Miriam Margolyes Stands Up for Fellow ‘Harry Potter’ Stars Against J.K. Rowling
Miriam Margolyes’ views on J.K. Rowling’s transphobia have been hard to pin down. Her opinions on the Harry Potter franchise are well-known by now—that adults shouldn’t still be fans of the movies—but her thoughts on Rowling, and transphobia in general, are a different matter.
The Harry Potter actress first commented on the issue back in 2020 during an interview with The Times, saying, “[Rowling] has a rather conservative view of transgender people. I don’t think I do.” She then went on to say, “If you seriously want to become a woman you should be allowed to. You can’t be fascist about it.” That’s not quite how it works, but she still gets points for trying to understand and be open-minded.
Then in 2022, she seemed to change tack, saying that “the vituperation that J.K. Rowling has received is misplaced.” This was before Rowling got even worse in her attacks on trans people and outright denied aspects of the Holocaust. She went on, “I don’t know her at all. I admire her as a human being. She’s a generous woman. She’s a brilliant writer.”
Unfortunately, we know Rowling a lot better now. We also know that she often uses social media to attack trans people who have done nothing except exist. Bearing that in mind, it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at Margolyes’ comments. But now she’s come out and said something else.
Rowling has burned her bridges with the Harry Potter stars
Rowling has completely isolated herself now from the Harry Potter actors who helped make her work famous. She said on X that Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, who are both pro-transgender rights, can “save their apologies” for whatever she imagines they have done. Daniel Radcliffe ended up indirectly responding to her, saying that just because Rowling had an influence on his career, “that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.”
And now, Miriam Margolyes has made it clear she agrees with him. In a new interview with the Telegraph, she said of the Harry Potter stars who are against Rowling:
Now they’re grown up and they have opinions. So why can’t they give their opinions? That’s fair to me. They shouldn’t be trammelled because they once were in a film that somebody wrote.
Margolyes said in the interview that she didn’t want to “make big statements about trans people.” She did however make a statement, saying that she believed “people who are born with a male frame” had an advantage in sports and that “has to be dealt with, either with a separate category or handicap loading or something like that.” (The question of trans men in sport never seems to come up in questions like this, does it?)
But Margolyes also told the newspaper (one of the most right-wing papers in the U.K.), “There are so few trans people. And I just think people should be allowed to get on and be who they are, or be who they want to be, without all this nastiness.”
It’s up to trans people whether they would count Margolyes as an ally or not, but her words are definitely a damn sight more sympathetic than anything Rowling has said.
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