J.K. Rowling (very predictably) Hates Asexual People

Transcript

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney and I’m here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And today we are finally talking about the one, the only, JK Rowling. I have to say JK Rowling, and along with transphobia, queerphobia, the radicalization pipeline, has been a topic of interest for us that we have had every intention of talking about since before we started this podcast even. And we have just been waiting for her to actually say something more concrete and transparently acephobic. Because I knew! I knew it was coming. And today is that day. It has come.

Royce: I think we’ve mentioned on this podcast before that the pattern of acephobia in a TERF pipeline is well established by this point.

Courtney: Incredibly well established. And this is something that we have talked about before, so our, you know, longtime listeners are not going to be surprised by this. But now that JK Rowling is once again punching down at a queer community, this time ours, a whole new world of people are beginning to get confused by this, to ask questions about it, and to start hopefully gaining a little more understanding. Because, quite– quite honestly, we could have talked about this before the latest debacle. There was enough to talk about. We’ve certainly talked about it a lot just in our own personal lives. But to me, this was not a matter of if it was going to happen, it was a matter of when. And I want to talk about that pattern. I want to talk about why this is the least surprising thing in the world to us, because of the fact that so many people, ace or allo, are just shocked that JK Rowling had to express her dissatisfaction for, in this case, International Asexuality Day, which is on April 6th of every year, passed recently. And that is what started this whole fun train of thought.

Courtney: So if you are new here, welcome. Please buckle in, because we are not surprised. I hope we can help illuminate, for those people that are surprised to see her punching down at aces, because there’s a lot of bafflement on Twitter these days. But this is the most expected thing in the world.

Courtney: So, whether you’re an old or a new listener, I hope everyone coming in here has at least a passing understanding of the fact that JK Rowling has become more vocally transphobic as the years go on. We’re certainly not going to break down a full history of her transphobic radicalization, falling down the rabbit hole, because other creators have done this. Other people have made the timeline. We have borne witness to all of the tweets. We were probably among the first wave of people to be like, “Oh yeah, she’s definitely transphobic.” And so, as things got more and more obvious, that was also not surprising to us. At this point in time, I think most trans people, and their allies, at least know enough that she has aligned herself with the trans exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, in a very, very public way.

Courtney: So let’s start with the– the tweet that we’ve been waiting for. We knew it was coming.

Courtney: On April 6, 2025, JK Rowling posted a little infographic from Switchboard, which is an LGBTQ+ support network, saying International Asexuality Day, April 6th. It has the– the three people in Ace Pride clothes that I know are from Canva. [laughs] Cause back when I was trying to make us YouTube thumbnails a little bit, if you typed in asexuality it was these three people. So you see them on every single infographic from the big organizations that occasionally will be like, “We’re acknowledging Ace Day,” or, “We’re acknowledging Ace Week,” so you see these three people over and over again. They’re the real icons of the Ace Community, if we’re being honest.

Courtney: And it just says: “Asexuality is where a person experiences little to no sexual attraction. Asexual people can form deep emotional connections and relationships, but don’t experience sexual attraction in the same way as others.” That is a fine and well, if not a little fluffy, just Ace 101. For anybody who doesn’t know what asexuality is, here’s your first foot in the door to learning about this. She posted up, with her own commentary saying: “Happy international fake oppression day to everyone who wants complete strangers to know they don’t fancy a shag.”

Royce: So in the first line, we have the ignorance of persecution coupled with what is essentially an argument for ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ in thus the year 2025.

Courtney: Yep, yep. And the thing is, I’m not only going to talk about JK Rowling and the people she aligns herself with and their views and what they’re saying on asexuality, but I also do want to give a bit of commentary on the reactions I’ve seen from other aces, other queer people, some people who are maybe like first stages of ace allyship but this is a whole new world to them. Like they didn’t know that– Like, “Why would JK Rowling hate aces? I don’t understand.” kind of vibes. Because a lot of ace people will see something like this and their initial knee jerk reaction is, “Well, she doesn’t know what asexuality is. Well, we have to correct her. Asexuality is not just someone who doesn’t fancy a shag, and some aces do have sex actually.” And we’ll go into this informational education mode, where she’s made this now so public, she has blasted this out to her 14.3 million followers, so they’re like, “Oh no, we have to correct the record. That will help.” Unfortunately, it won’t.

Royce: Yeah, that is a willfully misguided attempt.

Courtney: And I get the anger and frustration. Because it is a false equivalence. It is a misunderstanding of asexuality, but it is a willful misunderstanding of it when it comes from this crowd.

Royce: Yeah, we’ve spoken a bit about how, when you look at some aspect of bigotry, some bit of hatred towards a particular group, it’s sometimes better to turn the question on its head and instead of saying, “Well, JK Rowling hates trans people, and JK Rowling hates ace people.” It’s really TERFs in general, or pick any group of people, have a slice of the human experience that they deem correct, valid, acceptable. And sometimes, for some people, that slice is a little bit larger than what you see from the strict religious, conservative, far-right people. But there’s a reason why there is an LGB group. They just– That’s as far as they go. And anything beyond that, anything that touches on the gender binary or exists outside of that, and any orientation that doesn’t neatly fit into straight, gay or bi, is incomprehensible or deviant.

Royce: And they’re not going to listen to more information about that because they don’t respect it.

Courtney: And what we also have to understand. We don’t often talk about, you know, the JK Rowlings of the world and the TERFs of the world, the gays against groomers of the world. We don’t often talk about them in the same way that we do talk about the far right, religious, conservative politicians. Because sometimes, their– their focuses and their talking points are a bit different, but a lot of the underlying ideologies do align. And what we really really need to understand at this point is that the misinformation is part of the hate campaign. This is willful ignorance, yes, but it is also, dare I say, spreading fake news. And we don’t often talk about it in the same way. I mean, you’ll talk about MAGA and Donald Trump and you’ll talk about their fake news. You don’t often hear about, like the TERFs fake news. But I think we really do need to become more clever with the way we are discussing this, because if they are out here intentionally spreading lies, intentionally watering down the diversity of human experiences, there is an agenda behind that. There is a reason they are doing this. It’s not an issue of, “Oh well, if they actually understood what this meant.”

