What did JK Rowling really do wrong？

Hi there! You look great today. Welcome back to my channel. Now, today I'm going to have a little look at J.K. Rowling, which I know is a similarly controversial thing to do as my last video, which was on Ricky Gervais, which you should absolutely go watch after this one, but I think there's a lot of important things that I need to say. Now, obviously all of you have heard of Harry Potter, because if you haven't then you're probably literally born yesterday and you should not be watching this YouTube video, but some of you might not have heard of all the details about her controversies with recent years, especially to do with transgender people. I'm sure lots of you have heard different rumours, and today I just want to go through all of the specific facts that happened and how they influenced not only her wealth, but how she used it. But to be fair to her, just like I was fair to Ricky Gervais, I want to go through her whole career, not just the things she did badly, so in this video I'm going to explore three different things. Number one, what things has J.K. Rowling done that are good, such as the success of Harry Potter itself? Number two, what things has J.K. Rowling done that are bad, such as her online persona? And finally, number three, what things is J.K. Rowling continuing to do badly? Well, we will discuss the upcoming release of the new HBO Harry Potter series and how supporting that will support other things. Now, I want to say as a preface to this video, I know people in my real life who love Harry Potter, like love it, love it. Serious Potter heads, they're obsessed with the books, they're obsessed with the movies, and I used to like it a lot too. So spoilers, at the end of this video I'm not going to come out and say that you are bad for supporting Harry Potter and that you can't support J.K. Rowling and that it's wrong to do one or the other, you are not good or bad for supporting her, I am not good or bad for not supporting her, I just want to lay out all the different facts and I hope that it might sway your opinion a little to hear my opinions on these things, because I think it's just an important topic. So let's get started. First of all, to state the obvious, Harry Potter was a thing that J.K. Rowling did that was very good. Now, some people disagree on the literary value of the books because they have some strange representations of female characters like Hermione, and they also have a little bit of a weird depiction of slavery with the elves being really happy about being slaves, and when Hermione goes hey I think we should actually release these people from captivity where they're doing forced Everyone's like shut up, stop being so boring, but overall the books are very good and they were a big success. I mean everyone is obsessed with Harry Potter, or at least was at some point in their lives, and the books had over 600 million copies sold, which sure about half of those were probably Potterheads buying a hundred sets of the seven books to build their houses out of, it's still a very impressive claim to fame nevertheless. And the films also did very well, they made, oh I don't know, two and a half billion dollars, so pretty good, you know, a surmountable sum. I personally probably could have done better, but it's a good start. Fantastic Beasts, the following series, didn't do very well in comparison, but to be fair that's the rule of thumb with prequels, so there's definitely some leniency to be given there. Overall, just as a franchise, it made so much money, it's one of the most successful book series of all time, one of the most successful film series of all time, it grossed a huge amount of money, and just, you know, fame for all the actors and for JK Rowling herself. She won award after award after award for her work, and in a lot of ways it was deserved, because she'd worked hard on this project and everyone's heard the story where she went to several different producers over a number of years, none of them would take her, and then it's become one of the biggest things ever. Now, I do, a little caveat to that story, I do think it's maybe fair that those producers didn't want to take it. It's quite a weird show to try and give a logline for, or a short description for. A boy with a scratch on his head goes to school with magic, and you just take, the story takes place in school the whole time. It doesn't sound super entertaining, but it was, and it was hugely influential. But to be fair, that's not all that JK Rowling has done good. She's also been a huge philanthropist, and donated a lot of money to various charities. Between 2005 and modern day, it's estimated that she's donated around 200 million dollars to charities, which compared to most millionaires and billionaires, is a huge feat. Now, not all of that money went to necessarily very good causes, but most of it did. She donated a lot to different charities for women at risk, single mothers, and children's charities, and children's orphanages, as well as all of her, or at least most of her funds from Fantastic Beasts going to Comic Relief. So she's done a lot of philanthropy and support, and I do want to say in the current climate of the world, that definitely needs to be appreciated more. We've got all these people like Elon Musk, and Donald Trump, and Mark Zuckerberg, who just sit on their wealth and argue about it on Twitter, about how they shouldn't have to do anything with it, whereas there are people who need it. And J.K. Rowling was one of the people kind enough to