Author J.K. Rowling laid into her critics on Twitter, delivering a blistering reply after she noticed that several of the tweets appeared to have been copied and pasted before they were posted by multiple accounts.
Rowling shared screenshots of two pairs of duplicate stories — in each of which the person tweeting claimed to have a child who had been greatly offended by something Rowling had said or done.
“My trans daughter used to love your books, but after you became a bigot she cried and asked me ‘daddy, why do people hate those who are different from them?’ I don’t know, baby, I don’t know.”
The two tweets — one from @EGA_Kaaa and the other from @MarkoWoat2 — were identical, down to the punctuation.
The second pair of tweets — from @SSEpikal and @SoyzSoy3 — were also identical, even down to the misspelling of the “Harry Potter” author’s name and an extra space after the word “trans.”
“JK Rowing, i have a 12 year old trans daughter and she cries every time she reads one of your transphobic posts. She is a huge fan of Harry Potter, but but seeing the author of her favorite book series being so bigoted is heartbreaking. Please, J.K, make my daughter happy again.”
My one-year-old son just looked up from Twitter and said, 'Mummy, why have you made these very real children sad with your heinous yet unevidenced bigotry?' Then he ran upstairs and burned all his Potter books. I was so damn ashamed I almost forgot the kid was imaginary. pic.twitter.com/de2KQCRz9o
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 14, 2023
Rowling responded with a story of her own, tweeting, “My one-year-old son just looked up from Twitter and said, ‘Mummy, why have you made these very real children sad with your heinous yet unevidenced bigotry?’ Then he ran upstairs and burned all his Potter books. I was so damn ashamed I almost forgot the kid was imaginary.”
The “Harry Potter” creator has been taking barbs from the transgender community for quite some time, often being called a bigot, a transphobe, or a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) for her vocal defense of biological women and the need for female-only spaces. Most recently she made headlines and provoked criticisms for helping to fund a women’s shelter that would not accept biological males who self-identified as women.