If you thought that 2019 would ease off on all the shit headlines now that we’re almost at Christmas, you’d be wrong. If everyone who predicted that JK Rowling would post TERF crap on Twitter could please tick that off on your 2019 bingo card, that would be great.
TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, and is the name given to people who use feminism as a vessel for hating on trans people. The general attitude is that trans people shouldn’t exist, and that the ones who do are eroding women’s rights. Awful stuff.
Rowling, who has 14.6 million followers on Twitter, decided that this was a great thing to post.
What she was referencing was the case of Maya Forstater, who was a researcher that was fired from her job at an anti-poverty thinktank for being a massive transphobe. She took it to a tribunal and lost the test hearing because her views were deemed too “absolutist.”
If you aren’t convinced that Maya Forstater is horrible, suss what she said after misgendering Gregor Murray, who’s non-binary
“I had simply forgotten that this man demands to be referred to by the plural pronouns ‘they’ and ‘them’… In reality, Murray is a man … Women and children in particular should not be forced to lie or obfuscate about someone’s sex.”
Hot TERF garbage. But unfortunately, the sort of hot TERF garbage that JK Rowling has decided to publicly support.
Like tons of people, I grew up with Harry Potter. One of the main points of the entire story is that we should be kind to one another, and that hate never wins. I know JK Rowling has made some questionable announcements since the series wrapped up – I’m particularly thinking of the announcement that wizards used to just shit wherever they stood – but none of them have been hurtful in the way this tweet is.
Trans rights are human rights, and this tweet should definitely have stayed in the drafts.
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