Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

JK Rowling’s latest novel isn’t ‘transphobic’

J K Rowling (Getty images)

The object of a slanderer is to blacken the name of his target so thoroughly everything she says and does reinforces his slander. She can have no independent life or complexity. No one is free to say, although I disapprove of her views on X, I admire her for speaking out on Y. No quarter can be given or complexity acknowledged. The slander is all.

In the case of JK Rowling, everything she says and does must be twisted to reinforce the slander that she is a ‘transphobe’.

Last night, I turned on Twitter and wondered, ‘What the hell are they screaming about now?’ – a recurrent thought, I grant you. The hideous hashtag #RIPJKRowling was trending as trolls and their easily manipulated followers poured out their hatred. Rowling was a rat and a racist. She should ‘Sit Down and Shut the Fuck Up For The Rest of Time You Transphobic Bitch’. She wants trans people ‘to die’.

The ‘evidence’ that provoked the malice was so flimsy, even Twitter should have been embarrassed to publish it. Pink News, which dominates the LGBTQ+ outrage market, gave the case for the prosecution. According to the first review, ‘JK Rowling’s latest book is about a murderous cis man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims’, it announced

Rowling’s writing is becoming ever-more feminist — ever-more conscious of women’s physical and emotional abuse

It is about nothing of the sort, I thought. And I could say that with authority because I had just finished a review copy of Troubled Blood, the fifth novel in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, as research for a long piece on her politics and art I’m working on for the Critic. 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.

The men and women pouring out their loathing of Rowling online could not have read the unreleased book: not that their ignorance bothered them in slightest, as no mob on the rampage in history has ever stopped to read a novel.

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