MAUREEN CALLAHAN: What a cowardly betrayal! Free-speech heroine Judy Blume bows to militant trans activists and throws JK Rowling under the bus – so if even SHE can’t stand up for women and girls… who will?
Judy Blume has done the unthinkable: She’s bowed to the woke mob.
Eighty-five years old, a self-identified ‘active feminist’ and lifelong crusader for free speech, she is, it seems, afraid of trans activists. Afraid of being labeled a TERF.
One day after an interview with a UK newspaper, in which Blume voiced her support for JK Rowling, she walked back on her comments.
This is a sad moment for women like me, who grew up loving Blume not just for her books but her bravery.
She wrote about what happens when you get your first period, your first crushes and loves, and losing your virginity. For that she was denounced as a smut peddler, a pornographer bent on corrupting America’s youth – girls in particular.
Blume never once apologized. She never caved to book bans or calls for censorship. She defended herself and her work — and, most importantly, her young readers, coming of age in a time before TikTok and Instagram and Google, when the mysteries of adolescence were often terrifying.
She was a heroine to so many of us. To see her back down now isn’t just sad — it’s alarming.
Judy Blume (pictured) has done the unthinkable: She’s bowed to the woke mob.
For Blume to back away from JK Rowling (pictured) feels like apostasy. If anyone should stand up against witch trials and Orwellian groupthink, it should be Blume.
When someone so beloved and so devoted to the cause of free speech can’t say what they really think, our culture is in deep trouble.
‘I love her,’ Blume said of Rowling to interviewer Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times. ‘I am behind her 100 per cent as I watch from afar… But I haven’t been in touch with her during this tough time. Probably I should.’
It was clear that Blume was referring to Rowling’s vocal concerns about trans orthodoxy and her subsequent demonization. And for a minute there, this was heartening. Another woman of equal esteem joining Rowling in the town square, saying: Hey! Wait a minute. There’s some stuff here to be discussed. Asking these questions doesn’t make me a transphobe or a bigot.
Blume had used her considerable cultural capital for good.
Alas, it really did feel like a minute. Come Monday morning, Blume tweeted that her comments had been ‘taken out of context.’
How cowardly. What a betrayal for one writer to accuse another of carelessness if not nefarious intent. And ‘taken out of context’ is such a cliché. As any decent writer knows, clichés are to be avoided. Lazy language equals lazy thinking.
Blume clearly couldn’t claim that Freeman misquoted her or fabricated the quotes. Freeman herself took to Twitter after accusations that she had trapped the legendary author with her own so-called TERF agenda. Posting screenshots of her interview transcript, Freeman wrote: ‘For the record, my quotes are accurate and not disputed. I did not ask Blume about the criticisms of JK Rowling — she brought them up herself.’
But among Blume’s woke defenders, Freeman is the one to blame — a crafty journalist who, as one critic tweeted, twisted Blume’s words ‘into support of her own anti-trans rhetoric’. Either Blume is an easily manipulated feeble octogenarian or a sharp, savvy writer who has been very famous, controversial and media-savvy for over 50 years. It can’t be both.
Blume herself issued the boilerplate mea culpa that we’re all too familiar with: ‘I stand with the trans community,’ Blume tweeted, ‘and vehemently disagree with anyone who does not support equality and acceptance for LGBTQIA+ people. Anything to the contrary is total bull****.’
Blume tweeted that her comments had been ‘taken out of context.’ How cowardly. What a betrayal for one writer to accuse another of carelessness if not nefarious intent.
We’re in an age where Dylan Mulvaney (pictured with Blume), born biologically male but identifying as female, models Nike sports bras for women and pushes Tampax on TikTok.
What an insult to our intelligence. We all read what she said. There was no ambiguity there. Besides, does anyone even glancingly familiar with Blume’s work think she’s a bigot? It’s absurd.
So why would Blume act so uncharacteristically? Is she that afraid of a tainted legacy? Or is she afraid that the forthcoming film adaptation of her beloved coming-of-age novel ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ might suffer at the box office? One can only imagine the crisis talks with her movie studio this weekend.
Here’s a question: Could the Judy Blume who has disavowed her support of Rowling write ‘Margaret’ today?
Margaret longed to wear lipstick and buy a training bra and get her first period. This was revolutionary. Such things weren’t openly discussed when the novel was first published in 1970. If anything, menstruation was to be feared. Blood. Cramps. Tampons vs. pads. The worry that boys could tell, or would laugh and make fun.
As young adult literature critic and professor Dr. Roberta Trites told Vice, for Gen X women, ‘Margaret was the first person who presented us with the idea that it was a good thing to menstruate because it is the mark of maturity and the potential to have children, not some sort of curse or taboo.’
But would this now be considered exclusionary? Would it be fair for Margaret to be a sixth-grade biological girl who happily identifies as such? Can only biological women get pregnant and give birth?
After all, we’re in an age where Dylan Mulvaney, born biologically male but identifying as female, models Nike sports bras for women and pushes Tampax on TikTok.
Why, trans activists would surely say, can’t a young biological male long to develop female breasts? To menstruate? Why consider such changes the province of biological females?
For Blume to back away from JK Rowling feels like apostasy. If anyone should stand up against witch trials and Orwellian groupthink, it should be Blume. To watch self-identified liberal feminists slink from defending their own gender is beyond disappointing – it’s disgusting.
Is she afraid that the forthcoming film adaptation of her beloved coming-of-age 1970 novel ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ might suffer at the box office?
One week after Riley Gaines was attacked at San Francisco State University for saying that biological female athletes should not have to compete against those born biologically male, Democratic Rep. Katie Porter went on Bill Maher’s HBO show and said ‘I strongly disagree’ with Gaines.
By the way, Porter should be shamed for calling her new book, ‘I Swear: Politics is Messier Than My Minivan’. What a pandering, patronizing title, clearly aimed at women she thinks are dumb. Harried moms who just don’t have time to bother with the news, you know?
Porter went on to claim that Gaines was in it for the clicks — as if someone who was chased into a small room for three hours while trans activists threatened her outside, as Gaines was, is having fun here. Or considered popular.
It took fellow panelist Piers Morgan to explain.
‘All I’ve seen [Gaines] do,’ Morgan said, ‘is stand up for women’s rights for fairness and equality… She actually competed against [trans swimmer] Lia Thomas, and it was obviously unfair. Lia Thomas won one of the races . . . by 50 seconds, against a bunch of biological females who simply couldn’t keep up. That cannot be right. It cannot be fair.’
That is common sense right there. Yet to voice that opinion is to be quite lonely. It’s to risk your job and your reputation — cancellation, essentially.
This is exactly why we need those few who have the cultural power and financial means to speak the truth, to stand up for girls and women, to be feminists.
Judy Blume did more than any author of her time for young girls and women. I’m one among many, surely, she has let down. It feels as though she’s sullied her legacy at our expense, and that’s a greater loss than any amount of box office revenue.
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