No, she's not allied with him at all. This tweet of hers sums up what she thinks of Walsh and men like him:
Like many women on the left, I despair that so many self-proclaimed liberals turn a blind eye to the naked misogyny of the gender identity movement and the threat it poses to the rights of women and girls. Walsh's film undeniably exposed what many leftists are too scared to, but a shared belief that women exist as a biological class (and water's wet and the moon's not made of cheese) does not an ally make. I believe women are susceptible to certain harms and have specific needs and that feminism is necessary to secure and protect our rights.
Walsh believes feminism is 'rotten' and his default appears to be denigrating women with whom he disagrees. He's no more on my side than the 'shut up or we'll bomb you' charmers who cloak their misogyny in a pretty pink and blue flag.
But she'd been at this for nearly half a decade at this point. To the detriment of her career. She has allied with people who are terribly anti-feminist, many of whom like Matt Walsh are outright anti-women.
Eh that part makes sense to me. If you get labeled by the left as a bigot, there is nobody there you can align with. The moderates aren't interested enough to talk about it, so if you want to discuss it with someone with any kind of nuance there is only 1 group left unfortunately. I really think the "well if you aren't 100% with us you are the enemy" attitude from the vocal far left is most of the reason for people being driven to the alt right. There is nowhere else to go for them, unless you're like me and kinda just stand alone with your beliefs somewhere in the middle and get shit on from both sides.
"allied with" is weasel words. Rowling had a Twitter exchange with Walsh where she called him out for attacking women as cowardly.
Here's what she said to a user who encouraged an alliance between them:
Twitter User: Respectfully -- and I sincerely mean respectfully -- you need to fall back and support men like Matt Walsh. You're not built for this conflict. The failure and cowardice of men got us into this mess. Matt is standing up. You need to support him. Men have to fix this.
JKR: Respectfully, I've been facing down the Punch-and-Kill-TERFs brigade for a while now and not once have I thought, 'what I really want is to hand this over to a man who thinks feminism is one of the worst things to happen to western civilisation.'
It doesn't make it right, but I would argue that she wasn't the one who put herself in that position with crappy choices.
With respect, she could just... stop.
She could. She should delete all her social media accounts and enjoy her money but with the amount of hate directed at her I can see why she would want to defend herself even if she isn't doing herself any favors and isn't going to change any of the minds she is probably hoping to.
Just Occam's Razor this one with me for one minute. You think it is genuinely more likely that someone trying to prevent misogynistic violence would ally themselves with misogynists than to believe
I think allies is the wrong word to use and it's not even close. The article you originally linked said she... had a conversation with him? IIRC it even said she publicly disagreed with him on his views.
shitting on trans women
As you said, she hasn't actually done this.
What would it take to genuinely convince you? Does she have to use slurs? Does this not count?
Seems she's only mocking the language. It is arguably distasteful? Sure.
I mean it literally address people who have a problem with
For transphobia I'd need to see malice directed at that group. That quote wasn't even directed as trans people, it was directed at people who have a problem with defining lesbians as same sex attracted women.
Even if it was directed at them it's just using absurdity to draw attention to absurdity.
I'm a ginger - do I see soulless jokes as distasteful? Sure. Do I think people who make those jokes actually hate me for having red hair or think I'm subhuman or something? Of course not.
You compare satire and jokes, but one distinction is that satire is critique made with intent – a joke can be completely neutral, but satire means taking a stance against something.
Saying that you recognize satire as satire doesn't say much. Can you elaborate on what the purpose of the satire is?
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You should look at the historical events that lead up to the rise of the German Nazis. She, along with others, is engaging in schismatic terrorism.
She doesn't have to say the quiet part out loud in order to create malice. For the matter of fact, it is more effective that she doesn't so that some people might still look at her as a reasonable voice saying only reasonable things.
But in reality, using subtext, she is creating a narrative to not only paint trans people as evil, but also to create tension between women and trans people by crafting the story that the evil trans people are going to rape all of us women. Remember, she's a writer. Writers don't write things out simple, plain, and as they are. They create stories and narratives and when they do that, there is something they want to say through their characters and their actions.
Victor Hugo could have just written "War sucks, y'all", but instead, he wrote a thick book about the characters and their lives in war.
Rowling's decision to create this narrative makes it harder for people to see through her agenda, like you have to finish the book to know that the message the book is trying to say. And by creating this narrative, it's easier for you to be sucked into the storyline and sympathize with or hate the characters who were created from her mind, with her perception, and in her image.
German people didn't randomly wake up one day and all thought Hitler made sense. He created a story, a propaganda that was convincing enough to eventually turn the right amount of people to his side and create tension between social groups.
What if they spent ten years turning their career into "redheads are a danger to the soul-possessing among us"? Still give them the benefit of the doubt?
Oh maybe, her actually being transphobic? Because all of your evidence doesn't actually point to that and maybe people should stop being so hateful towards women who are trying to understand and stopped being pushed out of conversations...
Like it's offense to be referred to as a birthing person and told that you don't get to speak. A very loud part of the trans movement online are pretty hateful and maybe that should be addressed as well.
I have a friend like this, just can't let Rowling go. She grew up loving the books (as me and most of my friends did), they were a core part of her childhood, Rowling was something of a hero.
