J.K. Rowling is embroiled in a fresh row with another Harry Potter actor over transgender rights.
Following exchanges of fire with Daniel Radcliffe and others, Rowling has blasted David Tennant after the Goblet of Fire star voiced strident views on those who speak out against trans rights.
During an appearance at the British LGBT Awards over the weekend, he called on British equalities minister Kemi Badenoch to “shut up” after she advocated for banning trans women from entering women’s toilets and sports teams.
In an interview at the same event, Tennant called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon.”
Earlier in the week, Rowling branded people like Tennant the “gender Taliban.” In posts on X (once Twitter) on Friday, she expanded her comments to address Tennant’s “wrong side of history” quote.
Rowling wrote: “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders.”
She added: “For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist.”
Wait… The UK has a minister of Equalities and they’re against equality? What the fuck?
Welcome to thr Bizarro World of Tory politics. We’ve got an Environment Minister who doesn’t care that the rivers and overflowing with excrement. The Housing Minister hasn’t overseen much housebuilding. And on and on.
Yeah, this government is messed up. I don’t think there’s a single drop of humanity between them.
What till you see what the fairly resent exchequers did with money
Could the witch woman please shut up.
This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders.
It’s hilarious that she’s making these seem like widespread issues when most of them are literally just one incident, or aren’t happening at all. These are the best examples she can come up with of legitimate grievances against trans people?
How about “bullied to suicide, denied medical care, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, and getting violently hate crimed at enormous rates” for the other side of this issue? Even if you think trans identities are invalid, at least pretend to treat them with the same respect you would other human beings. But no, trans people who are just trying to survive day-to-day are nonchalantly grouped in with pedophile rapists, as if those two things are in any way equivalent.
It’s easy to hate someone when you just ignore what they really are and supplant it with something else entirely.
As a cis female rape survivor I would choose the care of a compassionate trans woman over a judgemental TERF anytime!
I 100% agree with your post. The issues she raises are nonexistent or extremely rare. In my personal life I believe and practice “trans-women are women” as for all intents and purposes it’s true.
I am however concerned that I don’t really have a response to anyone who doesn’t believe that, particularly women with some sort of past trauma that gives them an instinctual fear response. It feels insensitive to tell them to get over it or go to therapy. Particularly if they’ve been exposed to one of the extremely rare examples Rowling has presented. But I think going to therapy is probably what needs to happen.
My other conflicting thought is that therapy or condemnation it is what we would say to people being racist, but there seems to be a societal agreement that we need women only spaces. And we don’t say “get over it” in regards to men trying to enter a women’s shelter, we offer an amount of sympathy and understanding to the women and allow them that space. Which means there is some amount of gender discrimination is desired/needed. This also indicates there there should be a line or set of fuzzy criteria that determines if we treat trans-women as women or not. But this obviously also feels wrong, and I hate it.
Sorry if this was insensitive, I mostly just want to gather thoughts as I’m not confident in my thinking. I don’t think these issues deserve the amount of attention transphobes are giving them, but we’re here now, so I want to try and figure out a solution or response to more “reasonable” transphobes that I could potentially change the minds of
I appreciate this comment.
particularly women with some sort of past trauma that gives them an instinctual fear response
Surely the answer to traumatised women is to give them accommodations and special treatment, not to punish anyone who sets off that trauma response because of perceptions about that person’s race or gender.
The irony is that the Taliban agrees with JK Rowling on matters of gender and sexuality lol.
Conservatives & Projection
Headline blasted by grammar “Nazis” for having “too many” quotes to be taken serious
This picture makes me think that David Tenant is actually trans JK Rowling.
I’m so glad I pirated the harry potter audiobooks and didn’t give a cent to this bigot
I’m so glad I stopped giving a shit about Harry Potter and accepted that just because a zeitgeist happened in my childhood doesn’t mean I should cling to fictional fantasy that hadn’t actually done anything novel in the genre or touched upon topics that aren’t handled in better novels elsewhere
Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.
The moral of Harry Potter is that the status quo is correct and should never be questioned, and nobody should ever try to change anything.
Harry doesn’t defeat Voldemort or change any of the issues inherent in the bumbling bureaucracy of the wizard world. Voldemort kills himself on a magic technicality, Harry becomes a magic cop and helps to ensure that magic is never used to help the undesirables of society (Muggles), and Hermione is ridiculed for being a girl with blue hair and pronouns who tried to end the chattel slavery system before she “grew up” and became a much more sensible person who realized that the slaves actually want to be oppressed, and it’s for their own good.