Courtney: And, by extension, I know a lot of people at this point are not thinking that they’re going to change JK Rowling’s mind. They aren’t thinking they’re going to change Maya Forstater’s mind. They’re thinking about everybody who’s looking at this tweet. They’re like, “I have to get out from under this so that she doesn’t radicalize more people.” But the thing is, her audience is going to listen to her regardless. And, to be quite honest, they are probably already there. I’m seeing a lot of people talk about this as, “Oh, well, she just exposed ace bigotry to a bunch of people who have never turned their focus on aces before. And so we have to get out from under this, we have to help these people understand. We have to cut off the misinformation.” No... So, so many of the, like, career transphobes who have made this their career, they have developed organizations, they donate their vast amounts of wealth to anti-trans policies and politicians and trans exclusionary women shelters. Guarantee you, JK Rowling is not teaching the TERFs to hate aces. If anything, the TERFs have already taught JK Rowling to hate aces and this is just the first time she’s saying it in such a public way.

Royce: That also may be something to keep in mind. JK Rowling is arguably the most public TERF figure. She didn’t create it.

Courtney: No.

Royce: She was radicalized by an existing thing.

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: An existing ideology.

Courtney: And these people– And some of them are names that anybody who has been even passingly familiar with the history of JK Rowling’s transphobic tweets, like names like Maya Forstater. That was sort of the big first JK Rowling tweet that had a much larger group of people saying, “Oh wait, no… Oh no. Is JK Rowling…? Oh no.” Like, it was the like, hashtag ‘I stand with Maya’, hashtag ‘This is not a drill’. That was the big, big first tweet. Like there– there were absolutely some queer folks who were already side-eyeing her before that tweet, but that was what a lot of people would say is the beginning of the end. That was the start of the downfall.

Courtney: People like Maya Forstater have been coming after asexuals since at least 2021. At least. JK Rowling follows her. JK Rowling - hashtag - stands with her. JK Rowling has seen tweets from prominent, verified, also have at least hundreds of thousands of followers, certainly not the same million she has. She’s seen Maya Forstater slut-shame Yasmin Benoit for being an asexual lingerie model.

Courtney: We have covered on this podcast articles written by TERFs specifically attacking asexuals. There have been articles in the UK press saying these same talking points that JK Rowling is now saying. She has been reading and absorbing this, and seeing acephobia for years. Probably quietly nodding along to it. And that’s why none of this has come as a surprise at all.

Courtney: So that one tweet, of course a bunch of people start responding, some cheering her on, some criticizing her. And she engaged with the comments a little bit, and just, of course, doubled and tripled down. There were people who don’t think aces are queer, who are saying things like, “Give me strength.” And she’ll respond saying, “At this point it’s quicker to list who isn’t under the queer umbrella than who is.” You have some people, whether or not they thought they were getting directly to JK Rowling, or if they were just commenting this for the benefit of others who might happen upon this tweet, would say things like, “Actually, you can be gay, straight or bi while also being asexual.” To which she responded to a couple of people saying this. And her response was to throw a question back out at you.

Courtney: And this is supposed to be a gotcha question. This is not a good faith question. She’s not genuinely asking. She’s using the question as a device to further instill doubt and hate to people who are already predisposed to this ace phobia. She’ll say, “How are you supposed to tell which you are if you don’t experience sexual attraction?” And another reason why that’s a gotcha is because I’m sure someone who is this far into this has read of people talking about the split attraction model. We can’t even– This is another thing. The people who hate us do actually know a lot about us. They know so much about us. They know our talking points. They know the things we say. And they craft their own responses based on our language. In a way that our allies don’t even do, or our supposed allies. The people who hate us know more about us and our community, than the people who are like, “Yeah, you’re valid.” You know, the people who are going to make one post a year saying, “Yeah, happy… day to all the aces on my timeline.”

Royce: Happy day.

Courtney: Happy day. [laughs] Because she’s also going to throw another gotcha at you if you get too wordy, if you get too passionate, if you get too educational, if you’re trying to say, “Well, actually there is a split attraction model and some people do have a difference between romantic attraction and sexual attraction.” Because another thing she loves to say is just how, in a twist, all these activists get in and she’ll make fun of it.

Courtney: She’ll say things like this tweet here: “Refusing to accept that people who don’t like sex belong in the gay category is akin to wanting segregated bathrooms in the 1950s. As approximately a thousand gender activists will inform you, once their hands stop literally shaking.” They’ll always go to that, the literally shaking, or the crying on video. Like, they’re also doing the thing that fascism does. Right?

Courtney: They are picking at weakness. They are amplifying and highlighting any perceived weaknesses as a gotcha. They’re saying, “Yeah, if you’re shaking, if you’re getting too heated, if you’re yelling, if you’re crying,” they’re gonna make fun of that. And to add to the irony, she says, “Sure, people are still killed for being gay in a lot of countries, but straight people who don’t fancy a quickie are being literally ignored to death. Is that what you want?” Really funny, as you make this your problem of the day to your 14 and a half million followers, JK Rowling. I guarantee you so many more people know that International Asexuality Day even exists because of her tweet. And she has to know that too at this point.

Royce: Since you did make a point at the beginning of this episode, to call attention to anyone who might be here who’s not a regular listener of the podcast, who is just following the wave of information, or drama, or whatever you want to call it.

Courtney: The drama! We thrive on drama.

