J.K. Rowling Criticized After Tweeting Support for Anti-Transgender Researcher

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“Well, she finally said the quiet part out loud,” Jackson Bird, a transgender author, tweeted on Thursday. “This is really heartbreaking for a lot of folks. If Harry Potter is ruined for you, I completely get it.”

Ms. Rowling had not addressed the uproar by Thursday afternoon, and declined an offer from the L.G.B.T. advocacy group GLAAD to have an off-the-record conversation about the controversy, said the group’s spokesman, Mathew Lasky.

Ken Kleinberg, a lawyer for Ms. Rowling in the United States, declined to comment on the episode when reached by telephone on Thursday. Phone calls to The Blair Partnership, which represents her in Britain, went unanswered.

Anthony Ramos, who leads GLAAD’s engagement with celebrities on L.G.B.T. issues, said in a statement that Ms. Rowling had “now aligned herself with an anti-science ideology that denies the basic humanity of people who are transgender.”

On Thursday, Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the most influential L.G.B.T. advocacy organization in the United States, accused Ms. Rowling of being an anti-transgender fundamentalist and demanded she apologize for her statement.

“J.K. Rowling says she’s opposed to fundamentalism in any form, but she’s promoting a harmful fundamentalism that endangers the L.G.B.T.Q. community — particularly transgender youth,” Mr. David said in a statement. “She should apologize.”

But some people did express sympathy, of a sort, with Ms. Rowling on Thursday.

“J.K. Rowling dared say that biological sex is real and is now being canceled by the very woke outrage mob she helped create,” Paul Joseph Watson, a British online personality known for his work with Infowars, the website run by the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, tweeted. “The world’s tiniest violin plays.”



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