The Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling says that she has received a “tsunami of supportive emails and letters” since making anti-transgender statements from women who she believes were told to “sit down and shut up,” putting her anti-LGBTQ beliefs back in the public spotlight. Rowling, who has 14 million followers was responding to a trans man who goes by @ftmlorastyrell on Twitter and has several hundred followers, and the responses to her tweet attacked trans women even though the original discussion was about trans men and non-binary people.
The whole discussion started with Positive Birth Movement founder, author, and journalist Milli Hill, who got mean responses on Instagram when she said that obstetric violence, poor treatment and abuse directed at people giving birth, usually in a medical context, is only violence against women in response to someone else who wrote that obstetric violence affects trans men and non-binary people.
Hill wrote a long article about the ordeal. From her account, it doesn’t appear that she lost any paid work, faced physical violence, or got death threats. The comments she quoted in her piece called her “harmful,” “vile,” and “transphobic.” A few said they would discourage others from buying her books. She also reiterated that patriarchy is “a system that oppresses and damages women on the basis of their sex,” which she stressed meant “sex as in biological sex,” as if trans women aren’t oppressed by patriarchy.
Rowling tweeted a screenshot of the now-deleted tweet as evidence of the hate mail she received since expressing her controversial opinions about gender last year from the now-deleted Twitter account “@queerqegaard” on Monday, to which she responded, “To be fair, when you can’t get a woman sacked, arrested, or dropped by her publisher, and canceling her only made her book sales go up, there’s really only one place to go.”
Rowling then responded to another user who asked whether the death threat had been sent in response to her opposition to trans women using public bathrooms, which she detailed in a detailed essay last year.
“Is this still because of her comments about the safety of women in toilets/changing rooms if men can use them by simply saying they identify as a woman?” the tweet read.
Rowling replied: “Yes, but now hundreds of trans activists have threatened to beat, rape, assassinate and bomb me I’ve realized that this movement poses no risk to women whatsoever.”
A year ago, many of the Harry Potter cast including the three leads Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint had voiced their disagreement over Rowling’s opinions. “Trans women are women. Trans men are men. We should all be entitled to live with love and without judgment. I firmly stand with the trans community and echo the sentiments expressed by many of my peers,” Grint told British newspaper The Times.
In an open letter, Radcliffe had written, “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people.” Emma, too had extended her support to the transgender community.
The author concluded her Twitter thread by telling her 14 million followers that it was time for her to return to work on her latest novel in the “Strike” detective series, which she pens under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
She tweeted: “To all the people sending me beautiful, kind, funny and supportive messages, thank you so much. Wish I had time to answer all of you, but Strike and Robin are at a tricky stage of their investigation, so I need to drop a few clues.”
