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The Insidious Transphobia of “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling” by Megan Phelps-Roper

Rebekah Kohlhepp

At 7:00 in the morning on February 14th, 2023, Megan Phelps-Roper posted a tweet. “Last year @jk_rowling responded to a letter I wrote her. I’d asked if she’d be part of a conversation seeking to understand her perspective and those of her critics. The result is a new audio series from @thefp: THE WITCH TRIALS OF J.K. ROWLING.”

The now-complete podcast series by The Free Press, hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, purports to bring together the “two sides” of the “debate about sex and gender,” meanwhile investigating tribalism, discernment, and humanity. It seeks to do this by having an open conversation with J.K. Rowling, a legend-turned-villain who’s “been the object of intense backlash,” according to Megan.

Like Rowling, Megan “knew what it was like to be an object of intense hatred. But I also knew the value of good-faith conversation, and the role it can play in bridging even the deepest divides.” Thus, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling was born.

The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling | Episode 1: Plotted in Darkness | Episode 2: Burn the Witch | Episode 3: A New Pyre | Episode 4: TERF Wars | Episode 5: The Tweets | Episode 6: Natalie and Noah | Episode 7: What if You’re Wrong?

Who is Megan Phelps-Roper?

Three years before Megan tweeted, almost to the day, I was sitting in my comfy chair devouring her book Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. I was, and am, an ex-Christian atheist, so I was inspired by her story. I gave a 5-star review on Goodreads.

Megan Phelps-Roper is best known for leaving her family’s, er, close-knit religious group in 2012 at age 26. Since then, she’s been an activist in that she gave a TED Talk, went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and of course, wrote a memoir.

Unfollow

Megan’s memoir documents her childhood in the Westboro Baptist Church and her family’s deep love for one another. They saw no contradictions in holding signs with homophobic slurs while basking in the self-righteousness of knowing only they truly loved their neighbors.

Unlike her grandfather Fred Phelps, Megan brought the feud between Westboro and outsiders to Twitter, where debates with strangers led her to question everything she’d been taught to believe and ultimately leave the church.

It was a beautiful story. Readers like me saw that if we could just take the time to explain to those in hate groups that hate is actually wrong, bigots might change their minds. We just needed to see the humanity of folks like Megan and her mother who protested soldiers’ funerals using KJV Bible verses.

How to empathize with bigots

Megan’s book was essentially predicated by her TED Talk, in which the world first learned her feel-good story:

Sometimes the conversation [from Twitter] even bled into real life. People I’d sparred with on Twitter would come out to the picket line to see me when I protested in their city. A man named David was one such person. He ran a blog called “Jewlicious,” and after several months of heated but friendly arguments online, he came out to see me at a picket in New Orleans. He brought me a Middle Eastern dessert from Jerusalem, where he lives, and I brought him kosher chocolate and held a “God hates Jews” sign.

Megan Phelps-Roper, I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s why I left

This story is told in the book, as well. I remember loving this passage about an unconventional friendship. I shared a photo of it on my blog’s now-defunct Instagram page because of how well it encapsulated Megan’s entire story and the power of kindness.

But with the hindsight of who Megan is, what she has actually used her leaving-Westboro story for, how ubiquitous and real Christian anti-Semitism is, how these “friendly arguments” about God’s hatred must have felt to her friend David… it’s not a feel good story at all. It’s neither cute nor funny. Jewish people were a plot device in Megan’s story; David helped her become a better person. She helped him do what? Waste his time arguing with bigots on Twitter only for her merely stop and not really ever do anything to combat rising anti-Semitic violence?

Context with Caelan

Nonbinary YouTuber and fellow follower of Megan’s Witch Trials project Caelan Conrad helped me to gain this needed perspective about Megan.

The TED Talk revealed something about her mindset, something that would be echoed throughout her memoir. It’s always been about her journey, her growth, her redemption. And the marginalized people she harmed, abused, attacked along the way… They are but plot, NPCs that existed only to further her journey along the path to change. Whenever the discussion of her attacks on other people on Twitter come up, she looks back on those times almost fondly because the conversations on Twitter with the people who decided to give her dozens of chances and the benefit of the doubt were part of what started her down her road to lessening how extreme her views were.

Caelan Conrad, The ALLEGED Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling (What The Megan Phelps Podcast Won’t Tell You)

This assurance that patient conversations with your enemies will cause one or both of you to see each other with compassion is the basis for her entire worldview—no, her entire brand.

This has been at the front of my mind lately, because I can’t help but see in our public discourse so many of the same destructive impulses that ruled my former church. […] We’ve broken the world into us and them, only emerging from our bunkers long enough to lob rhetorical grenades at the other camp. We write off half the country as out-of-touch liberal elites or racist misogynist bullies. No nuance, no complexity, no humanity. Even when someone does call for empathy and understanding for the other side, the conversation nearly always devolves into a debate about who deserves more empathy. And just as I learned to do, we routinely refuse to acknowledge the flaws in our positions or the merits in our opponent’s. Compromise is anathema. We even target people on our own side when they dare to question the party line. This path has brought us cruel, sniping, deepening polarization, and even outbreaks of violence. I remember this path. It will not take us where we want to go.

Megan Phelps-Roper, I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s why I left

It sounds nice, it really does. I loved her book… without the context that Caelan’s video and Megan’s new podcast provide. Caelan, having that context, said that reading Megan’s memoir was actually “incredibly frustrating.” (Trigger warning: suicide.)

I fundamentally disagree that being nicer to bigots makes the world better for anyone but the bigots, and that policing the way marginalized people speak only furthers their marginalization. Have you been on Twitter lately? You’re asking me to extend empathy and compassion in the face of systemic abuse, stochastic terrorism, and calls for my death simply for existing. We are in a fight for our actual rights, our lives. While the people you want me to show compassion, to gleefully send me death threats, recount the tales of my suicidality after being the victim of a hate crime, telling me that I was right, I should have killed myself. There’s no nuance, no context allowed in Megan’s framework. It’s simply, “Are you being nice? If yes, continue. If no, that isn’t who you want to be. Resist the urge to fight back.” I will extend empathy. Often. I will assume positive intent when there’s actually a reason to. But I will not spend my life trying to convince bigots that I deserve rights on Twitter.

Caelan Conrad, The ALLEGED Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling (What The Megan Phelps Podcast Won’t Tell You)

Why is Megan Phelps-Roper famous?

When you put it into perspective, Megan’s level of expertise on the signs of and cures for hatred and bigotry are lacking. She was in a hate group in which she treated the violence she inflicted on others as a joke. Marginalized people online befriended her for some reason and she left the group once she started seeing them as as human as she was.

Because it’s such a feel-good story for those of us who see Westboro as a hate group (and especially for the antitheists who view all religion as hateful), we haven’t stopped to think that other than having been in the group, and leaving the group, Megan doesn’t really have legitimate qualifications to teach others about cults, authoritarianism, or an analysis of discourse beyond her own personal experiences. For 10 years, she has been telling the same story over and over and over again, never actually doing anything beyond asking you to be impressed that she’s not calling for the deaths of gay people. Congratulations on learning at 26 what most people learned in kindergarten and spending the rest of your adult life telling us what we already know.

It was only after years on Twitter spreading hate speech that people outside her family were actually able to shake her unwavering convictions by being kind, patient, and calm with her, as opposed to the people who shouted her down online and in person. [The TED Talk is] a milquetoast speech, and it never really asks any meaningful questions, let alone answers them. At the time, I didn’t look into it any further as nothing she said was even remotely novel. It was like listening to a kid explain how they learned to share. It’s very cute, but probably not something you’re going to walk away from with new insight like, “Oh my God, I never thought to be calm or ask questions before. Thanks, Meggie.” Her entire thesis is built around and centers her own experiences as the attacker, the bigot, the abuser. 

Caelan Conrad, The ALLEGED Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling (What The Megan Phelps Podcast Won’t Tell You)

A dangerous lens

Megan doesn’t see the world through a red, Westboro-tinted lens anymore. But the lens she has now is still dangerous. Having spent only 10 years outside the church, all that she really knows is to see anything that reminds her of it as harmful. Remember what she said: “We’ve broken the world into us and them, […] I remember this path. It will not take us where we want to go.” This is like seeing Black people creating their own spaces to be safe from racism as morally equal to white supremacists excluding Black people out of racism.

