Here we go again, says Libby Purves in The Times. That “thespian dementor” Daniel Radcliffe, “plucked from nowhere” to star in Harry Potter as a child, says the woman who wrote it is a baddie. With her “mild and anxious” views on women’s privacy and safety, JK Rowling is, he says, “hurting” countless troubled young fans, and he wants them to know “not everybody in the franchise” is so keen to “invalidate their identities”. What a “load of old Hogwarts”. Yes, fame is a “brain-fuddling drug”, but it’s “astonishingly nasty” of Radcliffe and his young co-stars to join the batty chorus accusing Rowling of “transphobia”.
There are, of course, real transphobic bigots, “but Rowling is not one”. She simply affirms that women are more than “wombcarriers”, and should be able to share a few intimate or protective spaces with other women. Including, she is clear, trans women who have been through a “careful transition”. Only the “dimmest” actors could be so fixated on “mewling trans-piety” that they’re happy “kicking her out of her own imagination” and renaming her solo creation “the franchise”. Thank Merlin for some of the older cast, who refused the “easy, fashionable line”. As the late Robbie Coltrane put it: “There’s a whole Twitter generation of people who hang around waiting to be offended. They wouldn’t have won the war, would they?”