Fanfic/Short Story Writer and Lover of Comics. Big nerd who loves reading, YouTube, and talking to anybody. Patton Sanders on the outside. Virgil on the inside. Glorious meme that is my header image by winterpower98. She/Them I'm a fan of: my cat, artists, Thomas Sanders, Dimension 20, Owl House, Dumbing of Age, Omniscient Reader, jacksepticeye, Markiplier, MatPat, Viva la Dirt League, Weird History, Dragon Cave, Undertale, Skyrim, Sims, D&D, StarKid, and more things than I could possibly list here.
1. Big thermos of cold water (hydrate or dydrate!)
2. 2-5 gallon bucket of the warmest water from your tap
3. Cup/small bowl (I use a 16oz store brand solo cup because light and floats)
Take a quick shower to rinse your skin/hair, raise your skin temp, and warm the tub. Then fill the tub, testing the water with your elbow so you don't get it too hot (it's a better gauge than your hand because it's not desensitized to hot/cold). Once you're in the bath, the cold water can be used to cool down your internal temp and the bucket of hot will let you SLOWLY raise the temp of the bath, one cup at a time.
JKR has been openly transphobic since 2020, and in that time she has said and done many things that traditional newspapers were a bit frisky about reporting. So I thought it might be useful to compile some of those things, either for people who haven't been following the situation closely and want a recap (strap in...), or for those who are trying to explain to their peers why they're boycotting HP and need specific talking points and sources. (Though I would remind you that none of this will convince someone who's also transphobic.)
This list is for reference purposes. I am not here to argue and TERFs will be blocked on sight.
The beginning
JKR's transphobia started out slowly and got more open and aggressive as the years passed and she was spurred on by a favorable response. Those who aren't familiar with how transphobia operates might not think much of it, and later sections will be more compelling, but I still wanted to include this part for continuity's sake.
In 2018, JKR liked and then unliked a transphobic tweet. She claimed it was a mistake, that her representative qualified of "clumsy and middle-aged moment." (x)
In 2019, she spoke in defense of Maya Forstater, a tax expert whose contract hadn't been renewed because of her anti-trans views (x, x). People noted that Forstater had done much worse things than "stating sex is real," (a transphobic dogwhistle) and that JK's tweet was condescending at best and insulting at worse.
In 2020, she complained about and mocked the use of the phrase "people who menstruate" (used to include trans men and non-binary people in discussions of reproductive health) (x). She then doubled down in a thread that was meant to sound supportive while reiterating gender critical talking points, which she concluded by denying that people are discriminated against "on the basis of being trans."
Later in 2020, she wrote an essay about her "concerns" regarding trans people, where she pretends not to have any problems with trans people, while also coming in support of known anti-trans activists and infantilizing trans men, among other things (here is a good video analysis about it). This essay, like most of this section, is not representative of her current opinion on trans people.
Notable transphobic moments
In October 2023, in response to a discussion about making deliberate misgendering a criminal offense, JKR claimed she would "happily" go to jail if the alternative was correctly gendering a trans person. (x)
In the 2023 podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, she calls transgenderism "a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement," and compares transgender activists to the death eaters, her fictional fascist group (x).
In March 2024, JKR denied that the Nazis burned trans research, calling the idea a "fever dream." When presented with sources on this well-documented event, she doubled down, moved the goalposts, then shared a thread claiming that trans people weren't targeted by the Nazis. (x, x) This caused the hashtag "JK Rowling is a holocaust denier" to trend (denying the persecution of a group targeted during the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial (x)). This was after she said doctors providing gender-affirming care to minors should be imprisoned (x).
In April 2024, JKR tested the limits of the Hate Crime and Public Order Act that had just gone into effect in Scotland, with gender identity as a protected category. She brought up and slandered ten trans women, mixing up public figures and convicts in an attempt to conflate the two, before concluding the thread by misgendering all of them and daring the police to arrest her. (x)
Rowling's novel Troubled Blood features a male serial killer who dresses as a woman to catch his victims, which is an old and harmful anti-trans representation (x). Her later book The Ink Black Heart follows a YouTube creator who is accused of being transphobic and racist, leading to a coordinated hate campaign from vicious social justice warriors and eventually to her murder (x). JK denied this had to do with her own experience (x). Very few people believed her.
JKR continuously supported the hate group For Women Scotland in their legal battle to restrain the legal definition of man and woman to "biological sex," which would exclude trans women from sex-based protections. (x) They had lost a previous case to the Scottish court, but with a donation of 70,000 pounds from Rowling (x), they were able to keep pushing until the UK Supreme Court passed the resolution in April 2025. This prompted the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention to publish a red flag alert on anti-trans and intersex rights in the UK, which mentions Rowling by name. She, meanwhile, tweeted this:
She frequently singles out and attacks specific trans public figures or trans allies, causing them to be harassed. We mostly hear about it when it involves someone famous (Daniel Radcliff, Emma Watson, David Tennant, Pedro Pascal, etc.) but it's especially appalling when she targets a random person who has absolutely nothing to do with her and was just living their life.
