After great battles, in the fog of war and consequent chaos and confusion, there is inevitably a remnant group, oftentimes isolated individuals as in the Japanese zanryū nipponhei (‘holdout soldiers’) that refused to surrender after WWII, who don’t understand that they’ve lost or that the conflict is over. In the case of the ‘Trans War’ between Gender Critical thinkers and Gender Theorists, this is evident in the True Believers, the Trans Radical Activists or TRAs who believe that the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, 21st Century edition, goes on despite the now triumphant consensus that “transgenderism” is not a Civil Rights but a mental health care issue. It’s ‘early days,’ certainly, but sanity seems to have returned to the American polity, at least, with respect to sex, gender, and the guardrails for the protection of children and the rights of women.
One quick way to spot a lost Confederate soldier is to check social media comments about J. K. Rowling. The remnant holdouts in the jungles online are testifying there that they believe their efforts to destroy J. K. Rowling, to cancel her by making even mentioning her name radioactive among all thinking people, were successful. Case in point, Kendal Peters, whose Twixter stream might be confused for a parody site because of its consistent conformity with every conventional political position advanced by the Legacy media. Last week, she (?) shared her belief that toxic and “transphobic” Rowling’s “literary career” had been “destroyed completely and globally” by the Forces of Good:
Truth tellers rushed to the internet island Peters lives on in the ‘cloud’ to share with her, that, no, Rowling’s book sales were booming, not crashing, and she was thriving as a writer rather than someone who was “destroyed.”
The Bookseller.com page linked in that tweet reported that Rowling’s Harry Potter earnings, a series a decade and a half on the shelf, were still akin to a just released best seller’s:
The global digital audiobook and e-book publisher of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series and associated titles from the wizarding world, reported on Companies House that revenues in the period were up by £0.6m to £48.8m (2023: £48.2m) and pre-tax profits also increased by 21% to £11.4m (2023: £9.4m).
The report on Companies House reads: “Pottermore had a record year thanks to its strong commercial partnerships with sales of the Harry Potter e-books and audiobooks now settled into a more regular pattern following the highs during the Covid pandemic.” The company’s financial trajectory had been volatile following the pandemic with profits down 40% in 2022 before vastly improving last year.
Not enough? How about the evidence, again from Bookseller.com, that Rowling is still out-performing every author alive and dead with respect to earnings:
Rowling seems to be reaching out to these ‘Holdout Soldiers’ who still fight for the ‘Lost Cause’ and follow her on Twixter. She has had this piece pinned to the top of her home page since September to alert them that their attempts to boycott or separate themselves from her work isn’t hurting her in the least:
Yesterday she repeated her message to those still at war post-surrender that they were shooting blanks from behind their barricade. As traumatic as their disassociation from her as Childhood Hero had been for them, their attempts to hurt her aren’t landing:
Will these lost soldiers ever understand they were wrong vis a vis “transgender kids” etc. and come to appreciate Rowling’s courage or even just that they lost? Rowling seems to have her doubts. As Dr Murray reposted at his Twixter feed:
Here’s hoping for a new Harry Potter fandom space online, one (or two!) to supplant the TRA sites that were all-in on canceling Rowling and cannot repent or even pretend they were the victims of a Confundus Charm.
The good news? Strike fandom never seems to have caught the contagion, for which, three cheers!
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