The Cowardice Of Emma Watson

The actress has been on an indefinite hiatus from Hollywood for years now, citing dissatisfaction with the promotional aspect of selling a piece of art that came along with acting as well as the pressure of performing. She’s been pursuing a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Oxford since 2023, and there have been recent reports that she’s studying to become a Doctor of Philosophy. A fan of Jay Shetty’s podcast , she expressed interest in appearing so that she could, for the first time, express herself in a long format, independent of outside influences like selling a project or being beholden to another company. “Such a big part of my job was trying to think three steps ahead of how everything that I would say could negatively impact the film that I was trying to do justice to and do service to and make sure that people understood what the director had intended and I felt this enormous sense of responsibility all the time to honor so many people’s work that put together something like a film,” Watson admitted of the traditional press tour. She added, “Interviews to me felt a lot like chess, and it required so much energy, and I think what’s nice about the way that I’m showing up today is I’m just showing up for myself and for once I actually am not here to speak on behalf of anyone else or anything else other than myself, which is unusual.” That provides some contextual understanding for why now, of all times, the actress feels more comfortable sticking her neck out (more a cautious peek than a bold stand, however) for Rowling following the Harry Potter author’s vocal heterodox stances on trans issues that led to her fall from grace in the industry. Rather than adding to the anti-Rowling dogpile as she, her co-stars, and Rowling’s other industry peers have in the past, she chose to take the high road, though the delivery landed more as word salad, heavy on the dressing and served over an eggshell-walking base. Shetty asked Watson how she feels about the comments J.K. Rowling has made about her in recent years. “I really don’t believe that by having had that experience and holding the love and support and views that I have, means that I can’t and don’t treasure Jo and the person that I had personal experiences with,” Watson said. “I will never believe that one negates the other, and that my experience of that person, I don’t get to keep and cherish. I just don’t think these things are either or." She added, “It’s my deepest wish that I hope people who don’t agree with my opinion will love me, and I hope I can keep loving people, who I don’t necessarily share the same opinion with.” She emphasized that this is an important way that she needs to be able to move through life. “I really do believe in having conversations and that those are really important, and I guess where I’ve landed is that it’s not so much what we say or what we believe, but very often how we say it. That’s really important and that’s really frustrating and not what you want to hear when you’re really angry and upset with someone.” She expressed dismay at the world we’re living in right now, where “we seem to be giving permission for this throwing out of people or that people are disposable and I will always think that’s wrong. I just believe that no one is disposable,” she said, seemingly condemning cancel culture. Welcome to the waking reality of the hybrid Hollywood entertainer-activist’s life: walking the tightrope of sounding principled while straining not to offend anyone, rendering you incapable of saying literally anything, and yet still failing to appease the zealous mob, whose response was “neutrality in the face of oppression isn’t compassion, it is siding with the oppressor.” While in one breath, Watson says everyone, no matter the conversation, should be treated with dignity and respect, in the next, she claims “a conversation was never made possible,” and she doesn’t want to say anything that will continue to weaponize a “really toxic debate and conversation,” as the conversation being had is very painful to her. She goes on to wax philosophic about the gratitude she has for Rowling’s creation of Hermione Granger, admitting she owes her success to Rowling’s works. Despite frustrating hesitation and nauseating therapy speak, the ethos of her message was clear. While the gender identity debate is emotionally charged, she thinks people should be able to agree to disagree and still hold love for Rowling, even if she doesn’t agree with her on this issue, and even despite the jabs Rowling has thrown her way in recent years. She draws on her memories of Rowling as a certain kind of person: warm and full of empathy, with heaps of pleasant memories to draw from. It’s a shame she’s waited so long to throw a crumb of support, and the timing is revealing. Some were then shocked to find that Rowling was less than impressed, responding by retweeting a satirical impression of Watson’s interview, poking fun at her comments. Rowling’s latest eloquently articulated tweet on the subject clarifies exactly why that is. “I’m not owed eternal agreement from any actor who once played a character I created. The idea is as ludicrous as me checking with the boss I had when I was twenty-one for what opinions I should hold these days," Rowling explained before expressing her contempt for the way Emma and Dan, in particular, have conducted themselves over the last few years. “They think our former professional association gives them a particular right - nay, obligation - to critique me and my views in public. Years after they finished acting in Potter, they continue to assume the role of de facto spokespeople for the world I created,” Rowling tweeted, referencing the subtweets and overt statements the stars have made in recent years, throwing shade her way and implying that she was stirring up hate. Rowling went on to read Watson to filth over the various ways in which her wealth and privilege shield her from the lived consequences of the incoherent policies downstream of the ideology she supports. To provide some background, back in 2020, Emma subtweeted Rowling, commenting that trans people are who they say they are and deserve to live their lives without being constantly questioned, at the time that Rowling started being more outspoken about her skepticism of modern gender activism that