The trailer for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore reduces the name of the story’s creator, J.K. Rowling, to barely a footnote in the last frame of the video.
Having created one of the biggest franchises in history, the ‘Harry Potter’ author has now been shoved into the shadows in her own productions, following her recent rows with the trans community.
While the teaser for the previous film in the ‘Fantastic Beasts’ series, ‘The Crimes of Grindelwald,’ started with a title shot stating, “J.K. Rowling invites you,” and credited her as the author and producer of the movie, the latest trailer has replaced the line with ‘Warner Bros. invites you’ and has scrubbed almost all mention of the writer. In fact, Rowling’s name is not mentioned anywhere throughout the two-and-a-half-minute-long trailer except for the very last title shot as a small footnote regarding publishing rights.
Many of Rowling’s supporters, such as women’s rights advocate Kiri Tunks, have been outraged by the move, saying it is an attempt to “detach the female author from her own creative achievement.”
“It won’t work. Not only is J.K. Rowling renowned for creating the world of ‘Harry Potter,’ she is now a hero to women all over the world for speaking up in the face of intimidation and abuse,” said Tunks, co-founder of Woman’s Place UK, in an interview with The Daily Telegraph.
Rowling’s fallout with the trans community started when she took a stance on the definition of a woman, saying that ‘people who menstruate should be called “women”’. This upset many trans activists who felt she devalued their life experiences.
The latest row in her spat with the trans community came earlier this week, when she commented on the recently introduced Police Scotland policy to log rape offenders with a penis as women if they self-identified as such.
Rowling described the policy as Orwellian and compared it to “doublethink” from George Orwell’s ‘1984’ novel. Parodying the famous line from the book, she wrote: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.”