Rowling replied, “Not safe, I’m afraid. Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces.”
Daniel Radcliffe says Rowling’s anti-trans stance makes him “sad.”
In an interview with The Atlantic published on April 30, Radcliffe said that since Rowling began tweeting and writing about trans rights, he has had no direct contact with her. “It makes me really sad, ultimately,” he told the magazine, “because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”
Rowling goes viral again for falsely claiming an Algerian boxer is a trans woman.
At the 2024 Olympics in Paris, a women’s boxing match between Italian boxer Angela Carini and Algerian boxer Imane Khelif ended when Carini withdrew from the match just 46 seconds after receiving a punch from Khelif. On X, Rowling posted a picture from the bout and claimed that Khelif was a trans woman. “Could any picture sum up our new men’s rights movement better? The smirk of a male who’s knows he’s protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered,” Rowling wrote.
In fact, Khelif was assigned female at birth and is declared female on her passport, per the Associated Press. After the controversy, Carini herself defended her opponent, per The New York Times, stating, “All this controversy certainly made me sad, and I also felt sorry for my opponent, she had nothing to do with it and like me was only here to fight.”
Rowling, however, continued to double down on X.
Rowling targets a trans athlete amid lawsuit.
Khelif, who is not trans, filed a lawsuit against Rowling and X owner Elon Musk for the “cyberbullying” she received as a result of their tirades against her. Instead of becoming more cautious, this apparently caused Rowling to pivot from speculating about athletes to simply finding and mocking the trans ones. In an especially cruel move, she took to Twitter in September 2024 to pick at an Italian Paralympic athlete who is visually impaired and, yes, a trans woman.
Valentina Petrillo is a sprinter and an out trans woman, the first to compete in a Paralympics track event. Though she did not even make it to the finals (no offense to Petrillo, who is 51 years old and really not hurting anyone), Rowling took offense, labeling her a “cheat.”
Rowling takes aim at asexual people.
Over the years Rowling has primarily focused her ire at trans people, but on April 6, 2025, she posted a derogatory comment about asexual people on X. A person who is asexual does not feel sexual attraction toward people of any gender. “Happy International Fake Oppression Day to everyone who wants complete strangers to know they don’t fancy a shag,” Rowling wrote, over an International Asexuality Day graphic.
