J.K. Rowling is at it again. The author, writing under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith, has released a new book, The Ink Black Heart, the sixth installment of her Coroman Strike series, that centers around a plot line suspiciously mirroring her own experiences griping about trans people online.
Rowling’s 1,000-page tome, which reintroduces readers to the series’s titular detective, partly centers on the investigation of the gruesome murder of Edie Ledwell, a popular Youtube cartoon creator that is essentially hunted down by what Rowling is heavy-handedly decrying as the woke mob of the cancel culture age.
In Rowling’s telling, Ledwell is criticized online for creating racist and ableist characters, and accused of being transphobic over a talking worm in the cartoon that is a hermaphrodite. Detractors eventually begin doxxing Ledwell and sending death and rape threats, culminating in Ledwell being found knifed to death in a cemetery.
Rowling has indeed received similar threats and, just as it happens to Ledwell, has had photos of her home posted online. The obvious allegory Rowling seems to be telling though, about the dangers that someone like her has faced specifically as a result of the apparent wrath of cancel culture, is an insult to the actual pervasive realities of online misogyny and to trans people who are literally murdered at a disproportional rate.
The author, though, has denied that the plotline has any connection to her repeated and often criticized transphobic takes in recent years. “I should make it really clear after some of the things that have happened the last year that this is not depicting [that],” Rowling said in a recent interview with Graham Norton. “I had written the book before certain things happened to me online. 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.”
Even if Rowling had finished the book’s first draft before she received such threats, she’s been using her Twitter account to rally against trans rights as early as 2018, from claiming clumsiness while “liking” a transphobic tweet to going back and forth with followers about it in the years since.
