It may be alarming at first to wake up to curly-haired Hermione from Harry Potter being zapped, hard, by her creator, J. K. Rowling, as if in a wand-battle in which the young witch has both betrayed her old mentor and underestimated her powers.
“Emma,” Rowling wrote on social media, referring to the Hermione actress Emma Watson, “has so little experience of real life she’s ignorant of how ignorant she is.” Whack. “I lived in poverty while writing the book that made Emma famous.” Whack.
And finally, Rowling’s wand smoking from firing bolts that ensure her young target can never find a way back to her: “Adults can’t expect to cozy up to an activist movement that regularly calls for a friend’s assassination, then assert their right to the former friend’s love, as though the friend was in fact their mother.” Oof, a deep, bloody wound. Rowling declared she has “finally” decided to say what she really thinks of Watson. With that she exited the battlefield, ready to rearm.
Why now? To understand this sudden and dramatic escalation in the conflict between Rowling and her former protégé witch, 14 years after the final Potter movie was released and three years since the height of their battle over trans rights, you have to go back to the source text.
Harry Potter isn’t a book about forgiveness; it is about fighting for principle, whatever the cost. Those who must be avenged, must be avenged. There is no book eight of the Harry Potter series in which, against a backdrop of a burnt-out Hogwarts and rubble, the surviving Death Eaters engage in a post-apartheid-style truth and reconciliation process.
No. That is not how this is going to go, as Rowling made clear by her statements on Watson this week. Their battle started over trans rights, but now the face-off between Rowling, 60, and the 35-year-old Watson, whose renown she largely created, is deeper and more symbolic.
It is a battle for our ages. It’s about generational politics; mothers against daughters; an older, tougher feminism versus “woke” millennials. It’s about whether “being kind” is truly important or just another way to get women to be submissive. It’s about the limits of a polarized world. Is it compassionate and mature to try to love someone with whom you profoundly disagree, or is it cowardly and unprincipled? Is there anything other than X and Y, black and white?
When I said there is no book eight of Harry Potter, I believe I was wrong. Stand back, ladies and gentlemen, for we are now witnessing the writing of book eight in real time on social media. While Watson chooses as her channel a podcast, in this case an interview with Jay Shetty, Rowling chooses, as she always does, her beloved platform X.
And who wouldn’t thrill to see this encounter on the big screen? It’s an all-female version of Harry Potter, free of the doddering greybeards. Here we have what we so rarely see in movies, two powerful women in a showdown over something other than a man (who are irrelevant here, at least if we don’t get into defining who on earth they are).
It reeks of Aslan in the Narnia movies, old and battle-weary, roaring at the Ice Queen for questioning his powers. “Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch!” admonishes the lion, “I was there when it was written.” Rowling wrote the magic, and now roars at her witch.
Rowling says in her statement that it was Watson’s “all the witches” speech that was a “turning point for me”. This was 2022, when Watson was presenting an award at the Baftas. Rowling was two years into her campaign for single-sex spaces.
One by one Rowling’s cast denounced her views. Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played Harry Potter, said “transgender women are women”, a phrase echoed by Eddie Redmayne, the actor who played Newt Scamander in her Fantastic Beasts franchise.
Trans people are “who they say they are”, said Watson. These actors were generally living and working in the United States, where the debate had polarized into extremes of left and right, and gender-critical views were commercial suicide in the arts. They are also millennials, who were surging in power on social media.
That year Rowling was at her nadir. She said this week that “the death, rape and torture threats against me were at their peak … I was constantly worried for my family’s safety.” Her name had become something of a “dare-not-speak” Voldemort-style curse for the Potter franchise. Rowling committed to the campaign steadfastly, despite the years of isolation and frightening and unrelentingly extreme abuse.
A publicity drive for a Magical Creatures feature at Warner Bros Studios pointedly excluded her. Tom Felton, the actor who played Draco Malfoy in the Potter films, was asked in an interview by Sky News whether “it is strange for her [Rowling] not to be around at events like this”. The PR interrupted to command, “Next question please.”
When Watson came on stage at the Baftas, her first line was that she was “here for ALL of the witches”, a coded reference to her support of trans rights. Masked by applause, Watson mouths words that appear to be “bar one”: Rowling. Rowling said that watching this was painful but “it had a postscript that hurt far more than the speech itself”.
“Emma asked someone to pass on a handwritten note from her to me, which contained the single sentence ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through’ (she has my phone number),” Rowling wrote. “Emma had just publicly poured more petrol on the flames, yet thought a one-line expression of concern from her would reassure me of her fundamental sympathy.”
Watson, naturally, remembers this differently. She said on the Shetty podcast that it is possible to separate politics from the person, and she still “treasures” Rowling. “The thing I’m most upset about is that a conversation was never made possible.
“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.”
Watson’s stance was satirized on social media by a comedian spoofing her, saying, “I have so much love in my heart” for Rowling, “but I also stand shoulder to shoulder with those who wish harm on her.”
Rowling retweeted this skit with the line, “I’m here for ALL the spoofs”, mocking Watson’s “ALL the witches”.
What is so fascinating about this battle is that the old orders of gender and age are swapped. As Victoria Smith, author of Hags, wrote, “Watson gets to be soft, gentle, feminine, while Rowling — the only one of them who actually challenges gender norms — is seen as unyielding and unforgiving.”
Rowling is immune from whatever pressure there is on women to be tolerant. In 2024 a number of rulings excluded trans people from elite sport, and the Cass report advised caution on gender transition for young people, while a new administration in the United States is highly supportive of gender-critical views.
This year the political weather truly swung in Rowling’s favor on trans rights, with the Supreme Court in the UK unanimously passing a ruling that defined women based on “biological sex”. Rowling revelled in several posts on X, such as “Terf VE Day”, plus a photo of herself smoking a cigar, captioned: “I love it when a plan comes together.”
It is no coincidence that Rowling is attracted to binaries. Biological sex is as binary as morality; she is a writer who creates worlds of black and white. In the fictional Potter world, genetics decide who is a wizard and who is not, and people are further sorted aged 11 by the Sorting Hat. These sortings are immutable, as immutable as sex. As immutable — in Rowling’s world — as enemies.
It is said that the young see issues in sharp relief, while older people deal in shades of grey. Not Rowling, who sees life as a clear-cut battle between good and bad, unclouded (or, critics would argue, unnuanced) by the softer, mistier focus of age. Polarization is often decried as an evil of our age. Not for Rowling, who wants us to pick a pole, and don’t be wrong. Rowling’s attitude is now divisive in itself: unstatesmanlike or gloriously uncowed?
Now Rowling is rising again, phoenix-like in a waft of cigar ash. A new Potter has been cast, filming again for HBO. Rowling can cut off her first disloyal set of fictional offspring. The new Hermione is a young British actress called Arabella Stanton, who said she is “quite like Hermione because I always want to do everything perfectly”. If she looks at Watson she will realize that’s not her job: it’s to fight.
Helen Rumbelow is a London-based writer