You can see Rowling’s morality change practically in real-time as the books go on, from criticizing the system to defending it as she began to benefit from it as her wealth grew. And underneath it all, you can see her discriminatory opinions of people. That was always there. When she wants you to hate a woman, she makes them fat or gives them masculine features. If I have to read the phrase “mannish hands” one more time, I might vomit.
Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.
Good call, here is a link.
Dude I’m saying! Harry Potter was never good, it was just popular
And yeah I read them and watched them, at least the first few. I’m not talking out of my ass. It’s a series with a few imaginative ideas sprinkled throughout otherwise super typical schlock with casually racist seasoning.
Fuck Harry Potter
Yep, I never understood the appeal besides making kids feel special. It seemed like a water down fantasy which when I criticized people just said read the books.
Ironically I did read the first one before the movies became a big hit. It was an okay children’s book at best.
For some reason we have these unwritten social rules that say you can’t critique certain pop culture icons once they hit critical mass.
Harry Potter is sort of the Classic Lays potato chip of the children’s book world. Dependable, reliable, not the most exciting in the world but any stretch, but easily snackable all the same.
They’re easy to read, not super deep, and because of that, probably got a lot of kids into reading who otherwise wouldn’t have, and there’s something to be said for that. It’s unfortunate that the author turned out to be a bigot the whole time.
I unfortunately had to watch all the movies because I had a child of the appropriate age range that wanted to watch them. Every last one was boring as all hell. Some of them were even in the theater so I added a little to them being popular. But they were not good.
I am/was likely far too old to be in the target demographic for Pottermania but they never worked for me. They always felt a little… safe, reactionary even as they drew on a long tradition of British boarding school books without really addressing or undermining the genre tropes or even using it as a means to examine that culture. It then wasn’t a surprise to find out the author had some questionable views didn’t seem a great surprise to me.
I had the first 4 books and read them around ages 11-13, reading the first two before the first movie came out. I think because none of my classmates at the time had read or watched anything relating to HP, I never really talked about it, so I set it aside after finishing Goblet of Fire, which coincided with the Lord of the Rings movies.
To me, it felt like I was leaving behind a story for kids and getting in on the “real good stuff for adults”
It came out when I was 9, so I was part of the target demographic, though I didn’t pick it up til I was 12 or 13 because we read it at school, though by that point I had read most of the Animorphs books, so potter came across as very tame and a bit too childish. I was already dealing with themes of war and genocide and existential crisis and everything else Animorphs threw at you.
I would love to see a Gender Taliban declare war on JKKK Rowling. Like 20 years of protracted insurgency which reduces her to poverty before it wins.
Where can I get my membership card, shirt, and other swag as a member of David Tennant’s Gender Taliban
David Tennant’s Gender Taliban
New band name. We play LGBTQ+ Punkry & Western.
i think that’s called folk punk in the US
Ok, I didn’t get this joke until like 15 minutes later and had to come back to upvote it. Amazing. Punkry Western.
I’d be very surprises if someone wasn’t working on at least a t-shirt design right now.
Putting all the politics aside, man I wish he got more roles. The purple man was the best part of Jessica Jones.
Broadchurch was a very strong performance as well.
Good Omens also fantastic and not just because of him
J. K. Rowling is a knob.
She wishes she had a knob.
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’
As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.
Joanne is bitter because others are having what she didn’t get.
Classic “Homosexuality is a choice because I’m gay and chose to deny it” energy.
“For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist.”
Critical of people she praises for compassion.
J.K. Rowling has recently been canceled because she… did not please the fans of the so-called gender freedoms,”
-Putin
Praised by fascist dictators.
And yet somehow JK thinks she is on the right side of history? 😄
Following this logic, the Gaza protestors theocratic terrorists because they were praised by jihadist terrorist groups
I expect in a Rowling vs. Tenant fight, Tenant is gonna come out with a win every time. That woman has a damaged moral compass on a good day.
Hmm maybe if you keep attacking the people who stand for good, that means that you’re the evil one with dumb, shitty, and wrong ideas? Ever think of that you dumb fuck Rowling?
they’ll all go away soon
I wonder what makes him think that.
Tennant: TERFs are whiny fucking babies
JK Rowling, Court Jester: whines like baby
Extra Fabulous on It as usual
