J.K. Rowling responds to Harry Potter stars signing pro-trans letter with scathing essay: Motivated by fear

J.K.Rowling is not backing down from her opinions on the trans community.Last week, several “Harry Potter” actors including Eddie Redmayne, Paapa Essiedu and Katie Leung signed a pro-trans open letter after the UK Supreme Court ruled that the terms “woman” and “sex” refer strictly to a biological woman and biological sex.Rowling, 59, publicly supported the ruling in an essay shared on X (formerly Twitter) Saturday, and called out “back-stabbing colleagues” who she said are “motivated by fear.”“In light of recent open letters from academia and the arts criticising the UK’s Supreme Court ruling on sex-based rights, it’s possibly worth remembering that nobody sane believes, or has ever believed, that humans can change sex, or that binary sex isn’t a material fact,” the author wrote.

“These letters do nothing but remind us of what we know only too well: that pretending to believe these things has become an elitist badge of virtue,” Rowling added.She continued: “Some argue that signatories of these sorts of letters are motivated by fear: fear for their careers, of course, but also fear of their co-religionists, who include angry, narcissistic men who threaten and sometimes enact violence on non-believers; back-stabbing colleagues ever ready to report wrongthink; the online shamers and doxxers and rape threateners, and, of course, the influential zealots in the upper echelons of liberal professions.”Later in her essay, Rowling wrote that “court losses are starting to stack up” against the trans community and “women are fighting back and winning significant victories.”To conclude her message, Rowling again called out the people who signed the pro-trans open letter, though she didn’t name them.“I wonder if they ever ask themselves how they got here, and I wonder whether any of them will ever feel shame,” she wrote.There were more than 2,000 signatories on the open letter which argued the court’s ruling “undermines the...