I’ll return to writing about The Former Guy and his bosom buddy Vladolf Putler soon enough, but for now I want to write something apolitical (at least at first).
Back in 1999-2000, I was an avid reader of Michael Kinsley’s online magazine Slate, one of the first two online publications that I read daily (the other was Opinion Journal, the Wall Street Journal’s venture into online publishing under the guidance of James Taranto, which at first included only Taranto’s Best of the Web Today column, the serialized book Amanda_Bright@Home by Danielle Crittenden, whom I later learned was the wife of political commentator David Frum, and a few op/eds). One of the things I most enjoyed about that version of Slate, other than learning the identity of “Deep Throat” as Mark Felt years before it was confirmed by Bob Woodward (thank you, Timothy Noah), were the reviews.
At the time, the lead movie reviewer in Slate was David Edelstein, whom I enjoyed reading but frequently found myself in disagreement with his opinions. Part of the reason for reading Edelstein included his frequent references to the opinions of others — and, of course, the fact that he was a very good writer, even if he did have dubious judgment. But one of his best friends was A.O. “Tony” Scott, who was the still-new film critic for the New York Times (and no relation to the other, more famous Tony Scott, the movie director who was Ridley Scott’s brother — but the presence of the other Tony Scott was part of the reason that he used his initials in his byline). There was no other critic at the time with whom my opinions coincided more closely than with Tony Scott.
Well, in 1999, A.O. “Tony” Scott participated in a Slate “Book Club” debate about a new children’s book: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the third book in the Harry Potter series. Interestingly, I had paid little attention to the series, published in the U.S. by the children’s book publisher Scholastic, but my wife had bought the first volume for our kids — although our oldest was only 3 and was still years away from reading it.
Scott made the following observation about the writing, and the author, Joanne “J.K.” Rowling:
That Rowling’s books, which are so smart and so bracingly British . . . , have resonated with parents is no surprise. She quite cannily sets Harry’s adventures in an England whose culture and geography are entirely literary. This is not the England of Tony Blair or Princess Di or Martin Amis, but the England we remember from other children’s books, an England somehow perpetually Edwardian, notwithstanding certain concessions to modernity like telephones and coeducation.
In an earlier posting you speculated that our enthusiasm for Harry Potter may arise from our anxiety about technology, and it’s striking (this is something my wife called to my attention after she read the first two books) how technologically underdeveloped the muggle world is in these books, in particular with respect to information technology. No e-mail, no faxes, not really any television or movies. And of course the wizard world is a world of artisanal handicraft, ancient wisdom, and small, local businesses. Hogwarts pupils don’t buy their textbooks from Amazon.com or a Barnes & Noble superstore but from a quaint old bookshop on Diagon Alley called Flourish and Blotts. They don’t have e-mail; they have owls. They don’t play Nintendo; they practice spells. (They do, however, collect famous wizard trading cards, which move, just as all wizard photographs do. But, curiously, wizard photography seems to be exclusively black and white.)
So there is a double nostalgia involved in reading these books–nostalgia for one’s own childhood and nostalgia for the timeless realm of classic children’s fiction. Rowling has cleverly, and subtly, modernized these realms with respect to matters like gender equality and multiculturalism–not that she makes a big fuss about such things. Of course, this being children’s-book England, there’s still a servant class. But though there’s plenty of cruelty, corporal punishment has fallen from favor. (The death penalty seems to be reserved for wayward magical beasts.)
I read this and remembered it, but I didn’t buy the book. Scott’s literary opinions didn’t have the same effect on my wallet as his movie opinions did.
But then, a year later (July 2000), Slate ran another “Book Club” about the next Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was more than double the length of any of the prior books in the series. One of the writers in that Book Club referred to the book as “The King Lear of the Kid’s Section”. And one quote from that review really stood out to me:
There’s also some Lear-worthy twinning afoot. Harry and Voldemort are unmistakably doubles and perhaps even brothers of a sort: Their wands are siblings, and by the end of Goblet of Fire, they share some of the same blood. Those passages you quote give us even more to go on: Harry and Voldemort are both are of mixed muggle/wizard lineage, and both were painfully rejected by muggle relatives who were creeped out about having wizard kin. They were each raised as orphans and re-introduced to the wizarding world at Hogwarts.
