MILLENNIAL DIARY
FINALLY, millennials have been given the folk hero we deserve: Amanda Donaldson, former personal assistant to JK Rowling, is being sued by the author for using her work credit card to buy expensive candles for herself.
The thing is, for the generation who grew up with Harry Potter, its creator has become more and more remote. Rowling, we all agree, should have put down her pen when she said she would. Instead of building palaces with bricks of €50 notes, she insists on tweeting backstories for her beloved characters that range from the nonsensical to the problematic.
And then Amanda came along, and allegedly spent £823 of JK’s money at Bibi Bakery, £1,482 at Jo Malone, £3,629 in Molton Brown, £2,139 at card shop Paper Tiger, £1,636 at Starbucks, and £1,200 on two cats. It is, in current parlance, a Big Mood.
It’s not that billionaire JK Rowling deserved it, as such, but how can you stay mad at someone who just wants to unwind in a nice hot bath with excellent body wash and scented candles? Hasn’t the person who requires £1,200 worth of cats got enough to deal with?
Amanda spent over two grand on cards — think of the joy she brought via good old-fashioned hand-written notes to people who needed it, after reading Rowling’s Twitter justification of Dumbledore’s secret gayness.
And who can say they wouldn’t, in an essentially victimless crime, binge on baked goods? Indeed, Donaldson denies the claims saying that her former boss has “not suffered any loss and is not entitled to damages”. JK Rowling could buy every cat in the world and put them up in luxury catpenthouses with their own cat butlers. It’s difficult to feel cross at Amanda.
Amanda’s long receipts are the logical conclusion of self-care culture, where we have all been tricked into believing that we deserve nice candles and croissants just for existing. And maybe we do. Amanda probably did. Amanda, hero of the people, patron saint of ‘treat yo’self’. While I would never condone breaking the law, I would say that if I had to deal with JK Rowling every day, I’d need to stress-eat £823 of iced buns too.
******* Anyone with older family on Facebook or WhatsApp will be familiar with Boomer Humour — that specific type of humour in which nothing is funnier than testicles and ageing bodies and wives are the worst and young people are mad. The vaguely problematic memes they forward you with a “Ha ha ha this made me laugh how are you?” are baffling but sweet in their own way, kind of. This is what I thought when I saw the headlines last week about a 69-year-old Dutchman who wishes to be legally recognised as a 49-year-old so he can have
more luck on Tinder.
Of course! I thought indulgently — a misguided baby-boomer internetjoke! It’s nice to see the old people getting to grips with photoshop for lols.
But it wasn’t a bad meme with a punchline about wrinkly testicles. If only.
Emile Ratelband, who is already well-known in the Netherlands for being some class of a rent-a-gob, reckons that he’s discriminated against because of his age. He thinks if he was younger he’d get laid more and could drive a cooler car.
This wasn’t an eccentric activist looking (however misguidedly) to make a point about ageism, and a society which fetishises youth at the expense of a huge proportion of the population. Emile had a different idea. “Transgender people can now have their gender changed on their birth certificate, and in the same spirit there should be room for an age change.”
And there it was. This wasn’t about increasing opportunities for older people — it was hate. It was about ridiculing a group of whom 41pc have been attacked or threatened with violence in the past five years, of whom half have attempted suicide at least once, of whom 84pc have thought about it.
Anyway. One of the problems with us snowflakes is that we don’t engage with criticism or arguments. Instead of having a nice conversation about whether certain people should be allowed to exist, we turn hysterical or quote emotive statistics.
Emile is relying on that favourite boomer trope: the slippery slope. You know the one — if we allow gay people to marry what will stop people marrying dogs! If anyone can identify as a woman what will stop people identifying as dogs! They are weirdly focused on dogs, actually.
If we legally accept men ‘feeling’ like women, then we must accept Emile ‘feeling’ 49. In the spirit of inter-generational harmony, I’ll try to engage. We know exactly what age refers to: the number of times we’ve been around the sun. Indeed, on Mars Emile would be only 36 — and I’m happy to organise crowd-funding to blast him into space, never to return. Ageing is negotiable, age is not. Emile Ratelband existed between 1949 and 1969. There may be a lot we don’t understand about ageing, but we do know that 1949 came before 1969.
Equating age and gender is based on the misconception that we are as scientifically certain about gender as we are about age. But we’re not. You will find many people in comments sections saying: “According to science, there are only two sexes,” but you won’t find any actual scientists saying that. Because according to science, biological sex is murky at best.
There is no genetic condition that affects your age, no differentiation process in the womb for it, but intersex people are about as common as redheads. Science doesn’t show sex is one thing or another. It doesn’t have much to say on gender, which humans made up.
Studies have shown that transgender people have genetic markers and neurological structures that are more similar to the ‘opposite’ sex than the one they were given at birth on the basis of their genitals.
This isn’t the argument we millennials like to focus on, because why should we have to use science to prove that the trans people we know and love and see exist and don’t deserve to be ridiculed and erased by people like Emile Ratelband. Unlike old Emile, their chances of finding work and getting laid will dwindle after they transition. There are no benefits to transitioning if you are not trans. None.