JK Rowling’s views on trans people cost me my longest friendship

J.K. Rowling ended my relationship with my cousin. 

Or, at least, transphobia did. These days, it feels to me like the two are synonymous. 

It started with a meme, back in 2019: a collage calling out trans people who wrote some pretty nasty tweets at Rowling for standing with Maya Forstater, a researcher who won an employment tribunal after she didn’t have her contract renewed following ‘gender critical’ tweets. 

The meme showed tweets by trans people, including one  that read ‘J.K Rowling can suck on my big fat trans d*ck’.

When this post popped up on my Facebook feed, it made me nauseous – because it had been shared by my cousin, Radhika*, without a caption and with no context. 

I felt like by defending J.K. Rowling, my cousin had outed herself as a transphobe and after years of hearing occasional hints of homophobia from her I wasn’t surprised by this sign of anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice. 

‘You haven’t called out the transphobic comments Rowling has made,’ I replied to her on Facebook – referring to my views on statements like JK Rowling tweeting that ‘trans girls aren’t real girls’. 

I called my cousin out for, in my view, endorsing that sentiment, and her silence seemed to confirm it. 

Her own post attracted transphobic comments, which she ‘liked’. 

At the time, my trans sister-in-law had just come out. 

Radhika knew how much I loved my sister-in-law, so her post felt like a cowardly way of making clear what she thought of her journey, since they were friends on Facebook.

Before this post, while she hadn’t shown obvious signs of transphobia, Radhika frequently used ‘gay’ as an insult and it felt dehumanising. 

She ignored my comments about how prejudiced her generalisation of trans people were and refused to acknowledge it as problematic.

I felt deflated with what I saw as Radhikha’s hatred of trans people. 

Growing up, she was like my cool older sister. I read books because Radhika always had her face buried in one, which was how I became a die-hard Potterhead. 

Then the worst happened: my mum married an abusive man and we moved from Mauritius to London.

I became a shell of the girl I was – I was no longer outgoing or confident and became withdrawn and hypervigilant.

But my cousin was my safe space. We spoke on the phone as often as we could and that felt like the only time I could be myself again.  

I was a huge Harry Potter fan before I moved to London but in what became an abusive home, the books were my only place of refuge – a brief escape from the horrors I lived with.  

And when Harry Potter became a banned topic in what I was supposed to call my home — my mum’s husband couldn’t stand anything that made me happy — I knew there was someone on the other side of the world I could still share that joy and magic with. 

My relationship with my cousin and Potter were vital to my survival. But as I grew older, I started to see early signs that Radhika and I did not share the same views. 

As a teenager, she converted to Christianity and it was clear that her fundamentalist approach demonised people.

When we were teenagers, I saw she’d liked a homophobic Facebook post shared by one of her Christian friends.

I wish I’d confronted it then – but I wasn’t ready to accept that she was hateful. 

Over the years, I watched Radhika treat people in appalling ways, myself included. 

Simultaneously, I saw the beginnings of J.K. Rowling’s views on trans people changing, and not for the better. In 2018, she liked a tweet that described trans women as ‘men in dresses’ and then claimed it was an accident. 

Like it did with my cousin, it took time for me to see Rowling for who she was but when I did, I lost all the respect I once had for them both.

I felt uneasy at Rowling’s early signs of apparent transphobia, as her language grew more hateful and less tolerant, and she posted an essay on her website expressing concerns about ‘the new trans activism’.

By 2022, she was funding legal defences for people who have lost work as a result of their gender critical beliefs, and since her foray into that ideology, many Potter stars like Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Eddie Redmayne had spoken out against her.

In the end, walking away from Radhika was a relief. I told her I was ending contact because of her transphobia and then blocked her.   

It’s been five years since I cut off my cousin and I’ve had no second thoughts. 

We crossed paths at a family event last year – but said no more than a polite greeting.  

Ideally, we wouldn’t be in the same room at all.  

Potter, meanwhile, is harder to cut off completely – my relationship with The Boy Who Lived was deeply personal, as we both grew up in abusive households. 

But J.K. Rowling’s vitriol against trans people has forced me to take several steps back. 

I no longer spend my money on the Harry Potter franchise. I won’t return to the Warner Brothers’ studio or see Harry Potter and the Cursed Child on stage again. My son will inherit my old copies of the books instead of me buying him new ones. 

As for my relationship with my cousin, I’ll always have a sister-shaped hole in my life but it’s the girl I knew as a child that I mourn, not the vindictive, transphobic adult she became. 

If it weren’t for J.K.Rowling, I may never have seen her true colours.  

*Name has been changed 

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

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