Joanne Harris is an archetypical trans rights activist
Gender Identity Ideology turned a perfectly harmless middlebrow author into a cautionary tale
An image I can never get out of my mind when I think about people like Joanne Harris is the despised village bully in France, 1940, who sees the tanks rolling in and claps his hands together with glee, thinking “Things are going to be different now!”. But this particular authoritarian moment, one in which women have been targeted and harassed and silenced for at least as long as WWII lasted, fits her terrible personality much more comfortably.
Twitter is a cattier environment than 1940’s France, and that, in particular, is what suits Joanne’s style. She is a gaslighting, envious creep who has found in trans activism a safe outlet for her poisonous hatred of other women, in this particular case, women who have the effrontery to stand up for their own sex-based rights, especially if they happen to sell more books than she.
Once again, here’s the tweet that kicked off the latest episode
Just to draw your attention again to that date and time….
This was one day after Salman Rushdie had been brutally stabbed, one day after JK Rowling had received a death threat reading “Don't worry you are next" and one day before we knew that Rushdie was going to make it. As Harris gleefully followed her instincts and scrambled to insult and demean Rowling by minimising the death threat, she actually forgot that another author was still fighting for his life.
She is not a fit Chair for the Society of Authors.
To see her at her very worst, I highly recommend following Jeremy Duns on the matter.
Also, don’t miss this brilliant follow-up to the open letter from Julie Bindel, which features the following to and fro.
“We note some of the signees of another letter to you, which condemns Ms. Harris, have, in fact, been previously suspended or banned from Twitter—the platform this latest row centers around—for violations of Twitter’s rules, which include sending abusive tweets, harassment, and what Twitter determines to ‘hateful conduct’ (Please see the Twitter Rules for a fuller description).”
Our response: Twitter does not list “sex” among its protected characteristics, and has frequently suspended and banned users, most of them women, for simply asserting that sex is real, or referring to a person’s sex in situations where sex, not gender identity, is relevant, such as sport. These users are victims of Twitter’s failure to adhere to English law, which bans discrimination in the provision of services on grounds of gender-critical belief. To treat Twitter bans as some sort of measure of “hate” is therefore a type of victim-blaming. It is using Twitter’s bias and discrimination against gender-critical women to claim that those women have acted in a biased and discriminatory fashion.
One man who Harris did sign her name alongside is Aiden Comerford, a bird of a feather if there ever was one: a not-too-bright bully who found in transactivism a way of getting back at the world for his own pathetic circumstances.
Hilariously, Comerford won’t be around for a while to advise.
What a tangled we weave, eh, Joanne?
Joanne Harris is not a fit chair for The Society of Authors. She should resign.
I believe that Joanne Harris has a trans child? I think this probably explains a great deal of her attitude. She can’t/ won’t face the fact that her child is probably going to suffer physical and mental ill health and unhappiness because of a psychological disorder, so she wants the rest of the world to agree that there is, in fact, nothing wrong. Anyone who disagrees is a ‘phobe.
It’s all rather reminiscent of Ms Mordaunt. However, the general public still knows that elevating the interests of your family member over those of the rest of the world, to the extent of causing harm to anyone else is not a proper way to conduct yourself professionally or socially.
Savage Minds had a great post the other day about "Maybe" critics of Salman Rushdie in the west. It really resonates with Joanne Harris and the "mean girls" authors who've tyrannized publishing in the UK.