A word or two of thanks
A word or two of thanks
I’m writing this on International day of disabled persons. There are many titles for this day, but you get the point, it’s a day on which disability & disabled people are highlighted and with very good reason.
Disabled people and in particular learning-disabled people, are disenfranchised.
In the case of learning-disabled people, this ramps up to the max. In the mandated league table of oppression, which we’re all now expected to abide by, I’m not sure learning-disabled adults, particularly women, even get a mention these days by those asked to comment on these things.
What I do know is that JK Rowling is widely touted by Twitter, on Twitter, as ableist and that is as wrong as it is offensive to me.
The evidence for this, the “receipts” to use the latest jargon, fall into perception only.
Her well-known philanthropy is disregarded, the institute set up from her donation devoted to research into multiple sclerosis which killed her mum and is named for her mum, is derided and her every word whether tweeted, or as an author is scrutinised & mined to find the hatred of disabled people, we are assured in vlog, tweet & TikTok video, is there.
From the Harry Potter series to the Strike novels, the receipts are found and displayed shared & called out across social media to ensure “she who must be shamed”, knows what she’s done.
But if we’re going to talk about it, let’s start with the truth, what she’s done ‘that is ableist’, is nothing.
I’m a diagnosed disabled woman (a point I make for a reason) and I’ve tweeted often about the fact that JK Rowling isn’t ableist. This usually triggers those who identify as disabled to pitch up and explain at length why I a ‘non disabled woman’ is wrong and why they so often a ‘self-diagnosed disabled person’ is absolutely right.
I say person not woman or man, because those are often their preferred pronouns, so they are often also of the belief that JK Rowling is transphobic. Ableism is seemingly just an add on to the list of the “Crimes of Rowling” and for me this “Oh yeah and …” accusation of perceived ableism (because that’s what it so often is), is ableism but of a different form.
A quick check of their online profile shows me, with depressing regularity, that they don’t usually mention ableism or hate crime targeting disabled people at all, except to frame it very clearly, in a list of JK Rowling’s perceived hatreds.
They flip this of course, by claiming it’s in fact her using and abusing learning disabled people when she talks about safeguarding of learning-disabled women, from the predatory sexual abusers who want nothing more than access to any and all vulnerable women.
Though not trans, the concern is that these male predators (as is so often their modus operandi) will use trans rights policies as a cloak of invisibility of their intentions, to quieten questions and challenge.
This was noted recently by Reem Alsalem, the UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls who warned Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon of the risks to women from violent males who could abuse the Self ID process, to acquire a gender recognition certificate. She called for a pause to the Bill, noting that to do so was “more than reasonable”.
As is often the case, any critics or even those questioning, as Rowling and other feminist women do routinely, see the full impact of the rage of misogyny under threat, honed in on them.
Spend as much time as I have campaigning on disability rights, and you’ll know the stuff of nightmares that is the sadly routine abuse of learning-disabled women in the care system. It takes many forms, but sexual abuse is amongst the worst of it and it relies on silence.
No one wants to know this happens, no one wants to believe it but elderly women with dementia, women with mental illness, female prisoners & learning-disabled women, are targeted precisely because of the aspects that makes society want to protect them, (or ignores them thereby enabling their neglect), also draws predators to them for the worst reason possible, opportunity.
JK Rowling engages in a cognitive process which culminates in the one thing that needs to happen above all others, she speaks out. She cares about these women & girls, she gets angry on their behalf and crucially she talks about what is being done to them in the darkness where the silence lives.
She isn’t talking about trans women (unless they happen to also be predators) she’s talking about predatory non-trans men exploiting a system. No one should be defending these men, no matter how the league table of oppression is looking, to the uninitiated.
The anti-Rowling critics online are seemingly perceiving her words as an erasure of their own trans or non binary identity, when she isn’t mentioning that at all.
Perception is a powerful motivation in cancel & call out culture.
I first knew that JK Rowling wasn’t an ableist when she wrote one of the first autistic characters in children’s literature and made her a girl. I don’t know if this has been stated anywhere and apologies to JK Rowling if my own perception bias here that Luna Lovegood is autistic is entirely wrong, but this next section will be written though a powerful prism of gratitude for my perception & why that is.
Luna often bullied and neglected, often misunderstood, ignored and to me beautifully eccentric, was also ultimately loved, championed & defended by her friends who knew her best & valued her most.
This I think sent hope to all the autistic fans of her novels, readers of her novels and parents of the readers of her novels.
Intended as an autisitc character or not they felt seen.
There she was writ large, as real as ever I’d seen in print and as a parent of autistic girls (at that stage undiagnosed as autistic myself), my heart soared.
Now, when I listen to the audiobooks, which we learnt this week have surpassed the billion hours Audible mark, my own autistic childhood is brought sharply into focus and that historic loneliness is eased.
I think I must claim a large part of those billion hours, they are still my go-to listen and a huge comfort in difficult times as a parent carer.
This wasn’t a character portrait written by someone who hated autistic people, children or adults. This was an author who cared about autistic children, particularly girls with the different and unique challenges we face, very deeply.
She took Luna through the peak bullying years. The onset of puberty and adolescence, fitting in and standing out - in what we wear, how we interact, how boys treat us and how, seeing how boys perceive us, how girls, then shame, isolate and bully us, in response.
Compacting our own self-loathing at a time of already acute vulnerability.
