(London) New muse of certain feminists, but accused of transphobia for her comments on “the truth of biological sex”: JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter phenomenon saga, has become in a few years a divisive personality through controversies on social networks.
If she denies any transphobia, these controversies tarnish for some her aura as a writer of modest origins who has enjoyed global success – more than 600 million books sold – with her world of school wizards. To the point of giving rise to calls for boycotts, as in 2023 during the release of a video game inspired by Harry Potter.
Latest episode at the beginning of April, with the entry into force of a new law in Scotland on the fight against hatred, particularly against transgender people.
The 58-year-old author, who has lived in Edinburgh since the mid-1990s with her second husband, published on 1er April a volley of messages on […] are not women at all, but men.”
She also judges that freedom of expression is threatened if “the precise description of the biological sex” of a person becomes objectionable, sparking a new wave of accusations of transphobia.
Its positions echo the lively, and sometimes tense, debate which is agitating the United Kingdom around transidentity, fueled by conservative media which have erected JK Rowling as a “heroine”, as recently a tabloid column Daily Mail.
It all started in 2018, when the writer liked a message on X (then Twitter) from a woman describing transgender women as “men in dresses”. Criticized, JK Rowling pleads error.
In 2019, she publicly defended a researcher, Maya Forstater, who was fired for tweets deemed transphobic. In 2020, she joked about an article that used the phrase “people with periods” by commenting: “I’m sure we had to have a word for these people. Someone help me. Fire? Fam? Feemm? », Raising an outcry.
Harry Potter actors, like Daniel Radcliffe, the interpreter of his famous wizard, publicly dissociate themselves from the writer.
In 2022, she opposed the Scottish bill aimed at simplifying the recognition of gender reassignment, ultimately blocked by the British government.
JK Rowling calls herself a feminist activist, in particular against the sexual and domestic violence of which she revealed that she was a victim, believing that women’s rights can be threatened by certain demands of defenders of the rights of transgender people.
She is particularly concerned about allowing transgender women to access changing rooms, toilets or prisons reserved for women.
In just a few years, she has become the bane of transgender rights activists, whose journey until now was more of a fairy tale. She says she received death threats.
Societal phenomenon
Born on July 31, 1965 in Chipping Sodbury in the west of England into a modest family, little Joanne began writing very early and telling stories born from her imagination.
After studying French, she became a translator at Amnesty International in London. It was during a train trip from Manchester to London that she imagined the story of Harry Potter, a young 11-year-old boy who discovers that he has magical powers and goes to study at a wizarding school.
The feelings of his orphan hero echo the premature death of his own mother, when she was only 25 years old.
She left to teach English in Portugal, where she married and had a daughter. She wrote the adventures of Harry Potter every morning before going to work, and continued on her return to the United Kingdom in 1995, when she settled in Scotland with her daughter, after her divorce.
Living on social assistance, it took him more than a year to find a publisher, Bloomsbury, ready to publish the first volume of his saga. In just a few years, his books have become a real social phenomenon, selling more than 600 million copies, translated into more than 80 languages around the world.
The eight films in their cinema adaptation grossed more than 8 billion euros, making JK Rowling a multi-millionaire.
Despite the controversies and calls for boycotts, the writer assured last year in a podcast interview The Witchcraft Trials of JK Rowling that she was “not embarrassed to come down from (her) pedestal” because of her positions.