For a gender that less than 0.5% of the population identifies as (Wiki numbers, 355 people out of 100,000), we sure do argue about this a lot, don’t we?
Never underestimate the will of bigots to obsess over other people’s genitalia.
Edit: I said the above to be facetious and poke fun at these wall-eyed transphobic lunatics. I realise that trans / NB issues encompass SO much more than that, and I was being deliberately reductive in order to make a point. I hope that comes through ❤️
You don’t have to learn them all, just use the ones the person asks you to. This is like saying “there’s like 100,000 names and I’m supposed to know them all? You’re just Jack or Jane to me.”
“there are over 100 fucking names now and I’m too stupid to learn anything other than you”. No one is asking you to be psychic but instead to give their pronouns the same respect that they give your name. If you don’t know them it’s whatever but if you do and don’t use them on purpose you’re being intentionally disrespectful. Like if I know your name is Bob and call you Barbra on purpose that’s disrespectful.
It’s just one of the culture war angles propagated by the rich to keep everyone angry with each other while they reap up as much of the world’s wealth as possible before any of the forthcoming disasters- whether that is climate crisis migration, the next financial crisis, AI unemployment crisis, further war, food and water shortages worldwide, etc…
The writing is on the wall, a majority of people can see it too if you ask them, but unfortunately people can’t help but get sucked in anyway. Probably because it’s a distraction from facing the uncertain future we all have.
OR, this is just a tinfoil hat getting the better of me. It feels like a logical conclusion, so maybe that’s the fallacy I’ve fallen for.
No, you’re right. Between 2009 and 2011, both the left and the right had their popular class movements with Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party. The risk of both sides coming together to attack the rich was too dangerous. Shortly after that we had Obama and other business and political leaders talking about “systemic racial discrimination.” Boy has that divided us. An incredibly effective tool to convince us idiots that race has ANYTHING to do with our differences. Poor people have far more in common with each other than they do with the rich. The trans issue has been injected to stoke the fires more, and everyone has been quick to jump on board.
You know what? If we’re too stupid to see through this obvious charade, maybe this is what we deserve.
Holy fuck you are so dense. Bringing up the tea party as a way of class solidarity? You are either lying or ignorant.
Please, learn about the shit you spew if you actually care, but I assume you don’t since here you are spewing nonsense.
Better that than throwing off the shackles of the oppressor and rising up against the oligarch class.
Those brown lads area after your crumbs! That man wants to be called “they”! Ooh look, Israel/Gaza, pick a side! Look at this jobless woman with her fancy flat screen television! Does eating Wotsits cure cancer? Distract yourselves with yourselves.
Even if they were only 1 in a billion. They still deserve to exist and live their lives how they like if it doesn’t negatively affect others.
They do, and they should get on with that, and start ignoring people who don’t agree with them, their lifestyle, or use of language. You cannot enforce your own ideas about your identity on anyone else, because they are also entitled to have their own ideas. All a person can do is just live. Celebrity opinions are not law, and should not be paid such attention as if they matter.
Fuck JK Rowling. What a bigot.
Always has been…
It’s just the kids reading her books 20 years ago didn’t recognize all the problematic shit she wrote till they grew up.
It’s just the kids reading her books 20 years ago didn’t recognize all the problematic shit she wrote till they grew up.
Adult here who was an adult when the books came out and recognized all the awful racist and sexist imagery. I have nothing new to add to the conversation, I’m just gonna vent. There were quite a few of us here and there who spoke up when the books were published, but we were significantly outnumbered and immediately drowned out by the “shut up and stop complaining” crowd. Yes, all this talk of “problematic” issues in the Potter books are old observations we’ve been rehashing for two decades…the goblins who run the banks are a horrifyingly obvious Jewish caricature, Chinese character Cho Chang’s first name is actually a Korean last name, the one black guy in the whole fuckin series is named “Shacklebolt” (seriously wtf), the one Irish character goes by “Seamus Finnegan,” the main female character Hermione is constantly referred to as “bossy”…just to name a few. JFC, what a shitshow.
Ok, one more example that got a lot of attention years back but sort of faded away from public consciousness: in the first movie there’s a bigass six-pointed star on the fuckin floor of Gringotts, of all places. You know, Gringotts. The bank…where the undeniably Jew-like goblins work. No fuckin shit, it’s right there, plain as day. That one still boggles my mind. I mean, what the fuck, man. https://i.postimg.cc/Jzx2hr31/happry-potter-1-star-of-david-gringotts.png
EDIT: Hey everyone, it’s been abuot an hour now and I just want to apologize for all this negativity. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’ve come to realize all the anti-this and anti-that complaints are really unfair and show only one side of JK Rowling. So I feel compelled to balance this out and remind everyone that she is also pro-slavery. Especially the kind of slavery that forces its slaves to work completely naked, and no one in the book has a problem with it except for the bossy lib girl that everyone hates.
Harry Potter reached the height of its popularity in the 2000s/early 2010s, in a time when gay was still an extremely popular insult, feminists were the punching bags of the internet, holocaust jokes were a dime a dozen and anyone saying it wasn’t funny was an enemy to comedy itself, the biggest internet creators took literal pride in their content specifically being offensive (Smosh was the biggest example of this IMO), and saying you should respect people’s gender identities on the mainstream internet will get you labeled as an SJW and actual death threats thrown your way, so I’d also argue that Harry Potter not being seen as problematic was in part because mainstream society (not you obviously, but the broader internet/pop culture in general at the time) genuinely did not view those things as problematic. Like if JK Rowling said all the things she said about transgender rights in 2003, she would probably still end up in controversy but way more people would actually support her, would have probably split the fandom roughly down the middle as opposed to the overwhelmingly negative response she’s receiving in the 2020s. Or look at it this way: Harry Potter was most popular in the same time period when Family Guy was most popular.
