Stephen King Says J.K. Rowling ‘Canceled’ Him for Supporting Trans Women

Eric Feferberg/Getty Images, Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images

Stephen King discussed his falling out with fellow author J.K. Rowling after he tweeted his support for trans women.

Last year, the Harry Potter author deleted a tweet praising the horror novelist and unfollowed him on the social media platform after he sanctioned a tweet saying “trans women are women.”

“Jo cancelled me,” King told The Daily Beast in a new interview. “She sorta blocked me and all that. Here’s the thing: She is welcome to her opinion. That’s the way that the world works.”

King continued, “If she thinks that trans women are dangerous, or that trans women are somehow not women, or whatever problem she has with it – the idea that someone ‘masquerading’ as a woman is going to assault a ‘real’ woman in the toilet – if she believes all those things, she has a right to her opinion.”

Rowling has been a vocal detractor of the transgender community in recent years. In 2019, she caught backlash for defending a researcher who was fired for tweeting that transgender people cannot change their sex. The following year, Rowling posted a series of tweets questioning the legitimacy of transgender individuals, which prompted Daniel Radcliffe and several other Harry Potter stars to push back.

King went on to tell The Daily Beast that despite the backlash she’s received, “Nobody has ‘cancelled’ JK Rowling.” He added, “She’s doing fine. I just felt that her belief was, in my opinion, wrong. We have differing opinions, but that’s life.”

King even acknowledged that Rowling’s opinion on trans people “is an outlier in her entire political spectrum,” adding, “She was very much anti-Brexit and very much anti-Trump. She’s on the side of the angels in most respects, but she does have this one thing that she’s very vehement about. No doubt.”