Royce: We do have past episodes in our catalog that talk to the actual statistics behind violence against the Ace Community. That information is out there. You won’t hear it, any of it, coming from the bigots, obviously because they want to pretend it doesn’t exist.

Courtney: No. And JK Rowling has consistently for years tried to make her case to the more casual observers of this, that she’s not transphobic, she just deeply cares about women’s rights. Women, of course, being cis women. She cares about same-sex spaces for the safety of women. She champions herself as a feminist. This is a women’s issue. These are the things that she will say. She does not care about all women. If she cared, she would be able to find the statistics that talk about the alarmingly high rate of intimate partner violence that asexual people face, including, but not limited to, corrective rape. And she makes sexual violence against women especially a big issue of hers. She says this is about protecting women from sexual violence. Apparently not asexual women. She also says, “I want an international board of this shit day.” Now, I haven’t googled this, so feel free to fact check me, but how many Harry Potter or JK Rowling days do you think have existed in various countries over the years? Like more than a few.

Royce: A lot. I don’t know how many have been kept consistently, but it was a big deal for a lot of people.

Courtney: Didn’t people try to make a holiday out of, like, the day that kids supposedly go back to Hogwarts? Like–

Royce: That wouldn’t surprise me.

Courtney: I’m–

Royce: Now it’s probably a good time to mention something that pops up into my head anytime JK Rowling becomes relevant again, because I think it’s funny.

Courtney: [laughs] Go for it.

Royce: But another woman who is an author, who I think deserves a lot more respect than JK Rowling did, at one point in time did a review of the first Harry Potter book where she called it: “Stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.”

Courtney: Ursula K. Le Guin, ladies and gentlethems. It is incredibly mean-spirited. And actually– So my history with the Harry Potter series. I read the books as they came out and I actually read them with my grandmother because we would often read books together. And, honestly, the first time I read through them, I didn’t necessarily pick up on exactly how mean spirited it is. But I don’t know, maybe like nine years ago or so, my grandmother found all these books, and they’re like the big, nice hard copies. They were the ones that, like, my grandma and I would go to the midnight releases at Barnes & Noble to get the next book so that we could start reading it right away. So she has these big, nice copies of these books. And after we got married, and I moved down here, she found those books again and was like, “Oh, I thought you might want these.” And we did decide, since we had these books now like, “Hey, let’s reread these.” Because I mean– When did the first one come out? Like 2001 or something? Might’ve been 2000…

Royce: The American edition of the first book was late ’98.

Courtney: ’98? Really? Wow, little earlier than I thought. I don’t think we read them right in ’98, though. Maybe.

Royce: I think I got onto them around ’99 or 2000. Because three books were out and I had to wait after that. But yeah, there was a period of time, many years ago, when we just found a bunch of old books, either from childhood or a bit later in life, that we decided to reread again.

Courtney: Yeah, and I had already had a growing distrust of JK Rowling when we reread these books. But my gosh! Seeing them with a fresh perspective 20 years later, they were so mean. The, you know, constant doubling down of how fat and ugly every evil person was. It was– It almost got comical.

Courtney: So, on the acephobia front though, I [sighs] I really just need people to understand that this is not new. This is not new. This is not news. This is not in any way different. In fact, I’ve mentioned that we have covered specific acephobic articles from the UK, and this has been becoming increasingly more common from these UK conservative news organizations, especially since 2021.

Courtney: 2021 was a big year for ramping up sort of these article based attacks against the Asexual Community. And some of which we also covered at the time. Some of you OG listeners might recall, a couple months after we started the podcast, we talked about– During Ace Week, which is the last full week in October every year, and is actually the longest running Asexual Pride observance. IAD, by comparison, is quite younger. There was a massive backlash in the UK against the Asexual Community during Ace Week in 2021. And a lot of it was prompted because Girlguiding, as an organization, just did the fluffy little “You belong” tweet. They did a little “Happy Ace Week to all of our, you know, members and our guides and who may be a part of the A-spectrum.” And that prompted just so much hate in vitriol.

Courtney: Specifically at that time, there was a massive wave of these people, most of whom were very obviously outspokenly transphobic, calling asexual people groomers. That was happening over and over again. And when I would tell people– Like, there were people who called us groomers just because we were asexual and online during that period of time. And then what happened in 2022? They started using the word groomer to attack any visibly trans people online. There is an enormous overlap. It is exactly the same people. And in that instance, the first spark kind of came from Ace Week. And I’m not going to say, because it’s certainly not true that no trans or other queer folks were called groomers before then, but these bigoted groups are extremely good at their branding, their talking points, the words they use to attack us.

Courtney: And during that Girlguiding instance, they were using our own language against us. They were specifically explaining how asexuals are groomers by using our language. They would outright say asexuality does not mean that a person does not have sex, it means they have no sexual desires. That is a direct quote from Safe Schools Alliance UK from 2021 Ace Week, where they went on to explain that: “It is our opinion that conversations about asexuality may groom children to see enthusiastic consent as an optional extra. This is clearly a risk. As an example, if a youth leader says, or lets it be known, that he is asexual and then a child asks a question about it, the predator has now got an easy way in to discuss sexual desire, or lack of, with a child. He can pretend to be increasing their knowledge. He can work out how to exploit the specific vulnerabilities of individual children. He can use the cover of ‘I am asexual, so I have no sexual desire’ to give the child a false sense of reassurance while he continues to groom her – in parentheses – (or him). He can touch her without her worrying that it is a sexual touch. He can get quite far until she feels that it is too late and that she cannot get help. He can also make her feel as though no one would believe her, as everyone knows that he is asexual.”

Courtney: This is written as a direct result of just saying, “Happy ace week. We see you and you’re valid.” Became a targeted campaign of aces are groomers, aces are not safe to be around children.

