Is J. K. Rowling’s New Book ‘Transphobic’?
It’s strange which lessons you remember from childhood and which you forget. For example, I do remember being told not to judge a book by its cover. I don’t remember being taught not to judge a book by three words used by one reviewer in a newspaper that I don’t normally read. I don’t remember being taught not to seize on three such words to proclaim that whoever penned them ought to be dead. Whether I have my parents, teachers, or creator to thank — I somehow managed to acquire this pearl of wisdom.
The Daily Telegraph’s Jake Kerridge wrote that J. K. Rowling’s new book, Troubled Blood, written under the male pseudonym Robert Galbraith, is about a “transvestite serial killer.” The novel’s moral, he avers, “seems to be: never trust a man in a dress.” Reading these words, I thought, Hmm, you know, I think I’ll read it and decide what the moral is for myself, thank you very much. Only two days before, I had lost confidence in the Daily Telegraph reviews section when I saw that another writer there enthused that Cuties — a film that blatantly and indefensibly sexualizes preteen girls — had “pissed off all the right people” in an “age so terrified of child sexuality.” (Maybe in the interest of the Telegraph, the young should be taught not to judge a paper by its reviewers.)
In any case, whatever Kerridge’s shortcomings as an interpreter of moral lessons in crime novels, the usual miserable cretins at Pink News — a pathetically sloppy LGBTQ+ propaganda website, which never fails to out-embarrass itself — seized on the three words “transvestite serial killer” and reported that Troubled Blood (a book they had not read) was “about a murderous cis man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims.” This immediately prompted the Twitter hashtag #RIPJKRowling, signifying that the author responsible for this “transphobic” work — a work of fiction — ought to be treated as if she were dead, which obviously she ought to be.
The pile-on was fast and predictable and included a lot of famous and nearly famous people, each one more pathetic and illiterate than the last. My favorites were the blond-haired, blue-eyed identical twins “Jedward” — who evidently share a brain as well as a name — who suggested that the book would be “perfect to burn next to a Romantic fire,” along with, one presumes, the entire Jewish canon.
What J. K. Rowling is now experiencing recalls what Salman Rushdie endured in the early ’90s after his depiction of Mohammed in The Satanic Verses. Rowling has a fatwa on her head — put there by the most unserious, hateful, and unreasonable people that our sick and sorry culture has spat out. Never mind that Hitchcock’s Psycho and Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs also feature male killers who wear women’s clothing, obviously this book, which many of its harshest critics had not, read was much worse. This is obvious because of the woman who wrote it. That terrible, monstrous “rat,” “witch,” “b****,” “c***” J. K. Rowling.
But, according to Nick Cohen, who reviewed Troubled Blood after actually reading the book, “transvestism barely features” in the plot, though “when it does, nothing is made of the fact that the killer wears a wig and a woman’s coat (not a dress) as a disguise when approaching one of his victims.” Cohen describes the work, which is the fifth installment in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike crime series, as a “900-page novel that is Dickensian in its scope and gallery of characters.” It tells the tale of Strike and his business partner Robin Ellacott, who are “hired by a middle-aged woman to investigate the disappearance of her mother in the 1970s.” A character called Dennis Creed (the so-called transvestite) is investigated, because he was thought guilty at the time. But “a good dozen other” suspects are also investigated. Cohen then quotes a paragraph that Kerridge distorted (thereby giving the activists fodder for their anti-Rowling campaign):
He had his failures you know. Penny Hiskett, she got away from him and gave the police a description in ’71, but that didn’t help them much. She said he was dark and stocky, because he was wearing a wig at the time and all padded out in a woman’s coat. They caught him in the end because of Melody Bower. Nightclub singer, looked like Diana Ross. Creed got chatting to her at the bus stop, offered her a lift, then tried to drag her into the van when she said no. She escaped, gave the police a proper description and told them he’d said his house was of Paradise Park.
He concludes, “You have to search hard to find a justification for the belief that the book’s moral ‘seems’ to be ‘never trust a man in a dress.’” But don’t take Cohen’s word for it! Why not find out for yourself? The one immensely satisfying aspect of this whole debacle, of course, is that Troubled Blood is now an Amazon bestseller.
