Rowling tarnishes magic she created

It is baffling that the writer behind a series of books that championed an outsider now seeks to exclude trans people from the right to self-actualisation

JK Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series of books and, latterly, the world’s most high-profile critic of some aspects of the transgender rights movement, has doubled down on her long-standing feud with the young stars of the franchise — Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. The rift opened in 2020. Back then, Rowling, in a long essay published on her website, pledged her support for trans exclusionary radical feminists, (Terfs). Terfs, in case there’s anyone at the back still languishing in blessed innocence, oppose policies intended to foster inclusion and recognition of trans people within public institutions and everyday life, believing those same policies can represent a threat to women and children.

Radcliffe, Watson, Grint and several other stars who rose to fame through the Potter franchise, were quick to distance themselves from her views.

“Trans women are women,” said Radcliffe in response. “Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are,” chimed in Watson. While Grint declared: “I firmly stand with the trans community.”

Last week, Rowling, galvanised by the publication of the Cass Review in the UK, doubled down on her criticism of the stars.

The Cass Review was the result of a four-year review of the evidence around the efficacy of the current model of care for trans youth, who are presenting to health practitioners in dramatically increased numbers.

The report found that evidence to support medical transition in children was “wholly inadequate” which made it impossible to gauge the “effectiveness of its impact on mental and physical health”.

In the four years of hostilities between Rowling and the Potter film stars, it’s become a rift that has widened to rupture. Any prospect of an entente cordiale between them seemed firmly scotched last week.

Asked on X about hopes for reconciliation, she dismissed the idea, saying: “Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces.”

But there was a jarring dissonance between the tone struck by Dr Hilary Cass in relaying her findings in the report — measured, careful, insistent about the vulnerability of young people suffering gender dysphoria and the importance that proper care of trans youth starts with validation of their experiences — and that of Rowling, who in her rhetoric on and offline has sought to characterise members of the trans community as predators-in-waiting, seeking opportunities to invade female-only spaces, in the case of trans women, or misguided and confused young women, in the case of trans men.

There’s a clear generational divide at play here as Rowling, a Generation Xer, decides to double down on her enmity against trans-ally millennials, represented by Radcliffe et al. But the irony is that she herself played an instrumental role in forging the current generation of social justice warriors, born after 1981, who came of age reading Harry Potter.

Online, over the last four years, many of her erstwhile fans have watched aghast as the woman they had cast as their moral mentor seemed to turn against everything they thought she believed in. Or at least, everything they had inferred she believed in through close, or even not that close, reading of her books.

For much of this generation, trans rights are indistinguishable from any other civil liberties movement. Trans rights are the lodestar of a value system that seeks to defeat discrimination against minority groups or protected classes.

They are on a par with a belief in Traveller’s rights and indigenous rights and the battle for working-class representation and gender equality. And for many millennials, Rowling was the person who opened them up to being sensitive to the plight of the outsider, the other and the marginalised in the first place.

Or at least, it was her story of an orphan boy, despised by his family for his difference, who found acceptance among an equally misfit group of peers which did it.

The Harry Potter books, as acknowledged in undergraduate essays the world over by now, provide a systematic takedown of social privilege.

The books consistently seek to deconstruct power structures based on wealth and high social class — with these things synonymous with evil and epitomised by the Malfoy family who oppress the vulnerable and abuse the poor.

For those young adults whose value systems were forged, at least in part, by these stories, it makes no sense to exclude trans people, historically among the most discriminated against, from the right to self-actualisation.

For this generation, trans rights are indistinguishable from any other civil liberties movement