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.
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.
She was already a TERF way before Covid.
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.
Harry Potter was a global phenomenon. Never before in history had a book series held such sway over a large portion of an entire generation of humans. Something like that is going to continue to have a place in popular discourse, largely because the average person is either ignorant of the issue or simply doesn’t care.
Also, in capitalism a moneymaker like HP simply isn’t allowed to die.
It's about kids playing with magic sticks
Being a right wing bigot it cool now. There's literally nothing you can do today to get actually cancelled.
I've never watched or read any of the Harry Potter stuff. So I feel pretty good right now.
Well... there is one way...
One? When it comes out I will send You at least 4 links.
Aye, matey. There be a way, for those who are so inclined.
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JK coulda kept her mouth shut and have remained as a beloved author forever. I'll never understand what could drive someone to taint their legacy for zero gain.
She became a billionaire and has almost certainly curtailed her social network to sycophants that not only agree with everything she says, they also boost her ego. That plus not wanting to lose the attention of the world will have her respond to whatever provokes the attention of the masses.
I’m not up 100% on how this all started because I genuinely don’t give a shit about Harry Potter but I would not be surprised if she made a controversial statement as a person with a huge platform, got a bunch of flak, and then once the dust settled realized how much “engagement” (read: attention) she got from it and subsequently doubled down over and over.
A great deal of human behavior is attention maintained. We have this ignorance though that “bad” attention is not desirable. Research continually shows that attention maintained behavior is perpetually reinforced by attention, not attention of a certain quality. Eg if your child exhibits an attention maintained behavior and you say “stop doing that or you’re grounded” the likelihood is that the behavior is still reinforced (and will subsequently be more likely) because attention was still achieved. The attention may have higher reinforcement potency if it is “positive” but that doesn’t mean “negative” attention doesn’t have a potentially powerful impact.
This is why the current social landscape of 3rd place community centers being social media, which almost exclusively give algorithmic favor to content that shows high “engagement” (read: annoying bullshit that many simple can’t resist interacting with) is probably one of the most toxic developments in the modern history of humanity. It encourages ugly behavior and reinforces disgusting belief systems. It is also why the age old advice of “don’t feed the trolls” is sage wisdom
It’s the manifestation of “all publicity is good publicity”
It seems becoming filthy rich causes your brain to turn into a hateful goo. There is really no exception to this, just varying degrees of billionaires being more or less good at hiding how they have become insane hateful creatures.
Gabe Newell. Instead of rotting his brain on bigotry, he just buys another yacht.
The clues to who she is were there all along in her writing. She couldn't keep quiet, because she believes what she's doing is right. Because she's conservative.
The only major black character in the series is called "Shacklebolt". The only Asian, "Cho Chang". Zero LGBTQ representation in the books. Harry had the world at his feet and decided to join the police. The whole struggle of the saga is for a return to the status quo, rather than a better world. General lack of female agency, and women just being hysterical and needing to be slapped out of it. Goblins as an antisemitic trope. I could go on.
I put it to you that it was inevitable that, one way or another, her rancorous bile would have spilled out into the public debate as soon as she got famous.
JK Rowling was always a liberal centrist. From an old 4Chan post:
It very neatly describes the way liberals see the world and political struggle.
Lots of people complain about the anti-climactic ending, but really I don't think it could any other way. I'd like to imagine that there’s some alternate universe where Rowling actually believed in something and Harry was actually built up as the anti-Voldemort he was only hinted as being in the beginning of the books. Where he's opposes all the many injustices of the wizarding world and determines to change their frequently backwards, insular, contradictory society for the better, and forms his own faction antithetical to the Death Eaters and when he finally has his showdown with Voldy. Harry surpasses by adopting new methods, breaking the rules and embracing change and the progression of history. While Voldemort clings to an idyllic imaging of the past and the greatest extent of his dreams is to become the self-appointed god of a eternally stagnant Neverland. Harry has embraced the possibility of a shining future and so can overcome the self-imposed limits Voldemort could never cross, and Voldemort is ultimately defeated by this.
