An open letter to Casey Bloys, re: JK Rowling

Dear Casey Bloys:


Your HBO Inspires page says: "At the heart of HBO is our passion for making a difference, and every day we are using our platform to educate, inspire thoughtful action and help make the world a better place." Your partnership with JK Rowling is inconsistent with this statement, and goes against everything you claim to stand for. Rowling is infamously very transphobic, and uses her online presence to advocate against trans women’s rights. Either end your partnership, or take down your statement, because it is a lie. Giving Rowling more money will enable her to spread hate more effectively, making the world a worse place, not better.

Rowling, being a famous and very rich author, with a net worth of $1 billion [9], has 14.1 million followers on Twitter, so her views reach many people. When she quote-tweets a user, she can bring a lot of attention to that account, like in the instance of Fee, @ftmlorastyrell. Fee tagged Rowling in a post, and Rowling's reply, through a quote tweet, brought so much hate and harassment to Fee, that they deleted their account. [1]


Rowling recently attacked Lucy Clark, the manager of the Sutton United Women’s soccer team, who is a trans woman.  Lucy wasn't involved in activism or saying things about Rowling in the press. She was living her life and doing her job, and Rowling attacked her for it. ]2 The mental and emotional stress this caused cannot be discounted.

In March of 2024, she deliberately misgendered India Willoughby, a broadcaster in the UK who is trans, and kept misgendering her in follow-up statements. [3] Willoughby reported Rowling to the police, who have recorded it as a non-crime hate incident. [4]

Rowling is so relentless in her hate that she even got the attention of Elon Musk, who scolded her for never tweeting about anything else [5]. Many articles have been written about her transphobia, in Rolling Stone [6], Glamour [7], and Vox [1]. That's how well known she is for her transphobia. That is who you're working with, who you're associating your good name with.

She's showing no signs of slowing down, either. On May 12th, 2024, in response to a tweet saying, "Your downfall is so sad,” she tweeted, "You've seen nothing yet. Wait til I hit rock bottom. It's going to be spectacular." She's just going to keep spreading hate, and she's proud of it. [8]

Currently, Rowling is fanning the flames of a manufactured controversy at the Olympics. Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer, has been accused of being assigned male at birth, and thus having an unfair advantage. She and another boxer were disqualified from the Women’s World Boxing Championships last year, due to failing unspecified “gender eligibility tests”, but both were confirmed by the IOC this year to be eligible to compete in women’s boxing. [10]  But Rowling refuses to accept the facts, and continues to insist that Khelif is “a male punching a female”. [11]
). She’s been presented with the facts, but stubbornly refuses to square her understanding of the situation with the truth, instead perpetuating harmful lies. She doesn’t care about the truth. She just wants to spread fear and hate.

JK Rowling is not a person aligned with your stated values, and you need to reconcile this disparity. Either live up to your stated values by ditching Rowling as a partner, or admit that you value an easy money grab at the expense of your morality. If you choose to continue your partnership with Rowling, then you choose the values of transphobia and hate, which is something your subscribers cannot stand with or by. If this partnership continues, you will lose thousands of subscribers who do not want their names to become synonymous with hate the way “JK Rowling” and now “HBO” have.

Sincerely,
A lifelong Harry Potter fan


2: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13407513/JK-Rowling-accused-cruelty-mocks-transgender-football-manager-comparing-straight-white-middle-aged-bloke.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490&ito=social-twitter_mailonline (2.4K retweets)

1: https://www.vox.com/culture/23622610/jk-rowling-transphobic-statements-timeline-history-controversy (7.3K retweets)

6: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/j-k-rowling-trans-twitter-elon-musk-1235019620/

7: https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy

8: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1789683368289874268

9: https://metro.co.uk/2024/04/02/jk-rowlings-private-life-including-net-worth-books-controversy-20574355/

3: https://www.newsweek.com/jk-rowling-india-willoughby-transgender-women-police-twitter-x-1876787

4: https://x.com/IndiaWilloughby/status/1766219683869450353

5: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1786828547581264118

10: https://www.today.com/health/news/imane-khelif-boxer-gender-eligibility-controversy-rcna164854

11: https://x.com/jk_rowling/status/1819335159591604560