Rowling Excluded from Jubilee Reading List Amid Attacks for Trans Views

Jack MontgomeryApril 18, 2022

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has been excluded from The Big Jubilee Read of 70 books, pioneered in part by the BBC, amid ongoing leftist attacks on her views on transgender ideology.

The initiative, co-founded by BBC Arts along with The Reading Agency, is intended to showcase Commonwealth books spanning the seven decades of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign to coincide with her Platinum Jubilee, but the Harry Potter series’ total exclusion from the supposedly “reader-driven list” has raised eyebrows.

Rowling, an anti-Brexit, anti-Trump left-winger who once donated £1 million to the Labour Party, has in recent years lost her heroine status among her increasingly identity politics obsessed fellow leftists, in large part for her insistence that “sex is real” and that pushing transgender drugs on children and opening single-sex spaces to transgender individuals is dangerous.

BBC Arts insisted leftist distaste for Rowling had nothing to do with the fact she was not selected, but contest judge Susheila Nasta appeared to give away that woke considerations did shape the list, telling The Sunday Times that “the education system in Britain is… terrible about educating people [about British colonialism]” and that some of the selected books — which paint it in a negative light — are ones she would want “taught in schools”.

Guardian ‘Person of the Year’ Poll Deactivated After J.K. Rowling Takes Leadhttps://t.co/Io4loFulkZ

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“There was a big discussion about JK Rowling,” confessed Nasta, a professor of modern literature, in further comments to the newspaper of record.

“She was on the long-list with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. A space was cleared for someone equally as good but whose work was not as well-known. There were some very tricky decisions,” she claimed.

The suggestion that Rowling, the most successful British writer of her generation and one of the most successful British authors of all time — behind only Agatha Christie, Barbara Cartland, Enid Blyton, and William Shakespeare in terms of sales — was excluded to make way for lesser-known writers rings somewhat hollow in light of the fact that the likes of The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, an extremely well-known work and author beloved by the social justice left, still made the cut.

Other high-profile books which made the list are A Clockwork Orange, adapted into an iconic Stanley Kubrik film, The English Patient, adapted into an Oscar-winning film by sex offender Harvey Weinstein, and sci-fi classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Glaringly absent from the list along with Rowling is The Lord of the Rings, an implicitly conservative work by the traditional Catholic author JRR Tolkien, and arguably the most culturally impactful British fiction writing of modern times.

Tolkien’s contemporary and friend C.S. Lewis, another unselfconscious Christian, although an Anglican rather than a Roman Catholic, was also excluded from the list.