Pamela Paul's Boot Creep

The New York Times' "In Defense of J.K. Rowling" is a terrible column whatever you believe.

Previously: The excuses
The cases of Brianna Ghey, Emma Pattison, and Lettie Pattison show that after certain kinds of killings, the press hunts for distractions and excuses.

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Pamela Paul is a bad writer. I don’t think that because I disagree with her ‘defence of J.K. Rowling’ — though I do — but because I have read many of her columns since she became a fixture of The New York Times editorial pages last year, having previously been editor of the paper’s Book Review.

From the gate, Paul’s been a tedious controversialist while claiming to be above that kind of grubby click-chasing. In her first column — The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’ (April 24 2022) — she wrote:

Am I, as a new columnist for the Times, allowed to weigh in on anything other than a narrow sliver of Gen X white woman concerns? Not according to many of those who wish to regulate our culture—docents of academia, school curriculum dictators, aspiring Gen Z storytellers and, increasingly, establishment gatekeepers in Hollywood, book publishing and the arts.

In subsequent columns, she railed against GoodReads critics (“In this frightful new world, books are maligned in hasty tweets, without even having been read, because of perceived thought crimes on the part of the author.”); the use of the word “queer” (turning to Dictionary.com and Oxford definitions to make her case); and what she believes — and she’s far from alone in this claim — is a trend towards saying “women don’t count” (by suggesting using trans-inclusive language is the same as passing anti-abortion laws).

For Semafor¹, the news startup of which he’s a co-founder, former New York Times media columnist, Ben Smith, wrote:

The former books editor Pamela Paul became a blunt object on the opinion page, whacking away at conflicts over cancel-culture and appropriation that had burned their way through Twitter.

The New Yorker’s Molly Fischer quoted Smith’s comment to Paul in her profile of the columnist; she replied:

I don’t think of myself as a blunt object. What I’m trying to do is write about things with a little bit more nuance and complexity than you might find on, let’s say, Twitter.

Paul isn’t on Twitter — she clearly still reads it zealously — and made bugging out of the platform the topic of her second New York Times column:

Yes, we know the discourse on Twitter is vile. Yes, we know that people who are delightful in real life metamorphose online into reactionary trolls and virtue-signaling vigilantes. Yes, the social media landscape is populated by basement dwellers and Russian bots. Yes, everyone is terrible on Twitter.

That angle has been done so many times by columnists with the implication that being paid by a newspaper and writing beneath a deceptively-lit byline photo is a solid-gold guarantee that you won’t be reactionary, trollish, ‘virtue-signaling’, or vile. I read way over the FDA-approved amount of columnists a day and I can say with certainty that being terrible is no impediment to professional success; in fact, being terrible is usually an advantage.

As I’m writing from libel litigation ground zero, Britain, I’m not going to use this edition to particularly pick at what J.K. Rowling is doing. Instead, I want to take a scalpel to Paul’s column to demonstrate the tricks its pulls and why every rabbit she removes from the hat is headless and still kicking.

Paul’s column appeared a day after The New York Times responded to two letters — the timing was coordinated — criticising its coverage of trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people in recent years; one signed by 1,000+ New York Times contributors as well as thousands of subscribers, the other organised by Glaad (the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), itself with a long list of prominent signatories.

In a public response to the open letters — although the New York Times kidded on that it was only a response to the Glaad letter — NYT director of external communications, Charlie Stadtlander, said:

We received the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD and the co-signers of the letter see our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.  

As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.  

The very news stories criticized in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society — to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we’re proud of it.

An anonymous source in Vanity Fair — wow, the silhouette of that person behind the curtain sure looks awfully like Charlie Stadtlander — assured staff writer Charlotte Klein that “Paul’s column was in the works well before the letter; that editors rarely hold columns, and didn’t see a reason to this time”.

Given the turnaround time on columns — from suggesting ideas to an editor to getting them written, filed, and produced — that’s feasible. So let’s treat Paul’s piece as yet another contribution to the trans ‘debate’ rather than a response to the specific criticisms levelled at her employer.

Paul opens her column with four quotes from J.K. Rowling about trans people; here they are with their sources:

“Trans people need and deserve protection.”
(J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues, JKRowling.com 10 June 2020)

“I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others but are vulnerable.”
(ibid., same paragraph)

“I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.”
(ibid., same paragraph)

“I respect every trans person’s right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them.”
(Twitter thread, June 7 2020)

After the quotes, Paul writes:

These statements were written by J.K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” series, a human-rights activist and — according to a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender rights activists and L.G.B.T.Q. lobbying groups — a transphobe.

