JK Rowling shakes off transgender row as controversial new book shoots straight to top of the charts
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JK Rowling shakes off transgender row as her controversial new book shoots straight to top of the charts
- Book Troubled Blood features a male killer who dresses up in women’s clothes
- Transgender rights activists want a boycott of the fifth in the Strike thriller series
- The book has sold 64,633 copies in its first five days doubling previous sales
JK Rowling’s latest book has shot straight to the top of the UK book charts after bitter attacks by transgender activists.
Troubled Blood, which features a male killer who dresses up in women’s clothes, has reignited claims that the Harry Potter author is ‘transphobic’.
Activists want a boycott of the fifth in the Strike thriller series, published under her pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
But the book has sold 64,633 copies in its first five days, nearly doubling the sales of its predecessor in the series over the same period, reported The Bookseller.
JK Rowling’s latest book Troubled Blood, which features a male killer who dresses up in women’s clothes, has shot straight to the top of the UK book charts after bitter attacks by transgender activists
The controversy is likely to have boosted its sales despite a strident social media campaign that prompted some bookshops not to stock it.
Miss Rowling, 55, has faced prolonged criticism from transgender activists since objecting to the term ‘people who menstruate’ being used instead of ‘women’.
She says she based the new character on two real killers, Jerry Brudos and Russell Williams, who fetishised women’s clothes.
The row started when it emerged that Miss Rowling has written a murderous male character who, at one point, dresses as a woman in order to ensnare a victim.
The book has soared to the top of Amazon’s best seller list, ahead of the likes of The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman and Captain Tom Moore’s autobiography, Tomorrow Will Be A Good Day
Most of her detractors seemingly hadn’t even read the book and were basing their outrage on a review.
The review described the ‘meat of the book’ as the investigation into ‘Dennis Creed, a transvestite serial killer’.
However, the character does not identify as transgender.
Miss Rowling revealed that she had based the character on two real-life killers, Jerry Brudos and Russell Williams, both of whom fetishised women’s clothes.
The author, 55, appeared to take aim at her critics on Tuesday, tweeting a photograph of herself wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan: ‘This witch doesn’t burn’
Furious critics were quick to point out that the website sells a series of other items they deemed ‘transphobic’, with users sharing images of badges reading ‘dead men don’t rape’
Other products at the store read ‘f*** your pronouns’ (pictured), causing fury to erupt over the author’s tweet
While many people criticised the author for perpetuating ‘deeply harmful tropes’ about transgender people, most reviews pointed out that it amounted to one scene in which a character recalled the killer once wearing woman’s clothing as a trap.
On Tuesday, the author promoted a firm which makes stridently feminist items.
After sharing a photo of a t-shirt she was wearing, which bore the slogan ‘this witch doesn’t burn’, she linked to the website of the company she had bought it from.
Wild Womyn Workshop, which sells feminist badges, stickers and clothing, has a section marked ‘gender critical.’ It sells badges which read ‘protect women only spaces,’ ‘female biology isn’t bigotry’ and ‘support detransitioners.’
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