|
Diane Paulson
Thanks Tim, sorry my boat's in permanent dry dock so this is all I've got: :) (trigger warning: don't read this if you think it will bother you at all)
This was the first thing I read this morning, a friend sent via What's App, the wonderful JT on the wonderful JKR. I wish every day could start like this.
Janice Turner:
"A friend believes people divide into sheep and goats. The sheep will never stray too far from their flock’s received wisdom because lone dissenters are picked off by wolves. Sheep are pleasant, biddable, placid, and panic when cornered. Sheep mainly aspire to a quiet life.
Goats are not nice: they’re cussed, belligerent, solitary. They scrabble and climb, cling to frozen rock faces. It’s not bravery that leads them far from low-hanging fruit and shelter into barren places with precipitous drops, or to ram their heads into hard objects and bigger foes. It’s their nature. They’re goats.
When people, mainly left-wing men, ask why JK Rowling has “ruined her legacy” by tweeting against the gender ideology which is now orthodoxy in liberal politics, trade unions, academia and so-called human rights bodies, I answer: because she’s a goat. A sheep may regard news that Scottish police will register a rapist as female – even though legally rape is only committed with a penis – as absurd, a statistical travesty, a gas-lighting of rape victims. But the sheep, craving its flock, keeps shtum.
How easily Rowling, at 56, could sit in her castle tapping out thrillers, jolly Christmas fables and Potter spin-offs, bathed in global adoration, a fast-tracked national treasure, a bland billionaire,. She could have stuck with her uncontroversial causes, like Romanian orphans and child literacy, into which she has poured many millions, mouthing fashionable mantras to placate the angry, ever-circling mobs of America’s culture wars.
Instead she entered the bitterest battle of all. There was nothing – nothing! – to be gained for her in defending unknown tax consultant Maya Forstater, when two years ago an employment judge decided her belief that biological sex is immutable was “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. Turn away, Jo; bang out another Fantastic Beasts! Anything but upset your youthful, progressive fan base: your loyal flock. But the stubborn goat refused. A single tweet #IStandWithMaya sent her on to an icy ledge.
How must it feel to have your name airbrushed from the $8 billion film franchise born of your scribbling in a coffee shop, penniless, while your baby napped? Or to watch the trio of child actors you chose and nurtured 20 years ago recall the stories which made them many times richer and more celebrated than their ho-hum talents deserve, yet not once uttering your name? Or have fools who run around with broomsticks up their backsides in college leagues change the name of quidditch, the sport you invented for wizards?
That’s putting aside the threats. Just search for JK Rowling on Twitter and see the stream of invective, the gun memes, the intent to rape and kill, the address of her family home handily displayed for passing stalkers online. For what? I’d bet few of those denouncing her even know and have certainly never read her long, thoughtful, compassionate essay.
But it turns out an author told to publish under gender-neutral initials, since boys won’t read books by girls, was a woman all along. One of the bothersome, old-fashioned types, who won’t jettison all they’ve learnt from motherhood or sexual trauma to assuage bullies or cultural fads.
In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice laughs at the White Queen’s ridiculous pronouncements: “There’s no use trying,” she said. “One can’t believe impossible things.” The Queen replies it just takes practice, half an hour every day: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
Rowling is incapable of believing impossible things. That human biological sex is not binary; male bodies have no advantage in women’s sports; a male person declaring themselves a woman is instantly, magically – Transformiamus! – eligible for female private spaces; that a global epidemic of teenage girls wanting to medicate themselves with testosterone and surgery is progress rather than a self-harm cult; that there is a special new category of human called “non-binary”, neither male nor female, for whom all existing facilities (mainly those designed to protect women) must be scrapped; that cherished words to describe female experience – girl, mother, woman – must be swapped for terms which reduce us to bodily functions like gestational carrier or menstruator; that it is impossible to identify a woman unless they declare their pronouns.
Just as Galileo refused to bow to the Inquisition and affirm the Earth is the centre of the universe, many women just don’t, won’t, can’t believe gender is real but sex is not.
The sheep, of course, will pretend they do. They bleat their sympathies, or purport to seek some miraculous compromise which will appease their flock. (As if untold reasonable, well-meaning women before them haven’t sought, in vain, a middle path, or that scientific fact can be bargained away.) Or like Caroline Nokes, Tory chair of the women and equalities committee, who voted against same-sex marriage in 2013 but bulldozed women’s concerns about Gender Recognition Act reform in her report last week, they strive to join the flock.
Only the goats stand their ground. And this has been the year of the goat. A succession of women have upended their lives, been cast out and despised just to uphold a fundamental belief. Keira Bell, who took a judicial review against the Tavistock gender service which irreversibly medicated her teenage body rather than healed her troubled mind; Sonia Appleby, who exposed safeguarding failures at that clinic; Jess de Wahls, an embroidery artist, whose work was summarily removed from the Royal Academy shop; Professor Kathleen Stock, hounded out of academia by masked protesters while her colleagues and union stood by; choreographer Rosie Kay who lost her eponymous company because she refused to disavow the intricacies of the female body she inhabits in dance.
I’ve interviewed most of these women and prior to speaking out, all experienced long nights of the soul. Fear (of losing political allies, friends and peers) battled against a burning urge for truth. But in the end, they couldn’t not speak out. It didn’t matter what happened next. They were not prepared to deny material reality, even if they never worked again. They were happy to ascend that rock face, cold and alone. But instead they found themselves alive and free, up among the goats."
|
