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Without getting into a thing about it, I certainly wouldn't consider Rowling poisonous. Wasn't it mostly female jacks for women, and no-one except women in women's sports. That's as sensible as sensible can be.

It's the venom in how she addresses it, more than anything. Revisit some of her comments on Imane Khelif, fittingly also not trans

Indeed he didn't pluck the intersex condition out of thin air. It's a long-identified biological fact 

Trans wasn't a hot topic back then at all. It was years before Glinner and Rowling got into it, for example (i.e. the poisonous people who poisoned the discourse). I think you're entirely failing to lift it out of cultural context and consider it as a plot device for throwing Catholic ideological certainty into complete disarray in the most undeniable, because biological, way possible. Like Galileo but with biology. And you're stuck in a contingent culture war lens, seemingly.

It is interesting in itself that in 2024, and all the more so in 2026, the ending might feel shoe-horned in, in our atmosphere of increasingly discourse-dominating accusations of box-ticking in tv and film. Whereas, in reality, the book was being written over 10 years ago, before sooo much of that landscape had been set in place: pre-BLM, pre-Musk takeover of X, pre-manosphere shite, pre-Olympic boxing controversy, etc. If anything, Harris was more prescient than he could have plausibly imagined when he wrote it.

Strolling past Golden Discs in Cork this morning, saw they had a 3 for €70 sale on vinyl:

Metallica - Master of Puppets
Iron Maiden - Seventh Son of a Seventh Son
Portishead - Dummy

And threw in Painkiller on top, which wasn't in the sale, but I was on a roll of vinyl gap-filling by that stage.

Lot of other great rock and metal in the sale too, if any of ye bois are passing by (I don't know where else there are Golden Discs these days...thought it was gone tbh!)

Personally I think it will survive the era of the anti-woke snowflakes very well, and may even become emblematic of them. Meet back here in 2036   

The "sermon" on certainty in the middle, that's what the story is about, not internal power struggles: they're just a device. Maybe give it another go! 

Ya, have spoiler tagged mine

I thought it was great, and if we're spoiling, then spoil accurately:

Spoiler

he's born biologically intersex, he's not "trans" in the way this is commonly understood. The story all along is about what happens when ideological certainty collides with the often ambiguous complexities of life, on all levels, hence the biological level is the apt culmination.

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I mean, it's the premise of the book, so they couldn't exactly leave it out.

Erm...spoilers...

Abso-mongin-lutely!

    

50 pages into The Third Policeman and have loved every sentence so far. Will be revisiting An Béal Bocht as soon as I'm done, which I've not read since I was 18.

A rough week for thoroughly sound masters of their arts! Love Tim Curry in everything I've seen him in, gonna marathon the hell out of his catalogue in September

Has been brought to my attention that yesterday also happened to be Halford's birthday, so...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ST8ZAmyJ9e4