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.
a daughter who was married to a man. In other words a straight woman who enjoying some queer tourism. So insulting and homophbic it's hard to know where to begin.
She seems to be quite reliant on the bank of mum in her ‘career’ as a freelance editor. Still she has 160 followers on whatever daft website she is on…
The recently retired rugby player Ellia Green who has recently 'come out' as trans and has had a baby with her female partner has been interviewed about her mental health and says exactly that - she hopes her daughter sees her 'father' (Ellia) as the person who helps people be their true selves etc. I'm not sure how they refer to the sperm donor. Maybe that's a 'sperm mother' too. And how does she know her daughter is a girl? Maybe her daughter 'identifies' as a baby boy and she's now 'misgendering' her. Or identifies as pangenderaseahorse. Who cares that's a lesbian couple, or if they 'identify' as hetero, or translesbian.
It is very odd how a man was integral, yet can be cut out of that process, yet she calls herself the child's father. Why replicate a heterosexual family unit. She's talked about how bad her mental health has been, but it must be if you have that level of cognitive dissonance and want everyone else to also.
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.
Typical that she's only in this cult because she has a daughter caught up in the delusion who thinks she's a boy. The TRAs managed to twist the knowledge of Harris' biased position into a "transphobic" attack on her female "son". Harris was also a they/them a while back. (Is she still?) Imagine making it as a female author, where its tougher and women as recently as the 90s had to have gender neutral pen names to get published... identifying out of womanhood. She's a traitor to her sex and a complete enabler to her deluded child.
"I won't sign that letter because I don't like some people who signed it" is the most pathetic words I've read from a supposed adult in a long, long time. Resign.
Yet another example of a woman who hates other women who are more successful than her. Its a pretty universal issue starting in school and running through all of life for us. We are in this mess precisely because women would rather support transwomen than their actual sisters. Its a sad indictment on our sex and I wish it would stop but it seems to be part of the female psyche for many women. I’ve been on the receiving end of this all my life. Its JEALOUSY and its not called the Green-eyed monster for nothing. Her expression says it all.
I've been on the end of it too - an awful lot. They'd rather pander to men to gain approval than stand on their own feet and claim their own power. I remember particularly a place I worked at which was very male dominated. The receptionist was horrible to any of the women including me - often not letting us in (we had to be buzzed in) for ages and never spoke or acknowledged us if she could help it and if she did speak she was surly as hell. With the men she was this sycophantic, fawning and giggly creature and they all thought she was "lovely". I've encountered quite a few of these type of women ever since.
Tried liking your comment and didn't feel like refreshing again.
I have occasionally dealt with these sorts of women and not just on the basis of sex. We have an insurance agent who spoke to my husband like he was dirt, and then one day she talked to me instead. I just deal with people who treat others like that with harsh authority, a very stern tone of voice, and guess what, it works. I had to talk to the agent the other day and she is now sweet as pie.
So the receptionist needed a woman to talk to her in the same tone and I'll bet she would have cleaned up her act. I got shit from an ad rep at a newspaper I worked at and I treated her to my NYC self -- if you're sweet in NYC you will end up as dust -- and I could tell she was shocked, but she never spoke disrespectfully to me again.
Yes sadly many women despise other women 😢. That includes women in my family. I had a lot of internalised misogyny when I was young. These transwoman supporters are the same.
I have no prob with middlebrow books - no doubt some would prefer Dostoevsky than JK Rowling ..... its only everything JH says n does in public on the subject of 'gender' since her conversion that I have a problem with!
She won't step down - she would have done so by now if she had any integrity. She feels justified in her actions and it is the dissenters that are in the wrong to her. Can she be ousted? A vote of no confidence?
Her defence of herself is typical of the logic of the times. Her critics are “misogynists”, no matter that their objection is to her sneering at a fellow author’s victimisation by violent threats and her refusal historically to put out a statement condemning this. They just fail to see that violent threats should never be made, as if it’s justified if you disagree with the victim’s views. This incenses me.
