Initially I was team Rowling but apparently her newest book is about a transvestite serial killer.
That's a gross distortion of the book. The "transvestite serial killer" isn't a major character in the book, he's among a rogue's gallery of characters the principals talk to during their investigation. Nor is he depicted as transgender or even transvestite. He's depicted as a cisgender man who used a disguise to get close to a victim.
The 'evidence' that provoked the malice was so flimsy, even Twitter should have been embarrassed to publish it. Pink News, which dominates the LGBTQ+ outrage market, gave the case for the prosecution. According to the first review, 'JK Rowling’s latest book is about a murderous cis man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims', it announced.
It is about nothing of the sort, I thought. And I could say that with authority because I had just finished a review copy of Troubled Blood, the fifth novel in Rowling’s Cormoran Strike series, as research for a long piece on her politics and art I'm working on for the Critic. 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.
The men and women pouring out their loathing of Rowling online could not have read the unreleased book: not that their ignorance bothered them in slightest, as no mob on the rampage in history has ever stopped to read a novel.
One person had read it, however, a reviewer for the Daily Telegraph. And it was his assertion that set off the hate fest. The meat of the book, he declared 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'.
...
It amounts to this. On page 75, Strike is listening to the son of an investigating officer tell him what he knows about Creed.
'He had his failures you know. Penny Hiskett, she got away from him and gave the police a description in ’71, but that didn’t help them much. She said he was dark and stocky, because he was wearing a wig at the time and all padded out in a woman’s coat. They caught him in the end because of Melody Bower. Nightclub singer, looked like Diana Ross. Creed got chatting to her at the bus stop, offered her a lift, then tried to drag her into the van when she said no. She escaped, gave the police a proper description and told them he’d said his house was of Paradise Park.'
Creed mentions the advantage of lipstick and a wig in making women think he’s 'a harmless old queer' when Strike interviews him, and that’s about that. A novelist uses a passing detail to explain how a murderer got close to one of his victims – for presumably the victim who gave the police a 'proper description' did not see him in a woman’s coat and wig. A critic, unintentionally or not, whips up a rage, and thousands allow themselves to be whipped. Pavlov’s dogs showed more critical independence.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/j-k-rowling-s-latest-novel-isn-t-transphobic- -k
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