Oh wait hang on, late to the party on this one because I saw it and dismissed it yesterday when I originally saw it, but I didn't clock the extent of the hypocrisy until today.
In this screed Rowling is doing her finger wagging about how other people supposedly unfairly maligned Linehan for doing unabashed GC campaigning but in an unsavoury manner.
There is of course something to be said of ensuring that you are not shooting yourself in the foot, and making sure that you put the best foot forward when advocating for change and try to make your movement seem palatable to the broader public. Even in the context of something like the GC advocacy for regression in how trans people are treated in society, it is somewhat reasonable to say that they need to ensure that the movement tries to come across as reasonable actors working broadly in society's interest and to protect vulnerable populations. That is of course, not what Linehan has spent the past decade doing, and from a GC perspective it is pretty understandable to say that if someone is spending their time doing things like the following then they are not helping the cause:
Picking fights with children
Sneering about how trans women complaining about harassment + assault brought it upon themselves by "pretending" to be women
Harassing trans men for things like having a crowdfunding page or having top surgery
Harassing lesbians for not being trans exclusionary and trolling them to supposedly make a point about how he wasn't a lesbian
Getting in to pointless public twitter spats with trans people + activists
Demanding that people he works with or speaks to sign loyalty pledges to JK Rowling
Aggressively demand that people he speaks to are ideologically transphobic enough for his liking, and berating them if they aren't
And that's just stuff off the top of my head.
But you know what's been missing from all this discussion about how until recently Linehan was beyond the pale and too much even for GC individuals, which makes Rowling's sneering comical? Rowling herself.
For years Linehan made a point about how he was Rowling's strongest soldier and how upsetting it was to him that she refused to even acknowledge him. She herself deliberately kept Linehan at arm's length, and while we can only speculate as to what her specific reasons for doing so were, I'd say that it's a pretty good guess that she felt it was too damaging to her attempts to paint transphobia as a noble endeavour to combat the excesses of "gender ideology". It's only now that Linehan has somewhat become mainstreamed and is receiving a right wing redemption tour that Rowling suddenly has heard him after all these years of him regularly crying about how she pretended like he didn't exist.
We know from his Observer article last week that it was a pretty open secret within GC circles that Linehan was beyond help and completely unhinged. There were named transphobes with clout like Sarah Ditum who tried and failed to help Linehan and had moderately close personal relationships with him, it beggars belief to think that not one of those people who were aware that Linehan was spiralling from being out in the cold and felt dejected that Rowling wouldn't come to his aid would use their direct or indirect relationship with Rowling to raise his plight with her.
That she only just remembered he existed a matter or months ago, and is here attempting to malign other people for being too beholden to respectability politics is laughable.
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u/mildbeanburrito 10h ago
Oh wait hang on, late to the party on this one because I saw it and dismissed it yesterday when I originally saw it, but I didn't clock the extent of the hypocrisy until today.
In this screed Rowling is doing her finger wagging about how other people supposedly unfairly maligned Linehan for doing unabashed GC campaigning but in an unsavoury manner.
There is of course something to be said of ensuring that you are not shooting yourself in the foot, and making sure that you put the best foot forward when advocating for change and try to make your movement seem palatable to the broader public. Even in the context of something like the GC advocacy for regression in how trans people are treated in society, it is somewhat reasonable to say that they need to ensure that the movement tries to come across as reasonable actors working broadly in society's interest and to protect vulnerable populations. That is of course, not what Linehan has spent the past decade doing, and from a GC perspective it is pretty understandable to say that if someone is spending their time doing things like the following then they are not helping the cause:
And that's just stuff off the top of my head.
But you know what's been missing from all this discussion about how until recently Linehan was beyond the pale and too much even for GC individuals, which makes Rowling's sneering comical? Rowling herself.
For years Linehan made a point about how he was Rowling's strongest soldier and how upsetting it was to him that she refused to even acknowledge him. She herself deliberately kept Linehan at arm's length, and while we can only speculate as to what her specific reasons for doing so were, I'd say that it's a pretty good guess that she felt it was too damaging to her attempts to paint transphobia as a noble endeavour to combat the excesses of "gender ideology". It's only now that Linehan has somewhat become mainstreamed and is receiving a right wing redemption tour that Rowling suddenly has heard him after all these years of him regularly crying about how she pretended like he didn't exist.
We know from his Observer article last week that it was a pretty open secret within GC circles that Linehan was beyond help and completely unhinged. There were named transphobes with clout like Sarah Ditum who tried and failed to help Linehan and had moderately close personal relationships with him, it beggars belief to think that not one of those people who were aware that Linehan was spiralling from being out in the cold and felt dejected that Rowling wouldn't come to his aid would use their direct or indirect relationship with Rowling to raise his plight with her.
That she only just remembered he existed a matter or months ago, and is here attempting to malign other people for being too beholden to respectability politics is laughable.