Someone needs to counteract the invisibility spell Warner Bros. cast on J.K. Rowling’s name in the trailer for “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.”
Rowling not only created the entire Harry Potter cinematic universe, including the Fantastic Beasts franchise, she’s also a producer for the film and co-screenwriter. The trailer for a previous movie in the series, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” featured her name prominently with its own prolonged title card near the beginning. Her name also took pride of place in the 2018 advertisements for “Fantastic Beasts: Crimes of Grindelwald not once or twice, but three times—in a solo moment at the beginning declaring “From Writer J.K. Rowling” and in two more mentions in the credits at the end. But no more.
In the latest trailer for the film, released Wednesday, the only reference to Rowling is a brief and minuscule, almost-illegible rights mention at the bottom of the screen at the end of the video, after many viewers will have stopped watching.
Warner Bros.’ move is just the latest Hollywood attempt to erase Rowling from Harry Potter’s legacy for her refusal to pretend that biology isn’t an objective reality.
Her most recent statement in defense of the truth in relation to gender came on Sunday when she commented on a report about Scottish police identifying rapists in official records as the gender they choose rather than the gender they actually are. Rowling tweeted, in reference to George Orwell’s famous novel about government speech control, “1984:” “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penis-ed Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”
In the past, she has also argued, “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased…. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives.”
As The Daily Wire previously reported, seemingly due to comments like these, HBO is not interviewing Rowling for its Harry Potter 20th Anniversary Special to air in January. The stars who built their careers on her creativity have distanced themselves from her as well.
Daniel Radcliffe who came to fame playing Harry Potter said last year, “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 [Rowling] or I.”
And when Esquire asked Rupert Grint, who played Ron Weasley in the series, what he thought of Rowling’s views on the transgender movement, he answered:
I am hugely grateful [for] everything that she’s done. I think that she’s extremely talented, and I mean, clearly, her works are genius. … But yeah, I think also you can have huge respect for someone and still disagree with things like that. … Sometimes silence is even louder. I felt like I had to because I think it was important to. I mean, I don’t want to talk about all that. … Generally, I’m not an authority on the subject. … Just out of kindness, and just respecting people. I think it’s a valuable group that I think needs standing up for.
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