J.K. Rowling Draws From Real Life For A ‘Persecuted’ Transphobic Character In Her New Novel

J.K. Rowling’s new novel, part of a series of crime-thriller books she writes under a pen name, is being debated for featuring a character experiencing death threats due to creating something labeled as racist and transphobic.

Rowling, the best-selling author of the Harry Potter series, has recently come under fire for airing views that seem to be simply feminist on the surface but have a chilling undercurrent of hostility towards trans people in the name of feminism.

A previous book in this same series, Troubled Blood, received similar criticisms when it featured a male serial killer who lured his victims to their deaths by wearing a dress. She has also echoed the bigoted and untrue claim that inclusive restrooms would cause men to freely use the policies to attack women in the bathroom.

If you want to read the whole book for yourself, spoilers for The Ink Black Heart will be following. The character of concern was Edie Ledwell, a cartoonist who creates a beloved YouTube series that eventually comes afoul of her fans over being transphobic, sexist and ableist. This leads to a torrent of hate messages, Ledwell’s address getting leaked, and her eventual murder by stabbing.

Obviously, toxic fandoms with unrealistic expectations for creators are very much a real thing, but the self-insertion is pretty clear here. I thought Rowling denied her social media presence had any influence on the novel.

She told Graham Norton, “I said to my husband, ‘I think everyone is going to see this as a response to what happened to me,’ but it genuinely wasn’t. The first draft of the book was finished at the point certain things happened.”

Since its original publication, the novel has received mixed-to-negative reviews. Some have mocked its huge 1200 pages, which is over 300 pages longer than the longest Harry Potter novel: The Order Of The Phoenix. One user online noted, hilariously, that the page count is inflated because the book contains tons of fake inflammatory tweets.