TWIBS: Chump Fangirls Over Felton
Just about everybody on the wrong side of this culture war is embarrassing, but Tom Slater’s glazing of a Harry Potter actor earlier this week was impressively pathetic.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
I’ve got a true barrel scraper for you this week! This is the sort of classic bread and butter TWIBS topic I don’t get to cover as often as I’d like in these days of seemingly nonstop high handed political action against the trans community. What we’ve got here is a delusional tool grasping at straws, reaching as hard as he can to affirm his choice to adore a rancid bigot, and oh boy, is it pathetic.
On Monday, Tom Slater, writing for The Spectator, absolutely slathered Tom Felton (the first actor to portray snide, sniveling rich boy antagonist Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter films, based on the mediocre book series penned by one of the most powerful and wealthy anti-trans activists to ever stain the Earth) in praise for his “[defending] the woman to whom he owes his career.”
Slater quickly needles Daniel Radcliffe (only as a strawman, seeing as the real Daniel Radcliffe is too busy being a normal adult man who isn’t obsessed with strangers’ genitals) and suggests that “gender-confused kids” are being “whacked on experimental drugs and sterilised.”
Of course, we’ve been prescribing puberty blockers to cisgender kids experiencing precocious puberty since the early 1980s and transgender kids experiencing gender dysphoria since the late 1990s, but I’m sure there are no ideological or political motivations involved in referring to medical treatments that predate your existence as experimental. I ask you, would the venerated editor of sub-tabloid rag spiked—a man who idolizes both Elon Musk and Nigel Farage—have bad opinions?
Let me be clear: Tom Felton, whatever his personal beliefs about transgender people may be, did not actually express support for JK Rowling in her crusade against us. What Felton said to Variety at 78th Tony Awards on Sunday was that he isn’t particularly tuned in to Rowling’s noise about trans people, and he’s grateful to her for generating the book series that launched his career as a child actor.
That’s it.
Truly the rich and famous are just like many of us: pig ignorant and completely unaware of anything happening outside of their personal sphere. Suffice to say, Felton is likely exercising the privilege he’s granted as a cisgender heterosexual white guy with money to simply not know about unpleasant things. Why grapple with the unhinged campaign Rowling is waging against transgender people when you can simply have a really good sandwich, or see what’s on TV, or own a dog? And anyway, since he’s still making money playing Malfoy in The Cursed Child, it’s no surprise that he’s buttering her up in public comments. Nobody wants to derail the gravy train!
For what it’s worth, he’s right. Harry Potter is an international sensation that held fiction in a death grip for decades and, thanks to its creator pissing off most people who have both brains and hearts, has now united a tremendous number of people all across the world in despising her.
It would be nice if Felton, like his former co-stars and even some new Potter actors, would join the rest of us in condemning this vile woman’s evil heart, or lack thereof. Absolutely. But do I need him to support us? Honestly, no! Tom Felton is just some guy. These people are all just some guy, and while I appreciate when they use the platforms granted to them thanks to their success to support my community, I don’t give a shit what they think about me or any other transgender person at the end of the day.
I’m sure we can all agree, however, that it’s extremely funny to watch chumps like Tom Slater cream their jorts over some guy who’s probably just hedging his bets so he doesn’t lose his job. Keep being embarrassing, Slater, it’s very entertaining.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
