FYI, I probably hate JK Rowling more than you do
That title is supposed to evoke two "friends" both acting like it's the other person being unreasonable when both are being equally unreasonable and obtuse.
The piece touches on my opinion that probably JK Rowling is unwell and trolling planet Earth for entertainment from her sick bed without admitting she's sick.
People frequently wildly misinterpret things I say and I'm concerned people will read that as me making excuses for her reprehensible behavior and saying it's understandable that she would intentionally harm so many vulnerable people because the poor baby is SICK.
That's not what I'm saying.
Years ago, I was on an email list and I did a lot of sincere public apologizing, in part because the internet was younger, so we didn't have a lot of stuff worked out. We were just stumbling our way forward as best we could.
It was a homeschooling list. I really needed to participate to educate my extremely challenging children.
I was extremely open about my medical situation and I routinely wrote sincere, heartfelt apologies because I absolutely wasn't trying to hurt anyone and, no, it wasn't okay with me to simply say "Sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you. I'm not well." and expect other people to suck it up in the name of understanding my sob story.
Unfortunately, other people weren't as consistently high minded as I was and that went bad places:
And the end result was that I became everyone's bitch. People would intentionally pick on me and be ugly to me and when it went sideways, the group as a whole would go "There she goes again!" and blame the whole thing on me and expect me to apologize and kiss everyone's ass.I am much less free with public apologies than I used to be, though I am still equally willing to own my actions (a la "I did x. That didn't turn out well.")
I'm someone with an incurable medical condition who has a history of unintentionally making an ass of myself. While I have often wished people would be kinder and more reasonable about my tendency to make typos because of my situation, I have never felt entitled to hurt people for entertainment nor felt like it was entirely on other people to simply put up with my shit because I'm a poor baby with a sob story and incurable medical condition and I was in agony all the time at one time.
It aggravated me that people weren't kinder because my writing on that list was extremely popular, so popular I inadvertently ended up with an unpaid consultancy where people would give my email address to people with very difficult children and say "Talk to her."
So I was adding plenty of value in spite of my difficult circumstances and then a lot of people were intentionally being ugly to me because they felt they could get away with pretending I started it when in reality they did. They were looking to pick a fight and blame me.
I was open about my medical situation not to insist other people needed to just put up with my shit but so people had information necessary to interpret the behavior of an active and consistent participant.
I didn't immediately tell people "I'm getting divorced." I have a right to privacy and that detail of my life wasn't pertinent to my on list behavior.
It was a homeschooling list. I wasn't trying to pick up men, so no one needed to know "She's actually available and not just blatantly disregarding social norms and having affairs without even trying to hide it."
I talked with people one on one often enough that probably about a third of the list knew I was facing a divorce before it got mentioned on list. So when one of my critics tried to start drama and pretend this was a big deal, it didn't turn into a firestorm of controversy like she wanted because no one else reacted strongly.
Everyone who ACTUALLY cared about me in the slightest already knew.
Big celebrities have a right to privacy and are not obligated to tell the public every detail of their private life. But if JK Rowling is, in fact, unwell and trolling people for entertainment from her sick bed, NOT informing the public of her health status is intentionally misleading them and denying them information relevant to try to interpret her remarks and what they actually mean.
It's implicitly trying to get people to take her more seriously than they should for the goal of getting maximum negative impact with her trolling.
She's enthusiastically button pushing a la this (not English, unfortunately) cartoon clip of a toddler at an elevator.
Toddlers, senile old people losing their faculties and very sick people tend to engage emotionally. Emotion is a form of memory and someone losing their faculties may not remember WHY they are mad at you, but they will remember they don't like you.
When I and my teenaged sons lived with my parents for a year during my divorce and my elderly father was suffering Alzheimer's, other household members were assholes to him because they were frustrated with him and they justified it with "He won't remember."
That's not how memory works. I ran a discussion group that both my sons were members of called Wired for Science that had the express goal of understanding neurological stuff and how it impacted the personalities and function of people with issues to help my oldest son make his life work, so all three of us were well versed in how to effectively interact with someone with wonky memory stuff.
