Daniel Radcliffe finds J.K. Rowling's embrace of transphobia "really sad"

The back-and-forth between Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling and the cast members of the Harry Potter movies continues. It all started a few years ago, when Rowling started posting misleading, eyebrow-raising tweets about the existence of trans people erasing "the lived reality of women globally." Things escalated in a 2020 essay where she misgendered trans people, implied that they’re dangerous or confused, and generally peddled in alarmist stereotypes disproven with a glance at the research or just by talking to trans people about their experiences. Things reached a new nadir recently when Rowling engaged in some light Holocaust denial rather than engage with the facts on record about Nazi persecution of trans people. Rowling has become the single loudest voice in the world speaking out against the rights of trans people. It's been a spectacular public meltdown.

Harry Potter cast members like Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson spoke out about this pretty early, with Radcliffe — Harry Potter himself — releasing a statement through The Trevor Project, a non-profit organization focused on suicide prevention among LGBTQIA youth, back in 2020. "Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I," it read. "According to The Trevor Project, 78% of transgender and nonbinary youth reported being the subject of discrimination due to their gender identity. It’s clear that we need to do more to support transgender and nonbinary people, not invalidate their identities, and not cause further harm."

Rowling recently tweeted that she wouldn't accept apologies from the likes of Watson or Radcliffe, who in this scenario I guess would be apologizing for advocating for the humanity of trans people in reaction to the world's most famous author demonizing them. Speaking to The Atlantic about his career (he was recently nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in Merrily We Roll Along), Radcliffe confirmed that he and Rowling haven't been talking since this all stared in 2020.

Radcliffe ackowledged that his career "would not have happened without” Rowling. “Nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is.” But that doesn't mean he's bound to support her when she advocates for rolling back the rights of a marginalized and imperiled group of people. “That doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life."

“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 of his 2020 statement. “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. […] I will continue to support the rights of all LGBTQ people, and have no further comment than that.”

“It makes me really sad, ultimately, 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 continued. I think that's what really shook people when J.K. Rowling first started to publicly embrace transphobia: the contrast between the empathy in her books and what she was saying in public. The Harry Potter story is about people coming together to fight prejudice and intolerance. So for the author behind it loudly champion prejudice...it's like we woke up in a funhouse mirror version of the world. Sadness is definitely an understandable reaction.

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