00:02:35.620For those of you who weren't able to tune into our Patreon episodes,
00:02:39.140and we should say that this is also a Patreon episode,
00:02:41.320if you're listening to this on the main feed,
00:02:43.660it's going to cut off after a certain point.
00:02:45.480Every point will become even more spicy.1.00
00:02:47.680Yeah, we're putting all the really bitchy stuff behind the paywall1.00
00:02:50.340because you've got to pay for that.1.00
00:02:51.720Except for my social media where I give it away for free.
00:02:55.120But this is good stuff. I think Adrian is going to take me on a wild journey with this insane woman.1.00
00:03:03.680Yeah, so part one of the series was about the genesis of TERFs as a kind of constituency and power block in online spaces.
00:03:10.820And there, the TLDR is that it was a kind of bog-standard online radicalization,
00:03:17.180except that it happened to and happened mostly among milieus that had serious clout in British media and politics, right?
00:03:24.580So it's no different in some ways from your uncle who like went really anti-vax during the pandemic, except that your uncle maybe owns a detailing business rather than like being a member of parliament or a associate editor at a major British newspaper, right?
00:03:40.700And then part two is about what happened when that clout, the clout that these usually women, but not only women who met in these online spaces around anti-trans activism, met a media ecosystem that was primed for a moral panic, both about trans youth and youth transition and about the limits of the sayable of like cancel culture, et cetera, et cetera.
00:04:03.220And this is where the UK just took a particular tack in the cancel culture wars.
00:04:08.360In the United States, it was often about Me Too and it was often about Black Lives Matter.0.54
00:04:13.080In the UK, it also was about those things, but it tended to be more about you're not even allowed to say mean things about trans people anymore, which, spoiler alert, you very much were and you very much did.
00:04:23.380So today is about the further mainstreaming of TERF ideology and specifically its fusion with government policies.0.72
00:04:30.080If you're looking for dates between late 2019 and the year 2022, we can call this the turf march through the institutions, right?
00:04:39.700Still, we can rewind the tape a little bit and talk about the arc of J.K. Rowling.
00:04:43.940And that's going to be our way into our topic.
00:04:46.460So, J.K. Rowling, cast your minds back to the halcyon days of 2019 where no one had heard of COVID before.
00:04:54.140And we thought that maybe we're on the ass end of the Trump administration rather than just kind of warming up.
00:05:00.080What I remember about J.K. Rowling during this time was that this is in the pre-Elon era when likes on the website formerly known as Twitter were in fact public, right?
00:05:13.260And there was some sort of whispering about some of the posts that J.K. Rowling was favoriting on Twitter.
00:05:22.000People were like, this seems like it's going in a little biggity direction.
00:05:28.520Yeah, and there's going to be a lot of liking of tweets in this episode, I should say.
00:05:32.060It's like so banal and humiliating that we have to talk about Twitter so much, but like every story of online radicalization is taking place exactly on these social media platforms, right?
00:05:42.940It is about the sort of hook of a, you know, like plausible statement that drags somebody down further, like first algorithmically and then also ideologically into this sort of like spiral of increasing bigotry and fervor.
00:05:57.960It's really part and parcel of this kind of cancel culture moment that a like can feel like such a small thing.
00:06:05.080And it's easy to say, oh, she got canceled just because she liked the tweet, et cetera, et cetera.
00:06:11.160But of course, what people were pointing out wasn't, oh, your thumb slipped and you liked this tweet.
00:06:16.120It's like, why was this tweet in your purview, right?
00:06:18.920There are a million tweets sent every day.
00:06:24.220What does the algorithm know about you that other people don't, right?
00:06:27.300The fact that, like, I don't get to see, you know, neo-Nazi content constantly, even when Twitter was, like, kind of a Nazi toilet, because, like, the algorithm knows that that's not what I click.
00:06:39.120If I'm like, all I see is Nazi stuff, it's like, well, you're kind of telling yourself that, but, you know?
