J.K. Rowling is wrong about Emma Watson

First thing Monday morning, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling posted a nearly 700-word screed about Emma Watson on X in response to the actress offering an extremely restrained answer about her on a podcast. Rowling could apparently no longer contain her condescension toward the woman half her age who brought Hermione Granger to life onscreen. “Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is,” Rowling ranted. “She’ll never need a homeless shelter. She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I’d be astounded if she’s been in a high street changing room since childhood.”

As usual, Rowling was ranting about anti-trans activism, the hateful obsession that has consumed her life. Rowling thinks Watson is too privileged and insulated from what working class, cisgender women experience to understand the threat that trans women pose to them. But it’s not a real one. Trans people are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than cis people are. But privileged, insulated cis women like Rowling pose a massive threat to the ability for trans women to survive and thrive. Rowling’s worldview has curdled into backwards conspiracy, which has expanded beyond trans people to include the former child actors she profited from. Rowling thinks they betrayed her. But really, Rowling betrayed them. Watson was ten when she met Rowling on the set of Harry Potter. Rowling watched Watson become an international household name. She watched as Watson has been terrorized by sexual harassment, first as a child and now as an adult. And now Rowling is piling on and letting her allies harass Watson, too.

This is because Rowling’s so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminism isn’t about feminism at all. It doesn’t protect women from violence. It obfuscates where that violence really stems from, and it’s a form of violence in itself.

Rowling’s Monday morning tweet was in response to a British right-wing news segment about Watson’s podcast comments. The broadcast had been clipped and posted on X by an anti-trans organization. Like Donald Trump, Rowling has taken to watching conservative media coverage of herself and responding to it in real time. The broadcaster and his guest—a woman with fewer than 7,000 X followers (Rowling is one of them)—bashed Watson for previously being supportive of trans people and for supposedly snubbing Rowling during a 2022 BAFTAs speech. Rowling also comments on this supposed snub in her post, calling it “a turning point for me.” In the clip, Watson says, “I’m here for all of the witches,” and supposedly mouths “bar one” or “by the way,” which is supposedly about Rowling. Except, it’s not clear what Watson was actually mouthing, if anything, and it wasn’t clear that she was talking about Rowling, either. She was responding to host Rebel Wilson saying “She’s proud to call herself a feminist, but we all know she’s a witch.” A lot of social media users ran with the snub narrative, but Watson never acknowledged it. Rowling is basing her condemnation of Watson on the kind of conspiratorial, self-centered thinking that is commonplace in alt-right pipelines. And without this context, a lot of the reporting on Rowling’s post is just smearing Watson.

Like her fellow anti-trans trolls, Rowling has embraced a kind of DARVO where she claims victimhood for the consequences of her own actions. Unlike most of her fellow anti-trans trolls (besides Elon Musk), Rowling is a billionaire with over 14 million X followers who is one of the most-read and beloved children’s book authors of all time. She, Musk, and Trump have each stared into the abyss of the darkest corners of the internet and let it warp their minds, but they each retain an enormous amount of power, and it’s only growing. The things Rowling says make people question her sanity, but they also inform official U.K. government policy about trans people. It’s similar to how Trump posts AI-generated video ads for fake medical miracle products but he’s still the president of the United States and he gets to decide whether people live or die.

As Rowling points out in her anti-Watson screed, “full-throated condemnation of me is no longer quite as fashionable as it was.” Her anti-scientific, bigoted approach to trans people has been accepted at the highest levels of her government and been pushed by far-right political activists around the world to ride a reactionary wave to electoral victory. Rowling has offered the most prominent, consistent endorsements for the rollback of trans rights in the U.K. and the U.S. And she sits atop the throne of the ever-expanding multibillion dollar Harry Potter franchise, printing cash she can use to further her anti-trans agenda.

