J.K. Rowling has received criticism from both netizens and celebrities including Harry Potter cast Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe ever since her transphobic comments in 2020.

J.K. Rowling, the renowned Harry Potter series author, has called out the colleagues who have publicly criticized her stance on transgender rights but privately tried to maintain friendship. The 58-year-old author has been under fire since her transphobic comment on social media in 2020.

She has received criticism from both netizens and celebrities including Harry Potter cast Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe ever since her derogatory comments on the LGBTQ community. Check out her controversial posts on X and what she has to say to her colleagues.

J.K. Rowling’s derogatory and transphobic comment from 2020

In June 2020, Rowling shared an opinion piece titled Creating a More Equal post-COVID-19 World for people who menstruate and wrote, “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

In order to make her position clear, Rowling emphasized in her blog the “issues” with marginalizing “women” to satisfy the “socio-political concept” of transgender. As a self-described Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF), Rowling said that there was already “toxicity” around the trans community and that TERFs were typically intimidated when they were called out for their transphobia.

Concerned about the “effect the trans rights movement is having on both, Rowling later wrote, “I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility.”

Emma Watson and Daniel Radcliffe called out J.K. Rowling for her transphobic comments

Watson wrote, “Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are.” While Radcliffe commented, “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”

Following this, she recently reignited her verbal sparring with Watson and Radcliffe, after the release of a historic UK review into gender identity services for children and young people provided by the National Health Service.

What did J.K. Rowling say about the double standards of her colleagues in this issue?

In a quote from her latest book The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, which was released by The Times of London, Rowling claimed she was taken aback by coworkers who publicly disapproved of her opinions but then privately emailed her to make sure they were still friends.

Without taking any names though, as per Deadline, she wrote, “People who’d worked with me rushed to distance themselves from me or to add their public condemnation of my blasphemous views. In truth, the condemnation of certain individuals was far less surprising to me than the fact that some of them then emailed me, or sent messages through third parties, to check that we were still friends.”

Rowling added that people who are “appalled” by her stance often don’t realize how utterly “despicable” she thinks theirs is. “I’ve watched ‘no debate’ become the slogan of those who once posed as defenders of free speech. I’ve witnessed supposedly progressive men arguing that women don’t exist as an observable biological class and don’t deserve biology-based rights.”