One of the clearest signs that a famous person has fucked up extremely bad is that when the really passionate fans—the ones who have dedicated significant portion of their lives to promoting and discussing the famous person’s work—decide to cut off any and all ties to them. It happened to Joss Whedon in 2017 when the Whedonesque fan site decided to suddenly shut down after 15 years, and now it seems to be happening with J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter fans.
As reported by Variety, two long-running Harry Potter fan sites (MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron) have announced in a joint statement that they’re both going to actively minimize how much coverage they give to J.K. Rowling, with both sites saying they will no longer be posting purchase links for her non-Harry Potter books, links to her website, coverage of her personal life, or even images of the author. Plus, they’ll both be referring to her exclusively as “#JKR” in social media posts so users can mute all references to her.
This is all due to Rowling’s decision to be more outspoken about her bad opinions about transgender people (mostly revolving around what she sees as an extremely strict binary between men and women), which recently inspired some petty Twitter drama where she praised Stephen King for sharing one of her tweets and then deleted her praise when he offered his own message of support for trans women. The joint fan site statement made their support for transgender people explicitly clear, saying, “Our stance is firm: Transgender women are women. Transgender men are men. Non-binary people are non-binary. Intersex people exist and should not be forced to live in the binary.” It adds that they don’t condone the “mistreatment” that Rowling has received because of her various comments, but they “must reject her beliefs” anyway.
If you want to support LGBTQ youth, consider donating to GLSEN, which promotes anti-bullying initiatives and gay-straight alliances in schools nationwide, and The Trevor Project, which operates a confidential hotline staffed by trained counselors who provide crisis-intervention and suicide-prevention services.