Transgender comedy legend Eddie Izzard defended J.K. Rowling in a recent interview.
Speaking with the Daily Telegraph, Izzard said, “I don’t think J.K. Rowling is transphobic…. I think we need to look at the things she has written about in her blog.”
Related: Trans entertainer Eddie Izzard will retire from comedy to run for political office
“Women have been through such hell over history,” she said in the interview. “Trans people have been invisible, too.”
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Last year, Rowling came out swinging against transgender equality advocates, writing Twitter threads of tweets for her 14 million followers that attacked transgender identities as fake, wrote a rambling essay where she compared the existence of transgender women to domestic violence, showed support for conversion therapy for transgender people, and even plugged a disgusting website that sells transphobic mugs and pins.
When she faced criticism, she claimed that she was just exercising her “free speech”… before she threatened legal action to shut down critics and even forced a children’s news website to apologize to her publicly.
While many celebrities criticized Rowling, others came out in support of Rowling’s transphobia – claiming she was being silenced – while she published a book about a man who dresses up as a woman so that he can get close to women and kill them.
“I hate the idea we are fighting between ourselves, but it’s not going to be sorted with the wave of a wand,” Izzard said of the Harry Potter author. “I don’t have all the answers. If people disagree with me, fine – but why are we going through hell on this?”
Izzard has identified as both transgender and genderfluid since at least 2016, when she said she is “somewhat boy-ish and somewhat girl-ish. I identify [with] both but I fancy women.”
She has also said that she uses the term “transgender” as an “umbrella term” and has called herself “a lesbian trapped in a man’s body” several decades before she said she was genderfluid.
In 2017, she told The Hollywood Reporter, “I am essentially transgender.”
“I have boy mode and girl mode. I do feel I have boy genetics and girl genetics.”
That same year, she joked on Twitter that she does not wear women’s clothes because “they’re my clothes. I bought them.”