As someone who devoured the books as a kid, I’ve been very disappointed in finding out JK Rowlings is a a TERF. Your post sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole and I’ve read up on some of the issues that people pointed out in the books. To me, some are valid, some seem to be a bit far-fetched…? For example, I’m not sure why she is labeled pro-slavery? Just because she writes that people in her fantasy world don’t seem to have a problem with it?
Not defending Rowling btw, just trying to understand some of the points better.
I gotta say as someone who grew up with the books, I’m glad y’all noticed it because as a kid I sure didn’t.
A lot of fantasy from that era has a lot of issues, but when I compare something like Harry Potter to say Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan may have been getting off on his depiction of magic slavery but he at least wasn’t excusing it.
Depictions she made weren’t ok in the 90s. Her politics aren’t ok now. And there’s better stuff too now. Fantasy has gotten so much better in recent decades.
Wow, I’m just realizing the deeper meaning behind gringotts being run by specifically goblins. I kinda knew the big-nosed people running a bank was rather stereotypical, and not in the just lazy way, but it made sense to me that fantasy goblins would hoard treasure, and never connected the two facts.
I was aware of the high amounts of tokenism, with that one irish character, that one black character, that one vaguely asian character, but that’s easier to rationalize away as using stereotypes to communicate things quickly. It’s all over fantasy; Lando is the one black guy, Gimli is the one Dwarf, Hagrid is the one (half-)giant. Looking back on it now, these tokens are pretty shallow, but at the time it was fairly standard. It’s when you get into the lore of these peoples that things get ugly. Often fantasy races are there for splashes of colour, or a simple analoge for some kind of politics, but the reasoning here is heinous, and everyone is just ok with it.
By the time these flaws surfaced, we were already invested in the decent storytelling, and the deep connections never got made. Then the author detonated and it’s only with that context can we see the signs that were right there.
It’s too bad that these stories were built on a bed of such horrible ideas. Some of them were nice.
That monologue (from one of the unambiguously “good” characters) about how it would be cruel to set the elves free, because of the joy they get from servitude? Even as a teenager, I recognised that as a messed-up sentiment, but my peers just said I was being too sensitive. Glad that you couldn’t let something like that slide nowadays.
To be honest, there’s not that much problematic shit in her books. Some VERY light commentary on slavery and its place in a civilized society, maybe some questionable themes of segregation, but largely the books are about good triumphing over evil and learning to work as a team including with people that don’t look like you. They’re just not overly well written books. She herself is the problematic person.
Has anyone in any country ever been incarcerated for misgendering a trans person? Is there even a significant number of people who seriously believe that would be an appropriate response?
Nope.
Just come out and tell us about your victimhood complex, Joanne.
Exactly! It’s like going to jail for having someone presenting themselves as Joanne and you always call them Joanna. How will it ever be so much of a concern to throw someone in jail and destroy their future over it, Joanna? HOW??
Using the correct pronouns is an issue of respecting others, and seeing Rowling doubling down on her smug and bigoted views in public is a revelation, because during a re-read, you start seeing these views reflecting everywhere in her writing. It’s a deeply prejudiced and irrational world, and it stayed that way all the way to the ending with nothing in that world really changed.
I think being an adult is realizing that I don’t love Harry Potter as much as I used to, because (I can’t believe I’m saying this) I’ve finally outgrown it. It’s time to move on.
Being a grown-up is painful.
A big part of that is context, I think. When we were children, we didn’t have the knowledge or developed brains to recognize these things. And the lossy nature of our memory leads us to skew towards remembering things in more idealized manners, probably because it is easier to recall things as “concentrates” of reality. The parts that we, as adults, recognize as problematic don’t tend to be remembered as significant because, when making the initial memories as children, we lacked the context to flag them as such.
I think being an adult is realizing that I don’t love Harry Potter as much as I used to, because (I can’t believe I’m saying this) I’ve finally outgrown it. It’s time to move on.
On other hand, this realization frees you in a way and may potentially inspire you seek out or create another piece of art to love (and potentially share with others). While I disagree with a significant section of the population and believe that art is inseparably and indelibly linked to the artist, it is important still to be kind to our past selves and not judge them for what they didn’t know. That still doesn’t entirely soften the blow of “breaking up” with a piece of art that one has loved but, it can help with accepting it.
Being a grown-up is painful.
It’s also joyful, terrible, wonderful, enraging, sorrowful, and countless other feelings and possibilities. I think it’s beautiful, even if not always comfortable. And the uncomfortable bits provide contrast to the positive, letting them seem to shine a bit more brilliantly. Though, that could also be the near-pathological optimism that I adopted to cope with depression in my younger years.
inspire you seek out or create another piece of art to love (and potentially share with others)
I think we did a pretty good job on that recently. :)
If you’re referring to the recent film, I think that you did indeed and hope your colleagues and yourself are proud of it. Nice to have a film that’s a bit more light-hearted (without being too saccharine) and, especially considering the thread topic, that embraces a diverse set of people in the cast and supports universal agency.
The world is fine (if flawed and sometimes generic). The real issue is there isn’t a single good character in them. Hermione is alright, with her desire to free the elves and generally no accepting of the status quo. Even she seems to stop caring about this after they’re free and capable of doing something about it. There’s not a single progressive person in those worlds. There are only not totally evil (but accepting of banal evils) people. Being against Hitler doesn’t make you a good person, it only makes you not a literal Nazi.
Neville is the only somewhat progressive character. It’s just a transformation from loser to hero, but at least he never tossed his core values.
All adults in the HP universe are terrible people, the only adult with a lick of integrity is McGonagall.
Unless a certain someone you know never stops reminding you that he was in thoses movies…
