This point was already clearly made by Awoo’s comment but I want to drive it home verbally. Rowling’s importance in the anti-trans “movement” has little to do with her popularity as a celebrity which has waned significantly over the years (and was never deserved though it rarely is), but it has everything to do with the fact she is now a billionaire. Because of her vast wealth she gets to dole out funding by the tens and hundreds of millions to the individuals and groups of her choice, handpicking those who will turn that wealth into terror campaigns that have real, quantifiable material effects on the oppression and persecution of trans people. This is because, especially in capitalism, wealth is power and the flow of currency is like the flow of energy in a system. She is a prominent central node in the anti-trans “movement” not because people still think she’s a good writer but because the wealth like energy flows from her outward, percolating out to the bigots who actually use it to materially influence policy as well as public sentiment. This billionaire has made it her actual life’s work to try to eradicate trans people by ensuring they have no place in society and she has had more than a little degree of success towards that end purely by virtue of the fact that she was able to hoard such an obscene amount of wealth (which is stolen labor at the end of the day). She may have been able to do that initially by being a popular writer, but at this point no one even needs to know her name in order for her to be that central node in a greater system of cruelty and despair (since a system is what it does).

She is singlehandedly funding every single terf org in the UK and the UK is the epicenter of terfism in the rest of the world.

All of this shit collapses without her.

Just the world being a reactionary hellscape as per usual

Still remember my aunt being like, “Pokémon is evil, it has evolution in it” when I was like 10

I’m trying to imagine a Nobuhiro Watsuki (Rurouni Kenshin author) defender adopting this stance and falling into the classic “well actually it’s technically ephebophelia and…”

Or someone trying to defend Neil Gaiman etc

Yeah, it sucks having something you enjoyed as a child turn out to be made by a monster, but there’s other media out there (a lot of it)

The same people who did knowingly overreact to Anita Sarkeesian, but wanted to make an example of her to show any would-be non-fascists who’s boss.

Wall

It’s way more than one billionaire, transphobia has substantial financial backing from basically every big fund for reactionary causes, from the Heritage foundation to Citizen Go or TFP (at this level, the Venn diagram between transphobia, homophobia and antifeminism is also basically a circle, actual TERFs in the historic sense of the term or transphobic cis gays only show up much further down the food chain). Many of the financers are individual billionaires like Rowling, Mercer or Malofeyev, but they also do more spread-out fundraising, Citizen Go being the prime example for that.

But yes, fascism is fully backed by capital, and that includes every fragment of reactionary ideology.

Prior to Rowling being in this position, it was Epstein.

She’ll expand from fueling transphobia to sending children invitation letters to Little Saint Hogwarts before you know it.

I’m not saying someone shouldn’t do it but they’ll find another billionaire to pick up the slack.

Elongated muskrat is already primed.