A timeline of JK Rowling's anti-trans shift

Despite backlash from the stars of her book series' film adaptation, Rowling continues to double down

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last updated 30 July 2025

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Theara Coleman, The Week US

J.K. Rowling's name has become synonymous with her legendary "Harry Potter" book series, but she is also famous for something more controversial: her public and often contentious views on the transgender community. While the final "Harry Potter" book was released in 2011, the last several years have seen a renewed uptick in news about Rowling due to her disparaging remarks about transgender people. This has led to backlash from many in the fantasy community and even from the three stars of the acclaimed "Harry Potter" film series. But despite the controversy, Rowling has not shown any signs of slowing down.

2018: Rowling 'likes' an anti-trans tweet, says it was an accident

An early instance of Rowling facing allegations of transphobia came in March 2018, when she was slammed for "liking" a tweet that referred to trans women as "men in dresses." But the author's spokesperson told Pink News this was purely an accident. "I'm afraid J.K. Rowling had a clumsy and middle-aged moment and this is not the first time she has favorited by holding her phone incorrectly," the spokesperson said.

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Rowling faced backlash after following YouTuber Magdalen Berns on X, then called Twitter. Berns was a "self-professed transphobe" who made videos with titles like "there is no such thing as a lesbian with a penis," Pink News said, adding that she was also following other anti-trans accounts. Rowling later admitted she followed Berns, an "immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour," because she "wanted to contact her directly."

Months later, Rowling came under fire again for coming to the defense of Maya Forstater. At the time, the researcher had been waging an employment discrimination battle, as her contract with a think tank wasn't renewed after she made a series of anti-trans statements. These statements included that people should not be "compelled to play along with literal delusions like 'transwomen are women,'" and she referred to a gender-fluid person as a "man who likes to dress in women's clothes."

The next month, Rowling landed herself back in the spotlight with a thread defending "liking" a tweet that compared hormone prescriptions and antidepressants. Health professionals are "concerned that young people struggling with their mental health are being shunted towards hormones and surgery when this may not be in their best interests," Rowling said on X in her defense. She compared it to a "new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people," who are "being set on a lifelong path of medicalization that may result in the loss of their fertility and/or full sexual function."

She went on to slam those who said that "women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves." Rowling revealed she is a survivor of domestic abuse and sexual assault and said this led her to sympathize with women who had "concerns around single-sex spaces." She argued against throwing "open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman."

Actors from the "Harry Potter" film franchise began to speak out against Rowling. In a post on the Trevor Project's website, "Harry Potter" star Daniel Radcliffe condemned Rowling's tweets. "Transgender women are women," he said. Any statement to the contrary "erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I." Radcliffe also said he was "deeply sorry" to those who "feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished" because of Rowling's statements.

Rowling condemned a bill in Scotland that would make it easier for a trans person to legally change their gender, Variety said. It would remove the requirement that applicants must be "medically diagnosed as having gender dysphoria" and "go through a minimum two year process and be aged over 18," lowering the age to 16, The Times said. On X, Rowling said the bill would "harm the most vulnerable women in society: those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women."

Rowling released another book in 2022 that drew scrutiny in light of her anti-trans controversies. Again published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, the book, "The Ink Black Heart," follows the creator of a YouTube cartoon, Edie Ledwell, who is accused of being transphobic. "The book takes a clear aim at 'social justice warriors' and suggests that Ledwell was a victim of a masterfully plotted, politically fueled hate campaign against her," Rolling Stone said.

After trans YouTuber Jessie Earl tweeted that supporting "Hogwarts Legacy" would be "harmful to trans people," Rowling responded, comparing this stance to book burning. "Deeply disappointed @jessiegender doesn't realise purethink is incompatible with owning ANYTHING connected with me, in ANY form," Rowling said. "The truly righteous wouldn't just burn their books and movies but the local library, anything with an owl on it and their own pet dogs." Two days later, Earl said she was bombarded with comments that included "calls for my death, insinuations that I'm a pedophile, dehumanizing comments about my supposed masculine features."

When Scotland's new Hate Crime and Public Order Act went into effect in April, Rowling tried to bait them into arresting her with posts online. The law criminalizes "stirring up hatred" against people based on their race, religion, disability, sexuality or gender identity. By passing the law, Scotland "placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls," Rowling said in the thread on X. If anything she wrote qualified as an offense under the new law, "I look forward to being arrested when I return to the birthplace of the Scottish Enlightenment," Rowling said.

Shortly after winning the gold at the Olympics, Algerian boxer Imane Khelif filed a criminal complaint with French authorities alleging "acts of aggravated cyber harassment" that named Rowling and other high-profile figures, like tech billionaire Elon Musk, said a Variety exclusive. Khelif was targeted online for harassment over false claims about her gender after her opponent, Italian boxer Angela Carini, dropped out of their bout seconds into the match, declaring she "never felt a punch like this."

In response to comments on X accusing her of being far-right and of celebrating President-elect Donald Trump's recent win, Rowling referred back to an earlier post where she said the U.K. left had "f**ked up monumentally on gender identity ideology." Women like her "aren't and never have been far-right," she said in the post. "We simply want the left to wake the hell up because we're watching it do its utmost to alienate people it used to represent." She clarified that she was not saying that "Trump's win was down to the gender stuff," as she is "not an American voter, so can't judge." However, she pointed out that the Labour Party won the last U.K. election, and they have "embraced gender identity ideology whole-heartedly."

The author's latest public tiff was in response to an online critic who called out her "hateful focus" on trans kids as "hurtful and unnecessary." Rowling clapped back, saying there "are no trans kids" and that no child is "born in the wrong body," in a post on X. She went on to call out the adults around the kids, including parents, teachers and surgeons, that encouraged what she deemed harmful rhetoric about gender identity. These adults are "prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined," she said.

In April, the United Kingdom's Supreme Court unanimously passed a ruling that limited the definition of a woman to be based on "biological sex" under Britain's Equality Act, excluding trans women from being protected from discrimination. In response to the ruling, Rowling gloated in several X posts celebrating "terfs" and referring to the ruling as "TERF VE Day," a "play on V-E Day, the formal end of World War II and Nazi occupation in Europe," said USA Today. She capped off the thread with a photo of herself drinking a cocktail and smoking a cigar, captioned "I love it when a plan comes together."

In May 2025, Rowling announced the launch of the J.K. Rowling Women's Fund, which "offers legal funding support to individuals and organizations fighting to retain women’s sex-based rights in the workplace, in public life and in protected female spaces," the fund's website said. Rowling is helming the fund with her own money (an unsurprising fact given that Forbes estimates her net worth at over $1 billion).

But controversy surrounds the fund, as many believe it is a "euphemism for the anti-trans' advocacy to which she has devoted herself and, seemingly, every waking hour of her life," said LGBTQ+ news outlet Them. This is also not the "first time that one of Rowling's organizations has made the exclusion of trans people a core part of its mission," as the outlet noted that Beira's Place, a rape and crisis center founded by Rowling in 2022, does "not hire or provide services to trans women."

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Brendan worked as a culture writer at The Week from 2018 to 2023, covering the entertainment industry, including film reviews, television recaps, awards season, the box office, major movie franchises and Hollywood gossip. He has written about film and television for outlets including Bloody Disgusting, Showbiz Cheat Sheet, Heavy and The Celebrity Cafe.

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