Sunday, June 4, 2023

An Open Letter To JK Rowling: Please Shut Up

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Dear J.K. Rowling,

Or maybe we should call you Joanne? After all, you seem to be obsessed with the names people have, especially ones they’ve chosen. So let’s go with Joanne.

Joanne, shut the hell up.

Do you really think you have any place to define womanhood for anybody? Do you really think you have any place to define anything for anybody? Oh, god forbid people get to express their true selves in their day to day lives like the way you literally always have been able to do so. Except when you take a shortened name to seem less “female” and sell more books, or when you take on a man’s name to sell your hack mystery novels. Great choice of pen name by the way! Robert Galbraith Heath helped pioneer gay conversion therapy back in the 70’s, when they put steel electrodes in a patient’s skull and let him shock himself until, in their view, he was straight.

I doubt you knew that because, based on the recent worldbuilding you’ve done on Pottermore, you are completely incapable of doing any research beyond your lived experience as an affluent white woman on an extremely wet island who thinks that war criminal Tony Blair was somehow the peak of British leftism.

You can take your “concerns” about trans people and shove them right up your Burrow. You’ve committed no “crimes” by supporting completely bigoted people, liking their tweets and, now, tweeting out TERF talking points as if you were some kind of feminist icon and not a two-bit pulp writer who lucked into her greatest success and has been coasting on it ever since. You claim to have read gender theory but seem to have absolutely no understanding of the trans experience outside of your own cis-normative experience and the same dubious science that the right wing like to bandy about. Who’d have thought the author of Harry Potter would be as much of a baby brain as Piers Morgan and Nigel Farage?

The most insulting thing of all, however, is your pretense that you care about trans people. You seem to think they’re all just little confused babies you have to guide and protect, that you actually have their bests interests in mind. Want to know what their best interests are? LISTEN TO THEM! Put down your phone and stop writing whatever twee update you’re working on for Pottermore (or, god forbid, the next Fantastic Beasts movie), and listen to actual trans people. Listen to your critics, listen to the people you’ve pissed off. But that’ll probably impossible for you, since it requires you to dismount your high horse for a few minutes.

So, once more with feeling. Shut the FUCK up, you colonialist, racist, myopic, transphobic HACK.

Love,

The Fandomentals Team

PS – Go Support Trans Communities!

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