@dewitty1 / dewitty1.tumblr.com
Because no one's dropped a source link yet, here's a few, along with a "highlight" from one of them. 🙃
Text: The bill filed Wednesday is titled the “Millstone Act of 2023” – a reference to a Bible passage that a person would be better off tying a large boulder around their neck to “be drowned in the depths of the sea” than harm a child.
I'm stuggling as a Harry Potter fan right now because I love the fandom but I really don't love Rowling for obvious terf reasons. I thought as long as I wasn't buying anything new or seeing movies in theater, that it was fine. Like making art and fic and stuff, especially if creators are really clear that they don't support Rowling. Except I've starting seeing Discourse saying that if I'm even talking about HP I'm supporting her and a terrible person for making fan art. Thoughts?
I agree that you shouldn't do anything to actively contribute to Rowling and her platform. I'd mostly disagree that creating fan art or fic supports her. In fact, I think she'd be pissed as hell to see all the Trans HP [insert character here] art and fic that has flooded the internet since she made her TERF stance clear, to say nothing of the "hey I hate [insert problematic aspect of these books] so I'm going to change it" flavor of fic that has existed since the book series wasn't even complete (exhibit A, the HP fic I wrote a few years back).
Fan works are not created in a vacuum without context. If people are saying they do not support Rowling's ideology, but they get joy out of taking her characters and narratives and world-building and changing them to explicitly subvert or correct racist/homophobic/antisemitic tropes, I find it difficult to rationalize that as support for Rowling. Someone new to the fandom isn't going to find a fic/piece of art with an author's note that says "hey I wrote/drew trans Harry because I hate JK Rowling and want a way to reclaim HP so that I can still enjoy it" and think "oh, neat, I should go buy the original books from Amazon and support Jk Rowling."
Henry Jenkins said: “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk.”
I agree, but I also think this can be extended to repairing the damage done by individual authors and their biases.
Basically, I think fandom furthers the idea of the "death of the author." In this case, fandom isn't just saying the author is dead, they're saying they killed her and now they're going through her belongings and throwing out the stuff they don't like while keeping/repairing/adding on to the things they do.
So, if you get joy out of making HP fan art or fic and you're actively trying to discourage people from supporting the original creator, and encouraging them to be critical of the original content's failings even while enjoying the fandom, I find that far more admirable than problematic.
As is usually the case, when people online are telling you you're a terrible person for doing a thing you enjoy that harms no one, they're likely the ones that need to go touch grass and get a little real-life perspective.
"Sometimes fanfiction is a love letter to the original canon, sometimes it’s just that one telegram that says “Fuck you. Strongly worded letter to follow”."
And well, I've recently found that a lot of Harry Potter fic falls in the latter category.
Just a reminder my blog is trans inclusive. It’s bi inclusive. It is pan inclusive. It is intersex inclusive. It is ace/asexual inclusive. It is aro/aromantic inclusive. It is queer inclusive.
I don’t support terfs or exclusionists.
If you came here looking for an ally in your bigotry you came to the wrong blog. Go away. You are not welcome here.
It speaks for itself.
but once wasn't enough.
the black hoop has sold. the white with gold is still available.
Happy Transgender Day of Visibility to all of my fellow trans Harry Potter fans who have had to do so much processing and mourning as she-who-must-not-be-named has done her best to ruin something important to us through spreading rhetoric full of lies, hatred, and bigotry against our community. Whether you’re out or not, I see you, I love you, and I’m here for you. Your continued participation in fandom is valid, regardless of what other people may try to tell you. She can break our hearts, but she doesn’t get to take the community we’ve built here away from us.
In the words of Albus Dumbledore, “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” She grew to be a monster. We grew, or are growing, to be ourselves.
Be safe, and know that you are not alone. 💖🤍💙
I’m sure most people have now seen this New York Times piece “How British feminism became anti-trans.” Personally, I think it should be posted far and wide, but this key bit here is something that resonated with me.
[caption: “middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummelling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have]
This is so accurate it’s unreal. British feminism is generally 20 years behind, not just on trans rights but on many things. It’s not a coincidence that the “feminists” writing transphobic nonsense in the Guardian and New Statesman have also made sneering comments about intersectional feminism.
Here’s Helen Lewis in the New Statesman complaining that intersectional ideals demand too much of feminists. And here’s Hadley Freeman in the Guardian complaining that intersectionality leads to too much “feminist infighting.” Julie Bindel deliberately conflates intersectional feminism with liberal feminism, so she can sneer at both. We know Caitlin Moran rightly got pilloried for saying she “doesn’t do race.” Same shit from Zoe Williams.
