Daniel Radcliffe responded this week to Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans stances, saying her ongoing criticism of the transgender community “makes me really sad.”
Rowling has made headlines many times in recent years for her social media campaigning against the trans rights movement, most recently responding to a four-year British investigation which claimed there was no good evidence that puberty-blocking interventions for transgender people were safe for the long-term.
“Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces,” Rowling wrote on social media in response, saying she would not forgive those who have supported trans healthcare, including Radcliffe and his Harry Potter co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint.
“It makes me really sad, ultimately,” Radcliffe told The Atlantic of Rowling’s comments this week, adding that he hasn’t had any direct contact with the author since the beginning of her first speaking out against the trans community. “I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”
Radcliffe previously wrote a statement supporting the trans community for the Trevor Project in 2020, saying, “I realize that certain press outlets will probably want to paint this as in-fighting between J.K. Rowling and myself, but that is really not what this is about, nor is it what’s important right now,” adding that “transgender women are women.”
“To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you,” he also wrote. “I really hope that you don’t entirely lose what was valuable in these stories to you.”
This week, the Harry Potter star told The Atlantic that he wrote the statement in an effort to separate Rowling’s views from the franchise’s community.
“I’d worked with the Trevor Project for 12 years and it would have seemed like, I don’t know, immense cowardice to me to not say something,” he said. “I wanted to try and help people that had been negatively affected by the comments… and to say that if those are Jo’s views, then they are not the views of everybody associated with the Potter franchise.”
Radcliffe added that Harry Potter “would not have happened without” Rowling, acknowledging that “nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without that person. But that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.”
Representatives for Rowling did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