Courtney: I noticed that in a lot of these mythological stories they came up with, they use he, the male guide. And I was perhaps the first to say at that time, because I was on that day when that got published, I was there, to say, “I am confident because I have already seen the pattern. I’ve been watching this pattern for years. The person writing this is writing he, but in their head they’re picturing a trans woman.” I am confident that that is what they were thinking. because the asexual and transgender hate is so much closer to a circle than it is a Venn diagram. And a lot of people do not understand that.

Courtney: And in fact that has given way to some of the more conspiracy theory minded TERFs who will say things like, “Asexuality is not real, it is a device to groom children.” And sometimes that is the sexually grooming children, like that fake scenario that was written out. Sometimes they do say, you know, “Asexual people are trying to trans the kids.” Because they always come back to what they deem as normal sexual behavior. And a lot of them will go so far as to, you know, call any kind of gender affirming care genital mutilation. They’ll call it sterilizing children. And they’ll say, “No, asexuality isn’t real. These are just kids who were tricked into thinking that they’re trans,” and asexuality is just sort of a band-aid to be like, “No, it’s normal that you don’t feel sexual attraction now, it’s normal that you don’t want sex now.” But they’ll argue that it is not normal. Because they don’t think that asexuality is real, in exactly the same way that they don’t think being a gender other than that which was assigned to you at birth is possible.

Courtney: Because, along with their slogan, “Sex is real,” sex being biological sex, in the way that they use it. For as much as they’ll say, like, “Oh, we support lesbians, we support gay women,” they’re still only so much deviating from the traditional gender norms that they think is acceptable, and being asexual is not included in that.

Courtney: Now, I know one article that we specifically covered from The Spectator was called Playing the Ace Card. We did an episode about it. But that was not the only nasty article attacking asexual people that has come out of The Spectator. And I’m not going to go over the entire articles now, but I thought just for funsies, I want to see how many of these people JK Rowling knows personally. So I just pulled up, without even reading them, three Spectator articles attacking asexuality. Only one of them we have officially covered on this podcast. So the first article called Playing the Ace Card by Rod Liddle. Let’s do a quick search: Rod Liddle and JK Rowling. It does not take me long before I find from 2021, December 2021, just a month after that Girlguiding fiasco blew up. Here is the Spectators Christmas special, available in print and online, featuring JK Rowling and Rod Liddle. Their names are right next to each other. They both wrote for that edition. One month after that, we also have instances of Rod Liddle writing about JK Rowling and defending her, even quotes from her. So at least professionally, they know each other.

Courtney: Next article was more recent October 25th of 2024. Hey, that was during Ace Week. And of course it’s an ironic title: The Very Necessary Asexual Awareness Week. This was written by Julie Bindel. Here we have July 20th 2023: “Happy birthday to my wonderful friend, Julie Bindel.” And finally, we have an article by a Mary Wakefield called: Why Are So Many Young People Asexual? Which, in addition to the conspiracy theories we hear about asexuality as just a cover for sterilizing kids or it’s, you know, a gateway drug to transing the kids, you also get people attacking things like antidepressants. They’ll say things like, “SSRIs make kids asexual.”

Royce: That’s something we’ve mentioned in a few episodes before, and we always get a comment or two that’s like, “Bigot wants to take away antidepressants because they lower libido. Well, you know what else lowers libido? Depression.”

Courtney: Yup! And this one, at least with a quick search, I can’t find as immediately a connection, but I do see at least several people in the mentions of JK Rowling’s other tweets mentioning Mary Wakefield. So not ironclad, but come on. Two out of three, if not three out of three, just the first three acephobic articles I could find, we found a connection to JK Rowling. And these are articles we’ve seen. These are talking points we know of. And so it truly is baffling to me that everyone’s like, “Where did this come from? This came from nowhere.” No, it didn’t. No, it didn’t.

Courtney: So I would love people who are confused and fired up about this to maybe pay a little more attention to ace voices. Because it really does feel like we are the Cassandras of the queer community. We often see when a new wave of hate is coming, because we’re– we’re very often the ones people are a lot more emboldened to shoot down on. Until anti-trans voices get loud and prevalent enough that everyone’s like, “Oh yeah, we can say this about trans people now, great.” Because the underlying issue is it’s the same fight. It really is. It is the same fight. And, in fact, bigotry and culture wars aside, a lot of people are also not aware of the fact that this is not the first time that JK Rowling has been weird about asexuality. Because we have to address the elephant in the room.

Courtney: We’ve often talked about what we see as good versus bad representation in media. And we’ve been very critical of the recent waves of sort of Word of God representation for asexual characters where this is not shown on the screen or said on the page, but a creator in a tweet or in an interview says “Oh well, this character is asexual’“. And oftentimes we’re so starved for representation because, as JK Rowling says, “We are getting ignored to death, except by all of her friends who are actively attacking us.” Then there’s always some percentage of the community that’s like, “Yes, finally we have more ace representation.” And they will latch on to that character in a very emotional way, just because we’re not used to seeing any elements of our story reflected back at us. And that’s incredibly meaningful to some people.

Courtney: But JK Rowling was always sort of the queen of Word of God representation, because I cannot think of a more famous instance, and I honestly don’t know that there ever, ever will be again something quite at this scale, was in 2007, when she said in an interview that Dumbledore is gay. That was– I almost can’t talk about it the same way I talk about other Word of God representation examples, because she is at a level of fame, and especially back in 2007, she was at a level of fame that most authors never get to. So this was also 2007, what was happening on the internet was an early iteration of fandom circles and discourse. It’s not the internet that we are familiar with today by any stretch of the imagination.

