Don't buy the monster's videogame! What the hell is wrong with you?!?

 People call JK Rowling a "TERF," but even that is giving her too much credit, I feel.  I mean, okay, it's not really giving her credit, but she likes to talk about what a feminist she is and how she cares about women's rights and supports abortion and same-sex marriage and all, but the fact is, she uncritically supports and refuses to distance herself in any way from the most nightmarishly hard right people there are--people who would strip women of all rights and force all gay people back into the closet at best--as long as they hate trans people as much as she does.  Actions speak pretty darned loudly, Joanne.  

The point is, she's a horrible person, and we live in a time where gruesome, evil monsters are literally trying to whip up a genocide against trans people.  So don't buy her fucking game!  What the hell is wrong with you?!?  This is the no-brainer of no-brainers!

Or so you would think.  But when you point out this extremely obvious moral calculus--moral arithmetic, let's say--you get a whole lot of dumb pushback.  So let's have a top-five list of disingenuous "it's fine to buy this woman's game" arguments.

1. "There's no ethical consumption under capitalism."

Okay, fine, but that doesn't mean it's a-okay to support the transphobe.  Are you seriously telling me that you believe in your heart of hearts that nothing you do matters cuz capitalism?  Supporting the transphobe and not supporting the transphobe are not morally equivalent.  Anti-capitalism is of course the correct stance, but you're giving it a bad name.

2. "You are writing this on a device that was almost certainly produced by people with terrible working conditions, you hypocrite."

I mean, yes, supply chains are massively complex, and none of us are really able to follow them through, and it's true that it's impossible to participate in contemporary society without participating to some degree in exploitation.  And yet, if there were a computer company whose CEO constantly loudly bragged about how their company's product was made with child slaves, you don't think most of us might avoid this company?  Once again, you're just using cheap nihilism as an excuse: "if you've ever patronized a company that does bad things, how dare you criticize anyone for anything ever?"  Fuck off.

3. "The game itself wasn't made by JK Rowling; what about the development team, huh?  Do you want THEM to suffer?"

This one just boggles my fucking mind, and more than any of the others, it convinces me that these pro-Rowling arguments are just fundamentally unserious.  People often respond to this with "they've already been paid;" I don't know if that's true, but I do know that this game is massively popular.  Your concerns that the programmers will have to sleep under bridge abutments are unwarranted, which is more than can be said for a non-trivial number of trans youth who have been disowned by their families in part due to the rhetoric of Rowling and her shithead friends.  But more to the point, do you buy every game ever made out of gnawing dread that the creators may suffer if you don't?  Or is this a convenient situational concern that you suddenly came up with?  Don't answer that.

4. "Rowling's already a billionaire; you buying or not buying her shit will make no difference to her bottom line."

Nobody doesn't understand this.  Well, okay, maybe a few of your more right-on TikTokers are a little naive, but it's really not the point.  The point is simple: you don't support the transphobe.  "Opposing the nazis won't actually do anything; why should I bother?"  Not much of an argument.

5. "Look, I agree that Rowling is a nightmare creature, but my eight-year-old is oblivious to all that; she just wants to play the wizard game based on the books she loved.  Do I REALLY need to make this political, even though it's obviously political?"

Actually, I've never heard anyone say this.  But it seems like something you might hear someone say, and I'm including it because it's the hardest one to argue against--indeed, the only one that's at all hard to argue with.

It's hard: if you're raising your child to be a decent human being, at a certain point they'll realize that JK Rowling is shit, but do you really want to have this conversation with them when they're a child?  Well...as painful as it is, it might be the best thing to do.  Then again, I'm not a parent, and I'm not going to say that for sure.  Ultimately, all I can say is that I'm not going to judge you too harshly if you just want to go along to get along in this situation--which, when you come down to it, is fairly bizarre, and it sucks that you should be stuck in it.  If it's at all possible, though, I would at least recommend pirating the game, just out of principle.

I mean, does buying the shitty transphobe's game mean that you are now per se a shitty transphobe.  I mean...no, clearly not.  But when there are super-easy things you can do to separate yourselves from the shitty transphobe and you're making elaborate justifications to avoid doing those things...well, I've gotta say, it's not a great look.  I do gotta wonder to what extent your heart is really in being anti-bigotry.  If transphobia were not exploding right not--if it weren't really a serious thing--then you could see Rowling as an obnoxious but harmless kook, and who cares what you do.  But it is, and so she's not, and so DON'T FUCKING BUY HER GAME.  Jeez.