LOL, I'm not sure I want to know but I'm going to ask. What did Aidan do?
He'll probably be safe on Twitter no matter what he does. Something like the drivers we hear about who still have a licence despite having 60+ points on it.
Spot on Julie Bindel ...... the deluded Joanna Harris needs to step down/ get chucked off by popular demand - else the Society of Authors needs to rebrand as Stonefall of Scribbling Grifters.
Isn't it strange that we always seem to think that every author who writes the most amazing fiction is a lovely, kind person 🙄🥴. Oh foolish humans who deify those with feet of clay😁!!
It's Phillip Pullman that gets me. He wrote a book about adult religious fanatics destroying the physical bodies of children and separating them from their souls (gendered souls, in the case of transgenderism). And yet in real life, he supports the medical abuse of children for a quasi religion. Unbelievable.
Just a general remark- since subscribing to this substack I have been reading stuff I could scarcely believe ... and yet so much of what's here is truly of no relevence to the world I know i.e. the world of (dare I say it?) regular folk who haven't a clue what "cis", "gender critical", "TERF" etc. mean and if told, would guffaw uncontrollably at the ludicrous presuppositions behind these terms. The whole of this trans discourse or whatever you want to call it is so obviously manufactured and even nonsensical that it needs to be constantly rekindled by very large amounts of funded hacks and spooks to keep it going. If it was not so ferociously hammered everywhere in the media, it wouldn't last another day.
It's funny to realise this isn't it? We need to be more and more compartmentalised and good at figuring out the torrents of 'information' and distractions we need to filter. I too live in real life, but then some absolute figment of nothing is mentioned (usually but but but what about the 0.0?% of populations that are 'trans') on the radio news/culture/travel/sport/music/health reports and I'm left thinking, what about that? And? So? Should I be concerned? So do I need to change anything? Then, likely not, so I move on and blank it out. It's screaming rhetoric and then we move on. Then I look something up online and am bombarded by the latest outrage when trying to bank, or shop, or work out how to get from A to B for whatever purpose. Meanwhile people are born, live and die and we manage through that as best we can. I might plan my week ahead on a Sunday and I wonder how much time we could save if prats weren't pushing this nonsense in the week to come. Your time, my time, our time. How much easier it would be for NHS staff and Local Authorities. There's a cost to that which I wish someone would tot up then present Stonewall and Mermaids et al with an invoice. I reckon £2.1bn for 'waste of everyone's time' and cost to the economy should cover it for now.
Someone tried to baffle me with Foucault and some arcane arbitrary position from some theoretical argument learnt decades back. Instinctively. I batted it right back and we kept this dance up for a while till I got round to the purpose of my call which was about a time-limited issue. I was fed up wasting time. It is common with fairly middle class and London of a certain level of privilege or education that likes to play that game. Because they can and some aren't aware of any other people or real struggle or discourse. Or needs. You need to be fairly confident now to slice through the waffle that seems a layer of general fashionable discourse that bogs us all down and is ultimately pointless. Then you are brought up short when your child or best friend, or professional body is defiantly spouting this candyfloss or someone's flashed in a loo, or is pressured to accept a male carer or loses dignity in a female only space. Feel unable to go into previously single-sex spaces through this whipped up doubt and fear of something happening, being confronted, or being accused of being transphobic. You are made to read a long new workplace policy. Some of us are now self-editing and pre-silenced more and more. Then I am reminded the information I read here and other also sensible places is priceless. So, it is worth it in order to counter it George, I do get where you might be coming from! Time well spent.
All that postmodernist discourse or whatever is relatively harmless. It keeps university professors busy but makes little difference to anyone else. But it's different when some "scientific committee" make some "informed" pronouncement and declare that it's OK to allow a dodgy guy in a wig to tell pre-pubescents that they can have their genitalia removed if they happened to feel like it just after being told that's what they ought to feel.
I don't think that postmodernist crap is harmless. Pretending that reality is entirely subjective and everyone's point of view is equal is extremely harmful and serves the powers-that-be very well.