seeks to dismantle the immutability of biological sex. Other Harry Potter stars piled on in their affirmations that “trans women are women,” not quite condemning Rowling but implying their strong disapproval of her stance, counter-signaling her at every turn, and never once standing up for her right to hold heterodox opinions without fear of retaliation. Rowling made critical comments, jeering at their cowardly support of a movement she’s observed to be harmful in a myriad of ways: to women’s rights, to vulnerable communities at risk of premature transition when some pre-existing issue could be the explanation of their gender dysphoria (such as mental health issues, autism, and trauma), to children who are put on hormones and puberty blockers that permanently sterilize and disfigure them before they even develop the cognition to consent, and the harm it poses to people who are gender nonconforming or same sex attracted, who may be pushed to transition just because they fall outside of conventional expressions of the sex binary. Rowling and many other trans-skeptical feminists are concerned about how the erasure of sex as an innate quality of biology pressures kids who are tomboys into identifying as men just because they might express some typically male interests or skew towards androgynous presentation. Likewise, same-sex attracted people not only have their identity undermined by the implication that aspects of their sex (which could reasonably be extrapolated onto sexual orientation) are a matter of choice. Gay people might feel pressured to transition to escape homophobia, to the raucous applause of supposed allies rather than just being their authentic selves. She has written about these issues thoughtfully and extensively on her blog. Had you never referenced the source material itself, you might confabulate an entirely separate version of Rowling, one dripping with hatred for trans people. The real Rowling, however, has maintained her love and concern for trans people the whole way through. “I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth,” Rowling tweeted in June 2020. She also affirmed in her essay explaining her reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues that “trans people need and deserve protection” because they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners, and those who work in the sex industry are at particular risk. “I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men,” she added, and confessed that she is a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, which is why the issue of single-sex spaces is so important to her. She went to great lengths to make her statements clear, nested entirely on valid, logical concerns, and avoiding casting all trans people with the same broad brush, stating that she believes the majority of trans-identified people pose zero threat to others and are actually vulnerable to a lot of harms that likewise plague women. She wants them to be safe, but not at the expense of biological women and girls. There’s no contradiction there. The promotion of self-ID as a means of asserting transgenderism means that any man, without transitioning in any medical or social sense of the word, can walk off the street and enter female spaces like bathrooms and women’s shelters, even be housed alongside women in women’s prisons. All the while, these performers have failed to condemn the Orwellian treatment Rowling has had to bear (largely alone) and with increasing conviction. Daniel Radcliffe made the most defiant statements, commenting that Rowling’s stances make him sad and that while Harry Potter wouldn’t have happened without her, that “doesn’t mean you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life,” and added that he has no direct contact with her. He apologized to Potter fans on her behalf if they feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished because of Rowling’s views and claimed that denying that transgender women are women goes against all advice given by professional health care associations, “who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.” While these actors were busy virtue signaling, Rowling has been bearing the brunt of the trans lobby’s vicious attacks with admirable conviction and courage. She had previously foreshadowed her lack of forgiveness last year when an X user presumptuously assumed Rowling would accept any public apologies given by Dan or Emma underneath a tweet about the Cass Review , a methodologically robust government-issued review of gender services for minors that found children had been let down by remarkably weak evidence on medical interventions in gender care. Rowling was quick to correct the record on that. “Celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces.” She made another jab directed at the three pivotal stars of the Potter franchise when she quote-tweeted a post asking what actor/actress instantly ruins a movie for you, to which she said, “Three guesses. Sorry, but that was irresistible.” A lifelong feminist and survivor of domestic violence, Rowling sees the fringe left trans activist push to erase biological sex in favor of gender identity as a threat to female-specific protections and puts vulnerable women at risk by allowing men who self-identify as women into their spaces via changing rooms, women’s shelters, and sports; the latter of which provides them a biological advantage and poses serious physical risk to women. Speaking out against the dangers of biological sex erasure, especially through the low bar of mere self-identification without medical diagnosis or reasonable bureaucratic gatekeeping, has led to her being branded as transphobic and a TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) and while she seems to have embraced the term cheekily, the leftist characterization of Rowling as a hateful transphobe has been grossly exaggerated through distortion of her stances and emotional propaganda. Rowling first dipped her toe into this contentious issue back in 2019, though some social media users noticed she liked a tweet referring to trans people as “men in dresses” in 2018. However, her spokesperson told Pink News at the time that this was a mistake . She clarified this further on her website in 2020, detailing her reasons for speaking out on sex and gender issues. In it, she explains her introduction to the