Published 13:12 IST, June 2nd 2020
JK Rowling 'accidentally' posts transphobic tweet while responding to a child's drawing
JK Rowling is currently busy with the online launch of her new children's book The Ickabog, for the promotion of which she had asked children to submit drawings
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Famed author JK Rowling on May 29 accidentally posted an explicit message while responding to a child's drawing on Twitter. According to reports, JK Rowling is currently busy with the online launch of her new children's book The Ickabog, for the promotion of which she had asked children to submit drawings of the characters from the story. While replying to one such drawing she accidentally pasted an explicit message, for which she later apologised.
(Sorry about the random and totally unconnected sentence that made its way in there. I accidentally pasted in part of a very un-Ickaboggish message I'd just received 😳)
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020
The post which has since been deleted read, "I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth! In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f**** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog." The Wolf part was not meant for this post, Rowling accepted later and said it was a message she had just received.
What does the sentence mean?
According to reports, the Wolf in the post referred to Tara Wolf, a transgender woman who was convicted for assaulting a transphobic feminist woman Maria Maclachlan during a protest in London in 2017. And TERF means trans exclusionary radical feminist. Critics accuse Rowling of being a TERF because of her supporting Maya Forstater, a researcher who was fired for tweeting “men cannot change into women”.
Rowling is being criticised for her recent mistake on Twitter because the message she accidentally posted referred to Wolf as a male and not female. Following the accident, she has posted multiple tweets defending her action and slamming people for calling her out.
I'm going to say this once and I'm going to say it calmly and politely. I certainly didn't mean to paste a quotation from a message about the assault of Maria Maclaughlin into a tweet to a child, especially given the language used by the person convicted of the crime 1/2
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020
However, I am not - as many of the people now swarming into my mentions seem to think - ashamed of reading about the assault. You should know by now that accusations of thought crime leave me cold. Take your censorship and authoritarianism elsewhere. They don't work on me.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) May 29, 2020
13:12 IST, June 2nd 2020