If the reader clicks through to the links on the phrase “were written” they’ll see that Paul is referring to a single paragraph in Rowling’s essay from 10 June 2020 and a single line in her tweet thread from June 7 2020 but many won’t.

Paul is playing cute here; extracting three quotes from a single paragraph and cutting a single line from a tweet thread removes context, underplays the weight of where Rowling’s arguments rest, and ignores the almost three years that have passed since.

But it’s clear from how Paul describes the sides in this ‘debate’ where she’s going: J.K. Rowling is “a human-rights activist” while those who criticise her are “a noisy fringe of the internet and a number of powerful transgender activists and L.G.B.T.Q lobbying groups…”

Notice that Paul doesn’t name any of these “powerful transgender activists”, of course, as they don’t exist. There is no trans person with the platform, reach, or resources of J.K. Rowling. Nor are there any trans columnists writing regularly in the British or international press, or appearing regularly on broadcast media.

Paul continues:

Other critics have advocated that bookstores pull her books from the shelves, and some bookstores have done so. She has also been subjected to verbal abuse, doxxing and threats of sexual and other physical violence, including death threats.

The critic “[advocating] that bookstores pull [Rowling’s] books from the shelves,” that Paul refers to is a librarian (134 followers on Twitter) who wrote a post on an American Library Association blog in 2020. The example of a “bookstore” that has pulled Harry Potter books from its shelves? A small independent in a suburb of Perth, Australia.

The link on “verbal abuse” leads to the personal Instagram account of the actor Erika Ishii (153k followers) and a video in which she and others say, “fuck TERFs”.

The clip doesn’t name J.K. Rowling though it does include Ishii saying they loved Harry Potter. The New York Times choosing to link directly to Ishii’s Instagram as an example of “verbal abuse” means directing the attention of a huge audience towards them and asserting that they represent someone “abusing” Rowling.

Paul — whose latest column on “free speech” was published two weeks ago — shows how costly she wants some ‘free’ speech to be. Wrote a blog post, expressed an opinion on Instagram, or decided what books to stock three years ago? Your freedom of speech is dangerous; Pamela Paul’s is righteous.

It would be ludicrous and demonstrably untrue to claim that Rowling’s views on trans people — she would say it’s her position on women’s rights — have not led to verbal abuse as well as threats and behaviour that some people class as doxxing (it’s hard to doxx Rowling given that the location of her home is very public information).

The issue here is that Paul pretends that abuse and threats flow only in one direction and that people on the gender-critical side of the ‘debate’ have never doxxed, threatened, or abused. You need only consider the ongoing activities of British comedy’s most divorced man to see that is not true. Paul’s column was published less than a week after Brianna Ghey, a 16-year-old British trans girl, was killed in her local park.

Paul goes on:

Now, in rare and wide-ranging interviews for the podcast series “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” which begins next week, Rowling is sharing her experiences. “I have had direct threats of violence, and I have had people coming to my house where my kids live, and I’ve had my address posted online,” she says in one of the interviews. “I’ve had what the police, anyway, would regard as credible threats.”

That series, presented by Megan Phelps-Roper — who left the Westboro Baptist Church — is a production of The Free Press, the media startup led by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss. Paul doesn’t mention that — Weiss is a former colleague, who she’s interviewed on stage in the past — or make it clear to her readers that she has been given a preview of the podcast.

The phrase “rare and wide-ranging interviews” gives the column the sense of a promo for The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling even as Paul pretends that she just happens to have alighted on this topic at a convenient time.

Paul cranks up the rhetoric dial with her next point:

This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of what can happen when writers are demonized. And in Rowling’s case, the characterization of her as a transphobe doesn’t square with her actual views.

This is an elision of the Iranian fatwa against Salman Rushdie and last year’s attempt to assassinate him with the criticism of Rowling. Paul uses that blunt, shocking, and highly contestible comparison to hustle the reader past the fact that she’s not going to actually define what she thinks a transphobe is and will engage in more obfuscation about what Rowling has and hasn’t said:

So why would anyone accuse her of transphobia? Surely, Rowling must have played some part, you might think. The answer is straightforward: Because she has asserted the right to spaces for biological women only, such as domestic abuse shelters and sex-segregated prisons. Because she has insisted that when it comes to determining a person’s legal gender status, self-declared gender identity is insufficient. Because she has expressed skepticism about phrases like “people who menstruate” in reference to biological women. Because she has defended herself and, far more important, supported others, including detransitioners and feminist scholars, who have come under attack from trans activists. And because she followed on Twitter and praised some of the work of Magdalen Berns, a lesbian feminist who had made incendiary comments about transgender people. 