Caelan explains, “Her litmus test for whether something is good or bad is often reduced to, ‘Does this remind me of the Westboro Baptist Church?’ If the answer is yes, then the action is unethical. But her analysis lacks nuanced depth. It seems to happen in a vacuum.” Her entire moral compass is based on this question, which depends solely on her own personal experience. And knowing how bad she used to be, she seems incapable of seeing herself as anything but reformed, an angel by comparison to the demon she was in what she would like to think was another life.

So when the trans community’s response to J.K. Rowling’s transphobia made Megan Phelps-Roper’s Westboro alarm go off, she realized that the two sides just needed to do what Megan knew in her bones was the answer. They need to be civilized, talk, and find common ground.

Scrupulously good faith

In an interview with her podcast’s publisher, Megan explained how she thinks Witch Trials can do for others what folks on Twitter once did for her:

I remember writing to [Rowling] about noticing these two backlashes that she has faced and how I really wanted to make sense of them, to understand where people were coming from. I talked about how I know the value of real good faith conversation and how I felt like it was important to try to find that in the conversation currently happening on sex and gender, where it has just seemed impossible for years now, many years now. […] my belief in the power of conversation is so strong, it completely changed my life. I would not be here if not for that, if not for the grace and generosity that people showed me, and I really believe this, that that people really want to understand each other. They don’t want things to continue on as they have been for so many years now. And I wouldn’t have pursued this project if I hadn’t spent a lot of time talking with a lot of people, including many trans people, and hearing from them, and not just my speculation about the power of conversation, but this was something that they wanted. They wanted to be able to discuss hard things in public with grace.

Megan Phelps-Roper speaking to Bari Weiss on Twitter Spaces
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The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling

It’s important to understand exactly what Megan Phelps-Roper thinks her podcast is. Why did she make it? What does she think she’s accomplishing? What ills of society is she healing, and how?

J.K. Rowling has been an absolute force in the culture for more than two decades at this point. And the world has changed a lot during that time. And so in Witch Trials, we kind of use her story as a way of exploring those changes. We investigate the similarities and the differences between these two vocal backlashes that she’s faced. First, from the Christian right, as you mentioned, who said she was promoting witchcraft and disobedience to authority. And then also now from the left who accuse her of transphobia. And it’s not a story about shaming or blaming people for being angry at her or for vehemently disagreeing with her and condemning her. And it’s also not about trying to prove that she’s right. It’s really about trying to understand where people on all sides of this conflict are coming from in a scrupulously good faith way.

Megan Phelps-Roper speaking to Bari Weiss on Twitter Spaces

All sides. Scrupulously good faith. Remember that.

It’s worth noting that Megan repeats this exact paragraph, nearly word for word, on Sam Harris’s podcast. I can only wonder why she would have something like this memorized; if it’s just because she’s not comfortable speaking on the fly or if The Free Press trained her on how to answer questions.

The origins

I’m fascinated when trying to imagine just how this podcast came to be. Megan and her publisher Bari Weiss’s story is that Megan wrote J.K. Rowling a letter in 2022, and was shocked that Rowling responded.

J.K. Rowling: very famous woman, but does not give a lot of interviews. Megan, for some reason, she agreed not to sit down with The New York Times or The Washington Post or any of the other legacy outlets. She decided to sit down with you for what ended up being more than 9 hours over the course of several days at her home castle in Scotland. And I don’t think she’s ever done that before. And you write in this essay introducing the series that it was all because of a letter you wrote. And so I think people are probably wondering what the hell was in that letter.

Bari Weiss speaking to Megan Phelps-Roper on Twitter Spaces

First of all, Megan frames it as a letter telling Rowling about her time in Westboro and asking her to have an open conversation about her views. Theoretically, it could have included that, but it obviously also included a request to be interviewed for a podcast. (We never get to read the letter.) Megan herself admits in her interview with Weiss that “it is such a long shot,” and “the likelihood that she says yes to this is so minimal that if she says yes, maybe that’s a sign of some kind.”

But was it a long shot? Considering that Weiss and Rowling co-signed a letter in 2020, and that they already had mutual friends like Maya Forstater and Julie Bindel, both of whom Rowling had brunch with in early 2022, I highly, highly doubt that Megan decided on her own to send Rowling a letter out of the blue last year. I am almost positive that Weiss approached Megan and Rowling with the idea for the podcast.

The title

Only moments after I saw Megan’s announcement of the podcast, I saw her predictably defending the title which paints an undeniable picture.

At the end of March, Megan was still trying to sell the title as “deep,” “interesting,” and “about human nature.” She says she references one reason for the title in episode 1. That reference is:

After I left Rowling’s home, I spoke to reporters and historians. Transgender adults, teens and advocates, doctors and lawyers, and many of Rowling’s critics, including some who supported book bans. And one of the things that stood out to me was how people on all sides of this conflict felt so under attack, so threatened that they invoked the language of witch hunts, even as they vehemently disagreed on who was the witch and who was the mob lighting the fire.

Megan Phelps-Roper, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 1: Plotted in Darkness

She went into more detail about this “ambiguous” title in the Twitter Spaces interview:

People on all sides of this conflict invoke the language of witch hunts. And they see themselves as the object of a moral panic. […] Ultimately, we realized the title was actually far more ambiguous than it seems at first glance. So obviously there are people who see Rowling as the subject of a witch hunt, so she is prosecuting a witch hunt, and other people who think that she is the object of one, that she’s the target of one. It is an investigation. People look at that and they read it in one way without acknowledging or realizing that it could be read a different way. And I don’t blame them. It makes perfect sense that people might misread or misunderstand, but it is a very well thought out title.

Megan Phelps-Roper speaking to Bari Weiss on Twitter Spaces

Well thought out indeed.

When you title something called “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” you have already set up a narrative in which Rowling is the persecuted figure.

Watch out for that narrative. Be vigilant. Because Rowling needs to be questioned, rigorously. She’s a talented enough writer to know exactly what she’s saying and exactly how it’s landing. She’s a talented enough writer to know exactly how to thread needle after needle, so her supporters can claim there’s nothing to see there and her critics get exhausted.

Monica Hesse, Listening to ‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’ is exhausting work

The Free Press and Bari Weiss

I had never heard of The Free Press before, but I did not trust it after reading Megan’s article about Rowling being “canceled,” with her air of wonder about why that could have possibly happened. And crucially, the concept of “freedom of speech” has been co-opted by the right to essentially mean “freedom to harass people and spread harmful misinformation without consequences.” So no, my hopes were not high for The Free Press.

Well, The Free Press is owned by Bari Weiss, who is best known for leaving The New York Times because they were “ideologically unaligned.” Her resignation letter doesn’t give many specifics of what happened, but it hints that The New York Times was simply not conservative—or centrist—enough for her and the writers she platformed like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jesse Singal. Mind you, this was before The New York Times—or Weiss—openly supported Rowling’s transphobia… largely to promote the Witch Trials podcast!

(Interestingly, the podcast is also sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. While “freedom of expression” is a common dogwhistle, and FIRE has enjoyed donations from places like the Charles Koch Institute, they’ve also done good things like challenging Florida’s recent “Stop WOKE” Act.)

But Weiss’s anti-trans views are extensive. According to Transgender Map, Weiss “is an American opinion writer and a key figure in promoting and platforming gender-critical and anti-transgender views.”

While at the New York Times, Weiss popularized the intellectual dark web, described as a gateway to the far right. She has platformed, appeared with, promoted, and logrolled for other activists in the gender critical movement, including J.K. Rowling, Alice Dreger, Jesse Singal, Katie Herzog, Abigail Shrier, Ana Valens, Sue Evans, Suzy Weiss, Julie Bindel, Carole Hooven, Maud Maron, Andrew Sullivan, Lisa Selin Davis, and Helen Lewis.

Transgender Map: Bari Weiss vs. transgender people

Weiss also sits on the board of trustees for the still-seeking-accreditation University of Austin Texas, which holds summer courses on Old Parkland Campus in Dallas, which is owned by Crow Holdings, the real estate business of Harlan Crow, Clarence Thomas’s recently-discovered Nazi artifact-loving benefactor. The school, where a Black Lives Matter protestor had the privilege of debating a Trump campaign worker, also boasts faculty and advisors such as Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kathleen Stock.

A look into The Free Press’s transphobia

Browsing The Free Press, I found an article by someone named Jamie Reed called I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle. Reed wrote that she believes that the clinic where she worked as a case manager, the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, didn’t screen young people enough before carelessly prescribing them hormone replacement therapy.

Three weeks later, a local St. Louis paper reported on what really goes on inside the clinic with detailed but anonymous stories from several patients’ parents which directly contradict Reed’s claims.

