I find it rather... curious that this needs to be repeated several times, by more than one poster, and yet we still have no indication as to whether or not it is understood.
There's literature to be found on motivated or strategic misinterpretation/misunderstanding, which is where I think such a phenomenon would fall.
Given how much of this thread is driven by pretenses not of direct advocacy for the particular political arguments at stake—(they're not anti-trans)—but objections against the objections against—(O! poor J.K.! so unjustly criticized by those scurrilous trans people and their allies!)—one might think the actual arguments and criticism were important to the critique against the criticism.
But since Rowling is, in this, nothing more than a celebrity rehash of Christian-right crackpottery, it's easy enough to guess why her supporters refuse to acknowledge history.
To reiterate, from
August↑:
Honestly, I expect it's because they recognize the implications. Let's face it, these people aren't as uninformed as they pretend to be. They already know they're running on superstition and emotion. That's why they can't countenance Rowling's behavior a year ago. Or the year before that. Or six or even seven years ago. And it's why they refuse to countenance the history of the issue before that. Rowling can only be an insightful critic on this issue if we abandon science and history; no wonder her supporters are such a mewling, terrified bunch.
At that point, Rowling supporters had ducked a question for
two months↑; there's a reason they were afraid of a one-word answer.
And we already knew, even then, that
Rowling's own words↑ just don't matter to her supporters.
What we have in Rowling's own words, ca. 2023, is refusal and provocation: Actually looking to the source tweet↱ shows us something more than the Entertainment Weekly report told us: Rowling chose to pick that fight; she chose to post a photograph of some words and respond.
The question remains:
What safe space, then, do you think she requires? What is this thing where someone like Rowling takes an explicitly transphobic position but somehow remains aloof from the transphobia?
The people who need that safe space for harm are not any new phenomenon; notaracists and notamisogynists have been doing that routine for generations; it's buried in everything from objections to political correctness on through projections of cancel culture. When Americans, for instance, do that bluster about how this is supposed to be a Christian nation, they're usually not doing the compassion part, but the authority part that seeks to exclude from Christ's compassion. It's actually their rebuke of Christ Himself, and aside from razzing them for believing in God, we might observe the part about the betrayal or reversal of principle is actually the important point. And, sure, it's important to remind that the Christian-nation rhetoric is wrong according to the historical record, but at some point we need to stop toddling back and forth between the who-said and start paying attention to what the words mean. Here's an obscure joke:
I'm in a roomful of scientists; I should know better than to use the word "function" because they don't understand that particular usage.
It's a very particular joke because you actually have to see the phenomenon occur repeatedly before it even occurs to recognize such an unbelievable explanation for the dearth,
i.e., "no indication as to whether or not it is
understood", is even possible. That is, you must first recognize the dearth in order to even wonder what it means.
Thus: What do the words mean? What does the argument do if it is put into action?
A persistent sort of
unresolved issue↗:
Can we agree that refusing censorship is not a violation of free speech? This is one of those square circle things; by definition, a refusal to censor is not an act of censorship. I've
reiterated↗ the question,
referred↗ to it, and even
connected↗ it to other parts of history lending toward why I might ask. And the curious thing about the apparent lack of an answer isn't
really the one I originally asked, but another sort of radio silence about self-defeating logic in any number of related discussions. That, however, is a matter of perspective and priority.
For instance, the other day I encountered what looks like an argument that if someone destroyed evidence, then it never existed. The explanation is only complicated because it must account for what isn't there.¹
So, again:
Given how much of this thread is driven not by direct advocacy of the particular political arguments at stake, but objections against the objections against, one might think the actual arguments and criticism were important to the critique against the criticism.
Compared to psychoanalyzing the ins and outs of what we see, the parsimonious suggestion is that confusion over why Rowling is criticized is too easily resolved by attending history. And there are any number of ways someone might fall into that hole, but it's not ours to write mitigating explanations for uncertain stories we can only project.
____________________
Notes:
¹ Toward Rowling, what is known is that she deleted twenty-seven tweets, but the deletion record doesn't tell us what was in them; beyond that, the standard for excluding witnesses who claim to have seen or screencapped is pretty low.
(For whatever it's worth, even the AIs think she deleted tweets. Or maybe that depends on what you're looking for. Since I had to scroll past it, it was hard to not notice. Image in Spoiler.)
