By Matthew Lodge
After criticizing celebrities who “cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-earned rights,” JK Rowling has said she won’t forgive Harry Potter stars Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson.
After the launch of the long-awaited Cass review into sex treatment in the UK, the multi-millionaire author criticized celebrities who use their “platforms to clap on the transition of minors.”
The fervent advocate for women’s rights said those who supported sex migrating in kids should apologize to “traumatized detransitioners and vulnerable women who rely on single-sex spaces.”
Radcliffe and Watson have remained vocal in their support of the transgender community, despite Rowling’s vocal opposition to allowing kids to change their gender.
According to a review conducted by renowned pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, teenagers in Britain were able to change their gender on the basis of “remarkably poor evidence.”
In her statement, Dr. Cass warned that there was “a lack of high-quality analysis” on the effects of giving children puberty blockers and estrogen, and that the toxicity in the controversy over the subject has become “exceptional.”
Many people who have questioned whether allowing children to transition have come out in good faith after the release of her report, including comedy writer Graham Linehan, who lost his job, wife, friends, and reputation as a result of his opinions.
Writing on X, previously known as Twitter, after the report was published, Rowling said it was a “boundary” time and that it “puts exposed the horror” of allowing children to transition.
When someone claimed that Radcliffe and Watson owe her “a pretty common apology… safe in the knowledge that you will forgive them,” Rowling responded by saying: “Not safe, I’m frightened.”
Celebrities who supported a movement that wanted to diminish women’s hard-won rights and who supported the transitioning of minors you preserve their apologies for traumatized detransitioners and vulnerable women who rely on single-sex spaces, she added.
In a series of posts after following the report’s release, Rowling wrote: “Over the last four decades, Hilary Cass has conducted the most powerful review of the health information for transitioning children that’s ever been conducted. committed propagandists are double-down shortly after it was made available to the media and the general public.
“These are people who’ve deemed opponents ‘deep-right’ for wanting to know there are right checks and balances in place before disabled, gay and abused kids—groups that are all overrepresented at gender clinics—are left sterilized, inorgasmic, lifelong patients.
The review’s conclusions may have shocked those who have hounded, demonized, and slandered opponents as bigots and transphobes, but trying to discredit Hilary Cass’s work isn’t just misguided. It’s actively malign.
“Even if you don’t feel ashamed of cheerleading for what now looks like severe medical malpractice, even if you don’t want to accept that you might have been wrong, where’s your sense of self-preservation? You jumped on the bandwagon so gladly, and it’s crashing against a cliff.
“And if I sound angry, it’s because I’m bloody angry. I read Cass this morning, and I’ve been getting more angry. Kids have been irreversibly harmed, and thousands are complicit, not just medics, but the celebrity mouthpieces, unquestioning media and cynical corporations.
The effects of this scandal will last for a long time. You praised it. You made every effort to obstruct and misrepresent research. You attempted to force opposing people to quit their jobs. Young people have been subjected to experimentation, left infertile, and in pain.
I believed that this would be my last tweet, but I just cried. For those who have written me heartbreaking letters of regret, #CassReview may be a turning point, but it is too late. Today’s not a triumph, it’s the laying bare of a tragedy.”
A number of recommendations were made in the report by Dr. Cass that was commissioned nearly four years ago to overhaul the NHS trans services in order to enhance the care that children received.
She suggested that NHS England establish its own research program in response to the “lack of high-quality research” on the effects of giving children puberty blockers and hormones.
The report also recommended the establishment of a “follow-through service” for 17 to 25-year-olds to protect teenagers who are “falling off a cliff edge” in care when they hit 17, and recommended the creation of a separate service for those wanting to “de-transition,” where a gender transition is stopped or reversed.
Dr. Cass warned that Dr. Cass’ review had been hampered by the polarized nature of the trans-caregivers debate. She claimed that medical professionals were “too afraid to openly discuss their opinions.”
The report found that those who socially transition at an earlier age or before seeing a medical professional were “more likely to proceed to a medical pathway.”
She argued that parents should not be prevented from discussing their children’s welfare and that the importance of what happens in schools cannot be overestimated.
Unregulated private clinics were given some of Dr. Cass’s toughest criticism because she echoed GPs’ warnings over prescriptions issued by services based abroad.
According to the review, family doctors “have expressed concern about being pressured to prescribe hormones after these have been initiated by private providers.”
In the past, Radcliffe, who played the titular character in Rowling’s hit Harry Potter series, has claimed that adults are “condescending” for making up their minds about gender transition in children.
The Trevor Project, a trans and non-binary child organization that organized a roundtable with six trans and non-binary children in 2023, said: “there are also people who also have a slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of, ‘people are young… and it is a huge decision.
He addressed the group of trans youths to ask, ”
I would love to hear from you all about why we can trust kids to tell us who they are.”
He added that “some people in the world are not trying to engage in this conversation in any kind of good faith.”
Radcliffe once said, “I think a lot of the time it’s just because people don’t know a young trans person, so there’s just this theoretical idea about this in their head.”
The November prior to that he had made a thinly veiled attack on Rowling, alleging young queer and transgender fans of the franchise were upset by her stance.
His comments were a barbed reference to Miss Rowling’s tweets from June 2020 in which she ridiculed an article’s description of women as ‘people who menstruate’.
Responding to the online article’s headline, the Harry Potter creator then tweeted: ‘I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone please help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’
In response to the author at the time, Radcliffe addressed the author, saying,” I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you.”
In response to Ms. Rowling’s remarks, Radcliffe, who at the time stated that “transgender women are women,” stated that he wanted to let the LGBT+ community know that not everyone in the franchise felt that way.
He continued,”The reason I felt very, very much like I needed to say something when I did was because, especially since I finished Potter, I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a lot of identification with Potter on that.”
I wanted them to know that not everyone in the franchise felt that way when I saw them hurt on that day. And that was really important.’
Meanwhile, Watson has previously addressed the trans debate, claiming that he gained notoriety after playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movie series.
According to Ms. Watson, “Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are.”
I want my transgender followers to know that I and many others around the world respect and love you for who you are.
Their co-star, Rupert Grint, has also previously stated, telling The Times in 2020,” I firmly stand with the trans community and echo the sentiments expressed by many of my peers.
‘Trans women are women. Trans men are men. We should all have the right to live in peace and without fear.
He explained his decision in March of that year by saying that despite having “a lot of respect” for the author, he can still disagree with her opinions.
Speaking to Esquire, he added: ‘I am hugely grateful]for] everything that she’s done. I think that she’s extremely talented, and I mean, clearly, her works are genius.’
Elaborating on his reasoning, he went on: ‘But yeah, I think also you can have huge respect for someone and still disagree with things like that…
‘Sometimes silence is even louder. Because I believe it was crucial, I felt like I had to do it. I mean, I don’t want to talk about all that… Generally, I’m not an authority on the subject.
‘Just out of kindness, and just respecting people. I believe it’s a worthwhile group that needs standing up for.
MailOnline has contacted JK Rowling, Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson for comment.