Rather than the “rapid medicalization” and “poor assessment of mental health concerns” that Reed cited in a complaint sent to Bailey in January, parents reported a well-defined, step-by-step approach that could be halted at any time.

Slow, methodical adjustments began at home, long before medications were used: testing out new names, using different pronouns, cutting hair short or growing it long. The social transitions ran concurrently with mental health care, sometimes lasting years. Only then, parents said, was medication considered.

Parents push back on allegations against St. Louis transgender center. ‘I’m baffled.’

What’s more, a parent on Twitter explained that she and her young trans child could not even obtain the information (not medication) they needed because Reed lied and said the center didn’t provide those services. And more recently, yet another writer at The Free Press, Emily Yoffe, published an article featuring a concerned mother about her transfemme child’s treatment at the same center. Hours after it was published, Alex—the teen in question—revealed that the article was rife with lies, and that she hadn’t given her mother permission to share the medical information that she did.

The patience to find transphobia

It’s safe to say that The Free Press is an anti-trans publication with a record of distorting and excluding information that doesn’t fit their harmful narrative. This is why I first wondered if Megan Phelps-Roper approached them or if they approached her, seeing her passion for “good-faith conversation” as a perfect vehicle for the biggest story about one of the internet’s biggest names all year. With Megan, they can shield accusations of platforming a transphobic bigot with claims that they’re just “bridging divides,” questioning what they see as authoritarian, and being unbiased.

It is none of those things. The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling is a transphobic podcast. But to anyone who calls it that on Twitter, Megan will always say, “Just listen to the podcast.” “We’ll get to that in episode x.” “If only people would listen to the whole thing.”

Well, I did listen. Every week. But listening is half of the battle. Maybe you’ve listened to Witch Trials and thought it was even-handed. But as Monica Hesse wrote for the Washington Post, “Things are said that sound reasonable. You would only know they were unreasonable — they were, in fact, wrong — if you had the patience to fact-check, or if you had the personal experience of counterevidence.” Or maybe… if you had this blog post.

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Episode 1: Plotted in Darkness

Let’s face it. Everyone wanted to listen to this podcast because we wanted to either confirm or deny J.K. Rowling’s transphobia. Most of us probably weren’t here to learn about the witch hunts of old, or Rowling’s story of writing Harry Potter, or about Harry Potter as a 2000s repeat of the Satanic Panic for Christians. And at first glance, these things don’t have to do with Rowling’s transphobia. But in fact, they were a tactic for setting up a very intentional narrative about Rowling as a victim: from men, from religious extremists, from inquisitors.

A tale of two backlashes

From the right

From the Twitter Spaces interview quotes above through the first half of the series, Megan teaches us to get comfortable slipping seamlessly between Rowling’s two backlashes—from Christians of the 2000s and from trans people and allies today—as equivalent situations. In this narrative, Rowling has managed to piss off two sides which hate each other. Therefore, they are both wrong and Rowling sits smugly in the self-righteous middle.

Megan begins,

J.K. Rowling is one of the most successful authors in the history of publishing and for the past 25 years, she’s also been one of the most beloved. […] But in the summer of 2020, Rowling published a string of tweets about one of the most polarizing subjects in society right now, sex and gender. She waded into a conflict about transgender rights and the way she believed some activists were eroding hard won rights for women. There was an explosive reaction to Rowling’s tweets, which led many, including lifelong fans of her work, to condemn her and to call for her books to be banned, boycotted and in some cases burned.

Megan Phelps-Roper, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 1: Plotted in Darkness

Notice how vague it all is. That’s the method of the entire podcast. If you don’t explicitly name anti-trans violence, you don’t have to condemn it. That’s why the tweets were about “sex and gender,” why she “waded into a conflict,” only to cause what feels like an acutely disproportionate “explosive reaction.”

From the left

After explaining that she grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church (and “spent the decade since investigating belief and how it compels us to act and identify and how it colors and shapes the world we inhabit” by doing what, I’m not sure), Megan pivots into the other “backlash”:

And reading Rowling’s tweets and then her transformation in the eyes of many who had loved her, it surprised me because growing up, it was my community that thought J.K. Rowling was evil and it was other Christian fundamentalists who had amassed in force to condemn Rowling and to call her work dangerous. […] Rowling, even though she’s inspired profound adoration throughout her career with fans all over the planet, she’s also been the subject of intense, widespread and vocal backlashes from people whose politics could not be more at odds. And for the past year, I’ve been trying to figure out why. What is it about this woman and her work that has captured the ire of very different groups of people across time?

Megan Phelps-Roper, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 1: Plotted in Darkness

As much as Megan can’t comprehend this mystery, I simply can’t comprehend why it’s a mystery. Why do Christians not like stories about wizards and witchcraft? There are Bible verses condemning wizards and witchcraft. Why do trans people not like it when you’re transphobic? They… want to live and be left alone. But if Megan really wanted to answer the questions because she literally just wanted the answers, the entire series would be 6 minutes long.

Megan, and/or her editors at The Free Press, used one of Rowling’s very first lines as a hook for the announcement article: “You could not have misunderstood me more profoundly.” I personally believe that they intentionally frame this quote as being about Rowling’s trans views—no, you’ve got it all wrong! I didn’t say what I said!—when it is actually about her legacy. She goes on, “I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy. What a pompous way to live your life. Walking around thinking, what will my legacy be? Whatever! I’ll be dead! I care about now. I care about the living.” This flippancy is how Megan and Rowling’s conversation in Rowling’s “snug,” “cozy,” “homey” castle begins.

The rest of episode 1 catches you off guard because it exclusively discusses Rowling’s abusive marriage at the time she had the idea and wrote the manuscript for Harry Potter before being catapulted to fame. As everyone who criticizes Rowling says, I can’t imagine the pain she must have gone through at the hands of her ex-husband, and it is a relief that she made it out safe and had a support system to rely on. Hers is not a situation I would not wish upon anyone. That said, Megan and her co-creators still strategically placed this story at the beginning of their Rowling deep dive so we always have the image of her as the damsel, the innocent victim at the mercy of a violent man.

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Episode 2: Burn the Witch

The first 15 minutes of episode 2 aren’t much more than a 90’s soundscape following a short, seemingly out-of-place discussion of witch hunts. We hear about gay rights, the LA riots, and the Bill Clinton scandal, until we’re able to make a pit stop at goth kids being prescribed Ritalin and Prozac. Megan makes a very clear parallel between the depressed teens back then and now:

There was a growing concern among many adults back then, just as there is today, that the cultural forces influencing young people were leading them to be depressed, anxious and antisocial. And in response to this, they saw a subset of the country saying that what these young people needed was medical intervention […] which sparked a national debate about whether to trust big pharmaceutical companies and the doctors who were telling parents that their kids needed these drugs.

Megan Phelps-Roper, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 2: Burn the Witch

The soundscape continues on through the Branch Davidian cult’s tragic shootout, the Oklahoma City car bombing, and the Columbine shooting that revitalized a narrative of Christians being persecuted by medicated Marilyn Manson fans.

Indebted to a wizard

From this mention of the Christian persecution complex we transition to the Christian parents and pastors who called for a boycott of Harry Potter. Megan reminds us that we owe the little protection that LGBTQ+ books have today to the 2003 Arkansas court case Counts v. Cedarville School District over whether schools could restrict students’ access to the Harry Potter books.

[Megan:] Would you say that these cases involving Harry Potter related book bans and restrictions are now the kind of precedent that is protecting LGBTQ books in public libraries?

[Brian Meadors (attorney who argued on behalf of access to the Potter books in the case):] Yes, I think that’s fair. The part of the legacy of Harry Potter is that it’s going to protect a lot of LGBTQ books. That’s right. And things like this are going to always happen, and they always have in American history, right? There’s always going to be some group that considers itself aggrieved. They’re going to try to shut down viewpoints that they don’t like.

Megan Phelps-Roper and Brian Meadors, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 2: Burn the Witch

Soon after, Megan asks the case’s opposing attorney, David Hogue, whether he would “say that the Christian parents were maybe part of a moral panic specifically around those books?” to which he replies, “Yeah, absolutely.”

Megan pleads the fifth

Although this example might feel like a stretch, the first three episodes have a very calculated way of equating these evangelicals with trans people. Both condemn Rowling, and neither have valid reasons. But Megan never comes out and says this. Actually, she never really comes out and says anything. Instead of calling the situation a moral panic herself, she asks this leading question to someone else, who will obviously answer in the affirmative after the long conversation they’ve been having about the (actually unjustified) Harry Potter backlash from evangelicals.

