J.K. Rowling cannot seem to let anyone support the transgender community without yelling at them. Maybe she should leave her little castle and touch grass, because yelling at someone who did not even mention her when talking is going to a whole new extreme for her.
This time, her anger is at David Tennant. The Doctor Who actor, who had a small role in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, was at the British LGBT Awards when he told Kemi Badenoch to “shut up” because she was vocal about banning trans women from sports and bathrooms. He then did an interview that night and called those transphobes “a tiny bunch of little whinging f***ers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon.”
Rowling took this as her time to open her mouth again—annoying, really. The former-beloved-author-turned-menace-to-society got on X to complain about Tennant’s comment. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote, completely missing the point of what Tennant was saying.
Oh she also said, “But the utterances of the Gender Taliban receive special dispensation, for they are a holy caste.”
In one of the replies, another user was seemingly mocking the fact that Tennant said his family has “skin in the game” when it comes to trans rights. Rowling responded by writing, “They don’t count. It’s their job to make space for men, whose feelings matter. Women and girls, as we all know, pretend to feel hurt and fear and loss, just to be nasty and manipulative.”
This isn’t a matter of women’s rights. You just have hate in your heart.
More recently, Rowling has ramped up her efforts to make her transphobia undeniable. She’s attacked former stars of her franchise outside of just Tennant and even acted as if star Daniel Radcliffe would want to apologize to her for his past comments against her transphobia. Radcliffe responded in an interview with The Atlantic, talking about how sad her response to the transgender community has been.
“It makes me really sad, ultimately, because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic,” he said at the time, and it is really sad. So many of us learned to be open and loving people because of the Harry Potter series, and now Rowling is using her platform to dangerously slam the human rights of the trans community.
Rowling hides behind this idea of protecting women, but trans women are women, just as a woman who uses a male pseudonym to write her books is still a writer.
As always, my heart goes out to the trans community as Rowling continues to target them day in and day out. They deserve so much better than her relentless attacks, and at least David Tennant is unafraid to fight publicly against people like Rowling.