Still, Rowling considers herself the ultimate victim of her own activism, because she has received “death, rape, and torture threats.” This is a distortion of the power imbalance between Rowling and trans people. Rowling spars with everyday trans people online while dehumanizing them, directing abuse and harassment toward more vulnerable individuals and populations. Lately, she has taken to attacking Black women athletes and probing their biology on the world stage in an attempt to prove they aren’t women at all. Since 2018, when Rowling first liked an anti-trans tweet, the murder rate for trans people in the U.S. doubled. Trans people are also more likely to be homeless and to be raped and sexually assaulted. Trans people are constantly subjected to violence in a society that refuses to treat them with respect, dignity, and equality.

Rowling and her defenders characterize her as the wronged party, an innocent woman under attack for her polite opinions, even though she is the one inciting conflict by attacking marginalized people and now her former protégés. Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Rupert Grint spoke out against Rowling one time in 2020, after Rowling published a 3,600-word essay outlining her anti-trans views. Since then, she has only gotten more extreme and has continued to attack Radcliffe and Watson, which she now obfuscates to paint Watson as the aggressor. Watson has also surely received her share of death, rape, and torture threats, too.

The reason Watson talked about Rowling now—on the sketchy self-help guru Jay Shetty’s podcast—is because Shetty asked her to. “Recently there’s been so many conversations and comments directly from J.K. Rowling, whether it’s her saying she’d never forgive you for your views, or the fact that when she was asked what ruins the movies for her, she named yourself and some of your costars,” he said. “How do you think about that?”

It’s not Watson’s fault that she got asked that question. It’s Rowling’s fault. Rowling knows the media will hound the Potter kids for a response to her one-sided feud. And Watson’s three-minute response is pained, trained, and tepid. She refers to Rowling’s “opinions” versus the person she knew and loved growing up. She is careful to avoid specifics. Even without defending trans people again outright, Watson incurs Rowling’s vocal ire. Worse, Rowling says the sentimentality in Watson’s approach is what inspired Rowling to be “honest.”

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Rowling isn’t being honest. She’s taking advantage of a perceived weakness to be manipulative and cruel. She characterizes Watson as a spoiled brat who throws everyday women under the bus, when really Rowling is doing that to trans women. In doing so, Rowling acts like Watson has never experienced sexual or gender-based violence, in the same way she undermines the violence trans women disproportionately experience. This is particularly galling when Watson has long experienced sexual violence as a result of playing Hermione, which inspired Watson to take on a public-facing feminist stance that Rowling now attempts to discredit.

“At fourteen, I started to be sexualized by certain elements of the media,” Watson told the United Nations over a decade ago. That year, websites began counting down to Hermione’s 18th birthday using Watson’s tween face. In 2018, Watson told Variety she had experienced the “full spectrum” of sexual harassment. These details are from what Watson has shared publicly, let alone what she has experienced personally and privately.

Two years ago, when I started reporting on nonconsensual deepfakes, I found that Watson was one of the most prominent targets. Her likeness has been stolen, sexualized without her consent, and used to advertise apps for making nonconsensual deepfakes. Her face has been swapped over women in pornographic videos to create increasingly realistic sexually-explicit deepfakes with millions of views. Some creators of this material profit handsomely from it, and it has been used to popularize the deepfake victimization of everyday women and girls.

Rowling dismisses this kind of gender-based violence against Watson because it doesn’t have anything to do with trans women. She uses sexual and gender-based violence perpetrated by cis men to further her position that trans women shouldn’t be allowed in public spaces like bathrooms and changing rooms. Rowling has linked her own experiences as a domestic abuse victim to her anti-trans activism, even though she was not abused by a trans person. In her world, trans women become the scapegoat for cis men and patriarchy, despite trans women being even more vulnerable to their abuse.

Watson is not ignorant of the realities of gender-based violence, because she has lived it, publicly. She knows trans women aren’t her enemies. Rowling wants to force Watson to capitulate to a false premise, and she’ll gladly smear Watson in the process. And even if Watson isn’t willing to call her out for it, someone has to.

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