JK Rowling is at it again, and this time she's ranting about... furniture.
Rowling spent the better part of the weekend raging on X, aka Twitter, after misunderstanding an old internet joke about chairs, which is used to criticize transphobes' constant demands that people "define what a woman is."
As a thought exercise, internet user Avery Edison asked Irish anti-trans activist Graham Linehan to "define a chair" in a way that "includes all things which are chairs and excludes all things which aren’t.”
Linehan responded that a chair is "a separate seat for one person, typically with a back and four legs," and another internet user immediately responded with a picture of a horse labeled "chair" to illustrate what a fool's errand this line of thought really is, whether applied to furniture or gender.
That is, if a horse can fit the definition of a chair, trans people can fit the definition of a man or woman. Case closed.
Suffice to say, JK Rowling has never heard of this discussion, let alone understood the point. Because when it was referenced on Twitter this weekend, she took it literally and soon went into full meltdown mode.
In response to someone who reference the "define a chair" argument, Rowling tweeted:
"You might think you’re progressive, but have you ever unironically compared women to chairs?"
Rowling very clearly thought this joke of hers was hilarious, because she made it multiple times in multiple ways.
To one fellow online TERF, she "joked":
"I identify as a faux-leather reclineable sofa with cup holders in the arms. Yesterday I was mistaken for a chaise longue."
In another, she "joked" about being "misfurnitured," presumably a reference to being misgendered, after saying she "identifies as a reclining sofa."
Hilarious, perhaps, but only if the chair metaphor flew over your head in the first place, as it clearly seemed to for Rowling, who as a reminder is a writer of such preeminence it has made her a literal billionaire.
Rowling immediately became an object of mockery on Twitter for somehow not understanding how metaphors work.
Others referenced Rowling's past Twitter controversies, like the time she insisted that transgender people were not targeted during the Holocaust, which is absolutely, categorically false.
Nothing like one of the greatest writers of a generation being unable to understand a basic analogy. Never change, Joanne. Never change.
