."

On top of the above reviews, I also saw a comment on Autostraddle refer to it as "A TERRIBLE TERRIBLE BOOK". Considering Autostraddle is where I first heard about My Education, that one stung especially badly.

Beyond the general complaints that My Education is just a generally awful, objectively terrible book, I think there are three major complaints among its negative reviews: the book was boring, its writing was overdone, and the characters were unlikable. In order to best defend the novel, I'm going to go through these points one by one and explain why I don't agree with them and why I actually like the book, its plot, and its characters.

First of all, the writing. Ignoring the plot and characters for the minute, the most controversial aspect of My Education seems to be its writing style. A lot of this comes down to personal taste, but I would disagree with other reviewers' statements that the writing is "too wordy" or "barely sensical". I enjoyed the flow of the writing, its use of unusual words (the second page of the book alone gives us "esoterica" and "stultification"), and the expressive, detailed prose. If at times it veers slightly into pretention, I took that as a representation of the not wholly-likable main character (a graduate student attempting to fit in among the lives of successful academics) and her mindset at the time.

As for the book's characters and plot, I feel that these two must in some way be analysed together, as the book's plot revolves almost solely around the emotions and personal conflicts of its characters. This is not a book with events on the scale of saving the world or even having an impact on a community - most of its plot has its impact limited to three characters, perhaps five at a stretch. If you are disinterested in these characters and thus are not invested in the personal stories, the book's plot will naturally not be of interest to you either.

In my case, I found the plot intriguing because I found the characters to be so as well. None of them are intended to be likable, as some readers were disappointed to find out. They are deeply flawed people who make terrible mistakes. Yet for all the blurb seems determined to paint Brodeur as some sort of sexual predator, none of the characters are that far beyond redemption. They are tragically human people, whose desires and skewed moralities lead them to make equally tragic decisions. I understand that sort of plotline might not appeal to all readers, but I found it fascinating.

The funny thing about writing this post, and reviewing all of the negative things people have said about my chosen book, is that it made me question my own judgement of the book. It's been a while (a couple of years, to be precise) since I last read it, so I am not so well equipped to argue its merits as I would be had I read it only recently. However, the memory of loving the book when I first read it is still strong in my mind. Perhaps if I were to read it again today, with all of these criticisms lurking in my subconscious, I wouldn't enjoy it so much. Still, that doesn't change the fact that when I read it I felt as positively about it as many other people felt negatively.