00:06:43.940And I think people were just like, well, okay, but how does J.K. Rowling even find this stuff?
00:06:47.860Like, it clearly is an interest of hers.
00:06:50.400But to an outsider, it can be like, oh, she got canceled just for a senior moment, I think she called it at some point, right?0.60
00:06:55.620But people were like, uh-oh, Joanne is going down a rabbit hole.
00:06:58.680And, like, that turned out to be exactly right.
00:07:01.020Like, J.D. Vance seems to be finding an awful lot of Nazi content wherever he goes.0.95
00:08:54.900She was not forced out, and it wasn't just about that.
00:08:57.640This is a case, Forstatter v. Center for Global Development Europe, which is an employment appeal where a tribunal basically had to figure out whether gender-critical views were capable of being protected as a belief under the Equality Act of 2010.
00:09:14.500The important thing is, like, is it a protected characteristic to be a TERF?
00:09:18.120And the court, in its infinite wisdom, found that, yes, it is, in fact, right?
00:09:21.800Like, this is basically an extension of gender-based violence to be reprimanded for, you know, spewing hate about a group.
00:09:29.680And so, basically, her coming out, after all these sort of likes and this toe-dipping that she did,
00:09:35.720she casts it as she stands with this woman and is, like, very invested in this case.
00:09:39.740That's how she's going to frame it later on.
00:09:41.660But she's using these hashtags that really suggest, again, where J.K. Rowling has been hanging out.
00:09:47.140So we're dealing with someone who's been in TERF spaces for quite some time, probably not just on Twitter, and is sort of versed in their vernacular and versed in the kind of like little cases that they always push up.
00:10:00.560Yeah, there's a tendency you can see with other online forms of radicalization as well.
00:10:05.040One of the signs that somebody is going down this rabbit hole is that their vocabulary will change in ways that can be like superficially innocuous.
00:10:12.520but like over time with repeated use they do tend to indicate like okay somebody's like spending a
00:10:18.740lot of time on an insular online community where these things are specific references
00:10:24.220and the shibboleth doesn't always like translate outside so like hashtag this is not a drill
00:10:29.760probably doesn't mean anything to you or i yeah but it means something very specific to
00:10:34.180But Rowling, or hashtag I stand with Maya, has this whole other domino line of meanings from the places where she's hanging out on the internet.
00:10:45.600Exactly. And I think that that's really important here.
00:10:48.120This could have been sort of QAnon, right?
00:10:50.540But it is QAnon for the J.K. Rowlings of the world.
00:10:53.680It has a veneer of respectability because these are children's book authors, these are journalists, these are politicians, right?
00:11:00.280These are people that you take otherwise quite seriously.
00:11:02.480But here they behave in a way that we normally associate, as you say, with online radicalization of far more marginal groups.
00:11:27.880So I think one bit of useful context is that, you know, JK started down this path before the pandemic, but a lot of people followed her during the pandemic.
00:11:36.980This is like a moment of mass right-wing radicalization on the Internet, really like throughout the world.
00:11:44.340Specifically also radicalization against health authorities, right?
00:11:47.720Which if you've listened to our first two episodes, you know, against the Tavistock Clinic, against the NIH, it's often framed as a sort of anti-pharmaceutical industry, right?
00:11:56.400which like allegedly is pushing puberty blockers on these kids to make money or whatever.
00:12:00.400There's a lot of skepticism against a quote-unquote medical establishment in TERFism.
00:12:06.040There's a lot of that around thanks to COVID lockdowns at that time.
00:12:10.440So Joanne tweets, quote, people who menstruate, unquote.
00:12:15.480I'm sure there used to be a word for those people.0.98
00:15:15.220You're trying to create a conversion narrative that hides the fact that you are really part of a very well-trod path of online radicalization.
00:16:41.700And then she says, months later, I compounded my accidental-like crime by following Magdalene Burns.