issue began in 2018 as research for her book, where a character was affected by these issues. She would regularly screenshot interesting tweets about trans issues on social media as a reminder to research them later, but mistakenly liked rather than screenshot a tweet one day, which had her outed for “wrongthink.” From this point on, any healthy level of curiosity and skepticism just short of unquestioning fanatical support of the trans lobby’s take on any given legal issue, regardless of how it impacted or put at risk women, children, and vulnerable communities like autistic and same-sex attracted people who are at much higher risk of misdiagnosis and subsequent detransition, seemed to compound the previous evidence against her in what amounted to a grand witch hunt. As Rowling became increasingly concerned about a number of seriously worrying trends promoted by the gender cultists, the trans lobby’s despicably dehumanizing, threatening, and often overtly misogynistic behavior towards her only confirmed that she was clearly hitting a nerve that ought to be hit, publicly and without cowardice. In 2019, researcher Maya Forstater, who worked at a poverty think tank, was let go from her job (her contract was not renewed) for posting “ transphobic tweets ” that were critical of gender self-identification and declared that biological sex was real. She filed a case with the employment tribunal claiming discrimination and asked the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is immutable is protected by law. The judge ruled it wasn’t. However, she appealed the case, and the ruling was overturned, determining that gender critical beliefs can qualify as a protected philosophical belief under the Equality Act. A subsequent hearing found she was discriminated against by her former employer, and she was awarded £100,000 in lost earnings, injury to feelings, and damages. Rowling’s first public statement on the trans issue was in throwing her public support behind Forstater with the hashtag #IStandWithMaya. The backlash was intense. She would continue to get in trouble for her gender critical tweets, including scoffing at articles using the gender inclusive term “ people who menstruate, ” and a thread expressing concern that young people struggling with their mental health are being shunted towards hormones and surgery when this may not be in their best interests and called it a “new kind of conversion therapy for young gay people who are being set on a lifelong path of medicalisation that may result in the loss of their fertility and/or full sexual function.” While she maintained that transition may be the answer for some, for others, it won’t, attempting to elevate the voices of detransitioners and suggesting that it’s propped up as a way to fix girls who don’t conform to gender stereotypes. She made a series of tweets about the consequences of erasing biological womanhood as a distinct material reality from mere identification with the word, saying it “isn’t hate speech to speak the truth,” and she isn’t transphobic. In a play on George Orwell’s 1984 , she tweeted “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.” to protest the police’s reported logging of trans rapists with penises as women merely because of self-identification. In 2022, she criticized a bill in Scotland that would remove many of the medical and bureaucratic hurdles put in place for people to transition, including being medically diagnosed with gender dysphoria, being at least 18 years old, and waiting a minimum of two years. Rowling was scandalized, tweeting that the law would harm the most vulnerable women in society: those seeking help after male violence/rape and incarcerated women. There have been attempts to blacklist Rowling from the entertainment industry, get her fired, and even arrested for hate speech. Mass boycotts, threats against her life, and public ostracization have persisted for more than five years since all of this began. Entire businesses have been propped up on the back of separating “she who shall not be named” from the beloved novels themselves. Former fans and millennial Potterheads everywhere have had public meltdowns—clamoring to remove their tattoos , to burn her books , and to boycott any project associated with her or that might earn her royalties. Anything to virtue signal how naughty her reasonable worries about these draconian policies were. Rowling has never once wavered. To the contrary, she has only grown more passionate, outspoken, and principled, to the point that she returned the Ripple of Hope Award she received after its president claimed Rowling was transphobic and implied she was harming trans people. Rowling, in a statement , wrote, "As a longstanding donor to LGBT charities and a supporter of trans people’s right to live free of persecution, I absolutely refute the accusation that I hate trans people or wish them ill, or that standing up for the rights of women is wrong, discriminatory, or incites harm or violence to the trans community.” In recent years, she has reiterated her stances through avid tweeting, podcasts like The Witchtrials of J.K. Rowling, essays, and activism. She’s opened a women’s-only support center, Beira’s Place , for survivors of sexual violence and set up the J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund to support people and organizations defending sex-based women’s rights. Rowling eagerly awaited a potential arrest in Scotland following a newly implemented hate speech law. While no criminal action was taken, she didn’t shy away from the real possibility that her views could land her in jail. Her response to those who think she’s ruined her legacy? She couldn’t care less. “I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy. What a pompous way to live your life, walking around thinking, What will my legacy be? Whatever, I’ll be dead. I care about now. I care about the living.” It’s a fitting perspective for the woman who lives by and falls on her own sword. It’s refreshing to see someone in Hollywood not just stand for something with real resolve, but to refuse to take the measly breadcrumbs the cowards offer up once public opinion starts to turn. For their own good, they need to be made aware of how weaselly (no pun intended) and spineless they are so that they at least have the opportunity for self-reflection and are made better for it.