Viraldice

Someone thought it'd be a good idea to put Donald Trump on the phone with George Floyd's family? Jesus Christ... (The Root)

Julia Roberts does the right thing and supports Black Lives Matter, which should go over real well with her aging white fanbase. (Lainey Gossip)

And then there's Madonna doing whatever the hell this is. (Dlisted)

Taylor Swift is out here making Kanye West look like... well, Kanye West. (Celebitchy)

you guys dont worry! kim k will talk to trump and get this all sorted out asap!

— Chelsea Peretti (@chelseaperetti) May 31, 2020

So remember when Thomas Middleditch did that weird, awkward Playboy interview where he brags about telling his wife that he wants to be a swinger immmediately after they got married? That situation reached its inevitable conclusion. (Vulture)

That time Angelina Jolie owned the Maleficent premiere. (Go Fug Yourself)

Don Lemon tells Ellen to stop texting him about the protests and get her ass out there to do something. (Jezebel)

Meghan McCain makes one of her rare, salient points about how Trump is going to lose 2020 thanks to his administration referring to senior citizens as "human capitol stock." (Raw Story)

"Destruction of property is not a valid form of protest"

Jesus: pic.twitter.com/eorXrjuscc

— Dean Trippe 🦋 (@deantrippe) May 31, 2020

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller apologize for not speaking out to support protesters sooner. (THR)

Did you enjoy J.K. Simmons reprising his J. Jonah Jameson role in Spider-Man: Far From Home? Good, because he signed up for more. (Entertainment Weekly)

Some MAGA douche trolled Chrissy Teigen over donating money to bail out protestors, so she doubled her donation. Suck it. (The Daily Beast)

Kylie Jenner isn't really a billionaire and it was all a ploy to over-inflate the value of her cosmetics line? I am shocked. (Forbes)

Elderberrywine calls Henri Bosco's 1973 book, Malicroix, "gothic mysticism." She was entranced with the atmosphere of the book, she was surprised to find it's set in a real place. "It is the Camargue region of France where the Rhone comes down from the Alps into the Mediterranean, and is still just as empty and wild today." What's your favorite real place you discovered through a book? (Cannonball Read 12)

they're listening SO WELL are you kidding me??? 14/10 for all https://t.co/mokSJBZ0ba

— WeRateDogs® (@dog_rates) May 28, 2020

Arie Luyendyk Jr. and Lauren Burnham -- one of the few couples to have made it from The Bachelor finale to the altar -- opened up this weekend about some devasating personal news:

Lauren recently miscarried the pair's second child.

The husband and wife uploaded a video on YouTube yesterday that detailed their story.

"A little over a month ago, we got the most exciting news and we found out that we were pregnant with our second baby," the video description reads.

"We made so many plans. We bought a new house with more space, we planned how we wanted to tell you all and we envisioned our future with Alessi's little brother/sister.

"We were planning to share our journey through pregnancy with you, but unfortunately we didn't get the happy story we had hoped for."

Said the former Bachelor lead and his spouse:

"We decided to share this part of our journey with you, because well, we share everything with you!

"But also because we hope that by talking about this we can make other couples going through these times a little less lonely.”

The video is 27 minutes in length and opens up on a fun-filled note.

We see Burnham saying that she has “a little secret surprise” and is planning to purcuase two pregnancy tests... sneak them into the bathroom,... mark one as positive ... and arttempt to prank the race car driver, who had accused her of being pregnant because she was “so mean” to him lately.

But then the joked turned out to be on Lauren.

Because one of the tests turned out to actually be positive.

After taking another to confirm it, Burnham, tears in her eyes, says:

“That took a turn that we did not plan for,” turning to the couple's daughter, Alessi, and telling the one-year old: “You’re going to be a big sister.”

Arie Luyendyk Jr. and Lauren Burnham: We Suffered a Miscarriage

From there, after showing an ultrasound to viewers -- in which they learn their eiight-week old fetus is only the size of a five-week old fetus  -- Lauren says that they “didn’t get the best of news."

And her husband says he “is still processing" everything.

After a couple of more doctor visits, the two were given the news of a "missed miscarriage," which happens when the fetus is no longer alive but the body doesn't recognize the pregnancy loss or expel the pregnancy tissue.