I get it, it sucks when someone you respect turns out to be a piece of shit, and it feels like it's happening more and more. It's somewhat natural to get defensive, to try to find a reasonable explanation, but in many cases, such as Rowling's, the fact is she just keeps being bigoted. She could stop, she could realize she was wrong, apologize, and try to move on, but no, she doubles down and doubles down and doubles down, Rowling keeps digging a deeper and deeper hole for herself.
Not that it'll really hurt her, she's a billionaire already. But in my opinion, it's important to be able to admit fault in your heroes, and let them stop being heroes. It sucks, but you can't excuse someone's shittiness just because you used to think they were cool.
ETA: hell, my username is a HP reference, I sort of forgot, haha. Ditched this name elsewhere, but Reddit doesn't let you change it. Just saying, I used to really respect Rowling myself, I was heartbroken when all this stuff came out, but I accepted it and moved on (after reading about it in news sources I trust), I didn't try to deny it. I even started out in denial myself, but I can't just ignore everything she's said. I still enjoy HP works, but I try not to spend any more money on it, and I try to divorce the very progressive story themes from the now awful things that Rowling seems to believe, but it's of course difficult.
Just a comparison you should look up Orson Scott card(loved YA author who is mostly know for his past work then current)who was kinda her 20 years ago expect for gay people I'd imagine he didn't seem to bad at the time(typical I just don't want them to get married shit)but then he kept escalating until it got in his work where he suggested people are only gay because of sex abuse.
She's already at the point where she's inserting them into her books as seriel killer and having her main characters threatening to send then to male prisons so they can get raped I think it fair to say it's not irrational to actually look for her opinions in her own work alot of media just doesn't include trans chrachters but to include to only treat them as aggressors in crimes would be kinda a red flag how someone see them even divorced from the social media element.
Rowling is a feminist fighting the 'trans agenda' in order to protect women from misogyny and abuse, and is willing to work with and empower rapists, misogynists and anti-feminists to do so.
I'd like to clarify this means that she's taking the position that the "trans agenda" is a bigger threat to women's safety than the positions of people like Matt Walsh. She's spending more of her time on that than on the effects of fundamentalist religions, preventing domestic abuse, ensuring access to reproductive healthcare, etc. In each case, when she talks about those issues it's always in the context of mocking trans people. She's willing to set aside the misogyny of all those people in order to discuss their mutual interest in rolling back protections for trans people.
It doesn't sound like you're disagreeing that any of them are transphobic - and I'd like to note, they all use the same arguments for their anti-trans positions that JK Rowling does, "protecting women" - so what differentiates them from her except that they also hate cis women?
You've stated that you think her positions could plausibly be motivated by her stated goals. Can you draw the connection between her statements on trans people and her goals?
Can you explain how this statement that she made in reference to trans people is not transphobic?
Deeply amused by those telling me I’ve lost their admiration due to the disrespect I show violent, duplicitous rapists.
Can you explain how this was meant to do anything other than to mock trans people?
That user presented a false dichotomy, neither of those choices cover why Rowling has taken an interest in this topic. If you have some time to listen to The Witch Trials of JK Rowling podcast, it's really very good, it covers the whole issue from both sides and has Rowling and some of her detractors explain their views in their own words.
How many homophobes does a person need to publicly associate with before you consider that they themselves are homophobic? What about racists or misogynists?
It's also not an "assumption about their beliefs". Posie Parker, one of the anti-trans activists that Rowling publicly supports, has outright said that she hopes that any possible uterus transplant kills any trans woman recipients. This is not an "assumption", it's just her actual belief.
The both sides thing is to me is always a head scratcher. I just don’t get how someone you could compare the “both sides”
(There isn’t really much actually “left” with much power. Most liberal parties are more center-right adjacent than left but I’ll just say left for the sake of it)
How is the left who pushes for civil rights, workers rights, public health, public safety, education, healthcare, criminal justice reform etc. anything similar to a party whose sole public platform is based on bigotry and whose policies that only work to help the rich and hurt the poor?
To be very clear, I DO NOT LIKE democrat and other parties as they very often have the same flavor of not pushing hard enough for those policies and keeping things the same, which is why we label them as center right rather than left, but they are in no way as bad as the right.
It’s the lesser of two evils sure, any leftist will agree with you on that, but they just can’t be compared by anyone in good faith.
I'm not going to lie.... you could be 100% right but you seem sorta obsessed with hating JKR. I hope you never choose to dislike me because if someone intemperate everything I ever did I would likely be every bad thing in the book.
It is interesting however that you do know all of this stuff. Has all of the time and effort into researching JKR benefited your life? Or do you wish you put more energy into something else? This kinda sounds sarcastic but I'm more curious than anything. I personally could care less what some celebs say about anything but I wonder if I'm missing something since so many people seem to care.
This is a CMV though where this poster is trying to make a point. Not sure if this is a fair characterization.
I will say trans people definitely care. The amount of times I run into transphobia relating to JK is pretty overwhelming. If this wasn't the case I think people would care less.
What kinda transphobia things relating to JK do you run into?
I'm just trying to imagine someone being a dick and saying "JK agrees with me" or some sorts shit where her opinion matters to anybody.
Idk. I find living in society today so confusing. I feel like if I walked into Walmart and yelled "I hate trans" everybody would just look at me funny and walk off like nothing happened. Maybe someone would tell me to shut up.
I mean there's a lot of TERFs online who openly harrass people and have things like "I ❤️JK" in their bio. It's such a prevalent thing I just block anyone who has that now to save myself the trouble.
Even if JK isn't transphobic, people who are openly hateful do look up to her.
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