So Graham Norton’s Twitter account has disappeared. Norton, the popular UK talk show host was last seen offering some seemingly uncontroversial opinions on trans issues that somehow did not meet the approval of Harry Potter mega-author and trans antagonist J.K. Rowling.
It is suspected that Norton was driven off Twitter by a tsunami of abuse from anti-trans fanatics riled up by Rowling and other anti-trans tweeters.
So what exactly led to this fury against Norton?
A couple of days ago, in an interview with journalist and TV presenter Mariella Frostrup, Norton offered his thoughts about so-called “cancel culture.”
You read a lot of articles in papers by people complaining about ‘cancel culture. You think, in what world are you canceled? I’m reading your name in a newspaper, or you’re doing an interview about how terrible it is to be canceled.
Norton suggested that “cancel”; is “the wrong word,” for it. “I think the word should be ‘accountability.'”
Asked about what Frostrup called the widespread “anger, rage and attempts at censorship” directed at J.K. Rowling for her comments on trans people, Norton wondered aloud why we pay so much attention to celebrity opinions anyway. After noting that the uninformed opinions of famous folks — including himself — tend to be “artificially amplified,” he suggested that it might be better to talk to actual trans people and experts on matters relating to trans people.
If people want to shine a light on those issues, and I hope that they do, then talk to trans people. Talk to the parents of trans kids. Talk to doctors, talk to psychiatrists. Talk to someone who can illuminate this in some way. Can we wrestle up some fucking experts … rather than a man in a shiny pink suit?
Shocking, I know.
He continued, again suggesting that he, personally, was in no way an expert on the issues.
Graham Norton shouldn’t be in your headline. If you want to talk about something, talk about the thing. You don’t need to attach a Kardashian to a serious subject. The subject should be enough in itself.
Apparently the very idea of talking to trans people about trans issues was enough to make Rowling pig-biting mad. Or maybe it was the slightest whiff of a suggestion that she was the equivalent of a Kardashian on matters of public interest — though the Kardashians are arguably more relevant than Rowling on this issue because they have a much more personal stake in it.
After lefty musician Billy Bragg tweeted his agreement with Norton, Rowling spat out this barely-coherent tweet accusing both of supporting rape and death threats.
Neither Norton nor Bragg in any way defended death or rape threats, and neither offered their opinions on the proper definition of “woman” (or “man,” for that matter). But evidently Rowling was so distracted by their terrifying beards that she forgot how to make sense.
Tweets from Rowling, with 14 million followers, have a disturbing tendency to precede twitter pileons on her targets, with death threats flowing freely from the anti-trans forces. This is what seems to have happened in this case.
And so Norton is gone from Twitter. Great job, JK.
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The truth hurts when you’re a terrible person, so of course Graham pointing out things that should be “well, duh” hurts the fee-fees of terrible people.
Stating bland common sense shouldn’t get you run off Twitter.
I think J. K(aren) R. was just hurt about being compared to Kardashians, too. Even though they’re family to a famous trans woman and thus know at least something about it, unlike her.
Hope Norton can come back soon. He really was “canceled” for bad reasons by bad people.
I knew JKR would go to “Norton supports rape threats!” as soon as I read him saying that cancel is the wrong word and accountability is the right one.
Not because he’s wrong, really, but people conflate 2 issues. One is abuse, the other is so-called “cancel culture” where people boycott someone’s work and encourage others to do the same.
To be fair, it can be hard to separate these things, because if you’re doing something significant enough to get boycotted by a large group, there will be some people in that large group (or any large group!) who choose to be abusive.
I think it’s easily possible to define cancel culture and abuse as two separate phenomena and to oppose abuse without opposing cancel culture, since CC is, appropriately understood, a combination of accountability + popularity. And accountability is a good thing while no one has the right to popularity, so I don’t give a fuck about the other thing.
What or who the hell is she talking about when she talks about coming out as an Old Testament prophet?
@mybonnieliesover:
What or who the hell is she talking about when she talks about coming out as an Old Testament prophet?
In this context? I’d hazard a guess that she means “bearded man pointing out her faults.”
Uh, Jo, given your new calling in life seems to have you marching in lockstep with Roosh V of all fucking people, ye might want to draw slightly fewer comparisons to people acting like they’re Biblical prophets.
holy shit i’m so fucking sick of this
i just wanna live my life but the UK’s anti-trans sickness is trying really hard to spread to my little country
Let’s face Rowling is fine with cancel culture as long as it’s the things she doesn’t like getting cancelled. She only gets huffy when people point how aweful her beliefs are.
Imagine misinterpreting making a sensible comment with supporting rape and death threats… and she really expects to still be taken seriously?
Also, to me, this is what actual “cancel culture” is. It’s not getting backlash for a horrible thing you did or said. After all, those people usually stay right where they are, and get even more publicity for it, as Mr. Norton aptly observed, and as anyone with eyes can observe time amd again (wearing a face mask with “canceled” written on it in the freaking US Parliament, anyone?). It’s getting bullied off social media for making sensible comments like this, by people who prevail like cockroaches despite all the horrible things they condone and their equally vile followers.
