J.K. Rowling chose a terrible time to share her terrible opinions about trans people
Here’s some stuff that’s going on: It’s Pride Month, people all over the world are marching against racial injustice and police violence, Trump deployed a private security force in Washington D.C. that convinced even the bad-take New York Times to use the term “secret police,” and the coronavirus is still an ongoing concern. Evidently, J.K. Rowling has decided that not enough people are talking about her and the plight of wealthy white women everywhere, so she felt the need to hop on Twitter and offer some more terrible opinions about trans people. Regardless of the bad stuff she has to say (and we’ll get to that), it should be abundantly clear to anyone with a shred of decency that now is not the fucking time.
And yet, here we are. Rowling’s inadvertent advertisement for why some rich people shouldn’t be allowed to run their own social media was prompted by an article on Devex called “Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate.” Rowling objected to the inclusive phrase “people who menstruate,” posting, “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” (Here’s a Medium post if you want to know why people are offended by this, beyond its generally snotty tone.)