JK Rowling ‘mortified’ after accidentally tweeting ‘f*** up some TERFs’ in response to a 9-year-old’s drawing

Author apologised for her copy and paste error following a backlash

JK Rowling has apologised after she accidentally sent an explicit tweet in response to a nine-year-old’s drawing.

The author is currently releasing a new children’s book, The Ickabog, in chapters online, and has asked children to submit illustrations of the characters in the story.

In a since-deleted tweet sharing one of the drawings, Rowling wrote: “I love this truly fabulous Ickabog, with its bat ears, mismatched eyes, and terrifying bloodstained teeth!”

The tweet then bizarrely continued: “In court, Wolf claimed the Facebook post in which he’d said he wanted to ‘f**** up some TERFs’ was just ‘bravado’. #TheIckabog.”

Rowling was criticised not only for the explicit content in the message, but also for the text’s apparent misgendering of Tara Wolf, a trans woman who was convicted for assaulting radical feminist Maria Maclachlan during a protest in London in 2017.

Apologising for her mistake, Rowling wrote: “Sorry about the random and totally unconnected sentence that made its way in there.

“I accidentally pasted in part of a very un-Ickaboggish message I’d just received.”

In a subsequent tweet Rowling said she was “mortified” by the error.

“I’m going to say this once and I’m going to say it calmly and politely,” she tweeted.

“I certainly didn’t mean to paste a quotation from a message about the assault of Maria Maclaughlin (sic) into a tweet to a child, especially given the language used by the person convicted of the crime.

“However, I am not – as many of the people now swarming into my mentions seem to think – ashamed of reading about the assault.

“You should know by now that accusations of thought crime leave me cold. Take your censorship and authoritarianism elsewhere.

“They don’t work on me.”

TERF stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist. The term is used to describe feminists who share views that some consider transphobic.

Rowling has previously been accused of being a TERF after she posted a tweet in support of Maya Forstater, a researcher who was fired for tweeting “men cannot change into women”.