#RIPJKROWLING
Best-selling author of Harry Potter books J.K. Rowling never ceases to disappoint her fans around the world. Following her transphobic comments and tweets earlier, now it seems the literary world is shaken once again with Rowling’s cross-dressing serial killer character, which she puts in her new novel Troubled Blood.
Published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, Troubled Blood follows the case of a woman, missing since 1974, who was thought to be a victim of a serial killer. What’s problematic is that the serial killer character is a man who dresses as a woman in order to abduct and kill a woman as portrayed in one scene in Rowling’s new book.
Trans advocates have criticised such a character as “deliberately enforcing an awful trope about transgender people”. And fans of the Harry Potter book series were also among people who expressed their anger towards such an offensive movement.
One fan even wrote on Twitter: “The hardest part of being a Harry Potter fan is J.K. Rowling herself.”
Despite such a hot debate in the literary world, all versions of Troubled Blood — be they hardback, audiobook or Kindle — have ranked in the top five in Amazon’s best sellers’ list.
Daniel Radcliffe — who played Harry Potter — earlier criticised Rowling’s anti-transgender tweets. He wrote in a blog post for the Trevor Project, an LGBTI youth suicide prevention group: “Transgender women are women.”
At pretty much the same time, Eddie Redmayne who stars Newt Scamander in the Fantastic Beasts franchise also spoke out against Rowling’s transphobic movements. He said in a statement: “I disagree with Jo’s comments. Trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid.”