Bel Powley, who plays Petunia Dursley in HBO's upcoming Harry Potter series, has said she strongly disagrees with J.K. Rowling's views on gender and that the trans community deserves safety, dignity, respect, and total acceptance. She is one of several cast members to speak out, joining Nick Frost, Paapa Essiedu, and a complicated set of statements from John Lithgow.

What Bel Powley actually said

In an interview with The Telegraph, Powley was straightforward: "I strongly disagree with J.K. Rowling's views on gender. I think that the trans community deserve safety and dignity and respect and total acceptance." Then she added something that I think is worth noting: "But I love Harry Potter. I grew up with the books. I am from that first generation of readers and, again, I love magic and spookiness."

There is no contradiction there, even if some people will want to frame it as one. A person can love a story and disagree with the person who wrote it. Books belong to the people who read them. That is not a loophole or a rationalisation; it is just how stories work. Millions of people grew up with those books, felt seen in them, found belonging in them, and many of those readers are trans. The franchise was never only Rowling's to define.

The chorus building around the cast

Powley is not the first, and the pattern across this cast is interesting. Nick Frost, who plays Hagrid, said clearly that his opinion and Rowling's "don't align in any way, shape or form." Paapa Essiedu, who plays Severus Snape, signed an open letter supporting trans rights in the UK. When speculation emerged that Rowling might try to have him removed from the show, she responded that she does not have that power and would not use it if she did, adding that she does not believe in taking away people's livelihoods for holding legally protected beliefs that differ from hers.

That is a notable thing for her to say, and I do not want to ignore it. Whatever else is true about Rowling's position, she has not, as far as the reporting shows, attempted to silence or remove the people around her who disagree. That does not make her views on trans people any less harmful. The harm is in the views themselves and in the public platform she uses to promote them, not in whether she fires her colleagues.

John Lithgow, who plays Dumbledore, has had a harder time holding a consistent line. In April of 2025 he told The Times UK that he saw no reason her stance should give him pause about taking the role. After backlash, he described her position as "ironic and inexplicable" at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Then, later in April, he made headlines again for suggesting her views had been "twisted and misrepresented." I am not going to pile on Lithgow; navigating this publicly, in a franchise of this scale, with Rowling as executive producer, is genuinely complicated. But the contrast with Powley's clarity is striking. Powley named where she stands and did not qualify it out of existence.

What Rowling said about the original cast

The original Harry Potter films produced a similar dynamic. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint have all publicly rejected Rowling's views. Her response to Watson and Radcliffe in September 2025 was revealing. She wrote that they have every right to hold their beliefs, and that she would not want them threatened for holding them. Then she added a long passage about Watson in particular, questioning her life experience, her exposure to public facilities, her understanding of the world. The warmth evaporated very quickly, and what replaced it was something much sharper.

The argument Rowling makes, that trans-inclusive policies pose risks to women in shared spaces, is one she believes and promotes with real intensity. It is also one that the evidence does not support, that major medical and human rights organisations reject, and that trans women pay for every single day in exclusion, hostility, and the knowledge that they are being discussed as a problem rather than recognised as people. Powley's words, "safety and dignity and respect and total acceptance," are not naive. They are the accurate description of what the trans community is owed and mostly denied.

A franchise built on belonging

The Harry Potter series is, at its core, about a child who does not fit the world they were born into and finds, through courage and friendship and a great deal of difficulty, that there is a place for them after all. Trans people have always read those books and felt that. The irony that the author of those books has become one of the most prominent voices arguing that trans people should be excluded from ordinary life is not lost on anyone.

What strikes me about the cast's pattern of dissent is that these are people who signed on to a production knowing the landscape. They are not making cost-free statements; they are attaching their names to a position while professionally connected to someone who holds the opposite one. Powley did it clearly and warmly and did not hedge. That matters, not because celebrity opinion changes policy, but because trans people reading it today know that the people playing those beloved characters see them, and disagree with the person trying to define them out of public life.

The first season of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone premieres on 25 December on HBO.

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Dr Helen Webberley is a gender specialist, medical educator, and advocate, and the founder of GenderGP. She writes about gender diversity, trans healthcare, and the lives at the centre of both.