In doing so, readers will apply this straightforward implication from Megan that the first backlash was an unjustified moral panic with a suggestion that today’s backlash is as well.

They bring this up very intentionally because the anti-trans frenzy we are living through right now is the textbook definition of a moral panic (which is not unlike other recent moral panics).

In their classic analysis of moral panics, sociologists Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda outline five key characteristics: concern, or the belief that the behaviour of the group in question are likely to have a negative effect on society; ‘hostility’ – fairly self-explanatory – to the point where the group in question are seen as ‘folk devils’, that is, a group of people who are portrayed in media as outsiders and deviant, and who are blamed for crimes or other sorts of social problems; ‘consensus’, or widespread acceptance that the group in question poses a very real threat to society; ‘disproportionality’ – the resulting societal action taken against the group is entirely disproportionate to the actual threat posed by it; and, finally, ‘volatility’ – moral panics typically appear and subside very quickly; often vanishing abruptly because media and therefore public, interest wanes or a new panic supplants the previous one.

Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue p. 38, describing Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda’s Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance, pp. 57-65

But by insinuating that it is people like Rowling who are the victims of moral panics, when it is quite obvious that it’s the other way around, people like me are required to shoot back with an indignant, “No, you are!”

It’s all meticulously thought out. Megan’s approving response to one tweet is very telling.

These tweets were in response to how real witch trials were not “someone sat in a mansion while the poors complained about how rude they were,” although it can also apply to those who have taken the opening sentence of Megan’s article as equating Rowling and God himself: “J.K. Rowling is arguably the most successful author in the history of publishing, with the possible exception of God.” Even I see it as a stretch to say that Megan was really equating Rowling with God here, but it’s worth mentioning as it’s gotten some attention.

Show me the words, Jack

But this shows how carefully Megan can guard herself from being accused of saying anything, because I could probably count on one hand how many times she actually comes out in this podcast and says what she believes. While Rowling tends to be more direct, she uses this tactic to deflect accusations of transphobia as well.

Remember: the title is ambiguous. It could mean anything. It’s mysterious. Future generations will marvel at the uncertainty that shrouds this cryptic artifact.

There, truly, is the whole issue in a nutshell. If your bar for bigotry requires Rowling to say out loud, “I hate trans people,” then that bar will never be cleared. Even if Rowling feels that way, I doubt she’d ever say it that way; even conservative pundits know not to say it that way. There is simply nothing to be strategically gained by uttering such an obviously prejudiced sentence.

Monica Hesse, Listening to ‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’ is exhausting work
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Episode 3: A New Pyre

Episode 3 is a total shock after the subtlety of episodes 1 and 2. It begins:

[Megan]: Can you talk to me about some of the threats that you’ve received over the past few years?

[J.K. Rowling:] There have been a lot, a huge amount, as every woman will know, who speaks up on this issue, a huge amount of “I want her to choke on my fat trans dick.” You know, like very sexualized abuse.

Megan Phelps-Roper and J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 3: A New Pyre

This victimhood sets the scene.

Enabling monsters

For about 15 minutes, Megan and Rowling talk about Harry Potter‘s rise to fame online and the growth of its online fan community. They touch on MuggleNet’s trolls and the gay teenagers who found a home in the Harry Potter fandom; then they reminisce upon Rowling’s experience giving the Harvard commencement address in 2008. Here is the full passage from which Megan shares bits and pieces:

Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places. Of course this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise, and many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages. They can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the willfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid. What is more, those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters, for without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it through our own apathy.

J.K. Rowling’s 2008 Harvard commencement speech

Searing, bitter irony.

Tumblr snowflakes

Soon after, Megan is talking to Angela Nagle, whom she introduces as a “writer and internet historian.” Megan and Nagle, together with Helen Lewis and Katherine Dee, describe Tumblr as an early home for two things: child porn and the exploration of gender identities.

But it was taken to such an extreme that people began to describe this as the snowflake, the person who constructs a totally kind of boutique and unique identity for themselves, and then guards that identity in a very, very sensitive way and reacts in an enraged way when anyone does not respect the uniqueness of their identity.

Angela Nagle, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 3: A New Pyre

They then take this odd but harmless community of young people exploring their identities, and say it was “somewhat similar” to 4chan, a site that has been a breeding ground for several mass shootings.

Notice how, even if they don’t come out and say “Tumblr and 4chan are equal,” the women speak of them in the same tone, poking fun at the silly identities on Tumblr and never once condemning the violent culture of 4chan. Both sites are treated as simply peculiar.

And at the same time, you had on the other side of the political spectrum, you could say the most insensitive culture imaginable, which was the culture of 4chan. And the culture of 4chan was really based around transgression and offensiveness and the kind of fun of being offensive. […] You know, the entire culture became a sort of a one upmanship of who can post the most outrageous or offensive thing imaginable. And so they’re going to make Holocaust jokes and they’re going to make Anne Frank jokes.

Angela Nagle, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 3: A New Pyre

They share a soundbite of what’s presumably a 4chan user saying, “Making an ethnostate is hard work. You really should ask yourself, what eugenics programs are you going to use? What type of plumbing do you use in your internment camps?” before Megan says, “So 4chan, if you’ve never heard of it, it was actually somewhat similar to Tumblr in that it was largely anonymous and text and image based.”

A bad etymology lesson

While they don’t acknowledge the shootings that 4chan spawned, Megan recounts how 4chan users would steal and leak celebrities’ nude photos, concluding “So in a lot of ways the norms and mores of Tumblr and 4chan end up being these kind of mirror images of one another.” Nagle agrees: Tumblr’s “ultra-sensitivity” reinforces 4chan’s “anti-sensitivity.” Identifying as genderqueer is very similar to joking about internment camps, apparently. Lewis chimes in: “If you’ve ever heard the kind of right wing activist railing against woke culture, then you’ll be hearing them condemning phrases that were popularized on Tumblr.”

Unknown voices read, “Micro-aggression. Trigger warnings. Latinx, nonbinary, two-spirit, transgender.” Lewis adds, “Even the idea of being cis as opposed to being trans, you know, the idea that everybody was one of those two things.” Megan explicitly says, “Many of them can be traced back to their increased use on Tumblr,” and “you can go back and kind of watch how these ideas start to migrate outward from Tumblr.” Lewis again adds, “The idea of privilege was very big. You know, the idea that you have white privilege, male privilege, cis privilege. That really came from Tumblr and has had a sort of odd effect on discourse ever since.”

I never said that

I share these quotes to show how frustrating it must be for listeners to ask Megan for clarification.

Instead of ever owning anything, admitting that something she says is wrong, or even discussing what she said, it’s always “I never said that.” It’s always “Heavily implying something is not actually saying it.” I wonder why they would even make the podcast when, conveniently, no one actually ever says anything, only shares their observations, when a critic tries to scrutinize their words. Why they would spend so much time focusing on how these terms feel like they originated on Tumblr, when they do not actually believe that, is beyond me.

(Angela Nagle’s book, which I’ll touch on in a moment, said somewhat more specifically that “Tumblr had put [Judith] Butler’s theory into practice and created an entire subcultural language, set of slogans and style to go with it. […] It was the subcultural digital expression of the fruition of Judith Butler’s ideas.” However, the only examples she gives are a list of unheard-of neogenders and the idea of checking one’s privilege.)

Milo and Michael

A lengthy discussion of Tumblr’s role in the invention of “cancel culture,” and Rowling’s framing as a victim in which cancellation “happened to her” (she was “hit with it” after writing a short story in 2016 depicting Navajo people with racist stereotypes), led Megan and Rowling to discuss the “authoritarianism” Rowling saw in the student protests against Milo Yiannopolous, “who was essentially the culture of 4chan in human form,” giving campus speeches.

And I’m watching from across the pond as he tries to speak on various campuses. And there are protests, riots. “We want him deplatformed. We don’t want him to speak at all.” And I thought it was a terrible strategic error. And my feeling was you are giving this man way more power than he deserves by behaving in this way. It made Milo look sexier and edgier than he deserved to look. I thought it was a strategically appalling turn. Get on that platform and eviscerate his ideas. Get on that platform and expose him for the charlatan that he is. You push back hard, but you’ve given him so much power by refusing to talk. […] I thought they were serving his purposes because he was able to walk away from that saying, look, they won’t even, they don’t dare debate me. This is how dangerous and edgy I am. And I don’t think we want to cast the alt right in that light.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 3: A New Pyre

(While Rowling talked, Megan also added that “Milo went from relative obscurity to being a regular on prime time television and political talk shows in just a few months,” which is false.)

