Some people accuse millennials of being ungrateful and entitled. Sadly, many of our celebrities do little to disabuse the public of this notion. Take the young cast of the Harry Potter films. Despite being, let’s face it, an assemblage of rather ropey talents who would be nowhere without the series, they have taken in recent years to denouncing JK Rowling: the woman to whom they owe everything.
To those who have been living under a rock, the once feted children’s author has, in recent years, caused intense and sustained outrage. Her crime? Saying some quite measured things about transgenderism. Rowling thinks biological sex exists and that letting male-bodied people into Rape Crisis centres is probably not a good idea. For these damnable heresies she has faced a barrage of death threats and been treated like a pariah. She’s even been left out of Potter retrospectives and had her name quietly removed from trailers promoting the film versions of her own work.
To salt the wound, the stars of the original Potter flicks have also publicly denounced Rowling. The one who played Hermione, the one who played Ron and the one who played Harry have all criticised the author in the gender debate. More seasoned members of the cast, including the late Robbie Coltrane and Ralph Fiennes, have defended her. Harry, aka Daniel Radcliffe, has now said in an interview with IndieWire he thinks his stand against Rowling was ‘really important’.
Radcliffe’s pomposity and self-regard is breathtaking. ‘I felt very, very much as though I needed to say something’, he says. ‘I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter… I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way.’
You would have thought he’d faced down the cops at Selma. What he actually did was join a pile-on against Rowling after she took to Twitter to mock the absurd phrase ‘people who menstruate’, one of the many new ‘trans-inclusive’ terms for women. (Rowling fears, as many feminists do, that due to gender ideology the very notion of womanhood is being erased.)
Anyone who has bothered to read what Rowling has actually said about gender will know she is not a transphobic bigot. We have tumbled so far down the rabbit hole that to denounce a beloved children’s author, while she is being demonised and bombarded with rape threats, is to be noble.
Harry and co should be ashamed of themselves.
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