Author JK Rowling is about as famous and accomplished an author as it’s possible to get.
Until recently she was widely admired throughout the world for her creations of a world of good and bad wizards and witches and the dramatic tales of their struggles. But no more.
Like a number of other famous and accomplished figures – such as Australian feminist Germaine Greer – she has earned the ire and venom of the trans activist community for questioning their definitions of sex and gender, and in particular what constitutes a woman.
There is something nightmarish in the transgender activist lobby’s attacks on JK Rowling.
But then there is something nightmarish and even grotesque in the push by gender activists to impose their own totalitarian fantasies on everyone else, including, on numerous occasions, children.
But first, some background.
In recent weeks, Ms Rowling has had the temerity (in the eyes of the trans activist community) to question the thinking and assumptions which underpin the whole movement as to what constitutes a woman and the uniqueness of feminine life and experience.
On 6 June, Ms Rowling retweeted an article mentioning “people who menstruate,” questioning the obvious refusal to use the word ‘women.’
“‘People who menstruate,’ she tweeted. ‘I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
It became clear that Ms Rowling’s interest in the trans issue went far deeper than the vapid reasoning of her attackers and critics when she ventured to write further on the issue of the transgender paradigm which declares that sex and gender are purely mental and psychological irrespective of biology and yet simultaneously material and physical.
Her comments were a red rag to an enraged transgender lobby and their politically correct hangers-on.
Quick to join the public denunciations and rebukes against her were the now-famous actors associated with the production of her movies who derided and misrepresented her perfectly rational and commonsense observations about the objective reality and experience of femininity as examples of intolerance, bigotry and prejudice.
It is interesting, at this point, to observe in passing that was really happening was that individuals whose sole claim to fame is the ability (to some extent) to pretend to be someone else for 30 to 40 minutes over several months of filming (not exactly the greatest achievement to which one might aspire in life) somehow supposed that they were now eminent masters of the entire debate surrounding the transsexual phenomenon (as opposed to the amateurish world-famous author) and somehow morally superior to her as well.
Fortunately, JK Rowling is made of tougher material than that and was not cowed by the skin-deeps.
“The long-term health risks of cross-sex hormones have been now been tracked over a lengthy period,” she tweeted this week.
“These side-effects are often minimised or denied by trans activists … None of that may trouble you or disturb your belief in your own righteousness. But if so, I can’t pretend I care much about your bad opinion of me.”
It is entirely likely that if JK Rowling sat down across the editorial table from The Catholic Weekly there would be plenty of debate on all sorts of issues.
But, we like to think, that debate would be reasoned, rational, reasonable and above all respectful of one of the cleverest and most accomplished authors of the 21st Century.
Yet JK Rowling, like Germaine Greer and other feminist writers, is perfectly correct to question the manipulation of language around femininity that is at the very heart of the transgender lobby’s fanaticism.
The problem is simply defined: in an effort to appropriate and bend the word ‘femininity’ to their own ends, the transgender lobby has to deny that masculinity and femininity are, in fact, objectively real.
If femininity exists, it is, in the end purely a subjective feeling. If masculinity exists, it is purely a subjective feeling.
In order for this paradigm to succeed, the uniqueness of the feminine experience which includes things such as the experience of menstruation, for example, has to be – bizarrely – denied.
On the issue of transgender activism and ideology, JK Rowling is really the small boy from that wonderful fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen who, alone among all the fatuous and unctuous courtiers points out what everyone else refuses to say for fear of non-acceptance: that the Emperor is as naked as the day he was born.
The transgender lobby, weirdly, want to make JK Rowling into a character from one of her own novels – She Who Must Not Be Named.
Ordinarily, we call such attempts at suppressing intellectual truth a form of bullying. But there is a certain fascist quality to it all as well.
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