A transgender novelist has been severely censured for depicting the creator of the Harry Potter series of books, J.K. Rowling, being burnt alive in a gory horror novel, reported The Times.
The way the author kills off the JK Rowling character in the book has been slammed as “abuse of women and nothing more,” penned by a “misogynist.”
JK Rowling has been consistently outspoken regarding her position on transgender issues and biological sex and, as such, has been accused of "transphobia" by activists and members of the LGBTQ + community.
“Manhunt,” a debut novel by Gretchen Felker-Martin, centers on two trans women “attempting to survive in a world ravaged by a plague which transforms anyone with enough testosterone in their system into a shrieking monstrosity.”
The lead characters are also forced to battle against “TERFs,” an acronym for so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Depicted among these in the novel are military contractors, dubbed “Knights of J.K. Rowling,” who had assembled “at her castle in Scotland.” The TERFs are portrayed as using a warship called the Galbraith, in what is seen as a reference to Robert Galbraith – one of Rowling’s pseudonyms for her Cormoran Strike novels.
The “Harry Potter lady … ended up being a crazy TERF, like, super intense,” the character created by Felker-Martin says in the book. As one of the “knights” accidentally knocked over a lamp, igniting a blaze and subsequent explosion, the Rowling character and her followers in the book are left to “to burn alive, and finally the whole castle collapsed,” writes Massachusetts-based Felker-Martin.
The author herself has touted her novel as one of “the most disgusting books in the English language, books about sexual revulsion, about body horror, about how violence forms and fits into our lives.”
“If you’re sick of gender plague novels written by transphobic dips*ts, try my novel MANHUNT, written by a trans woman for a trans audience. Trans dykes fall in love and f*k and murder TERFs, feral men maraud in the wilderness, J.K. Rowling dies, etc.,” she wrote in March.
‘Misogynistic Trash’
Despite ‘Manhunt’ becoming a bestseller in Amazon’s “LGBTQ+ Horror Fiction” genre, and Publishers Weekly speaking in awe of its “gut-churning prose”, a quarter of the reviews gave it the lowest one-star rating and many readers deplored it as “rape fantasy” and “misogynistic trash”. According to one of the reviews: “A trans-identified male fetishist writes his fantasy about raping and murdering women he hates in a post-apocalyptic world.” The author of the review added that there is “no redeeming aspect to this story. None.”
The novel has been deemed dangerous by women’s rights campaigners. “‘Terf’ is simply the new term for ‘witch’, making us fair game to be threatened, harassed, and yes, even killed. Astonishing that any responsible publisher would publish this vile male sexual fantasy,” Karen Varley, co-founder of Women Uniting UK, was cited by The Times as saying.
While there has not yet been any official comment from the book’s publisher, a Macmillan imprint, Tor Nightfire, Felker-Martin has been engaging in a Twitter fest of ads for her “depraved psychosexual horrorshow” that is “currently giving TERFs around the world a collective aneurysm.”
The author took a dig at JK Rowling for not responding to her book, tweeting on Friday that she was “too chicken to say ‘boo’ about MANHUNT. In which she dies. Fictionally.” JK Rowling has been at odds with the trans community over what many perceive as transphobic views and statements.
Back in 2018 she liked a tweet that denoted transgender women as “men in dresses,” and in December 2019 displayed support to policy researcher Maya Forstater, who had been thrown out of her job for tweeting that “men cannot be women.” In June 2020, Rowling sarcastically reposted an op-ed piece from development NGO publicity website Devex, which referred to “creating equality for people who menstruate” following the coronavirus pandemic. “People who menstruate… I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” she had tweeted.
That same year Rowling penned an essay on her website in which she argued that biological sex was real. All this set the author in the crosshairs of a cancel-culture backlash that has also made her the target of hundreds of rape and death threats.
Just recently, the first Harry Potter story was dropped from a list of 70 British and Commonwealth books to mark the Queen's platinum jubilee. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling's first novel, had been among the 153 candidates for the Big Jubilee Read list. However, it was absent from the final list of 70 books compiled by BBC Arts and The Reading Agency, 10 from each decade of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.