Here the free will theme, which has been threaded throughout the series, takes on some real grandeur. The similarities between Harry and Voldemort’s backgrounds only serve to emphasize their different choices. For example, Harry doesn’t use his newfound powers to take revenge on the Dursleys, the muggle oppressors who have lied to, starved, and neglected him for eleven years. Instead, he allies himself with Hermione Granger, daughter of two muggle parents, and Ron Weasley, son of an unabashed muggleophile.
A children’s series including a “free will” theme? OK, I had to read it. There was a big display for the book (as an adult book, not a children’s book) at the Borders bookstore in downtown Boston — and I decided, based both on Tony Scott’s praise and the rave reviews that the new book was drawing, that I needed to buy the entire series (except for the first, which we already owned). That day. And then I needed to immediately binge-read the series, beginning with the book that Tony Scott had liked (which had the advantage of being half the length of the new one).
It took less than a day to finish them all. I read through the entire night and much of the next day, beginning (as noted) with Prisoner of Azkaban, then Goblet of Fire, then Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (the first book, redubbed . . . Sorcerer’s Stone by Scholastic in the U.S.) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and finally returning to re-skim Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire to tie up the loose ends that I didn’t understand due to starting in the middle.
And I became a total fan of the series (although frequently commenting on the difference in writing quality between the first two books and the later two books, which I might not have concentrated on as much if I hadn’t read them in the order I did), to the extent that I noticed the two big factual errors in the fourth book (which were corrected in future editions — and in part led Rowling to take three years (!!) and have some extra editing performed before publishing the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, in order to avoid a repeat).
But a bigger shock was coming: the movies based on the books, all but one (Order of the Phoenix, perhaps the best book in the series but unquestionably the worst movie adaptation of the bunch) written by the director and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Steve Kloves, became a phenomenon even before release, especially with children too young to read and enjoy the series. In 2001, my daughter Whitney, who went to preschool with a short dark-haired boy (Sam) and a tall red-haired boy (Daniel), began playing Hermione to their Harry and Ron, respectively, in their preschool games. (NOTE: In the books, Harry is relatively tall, so having a short Harry shows that the influence here was from the movies!)
And the movies were such a smash hit that in the summer of 2004, when my daughters were 8 and 7, I made reservations in downtown Boston (at the iMax movie theatre within the New England Aquarium) to see the third movie (Prisoner of Azkaban, directed by the future two-time Oscar-winning director Alfonso Cuarón) on the Friday night that it was released. The next year, when the book of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (sixth in the series) was released, the girls wanted to go to the “launch” circus at the local bookstores, which began selling the book at midnight (to pre-drawn customers with bracelets sorted into 15-minute intervals; our bracelets allowed us to enter the store at 1:30 AM, with probably another half-hour to an hour after that before getting the book) — but when they started to sag after waiting for much less than an hour, I took them (and their friend Claire, who had come with us) to a 24-hour “Stop & Shop” grocery store, which was also selling the book starting at midnight but had virtually no one inside, and I bought four copies (one for me and one for each of them). I believe only two of them ever got read, but seeing the circus was the real idea, not reading the book.