I genuinely don't find it harmless - it's the underpinning of all of this. It's created the 'logic' that those scientists, government departments and corporations are now proselytizing from. It leaked out from academic depts as those students graduated, got jobs and it gained an authority over decades. It changed the law. It created its own evidence base. It causes students to violently harass and attack lecturers they dislike. It gives weight to nonsense. So it perpetuates itself. Those students become lecturers.
Read the draft 'guidance' the RCOG have put out for review. Doctors and women's health services are being directed to follow this policy. If it's in our educational establishments it's in all our big 'p' Professions.
I've always seen it the other way round. The rulers have already made their plans and the ideological function is then served by the professors. The notion that e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche created the Nazis can be put to bed by asking that, if Nietzsche had never existed, would it have made any difference to the Nazis? No. Granted that the professors may oil the gears but I have always thought their supposed influence was vastly exaggerated.
I too tweeted her and said she should resign from the Soc of Authors. JH complained to twitter and I was found to be allowed to say so! Then within the same hour my account was suspended for two other tweets and a complaint by two people I don't know. I have appealed this as I only stated facts there.
I said "@Joanne chocolat should resign. She should have declared an interest earlier, the nasty tone of her poll rang alarm bells. She used her position to snipe at the author who has a bad rep for things she never ever said. Yet JH own adult daughter is now a pawn in this; for sympathy?".
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.
a daughter who was married to a man. In other words a straight woman who enjoying some queer tourism. So insulting and homophbic it's hard to know where to begin.
She seems to be quite reliant on the bank of mum in her ‘career’ as a freelance editor. Still she has 160 followers on whatever daft website she is on…
Munchausen by trans
or Munchausen by association.
Yep and she enabled it by briefly de-sexing herself in her bio with that they/them bollocks
The cognitive dissonance of a desexed being having given birth to a child is astounding. Is she then no longer her child's mother?
The recently retired rugby player Ellia Green who has recently 'come out' as trans and has had a baby with her female partner has been interviewed about her mental health and says exactly that - she hopes her daughter sees her 'father' (Ellia) as the person who helps people be their true selves etc. I'm not sure how they refer to the sperm donor. Maybe that's a 'sperm mother' too. And how does she know her daughter is a girl? Maybe her daughter 'identifies' as a baby boy and she's now 'misgendering' her. Or identifies as pangenderaseahorse. Who cares that's a lesbian couple, or if they 'identify' as hetero, or translesbian.
It is very odd how a man was integral, yet can be cut out of that process, yet she calls herself the child's father. Why replicate a heterosexual family unit. She's talked about how bad her mental health has been, but it must be if you have that level of cognitive dissonance and want everyone else to also.
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.
Typical that she's only in this cult because she has a daughter caught up in the delusion who thinks she's a boy. The TRAs managed to twist the knowledge of Harris' biased position into a "transphobic" attack on her female "son". Harris was also a they/them a while back. (Is she still?) Imagine making it as a female author, where its tougher and women as recently as the 90s had to have gender neutral pen names to get published... identifying out of womanhood. She's a traitor to her sex and a complete enabler to her deluded child.
"I won't sign that letter because I don't like some people who signed it" is the most pathetic words I've read from a supposed adult in a long, long time. Resign.
That was exactly my thought! It's a classic contemporary excuse to cover her real reason.
Yet another example of a woman who hates other women who are more successful than her. Its a pretty universal issue starting in school and running through all of life for us. We are in this mess precisely because women would rather support transwomen than their actual sisters. Its a sad indictment on our sex and I wish it would stop but it seems to be part of the female psyche for many women. I’ve been on the receiving end of this all my life. Its JEALOUSY and its not called the Green-eyed monster for nothing. Her expression says it all.
