So here's another longish thread from someone I like and want to ramble about in more detail. Apparently visiting stochastic terror on innocent people while hiding behind hatred directed at you from unrelated sources is kind of a theme of the day. Before getting into this though, context matters, so here, to the best of my ability to ascertain, is what Rowling is claiming as "threats to beat, rape, assassinate and bomb her" coming from "hundreds of trans activists."
This is a single post, expressing hope that violence befalls her, from a now-suspended account which apparently belonged to someone way into a specific Russian flavor of fascism.
https://archive.ph/cdRqO
Now I don't want to go splitting hairs over this, but as someone who has on multiple times been in the position of someone trying to report death threats to people I happen to know the police don't classify it as a death threat unless the person is explicitly stating when where and how it is they plan to end your life. So, "when you come home from work tomorrow, I will be there in your driveway with a gun, and blow your brains out" would be a death threat, but anything less specific than that would not. In this particular case, this person has worded things in such a way as to indicate no desire to personally attack Rowling at all, just generally putting it out there that it would be a good thing if Rowling faced an act of violence. The term for THAT, at worst, is "stochastic terrorism," and I am taking the time to explain this because what Rowling is doing here is ALSO an example of stochastic terrorism and one significantly more likely to lead to people carrying out actual acts of violence as she has a much larger platform, is gesturing towards a much larger and more accessible group of people to enact this violence on, and has been hammering that drum and adding extra reasons for a real long time now.
But mainly I wanted to focus on the other part of this, where she's talking about this post and "hundreds of others" threatening other forms of violence are coming from "trans activists." And specifically I'd like to drill down on what, exactly, a "trans activist" is.
"Trans activist" is a term used more or less exclusively in transphobic, explicitly fascist circles, which I would best describe as a term of convenience, lumping together anyone and everyone the speaker wishes it to, and heavily implying that everyone so painted shares whatever qualities are convenient to the speaker's point. Specifically, those most commonly named include: Literally every trans person in the world, anyone who does not actively hate trans people (typically in a hasty application when a fascist learns halfway through attacking someone for being trans that they are actually cis), rapists, murders, terrorists, and purely hypothetical boogiemen who perform acts that have never been recorded as having been done by anyone in history. It's also worth the added emphasis that the aforementioned rapists, murderers, and terrorists are typically specific individuals pulled from recent headlines who are not trans themselves nor connected to trans people in any meaningful way. Mass shooting suspects, random men in prison for violent crimes, and of course what is apparently the fire-and-brimstone-Bible-quoting extreme Russian nationalist (NOT exactly a demographic known to be supportive of trans people's rights) Rowling is specifically calling out are all people I have seen explicitly and baselessly referred to as "trans activists" by people Rowling actively supports/promotes/cites when composing transphobic propaganda pieces.
course is to completely eliminate in the mind of the listener any distinction between the likes of this person talking about Rowling receiving pipe bombs, or the shooter in this case who like-minded conspiracy weirdos swear to this day is secretly trans- and whatever random innocent minor online fascists have decided to start hunting for sexualized photos of, or sending death threats to, or whoever might be addressing level-headed politely worded criticisms to dangerous bigots like Rowling, directly or otherwise.
"Of course we despise these random children and women getting beaten and murdered in the streets. They're vile trans activists, just like these murderers over here!"
Random side note, before settling on the term "trans activists" for this, the convenience term of choice was "TRA," parodying "MRA" or "Men's Rights Activist," which had even more obvious condemnation baked right in, but was a bit too blatant a dogwhistle. "SJW" still leaks into the vocab too, from all the crossover with more openly fascist groups.
Also damn, I said I wasn't going to downplay the whole "death threat" thing because it's far less important here and I don't believe anyone should be subjected to that sort of violent fantasizing, but looking around her twitter feed to see if there were, in fact, any highlighted examples of these beating rape and murder threats she's claiming to be receiving alongside the pipe bomb comment, and uh... CW for bigot-quotes.
I swear on my first pass there was one in here where she went off about how "middle-aged woman is a slur" too, but twitter is useless and her feed's hard to look at. I'm not cherry-picking.
Like, OK, I certainly don't quote every violent message I get on this website. Before I went to bed last night I blocked a good half-dozen accounts with "gender critical" profiles hurling graphically violent language and calling me a pedophile because I shared something about the hoax some bigot ran to get nazis to start attacking people on the street in front of a spa, but I'm also not quote-tweeting and singling out people for saying "please talk to some queer people" in front of 14 million people.
So either she's misrepresenting the HELL out of the sort of messages she's routinely fielding from critics, or her priorities are so skewed she ignores rape threats but how DARE you suggest she talk to one of those disgusting queers, which I'd say is worse. I suspect both though, really.
Anyway like I was saying I feel incredibly dirty for having gone looking for those because most of her feed looks like this, and then every 30th post or so there's some bolded quote or propaganda article link saying "supposedly trans-identified loonies mutilate children's genitalia, then they die of sudden heart failure."
You'd think at some point a publicist would beg her to quit crapping where she eats, right? Maybe after she outed herself to the world as a genocidal bigot by crossing the streams with the children's art and the conspiracy websites and posted this little gem with an errant paste?
I'm getting way off on a tangent, but seriously what the HELL? I know kids aren't officially allowed their own twitter accounts, but the woman calls out toddlers by name to praise their fan art, encouraging kids to watch like it's the end of Romper Room...
and then sandwiched in between two of those she just slaps out some sick bigoted filth, or a proud statement about how she doesn't say anything when people reply to that very children's fan art with sexual material aimed at those children. How is this not all anyone talks about?