Paul is not presenting anything like a full picture of Rowling’s arguments; just as she cherry-picked a single paragraph from an essay and a single line from a tweet thread, both from three years ago, she’s omitting lots of much harder and more pointed statements and actions Rowling has taken. When Paul quotes Rowling she is deliberately excluding everything that comes after “but…” and the same applies to other witnesses for the defence that she calls:

There is no evidence that [Rowling] is putting trans people “in danger,” as has been claimed, nor is she denying their right to exist.

Take it from one of her former critics. E.J. Rosetta, a journalist who once denounced Rowling for her supposed transphobia, was commissioned last year to write an article called “20 Transphobic J.K. Rowling Quotes We’re Done With.” After 12 weeks of reporting and reading, Rosetta wrote, “I’ve not found a single truly transphobic message.” On Twitter she declared, “You’re burning the wrong witch.”

While Rosetta claimed in a Twitter thread posted in November 2022 that she abandoned an attempt to write a listicle of “transphobic J.K. Rowling tweets” after spending three months working on it, no one who knows anything about modern journalism/isn’t pretending not to finds that credible. Three months on a listicle? And for what publication? Rosetta won’t say.

She’s written for HuffPost in the past and now writes for AfterEllen, but even people on the gender-critical side are highly sceptical about her. The New York Times has not subjected Rosetta’s claims to the same level of scrutiny as a Mumsnet forum poster.

Echoing Rosetta’s claim that she could find not a hint of transphobia in Rowling’s books, Paul writes:

For the record, I, too, read all of Rowling’s books, including the crime novels written under the pen name Robert Galbraith, and came up empty-handed. Those who have parsed her work for transgressions have objected to the fact that in one of her Galbraith novels, she included a transgender character and that in another of these novels, a killer occasionally disguises himself by dressing as a woman. Needless to say, it takes a certain kind of person to see this as evidence of bigotry.

Troubled Blood, the first Cormorant Strike novel published by Rowling (as Robert Galbraith) after she posted her 2020 essay features a male villain who dresses as a woman. Laura Bradley for The Daily Beast wrote that the book…

… frames Creed’s interest in women’s clothing as the result of abuse he suffered as a child, and casts him as a voyeur who uses the cloak of womanhood for his own twisted purposes—again, pernicious anti-trans tropes.

Jake Kerridge, writing in The Daily Telegraph of all places, said:

The meat of the book is the investigation into a cold case: the disappearance of GP Margot Bamborough in 1974, thought to have been a victim of Dennis Creed, a transvestite serial killer. 

One wonders what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress.

Rowling wrote on Galbraith’s website that Creed “was loosely based on real-life killers, Jerry Brudos and Russell Williams — both master manipulators who took trophies from their victims” and Nick Cohen — yeah, that one — argued in a piece for The Spectator that:

No honest person who takes the trouble to read it can see the novel as transphobic. But then honest people are hard to find in a culture war.

His conclusion is a peach given the circumstances of his own departure from The Observer and that paper’s ongoing treatment of women who complained:

… Rowling’s latest work honestly mirrors her online life. She knows, as her characters know, that women who speak out of turn find themselves alone in a free-fire zone.

The latest Strike book The Ink Black Heart is 1,034 pages long, heavy with imagined online chats and social media interactions; the case is the murder of a “popular cartoonist” who is persecuted online after being criticised for racism, ableism and transphobia (there’s a bit about “a hermaphrodite worm”).

Rowling said on Galbraith’s website that she had written the book before her experience of social media changed:

Although I have to say when it did happen to me, those who had already read the book in manuscript form were [like] – are you clairvoyant? I wasn't clairvoyant, I just – yeah, it was just one of those weird twists. Sometimes life imitates art more than one would like.

It’s scarcely believable given how specific, detailed, and axe-grinding the novel is on the page. Paul’s shrugging is a different kind of ludicrous though; if I were her editor — a thought that hits like a waking nightmare — I would have red-penned the phrase “a certain kind of person”. Say what you mean or don’t say it at all, Pamela. We’re writing for humans, not testing dog whistles.

But then, Paul is all about insinuation. She uses Phelps-Roper’s presence as the host of The Witch Trial of J.K. Rowling to compare the author’s critics with the fanatical members of the Westboro Baptist Church:

Those who accuse Rowling of punching down against her critics ignore the fact that she is sticking up for those who have silenced themselves to avoid the job loss, public vilification and threats to physical safety that other critics of recent gender orthodoxies have suffered.  

