We’re all Mudbloods now

Of Joanne, the less said, the better. Once one has outed oneself (again, and again, and again) as a fascist — a gleeful, cruel-hearted fascist, who has made it abundantly clear that any principles she espoused in her novels were a ruse, a means to accrue capital; and that having accrued that capital, she is immune to concerns of “tarnishing her legacy” or whatever else — well, checkmate, I guess. She sits upon the enormous mountain of wealth we handed her; she’s not giving it back; and she’ll continue to use it, and all future Wizarding World revenues, to fund anti-trans legislation until she is dead.

And as she repeatedly underlines in her social media posts, because we have given that money to her, Joanne has ceased to consider whatever it is we think of her. (So she claims, anyway.) The transaction is complete; we paid her, and that was the point of the whole thing. The Gringotts robbery, except she wasn’t looking for horcruxes. She was just there for the gold.

I find myself, instead, thinking of intersex people.

I’ll probably make some mistakes in what I’ll express next because, gods know, I am far from an expert in either the legal or medical particulars here. But it occurs to me that the machinations of Joanne’s ruling, and similar rulings all over the world, are to an extent legible — they are cruel, certainly, and they deny certain freedoms to all people.

But: they perceive a world in which there are two types of human beings, as defined by their gene code, and in which that gene code always punches out a penis or a vulva in utero, and that’s that. The intent of the ruling is to remove the premise that one’s identity can differ from one’s gene code, and so it establishes a set of rules that can theoretically be followed, if one removes the pesky asterisk of freedom of self-determination from the equation.

The ruling is intended to flatten identity — that’s one whole problem, and there’s been plenty of rightful outrage about that one. I keep thinking about two other problems, which have also bubbled up in the conversation:

The first thing my mind keeps wandering back to is how this legal outcome also flattens genetics, the scientific stalwart upon which it is theoretically based. What happens, for example, to an intersex person who has lived as a woman since she was a child, and had testicles removed from her belly at a young age but retains her XY chromosomal pairing? Does she not now, technically, not exist under the law? Or does the fact that she has external-facing genitalia that read feminine, even though they don’t lead to a functioning reproductive system, give her a pass under Joanne’s law? What if she doesn’t?

I know, I know, I’m getting caught up in the technicalities, when the technicalities are — like Joanne’s stories of a boy wizard — a ruse to get to the real objective, which is the right to brutalize trans people whenever they try to do anything. Surely, if a post-operative transgender woman were to walk into a ladies’ room in Manchester and attempt to use the loo, and Joanne’s fascist thugs descend from the rafters to strip-search her, the presence of her surgically perfect vulva isn’t going to stop them from their cruelties. So the expression of biology, too, isn’t actually the point. The cruelty, as ever, is the point. But I digress.

My second preoccupation is this: look, it’s just ruefully funny to me that the person who coined the term “Mudblood” as a gasp-inducingly offensive slur within her fictional universe is now basically trying to get us all to pass a biological purity test before she’ll let use the bathroom. You couldn’t write this shit (the Joanne part, not the original mudblood part). Well Joanne: I was born on September 19th, so post me up over there with the rest of the mudbloods. In every way I can think of that’s worth thinking about at all, purity is nothing to aspire to. To return to Penda’s Fen again (I promise I’ll do something longer about that, sometime), we are nothing pure. We’re mud(blood) and flame.

And it’s all of us. She’s tried to take rights away from all of us. We’re all of us pagans, waiting beneath the soil of England. Older, wiser, richer, dirtier.

You Are What You Eat

I was so excited, I emailed it out on Tuesday; but in case you missed it, my short story, You Are What You Eat, has been published in the Spring 2025 edition of the Genre Society magazine. Science fiction, baybee!!

The premise for this one was in my head since I got on TikTok two summers ago — basically, “if the algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, what happens if they show us something we’d prefer not to admit that we like?” — and the writing of it was so joyful that I immediately* started writing more short fiction.

*several months later

Now I’ve got a solid half-dozen stories in the bank which, if I take a bit of time to edit and shape them, might become a self-published collection one of these days. There’s no money in short stories — or any other stories honestly, unless you’re Joanne — but writing these reconnected me with some part of “the love of the game.” So: I win!

Also, eat this!

I have a paid tier now! It’s super cheap! As of this Sunday, Andor posts go behind the paywall. I’m that bitch

Re-form the line

I know, I know, elections, uck. I’m tired of even thinking about them. This one was pretty spectacular, though; it was also a step on the way somewhere, not an end unto itself. So: let’s keep it going.

On Tuesday, I resigned from the Liberal Party of Canada (I had joined early in the year in order to vote in their leadership race). The next day, I joined the NDP (whose leader, himself, resigned Tuesday morning after losing his seat, and his party’s status). My objective in the upcoming term will be less to agitate against my own MP (a white guy named Evan, the first Liberal I’ve ever voted for) on specific issues, and more to do what I can to take part in the shaping of an improved NDP — because with the Greens and the NDP holding a miserable eight seats between them, what this country desperately needs is a proper Left party, with progressive policies whose value are clear to Canadians.

This election, in another version of the universe, should have been such a layup for them: wealth disparity, the environmental collapse, the reality wars, broligarchies… and the leftists got eight seats?? There’s a gap in both policy and messaging that is, at this point in my nearly fifty years on this planet, unforgivable.

Like the yokels down south, we pretend we have choice in this country when it comes to our dominant political powers, when we’re actually choosing between a far-right leader and a centre-right leader, every time. (Our centre-right guy is closer to the centre than their centre-right guy, but the margins are slim.)

So yeah. I’m sick of elections too. But by “the next one,” whenever it is, it will be too late.

Gender-detonating links. Do not click these links if you are a boy (or a girl)!

• I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that Scaachi Koul’s page-long paragraph rant about Joanne got me started thinking I wanted to write the above. (Hater Nation)
• This week’s just trust me. Incredibly thoughtful discussion on some of these issues by the guest, Arabelle Sicardi. (The Culture Study Podcast)
• And on we go, re: this whole made up “gender” thing (The Normie Restoration)
• And finally, since we’re currently popeless and I was thinking about intersex people, let’s think about Conclave some more. (Vulture)