"A minority of angry people on twitter can't cancel her life.
Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues."
Not true at all.
It's not about her money, it's about her ability to speak and to have a public opinion, and therefore a relationship with us - not about her 'personal wealth'.
She has specific views on gender, which she should be allowed to have and which I don't think are objectively 'anti trans'.
The statement above, ie that her views are 'anti trans' is really a problem.
'Shutting down her voice' is significantly worse than 'taking her money' - because it means the rest of us are not allowed to have a debate or to have our own opinions.
I generally agree with her assessment. It's nuanced, informed and not 'anti trans'.
Labelling it 'anti trans' is precisely the kind of 'Red Guards killing the unpure' we need to worry about.
'Cancel culture' has succeeded in banning speakers on most University campuses, and systematically disabled tons of voices from being heard. Speakers aren't even on the slot anymore 'can't afford the security' is now a common statement.
This is inexcusable.
The fact that 100 or so of the world's leading thinkers had to take out page to tamp down people in their own midst is crazy, and a sign of a problem.
It's a fairly existential problem right now.
A lot of this actually may be a kind of 'anti Trump' anger exhibiting in an odd kind of way, maybe it dies down a little bit, but the 'winds' are heading in one direction right now, and the press in particular seem to have joined in.
JK Rowling's views on trans people are also nearly the perfect demonstration that pg's "aggressive conformism" analysis is spot on. See, not too long ago those particular views were in fact something that was doing quite a bit of harm to trans people. They were being used to succesfully lobby for laws that did things like effectively deny trans women access to rape counselling and domestic violence services, and justify pretty awful campaigns of online harassment against any openly trans woman - not by JK Rowling, who seemed quite happy to just quietly hold her opinions, but by others. The reason you didn't hear much about this is because when these views actually had power, the loud, aggressive, well-connected warriors for social justice kind of supported them.
Now, it wasn't quite mandatory to hold these views back when I started following things about a decade, decade-and-a-half ago (though I remember Shit Reddit Says, the group trying to force Reddit to police its content based on their ideological demands, got quite close). What was mandatory was covering for them, shutting up about the laws they passed and the harm they did and pressuring everyone else to do so with allegations of misogyny. The arguments used to do this were quite reminiscent of present-day claims that "cancel culture" doesn't matter and people only object to it because they're bigots, now I think about it - supposedly the people pushing this didn't hold any power, and therefore the only reason for trans women to spend effort objecting to them rather than fighting non-feminist men, who by definition were the ones with real power, was because they had a misogynistic hatred of women. It was only when those views actually lost their power and relevance that the loud, aggressive, well-connected online activists switched from covering for them to demanding that everyone support beating up elderly lesbians for merely existing in public whilst holding transphobic views. (I am unfortunately not exaggerating, this actually happened - and yes, it was definitely the same people. pg's remark about "an exclamation point after a variable" is an extreme understatement.) This shift was quite recent too - maybe around 2016 or so?
There were of course actually non-conformist people with moral views that didn't just follow the crowd and various levels of aggressiveness who balked at this at the time. They just ended up being effectively irrelevant - too far from the status quo for its supporters, but so throughly and aggressively labeled as evil supporters of it by its organised, orthodox self-proclaimed challengers that few people seeking to challenge it would listen to the non-conformists.
"not too long ago those particular views were in fact something that was doing quite a bit of harm to trans people"
I understand what you are saying, but there's a pretty big concern right there in the conflation of 'intellectual position' vs. 'ammunition supporting specific movements'.
That some systems take another persons nuanced views, possibly out of context, and use them to promote their agenda, should not in any way stop people from being able to have public discourse about them.
The fact of the matter is, JK's views are not anti-trans, even if they could be used by others as such.
However much we can decry other parties for using her words in a manner in which we do not agree, the same thing applies in the other direction: we don't get to shut her down because she doesn't 'toe the line' on the current, 'new' orthodoxy.
JK's views are reasonable.
It doesn't matter that 'some other organisation using those words to do this or that'. It's relavent, but not to the extent of censoring her.
Now - if we're talking about crude, casual bigotry from 'powerful voices' and the public effects of that, i.e. a 'Famous Person' tweeting 'bad things' - then yes, this is just populism.
