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Culture Thursday: The descent of J.K. Rowling


Full disclosure: Even as a children's librarian, I never had any use for J.K Rowling's fantasy world. I was raised on Tolkien and Lewis, on Le Guin and Zimmer Bradley. Rowling's work just seemed like a cheap knockoff. And as the characters were children, that didn't appeal to me. But, I dutifully recommended Harry Potter to my kids, as it got them reading. It was a gateway drug to better literature.

Now, the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had their own issues. Their views on race and religion would not endear them to the readers of this blog. But mercifully they died decades ago, and can be slotted into that category of "men of their time". Rowling has no such luxury.

This is the latest irruption:
Yes, again she's waving her anti-trans flag proudly, continuing with the assertion that the transgender movement is a modern concoction of the past few years and should not be included with lesbians, gays, or bisexuals. Unfortunately, there's a little thing such as history: 
On May 6, 1933, Nazi demonstrators raided the libraries of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a German name that roughly translates to the Institute of Sexology. The Institute was a privately operated research space for studies of human sexuality. More than 20,000 books were taken from shelves and burned days later in the streets by Nazi youth groups.

It was a devastating blow to the life’s work of Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute’s founder. Hirschfeld, who was Jewish and gay, was a pioneer for rights and liberation in Berlin’s thriving LGBTQ community. He founded the institute in 1919, after beginning his career as an activist in 1896 with his pamphlet Sappho and Socrates, about a gay man who took his own life after he felt he was being coerced into a straight marriage.
And what else did Magnus Hirschfeld write about?
In 1904, he published a book titled Berlin’s Drittes Geschlecht, which translates to Berlin’s Third Sex. It was an early look at gender variance in early 20th-century Germany, which had a thriving drag scene and a burgeoning transgender community.
A treatise on trans people in 1904? I don't know, but that doesn't seem like a "modern fad" to me.

Rowling has allowed her trauma to lead her to oppress a group of people, to target them, to degrade them, to vilify them. She demands a grace which she withholds from some of the  most marginalized people in the world. And she denies that transgenderism is well-attested in indigenous cultures world-wide, where it was accepted as a gift from the divine. On this issue she is nothing but a bigot, and that colors any support she gives to any other cause. Yes, you can be a liberal and an asshole at the same time, as we on this blog are all-too-aware.

I hope that at some point a light will go off in her soul, and she'll recognize the damage she's doing, not only to adult trans people, but to children who have read her books and now are confused because the creator of their favorite fantasy world sees them as defective and not real. But I doubt it. Once you set off on the road to bigotry and hatred, it's hard to take the exit, no matter how many times it comes up on the horizon.

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