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Showing posts from June, 2025

J K Rowling

  I read recently that public artworks referencing J K Rowling have been defaced, presumably by supporters of trans rights. If you’ve read my earlier posts you’ll know that I think this sort of thing is counter productive. But if anyone is going to be     targeted it’s Rowling.   The funny thing is, not long ago her views were not unreasonable. She, like that other hate figure Kathleen Stock, argued that trans women’s experience growing up, both physiologically and societally, is different from natal women and therefore they are not the same. It is unclear to what extent they thought this might mean trans people should be  treated  differently, but both used to say that trans people should be treated with kindness and respect. You might not agree but it’s a respectable view.  That’s still Stock’s position as far as I know. But Rowling has become a full blown trans denier of the most inflexible and virulent sort.  Why? I know nothing of Stock’s ear...

Trade deals

  At first sight trade deals don’t seem to have much to do with trans issues. And they don’t. But the reaction to their announcement in certain quarters seems to me to have a bearing.  It helps to explain why trans deniers are so passionately illogical.  Every time someone of a liberal disposition decries, say, a black person being killed by a policeman while being arrested, or notices that extreme weather events are occurring more frequently and glaciers are melting and that this just might be due to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the reaction from the Tories and Reform or the MAGA crowd in America is hysterical. You’re a lunatic left wing Marxist radical, or, worse, you’re “woke”.   And so the recent trade deals, which are palpably to the benefit of the UK as a whole, is a “betrayal of Brexit”.  These reactions aren’t logical, they haven’t been thought through. They’re a knee jerk reaction to anything that isn’t what George Orwell would have called “rightth...