SPEAKING OUT

Daniel Radcliffe: J.K. Rowling’s Anti-Trans Stance Makes Me ‘Really Sad’

You don’t “owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life,” Radcliffe told The Atlantic.

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe has addressed his rupture with series author J.K. Rowling over her dissemination of transphobic rhetoric. “Jo, obviously Harry Potter would not have happened without her, so nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without that person,” Radcliffe told The Atlantic. “But that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.” In response to Rowling’s tweets, Radcliffe said in a 2020 statement through the Trevor Project that “transgender women are women... any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people.” Last month, Rowling unloaded on Radcliffe and co-star Emma Watson, calling them “celebs who cozied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights.” “It makes me really sad, ultimately,” Radcliffe said, “because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”