Daniel Radcliffe said that Harry Potter writer J.K. Rowling's comments against trans women “makes me really sad,” in an interview with The Atlantic.
The actor also said that he has had no contact with Rowling since she started posting tweets in June 2020 that were deemed anti-trans.
“It makes me really sad, ultimately,” he noted about the situation.
“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,” Radcliffe added.
Daniel Radcliffe vs. J.K. Rowling
He spoke against Rowling statement through the Trevor Project — an LGBTQ charity that the actor had been associated with for a long time.
“I'd worked with the Trevor Project for 12 years and it would have seemed like, I don't know, immense cowardice to me to not say something,” Radcliffe said.
“I wanted to try and help people that had been negatively affected by the comments. And to say that if those are Jo's views, then they are not the views of everybody associated with the ‘Potter' franchise,” he continued.
While he is speaking against Rowling, he does acknowledge that Harry Potter “would not have happened without” Rowling, “so nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it without that person.”
However, he clarified that it “doesn't mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.”
Radcliffe isn't the only Harry Potter star that has spoken against Rowling. Last month, the author responded to a user on X (formerly Twitter) that they were “waiting for” public apologies from both him and Emma Watson.
“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 traumatized detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces,” the author responded.
As for the actor, his only reply was to say, “I will continue to support the rights of all LGBTQ people, and have no further comment than that.”
Rowling's representatives refused to comment.
How did this all start?
The author's controversial posts on the transgender community started out seemingly innocent enough as Glamour broke down the timeline. In June 2020, she retweeted an op-ed piece that used the term “people who menstruate.” She had an issue with using the term in place of the word women.
That tweet received a lot of backlash and Rowling responded, trying to explain her stance, “I respect every trans person's right to live any way that feels authentic and comfortable to them. I'd march with you if you were discriminated against on the basis of being trans. At the same time, my life has been shaped by being female. I do not believe it's hateful to say so.”
A few days later, she posted J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues on her website and shared a link on X with the caption TERF Wars. Fans — or should they now be called former fans — saw this as the author doubling down on her anti-trans rhetoric.
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