Emma Watson’s Meaningless “Stand”

Actress Emma Watson is in the news again, this time for her saying that she’s unwilling to do anything related to the Harry Potter franchise if J.K. Rowling is involved. According to Giant Freak Robot, which broke this story, Watson wants nothing to do with Rowling because of Rowling’s history of spewing transphobic rhetoric. With that said, even they admit that’s nothing more than a guess because Watson has not publicly announced why she’s making this decision:

We have to speculate that JK Rowlings’ very public, very loud, and very constant commentary on the rights of transgender people in the United Kingdom (and broadly, the world) has made Watson not particularly willing to be further associated with her.

Coming from somebody who was never a Harry Potter fan, most of my experience with Watson comes from her political activism. Said activism is the major reason I’m skeptical of this news — not that Watson is doing it, but that she’s doing it as some statement against transphobia, an issue she will only ever talk about in the vaguest of manners. Earlier this year, Watson made a joke about witches or something that some saw as a potshot at Rowling — but, of course, Watson could never come out and say that’s what it was. In response to Rowling writing an incredibly long, detailed, and lie filled transphobic manifesto in 2020, Watson simply tweeted the following: