Muggle net stops being sexist and anti-JKR

[fromorbit]

One of the oldest Harry Potter sites went crazy in 2020 and went all out against Harry's creator JR Rowling because she said she thought women were a thing.

Now the site owners have dismissed the sexists. In 2025 the entire staff was let go, and the archive dating back to 1999 was deleted in April 2026 after a law suit from former staff.

Details:
MuggleNet Drops Staff, Gets Sued, Disapparates, Reappears Brand New

https://www.hogwartsprofessor.com/mugglenet-drops-staff-gets-sued-disapparates-reappears-brand-new/

This is going to be about the huge surge of Potter interest which will occur after the TV series drops in December.

Going to be a lot more reverse ferreting in the coming year I suspect. Obviously profit is part of it, but also a cultural shift. The genderists are losing ground everywhere. The fact they couldn't cancel Harry Potter is part of it, but they also couldn't cancel reality.

Thanks op. That's interesting. The new series is going to bring JKR's views back into the spotlight. For years, we have had most media taking the TRA line. The BBC has attempted more balance of late (e.g. referring to her as a women's right campaigner rather than an anti-trans activist).

I don't think smearing JKR is going to go down as well as it did 5 years ago. I think there will be more pushback and more awareness of what her actual views are, rather than the lies that have been perpetrated about her for years by TRAs and a biased media.

I remember reaching the point of unfollowing Mugglenet. It must have been 2021. Sad day because I loved the Potter content, but not the JKR bashing.

It would be awful if they got a sponsorship deal now. I will not re-follow them on principle.

I don't know the site, but I think the loss of an archive of conversations running from 1999 to 2026 is terribly sad. Even if I would disagree with some of the content, losing any type of record of people speaking at the time in their own words is still a pity IMO. I wish they could have found a different way.

It is a loss from archival perspective. It sounds like it was triggered by the legal drama by the ex staff they were trying to sue the site over content. The article I linked to talks about some of the best posts lost. Worth reading.

Yet the former staff acted against anyone who defied the hate against JKR and censored their posts. The lack of balance is what doomed it. When you head down the absolute censorship path you are screwed. Look at Mumsnet in contrast. You can slag off JKR or laud her to the heavens. As long as you are not abusive/violent you can state your case and argue it out.

If Muggle.Net had done that the staff would not have been fired. In fact it probably would have flourished as lots of people love arguing about JKR and gender. You just create a separate section and let people discuss. Probably would have been enlightening,

Instead they tried to pretend JKR didn't exist and biology didn't either.

For the times, they are a’ chaaangin’ 🎶

People just want to enjoy things without all the emotional labour, caveats, and declarations. I hope they do some major gatekeeping so the old guard doesn’t slip back in and stink up the place.

It sounds like the legal challenge from ex staff/volunteers prompted the clean sweep approach. They presumably are aware it’s all on the way back machine as a record but no longer has to be hosted by them. Although perhaps it is also a great benefit if the site’s owners are looking for advertising deals when the new series comes out:

I think what The Leaky Cauldron is missing, though, is that, by suing Topix Media Lab in February for benefitting from their labor without compensation, the legacy MuggleNet staff pushedthe site’s ownership to dump all that content in April so that it could argue in court that said content was both worthless and no longer benefitting the owners, if it ever had.

It was always going to be difficult to keep a fan site going while pretending that the author of the books doesn't exist.

It just sounds so flat.

Sadly I think the anti-JKR rhetoric is still going strong in the media. Well, it is in the recent Metro article about Kit Harington replacing Nicholas Hoult as Gilderoy Lockhart in the new TV adaptation.

The Metro is ridiculous though. I think a lot of the time they just do it as click bait. Look at the comments though. The top one are always sensible.

the new series is going to make things interesting because people will watch it, they will enjoy it and they will therefore have all this internal conflict about how they 'shouldn't' enjoy it. all ridiculous of course.

I've always wondered if JKR will write an autobiography. It would be a fascinating read, and it would be great for her to be able to put her perspective across.

Have you listened to the Witchtrails of JKR podcast? It contains a lot of autobiographical interview alongside context and content from other perspectives. It's very good.

https://x.com/Daniel_Sugarman/status/2092227172819779794/photo/1

The Metro article does indeed seem to be of questionable quality (although following an update may be less likely to incur legal action).

The Metro has been as daft as a box of brushes on this issue for ages. It seems to be a mixture of clickbait and young captured staff writers.

