As is probably well known all over the world by now, the author of the Harry Potter books, JK Rowling, has been targeted by self-styled trans activists because of a tweet she published gently mocking the attempt to avoid using the ‘gendered’ word ‘women’ by substituting ‘people who menstruate’.

Ella Rule's ignorance is on full display from word one. What world are we talking about - this one? The one where the global proletariat sings with one voice - "stop canceling Rowling"?

So from the outset of her article, Ella Rule of the CPGB-ML is lying about the material impact of this issue. Imagine the opening sentence with the lie stricken, starting with "The author...". It would simply be a summary of what is happening to JK Rowling at the hands of "self-styled trans activists." If you read that, all you might think is how hateful it is for her to refer to critics as "self-styled trans activists" rather than say, "trans people," "critics," or any other word that doesn't seek to erase her ideological opponents from existence. (If they're only "self-styled" "activists", they might not even be trans - they could all be hired by George Soros!)

It's an amazing sentence, because it manages to conclude with a third, entirely separate piece of dishonesty. Ella Rule pretends there is (or ever would be) an attempt by the trans population to stop saying "woman" and instead say "people who menstruate", which would actually be anti-trans, because trans people generally don't seek to narrow the definition of gender. From the conclusion of this opening sentence we can conclude that Ella Rule is one or more of three sad things: a liar, too lazy to proofread their own hate speech, or dumber than an empty paint can. Replacing "woman" with "people who menstruate" is more characteristic of the "biological essentialists" (fancy word for neo-nazis) Ella Rule (CPGB-ML) is siding with, but at this point we're all very used to watching people performatively blame others for things they are responsible for, and I am too jaded to remark further on this point.

The political correctness enforcement brigade responded variously from calling her a ‘hag’ to threatening her with physical assault and rape. Charming!

The political correctness enforcement brigade. Let's think about what this term means. Political, okay, everything is political, at least this is explicitly so. Correctness, well sure, there's a correct line and an incorrect line, liberals are incorrect for example. Enforcement, well you're not going to convince the bourgeoisie to submit to the dictatorship of the proletariat by arguing at them. So far so good. Brigade, okay, well here's where I have a problem. A brigade is fearsome but it's not going to win us a revolutionary war against an imperialist military so large that each corps has multiple divisions. I assume, then, that the CPGB-ML's Ella Rule is mocking the small scale of the effort. To which I say heck, the Granma held just 82 boys, okay? And Cuba was far mightier and more terrible than JK Rowling is today, once you account for inflation.

About these threats though - is that supposed to be an argument? Am I supposed to feel transphobic because Rowling was threatened with rape online? My understanding is that men on the internet will threaten women with rape for liking an Eric Clapton song. Many people responded to Rowling with argument, not insult, but Ella Rule has nothing to say to those people, because Ella Rule of the CPGB-ML is not relevant on this (and I assume any other) issue. And hearkening back to that material reality I've heard of - in material reality, JK Rowling has private security paid for by her obscene wealth, while trans people are actually jailed, threatened, assaulted and murdered at higher rates than almost any other group. But I'm sure others have made that point to JK Rowling, Ella Rule and the CPGB-ML repeatedly and none of them care, so whatever.

These people who are spitting hate, and ought to be criminally prosecuted for threatening behaviour, actually have the gall to accuse people who accept that sex is a biological reality of thereby, of necessity, ‘hating’ trans people! But clearly there is no logical connection between the two.

The leader of CPGB-ML Ella Rule is openly, fully aligned with the carceral state, a snitch organization down with making average people disappear for calling a regime propagandist a "hag." There is no other way to read these words. Anyway, many have proven there is no other explanation for JK Rowling's behavior than transphobia - not my department.

Ms Rowling wrote a lengthy response, published in the Times on 12 June, explaining that, while she entirely sympathised with trans people, at the same time one cannot deny the reality of biological sex.

Sympathy for trans people, and conferring rights on them to live for most purposes as members of their chosen gender, however, does not mean that one must deny the existence of men and women as separate biological sexes and be forced into proclaiming that biological sex does not exist. To do so amounts to denying womanhood and women’s rights, reflecting a high level of misogyny in modern society.

Look at the kind of dog shit Rule expects people to swallow. Here is one of the more widely read responses to that piss-poor op-ed that Ella Rule employs here as a bloated, stinky QED. At times, I feel like the frenzied mish mash of non-logic that passes for "analysis" in these reactionary screeds is due to the failing of an aged, uninformed mind that has nothing left to judge itself by except delusions of importance. For example, can Ella Rule actually be arguing that someone is being "forced to proclaim that biological sex does not exist"? Or did they suffer a bad nightmare after watching Greystoke: the Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes late one night, not recalling that the VHS dub included commercial breaks, and falling asleep to Apple's 1984 advertisement? Can Ella Rule actually be sitting there at CPBG-ML HQ, arguing that abolishing the caste system of gender would be bad for women, off of their apparent premise that "women's rights" are a list of rights that anyone who doesn't look enough like a woman for Ella Rule to call them a woman should not have - or did they, in fact, get invited to a book club of pensioners, then get kicked out of the club after "making a stand" against Moby Dick, which nobody else had actually read (can you imagine that!), then in the post-separation dirt-digging, did they find that the club had also read Middlesex when it came out, and became so purple with hate that their psyche fell to Rowling's dark manipulations? That's how it happens in Amerika. I'm just saying, both explanations for why Ella Rule of the CPGB-ML has written this seem plausible, to me.

It seems incredible that Ms Rowling’s eminently empathetic and sensible approach to this issue, which is undoubtedly in tune with the attitudes of the overwhelming majority of British people, has given rise to howls of abuse, with various actors who became famous acting in the Harry Potter films, for example, rushing to denounce her and exclude her from their friendship.

