Anyone who’s ever dipped a toe into online debate on trans issues will know that British TERFs are some of the worst people on the internet. To the confusion of the rest of the world, the United Kingdom is home to strange and unpleasant people who have devoted their lives to making life miserable for trans people. They brand themselves as gender critical, organize dogpiles of their critics, all the while doing their best to maintain an aura of “common sense” as they sow division and spread hate.
Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has become increasingly embroiled in this warped world, which makes what happened last night on a train to Cambridge so much funnier. The story comes to us via X, where user @dschw69 found themselves sat near Helen Joyce, director of the anti-trans campaign group Sex Matters. Joyce, who published the 2021 book Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (described as “alarmist” and criticized for being anti-semitic) was working on her phone with her screen visible to other passengers:
Now, ordinarily a story about someone reading a phone over someone’s shoulder on public transport would be an invasion of privacy. But it’s what happens next that makes it newsworthy. As per the images posted to the thread, Joyce switched tabs to begin poring over…. erotic Harry Potter fan fiction.
Diligent research from the OP resulted in confirmation that Joyce was reading “Mudblood”, a graphic story in which Hermione and Draco Malfoy have violent sex in a potions storeroom, predicated on Hermione getting turned on by Draco verbally abusing her. As the replies quickly pointed out, Joyce is reading an erotic story about children in public, only taking time away from it to approvingly retweet J.K. Rowling. We have to wonder what Rowling herself would make of this!
The reactions are pretty much what you’d expect:
We can only concur that this is not a good look for Joyce:
Joyce hasn’t directly responded, though has just posted a tweet arguing that she’s reading underage Harry Potter erotica as part of an “ongoing research project”:
Replies dub it “the funniest possible defence you could’ve come up with”, pointing out that it’s very convenient that it’s a project that “hardly anyone knows about” and, succinctly, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA”.
And, also it’s worth pointing out that:
Somehow we suspect the hilarity hasn’t quite run its course on this story, so stay tuned for updates.