J.K. Rowling Gave Up Love For Hate
Edinburgh on my mind.
During the 2007 Doctor Who episode, “The Shakespeare Code,” the Doctor (David Tennant) tells his companion Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) that he’s read the then-unreleased final installment of Harry Potter: “Oh, I cried!” he admits.
Later, Martha helps defeat the episode’s monsters, the Carrionites, when she calls out the Harry Potter spell word, “Expelliarmus!” The Doctor exclaims appreciatively, “Good old J.K.!” (Watch below.)
The Doctor is a time traveler but perhaps had not yet landed in a not-so-distant future where J.K. Rowling has dedicated herself to persecuting a marginalized group who she holds in unreasoning contempt. In short, Rowling doesn’t like trans people: “There are no trans kids,” Rowling claimed in 2024. “No child is ‘born in the wrong body’. There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.”
“Good old J.K.” was a financial backer for an anti-trans group that sued the Scottish National Parliament and obtained a U.K. Supreme Court ruling that a woman is someone born biologically female, excluding transgender people from the legal definition. When the ruling was announced, Rowling posted a photo of herself smoking a cigar and holding a glass of wine on her yacht that Harry Potter fans — many of them trans — helped her acquire. “I love it when a plan comes together,” she gloated in the caption. That’s not very Doctor-like, but the Doctor’s own gender fluidity would likely repulse Rowling.
The Doctor’s Rowling shout out was significant because in barely a decade, Harry Potter had become as much of a British institution as Doctor Who itself. When I was in Edinburgh recently, there were many references to Rowling and her non-bigoted work. She lived in the Scottish capital in her youth and it’s clear that her surroundings inspired Harry Potter, though she has minimized it over the years. Still, you can’t will down Victoria Street and West Bow without thinking about Diagon Alley.
Edinburgh leaned into the Potter connection. In 2008, Rowling was the unanimous choice to receive The Edinburgh Award, which honors those who have made a positive impact on the city and gained national and international acclaim. Edinburgh's ceremonial head, Lord Provost George Grubb, said Rowling was “a tremendous asset to the city, not least for her writing prowess but also for her philanthropy and the vast amount of support she gives to numerous charities.”
In fairness, Rowling might still support charities. She just prefers to publicly deride trans people on social media.
There are Harry Potter walking tours in Edinburgh, and local shops advertise their relationship to the book series and Rowling herself. However, it now feels like the city is stuck with the relationship. Tour guides mention Potter and especially Rowling somewhat begrudgingly. It’s as if Rowling has assumed the real-life title of she “who shall not be named.” While on a ghost tour, our brilliant guide Nicola mentioned that The Elephant House cafe was where Rowling reportedly worked on early drafts of Potter. She noted that the cafe had gone up in flames in 2021, and my wife remarked, “Like Rowling’s reputation,” which Nicola found very amusing.
Many popular authors of enduring works have held repulsive views. Roald Dahl, who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was a raving antisemite.
“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” Dahl said in a 1983 interview, which inspired the play Giant, starring John Lithgow, who won a Tony Award for his performance. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason. I mean, if you and I were in a line moving towards what we knew were gas chambers, I’d rather have a go at taking one of the guards with me; but they [the Jews] were always submissive.”
Shortly before his death in 1990, Dahl said in another interview, “I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic.”
L. Frank Baum, who wrote The Wizard of Oz, also wrote op-eds promoting the genocide of native tribes. Baum wrote in 1890, “The Whites by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.”
However, it’s admittedly harder to successfully separate the art from the artist when the artist is still alive and posting “bwa-ha-ha!” messages on social media. Perhaps what’s unique about Rowling is that she has alienated the very people who would’ve been among her most enduring fans. Harry Potter spoke to the marginalized and the vulnerable, who often wished they could travel to a magical place that appreciated and nurtured their unique gifts. Sure, millions of people might have read the book and watched the films, but as time passed, it was the true fans with the personal connection who’d stick around and not just move to the next fad. On Doctor Who, Martha Jones in 2007 represented the casual fans who were part of a specific cultural experience.
Rowling insists her anti-trans advocacy is more important than her reputation. “I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy,” she said in 2023. “What a pompous way to live your life, walking around thinking, what will my legacy be? Whatever, I’ll be dead. I care about now. I care about the living.”
I’m sure she believes that’s true, but I fear the living she cares about is a restricted group.
She is entitled to her personal views on gender, of course, as we all are, but her all consuming vendetta in service of them is both remarkable as well as baffling in terms of what she has been willing to sacrifice to promote it. This one issue seems extremely personal to her, as she doesn't appear to indulge in the across the board bigotry of a true xenophobe-annihilating trans people seems to be her part and parcel. I was never a huge Harry Potter devotee so I don't feel the competing angst as many do, and I am also not inclined to judge or "cancel" an artist solely on their bigotries. But the fact that she lives and persists doggedly in this bigoted effort hits differently (Dahl might have been an anti-semite but I don't remember learning he ever took sustained political action on behalf of that belief, for example) and makes me wonder if her self-immolation was not calculated, part of the intended consequence of her behavior. I mean, what did she *think* was going to happen?
I care about the living, too. It's why I don't partake in products made by repulsive people until after they're dead and can not benefit from it. Who needs Woody Allen or Roman Polanski? There's plenty of other art out there. I'm sure plenty of THOSE creators have unsettling elements about themselves too, but I just don't know it. Want to buy a Harry Potter book? Buy it used, Rowling gets nothing.
An imperfect system? Yes. But it's how I've decided to sort things and it has made my life simpler. No hand wringing. Just keeping awful people who are generally already wealthy from getting a dollar from me.