It was no April Fool’s joke.

Harry Potter author-turned culture warrior J.K. Rowling kicked off the month with an 11-tweet social media thread in which she argued 10 transgender women were men — and dared Scottish police to arrest her.

Rowling’s intervention came as a controversial new Scottish government law, aimed at protecting minority groups from hate crimes, took effect. And it landed amid a fierce debate over both the legal status of transgender people in Scotland and over what actually constitutes a hate crime.

Already the law has generated far more international buzz than is normal for legislation passed by a small nation’s devolved parliament.

  • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Her hostile fixation with trans people is just bizarre at this point.

    I understand she is concerned about biologically-born women (sorry, I don’t know what the correct term is) being at risk from a very small minority of criminal trans women assaulting them in bathrooms etc. But statistically that risk seems far out of context to the shouting she keeps making on it. And her ranting is just doing harm to the vast majority of trans people who just want to live their lives, because it sows animosity towards them and emboldens bigots and their hate crimes.

    It’s basically an axe-grinding exercise on her part. And she probably keeps going due to the fact that people keep calling her out. So she then doubles, triples, quadruples down out of pride.

    It’s just irritating. I wish she’d just calm down and either keep her opinions to herself or be more tactful.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Her hostile fixation with trans people is just bizarre at this point.

      It makes perfect sense.

      Bigots are rarely just bigoted about one thing. And this is the current “battleground”.

      If they win this and this kind of discrimination becomes acceptable again, they’ll go back to homosexuals. If they lose they’ll move to another group.

      It’s why you can never stop fighting them and the facsim they want, they’re never honest about their end goals

      If you don’t defend the human next to you, there might not be anyone to defend you later. So we don’t even need people to get this for the right reasons, they should agree with it on a base instinct of self preservation.

      The same thing the bigots exploit to gain followers.

      • ThePowerOfGeek@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Good points.

        That kind of anger and fear towards people who are different from yourself just sounds exhausting. But I guess what’s exhausting to me and many other ‘live and let live’ people is invigorating to some people. Just seems like a really shitty way of wasting your life.

    • HopeOfTheGunblade@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      Transphobia, more than any other bigotry, seems to rot the mind. It’s not obvious to me why it’s that way, but there are several cases where you can watch someone start at some vaguely terfy position, and end by losing their work and nobody wanting to hire them and getting divorced because they just will not shut up about how trans people, a subset of humanity roughly on par with genetic redheads in the general population, are destroying society and making everything awful and ruining their bodies and on and on and on.

    • Taffer@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      The term you’re looking for is cisgender. Trans = “on the other side of”, cis = “on this side of”