"[Religion] meant that an ignorant, stupid lout who seldom bathed and planted his corn by the phase of the moon could claim to know the final answers of the universe. That entitled him to look down his nose at everybody else."
Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Last year when Johnny Depp managed to avoid getting lynched I cautioned that such an over-hyped, symbolic victory over politically correct thuggery meant nothing so long as Depp keeps making movies in which he gets slapped by random women to proclaim he deserves it. He contributed more than his own share to shaping the culture which presumed him guilty for being born the wrong sex. Take that conclusion, square it, and you'll arrive at how I view J.K. Rowling being blacklisted for "transphobia" in stating the most blatantly, benignly factual observation that plastic surgery and hormone shots (or more commonly, simple opportunistic pretense) do not erase half a billion years of evolution.
It was a few months into this blog that I threw a brief critical glimpse at young adult fiction born of the self-esteem movement, citing a widening gulf between stories like Ender's Game or the Heinlein so-called-juveniles in which youths triumph via superior cleverness or erudition, sacrificing and suffering along the way, and the new '90s/2000s breed of more widely identifiable (read: lowest common denominator idiot-friendly) protagonists stumbling to success on nondescript magical specialness, more often than not openly flouting the necessary primacy of reasoning ability, the defining measure of existence itself.
Rowling justified and in no small part created the generation of overentitled snots now responsible for her own ostracism. Even five years ago I remarked snowflakes' puerile cliquishness is driven not only by the ever-present instinct to gang up against others but by an internal fear of being discovered as ordinary, by a self-hypnotic denial of their own inadequacies. Where a personal grasp of science, philosophy and the general workings of reality fails to bear out their mommies' and schoolteachers' promises that each and every one of them is the best in the world, self-affirmation as members of an elite social group (be it racial, sexual, dietary, whatever) may at least temporarily assuage their bloated expectations. It doesn't take a cryptologist to decipher the link between that and entering adolescence with the expectation of incipient wizardly powers instead of a drive to acquire astronaut knowledge.
At least the X-Men learned to fly a plane, damnit.
The snowflakes have established their own myriad Hogwartses, schools of thought deriding thought in favor of guaranteed existential superiority over straight/white/male muggles. Every sub-sapient piece of genetic filth whose idea of personal worth reaches no farther than its own gonads can now hold itself superior to the world's foremost minds by declaring itself a "they" magical in some intrinsic, unanalyzed, indefinable fashion.
Enjoy the fairy dust backwash, Rowling.
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