But I remained completely drawn in to the story and to Rowling’s writing style. And so I waited with much of the rest of humanity for the conclusion. Mind you, the major part of the wrap-up in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was obvious, at least to the adult readers: Harry himself was a Horcrux, evidenced by the scar thought to be a curse scar; there was an important subtext about Snape and Lily in “Snape’s Worst Memory” in Order of the Phoenix, which Rowling had tried to hide by focusing so much on Harry’s negative reaction to seeing his father’s gang bullying Snape in the memory (although I have to admit that I didn’t pick up that it revolved around Snape’s offhand use of the wizarding slur “mudblood” to describe Lily — and the substitute non-Kloves screenwriter for Order missed the relevance of this scene entirely); “RAB” was obviously Sirius Black’s brother Regulus, who was more like Sirius than either of them had ever realized during most of their lives; Snape’s killing of Dumbledore may have been prearranged between Snape and Dumbledore, which is why Snape snuck past Harry to get to the tower and didn’t try to kill Harry afterwards; the true identity (and allegiance) of Dumbledore’s brother Aberforth; and many more. But then there were other (and very clever) ideas that were just introduced at this late date, such as the Tales of Beedle the Bard, Dumbledore’s relationship with Grindelwald, and the Deathly Hallows themselves (although readers were already familiar with two of them).
In fact, the only three parts of the end of the series conclusion that I would have changed were (1) Harry going to his execution by Voldemort at the end of Deathly Hallows, which seemed derivative of the execution and resurrection of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, although, again, Rowling tried to downplay some of the similarities (but it seems likely that this sequence was part of the original plan of the novels, and so all Rowling could do was trim it around the edges); (2) the scene immediately thereafter with Harry and Dumbledore in the “train station”, where Harry has to be expressly told by Dumbledore some things that should have been obvious to him by now (although perhaps this was added for the youth audience, to whom this might not have been as obvious); and (3) the epilogue, which seemed more of a set up to permit a sequel than to serve as the story’s end (and which Rowling said was written at the same time as the first book). Oh, and an overriding fourth issue, which wouldn’t be as relevant in a children’s series: to the extent there was any type of emotional connection between any two characters in the series, it was between the two muggle-raised characters Harry and Hermione, and there is no way that they wouldn’t have ended up together.
But despite these quibbles, the Harry Potter series was one of the best ever written, and Rowling deserved to become the wealthiest writer in the world who had made her fortune solely from writing, as she indeed became after this series. Only one problem: where do you go from the top?
Five years after the Harry Potter series, in September 2012, Rowling published the novel The Casual Vacancy. Its title and its opening chapters created the illusion that it was going to be a comedy of manners, but it evolved into a Thackeray-esque bitter satire and could have used the original name that Thackeray had intended for Vanity Fair before settling on the reference to Pilgrim’s Progress (and so added it as a subtitle): A Novel without a Hero.
To many of us among Rowling’s fans, it was impossible to believe that she had opted to devote her considerable skills to write such a cold work of social criticism, even though it was unquestionably a top-notch effort, and there was much speculation about whether she would continue in that vein. About a year later, it turned out that Rowling had already acted on a decision to go in a different direction.
In April 2013, a detective novel entitled The Cuckoo’s Calling, written by an Iraq War veteran of the Royal Military Police under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith (according to the cover notes), had been released to relatively little acclaim except among literary critics, and it had sold about 8,500 copies total (including library copies and e-books) in three months, up to July of that year. The two lead characters in the book were Cormoran Strike, an RMP veteran with a prosthetic leg, who was also the illegitimate son of a rock star and a famous groupie, and Strike’s temporary secretary Robin Ellacott, who was described in a way that meant she physically resembled the real-life Rowling.
And then everything about the novel changed, after a writer for the Sunday Times (of London) posted speculation on Twitter that the book was too well-written to have come from a first-time author, and someone tweeted back (but then quickly deleted the tweet) that the book actually had been written by Rowling. And so it was, and when the Sunday Times went public with that story, the book shot to #1 in the world overnight.
Rowling, however, was unhappy about the leak, and especially unhappy when she found out that the leak originally identifying her as Galbraith had indirectly come from one of her lawyers: the lawyer had told his wife; his wife had told her best friend; and the best friend had tweeted it to the Sunday Times reporter. The law firm paid Rowling a substantial settlement for its leak of her confidential information (which she donated to charity, as well as her increased royalties from the book, as she has done with a substantial part of her wealth).
