When Our Idols Turnout To Be Made Of Clay

Many time the people who we look up to turn out to be bigots.

Two such are…

JK Rowling's Transphobia Wasn't Hard to Find, She Wrote a Book About It
It's not just her blatant transphobia on Twitter. As the trans community has been saying for years, Rowling's transphobia is obvious in her writing, too.
Vice
By Rob Zacny
December 20 2019

Fans and critics alike have been calling out Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling for years for her history of playing online footsie with noted transphobes. This week, she finally made explicit what a lot of those fans and critics have argued: She's an aggressive biological essentialist, and vocally supports known transphobes and their beliefs. It's the latest stage of the slow-burning, deepening estrangement between Harry Potter readers and a woman who has often been as ill-suited to the role of pop culture celebrity as she is eager to play it.

But this latest turn in the conversation also underscores the degree to which Rowling has been successful in downplaying the peevish condescension and personal conservatism that she has flaunted in her writing outside the saga of the Boy Who Lived. It's also perhaps revealed how many literary critics were either happy to overlook, or were unable to perceive, the prejudices and grudges that she has exercised since becoming a successful adult fiction author with the Cormoran Strike mystery series (that she writes under the pen-name Robert Galbraith). If J.K. Rowling has been a disappointment in her public statements and interviews and troubling on Twitter, she's been positively abhorrent as a mystery novelist. And there might be nothing she's written more vindictive and grotesque--and revealing--than 2014's The Silkworm.
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There's a viciousness in Rowling's descriptions and characterizations in the Galbraith books from time to time. But her descriptions of Pippa, the features and mannerisms she chooses to focus on and emphasize when writing from Strike's POV (generally one of our two reliable narrators in this world) are consistently objectifying and othering in ways that are very familiar from the ways transphobes describe and debate the validity of trans men and women's identities.

Critic and VICE contributor Katelyn Burns wrote about this last year, using this particular sequence to contextualize some of Rowling's other statements and behavior on Twitter and to persuasively make the case that Rowling is transphobic in very familiar and common ways. She writes:

In the scene, a trans woman, Pippa, follows and tries to stab the protagonist, Cormoran Strike, before getting trapped in Strike’s office. After demanding Pippa’s ID, her trans status is revealed and her visible Adam’s apple is noted, while it's noted that her hands were jammed in her pockets. Pippa tries several times to escape the office before Strike finally says, “‘If you go for that door one more time I’m calling the police and I’ll testify and be glad to watch you go down for attempted murder. And it won’t be fun for you Pippa,’ he added. ‘Not pre-op.’”

An English stand-up comedian, and actor also attacked us,

People are calling for Ricky Gervais to be sacked after several tweets on trans women
The next Golden Globes host joins the list of celebrities judging the validity of transgender people - but claims it was all a joke.
LGBTQ Nation
By Juwan J. Holmes
December 21, 2019

Comedian Ricky Gervais is being called transphobic for a series of tweets defending, and reiterating, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s inflammatory comments about transgender women. People are calling for Gervais to be fired from hosting the 77th Golden Globes Awards on January 5, 2020, being held by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

After saying ‘enough is enough’ and daring followers to report him, Gervais now says it was all a joke’, as it’s his job to make fun of every identity.

In response to writer Jarvis Dupont posting her latest article in Spectator USA on Twitter in which she designates Rowling as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist (TERF), Gervais mocked Dupont and other trans women for being upset by “awful biological women” “who can never understand…becoming a lovely lady so late in life” and “take their girly privileges for granted.”

Gervais, the creator and star of the original series The Office in the UK and Extras, concluded in his reply to Dupont, “Winning at female sports and having their own toilets. Well, enough is enough.”

In further tweets, Gervais reduced transgender women to ‘men’ taking the rights of women who ‘have found a new cunning way to dominate and demonise an entire sex.’ He then claimed he’s being targeted by people who ‘can’t afford to have their propositions questioned’, comparing defenses of trans people to ‘blasphemy laws’ and ‘the fatwah’, a legal Islamic declaration stereotypically associated with terrorism.

When we were little we used to chant “Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.” but unfortunately that is not true.

Words can hurt.

Words can increase suicides. Words can increase hate against us, words can cause legislators to vote against us.

We cannot let these words go unchallenged.