Her views on transgender people may have divided fans, but JK Rowling appears to be more popular than ever on social media, winning thousands more followers despite her latest controversy.

The Harry Potter author has gained more than 62,000 followers in two days, after speculation that she could be arrested under Scotland’s Hate Crime and Public Order Act, which came into effect on Monday.

The English novelist has lived in Edinburgh since the 1990s, and Siobhian Brown, Scotland’s minister for victims and community safety, suggested Rowling could be investigated there for deliberately referring to someone by the wrong pronouns.

J.K. Rowling at a Royal Albert Hall awards ceremony in London, England on February 12, 2017. She seems more popular than ever, despite her “arrest me” dare to police. Samir Hussein/WireImage
Rowling has been branded transphobic by some in recent years due to her public remarks on gender identity. The 58-year-old has also been accused of conflating transgender people with sexual predators and purposefully misgendering public figures.

 

“It could be reported and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that,” Brown told the Daily Telegraph.

In response to Brown’s comments, Rowling “dared” Scottish police to arrest her, hitting out at the new law on social media.

“In passing the Scottish Hate Crime Act, Scottish lawmakers seem to have placed higher value on the feelings of men performing their idea of femaleness, however misogynistically or opportunistically, than on the rights and freedoms of actual women and girls,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

“The new legislation is wide open to abuse by activists who wish to silence those of us speaking out about the dangers of eliminating women’s and girls’ single-sex spaces, the nonsense made of crime data if violent and sexual assaults committed by men are recorded as female crimes, the grotesque unfairness of allowing males to compete in female sports, the injustice of women’s jobs, [honors] and opportunities being taken by trans-identified men, and the reality and immutability of biological sex.”

Although Police Scotland confirmed it will not be investigating Rowling under the Hate Crime and Public Order Act, the furore against her led to an outpouring of support from celebrities, such as Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, former Olympian Caitlyn Jenner and conservative commentator Megan Kelly.

The arrest rumors have also boosted Rowling’s online presence. According to social media analytics website Social Blade, Rowling has gained more than 62,000 X followers since Tuesday, taking her subscriber count to 14,104,156.

Rowling was first accused of transphobia in 2018, after she liked a tweet that dubbed trans women as “men in dresses.” The author claimed that she clicked on the post by mistake, but was later criticized for following self-described “transphobe” and YouTuber Magdalen Berns on Twitter.

Her defense of researcher Maya Forstater, who was fired from her job after making anti-trans statements, sparked backlash from the LGBTQ community in 2019, as did her comments about an article referring to “people who menstruate.”

“‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” Rowling wrote on social media. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

The inclusive term “people who menstruate” encompasses trans men, non-binary and intersex people.

Although Rowling has always denied that she is “transphobic,” the backlash led the cast of the Harry Potter movies to distance themselves from the creator, with Rowling left out of the 20th-anniversary reunion special in 2022.