Author and activist J.K. Rowling, the creator of the wildly successful Harry Potter series, would be considered at the very least a liberal by American standards, on most issues. But that aside, on one issue she's spot-on: the madness of allowing "transgender women," or, as we know them, men, in women's private spaces and in women's sports. Rowling has been very outspoken about this, she's put a lot of her own money into creating safe women-only spaces for vulnerable British women, and she has shown herself able and willing to take on anyone in argument over this issue. Personally I don't agree with her on a host of other issues, but on this one she's dead right, and I admire her grit.
Now, though, the British state media — yes, they have that, it's called the British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC — is creating a two-part documentary about J.K. Rowling, about her commercial success, and about her activism.
There's just one problem: Rowling herself wasn't offered the chance to have any input. That's right, they are crafting what gives every indication of being a hit-piece with no input from the target herself.
The BBC is making a documentary series about the influence and legacy of JK Rowling without any input from the author.
Rowling, 61, who wrote the Harry Potter books, is understood to have had no involvement in the new two-part production, which covers her path to “unprecedented literary success” before she became “one of Britain’s most polarising public figures”.
That second bit is the concern. Nobody questions Rowling's commercial success, which has been phenomenal. My kids have all read the entire series, and while they aren't complete fangirls like some people, they enjoyed them, they read the books at a young age, and it engendered a love of reading that all four of them, along with many other young people, have retained. Parents the world over owe J.K. Rowling one for that. Reading is, as they say, fundamental, and J.K. Rowling has done as much or more as any other living person to foster a love of reading in youths all over the world. She's earned every bit of her success.
That's the good news. Now, there's the not-so-good news.
The two episodes, which Rogan Scotland is making for BBC Factual and BBC Scotland, will use Rowling’s life “as a lens through which to explore three decades of profound social, political and technological change”, according to the production company.
For the hour-long episodes, producers will draw on “rare archive” material and “Rowling’s own words”, as well as interviews conducted with people who have worked with her in the past.
Simon Young, the head of commissioning for the BBC History, said of the programme, which has the working title JK Rowling: “No cultural history of Britain in the 21st century would be complete without the story of the boy wizard that JK Rowling created, the publishing and film-making phenomenon that she spawned, or the polarising public figure she has become.”
Yes, the "polarizing public figure." That's the rub. That's the real agenda under which the BBC appears to be operating. This is looking to be not a biography so much as a hatchet job — or else they would have actually spoken to the subject of the piece.
Here's what J.K. Rowling stands for: She is for only allowing women in women's sports, not men. She is for only allowing women in women's shelters, be they homeless shelters or shelters for abused women or the victims of sexual abuse. Not men. Despite the fact that her writing leans heavily on magic, wizardry and so on, her real life is grounded in biological reality. She knows that men are men and women are women, and she will metaphorically slap anyone in the face with that knowledge. She knows that men have and always will have a suite of physical advantages over women in sports. She knows that people are not "assigned sex at birth," but that sex is determined genetically at conception.
Plenty of people know this. But J.K. Rowling has a greater voice than most. And she's not afraid to use it.
Rowling, who has sold more than 600 million copies of her novels worldwide, once said she would rather go to jail than refer to a transgender person by their preferred pronouns. She first voiced her gender-critical views more than six years ago, when she mocked the use of the term “people who menstruate” instead of “women” in an article.
That right there is how it's done, and that's for sure, and for certain.
J.K. Rowling, of course, can look after herself. She has more money than Croesus, she's earned every penny of it, and she frankly doesn't seem to care who she torques off with her advocacy for women - actual, you know, women, people with two X chromosomes. That's a good thing. But the BBC is, nevertheless, doing her a disservice here. The proper thing, at the very minimum, would have been to at least give her a chance to respond.
But that's not how the legacy media works, not in Britain, and not here.
