Deciphering the most beloved, most reviled childrens-book author in history.
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Edinburgh Castle, many centuries old, has been called the most besieged place in Britain.
In 2005, on the night Melissa Anelli arrived, it was besieged primarily by children.
The cover ofHarry Potter and the Half-Blood Princewas projected on its outer walls.
Anelli was then the 25-year-old web mistress of a Harry Potter fan site calledThe Leaky Cauldron.
It would take place on the afternoon of the day the book came out.
We were sleepless and dizzy and euphoric, Anelli told me.
Anelli and Spartz were ushered into Rowlings office, an outbuilding with honey-colored wood and floor-to-ceiling windows.
Then the family cleared out and the interview began.
Anelli and Spartz asked Rowling everything they could about the world she had created.
Has the Sorting Hat ever been wrong?
No, Rowling said, unequivocal.
The ring, Rowling wrote, was to thank her for her invaluable protectiveness towards Harry and his fans.
That weekend, Anelli had lived a fan fairy tale: She had gotten everything she wanted.
Her authority was, indeed, the whole point of the exercise.
Anelli and Spartz were there to receive authorial pronouncements ex cathedra.
In the past few years, Rowling began to share her skepticism of transgender identity online.
Outcry followed.Fans, including many trans and nonbinary fans, felt betrayed.
Whats wrong with her, Colin?Davidson asked Weekend Update co-anchor Colin Jost.
Perplexed was a common reaction.
Rowling had never been a particularly controversial figure.
In 2012, she gave enough to charity and paid enough in taxes to knock herself off theForbesbillionaires list.
Read another way, though, the latest turn in Rowlings story looks perhaps less perplexing than inevitable.
Though the struggle may be lonely and hard, right ultimately beats wrong.
For Rowling, this was no less the case.
She thinks shes doing good work right now.
Rowling completed thefirst Harry Potter book in 1995 in a modest apartment in the Edinburgh port neighborhood of Leith.
This Cinderella story proved irresistible, as did the parallel to Harry himself.
Rowlings circumstances were in some ways not quite so dire as this story may suggest.
She was a college graduate from a solidly middle-class background considering a teaching career.
She married a Portuguese journalist, but the marriage, she has said, was catastrophic.
(Her ex-husband later told the tabloid press that he had slapped her the night she left.)
She completed the seventh and final Harry Potter book at Edinburghs five-star Balmoral Hotel.
As the series progressed, book tours and readings took on the pitch of Beatlemania.
Rowling hired her own PR sentries and earned a reputation for guarding her privacy vigilantly.
She secured a deal that future films would hew to her books.
Rowling had turned Oprah down once before, during the first flush of Potter publicity.
This time, the author chose the Balmoral for their interview.
The red of a rug picked up the soles of Rowlings beige patent Louboutin pumps.
Her hair was sleek and blonde, her delivery polished.
Winfrey did her best to probe personal trauma; Rowling responded with polite restraint.
Surrounded by the opulence Rowling could now treat as office space, Winfrey also wanted to talk about success.
Are you in a place now where you could accept that you will always be rich?
No, said Rowling.
Winfrey said she was (Kinda.
Her fantasy was to be left alone in a world where she made the rules.
Finishing her work on the Harry Potter books was an occasion Rowling mourned like a death.
Harrys world had been a reliable refuge, and she now seemed reluctant to depart.
Shortly after the last book was published, Rowling made it clear that she wasnt quite finished yet.
At the time, this revelation caused a stir that was enthusiastic mostly.
Oh, lady, you had your chance!Roger Sutton remembers thinking when Rowling unleashed the Dumbledore news.
I thought that was a real intrusion upon the readers experience.
And Im gayer than five Dumbledores.
Rowling showed you everything you would see.
She told you everything you would hear, he said.
I need more air in the books I read.
Down to the level of the sentence her penchant for adverbs became a well-known foible Rowling eschewed ambiguity.
The judge ruled in Rowlings favor, awarding $6,750 in damages.
Blair was workingat Warner Bros. when he got into the business of Harry Potter.
This inaugurated a period in which, books complete, the business continued to grow.
Warner Bros. would eventually announce a Harry Potter Global Franchise Development Team.
