Hogwarts Professor

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…]