JK Rowling’s feud with Butlin’s is a sad new low

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. After getting wind of the incident, Rowling took to her Twitter/X account – the place she does most of her best fantasy writing nowadays – to slam the company: “Does Butlins think the desire of cross-dressing men to enter women-only spaces is more important than women’s and girls’ right to privacy and dignity? To go from that to obsessively campaigning against a marginalised group, and slating them as “cross-dressing men”, is a type of cognitive dissonance that shouldn’t even be possible. Watching Rowling deliberately misgender people on social media really makes me re-evaluate what I was supposed to take away from the Death Eaters’ use of “mudblood”. We did the same thing during the gay marriage “debate”, and we’ll probably do it with some other poor marginalised group down the line, because that’s how moral panics work.