Two Harry Potter theme parks had already opened; plans were under way to expand and open others.
But what exactly the fans wanted from her remained to be seen.
That was when she discovered Harry Potter and soon became immersed in the fandom taking shape online.
Rowling fashioned herself an untouchable goddess at the exact moment untouchable goddesses became obsolete.
Still, she had published four Harry Potter books before she permitted herself to do some Googling and explore.
I was concerned for the safety of the fragile glass bubble within which I wrote, she once explained.
There was something about the internets basic dynamics that unnerved her.
That was always a very scary image to me.
On the internet, after all, nobody knows youre a suburban middle-schooler.
The archetypes and lore she assembled were raw material for new stories to be told.
From the wordgo,it was a boy, she has said of imagining her protagonist.
I never thought,Oh, maybe its a girl.Never once.
It was always a boy.
Klink remembers writing the queerest fanfic Ive ever written about Tonks turning into a man.
Since then, Klink has come out as nonbinary.
But when you look back on Tonks, Tonks never changes into a guy.
Tonks never changes into anything but different kinds of girl.
Tweeting, she was delighted to discover, was writing.
Youre swimming in your own medium, she told a 2015 interviewer.
Twitter for me has been an unmixed blessing.
Rowling too found she could be the person she wanted to be online.
For her, this meant shrugging off the trappings of celebrity.
You cant answer everyones question.
Twitter gave that back to me.
It was also an ideal conduit for a constant stream of Harry Potter amendments.
They learned that Hogwarts was tuition-free and that, among wizards, homophobia did not exist.
Rowlings updates sometimes seemed like retroactive gestures toward inclusion.
She often described the series as a plea for tolerance.
An organization called the Harry Potter Alliance sought to channel the energy of fandom into activism.
Jackson Bird worked at the Harry Potter Alliance from 2013 to 2018, eventually serving as communications director.
Upon arriving at Hogwarts, Harry and his magical peers are sorted into four houses based on their characters.
The process reveals their truest selves and shapes their fates.
The self-proclaimed millennial Gryffindor (or Slytherin or Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff) is the stuff of generational caricature.
Rowling published adult fiction regularly through the 2010s, primarily a crime series under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
(When her real identity was leaked through a partner at her law firm, she sued the partner.
The books then became best sellers.)
This time, she cast her gaze beyond Britain, to unfortunate effect.
Despite thousands of tweets directed at her about these concerns, she has not addressed it at all.
Flourish Klink now advises entertainment franchises on building relationships with fans.
The approach Rowling took to global wizarding struck them as a waste.
She missed a big trick there, Klink told me.
Yet none of this was, in itself, destructive to Harry Potters appeal.
The fandom had grown into a vast community independent of one woman in Edinburgh.
The three joined Will Gompertz of the BBC for an interview before its opening in Londons West End.
I wouldnt go that far, Will, she said, not quite smiling.
(Someone with Rowlings taste for adverbs might note that she said thisrather sharply.)
The collaborators sitting alongside her laughed.
Im deadly serious, she continued.
Because that would be to disavow what that world was to me.
Seventeen years, that world was mine.
And thats how that would feel.
The dawn of the Trump erafound the vocabulary of Harry Potter deployed with new urgency.
Hermione signs proliferated at the Womens March.
Order of the Phoenix, mount up, tweeted Lin-Manuel Miranda alongside a Harry Potter GIF.
Rowling, for her part, fired off insults at the new U.S. president with palpable delight.
Her politics had always been comfortably center left.
And sometimes she objected to the parallels others saw.
She stressed the point two months later: Corbyn.
Rowling issued long threads decrying Saint Jeremy and lambasting a Corbyn supporter who had called Theresa May a whore.
Corbyn, though hardly above reproach, was, notably, pro-trans-rights.
Men in dresses get brocialist solidarity I never had.
At the time, transgender rights were becoming a lightning rod in the U.K.
The difference reflects, perhaps, the relative insularity and homogeneity of British feminism.
Fans began to note with alarm that Rowling followed vocally anti-trans Twitter accounts.
All of this mostly passed beneath widespread public notice, however.
More prominently controversial was Rowlings support for Johnny Depp.
