TERFs, PART 2: JK ROWLING, QUEEN TERF
Welcome to Trans Tuesday! Let me tell you, the last thing I want to be doing is an entire essay about this, but so many people don’t know, or claim to not know, or pretend it’s not the huge problem that it is. So let’s talk TERFS 2: JK ROWLING, QUEEN TERF.
Please be sure you’ve read the essay on TERFs first, so you understand exactly what we’re talking about here.
Before we get into it, I want you to know this topic is important for you to understand regardless of if you love, hate, or are indifferent to the Harry Potter franchise. But also, and more importantly:
The problems related to Harry Potter’s author and what she does with her money is not related to the quality, or lack thereof, that you find in the work itself.
I’m not saying the books or films or whatever are good, or bad. Others have spoken about ways in which they are problematic, but that’s not what this essay is about.
It’s so important, so let me make this abundantly clear:
The subjective quality of a work of art is in no way an indicator of the “goodness” or “badness” of its creator.
Like yes, you can tell from some work if a creator has a lot of empathy for others, or some IMPLICIT BIASES, and those things are worth talking about.
What I mean is that saying “JKR is a bad person and this is why I always knew Harry Potter was bad” is a horrible thing, because you’re saying only a bad person can make art that you do not like, or vice versa. Just because you find a piece of art good or important to you, does not mean its creator is a good person.
That way of thinking is what protects bad people so often. “How could this author be a sex pest when their book is so good and important to me? Impossible.” And the reverse is also held true, “I hated this piece of art so its creator must be a terrible human.”
Bad humans can make art you love. Good humans can make art you hate.
Art is subjective. Yes, all of it. Yes, even the thing you love. Even the thing I love.
The good or bad representation and biases in a work are objective and can and should be discussed, but art is otherwise absolutely a matter of taste. That is, famously, the point of art. It means something different to all of us.
We can like problematic art, and still acknowledge its biases. By now you know my love for Star Trek, but it’s always been a product of its time and reflects the biases of its creators. Even though it is, objectively, one of the most progressive franchises ever, it has had problems. There have been sexist episodes, racist episodes, homophobic episodes, transphobic episodes. I like it not because of those, but in spite of those, because outside of the missteps it’s wonderful and the kind of compassionate and inclusive storytelling that I love.
I don’t pretend it doesn’t have those problems, or that it’s always been perfect. I acknowledge those and look at the ways it’s grown over time.
And an even better example for you: I used to adore Seinfeld. It was so clever, so witty, and taught me so much about writing and how to weave disparate subplots together in masterful, organic ways. I’ve seen the entire series ten times or more, and used to quote lines from it back and forth with my wife Susan on a literal daily basis. It was foundational to me as a writer.
When Michael Richards revealed himself to be a racist, I was so mad at him and sad that it colored his performance for me. But he was just one member of a larger cast and crew. I could still like the show overall even if every time I saw him I was reminded he was a terrible person.
But then Jerry Seinfeld revealed himself to be a racist.
Jerry Seinfeld drew criticism earlier this month when it emerged that while in Israel to perform in Tel Aviv, the famous comedian visited an air force base and took his family to a tourist attraction in the occupied West Bank for ideological and military instruction.
Caliber 3, the Israeli firm that runs what Israeli newspaper Haaretz calls an “anti-terror fantasy camp” boasted about the Seinfeld family’s patronage in a Facebook post on 7 January.
“Finally we are allowed to tell you!! The legendary Jerry Seinfeld and his family were at Caliber 3 during their visit to Israel last week, they came to us for shooting training with displays of combat, Krav Maga [martial arts], assault dogs and lots of Zionism,” the post – which has since been deleted – said, according to Haaretz.
…The video also reveals that the training courses include live weapons fire on targets designed to look like Palestinians and simulated armed combat in faux Palestinian villages.
And Jerry Seinfeld then revealed himself to be a sexist, when talking to Bari Weiss of all people. Going on that fascist bigot’s show tells you a whole lot, all on its own.
Jerry Seinfeld said he is nostalgic for the “agreed-upon hierarchy” of American culture in the 1960s, adding that he misses “dominant masculinity.”
Seinfeld shared the comments on Tuesday’s episode of the Honestly With Bari Weiss podcast, where he said he feels cultural hierarchy has “absolutely vaporized in today’s moment.”
“That is why people lean on the horn and drive in the crazy way that they drive,” he continued. “Because we have no sense of hierarchy. And as humans, we don’t really feel comfortable like that.”