donate at least a portion of her large wealth to common people who needed it. So she's done a lot of good, and had a lot of good impact, as well as the negative impact of her controversies in her career. And she also hates the Daily Mail, which I am 100% on board with, so we're very strong allies there. So you definitely can't say just as a blanket statement, J.K. Rowling is a bad person. Now, her political views that she's shared in the past, I find it difficult to sort of pick out. There are some things I really strongly disagree with, and there are some things I strongly do agree with. For example, she donated a lot to Labour in 2010, opposing David Cameron, and was very much in opposition of Brexit, which I think was very good. It was important to have someone who has, you know, a certain amount of sway in the public to voice that opinion. But then she also, in 2024, said that she would not find it very hard to vote for Labour and Keir Starmer. Now, listen, I'm not saying it's weird to not like Keir Starmer. In fact, I think it's probably as hard to find a person that likes him as much as it is to find a person who's never heard of Harry Potter before. He's not the most likable individual. But the reason she said it is what puts me off a little bit, which is that she said she would find it difficult to vote for Labour due to their current stance on trans rights. And what she meant by that was not being angry at trans people. And unfortunately, that is a very good segue to talk about the next thing, which is... There have been reports on JK Rowling's views on gender for a long, long time. First sort of sparking in 2017 and 2018, when she liked a series of tweets that were incredibly transphobic. Now, she came out and has said since that she liked those by accident and that it was all a big mistake. And I would like to give her the benefit of the doubt there. You know when your phone goes like a little bit smudgy, you've got some grease on it or something, and it just starts pressing things by accident? That happens to all of us. So if that's what happened to her, fair do's. It's not her fault. She didn't mean it, and it was all resolved. Then in 2019, she supported someone called Maya Forstater, who was a researcher whose job contract was not renewed after she made a series of very transphobic tweets. Now, this situation is also difficult to sort of analyse, because JK Rowling said that she is happy for anyone to identify however they would like, but that she doesn't think anyone should be fired over saying that sex is real. Now, it's difficult to say. It's not a situation where JK Rowling has directly sort of agreed with transphobia, but she also didn't oppose it at all. She didn't seem to address the fact that the tweets were transphobic as much as she addressed the fact that someone shouldn't have been fired. But to be fair, this was someone just saying that person shouldn't have been fired, and the court agreed with her because they filed it as a discrimination against Maya Forstater. So, though JK Rowling was very much on Maya's side, it doesn't necessarily implicate her in transphobia. Now, I think that's all fair enough. The court agreed it was discrimination. JK Rowling was saying it was discrimination, and I think that's a good point to make. Discrimination is bad under any context, and from now on, we can all view JK Rowling as someone who is actively anti-discrimination. Yes? Great. So, people started labelling her as a TERF from this point on, which is a term you've probably heard before. It stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, essentially saying that trans activism is directly dangerous to women, and that it will affect how women are discriminated against. Now, obviously at this point, like I've said, she didn't pick this name for herself, but it is interesting because definitely the exclusionary part of that doesn't feel super anti-discrimination. In June 2020, she sparked more controversy. Now, June of 2020 is probably the time where you should have been able to get away with pretty good tweets. You could essentially just talk about, I don't know, the thing that was affecting literally everyone in the world, and you could empathise with that on a common level with most people, except she didn't particularly. She unfortunately made some comments that people associated with transphobia. She responded to a tweet that simply used the phrase, instead of women, because they wanted to be inclusionary to lots of people, for example, trans men, who are people who menstruate but don't identify as women, and also other people of different associated genders. And she referred to it as, in a sort of silly, jokey way, and she responded by saying, oh, I'm sure there's a word for people who menstruate. What was it? Oh yes, women. And of course, I'm not going to get too angry at this personally. I think a lot of people did, which is fair enough. I think they're allowed to, but I didn't get too angry about this personally because I think that it's just a silly, jokey reply. What went wrong is that she started interacting with comments. Now, people started commenting on her silly joke and saying, this feels a little bit transphobic. Why can't we use an inclusionary term instead of being exclusionary? And she responded to them, and she argued with people on Twitter. Now, I just want to say, if you're a super wealthy person, first of all, lucky, but second of all, don't use Twitter. I think it's just a bad idea, because any sort of influential person I can think of, there's a