J.K. Rowling is embroiled in a fresh row with another Harry Potter actor over transgender rights.
Following exchanges of fire with Daniel Radcliffe and others, Rowling has blasted David Tennant after the Goblet of Fire star voiced strident views on those who speak out against trans rights.
During an appearance at the British LGBT Awards over the weekend, he called on British equalities minister Kemi Badenoch to “shut up” after she advocated for banning trans women from entering women’s toilets and sports teams.
In an interview at the same event, Tennant called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon.”
Earlier in the week, Rowling branded people like Tennant the “gender Taliban.” In posts on X (once Twitter) on Friday, she expanded her comments to address Tennant’s “wrong side of history” quote.
Rowling wrote: “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders.”
She added: “For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist.”
Tennant called transgender critics “a tiny bunch of little whinging f*ckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon.”
Is the real headline here. And good for him.
I’d rather not give what’s her name any more attention over this crap.
Also, calling Tennant a “Harry Potter actor”, while true, feels like a calculated insult to a man who has played Doctor Who, The Purple Man, and Crawley.
He was also barely even in Harry Potter, if we are going by screen time pretty sure Harry potter is the least relevant part of his career.
I wasn’t even aware that he was in there.
He was in Goblet of Fire. Showed up briefly at the beginning and end of the movie, certainly easy to miss. More of a cameo appearance for David Tennant fans.
It’s the first time I learned who he was and I was so impressed with his performance, however short, that when I caught a Doctor Who episode and recognized him, I kept watching and became an instant fan.
Another great show he’s in is Good Omens. Highly recommend if you haven’t watched it.
Highly recommend the book, much more than the show.
No worries if you haven’t had a chance to read yet…
I read the book at least 10 years ago, want season one of the show when it came out.
It’s a good adaptation but man, it just doesn’t hit quite the same as the book.
Absolutely! I’m definitely in that camp that thinks the book is (almost) always better than the show/movie - totally agreed there. I try to judge them separately when I can though since there’s a lot on stuff in text that just doesn’t translate well to the screen.
S2 is better than S1.
Some of the best tongue-based acting I’ve ever seen
Oh my 😳
Also, calling Tennant a “Harry Potter actor”, while true, feels like a calculated insult to a man who has played Doctor Who, The Purple Man, and Crawley.
I’m not sure it’s a “calculated insult” but it did read a but oddly (I assumed initially that it was referring to someone else). I presume the writer or their editor went with that angle because because his having appeared in the Harry Potter movies is relevant to an article and fitted the wider context of JK Rowling falling out with HP cast members. I’m not convinced it was the right approach.
Tennant, who once lowered himself to appear in a Harry Potter film, stated…
Better?
I’m not sure it’s a “calculated insult” but it did read a but oddly (I assumed initially that it was referring to someone else).
Yeah. My choice of words was a bit unnecessarily inflammatory. I struggled to find the words for how weird a choice of introduction it is, but don’t mean to actually assign malice.
I don’t really think the article author meant anything by it necessarily.
Your point about the context of the cast relationships makes sense. Probably why they went for it.
Tennant: TERFs are whiny fucking babies
JK Rowling, Court Jester: whines like baby
Extra Fabulous on It as usual
How is it that every time we hear from the TERF in the high castle, she’s somehow even more unhinged?
When you have that much money reality ceases to exist. Rich people live in the ultimate echo chamber.
reality ceases to exist
Uh… wut?
They become completely disassociated with how the world actually functions because they are surrounded by people who tell them whatever they want to hear so they don’t lose their jobs.
That’s not reality ceasing to exist. Or like it.
I think you wandered into the wrong room. The Department of Taking Everything Literally is down the hall.
I mean it doesn’t work as an analogy.
You are correct! Because analogies are for comparing things and I wasn’t comparing anything.
succumbed to the terf madness, many such cases. see also: graham linehan
shes starting to talk like a final fantasy villain so shes being very normal right now
Calling someone Taliban while at the same time sharing a lot of Taliban ideology is the kind of delicious irony people like Rowling are completely oblivious to.
It’s called projecting.
Clearly, it’s not like her literary skills allow her to reach the level of understanding irony.
sharing a lot of Taliban ideology
That seems like a bit of a stretch.
“For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist.”
Critical of people she praises for compassion.
“J.K. Rowling has recently been canceled because she… did not please the fans of the so-called gender freedoms.”
-Putin
Praised by fascist dictators.