Courtney: And part of that is what fueled JK Rowling’s immense fame was that there were Harry Potter fandoms that were started on the early internet, so it was allowed to sort of flourish before things got very compartmentalized and flooded and weighted down with, you know, everything all at once from every single person chiming in on every single social media platform. So that did play a part in it, true. But that was also during a time where incredibly famous author can say, “Yeah, this character everybody loves is gay,” and that was being reported as a big deal, even on traditional, like, cable news outlets. You know, if the creator of The Owl House says, “Oh, Lilith is asexual,” if I try saying that to, you know, my mom, or if I said that to my grandmother while she was still alive, like, they’d say, “What’s The Owl House? Who’s that? Who’s the creator?” They don’t know, they don’t know anything.

Courtney: But even people who hadn’t read Harry Potter know that JK Rowling is the author of Harry Potter, because there’s also this incredible mythology around JK Rowling as the person, right? There’s– There are overblown stories about how horribly poor she was, the rags to riches story. And of course she does have the domestic violence issue which I’m not going to discredit, because nobody deserves that. But people have latched onto the story of JK Rowling almost as much as they’ve latched onto the story of Harry Potter. So all of those things together made the perfect storm of, like, my grandma saw on the news that Dumbledore was gay. And since we were reading that book together, she was like, “Did you know Dumbledore is gay?” And it’s like my mother, who never read the Harry Potter books, heard that Dumbledore was gay. Like that was a much different world to have a Word of God representation.

Courtney: That almost makes me want to give it more credit than by the modern standards that we’re holding it to. Because we tend to say, you know, not good enough. If you care about this representation, make it obvious. And for sure, there were those criticisms of JK Rowling at the time and increasingly since then, where people are looking back on it, on retrospect, and saying, “Was that good enough?” People were really hoping that that prequel series was going to show more of Dumbledore being gay, but whatever happened to that?

Royce: Well, if I remember correctly, the screenplay for the last movie was based off of a screenplay written by JK Rowling, and I don’t think it did too well.

Courtney: I don’t recall it doing too well, no. So I– I at least want– I know we have younger listeners who were not there for the 2007 Dumbledore is gay drop, so I at least want to paint that picture for them. If anyone’s confused as to why I’m being less critical about that meaning something than we talk about it now. Because especially back then, like 2007, sure there were some gay characters in mainstream media, it was still a big deal to have such a widely beloved character in such a best selling series that was geared towards children. That did mean a lot to so many people in a way that that would not fly today. People would not give an author these days as many flowers as they gave her for saying, “By the way, this character is gay.”

Courtney: But what a lot of people don’t remember is that shortly after she confirmed that Dumbledore is gay, she also said that Dumbledore became asexual. I found this quote from an article on theleakycauldron.org in 2008. This was an interview with the Edinburgh Student Newspaper where she said: quote, “I had always seen Dumbledore as gay, but in a sense that’s not a big deal. The book wasn’t about Dumbledore being gay, it was just that, from the outset obviously, I knew he had this big hidden secret and that he flirted with the idea of exactly what Voldemort goes on to do. He flirted with the idea of racial domination, that he was going to subjugate the muggles. So that was Dumbledore’s big secret. Why did he flirt with that? He’s an innately good man. What would make him do that? I didn’t even think it through that way, it just seemed to come to me. I thought, I know why he did it. He fell in love. And whether they physically consummated this infatuation or not is not the issue. The issue is love. It’s not about sex. So that’s what I knew about Dumbledore. And it’s relevant only in so much as he fell in love and was made an utter fool of by love. He lost his moral compass completely when he fell in love and, I think, subsequently became very mistrusting of his own judgment in those matters, so became quite asexual. He led a celibate and bookish life.” So that’s cool.

Royce: So at least 2008 JK Rowling didn’t know the definition of the word asexual and used it as a placeholder for celibate.

Courtney: Yes. And the thing is, I find this so, so fascinating.

Royce: It is funny that, given that you read those tweets earlier, JK Rowling had an example of a gay ace.

Courtney: Yep

Royce: According to her own definition.

Courtney: According to her own definition. The thing is, while she says one thing, she says it’s not about sex it’s about love, time and her own tweets have betrayed the truth. She’s saying this is about love, it’s about love, and I’ve seen her say so many times when giving interviews about Harry Potter. The whole thing is about love. You get those really weird icky vibes where it’s like, “Oh, Voldemort is evil and can’t feel love because he wasn’t conceived through love. It was a love potion. And since that wasn’t real love, he’s just, you know, evil. No emotions.” Like that’s not great when you ride that train of thought too far. And she’ll always say, “Well, it’s about the love. That’s the most interesting part of human relationships is the love and it’s not about the sex.”

Courtney: Now, the thing is, for as much as she said that, she’s now saying repeatedly, “How are you supposed to tell which you are if you don’t experience sexual attraction?” She asked again, “How do asexual people know whether they’re gay or straight? I wonder.” It’s because she’s only trying to separate the sex in so much as, “I don’t want to think about gay sex. I don’t want to think about them having sex, because it’s not about that.” But it is. It really is. In her mind, romantic and sexual attraction are one and the same. So when she says it’s just about the love, in her mind that is the same thing as the sex. She just doesn’t want to talk or think about it. Which is also really really fascinating because she’s made sex her whole thing, with the same sex spaces and the defending lesbian. She really likes to hide behind transphobic lesbians in her talking points because she’s like, “Lesbians are women who want to have sex with women. They don’t want a penis because that’s not what lesbians like.” So, yeah, in her mind sex is binary and it is important, and it is inherently tied to love. And when it’s her gay character, she’s like, “Well, it doesn’t matter if he had sex or not, it’s not about the sex.” But now, now it is, now it’s all about the sex.