JK Rowling's approach to the issue is abusive, ignorant and bound up in self-loathing, but no matter. Ella Rule, CPGB-ML, just can't tell which way the wind is blowing, possibly due to the quantity of linen cloth and resin they are wrapped in to preserve their flesh against putrefaction and disintegration for thousands of years. See, these professional actors starred in the hokey, crappy, ugly, fascist-adjacent flavor-of-the-decade series of children's movies because they got paid millions of dollars, and to preserve the trajectory of their lucrative careers, they have agents and other people who know a lot more about what the majority thinks than Ella Rule or anyone else in the CPGB-ML. They might not agree with the majority, and they might cynically manipulate the majority opinion. But in the end, their bottom line depends on keeping their millionaire actor clients from blacking up, abducting teenagers, or making friends with public enemies like the notorious bigot JK Rowling, because nobody would want to see them in films anymore. Whereas Ella Rule's bottom line depends on not being relevant to the public, because if the CPGB-ML had any relevance or value as a left organization, Ella Rule would be replaced by a competent person in the flush of a toilet.

It is, however, they who must be denounced as idiotic in the extreme.

Good one.

Of course, they are entitled to their idiotic views, but these are not of a nature to demand the breaking off of friendships, much less threats of physical assault and rape.

I'm gonna have to sort of disagree with Ella Rule here. First off, people are not actually entitled to idiotic views, even though that is the prevailing view in bourgeois society. Actually, idiotic - and reactionary - views should be met with education. And people like JK Rowling and Ella Rule and the CPGB-ML who hold idiotic views in the face of an overwhelming popular campaign to educate them out of their bigotry? They should not have friends, not even among their own ranks. They should feel like they are under constant threat if they won't reform themselves. This is called revolutionary terror, and you should feel lucky you're getting the homeopathic version. It's not going to respect the CPGB-ML as a vanguard party, sorry!

As regards attitudes towards trans people, one would break off a friendship with someone who proclaimed trans people should be beaten up, killed, or even deliberately taunted or ridiculed, but even if you disagreed with a person who thought, for instance, that allowing people to change their birth certificates was a step too far, would you really break off a friendship for that reason alone? Or with someone who was against allowing those who are still obviously anatomically male to use a women’s changing room, or to reside in a women’s refuge? Or with allowing someone whose body originally developed as male, thus conferring superior strength, to compete in women’s sports?

I am like a scientist staring at the impenetrable Jupiter. If I could only boil away the atmosphere of foolishness that produces such lethal radiation, I would find a boring, carbon crystal core, a uniform lattice of fear that nobody will be Ella Rule's friend now that she is incapable of personal growth. This description of what happens when a friendship is "broken off" is rooted in victim-blaming and denial of abuse. For example, it's not unusual in the US and UK for gay and trans children - heck, for people in general - to cut off contact with abusive parents who want to deny, cure, or just hate them for not being cissexual. Is this an evil tactic by mean children? No, it's legitimate to tell someone, I can't be friends with you until you stop being a bigot. This is the opposite of exile, because it spells out very clear conditions under which the relationship could be restored. It's actually the basic level of care for a friend that qualifies real friendship - friends don't let friends be bigots. I hope someday, somebody cares enough about Ella Rule to help them be less angry and hateful.

Many of the political correctness bullies are students or graduates, and this may be related to the fact that universities push onto today’s humanities students a ‘postmodern’ idealist philosophy which denies that correspondence with the material world is any basis for judging the correctness of an idea. On the contrary, the only measure of correctness, according to these modern reactionary philosophies, is what the majority of people believe to be true (or the majority of ‘educated’ people, the initiated elite, believe to be true).

You can quite literally find people like Ben Shapiro and Mike Cernovich to make this exact same point, using the same words.

It is not always easy to persuade people to change their minds, even when presenting them with concrete and irrefutable evidence from the material world.

This itself is not a materialist line. Now and only now, with the momentum behind me to dismissively wrap up this post within a few more minutes of hard typing, I stop to ask myself why I'm writing this at all. I guess I want something to exist that people can point to when reactionaries try to pretend like the views of the CPGB-ML are "communist." The most amazing thing about Ella Rule's transphobic essay for the CPGB-ML, to me, is how hard it works to recuperate and "make holy" so many aspects of communist philosophy while betraying them at every turn. This particular sentence might take the prize. Not only is it "not always easy to persuade people," we students of communism have become acutely aware, over the last 160 years, that you can't persuade people to betray their class interests by arguing with them, but instead, material factors determine their politics, and the most we can consciously do is help people to educate themselves and struggle together.

The remainder of Ella Rule's hate speech is not worth reproducing here. It's more of the bigot's classic rhetorical inversion of actual bigotry - where trans people lead online hit squads that ruin people's lives for minor ideological differences and famous reactionary millionaire anti-Semite authors like JK Rowling are sole defenders of truth. They habitually sneak into women's bathrooms and secretly urinate out of their penises, but at the same time, they wield such a fantastic economic force that they can prevent a celebrity intellectual property magnate from earning residuals from a ninth movie, third spinoff movie, or seventeenth video game.

Again, perhaps this all comes down to senility, which is probably affecting Ella Rule the same way it's been affecting other political leaders like Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Ella Rule says trans people are more powerful than the major media conglomerates who push transphobic journalism in between Harry Potter reruns, because Ella Rule has confused "trans people" with "the rhizzone" and "major media conglomerates" with "CPGB-ML", and they are mad that the Rhizzone is actually more politically powerful than their pathetic org could ever hope to be. What's more, Ella Rule has confused "women's bathrooms" with her own grave, somewhere at least one Rhizzone poster plans to secretly urinate out of their penis.

Edited by swampman (July 10, 2020 23:16:35)