Also, the irony and pure hypocrisy. She complains about anyone who makes even vaguely threatening comments towards her or her FART friends, but something like this is apparently fair game. It’s always bad when the others do it, right, and never when you and yours do it… and people seriously ask me why she is hated so much.
@KMB:
(wearing a face mask with “canceled” written on it in the freaking US Parliament, anyone?).
Small Yankpick: our elected legislative body is a Congress.
Why does anyone listen to a C-list author about…well, just about anything. Except maybe that game she made up for her books.
@MHaha: And even the people who play that game in leagues have renamed it so it’s not called what it was in the books. New people weren’t joining because of JKR’s bullshit like this, current members were increasingly uncomfortable with it, so they changed the name to show they have nothing to do with her.
So in the US, it’s now called “quadball”. Same rules, but since the leagues were already putting inclusive language in all their rules, everyone’s happier.
It’s still goofy, but at least it doesn’t make you think of a TERFF (TERFakeFeminist).
@KMB: Please tell me what FART is short for. I may need to add it to my lexicon.
Ok, because I don’t want to get attacked, here are my base positions…
1) I don’t agree with JK Rowling’s positions
2) That shouldn’t have happened to Graham Norton and was clearly an “oh yeah? then have a load of THIS ‘accountability'” moment from JK Rowling
3) Totally irrelevant, but I love Graham Norton’s show most of the time that I’ve seen (you can always find something to disagree with on a long-enough running show, which is why you should not put people on pedestals)
…but why do people deny objective reality when talking about JK Rowling? A C-list author? She was #1 best-selling so hard for so long that the NYT literally made a children’s list just so that she wouldn’t be top of the list anymore. Objectively, it’s top of the A-list authors.
[…]
”The time has come when we need to clear some room” on the list, said Charles McGrath, the editor of the Book Review, which appears weekly in the paper’s Sunday issue.
[…]
Some publishers have been advocating such a move for months, complaining that a cluster of popular children’s books can keep deserving adult books off the lists. On Feb. 27, for instance, a third of the places on the hardcover fiction list had children’s books: three Harry Potter books, ”The Legend of Luke” by Brian Jacques and ”Bud, Not Buddy” by Christopher Paul Curtis.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/24/books/the-times-plans-a-children-s-best-seller-list.html
Even if her writing style is not to someone’s taste (and it may well not be, that’s personal choice and can be influenced by many factors including personal hatred), which is the best rejoinder that can be given to this observation: what has that got to do with her terrible opinions? Why muddle the issue with extraneous information?
@M Haha, you’re the person who’s said it here, so obviously I am in some ways prompted by you, but I am in fact saying this generally, because I have seen it before, here and elsewhere. People will say she’s untalented (obviously not, wrote 7 (+?) books that sold millions of copies), stupid (obviously not, created a marketing empire worth billions with a b whether or not you think it was ethical, can’t be stupid), faking (what even is this criticism), all sorts of stuff that have nothing to do with “is her opinion on trans people morally bad”.
Of which, we should come to the conclusion “it is” and “she’s directing a mob of millions of followers knowingly and hypocritically, also bad”.
@GSS ex-noob:
@KMB: Please tell me what FART is short for. I may need to add it to my lexicon.
I’m not KMB, but the interpretation I’ve heard is Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobes.
And Sorting Hat Chats on Tumblr and WordPress (who’ve put far more thought, balance, and nuance into interpreting Rowling’s personality-typing system than she could ever be arsed with) have likewise made a point of distancing themselves as well, rebranding the mascots to Badgers, Birds, Snakes, and Lions.
She’s sold a lot of books, but McD’s has sold a lot of hamburgers. So while she may not be C-list in sales, she’s not that great of a writer, and gets an F- for being humane. Also for all that damn camping.
@FMOx: Thank you. I am definitely adding that term. Considering how they stink up a society and their excessive obsession with restrooms/WCs, it really fits.
And Tumblr/WP communities produce very fully imagined worlds.
Nothing from JKR on Norton since. Just a big narcissism binge on Sunday, quote tweeting questions from adoring fans about her latest literature by the pound “masterpiece”
@Big Titty Demon
I’m just going to quote an A-list spec-fic author (Ursula Le Guin) on the quality of Rowling’s work:
In my own words, Rowling’s worldbuilding is lazy, her characters two-dimensional at best, and her plotting is sloppy and inconsistent. Leaving aside the anti-Semitism etc. her work is technically adequate but nothing special.
Rowling’s inhumanity obviously troubles me deeply, and I condemn her public efforts to spread that inhumanity
That said, I’m between Dalillama & Big Titty Demon on her writing acumen, leaning much closer to BTD.
Writing, I have always said, is just like other forms of communication and should be judged on how it affects its intended audience. My inability to understand the nuance of a novel written in Spanish or Polish or Tagalog is not a comment on that work.
Rowling wrote those books to connect with children, and she did. In huge numbers, inspiring a deep (and as a result of later developments, deeply regrettable) love for the author herself.
She may or may not be able to write a competent novel for adults. Just as Picasso might or might not have been able to have sculpt like Michelangelo or Rodin. But adults weren’t the audience she picked and adult novels weren’t the art form she chose to specialize in.