…“That’s part of what makes that moment attractive looking back,” he said… The comedian elaborated on his point saying, “I miss a dominant masculinity. Yeah, I get the toxic thing, but I still like a real man.”
And yes, that show was as much Larry David’s as it was Jerry Seinfeld’s, but Seinfeld is in every episode. The show is about (a fictionalized version of) him. His name is the title! He profits the most from that show, and my continued fandom of it, keeping it alive in the public consciousness and a financially viable thing for its studio.
I have not watched the show since. I have not quoted it a single time. To anyone.
I gave it up, because I can no longer support the show, knowing what I now know about half of its main cast, including the creator and star. And as far as I know Seinfeld’s not even using his incredible riches from the show to actively hurt people, like JK Rowling is. But I just can not support something made by someone so awful. I can not and will not.
There are good people making things that I love just as much, and they will get my support.
And look, I know, I haven’t even gotten to Harry Potter yet. But this is so important for any discussion of media, which by now you’ve probably realized that I do a whole lot. But I’m a writer, a director, a creator. This is my life. Art is my life. It’s what gives it meaning and makes it great (well, that and love) (and Costco pizza).
I’m just heading off the replies I can see coming. “I am justified in never liking Harry Potter!” No, that’s not what this is. It’s fine if you didn’t like it, but that has no bearing on what we’re talking about today.
Also I’m just gonna head off the whole “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” aphorism people will point to in defense of their supporting the world’s biggest transphobe.
While yes, it’s true, that mostly there is no ethical consumption under capitalism because the entire system is bad, buying things from small local businesses and individuals can actually be mostly (or entirely) ethical.
But just because there are big problems with most companies, media, products, items, and services we need to pay for does not mean that we just give up entirely and give in to the system. We all still have to decide if there are lines we will not, or can not, cross. As with the nationwide boycott and rejection of Target and other businesses that have capitulated to the bigoted Trump administration’s demands. See RAINBOW CAPITALISM 2: FROM BAD TO WORSE for more.
Some things are still very empirically bad and harmful. Part of the problem discussed in the original RAINBOW CAPITALISM essay was how stores would often sell Pride merch, but then donate money to anti-trans and anti-queer Republican politicians that do us real world harm.
If someone you know and love donated to a politician that wanted to strip your rights away, would you feel safe around them? Would you feel like they respected you and your equal rights?
You can’t be my friend and claim to care about me when you’re buying the fascist the boots they’re using to step on my neck. That’s not what friends do. See TRANS POLITICS 1: STOP TOLERATING TRANSPHOBIA for more.
And that’s what we’re discussing today, because we’re talking about Harry Potter’s creator, who ironically has become the she-who-must-not-be-named from the very books she wrote, and who directly uses the money and support she gets from Harry Potter to fund anti-trans hatred and legislation. Trans people have literally (actually literally) lost rights because of her! Keep reading.
JK Rowling is a transphobe. And when I say that, I do not mean she has some transphobic beliefs, or some unexamined implicit transphobia like literally everyone raised in our society does.
I mean she is actively transphobic. And like so many transphobes, it has become her entire personality to the extent that she’s probably now just as famous for being a horrible bigot as she is for writing the Harry Potter books. At least, to those of us who are paying attention and have seen what she’s said and done.
She’s such a transphobe, she shows up in the examples of transphobia in the Merriam-Webster dictionary!
For those who haven’t been paying attention to what she’s been doing, hi, this essay is for you!
Just what has she said that’s so bad, you ask? Friend, thank you for playing along, because I’m here to tell you!
Or, rather, Vox is. Have a read.
By 2025, her transphobia has become so rampant and constant that it’s difficult to build a completely comprehensive timeline of it. For those attuned to it, she doesn’t have to spell it out every single time; it’s a huge part of her identity.
These dog whistles only lead to more confusion, allowing people to point to the absence of immediately obvious bigotry to claim she’s being unfairly maligned. Over time, however, that bigotry has not only grown more pronounced but also broader in scope, leading her to recently target not only trans people but also asexual people. Additionally, she increasingly threatens detractors with legal action, which contributes to critics of her behavior falling silent. Conspicuously, many of her legal threats appear to be directed at individuals identifying as part of the LGBTQ+ community.
Let’s have a look at some of her Ungreatest Hits. She really fell into transphobia in 2020, and that’s when a lot of people first became aware of it. But she’s always been this way.