As a result, a woman's body may still release hormones and a woman may still continue to experience signs of a pregnancy.

Says Arie:

"It's been a roller coaster of emotions, going from scared a little at first because it was so soon, then happy then stressed and worried for weeks on end, and obviously today was the bad news and it's something you can never prepare for.

"It's been hard holding this back from everybody."

"Trying to pretend like nothing is going on is really difficult," Lauren says in the footage.  "I feel like this is kind of the best way for us to tell the whole story."

Luyendyk proposed to Becca Kufrin on his final episode as the Bachelor -- but then reversed course and asked for Lauren's hand in marriage on the After the Final Rose ceremony in early 2018.

Less than a year later, the reality stars got married in Hawaii.

Please join us in sending them your best wishes during this very difficult time.

Last night, that little pissant Jake Paul joined others who had no interest in actually protesting police violence in looting a mall. Honestly, who f**king cares? It's a distraction from the real story, which is that protests continued to erupt around the nation over Derek Chauvin's murder George Floyd. How did the police react to protestors protesting police violence? By inflicting more police violence. It's a shame that Jake Paul would distract from this, but maybe all those people who clicked on this because of Jake Paul can be witness to scenes of unprovoked police violence around the nation last night.

This is just what was caught on camera:

Here is the video. On LIVE TV the APD just broke car windows, slashed tires, tazed both passengers and arrested both passengers for NOTHING. RIPPED THEM OUT OF THER CAR. #AtlantaRiots #ATLFORUS #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/9XFDEdq7qr

— nina | blm (@imactuallynina) May 31, 2020

That woman in red. THATS how you use your privilege. https://t.co/UTd9oi4uYW

— Mommy Stark (@HolaCarmitooo) May 30, 2020

Share widely: National guard and MPD sweeping our residential street. Shooting paint canisters at us on our own front porch. Yelling "light em up" #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #JusticeForGeorge #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/bW48imyt55

— Tanya Kerssen (@tkerssen) May 31, 2020

This boy had his hands up when an NYPD ofcr pulled his mask down and pepper sprayed him. ⁦@NYPDShea⁩? Mayor ⁦@BilldeBlasio⁩? pic.twitter.com/YtXDOoVckA

— Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) May 31, 2020

this proves that these protests were NEVER A RIOT until police enters the scene THEY ARE THE ONES WHO USES VIOLENCE. PR0TESTERS WERE LITERALLY JUST SITTING THERE PEACEFULLY, FIGHTING FOR SOME BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS THAT YOU CAN'T UNDERSTAND #BLACK_LIVES_MATTER pic.twitter.com/BGM9J5stdO

— BLM ♡ | 📌 (@_jeonanamilk) May 31, 2020

In the last twenty four hours we have seen hundreds if not thousands of clips in which police forces across America appear to escalate violence on the streets for no legitimate purpose. https://t.co/ncfCoZnzh1

— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) May 31, 2020

Even goddamn John Cusack was assaulted by police.

Gonna go out on a limb here and say that John Cusack is probably not a sufficiently dire threat to public safety to justify the use of force. https://t.co/FikIwnnt1L

— Ben Burgis (@BenBurgis) May 31, 2020

Meanwhile, before he turned in early for the night, Trump was out there inflaming.

This is deadly assault. This is attempted murder. You don't get to RUN PEOPLE OVER even if you're a cop. Every cop in these cars should be fired and prosecuted. https://t.co/Ef0idfba1Q

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) May 31, 2020

Let New York's Finest be New York's Finest. There is nobody better, but they must be allowed to do their job!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2020

This about sums up the state of things in America right now, from the former Director of Government Ethics:

100,000 dead from a virus, more than any other country; white gunmen storming a state capital; black jogger lynched; police murdering a man on camera; police attacking peaceful protesters & reporters; a president glorifying violence; crowds burning cars and looting. America 2020.

— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) May 31, 2020

Even by his own macabre standards, Alfred Hitchcock surpassed himself in his penultimate feature, Frenzy. Marking a sense of homecoming for the director, the film’s dark London setting renders the film as one of his most shocking and unforgiving. There’s a disturbing sense of recognition throughout due in part to Hitchcock’s use of some very recognisable locations, albeit when central London was a place of markets and industry. The very character of the city comes to haunt Frenzy, as if its sheer grimy opulence and messiness aids the vicious crimes committed by its chief villain.

