J.K. Rowling Shows Her Ignorance Once Again, but Why Target Asexuals?
She recently made a post on Twitter criticising the concept of asexual awareness day
It would appear that Miss Joanne Rowling has once again shown that she is completely ignorant of something relating to the experiences of LGBT people. A shocker, I know.
Ok, ok, in all seriousness, Joanne has at least changed up her usual content and has chosen to branch out a little bit and instead dedicate some time to criticising asexual people. I guess being a billionaire, she has so little time on her hands, so she has no choice these days but to go after every marginalised group.
She recently made a post on Twitter criticising the concept of asexual awareness day as “fake oppression day” for people who just want strangers to know that “they don’t fancy a shag”.
It’s not exactly surprising that she would come out with something like this. There is a lot of hatred of asexual people within the “gender-critical” movement (as can be seen in the comments under her original post). One such person said asexual people are just “mostly people who are on SSRI’s,” while another compared asexuality to simply not liking celery. Seeing all of this articulated out in the open like this by Joanne, though is something else, really.
As usual, though, she is completely ignorant of this topic. For starters, asexuality isn’t simply not wanting to have sex. The graphic she herself posted defined asexuality as a sexual orientation in which people experience little to no sexual attraction while at the same time being able to form emotional/romantic connections with others.
This simple definition is, I think, one of the main reasons why acephobia is so baffling to me and many others. A common homophobic trope you will see is people claiming that gay people make being gay the focal point of their entire existence. Obviously, this is not true, but if anything, it’s even less true for asexual people. Asexuality is so wholly innocuous that getting worked up over it is just pathetic, in my opinion.
Her point about it being a fake oppression day is especially silly to me, given the myriad of ways in which asexual people are treated horribly by society. One of the more horrifying examples of this and something many ace people can unfortunately attest to is the fact that we are often subject to corrective rape in order to “correct” our asexuality.
When someone discloses that they are asexual, one of the more common response is that the asexual person simply hasn’t had good sex and that if they had, they would enjoy it. This goes hand-in-hand with the forced/unwanted sexualisation that many asexual people go through.
Setting this aside, though, many people in the comments to Joanne’s post did actually point out that you can be asexual and gay, straight, etc. This is an obvious point (that was actually mentioned in the very graphic that Joanne posted): being asexual doesn’t mean someone can’t form romantic connections with people. It simply means that they don’t experience the same level of sexual attraction that non-asexuals do.
She questioned this, acting surprised and confused about how one would know they are gay if they don’t experience sexual attraction. This actually represents another homophobic trope, which is viewing gay/LGBT people as being strictly sexual and not even thinking about romance or love. Given that Joanne often fashions herself as a defender of gay/lesbian rights, you would have thought that she would know better than this.
I actually saw someone bring this point up on Twitter, arguing that the reason why people are acephobic is that it flies in the face of their narrative about LGBT people being obsessed with sex and people’s genitals. Honestly, this is fairly hard to argue against in my opinion, given what Joanne commented in her original post.
Again, there are a number of ways in which asexual people are treated horribly on a societal level. Another example of this is the total lack of asexual representation in media. Look at all the media we see, from film and TV to books and video games; there is barely any asexual representation, and it’s only in very recent years that this has been changing slightly.
Even when there is asexual representation in media, it’s often portrayed as being a negative trait, going as far to imply that being asexual means there is something wrong with the person. This goes back to the point about asexuality and corrective rape that I mentioned earlier.
Something else that I do want to touch on here because I do think it’s relevant is that Joanne also made a post about Russell Brand in response to him being charged with rape and sexual assault in relation to allegations made against him as far back as 1999. This comes after much reporting, and even a documentary was made that explored some of these allegations back in 2023.
She specifically stated in relation to him and these charges that “it’s always the ones you most expect,” only for many of her followers to denounce her as some crazy man-hating feminist.
Now, to me, this is unsurprising since the anti-trans crusade that she has been on for the last few years is always going to attract misogynists, and this is what we’ve seen from some of her supporters. There were tons of comments from people saying they agree with her on the trans stuff but hate the fact that she is a feminist, and one rather amusing comment stated she was dragging him through the mud. You’d hope that Joanne would do some introspection in response to this, but I won’t hold my breath.
At the end of the day, what I really think Joanne and her outburst against asexual people shows is that transphobia and the transphobic movement will never just stop at trans people; they will always have to find a new target because the movement is fundamentally irrational.
Sure, they might claim that they are opposed to trans people for any number of reasons, but all of it is nonsense because Transphobia is rooted in fear of the other and the not understood. Even if trans people were gotten rid of, people like Joanne would simply move onto another target, and one of those, as we’ve now seen, is asexuals.
