hello, hello and welcome back to A Bit Fruity, the show where we think that you should never live in the closet, Harry, even if the woman who created you changes her mind. If you would like to support the show or perhaps want a little bit more of the show, we are on Patreon and by the time this episode is up, it'll be around the same time that I upload March's deep dive on Patreon, which I do every month and this month it is on the wokeness of Sydney Sweeney, the right just figured out who Sydney Sweeney is because they saw her on SNL and they never watched Euphoria and her being hot is, uh, is causing a freakout of epic proportions. So we're going to do a little analysis of a woman's body, which is something I'm fairly new to. So, you know, wish me luck. Today we are joined, once again, by someone I'm honored to call a friend of the show, Natalie Wynn, or as you may know her online, ContraPoints is, an ex-philosopher, she is a youtuber but I think calling her a youtuber is kind of diminutive to her craft. She puts out a couple feature film length videos a year that you've probably watched but if you haven't, you really should go check those out. She talks about philosophy, sex and gender, and capitalism, and twilight. Natalie Wynn welcome back to A Bit Fruity. Thank you much for having me back on. I am excited to be here again. I'm honored to be a friend of the show. I'm honored to have you as a friend of the show. So, a couple weeks ago J.K. Rowling, she got caught up in a little Holocaust denial. She does Holocaust denial a little from time to time, (laughter) yeah. It wasn't always this way. J.K. Rowlings wasn't always on Twitter denying that, uh, queer people were persecuted in the Holocaust. Until 2019, J.K. Rowlings was a universally beloved children's author who taught every kid that there was magic inside of them no matter how cast out they may feel. Today, though, how would you characterize her position in the culture today? Well, her position in the culture is kind of weirdly split, right, cause on the one hand, there is her continuing legacy as the author of the wizard books and on the other hand, there's like almost her entire public persona, that which we mostly experience through Twitter which is basically obsessive bigotry towards trans people. That's become sort of her definitive thing, right? I think that people who don't follow this kind of don't understand the extent of it because, you know, I don't know, people throw around like all kinds of accusations on Twitter, so it's easy to think that this is some kind of internet drama blown out of proportion. But what you're missing is that if you have not been paying attention to J.K. Rowling's Twitter for the last, at this point, we're talking about four or five years, which is a long time. Like, she's basically used her platform more often than not to do trans-bashing. There's a reason why that this gets talked about so much because, I mean, she's one of the most famous authors in the world with an enormous platform, and she's just using it constantly to target this small and, like, already besieged, minority of people who are facing, like, all kinds of, like, legislative and cultural backlash in the U.S. and the U.K. So it's like really devastating (chuckle) that an author that, that's this influential is also, like, this obsessively devoted to persecute, you know, to contributing to the persecution of this group of people, who's already so harassed. But it's also, I don't know, it's also kind of a bizarre spectacle, like, in it's own right it's kind of like another reason I feel like we're drawn to this maybe, is that it's kind of like darkly fascinating. How does this happen? Like, how do we go from, like, the Gryffindor common room and, you know, Severus Snape, to, like, these unhinged rants about the transexuals. It's weird. It, it is weird and I think also, I mean, yeah, if you go to J.K. Rowling's Twitter right now and scroll through her feed, it is literal years of talking every single day, almost exclusively, about transgender people, for years. Which I think is the type of behavior we associate, with like boomer facebook moms, and then I guess in a sense, she kind of would have been that, if she hadn't become a billionaire and one of the most famous and beloved children's authors of all time. But she is those things and the idea of her behaving the way, like, our homophobic aunt does or whatever, but like from some castle in the U.K., is just like a very jarring image. (Natalie) I think that summarizes it really well, right, like, it is, like, your bigoted aunts deranged Facebook post except on a platform with millions of people as the audience. I feel like we as a society, have, like, yet to know how to deal with this type of thing cause J.K. Rowling's not the only case of it. I mean, like, Elon Musk has dabbled a little bit in some similar forms of bigotry with a (inaudible) or even larger platform. But I feel like what's