00:16:47.740I don't even know who that is on Twitter.
00:16:49.120I actually do know the Magdalene Burns character.
00:16:51.040This was another sort of online turf, like somebody who's building an online following as kind of like a transphobic influencer a little bit.0.56
00:16:59.700Although I think she was mostly text-based.
00:17:58.320She says, I mentioned all this only to explain
00:18:00.240that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen
00:18:02.960when I supported Maya, Maya Forstetter, that is.
00:18:06.100I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then.0.99
00:18:08.480I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch, sorry about that, and of course for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he composted them.0.99
00:18:22.640Yeah, yeah. But what I want to home in on here is I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. That, again, to me is a very telling turn of phrase.
00:18:34.620There is that, but also you're a billionaire. You're this fated author. How do you know? Right? This is someone who hangs out on Tumblr blogs of people who like her work, who interacts with people on Twitter who like her work or who admire her, who participates in debates about the books she wrote. That's one of those things about the J.K. Rowling story. She is part of a model of author, most of them actually younger than her.
00:19:04.160Particularly in, like, sci-fi and fantasy, they're really engaged with fan fiction, with fan communities.
00:19:12.680They're really, like, genre fiction writers often have these much more direct and accessible relationships with their readers in ways that have been really intensified by the internet.
00:19:33.180But also like there's several extraordinarily wealthy or powerful people whose wealth seems to create like an unexpectedness or irony to the fact that they are also incredibly, incredibly online.
00:19:45.780I'm thinking of obviously Elon Musk, but also if anybody's following Sam Alito, the Supreme Court justice, the very far right wing Supreme Court justice, his opinions show consistent evidence of spending a tremendous time on the right wing internet.
00:19:59.760And, you know, these are people who have tremendous amount of power, tremendous degrees of responsibility, or just like a tremendous amount of money that could insulate them from what I consider to be like the sad dregs of the human experience, i.e. spending time on Twitter, right?
00:20:16.680I'm like, my fantasy of being a rich and powerful person does not involve so much time on my phone as like I currently have, let alone as much as these people apparently have, right?
00:20:27.180And so there's a contrast between the fact that, like, they are raised above ordinary human discourse and exchange by their positions in life, but they are sort of down among with the rest of us in terms of their impulses and their narcissism and their, like, tendency towards grievance that's driving them into the same, like, dopamine slot machine that the rest of us are all addicted to.
00:20:52.700Yeah, Rowling is really interesting in that she is both extremely open towards fans, which is very laudable, but maybe not the healthiest thing, and kind of possessive of her own work.
00:21:06.480So there's these kind of canonic and, in hindsight, fairly troubling J.K. Rowling interactions where she sort of asked about the wizarding world and then gives kind of like tone-deaf answers.
00:21:17.620I forget exactly the name of the Jewish Hogwarts student.
00:21:21.440or someone's like, are there Jews at Hogwarts?
00:21:23.860And she gives this name where you're like,1.00
00:21:25.760Joanne, just fucking think before you tweet, man.0.99
00:22:01.080That was like a pronunciation she made outside of a book that was very popular at the time.
00:22:06.420She did it like right around like Obergefell, like love is love, love wins era of cheerleading, kind of like self-congratulatory, like straight acceptance.
00:22:16.160That clearly got her a lot of rewards, right?0.74
00:22:18.100But this kind of like continuous intervention in the fan community to like add to and police the boundaries of the quote-unquote canonical realities of the world she created strikes me as something that you would only do if you're really, really insecure and really, really intent on being like not misunderstood, which might also be why she wrote a 4,000-word essay about shit she liked on Twitter and why.
00:22:43.720It's definitely the same impulse, you know?
00:22:45.660Exactly. And I think people who tell this story as a cancellation, including friend of the show, Barry Weiss, in her 8,000-hour The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, which you should not check out, will fixate on the fact that J.K. Rowling's intervention were all about, quote-unquote, wokeness, like ethnic diversity, gay Dumbledore, et cetera, et cetera.
