{"id":108878,"date":"2025-09-02T10:25:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-02T10:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/108878\/"},"modified":"2025-09-02T10:25:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T10:25:08","slug":"chris-columbus-doesnt-understand-why-he-disagrees-with-jk-rowling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/108878\/","title":{"rendered":"Chris Columbus doesn\u2019t understand why he disagrees with JK Rowling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Columbus, who directed two of the Harry Potter films, wants you to know he doesn\u2019t agree with J.K. Rowling on trans issues. Which trans issues, one may ask? Indeed, Rowling has asked<\/a> this herself. Is Columbus desperate to keep male rapists<\/a> in women\u2019s prisons? Does he hate thinking of lesbians never experiencing<\/a> the joys of the male penis? Is he a fan of breast binders<\/a> and mastectomies<\/a> for traumatised teenage girls?<\/p>\n

Well, he\u2019s not going to say. He just wants everyone to know that Rowling\u2019s questioning of all of these things and more makes him<\/a> \u201creally sad\u201d.<\/p>\n

In fairness, Columbus is only one of a long list of people with professional links to Rowling \u2014 including Daniel Radcliffe<\/a>, Emma Watson<\/a> and Stephen Fry<\/a> \u2014 who keep declaring how much they disagree with her without ever stating why. They might produce some waffle about kindness, but at no point do they explain why their position should be considered the kind one.<\/p>\n

This is a common feature of the \u201ctrans debate\u201d. Even Judith Butler, supposed high priestess of gender wisdom, can\u2019t muster a single argument against the women she denounces as Terfs. The entirety of her attack on British feminism in her 2024 book Who\u2019s Afraid of Gender?<\/a> amounts to smearing feminists as Right-wing, misunderstanding the concept of biological essentialism, and not showing any signs of having read a gender-critical text to the end. Then again, she doesn\u2019t have to. After all, she\u2019s on the \u201cright\u201d side.<\/p>\n

How did it come to this? Columbus et al. aren\u2019t necessarily stupid \u2014 that the feminist case against gender self-ID is distinct from the conservative one is hardly difficult to grasp. Both trans activists and their Right-wing opponents are happy to define women using regressive stereotypes; they merely disagree on whether a regressive stereotype should be born with a vagina. Yet rather than engage with women such as Rowling, who rejects both positions in favour of centring female subjectivity, many in the arts and academia have chosen to pretend the feminist position simply does not exist.<\/p>\n

The double standard is staggering. One thing that the past decade\u2019s \u201cgender wars\u201d have thrown into sharp relief is the difference between those who get their views by thinking through an issue and making a choice, and those who simply self-ID into being a member of Team Progressive. From a distance, if you didn\u2019t think very hard about it, trans activism could look a bit like the fight for gay liberation. After all, it seemed to annoy the very people who\u2019d get annoyed about the latter. It\u2019s therefore incredibly ironic that so many people who claim to want an end to binaries have found themselves supporting a misogynistic, homophobic movement because they can\u2019t conceive of there being more than two sides.<\/p>\n

It is much easier to don a \u201cProtect the dolls<\/a>\u201d t-shirt than to answer any of the following questions: what\u2019s the difference between a trans woman and a man who says he\u2019s a woman? How do you conflate sex and gender without reinforcing sexism? How is gender diversity promoted by telling gender non-conforming children they\u2019re actually the opposite sex?<\/p>\n

Ask such questions, and you will be commanded to shut up and listen to trans people. Alas, as many of us who did this discovered, you were only ever really expected to obey the first part. Genuinely engaging with the arguments of trans activists is a surefire way to turn anyone into a Terf. This is arguably one of the reasons why Rowling has been excluded and denounced by so many supposedly thoughtful, kind people. They can\u2019t refute her arguments<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Columbus might have no in-depth knowledge about this particular issue. That he, like so many others, is so willing to condemn Rowling without any clear justification is nonetheless to his shame.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re in favour of puberty blockers for confused children and the end to all single-sex resources and spaces, you ought at least to own it. Tell us why. Otherwise, you\u2019re just a man throwing rocks at a woman because all your mates are doing the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chris Columbus, who directed two of the Harry Potter films, wants you to know he doesn\u2019t agree with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":108879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[5343,96,59,52840,1635,39033,4968,3085,4969,52841,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-108878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-culture","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-gender-critical-feminism","tag-harry-potter","tag-jk-rowling","tag-non-classifiu00e9e","tag-none","tag-optional","tag-trans-activism","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/108879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}