Owl Fisher
Authors spit dummy and resign from Rowling’s literary agents
Goodbye-ee! Goodbye-ee!
Wipe the tear, baby dear, from your eye-ee.
Though it’s hard to part I know
We’re quite happy to see you go…
As we learned from the Guardian yesterday, a small group of authors have thrown their toys out of the pram and flounced off the Blair Partnership’s list of clients because they couldn’t bully the literary agency into kowtowing to their inflated sense of entitlement by making some pointless, cringeworthy gestures.
Obviously, the Guardian doesn’t put it quite like that, going instead for more subtle, low-key humour and saying the four had “resigned after accusing the company of declining to issue a public statement of support for transgender rights”.
Wow! They actually accused them of that? How very, um, serious.
I mean, really? They resigned not because of anything the agency did but because of something they wouldn’t do, something there was no need to do. Further down the Guardian piece we learn that not only did the authors want a public statement but they wanted the company to “conduct staff training with the group All About Trans”, a group that promotes itself as “Positively changing how the media understands and portrays transgender people”.
But why? Had the Blair Partnership said or done anything, either publicly or internally, that could be construed as anti-trans? It seems not.
“Unless you understand what it is to be trans you’ve no right to question my existence”
The article by @UglaStefania aka Owl Fisher that appeared with this title last week is one of the worst I’ve ever read. OK, there’s plenty of competition out there but this monstrosity wasn’t published on some unknown blog languishing in a dusty corner of the internet. It wasn’t even on Medium where trans writers regularly publish such torturous rubbish as the piece I blogged about recently. This one by Owl Fisher was on the Metro news site! What on earth were you thinking of, Metro?
I have, on this site, devoted a page to bad arguments by trans people and allies but this one plumbs new depths of absurdity. The problem with it is so obvious that I’m not even sure it’s worth adding to that page, lest it insults the intelligence of readers of this site (a predicament that doesn’t concern editors of Metro, obviously).