2014: Rowling writes The Silkworm, the second novel in the Cormoran Strike mystery series, which involves a trans woman who is portrayed as conspicuous and unable to pass. The book includes a scene where the main character gleefully threatens this character with prison rape.
2018: In March, Rowling “likes” (and then unlikes) a tweet referring to trans women as “men in dresses” and implying that trans rights are “misogyny.” A JKR spokesperson later claims that this “like” was an accident and that Rowling was having “a middle-aged moment.”
In September [2018], Rowling “likes” a tweet linking to an opinion column by known TERF Janice Turner, which argues yet again that trans women are inherently sexual predators, referring to them as “fox[es] in a henhouse … identify[ing] as [hens].” The myth that trans women are a danger to cis women is a grossly transphobic stereotype with almost no real-world justification.
In fact, here’s an article showing that it basically never happens.
And here’s a study that shows the same thing!
Legislation, regulations, litigation, and ballot propositions affecting public restroom access for transgender people increased drastically in the last three years. Opponents of gender identity inclusive public accommodations nondiscrimination laws often cite fear of safety and privacy violations in public restrooms if such laws are passed, while proponents argue that such laws are needed to protect transgender people and concerns regarding safety and privacy violations are unfounded. … This study finds that the passage of such laws is not related to the number or frequency of criminal incidents in these spaces. Additionally, the study finds that reports of privacy and safety violations in public restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms are exceedingly rare. This study provides evidence that fears of increased safety and privacy violations as a result of nondiscrimination laws are not empirically grounded.
But going back to that incredible Vox timeline of Rowling’s descent into anti-trans madness:
June 2020: In a tweet, Rowling mocks the trans-inclusive phrase “people who menstruate” in an article about pandemic menstrual health, implying that the phrase, meant to encompass trans men and nonbinary people, erases, overrides, or obscures the word “women.”
In a follow-up to the previous tweet and the backlash it spawned, Rowling posts a thread implying that trans activists are “erasing the concept of [biological] sex” and along with it “the lived reality of women.” She also states, “I’d march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans.” (To date, she has not.)
To date she has not. Ell oh ell.
Days later, Rowling produces her most overt and lengthy discussion of her views, a 3,600-word manifesto published on her website responding to “the new trans activism.” The post is replete with myths and false transphobic stereotypes, particularly revolving around the narratives that gender and biology are inextricable and that trans women are dangerous. Rowling states the movement offers “cover to predators.”
September 2020: Rowling releases the Cormoran Strike book Troubled Blood and is widely criticized after she creates a villain who preys on [cis] women by wearing women’s clothes. This is exactly the specter of a sexual predator that Rowling believes hides behind the label of “trans woman.”
And isn’t it interesting that Rowling releases those Cormoran Strike books under a pen name, Robert Galbraith. A male pen name. When she is a cis woman. Using her pen name. To impersonate a man.
HUH.
December 2021: Rowling shares a Sunday Times article that mocks the Scottish police for recognizing transgender identity. In her tweet, she parodies 1984, writing, “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”
Fuckin’ yikes.
…Rowling tweets, “The question at the heart of this debate is whether sex or gender identity should form the basis of decisions on safeguarding, provision of services, sporting categories and other areas where [cis] women and girls currently have legal rights and protections.” The idea behind what Rowling is saying is that allowing trans women equal access to those spaces will erode current legal rights for cisgender women and girls. This is a position that only makes sense if you are denying that trans women and girls are women and girls. Rowling then adds an insistence on separating “sex” from “gender,” an essentialist idea that contradicts current medical practice and scientific research, which advocates for treating gender identity as linked primarily to the brain, not anatomy.
…British lawyer Alison Bailey partially wins an employment discrimination lawsuit in which she claimed that she was discriminated against because of her gender-essentialist views. While the lawsuit was in progress, Rowling posted a tweet urging her followers to financially support Bailey.
December 2022: Rowling screencaps a thread about the controversial new Hogwarts Legacy video game by the aforementioned popular transgender YouTuber Jessie Earl, aka Jessie Gender. Earl points out that supporting the franchise would “justify her continued targeting of trans people”; Rowling, in response, sarcastically accuses Earl of practicing “purethink,” implying trans advocacy is a type of religious dogma. An onslaught of transphobic social media harassment targeting Earl follows.
This is what we’re getting at. Full disclosure, Jessie Earl is a good friend of mine (though I did not get to know her until 2024/2025). But Jessie is right on the money. Supporting any Harry Potter project condones what Rowling is doing, and enables her to keep doing it. More on this soon.