She was good at what she chose to do, and many of the limitations on the work that we perceive as diminishing its value were conscious choices that made the work more accessible to and popular with its intended audience.
Madonna ain’t Mozart, but I can admit (today, not when I was a child) that she was a great artist. AC/DC might be derivative in 500 ways that someone as fluent in the analysis of music as LeGuin is in the analysis of speculative fiction could easily articulate. But those other artists which did more original development of the musical and lyrical themes the band later exploited didn’t sell 50 million copies of a single album. I might rage that more innovative and (to my mind) more musically gifted artists get less attention, but it has to be true that AC/DC was doing SOMETHING right.
I’m with BTD: It’s silly to call Rowling a bad artist, even if as an artist she’s not to your taste (and if you’re an adult, she probably isn’t).
She’s a bad person, and that’s enough.
@Crip Dyke
I wasn’t comparing her to writers of adult fiction, but to other writers of children’s fantasy fiction. She’s no Le Guin, nor Tamora Pierce, Jane Yolen, KA Applegate, Daniel José Older, Andre Norton or Ursula Vernon. She was fortunate enough to publish her books right as fantasy was going mainstream, which got the first book a lot of attention, and after that things snowballed, as they will when there’s a massive marketing push for them.
Re: music, Madonna is a very skilled musician, and has been for decades. That’s a fact irrespective of anyone’s tastes, or her popularity. There’s been musicians not as good as her who’ve been more popular at various times in her career, but that’s not directly about skills.
My 13-year-old-self found Harry Potter exciting and imaginative. My 19-year-old self found the last book tedious – it seemed Rowling was cramming all this backstory into it that distracted from the main plot. So I abandoned it and finished James Joyce’s Ulysses that summer instead – not just because I was a wannabe snob back then. Looking back, I genuinely think Ulysses was easier for my ADHD mind to grasp because I didn’t expect a straightforward plot. (Or my interests changed. But that’s kind of an ADHD thing too.)
Anyway, if we’re going by difficult to read = great literature, then in my books Rowling was more difficult to read than James Joyce! Ergo…
…ergo nothing, I’m being silly. But it’s just to say that quality perceptions of art are always context-dependent. I don’t know if it’s useful to strive for objectivity, but it can help to say what parameters you’re judging by and acknowledge your own point of view. E.g. I would say the early books have a good flow, but the overall series isn’t particularly well-plotted (to be fair, I struggle with that in my own fiction).
@GSS ex-noob
As @Full Metal Ox said, it stands for Feminism-Appropriating Radical (or Reactionary, depending on who you ask; I like that better tbh) Transphobe. Which I think is the best description for what they are, plus a funny acronym. Win-win! And more widespread use makes me and my trans friends happy 😀
Just sadly didn’t find something fitting for SWERFs yet… any ideas?
@Crip Dyke
Actually, she IS an adult author with her detective novels that she erites under a male pen name…
@Dalillama
Omg, I love Tamora Pierce’s Tortall universe! I grew up with the Daine books and later Alanna and Aly and Kel, and they were all so empowering and captivating. I still feel Daine’s rant about dresses to this day. Her journeymight have started my escape from gender norms, honestly. I even read the Numair books now that I’m an adult, and will get to the other book series she has for sure, both Tortall and other. Just lacking time right now…
@epitome
And I would say James Joyce’s stuff is trash, from its tumptytumtoes to its humptyhillhead—for me.
But those are my reasons. Many people disagree with me. He is popular because he can connect to people, just not me: you’re one of them. I respect there’s a difference in opinion. I wouldn’t call people stupid, tasteless, wrong, for disagreeing with me, which is what I see happening with JK Rowling.
And despite not ever wanting to pick up any of his works, the only thing I know about James Joyce is that he had the most marvelous relationship with his wife and wrote her love letters about how he wanted to smell her sweet little fartlets again all the time. I vastly prefer that knowledge to what I know about JK Rowling, which is the reason I don’t want to pick up her books.
@Dalilama
This review is very funny to me, not least because it is exactly what has been said of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-shortlisted science fiction-inspired literature by famous authors relegated to science fiction. I also would say the same thing about the horrendously ableist remake of Flowers for Algernon (itself very questionable but also written in a very different time) that was on the Booker list last year, except that I was also shocked that something so extraordinarily ableist was there in addition to its total lack of originality. And yet, it doesn’t change the fact that all 3 books under question were still A-list books. Our opinions, and the masters of science fiction, and even Ursula Le Guin, could not change reality.
JKR still got the Andre Norton award. She still got the Hugo. She still got countless other A-list awards. It’s, you know… reality. It’s enough that she’s got terrible opinions and is wielding a Twitter mob, to condemn her for that.
JK needs a therapist.
No sarcasm
I’m not Graham Norton’s biggest fan, mainly because of his treatment of fan art, but on this, I applaud him.
@KMB: I’ve never heard anything bad about Tammy, and she was perfectly lovely the one time I met her.
Also unsurprisingly (in case anyone here didn’t already know), her adult novels are transphobic and the “hero” is just kinda creepy.