This Tuesday Variety published a piece 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.’ The title simultaneously shares the news it reports, two points of relatively low shock value, and the focus of the opinion-editorial embedded within the news article which op-ed argues that both HBO assertions are scandalous and shameful.
I think we have arrived at a point in the Trans Wars, the TQ+ assault on J. K. Rowling’s right to speak biological common sense to their shared delusion that men can be women and vice versa, where we are obliged to take score. The science vis a vis “transgenderism” is now on the side of Rowling, the courts agree that her stance is correct and women’s spaces must be protected, athletic bodies are beginning to retreat from their “inclusive” definitions of ‘woman’ that allows men to compete in women’s sports, and, in the US at least, the sizeable majority of Americans voted for the Presidential candidate who took Rowling’s position point by point starting early in 2023 and made it a focus of his campaign advertising in the ‘Swing States’ in the fall of 2024. Rowling has moved from a defensive position during the first two years of an all-out effort to “cancel” her to an aggressive position of truth-telling and of refusing to accept apologies from the conformists who threw her under the bus when she needed their help.
The Gender Theory Extremists, in other words, have lost the high ground. The government, the majority of voting citizens, the courts, the sports authorities, and the scientists are now supporting Rowling’s supposedly “murderous” opinions, “transphobia,” and “bigotry.” Who are the hold-outs who insist against all evidence that “TWAW“? The Twitterati, certainly, and the main-stream media talking heads, but there are at least three other significant pockets of 21st Century zanryū nipponhei who refuse not only to acknowledge their profound error in judgment but also to apologize for their years-long defamation of those who were correct. This article unwittingly exposes them all by exclusively citing their spokesmen (persons!) as authorities on the Trans War status quo.
The three TWAW Holdouts incapable of surrender or repentance? Hollywood, Schools, and Potter Fandom.
Variety clearly represents the mass of the Left Coast entertainment establishment for which “transgenderism” is a sacrament and anything but utter devotion to this cause is heresy and apostacy demanding excommunication. Vary’s article’s headline says it all; the one-liner meant to draw reader interest because of its remarkable revelation or newsworthy substance is anything but that — except in Hollywood. Where else would a celebrity author’s participation in a television adaptation be considered anything but a “benefit” to that project? In what other world does the statement that J. K. Rowling “has the right to express her own personal views” strike anyone as a remarkably outré assertion? Vary cites, as all such articles do, that Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint all parroted the “We disagree with JKR! TWAW!” mantras after her first tweets contra euphemisms like “people who menstruate” for “women.”
Potter Fandom, who “creative director of MuggleNet” Kat Miller described in the article as “majority women, and very, very, very queer,” is a radical hold-out as well. Miller and Melissa Anelli are quoted at length in this piece, both describing the agonies in this community, actually a very small faction of Harry Potter fans globally, of loving the stories but hating the author’s no-nonsense, no-compromise position on women’s safe spaces, sports exclusively for biological women, and the protection of children and adolescents from “Gender Affirming healthcare,” i.e., chemical castration and surgical mutilation. There is not a hint in the quotations from the Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet decision makers and representatives that anything has changed in the consensus about “transgenderism” since they tried unsuccessfully to cancel Rowling and succeeded in black-balling all Potter Pundits not on board with their outlandish beliefs.
And the Schools? They are not represented in Vary’s piece, I admit, but they are among the defiant holdouts who refuse to recognize they have lost the war and to lay down their arms. See any of the Potter essay anthologies printed in the last several years — three that are on my shelf as I contributed a chapter to each are Anne Mamary’s The Alchemical Harry Potter, Cecelia Farr’s Open at the Close, and Lana Whited’s The Ivory Tower, Harry Potter, and Beyond — and you’ll find the inevitable wringing of hands, even rending of garments, about the problematic position of Potter Pundits in the wake of Rowling’s supposed “transphobia” and deadly “bigotry.” The care with which these anthology editors to separate themselves from Rowling’s assumed ignorance about an issue that cannot be questioned or debated in their classrooms or faculty lounges speaks for itself about the ideology on tap in those institutions.
I don’t expect the Twitterati, the main-stream media talking heads, the academics, the Movie making community and larger entertainment industry, or Harry Potter Fandom, Inc., to re-examine their positions anytime in the immediate future. The “resistance” to President-elect Trump and its attendant infectious TDS all but guarantees their digging in rather than reflecting or retreating in the face of their losses at the ballot box, in scientific and social studies, and in the courts.
I read something today in First Things, though, by Matthew Crawford, an aside in a book review ‘Ready for Weirdness‘ in which he touched on the stakes involved in the battle by elites to erase the distinctions between the sexes. For those who think that this Trans War kerfuffle is just another ‘culture war’ battle between libertines and puritans, Crawford offers a sobering correction:
Modernity progresses from disenchantment to disenchantment, advanced under the banner of liberation (whether from superstition, from ecclesiastical authorities, or from childish hopes). And once man’s connection to the divine is severed, he takes himself to be free for self-making. Like Dreher, C. S. Lewis saw where this freedom leads: “The power of Man to make himself what he pleases” really means “the power of some men to make other men what they please.”
The most reliable bulwarks against such manipulation are, first, the revelation that man is made in the image of God; and second, that “male and female He created them.” Dreher quotes at length from his conversations with a man he calls Jonah, who once was deep into occult practices but later converted to Orthodox Christianity. Jonah suggests to Dreher that
transgender ideology is an attempt to destroy the image of God within us. The distinction between men and women, and the metaphysical implications of correct relationship between masculinity and femininity, are key to correct theological understanding. Destroy this boundary and many others will follow, such as the boundaries between human and animal, and human and technology. If one of these foundational distinctions can be made to seem arbitrary, do we expect the others to hold?
Here we begin to see continuities between the project for “artificial intelligence” (the notion that there is no essential difference between man and machine) and the messianic drive of progressives to deny sexual difference. Freedom requires erasing the boundaries between natural kinds. Such erasure, pursued in a debunking spirit, arises from resentment of the given order. It follows easily from reductive materialism, the view that “really” we are “nothing but” protons, neutrons, and electrons.
Reductive materialism is not a scientific method but a posture toward reality. It denies the significance of heterogeneity: Everything is ultimately the same stuff. Applied to human beings, such a metaphysics has a political corollary. It is clearly the tacit foundation of what Renaud Camus calls “replacism,” the tendency to efface all differences (including among peoples) because they impede the substitution of one thing for another. What is wanted is “undifferentiated human matter” that is maximally pliable to the needs of global capital, like the smoothest brand of peanut-flavored sandwich filling.
Sexual difference is one impediment to the spreadability of human matter (not least, across labor markets). As Dreher says, in a fully disenchanted world we become “putty in the hands of the powerful.” The meteoric increase of young people who identify as “non-binary,” neither male nor female, gives us some indication of the success of the HR ideology of sameness, that late fruit of scientific materialism.
No, I don’t think Crawford’s view is Rowling’s position on the issue or that of the Gender Critical feminists, which sadly is as atheistic at root and historically restricted in perspective as the opinions of their naysayers in the LT+ community and all of its supporters.
Whatever Rowling’s reasoning was or is, however, she has been the bulwark defense against the onslaught of the transgenderistas. For that, I salute her and feel nothing but sadness for those in the Gender Theory Extremist ghettos.
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