Actor Rupert Grint is the latest star from the Harry Potter triumvirate to reject author JK Rowling’s alleged anti-trans tweets and voice support for the community. After Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson, he, too, has shared his opinion on the matter.
Rupert said in a statement to The Times, “I firmly stand with the trans community and echo the sentiments expressed by many of my peers. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. We should all be entitled to live with love and without judgment.”
In a series of tweets this week, Rowling said she supported trans rights but did not believe in “erasing” the concept of biological sex. Rowling said she refused to “bow down’’ to a movement seeking “to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.”
The comments prompted Daniel and other cast members of the Potter films to publicly disagree with her. Daniel, in an essay on the Trevor Project, a non-profit dedicated to crisis intervention and suicide prevention for LGBTQ people, wrote, “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”
Emma tweeted, “Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are.” Eddie Redmayne, who plays Newt Scamander in Rowling’s Harry Potter spin-off, said he wanted to make his stand on the topic clear. “Respect for transgender people remains a cultural imperative, and over the years I have been trying to constantly educate myself. This is an ongoing process,” Redmayne said in a statement to Variety.
{{/usCountry}}Emma tweeted, “Trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned or told they aren’t who they say they are.” Eddie Redmayne, who plays Newt Scamander in Rowling’s Harry Potter spin-off, said he wanted to make his stand on the topic clear. “Respect for transgender people remains a cultural imperative, and over the years I have been trying to constantly educate myself. This is an ongoing process,” Redmayne said in a statement to Variety.
{{/usCountry}}Rowling was unmoved, and issued a statement explaining her views in which she discussed her past. “I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces,” she wrote. “The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women — ie, to male violence — ‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences — is a nonsense,” she added.She also said that she had been sexually assaulted but did not identify the attacker.
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