In the film, the swinging optimism that gripped the city in the previous decade has dissolved into nihilism as the streets are plagued by a spate of sex murders, the killer’s signature being strangulation by necktie. The sexual revolution combined with the patriarchy has formed a social, psychotic monstrosity.

We follow Richard (Jon Finch), a down-and-out ex-serviceman who appears at first to match the killer’s description and behaviour. When his ex-wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) is found dead moments after Richard was spotted visiting her, the man is forced to go on the run through the gutters of London. How long will it be before the police catch him or, more importantly, before the real killer cannot resist his urges and strikes again?

In the opening shot, Hitchcock uses London for a magnificently underhand ploy. A helicopter shot slowly follows the Thames along through Tower Bridge, the docklands of the city still looking atmospheric but the music and a postcard mark in the corner marking it as a seemingly picturesque, pleasant film.

This turns sharply and shockingly towards the actual reality of the film within moments when the body of a naked woman is found floating in the river’s murky water. The city in Hitchcock’s film is vile but also breathing and excitedly alive. Every wall seems stained, crumbling or marked, the boozers and pubs are grim and filled with greasy drinkers, and the streets are littered with rubbish and lost souls.

It’s as unforgiving a portrait of the city as cinema has ever dared produce. Within this is essentially the crux to Hitchcock’s film and Anthony Schaffer’s script too. Some of its casual, light dialogue feels incredibly disturbing in today’s light but it aids the film, not least in that so many of the men on screen express the same sort of misogyny that they only perceive as legitimately manifesting as violence via the necktie murderer. As one character knowingly suggests, “All blokes are that sort of bloke…” Malice is on every street corner.

Filming extensively around Covent Garden when it was still a functioning market, Hitchcock was, in a way, revisiting his own personal experiences. Being the son of a greengrocer, he would have undoubtedly had experience of the market and its vibrant, bustling characters. Frenzy captures its last gasp before it was eventually moved to the other side of the Thames to Nine Elms only a few years later. Being at the centre of the film allows the director to sketch and create small dramas around the area, a place of transit and working people that is a far cry away from its status today as a square of luxury branded shops and tourist friendly street performers.

One scene from the countless uses of this setting stands out, perhaps ultimately as a last hurrah for the director’s innovative eye before his decidedly average final film, Family Plot. We see the real killer about to strike again, the pathos for the viewer unbearable as Richard’s only hope and true friend Babs (Anna Massey) is unsuspectingly lured into the killer’s flat. We instantly cut to a set showing the dingy building, following the pair upstairs.

Before we can follow them further, the camera tracks back down the stairs and out of the building. For a film that has some of Hitchcock’s most relentlessly voyeuristic, gratuitous scenes of the violence towards women, the decision to not show the killing reveals an unusual but refreshing reserve on the director’s part.

The camera continues on through the set until initially out of the doorway and a cleverly angled edit on the shoulders of a passing walker cuts to the real Covent Garden location. It’s a technique Hitchcock used throughout his career, from the travelling car shots of The 39 Steps to the various cuts that weave together seamlessly in Rope. The shot here adds to the sense built throughout the film that behind London’s closed doors is a quiet but endlessly lurid potential; that dark secrets are hiding almost in plain sight, masked unnervingly well by the everyday architecture and character of the city.

The house still stands today at 3 Henrietta Street, right on the corner of Covent Garden where once a hub of Victorian publishing houses sat alongside the market. The majority of the stalls have gone and the atmosphere has changed beyond recognition but the building is exactly as it was. Next door is a branch of the celebrity favoured restaurant, The Ivy, and even the building next door is now a luxury clothes shop.

In spite of this, there’s still something eerie about the building, ultimately because the director showed the possibility of something horrific lying in wait, even behind the most earnest and respectable of facades.

With thanks to Polaroid Originals.

The post On Location: The door from Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy appeared first on Little White Lies.

A couple of weeks ago, Hannah Brown messed up.

Big time.

She was drunk on Instagram Live and decided to sing a bit of DaBaby's "Rockstar," a song that's very big on TikTok right now.

