Daniel Radcliffe is on the wrong side of history

When you are in a hole, it is maybe best to stop digging. That is advice Daniel Radcliffe would have been wise to heed when he responded to J.K. Rowling’s challenge to apologize to “traumatized detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces.”

That was April 10, when Rowling had been commenting on the Cass Review of gender identity services for children and young people. Four years after she had first opened her mouth on the egregious impact of gender identity ideology on our society, Rowling expressed her anger about the consequences on vulnerable children who have been “irreversibly harmed.”

Make no mistake, Rowling is right. But her willingness to stand up and be counted has cost her dearly. Early on, she returned her Ripple of Hope Award to the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights organization amid accusations of transphobia. She has been routinely condemned as “anti-trans,” a bigot and worse.

In 2020, Radcliffe joined the public critics announcing that “trans women are women.” He even had the gall to apologize on behalf of Rowling after she posted social media comments about the importance of biological sex. In a statement that has not aged well, Radcliffe added:

Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.

Dr. Hilary Cass has expertise — plenty of it. After all, she is a former president of Britain’s Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health. If Radcliffe couldn’t bring himself to admit that he had been wrong and apologize to Rowling, then maybe the best he could do was sit at the bottom of the hole that he had already dug.

It would have been a sad ending to a relationship that once mattered to him. Without Rowling’s books there would have been no Harry Potter, and probably no fame or fortune for Radcliffe. Fortune smiled on him when he was cast in the starring role as an eleven-year-old boy.

But the digging has recommenced. In a recent interview just published by the Atlantic, he declined to acknowledge the psychological and physical damage that has been done to children who have been lied to by those peddling this pernicious ideology. Instead, he doubled down, “I will continue to support the rights of all LGBTQ people, and have no further comment than that.”

Is that what he thinks? That he must choose between supporting “LGBTQ people” and the protection of children from harm? But there again, Radcliffe is an actor who is paid to read the words that someone else has written. That may be what he is used to in his professional life, but if he chooses to apply the same principles in his private life then he needs to be far more careful who writes the scripts.

Radcliffe leans on “The Trevor Project” — an American nonprofit organization for LGBTQ+ young people. He told the Atlantic:

I’d worked with the Trevor Project for twelve years and it would have seemed like, I don’t know, immense cowardice to me to not say something… I wanted to try and help people that had been negatively affected by [Rowling’s] comments.

From her first “dress however you please” statement on the matter in December 2019, Rowling has been firm in what she knows to be true — things like biological sex — but she has also been empathetic towards trans people. In June 2020 she wrote, “I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection.”

Rowling offers trans people far more to trans people like me than those banging drums and chanting slogans. Radcliffe would be wise to listen to her or he might find himself in what the followers of the ideology worry might be the worst place possible — the wrong side of history.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.