As for Mugglenet, I was only a casual reader but stopped once the anti JKR stuff came in. It's a shame it was all deleted (although hopefully archived somewhere) as removing something from public view doesn't change the fact that it happened. But it is interesting to see the swing away from the rampant TRAism.

I can hear the rending of Harry Potter themed garments already though...

Yes, I have. I enjoyed it. I just think she is such a good writer, amd so insightful and wise, that an autobiography would be wonderful, if she ever decided to write one.

We already saw this playout before in the attempt to cancel Hogwarts Legacy in 2023. The reviews and online articles in run up always mentioned how evil JKR was. The controversy got the game trending. The result everyone who heard about it skipped the anti JKR ideas and just realised there was a Harry Potter game and bought it. Free publicity.

It became the best selling game of 2023. Made Warner Brothers and JKR a LOT of money.

It also locked Warner Brothers in on the idea that a HP series would be massive and proved that most of the public didn't care that JKR was cancelled so they could ignore the genderist media stuff and go ahead.

Again the drama about who or who will not be in series over the past few years gave it more publicity than ever. The trailers have had record views.

For JKR herself the huge ongoing sales of HP since 2020 gave her space to use her money for good causes, but also indicated that in the long run she was likely to always remain relevant and outlast her critics.

Speaking of JKR, I came across this article in UnHerd which seems to be arguing that JKR is a noble woman for standing up for her beliefs AND that the morality she wrote in the HP books is what gave her fans the inspiration to try and cancel her. The argument makes no sense to me but I thought others might like to read it.

https://unherd.com/2026/08/jk-rowling-is-reaping-the-potter-whirlwind/

http://archive.today/IEczq

'It has become depressingly fashionable to distance oneself from the supposedly heinous views of Harry Potter’s creator. Rowling’s advocacy for women and children in the gender debate, at great personal cost to herself, has awakened all the fury and poisonous misogyny of those living in their own fantasy worlds. Hundreds of scribblers and social-media screamers have been keen, over the years, to highlight the “irony” of the offence emanating from one of the figures in British life most celebrated for promoting warm and fuzzy values. How can this woman going to bat for single-sex spaces on X be the same dreamweaver of our childhoods — the creator of a world in which the oppressed triumphed? The implication is of a national treasure turned witch — a fallen angel. And, for many, it’s personal: some of the biggest evangelists for the cult of gender were once the biggest fans of Harry Potter.

The pipeline here should be self-evident. Many of the most vocal apostles for “trans resistance” are part of an arrested cohort: their generation festers in fandoms, hoards Funko Pops, indulges in parasocial relationships with celebrities and fictional characters. They assimilate the moral frameworks of imagined worlds and bluntly apply them to complex grown-up politics. Gender evangelism being a distinctly dweeby movement is not incidental: it directly relates to the baked-in credulousness, magical thinking and outsiderdom which has come to define their generation.

Nor is it incidental that these themes are the very foundations of the Harry Potter novels.

...The force — the creed, the author — which shaped our values also handed us the tools to dismantle them. Harry Potter’s Christian skeleton (intentional or otherwise) put the novel’s author on a familiar track: it seems inevitable now that she’d be ridiculed by those who were raised in the cosy, tolerant atmosphere which both Christianity and Rowling, in their own ways, ushered into being. '

Metro is only a whisker away from being Pink News.

Me neither. I posted 1 mild post, I wasn't banned but severely rebuked.

Metro have published an apology at the top of the article now.

I doubt any lessons will be learned.

"An earlier version of this story wrongly stated that JK Rowling had been ‘engaged in Holocaust denial’. This follows claims in March 2024 when Ms Rowling was accused on X of denying aspects of the Holocaust, an allegation which she strenuously denied. The allegation has been removed and Metro apologises for the error".

https://www.google.com/amp/s/metro.co.uk/2026/08/24/nicholas-hoult-backs-harry-potter-jk-rowling-backlash-29452455/amp/

Sorry, not relevant to the thread, but I'm pleased Kit Harrington will be playing Lockhart 😍 Even though Lockhart is a dafty.

It's fan sites like that that inspired The Ink Black Heart, so that's one good thing that came of it all!

Very glad that all the anti JKR people are disbanding and hopefully they'll one day be able to live down the embarrassment of being so silly

Nick Wallis needs to make a documentary about the hate she received

Agree! Have you listened to the audible recordings of the books? He played Lockhart for those and he is fantastic!

Praps Metro hacks will think twice in future. Bunch of numpties.