Wednesday, November 16, 2022

Quips and Quotations (A Whiz of a Wiz if Ever a Wiz There Was Edition)




The reason I felt very, very much as though I needed to say something when I did was because, particularly since finishing ‘Potter,’ I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter on that. And so seeing them hurt on that day I was like, I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way. And that was really important.

--Daniel Radcliffe, on distancing his views of the transgender community from those of J.K. Rowling.














 


12 comments:

  1. One might assume an older gay man would have some empathy towards young trans people, but I don't. I don't understand trans gen nor non binary. Nevertheless, they are part of our society and should be accepted and supported.

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    1. Andrew, as an older gay man have you ever seen the beginning of the 1986 movie version of Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy? He's shown as a little boy trying on his mother's makeup, and then grows up to be a female impersonator. Yet the term "transgender" is never mentioned, because it was not yet in common parlance, and Harvey's character is just assumed to be gay. This is something that's always been with us. It's the semantics, and an awareness of the semantics, that's changed.

      "Transgender" is actually an umbrella term, and is often confused with "transexual", a person who medically transitions from one sex to another. Transexuals fall under the transgender umbrella, but don't make up its largest component. Anybody who regularly presents themselves as a gender of which they were not labeled at birth may be considered transgender. A drag queen is transgender. It's also can be considered a psychological state. A person who identifies with a gender they weren't born into but keeps that thought to themselves is nevertheless transgender, the same way having exclusively gay desires but never acting upon such desires doesn't change the fact that someone is gay.

      "Nonbinary" may be considered an umbrella term within an umbrella term. There's a lot of nuances involved here but it generally means someone who identifies with neither gender, or considers themselves both genders. I read in The New Yorker that nonbinary people now outnumber those who are more conventionally transgender. Given the cost prohibitiveness of transitioning, at least here in the United States, and the constant need for medical treatments (as the biological plumbing fights back) that doesn't surprise me.

      It's hard to know how all this is going to sort out, but a genie has definitely been let out of a bottle, and I don't see it going it going back in without some serious affronts to civil liberties.

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  2. Such sad statistics. We are all equal. I will never understand prejudice, it makes no sense to me.

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    1. You don't understand prejudice, Ananka? That's because you're not running for office.

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  3. Hi, Kirk!

    Right away, I can tell you that Daniel Radcliffe has been in a relationship these last ten years with one of my favorite actresses, Erin Darke, star of the TV series Good Girls Revolt in the role of Cindy Reston. (As you might recall, Cindy and her co-worker friends Patti & Jane are Shady Bunch personalities at Shady's Place, hosts of the series Libbin' it Up with The Good Girls. Erin also plays Mary in another period TV series Mrs. Shady and I are wild about: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

    I won't pretend to fully understand the disagreement between Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and the various groups she has apparently offended through tweets and essays, nor can I comprehend the mindboggling myriad labels and designations now being used to describe sexual identity and orientation. I do, however, understand the cruelty and devastating impact of bullying and other forms of abuse, hate crimes against those who are different, discrimination, denial of equal rights and the suicidal ideations that manifest themselves as a result of the above. The stats you posted are alarming.

    I call upon you to break it down for me and explain in the simplest terms that even I can understand, Radcliffe's position on the transgender community and how it differs from that of Rowling.

    Enjoy the rest of your week, good buddy Kirk!

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    1. Shady, this quote is from about two weeks ago and is culled from an interview that mostly focused on Daniel Radcliffe playing Weird Al Yankovich in a movie currently streaming on Roku (I watched this movie and found it pretty funny, particularly Evan Raquel Wood as a femme fatale Madonna.)

      As Radcliffe's quote indicates, many LGBTQ youths saw their stories told in the Harry Potter books and movies. It's not the first time that's happened with a fantasy book or film (what would Frank L. Baum make of gays who refer to themselves as Friends of Dorothy? We'll never know.) It's understandable. A group of magical people live secret lives amidst shortsighted muggles. What's for a LGBTQ kid not to like? Except R.K. Rowling doesn't seem to have had the LGBTQ community in mind when writing the books. It's an unintentional allegory. I wonder if Rowling blinked once she realized the LGBTQ community represented a significant portion (though hardly the entirety) of her readership. She doesn't seem to have a problem with the L, the G, and the B, just the T. She's said different things at different times, sometimes, especially early on, describing trans people as misguided, and then, once the blowback became apparent, seeing trans people more as a threat, particularly a threat to feminism, as well as a physical threat to females, as she raised concerns that trans women were entering female bathrooms with rape on their minds.

      Enter the heterosexual cis male Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter in the movies. At some point he became aware of the large LGBTQ youth audience for the franchise, and rather than blinking, found himself touched by it, and chose to become a straight-and-cis ally by getting involved with such organizations as The Trevor Project, which, among other things, tries to save suicidal LGBTQ youth before it's too late.

      The mindboggling myriad labels. You mean LGBTQQIP2SAA? Actually, I think that's the shortened version. It's all about self-determination, Shady. Originally, the only two terms that mattered was "homosexual" and "transvestite", two terms coined by people who I believe were neither. If that was all there was to it, then it wouldn't be that bad, except that society had to apply two more labels of a more consequential nature: "criminal" and "lunatic", and for quite a while there being LGBTQ could get you behind bars or in a padded cell or some combination thereof. Is it any wonder that self-determination came to be seen as more appealing? But along with self-determination came disagreements exactly how that self should be determined. Some homosexuals don't buy the existence of bisexuality, and some bisexuals don't buy the existence of homosexuality OR heterosexuality, believing that it's all just love the one you're with. Some transgender people fervently believe in the difference between males and females, and that their brains are just in the wrong bodies, whereas at least some nonbinary people believe there's no such thing as males and females and that penises and vaginas are no more different than having brown eyes or blue eyes. And while we're at it, gays and transgender people sometimes look upon each other with suspicion (read Andrew's comment.) What unites all of these factions, however, is a wariness of a sometimes-adversary, the cis-heteronormative majority. Try not to take it personally.

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    1. Especially to the young, Debra, my reasons for showing all the statistics.

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  5. And I immediately had renewed respect for Daniel Radcliffe. JK Rowling’s outspoken stance is disappointing, hurtful, dangerous, and appalling. Feminism does not need to be defended by attacking trans women.

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    1. There are no transwomen on the Supreme Court, Mitchell, but maybe if there had been, we'd still have Roe vs, Wade.

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  6. So very hurtful, especially from someone with the platform that she has. I can't even imagine the hurt that she has inflicted. It is very sad.

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    1. Daniel Radcliffe is the balm for that hurt, JM.

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