As I wrote yesterday, the organ of the entertainment industry, Variety, featured an article earlier this week by Adam Vary titled HBO Says ‘Harry Potter’ Series Will ‘Benefit’ From J.K. Rowling’s Involvement: She ‘Has the Right to Express Her Personal Views.’ Rowling appears to have responded to it without mentioning it by name in at least one tweet, perhaps two.
In the article, Vary quotes from interviews he had with Kat Miller, the “Creative Director” at MuggleNet, and Melissa Anelli, the long-time leader of the Leaky Cauldron website, best-selling author, and fandom convention entrepreneur. Each spoke about how difficult it is to be a Potter fan today because of Rowling’s supposed “transphobia” and “bigotry.” Vary ended his piece with a quotation from Miller:
Ironically, while Rowling’s actions have undermined many Potter fans’ dedication to her, they also appear to have strengthened those fans’ solidarity with each other. “Abandoning the fandom and shutting it down is not the place we wanted to be,” Miller says. “We see the value in the community that the fans created. We can love and enjoy that without the author.”
This has been something of a mantra among the Genderistas who are Potter-philes for the last five years: “We can enjoy the books and each other’s company while ignoring the poisonous opinions of the author.” Rowling’s tweet yesterday let her feelings be known about this sort of reader:
The timing of this post, in the wake of the Variety piece, leads me to think it possible, even likely, that it is Miller and Anelli specifically that Rowling is calling “dickheads.”
I’m pretty sure of that connection between article and tweet. More of a stretch is connecting the dots between Vary’s assertion that Rowling has dedicated her “online persona” to advancing what seem to Vary a “campaign” of irrational bigotry and verbal violence against helpless “transgender” people:
Rowling, meanwhile, has made her campaign against trans identity the central focus of her online persona. On Sept. 10, she posted the U.K. open casting call for the roles of Harry Potter, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley to her 14.2 million followers on X. That was an exception: Over the next two months, Rowling posted or reposted more than 200 times (excluding replies) about trans-related issues to support her conviction, as she posted on Oct. 7, that gender identity “is defined by little more than a person’s subjective feelings, or (more accurately) their claim to feel those feelings.” Within the same time frame, she posted or reposted about Harry Potter just eight more times, including one in which she said she “pulled something laughing” at a fan expressing their “immeasurable” disappointment that Rowling was, in her words, “very involved” with the “Potter” series. (Through a spokesperson, Rowling declined to comment for this story.)
Vary believes the @JKRowling should be consumed by all things Harry Potter, a book series she finished seventeen years ago, a social media platform akin to MuggleNet or LeakyCauldron. He does not compare Rowling’s twitter feed activity, work-related versus Gender Critical posts, in the month before and after one of her books is released but chooses a time when Rowling’s lightning rod role in the resistance to the erosion of women’s rights is at a critical stage. It is Vary and Variety, then, that seem to be on a “campaign” to get Rowling to c0nform her “online persona” to their view, the ubiquitous one of main-stream media, especially in the Entertainment sections of newspapers and online platforms.
It may seem a bit of a stretch, but Rowling may have chosen this week to post a tweet about her supposed obsession with the rights of women and children in order to push back to the borderline nonsensical assertion by Vary that she is an unhinged ideologue on this issue. Note that Elon Musk chimed in immediately after Rowling put up this post:
Rowling, as I noted yesterday, played defense in the first years of the Trans Wars, but those days are long past. The political, juridical, scientific, and even sporting world view of “transgender” people now lines up pretty neatly with Rowling’s “conviction” per Vary, quoting Rowling, that “gender identity ‘is defined by little more than a person’s subjective feelings, or (more accurately) their claim to feel those feelings’.” Now she has the backing of the incoming US President and one of the world’s richest men in addition to the new populist consensus contra “transgender” over-reach. She didn’t call out the Variety article directly with its in-your-face bias and implicit defamatory agenda, but she now has responded to at least two of its more ridiculous assertions while not sharing a link to the Vary piece with her 14+million followers on twixter.
As I noted yesterday, I do not share Rowling’s motivations for resisting the “transgender” tide, one that seemed a tsunami only a year or two ago, but I have paid at least the price she has economically (when adjusted for our comparative incomes, of course) for my resistance to same. Despite our differences in reasoning (and Rowling’s despising all those who fight against her enemy for anything but advancing the causes of feminism and sexed-based science), I admire her heroic stand and am delighted that she is now fighting back in a subtle and measured fashion.
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