But the leak didn’t deter her. Rowling continued the Galbraith series (still under the pseudonym) with 2014’s The Silkworm (far and away the weakest entry of the series, too preoccupied with literary and class issues — although it does advance the series by having Strike send Robin to detective school at the end), 2015’s Career of Evil (a surprisingly good recovery, considering all the cross-plots among its four suspects, and including the history that Robin was raped in college, which led her to drop out, and the present story where Robin is slashed in a knife attack, then is fired by Strike, and ultimately marries her fiancé at the end, after Strike has wrapped the case), 2018’s Lethal White (which, as in the Harry Potter series, doubles the number of pages in the book and also ups the complexity, as newly-married Robin becomes a name partner in Strike’s firm, then catches her new husband in a long-term cheating relationship and separates from him, while Strike and the firm resolve a very complicated blackmail scheme and murder that was ultimately tied to an inheritance plot), 2020’s Troubled Blood (which, aside from the mystery plot, brings the relationship between Strike and Robin to a crossroads, as Robin’s divorce from her husband is finalized and Strike tries to separate their friendship from his personal feelings), and, at the end of August 2022, The Ink Black Heart (the first book in the series to exceed 1000 pages, and it made good use of them all, except perhaps for its Jane Austen-like approach to a potential couple (Strike and Robin) continually misreading and misinterpreting each other’s thoughts and intentions).
Although I don’t read the Galbraith series with the same urgency as I did the Harry Potter series (it took me five days to finish The Ink Black Heart due to other plans that I’d made for the Labor Day weekend), the series is every bit as clever and well-written as its illustrious predecessor. But, while writing the lengthy and complex Galbraith books (with enough red herrings to mislead the most diligent pack of hunting hounds), Rowling has also co-written a story treatment for a play extending the Harry Potter series (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which was an intriguing idea turned into a mediocre product by the actual author of the play, Jack Thorne); two Potter prequel original movie screenplays (Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Fantastic Beasts: The Grimes of Grindelwald) and co-writing a third (Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, with executive producer and primary Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves as her co-writer); and two best-selling children’s fairy tales (The Ickabog and The Christmas Pig). And she also oversaw a BBC/HBO co-produced TV series based on the Galbraith books (Strike, or C.B. Strike in the US), which has filmed 15 episodes through the first five books.
But, if I look up J.K. Rowling on the Internet, something I had to do in writing this piece, I won’t find much in the way of discussions about her amazing proclivity or even about anything having to do with writing.
Instead, Rowling has become the public face of what is referred to as “trans-exclusionary radical feminism” or “TERF”. (The question of whether her views are actually “radical”, as the woke trans activists claim, comes back to a question of whether gender reassignment surgery is necessary for transgender status, as Rowling and most of the world (but not the woke activists) believe.) Basically, Rowling refuses to accept the woke fiction that men become women simply by claiming that they are women, and thus should be able to compete in women’s athletics and use women’s restrooms despite having male reproductive organs. In one of the original expressions of her beliefs, Rowling tweeted her support for Maya Forstater, a British government employee who was fired for anti-trans tweets from her own account; Rowling herself discusses her interest in the issue here.
The backlash against Rowling was swift and fierce, but instead of backing down and apologizing to the woke mob for her heresy against their religious beliefs, Rowling went on to write more about “rapid onset gender dysphoria” and the (unproven) claim of trans activists that gender identity is innate and independent of biological reality. She tweeted, in response to an article that referred to “people with uteruses”, that we used to have a name for such people: women. But Rowling went on from there to explain her own interest in the subject, in this excerpt from her article that I linked above:
The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.
When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’
As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgment that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.
And, to be honest, the biological reality that only women can be mothers, and the obligations and limitations that are imposed by that law of nature, has long produced conflicts among young women in Western culture, so the idea that there should be such conflicts in the present generation is not at all surprising. As I’ve discussed here before with regards to mid-40s-male-opthamologist-turned-women’s-pro-tennis-player Renée Richards, there is nothing wrong with gender transitioning combined with sex reassignment surgery, and the advances in plastic surgery since Richards’ time have been nothing short of amazing.
