Another day, another outrageous smear about JK Rowling
Larry Fitzmaurice defames JK Rowling in Buzzfeed
One of the scariest things about the current gender debate is the way in which a minority of bad actors have been allowed to re-write reality.
Someone who has become emblematic of this phenomenon is Harry Potter author JK Rowling. She made the mistake of sharing some perfectly normal and obvious opinions about gender identity and male violence back in 2020.
Since then, I’ve lost count of the number of publications and public figures that have published outrageous falsehoods about what Rowling has said or believes. The latest to join this trend of creative writing is Larry Fitzmaurice via a Buzfeed piece in which he writes:
You probably also wondered if she [Rowling] wasn't asked to appear due to the anti-trans rhetoric she's embraced in recent years — a set of dangerous and hateful beliefs that she's apparently so committed to
I decided to reach out to Larry on Twitter with a very basic request about his claims:
And of course, the response was about as predicable as you might expect from someone so loose with the principle of honesty:
The lie that JK Rowling has said something hateful about trans people has been repeated so often that people publish it on huge platforms without a second thought. As though it’s an established truism like “the sky is blue”.
Of course, you can read what JK Rowling has actually said about this issue here. It’s remarkable that a piece of writing that contains the below could be interpreted as ‘hateful’ or ‘dangerous"‘ by anyone:
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.
So I want trans women to be safe
JK Rowling isn’t being treated this way because she said something hateful or inaccurate. She is being demonised as a heretic for rejecting the dogmas of a new religion. This is how blasphemy is enforced in the digital era.
We cannot allow deeply deranged and unserious people to control the narrative in this way. The stakes are too high. They are a tiny minority of activists that are completely untethered from the concept of reality and fairness. And the only power they have is the power we afford them by remaining afraid to speak up. If someone as reasonable, compassionate and clear-thinking as JK Rowling cannot be allowed to talk about this issue, then who can?
The time for biting your tongue has well and truly passed. More people agree with you than you realise. That’s why those pushing a false narrative opt for destruction instead of discussion. As the great, late Christopher Hitchens said “Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity”.
UPDATE 30th August 2022 - It seems BuzzFeed has quietly deleted some the defamatory claims in its article. You can read about it below
It's always amazing to compare what they want us to imagine she said, with what she actually said