JKR isn't just bigoted; she's obsessed. At any given time, you can open her twitter page and scroll through several anti-trans tweets made in the past week (to the point where Elon Musk of all people told her to go touch grass). Her replies are, predictably, filled with her transphobic followers throwing around slurs and threats of violence, and not only does she never call them out (she used to block people who point it out to her) but she'll frequently encourage them, like here:
Monetary support
One of the biggest justifications of boycotting HP is that JKR has been using her royalties to support anti-trans organizations and campaign to restrain trans people's rights. Here are a few such cases.
She gave 70,000 pounds to For Women Scotland, an anti-trans organization, to fund their legal fees (as mentioned in the previous section) (x, x).
She has sued (or threatened to sue) for defamation many journalists who point out her misinformation and hate speech. (x) Notably, she forced Rivkah Brown, a Jewish journalist, to retract her claim for correctly pointing out her holocaust revisionism. (x)
She created, and will be funding, the "J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund," which supports cis women in legal battles concerning “women’s sex-based rights." (x) For example, she said she would support any woman being incarcerated with a trans woman (x). She had already been paying other transphobes' legal fees (she offered it to Kelly-Jay Keen, for example (x)) but this fund makes it official, widespread and a much bigger deal.
Last and perhaps most worrying, she's been a big donor for the Labour Party (x), which has led people to believe she might influence their politics. In 2024, they offered to meet her to discuss their gender transition policy (!), which she had "concerns" about (x). She agreed, with the condition that they meet several other organizations in-person first, including hate groups like Woman's Place UK and the LGB Alliance (x). Needless to say that a private, unqualified citizen having this level of influence is alarming and deeply undemocratic.
Those are some of the publicly known cases, and we can only imagine what kind of private donations she might be doing. Nadia Whittome, a member of the U.K.'s House of Commons, said that billionaires were funding transphobia in the UK, and named Elon Musk and J.K. Rowling (x).
Intersexism
During the 2024 summer Olympics, JKR participated in the online harassment of Imane Khelif, an Algerian gold-medalist boxer who had been rumored to be intersex and/or transvestigated after one of her opponents dropped out seconds into their match. Khelif filed a criminal cyber harassment complaint, which named JK Rowling and Elon Musk, among others (x). Despite this, JKR was still at it in March 2026 (x).
Later in 2024, Rowling attacked another cis woman, Zambian athlete Barbra Banda, after she won BBC's Women's Footballer of the Year (x). This was seemingly in response to a gender illegibility incident from a few years prior. Meghann Burke, the executive director of the National Women's Soccer League Players Association, came to her defense.
Acephobia
In 2025, JKR retweeted a post about International Asexuality Awareness Day, calling it "International Fake Oppression Day" and denying that asexuality is a real sexuality. She then proceeded to blame "gender activists" for that too. (x, x)
Relevant video essays & articles
I tried to keep this list relatively compact (lmao) while still giving enough details for everything to be clear, but if you want a more in-dept analysis, I would recommend these. The videos in particular are very informative about transphobia and bigotry in general.
Videos
How is JK Rowling Transphobic? Trans Guy Responds by Jammidodger (good summary and explanation, covers up to 2024).
J. K. Rowling by ContraPoints (early, in-dept analysis, covers up to Jan 2021).
JK Rowling's New Friends by Shaun (examines the ties between the gender critical movement and far-right groups through JKR and her connections).
The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling by ContraPoints (a response to JKR's podcast and a very good study on hate movements, activism, radicalization, etc.)
Articles
A timeline of JK Rowling's anti-trans shift, by Theara Coleman for The Week
JK Rowling's GLAAD Accountability Profile
A Comprehensive Timeline of J.K. Rowling's Descent Into Transphobia by Quispe Lòpez on Them
Here’s What J.K. Rowling Has Actually Said About Trans People by Claire Lampen and Olivia Craighead on The Cut
A Complete Breakdown of the J.K. Rowling Transgender-Comments Controversy by Abby Gardner for Glamour
This is, of course, far from everything, but it seemed like the main points regarding transphobia, intersexism and acephobia, which are the aspects I felt most qualified to cover. Feel free to add on if you have the source for it. Information regarding her racism, antisemitism and homophobia would be especially welcome.
