jonah
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2009
- Messages
- 6,650
Well I don't feel qualified to talk about trans issues so i'm not going to but if you think the author of this article writes in bad faith based on previous writings i'll take that viewpoint on board when reading stuff by them and thank you.
For what it's worth I don't see a good counter argument to the one made in the article posted in that specific thread. I see a denial of a thing that other people are saying is definitely happening (see the responses to the authors cancellation tweet), and a declaration that the writer of the article knows nothing. I certainly don't know which of these arguments is more true in this case but i've followed enough YA stuff over the years to see some truth in the article as written. Ultimately one has to respect the author's decision to cancel her book though.
Also i'm almost definitely in this for the gossip and likely wouldn't have heard of her if this hadn't blown up. I find most YA nowadays to be the same quality as the YA "issues books" of the 1980's but usually with some form of wider world building mythology grafted on top and I probably preferred the honesty of the 80's books.
Good points. My mention of his being a known transphobe more relates to this being on brand for him (as a man who has made a career out of speaking loudly on and continually being hired to write about trans issues, for reasons beyond me, and if this article is to believed, for reasons beyond a lot of trans folk) to rush in to a sitaution he knows nothing about and write a scatching article that quotes no-one who does know anything, really. My cynicism sees a man who loves jumping on any opportunity to insert himself into conversations that are actively not about him, nothing to do with him, he has no expertise on, and is usually just entering into to make some un-nuanced argument about why woke-twitter culture is toxic.
I find it hard to credit what he's saying in this case, because when looking into it, it definitely seems more like the real bullying and insanity has come on the back of HIS article, which incensed a bunch of dopes to send death threats to POC women authors. Which, to me, is far more interesting a think piece than acting like the authors he mentions are she-devils for having an opinion on racism in another womans book. Like, valid criticism, whether you agree on it or not, vs death threats because women spoke their minds on their experiences and reading of a book? Madness.
So in short, I'm not actually coming at you or your reading of this at all more just annoyed because I'm sick of this milo-yiannopoulos-joker.