JK Rowling makes stance clear on House of Lords peerage calls amid Badenoch support: ‘Already rejected twice!’

Harry Potter author JK Rowling has revealed she has turned down two peerage offers in an admission on social media.

The 59-year-old writer was previously praised by Conservative politician Kemi Badenoch, who publicly announced she’d appoint her to the House of Lords if she won the Tory leadership.

It follows years of Rowling making headlines for her views on the gender debate and defence of women-only space.

It seems the author wasn’t interested in the offer though and this weekend, she took to X, formerly Twitter, to spill on the offers and how she had declined.

She penned on Sunday: “It’s considered bad form to talk about this but I’ll make an exception given the very particular circumstances.

“I’ve already turned down a peerage twice, once under Labour and once under the Tories. If offered one a third time, I still wouldn’t take it. It’s not her, it’s me.”

Former Secretary of State for Business Badenoch recently claimed in an interview that she had “managed to get Dr Hilary Cass a peerage” after her review of NHS gender identity services.

Lady Cass took her seat on Monday after being elected to the upper chamber as an independent crossbench peer in Tory leader Rishi Sunak’s honours list earlier in the year.

Rowling also welcomed the findings, which saw the NHS putting an end to prescribing puberty blockers for children.

The writer’s stance on the transgender discussion has been in the spotlight for years, with Rowling facing constant backlash amid claims she is being “transphobic”.

Despite her passionate views on gender identity, Rowling has strongly denied accusations of transphobia.

In a recent new essay she wrote, which features in The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a book on Scotland’s women’s rights battle, Rowling explained how she has only one regret about speaking out: that she didn’t decide to “sooner.”

Rowling pens in the essay that the transgender debate is “the greatest assault of my lifetime” on women’s rights.

In an extract published in The Times earlier this year, Rowling argues that she chose to speak up on the issue because she would have “felt ashamed for the rest of my days if I hadn’t”.

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She goes on to say: “I’d come to believe that the socio-political movement insisting ‘trans women are women’ was neither kind nor tolerant, but in fact profoundly misogynistic, regressive, dangerous in some of its objectives and nakedly authoritarian in its tactics.”

The writer confessed she neglected to voice her concerns sooner because “people around me, including some I love, were begging me not to speak”.

“I believe that what is being done to troubled young people in the name of gender identity ideology is, indeed, a terrible medical scandal,” she continued.