But that would require a Harry that believed in something, and since Rowling is a liberal centrist Blairite that doesn't really believe in anything, Harry can't believe in anything. Harry lives in a world drought with conflict and injustice, a stratified class society, slavery of sentient magical creatures, the absurd charade the wizarding world puts upto enforce their own self-segregation, a corrupted and bureaucracy-choked government, rampant racism, so on and so forth But Harry is little more than a passive observer for most of it, only the racism really bothers him (and then, really only racism against half-bloods). In fact, when Hermione stands up against the slavery of elves, she’s treated as some kind of ridiculous Soapbox Sadie. For opposing chattel slavery. In the end. the biggest force for change is Voldemort and Harry and friends only ever fight for the preservation and reproduction of the status quo. The very height of Harry's dreams is to join the aurors. a sort of wizard FBI and the ultimate defenders of the wizarding status quo. Voldemort and the Death Eaters are the big instigators of change and Harry never quite gets to Vold/s level. Harry doesn't even beat Voldemort, Voldemort accidentally kills himself because he violated some obscure technicality that causes one of his spells to bounce back at him.
And this is really the struggle of liberals, they live in a world fraught with conflict, but aren't particularly bothered by any of it except those bit that threaten multicultural pluralism. They see change, and the force behind that change, as a wholly negative phenomenon. Even then, they can only act within the legal and ideological framework of their society. So. for instance, instead of organizing insurrectionary and disruptive activity against Trump and the far-right, all they can do is bang their drum about what a racist bigot he is and hope they can catch him violating some technicality that will allow them to have him impeached or at least destroy his political clout. It won't work, it will never work, but that's the limit of liberalism just as it was the limit of Harry Potter.
My initial theory is that JK Rowling saw trans women as a threat to her status quo. At the end of the day, that's all Centrist Liberals care about. Social progress can't affect their status quo. It's why Centrist Liberals will always back fascism. Fascism is designed to protect the status quo. The problem is that Centrist Liberals don't understand that fascism requires an out group to work and those Centrist Liberals will be the out group at one point.
I want to caution about reading -isms into authors works. People often don't really know their own stereotyping unless it's pointed out (you, dear reader, probably have some problematic world views that no one has noticed or mentioned...). The fallout afterwards is where the problems exist, when someone doubles down on their viewpoints after being informed of them.
Rowling has clearly done that and is dismissed because of it. I will avoid things that give her a platform, and the original art itself is tainted due to her continued stances; but, back to the general case, just because art might be racist or antisemitic, etc., at the time of creation, if the artist can be convinced that their views are wrong, we should celebrate that -- just with footnotes and context.
I think everyone -including public figures- should be allowed to learn from their mistakes and grow. I think social media can interfere with that and make people refuse to admit error and double down for fear of being cancelled. Ideally this should change.
But, the case of Jo Rowling in particular is egregious. Not only does she refuse to engage with the possibility of being wrong, her bigotry extends beyond words, into concrete, hateful actions where she is fuelling the fire of transphobia worldwide with her influence, both parasocial and financial. That results in misery and suffering for millions. Fuck Jo Rowling.
This condemnation of her doesn't extend to everyone.
And if she one day sees the light and walks everything back, then she should get a chance to redeem herself, too.
JKR is allowed to learn and grow! She just refuses to and her takes keep getting worse.
I was certainly not defending her. She is, as you say, egregious in part because when she was called out she refused to reflect. I was more talking in the general sense. The world sucks right now, but we are quick to attack people on their views without granting them opportunity to change.
I call this out because of the trend of 'leopards-eating-faces' kind of jokes. When the leopards eat your face, you might notice they were not friendly to begin with and the rest of civilization can welcome you back instead of mocking you; or they can mock you and you will feel isolated and defensive and the other bigots will welcome and validate you instead.
I think you've got s point there. Making fun of people in that way is surely going to entrench their views.
She also describes women that she wants the reader to hate as having masculine features. "Mannish hands," a square jawline and thick neck on a teenage girl, there's plenty in the first book alone.
Wasn't there one Irish guy, and he had an experiment blow up in his face?
Never gave a shit about the series but remember hearing about token characters having a dose of racism to them.
Not just that, he was also obsessed with turning drinks into alcohol. As a 15 year old kid. I'm pretty sure he also tried to blow up multiple things as well, I don't think it was a one time thing.
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