Trantrums and Media Outrage
Clickbait for a Generation of Acolytes Willing to Believe Anything
I was surprised to see so many Piers Morgan haters thoroughly enjoy his decimation of Benjamin Butterworth yesterday on Good Morning Britain in the discussion of the trending hashtag #RIPJKRolling. Butterworth insisted that JK Rowling has debased “trans people” in her latest book insisting that people not to buy J.K. Rowling’s latest book. Challenging Butterworth on principle since Rowling’s book was only released the day before and he could not have possibly read the 944-page book in time to make any judgment about it, Morgan states: “You want to have a book cancelled that you have actually not read!”
Morgan’s assessment perfectly underscores the situation of what feminists have been up against the past decade and what Rowling has experienced in recent months. It goes something like this: women say that men are not women or that being a woman is not a feeling and the transgender lobby responds by producing and circulating numerous threats on social media all the while displacing the very hatred of their threats upon women claiming that these women are actually the ones who are threatening them. This is the tactical essence of the transgender debate. End of.
While swathes of onlookers have observed quietly how trans activism has increasingly dominated the socio-cultural landscape over the past decade, the issue of “transgender rights” has forced many from their armchairs to their keyboards in recent month due to the augmenting threats made to the freedom of expression. Not only has the shark been jumped, but it would seem that the trans media outrage machine is eating itself alive.
What used to be considered an issue referring to a tiny group of people who faced the condition—then called “gender identity disorder” (DSM-IV), now rebranded as “gender dysphoria” (DSM-5)—transgender rights activism has shifted focus from being primarily about the advocacy for the treatment of a psychiatric condition to having become a battleground which poses a threat to women’s and children’s rights. Today this movement highlights the threat to democratic forms of expression as the transgender lobby has grown increasingly intolerant of other viewpoints and has demonstrated itself to be a political machinery uniquely focussed on shutting down free expression when its orthodoxy is not strictly adhered to. One of the greatest ironies of Morgan’s interview of Butterworth, as became apparent during the first minutes, is that Butterworth himself had no inkling as to the difference between a transvestite and transgender person and kept interchanging them. Much of the murky language of this lobby is not even understood by its most fervent acolytes as they continue to share and like a hashtag celebrating the death of Rowling.
It’s also not coincidental that this week’s television debates kicked off because a powerful and wealthy writer has been placed in the crosshairs of the transgender movement. Over the past two years, Rowling has cogently and politely expressed her concerns about the encroachment of women’s and children’s rights by men as well as criticising the growing medicalisation of girls’ bodies. Where the transgender lobby has claimed that words are the tools of “literal violence,” it’s not surprising that the people whom they hold hostage, metaphorically speaking, are the very ones who cobble in words. I have yet to speak to a fellow writer who, after having written on this subject, was not massively harassed, threatened and/or no-platformed. And if the writer is a “non-male,” then chances are that she has been treated to the same breadth of misogynist threats of violence and rape as has Rowling in recent months.
Trending since early this week is the hashtag #RIPJKRowling, the 21st century’s implicit death threat gone viral. It’s the millennial soft touch to the “die in a fire” that feminists have routinely faced all for disagreeing with gender ideologues. This latest hashtag is a linguistic fudge which allows those who share it, when called out for their threat, to pretend that the RIP actually refers to Rowling’s career dying as the Los Angeles Times editor, Tracy Brown pretends. Let’s be clear—it doesn’t. These are the typical threats of a lobby group which claims that when feminists assert that sex is somatic or gender a social narrative, that these words are akin to carpet-bombing the planet. The irony, of course, is that the only violence issued within this debate regularly emanates from the transgender side to include this recent death-celebratory hashtag intended for Rowling. It’s one of the great tells of the gender wars: those threatening to “jam something up hers” in reference to Rowling are generally not female. So much for breaking the gender binary (one can only presume over women’s heads) given these many threats only serve to confirm the very binary nature of gender.
But here’s the real story behind this Sturm und Drang of the gender cha-cha-cha: the media loves it! To wit, major media heads are laughing all the way to the bank with the click revenue gained by shit-stirring a very large pot. No other story so clumsily written and poorly researched would have gone to print as had the PinkNews article on Monday which effectively recycled The Telegraph’s book review of Rowling’s fifth instalment of her pseudonymous series from the day before.
