Opinion J K Rowling-Emma Watson row reveals tension between lived truth and fiction’s sweep
When faced with confusion or disagreement in the classroom, I turn to literature, not for answers, but for language to hold contradictions.
J K Rowling and Emma Watson 
J K Rowling’s anger over what she calls the “public betrayal” by Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Rupert Grint — who played Hermione, Harry and Ron respectively in the Harry Potter films — shows little sign of easing. On Jay Shetty’s podcast, Watson recently declined to “cancel” Rowling, saying instead that she would hold their incompatible views in tension, hoping they might one day be reconciled. Rowling swiftly rejected this conciliatory gesture on Twitter, calling it merely “a change of tack”. Claiming that Watson’s lifelong affluence meant she would “never likely need” single-sex spaces, Rowling suggested her own experience of poverty had made her more protective of women’s sex-based rights. Though she once acknowledged the vulnerability of trans people, Rowling’s stance that sex is biological, binary, and immutable has helped harden social and legal attitudes that endanger trans women’s rights and safety. The conflict feels almost like the fable of Pinocchio — Rowling’s creations have stepped off the page, turning their gaze back on their maker’s limits.
A recent Saturday Night Live sketch captured this reversal with biting humour. In it, Dobby, Rowling’s fictional house elf, struggles to defend his master’s instructions to “define, once and for all, what a woman is”. “Master Rowling has done so much for Dobby and for inclusion in general,” he stammers. “Remember when Dumbledore was gay after the books came out? When Hermione was Black only on Broadway? And when Cho Chang was… wait, was Cho Chang Asian?” Watching her characters slip from Rowling’s grasp, we are reminded of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s reflection on Pinocchio: that the puppet’s journey expresses the fundamental instability of human identity. In a similar fashion, perhaps this refusal to be fixed is what makes trans experience so threatening to those invested in certainty.
The question of whether facts alone can change minds is hardly new. It haunted the sociologist W E B Du Bois, the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard. Though he began his career countering racist pseudoscience with empirical research, Du Bois soon realised that cold, hard facts could not capture the emotional and moral reality of racism. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), he turned instead to a lyrical, multi-genre style to change hearts and minds.
I think of this as a teacher navigating rapid shifts in gender discourse, new vocabularies drawn from social media, and the expanding possibilities of medical transition. When faced with confusion or disagreement in the classroom, I turn to literature, not for answers, but for language to hold contradictions. A Revathi’s The Truth About Me, an autobiography shaped before the idiom of rights became mainstream, illuminates hijra life in ways that are both political and literary. It reminds us that recognition and empathy often arrive through narrative and not terse, uncompromising positions.
Recently, my friend Aarohi, who runs a book club in Bangalore, suggested I read Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby (2021). The novel follows three women — Reese, a trans woman; Ames, her ex who has detransitioned; and Katrina, his cisgender lover — as they consider forming an unconventional family after Katrina’s pregnancy. Peters writes with disarming wit about gender, love, and the longing to build a life beyond prescribed roles. Reading it, I recognised what Peters calls the “Sex and the City problem”: That despite feminism’s gains, women are still offered only four routes to fulfilment — love, career, motherhood, or self-expression. Peters shows how the world systematically denies trans women access to all four, making even the idea of motherhood exhausting to imagine. Her novel lays bare not just the limits of gender categories, but the emotional toll of trying to live fully within or beyond them.
My 17-year-old students articulate similar frustrations. As they begin to find their voices and navigate differences on campus, they question whether the futures they are encouraged to chase are, in Peters’ words, “a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood”. In these moments, the classroom becomes a space to explore the instability of identity that defines their time. Perhaps Rowling, a master of narrative herself, might also benefit from such creative and messy stories, ones that broaden our sense of vulnerability beyond the boundaries of our own “lived experience”.
The writer is assistant professor (Social Sciences) at the National Law School of India University
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