I've been on the end of it too - an awful lot. They'd rather pander to men to gain approval than stand on their own feet and claim their own power. I remember particularly a place I worked at which was very male dominated. The receptionist was horrible to any of the women including me - often not letting us in (we had to be buzzed in) for ages and never spoke or acknowledged us if she could help it and if she did speak she was surly as hell. With the men she was this sycophantic, fawning and giggly creature and they all thought she was "lovely". I've encountered quite a few of these type of women ever since.
Tried liking your comment and didn't feel like refreshing again.
I have occasionally dealt with these sorts of women and not just on the basis of sex. We have an insurance agent who spoke to my husband like he was dirt, and then one day she talked to me instead. I just deal with people who treat others like that with harsh authority, a very stern tone of voice, and guess what, it works. I had to talk to the agent the other day and she is now sweet as pie.
So the receptionist needed a woman to talk to her in the same tone and I'll bet she would have cleaned up her act. I got shit from an ad rep at a newspaper I worked at and I treated her to my NYC self -- if you're sweet in NYC you will end up as dust -- and I could tell she was shocked, but she never spoke disrespectfully to me again.
Yes sadly many women despise other women 😢. That includes women in my family. I had a lot of internalised misogyny when I was young. These transwoman supporters are the same.
To be fair, men do it too! But yeah.
“middlebrow author’ ‘gaslighting, envious creep’ — why hold back? Why not tell it like it is?
I have no prob with middlebrow books - no doubt some would prefer Dostoevsky than JK Rowling ..... its only everything JH says n does in public on the subject of 'gender' since her conversion that I have a problem with!
Excellent analysis of this awful women JH. Julie Bindles letter was right on point.
She won't step down - she would have done so by now if she had any integrity. She feels justified in her actions and it is the dissenters that are in the wrong to her. Can she be ousted? A vote of no confidence?
Her defence of herself is typical of the logic of the times. Her critics are “misogynists”, no matter that their objection is to her sneering at a fellow author’s victimisation by violent threats and her refusal historically to put out a statement condemning this. They just fail to see that violent threats should never be made, as if it’s justified if you disagree with the victim’s views. This incenses me.
You see an awful lot of this online. They justify their poor behaviour as "consequences" for people doing things they deem "bad".
Typical narcissist DARVO/ projection.
LOL, I'm not sure I want to know but I'm going to ask. What did Aidan do?
He'll probably be safe on Twitter no matter what he does. Something like the drivers we hear about who still have a licence despite having 60+ points on it.
Spot on Julie Bindel ...... the deluded Joanna Harris needs to step down/ get chucked off by popular demand - else the Society of Authors needs to rebrand as Stonefall of Scribbling Grifters.
Isn't it strange that we always seem to think that every author who writes the most amazing fiction is a lovely, kind person 🙄🥴. Oh foolish humans who deify those with feet of clay😁!!
It's Phillip Pullman that gets me. He wrote a book about adult religious fanatics destroying the physical bodies of children and separating them from their souls (gendered souls, in the case of transgenderism). And yet in real life, he supports the medical abuse of children for a quasi religion. Unbelievable.
I've been wondering about this for quite a while too.
Yep if only all the talented artists were lovely! ... eg Picasso was an absolute pig to women.
I prefer Barbara Pym's succinct description of novelists: They have no friends because they're always putting the people they know into their novels.
Such gentle comedy she wrote, but sometimes she could be very sharp with her barbs!
Just a general remark- since subscribing to this substack I have been reading stuff I could scarcely believe ... and yet so much of what's here is truly of no relevence to the world I know i.e. the world of (dare I say it?) regular folk who haven't a clue what "cis", "gender critical", "TERF" etc. mean and if told, would guffaw uncontrollably at the ludicrous presuppositions behind these terms. The whole of this trans discourse or whatever you want to call it is so obviously manufactured and even nonsensical that it needs to be constantly rekindled by very large amounts of funded hacks and spooks to keep it going. If it was not so ferociously hammered everywhere in the media, it wouldn't last another day.