Courtney: And in this same interview she goes on to say: “It is a very interesting question, because I think homophobia is a fear of people loving more than it is of the sexual act. There seems to be an innate distaste for the love involved, which I find absolutely extraordinary. There were people who thought, well, why haven’t we seen Dumbledore’s angst about being gay? Where was that going to come in? And then the other thing was and I had letters saying this that as a gay man he would never be safe to teach in a school. He is a very old, single man. You have to ask, why is it so interesting? People have to examine their own attitudes. It’s a shade of character. Is it the most important thing about him? No. It’s Dumbledore, for God’s sakes, there are 20 things more relevant to the story before his sexuality.”

Courtney: So there are people who are like– who she’s seeing as being obsessed with Dumbledore’s sexuality, which she absolutely started by bringing it up in the interview in the first place, and she’s like, “Why are you so obsessed with his sexuality? He’s just a person. He loves just like everyone else, and there are so many more interesting things about him than sexuality.” But do you know how many ace people I know who say the same thing? Where it’s like sexuality is not interesting to me. She has known on some level, because it was directed at her own character, that people are obsessed with sex and sexuality. And when she didn’t want to talk about it or draw importance to it, that was a problem to her. And she’s telling people to examine their own attitudes.

Courtney: And so, God forbid, we have a day to uplift the Asexual Community and spread awareness, try to gain some amount of social or material support, and for us to say: hey, we’re living in a sex obsessed world. People expect us to have a sexuality, people expect us to have a sex life, people expect us to fall in love, get married, have kids. If we don’t conform to society, there are people who can and do ostracize us. And we want people to examine their own attitudes. And she’s like, “No, I’m bored of this shit. Fake oppression, not a thing.” So– I also just– I mean, I’m not– I’m not talking to any of the TERF lesbians, they aren’t going to be reached, but does this actually sound very supportive of gay people either? She’s like, “Yes, Dumbledore was in love with someone. Doesn’t matter if he had sex or not, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to talk about that. But that relationship made him kind of evil. And he was like maybe I shouldn’t be evil, so I’m just going to be celibate for the rest of my life.” Dumbledore is an ex-gay, is what I’m saying.

Courtney: So [chuckles] part of why I didn’t want to talk about JK Rowling and acephobia in the same episode until she said something a little more concrete than Dumbledore became asexual, was because I didn’t want it to be like, oh– when she finally does say something overtly acephobic, I didn’t want anyone to be like, “Oh well, they’ve been provoking her. They started it, it wasn’t her, she didn’t start it.” But now I hope, and I think I can make a safe prediction that it won’t be out of the realm of possibility that she’ll start saying horribly arophobic things too. As soon as, like, an aromantic day or week comes across her timeline, as soon as one of her friends over at The Spectator start writing at least a yearly hit piece against aromantic people, she’s gonna be right there. Because it’s all coming from the same frame of reference and she already has such an over-aggrandized vision of what love is and means.

Courtney: And you can see that so clearly in her books, in the trope she decides to use. And even when it comes to sexuality she’s like, “It’s about the love, it’s not about the sex, it’s about the love.” So does anybody genuinely think that someone just living their life as an out and proud aromantic person, whether or not they’re also asexual, do you really think someone like that is not going to get under her skin? She’s going to be like, “I’m bored of this shit, why? Why are you talking about this? Why do you need a day. You’re not oppressed.” Meanwhile, her whole book is if your parents didn’t love each other when you were born, you’re gonna be evil. If your parents don’t love you enough, you’re gonna die. And if your love is same sex, you’re gonna get a little bit evil for a bit, and that’s why you should probably actually just be celibate.

Courtney: Oh, and actually, on that note, someone has already brought aro people at least across her passing attention. Someone did post a quote from someone else. This is just a screenshot that says: “I imagine this conversation for aro people takes some painful, dehumanizing twists as well. It was exhausting and every time I felt the drip-drip of other people’s doubt wearing away at my new understanding of myself. But I’d expected this reaction from my religious, rigidly heteronormative family. The real kick in the teeth happened when I went online and discovered the aggressive acephobia coming from the one place I was sure I’d find understanding and acceptance. Aces are queer, so why do so many people within the LGBTQIA+ Community insist we’re not?” Which does happen sometimes.

Courtney: In my personal experience happens way more in the wild west that is the internet than it does in person when you build real community with other queer people. But JK Rowling’s very flippant response to that was: “If there’s one thing all religious heteronormative people have in common, it’s that they require all family members to be in a constant state of sexual arousal. Amazed you don’t know this.”

Courtney: So you said something at the top of this episode, Royce, that I think is extremely relevant here. The folks like this, the TERFs, who say that they do champion gay rights or at least same sex rights– which can be the same thing depending on who you’re talking to, but you gotta check who you’re talking to, because it might not mean the same thing at all. They do have tactics that heavily resemble that of the religious conservative, in our case in the US the Republicans, and they sometimes have a slightly wider view of what they deem to be an acceptable human experience. But at the end of the day, what they have in common is that they all have a narrow view of what an acceptable human experience is. This is the same fight.

Courtney: There could be a bigot who says everything must be cis, hetero, and allonormative, and procreative. Then there are the folks who say, you know, actually same-sex attraction is okay, but it still has to be a sexual attraction. That sexual attraction aspect still has to be there. And that’s often narrowed by sometimes folks like JK Rowling, well, it also has to be romantic. If it’s not romantic, then it’s still deviant. Because, of course, she can say all she wants that it’s about love and love is the important thing, until it’s trans love. Then love isn’t the most important thing. Unless it’s asexual love, then the love isn’t the most important thing. She can say she’s protecting women, and it’s about protecting women, until they’re asexual women, until they’re trans women. It’s a very narrow view of gender. It’s a very narrow view of sex. It’s a very narrow view of sexuality and romantic orientation.

