Thoughts for the Serious Reader of Harry Potter
The talk above is one I gave in 2017 at the Highlands Latin School in Louisville, Kentucky.
I’m not sure it has a lot of ‘Fourth Generation Rowling Studies’ material, but it has some challenging ideas that ‘hold up’ even after the passage of seven years.
If I say so myself! Let me know in the comment boxes what you think of what I said about Rowling before her ‘Lake and Shed’ revelations and the Trans-TERF War.
The book is titled Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars. It is not yet in print in the US but both the hardcover and paperback editions will be available here next January. What is it about?
The last decade has seen countless cases of women being fired, disciplined, protested or no-platformed for their views on sex and gender. Whether high-profile celebrities or previously unknown feminists, such women’s vocal non-belief in ‘gender identity’ as a universal human condition bears a high social cost. These ‘houndings’ are often presented starkly, clinically, in headlines or fleeting social media moments, stripped of the true cost of holding such beliefs.
But what is the reality behind the headlines and noise? What are the true consequences of holding – and living with – such seemingly now-heretical thoughts?
Hounded charts the often hidden and unspoken harms women face for prioritising and defending sex-based language and rights. Outlining the often-bewildering array of tactics used by opponents against such women, as well as the resilience required to refuse to be silenced, Lindsay presents a compelling argument for recognition of the individual and social harms that are being enacted under the auspices of ‘gender identity activism.’
This debut non-fiction book by award-winning poet and essayist Jenny Lindsay, whose own ‘hounding’ offers a unique perspective, is a solid, sane, witty but also compassionate account about the very human cost of this extraordinary cultural and political schism.
The Amazon.com page for the book features several blurb reviews, the most interesting of which, I thought, was this one:
“Jenny Lindsay’s Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars is a reminder of why compassion is so vital for social justice work in a liberal democracy. Lindsay lays bare the dark side of the gender identity debates, exposing the damage caused by online smear campaigns, harassment, and violence targeting gender critical feminists. While I vehemently disagree with Lindsay and other gender critical feminists on sex, gender, and trans inclusion, we do not have to be on the same side to know that terrorizing those with differing beliefs is illiberal and dehumanizing. Hounded serves as a crucial wake-up call to the silencing impulses on the left that stifle meaningful debates, and the human cost of this silencing.”
Caroline Heldman, Occidental College
Lindsay lives and writes in Scotland and it is a good bet that Rowling is featured in the new book. The fox badge reflects that the person wearing it, a Gender Critical feminist presumably, has been set upon figuratively by hounds, whence “hounded,” in the aristocratic sport of fox hunting. The hounds referred to here are the Gender Theory extremists, the TWAW enforcers, who, oblivious to irony, act out authoritarian pantomimes online and in person while claiming to be hunting “fascist TERFs.”
It is a beautiful photo of Rowling, one of the best in several years. I have to believe, though, that we are meant to laugh about the exchange Rowling had with an admirer, given the absence of any wrinkles in the picture, in which both discuss the non-existent signs of aging as if they haven’t been air-brushed, filled, or botoxed away, as if Rowling is a weathered prune.
Still, whatever ‘work’ Rowling has done to maintain her youthful visage in addition to the hair coloring, it is good to see her looking as well as she does now that the tide has turned as totally as it has in the “transgender” TERF wars. For someone who has been hounded as Rowling has for as many years as she has and at such a cost, a true solve in the alchemical formula, that she appears no worse for the wear and ready for the next battle is no doubt reassuring to those who look to her as a lightning-rod leader in resistance to contemporary madness.
Yesterday Troy Honeycutt, his assistant Ashley, and I put the canvas ger cover from Mongolia over the ‘yurt’ rafters, ring, and pantograph walls. It was too late to take pictures when we were done, but I snapped a few today.
Incredibly, as small as the cover’s package was, it unfolded to fit the home-made scaffolding like a glove on a hand.
The problem we had was consequent to not laying it out before pulling the cover over the ring and rafters. That haste meant that the door cut was on the opposite sing of the ring from the doorway. It took us much longer to spin the cover around than it did to pull it over.
But when it was done, the anything-but-waterproof tent was ‘up’!
I still have to tie and pull tight the seam strings and tweak quite a few of the rafter connections to the baby-gate wall and to the ring, not to mention cutting the tree branches that are visible through the canvas cover.
Tomorrow night the family hopes to have our first fire inside the building in order to see if the center hole works as chimney or if the smoke quickly chases us out of the ger. More anon!
I spent yesterday and the day before re-reading Casual Vacancy for the Pregnancy Trap 2 post I promised last week. Troy Honeycutt and his assistant Ashley came over to put up the final rafters on my 20′ Mongolian ger (Americans call them yurts but that is the Soviet word for “shack” that they used to dismiss traditional Mongolian tents and, with them, Mongolian nomadic life). Today we struggled to put on the cover (from believe it or don’t MongolianStore.com) and succeeded but it was too dark for pictures.
Tomorrow, Deo volente, I will finish my notes and charting of Casual Vacancy and share my findings in a post — along with pictures of my wife’s new Tai Chi studio. Thanks to my brother-in-law Craig Jahr for the carpentry work he did on the ring, to the Honeycutt team for assembling the pantograph walls and rafters, to Benedict Ovel for the ad hoc door he put together in January, and to my family and friends for the five years of Christmas Parties we celebrated inside the incomplete ger extended baby-gate sans ring and rafters.
Three thoughts on this rumor:
(1) It’s a Rumor. The Rowling Library (TRL) is very well connected with Rowling, Inc., and all the fandom outlets that cover it so it can be taken seriously but TRL also carefully notes it is best to wait for confirmation.
(2) It’s Not Credible. If Fortress Rowling chooses a writer unfamiliar with the books and one who has already expressed a willingness and desire to re-invent the series as part of his “adaptation” of it for television, that would mean, because The Presence owns Bronte Studios and is signed on as an Executive Producer, that she will have signed off on another writer having his way with her legacy. And that simply beggars belief; Rowling has been and remains protective of her work as it is adapted whence both her break with Warner Brothers and their blockbuster Double David movies and her invention of her own studio.
(3) It’s Too Credible. Can you say ‘Black Hermione’? ‘Gay Dumbledore, Scorpius, and Albus Severus’? How about ‘Solve et Coagula’ and Rowling’s re-invention of her public persona after the RFK ‘Ripple of Hope’ Award dinner? I find it not only believable but somehow even likely that Rowling will do what she can to make the teevee adaptation of her Hogwarts Saga ‘edgy,’ which is to say ‘offensive and upsetting to the greater audience of people who love the books and watch the film versions on endless loop.’ A further explosion of the Potter fanbase by allowing the teevee Hogwarts to be defamiliarizing or estranging rather than a re-telling may very well be in the cards.
Interesting Times!
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