It's funny to realise this isn't it? We need to be more and more compartmentalised and good at figuring out the torrents of 'information' and distractions we need to filter. I too live in real life, but then some absolute figment of nothing is mentioned (usually but but but what about the 0.0?% of populations that are 'trans') on the radio news/culture/travel/sport/music/health reports and I'm left thinking, what about that? And? So? Should I be concerned? So do I need to change anything? Then, likely not, so I move on and blank it out. It's screaming rhetoric and then we move on. Then I look something up online and am bombarded by the latest outrage when trying to bank, or shop, or work out how to get from A to B for whatever purpose. Meanwhile people are born, live and die and we manage through that as best we can. I might plan my week ahead on a Sunday and I wonder how much time we could save if prats weren't pushing this nonsense in the week to come. Your time, my time, our time. How much easier it would be for NHS staff and Local Authorities. There's a cost to that which I wish someone would tot up then present Stonewall and Mermaids et al with an invoice. I reckon £2.1bn for 'waste of everyone's time' and cost to the economy should cover it for now.
Someone tried to baffle me with Foucault and some arcane arbitrary position from some theoretical argument learnt decades back. Instinctively. I batted it right back and we kept this dance up for a while till I got round to the purpose of my call which was about a time-limited issue. I was fed up wasting time. It is common with fairly middle class and London of a certain level of privilege or education that likes to play that game. Because they can and some aren't aware of any other people or real struggle or discourse. Or needs. You need to be fairly confident now to slice through the waffle that seems a layer of general fashionable discourse that bogs us all down and is ultimately pointless. Then you are brought up short when your child or best friend, or professional body is defiantly spouting this candyfloss or someone's flashed in a loo, or is pressured to accept a male carer or loses dignity in a female only space. Feel unable to go into previously single-sex spaces through this whipped up doubt and fear of something happening, being confronted, or being accused of being transphobic. You are made to read a long new workplace policy. Some of us are now self-editing and pre-silenced more and more. Then I am reminded the information I read here and other also sensible places is priceless. So, it is worth it in order to counter it George, I do get where you might be coming from! Time well spent.
All that postmodernist discourse or whatever is relatively harmless. It keeps university professors busy but makes little difference to anyone else. But it's different when some "scientific committee" make some "informed" pronouncement and declare that it's OK to allow a dodgy guy in a wig to tell pre-pubescents that they can have their genitalia removed if they happened to feel like it just after being told that's what they ought to feel.
I don't think that postmodernist crap is harmless. Pretending that reality is entirely subjective and everyone's point of view is equal is extremely harmful and serves the powers-that-be very well.
I genuinely don't find it harmless - it's the underpinning of all of this. It's created the 'logic' that those scientists, government departments and corporations are now proselytizing from. It leaked out from academic depts as those students graduated, got jobs and it gained an authority over decades. It changed the law. It created its own evidence base. It causes students to violently harass and attack lecturers they dislike. It gives weight to nonsense. So it perpetuates itself. Those students become lecturers.
Read the draft 'guidance' the RCOG have put out for review. Doctors and women's health services are being directed to follow this policy. If it's in our educational establishments it's in all our big 'p' Professions.
Where do you think 'scientific committees' get their professors from?
I've always seen it the other way round. The rulers have already made their plans and the ideological function is then served by the professors. The notion that e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche created the Nazis can be put to bed by asking that, if Nietzsche had never existed, would it have made any difference to the Nazis? No. Granted that the professors may oil the gears but I have always thought their supposed influence was vastly exaggerated.
Well said mate
I too tweeted her and said she should resign from the Soc of Authors. JH complained to twitter and I was found to be allowed to say so! Then within the same hour my account was suspended for two other tweets and a complaint by two people I don't know. I have appealed this as I only stated facts there.
I said "@Joanne chocolat should resign. She should have declared an interest earlier, the nasty tone of her poll rang alarm bells. She used her position to snipe at the author who has a bad rep for things she never ever said. Yet JH own adult daughter is now a pawn in this; for sympathy?".
I thought you might be interested to know.
Thank you
Commerford's been kicked off Twitter at last? Happy days :-)