There’s a lot of good work done by feminist women of colour in the UK - you can read much of it on Media Diversified or gal-dem. You could also follow Guilaine Kinouani or Judith Wanga or Sara Ahmed on Twitter. But these voices are not the predominant voices in British feminism. They’re not getting regular columns in the Guardian or giving takes on BBC news.
Who gets the columns? Helen Lewis. Caitlin Moran. Julie Bindel. Hadley Freeman. Zoe Williams. This post is already too long, so I won’t get into the history of these women when it comes to writing about race, sexuality, disability and religion. I could list pages and pages of shitty things they’ve said. The point is, these are the women who speak for British feminism. These are the women who get top billing.
It’s not good enough. We deserve better. We deserve more working class voices, more diverse LGBTQ voices, disabled voices and women of colour’s voices. We need to amplify them wherever we can, because these white middle class assholes in our newspapers are trying to claim that they’re doing this bullshit for us.
And not only is that allowing transmisogyny to hurt one of the most marginalised groups in Britain, but it’s opening the door to a raft of toxic bullshit that they’re getting away with in the name of feminism. Fuck knows who they’re gonna target next.
It’s also worth noting that the obsession with supposed “biological realities” of people like Ms. Parker is part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it’s not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of “other,” and “biological realities” as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)
We have terfs who admit that ace discourse was their first step towards radfem ideas. We’ve had multiple break downs of how terfs and radfems try to radialize other people by using ace/bi/pan/nb/queer/etc. discourse. We’ve had multiple break downs of how popular exclusionist arguments use the same faulty logic and arguments that radfems use.
Can exclusionists maybe finally admit that this is a problem and either drop the discourse entirely or try to come up with arguments that aren’t copied from radfems?
This is really important to recognize, because exclusionists don’t often want to recognize this dirty little truth about their community.
note how the “queer is (always) a slur (and should never be used, even to talk about yourself or the queer community or queer academia)” nonsense is directly mentioned as point 2 on the aphobe to TERF pipeline
Hey Neil, due to a certain British author saying some stupid things again... Could you please quickly say something supportive for trans people? Would be really comforting right now
I’ve missed this (I’ve been taking a Twitter holiday for the last month, for my own mental health), but I can imagine. I’m sorry.
Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Trans rights are human rights. I’m sorry that some people have such a hard time getting their heads around that. But the world is changing, and history is with you.
This, from 13 months ago, has just been noticed by transphobes, who have been screenshotting it, announcing that I'm jumping onto a bandwagon and they won't read my books any more. So I thought I'd reblog it, because there may be some trans men or trans women out there who need reassurance, and this might help. (Thank you to all the people who turned up on my Twitter feed hoping for a fight for reminding me to reblog it, even if that wasn't what you thought you were doing.)
new terf/trans exclusionary dogwhistle, heads up
just not even hiding the fact that all the “LGB” rights stuff was a rouse and really they’re just fine with siding with straight people if it fucks over trans women
Just as an fyi:
SuperStraight was evidently started by 4chan, and the acronym (SS) references Hitler’s Schutzstaffel. Terfs have taken on the terminology on one way or another, but best to know the full scope of the situation. Post with screenshots is here (homophobia/transmisogyny/nazism/racism/abliems/various slurs tw)
[ID: A screenshot of a post that reads Super Straight, Super Lesbian, Super Gay. The tags read #super lesbian supremacy. The OP is cat-boy-lover and it is reblogged from misgenderer.]
yet another example of TERFs directly borrowing talking points and terminology from fash on 4chan. anyone who thinks there isn’t significant cross-pollination between these ideologies is lying to themselves at this point
please be advised that while some people do actually believe this shit, the majority of people on 4chan occasionally think of false flag bullshit to annoy us.
Fuck Terfs.
Do I know why I associate Regulus Black with the color blue? No, no I do not. Will I stop doing that? Never. Am I writing a Severus × Regulus fic, ignoring all of my other wailing, neglected WIPs for the sake of the Muse(TM)? ...perhaps.
People be like "Professor Snape is ugly and old!!!" And im just over here doing this like "Yessir of course sir"
Open for better quality, yall know the drill
i am talking to you miss rowling
your daily reminder that terfism is rooted in racism in the first place
We’ve said it before & we’ll say it again: fuck TERFs.
Myth: Trans rights are not human rights
when lizzo said “if you feel like a girl then you real like a girl,” that was the thanos snap that absolutely wiped out all TERFs