We were always polite to my father. We helped establish a pattern of relying on his habits and long-standing routines to put food and supplements at his place at the head of the table where no one else ever sat and got my mother to change how she handled things and stop screaming at him in frustration.
I told her "Lock his drugs up if you are scared he's taking double doses because he doesn't remember. Screaming at him doesn't improve his memory." And she found to her amazement that merely placing his medicine in a lockbox without actually locking it prevented him from double dosing.
Anyway, my father was not famous. I am not famous but my life is online because of my medical situation.
I have worked extremely hard at developing patterns of behavior for keeping myself occupied when I'm at my worst without routinely being disruptive online. I still sometimes get wildly downvoted because a joke bombed and, hey, that happens and is not necessarily about my medical situation causing me to have foot in mouth disease.
If JK Rowling is:
1. Unwell
2. NOT informing the public of her health status
3. Trolling people about trans issues as entertainment and distraction from her misery
I don't approve.
I think it's extremely irresponsible behavior. I think frankly given how famous she is, if that's what is happening, she should be charged for her actions because it has significant impact on the trans community and isn't a good faith pattern of behavior.
I think anyone listening to her and jumping on the bandwagon is LOOKING for an "authority" to help them justify their shit and is also behaving badly.
If you are trans:
1. I think you should do your best to starve this shit of oxygen because the entire point is to get attention for her shit. That's what I'm trying to do and that's WHY I don't write about it more.
2. Work at finding real solutions for the trans community and try to get eyes on that instead of adding to this debacle which only serves her warped agenda. That's what I'm trying to do with both this site and other activities of mine, such as my blog The Genevieve Files and r/GenevieveFiles on Reddit.
3. If you have a friend or social contact who is a TERF, be aware that they also have personal shit and probably cannot be the ally you want BUT if you want to try to remain friends, making no effort to understand their side of things won't be productive.
4. TERFs who aren't friends of yours and are random Internet strangers should as much as possible be avoided.
I do a lot of writing about how fucked up heteronormative culture is and how things need to change to make a better future. I'm a former homemaker and horrified that our current world is trying like hell to justify women seeking to marry well and be chattel property in a gilded cage and insist some man needs to provide for them for life if she cranks out a kid or two for him.
Heteronormative culture is rooted in a world without birth control and antibiotics where people ROUTINELY had five to twelve kids and there were no refrigerators or microwaves or TV dinners or fast food drive throughs and women's work took up a LOT of time for cooking and cleaning and trying to just keep the family alive.
We created women's work -- a category of tasks the "weaker sex" could perform while pregnant, breastfeeding and raising kids -- to make women contributing, productive members of society under difficult circumstances in subsistence cultures. It's a complete bastardization of the idea for women to marry well, hire a maid, order in takeout, have a nanny and nominally have stuff to keep her occupied like hobbies or charity work instead of finding new ways to be productive, contributing members of society now that the average American household has 1.5 children.
I'm frustrated at my life not working. I'm certain many women are frustrated. I'm equally certain many women are lazy HOs who feel entitled to The Good Life because they are pretty and have girl bits between their legs and a HUSBAND.
YOU are not going to singlehandedly inspire a lazy over entitled HO to pick a career goal and pursue it and remove the shackles from her life that she willingly put on herself and likely has no desire to be rid of. So in most cases, your TERF "friend" merely wants to break you and insist YOU are obligated to support HER warped narcissistic self serving agenda justifying her expectation that "I reproduced and I'm a cis female, so that's supposed to be some kind of winning lottery ticket and I'm supposed to be set for life and never have to really work at anything!"
There are exceptions. I was angry at Genevieve because she and I ran in the same social circles and it resulted in well-paid remote work for her and sexual harassment for me because MEN with money and power were willing to befriend her on the assumption that other people would not assume they were sleeping with her because she was trans.
They were NOT willing to befriend ME and make similar introductions and open doors for me career wise while Genevieve actively poisoned the well and turned people against me AND then acted like I was a lazy whiny bitch just not trying hard enough who didn't have real problems.
If you do that to your so-called "friend," you are just digging the grave deeper for the trans community because MOST women will NOT decide like I did that the villain is heteronormative culture. It will just be fuel for the fire helping them double down on how you people are the problem.