00:23:05.660But what they'll miss is that, as you say, it's a form of control, actually.
00:23:09.660Yes, it's in the service of some kind of sense of social justice, but by and large, she's policing.
00:23:15.360I think you used exactly the right word.0.99
00:23:17.480She ends up being quite possessive of her own work and very ticked off if fans come at it in a way she doesn't like,0.97
00:23:25.700which I think matters because she seems like someone who obsessively engages with fans online and is unhappy with what they do.
00:23:34.180And also not to put too fine a point on it, but aren't most of her fans like literal children? I mean, I know this became a nostalgia item for millennials were children when they came out and then sort of like retained a connection to the books as adults, which I know has a really cringe reputation, especially now that like J.K. Rowling is so odious.
00:23:52.420But, like, there's something about the fact that she's talking to children and to adults who have, like, a really intensive investment in their own childhood, which also makes this kind of degree of control a little unseemly or, like, pathetic to me.
00:24:06.560Yeah, or that people use their childhood preoccupations to make sense of transitions in their own lives.
00:24:14.400Right? Which is like, yeah, like this was a meaningful experience for a whole generation of children who then grew up and some of them were trans and some of them were queer and decided to draw on their childhood love to narrate that.
00:24:31.620So the fourth or fifth cancellation, I think, is important because she clearly thinks that every time she got blowback, it's always like, dude, that's kind of anti-Semitic or, dude, that's kind of racist.0.97
00:24:42.320They're like, oh, how come this gay Dumbledore shit never came up in the books?0.98
00:24:46.060She's like, oh, I'm being canceled, right?1.00
00:24:47.680It's like either let people say their thing or be okay if people clap back.0.93
00:24:55.800This is someone who feels persecuted, but the persecution is largely downvotes and or snide replies, right?
00:25:03.420Right. And that stuff became really outsized during the pandemic when everybody got online, right?
00:25:08.820Or was too online because they were isolated.
00:25:10.760But this sort of like sense of needing to be seen on the internet a lot and like living and dying by the way people on the internet respond to you, that really predates COVID for Joanne, right?
00:25:24.140She's, like, way too online, clearly kind of needs to, like, touch the proverbial grass and have, like, friends she's interacting with more in the physical world.
00:25:35.060Like, that's clearly something that is lacking in her life and sort of leading her to this, like, needful, insecure, like, lonely policing of her canon on the internet, like, well before COVID.
00:25:56.180What I didn't expect, she says, in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful, and supportive.
00:26:19.400But then you also get a new community, and you can build your identity by being in relationship with those new people who, like, share whatever, like, fixation or bigotry you have.
00:26:29.400It's like your mutuals on Twitter or Blue Sky are all yelling at you, but there's an email from Chris fucking Rufo in your inbox being like, hey, buddy.
00:27:47.240She says, it's been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism, new, that's the bad one, that the new trans activism is having or is likely to have if all of its demands are met, ominous, a significant impact on many of the causes I support because it's pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.0.57
00:28:07.520She gives five reasons and I may go through them.0.70
00:28:55.340I think it's not crazy to assume that what's kind of ringing around in the background there is the idea of grooming, right?0.86
00:29:01.780What other possible reason would there be to think that the trans rights movement would have a deleterious effect on education and safeguarding?0.89
00:29:12.700Maybe I'm being overly suspicious here, but I can't think of anything else.0.91
00:29:15.980Like, it's not going to change the way English is taught.
00:29:18.260It's going to be about teachers pushing children into something they would not otherwise embrace, which was someone who was, let's say, equally online in 2020 as J.K. Rowling, but less circumspect than her, Graham Linehan, would call grooming, right?
00:29:35.480There are TERFs that did use that word and then others who avoided it.
00:29:38.500But I think that's the bell that's being rung here, to be quite honest.