Courtney: And that hasn’t really changed all that much. Because, even though those quotes I pulled were from 2008, in 2019, talking about The Crimes of Grindelwald, she said: “Dumbledore and Grindelwald had an incredibly intense love relationship. I’m less interested in the sexual side, though I believe there is a sexual dimension to this relationship, than I am in the sense of the emotions they felt for each other. Which ultimately is the most fascinating thing about all human relationships.” And so I suppose, on the– going back for just half a second on the word of God thing, I’ve seen a couple people here and there champion Dumbledore as asexual. A couple people have. But for the most part people try to sweep that under the rug because the people for whom Dumbledore is gay meant a big deal at the time don’t really like the walking back of the like, “Eh, actually he’s pretty asexual. He was just celibate his whole life.”

Courtney: People, whether or not that tangibly upsets them, are at least aware that it’s not a good look. And so people just don’t talk about it nearly as much. But I have unfortunately seen a lot of people champion Charlie Weasley as ace rep in Harry Potter…? And I’ve seen some people go so far as to say JK Rowling has confirmed this, when the confirmation was a quote where someone’s like, “Oh well, I think she was asked if Charlie Weasley is gay because he wasn’t straight. So if not straight, must be gay.” That’s another thing we talk about a lot on this podcast is that is the assumption. And her response to that was to say, “No, he’s not gay, he’s just more into dragons than he is women.” And a lot of ace people were like, “Mood! Yeah, same. Same, Charlie Weasley, I’m also more interested in dragons than women.” And that is funny, right? That is an in-community joke amongst many aces. You know, dragons are cooler than sex. That’s fine and that can be fun for us in the right crowd.

Courtney: But when I see people say Charlie Weasley is canonically asexual and JK Rowling confirmed it because she said he likes dragons more than girls, oh, that hurts my heart because I saw this coming a million miles away. She is no ally of asexuality. She is, at this point, intentionally, willfully, ignorant of what asexuality means. Because, quite frankly, at the end of the day, she doesn’t believe asexuality is real or important. She has admitted that. She does not think it is queer. She does not think that we face any oppression, which is another thing that this group of people will say, they’ll be like, “You’re not getting killed for being asexual.” Even though when an asexual teenage girl did get brutally murdered and images of her body went viral, the Rolling Stones accused asexual people of exploiting her death to push our agenda, when all we did was take a few days to mourn her death. Because she had come out to us, in our community, using our hashtag, submitting her picture to be a part of a community project.

Courtney: We do know aces who have been murdered. We do know that there are, there are studies, there are personal anecdotes that I could even share of experiencing sexual violence as an ace person. We know that aces are more likely than gay and lesbian and bisexual people to face conversion therapy. We are an incredibly medicalized orientation because we aren’t often seen as a real orientation. We’re seen as a symptom or a problem to be corrected, dare I say, converted. And these studies exist, but folks like this are never going to look at them because some of them get published by organizations like Stonewall UK, whom they have made a personal target of theirs because of their history of championing trans rights. Which it really is fascinating. Because, as an American who has actually been to the Stonewall Inn, like, I guess, if there’s one nugget of hope, like, do not let these loud, famous millionaire bigots set your expectations for what the queer community is like. And whether or not they really are accepting of us. Whether we be trans, whether we be ace.

Courtney: Because I know for a fact right now if you were to walk into the Stonewall Inn in New York City, you will see a Trans Flag on the wall. You will also see an Asexual Flag on the wall. Not only is the flag there, there is an explainer about what the flag means. There are resources from AVEN on there. Like there are queer communities out there that are accepting and loving and do see our concerns.

Courtney: Because the final note I want to leave on is one of the most common responses I’ve seen to this new wave of hate that was started by JK Rowling are the people that are just shocked and baffled. Some are ace themselves, some are not, but I’ve been seeing a lot of commentary saying, “Literally, the aces aren’t hurting anyone.” And they’ll say, “What did the aces do? Why is JK Rowling going after asexuals? They’re literally not bothering anyone.” And I’ll see some ace people say that too. Like, “But JK Rowling, we’re not bothering anyone. We’re just over here in our own little world, we’re just in our own little pocket. We’re not doing any harm to anyone.” That is the wrong thing to say, I think.

Courtney: Whether you’re ace or an ally, that is exactly the wrong thing to say, because what we should be saying is: trans people literally are not hurting anyone either. That’s why this is not a surprise. You’re almost inadvertently giving a little grace. Like, “Well, I don’t agree with the fact that she hates trans people, but I at least understand why she hates them. But the aces… I don’t understand why she hates them.” No, cut it out. First of all, folks who are surprised about that look up the asexual hate crime statistics. The asexual interpersonal violence statistics. The asexual conversion therapy statistics. They are out there. They are shocking. Understand that we do face real, tangible political concerns, but every time we try to advocate for our political concerns, we get overshadowed by this. This is the most publicity we’ve had in a long time because of JK Rowling.

Courtney: So any headlines that are coming out of this are not: here are some issues asexual people face; here’s what they’re asking for; here’s what they’re advocating; here’s how we can be better allies to them. The headlines are, “Wait! Famed author JK Rowling hates asexual people too? What?” She is now becoming the face of any asexual news and media and discourse, and we cannot let that happen.

Courtney: We also can’t let people passively, or overtly, throw trans people under the bus by being like, “Now, that’s a bridge too far because the aces aren’t bothering anybody.” Trans people aren’t bothering anybody either. They are not. They never were. So I would like people to acknowledge the social and political concerns of trans people and ace people, and acknowledge that, while trans folks do have more active legislation attacking them right now and we need to do absolutely everything we can to stand in solidarity with them and fight against it, we do need our allies to understand that we do have legislation that harms us.