Tumblr added a bunch of tracking shit to share urls, so now ill teach you how to get rid of them
if you copy a url by sharing on the website, the link will look like this
getting rid of tracking in these is easy, just delete everything after the question mark and you are golden
in the case for the app, its slightly more complicated
first you have to delete at. that appears before tumblr(.)com the other tracking shit on this one has a lot more info, so please, clean app urls. after the first set of numbers, there's a / you have to delete everything after it
Just saw a tweet like "REAL libraries check for quality!" as some kinda gotcha at AO3?? But I'm a librarian, so... heads up that "quality checks," AKA "weeding" or "pulling," means looking for damaged books or ones that haven't circulated in a few years to clear up shelf space. We don't Quality Check for if the library books have nontoxic romance or good grammar. :U I assure you every library in your area has absolute ABOMINATIONS of bad storytelling as well as your favorite pop lit.
"ReAl LiBrArIeS cHeCk fOR qUaLiTy" LISTEN. There was a collection of poems in circulation at one of my previous libraries that had never actually been published, and we only found out about it because the author called while I was on the reference desk one day asking how the hell a book that never went to print had ended up in our online catalogue. And you think we're monitoring content?
This is how we get a shifting baseline. Defining "bad" as "everything below average" and fighting until it's all destroyed just results in a new average for people who weren't as hard wired with the old average. A bunch of people get a new below average to rally against and the cycle continues. Attacking things that fall below the average and trying to erase them should be done mindfully and (AT BEST) saved for specific circumstances (such as things that remove autonomy). For the rest (like literature you consider trash), lift up the good and teach good media literacy (and just critical thinking in general).
Let’s just say, episode 9 changed my perspective of episode 5 and 6. It explains Ragatha’s behaviors towards Jax getting close with Pomni and she said “Jax is corrupting her”. I thought corrupting meant Pomni changing for bad, not literally
So she has been trying to protect her, to not the history repeat
Let’s just say, episode 9 changed my perspective of episode 5 and 6. It explains Ragatha’s behaviors towards Jax getting close with Pomni and she said “Jax is corrupting her”. I thought corrupting meant Pomni changing for bad, not literally
So she has been trying to protect her, to not the history repeat
Starting a mass movement to refer to specific Tylwyth Teg by name until they lose their power and become common household standards like Kleenex and Velcro
Spreading legend of The Rodent In Red Pants Who Walks Upright On Hind Legs Like a Man and if you sully his Good and kindly Name then great misfortune will befall you and you will never be heard from again
I've been living out of a rental because my home makes me react and we can't get it clean enough. My body randomly decides from day to day what food is safe. I have to take 2 showers a day with a limited ingredient soap that feels bad and dries out my skin. Bathroom trash and any place I spend time has to be regularly cleaned because I'm reacting to anything that comes out of me (sweat, coughing, menstruation, tears,...). I'm limited on how long I can wear clothes before I react to myself (so I'm just in underwear a LOT) and I'm sleeping on a plastic tarp with a sheet on top (makes cleaning possible). My best friend is soaking/handwashing my clothes in enzymes (to break down even trace mold) and hydrogen peroxide (to help remove the frankly INSANE amount of histamine I make) because it's the only way we've found that makes my dirty clothes safe to wear again (AND THEN she has to clean the bathroom and herself so I don't react to what came off my clothes). We have to spray dishes down with vodka before I use them (I feel like a CRAZY PERSON but it seems to break down whatever cursed fucking bullshit I leave behind on my dirty dishes that dishwashing liquid doesn't remove). The head to toe itching is unbearable sometimes and the spikes in severity can cover me in tiny bumps and push me into SEVERE autistic sensory overload (on top of sporadic crippling nausea, screaming headache at the front of my head, and asthma attacks). I swelled up over 25 lbs because I STARTING TO REACT TO MY ANTIHISTAMINE!!! (now I'm covered in stretch marks) Just... hell. But the good news is that my doctors are sending information to one of the big medical academic institutions to take on my case. My doctors said my testing is all over the place and my case is well beyond their training (they suspect something to do with mast cell but aren't sure), but they believe I can get help there and I trust them.
Side note: I wanted to add how grateful I am for my friends and my best friend's family. I cannot overstate how much the family I forged have been there for me through all of this. I have genuinely never known so much love and care in my entire life. They keep me going, never stop advocating for me, and no matter how tired or frustrated they get, they never make me feel like my life isn't worth the burden I put on them. I have no doubt that if this happened a decade ago when I just had my bio family, I would be dead by now (they would've taken me to like 2 or 3 doctors, told me it was in my head or incurable because the doctors found nothing, and started planning my funeral BECAUSE THEY HAVE FOR LESS). It took a long time and some luck to build my family, but despite everything that has happened in the past decade, I'm happier than I've been in my entire life because of them. Regardless of how my current health nightmare pans out, I have no regrets.
okay, for those interested, here is a full timeline of how we got to Count Binface:
1977: Star Wars is released, featuring, of course, Darth Vader
(Pictured: Darth Vader)
1984: Director Todd Durham releases his Star Wars parody movie, Hyperspace, featuring Darth Vader inspired villain Lord Buckethead.