Social media is then leveraged to amplify those attacks. It’s a strategy Phelps-Roper recognizes from her days at Westboro. “We leaned into whatever would get us the most attention, and that was often the most outrageous and aggressive versions of what we believed,” she recalled.

The levelling out or total erasure of power dynamics is a common move among columnists; individuals with tiny followings on social media are raised up to be equal in reach and privilege as famous authors and sinecured commentators. The voice of even a single critic of Rowling is absent from Paul’s column; it’s so she can paraphrase and frame their positions as she fancies.

Paul makes statements that are demonstrably untrue regardless of where you sit in the ‘debate’:

Despite media coverage that can be embarrassingly credulous when it comes to the charges against Rowling, a small number of influential journalists have also begun speaking out in her defense [sic]. Here in America, Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic tweeted last year, “Eventually, she will be proven right, and the high cost she’s paid for sticking to her beliefs will be seen as the choice of a principled person.”

In the UK, gender-critical voices have prominent positions in the press and most of the major newspapers come from that perspective, with the occasional exception of The Guardian and The Independent. The Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail take strongly anti-trans positions on a daily basis. In the US, The Atlantic has published lots of gender-critical pieces for years.

But for Paul’s premise to work, she has to set up a situation where trans rights activists have been winning and now “the tide is turning”. She writes…

In Britain the liberal columnist Hadley Freeman left The Guardian after, she said, the publication refused to allow her to interview Rowling. ​​She has since joined The Sunday Times, where her first column commended Rowling for her feminist positions. Another liberal columnist for The Guardian left for similar reasons; after decamping to The Telegraph, she defended Rowling, despite earlier threats of rape against her and her children for her work.

… while pretending that The Guardian isn’t an outlier rather than an exemplar of how UK media covers trans people.

The column returns again to Paul’s underlying argument that some free speech is fine because she likes it but other speech should be locked up and ignored:

Millions of Rowling’s readers no doubt remain unaware of her demonization. But that doesn’t mean that — as with other outlandish claims, whether it’s the Big Lie or QAnon — the accusations aren’t insidious and tenacious. The seed has been planted in the culture that young people should feel that there’s something wrong with liking Rowling’s books, that her books are “problematic” and that appreciating her work is “complicated.” In recent weeks, an uproar ensued over a new “Harry Potter” video game. That is a terrible shame. Children would do well to read “Harry Potter” unreservedly and absorb its lessons.

That first line (“Millions of Rowling’s readers no doubt remain unaware…”) is an attempt to shove aside the fact that the author’s work still sells very well as do new extensions of the ‘Wizarding World’ such as the new Hogwarts game. It’s the kind of cancellation of which we all might dream.

By raising “the Big Lie” — comparing trans people and their allies to Nazis — and QAnon, Paul is tying together the existence of trans people to conspiracy theory and implying that a coordinated, “insidious and tenacious” campaign is afoot. The claim that “children would do well to read ‘Harry Potter’ unreservedly and absorb its lessons” is facile sloganeering; we shouldn’t teach children to read any book “unreservedly”.

Paul quotes Rowling’s speech from 2016 when she accepted the PEN/Allen Foundation Award for Literary Service…

My critics are at liberty to claim that I’m trying to convert children to satanism, and I’m free to explain that I’m exploring human nature and morality or to say, ‘You’re an idiot,’ depending on which side of the bed I got out of that day.

… but she doesn’t believe that. Every word of her column is dedicated to arguing that those she disagrees with should shut up and go away.

She concludes:

Defending those who have been scorned isn’t easy, especially for young people. It’s scary to stand up to bullies, as any “Harry Potter” reader knows. Let the grown-ups in the room lead the way. If more people stood up for J.K. Rowling, they would not only be doing right by her; they’d also be standing up for human rights, specifically women’s rights, gay rights and, yes, transgender rights. They’d also be standing up for the truth.

It’s an attempt at putting a neat bow on the column but it’s hard to wrap ribbon around a pile of steaming shit. Only a columnist — especially a New York Times columnist — would attempt to argue that writing a defence of a multi- multi-millionaire who has no shortage of defenders and fans is anything resembling bravery. Near the end of The New Yorker’s profile of her, Paul says:

If people on the fringe are accusing me of ‘making straw-man arguments’ or ‘both-siderism’ or ‘false equivalency’ or ‘just asking questions’ or ‘concern-trolling’—and please put scare-quotes around those things—then I know that I’ve done something right, because it means I’ve written something smart and complicated.

I’m here on the fringe and I see nothing smart or complicated, just a woman who wants to believe that.

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Thanks to DKD for reading the draft today.

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1. I have many issues with Semafor and I need to write about them soon.