Lots of people who felt like underdogs, including LGBTQ+ people, fell in love with Harry Potter.

And now the author is basically saying that transgender women are a dangerous threat.

This encourages violence against transgender women. And it encourages assholes who think that transgender women shouldn't be allowed to use public bathrooms. Which, followed to its logical conclusion, basically means that they can't go out in public. Because humans need potty breaks.

Transgender women have long lived lives on the margins of society. Often with no possibility of finding work or making a living other than by prostitution. Often murdered in the streets and no police even bothering to look for a killer.

The suicide rate among transgender people was as high as 50%. Think about that. It can be so stressful to be forced to inhabit a gender role and a body that don't fit, and to have no one see you, that people end their lives. Imagine if you were forced, for the rest of your life, to dress and act as the opposite to your gender and even your own family went along with it. Imagine looking down at your body and its all wrong. And if you even make the tiniest protest, they call you crazy. It is too much for so many humans. Those who managed to get through it and make a good life for themselves are heroes.

Finally, with medical advances, where endocrinologists and psychologists came to agree that transgender people are not only perfectly sane, but that they can often be identified in childhood, and just raised in their actual gender with the potential to use hormones to make their bodies match their minds. It revolutionized things. Suddenly we have extensive medical literature on how to identify these kids and how to treat them, and the treated kids almost all grow up and are healthy and stable. Whereas before, half of them would die.

We were on the cusp of a world where transgender people could just get the care they need to actually be comfortable in their bodies. Where they could have non-discrimination laws that let them get and keep good jobs. Where their families would see them and support them.

It's such a difference to see these confident young kids and to contrast it with the battered and traumatized people who managed to survive in previous generations. It's night and day. And people like me want more day. More happy innocent kids who worry about what college they'll go to instead of living (and dying) on the streets.

And then JK Rowling starts using her bully pulpit to promote these hateful, medically inaccurate, myths. And the hate that gets frothed up results in politicians cutting off medical care for transgender kids, pretending to care about the complex medical decisions parents make for their kids, pretending to understand or care about the state of the art in this tiny field of endocrinology. (You don't see politicians getting involved in the chemotherapy drugs of teens-- even though those can cause sterility, and future cancer risk, and brain damage. Why doesn't the news cover all those pediatric cancer doctors with the same skepticism as the pediatric endocrinologist at the same hospitals?)

It's bull. I'm a biologist with 15 years of lab experience and I can tell you: gender is a spectrum. There have always been humans that don't fall into the two main categories. Transgender people, intersex people, people with all manner of genetic differences that make them medically NOT ordinary men or women. And those people have been studied (and not always respectfully) ever since medicine was invented. They are real, and they don't want to be hidden away or turned into side-show freaks. They want to live their lives and get their damned medicine.

People like Rowling can take their bigotry and stuff it!

So that's me, one person in the LGBTQ+ community, on why Rowling is a big deal.