A couple months ago, the U.K. Supreme Court issued a ruling stating, essentially, that transgender women are not legally considered women and transgender men are not legally considered men. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has crusaded against the rights of trans people for years, celebrated on X with a picture of herself smoking and drinking. "I love it when a plan comes together."
People had a lot to say about that. Actor Pedro Pascal, who's sister Lux is a trans woman, had one of the most memeable reactions when he called Rowling's tweet an example of "heinous loser behavior." Obviously that went viral, which led to a whole new round of reactions. Speaking to Vanity Fair, he talked through his feelings, saying he briefly felt like “that kid that got sent to the principal’s office a lot for behavioral issues in public schools feeling scared and thinking, ‘What’d I do?'”
"The one thing that I would say I agonized over a little bit was just, ‘Am I helping? Am I fucking helping?’ It’s a situation that deserves the utmost elegance so that something can actually happen, and people will actually be protected. Listen, I want to protect the people I love. But it goes beyond that. Bullies make me fucking sick."
It's definitely valid to think about whether a brutal clapback is really helping anything. Sure, going viral is neat, but does it actually help make things better? Sometimes I think people online mistake the first for the second. Still, Pascal is an actor, not an activist, so using his platform to speak out on issues he finds important is one of the only options he has in between all his acting gigs.
Rowling, on the other hand, has been laser-focused on the issue of opposing trans rights for several years now, and it's borne fruit. Pascal is far from the only celebrity to push back on her. After the U.K. Supreme Court ruling came down, several actors signed an open letter opposing it, including Bridgerton star Nicola Coughlan and Pascal's The Last of Us costar Bella Ramsey. “We the undersigned film and television professionals stand in solidarity with the trans, non-binary and intersex communities who have been impacted by the Supreme Court ruling on April 17,” the letter reads in part. “The Supreme Court’s ruling that, under the Equality Act, ‘woman’ is defined by biological sex, states that ‘the concept of sex is binary, a person is either a woman or a man’. We believe the ruling undermines the lived reality and threatens the safety of trans, non-binary and intersex people living in the UK.”
Another signatory to that letter was Paapa Essiedu, who will play Severus Snape in HBO's upcoming Harry Potter TV show. Nick Frost, who's playing Hagrid, has also distanced himself from Rowling's rhetoric. With HBO spending a mint on the new Harry Potter show and J.K. Rowling's profile rising once again as a result, I only expect for there to be more of these kinds of clashes as time goes by. And that's without getting into the other controversies that new Harry Potter show is stirring up. We'll see if the show can shake off the sense of being dogged by controversy when it premieres late next year or in 2027; we don't have a firm release date yet.
In the meantime, Pedro Pascal continues to be one of the most visible actors on the planet; he made waves as Joel in the latest season of The Last of Us, and in July he'll debut as Mister Fantastic in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
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