Just who is abusing whom? And is J K Rowling a real woman?
It’s summer. J K Rowling has a new book to flog. So, newspapers and social media alike are once more warming the tired old trope of “trans rights activists” abusing a harmless middle-aged author — while simultaneously ignoring the actual violence that has been enacted with ever greater ferocity this year on the bodies of real trans people.
Both sidesing? No. This is a piece about asymmetry and hypocrisy, and a commentariat that will twist the facts every which way to preserve their own victim narrative.
Bottom Line
Let’s start with a thing that shouldn’t need saying. But because it is now commonplace in the world of transphobia to condemn trans people any time they don’t call out violence, let’s be clear. Violence or threats of violence is broadly wrong.
That’s not to say never.
Where alternative forms of protest and discourse exist, violence is wrong. Period.
Yet, had he not been prepared to deploy violence against the Nazis who imprisoned him, I suspect my father would have been murdered in 1939: just one more victim of racist bigotry. Nor will I lecture the Yazidi or the women of Kobane who took…
