JK Rowling has once again attracted attention on social media for comments that could be interpreted as transphobic. The “Harry Potter” author reacted with criticism to an X-Post that reported that a 26-year-old woman named Scarlet Blake was going to prison for murder. She was bothered by the fact that the British news channel had referred to the convict as a woman and not a “transgender woman”.
JK Rowling on the condemned woman: “That’s not a woman”
Scarlet Blake was found guilty in court of murdering Jorge Martin Carreno. She also filmed herself killing a cat, drawing attention to herself – an inspiration from the Netflix documentary Don’t Fuck With Cats. Carreno killed her in 2021 by hitting him and then pushing him into a river. Blake is a transgender woman who, as BBC has reported, will now serve a life sentence in a men’s prison.
Sky News wrote via The fact that the convict was described as a woman in the X-posting led JK Rowling to criticize her – in her opinion, Blake should have been described as a “transgender woman”. Her comment specifically: “I’m so tired of this shit. That’s not a woman. These are #NotOurCrimes.”
The writer shared this transphobic statement with her 14 million followers – a target group that partially supports her attitude.
Criticism meets criticism
However, not all readers of her As if there aren’t many cis women who have committed terrible crimes. What does it matter how the person identifies?” The author then published three points that, in her opinion, justify her attitude. She explained: “1. Crime statistics are useless if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as crimes against women. 2. Activists are already calling for this sadistic murderer to be imprisoned in a women’s prison. 3. Ideologically motivated misinformation is not journalism.”
Supporting a transphobic journalist
A little later, Rowling responded to another post. The Guardian journalist Louise Tickle had previously shared a text commenting on one of her own articles. This was also a report on the same murder case in which she had called Scarlet Blake a woman. In her statement, she stated that she regretted describing the convict as female and that she could not have understood from the information previously presented to her that she was a transsexual person. She also made statements in her statement that denied Blake her gender identity. She wrote: “It was a man who committed this murder. Not a woman.” At the end of her post, she announced a new, “preferred” version of her report, in which she stringently described the 26-year-old as a man. Their updated version reads: “A man who filmed himself killing, dissecting and mixing the body of a cat before brutally attacking a man and leaving him to drown in a river months later has been convicted of murder. The 26-year-old man, who calls himself Scarlet Blake and claims to be female or transgender, attacked Jorge Martin Carreno, 30, as he walked home from a night out in Oxford in July 2021.”
JK Rowling gave the publication her approval, reposting it and writing: “Every single word of this article.”
Past controversies surrounding Rowling
Controversy surrounding JK Rowling has been erupting since June 2020, when she tweeted, among other things, “If genders aren’t real, same-sex attraction doesn’t exist.” She also claimed that trans women “perpetuate male patterns of crime,” which makes them more likely to do so would physically or sexually assault someone in a locker room or women’s shelter.
Many of the actors who worked with the author on the set of “Harry Potter,” among others, have already publicly distanced themselves from her and her statements. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Eddie Redmayne are among those who have criticized the controversial writer, while Ralph Fiennes is among those who have defended her.