story of them using Twitter, and if they respond in comments, it becomes a controversy. Because if you start arguing with people online, you have just lost sort of all sense of the world. People on Twitter, half of them are bots, and the other half of them are just rage baiting you, and if you start talking to them in the comments, you're just sparking more anger for no reason. If you're influential, and you're wealthy, and you've said something that people are saying is a little bit yikesy, maybe just ignore it, and move on, and have another drink on your yacht, and then come back 10 years later and be like, oh yeah, that was a weird thing that happened, but luckily I'm a well-rounded individual. But she continued to establish that saying a phrase like people who menstruate is actually exclusionary, rather than inclusionary, because you're trying to deny the idea that women exist. You're trying to deny the idea that sex is a real thing, and you are perpetuating dangerous ideas about how women's lived experiences aren't lived experiences. This was a really weird argument, and it was between a multi-millionaire writer and a minority group, so everyone started to be a little bit fairly critical of her as an anti-discriminatory person. Later that month, she then also released a lengthy blog post about sex and gender issues, which a lot of people had issues with due to her views on sex and gender. So hey, I guess she picked the perfect title. In this, she spoke out about different many reasons that she thought that trans activism was dangerous to women, which I wouldn't call speaking out necessarily, since that's pretty much the universal thing to do, is discriminate against a minority. But again, she's anti-discrimination, so you know, there's no accusing her of that. And she just sort of talked about a lot of these topics in a sort of difficult way for people to not interpret negatively. She mainly just several times insinuated that trans activism is actually Now, I don't see how that can be true sort of logistically. I mean, trans women existing is technically a net positive for women, or of women, because there's more women. But she went on a huge tangent about it, and she started the sort of gendered bathrooms debate. Now I know, this debate has been going on for ages, and people haven't shut up about it, but So this was sort of one of the beginnings of that debate, and it went on for a very long time, as most of you will have heard. Her statement was that I again disagree with this for two reasons. Number one, directly towards her, I think that was really I think that suggesting that trans women are just men who feel like being a woman is a bit exclusionary, and maybe a little bit discriminatory, but again, we'll hold back from that. And then the other reason I disagree with is actually not just from JK Rowling, but just as a wider point of view, which is about the gendered bathrooms debates. Now my opinion on this is that it's stupid, because the idea that if we let trans women exist, then men will be able to go into women's bathrooms doesn't make any sense, because, not to be too pessimistic about the world right now, but that can already happen. At the current moment, it's not like the whole world is perfect, and there's no crime, and there's nothing going wrong, because there's no trans people. Right now, if a man wanted to commit a sex crime by going into a women's bathroom, which does happen all the time across the whole world, then he just would, and they just do. He doesn't need to pretend to be a woman, because you can just walk into places, and it's not going to be this loophole that they've found to get in. You can just do it. It's not going to be a legal case where if someone goes in, commits a sex crime, and then says they're a woman, the court will drop it, because that's not how that works. If a cisgendered woman goes into a women's bathroom and assaults someone, they will also be arrested. It's not about what the sign says, it's about the crime you did. So the sign isn't a thing that's going to stop criminals, because it's just a sign. And I think this is just an idea that's used to perpetuate hatred against the trans community, and I'm sure most of you already know that, I don't need to say that out loud, but I will, just because, you know, I don't know who's going to be watching these videos, and judging from the last video, it's probably some transphobic people. But anyway, along with some completely factual inaccuracies that people complained about, and misusing statistics that people complained about, generally the blog post just didn't go down very well. So there was a lot of backlash from this, and several Harry Potter adjacent people, such as Harry Potter, Daniel Radcliffe, Hermione Granger, Emma Watson, and Ron Weasley, Rupert Grint, all came out and actively said, I support the trans community, in response to this. Warner Brothers also released a statement. This is where things felt like they could just die down. If she had done this blog post, and then all the people sort of adjacent to her in her franchise said, we actually don't agree with this, and then she'd said nothing, nothing would have happened. It would have moved on. She could have kept her opinions to herself, maybe just talked to, like, I don't know, any of the people she could talk to about this, such as all of, you know, wealthy people, but she unfortunately kept fanning the flames. She, later on that year, started talking about how gender-affirming care, such as hormonal therapy, is just the lazy way out