What this is about: Two years ago, Gender Critical Feminists in Scotland decided to ‘make a statement’ via the Covid-delayed census in Scotland about the state of legislation concerning women’s safe spaces and changes in Gender Identity declaration laws. They took a page from the Suffragette’s playbook a little more than a century ago in this regard, slowed the census taking process by insisting on paper forms rather than online entry, and made a public splash recently when their effort was made public in a study published at EUPublishing.com. The marker they put down for posterity to discover was declaring their religious belief as “Believer in Biology” rather than a Christian denomination, one of the other revealed traditions, a political party, or ‘None.’ You can read about this subliminal protest, which no one would have heard about except for Rowling’s tweet, here and the report at EUPublishing here.
Three brief notes about this after the jump!
(1) “Hurrah For Our Side!” There are three million people in Scotland, more or less, less than half the size of metropolitan Houston and twice the size of Oklahoma City. Not even three thousand women participated in this ‘protest’ organized by online feminist groups. That’s one tenth of once percent or .001 in straight up numbers. The census may or may not have been slowed by this homeopathic dose of requests for paper census forms. No one would ever see these paper forms because they were destroyed after being entered into a digital data base and the Suffragette posterity protest — they knew that their 1911 forms would be available after a century for their silent witness to become known — was not going to work for them.
Not only did the protest have no effect on gender relevant legislation in Scotland and the UK, the protesters had to have known it could have no effect and that the only way it would be made known is if they themselves publicized it. They would have achieved as much by shouting into their pillows en masse one night in their individual bedrooms, from Edinburgh and Perth to Glasgow and Aberdeen.
This is the most pathetic and lame bit of virtue signaling, in other words, that I have ever stumbled upon. It makes the efforts of the Facebook horde who changed their status icon from hypodermic needles (which showed their support for the mRNA jabs) to Ukraine flags (to demonstrate their disapproval of Putin’s invasion of that country) seem both heroic, effective, and daring, something extraordinarily bold because of the risk of blowback and loss of income, reputation, or personal freedom.
(2) A Historical Marker: I think this census protest is important, nonetheless, in several regards and that it served a real purpose.
Even just two years ago, it seemed inevitable that the transgenderism madness of crowds was on an inevitable march to an Orwellian victory, that Scotland, with the rest of the UK and the US, was on its way inexorably towards Animal Farm status with respect to TWAW orthodoxy and biological fact being forever banned as a thought crime. Media hegemony under the thumb of Big Pharma had convinced all ‘thinking people’ that saying “Black is White!” loud enough and frequently enough made it true — and that refusing to get the TWAW forehead tattoo meant one was a bigot and a dash-phobe in a rainbow of colors. Phobe-phobia ruled the day.
I like to think that the great majority of people never bought into it. They, however, were silent. Only a tiny fraction of the population bore public witness to the madness and cried out against the crimes against women and young people being committed in the name of broad-mindedness and diversity. I think “a tenth of one percent” captures the size of this fraction neatly. We owe this heroic group a great debt.
If they needed a token at that time, to leave a historical marker of their resistance for those in the future a la the Suffragettes, in the face of the smug academics, politician-pundits, and media mavens who decried their “ignorance,” their “prejudice,” and their “malevolence” (!), not to mention hatred, bigotry, and fear, their “exclusive feminism,” that is more than understandable. That it was a silent and ineffectual protest does not undermine the public and eventually victorious witness for sanity they made elsewhere; so much as it served to forge a greater fellowship among them, it is historically important and laudable.
With respect to Rowling’s participation, which was unknown until this tweet, that also is notable with respect to this sanity-and-life-saving movement. As small as this minority opinion was against the onslaught of the Bolsheviks, the self-proclaimed consensus or “majority,” they needed a literate leader, one with a global reputation, as their voice and lightning rod if they were to have a chance of prevailing against the campaign of the pharmaceutical oligarchs and their millions of unwitting minions. Rowling ‘took the point position,’ as Marines on patrol say, and, with the support of that tenth of one percent, seems to have reversed a rip tide in public opinion.
As much as her requesting a paper census form and filling in its religious preference answer space with “Believer in Biology” fortified her in her position, one that no one else could have filled as she did, that “virtue signaling” within their group becomes anything but pathetic. Rowling is not courageous on all points, as I’ve noted in another post (it is encouraging that her husband retweeted a piece about Islamicist crimes in the UK, though), but there’s no doubting the courage and principle of her stand contra mundum and “transgenderism.”
(3) Spiritual Not Religious: Having said that this exercise was simultaneously stupid and salutary, I want to shift gears again in my last point, a ‘Rowling Studies’ note.
Perhaps the greatest mystery of Rowling’s writing is the amount of Christian content in it. I have recently read the best explanation of where it comes from, the Jesus Island if you will in Rowling’s Lake of inspiration, an explanation I hope to share with you sooner than later. Even with this explanation, however, it remains a real enigma. The Presence has her core beliefs about the immortality of the soul, she has her frequently repeated statements about how important and how tenuous her faith in God is (cue Graham Green quotation), and her testimony and visible witness about her discomfort with the “institutions” and “rules” of the church. None of that really adds up to the profound Christian content — structure, symbolism, and story effects — of her work, content “baked into the cake,” the cake itself, in fact, rather than icing.
This census piece, I think, has to be thrown in the pile of evidence that Rowling is “spiritual not religious” rather than a Christian in any conventional or traditional sense of that word. Other than the logos etymology of “biology,” there is no substantive reason for her to have written “Believer in Biology” in the space for declaration of faith group except that “Anglican Church of Scotland,” the correct or truthful answer as far as is publicly known, means less to her than her feminist identity and than oneness of mind with her husband, ‘Dr Slowfinger.’ His twixter creed is “Better to walk alone than with the crowd in the wrong direction. Biology is real. Sex matters, and so does Evidence based Medicine.”
When Rowling’s census form declaration of faith was “Believer in Biology,” she chose to make a political rather than a religious point. As trivial as this declaration was — and meaningless, really, at least relative to the equivalent question of Soviet and Communist block nations’ census forms questions about belief in God that were life-or-death decisions — it has to be read as another note that Rowling’s religious faith is not the axis of her identity.
Much more on this in coming days. Consider this just another ‘marker put down’ on a subject to be explored at greater length later.
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