J. K. Rowling in New York City, 2016 (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Our very special friends at Vox — which with dry wit describes itself as “a general-interest news site” whose “mission is simple: explain the news” — have just indicted J. K. Rowling on a charge of “transphobic B.S.” Vox poses the following question in a tweet:

Did J.K. Rowling just destroy the legacy of Harry Potter with a single, transphobic tweet? https://t.co/K8CgiBeRRZ — Vox (@voxdotcom) December 19, 2019

“Destroy the legacy of Harry Potter?” What does that mean? Does Vox think people are going to stop enjoying Harry Potter stories? Or does “legacy” in this context simply mean “the good will of people who think like Vox writers?” Wouldn’t it have been more accurate for the tweet to ask, “Did J. K. Rowling just incur the wrath of Vox?”


Rowling earlier suggested that women should not be “forced out of their jobs for stating that sex is real.” The reference is to the case of Maya Forstater, who lost her job at a British think tank when her contract wasn’t renewed because she posted tweets stating her belief that biological sex is immutable. Rowling’s tweet is as follows:

Dress however you please.

Call yourself whatever you like.

Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.

Live your best life in peace and security.

But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill — J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 19, 2019

Forstater sued and was rejected by a British court that declared her “absolutist in her view of sex” because she “will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”


And anyone who thinks Maya Forstater should not have lost her job because of her beliefs about sex is equally unworthy of respect, according to Vox. With its characteristic pose of childish woundedness, Vox declares that Rowling “just ruined Christmas,” that her “fans are heartbroken,” that her tweet is “blatant transphobic rhetoric,” and her attitude is “shocking.” It notes that although Rowling is “moderately liberal to progressive,” she is “increasingly less so than her fans” — who number in the scores if not hundreds of millions and have not, so far as I know, been polled to measure their wokeness. The only evidence Vox cites to back this assertion is anecdotal, not to say lazy — a basket of angry or wounded remarks fired off by Woke Twitter.


I eagerly await the sober, empirical, data-driven analysis proving that Harry Potter fans are as woke as Vox writers. Failing that, maybe Vox should just organize a public bonfire of Rowling’s books.