And while singing the song, she sang the N-word.

With a hard "R" and everything.

The backlash came quick, because of course it did, and at first, Hannah denied saying the word.

She said that she was sure she skipped over it in the song because she never says that word, and maybe someone else said it, but certainly not her.

But if you saw the video, it was undeniable -- she definitely said it, although she did skip over "f-ck," which seems like a super questionable choice.

Like one of those words is 100% worse than the other, and it's not the one she censored herself from saying.

When the video was over and she sobered up a bit, she realized that this whole thing wasn't going to blow over, and she posted a quick text apology on her Instagram story.

A lot of people didn't think it came across as sincere, and many suspected it was just something a publicist wrote and sent over.

But whether Hannah wrote it herself or not, many Bachelor fans didn't think it was enough.

If you've been keeping up with this story for the past two weeks, you know that it's been wild.

Former contestants of the show like Rachel Lindsay, Nick Viall, and Bekah Martinez have all thrown in their two cents, with Rachel even trying to help Hannah do a proper apology.

And fans have been torn, with some cancelling Hannah and others defending her.

But tonight, Hannah herself has finally stepped forward to talk about everything in a lengthy video, again posted to Instagram.

So let's take a look at that, all right?

At the beginning of the video, she's visibly very nervous, which is fair, and she explains that she's been silent for so long now because she was trying to wait for the right time to address things.

Hannah Brown: I'm Sorry for Saying the N-Word and I Promise to Do Better!

She says that right now, when "the death of George Floyd is happening and there’s so much suffering and anger I didn’t want to offend anybody."

But after thinking about things, she "realized that it’s not about the right time, it’s about the right thing," and that she needs to start taking accountability for things and using her platform for good.

Early on in the video, she admits that she does have some notes that she'll be referring to, so it seems like she really is trying her best here.

After explaining what happened in that now-infamous video, she says that "I initially didn’t even know it was happening, because I know it is wrong to say the N-word in a song, and I couldn’t imagine I had used it, so I immediately denied it."

"It is a word I always omit," and she says that while she tried to defend herself, between being "intoxicated" and "embarrassed and confused," she made the situation worse.

It wasn't until the next morning that she fully realized what she had done, and she immediately felt ashamed and embarrassed, so she wrote her apology, which she maintains was fully her doing.

However, she never intended that to be the end of things -- she wanted to gather her thoughts and really speak from the heart, which is why she took so much time away from the spotlight.

In her time off, she did a lot of prayer and a lot of journaling, and she came across a bible verse that read "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks."

"If I can say this word slipped out of my mouth, then what slipped into my heart?" she asked herself.

So she actually hired someone to help her learn about all of this, and she started reading books and listening to podcasts and watching videos of people talking about racism.

"I don’t want to be ignorant anymore," she tells her followers. "I don’t want to be an ignorant white girl who uses the N-word."

To her fans, she says "If you want to support me, do not defend me. Do not send hateful messages to people who are holding me accountable. If you want to support me, just continue to encourage me to do better."

She adds that "I promise you, I will not be a part of the problem anymore from ignorance, I will be part of the solution."

She apologizes once again, "from the bottom of my heart," and promises to keep learning and to keep trying to do better and help others like her learn how to do better, too.

It's an 18 minute long video, so obviously these are just a few of the high points, but it does sound like she really is taking accountability for what she did.

It's also nice that she acknowledged that some people won't forgive her, and that's fine too.

View Slideshow: Hannah Brown Might Be Getting a Second Chance as Bachelorette ... And Fans Are PISSED!

What do you think about her apology?

There are some films you watch when you need a warm hug from a familiar source. There’s no new terrain to explore, no outside world, no alarms and no surprises – they are simply soothing. Since a global pandemic was declared on 11 March, daily life has become so strange that the solace offered by comfort blanket movies is enhanced. In this series, we want to celebrate them, in whatever form they take.

