The J.K. Rowling Exposes Herself Party has continued, now featuring horror writer Stephen King.
Yesterday, Rowling shared a quote from the late feminist and writer Andrea Dworkin, about the way men react to women’s opinions as if they are “acts of violence.” King found something powerful in that and retweeted it on his own feed. It’s still up now. That will be important later.
Andrea Dworkin wrote: ‘Men often react to women’s words—speaking and writing—as if they were acts of violence; sometimes men react to women’s words with violence.’ It isn’t hateful for women speak about their own experiences, nor do they deserve shaming for doing so. 8/9
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) June 28, 2020
In response to this support, Rowling tweeted that her love for King had reached “new heights.” She tweeted, “It’s so much easier for men to ignore women’s concerns, or to belittle them, but I won’t ever forget the men who stood up when they didn’t need to. Thank you, Stephen.”
Following that, a fan asked him where he stood on transgender issues, and King tweeted, “Trans women are women.”
Yes. Trans women are women.
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 28, 2020
In response to this, Rowling deleted the tweet praising King because she doesn’t actually care about women’s voices. She cares about being “right.”
Unbelievable: Stephen King retweeted one of JKR’s tweets today. She got so excited that a single celebrity finally backed up her views with a mere RT that she wrote a whole thank you
King then said “trans women are women” and JKR deleted her praise. https://t.co/zS08UGnYTF pic.twitter.com/3GAddq1o65
— Andrew Sims+ (@sims) June 28, 2020
What makes this even more laughable to me is that Andrea Dworkin’s life partner, John Stoltenberg, highlights that within Dworkin’s own work, she pushed against biological essentialism:
The discovery is, of course, that “man” and “woman” are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The discovery is inescapable: We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.
As Stoltenberg put it,
Lately some trans-critical radical feminists have told me I am wrong because Andrea died before what they call transgender ideology threatened to undermine the biologically binary basis of feminism; Andrea could not have known, they say, what a “menace” to women’s sex-based rights transwomen have become. To which I reply: Andrea absolutely did know, as a woman and as a Jew, what biologically essentialist scapegoating looks and feels like.
But it appears that Rowling may have missed those bits as she was trying to silence and dismiss the voices of trans activists and their allies.
If we remember Stephen King was an early champion of the Harry Potter series, so Rowling blocking him for saying “Trans women are women” [Fact] means that she cares more about being a TERF than she does about literal Harry Potter
— Maggie Mae Pan Fried Fish 🏳️🌈 (@MaggieMaeFish) June 29, 2020
That Stephen King sticking up for trans women was enough to make JK Rowling delete her tweets praising him and block him (!!!!) really shows how much her transphobia is rooted in her own selfishness and not any actual “concern” for other people (which is also bullshit but lol)
— angelina christina 💙💖💜 (@whyangelinawhy) June 29, 2020
Joanne Rowling, all I have to say about you and your pettiness can be summed up in one gif:
(NBC)
(via The Indepedent, featured image: KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP via Getty Images)
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