J.K. Rowling published a new essay Wednesday restating her position on sex and gender, writing that she will not retreat from her advocacy despite what she called an “avalanche of death, rape and torture threats.”
The essay arrives six years after the “Harry Potter” author’s June 2020 commentary on transgender rights and women’s single-sex spaces ignited a sustained public fight. Rowling said her underlying views “haven’t changed” since then, but that “the landscape certainly has, and my own involvement in the issue has become practical as well as theoretical, so I thought it was time for an update.”
In the new piece, Rowling again defended her opposition to policies that admit transgender women into certain female-only spaces, arguing such policies erode protections designed for women. She went further than in 2020, describing modern transgender activism as “elitist to its core.”
“It’s true, of course, that trans activism doesn’t impact all women negatively. In fact, the more privileged you are, the less it tends to affect you, and the more it might benefit you. Aside from an avalanche of death, rape and torture threats, it hasn’t noticeably affected my life,” Rowling wrote.
Rowling pushed back on characterizations of her position as anti-trans, framing her advocacy as centered on women’s safety and privacy rather than hostility toward transgender people.
“Should trans people be discriminated against when it comes to housing or employment? Of course not. Should trans people be stripped of their human rights, or denied personal safety? Again: of course not,” she wrote.
A six-year fight with no sign of ending
The backlash to Rowling’s original 2020 essay was swift and has not fully subsided. LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD wrote at the time that “JK Rowling continues to align herself with an ideology which willfully distorts facts about gender identity and people who are trans. In 2020, there is no excuse for targeting trans people.”
Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter in the film series, also broke publicly with Rowling in 2020, issuing a statement through The Trevor Project: “Transgender women are women. 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.”
Earlier this month, transgender rights activists protested a gala performance of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in London. One demonstrator wore a shirt reading “Rowling money kills” before security removed protesters from the red carpet.
Legal and political backdrop
Rowling has backed For Women Scotland, the campaign group that challenged how “woman” is defined under the UK’s Equality Act 2010. On April 16, 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that “woman” and “sex” under the law refer to biological sex, while also affirming that transgender people remain protected from discrimination under the law’s gender reassignment provisions.
May Mailman, director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, told Fox News Digital she agrees with Rowling’s critique of well-off transgender-rights supporters, arguing working-class women bear the brunt of policies governing single-sex spaces.
“For people in the United States who have real problems to deal with, they need to figure out how they’re going to put food on the table,” Mailman said. “They’re not worried about pronouns. They’re worried about improving their families and improving themselves. And so, there is this elitism that’s like when you run out of problems, you start inventing them.”
Mailman welcomed the UK Supreme Court’s ruling but said she sees a broader threat to free expression in Britain. “I think the status of free speech in Great Britain is much more under attack than it is in the US,” she said, adding that “people look to Britain as where the United States could and often does head.”
Jeremiah Igunnubole, UK legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom International, also welcomed Rowling’s essay, telling Fox News Digital: “We welcome JK Rowling doubling down on her determination to challenge gender ideology and defend the importance of biological reality. Truth matters, and we should not be afraid to uphold it simply because doing so is controversial.” He said his organization would “continue to defend these principles and the protections that flow from them robustly, including through litigation in the UK where necessary.”
