Harry Potter Bumped Off Queen's Jubilee Book List Amid J.K. Rowling Trans Row

J.K. Rowling, the world's richest writer, received hundreds of rape and death threats after she lampooned a reference to women as 'people who menstruate' in a 2020 twitter post. The former child stars of the Harry Potter film franchise have since turned against her.

The first Harry Potter story has been dropped from a list of 70 British and Commonwealth books to mark the Queen's platinum jubilee.

The apparent snub to billionaire authoress J.K. Rowling follows attempts to "cancel" her over her allegedly 'transphobic' comments.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Rowling's first novel written when she was an unemployed single mother, was among the 153 candidates for the Big Jubilee Read list.

But it was absent from the final list of 70 books compiled by BBC Arts and The Reading Agency, 10 from each decade of Queen Elizabeth II's reign.

"There was a big discussion about JK Rowling," book list judge Susheila Nasta, an emeritus professor of modern literature at Queen Mary University of London, told The Times. "A space was cleared for someone equally as good but whose work was not as well-known. There were some very tricky decisions."

Nasta did not make reference to the row that blew up in June 2020 after Rowling took offence at a headline from development NGO publicity website Devex, which referred to women as "people who menstruate".

The authoress said she had received hundreds of online rape and murder threats from transgender rights activists following her Twitter post ridiculing the convoluted choice of words.

Rowling was one of of nearly a dozen well-known so-called Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) photographed enjoying a "boozy lunch" at the swanky River Café restaurant in Fulham, west London, just over a week ago.

Several of the youthful stars made famous by the Harry Potter film adaptations publicly criticised Rowling over her comments, on the grounds that a person born female who identifies as transsexual should be considered a man even if they do not undergo gender reassignment surgery or hormone replacement treatments.

That has not dissuaded her from speaking out on issues such as protecting women-only spaces and Police Scotland's decision to record rapes committed by male-bodied transsexuals as female crimes.

Rowling's name was virtually absent from early trailers for the third film of her Fantastic Beasts series of Harry Potter prequels, although it featured prominently in the latest teaser promo.