(Pictured: Hyperspace poster featuring two Jawa-esque aliens flying through space in a shopping trolley.)
1987: Hyperspace is released on video in the UK, under the new title Gremloids.
(Pictured: Gremloids cover in the style of the original Star Wars poster, featuring Lord Buckethead.)
To promote the film, Mike Lee, the owner of the distributing company, ran for parliament as Lord Buckethead. He ran in Margaret Thatcher's constituency, Finchley, in order to get on TV. Lord Buckethead was representing the Gremloids party.
(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with Margaret Thatcher.)
1992: Gremloids is re-released. Lord Buckethead rides again, this time against prime minister John Major in Huntingdon. (Here's a fun fact about Huntingdon: I was born there! :D) 87/92 Buckethead seems to have leaned pretty hard into the space supervillain thing, with campaign promises including 'demolish Birmingham to build a spaceport'.
(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with John Major. Other notable candidates include Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party.)
2017: comedian Jon Harvey, having recently watched Gremloids and learned of Lord Buckethead's candidacy for parliament, decides it's a great bit. He runs against Theresa May in Maidenhead. 2017 Buckethead seems to have a wackier and also more political approach, with campaign promises ranging from nonsense like 'nationalise Adele' to gesturing at actually sensible policies with stuff like 'lower the voting age to 16 and restrict voting after age 80'.
He also made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. As with his previous incarnation, he was a member of the Gremloids party.
(Pictured: Lord Buckethead dabbing on stage with Theresa May.)
2018: Director Todd Durham asserts his legal ownership of Lord Buckethead. Jon Harvey opted not to go to court over Buckethead and handed over the reins. Todd Durham extended an invitation to anyone who wanted to be the 'authorised' Lord Buckethead.
(Pictured: the new Lord Buckethead.)
2019: Lord Buckethead, now played by journalist David Hughes, stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. He ran for the Monster Raving Loony Party, the UK's pre-existing gag candidate party. He ran with a similarly silly manifesto as the 2017 incarnation, but with a bit less of a political edge. His promises included 'All doorways to be increased by 1 foot (30 cm) in height' and 'Nigel Farage to be sold for parts'.
(Pictured: Lord Buckethead and Count Binface square up.)
Meanwhile, Jon Harvey in his new persona Count Binface, also ran against Boris Johnson. Buckethead and Binface face off! Binface ran as an independent with a manifesto once again blending silly and semi-serious promises such as 'nationalising model railways' and 'giving £1 trillion a week to the NHS'. This was also I believe the debut of his promise to 'move the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position'.
(Pictured: Count Binface presenting the offending hand dryer, inconveniently close to both the sink and the urinals.)
He has a point.
2021: Count Binface runs for the position of Mayor of London for the first time, with promises such as 'London to join the European Union'. He notably finished ahead of far right party UKIP.
2023: Count Binface runs in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election following Boris Johnson's resignation. He once again gets more votes than UKIP.
May 2024: Count Binface once again runs to be Mayor of London, debuting his now iconic 'build at least one affordable house' promise. Notably, he finished ahead of far right party Britain First.
(Pictured: Count Binface with Rishi Sunak. Also pictured: Monster Raving Loony Party candidate Sir Archibald Stanton with a ventriloquist's dummy.)
July 2024: Count Binface stands in the general election, running in Richmond and Northallerton against prime minister Rishi Sunak. He debuts his promise to cap the price of 99p flakes at 99p. This is his most successful election to date with 308 votes.
(Pictured: Count Binface with Andy Burnham. Also pictured: independent candidate Robert Pownell, dressed as a fox for his own reasons.)
June 2026: Count Binface stands in the Makerfield by-election against Andy Burnham, (recently) former Mayor of Manchester running for parliament with the intention of standing in the Labour Party leadership contest.
(Pictured: Count Binface on BBC's Newsnight.)
July 2026 (this week): Count Binface announces his intention to run against Nigel Farage in the upcoming Clacton by-election. He is briefly the only other candidate in the race and by the time other candidates announce themselves the narrative of 'Nigel Farage vs Count Binface' has already bedded in. And then it was now, and then I don't know what happened.
The burning question: When she has her hands on either side of her face, right at the start, is this the moment she realized, “I’m gonna have to marry this guy” ?
