Harry Potter star Helena Bonham Carter is standing with She Who Has A Dangerous Case of Poster’s Disease.
In a new interview with The Times UK, Bonham Carter, who famously played Bellatrix Lestrange in the Potter franchise, shared her thoughts about the controversy surrounding J.K. Rowling’s harmful transphobic remarks, calling it “a load of bollocks” and arguing that Rowling “has been hounded.”
“She’s allowed her opinion, particularly if she’s suffered abuse,” the actor said. “Everybody carries their own history of trauma and forms their opinions from that trauma and you have to respect where people come from and their pain. She’s not meaning it aggressively, she’s just saying something out of her own experience.”
Over the last few years, Rowling has doubled down on her status as one of the world’s most high-profile TERFs, escalating from subtle Twitter “likes” into full-blown transphobic posting. In a lengthy essay shared on her website in June 2020, the author shared that she was a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor, but spread common misinformation about the trans community in the same breath, including inaccurate fear mongering about “forced” transition and the disproven notion that trans-inclusive restroom policies lead to violence against cis women.
While no one is denying Rowling’s own serious experiences with assault and abuse, nothing justifies anti-trans bigotry, especially considering that trans people (particularly trans women of color) face disproportionate levels of physical and sexual violence. This year alone, escalating anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans rhetoric has had devastating real-life consequences, including the introduction of nearly anti-LGBTQ+ 300 bills in state legislatures, bomb threats against children’s hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, and anti-drag protests in 47 states. The recent Club Q shooting was a grim capstone to an already horrifying year.
Yet Rowling can’t stop sharing dangerous misinformation about the trans community instead of, I don’t know, logging offline and enjoying one of her literal castles.
Bonham Carter isn’t the only Harry Potter alum who has voiced their support for Rowling. In a September 2020 Radio Times interview, Robbie Coltrane (who played Hagrid) brushed off criticisms of the author by arguing that said critics are “a whole Twitter generation of people who hang around waiting to be offended.” Meanwhile, He Who Must Not Be Named himself, Ralph Fiennes, called the “abuse” Rowling receives for her transphobia “appalling” in an October interview with The New York Times.
Several of the younger Potter cast members, however, have publicly denounced Rowling’s comments, including Daniel Radcliffe, Evanna Lynch, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson, Katie Leung, Bonnie Wright, and others.
In a November interview with IndieWire, Radcliffe opened up about how he “needed to say something” after Rowling’s transphobic comments first surfaced.
“Since finishing Potter, I’ve met so many queer and trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter on that,” said Radcliffe, who published an open letter stating his support for trans people on The Trevor Project’s website in June of 2020. “And so seeing them hurt on that day I was like, I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way. And that was really important.”
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