Today, in a televised rant against transgender people and “cancel culture”, murderous Russian dictator-for-life Vladimir Putin endorsed JK Rowling and her views on transgender people.
“Today they are trying to cancel a whole thousand-year-old country, our people,” Putin said. “Not so long ago, they canceled a children’s writer, Joanne Rowling, because she, the author of books spread around the world, in hundreds of millions of copies, failed to please the supporters of the so-called gender liberties.”
Putin has frequently cited transgender people and gender ideology as why the West is decadent and weak, terrorized and murdered LGBT citizens of his country, and inspired LGBT Ukrainians to stand and fight for fear of what would happen to them if Russia wins. At the same time, Russian forces have engaged in a deliberate campaign of destruction and slaughter, bombarding Ukrainian cities, bombing shelters full of children, massacring the elderly, executing Ukrainian prisoners, and deporting civilians from Mariupol to unknown camps inside of Russia.
Rowling once again proves that TERFs and Gender Criticals (GCs) are incapable of having an “Are we the Baddies?” moment. Saying “Hitler’s a very bad person, and I disagree with him a lot, but we agree on the Jewish question,” isn’t exactly the best defense of one’s own character. Indeed, Rowling didn’t even attempt to distance herself from Putin’s views on transgender people, she only chose to criticize the mass murdering Ukrainians part. She would apparently be perfectly happy with Putin getting rid of trans people instead, though.
Far-right, and religious right Putin aligned elements in the US and the UK have been increasingly pursuing violence and systematic oppression against transgender people in the past year. This has led to an increasing amount of language being used by prominent Pro-Russian figures, such as Tucker Carlson, telling their audiences that transgender people represent an existential threat to transgender people. TERFs, for their part, have been frequent guests on his top-rated cable “news” show.
At the same time, these same conservatives push for a culture more like Russia’s with a strong leader and zero tolerance for LGBT people. The result is a growing danger of a humanitarian crisis for LGBT people in the US if democracy fails, and the GOP seizes permanent power. During the Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing, Republican Senators made it perfectly clear that they intend to end marriage equality, while criminalizing homosexuality and “gender deviance.” Senator Marsha Blackburn’s (R-TN) demand that the Supreme Court nominee “define a woman,” was a clear shout out to TERFs and Putinistas.
Since Rowling and her coterie of neo-fascist adjacent sycophants are incapable of asking the question themselves, I’ll answer it for them since it’s completely obvious to the rest of us: Yes, you’re the baddies. You’re in complete agreement about trans people with genocidal dictator who blames his invasion of Ukraine on transgender people (as do his Western proxies), in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of how Hitler used “Jewish communists” as an excuse for invading the rest of Europe.
It doesn’t get any clearer than that. She may want Putin to lose in Ukraine, but she’s more than happy to help further his mission against transgender people. You cannot separate Putin from transphobia, it is too tightly intertwined with his world view. As much as Rowling ducks and wants to deny it: she’s an ideological fellow traveler with the worst mass murder in Europe since World War II when it comes to the kinds of people they both hate, fear, demonize, and target for destruction.
The SCOTUS Event Horizon for the LGBT Movement
Stop for a moment. Imagine how bad it will be…