Rowling also personally funds a new domestic violence support center in Edinburgh, which explicitly excludes trans women; Rowling frames this new center as offering “women-centered and women-delivered care.” Edinburgh’s longstanding domestic violence support center has had a trans woman as its director since 2021. Trans women, in particular women of color, are at a vastly higher risk of experiencing domestic violence and sexual assault than cisgender women.
Are you starting to see the real-world effects of her transphobia?
March 2023: A new podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, produced by Bari Weiss’s the Free Press and hosted by prominent former Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper, featured interviews with Rowling. In its fifth episode, Rowling begins discussing the modern trans rights movement, calling it “a cultural movement that was illiberal in its methods and questionable in its ideas” and insisting, “I believe, absolutely, that there is something dangerous about this movement and that it must be challenged.”
As mentioned in the essay on TERFs, you here see Rowling allying herself with the far-right… who are the most misogynistic, anti-feminist group around. She’s telling on herself. Are you listening?
My earlier note on Seinfeld going to talk to Bari Weiss also applies here! Just being willing to talk to a far-right fascist like that tells you so very much, let alone having her produce a show about how you, a billionaire, are being “victimized” by being held to account for your bigotry.
Look at this quote from JKR:
[S]ome of you have not understood the books. The Death Eaters claimed, “We have been made to live in secret, and now is our time, and any who stand in our way must be destroyed. If you disagree with us, you must die.” They demonized and dehumanized those who were not like them.
I am fighting what I see as a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement, that has gained huge purchase in very influential areas of society. I do not see this particular movement as either benign or powerless, so I’m afraid I stand with the women who are fighting to be heard against threats of loss of livelihood and threats to their safety.
This is, quite clearly, a case of DARVO that she cannot even see. For more on the DARVO poop nugget, and how it’s a thing the far right wing does like clockwork, see RAINBOW CAPITALISM 2: FROM BAD TO WORSE and CHASERS AND THE FETISHIZATION OF TRANS WOMEN 2: REACTIONS AND ORIGINS.
While Rowling can say she only intends to target the specific trans activists who are angry at her, that’s an impossible distinction. She does not mention any formal group or entity that represents trans rights that has acted against her. The only context we have for what she is responding to are nonaffiliated individuals on Twitter sending angry messages in response to her transphobic comments. … This generalization doesn’t distinguish “the movement” from people who are simply angry and upset with Rowling. Instead, it seems to imply that “good” trans people are the ones who accept Rowling’s version of their identity and allow her viewpoint — that they aren’t who they say they are — to dominate their fight for social acceptance.
Trans people are estimated to comprise about half a percent of populations in both the US and the UK. A 2018 study from UCLA found no evidence to support that anti-trans legislation makes designated public spaces safer, but did find that “reports of privacy and safety violations in these places are exceedingly rare.” In essence, there was no danger to begin with.
February 2024: Rowling donated 70,000 pounds (about $90,000) to an anti-trans Scottish political lobby campaigning to restrict the Scottish government’s definition of “women” to cisgender women only.
Are you starting to see the real-world implications of her transphobia??
March 2024: On March 13, Rowling appears to deny on X (formerly Twitter) that trans people were targeted during the Holocaust. … a user responded with, “The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research, why are you so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender?”
Rowling then takes this post and screencaps it, asking, “I just… how? How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?”
The burning by Nazis of books and research from Berlin’s pioneering Institute for Sexual Research, which conducted the world’s first gender-affirming surgeries for trans people, was captured in German newsreels at the time and has been well-documented since, including by the UK’s own Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Calling this very well-sourced history a “fever dream” quickly drew significant backlash from X users, with many framing it as a form of Holocaust denial.
This is, in fact, a very real form of Holocaust denial. As is the fact that when the Allies liberated the concentration camps after WWII… they left the trans and queer people in the camps. For more on that see TRANS HISTORY 2: EXAMPLES OF TRANS PEOPLE IN HISTORY.
And this link. And also this link.
May 2024: As part of an X discussion that began with Rowling deliberately misgendering a trans soccer manager, she doubled down in response to criticism, both by claiming that trans women are “crossdressing straight men” and by comparing trans identity to cultural appropriation.
“Do I get to be black if I like Motown and fancy myself in cornrows?” she wrote. “What if I claim the authentic me has always been black and that you’re being racist to me? Would that be OK, or would you find it ludicrous and deeply offensive?” She did not respond to the many platform users who replied to address her use of racist stereotypes or to point out that race, unlike gender, is a genetic identity.
