Week 2: Me! YA Lit! J.K. Rowling…?
- What text are you most excited to read this quarter and why?
I’m most excited to read George Takei’s They Called Us Enemy — I have no relationship at all with Takei’s work in film or theater, but it showed up in the mail the other day and looks very beautiful. It’s a chapter of American history I don’t know enough about, it’s a style of art I admire… what’s not to like?
2. What biases do you have (positive or negative) towards YAL?
Well, hmm. Is a positive bias just an affection? Either way, I guess I can’t say I have all that much affection for YAL as I’ve experienced it so far — which is to say, rarely and in the distant past. I read John Green in high school like the dutiful pubescent nerd I was, and back then I liked what I read, but every time I’ve returned to him since has left me less impressed than the last. I read Hank Green’s book when it came out, too, and it was fine, but it also felt so totally Young-Adultish: a superficial engagement with certain interesting themes that is in the end pretty much totally drowned out by the relentless, flatly-narrated flow of Things Happening. At the rare times I go to books for sheer, drooling, Netflix-grade entertainment anymore, I’d much rather do it with a Brandon Sanderson or a J.K. Rowling who’ll spin such a lovely and complete world that I can more or less stop thinking about my own. Whereas if I want a book that’s seriously engaged with our world, which is most of the time, I don’t want it to be distracted trying to grip or entertain me. That should come naturally from its being honest and thoughtful and good. There’s one reservation.
3. Part of the work I am asking you to do this week is to research a controversy or tension within the field of YAL and to find two articles that discuss that controversy or tension in some way. Within your blog post, share what you found out about your chosen controversy or tension. (Please provide links to the articles you found within your blog post).
Right, so, speaking of J.K. Rowling. How ‘bout all that, huh? I am having to defy every WWU-molded bone in my body to not just dish up an emphatic “ooh, yikes” and walk away. It helps that I am, somehow for the first time in my life, up to book 7 of Harry Potter and having an awfully good time. It also helps that I hadn’t really looked into what happened regarding all the transphobia accusations until a couple weeks ago, so my impressions are pretty fresh.
Basically, on June 6th of this year, J.K. Rowling responded to an article titled “Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate” with the tweet “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
Which is, uh… not her best work. Even as far as basic standards of funny tweeting go.
And actually, although I wanted to walk through the whole protracted controversy, maybe this is the real place to pause — because this, more than any other, is the place where we make a choice in how to read what Rowling wrote. Crucially, it’s not the choice between whether or not we want to take her side in the fight. That isn’t really a choice: if we read this as a solitary punch in the big political brawl around trans rights, then whoever we are, we already know where we fall. Probably here, at Western, most of us are on the side that finds the belittlement of trans issues and trans people somewhere between disappointing and morally repugnant. Whatever we believe, Twitter, doing what it does best, will all but ensure that the fight is the context we choose to bring to bear on this tweet.
But there are other ways to read it as well. You could read it as the out-of-touch joke of a 55-year-old, familiar I hope to all people who have experienced the fact of parents. You could read it as the statement of a woman who grew up in the heyday of second-wave feminism, when claiming solidarity and equal rights on the basis of an essential, empowering womanhood was a new and vital project. You could read it knowing that it’s written by a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault, whose sense of her own innate womanhood is perhaps not only meaningful but load-bearing, crucial, sustaining.
Or you could read it after reading her own explanation: “the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.”
Take the following passage from her account of herself during the controversy this summer. It’s long, so bear with me.
“If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.
I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.”
To believe that those two paragraphs were written by someone with hateful intent requires you to believe that they are outright disingenuous, included only as rhetorical padding, meant to deceive. They are, to be clear, one part of a piece that also argues, either implicitly or explicitly, that gender is essential, that laws opening up dressing rooms to all who identify as women are dangerous and misguided, and that the “extremist” criticism of public figures like herself has gone too far. All those claims deserve skepticism, if not outright rejection. The question that remains, to me, is whether we can still take her at her word when she expresses the kind of sympathy and solidarity she does above. Most of all, whether we can still read her as the kind of person we sense behind the words of Harry Potter: sensitive, wise, a lover of difference and divergence and peculiarity of all sorts.
If nothing else, this is an interesting thing to think about rhetorically. What happens to honesty and authenticity in an environment of ideology and point-scoring? Can we really expect her to be nuanced, despite her best efforts, when she was being told she “was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death”? Can we, offended by other lines like “Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists,” really be nuanced ourselves? Should we try?
I’m reluctant to lay claim to any answers. I am neither a woman, nor transgender, nor even on Twitter. I can say that I don’t like its combativeness, its penchant for hair-trigger condemnation, its 280-character hostility to all gracious instincts, all unanswerable questions. But I can’t say, or really begin to know, how it would feel to read Rowling’s comments as a trans man who grew up cherishing Harry Potter. I suspect I would feel betrayed by a person I loved, and if there’s a good occasion for anger, that’s it.
What I wonder — and what of course is not for me to decide — is whether the forgiveness we also extend to the people we love, knowing full well that it never annuls the things they’ve said or done, is still possible, or even deserved.
https://www.thecut.com/2020/07/j-k-rowling-writes-essay-defending-her-transphobic-remarks.html