[user104658]

Originally Posted by Stu

JK Rowling's been an interesting one. And a far more palatable figurehead for 'contentious' trans views than smelly Graham Linehan. What's intriguing about Rowling is that she's traditionally been a figure of veneration for those who are at the beating heart of this debate, so it's almost like the village chieftess is being ousted, a bit. I try not to follow social media, but it's very telling how vicious some of these folk are being towards what I still suspect is a traditionally well reasoned, intelligent woman. It's been a rather ugly reflection. That's not me aligning myself with her views, either. All I have on this is my heart, and my heart loves and accepts anyone at any stage of that journey for who they are and who they would like to be. The problem is that from what I can take from it she's raising difficult questions, and they seem to be a genuine no-go area for some people.

They will inevitably assume the position of harmful rhetoric for some, where others will applaud her courage in doing so. I've not seen any tweets of hers that I myself would take to be destructive sloganeering etc and am basing most of my character assessment of her on her blog post she made awhile back addressing all of this. But again as respectful as I found that piece of writing, I'll say again that I'll relent at aligning myself with her views. I will freely admit to not having the nous or practice to weigh on in trans issues save for what I've said above based on my gut, my heart. I've just found her a fascinating exhibit in online extremities.

That's a really long way of saying I still find her measurably more palatable than the digital army of "bitch plz, you're over" morons who brandished the pitchforks for her.

Her major mistake was engaging with it honestly. She responded, it gathered pace, she responded again... etc... at some point she started defensively retweeting things that were in support of her, but were coming from questionable sources if you did a little digging, when ideally she should have stuck to the better thought out dialogue and ignored the sniping (at least in public).

It's the only way to do Twitter really. It's a toxic mess of hive-mind idiots and if you don't ignore them, you'll get drawn into a back-and-forth that's a waste of everyone's time. "They'll drag you down to their level, and beat you with experience" as the saying goes.