Controversial author J.K. Rowling courted controversy online when she tweeted that her iconic gay character Professor Dumbledore had actually just been going through a phase when he began a long and loving relationship with fellow wizard Gellert Grindelwald and had dated, and even married, a series of conventionally attractive, cisgender, heterosexual women.

“Dumbledore’s sexuality was never on the forefront of my mind, so when you just assume he had a homosexual relationship because I said he did, you can’t therefore assume he’s some kind of deviant homosexual! It’s nowhere in the text, it’s nowhere on the page, that isn’t how literature works, you filthy freaks!” the author emphatically insisted, receiving several replies featuring AI-generated images of a six-fingered Dumbledore holding the hand of a woman who appeared to be a construct of Rowling and several other prominent women in the online TERF space. […]