If you remember last fall when Spitfire Audio co-founder Christian Henson made a statement publicly aligning himself with Rowling and Glinner and making absurd 'the trans are coming for your autistic children' claims, guess what? He's back!
Shortly after Henson's original tweet in September, Spitfire's CEO Will Evans put out a very mild statement that at least appeared to be condemning it, stating that "Christian's going to take a break as we reflect on how to move forward". In response, Rowling sent her legions of Twitter followers after Spitfire, resulting in a pro-Henson hashtag trending with angry TERFs who had never even heard of Spitfire Audio five minutes prior.
Meanwhile, various composers, including Ólafur Arnalds (who had collaborated with Spitfire on a number of products), made their own statements and attempted to talk sense into him, to no avail.
More recently (see link for much more detail on recent events), Glinner has posted Discord screenshots to send trolls to harass and abuse volunteer staff of the Spitfire-adjacent Pianobook community that Henson himself spearheaded. Henson has not distanced himself from Glinner or taken any responsibility for the harm he's caused to his own volunteer mod staff or to the marginalized people in his community.
And now Henson's break from Spitfire is over, and he is back there in full capacity. It appears that the strategy they settled on was "lay low until people stop yelling at us, then change absolutely nothing."
And so far, it seems to have worked: they waited out the backlash, quietly reinstated Henson, and musicians on social media seem to be none the wiser. I'm posting this because I think it's important that people know what they're supporting.
Personally, unless there is a significant change in how they're choosing to handle this, I can no longer in good conscience support Spitfire Audio.