Set to star in a newFantastic Beastsmovie, he stood accused of domestic abuse.
Others may disagree, she acknowledged, but conscience isnt governable by committee.
Meanwhile, Rowling undertook a new courtroom battle.
(Rowling said she intended to donate any money she recovered to Lumos, her childrens charity.)
The expenditure on Molton Brown toiletries of 3,629 was extraordinary, Rowling testified, according to court records.
She had never asked [Donaldson] to buy these toiletries.
She does not like them.
She finds them overly-perfumed.
Donaldsons exploits suggested a portrait of Rowlings life that (according to Rowling) was all wrong.
She was staggered that [Donaldson] thought she would not be caught.
Animating the Donaldson lawsuit is a sense of shocked violation alarm at a sanctuary breached.
Ever since vaulting to fame, Rowling had sought the protection of some private realm.
But her safest space had long been the one she found in writing.
There, she knew all the secrets, ordained good and evil, and decided how everything would end.
Your story is the best-selling childrens-book series of all time.
You transform childrens literature and media …
Being told that youre wrong.
Dress however you kindly.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult wholl have you.
Live your best life in peace and security, Rowling tweeted.
But force women out of their jobs for stating sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill.
The tweet markedRowlings first direct statement on trans issues.
The author is always right.
After the outrage over her Forstater tweet, Rowling stepped away from Twitter.
She returned in the spring of this year.
She was taking Harry Potter quizzes.
She was reorganizing her books by color, she reported, posting a video of her library.
Im sure there used to be a word for those people.
Someone help me out.
The tone called to mind her Trump-heckling days; it was a tweet that anticipated applause.
Rowling returned a half-hour later on a note of affronted righteousness.
Four days later, Rowling elaborated in her long essay on reasons for speaking out.
She had been following trans issues for a couple of years now, she wrote.
She had hesitated to discuss these things not out of shame but because they remained so difficult to revisit.
My perennial jumpiness is a family joke, Rowling wrote.
That is the simple truth.
Im not excusing this politics, but I think that that is a reason for it.
The problem is that gender-critical feminism completely misrepresents where the danger is.
Very few people are going to be raped by somebody in a public toilet.
Fears can be ungrounded or unfair and still be genuinely felt.
Peoples triggers are not politically correct, Phipps said.
The experience of womanhood that anti-trans feminists present often seems to be defined by fear.
Maya Forstater, for example, shared an essay in 2019calledPronouns Are Rohypnol.
They dull your defenses.
They change your inhibitions.
Youve had a lifetimes experience learning to be alert to him and relax to her.
I think theres a certain attachment to victimhood, Phipps said.
Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand without having experienced.
They can think themselves into other peoples place, she said.
But many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all.
Rowling now seemed unable to think her way into her critics point of view.
I JK ROWLING,read a poster that appeared in the Edinburgh Waverley rail station in July.
It stayed up only briefly.
connection Rail said its political nature violated its advertising rules.
But it lasted long enough to make an impression on Chris Elston, an insurance broker in British Columbia.
He was troubled by what he read.
I have two little girls, and I just got really tired of all this nonsense.
The September morning that Elstons billboard went up, it received little reaction until he tweeted it out.
It wentboomon Twitter, he said.
The billboard was paint-bombed overnight; a city councillor called it hate speech.
The sign company buckled to the pressure right away and brought in a crew to cover it up.
Afterward, Elston sent out a call on Twitter, where he has 25,100 followers.
He sought funding to put up more billboards, and he received an enthusiastic response.
For those opposed to gender ideology, Rowlings embrace of their cause has made her an icon.
Im really calm, he said.
Even so, Ive been making a lot of waves.
In October, he wore his sandwich board to a rally held by a trans candidate for local office.
J. K. Rowling has absolutely been the inspiration for all of this, Elston said.
In her books, theres a journalist called Rita Skeeter.
And thats whats going on about J. K. Rowling.
And thats whats going on with me.
He is determined to stay the course.
So thats physiologically going on.
But in my mind, Im crystal clear.
And Im totally at peace with what needs to be done.
Elston began the Harry Potter books for the first time with his 8-year-old daughter this year.
When we spoke, they were just starting the fourth.
I consider her to be a genius among geniuses.
