The famous author, naturally, saw right through the actress’s artifice.
W hen it comes to her toxic treatment of J. K. Rowling in the trans debate, Harry Potter star Emma Watson thinks she can have her cake and eat it, too. She thinks she can publicly gesture for goodwill after years of jabbing at the author to whom she owes her career.
As with the twisted activist argument that a gender transition marks the death of one person and the birth of a new one, Watson has suggested that the inspirational author she once knew and worked with ceased to exist somewhere around 2020 — and was replaced by an unrecognizable TERF (“trans-exclusionary radical feminist”).
Appearing recently on the Jay Shetty Podcast, Watson, in carefully crafted, PR-conscious terms, said she can still “love” Rowling and be “grateful” to her. She continued: “I just don’t know what else to do other than hold these two seemingly incompatible things together at the same time and just hope that one day maybe they will resolve or like cojoin themselves or maybe accept that they never will, but that they can both still be true.”
Even if Watson thought she was extending an olive branch, the implication is that the current Rowling is a stranger now, all because Rowling has stayed true to what women’s rights really mean.
It would be one thing if Watson said, “I disagree with Rowling on the trans issue, but I deeply love and respect her as an intellectual and person.” Instead, her comments conveyed the message that she has a faint and fond memory of a good person who no longer exists.
So it’s no surprise that Rowling reacted negatively. As the author theorized in her scathing response to Watson on X, her PR team probably urged her to ease off on the defiant leftism because the zeitgeist has changed. Slowly but inexorably, both the U.S. and the U.K. are waking up to the trans insanity. Watson evidently assumed that Rowling would welcome a détente. Hogwash, Rowling retorted.
In the podcast interview, Watson acted as though she has been the peacekeeper all along, not at all interested in escalation but only in love and magnanimity. This is the same actress who once threw a sly, nasty jab at Rowling. As the presenter of the British Academy Film Awards in 2022, Watson opened the ceremony by saying, “I’m here for all of the witches.” After a slight pause, she smiled and mouthed, “Barring one,” to the hoots and merriment of the audience.
Perhaps what’s most insulting about Watson’s portrayal of Rowling is that Rowling has been a consistent feminist her entire professional life. When transgenderism emerged, she logically applied her embrace of women’s rights — no doubt informed by her experience as a young mother with an abusive husband — to women’s spaces that faced invasion by men claiming to be women. Rowling notes the simple fact that womanhood is not an act, a part to play, or a costume, but an immutable biological reality, and she further notes that women must be protected from male predation, even if it’s disguised as the so-called marginalized trying to claim equal opportunity.
During another part of the interview, Watson broke down as she told Shetty how cold and cutthroat Hollywood was to her after she left the Harry Potter cocoon, where she started as a child and made friendships over a decade. It’s fair to feel this way, but the coddled, protected environment that Watson enjoyed on the set of Harry Potter was made possible only by Rowling. You’d think Watson would be grateful, instead of mealymouthed, toward Rowling for creating this safe space.
Contrast Watson’s behavior with that of Tom Felton, who played antagonist Draco Malfoy in the movies. Asked by a reporter at the June Tony Awards whether Rowling’s position on the trans issue affects his work, Felton replied, “I can’t say it does. I’m not really that attuned to it. The only thing I always remind myself is that I’ve been lucky enough to travel the world, here I am in New York. I have not seen anything bring the world together more than Potter. She’s responsible for that, so I’m incredibly grateful.”
This is the proper attitude toward the visionary who gave you your big break. Watson is entitled to her free expression, as Rowling points out. But it’s another thing entirely to expect forgiveness from someone who has faced a barrage of death, rape, and torture threats — for having taken a stand in one of the most combustible cultural debates of our time. Watson can say what she likes, but then she must accept the consequences of what she’s said.
As Rowling put it: “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. Emma is rightly free to disagree with me and indeed to discuss her feelings about me in public — but I have the same right, and I’ve finally decided to exercise it.”