I am struggling with the Casual Vacancy Pregnancy Trap post, largely because my copy of this book is a ‘Large Print’ edition that I find it difficult to navigate. Or is it because the Byzantine (labyrinthine?) structure of this book, the least popular of Rowling’s work despite Potter level sales, makes searching it a needle-haystack effort? Regardless, still a work in progress because I have to find the passages about Pregnancy Traps to make the case — and there are three Pregnancy Traps in Casual Vacancy if read diagonally and in ‘Small Print.’
So here is a quick post about Rowling’s twixter page changes and long-form tweets:
We’ve moved from the Oranda goldfish to a swan in Rowling’s header. A quick word search reveals ‘swan’ appears in every book except Running Grave and they have been the subject of intense Serious Striker speculation. Here are five quick links; use the search tool in the sidebar to find many more.
-
The Swan Symbolism in Lethal White
-
More Strike Swans: Historical and Film Connections
-
Liminal Women: Mermaids and Swan Maidens in Galbraith’s Strike Novels
-
The Alchemical ‘Swan’
-
Strike-Ellacott Podcast’s series of three posts (Parts I, II and III) on the Tannhäuser opera.
The good news is that Rowling is hinting that we’ll back to the swans in Hallmarked Man, but, no, I won’t be speculating about the indefinite number of possibilities in hopes of a bullseye. I have Pregnancy Traps to discover and explain…
On to the latest Trans Wars tweet! Here Rowling takes a time-out in the exchange of snark and grenades between sides (and, really, Trans Terrorists, when are you going to realize that Rowling owns this venue the way Nadal played on clay courts? Give it up, already) to define her terms. She explains that the “umbrella term” has become whatever one wants and the sense in which she uses it.
I think she was on a roll before her final request that her interlocuters stop berating her for using the phrase “trans person.” Good luck with that; unless, of course, she wants them to continue doing that (knowing that they will enjoy doing anything that bothers her?) as a marker of their childishness. Y’know, three-dimensional Twixter Chess.
The take-away or keeper of this post was the one sentence summary of Rowling’s rejection of the core premise of the “transgenderism” delusion, namely, the existence of people “born in the wrong body,” of “gendered brains or souls.” “I believe the ideology that preaches such ideas is dangerous.”
I think the rest of the tweet, the request for those who comment on her posts to ‘get a life’ with respect to correcting her about using the phrase “trans person,” is handy because she defines exactly what she means when using language with otherwise amorphous meaning, but otherwise forgettable.
The heart of it, beneath the Swooping Swan, is her call to engage her on the heart of this controversy. “Lay out your evidence,” she seems to be offering as an empty glove to the face dueling challenge, “for the existence of ‘gendered brains or souls’.” As there is no evidence for this, only the assertion, she is calling their bluff, especially the academics, psychologists, and phrenologists of equal repute, to explain how their argument works based as it is on a non-falsifiable premise.
Please let me know if anyone responds to her challenge!
Speak Your Mind