On justice, open debate, and why we need to unite in telling JK Rowling to shut the fuck up

Yes, another JK Rowling take, I know, but please bear with me

If you haven’t been paying attention to why billionaire TERF, and sometimes author, JK Rowling has been trending for about a month now, here’s a brief summary; she continues to say transphobic shit and is now sulking because fans, and former friends, are socially, and professionally distancing themselves from her. Most recently, she doubled down on her baseless convictions about Transgender people, writing a Twitter thread filled with erroneous claims about dangerous gender-based medical practices harming both kids and adults, supported with the same amount of evidence I provided to my friends in the sixth grade when I told them I had an out of town boyfriend - none.

It isn’t worth discussing Rowling’s ideas, because they are unfathomably stupid, and because none of them are substantiated by any scientific evidence, expertise, or even mildly convincing testimony from all of these “Trans friends” she claims to have. What she is writing and saying is dangerous both due to the utter lack of rigour in her discourse causing brains everywhere to atrophy while reading it, and due to her untethered inventions promoting long debunked transphobic rhetoric that puts the health, well-being and lives of Transgender and gender fluid people at serious risk.

What might be more worthy of discussion is whether or not she should have the right to say these things on a public forum, given how powerful and influential she is, and how vulnerable and impressionable her largely young, unwitting fans are. Considering her immense wealth and powerful allies, it’s unlikely we would ever have the ability to de-platform her, but I still think it’s an interesting question; if a person is actively harming a community using their platform, should they be excised from it, much like we’d excise a gnarly looking mole that could give us cancer?

Of course this means I have to talk about that much dreaded subject, free speech. Goddamnit.

It’s clear that the ‘free speech’ debate has been a Sisyphean nightmare since Twitter became more than just a place for me to tweet “why am I so sad?” 7 times a day. But really, access to free speech was a cornerstone in the advent of Democracy, and so, Sisyphus started pushing this cornerstone up a hill thousands of years ago in Ancient Greece.

There are two very distinct and hotly debated Ancient Greek concepts that directly fed into the modern day definition of “free speech”. The part that Karens love to shout about after someone calls them out for saying racist shit is parrhesia, which is the license to say whatever we want, however and whenever we want, and to whomever we want. On its own, this would enable a pretty grim free-for-all out here in our 21st century democratic wasteland. There’s no regulation, no protections, and no ability to stop Stacey from telling the entire school assembly that I didn’t have a boyfriend when I clearly did.

Luckily Athenian democracy had another, equally important value called isegoria, which describes the equal right of all citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly. Theoretically, within an Athenian democracy, the voice of a fishmonger was just as important as the voice of an old bearded white man who liked to wear shower curtains as clothes. They both had the right to a soap box, and the ability to say whatever the hell they wanted while standing on it, even if it was just complaining about the weird fish smell and how the bloody soap that was in the box won’t get it out.

Of course, in practice, there was an extreme imbalance of power in ancient Athens, as there has been in all human cities throughout history and today. This meant that fishmongers were less likely to have the time, education, access, or even the appropriate attire to stand on a soap box and participate in public debate, let alone match the verbosity of the curtain wearers, or the volume of their sick af sound system. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that this invitation to public debate wasn’t extended to women, for whom it was illegal, nor to people who were enslaved, who were considered property, not citizens.

But still, in principle, isegoria demands equal access to public debate, which, without full social equality, can only be attained in public spaces through regulation, and only to a very limited extent. In English speaking democracies, isegoria is implemented all the time in democratic assemblies such as universities, government institutions, and even on social media platforms, where they draw up policies that help regulate certain types of speech which could vilify, endanger, or otherwise prevent equal access for more vulnerable population groups. It’s also important to note that regulations to promote equality in public forums extend well beyond language policy to include procedures, such as allotting equal time for testimony within a courtroom, or public services, such as free childcare that would enable equal access for people with children, and especially women who statistically remain the primary caregivers, or app features like Twitter’s new ‘alt-text’ which allows us to add descriptions of the images we post for people who cannot see, or even building plans such as adding ramps at entrances to facilitate access for people with disabilities. Of course this is an optimistic view, as these forums seem to fail at doing these things far more often than they succeed.

A less optimistic assessment is that the complex, difficult and unyielding work that goes into the implementation of isegoria is generally ignored or sidelined within democracies, especially by Americans, and by those who are powerful and privileged, whose participation in public debate is a given, and who benefit from purrhesia alone.

So, you know, people like JK Rowling, who was recently joined by a wealth of literary magnates in co-signing a letter defending purrhesia, published in Harpers Magazine. Titled ‘On Justice and Open Debate’, the letter outlines their collective fear that the recently heightened pursuit of equality and justice has “intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity.”

I’m thrilled to say that these fears are justified, because the “norms of open debate” in english speaking democracies, and likely around the world, are genuinely under threat. But this isn’t a threat against tolerating differences, it’s a threat against tolerating inequality in public spaces, systems and institutions. The fight is against powerful people utilising their influential public platforms to cause harm to marginalised people, and further serious social inequities. In the literary community, this is a fight against powerful authors, writers and publishers, like Rowling, who use purrhesia to diminish our collective democratic right to isegoria.

The letter features evocative words like ‘stifling’ and ‘restricted’ to emphasise the impact of this so-called attack on the creative freedoms of artists and publications in their industry, without considering the irony of such self-victimisation in a publication that reaches millions of people, and is actively supported by millionaires and billionaires. It concludes that “we need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.” But the letter does no work to engage with how these professionals attained their “professional” status, or why the majority of them come from extremely privileged backgrounds and identity groups. They also fail to define “good-faith”, or acknowledge what the consequences of these so-called “good-faith disagreements” might be for people who don’t come from such privilege, or even have access to a public platform to argue back.

The divide between who gets access to public debate and who doesn’t is so extreme that somehow a children’s author with no qualifications or personal experience has become an overbearing and constantly cited voice in discussions on Trans identity, health and culture. Like her own monstrous villain Voldemort, she’s able to penetrate millions of minds all at once with propaganda, alleging, for example, that people are becoming Trans women because they really, really want to get into women’s bathrooms, when there is clear literature, research and testimony to show that men’s bathrooms have shorter wait times and are therefore more convenient when you’re busting to go (and also that people transition largely for their own emotional, mental and physical health and well-being).

Meanwhile, other powerful villains, with an equally monstrous reach, are defending Rowling’s ubiquity in the field as if it’s a good thing, as if anything else would be censorship.

To answer my earlier question, yes. I think we should absolutely de-platform those who use “open debate” to actively harm marginalised people and diminish our democratic rights. Fuck those entitled pricks proselytising from their grand stands and expecting the rest of us to look down at our flimsy as fuck soap boxes and actually believe this is how it should be. And, most importantly, fuck people like JK Rowling, who use their amplified voices to encourage us to destroy the soap boxes that marginalised people have built for themselves.

But pulling people down from their grand stands isn’t an easy thing to do, especially if you’re part of that marginalised group they’re attempting to isolate and disempower. It’s almost poetic then that Rowling’s own books demonstrate over and over again that people are capable of dampening the amplification of voices who would work to further oppression, as long as we throw our own voices together, united in the common cause of telling them to shut the fuck up.