Zoe Strimpel #transphobia #homophobia uk.news.yahoo.com
But the great Rowling has won: she bravely hoisted the mad world on her shoulders and shifted it to saner ground. The Cass Report drew a line in the sand about puberty-blockers and the clinics that prescribe them: they are no longer routinely offered in Britain. And as the hailstorm of adolescent girls transitioning to boys and seeking body-altering surgery to that effect has slowed, some of them are “detransitioning”, realising that their apparent gender dysphoria was more to do with other issues from undiagnosed autism to lesbianism. In the US, the new administration has declared war on the trans lobby.
Without her bravery in speaking the truth bluntly, to politicians, Twitter terrorists and journalists – as well as that of her coterie of close friends, including the Telegraph writers Julie Bindel and Suzanne Moore – the right of biological women to spaces reserved for them would never have been recaptured. Biological men can no longer compete in most women’s sport. Most people would have surrendered to the sustained assault on their mental health and basic safety. But she endured. In refusing to kowtow to the trans lobby, she has made it OK, and less dangerous, to say true things of vital importance.
And now, despite the original cast’s intolerable ingratitude, despite a whole generation of trans activists pretending she is the devil incarnate, there is now a new Harry Potter series – made for HBO this time – scheduled to hit screens in 2027 and set to air over the course of a decade. More than 31,000 children sent in audition tapes.
It wasn’t quite the case that she was ostracised. Rowling has written about the outpouring of letters from people who were grateful to her for speaking up about what they also recognised was a terrifying and pervasive trend: the denial of women’s sex-based rights, and all that that entailed. It meant allowing self-identifying “women” into women’s changing rooms, prisons, and hospital wards.
The Harry Potter books came out while I was an undergraduate, and a recent attempt to read one backfired: I hated it. No matter: Rowling is one of the greats, whether you think it’s for her world of wizards, or the way she forced a bit of sanity back on a culture that is distinctly short on it.