J.K. Rowling takes swipe at David Tennant after Kemi Badenoch named new Conservative leader

2 November, 2024

J.K. Rowling has taken a swipe at David Tennant after Kemi Badenoch, who Tennant has publicly criticised, was named the new leader of the Conservative Party.

The 44-year-old MP was announced as the Tory leader on Saturday (November 2) after defeating Robert Jenrick in a leadership contest by over 12,000 votes. She becomes the sixth Tory leader in less than nine years, replacing Rishi Sunak, who guided the party to their worst ever general election result in July.

The news prompted the Harry Potter author to tweet, “My thoughts and prayers are with David Tennant at this very difficult time,” reviving a public spat with the former Doctor Who star from earlier in the year.

In June, Tennant received the LGBT+ Celebrity Ally award at the British LGBT Awards. He took the opportunity in his speech to address Badenoch personally, saying: “I don’t wish ill of her, I just wish her to shut up”.

The comment was in response to Badenoch’s proposal when she was the Minister for Women and Equalities for the mandatory implementation of single-sex toilets in public spaces across Britain. She claimed it would “end the rise of so-called gender-neutral mixed sex toilet spaces”, provoking criticism from transgender rights groups, who argued that gender-neutral toilet spaces help protect trans people from discrimination.

Rowling dismissed Tennant’s words, describing them as “the utterances of the Gender Taliban”, who she claimed “receive special dispensation, for they are a holy caste”.

Badenoch herself also responded to Tennant’s speech, criticising the actor as a “rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology”.

Rowling also picked up on comments Tennant made at the red carpet at the British LGBT Awards, in which he described anti-transgender campaigners “a tiny bunch of little whinging fuckers who’re on the wrong side of history and they’ll all go away soon”.

“This man is talking about rape survivors who want female-only care,” Rowling tweeted, “the nurses currently suing their health trust for making them change in front of a man, girls and women losing sporting opportunities to males and female prisoners incarcerated with convicted sex offenders.”

Rowling further criticised Tennant in a follow-up tweet in response to another user, saying: “For a man who’s supposedly a model of compassion and tolerance, he sure does want a lot of people to cease to exist.”

Tennant, who also starred in 2005’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, is famously not the only actor in the franchise to publicly speak out against Rowling’s anti-trans sentiments.

In May, Daniel Radcliffe reflected on her controversial views in an interview with The Atlantic. “It makes me really sad, ultimately,” he said. “Because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathetic.”

In 2020, Radcliffe wrote an essay in support of the trans community, referencing Rowling. “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”

More recently, Rowling got involved in an alleged transphobia controversy surrounding the Butlin’s holiday resort in Skegness, and was also named in a lawsuit filed by Olympic boxer Imane Khelif.

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