David Tennant takes swipe at JK Rowling for transgender views: “Just let people be”
Actor David Tennant is the latest celebrity to comment on author JK Rowling’s transgender-exclusionary feminist politics.
Talking on the ITV1 show The Assembly, Tennant remarked: “JK Rowling is a wonderful author who’s created brilliant stories, and I wish her no ill will, but I hope that we can all, as a society, just let people be. Just get out of people’s way.”
JK Rowling has received recent backlash from a post on social media, where she smugly celebrated the news that the Supreme Court considers gender and sex to be indistinguishable. This refutes the gender identity and lived experience of transgender people. In the post, she is seen holding a beverage and smoking a cigar in front of a peaceful ocean setting.
“I love it when a plan comes together,” she captioned the picture.
On the show, Tennant likened the treatment of transgender people to Margaret Thatcher’s government introduction of section 28. This was a 1988 law that prohibited local authorities from promoting or discussing homosexuality.
He reminisced on the show: “When I was a teenager, there was this thing that Mrs Thatcher’s government introduced called section 28, which was about stopping the promotion of homosexuality in school, which was a weird umbrella term, which was basically saying it was illegal to talk about being gay in school, or to suggest that that might be a normal way of behaving.”
He continued in this vein: “We look back on that now as a medieval, absurd thing to try and say, and I think the way the trans community is being demonised and othered is exactly the same. It’s become this kind of political football.”
Tennant appeared in 2005’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, so he has a long-standing relationship with the author. However, Rowling has previously called out Tennant for saying that Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch should “shut up” after she called for a van of transgender people in single-sex spaces.
Tennant isn’t the only actor to go head-to-head with Rowling. Recently, The Last of Us actor Pedro Pascal slammed the author as a “heinous loser” for celebrating the recent gender ruling by the Supreme Court.
Other celebrities have also shown their solidarity with the transgender community in reaction to the biologically determinist gender ruling. Scissor Sisters, Rachel Chinouriri, Aimee Lou Wood, Lambrini Girls, Garbage, Shame, Billy Bragg, Jade, Mae Muller and Cat Burns are among those who have opposed the new legislation.
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