This was released six days before Michael Knowles would go on CPAC and publicly call for “the eradication of transgenderism from public life entirely,” while the University of Pittsburgh, still, at time of writing, is slated for him to speak on campus on April 18th. This is why we cannot debate the alt-right. Not Milo Yiannolopous, not Michael Knowles. There’s no witty comeback to “I want to eradicate human beings.” If protesting people like that makes them look edgy and sexy, perhaps Rowling hopes that she can be perceived the same way online.

Kill All Normies

This talk of Tumblr, 4chan, and Milo Yiannopolous is actually taken pretty directly from Angela Nagle’s 2017 book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.

This article about Nagle’s book is thorough, detailed, and loaded with context. Large sections of the article’s criticism of the book can also apply to this episode, such as when the author says Nagle “laugh[s] along at the alt-right’s chosen [Tumblr-liberal] scapegoats,” Nagle implies that an article filled with misrepresentations of rape allegations on college campuses is protected free speech, she cites a white nationalist’s dubious claims to justify why men become incels, insinuates that Gamergate was just a response to a terrible “SJW” game, and suggests that trigger warnings are unreasonable.

Finally, another Twitter exchange Megan had regarding this episode was telling.

She wasn’t equating them, she was noticing and examining the dynamics between them, you see. And when you try to call out the podcast for not acknowledging the real-world harm generated in 4chan (or anything else that Megan or Rowling obviously imply throughout the series), suddenly that’s not subtle or pervasive enough for this podcast. Not to mention that the counter-example that Megan brings up here, the fact that people who reported on Westboro Baptist Church when she was growing up didn’t simultaneously report on the murder of George Tiller 50 years earlier because his murderer was Christian, is worse than an imperfect parallel, it’s an entirely false equivalency.

Here’s how episode 3 ends…

https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/episode-3-end.mp3
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Episode 4: TERF Wars

…and episode 4 begins.

https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/episode-4-beginning.mp3

The stage is set with these repeated soundbites of violent trans people harassing so-called feminists, saying, “Fuck you, you ugly piece of shit! You look like you got your teeth knocked out, you fucking fascist! Nobody knows who you are and nobody cares and you will die alone!”

Just before this, at the start of episode 4, guest Helen Lewis had explained to Megan how the term “TERF,” trans-exclusionary radical feminist, is an extremely offensive term to “handle with tongs.”

It stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. And it kind of doesn’t mean any of those things anymore. I’m often called TERF, even though I’ve written in print that I think trans women are women. It doesn’t matter, though. It just means this is a bad woman. You don’t need to know any more about her. I mean, TERF is basically witch.

Helen Lewis, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars

“TERF is basically witch.” But the title, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, in which they discuss people’s use of TERF to describe Rowling, is to be understood as ambiguous.

Women’s rights and wrongs

(Trigger warning: domestic violence.) Similarly to the beginning of episode 3, they switch gears after a loaded opening to a still heavy but seemingly different topic: domestic violence. Lewis explains to Megan how Rowling grew up during a time of progress in the UK feminist movement, in which the first women’s refuge opened in Britain by a woman named Erin Pizzey (whose switch from feminism to violently misogynist men’s-rights-activism Lewis more or less justifies; she doesn’t say “feminism has become too woke,” but she may as well have). Lewis highlights the Reclaim the Night campaign, for women to be able to safely walk outside at night, which is now ironically intersectional and trans-affirming.

Naively, I wasn’t sure at first where this conversation was going until Rowling’s voice appeared.

It’s very much a feature of the culture in which I grew up that women, by virtue of their biology, are subjected to specific harms, specific pressures, and require certain protections, and that is inextricably linked with our biology. And we cannot fight for our rights without naming and accurately describing what makes us different from men. […] My feminism must remain grounded in the sex class and the oppressions my sex class suffer. That’s the basis for our oppression. That’s my understanding of why certain things have happened to me.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars

Ah, okay. Women with vulvas require protections that women without vulvas somehow do not need. To begin steering the conversation in the direction where it is undoubtedly headed, we also get the first claim that TERF is a slur. (It’s not.)

Feminists were hugely disparaged across the mainstream. They were ugly. They didn’t shave their armpits. They were aggressive. They were butch. And I suppose I see real parallels with, now, with the slur that is TERF. All the same tropes about a woman not behaving the way a woman is supposed to behave. You know that. All of the clichés.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars

It’s the same picture

After the ad read (for NetSuite, Athletic Greens, and Stamps.com, if you were wondering), Megan steps back and recounts the rocky progress of LGBT rights over the past decades, including rights for gay couples to marry and adopt, as well as Obama’s “protections for trans healthcare and military service” and Trump’s subsequent overturning of those protections. Megan then adds “Figures like Viktor Orbán in Hungary who are stoking attacks on the very legitimacy of LGBT identities altogether. But that was not the fight that J.K. Rowling would eventually step into.”

Was it not?

I think the hardest thing for outsiders to understand is that there are two different arguments going on. One is the traditional conservative right argument, which is anti-LGBT. So someone like Viktor Orbán in Hungary doesn’t think people should be allowed to transition, and he wants to take away that right from them, which is part of a broader idea that LGBT identities are decadent and postmodern and are going to sap the vital life force out of the country. That is one criticism of modern LGBT politics. The other one is a criticism from the left in which it says sometimes male people and female people have different interests. No matter how the male people identify. And we need to work out those conflicts in policy and law.

Helen Lewis, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars

Megan vs. the Overton window

Megan and her guests don’t understand that people like Viktor Orbán, or, notably, the Westboro Baptist Church, shift the Overton window of what type of ideas are socially acceptable by giving people something to point to and say, “You think what I’m saying is homophobic? I’ll show you homophobic.”

As Caelan Conrad pointed out in their video after reading this tweet:

She is so certain, so assured, that her open bigotry didn’t inspire more, that if she had persuaded anyone, she definitely would know about it. This is naivete to the point of willful ignorance. She can’t possibly believe that she actually persuaded zero people to do something a little more extreme. Because her abuse didn’t exist in a vacuum. When you move the anti-gay Overton window to the right, it gives the people lobbying to restrict queer rights, something they can point to, to say, “This bill I wrote isn’t homophobic, I’ll show you homophobic—real homophobia.” It makes everything less than the worst seem less bad. “Yeah, I don’t support gay marriage, but I’m not, like, out on the street saying they’re going to burn in hell. I’m not a homophobe.”

Caelan Conrad, The ALLEGED Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling (What The Megan Phelps Podcast Won’t Tell You)

In a tweet after the release of the final episode, Megan would echo what Lewis said here:

It’s very interesting to me that she acknowledges, um, speeches like the one at CPAC, and condemns the conflation of her and her guests’ positions (of women’s safety) with Knowles’s (of trans eradication). But as Caelan said, her and Rowling’s ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. When a podcast like this tries to frame Rowling’s harmful anti-trans rhetoric as centrist (somewhere between the evangelicals and trans people who both burned her books) or even leftist, as Helen Lewis implies in the quote above, now there’s room for rent on the right for more extreme and explicit calls for violence like those from Knowles.

Ties to the far right

Even without that less direct effect of this podcast on anti-trans rhetoric, people like Rowling and Kathleen Stock, who we will meet later, have mutual friends with far-right hate groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and The Heritage Foundation who influenced the total ban on homosexuality in Uganda by Yoweri Museveni, who could be seen as a modern-day Viktor Orbán. (Maya Forstater recently gave a speech at an ADF UK event; Julie Bindel is friends with Heritage Foundation speaker Jennifer Lahl; Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance together with Angela Wild, has claimed that working with the Heritage Foundation is the only solution to the trans “medical scandal.” Details here.)

As YouTuber John Duncan points out, especially with respect to how this newer anti-trans movement is virtually identical to past moral panics about keeping cis white women safe from Muslim men, Black men, and Jewish men, maybe it’s not two movements, but one.

Not to mention the evidence we have of how Rowling has both directly and indirectly influenced anti-trans policies in the US, as well as platformed and defended Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull/Posie Parker, who also has far-right ties and whose rallies have attracted positive attention from Nazis.

Lewis goes on: “That is very different from saying someone’s a pervert or a degenerate. It says you are perfectly free to live your life. This is a perfectly valid identity to adopt. However, there might be times when it comes into conflict with other identities.” To which Megan replies, “Take, for example, women’s sports,” before launching into newscast soundbites about Lia Thomas breaking women’s swimming records. So the conclusion is that trans people can live their lives, as long as that doesn’t include competing in athletic events, seeking refuge from domestic violence, or as Megan pivots to next, going to the bathroom.

