Thread by Twitter user @onyxaminedlife
So Maya Forstater, the woman JK Rowling is supporting, wrote a manifesto. I won’t link to it, but it gives a more detailed version of how she lost the contract. She nervously makes a transphobic tweet, and nothing happens. So she decides to make more specific ones.
No reaction. Rather than questioning if she’s oppressed, she makes, by her own count, 150 TRANSPHOBIC TWEETS IN A WEEK (which are at most politely debated with) before finally getting, not fired, but a polite letter telling her coworkers are uncomfortable and could she stop.
Let’s take a moment here to remind ourselves that she works getting funds for charity. So, like, public goodwill is the core of her work. This isn’t something where you can say what she tweets doesn’t affect her job. Her image is her job. And she’s using her image for this.
So after making, on average, at least one transphobic tweet every hour she was awake for a week, she got asked to tone it down. Not really the smoking gun of trans control over speech, so far, but she keeps going. She gets investigated for harassment, and still doesn’t cut it out
After MONTHS of this, she gets fired, right? No, her contract is not renewed. Because she was becoming a public transphobe and pissing off coworkers and management while her contract for a job that’s all about being a liked public figure for a charity was up for renewal.
She then turns to the transphobic activists and organizations that she’s been talking with and asks for their support with the lawsuit, promising them that if she wins they can use discrimination laws to prevent anyone from punishing them for harassment or denying them a platform
It’s startling how embarrassing this story is, honestly. And this is HER telling of it. This is what JK Rowling decided she needed to defend. The takeaway is, next time someone says they got punished for “saying biological sex is real”, remember, this is probably their real story