Yikes yikes yikes.
August 2024: Rowling contributed to ongoing harassment of and attacks on Olympics boxer Imane Khelif … Khelif was born female and has always been a cisgender woman. Rowling seems to be arguing that any hormone-related variance at all among [cis] women — despite the millions of [cis] women who have hormone imbalances — is enough to render them inauthentic or not “real” women. It’s an alarming development in her ongoing shift into extreme transphobic views.
It’s also deeply ironic. One of the points Rowling first made in her lengthy 2020 manifesto was about the need for cisgender women not to feel limited by the confines of normative gender expression. “In spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head,” she wrote, and later: “Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now.” Yet Rowling’s transphobia has progressed to such an extent that she has herself become a denigrator of a cisgender woman and a reinforcer of “compliant” femininity against Khelif.
Do you have a hormone imbalance, cis ladies? And/or are you not white? JKR doesn’t think you’re a “real” woman. What a feminist!
April 2025: On April 16, 2025, the UK supreme court delivered a major ruling that explicitly denied trans women protection from discrimination on the basis of gender. The decision was prompted by a lawsuit brought by For Women Scotland; the transphobic group that received a 70,000-pound ($93,000) donation from Rowling in 2024 to aid them in funding the suit.
She directly funded the organization whose goal was to remove the rights of trans women to not be discriminated against! And then all trans women in the UK lost the right to not be discriminated against for being trans!
May 2025: Rowling launched the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, an organization explicitly devoted to funding the work of transphobic activists and organizations under the guise of “women’s rights” activism. She will be footing the bill, per the website, for “legal funding support to individuals and organisations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces.” … As a recertified billionaire, Rowling should have plenty of money to devote to her pet cause — especially as her once-beloved Harry Potter franchise heats up again with a new HBO Max series adaptation.
Do you see what giving her more money and supporting her projects does??
GLAAD has its own timeline of some of her transphobia, which includes her wishing someone a “merry TERFmas”. What an upstanding lady.
Just this year, in 2026, Aminissty International (misspelled on purpose, keep reading), “an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights” that is based in the UK, released a report titled “A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK”.
Why the hell would JKR care? Because transphobia is her entire personality now, and:
The briefing, published in July [2026],defined anti-rights actors as groups whose aim is to “restrict human rights by undermining human rights protections in law and practice”…
Many of the organisations it listed were classed as “gender critical”, including Beira’s Place and For Women Scotland, a campaign group that last year won a landmark case on the legal definition of a “woman” .
Rowling set up Beira’s Place in 2022 after a row over the management of the Edinburgh Rape Crisis Centre which at the time was being run by a transgender woman.
JKR sued them over it, due to the UK’s draconian, anti-free speech “libel” laws, and forced them to retract it and offer a fucking apology because she’d otherwise sue them out of existence.
Not only did they post that apology, they took the report down. And JKR’s since been working to ensure it’s removed from the web. Weird that she’s so ashamed of it, when she claims to be a proud TERF.
Many trans people outside the UK have taken to preserving that Aminissty International report. Like me! Here it is, for as long as the US still has free speech, anyway. Misspelled in the hopes bot scrapers don’t find it.
And she also recently suggested that her fourteen million followers on X should… follow trans people, even suspected trans people, into bathrooms to take photos of them. Highly illegal! Incredibly dangerous! Something only an unrepentant shithead would do.
Okay, that was a lot. It is so much. It is sobering to see it all laid out like that, and I am only giving you the highlights (lowlights?), there’s so much more in the full Vox article.
Let’s go back to that UK supreme court ruling for a second…
Rowling donated £70,000 (roughly $88,200) to the anti-trans group For Women Scotland in 2024 after it lost its challenge to a 2018 Scottish law that legally recognized trans women as women. The group appealed its case to the U.K. Supreme Court, which ruled last month that trans women aren’t considered women under the nation’s Equality Act.
Rowling responded to the decision by posting a picture of her having a drink and smoking a cigar, with the text “I love it when a plan comes together.” The post was widely criticized, including by The Mandalorian and The Last of Us star Pedro Pascal, who called it serious “Voldemort villain s—” and referred to Rowling as a “heinous loser.”
Pascal, whose younger sister Lux is trans, urged his followers to not “buy a single Harry Potter thing ever,” including by boycotting the upcoming HBO series and attractions at Universal Studios theme parks.