Self ID

This begins a long conversation about the passing of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill in Scotland (or self ID law) which now allows trans people to get their correct (Megan says “preferred”) gender printed on their government ID without a gender dysphoria diagnosis or medical intervention. What no one mentions is that the UK’s National Health Service’s protocol for gender-affirming care is deeply flawed, requiring a gender dysphoria diagnosis and a trial period living as one’s true gender before agreeing to get the gender-affirming hormones or surgeries that folks like Rowling and Lewis believe should be required before people can apply for a Gender Recognition Certificate. Even then, there are years-long wait lists to receive this care, if your doctor even agrees that you need it. In British trans woman Shon Faye’s case, her clinician would not move forward with her care until she legally changed her name.

The series gets less subtle as it progresses, as we can see when Megan first claims that this Self ID law would allow “predatory males” into women’s spaces. But of course, it’s Rowling who first drops the charade altogether.

So I was already aware that the activism was arguing for this kind of self-identification. Therefore, an entirely male-bodied male can, by self-declaration, “become,” in inverted commas [quotes], a woman. Conceptually, as it were, he’s now conceptually a woman. […] I can already hear the screams of outrage. “You are saying that trans people are all predators?” Of course I am not, any more that I’m saying—I’m a happily married straight woman. I know perfectly well all men aren’t predators. I know that I have good men in my life who are among my favorite people. But I am also aware that 98 to 99% of sexual offenses are caused by those born with penises. The problem is male violence. […]  To open the doors to any male who says, “I’m a woman and I have the right to be here,” it will constitute a risk to women and girls. Now, that actually has very little to do with trans people and a lot to do with what we know of the risks from men to women. But this is the flashpoint. The activists who would argue against me, I’ve seen them say, “but these are now women.” And I say, well, here is where what a woman is becomes hugely important.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars

Check “male-bodied male,” “trans ‘people’ are men,” and “what is a woman?” off your J.K. Rowling bingo card.

Strawmanning and steelmanning

Ever the strawwoman, Rowling asserts that “it’s been claimed that nobody has ever abused dressing as the opposite sex, and no trans woman has ever presented a physical threat to a woman in an intimate space.” We’re not told who claimed that, because it’s highly unlikely that anyone ever did. Trans people are human. Humans are messed up. But Megan and Lewis spend a lot of time talking about Karen White and not a word about the rampant abuse in women’s prisons from correctional officers, guards, and wardens.

In 2018, a trans prisoner named Karen White was convicted of sexually assaulting two female inmates while held on remand for other offences in HMP New Hall, a women’s prison in Wakefield. White had previously raped two other women while living as male, and had admitted to sexual desire for children. Passing sentence, Judge Christopher Batty said: ‘You are a predator and highly manipulative and, in my view, you are a danger. You represent a significant risk of serious harm to children, to women and to the general public.’ That a sadistic and manipulative predator like White was given unfettered access to assault inmates when her history was known was a grave failing on the part of the authorities, who were responsible for keeping her victims safe.

Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue, p. 184

What White did was abominable, and at the same time we have no reason to think she’s not really trans, as a news soundbite in the podcast implies when it says she “used her transgender persona.” She never should have had any access to female inmates after having raped two women in the past. But the fact that Megan, Lewis, and Rowling only care about White’s two assaults and not about the cis men’s innumerable crimes, tells us that they’re not concerned about women’s safety. If they wanted to reduce the most harm for women, they would actually be in favor of abolishing prisons altogether, or at least not allowing men to staff them. But they focus on the one trans woman who is guilty of assaulting fellow inmates, because they can use this story to subject other trans women to the even worse abuse of serving time in men’s prisons.

Speaking of strawmanning, however, Megan is aware of the dangers of assuming your opponent’s position. So she asks Helen Lewis, “Can you articulate where those on the opposing side of this debate are coming from? Like, what is the steelman good faith way to understand the argument that says if your gender identity is female, then medical transition or not, you should be housed in a women’s prison?” She does not ask a trans person or even a trans ally, or someone who works in an organization fighting for trans equality. Lewis’s answer starts off not that bad, acknowledging that “trans women are particularly at risk of sexual violence in male prisons, and that is a fact” and that male prisons are “violent, tense,” and “really horrible.” But she ends by condemning the ACLU for arguing that trans women convicted of violent offenses should be housed in women’s prisons.

Megan and Lewis essentially rinse and repeat the prison conversation about public bathrooms, complete with “extensively documented cases” of “males who pose as trans women” attacking little girls in bathrooms, but neglecting to mention that one doesn’t need a government ID to enter a restroom or that assault is already illegal.

To make sure every topic has been checked off the anti-trans talking point list, they then switch to condemning gender-affirming care for children, bringing in trans-healthcare-gatekeeping trans psychologist Dr. Erica Anderson, who left the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in 2021 because WPATH criticized the model which views gender dysphoria as a disease. She tells pretty much the same lies about rushed care that Jamie Reed did in her article, propagating myths about transition regret and detransition.

A little later in the episode, we somehow manage to find ourselves back again at the “feminist meetings” in which trans activists call the women gathered inside TERFs.

https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/episode-4-47-min.mp3

No debate

And then we come to the famous two word slogan, the stop phrase. “No debate. No debate. No debate.” We hear it all the time. That alarms me. Really alarms me. I can’t think of a purer instance of authoritarianism than no debate. In fact, that is the attitude of the fundamentalist. “You may not challenge my ideas. That makes you evil. I am righteous. I don’t have to explain my righteousness. And I am entitled, therefore, to bully you, to harass you, to silence you, to take away your livelihood all the way up to attacking you.”

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars

This woman could not be more wrong about authoritarianism. Throughout the history of the United States, there have been a lot of topics that people thought were perfectly appropriate subjects for debate, like whether or not to abolish slavery or whether women should have the right to vote. Whether trans people deserve human rights (which is what she’s arguing against) is not up for debate. There is plenty that’s fair game to debate about. It is only someone with a severe lack of creativity who cannot find anything to debate about other than human rights.

Megan is soon joined by Michelle Goldberg, whose views on trans issues are slightly better than those of her peers here but still not good. They detail some threats towards TERFs from trans people online, and Goldberg’s analysis is really all over the place.

I don’t think those people are representative of the trans rights movement. But nevertheless, there’s a lot of feminists who feel like aggrieved people kind of constantly saying, “If you don’t recognize me as a woman, I’m going to rape you.” They just they feel like there is this very vicious online dialog in which a really brute sort of misogyny is dressed up in progressive clothes. And so, you know, to add insult to injury, you’re not even supposed to complain about it within feminist spaces. 

Michelle Goldberg, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars

I actually agree that “those people” don’t represent all trans people, but it is also certainly not trans people who are “misogyny dressed up in progressive clothes.” Perhaps if they actually listened to trans people beyond their most angry, anonymous tweets, they might be able to better understand them. They don’t even need to go offline to do that: there are several trans video essayists on YouTube who work extremely hard on well-researched videos about trans rights, lives, and healthcare, but they’re not mentioned.

Looking in the wrong places

Perhaps if Megan had looked there, she would see more coherent arguments and fewer “accusations that [‘feminists’] are violent transphobes [which feel] less like a sincere criticism and more like an attempt to smear them so that no one will listen to them.” Especially considering the amount of violent and sexual abuse and harassment that trans people endure on these same sites daily, I’d argue that it’s not a problem with trans people, it’s a problem with all people when given the anonymity of social media. Surprisingly, Megan does acknowledge that trans people receive the abuse too, but she says it’s “often coming from the right and the alt-right” rather than the daily threats that they receive from Rowling’s own fans.

Goldberg knows that trans people are fighting for their lives, and she doesn’t care.

I think that they can, they will enjoy the same sort of assumed protection as other groups whose rights we’ve decided are not up for public conversation. I think the problem is that we don’t actually have a consensus about what gender means or what makes someone a boy or girl or woman or man. And so you still have to talk these things out and have these conversations.

Michelle Goldberg, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars

Except we really don’t. It’s more a topic to research than to squabble about. Gender is a cultural construct. We know this. There are books and articles and experts that can tell us exactly what it is and how it was created. And even then, we don’t need to “have a consensus about what gender means” to give trans people the “basic rights” that these two women know they deserve just for being human. (To be sure, we don’t really have a consensus about what race or sexuality “mean,” but there are still some, albeit not enough, legal protections for Black and gay people, which Goldberg would likely agree with.)

