So there's been a big stink this week about a since-retracted comment from a trans person about Rowling being "a danger to children" which transphobes have of course opted to respond to with "HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE HER OF BEING A PEDOPHILE!?" which of course did not happen, but that that's where their minds instantly go is really telling of how often they baselessly throw around pedophilia accusations both veiled and overt, how it's generally a subject always on their mind (in no small part due to counting several people actually guilty thereof amongst their number (and that's without even getting into how they hold up freaking James Cantor, outright activist for pedophile rights as a voice to be listened to) and of course the general knee-jerk instinct they all have to keep anyone from thinking about OTHER forms of child abuse which again, they actively, vocally advocate, and in many cases, admit to practicing.
All that being said though, again, nobody has been accusing Rowling of pedophilia. Someone (well, several someones now, solidarity gestures and all) simply that she's not safe to have around children. And that's... kind of self-evidently true just from the immediate context here. She is a person who has gotten so swept up in vicious hatemongering and conspiracy theory that she's pasting horrific bloody-minded conspiracy theories into what are supposed to be PR posts about a children's book. I mean, that's disqualifying on its own. If you had a clown over for your kids' birthday party and he started spouting race war stuff, you'd ask him to leave. If a children's TV show host blurted out "god hates fags" he'd be gone, immediately. Hell, I even have a non-hypothetical example here. Paul Reubens, better known for the character he played in various media at the time, Pee-wee Herman, was arrested in 1991 for masturbating in a pornographic movie theater (which is, apparently, a crime, who knew?) and while not actively entertaining children at the time, nor that really being the sort of thing that should make the national news to begin with, the world at large kinda collectively decided that full stop, he was not going to be anywhere in children's media. Which people did sort of collectively back down from 15 to 20 years later, but yeah, that's where the bar was in 1991. "Pee-wee Herman can't masturbate!" shrieked the horrified masses when... OK that didn't happen, it's the actor who played him, who... really is kind of entitled to do something that nearly all people do regularly.
What Rowling is guilty of here though is a whole hell of a lot worse. Advocating, while on the job, for quite frankly, violent radical terrorists she's fond of.
It doesn't come off that way to some, because the context is something not discussed in public often. Here's her post:
Now, again, just... dropping an F bomb when replying to a 9 year old drawing fan art for your children's book should really be career ending alone here, but it's worth noting that what Rowling is talking about is the subject of this famous thread of mine:
The "Wolf" to whom Rowling is referring here (with decidedly the wrong pronouns, would be Tara Wolf, the fine upstanding young woman pictured here.
You will also notice that she is decidedly NOT the burly purple-haired woman plainly committing assault in that image I did my best to help go a bit viral when it was taken, close to 3 years ago now. That would be one Maria McLaughlin, who Rowling is claiming as a victim of assault here. It's also worth noting that the person who can clearly be seen so savagely pounding on McLaughlin's knee with their kidney while keeping her hands occupied with the back of their coat is not Tara Wolf either, a popular claim by bigots when their efforts to convince people McLaughlin is the one being beaten are defeated by someone pointing out which of this people is McLaughlin—hiding behind reporting over the assault charges that were eventually filed. Clicking through from my thread on the subject to the full sequence Joss Prior was providing a "Zapruder interpretation" of, I believe Tara Wolf is the person you can see towards the very end in the snow camo jacket trying to pry her off her victim (who, to the best of my knowledge, remains anonymous, and for fear of further violence from this hate group, did not press charges for, again, the actual act of assault clearly committed here).
I'd link to McLaughlin's candid confession about the assault, but her Twitter account has since been permanently suspended (as a result, as it happens, of her spending a full year terrorizing me for daring to provide accurate commentary about all this) and
http://archive.is also seems to be down at the moment, so, have a zoom-in on a cached preview? Best I can manage at the moment. Class act that bigot.
And it's also worth noting that the actual lead up to the actual assault is that a violent gang of hardcore transphobes went out of their way to seek out a group of people protesting a hatemongering event, closed in on them with cameras both photo and video (all available images of the event coming, as it happens, from the bigot recording the attack to laugh about later), attempting both to intimidate the crowd into dispersing, and to photograph the faces of everyone present to, as is their standard MO, stalk over the internet and terrorize for years (again, precisely the sort of behavior which McLaughlin was later permanently suspended over).
And ah, thanks. That's much easier to read.
https://twitter.com/OneWeirdAngel/status/1267236369862217728…
The actual violence began when McLaughlin's efforts to push aside the sign her victim was holding up out of the way to get a clearer photo than the above weren't going particularly well (her claim incidentally of her camera being smashed is one she was forced to withdraw in the court transcripts bigots love to selectively quote by the way) so she decided to just use her massively larger frame to lift her victim up off the ground and start kicking, while the rest of the violent mob cheered her on... before returning home to write propaganda about the whole thing. The question though remains here, hey, why the hell does a children's book author have weird hate speech propaganda about a savage public beating that happened close to 3 years ago on her clipboard to accidentally drop into a response to a child's artwork in the first place?
Well, self-evidently, Rowling is an active member of the hate group in question (as has been firmly established for quite some time now), and this particular incident is one they are absolutely obsessed with, and will never let go of. What they had hoped to accomplish that day, and I can't stress this enough, very nearly DID accomplish, was a display of total dominance against the group of people they wish to exterminate.
They walked up to a group of trans people, in broad daylight, in public, with police standing nearby, savagely assaulted them, filmed the whole thing, proudly uploaded the whole incident to a public youtube account, had one of the victims arrested, and got every paper in the country to run a story on it completely reversing victim and offender, some of which even running with a photo clearly showing what actually happened.
It's the same exact sort of fascist power play you can see unfolding today, with racist police just actively assaulting members of the press as a show of force in response to being criticized for murdering people in the street.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/george-floyd-protests-police-violence.amp?__twitter_impression=true…
What this sort of violent bigot wants above all is not only to be able to enact violence on the targets of their hatred without any fear of consequence, but to be able to brag about it afterwards and receive applause. In McLaughlin's close, they came real damn close, again, locally, they fully controlled the media narrative. There were enough people though willing to stand up to this (and seriously, Joss Prior never gets enough credit for that threat analyzing the original video that my big popular thread is really just there to hype up) to get the truth at least partly out there (although I'm STILL fairly sure no one actually ever reported an accurate version of events in any sort of major publication) and again, not to toot my own horn here, but McLaughlin's effort to play damage control by attacking the most visible reporting on the subject out there (which sadly was just my freaking twitter thread with about 1000 RTs) massively blew up in her face and got her kicked off Twitter. So they're just... all still really really mad, and trying to find some way to change public perception of the facts to convert the whole thing back to a clear win.
So... you know, tl;dr children's author J.K. Rowling seems to be participating in a plot by a radical hate group to normalize and celebrate violently assaulting trans people in the street, and yeah, that's not someone whose books children should be reading, and definitely not a person who should be allowed to speak to or around children now that she's proven she can't even keep that hatemongering from spilling out, resplendent with profanity and misgendering, in the middle of doing PR work FOR her children's book.
That should be instantly career ending