unique about J.K. Rowling is that she's, like, single mindedly focused on trans people as this one issue. (Matt) So she wasn't always this way, though and what we're gonna do today is use J.K. Rowling as what I think is a valuable case study in the worm hole that transphobia is. The way that it can serve as it has for J.K. Rowling and so many millions of other people as a portal into the broader world of right-wing ideology that gets pretty scary pretty quickly. We're gonna try to understand why transphobia, and I think especially when it's cloaked, no pun intended, as a progressive feminist cause and especially effective gateway into the alt right. One day you're reminding people that you just like to be preferred to as a woman and that you are a woman and then, you know, the next day you are participating in Holocaust denial. It can happen to you. (Natalie) Many such cases. (Matt) Many such cases. And so, to begin this story I wanna go back to 2019 to the first tweet that I remember seeing of J.K. Rowling's, her foray into the anti-trans movement, which at the beginning was very tepid. I am going to send you the tweet. (Natalie) "Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who'll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? Hashtag I stand with Maya. Hashtag this is not a drill." (Matt) So what was the context of this one? (Natalie) So, the context is that there was a English consultant named Maya Forstater who, I guess she wasn't fired but her contract was not renewed because she had, like, refused to use the correct pronouns for a trans coworker or something along those lines. And a lot of so called "gender-critical", that is "transphobic", people in the U.K. decided to turn this into a celebrated cause, they, you know, rallied behind this hashtag "I stand with maya". The idea being, like, "oh, we shouldn't have to submit to gender ideology by, you know, using the correct pronouns for trans people in the work place or whatever. This is where J.K. Rowling decided to join this discourse officially. She decided to jump in on the side of people who think that it's terribly oppressive to have to use the correct pronouns for a trans person. And I guess at first, you know, there was some ambiguity because you could be like, "Well she's not transphobic. Maybe she just believes in free speech, and she thinks that, you know, that people shouldn't be fired for having different opinions." (inaudible) okay, like, at first you could sort of plausibly think that maybe, given the benefit of the doubt, that's why she was getting involved in this. But, like, to people who kind of know the pattern that transphobia takes place, we all pretty much knew that, "Oh, okay she really is transphobic behind the scenes". Like, there is no way that you would -go decide to die on this hill unless - Matt: Hmm. you already were. At least that's what I think now. I mean, I think J.K. Rowling was at her most dangerous in 2019 and in 2020 because of the stuff she was saying seems kind of plausible and reasonable to the average person, you know. And so, there's this kind of like clever selection of which topics to get behind, right, instead of just, I don't know, calling trans women "men" in dresses, or whatever, it's like she's defending the "right" of people to not use the correct pronouns if they don't agree, right?. (inaudible) this people kind of hedge in this way, like, when they have a kind of like bigoted opinion instead of just stating it out, right. They sort of defend their right to have -that opinion. - Matt: Mhmm. So, that was very much with this thing with Maya Forstater is, right. It's like she's not saying something sort of directly transphobic, but she is kind of indirectly getting there by being like, "I am going to publicly champion Maya's right to be transphobic. " (Matt) I feel like in the early days she did so much of this plausible, deniability stuff where it's like, you know, "I'm just saying sex is real". Right? And the average person who isn't, like, a terminally online queer is going to be like, "Yeah, sex is real, whatever, like, who cares." You know? It's like not a big deal. (Natalie) Yeah, she was very effective early on at kind of like deciding what it was that she thought people were mad about, right? And so she framed the conversation, "Oh here's why I'm getting backlashed. I'm getting backlash because I said quote on quote 'sex is real'. And so, it kind of seems like if you believe her account of what people are mad about, then it sounds like everyone whose mad is unreasonable because they are mad at her for taking this kind of - taking what? An abstract, philosophical position about the metaphysics of biological sex? Like, is that what people are mad about? No, right? It's of course not that because she is intervening in this social and political debate, right, on the side that wants trans people functionally to not exist in public life, or not to be acknowledged in public life.