for young people, and just made a lot of transphobic points. Now just to put this out here, just as my opinion, gender-affirming care as an option is never a negative thing. Gender-affirming care being accessible to young people not only literally saves lives, because some people find the response of society to their identity as too harsh to keep living through, but also, it's an option. It's not mandatory. So having it there is just a good thing. It's not a lazy way out for people, because A, people have to come to terms with a lot of sort of mental understanding of their identity to get to that point, and B, gender-affirming care is very, very hard to access. It's either extremely long waiting lists, or a lot of money. Other than this, she released a detective book called Troubled Blood about a man who dresses up as a woman to kill other women, and so I feel there's enough said there. Coincidentally, she did release this and many other detective books as her adult fiction series under the alias of Robert Galbraith, which, uh, that's interesting. I guess she's not really, I guess she's not really subscribing to gender norms there. She's taking alias or taking on a different name than the one she was born with, and sort of a name that's associated with the opposite gender. So she's, I know, I guess she's not really subscribing to gender roles there. Moving on to more recent events, in October 2022, JK Rowling backed several protests against the Scottish Gender Bill, which was trying to help people be recognised legally as their preferred gender. Now she claimed the same things as she has done before, which is the rhetoric that if you let men meet these meagre requirements, then it will make women less safe across the board. Then in 2023, she sort of gave up her point that she's been making this whole time, which so far has been, I support trans people, except in a sort of governmental or legal dispute, and she just sort of let that all go. She's given up on the anti-discrimination, and retweeted a post that said trans women are women, with the caption, no. So pretty cut and dry, plain and simple. She might not be anti-discrimination, or at least not as much as we thought. Then in 2024, she also responded to a Guardian News article about a murder of a man in Oxford, and the murderer coincidentally happened to be a trans woman, with the fact that the article should have made it clear that it was a trans woman, shouldn't have pushed these crimes onto the idea of women, and that the main focus of the story should have been that person's gender identity. Now people pushed back on this very poor argument, obviously, for several reasons. First of all, the main focus of the murder that happened should probably be the murder, because murder is pretty bad. And secondly, women do commit crimes. J.K. Rowling's point seemed to be that not making it clear that it was a trans woman as opposed to a cis woman meant people thought of women as murderers. But to be fair, women can be murderers, and men can be murderers. Murder doesn't need to be gendered. It might be a weird comparison to make, but this annoys me on the same level as when people sort of associate being emotional as a gendered thing, and I think we just kind of need to publicly accept that some people are more emotional than other people. It doesn't have to be a gendered thing. More in 2024, she challenged the Scottish Hate Crime Act, saying that being anti-discrimination is actually bad. Not only is she not anti-discrimination, it's bad to be so because you are ignoring biological facts. And then she got involved with that long discussion about the boxer Imane Khalif. Now, first things first. Imane Khalif was born female, and has never identified as transgender or intersex. So all of the points anyone was making about her are just wrong. Now, the reason there was a lot of backlash or controversy around this was because during the Olympics, during the boxing, Imane Khalif was doing very well, and it then came out that she had an X chromosome. Again, she was born female, has been identified female all her life, and yet JK Rowling started making some pretty disgusting comments about her. During the competitions, she talked about how everyone was clearly watching a misogynist man clearly laughing in the face of a distressed woman as he punched her. I don't think it's a super fair criticism of a boxer to be punching someone. I did think that punching was sort of the point of the sport, so that does seem like an arbitrary point to be like, that person's punching a woman, let's gang up on them, because that is kind of the point of boxing. So I guess JK Rowling would like women to not be allowed in boxing, and maybe she doesn't want them in sports at all. Let's get rid of those opportunities for those people. Not sure, but that seemed like a pretty arbitrary point, and then she also just kept arguing that with people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump on her side, and I think generally, if those people are on your side, it does sort of, I don't want to say invalidate your opinion, but it makes you look like a complete and total idiot. Can we all agree on that at the very least? So she spread a lot of disgusting comments about this governmentally identified woman who was backed by the International Olympic Committee, who I would say have much more say in this than a rich writer from 2007, and then she also accused a Paralympian woman, Valentina Petrillo, of cheating because of being a trans woman. Now not only did this person have to go