We end episode 4 with a teaser for episode 5 which talks about Rowling’s transphobic tweets.

There were people close to me who were begging me not to do it, I think out of concern of what that would mean, they’d watched what had happened to other public figures, and there was certainly a feeling of, “This is not a wise thing to do. Don’t do it.”

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 4: TERF Wars
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Episode 5: The Tweets

We know how it starts, when Rowling “jumped into the public conversation around sex and gender;” she “weighed in” on the issue. And as trans people lose their human rights and their lives every day, Rowling ponders, “Time will tell whether I’ve got this wrong.”

Maya Forstater

The Maya Forstater case that Rowling’s tweet refers to, as well as analyses on Rowling’s history of transphobia as a whole, have been shared on CNN, on Glamour, on Snopes, on Vox, on Medium by Katy Montgomerie and Phaylen Fairchild, on Twitter, and on YouTube by ContraPoints, Jessie Gender, and Caelan Conrad, to name a few.

To sum up, Maya Forstater’s contract with the think tank she worked for was not renewed following several transphobic tweets and private messages in the workplace in opposition to the Gender Recognition Act (allowing people to self-identify on government IDs).

I should be careful and not unnecessarily antagonistic. But if people find the basic biological truths that “women are adult human females” or “transwomen are male” offensive, then they will be offended.

Of course in social situations I would treat any transwomen as an honourary female, and use whatever pronouns etc…I wouldn’t try to hurt anyone’s feelings but I don’t think people should be compelled to play along with literal delusions like “transwomen are women”

Maya Forstater as quoted in Case ruling in Forstater v Center for Global Development Europe

Forstater also did the public the courtesy of compiling all of the tweets from the ruling into one thread in the name of being taken out of context, although they either show that the full tweets were worse, or they unintentionally confirm that the ruling fully quoted what she actually said. And while she did say that trans women were deluded—which Megan actually reads out—she never once said that sex was real.

Enter Kathleen Stock

Kathleen Stock‘s very first words on Witch Trials are “The judgment said that basically her speech in this case could not be protected because it was not worthy of respect in a democratic society.” If these gender critical women are so passionate about context, perhaps we can look at why the judgment said this. After describing an ongoing situation in which Forstater repeatedly refused to use they/them pronouns to describe a colleague because “I recognize a man when I see one” (which is not “us[ing] whatever pronouns etc”), the judgment concluded,

I conclude from this, and the totality of the evidence, that the Claimant is absolutist in her view of sex and it is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment. The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.

Case ruling in Forstater v Center for Global Development Europe

When Stock had seen the Forstater decision, she had gone to her blog “in a fury really, and typed out a quite a short piece called This is Not a Drill.” For everyone who wondered what #ThisIsNotADrill meant, it’s this. The post disparages the British LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall for spreading “propaganda that ‘transwomen are women’.” As she tells Megan, she ends the post by calling upon British philosophers to make public statements that “people should be legally permitted to believe that biological sex is immutable and cannot be changed, without fear of losing their jobs.”

Stock has a particular stake in the fight of TERFs losing their jobs since, as she and Megan discuss, a group of queer and trans students at University of Sussex successfully campaigned for Stock’s removal from the faculty.

Kathleen Stock is not going to be coming back to University of Sussex as a professor. Good fucking riddance. This is a monumental victory for trans and non-binary students, who have protested the ways that this university has enabled transphobia, abuse and discrimination. The full weight of a colonial institution, the national media circuit and government ministers, were no match for the unity and solidarity of the queer and trans communities at Sussex University. […]

Fuck the national press media who happily collaborated with the university and Stock to turn this into a debate about ‘free speech’ and ‘academic freedoms’. […] For those reaching out to this account, we will not speak to the press because we will never debate, discuss or organize on the terms of the people who have enabled discrimination and transphobia. This has been a campaign to get Stock out of Sussex, for the sake of the safety and protection of trans and non-binary students. And it fucking worked. Direct action gets the goods, and trans and non-binary students are safer and happier for it.

Anti-TERF Sussex

Everyone, including Stock, deserves to have their basic needs met, which in a capitalist world usually means being employed. But Stock is not owed a job teaching at a university where the students have come forward and made it known that she makes their campus unsafe.

You cannot argue me out of this

Rowling, too, had a heyday with the “worthy of respect” line, twisting it further in her justification for tweeting:

I felt that the tribunal was wrong. I think there is, in my view, considerable evidence for the fact that a woman is the producer of the large gametes, and I found it outrageous that this employment tribunal had decided no, that belief wasn’t worthy of respect. […] You cannot argue me out of this.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 5: The Tweets

An aside: I really do not have the words to describe how uncomfortable the audio design of this entire podcast was. All I can do is share with you the very worst bits, in which Megan reads out the tweets replying to Rowling in an unsettling monotone voice.

https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/episode-5-1.mp3

I will give Megan credit for also sharing more substantial tweets from disappointed long-time Harry Potter fans, like the admins at MuggleNet and the Potterless podcast.

I do wonder, however, why people like these, or even Daniel Radcliffe or Emma Watson, weren’t featured on Witch Trials as well, since Megan claims that it is so balanced and talks to people from “all sides” when so far, we’ve almost exclusively talked to people who are known to be TERFs in the discussion about trans people. Did Megan reach out to them, and they knew it wasn’t actually good faith, or—more likely—was the plan only ever to primarily serve as a platform for Rowling?

Even after Megan reads these two tweets and others like them, Rowling describes the overall reaction to her statement as “fury and incomprehension.” Meanwhile, she is the one who cannot comprehend that this many people in her audience actually support trans rights:

What’s interesting is the fans that found themselves in positions of power online, did they feel they needed to take this position because they themselves had followers? Possibly. I don’t know. I mean, I do know that there is huge pressure on people to take certain positions at the moment, and I know that there is a huge amount of fear around it. Some of them, I don’t doubt, sincerely felt it. They just couldn’t understand why. “Why aren’t you simply repeating ‘Trans women are women’? Why aren’t you doing that? That is the kind and good and righteous thing to do. I don’t understand.” And I’m constantly told I don’t understand my own looks. I’m constantly told that I have betrayed my own books. My position is that I am absolutely upholding the positions that I took in Potter. My position is that this activist movement, in the form that it’s currently taking, echoes the very thing that I was warning against in Harry Potter.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 5: The Tweets

I actually never read Harry Potter, in a tenacious attempt to be different from all the other kids my age, so I couldn’t tell you what does or does not contradict its message. I do know that Rowling’s current stance flies in the face of her message to Harvard in 2008, that affirming trans people is the opposite of authoritarianism, and that if Harry Potter was about acceptance, then no, she’s not holding that position.

Since I didn’t grow up reading Harry Potter, I also don’t have this rosy view of Rowling as a progressive and loving icon that her former fans do. Many Potter fans still have faith in Rowling, though, like Jackson Bird, whose essay Megan mentions:

The book series, which I started reading shortly after its debut in the United States when I was 9 years old, was an escape from my lonely childhood of gender confusion. I used to dream about characters from the books showing up on my doorstep to whisk me away to the wizarding world, as they do for Harry in the first book. As I grew up and the series continued, I learned about the importance of critical thinking and standing up for your beliefs — as when Harry has to fight back against a government-sanctioned disinformation campaign denying the return of the evil wizard Lord Voldemort.

[…]

J.K. Rowling’s latest opinions, as much as they might sting, can’t take that magic away from me. I can only hope she takes this opportunity to practice some of the same values she taught us and listens to trans fans of her books. Let us tell you about our lives, how we got here, and even how the world you created saved many of us. We’re ready to have a conversation if you are. Send us an owl.

Jackson Bird, ‘Harry Potter’ Helped Me Come Out as Trans, But J.K. Rowling Disappointed Me

This takes us to Rowling’s next TERFy tweet in summer of 2020, which Megan describes as—and you might want to get ready for this one…

A chaotic political moment

The fact that Megan calls this highlighted violence of police brutality and the fight for Black lives “the chaotic political moment that was the summer of 2020” has been overlooked in the vast reactions to this podcast because of the sheer quantity of abhorrent takes to choose from—the most notable of which is coming up at the end of episode 5. But I’ve had an image of George Floyd’s murder together with the words “Chaotic Political Moment” floating around in my head since I first heard them uttered a month ago. Chaotic political moment. The lengths this woman will go to appear to not take side in anything is astonishing. I just can’t with her.

