A CASTLE OF HER OWN, Scotland (The Daily Whatever Press)—J.K. Rowling, a woman worth more than $1 billion, sat down this week to tell the world that trans activism is elitist.
Oh.
After I typed that sentence I got up and checked my bank account and my privilege. Both seemed modest, or at least, miles away from anything resembling elitist. Turns out, I just believe trans people are… well, people.
Then I checked back in on what else Rowling wrote. I used to be someone riveted by Rowling’s words. Like most of the rest of the world, I was obsessed with her Harry Potter series. Lawrence Winnerman and I queued up at midnight for the final book releases, picking up our pre-orders at our favorite local bookstores and then dashing home to read them. I like to fancy myself a fast reader, but Lawrence was always faster. For the final book, I’d only just started reading the Battle of Hogwarts when he called me, sobbing. “Are you there yet?” he gasped between the tears. “NO SPOILERS!!” I cried back and hung up, thoroughly freaked out by who must’ve died to make Lawrence bawl like that.
Once I figured it out, I called him back and we wept together.
We all have similar stories. Rowling held an entire world captive with her series, once upon a time, and was pretty much universally beloved and admired. Was. She squandered all that good will to punch down at one of the most marginalized communities in the world: trans people.
This is the very least Hufflepuff belief imaginable and will never, ever make sense to me.
But still. On Wednesday Rowling posted a 2,000-plus-word essay to her website titled “An Update to My Essay of June 2020,” and so I read it. That is the most British possible title for six more years of the same goddamn fight. Her first big reveal is that her views “haven’t changed.” Stop the fucking presses, which incidentally, she could also afford to buy.
Then she gets to her thesis, and the thesis is... something else. She says the civil rights, gay rights, and women’s movements of the 20th century were grassroots uprisings against the powerful, and that 21st-century trans activism is the reverse, “elitist to its core.” The elites on her list are Stonewall, Amnesty International, trade unions, an Edinburgh rape crisis center, politicians, academia, publishing, and my personal favorite: rich women in media who never have to use a shared changing room.
She does admit she’s rich. She concedes that her money insulates her. Then she explains that she’s spending it the right way, on lawsuits.
Wait wait, what now?
Who’s actually holding the purse
Start with what Rowling has. She has the fortune, much of it from the Harry Potter franchise, which HBO is rebooting right now, and she has bragged that she “worked closely” with its writers. She has the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, launched in 2025 to provide legal funding for women in the UK and Ireland fighting to retain sex-based rights. In 2024, she pledged £70,000 to For Women Scotland, the group whose legal challenge led to the UK Supreme Court’s April 2025 ruling that ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological sex. She founded and funds a women-only sexual violence center in Edinburgh. And this summer, after Amnesty International UK called certain groups “anti-rights,” she publicly invited those groups to apply to her fund if they wanted to take legal action.
Now look at what the “elite” trans community has. In the 2021 census, roughly 0.5% of people aged 16 and over in England and Wales reported a gender identity different from their sex registered at birth. They have Stonewall, which is a charity. They have one San Francisco bookstore, the Booksmith, that stopped stocking Harry Potter over her fund. They have some protesters who disrupted the London premiere of a new Cursed Child production a few days ago. They have the original actors who played Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Ginny speaking out on their behalf. It’s not nothing.
But on one side sits a billion dollars and a standing legal war chest. On the other side are cardboard signs and the lip service of some grown up child actors. It’s not exactly balanced and I know which side holds the power.
The feminism she’s selling isn’t the one I was handed
My generation got its feminism off dubbed cassettes, zines, and Kathleen Hanna yelling at the boys to move to the back. The lesson was that the people with the power are the ones you punch at. Women’s safety was never supposed to be a gated community with a billionaire holding the clipboard at the front gate.
I’m raising two daughters. The feminism I want to hand them says you don’t get safer by making somebody else less safe, and solidarity doesn’t come with a door policy. Rowling’s version says protection requires a perimeter, and the richest woman in the room gets to draw the line.
She does say, to her credit, that vulnerable trans people exist “without question” and shouldn’t be denied housing, jobs, or personal safety. Then she spends the rest of the essay calling trans women males and using male pronouns. That’s a get-well card signed by the driver who hit you, and she’d like a thank-you note.
Her critics have also noticed what she leaves out. ThePrint points to her silence on the Cornell rape case and on reports of sexual violence in ICE detention centers. If this crusade is about protecting women from sexual violence, the selectivity tells you what it’s really about.
How the hell did the creator of the Harry Potter universe end up here?
I’ll keep asking this one until somebody gives me an answer that doesn’t make me want to scream into a pillow.
She wrote seven books about a kid locked in a cupboard under the stairs by relatives who were ashamed of what he was. She built an entire wizarding world whose villains are obsessed with who was born the right way, who counts as pure, and who gets to belong. A whole generation of readers absorbed that lesson, and plenty of them were queer and trans kids who found themselves on those pages and in Hogwarts, at least for a while. They grew up, came out, and expected the author to recognize them.
Instead she looked at the most marginalized people in Britain and the rest of the world, people already getting flattened by courts, governments, and the tabloids, and decided they were the Death Eaters. Then she cut the check to fight them.
The topper comes at the very end of the essay, where she promises to “continue to use my money to help women who otherwise couldn’t afford to go to court.” She means it as a mission statement. The richest author on earth just put it in writing that the fight is now her full-time job, funded by every Hogwarts lunchbox, theme-park butterbeer, and HBO subscription a nostalgic Millennial or GenXer ever bought.
She could have kept the legacy. She could have been the woman who taught 500 million readers that love beats blood purity. She looked at all that and chose to be Umbridge.
The sad part is that the books still say what they said. The kids who read them got the message.
The woman who wrote them is the one who missed it.
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I was never a Harry Potter fan (I’m the wrong demographic), but I know the series is beloved by millions. J.K. giveth and she taketh away. I’ll never understand why anyone, especially a woman, would make someone else’s gender identity the hill they’ll die on.