JK Rowling was hashtagged dead on Twitter for her crime thriller “Bad Blood”. The novel has now been published in German. Is the book a scandal?
OfStefanie Wirsching
Where there is a lot of love, there is also a lot of hate. And it’s not that Joanne K. Rowling, the world’s beloved writer, experiences it for the first time this year. With fine, snappy tweets, she was so angry with Trump fans that they burned Harry Potter books, Potter DVDs and Potter scarves in a furor or at least announced it. But what does it matter to the world’s most successful author. “The smoke from the burning DVDs is probably poisonous and I still have your money, you can borrow my lighter,” she wrote casually on Twitter.
Rowling, 55, is used to a lot. But she lost her casualness last year. This time, however, she did not upset Trump fans, but trans activists with some polemical tweets about the difference between social and biological sex. The storm of protest was so violent that Rowling withdrew completely from social media for several months and at some point felt compelled to comment on the accusation of trans hostility in a personal essay on her website. Then her new novel came out. And Rowling was declared dead on Twitter with the hashtag #RIPJkrowling. “Rest in Peace, JK Rowling”.
Rowling wrote “Bad Blood” under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith
All of this has to be sent in advance in the short version when one comes to speak of this book, which is now also available in German. “Bad Blood”, published under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith. It is her fifth crime story with investigator Cormoran Strike, a former military policeman, handicapped by a prosthetic leg, who has his money in
London earned as a detective. Rowling approaches the novel as successfully and routinely as Strike approaches the new case: a typical Whodunit. What needs to be clarified this time is the disappearance of a doctor 40 years ago. On the way from the practice to the pub, Margot Bamborough disappeared without a trace, now her daughter wants certainty.
If it weren’t for the argument about whether or not Rowling is trans-hostile, the novel would be in England and then in
Germany Presumably published with a lot of benevolent reviews. What Rowling is indisputably good at: telling a story in such a way that you can spend evenings, weeks or even years with it. And what she can do no less: to portray the whole of English society in a cross-section in a mockingly elegant way, here the eccentric ex-lover Strikes suffering from a border line disorder, there Strikes old friend from school days with a humble background, who was in Cornwall would love to seal off everything that is foreign. And in between his sister’s annoying philistine family. The fact that the novel has lengths, Rowling’s pleasure in writing, strains the reader’s patience a little, especially with a rather lengthy beginning – Rowling compensates for it with his furious finale. So – and thus the problem. Or at least what is seen as a problem.
The rapist and serial killer wears a woman’s wig? Is that good for a scandal?
Suspects in this case include Dennis Creed, a serial killer and rapist who has been in prison for years. Another reason why his victims followed him trustingly into the trap was that he wore a woman’s wig and a pink coat. Then the worst awaited the women in his torture cellar. Didn’t that prove that Rowling did …?
It goes without saying that the book entered the bestseller list in England. However, quite a few apparently only bought it to burn it for video. But if you read it now, you first of all realize. How much the public debate changes the view of reading and can influence it. So just read the new Rowling crime thriller and switch off and let yourself be entertained, difficult now. One can see it in a positive sense that it is precisely through debates like this that readers are sensitized to discriminatory clichéd representations of people who have to fight prejudice anyway. So why does Rowling also have to portray a man wearing women’s clothes as a severely disturbed type?
The point is: The perfidious Dennis Creed is not a trans woman, but a costumed man who wears the woman’s clothes to appear harmless. And just as Creed is overdrawn, so are other characters – Rowling shows little mercy. Incidentally, one of the most likable is the doctor’s daughter, who lives in a happy relationship with a woman. There is actually no scandal to be made out of this novel, unless you really want to, possibly to attract attention to a serious topic thanks to the popularity of the author.
Does JK Rowling’s feminism exclude trans people?
But the whole thing becomes ridiculous if even the choice of the pseudonym is used as an indictment. She chose this name, Rowling once explained, because Robert was one of her preferred male names, also because of Robert Kennedy, and because as a child they wanted to be called Ella Galbraith. “I don’t know why.” But now that too is being questioned. Wasn’t Rowling thinking of the psychiatrist Robert Galbraith Heath after all? Born in 1915, made famous for his method of treating homosexuals with electric shocks to cure them of “their illness”? Rowling denies that. Heath was also known only as Heath, just as no one speaks of Rowling as Joanne Kathleen. But as it is with a suspicion, it is only once in the world …
Is Rowling now a TERF, a “Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist”, so represents a radical feminism that excludes trans people? If you want to form an opinion, you’d better do that Essay on their website read and not look for further suspicions in the entertaining novel. In it, she publicly describes for the first time how her first husband abused her. She feels solidarity with transgender women who have also experienced violence and believes that most transgender people are not a threat to others. “Trans women need and deserve protection,” writes Rowling. On the other hand, however, she also doesn’t want native girls and women to be less safe. But if you open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to every man who feels like a woman, then you open the doors to all men who want to come in. “That’s the simple truth,” writes Rowling. At least from their point of view.
Daniel Radcliffe, leading actor from the Harry Potter films, saw it a little differently in his blog entry for the Trevor Project, a non-profit organization that works for suicide prevention in the LGBTQ scene. He owes his entire career to Jo, as he calls Rowling, but now he needs to clarify something. Namely: “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people. ”But what was also important to him: That this line does not mean that there is a falling out between him and JK Rowling. At least the two still seem to be talking to each other …
Robert Galbraith: Bad blood. Ad Eng. of W. Bergner, C. Göhler and K. Short. Blanvalet, 1200 S., 26 Euro
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