JK Rowling has accused Chocolat author Joanne Harris of failing to defend writers who disagree with her views on trans rights.
Rowling, famous for her Harry Potter books, received a death threat after tweeting her anger about the stabbing attack on author Sir Salman Rushdie in the US last week.
After hearing about the attack, Rowling tweeted: “Feeling very sick right now. Let him be ok.”
Someone replied: “Don’t worry you are next.”
The threat is being investigated by police but in a statement published by The Times, Rowling said Harris, who is head of the Society Of Authors, had “consistently failed” to defend female authors who disagree with her “personal position on gender identity ideology”.
Responding to the accusation on Twitter, however, Harris said: “I’ve always said loud and clear that I condemn threats of any kind, to anyone.
“That goes for people whose views I disagree with as well as those whose views I share.”
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Harris has a trans son, and Rowling has spoken against the use of the phrase “people who menstruate” instead of “women”, saying she objects to people “erasing the concept of sex”.
‘JK Rowling has every right to her opinions’
Harris said: “…my personal feelings about the gender-critical movement don’t affect my belief in free speech, or what I do for the Society Of Authors.
“JK Rowling has every right to her opinions. I may not share them, but that’s fine. And I totally condemn any threats to her, as I do to anyone. I think the literary world can do better than this fabricated culture war, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
Rowling told The Times: “Harris has consistently failed to criticise tactics designed to silence and intimidate women who disagree with her personal position on gender identity ideology and has said publicly, ‘Cancel isn’t a dirty word. We habitually cancel things we no longer want.’
“I find it impossible to square the society’s stated position on freedom of speech with Harris’s public statements over the past two years and stand in solidarity with all female writers in the UK who currently feel betrayed by their professional body and its leader.”
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‘Severe personal and professional harm’
Fellow authors Rachel Rooney and Gillian Philip had suffered “severe personal and professional harm” because they had challenged a “fashionable ideology which has been remarkably successful in demonising those who protest against the current attack on women’s rights”, Rowling told The Times.
Rooney was a poet and children’s writer but after one of her books – My Body Is Me! – was published by a group sceptical about the number of young people identifying as transgender, she was accused of being transphobic.
Philip wrote children’s fantasy novels under the name Erin Hunter but her contract was cancelled after she tweeted support for Rowling’s views on gender.
Both women told The Times that the Society Of Authors had not helped them.
‘They can’t comment on every Twitter quarrel’
Harris’s Twitter response began with: “Today I made The Times. The article is paywalled but from what I can see it is felt that as chair of the Society Of Authors, I am not offering enough aid to gender-critical women who feel threatened for their beliefs.
“I can’t believe I have to say this again, but here goes.”
She went on to say that the Society Of Authors is a trade union run by a small number of staff, adding: “They can’t comment on every Twitter quarrel. Nor can they intervene, or decide who was right, or who bullied who first.
“Twitter has protocols for that, and in the case of death threats, the police are a more appropriate place to lodge a complaint than an authors’ union.”