There’s a tradition at weddings – if you haven’t seen it in real life, you’ve probably seen it in a film – where the newly married couple are introduced to a room full of their guests. It’s their first time entering the party as husband and wife, and music plays them in. At my own wedding, we helped choose the music carefully, and we had fun picking a song for this particular moment that might raise a knowing smile in a few of our guests. It was Tony Bennett’s ‘Rags to Riches’. The expansive, sweeping ballad with its soft croon always gives me a little electric jolt when I hear it. And I always hear it in concert with one line, one opening sequence, and one film: Goodfellas.

For the same reason as it seems like an odd choice of soundtrack for a wedding, it might seem strange to describe Martin Scorsese’s gangster classic as ‘comfort viewing’. The phrase entails something cosy, like a warm blanket. For my part, I like those sorts of films, too: Audrey Hepburn in swirls of designer chiffon in Funny Face, Gene Kelly musicals, Heath Ledger and his dimple in 10 Things I Hate About You. But comfort implies something unthreatening, right? Not a brutally violent, blackly comic story of a low-level mob associate turned police informer, which Scorsese took from the real story of mafioso Henry Hill.

From the very start of Goodfellas, the bravura camera work of the opening segment has every intention of hooking the viewer and keeping them wriggling on that hook. Scorsese bamboozles us with the glamour and vicarious thrill of the criminal lifestyle before sending Henry and his cohort on a steep downward trajectory. The restless, roving camera, the dollies, the freeze-frames, the deadpan voiceover, the faultless doo-wop soundtrack; in five minutes it’s pure sensory overload, visual storytelling on so enrapturing a level that any possible stray thought from the external world is pulverised.

On countless occasions, bad or good or just terminally bored, I’ve curled up on the sofa to see the pure, unravelling id of Joe Pesci’s Tommy and his murderous rages; Henry and Tommy bickering in the car as they comically forget to abscond from the scene of mob-sanctioned arson; that unforgettable camera tilt from the ground up, revealing Ray Liotta for the first time, leaning on the back of his car; or the moment where Karen (Lorraine Bracco) bleats, “I thought he was obnoxious.” And there she goes picking up the voiceover, unexpectedly and commandingly taking charge of the story.

I’ve always had a particular soft spot for Karen Hill, the ride-or-die gangster’s moll with lots of brains and a big mouth. Scorsese unequivocally presents Henry and Karen as a duo, working in tandem, and she is afforded a subjectivity that goes beyond the limited viewpoint of the men in this world. She explains to us exactly why and how she’s drawn to the mafia life, and how it excites her; she admits at one point that it “turns her on”.

She even tells us about her early misgivings trying to fit in with the other mob wives, and her fears about prison. “Don’t play the babe in the woods routine,” an FBI agent tells her later in the film. He’s right: she’s no innocent bystander. She’s not willing to let go of this life easily, whatever the costs. Her character – and the way Bracco plays her, full of energy and crackle – makes Goodfellas among the most insightful of its genre when it comes to women.

I find myself ever more drawn to the movie – and to the gangster genre in general – lately. There’s something undeniably comforting about them, in spite of their violence and ugliness. These are films which present a world that operates by strict codes; here the lines are clear. Everyone has their place in an admittedly crooked and morally corrupt hierarchy. We understand how these people operate, and on some level we probably wouldn’t like to admit, we can relate or project or identify with something in them.

Maybe not the part that has them stab someone to death in the trunk of a car. But in a looser sense: wouldn’t it be fun to behave so badly and be rewarded so fabulously for it? To be treated like you were special? To have the nerve to act so decisively in the face of betrayal or insult? It’s the same feeling of forbidden glee that audiences probably had when they first saw James Cagney fall with a thud to the floor at the end of 1931’s The Public Enemy.

I once knew someone who told me that he loved these films, films like The Public Enemy and Goodfellas and Blow, but that he never watched the endings, when the bad guys got their comeuppance. “They always get a happy ending if I turn the film off early,” he would say. But that’s not most of us. Most of us like the thrill of watching people live outsized lives, and the familiarity of knowing exactly where those outsized lives are headed.

There’s another thing that makes Goodfellas feel particularly comforting: familiarity. It’s up there with my most frequently-watched films, and it’s been a regular source of communal pleasure with people I know. Whether it’s my husband or my teenage sister, when we’ve watched the movie together it’s impossible not to elbow one another and pre-empt our favourite lines: “Fuck you, pay me,” and “It was outta RESPECT.”

