Seeing that photograph of J.K. Rowling, I reflected gleefully that her journey from mousey, play-nice moderate to unapologetically glam and flamboyantly defiant fox is complete. It’s not often that glamour and righteousness come along in one person – but when it occasionally happens, as her caption said, ‘I love it when a plan comes together.’
Many brave people – mostly women, but joined by a few exceptional men – have sacrificed much for the victory we finally took receipt of in the Supreme Court last week. They have been robbed of reputations, careers, relationships and – almost – sanity, as much of the world’s establishment and institutions went gender-woo gaga and told us that women could have penises, men could grow cervixes and giraffes are born without sex. (Dawn Butler will never outrun that one; it’s her George Galloway cat-impersonating eternal moment in the spotlight.)
Until she was hated, I never cared for J.K. Rowling. The idea of anyone over the age of majority who could be reading, say, Lionel Shriver instead wasting their time reading stories about boy wizards irritated me intensely. There were so many of these clowns, apparently, that special ‘adult’ covers of the Potter books were being manufactured, to cover their embarrassment. As with adult babies, I must admit an intolerant part of me felt that such people should probably have their voting rights removed if they were not willing to fully embrace the blessed state of being a grown-up.
But the trans-battle was the making of her – and the real epic tale of transformation. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a comparative study of myth and heroes, Joseph Campbell writes: ‘A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.’ When I read this, I think not of the rather dull character of the boy wizard – but of the extraordinary journey of Joanne Rowling herself. When she fled from a violent man in a foreign country to the city of Edinburgh, the mild-mannered young mother had a trick up her sleeve. Or rather, three chapters of the first Harry Potter novel in her suitcase.
She has earned so much money and given so much away that she is believed to be the only billionaire to have become a mere multi-millionaire through her own personal generosity. Just as becoming rich suited her, she took to fame easily; an elegant woman with the face of a Modigliani, who unusually for a writer turned out to be something of a clothes-horse. She appeared to be civilised in every way one can be; sometimes a bit too much so, as despite her experiences of struggle and her residence in Edinburgh rather than the English capital, her politics seemed very much those of the London liberal elite. She was for Remaining in all its political forms: for Scotland staying in the United Kingdom, for the United Kingdom remaining in Europe, and basically everything that supported the status quo. Until she became involved in the issue that until recently was the most savage – yet also the most comical – in British political life: can a man be a woman?
In the summer of 2020, this very model of moderation was reborn again as a heroine of free speech and feminism. She became subject to a massive online pitchforking by the Men’s Rights Activists (Frock Division) – those incels in thongs and their treacherous Transmaids (who cannot see a dick without wanting to pander to it) – who believe that woman is a dirty word unless preceded by the nasty-sounding cis. I had always considered her humourless, but I was about to be pleasantly surprised when she tweeted, after reading a newspaper article which used the phrase ‘people who menstruate’: ‘People who menstruate. I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’ There commenced a social media pile-on of thwarted Harry Potter fans in which a horde of no-marks opined that this self-made, super-successful woman should EDUCATE HERSELF – simply because she knew the difference between fairytales and facts and they didn’t.
This very model of moderation was reborn again as a heroine of free speech and feminism
Wokeness is a reactionary rather than a revolutionary movement, one of the signs being that those who have historically held power – men, the educated, the wealthy – spent so much time censuring the behaviour of women, the uneducated and the poor in the name of wokeness. This was now demonstrated as the mediocre young Harry Potter actors turned on the woman who had brought them to public attention and to whose sparkly brain they owed everything they had. That they were from privileged backgrounds (Daniel Radcliffe, the privately educated son of a casting agent) while she was once an impoverished single mother made the situation even more grotesque. So after a period of attempting to placate the geek chorus, Rowling was fully reborn as a fearless and funny feminist who responded to the proposed book-burning of her Harry Potter bestsellers with: ‘Whenever somebody burns a Potter book the royalties vanish from my bank account. And if the book’s signed, one of my teeth falls out.’
The hashtag #RIPJKRowling may have trended, and such breathtakingly unhinged tweets as ‘She ain’t dead but she killed her own career by hating trans people’ may have abounded, but once more this mastering mob – Violet Elizabeth Bott joins the Stasi – only had a tenuous grasp on reality. In fact, by turning on her, they had helpfully propelled Rowling away from children’s books into the world of adult fiction. In 2013, the first of her Cormoran Strike crime novels was published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith; all bestsellers, they are excellent – as much literary triumphs as page-turning thrillers, bringing to mind Graham Greene and how he wrote ‘entertainments’ as well as novels. Utterly defiant by now, the series variously featured a cross-dressing male killer of women – and a character who, while pretending to be an anti-Zionist, is actually a rabid anti-Semite. Rowling had shaken off the clunking, cliched chains of woke-speak and was born again as an open-minded maverick worthy of a Joseph Campbell allegory. But she is a reluctant heroine, and very much a woman who toed the line – until it snapped, and with it her patience. And look at her now – enough money not to work again for nine lifetimes, and enough creativity never to stop.
Whereas the trans mob seem eerily similar, we have all sorts of fascinating individuals on our side. The brash and glamorous Kellie-Jay Keen, the sexy and serene Kathleen Stock; the fearless and mesmerising Dr Julia Long, the bold and brave Keira Bell. The unsinkable Mayas and Allisons and Helens and Stephanies; the sainted Magdalen Berns. This striking cast of characters have inevitably produced images that will go down in history: Keen covered in tomato soup, Stock with her phalanx of suited and booted bodyguards, Bell’s beautiful face comprehending her making of history outside of the High Court. Now we can add to that J.K.R. living it up and making her enemies suck it up. ‘Living well is the best revenge’ is often an empty and bitter line – but working hard, being generous and living well makes it land perfectly. So that photo of J.K.R. will, for me, forever be that perfect moment when righteousness and glamour become one.
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