00:29:42.540The third is that, and here we get to my wheelhouse, as a much-banned author, this is true, she's correct, I'm interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it even onto Donald Trump.
00:30:38.020as if these people were really nice to tomboys to start.
00:30:41.020Oh, that group of children you all love so much.
00:30:44.380But it's like it's a threat to tomboys.1.00
00:30:47.940It's a threat to our capacity to like reproduce the white race, right?0.95
00:30:53.560It's just a lot about like quote-unquote irreversible changes, I believe the name of that evil book.0.82
00:30:57.740This notion that these girl children are experiencing some kind of psychosis or adult manipulation
00:31:05.680that is going to lead them to irreversibly eradicate their ability to have babies.
00:31:12.780Yeah. In our next episode, when we talk actually about the CAS report,
00:31:16.640we're going to be getting to this idea that this number is exploding is really, really important,
00:31:21.820which in a technical way is true, but only in the sense that, you know,
00:31:25.420the numbers were tiny before and are still tiny, but have like doubled or tripled in some cases, right?
00:31:32.460Which makes sense if you just start with an incredibly rare and difficult phenomenon.
00:31:38.040Right, like the number can triple if it goes from 10 to 30 in the whole country.
00:31:43.300But also, I don't know, this reminds me of the common analogy about left-handedness, right?
00:31:49.960It used to be when my parents and grandparents were growing up is that if you were left-handed in school, they would beat you until you started writing with your right hand, right?0.94
00:31:59.280And as transgender identity became a little more visible and at least for a moment in like the sort of woke era of the 2010s a little less aggressively punished, that more people would wind up doing it strikes me as kind of logical.0.99
00:32:19.160And what the TERF position is actually like in effect calling for is the reimposition of that like violent stigmatization that intimidates people out of transitioning in the first place.
00:34:00.240The label is not newer, but like the broader social use and acceptance of it is a more recent phenomenon.
00:34:06.320And yeah, that will mean that the numbers change.
00:34:09.540I mean, I also wonder how much of this is, you know, like when we historicize the rise of like politicized transphobia across this series and sort of in general in our work on this podcast, we tend to imagine transphobia as like where homophobia went after the gay marriage battle was lost.
00:35:00.380Here we get a first indication of what her quote-unquote research looked like, because in her, not quite footnote, but her referent in the young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning is, quote, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman.
00:35:16.780So this is the jank-ass study that we keep talking about.
00:35:24.100The one for our listeners who are following along at home where this quote-unquote researcher doing this study literally didn't talk to the transitioning children who she said were rapidly transitioning and only talked to parents and I think talked to parents primarily who she recruited from anti-trans web forums.
00:35:59.040And then she brings up the thing that every transphobe from Andrew Sullivan on will say,
00:36:03.400which is like, well, if I'd had this label available, maybe I would have transitioned, right?
00:36:07.580When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth, right?
00:36:12.460And it's like, okay, Joanne, like, can we all recognize that that's different?
00:36:16.560I mean, like, M. Gesson and Lydia Polgren had what I thought was a really thoughtful and careful piece about this, the New York Times. I don't agree with M. Gesson on everything. But their position, these are like two assigned female people who are now like queer adults of various identifications.
00:36:38.280And they're like, yeah, maybe we would have.0.59
00:36:40.160Like maybe if we had been born in 2000 instead of like 1970 or whatever, perhaps then we would in fact have transitioned instead of going on to live like lesbian lives, right?
00:36:56.660Like something that we have to accept is that the shape of our lives and indeed the shape of our identities is to some degree historically contingent.
00:37:04.540Like there's all these chances and factors that we're not accessing or controlling.
00:37:11.300And something that means accepting is that there might not be like one like true pre-social trans-historical authentic self at your core, right?
00:37:19.520Like the thing that is you is actually shaped like clay by your circumstance and you would be a different person in a different circumstance.0.98
00:37:27.460Like that's actually kind of a head fuck, right?0.99