J.K. Rowling removed from Museum of Pop Culture exhibit for her transphobic commentary

J.K. Rowling has been removed from a “Harry Potter” exhibit at Seattle’s Museum of Pop Culture, due to her “super hateful and divisive” transphobic views. In a blog post published in March, the museum’s project manager Chris Moore — who is also transgender — slammed Rowling’s anti-trans rhetoric: “There’s a certain cold, heartless, joy-sucking entity in the world of Harry Potter and, this time, it is not actually a Dementor. We would love to go with the internet’s theory that these books were actually written without an author, but this certain person is a bit too vocal with her super hateful and divisive views to be ignored.”

Moore continued, “For the time being, the curators decided to remove any of her artefacts [sic] from this gallery to reduce her impact. It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s what we were able to do in the short-term while determining long-term practices.” 

Rowling was previously inducted into the museum’s Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. But amid the controversy, the museum removed any mentions of Rowling in its “Fantasy: Worlds of Myth and Magic” gallery — which still includes memorabilia from the “Harry Potter” films.

Rowling came under fire for her transphobic rhetoric in June 2020, when she called out a Devex op-ed for using the term “people who menstruate” instead of “women.” The “Harry Potter” author continued to voice her beliefs in blog posts and even a 3,500-word essay, asserting that transgender rights essentially threatens the women’s rights movement. In March 2022, she openly opposed Scotland’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which would improve the process by which trans people can legally affirm their gender. And in the following month, she organized a boozy TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) lunch amidst a trans-rights protest urging former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to include transgender people in a U.K. conversion therapy ban.