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Edward Barrett's grandmother committed suicide. She left him everything. Having been homeless, Edward unquestioningly moves into her apartment, unaware that she left something behind. Something that sinks its teeth into his very existence.
His one shot at figuring out what's haunting him and saving himself is inside the journals he picked up from Otherside Book Exchange – the writers were all victims, and all became monsters following their deaths.
Between the off-putting proprietor of Otherside – a soft-spoken woman named Conscience – and the distressing contents of the journals, Edward has no choice but to come around to the idea that otherworldly horrors exist, and they're all around him.
If he wants to save himself from being eaten alive, he needs to find the diary of the monster preying on him.
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.
So Mattel came out with different Barbie body types a couple years ago, right? There’s your normal body, but there’s also Curvy, Petite, and Tall now.
Around the same time, they came out with the Made to Move body, which has a ton more articulation than your normal Barbie.
Customizers love the Made to Move body, because hey, a lot more fun positions to put a doll in for photographing. But now Mattel has started making the Made to Move dolls with the additional body types from above. We’ve gotten a Curvy Made to Move doll so far, afaik.
This Queen Elizabeth doll, though? Is the first time there’s been a Petite Made to Move body released by Mattel. So customizers were buying it up not out of any care about Queen Elizabeth — but they were buying it to pop her head right off and use the new body for other dolls!
I was once talking to my 75 year old Chinese dad in passing about a trans friend of mine not getting along with her family and he asked why and I said err, because she's trans, dad.
He asked: "Oh, was she the only son or something before *waves hand*?" and I was like, warily, no she has two brothers. And he responded with a great deal of confusion: "Then what's their problem?!?!"
Later on: "Anyway, even if she WAS the only son, that's not her problem, that's THEIR problem. They should have had more sons if they were going to be bothered about it."
Knowing what I know about chinese culture there’s something so beautifully simple about his logic of “no son to carry on family name/look after them in old age/all the other stuff? Skill issue! Should’ve had more sons! Should’ve kept the family unit strong yourself! Blaming your daughter for your own failure of family planning is W E A K!” and then he learns there are more sons and it completely breaks his train of logic because if yes to more sons then why issue?? You have two others and you’re mad you don’t have three?? Whack. Greedy.
I can already envision him as an ancient lord of a powerful house looking down his nose at the latest messenger bringing gossip from the house of his offspring’s friend and going “now they have a daughter to marry into another family for powerful alliances and two sons to take over her former duties and somehow they’re still complaining about their good fortune? They shall not survive the winter.” and then sipping his tea with all the grim satisfaction of someone about to watch an unnecessary soap opera of drama unfold from a safe distance or something
The US is crazy bc like so many people have intense conspiracy theories about the government like "I think there's a secret elite group of people who control everything" and you can tell them "actually you're not completely wrong, it's just not a secret group of people, it's a bunch of rich people and lobbyists who are doing it all out in the open" and they'll be like "hmmn I don't think it's THOSE people though. I prefer my racist & antisemitic theories"
They'll be like "I heard there's a powerful ring of pedophiles who are influencing the country" and you'll tell them "I mean yeah that's what the Epstein files are about" and they'll say "no I'm pretty sure this has to do with The Queers actually"
Hello person having transgender thoughts but convinced they aren't trans because they don't have the requisite amount of dysphoria they think they need
Hi I transitioned without even thinking I had dysphoria. Like later in hindsight I can go "oh that's probably what it was" but for the first year of my transition I was straight up like "I like being a guy but I like being a girl WAY more" and you can do that!! There is no prerequisite amount of suffering needed to make yourself happier.
Being transgender isn't something you have to earn, you just have to decide if you want it. And if you change your mind, that's okay too. There's no one serving a, a toll gate of transgender identity and saying you have to be this dysphoric to enter, all you have to do is just decide for yourself.
Another thing is that if you base your identity on a specific form of suffering you experience, you might find it hard to get better because the absence of pain might feel like a loss of identity.
omg??? idk if i agree that the organ the users of the broken peacock valued the most are what pass on to their children as a prevalent trait (the sentibeing concept still largely confuses me personally but wouldn't that mean that piece of the user passes onto every single sentibeing they create even if it isn't an offspring? i just don't know if we have evidence of that and astruc isn't addressing that aspect of the theory here) but it is fascinating to think about. when he says "emotion that is at the origin of the sentibeing" it probably is related to what the user values and their reason for creation, so that organ being a kind of "exchange" for using the (broken) peacock in the first place makes sense, and if the organ affected ends up being a vital organ it leads to death (so in emilie and colt's case, the heart and brain, whereas tomoe can survive without her eyes). interesting. (what was nathalie's vital organ that was failing?)
get incredibly horny and aroused when x IS involved in sex
don't find interest in sex if x is not involved in some way shape or form
then congratulations, you have a fetish!! and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! fetish isnt a bad or ugly thing, it's just something that's a part of your sexuality, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.
It's not r*pe, it's rape. It's not su*cide, it's suicide. Not unalive, dead. The backbone needs to be reintroduced en masse because softening the blow of these concepts with advertising language does absolutely nothing but allow people unaffected by them to feel not even a sting of what they can do, prompting inaction.
And it's been proven that on certain websites, you don't even face a repercussion for using the words as they are. People just started censoring themselves because they feared the potential lack of views and likes and followers which is so nasty itself.
I attended an anti-suicide seminar in college. One of the big takeaways from it was that stigmatizing suicide increases the rate of suicide, because people who are feeling suicidal feel like they can't ask for help. Every time I see babytalk garbage like 'unalive', I think of that.
little inconsistencies that at first you assume "oh, the author must have fucked up", but then later on you realize that no, it was on purpose, they wanted you to think they fucked up but they hadnt
tumblr post made by a 27 year old woman frustrated bc her boyfriend leaves her with the burden of household chores: god I wish men would stop "forgetting" to do the dishes
15 year old with adhd in the replies who has just been yelled at for forgetting the dishes: what if he's neurodivergent and you're bullying him
mra blogs, by the dozen: this is why Matriarchy has failed our most vulnerable men
This is actually such a good point. 100% of posts I make with an opinion are things I made while a bit pissed off that don’t stand up to any scrutiny and should not get more than 2 notes
Anyway, daily reminder from a culturally isolated Romani person.
Gypsy does not mean wanderer.
It literally means ‘people from egypt’ or similar, as europeans believed Romani people were from Egypt. It has become known similar to nomad due to how our ancestors have been forced to be nomadic due to racism and ostracization, but it is a SLUR.
Romani people are STILL being forcibly sterilized.
Romani people are STILL being forced into ghettos.
Romani people are still facing violence and danger in countless European countries- and recently, I’ve seen the beginnings of the extremes in the United States.
Have a little fucking respect and DON’T USE A SLUR THAT’S BEEN USED FOR CENTURIES AGAINST US.
And for the love of whatever’s up there, ESPECIALLY do not use it to describe your witchcraft. It is playing on the ‘magic gypsy’ trope, and is EXTREMELY insulting.
non romani people, please reblog this.
The Irritable Queer @theirritablequeer - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
