Author and creator of the Harry Potter franchise J.K. Rowling said only women can menstruate. The statement was met with wide outcry from the woke left and radical transgender activists. Now, Harry Potter star Ralph Fiennes says he finds the backlash over Rowling’s comments “irrational” and “disturbing.”
“I can’t understand the vitriol directed at her,” Fiennes told The Telegraph in a recent interview. “I can understand the heat of an argument, but I find this age of accusation and the need to condemn irrational. I find the level of hatred that people express about views that differ from theirs, and the violence of language towards others, disturbing.”
When it comes to “cancel culture,” Fiennes — who played Lord Voldemort in the film adaptations of Rowling’s Harry Potter book series — said he gets “worried if it’s decided that certain classical plays are irrelevant.”
“I think often there’s a superficial reading — Restoration drama is ‘colonialist, hierarchical, quasi racist.’ But they’re just plays,” Fiennes said. “You can turn them on their head. The danger is of labelling stuff.”
“We need to have those voices that risk being offensive,” Fiennes continued, citing Picasso and Henry Miller. “How sad if we sat on any expressive voice that could shake the scenery, that could get inside us and make us angry and turn us on. I would hate a world where the freedom of that kind of voice is stifled.”
Not all Harry Potter actors, however, appear to agree with Fiennes’ sentiments, as several of them — including the film’s stars Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint — have come out against Rowling over her comments.
Radcliffe, who starred as Harry Potter, reacted to Rowling’s comments by stating that “transgender women are women,” adding that he is “deeply sorry for the pain” caused by the author.
Watson — who starred as Hermione Granger in the franchise — echoed Radcliffe’s sentiments, tweeting, “Trans people are who they say they are.”
Rowling has now been labeled a “TERF” (trans exclusionary radical feminist), a term referring to feminists who are considered too “radical” for even left-wing activists, as they do not believe that a biological man is a woman.
“I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it,” J.K. Rowling wrote in a lengthy essay responding the attacks she has received from transgender activists.
“It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities,” Rowling added. “The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much.”
“It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies,” she continued. “Women [are told they] must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.”
“But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive,” Rowlings wrote. “Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanizing and demeaning.”
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, on Parler @alana, and on Instagram.
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