JK Rowling, Harry Potter's creator and a proud transmisogynist, claimed on Twitter-slash-X that she’d “happily do two years” rather than participate in the “forced denial of the reality and importance of sex,” a.k.a. theoretically being “forced” to call trans women women (as if the UK has proposed rounding up those found guilty of misgendering to be paddy-wagoned away).
In her original post, Rowling added the caption “No” under a photo of the message “Repeat after us: Trans women are women.” Someone else responded with a confusingly worded comment about “gett[ing] a two-year stretch,” which evidently spoke to Rowling, so, here we are.
Rowling has a long history of posting transphobic rhetoric online. She constantly claims to be under persecution; a conservative media outlet launched a podcast this year literally calling the treatment of Rowling a “witch hunt.” But when she's not busy posting online about trans women, Rowling has continued to amass an enormous fortune, making her comments come off… well, we’ll let you choose an adjective for it. (Warner Bros. has invested millions into expanding the Potter universe into a TV series and yet more movies, though the original books were exhausted more than a decade ago.)
Compare this to the quality of life for trans people in the UK, where just weeks ago Prime Minister Rishi Sunak claimed during a speech that people “shouldn’t be bullied” into recognizing trans people’s gender identities. A poll published last month found that Britain is becoming more “prejudiced” toward trans people, in particular.
Additionally, a survey from the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Stonewall previously found that 41% of UK trans people who responded to the poll had experienced a hate crime and 25% had experienced homelessness. And despite Rowling’s apparent glibness about incarceration, serving time is an especially harsh experience for trans people: Most trans prisoners in the UK are put in prisons not correlated to their gender identity, according to Pink News, which cited 2022 UK Ministry of Justice data.
The UK’s Home Office announced earlier this month that the country's 11% rise in anti-trans hate crimes between 2022 and March 2023 “may have been fueled” by commentary from politicians on transness, with conservative politicians — as in the US — becoming increasingly obsessed with trans people as a talking point. In February, 16-year-old Brianna Ghey, who discussed being trans on her popular TikTok account, was stabbed to death in the UK.
Another poll, released in June, found that the UK and US are in a race to the bottom over which supports gender-affirming care less, with the UK at 47% and the US at 45%. Twenty-year-old Alice Litman reportedly died by suicide in May 2022 in the UK; her mother went to the media last month to say her daughter’s death would have been “preventable with access to the right support” from the government for trans people. Litman had been awaiting access to gender-affirming care for three years before her death.
In contrast, in Rowling’s country of Scotland, the government is fighting with the UK's England-based central government to retain a policy that eases the process of changing one’s gender marker on legal identification. After the UK attempted to intercede in this policy in January, reported VICE News, some trans people began leaving the UK.
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