through extreme measures to be allowed in by the government and by the Olympic Committee, who again no more than JK Rowling, but she also then lost. So the whole point about cheating was kind of really stupid, and it's the same thing as has happened several times. People push this idea that trans women in sports is dangerous, and not only is the percentage less than half of half of a percent of people in women's sports are transgender, but also they don't always win, and so your point about how, well obviously they're going to instantly win if we let them in, doesn't even hold up with facts and evidence. It is just bigotry that's stupid. And finally the cherry on top of this cake of bigotry. JK Rowling donated a large sum to the group For Women Scotland, who brought legal challenges that led to the UK Supreme Court case For Women Scotland Limited versus the Scottish Ministers. Now I'm not sure how many of you will have heard of this, especially if you're not in the UK, but last summer, summer of 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruling kind of majorly affected the lives of hundreds of people, and majorly affected the safety of a huge minority, because the Supreme Court ruled that transgender women can no longer legally be considered as women in any way. Under the Equalities Act, under the various governmental laws that were there to keep trans people safe, and it was a real heartbreak for the trans community. JK Rowling actually celebrated this move, and she donated a sum equalling $92,000 to the group, which helped lead them to this ruling. So she actively supported this ruling financially. However, she not only did this, but she has set up her own private fund to support other cases like this. Now, since that event, I haven't seen much about it actually happening. I don't know if she's supported anything thus far, but she now has a organisation of her own that is built to support cases that take away the rights and safety of transgender people. Which leads me to my final point. Next year, the Harry Potter HBO series comes out, and there's been a bit of discussion about it already. I personally just think it's boring to do another remake. We have seven billion remakes of seven billion things. The movies are already in adaptation, do we need another one? There's also a million fan fictions about Harry Potter already. I think we're good on Harry Potter stuff, but regardless of the sort of media literacy of making another Harry Potter show, JK Rowling is estimated to make around 20 million dollars per year for the show. And unless something dramatically changes, that money will be used in part for her organisation. So again, I'm not going to make a moral judgment on whether you want to watch the Harry Potter series. I think you probably shouldn't, because if you already own the books or the films, you're good on Harry Potter stuff. The series isn't going to be much different. But it's not my place to say, I just want to lay out the unfortunate fact of the matter. The fact is, if you watch and financially support this HBO series, you will be financially supporting JK Rowling. And if you support her, you're supporting her organisation. And by supporting her organisation, that money is supporting several legal cases that diminish the rights of transgender people across the UK in similar situations as that Supreme Court ruling. Taking away their safety, taking away a lot of people's livelihoods, taking probably some lives. And this is obviously not ideal. So from now on, unless something dramatically changes, supporting JK Rowling supports anti-trans rhetoric with real-life impact. And I don't just mean supporting it in terms of beliefs, because our anti-trans rhetoric has spread that rhetoric, which has always been true. I mean financially. And I don't just mean a real-life impact in that people's mental health has been affected for years, because that's always been true. I mean literally rights being taken away by the government. Now, that's not a lovely note to end on, but that is going to be the end of this video. Again, I'm just going to say it. It's not my place to tell you what your opinion on supporting Harry Potter should be. If you want to continue supporting JK Rowling, and if you continue just wanting to love the Harry Potter series, I understand. I'm not going to hate you. Harry Potter is hugely influential. It means a lot to people. And it was obviously many people's childhoods, which is why it was so important to everyone. But I am going to say that supporting JK Rowling is dangerous to trans people. And if you care about trans people, you might want to consider some kind of alternatives. So that's the end of the video. I hope you enjoyed it. Please leave a comment on what you thought. I'd love to hear what people thought about this one. A lot of the comments from the last one were not particularly fun to read, so leave a nice comment if you can. And I hope you enjoyed it. Speaking of the last video, that was a very similar one to this one about Ricky Gervais, so go check that out if you enjoyed this. And if you want something of a little bit of a different pace, I've also released five videos on the Stranger Things series, so you can go watch my reviews on that. And please like and subscribe if you'd like. I'm sorry I didn't post for ages. I didn't post for over two weeks. Life got a little bit in the way, and it's probably about to get in the way again, so I might not post for a while. But thank you for joining me, and I hope that you have a lovely rest of your week.