DON’T SUPPORT JK ROWLING.

I remember when Japanese whaling was discussed, one person wrote a letter to the paper saying that their next car, camera or whatever else would not be from Japan. I am anything but anti-Japanese and I say that what this person needs to remember is, there’s Greenpeace in Japan, and not all Japanese people support whaling or even eat whale meat, and Japan is not the only country that does whaling; there’s a few others. You can be pro-Japanese and anti-whaling. And you might refuse to buy a Japanese camera, but if the people who make them don’t eat whale meat, it will have no impact.

I saw a quotation that I thought made more sense which was, “Don’t tell someone you love them and then vote for a person or party that will hurt them.” So, if you lived in Australia and had an LGBTIQA family member who you loved, but voted Liberal, or worse still, one notion (the party can say that it has a staffer who is openly gay, but being gay does not mean that you are left-wing), it is not the same as going whale watching or swimming with dolphins and saying you love them, yet driving a Japanese car, watching a Japanese television or doing anything else Japanese.

I know that many children, teenagers and even some adults like Harry Potter, but JK Rowling’s transphobic statements, and they are transphobic and ill-informed should put anybody off buying anything related to him. Firstly, when JK Rowling took exception to the term “People who menstruate,” she ignored something. Females typically begin menstruating anywhere between the ages of around 9 and 12, but a female is not a woman until she reaches the age of legal majority, so bang goes her first assertion that they used to be called women. Someone criticized me for being critical of a post that mentioned autistic kids when those mentioned were 20 and 18, and I said that they were not children they were young adults.

What people forget is, some transmen do not have bottom surgery and nor do some transwomen.

Every time somebody purchases a Harry Potter book or other merchandise, it benefits JK Rowling. And she herself said that whenever she is criticized, she looks at her royalties. Now, it’s one thing to say to a child or teenager who is being bullied, “Look, you won first prize in this competition, so what’s more important, what a bully says or what a judge says?” but JK Rowling is simply arrogant. I remember, when I was in Year Eight, a nasty bully said to me, “You might know Japanese, but you can’t speak it,” but when I went to Japan, a Japanese woman whom I wasn’t facing didn’t clock that a question from me was asked by a learned speaker of Japanese, not a native speaker. So, in that case, all I can say is, the bully just wanted to drag me down, and yes, the fact that a Japanese woman didn’t clock that I wasn’t Japanese should matter more.

Furthermore, the term “cis” in my eyes should be no less offensive than “native speaker.” I have had people say, “Oh, but you’d be speaking Japanese now if it wasn’t for the Americans,” and I laugh and say, “I have been since I was 12.” If somebody tells me I’m a learned speaker of Japanese, I am not going to jump up and down and say, “I can speak Japanese! What’s it matter?”

JK Rowling probably won’t change her opinions and beliefs, but she certainly can lose her influence and prominence if people choose to reject them and not to support her.