My youngest son has audio versions of all of the Harry Potter books. Given the public pronouncements of a certain artist, I’ve started to find this problematic. True, one can separate the art from the creator, but sometimes the latter’s hateful beliefs infect the former. This is the case when actor Stephen Fry reads the works of brilliant, principled writer J.K. Rowling.

There’s something in the way he voices each female character, from Hermoine Grainger to Dolores Umbridge, which reeks of misogyny. The way to sound like a woman, in Fry’s view, is to make yourself high-pitched, whiny and annoying, no matter what you have to say. I haven’t banned my son from listening because the books are still wonderful. Nonetheless, every time I hear Fry holding forth, I’m reminded of Liz Lochhead’s poem “Men Talk”: “Women prattle / Women waffle and wiffle / Men talk.”

And if women are going to keep talking, it seems that the least they can do is shut up about serious issues such as their own existence in law. Fry has become the latest self-appointed man of reason to express dismay at Rowling’s involvement in current debates around sex and gender. Speaking to The Show People podcast, Fry, a man who once told sexual abuse victims to “grow up” and stop being so “self-pitying”, believes that Rowling, a woman who uses her own money to help such victims, has become “cruel” and “mocking”. Then again, he suggests, perhaps she can’t help it.

“She has been radicalised, I fear,” he told the podcast. “Perhaps by Terfs, but also by the vitriol that is thrown at her.” He added: “I’m afraid she seems to be a lost cause for us.”

Oh no! Not another weak lady brain destroyed by “radicalisation”!

The spectre of “radicalised woman” has loomed over the gender wars for years. When Mumsnet users first started to question the impact of gender ideology on women’s rights, it prompted a spate of handwringing articles about those poor, bored mummies, their mushy mummy brains poisoned by such terrible ideas as “there are only two sexes” and “gender non-conforming girls don’t need their breasts cut off”.

In her 2021 piece “The Road to Terfdom”, the journalist Katie J.M. Barker claimed to want to know “why so many Mumsnetters […] were invigorated by an outdated and bigoted perspective on gender”. She wrote that “many of the posters wrote about feeling newly disenfranchised and isolated after giving birth for the first time.” Then, “through organizing around this ‘taboo’ issue […] they were experiencing solidarity and a sense of purpose that had been missing in their postnatal lives.”

Yes, that’s right. The women of Mumsnet only started thinking female prisoners shouldn’t have to share cells with male rapists because they were sick of watching yet another episode of In the Night Garden. It’s not as though these women could have reached the point of believing the things they did by interrogating all of the stories trans activists told them and finding them to be at best meaningless, and at worst hateful.

In Fry’s version of the “radicalised woman” slur, it’s implied that Rowling has been driven to extremes not by domestic boredom, but “by the vitriol that is thrown at her”. Presumably, this is the vitriol thrown by trans activists following her 2020 blogpost on sex and gender, which does rather suggest that 2020 Rowling is no longer seen as radicalised — not that those suggesting this now showed much support for her then. In any case, Fry avoids addressing a single one of Rowling’s arguments from then or today. Instead, the very fact that she has suffered such appalling abuse is used as evidence, not that those attacking her are extremists, but that she is now “a lost cause”.

The ultimate irony of the “radicalisation” slur is that no one needs to be radicalised into believing the same things everyone on the planet believed 10 years ago. It is darkly hilarious to think that feminists popping champagne corks are held up as examples of damaged, brainwashed bigots, while men who take to the streets calling for their deaths are merely considered to have taken things a bit far in the name of a just cause.

I doubt that the Stephen Fry who recorded the Harry Potter books could have predicted that one day, he’d be on the side of those men. Still, that Fry’s low-level misogyny always made him vulnerable to radicalisation. Perhaps there’s a way back, but my feeling is he’s too far gone.

---

Victoria Smith is a writer and creator of the Glosswitch newsletter.

glosswitch

---