“It’s time to tell these corporations that transphobia loses money,” he said.
And it sure does lose them money! See RAINBOW CAPITALISM 2: FROM BAD TO WORSE to see a mountain of evidence showing that companies that stood by their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have seen greater financial success due to standing up for those policies. All while companies that ended their DEI policies are struggling through boycotts.
And don’t for a second believe the stories trying to launder Rowling’s reputation now that it may affect her precious new tv show.
Transphobic billionaire Harry Potter author JK Rowling issued an exceedingly rare statement of support for transgender adults and gender-affirming care yesterday. Regardless, her comment doesn’t make up for her continued anti-trans activism.
In a response to a now-deleted comment on X, Rowling wrote on August 19, “I’ve always believed that adults with intractable gender dysphoria may only find peace after surgery and taking hormones. I’m glad you’re happy.”
The rest of that article at least somewhat takes her to task for the seeming hypocrisy of her tweet, but it’s far worse than that.
What is “intractable” gender dysphoria? Who gets to decide? Why is Rowling only okay with it if our dysphoria meets her approval? That’s some bullshit. It doesn’t matter what level of dysphoria a trans person has, including if that amount is none. Not all of us have it, even if most of us do! See GENDER DYSPHORIA for more.
And note she only mentions adults, who are, y’know, trapped with the body horror of going through the wrong puberty for their entire lives when we transition as adults. See TRANS KIDS 1: FACTS AND DANGERS, and TRANS KIDS 2: THE INTAKE EXAM AND TRANS FLIGHT to learn why it’s so important to help trans kids avoid going through the wrong puberty.
It’s just more transphobic bullshit from the world’s biggest transphobic bullshitter.
The three stars of the original Harry Potter movies, Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint, have made public statements condemning Rowling’s transphobia.
Of course Grint then recently signed on to reprise his role from the films on Broadway, so apparently enriching the woman who uses that money to hurt trans people, which he claims he is against, is okay if he’s getting a paycheck? Eesh. And shame on Deadline for not even asking him about this hypocrisy.
This article gets to the heart of what the new HBO Harry Potter tv series is really about.
Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson stood up for trans rights after Rowling made her views clear, and she has since stated that she won’t forgive them for cozying up to a movement intent on “eroding women’s hard-won rights.” It’s become evident that part of the driving force behind the upcoming HBO TV series adaptation of Harry Potter is to have an adaptation that doesn’t include celebrities who are vocally pro-trans rights.
… If you’re buying Rowling’s works, then you’re putting money into the fight against trans people. If you’re sharing things about her fictional worlds, you’re telling your trans friends that they can’t trust you, amplifying her social relevance, and giving her words more weight to speak out on political actions.
People will argue that Rowling’s books aren’t even that good, as if that’s the point of all this. The books were enjoyable. It sucks to give them up. A lot of us enjoyed them and watched the movies over the holidays. But we have to move on if we want to embrace social progress and stay true to our ethics. The only way to combat her anti-trans rhetoric is to let these fictional worlds move into obscurity, rather than boosting them up for another generation to embrace and telling Rowling we want to keep hearing her hate.
This is what it comes down to. If you continue to support Harry Potter by buying books or merch, or wearing that merch and keeping advertising and interest in the franchise alive, by spreading Harry Potter further through culture and society, by going to and supporting its theme parks, by buying video games or new copies of the movies or books, or by watching (or working on!!) the new tv show, you are directly supporting her transphobia.
Trans people, and our actual cis accomplices, are going to side-eye you for it. Because maybe you’re ignorant of the issue, which is a problem. Or maybe horribly damaging real-world transphobia is somehow not a dealbreaker for you, which is a huge problem. Or maybe you agree with her, which is a nightmare. In any regard, you’re telegraphing to trans people that you are not safe.
And next week we’re going to talk all about that, and I need you to read it.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com
![Sigma.male2022 on insta DMs me: Hi my lady [lip emoji]. I want to see your swallow my goldfish henry. [two devil emoji]. Put him inside your belly [open hands emoji]. And I give you all you want. [devil emoji]](https://www.tillystranstuesdays.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/38.jpg)
![Today I did something I’d been terrified to do for most of my life (I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s not dangerous so do not worry). And all I can tell you is that we only live once and if you’re wondering if you should do that thing that scares you? Fuck yes. Go do it. [purple heart emoji]](https://www.tillystranstuesdays.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/image.png)