But the idea that “men can become women” while maintaining their male anatomy is simply preposterous. As Rowling wrote about the U.K.:
A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.
And worse yet, a woman who has been nominated (and was confirmed) to the Supreme Court was unable to define the term “woman”, obviously because she was so afraid of offending some party looking to take offense. You have to wonder how she’ll deal with controversy on the Court after she’s already humiliated herself to avoid controversy during her confirmation hearings.
But that’s not the only bad element arising from the trans issue. Currently, some men believe that they can become world-class female athletes, and that they are entitled to be so recognized without even gender reassignment surgery but simply after hormonal treatments. At the NCAA swimming championships in 2022, a University of Pennsylvania swimmer named Lia Thomas, who was competing as a female after having competed for three years for the university as a man, was the controversial NCAA champion in the women’s 500-yard (500y) freestyle by 1.75 seconds, defeating three female U.S. Olympic medalists from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.
In 2018/19, before Thomas began transitioning, “he” ranked 554th in the men’s 200y freestyle, 65th in the men’s 500y freestyle and 32nd in the men’s 1650y freestyle. In 2021/22, as a woman, Thomas ranked 5th in the women’s 200y freestyle, 1st in the women’s 500y freestyle, and 8th in the women’s 1650y freestyle and qualified as an NCAA All-American in all three disciplines. Now Thomas wants to compete in the 2024 Olympics in the female disciplines. John Lohn in Swimming World magazine summarized this farce appropriately:
Most times, a national championship should be celebrated, the athlete commended for her hard work, dedication, and discipline.
Not this time.
No, this title-winning effort in the 500-yard freestyle should be met with nothing less than a head shake, an eye roll or a shrug of the shoulders. Why? Because Lia Thomas’ victory is an insult to the biological women who raced against her. Against those who fought for Title IX and equal opportunities for female athletes. Against science, and the unmistakable physiological differences between the male and female sexes. . . .
A transgender female competing against biological females is not a fair fight.
The example of Renée Richards cited above is a classic example. Richards was in her mid-40s when she turned pro, an age when most pro tennis players have already retired, and she had never played a second of professional tennis prior to that, but she was ranked as high as 19th in the world in 1979 (at 45) after her gender reassignment. In retrospect, Richards said the following:
Having lived for the past 30 years, I know if I’d had surgery at the age of 22, and then at 24 went on the tour, no genetic woman in the world would have been able to come close to me. And so I’ve reconsidered my opinion. There is one thing that a transsexual woman unfortunately cannot expect to be allowed to do, and that is to play professional sports in her chosen field. She can get married, live as a woman, do all of those other things, and no one should ever be allowed to take them away from her. But this limitation—that’s just life. I know because I lived it.
Yet acknowledging that limitation is taboo among the woke, as Rowling is well aware, and it continues to recur (such as with the British cyclist Emily Bridges). In part because of this issue, Rowling wrote in June 2020 (when The Former Guy was still in the White House) that:
We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else. . . .
But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating. . . .
[Despite how] endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.
I strongly disagree with Rowling about one big item; rather than this being the “most misogynistic period” of her life, I’d posit that it’s the least misogynistic period. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t real and troubling issues, including The Former Guy and the incels as well as the insistence of trans activists and the online woke mob that declaring that you are a woman is 100% equivalent to actually being a woman.
And, other than to the trans activists, who believe the world revolves around them and they occupy every moment of everyone else’s attention, it shouldn’t have come as any surprise that the ultimate villains in The Ink Black Heart might be described in these Rowling paragraphs (but I don’t want to give the central plot away!). But, of course, that doesn’t affect the woke media reviews of The Ink Black Heart, which generally focus on demonizing Rowling and ignoring any serious discussion about what the book is actually about. Fortunately for Rowling, she already had what is colorfully described as “f***-you money” before this ridiculous issue arose, and so she is under no compulsion to bow to the woke mob, unlike the rest of us who lack such funds.
