OG Potter Director Lightly Critiques Rowling, Meltdown Ensues
When Chris Columbus offered a very gentle rebuke of J.K. Rowling’s years of devotion to destroying transgender people, she immediately went on Twitter and completely lost her mind.
Opinion by Aly Gibbs
Another key player in the original Potter film franchise has come out against J.K. Rowling’s never ending, unhinged crusade against transgender people… sort of.
If you don’t recall, or perhaps never knew in the first place because you spent 2002 through 2011 doing something more productive than watching the film adaptations of the most obscenely popular books of the era (which, despite predating her pivot to Major League Bigotry, were still rife with racism, fatphobia, and some early transphobia), Chris Columbus directed the first two films in the franchise and produced the third. He was integral to the many decisions that shaped the extremely successful films to follow, telling The Times in a recent interview, “I cast the film, with my team … and we created the world, the look and the costumes.”
If you had to point out one person as most responsible for the film series, Columbus would be a safe bet, and while discussing his latest film with The Times, the director (also famous for Home Alone and The Goonies) made it very clear that Rowling’s behavior completely precludes any possibility of the original actors appearing in new Potter media.
“It’s never going to happen,” Columbus said of a potential adaptation of a Harry Potter sequel stage play. “It’s gotten so complicated with all the political stuff. Everyone in the cast has their own opinion, which is different from [Rowling’s] opinion, which makes it impossible.”
Around the same time, Columbus said to Variety, “It’s unfortunate, what’s happened. I certainly don’t agree with what she’s talking about. But it’s just sad, it’s very sad.”
Columbus’ remarks are certainly interesting, to say the least; even to this dullard, it seems, the writing is on the wall about Rowling’s toxicity. He admits he hasn’t spoken to Rowling in more than a decade, but that he maintains regular contact with Daniel Radcliffe. His wishy washy disapproval of “what she’s talking about” sounds a lot like Tom Felton weakly stating he’s “pro-human rights across the board,” as opposed to working up the merest morsel of backbone necessary to say you support trans people’s right to exist.
Besides that, Columbus goes on to ramble about the things they couldn’t fit into the Potter films, like Peeves the Poltergeist, a mischievous dickhead who haunts the castle that doubles as the protagonists’ school. If you’ve never seen the films, you should know that they rightly cut out a lot of Rowling’s worst writing, like one character’s attempt to abolish slavery in book four, a notion that is roundly mocked and derided by the rest of the book’s main characters. While I had always assumed Columbus and the films’ main screenwriter had wisely opted to prune some of Rowling’s bad storytelling (she was only a producer on the films, lacking final say in how they were made), it seems I may have been too generous.
Despite Columbus’ softball remarks, Rowling took to Twitter to ramble and rant across several paragraphs about what a brave hero she is. I don’t need to repeat or debunk the brunt of her monologue, because it’s a bunch of disingenuous crap I’ve fact checked a hundred other times before, but I was somewhat shocked that she very brazenly called me and people like me “cross-dressing heterosexual male fetishists,” who “aren’t actually oppressed, but having the time of their lives piggybacking off gender identity ideology.”
She says we “suffer zero consequences” for promoting trans rights. I would point to Erin Reed’s Anti-Trans National Legal Risk Assessment Map, which has become considerably more orange-red than when it was first created. I would point to the back-and-forth passport rules that have sent many trans people into a panic trying to get their documents in order in case they need to flee the country. I would point to the Education Department literally starving children to punish their lawmakers for allowing a handful of trans student-athletes to play sports.
As ever, Rowling is a raving lunatic who’s full of shit. Even the gentlest rebuking sends her into a spiraling Twitter frenzy, and as amusing as that can be, I have to wonder how many more hate groups she intends to fund in her ruthless drive to scour trans people from the face of the Earth.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
