J.K. Rowling has become the entertainment world’s favorite villain for her recent advocacy against the United Kingdom‘s legal war on sexual dimorphism. Haters have derided the first-ever author to become a self-made billionaire as a product of privilege, but harkening back to her working-class roots, Rowling took to X to remind the world her advocacy for single-sex spaces is as much a class issue as a feminist one.
In response to Harry Potter star Emma Watson claiming during a recent interview to still “treasure” Rowling despite past public criticism of the author’s remarks about transgender issues, Rowling broke her silence over the child star she plucked from obscurity and turned into an international sensation.
“Like other people who’ve never experienced adult life uncushioned by wealth and fame, Emma has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is,” Rowling wrote. “She’ll never need a homeless shelter. She’s never going to be placed on a mixed sex public hospital ward. I’d be astounded if she’s been in a high street changing room since childhood. Her ‘public bathroom’ is single occupancy and comes with a security man standing guard outside the door. Has she had to strip off in a newly mixed-sex changing room at a council-run swimming pool? Is she ever likely to need a state-run rape crisis centre that refuses to guarantee an all-female service? To find herself sharing a prison cell with a male rapist who’s identified into the women’s prison? I wasn’t a multimillionaire at fourteen. I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous. I therefore understand from my own life experience what the trashing of women’s rights in which Emma has so enthusiastically participated means to women and girls without her privileges.”
Rowling’s beef with Watson, on one level, is rightly personal. Rowling claims that Watson “publicly poured more petrol on the flames” when the backlash against the former was at its greatest, and that despite having Rowling’s phone number, Watson only ever reached out with a single-sentence, handwritten note. Rowling correctly surmises that Watson’s sudden public pivot back to embracing her is only a product of the public vibe shift against the apex of transanity.
But as a matter of public interest, Rowling comes from a place of advocating the working class as much as women. Indeed, it’s illustrated by the biography Rowling didn’t include in her evisceration of Emma.
Watson was born in Paris to two lawyers. Rowling was born outside of Bristol, England, to two parents who never set foot in university. Watson may never have needed a homeless shelter, but when Rowling’s violently abusive husband threw her out of her home and into the streets of a foreign country, she was only saved from total vagrancy by her sister, who allowed Rowling and her infant daughter to stay with her. Watson may never have relied on taxpayer-funded social services after surviving said domestic violence, but Rowling did, ultimately finishing the first installment of Harry Potter while subsisting on the equivalent of $100 a week and living in a council flat.
For her part, Rowling has publicly and repeatedly drawn the connection between the past violence and poverty wrought by the hands of men that she escaped and her current advocacy. It’s why she funds women’s-only rape crisis centers, legal advocacy, and charitable trusts. And for her candor, Rowling has been rewarded with Labour Party members of Parliament such as Lloyd Russell-Moyle claiming that Rowling disclosed her past sexual assault to “cynically undermine the rights of others” and “as justification for discriminating against a group of people who were not responsible for it” — predictably, Russell-Moyle was the son of a chemical engineer and a teacher.
Growing up in wealth and comfort is by no means a sin, but Rowling is right that it insulates the privileged from the real consequences of poor public policy. In the United States, how many parents who can afford it now send their children to private schools just to escape the unnecessary debate over biological boys in the girls’ locker room?
FOR A MOMENT WE ALL LOVE MRS. AMERICA
Even here in Washington, the daughters of lobbyists and think tank fellows get to go to Vida and Equinox, while working-class girls in Fairfax County, Virginia, are subject to public recreation centers where prosecutors allow registered sex offenders to hunt and molest them with impunity.
The rich can pay their way out of the hysteria, but it’s the least lucky in society — rape victims, homeless women, and prisoners — who cannot escape the worst excesses of sex denialism. The lifelong liberal Rowling hasn’t changed. It’s the elite Left that has ignored the working class in its abandonment of actual feminism.
