The trans thing was so weird and seemed to come out of nowhere. Before she revealed herself to be such a weirdo willing to die on the most ignorant of hills, JKR was running around telling everyone who would listen that all these Harry Potter characters were gay. Like she said Dumbledore was obviously gay and had been lovers with Grindelwald. After her embrace of gay people her punching down at trans people/women was so unexpected and seemed so uncharacteristic and especially mean considering her popularity and enormous wealth and the respect and awe she USED to generate. She ruined her own legacy by not keeping her mouth gracefully shut, which is a massive problem these days with a lot of people who have more ego than sense.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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She didn't embrace gay people, she used them as a prop for profit, to generate buzz, to get people taking about her and her books again. She did the exact same thing with black people when she tried to claim Hermione has been black the whole time, after a black actor played her in the Cursed Child play.
JK Rowling has always been a terrible person, and it shows in her writing and her actions if you look a bit more than surface-deep.
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I'll bet she went on some YouTube rabbit hole sometime in COVID times. It's such a 180 from where she used to stand.
I re-read the first chapter of the first Harry Potter book (old book, I didn't give her any money) and it's all about how Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia hated Harry being a wizard because it wasn't normal, it didn't fit their idea of normal, and they wanted to be seen as normal more than any else, but Harry couldn't help being who he was. It's not hard to read a gay or trans allegory into that.
Just to say up front, this is not a defense of her behavior, but as I understand it, the seed of this development seems to lie mostly in sexual abuse she suffered, along with what may be an internal struggle with her own gender identity that is informed by that abuse. Her beliefs are existential, as in focused on the continued existence and safety of her and other women. So when she recieves pushback, even light or friendly, the only response she can accept to give is digging in further and further, escalating more and more. At this point I don't even think she needs an "opponent". She's stuck in fight-mode with no way out.
I don't get this whole drama with Harry Potter. When I was younger, I was a big fan of Ender's Game. A few years later it came out that the author of the Ender books was a huge bigot and was using his money to promote right-wing causes. I dropped the books, didn't buy anything else from the author, and every other fan of the series that I talked to did the same. There wasn't really any debate about it. When the movie came out, none of the fans of the books showed up and so it flopped.
With Harry Potter, though, it's been years since we found out what kind of person J. K. Rowling is and people are still whinging about it. Why is this still even a debate (outside of right-wing transphobic circles, of course)? Find some other books to be a fan of.
I think part of the reason is that Harry Potter is one of the more interactive Fandoms. The world in Ender's Game is more or less closed. The story is finished, the world isn't too big.
Harry Potter on the other hand (much like e.g. Star Trek) is way more inviting to be interactive: Which house are you, what would be your favorite class, what might the other schools look like etc. It is (by design or not) built to invite engagement and also very marketable. The special foods, the shops, all the gimicky in-world-items, the classes...
You get people so invested into this world beyond the books because there are so many details that are marketable. Other fantasy or SciFi worlds just aren't full of fun little items you can sell. In that regard Harry Potter is more like those kids shows that are made to sell toy lines.
So most people are way more emotionally attached to the stories. It wasn't just the books and a Halloween costume. It was years of choosing your house, learning about potions, discussing brooms, trying to cook the food, etc.
Being a right wing bigot it cool now. There's literally nothing you can do today to get actually cancelled.
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All of you, do yourselves a favour and read the Rivers of London series to get your fix of British Wizards:
- Actually competent world building
- They've got a lot of humour
- They're not written by a bigot
Or give the audiobooks a listen as they're read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith who's voice is like butter.
"No ethical, legal consumption." FTFY
so you pirate it - but why? why would you want to consume something you know was made by someone who is awful?
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Why do we even need a remake of the old movies? The movies are still holding up very well in this day and age. Why couldn't they focus on some other story? Expand the universe a little. Hogwarts is not the only magic school that exists...
They tried expanding the world, it sucked and nobody liked it (also, the worldbuilding is so weak that it falls apart if you consider wider society outside of Hogwarts for five minutes, because the series started as books for grade schoolers)
The world building is weak because Rowling is a bad fantasy writer, not because it was written for grade schoolers. There are tons of series aimed at grade schoolers with incredible world building - Redwall, Warrior Cats, Earthsea, just to name a few, all have way better world building than Harry Potter.
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Because JK Rowling is pissed that the original cast doesn’t support her becoming a raging transphobe/capitalist goon.
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