Surreal watching Rowling become some sort of literary and political totem.

This to me is the achievement both of her unnecessary intervention and the way the discourse is structured: people can now effectively make their views known symbolically, using Rowling as a proxy.

You no longer actually need to engage directly with any of the issues that have led to this situation, you can just make some vague noises about Rowling, cancel culture, and how worried you are about where it’s all heading.

This sounds, superficially, perfectly reasonable, but only if you ignore what is actually being said, and ignored, by such seemingly bland expressions of solidarity.

This, it seems to me, is how celebrity and power skew debate, and why people should be careful with the power and privilege they wield.

The burden now falls on people (ridiculously) being called upon to speak out in support of trans rights to make a closely-argued case, while people who want to voice their transphobia can do so in this conveniently oblique way simply by invoking Rowling.

It’s depressing to me that this has been conveniently reframed as an argument about literature, writers, freedom of speech etc, and that by extension it’s become such an issue for the literary community. I don’t think it was ever about those things.

Sometimes as writers we’re lured into believing that our solidarity must lie with other writers over and above our solidarity and empathy with anyone else.

And I think that instinct is now being cynically manipulated by certain high profile writers and a media landscape struggling to report properly on what’s happening in order to give the impression that this “debate” is about something it’s not actually about.

This is what you can do if you have a huge enough platform: you can tilt the discussion entirely towards yourself and away from the issues at hand and the people those issues actually affect until suddenly we’re just discussing you.

Hence the ridiculous centrality of Rowling - a cultural touchstone for a generation perfectly reshaped as a useful political proxy for the timidly bigoted.

We should ask ourselves why every high profile cis writer in the 21st century apparently has to weigh in on the issue of trans rights, why they can seemingly only do so through the prism of Rowling, and whether that, rather than a boy wizard, is Rowling’s true legacy.