J.K. Rowling’s virulent transphobia may be a public relations problem for Warner Bros. Discovery, but it’s one that the studio has a pretty easy time brushing off. “The decision to be in business with J.K. Rowling is not new for us. We’ve been in business for 25 years,” HBO boss Casey Bloys reiterated on The Town podcast (via Variety). “It’s pretty clear that those are her personal, political views. She’s entitled to them. Harry Potter is not secretly being infused with anything. And if you want to debate her, you can go on Twitter.”
Well, that last bit is definitely true: the amount of time Rowling spends on Twitter/X posting about her views would astonish anyone unfamiliar with the platform. Her posts are so obsessive even Elon Musk asked her to chill out (“While I heartily agree with your points regarding sex/gender, may I suggest also interesting and positive content about other things?“). But though the average Harry Potter fan buying tickets to Universal’s theme parks may not know or care about Rowling’s views, they are nevertheless inextricable from any Potter project.
Not in content, necessarily, though there are plenty of critics out there who have argued that the content of the Harry Potter series belies narrow-minded views (“Cho Chang,” etc.). Regardless of whether transphobia was “secretly infused” into her writing, Rowling is unquestionably using the financial success of the series to further her political agenda. Most recently, she contributed a huge sum to the legal challenge that resulted in the U.K. court ruling the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex. Unlike most of the people who spend their days arguing online, J.K. Rowling has the economic power to advance her political agenda, and every Harry Potter project contributes to that power. If WBD is the one bankrolling those projects—as it is with the upcoming HBO series—the company, and anyone else that does business with her, will have to answer for it.
