Going to go on a bit of a
essay here but I've been mulling it over in my brain so I appreciate you all bearing with me.
So I might differ a little from many in this thread in my angle on all this. JK Rowling is, at the end of the day, just an author. She is successful, and influential as far as it goes to be sure, but the current backlash against the trans movement, especially in the UK, is not because of her. It was a long time coming, emerging out of concerted political activism on the part of many players, and has been aided along by a shifting consensus in medicine pushing against the WPATH imposed orthodoxy. I'm more interested in the situation itself, because the degree to which Rowling became the central figure of hate for the trans movement I think is very telling.
Rowling's arguments, behind the understandably ever increasing snark she puts out in response to the constant onslaught of queer leftist vitriol, is actually not extreme, and this is true of the "TERF" movement itself in the UK. Despite the A&H interlopers frothing at the mouth to enact their perfect vision of society and hating on her for only hating trannies, Rowling and the TERFS aren't even advocating for anything other than taking sex seriously as a factor in social relations. For treating observable reality as real. They aren't arguing for criminalizing transitioning, for denying trans people employment in general, for general social exclusion. All they are asking for is limits to how transitioning is allowed to happen (for reasons of potential issues of informed consent and regret) and for single sex spaces to keep maintaining the purpose they are actually supposed to serve. For this they are labelled Nazis. They are dragged out, blacklisted and cancelled, receive death threats, and sometimes face legal consequences.
For me the most obvious parallel to what Rowling and many others experienced is probably the red scare. There's a air of "First as a tragedy, then as a farce" to the fact that an ascendant left's push into McCarthyism was about whether or not having your dick chopped off makes you a woman. And it was something I saw metastasizing in the left for many years before the current moment, something that was present in spots even before the real massive rise of callouts and cancel culture as an actual social force in the mid 2010s. It was this belief that anyone not exactly in lockstep with you was an enemy, and secretly working with all your other enemies. It was very reminiscent of what Richard Hofstader called the
Paranoid Style of American Politics, though there he was talking about right leanings movements and organizations more than anything (anti-Catholicism, McCarthyism, etc.). Watching this unfold over years, it occurred to me that it was very much a epistemic framework present across the political spectrum in the US, and we watched the left fall directly into the same trap with the trans issues. And I really do think the specific organized 2-minutes hate style vilification of Rowling doesn't happen without the American Trans movement, that whole ecosystem, boosting it and revving it up. Part of the reason the politics of the UK are the way they are is the internet linking these movements together and collectivizing their hatred across borders.
Rowling was lucky that the enduring love and nostalgia people had for her works was strong enough to override the risk aversion of the companies she worked with. Despite all the hate thrown against her, Harry Potter never stopped being bankable as an IP. My personal cynical take is that probably had a lot more to do with the Myers-Briggs-style Houses and the degree to which people latched onto that construct than to anything transcendent in the novels themselves, but it remains that the real gatekeepers here are and always were the corporate elements in this, the capital holders who can decide arbitrarily to kill something (despite popular support) for ideological reasons. They stood by her, and she survived, whereas for many other people they did not. In my brain I connect it to the troubles KF has had, payment processors and Cloudflare becoming private censors because the right person has the right connections. The left seems to be learning now, too late, that demanding companies blacklist someone doesn't require being on their "right side of history", and that many companies having the right to kill something for what is ultimately political speech isn't a good thing in a society that claims to have free speech. You'd think the entire history of the 20th century would have taught them that, but whatever, the zealots in these movements rarely ever look into history beyond superficial revisionism.