In Sunday’s Telegraph, Jake Kerridge surmises what he believes to be the heart of Robert Galbraith’s Troubled Blood writing, “The meat of the book is the investigation into a cold case: the disappearance of GP Margot Bamborough in 1974, thought to have been a victim of Dennis Creed, a transvestite serial killer. One wonders what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress.” Were the book heavily focussed on the subject of transvestitism, the review might not be perceived as stirring the pot. But as Nick Cohen relays in his review of the Rowling’s/Galbraith’s latest: “No honest person who takes the trouble to read it can see the novel as transphobic. But then honest people are hard to find in a culture war.” Cohen goes on to let the reader know that, “Transvestism barely features” in Rowling’s latest.
Kerridge’s review became Monday’s opportunity for PinkNews among other alphabet soup media to piggyback on an even greater fake story about a book that almost none of the outrage reviewers had even read. Reiss Smith’s piece entitled “JK Rowling’s latest book is about a murderous cis man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims” also commits the trans-orthodoxy high crime of misgendering. After all, given that Smith had clearly not read Troubled Blood, then how does he know how the villain identifies, right? We can only condemn Smith for assuming the gender of the murderer, potentially misgendering this villain. Then there’s the fact that the killer was a cross-dresser and not transgender. Where is Stonewall UK when we need them?
But then, who needs to read the article? The title says it all. Reading is for people who care about facts and that’s just ballparks away from the scope of PinkNews. Sadder still, is that the slash and burn articles condemning Rowling’s alleged “transphobia” are based entirely upon Kerridge’s tongue-in-cheek reference about the book’s moral about never trusting a man in a dress. So not only had the outrage journalists not read Rowling’s book, but they completely misunderstood the sleight of sarcasm within Kerridge’s original book review.
To be fair, it’s not just journalists like Butterworth who didn’t bother to read Rowling’s latest book, it’s pretty much everyone who has an axe to grind against Rowling. We’re living through a global pandemic, but there’s an equally contagious and growing epidemic in media today: outrage journalism. Getting angry about something which one has not taken any effort to investigate or fact check involves as much intellectual activity as an animal marking his territory. This is where we are in 2020 as the landscape of dogmatism is a never-ending performance that demands to be marked and codified as doctrine. The victor of these debates comes down to, essentially, which groups can express their anger the loudest—and newspapers are eating it up. Hell, the media is now manufacturing its own stories by hiring writers who either don’t read or purposefully misread while employing well-placed outrage keywords to set up their future rebuttals and sales.
Today, Kerridge even penned a response to Cohen’s article clarifying that the character in Rowling’s novel was not minor stating: “Of course, people are entitled to think that my interpretation is wrong-headed or was glibly expressed: but it was not conjured, as some have asserted, out of thin air. The references to cross-dressing are not numerous and sometimes oblique, but it is one of the jobs of a critic to tease out subtexts, spot connections, make explicit what is implicit in a book.” Oh, Jake, most people don’t read subtly and they haven’t for at least twenty years. Yet, "subtexts" sounds like text which sounds like sex and wait, I need to text my mate to get me a—what was I saying?
We are living in delusional times for those of us who know what words mean and who love the sounds made when uttered every bit as much as we marvel at the swirls and lines they form on paper or LED screens. But facts and linguistic references seem to have no place in journalism today as media is driven by pathos, not logos. The public shaming that women have been given in recent years as blowback for their speaking out of turn to males who say, “Suck my dick” is now being foisted upon the rest of society. How long until people wake up and realise that they’re pawns in a clickbait media war involving an extremely well-funded men’s rights activist lobby?
Tracy Brown knows it given she doesn’t miss a beat while skooling her readers to awoken as she writes, “The book appears to lean into problematic stereotypes portraying transgender people as villains.” So too does the Los Angeles Times which saw fit to print Brown’s propaganda based on her plagiarism of Kerridge’s book review which in the same paragraph bizarrely jumps to a survey (which she mistakenly calls a “study”) of self-reported harassment to a blurb on Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. All this based on a gut feeling about a book she chose not to read. Indeed, the only stereotype out there seems to be the one that transgender advocates and their journalist cheerleaders have created of Rowling.
For all the outrage clicks that PinkNews, the Los Angeles Times and other media command here’s my advice to readers: don’t click! If we want media to be better at reporting the news we must also train ourselves to be better readers and resist their clickbait. Let’s not open every article that demands that we react with social media shares and anger whipped up and slathered on top of more anger. At the end of the day, there are only two groups with whom anyone has a right to be angry: the gender activists using threats against others for the high crime of disagreement and the lazy journalists who work up their outrage Smörgåsbord through a carefully prepared word salad, all based upon a text they hadn’t even bothered to crack.
Bam!