Beautifully, Luna rises above all of this with the acceptance which often frames the lives of many autistic women and girls, so completely. As an autistic character or not
We learn not just to live with being hated, misunderstood, misrepresented and ridiculed but to understand it & to expect it.
Crucially we know that as hard as this behaviour is to experience, the rules of conformity which we don’t bother with so much, but which non-autistic girls are expected to know, by a sort of osmosis, are actually a true burden of another kind.
When you’re living in the midst of turbulent adolescence however, this bullying can be a wound which keeps being reopened.
This can manifest literally as well as figurately too, as a way of coping or in self injurious behaviours of different sorts, as we navigate the world.
Usually from the outside looking in.
With Luna Lovegood, I felt we were invited in as an equal.
That’s the principle reason that I know my critics online who try to shame me into condemning JK Rowling as an ableist, when by threatening me with expulsion from the autistic community or ostracism, aren’t any kind of autistic person I recognise.
Often they’re not autistic at all, but rather have a different self ID condition which makes them the expert in all fields or none, dependent on your viewpoint of sef ID & disability.
I don’t want to fit in, that’s the point. It looks really tiring if I’m honest and it seems that lying & bullshit, which I think is deemed “reputational management” is given a significance and a value as standard which it really doesn’t deserve.
Anyway….. back to Strike and here again we have a three dimensional disabled character but this time as the protagonist.
An amputee forces veteran, Strike is gloriously real. Given words and attitudes which don’t dovetail Rowling’s own, either politically or personally, but he doesn’t have to because Cormoran Strike is giving us a perspective on a world we don’t know but are desperate to understand and know more about.
And again, we see the accusations of ableism being levelled. In descriptions of a quote from “The Ink Black Heart” there is a discussion of a fictional court case, which the internet “autiratti” (there are lots of young autistic celebrities now) have decided are verboten, but are used in fact, by clinical experts because they need to represent the autistic spectrum in reality.
Not how Twitter thinks the world should be but as it actually is.
So Rowling uses “profound autism” with good reason, to highlight and flag the vulnerability of autistic women from a clinical perspective, in the criminal justice system.
Autistic women are no friend to the patriarchy and Rowling knows and writes this.
And as I write this, it’s nearly that time again where people gather around their phone screens and unite to call JK Rowling out with various versions of old English epithets which they find to be the most derogatory & hurtful.
The adaptation of Rowling’s Strike novel “Troubled Blood” is being broadcast on 11th December on BBC One at 9pm.
Whenever over the last two years the still beloved author has a new book film or TV series out, it’s open season on her.
As always the “criticism” strays beyond her work, encompassing her looks, her age, her intelligence, her wealth and on and on and on .
It’s virtually a political movement all of its own, and one as distinct from the avowed reasons behind it, as it is from the truth of Rowling’s motivation and intentions for making her feelings on the debate of the day, known.
That particular ‘former fan’ fiction is a genre like no other and the publishing industry (so kind to women writers, as we know) really has missed a trick by not creating a society of authors, just for that.
We are told it’s her perceived transphobia that they’re simply calling out when they travel to her home and post protest photos from outside it, or when they highlight a photo of her with other gender critical feminists, eating lunch together and for some reason known only to anti Rowling activists, they mock her breasts.
Definitely not, misogyny. Everyone knows that body or face shaming women with vicious ridicule, is the most feminist thing anyone can do as an ally. I think it was Germaine Greer who made that point first wasn’t it? Or perhaps Simone de Beauvoir? I forget.
They wear their anti-Rowling credentials loud and proud on social media these days when they send her death threats and rape threats. When they claim she’s racist, or sexist, or a nazi, or a supporter of the far right, or ableist, or any number of false accusations, which comprise a dossier of perceived awfulness which should see her locked up and the key thrown away as soon as is humanly possible.
In short if it’s hateful in nature, she’s done it as far as her critics are concerned. When it comes to JK Rowling, they are clear its “All discriminatory, all the time”
I can do nothing of any consequence to turn the tide on the hatred & shaming of JK Rowling. I can offer her nothing by way of emotional compensation for the lies, the threats, the doxxing & the fear which she must feel for herself and for her family, when small but determined pockets of public approbation for her request to look outside political solidarity to one cause; turns to pitchfork wielding hate mobs, who dog her words online and onscreen with their anger and existential angst.
Rowling is quietly but clearly asking those with the most power instead to pause, consider and reflect on the wider picture of rights and responsibilities to those with the least power.
A consideration incumbent on everyone because not everyone is equally impacted by gender ideology. We know what it means for self ID trans people and a little more about what it means for women in sport now but do we all really know what it means for lesbians, autistic girls being referred to GI clinics, vulnerable women in prison, elderly women with dementia, mentally ill and disabled women?
And would we if it wasn’t for JK Rowling choosing in the face of all safety concerns, to stand up and speak about it when she didn’t have to at all.
Isn’t that from a woman who has spoken about her own battles with depression in the past and as a survivor of sexual assault and domestic violence, leaving her with residual trauma, a supreme act of solidarity for her own community of ill & disabled people, which we should celebrate not claim she has no stake in, or right to comment on.
All I can say is that as I wrote about what her disabled characters have meant to me, I cried again with the gratitude I felt all those years ago when I first saw how gently and carefully she writes about disabled lives.
And on this International day for the global disability community and with her work translated and shared around the world, I know that my gratitude to her isn’t isolated either, but rather that it’s international too.
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