And yet somehow JK thinks she is on the right side of history? 😄
Following this logic, the Gaza protestors theocratic terrorists because they were praised by jihadist terrorist groups
Thankfully the vast majority of the cast of the Harry Potter movies ended up being decent people. They are the ones that young people should look up to, not whatever the fuck Joanne has become.
She’s taking the Graham Linehan route, dedicate your whole life to bashing trans people and spreading hate against them, to the point where you ruin your entire legacy and your own personal relationships.
She can keep fighting against trans people’s right to exist, but trans people will just fight back at every turn.
So much Love for David Tennant<3
Harry Potter actor? This man is the Doctor.
He’s a national treasure.
doctor who?
Strange
Maybe. But who am I to judge
Exactly.
Won’t get fooled again
To be fair his character in HP was a murderous psychopath.
Didn’t even know he was in it, so I had to look it up. Apparently he played Barty Crouch Jr. in the Goblet of Fire.
yeah he was on screen there for a solid 3 or 4 short scenes. That man is the Doctor, not a side-ish character in one of the Harry Potter movies (Well technically the twist villain in the story but Tennant didn’t get to play him much due to shape-shifting shenanigans)
Yeah, that’s likely why I don’t even remember him being there. My guess is they mentioned his role in Harry Potter to make his relationship to Rowling more relevant to the story.
He was hardly in it, storywise he’s Mad Eye Moody for a whole year, but they didn’t hang any actual polyjuice potion for filming
Where can I get my membership card, shirt, and other swag as a member of David Tennant’s Gender Taliban
Putting all the politics aside, man I wish he got more roles. The purple man was the best part of Jessica Jones.
Broadchurch was a very strong performance as well.
Good Omens also fantastic and not just because of him
I’d be very surprises if someone wasn’t working on at least a t-shirt design right now.
David Tennant’s Gender Taliban
New band name. We play LGBTQ+ Punkry & Western.
Ok, I didn’t get this joke until like 15 minutes later and had to come back to upvote it. Amazing. Punkry Western.
i think that’s called folk punk in the US
There’s a few butt-hurt TERFs here downvoting. I wonder if the endorphin rush from such a rebellious act will carry them through the day.
Transphobes are half the reason we got rid of downvotes over here. They’re simultaneously blowhards and too cowardly to speak.
too cowardly to speak
Have you considered making an effort to be a person they would like to speak with?
They should make the effort to be worth talking to.
That works both ways.
It really doesn’t.
I disagree.
As is your right.
lmfao, who the fuck cares who TERFs like to speak with? I don’t like speaking with TERFs, all the better if they don’t speak to me.
who the fuck cares who TERFs like to speak with?
How about being a compassionate human being who tries to understand the conversation partner’s fears without bowing down to misinformation? If that’s not enough for them because they see debunking their bunk as personal attack, I don’t think anyone from outside of their cult is an acceptable conversation partner for them.
That works both ways. Everything you’ve said could be seen as applying from the perspective of either party.
Yeah, everyone is the hero in their own story, so from their perspective, they surely feel like they know things until they meet an actual biologist challenging them.
TERFs invoke half-remembered high-school level biology as if it was mathematical fact. In actual biological reality, nothing is binary or absolute. I don’t need a PhD in computational biology to know that, but if surely helps.
until they meet an actual biologist challenging them
I’m curious (perhaps against my better judgement) what you think a biologist could tell Rowling that would challenge her?
We could maybe give people like her a glimpse into the sheer defiance that nature has against all attempts to fit into tiny categorical boxes.
It’s not just the topics that she doesn’t understand (especially the intersection of gender with endocrinology and neurology), but everything.
If you are a biologist and think you have found a rule that applies to some part of biology, you will feel deeply uncomfortable until the inevitable exceptions start cropping up that tell you that while the theory is still statistically sound, it’s not unnaturally strict and therefore plausible.
Obviously trans people exist and are valid. Thinking otherwise would be ignoring mountains of biological patterns and data that tell us that every binary in biology isn’t actually clean-cut.
I’m so glad I pirated the harry potter audiobooks and didn’t give a cent to this bigot
I’m so glad I stopped giving a shit about Harry Potter and accepted that just because a zeitgeist happened in my childhood doesn’t mean I should cling to fictional fantasy that hadn’t actually done anything novel in the genre or touched upon topics that aren’t handled in better novels elsewhere
Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.
The moral of Harry Potter is that the status quo is correct and should never be questioned, and nobody should ever try to change anything.
