'Harry Potter' author criticized for gender views

LONDON

British author JK Rowling, who scored stellar success with her series about the boy wizard Harry Potter, has courted controversy online and even death threats because of her outspoken views on gender identity.

Her position that biological sex is immutable has made her a darling of some feminists over the years, but incurred the wrath of transgender rights activists, who have called for her to be "cancelled."

Rowling, 58, denies charges of transphobia that have tarnished the global success of the Harry Potter books, which have sold a staggering 600 million copies worldwide.

The latest row on social media blew up last week after the Scottish government in Edinburgh, where Rowling lives, passed a law criminalizing hate speech, including against transgender people.

Rowling, who lives in the city with her second husband, on April 1 published a volley of messages about transgender women on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter, including several convicted of sexual offences.

"Obviously, the people mentioned in the above tweets aren't women at all, but men, every last one of them," she wrote.

The new legislation, she added, was "wide open" to abuse those wanting to silence advocates of women and girls' single-sex spaces, and predatory men identifying as women.

"Freedom of speech and belief are at an end in Scotland if the accurate description of biological sex is deemed criminal," she added, saying she welcomed arrest.

Police said complaints about the post were not criminal as the comments predictably triggered a firestorm, including from those for whom gender identity has become a "culture war" issue, such as Britain's right-wing media and politicians.

The right-wing Daily Mail newspaper called Rowling a "hero."

Rowling's transformation from almost universally popular children's author to a hate figure for supporters of gender identity began back in 2018.

The writer liked a post on Twitter - the forerunner to X - by a woman who described transgender women as "men in dresses."

She apologized after attracting criticism. Then in 2019, she publicly defended a woman who was sacked from her job after posting what were deemed to be transphobic tweets.

Rowling calls herself a militant feminist and has revealed how she had been a victim of domestic violence.

Women's rights, she argued, could be threatened by some supporters of transgender rights and has spoken out about allowing transgender women to use changing rooms, toilets or prisons designated for women only.