J.K. Rowling canceled Stephen King like earbuds cancel noise.

Stephen King is the latest annoying personality to get rewarded for his self-righteousness about the culture wars. He posted an ultra-woke retort to J.K. Rowling on Twitter about gender that said, “yes, trans women are women” and is apparently a hero for women everywhere now because of it and a victim of cancel culture because Rowling blocked him.

Boo hoo.

Maybe Rowling blocked King because she reasonably concluded as I do that incessant gender talk is a waste of time. It’s a battle over words and feelings and is exhausting. My view is that J.K. Rowling didn’t “cancel” Stephen King, she shut him off and declined his snarky invitation sent into the stratosphere of haters waiting to pounce on anything with a whiff of independent thought.

After a few rounds of Internet discourse with King, Rowling saw the writing on the wall and checked out. Stephen King is a horror writer and stuck in the mud. Rowling is more thoughtful and withdrew her prose on Twitter and blocked King because she didn’t want to get caught up in yet another fruitless argument about what came first, the chicken or the egg and who can blame her?

You can bet Stephen King is a climate change warrior and masked man because he believes in “the science.” It’s quite possible he and his lovely wife Tabitha have generously donated to the effort to vaccinate all the good people in the hinterlands of Maine.

That’s great! So can we at least have a conversation about language and “the science” of gender, or is anyone with a thought inconsistent with the current so-called progressive diktat a rat-fink woman hater including J.K. Rowling?

Perhaps J.K. Rowling refused to engage Stephen King about who is a woman because she has better things to do, more important things to think about and very little time.

Let’s start at the beginning with the Big Bang  13 billion years ago.

Did you know all the matter and energy released at the time of the big bang are the source of all the matter and energy in the universe right now? Everything is made of the same atomic material. People, animals, rocks, wood, beer. You name it. Dust to dust.

There are over 100 billion galaxies and the laws of physics are the same throughout the universe. Our galaxy, the milky way, contains 300 to 400 billion stars and measures 100,000 light years in diameter. Our solar system is spinning inside the milky way and earth spins around the sun while spinning.

It’s enough to make you dizzy and think for a moment your gushing feelings about gender matter.

But here’s the thing — if we imagine the big bang theory occurred 24 hours ago, then our species, homo sapiens, “homies” as we say now, appeared 1 second ago.

In the big bang scheme of things -- the span of a human lifetime of 100 years would last less than 1/1000 of a second.

Life began as single-celled organisms and over billions of years spawned multi-cellular beasts like the dinosaurs who ruled earth for 150 million years until an asteroid collision took them out.

Fast forward and now it’s our turn. Talk about a cameo appearance!

Again, if you think of when the party started with a big bang 13 billion years ago as 24 hours – then we’ve got .0006 seconds on the clock to make a shot.

From a scientific perspective -- our task as homies is simple. To diversify the gene pool for the survival of the species we pass our DNA to our children to pass on, etc.

Just as the basic unit for all life is the cell, the basic unit of reproduction and heredity is the gene.

And genes these days come equipped with chromosomes that feature DNA from both parents. There’s X’s and Y’s and the mixing of the gene cocktail to procreate most often is done by parents having sex but can be achieved beautifully using other methods.

But who wants to talk about parents having sex?

That’s a bit disturbing and in poor taste, don’t you think? An immediate conversation buzzkill is if mom or dad bring up their sex life.

And that’s why some people don’t want to talk ad nauseam about where on the spectrum at the moment someone else is feeling about their gender and what language must be used to speak about it.

They long instead perhaps to speak to them about who they love.

Because if it’s not about love then it’s about sex.  Isn’t that what gender essentially reveals in today’s hook up culture -- not so much who you are but who you want to have sex with?

All well and good. Rock on. But we have limited time here on the planet — less than a second, metaphorically speaking.

In the big scheme of things the “gender” of others doesn’t matter.  

Who you bang doesn’t matter.

We’re all made of the same stuff – atomic matter—and we all have genes to toss in the pool and energy to contribute to the universe.

So enough about gender, perhaps Rowling thought to herself. In the short time we have to find purpose as homies let’s talk about love.

Love matters and is the only things that transcends biology and sets us free from our genes. Let’s look up together from our navels and open our mind’s eye to the heavens.

Meet me in the divine and then we’ll talk.

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The scientific observations in this column are derived from “Science and Spirituality” by Lou Clarke, 2007, and first appeared in the Smugsy Show on March 31, 2021.