JK Rowling is very upset after David Tennant called transphobes "little whinging fuckers"

People like Tennant represent the "gender Taliban," according to the Harry Potter author

By Emma Keates  |  June 28, 2024 | 5:07pm
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JK Rowling is very upset after David Tennant called transphobes
David Tennant; JK Rowling Photo: Tim P. Whitby; Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images for Warner Bros.

The sky is blue, and JK Rowling is in a fight with yet another Harry Potter actor. At this rate, she’ll be beefing with the CGI dementors before the year is even up. There really are not any other jokes to be made at this point—the whole thing is just profoundly upsetting.

Rowling’s latest (and perhaps most formidable) opponent is David Tennant, who is best known for his role in Doctor Who but also played the slimy Barty Crouch Jr. in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire. Tennant has long been an advocate for transgender rights—his child, Wilfred, is nonbinary—and recently had some strong words for British equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, after she advocated against allowing transgender women to use gender-affirming bathrooms and play on women’s sports teams. “Until we wake up and Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist anymore—I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up,” Tennant said during his acceptance speech at the British LGBT Awards this past weekend.

“It’s a tiny bunch of little whinging fuckers who are on the wrong side of history, and they’ll all go away soon,” the actor added of anti-trans advocates in an interview from the same event (where he was delightfully and correctly identified as “Celebrity Ally – Winner”).

Little whinging fucker JK Rowling didn’t like that very much. “But the utterances of the Gender Taliban receive special dispensation, for they are a holy caste,” the author posted in relation to Tennant’s critique of Badenoch on Twitter/X. Later, she doubled down. “This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care, the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders,” she wrote.

“For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist,” she added, which is a pretty ironic thing for someone who’s actively been calling for the erasure of trans people for years to say.

Unfortunately, Rowling isn’t going away any time soon. She’s serving as an executive producer on Max’s upcoming Harry Potter show, which just announced that it had snagged Succession’s Mark Mylod and Francesca Gardiner as its director and writer/showrunner respectively. Hopefully, the show will cast people as willing to stand up to its creator as the original film cast.

 
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