But anyone willing to make a serious point within the boundaries of civility needs to be able to make it, full stop.
People can debate with JK, they can even ask her to not make her statements public 'because bad people will use it as ammunition' - but there's no way her words cross the thresholds of uncivil, and she should be able to make them without fear of being banned.
I don't view trans women as 'the same as female women' either, to me, they are very objectively 'something else', 'not exactly like women', but I also have zero problems with them 'being women for the most part' and identifying as such if they want.
In my view, denying the glaringly obvious difference between 'trans women' and 'female women' is to deny reality, in the name of some cause.
Now, I have zero problem with people wanting to identify as women, if a trans woman wants me to call her 'she' - or whatever - it's fine by me. I hold zero concern or anything against them.
I will also tell you that in other cultures - particularly in Brasil wherein trans is far more common - that this is a popular view. The only trans women with whom I've ever had a conversation about the issue literally told me, unsolicited, that 'she is not like other women'. I kind of 'gasped' at the statement, but this woman was simply stating her mind and what to her was obvious. The statement was not ideological oriented, formed by 'mob opinion', and not a complex, intellectual thing. Just her view. Is this tans woman a bigot?
It's perfectly fine if people want to disagree with Rowling's view. I'm basically certain that Rowling doesn't mind a single bit if many would disagree with her.
The issue, is that she's not allowed to have her opinion because of the ostensibly ideologically held view that 'people who identify as women are women and that's it'.
And so this is one of the points made: "Agree with me on you're a bigot".
I meant for clarity that people are allowed to think JK rowling is a bigot and she is allowed to roll in pile of money while denying it and attacking her detractors.
It's not a linguistic question, it's a social question.
"Is a man who identifies as a woman, a woman, or a man?" - that's a pretty core question.
To be fair, it's pretty important to trans women that they identify and be referred to as 'women'. That's pretty core to the identity, so it's more than a word.
So, in that sense, I can understand how her arguments could be disconcerting to some.
But - when we talk about what is 'objectively a woman' or the policies we apply in sports, that kind of stuff, then it's an issue that transcends just self identification.
In terms of 'self identity' - well - 'who cares' really, I agree, but what about the legal requirement for others to use specific words, or sports, special facilities, access to gendered facilities and clubs etc. - then it becomes a real problem.
I think most people would admit he is a buffoon. I also think most people would not stand by if he did something obviously, materially, directly and apolitically harmful to people. I can't write people off if they continue to vote red until then. I also don't find republican rhetoric to be much different than democrat rhetoric. Both-sides-ism acknowledged, I think prominent Democrat and Republican and messaging both rely almost entirely on emotional argument. I think this is novel behavior for Republicans, since their old behavior was to meekly, logically and unsuccessfully argue their point. The change to unapologetic emotional argument is shocking to the left wing, but it prevails. A scream of "kids in cages" is no more convincing than a growl of "some of them are good people." A "womp womp" is as convicing as a "how absolutely dare you sir." You are right on the result: it pushes common people into irrelevant, trivial debates, preventing meaningful discussion.
Cancel culture is a distraction from more relevant issues."
Not true at all.
It's not about her money, it's about her ability to speak and to have a public opinion, and therefore a relationship with us - not about her 'personal wealth'.
She has specific views on gender, which she should be allowed to have and which I don't think are objectively 'anti trans'.
The statement above, ie that her views are 'anti trans' is really a problem.
'Shutting down her voice' is significantly worse than 'taking her money' - because it means the rest of us are not allowed to have a debate or to have our own opinions.
I generally agree with her assessment. It's nuanced, informed and not 'anti trans'.
Labelling it 'anti trans' is precisely the kind of 'Red Guards killing the unpure' we need to worry about.
'Cancel culture' has succeeded in banning speakers on most University campuses, and systematically disabled tons of voices from being heard. Speakers aren't even on the slot anymore 'can't afford the security' is now a common statement. This is inexcusable.
The fact that 100 or so of the world's leading thinkers had to take out page to tamp down people in their own midst is crazy, and a sign of a problem.
It's a fairly existential problem right now.
A lot of this actually may be a kind of 'anti Trump' anger exhibiting in an odd kind of way, maybe it dies down a little bit, but the 'winds' are heading in one direction right now, and the press in particular seem to have joined in.