JK Rowling has spoken out after tweeting – and swiftly deleting – a post which contained a sentence misgendering a transgender woman.
The Harry Potter writer recently unveiled her new children’s story The Ickabog, and for the last few days has been sharing art created by her young fans, inspired by her new work.
However, on Friday afternoon, she shared one fan’s picture with an unfortunate additional message.
“I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes and terrifying bloodstained teeth!” she wrote.
Her tweet then continued: “In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which she’d said he wanted to ‘fuck up some TERFS’ was just ‘bravado’.”
That second sentence was seemingly copy and pasted from a website called Feminist Current, more specifically an article about transgender activist Tara Wolf, who was fined £150 for assaulting Maria Maclachlan in 2018.
In the article JK was seemingly quoting, Tara is branded a “trans-identified male”, and referred to throughout – including in the sentence copied and pasted by the Harry Potter author – as “he”.
The post was removed from JK Rowling’s account around 20 minutes after it was first shared.
She has since re-uploaded the first part of her original tweet, along with the message: “Sorry about the random and totally unconnected sentence that made its way in there. I accidentally pasted in part of a very un-Ickaboggish message I’d just received.”
A representative for JK Rowling told HuffPost UK the deleted tweet contained “a cut and paste error, unrelated to the intended message, and originating from a message the author had received”.
They added: “She has apologised and the tweet has been deleted.”
Back in 2018, the Wizarding World creator was accused of transphobia when she was seen “liking” a tweet referring to transgender women as “men in dresses”.
Her rep later put this down to a “clumsy” and “middle-aged mistake”.
Towards the end of last year, she faced a backlash when she spoke out in defence of Maya Forstater, who had been accused of using “offensive and exclusionary” language in a number of tweets relating to proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act, which would allow self-identification.