J.K. Rowling criticized Sky News on X (formerly Twitter) after the British television news channel posted a story about a 26-year-old being jailed for murder and referred to her as a “woman” and not a transgender woman.
Scarlet Blake was found guilty last week of murdering a man four months after she live-streamed a video in which she killed a cat. The judge said Blake was somewhat inspired by the Netflix documentary “Don’t F*** With Cats.” Blake was charged in the death of Jorge Martin Carreno, whom she hit and pushed into the River Cherwell in Oxford in July 2021. Blake is a transgender woman. The BBC reports that Blake will serve a life sentence in a men’s prison.
“I’m so sick of this shit,” Rowling posted to her 14 million X followers in response to Sky News not identifying Blake as a transgender woman in its tweet (the outlet did note Blake was transgender in the full story on its website). “This is not a woman. These are #NotOurCrimes.”
Per the BBC: “The court previously heard how she arrived in the UK from China aged nine, coming out to her parents as transgender at 12. She said it ‘made my father really unhappy and my mother as well’ and ’caused a large emotional rift. Jurors were told how Blake, formerly known as Alice Wang, had an ‘extreme interest in death and… harm’ that ‘went beyond mere fantasy.’”
Rowling then re-shared a post from The Guardian writer Louise Tickle, who called out her own publication for also not identifying Blake as a transgender woman in its coverage of the verdict. The “Harry Potter” author said she agreed with “every word of this,” referring to Tickle’s issues with The Guardian’s coverage, which according to Tickle only referred to Blake as a woman and did not mention she’s transgender.
The author then posted another follow-up statement on the matter: “1. Crime statistics are rendered useless if violent and sexual attacks committed by men are recorded as female crimes. 2. Activists are already clamouring for this sadistic killer to be incarcerated in a women’s prison. 3. Ideologically-driven misinformation is not journalism.”
Rowling has courted controversy in recent years for making comments that are widely perceived by the public as anti-trans. She claimed last year that people have deeply misunderstood her position on transgender women and stressed she’s not preoccupied with how the controversy will affect her legacy.
“I do not walk around my house, thinking about my legacy,” she said on the “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” podcast. “You know, 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.”
Controversy first erupted around Rowling in June 2020, when she tweeted among other things, “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” Rowling also has suggested that trans women “retain male patterns of criminality,” which makes them likelier than cisgender women to physically or sexually assault someone in a women’s locker room or shelter.
Rowling’s comments about the transgender community have been criticized by actors from movies based on her books, including Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint and Eddie Redmayne, while Ralph Fiennes is among those who have defended the author.