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JK Rowling’s Crime Series Is Not Just Transphobic, But Islamophobic Too

Wow, two bigoted stories for the price of one. The deal I never asked for.

JK Rowling is obsessed with destroying her own legacy, it seems – and I’m not just referring to her transphobia, which is largely what she is known for lately. JK Rowling’s crime series also has some casual Islamphobia in it, too.

In case you haven’t heard, JK Rowling is a proud TERF – a ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’. Which is basically a flowery way of saying she’s a transphobe.

Perhaps this should’ve been obvious earlier, given her depiction of Rita Skeeter as a woman with manly hands, a strong jawline, deep voice and a masculine build who spies on children and makes up manipulative lies for a living. The transphobic queercoding has been there since day one.

Unfortunately, her bullshit doesn’t end there. She began publicly outing herself as a TERF after aligning with a transphobe on Twitter, and it just keeps getting worse. Recently, she criticised gender-neutral language in a news headline, and since then has consistently doubled-down on her transphobia, and has even written an essay defending her bigotry.

It says a lot that we already have three articles on this site detailing the times she’s been transphobic, and yet here I am writing another, because this time JK has written a book where a cis male murderer dresses up as a woman to get to his victims.

Yep. Wish I was joking.

The offending novel Troubled Blood is Rowling’s latest in her Strike detective series, which she writes with the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

Oh, the irony of pretending to be a male author while accusing transwomen of being men pretending to be women. (And, in case you didn’t know, Robert Galbraith was a real man who tortured queer people, sometimes to death, in conversion therapy with electrocution and the injection of corrosives into their brains – which she claims to not have known about).

The plot line of this book was revealed in a Telegraph review, which said the book centres around “a transvestite serial killer.” The word transvestite is a super outdated and derogatory slur for cross-dressing, and it’s gross and also not the same as being trans.

The review goes on to mention the obvious politics in her novel: “One wonders what critics of Rowling’s stance on trans issues will make of a book whose moral seems to be: never trust a man in a dress.”

Understandably, this has caused outrage. For someone who continues to perpetuate a dangerous agenda against trans lives, going on to write a novel in which a murderer dresses up as women to kill women is obviously a statement. For reference, JK Rowling has previously liked tweets suggesting transwomen are foxes in a henhouse, and she has advocated for women’s spaces to exclude transwomen on this basis.

To then double down and write a story in which a man uses female identity to hurt women only further alienates and endangers transpeople  because of the hate it incites against them.

And guess what – that’s not the only time she uses the plot device of a man dressing up as a woman in her series.

In the second book of Rowling’s Strike detective series, called Silk Worm, a man dresses up in a burqa.

I know some people won’t understand why this is offensive, but it is actually incredibly harmful to perpetuate the narrative of men weaponising the burqa because this is exactly why the burqa is banned in several countries. France, for example, has banned the burqa for security reasons and the fine for wearing a burqa is greater than that of violating the mandatory mask rule.

A huge part of the reason Muslim women who wear the burqa are oppressed in western society is because of the assumption that they are trying to hide something, are “scary” or  that the burqa could be used to conceal crimes – a claim that has almost no backing except for some exceptional circumstances.

Women wearing burqas are constantly demonised, harassed, abused and dehumanised by western society – and here is JK Rowling, further perpetuating the idea that women in burqas are potentially dangerous and not to be trusted.

There’s also weird comments on halal food that are more just casual ignorance than actively violent – but they’re still Islamophobic. How does JK Rowling think halal food works? How is it identified in someones intestines? Honestly, the nonsense…

On top of all that, Silk Worm is actually just as transphobic as everything else JK Rowling says.

It seems JK Rowling isn’t satisfied with demonising one marginalised group, and has expanded her range – especially when you include the accusations of antisemitism rooted in her depiction of the goblins in Harry Potter.

Someone take away JK Rowling’s platform, please. If anyone deserves to be cancelled, it’s her.

Image Sources: Twitter. 

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