J.K. Rowling published a new essay Wednesday reaffirming her position on sex and gender six years after her original 2020 statement ignited a firestorm. She says the death, rape and torture threats haven’t let up, and she isn’t retreating.
“My views haven’t changed,” Rowling wrote, “but the landscape certainly has, and my own involvement in the issue has become practical as well as theoretical, so I thought it was time for an update.”
The author is unsparing about who actually pays the price for policies that open women-only spaces to transgender women. She calls modern trans activism “elitist to its core.”
“It’s true, of course, that trans activism doesn’t impact all women negatively. In fact, the more privileged you are, the less it tends to affect you, and the more it might benefit you. Aside from an avalanche of death, rape and torture threats, it hasn’t noticeably affected my life.”
Rowling rejects the label critics have pinned on her, insisting her advocacy is about women’s safety and privacy, not hostility toward transgender people.
“Should trans people be discriminated against when it comes to housing or employment? Of course not. Should trans people be stripped of their human rights, or denied personal safety? Again: of course not.”
Backlash Then and Now
Rowling’s 2020 essay drew condemnation from LGBTQ+ advocacy groups and calls to boycott her work. GLAAD said at the time that she was aligning herself “with an ideology which willfully distorts facts about gender identity and people who are trans.” Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry Potter on screen, issued a statement through The Trevor Project saying “transgender women are women” and that any contrary statement “erases the identity and dignity of transgender people.”
Earlier this month, activists protested a gala performance of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in London. One demonstrator wore a shirt reading “Rowling money kills” before security removed protesters from the red carpet.
Working-Class Women vs. Elite Activists
May Mailman, director of the Independent Women’s Law Center, backed Rowling’s framing, telling Fox News Digital that ordinary women are the ones actually affected by single-sex space policy — not the activists pushing it.
“For people in the United States who have real problems to deal with, they need to figure out how they’re going to put food on the table. They’re not worried about pronouns. They’re worried about improving their families and improving themselves. And so, there is this elitism that’s like when you run out of problems, you start inventing them.”
A Legal Win, and a Warning
Rowling has backed the group For Women Scotland, which took the question of what “woman” legally means under the UK’s Equality Act 2010 to court. On April 16, 2025, the UK Supreme Court ruled that “woman” and “sex” under the law refer to biological sex, while affirming that transgender people remain protected from discrimination under separate gender-reassignment provisions.
Mailman welcomed the ruling but cautioned that free expression on this issue is more at risk in Britain than in the U.S.
“I think the status of free speech in Great Britain is much more under attack than it is in the US. I think we should treat it as a warning sign, because I think people look to Britain as where the United States could and often does head.”
Jeremiah Igunnubole, UK legal counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom International, also praised Rowling’s stand.
“We welcome JK Rowling doubling down on her determination to challenge gender ideology and defend the importance of biological reality. Truth matters, and we should not be afraid to uphold it simply because doing so is controversial.”
Igunnubole said his organization will “continue to defend these principles and the protections that flow from them robustly, including through litigation in the UK where necessary.”
