One of the biggest video game releases of the year is set to be the action RPG ‘Hogwarts Legacy’. Based on the outstandingly high number of pre-orders, Forbes estimates sales of up to 20 million copies for the new game by Avalanche Software. In fact, it’s currently the best-selling title on the Steam and PlayStation 5 stores, despite its official release date being nearly a month away, 10 February.
However, despite the game’s immense commercial success, there are a few noisy contrarians in the mix who want to make sure their complaints are heard. People who are not happy with Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s public statements about transgenderism used Steam’s customizable tags feature for some left-wing activism, and labelled this children’s game as ‘transphobic’. They also added a few unrelated, unpleasant tags such as ‘psychological horror’ and ‘World War 2’, just to cause some damage. Since then, Steam’s operator Valve stepped in and removed these tags, but screen shots of the product of the shenanigans still exist on the internet.
The voice actor for one of the characters in the game, Sebastian Croft, even went as far as publicly apologising on Twitter for his involvement in the project. Croft also plays a character on the LGBTQ teen drama Heartstopper on Netflix, so many in his audience were triggered by the fact he worked on a game that is based on the creation of someone they do not agree with.
The author of the widely successful children’s book series Harry Potter, JK Rowling, routinely had to face attempted sabotage and boycotts of her work ever since she spoke up against modern gender theory. Also on Twitter, she called out trans activist writer and YouTuber Jessie Earl, for promoting ‘pure think’, after she said that she would not want to buy any products associated with Rowling’s work. To further stress her point about the new type of puritanism emerging on the activist left, Rowling added: ‘The truly righteous wouldn’t just burn their books and movies but the local library, along with an owl on it, and their own pet dogs’.
Despite all this, Rowling is far from someone who could be labelled as a right-winger. She supported the Labour Party during the prime ministership of Gordon Brown. She also vocally opposed the United Kingdom’s potential exit from the European Union leading up to the 2016 referendum and Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign in the US at the same time. However, her views on transgenderism happen to fall in line with what is presumably the view of the vast majority in her country (and many in many other countries as well)—but views that the zealous activist left cannot tolerate.
And that view is that is it is impossible for a biological male to become a woman, and simply calling him as such will not change reality.