Courtney: We do not have protections against conversion therapy in many places. And none of us are harming anybody by being our own authentic selves. Now, I’m not going to rehash absolutely every political issue we have, because we have dozens of episodes at this point talking about it, but what I will grant is that a majority of the political issues we talk about are US based, and that is purely because that’s where we live. That’s the news we get the most. That’s what harms us here in our country. But I want to end with this UK based example. This is an issue we have talked about before, usually with examples from other countries, but this one is from the UK. An article from the Guardian entitled Couples Face Insulting Checks in Sham Marriage Crackdown. So everyone, just keep in mind the fact that sex doesn’t matter. We don’t need to talk about it. And keep in mind her comments of this is fake oppression, nobody is oppressing you because you don’t fancy a shag. Well, here are UK examples of people being oppressed for not even not fancying a shag, just perceived not fancying a shag.

Courtney: [reading] “Genuine couples are being prevented from getting married and are subjected to insulting and grueling checks as part of a government crackdown on sham marriages. A Guardian investigation has found couples and lawyers described wedding ceremonies being interrupted so that the Home Office could question people about their sex lives. An official finding a nude picture on a person’s phone and showing it to others in the room, and dawn raids carried out to check if couples were sharing a bed. In one case, a couple were told their relationship could not be genuine because they were wearing pajamas in bed. In others, people have been detained for months after being wrongly accused of entering into a sham marriage. This goes on to talk about multiple reports where the Home Office was given powers to delay weddings for up to 70 days to allow for investigations.” Where they have showed up at people’s houses at dawn to check to see if they were sharing a bed!

Courtney: Also, actual weddings, and these are, mind you, all the instances that are being presented here by name – and I will link this article in the show notes on our websites, as well as the description on YouTube – these all appear to be heterosexual couples, except one instance of a gay couple. I have no idea whether or not any of the people in any of these relationships are asexual or not, but that is not the point. The point is that people do care about sex a whole lot. And if you are not having the type of sex they expect you to have, people have been detained, people have been refused marriage licenses, and people have had their homes invaded and asked invasive personal questions. Here’s a couple who say: “We were questioned separately about our relationship. And then Kasim my–” in this case the man in the relationship, “was arrested, taken away and locked up in detention for four months before the Home Office finally accepted that our relationship was genuine.” People are getting arrested because they don’t think they’re having sex. That’s not hyperbole, that is literally happening.

Courtney: We’ve talked a lot in our country how there are judges and there are politicians who do view sex and marriage as synonymous, and will say that asexual marriage cannot exist, platonic marriage is not a thing, because you cannot separate sex from marriage. But this is one of the most overt examples I have seen of that from a country that is not our own. [reading] “Another couple who sought permission to marry were told their relationship would not be investigated, only to have their wedding ceremony interrupted by officials. The statement said the couple were taken into separate rooms and asked about their sex lives, including details about sexual positions and contraception. The woman was so distressed that partway through the interview she refused to answer any more questions. The Home Office officials then halted the ceremony and declared the marriage to be sham.”

Courtney: Can you imagine? You are literally at your wedding and government officials come in and say so you having sex? How much sex are you having? How are you having sex? What position is it in? Is he on top or are you on top? Oh, you don’t want to answer our questions? You don’t get to get married today. Are you kidding me?! This is everything short of, like, having a witness to view the consummation after marriage. People do care a whole hell of a lot about other people’s sex lives. And if you are not having the sex that is expected of you, there are genuine oppressions that we face. Because in these cases, it’s not about love. If any of these people do love the other deeply, but for one reason or another, they are asexual, maybe there is a religious or lifestyle choice, at this point I don’t even care.

Courtney: I don’t think sex should be required to get married. Because, as JK Rowling says, love is the important thing, isn’t it? No, it’s not. That has always been a myth. But still, famous millionaires with millions of followers in the one of the largest microphones this planet has ever known would rather spread bigotry and fake news than actually stand up for women. Is that protecting women to ignore the fact that women are being asked invasive questions about their sex lives at their wedding and then being told they can’t get married if they won’t answer this? That doesn’t sound like protecting women. But no, it’s much more fun to make fun of asexuals and reduce us to people who don’t fancy a shag, who have no real political concerns.

Courtney: So, on that note, we are going to end today’s episode the way I always like to, by featuring a small business owned by a member of our community. And today our featured MarketplACE vendor is the Bookish Crocheter, where you can find book sleeves and other bookish accessories by an asexual, non-binary and disabled artisan. Now, I love the Bookish Crocheter, and if you have just listened to a couple hours of us talking about an author, presumably you’ve read a book or two in your life. And I think that these adorable book sleeves can absolutely enhance your book reading experience, as they have mine. I actually, not too long ago, just ordered my second book sleeve from the Bookish Crocheter. The first one I got was very autumnal, had some pumpkin jack-o’-lanterns on it. I really loved it. I just got another one recently that’s gonna come with a crocheted bookmark even. But there are a lot of fun ones.

Courtney: Some are just beautiful patterns. Some look kind of like dragon scales and actually have a little bit of a dimension to them. And there’s even one that is orange and blue with a big ol’ alien on it and it looks incredibly reminiscent of the Aroace Flag, and I just love these little things so much. So I think you should check them out, because my books feel very cozy when they are sleeping in their little adorable book sleeves. So links, as always, to find our featured MarketplACE vendor are going to be in the show notes on our website, as well as the description on YouTube.

Courtney: And if any of you are new around here and made it this far, and if you are curious as to more specifics about the actual political and social issues that we do face in the Asexual Community, we have just a ton of episodes about it. If it makes it easier for you, you can go onto YouTube, where we have made a playlist about acephobia. Otherwise, you can certainly just take a look through our backlog on our website or whatever podcast platform you are listening to, and you will find even older episodes that are, unfortunately, aging really, really well. I wish our older episodes were so outdated that I could just say, “Oh, that problem’s been fixed, don’t listen to that.” No, they age very well, unfortunately. So go listen to all of them. Okay, that’s all that is all for today. Thank you all so much for being here and we’ll see you all next time. Goodbye.