For people who want to read more about this topic, I’d recommend Madeleine Kearns at National Review and several writers who are republished on Bari Weiss’s “Common Sense” Substack, such as Lisa Selin Davis and Bari’s sister Suzy Weiss (who also tends to cover a broader agenda of what a previous era would have called “women’s issues”). But this trans fad seems so bizarre to me — so anti-scientific, alternatively religious, and contra-logical — that I have little to say about it that others haven’t already expressed better.
Back in the 1970s, the science fiction writer John Varley wrote a short story entitled “The Barbie Murders”. In the story, both male and female members of a cult are able to have transition plastic surgery making them into identical Barbie look-alikes . . . and then (as I remember it) are able to de-transition back into their former bodies and identities (and one of the police officers investigating the case transitions into a Barbie to pursue a lead in the case from the inside).
Perhaps some of the trans-curious teens in the Suzy Weiss article linked above believe that this is actually possible. But it isn’t, and it won’t be even within my grandchildren’s lifetimes. So you have to make the best of what you have, until you’re actually able to be certain that what you’re getting in place of it is what you want for the rest of your life. Renée Richards was sure, but she was already 40 when she began transitioning, not a teen. I’m on Rowling’s side in this fight; “gender-affirming care” for teens is neither gender-affirming nor care, and anatomical men are not women. And there really isn’t anything else to say.
Be seeing you.
ADDENDA: One of the hazards of not posting regularly is that you forget some of the items that you had intended to include in your articles. For example, in regard to Rowling’s point that this is the most misogynistic period of her life, I had wanted to include the example of one of Jane Austen’s characters as an example of the changes that had taken place over the last 200 years. In Austen’s first novel, Pride and Prejudice, the home where the Bennett family (who had five daughters) lived, Longbourn, had been entailed to their father’s closest MALE heir: the pompous, boring, and self-righteous Mr. William Collins, who had a “living” as a parish clergyman at the estate of the arrogant and conceited Lady Catherine de Bourgh.
In the world at that time, Mr. Collins was able to use that upcoming inheritance and his current living to enter into a marriage with Elizabeth Bennett’s close and intelligent friend (but both older and single) Charlotte Lucas, who needed such a marriage to be able to provide for herself in the future. As one of my on-line friends noted, in today’s world, a woman like Charlotte would have earned a law degree or an MBA and would never have looked twice at Mr. Collins. Accordingly, in today’s world, Mr. Collins (who also would not be inheriting Longbourn) could easily have become an incel, because few women would be interested in a pompous, boring, and self-righteous husband, even if he did have a job. And why should they be?
I will say I agree with Rawling on the trans issue. Have to wonder if current influence was common back when I was regarded a "tomboy" would I have been persuaded to undergo such drastic measures? In my opinion you can decide whatever you want once you've reached full brain development (I've heard that's age 25 or so?) but leave the kids alone. I know someone who is trans, who didn't go as far as surgery but is living life as a female and passing pretty well and oddly enough she is even conservative in her views. One of the nicest and smarted people I know and in my opinion it's just that person's choice. As far as Rawling's writing, I never read more than the first Harry Potter book, though I'd like to. Local library seemed to never have the second book and I wanted to read them in order and then promptly forgot about it after a while. Have to say I was shocked at just how well the first movie matched what I was visualizing as I read the first book because as a rule, movies are never as good as the books they are based on. Loved the Galbraith books. Just found the Ink Black Heart yesterday at the library and will read it when Craig is done with it. It will probably take me a month but he will read it in a week. He tends to go through the books faster than I do, probably because he spends NO time on the internet. lol I'm looking forward to it. I read a lot of science fiction when I was young but these days I prefer the mystery/detective genre, especially the British authors Elizabeth George, Val McDermid and Reginald Hill. And a couple more I can't think of at the moment.