Harry doesn’t defeat Voldemort or change any of the issues inherent in the bumbling bureaucracy of the wizard world. Voldemort kills himself on a magic technicality, Harry becomes a magic cop and helps to ensure that magic is never used to help the undesirables of society (Muggles), and Hermione is ridiculed for being a girl with blue hair and pronouns who tried to end the chattel slavery system before she “grew up” and became a much more sensible person who realized that the slaves actually want to be oppressed, and it’s for their own good.
You can see Rowling’s morality change practically in real-time as the books go on, from criticizing the system to defending it as she began to benefit from it as her wealth grew. And underneath it all, you can see her discriminatory opinions of people. That was always there. When she wants you to hate a woman, she makes them fat or gives them masculine features. If I have to read the phrase “mannish hands” one more time, I might vomit.
Once again, I am tapping the sign for people to go watch the two hour video by Shaun on the subject.
Good call, here is a link.
Dude I’m saying! Harry Potter was never good, it was just popular
And yeah I read them and watched them, at least the first few. I’m not talking out of my ass. It’s a series with a few imaginative ideas sprinkled throughout otherwise super typical schlock with casually racist seasoning.
Fuck Harry Potter
Yep, I never understood the appeal besides making kids feel special. It seemed like a water down fantasy which when I criticized people just said read the books.
Ironically I did read the first one before the movies became a big hit. It was an okay children’s book at best.
For some reason we have these unwritten social rules that say you can’t critique certain pop culture icons once they hit critical mass.
Harry Potter is sort of the Classic Lays potato chip of the children’s book world. Dependable, reliable, not the most exciting in the world but any stretch, but easily snackable all the same.
They’re easy to read, not super deep, and because of that, probably got a lot of kids into reading who otherwise wouldn’t have, and there’s something to be said for that. It’s unfortunate that the author turned out to be a bigot the whole time.
I unfortunately had to watch all the movies because I had a child of the appropriate age range that wanted to watch them. Every last one was boring as all hell. Some of them were even in the theater so I added a little to them being popular. But they were not good.
I am/was likely far too old to be in the target demographic for Pottermania but they never worked for me. They always felt a little… safe, reactionary even as they drew on a long tradition of British boarding school books without really addressing or undermining the genre tropes or even using it as a means to examine that culture. It then wasn’t a surprise to find out the author had some questionable views didn’t seem a great surprise to me.
It came out when I was 9, so I was part of the target demographic, though I didn’t pick it up til I was 12 or 13 because we read it at school, though by that point I had read most of the Animorphs books, so potter came across as very tame and a bit too childish. I was already dealing with themes of war and genocide and existential crisis and everything else Animorphs threw at you.
I was the right age for it too, read the first book at school, saw the first movie at some point. It never clicked and I never understood the fervor.
I had the first 4 books and read them around ages 11-13, reading the first two before the first movie came out. I think because none of my classmates at the time had read or watched anything relating to HP, I never really talked about it, so I set it aside after finishing Goblet of Fire, which coincided with the Lord of the Rings movies.
To me, it felt like I was leaving behind a story for kids and getting in on the “real good stuff for adults”
She really is firmly determined to take anyone who’s ever cast doubt on her intelligence and decency, and prove them thoroughly right.
Rowling should have stopped saying things in like 2005 tbh
All she had to do was hold onto the ball and run out the clock
Literally just take it to the corner flag and turn around
I don’t understand this sports metaphor but that’s on me for chiming in on a British community discussion of a British celebrity that I do in fact no a little bit about. The good news is you can tell me its from basically any sport y’all like on the isles and I’ll be like “wow so fascinating”
Haha that’s fair I realised afterwards that you probably weren’t talking about English football, but the concept I guess is the same - to waste time in a match where they’re ahead and only a few moments of the game remains, a football player might dribble the ball slowly and without a sense of purpose into the corner of the field. There is a flag in each corner of the pitch, marking the point where a corner kick can be taken. Are you American, by chance?
Yup! I was thinking basketball where once the shot clock no longer matters you stand at the top of the key dribbling and if anyone tries to steal it you pass to the corner
Celebrities should stick to what they good at. Her writing the book should give no authority to her opinions, even if we agreed with her.
It’s not like she’s forcing anyone to listen. I agree that she’s a moron, but I don’t understand the celebrities shouldn’t have freedom of speech take.
No I’m glad she let us know who she really is
The irony is that the Taliban agrees with JK Rowling on matters of gender and sexuality lol.
Conservatives & Projection
Fuck you Joanne.
