"What did JK Rowling even do?" An overview
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.
