JK Rowling is uncancellable – so liberals are now trying to imagine she doesn’t exist
Idon’t know who Lianna is, but she is a dull creature devoid of imagination, a person cobbled together from unthinking hipster clichés. Apparently, she is the ideal reader for The New York Times, yet another part of the cultural universe that is spiralling down into vacuous purity.
But back to Lianna who, in an advertisement for the paper, ticks boxes with her random wistful thoughts. “Lianna is a Harmony of Flavours” (is this an air freshener?). She is “a week in Crossword land” (try an easier one, babe). She likes getting lost. Then there is the political stuff. Lianna is black. “Lianna is Breaking the Binary”, “Heritage in rich hues”, “Queer love in colour”. We are not referring to paint charts here.
So far, so meaningless. Then the punchline that has been picked out and put on posters in the New York Subway. She is “Imagining Harry Potter without its Creator”.
What? Has JK Rowling been disappeared? Have the threats made against her been acted on? The tagline is “independent journalism for an independent life”. But its message is clear: we will tell you what you want to hear; lifestyle affirmation sold as journalism.
This is aimed at attracting a younger, diverse readership, and it presumes that such people have no qualms about “cancelling” Rowling. This presumption, derived mainly from Twitter, is abhorrent. For a start, Twitter is not the universe, but a tiny part of it. The endless rows over trans rights that occur there do not reflect the real world in which Rowling’s books sell more than ever. Readers are not boycotting her.
All the vile efforts to denounce Rowling for “transphobia” – i.e., thinking biology is real, and that being a woman is not simply a feeling in some man’s head – become ever more desperate. Her power, her wealth, her grace under pressure have made her even more of a hate figure for liberals who deny that cancel culture exists. This uncancellable woman sure does get to them.
Which is why this New York Times ad is more than idiotic – it is dangerous. Imagine a world in which JK Rowling did not write the books we know she did. What happens to the author in this scenario, her intellectual property? Will her creation be removed in some Maoist obliteration? Imagine she does not exist. What does that actually mean? Let me spell it out.
Every death threat I have ever had, every woman I have spoken to about being stalked or abused, has heard these words. They have “no place”, they have “no right to exist”. It is a threat, and I felt sick when I saw that fox-killing egomaniac lawyer, Jolyon Maugham, tweet about the Labour MP Rosie Duffield, who is already anxious about her own security, saying: “There should be no place for her in progressive politics.”
Such dog-whistling is everywhere, often from these men who believe themselves to be on the right side of history. JK Rowling writes successful books. Duffield got elected. Kathleen Stock was made a professor. These women will not be imagined away for the sake of a tiny percentage of the population. To think that this advances trans people’s rights is a delusion.
But delusion is now part of a liberal mindset. I was interviewed recently by an American writer who was trying to understand the differences between what is happening here over trans issues compared with the States. We are told – wrongly – that the only people not on board with gender ideology are nutzoid Christian evangelicals, yet here most gendercritical feminists are from the Left.
It is more complicated than that, and already it’s breaking down. Sport is opening up the eyes of those who have not paid much attention to this debate. Watching swimmer Lia Thomas, recently transitioned, wiping the floor with the women in the Ivy League is sowing doubt. No one in the stands looks happy. Off the record, many female students and parents think that the National Collegiate Athletic Association, the governing body, has done wrong; that biological facts mean however hard their daughters train, they cannot win – but they don’t want their kids labelled “transphobes”. A friend of mine, campaigning for the Democrats, told me that on the doorstep they were hearing that Biden was responsible for ending women’s sports.
Not everyone is happy to see the demonisation of a woman who stands up for women, which is all JK Rowling has ever done. That someone should whip up more hatred against her to sell newspapers shows a complete loss of moral fibre and a condescending attitude to readers. If you want publications edited by Twitter, then all you will get are publications without analysis, reportage and argument.
That this, again, involves tying a woman to the pyre and asking for a match – and thinking this is attractive – is a new low.
Not everyone is happy to see the demonisation of a woman who stands up for women