By comparison, when 58 famous names including Tom Stoppard and Lionel Shriver went public with their support for Rowling via a letter in the Times their average age hovered somewhere in the 60s. In fact, it still hasn’t. I’m not going to see films. Unsurprising, then, that those at the top of the franchise insist that it will continue developing apace, undaunted, unslowed and ultimately unaffected by the latest controversy. You understand if you use it for nefarious means, it’s a fraudulent use of the process. Consider too that Neil Blair, Rowling’s agent, first worked on Potter at Warner Brothers, then moved to Rowling’s first literacy agency, Christopher Little, and finally launched his own where he continues to represent her, helped her to launch her digital publishing company Pottermore, and is Chair of her charity Lumos. The beloved hymn and its author John Newton, a former enslaver, have inspired a new Broadway musical, but the true history is complex and ambiguous. As a teen, Rowling also had a friend named Sean Harris, who she empathized with because he was also an outsider. Although Ron doesn’t have a direct correlation to anyone in Rowling’s life as far as we know, he does hold an uncanny resemblanceto Rowling’s own childhood friend, Sean. And if he was challenged, he could simply say, ‘Oh, actually I identify as a woman, I’ve filled in the form’. That year, Rowling jumped ship to a brand new literacy agency, The Blair Partnership, with which she developed Pottermore, an online platform giving her the power to sell her own e-books directly (now called Wizarding World, it has expanded into a fan site). And I think that Harry Potter could get to that place for people. Rowling claims that Hermione liked Ron from the start, that means from the first day the met. Woomud? Emma Watson as Hermione Granger in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". “Warner Bros.’ willingness to continue the series even though it’s on a downward path financially is evidence of playing the long game,” says Jeff Bock, senior media analyst at Exhibitor Relations. Live your best life in peace and security. In Scotland, however, the timeline has been different and distended. The world that we have been left is mostly trash and we’re done. Its second consultation was launched in December 2019, when Rowling wrote her first controversial tweet on the subject of trans rights and in support of Maya Forstater, a tax expert whose contract at the at the think tank Center for Global Development went unrenewed after she tweeted that transgender women can’t change their biological sex. It has been this way all along. The literary agent who launched JK Rowlingto international stardom has passed away, his representatives said last night. But rather than let it die out, more tweets followed, that day and the next. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.”. Holyrood launched its consultation on GRA reform earlier than Westminster’s, in 2017. If a creature (or, indeed, Kreacher) was to be cut from a movie, Rowling would personally intervene in the script writing, to explain that he would have a vital role in future films. #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill”. Rowling modeled her young hero after her childhood neighborhood friend, Ian Potter, who once lived four doors down from… For Sean P.F. There’s more than money at work here, however. They married on 14 March 1965. Trans people need and deserve protection. And, says Mackenzie, “the persistent failure of government and other public authorities to make clear statements about the parameters of existing anti-discrimination laws have meant that the issue has been left to be slugged out in the public square, in an atmosphere of increasing tension and antipathy.”. Interestingly, Hagrid was one of the first Harry Potter characters Rowling created. Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". What of Rowling’s suggestion that social contagion (so called “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”) is influencing the 4,400 per cent increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment in the UK over the past several years? On 6 June, of course, there were plenty of opportunities to feel that an old guard had created a frightening dystopia, and that they were the ones silencing less powerful voices. Nor were fans silent. Many of them, of course, were never trans and thus would not become trans adults. “He could then go out and use that the next day to get access to a women-only changing room… and commit voyeurism and abuse against those women. Rowling also followed her PR, Mark Hutchinson, when he left the Colman Getty agency and founded his own in 2011 (type his name into Google News and the top results are all now accompanied by variations on the phrase “declined to comment further”). There’s Fiona Shapcott, nanny to their children for 16 years and working in the Edinburgh office part-time. “What’s JK Rowling like to live with?” Murray is asked as the couple travel by private jet. Non-disclosure agreements proliferated. We’re not going to take it anymore.”. A community of fans, says Miller, are saying: “I’m not going to the theme parks. The identity of Ron Weasley's real-life inspiration has not been fully revealed, but Rowling did admit that Harry's best friend is based off of her own and oldest friend, Sean. Yet, in a real-life echo of the human chess game at the climax of The Philosopher’s Stone, it seemed Rowling had yet to play her final move. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’”. Radcliffe, Watson, Grint… all millennial, all immediately and earnestly disavowing Rowling’s position. Scotland, however, has yet to make any decision. “You know, we’re done. In the seven days from 14 September, 28,475 original tweets, reaching a likely audience of more than 91 million, bore the ominous hashtag #RIPJKRowling. Back in 2007, Rowling and her sister Dianne elaborated further, telling James Runcie that, as a child, Joanne was dressed in blue, “because I was supposed to be a boy…. Opening up those spaces will in fact decrease the level of violence against women overall, because forcing trans women to use changing rooms, bathrooms and prisons for men frequently results in violent assaults against them. It is almost as pronounced as that noted by a New Yorker journalist granted a rare interview in 2012: “The conifer hedges in front of J. K. Rowling’s seventeenth-century house, in Edinburgh, are about twenty feet tall. The actress was already guest-starring as a waitress named Ursula on "Mad About You" when the role of Phoebe came along and producers scrambled to create a connection. Then follows the wobbling, precarious balancing-act that sits at the core of the essay. Robbie Coltrane as Rubeus Hagrid in "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone". Sounds uncontroversial enough for a proud feminist like Rowling, but it was the definition of “woman” that rankled some women’s groups, since it didn’t require trans women to have had surgery nor, in the words of the guidance, “dress look or behave in any particular way” in order to qualify. “So everyone else gets blocked out, and she becomes more and more stressed and less and less able to accept any help. There, then, is our first clue to the question: why now? Wumben? He’s also founder of the world’s largest transgender archives and is trans himself. Rowling was, she implies, fully aware of the violent backlash that June’s tweets would trigger, yet she pressed send anyway, to strike a blow for freedom of speech. Over the course of seven days, a total of 12,296 original tweets bore the hashtag, reaching a probable audience of around 7 million people. She was bringing up her child on benefits in Scotland, in the mid-nineties, and she somehow used her writing skills to forge a better life for herself,” summaries Cassie Brummitt, academic at the Cinema and Television History Institute at De Montfort University, who wrote her PhD on the development of the Harry Potter franchise. I had to drag her out of the house at five in the morning, and I admit I slapped her very hard in the street.” (This June, in the wake of Rowling’s essay, he insisted that: “I slapped her, but I didn’t abuse her.”), “The scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made,” Rowling writes. The writer didn't have to look far to pen the now-classic American novel. Since there were no dramatic developments in Scotland’s GRA reform in early June, it seems likely she was referring to statutory guidance published on 2 June and relating to the Gender Representation on Public Boards (Scotland) Act 2018. "I did not set out to make Hermione like me, but she is . Will 60 to 90 per cent of teens “grow out” of gender dysphoria, as Rowling suggests? At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. The franchise developed apace. And while it is likely to have little commercial implication for the Wizarding World, it has sent profound shockwaves through her own: putting a spotlight on the things that define us as individuals and as a society, probing the boundaries of both identity and freedom of speech. In 2018, the Westminster government launched a consultation on reforming the Gender Recognition Act. So are we finally seeing JK Rowling unleashed? 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