WIZARDS OF WOKE

They’re Harry Potter stars who owe fame and wealth to JK Rowling — but still turned on her over trans issues... just one of the PC causes that have cast a spell over them

LONG before the current controversy over whether it is acceptable to call a woman a woman rather than a person who menstruates, JK Rowling had been trying to make her wizarding world more ‘woke’.

She has spent the years since her final Harry Potter book was published in 2007 making the stories more inclusive — and announced, just after The Deathly Hallows appeared in bookshops, that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay, even though he was not depicted as such in any of her books.

She returned to the theme in the Fantastic Beasts films, which showed Dumbledore’s intense relationship with the dark wizard Grindelwald, although she drew ire from some in the LGBT community for falling short of showing any romance.

Then, in 2016, the role of Hermione in the Harry Potter And The Cursed Child play was given to a black actress, Noma Dumezweni.

Rowling said her books never explicitly mentioned race or skin colour, only that Hermione had brown eyes and curly hair.

Her efforts to stay on the right side of the right-on, though, have been sunk by the latest row over transgender women.

Her views — set out on Wednesday in a long, nuanced essay, which argued that a minority were putting women at risk — have been declared unacceptable by five of the young actors who made their fortunes in her films.

This should be no surprise, as it turns out the actors in Harry Potter films are a hotly political bunch and seem to compete to be more right-on than each other by endorsing fashionable and worthy causes.

ALISON BOSHOFF reveals how the politically correct Harry Potter posse have become the Wizards of Woke...