Now that we’re under lockdown, my sister and I are separated for who-knows-how-long by a pandemic and a whole ocean. So not long after lockdown began, we decided to do a weekly Netflix Party viewing. The app allows you to view a film in real-time together, and to comment on it in a side-by-side chatbox. No surprise that Goodfellas was the first movie we chose, so we could type the quotes to each other in all-caps instead of yelling them at each other. To accompany it, we dreamt up our own version of mob wife outfits, draping ourselves in fur and gold jewellery and low-cut wrap dresses, uploading photos and commenting on them with deep-cut quotes like: “One night, Bobby Vinton sent us champagne!” It brought us together – let us feel a sense of occasion and community around moviegoing that we won’t actually have in person for a long time.

Together, we revelled in the little shared details and trivia from umpteenth viewings, like the beautiful bow on the back on Karen’s black cocktail dress during the Copacabana kitchen sequence, or the way Scorsese’s mama – playing Pesci’s mama in the movie – accidentally glances to camera and bursts out laughing while the guys around her ad-lib, or the nod to Crazy Joe starting a war that Marty would later follow through on in The Irishman.

At this point, Goodfellas isn’t just a comfort movie, but a whole private club that me and my loved ones can share. I think a lot of people (and there are a lot of us) who love Goodfellas feel the same. We get to be part of something – that reprehensible but oh-so-thrilling secret world of gangsters and guns and Lufthansa heists. We don’t mistake Henry or his friends for heroes, but the world’s got enough of those, anyway.

The post My Comfort Blanket Movie: Goodfellas appeared first on Little White Lies.

Children’s book author and billionaire Joanne Rowling has also become known for her transphobic views. Rowling has, over the years, been seen to sympathize with TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) on Twitter, before doubling and tripling down and expressing trans-exclusionary sentiments in her own words. Many of us have long since written Rowling off as a result, yet she still finds new ways to infuriate and provoke disgust.

This was the case today, when Rowling accidentally copy-pasted a line later said to be from a message into an unrelated tweet. The sentence is about an incident between a trans activist and a person the Evening Standard describes as a “radical feminist,” and the text she pasted in intentionally misgenders the trans activist. It would seem that Rowling is passing the time by discussing TERF-laden propaganda and talking points with someone. A friend? A group? Sycophants on social media? The world will likely never know.

lmao @jk_rowling gurl you gotta be more careful with your transphobic copy/pastes while you do marketing for your new children’s book!! pic.twitter.com/vHR0LUoOkO

— ella dawson (@brosandprose) May 29, 2020

The extraneous sentence was tacked on to a tweet Rowling made showing a child’s fan art for her latest effort, The Ickabog. The juxtaposition here feels sickening to me: that so many people, young and old, still put such love and faith in the works of a woman who has proven herself to have reprehensible beliefs. That such exclusionary intent could be amended to such a joyful artistic output from a child.

Can you explain why someone was messaging you about a trans activist, and why they were misgendering her, and why you wanted to copy and paste that…? pic.twitter.com/DPXH7rQfLP

— Max Curtis (@MaxCCurtis) May 29, 2020

transphobia really does rot the brain huh

— ryan john butcher (@ryanjohnbutcher) May 29, 2020

The case Rowling was discussing took place three years ago, in which trans activist Tara Wolf was fined £150 for assault after “striking Maria Maclachlan on the back and shoulder during a protest at Speakers’ Corner.” Actions were taken by all parties involved. Maclachlan seems like a real charmer, even in the phrasing of the right-leaning Evening Standard:

Maclachlan, who blogs and tweets about gender issues, admitted grabbing hold of Wolf’s girlfriend and kicking her, believing she had snatched her camera and thrown it to the ground, adding that Wolf’s partner – who was never identified – had kicked her first.

Wolf denied one count of assault by beating, but admitted striking the complainant, saying she acted in defence of her partner and to prevent any footage being posted online that might make members of the group the target of online abuse.

[…]

Ms Maclachlan admitted that following the event she had sent out a tweet featuring a close-up of the defendant’s face with the words: “Hiya, got any hair restorer while I’m in hiding? Love Tara.”

She had to be repeatedly told to refer to the defendant as female by the judge during her evidence.

