Oh, for a cloak of invisibility right about now.
JK Rowling made an embarrassing Twitter blunder on Friday when she accidentally tweeted about "f--king up" transphobic people while reviewing a 9-year-old's art work.
The Harry Potter author is currently judging an online competition for children to illustrate her new story, "The Ickabog", and has been offering sweet feedback to the young entrants on Twitter.
But on Friday, she appeared to copy and paste an expletive-laden passage from a news report while replying to one little girl — and hit send before she realized.
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View Story"I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he'd said he wanted to 'f--k up some TERFs' was just 'bravado.' #TheIckabog", the wince-inducing tweet read.
The offending passage was taken from a news story in the UK, regarding a 2017 incident in which a transwoman and transactivist named Tara Wolf was convicted of striking a 60-year-old woman after posting on Facebook that she wanted to "f--k up some TERFs" — AKA "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists".
Rowling instantly deleted the tweet, apologizing: "(Sorry about the random and totally unconnected sentence that made its way in there. I accidentally pasted in part of a very un-Ickaboggish message I'd just received)", and even sent a signed book to the little girl of the mom who tweeted her artwork.
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 @jk_rowling
Alas, as Rowling has been accused of being a TERF before, critics were quick to call her out.
Many asked why she was reading the news story, who she was supposed to message and about what; but most offensively to her opponents was the fact the passage she pasted had misgendered Wolf as a he, rather than a she.
The Brit went on the defensive: "I'm going to say this once and I'm going to say it calmly and politely. I certainly didn't mean to paste a quotation from a message about the assault of Maria Maclaughlin into a tweet to a child, especially given the language used by the person convicted of the crime."
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View Story"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."
Rowling even got embroiled in a Twitter argument with — and threatened to set her lawyers on — one activist who claimed she "could no longer be trusted around children."
Unless you want to hear from lawyers, you might want to rethink that tweet. I'm not wasting time arguing with wilful misrepresentations of my views on transgenderism - your timeline shows you're not big on truth - but making serious insinuations like this comes with consequences.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020 @jk_rowling
Truth has always been far more important to me than clickbait, Nicola. Please provide your evidence that a) I can't be trusted around children and b) that I 'attack trans folks'.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020 @jk_rowling
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
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020 @jk_rowling
1/2
of your published claims that 1) I cannot be trusted around children and 2) that I have 'attacked trans people.'
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020 @jk_rowling
In December, Rowling found herself in the middle of another Twitter storm, involving another gender identification incident.
When 45-year-old Maya Forstater was fired after claiming that "men cannot change into women" on her personal twitter account, Rowling tweeted her support of the woman, saying she had been forced out of her job "for stating that sex is real"; "JK Rowling is a TERF" began trending almost immediately afterward.
The year previous, the children's author came under fire for liking a tweet calling trans women "men in dresses"; a rep later said she accidentally liked it while holding her phone incorrectly.
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