The first time I really noticed that J.K. Rowling had—let’s call it—“gender trouble” was when I read The Silkworm, the second mystery novel written under the Robert Galbraith pen name. This was in 2014, three years before she became the public transphobe we all know and hate, a decision which has defined her whole personality and legacy. If you buy a Harry Potter or Cormoran Strike novel, you’re contributing to royalties which J.K. Rowling can funnel into anti-trans hate campaigns. This shift in (or revelation of) Rowling’s politics and obsessions has always been strange and unnecessary, and I’ve been trying to figure it out for some time. Rowling is so rich, she could do absolutely anything with her life. She can write any kind of novel (increasingly unedited, it seems) and get them published. She lives in a fucking castle. And yet she’s made herself as small and nasty as possible, squatting in that castle, typing out mean little messages online and increasingly obsessed with the imaginary mob of genderfluid villagers at her door.
The key to all of this, I think, can be found in The Silkworm; and with the due caveat that I don’t love attempts to psychoanalyze novelists through their novels, I think it’s legal and appropriate to identify patterns that appear throughout someone’s oeuvre.
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