FINALLY CRACKING
DIVISIONS IN THE WOKE CONSENSUS DESERVE APPLAUSE
J.K. ROWLING’S VIEWS ARE COMPLETELY UNEXCEPTIONABLE. — CONRAD BLACK
As someone who finds approximately 75 per cent of political correctness and 99 per cent of anything woke to be nauseating and imbecilic, I am on the brink of window-rattling ululations of joy at fissures that have appeared recently among both militant gender and sexuality agitators and the environmentalists. In British Columbia, a nurse, Amy Hamm, whose professional performance has not been questioned or criticized, has been dragged before a disciplinary tribunal of the British Columbia College of Nurses and Midwives because of two public complaints, one of them anonymous, because Ms. Hamm was behind a public billboard expressing support for British novelist J.K. Rowling. Ms. Rowling is the phenomenally successful author of the Harry Potter books as well as a number of other series and titles, who has herself been attacked for what she considers to be unjustified dilution of traditional distinctions between males and females.
The controversy engulfed Ms. Rowling when she responded to the dismissal by the Center for Global Development in London of an employee who had expressed gender critical views. Rowling responded, in December, 2019, by tweeting that transgender people should certainly live their lives “in peace and security” but she disapproved women being “forced out of their jobs for stating that sex is real.” This sparked a controversy that rose steadily through a series of tweets and disputatious comments on the Internet and in the press. In June 2020, Rowling ridiculed an article that had substituted “people who menstruate” for the word “women” and tweeted that women’s rights and the “lived reality” of the great majority would be “erased” if the notion that “sex isn’t real” was allowed to take hold.
This brought LGBTQ charities and a wide range of celebrities and gender advocates snorting out of the undergrowth denouncing Rowling. The always militant GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance for the Advancement of Democracy) accused Rowling of being both “cruel” and “inaccurate,” and she responded with an essay on her website asserting her championship of women’s rights and referring to her own experience as a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault. She wrote that most trans people were “vulnerable” and “deserved protection,” but that it would be unsafe to permit “any man who believes or feels he’s a woman” into bathrooms or changing rooms and said that trans activism was “seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class.” This put the cat squarely among the pigeons and she was widely denounced as a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist). J.K. Rowling strenuously rejected these accusations and returned an award given her by the Robert
F. Kennedy human rights organization to Senator Kennedy’s daughter, Kerry Kennedy, when she publicly expressed “profound disappointment” in Rowling’s views.
This argument intensified with the publication of Rowling’s last novel, Troubled Blood, which some critics accused her of using anti-trans tropes, but such hysteria was roundly dismissed by those who actually read the book. As one would hope for such a prominent and successful author, although she received a good many death threats and a lot of insulting comment on the Internet and elsewhere, many well-respected writers rallied to the Rowling view, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lionel Shriver (a woman), and Sir Tom Stoppard. It became very complicated and Debbie Hayton, a trans woman teacher who was one of 58 signatories in a letter to the London Sunday Times supporting Rowling, wrote “I might be a trans woman but in this debate I am on the side of reason, and therefore stand with Rowling.”
Of course, J.K. Rowling’s views are completely unexceptionable, as are those of almost all feminists who do not go to extremes of man-hate. The Rowling-supporting writer Amanda Craig was sacked as a judge of the feminist magazine Mslexia’s fiction and memoir competition because she signed the letter in the Sunday Times. Craig denounced “the ludicrous situation of a woman being bullied by a magazine that is supposed to promote women writers.” Shriver scored a direct hit on the dangerous fatuity of the militant trans position when she accused her opponents of having “refused to make any distinction between a trans character and one that simply wants to cross dress. They made a big to-do about the fact that trans people are not cross-dressers and now they want to blur the distinction. I don’t think they can have it both ways.” Rowling continued to put up strenuous defences of her views and wrote that “I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability to meaningfully discuss their lives.” (It is slightly reassuring that even such an illustrious author is sometimes reduced to a split infinitive.) “It isn’t hate to speak the truth.” The argument caught fire in the United States as well, especially when African-american comedian Dave Chappelle declared that he was a member of “team TERF.” This brought out the full-throated anger of LGBTQ activists, but Chappelle was unfazed and effectively accused his opponents of thinly disguised anti-black racism, a somewhat hackneyed refuge but a difficult rhetorical fortress to storm, especially in America.
Finally, the unholy and unnatural coalition of every conceivable atomized aggrieved group against white, Judeo-christian, heterosexual people who obstinately insist that they are either males or females, is disintegrating in a hilarious donnybrook of scurrilous imputations and invective. A somewhat parallel phenomenon is opening up in a key area of the environmental sector. The spur to oil, gasoline, and home heating fuel costs was bound to generate immense discontent, and most of the governments of the principal western countries that fell for climate change alarmism are facing what is or should soon become irresistible demands for retrenchment. But intellectually, this could be disparaged up to a point as the avarice and reactionary philistinism of those very masses for whom the Marxists now prominent among those claiming to be saving the planet, toiled for 150 years. But in the last few weeks the installation of hideously expensive, unsightly, and inefficient windmills off the Atlantic coast of New Jersey has apparently caused the death of a number of large whales, and has disrupted fish spawning areas and reduced fishermen’s catches.
The environmental militants have got away for much longer than they should have with their deranged and dishonest war on the petroleum industry, but the legitimate ecologists are going to desert them en bloc in support of the whales and marine life generally. The cowards and hypocrites among the oil executives who have taken to inflicting upon the public saccharine advertising about their determination to get rid of fossil fuels and their lockstep adherence to the authoritarian austerities of the World Economic Forum that has just had its annual volcanic disgorgement of nonsense at Davos, may soon have to retreat to their true vocation of producing and distributing cheap, clean, efficient energy. The attrition of internecine squabbling will force society to settle for respectful toleration of everyone’s adult consensual sexuality as long it is not indecently public, while sane ecologists work out a reasonable and survivable compromise with market forces. The outrageous persecution of Amy Hamm should end immediately. Those who believably self-identify as reasonable people will prevail, (whether they menstruate or not).
THE OUTRAGEOUS PERSECUTION OF AMY HAMM SHOULD END IMMEDIATELY.