J. K. Rowling on Twixter today repeated her assertion in April that “the left has fucked up monumentally on gender identity ideology,” and, though she disavowed the idea that this was the difference maker in Trump’s victory this week, she made it clear that the progressive party’s having done “its utmost to alienate people it used to represent” played its part. Here is that explosive long-form tweet and some of the more interesting responses and relevant commentary:

I wrote the words below in April, about the UK left, and I’m retweeting them today for the benefit of some of the numbskulls in my mentions.

Women like me, and there are a lot of us, aren’t and never have been far-right. We simply want the left to wake the hell up, because we’re watching it do its utmost to alienate people it used to represent.

I’m not saying Trump’s win was down to the gender stuff – I’m not an American voter, so can’t judge. In any case, the Labour Party won the last UK election and they’ve embraced gender identity ideology whole-heartedly (although they won against a Tory government so enfeebled and unpopular it would have been miraculous if they hadn’t, and their popularity since gaining office has plummeted.)

What I do know is that millions of women in the UK and across the developed world are extremely angry about men in women’s sport, men in women’s jails and the erosion of single-sex spaces. Parents are angry at being demonised because they don’t want their troubled kids to undergo irreversible medical treatments of extremely questionable benefit. People are sick to the back teeth of being bullied and threatened for refusing to embrace an elitist, academia-generated ideology that’s having severe real world consequences.

Large swathes of the left continue to be threatening and abusive to anybody who resists their attempts to impose ideological language or bully them out of wrongthink. Leftist activists jeer and sneer at erstwhile female allies for the crime of believing biological sex is real and matters. And leftist leaders still appear more interested in sucking up to gender activists than – to take a topical example in the UK – female nurses whose crime is not wanting to undress in front of a fully intact male.

So to those screaming ‘bigot’ and ‘fascist’ at me, you should know two things. Firstly, I’m completely indifferent to your disapproval, as I’d have thought you’d have realised by now. Secondly, and far more importantly, the only thing more harmful to your cause than your pseudo-religious belief in gender identities is your astounding, self-righteous arrogance.

Rowling had a back-and-forth with @KProtein19 about whether this issue tipped the scales in Trump’s favor. The consensus was that Trump had a relatively small budget for ad buys relative to the oligarchs’ candidate but decided to go all in on anti-“transgender” pieces to win the votes of those who would normally vote for the Blue candidate. [Read more…]

J. K. Rowling is an unhinged sufferer of Trump Derangement Syndrome. At least, she was during his first term and the inter regnum. Now, who knows?

For one thing, she went silent on the subject of the United States Presidential campaign period with her only mention being a single retweet of a feminist decrying unkind things being said about Vice President Harris after the Democratic Party nominated her over Biden in a de facto coup. That’s as close as she could bring herself to an endorsement of a woman progressive running against someone she once tweeted was “much worse than Voldemort.” See ‘Point #2’ of this post for much more on this subject.

Today, though, the day after Trump’s victory in the popular and Electoral College votes and his coattails giving the GOP control of the House and Senate, Rowling put out three tweets, each of which, while not Three Cheers for DJT, highlighted her shared experience with the Orange Man of progressive snobbery and being smeared as Nazis. Let’s look at these three tweets and some of the better responses in each post’s thread.

Vice President Harris struggled to make coherent answers to even the simplest unscripted questions from reporters. In her softball interview with Anderson Cooper, though, she skipped the usual word salad and affirmed loudly and clearly that former President Trump was a “fascist.” Do an internet search for “Trump called Nazi” and check out the number of hits there are. Rowling is clearly referring here, I think, to that progressive maven reflex with respect to Trump — but she makes it in the context of her being called a “transphobic Nazi” repeatedly the last four years. Hold that thought. Some of the funnier responses to this tweet:

Pretty funny — and I didn’t expect Rowling to be joking, however darkly, on the Morning After a Trump electoral sweep. There were also tweet-responses from Gender Critical feminists, who made the point that progressives got their due by treating women as third class citizens and then expecting them to show up and vote for a candidate who shared that view though also being a woman:

[Read more…]

If you read Nick’s post, The Rt Hon The Baronness Rowling of Killiechassie, you know that Rowling was already given an Order of the British Empire award and been inducted to the much more exclusive Order of Merit (Companions of Honour) of whom there are only sixty-five in the UK and Commonwealth nations. A life peerage, though, is a whole different matter because it would make Rowling a Baroness, someone referred to properly as Mi’lady, has a coat of arms, sit in the House of Lords, etc.  P. D. James, the Baronness James of Holland Park, was a life peer and I’m guessing that Agatha Christie, though a Dame Commander of the Order of the Empire (DBE), two ranks above Rowling’s OBE and known as Lady Mallowan, was not.

[Read more…]

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.