The judge in this case also declined to award Maclachlan compensation, and said, “It was notable that when I asked Ms Maclachlan to refer to Ms Wolf as ‘she’, she did so with bad grace – having asked her to do so she continued to refer to Ms Wolf as ‘he’ and ‘him.'”

This was the same intentionally misgendering language about Wolf that J.K. Rowling shared in her tweet some three years later. One of the most successful writers in the history of the world is, on a May day in the middle of a deadly pandemic, apparently still chatting about this event, framed in such a way as to induce pearl-clutching and scaremongering. Wolf, for her part, in explaining her Facebook post, “claimed she made the comment out of bravado and wanted to protest peacefully.”

To better understand why many British so-called “feminists” and others are comfortable with their openly trans-exclusionary bigotry, I often point people to this excellent New York Times article by Dr. Sophie Lewis that first helped flesh out that phenomenon for me. Titled “How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans,” Lewis explores TERFism and how in Britain, a history of colonialism, a long-held cultural obsession with “biological realities,” and a concerted lack of modern social movements have combined to thrust this virulent group into the mainstream. (I rarely commend America for doing much these days, but I have to applaud the fact that here in the U.S., as Lewis describes, “TERFism today is a scattered community in its death throes.”)

Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it’s not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of “other,” and “biological realities” as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)

But having a clearer understanding of why TERFs have gained such a foothold in some British circles doesn’t excuse Rowling’s continued behavior. In fact, because British-specific TERFism has been so neatly dissected is all the more reason someone with Rowling’s influential reach has a duty to better educate herself. Since her support of TERF ideas became public knowledge, she has likely received thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of replies and pleas from her fans and followers to revisit her views. She appears to have done nothing of the sort.

Even worse, when called out for her behavior as she was in the wake of her most recent tweet debacle, Rowling responded by tweeting about “thought crime” and suggesting those who are objecting to her interests are trying to censor her. This also happens to be a favored mode of shutting down conversation by far-right trolls like Donald Trump.

However, I am not – as many of the people now swarming into my mentions seem to think – ashamed of reading about the assault. You should know by now that accusations of thought crime leave me cold. Take your censorship and authoritarianism elsewhere. They don’t work on me.

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020

She also got into a spat and seemed to be threatening legal action against a Twitter user who wrote that Rowling’s transphobia made her dangerous around children and caused real harm, among other claims.

I’m also very much interested in the truth. Tweeting support for someone who is indisputable transphobic is transphobic in and of itself. Suicide rates among trans people are so high due to lack of acceptance, hence transphobia is dangerous to children.https://t.co/0bbb7A5cF5

— Nicola Spurling 🌿 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ (@NicESpurling) May 29, 2020

I’m afraid your lawyers might need a little more than my tweet in support for Maya Forstater, who believes that humans are a dimorphic species, but who has stated her unequivocal commitment to treating trans people with respect. Again, I must ask you to provide evidence
1/2

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020

It doesn’t have to be this way. Rowling could choose not to engage on this topic, since I fail to see how the vital fight for trans rights and recognition could possibly affect her staggeringly privileged lifestyle—save that now she is called out for her toxic rhetoric, and many former fans have sworn off her properties. Or she could learn from other popular writers who impact young adults like Rick Riordan, who listens when his community of readers want to see themselves reflected on the page, and proudly writes such representation into his works. But Rowling’s continued alignment with transphobia and apparent contempt for many in her audience only show her to be self-centered and narrow-minded.

Ah, yes, the occasional “Why did you put gender fluidity in your book your agenda is ruining the story” comment. Perhaps what is ruining the story for that reader is their insistence on believing that a non-cishet character’s right to exist in a story is an “agenda”?

— Rick Riordan (@rickriordan) April 26, 2020

I’d remind J.K. Rowling that she created a fictional universe where the evil villains are a bunch of rotted, fascist aristocrats who oppress others for being different. While we wait to see if she will ever realize her hypocrisy, we can gaze upon the latest fan art reflection of her output.

Dear @jk_rowling. How are you? I drew a picture of The Ickabog and I hope you include it in your book! pic.twitter.com/ISSr30aNOM

— ROU Frank Exchange of Wooloos (@mockferret) May 29, 2020

(image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

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