She expands this uncomfortable and detached description of the reckonings in 2020:

This unrest was also present online where social media was full of outrage and anger and uncertainty about COVID-19 and its origins, about racism in the U.S. and what should be done to remedy it. About the gap between the haves and the have nots, and about whether the current systems could remedy these problems or whether those systems needed to be dismantled entirely. There was a reckoning about the past, about historical figures and their statues, but also about prominent people in the present.

Megan Phelps-Roper, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 5: The Tweets

People in period poverty

It was apparently a reckoning about people like Rowling, who they again imply is a victim of cancel culture. Feeling “really angry” about the “incredibly febrile, oppressive atmosphere that we are all currently living in,” Rowling tweeted her disdain about an article by three global menstrual health experts on “creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate.”

I find this tweet to be especially infuriating, not least because if she had actually read the article, it mentions “women” 10 times. But what’s worse, the article is focused on how to fight period poverty so that women and others who menstruate worldwide have access to things like clean running water and menstrual supplies. I’m sure that of the 500 million-plus people worldwide who live in period poverty, only a fraction of them even know or use terms like “people who menstruate,” but whether we call them that is probably not very high on their list of priorities. Women are fighting for their lives, and J.K. Rowling has to focus on semantics. Who do you think are the real feminists here: nitpickers like Rowling, or global health heroes like Marni Sommer, Virginia Kamowa, and Therese Mahon?

The audacity

Regardless, Rowling was admittedly furious, and this tweet was her snapping point. She was “angry” and “flippant,” and “seeing this article, she just reacted” with “no courtesy call to [her] management” as there had been for her Forstater tweet.

We are treated to more of the negative responses from her:

https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/episode-5-2.mp3

Including this gem.

Notably, as blogger Evan Uruhart pointed out,

In the discussion of a mocking tweet of Rowling’s, one in which Rowling made fun of the idea of including trans men in discussions of menstruation, Rowling is given time to explain how she was responding to the oppressive atmosphere of the COVID-19 stay-home orders. She says she was “angry and flippant” and not thinking ahead or planning her words.

The possibility that trans people might also exist in oppressive atmospheres, that they too might feel angry, or become flippant, is never raised. […]

Instead, there are quotes of tweets, purportedly from trans women representing the broader transgender rights movement, that reference a desire to sexually assault Rowling. They are graphic, disturbing, and wrong. But the podcast never once reads out the violent, threatening, or degrading tweets targeting trans people, from Rowling’s side. It never suggests that Rowling’s activist friends engage in this behavior routinely, or asks Rowling to account for that.

Evan Urquhart, Eden, and the Humanity J. K. Rowling Wants You to Ignore

I would (not) march with you

It must have gotten to her, because she then posted this thread—not to apologize, but to “clarify”:

As a cis white woman, I’m really not the victim of any of Rowling’s transphobia here, but I do find it so appalling that she uses “the lived reality of [cis] women” and our “ability to discuss our lives” as her justification for being a bigot. She does not speak for me. And gatekeeping womanhood as she does just makes her a shitty feminist.

And her vow to march with trans people “if [they] were being discriminated against on the basis of being trans” especially stings considering that her TERF brunch, celebrating the launch of Forstater’s campaign to require local government candidates to answer “no” to the question “can a woman have a penis?” before she would vote for them, was on the same day as a massive LGBTQ+ rally protesting Boris Johnson’s ban on conversion therapy just 20 minutes down the road.

Rowling also claims in the podcast, might I add, that she was “arguing against people who are literally saying sex is a construct. It’s not real,” which literally no one said. In fact, there are dozens of tweets telling Rowling that sex is real, reminding her that no one ever said it wasn’t real, and that it is not the same as gender.

But we don’t hear any of those tweets. Instead we get another soundscape of Megan mechanically reading tweets calling Rowling a “rectangle head.”

https://sheseeksnonfiction.blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/episode-5-3.mp3

This tweet was Rowling’s next attempt at “engaging with her critics.”

Seeing through the eyes of a TERF

I think it’s pretty clear by now who Rowling thinks the witch is. But a less obvious takeaway from this tweet and other instances of Rowling and her friends’ general persecution complex is that these trans-exclusionary radical feminists think it is appropriate to speak in these extremes because their entire worldview is constructed in an entirely different way from those of us who affirm trans identities. She sees the word TERF as simple “woman-hate,” because she plainly and unequivocally believes that only cis women are women.

Michelle Goldberg had called trans rights “a really brute sort of misogyny dressed up in progressive clothes,” because to them, it truly is just a new way to hate women. We know they don’t believe trans women are women, but when you actually follow that logic, it takes you to this idea that trans people and allies hate all “real” women. But they clearly haven’t noticed that most cis women—just like them—do believe trans women are women, are not TERFs, and don’t suffer from this brand of “misogyny.” It’s not a woman problem, Joanne. It’s a bigot problem. And TERF is not a slur, just as calling someone homophobic or racist is not a slur. Would she not agree that she’s trans exclusionary? Would she not agree that she’s a radical feminist? They want us to simply replace the word “TERF” with “woman,” but clearly not all women are TERFs. We can’t call out bigotry if we don’t even have the language to do it.

The essay

We finally make it to June 10th, when Rowling posted her essay on “sex and gender.”

You have to keep going back to what you actually wrote. And you know, you almost expect there to be some terrible inflammatory language there or some terrible threat to somebody that somehow you didn’t notice that you’d written. But then you remind yourself, no, I just wrote this sort of relatively centrist, moderate in the middle, compassionate thing.

Kathleen Stock, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 5: The Tweets

(Trigger warning: transphobia and sexual assault.) What Stock said about her own essay applies to Rowling’s as well. Megan and Rowling read excerpts from Rowling’s essay in which she says she has “solidarity and kinship” with trans women, and she even notes that trans people, “like women,” are more likely to be killed by sexual partners, and that trans sex workers of color are at an even higher risk. But she also describes people like Maya Forstater and Magdalen Berns, who called trans women “blackface actors” and “pathetic, sick, fucks,” “hugely sympathetic” towards trans people.

The part of Rowling’s essay that gets the most attention is that she shares for the first time that she’s survived not only domestic abuse but sexual assault. These visceral traumas clearly continue to shape how Rowling interacts with the world around her. As trans YouTuber Natalie Wynn explains,

I hope it goes without saying that trans people gaining easier access to legal recognition in Scotland in 2020, is completely unrelated to Joanne Rowling being assaulted by a cis man in the 1990s. This is a non-sequitur.

And again it’s not that I’m unsympathetic to her trauma. And I would be nothing but sympathetic if her feelings about this amounted to simply being triggered by, for example, perceiving someone as male in the women’s bathroom. Which is something most trans women are sensitive to. 

[…]

But Joanne’s transphobia has so outgrown the scope of an automatic trigger response. It’s become a fixation for years, to the point where she’s written a 900 page novel about a serial killer who cross-dresses to trick women into being less vigilant. And now, the primary political cause she’s decided to use her superstardom to champion is opposition to trans liberation. And past trauma is just not an excuse for that.

Natalie Wynn, J.K. Rowling

Without the context that Wynn and countless others have provided about the essay, the angry reactions that Megan reads and plays from countless Harry Potter fans sounds completely out of proportion. Megan even lists by name five people who were fired for publicly aligning themselves with Rowling’s views, without naming a single trans person who has been harassed or murdered simply for being trans. Not Brianna Ghey. Not Marisela Castro. Not Brianna Hill. Not Eden Knight, whose death was confirmed the day before this episode released.

Death Eaters

Instead, Rowling compares trans people to the Death Eaters in Harry Potter, which one reader explains “were a movement of genocidal racists and serial murderers, and their members were key antagonists throughout the series as they attempt to kill numerous children and take over the world.” Of course, Megan says in a tweet that “If you listen to the episode, she says she is fighting a movement that attempts to silence women via ‘threats of loss of livelihood and threats to their personal safety’—not trans people writ large.” Here’s what Rowling said when Megan asked her what she says to those who say she’s become like the villain in her own books.

I suppose the thing I would say, above all, to those who seek to explain, to seek to tell me that I don’t understand my own books, I will say this. Some of you have not understood the books. The Death Eaters claimed, “We have been made to live in secret. And now is our time. And any who stand in our way must be destroyed. If you disagree with us, you must die.” They demonized and dehumanized those who were not like them. I am fighting what I see as a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement that I think has gained huge purchase in very influential areas of society. I do not see this particular movement as either benign or powerless, so I’m afraid I stand with the women who are fighting to be heard against threat of loss of livelihood and threats to their personal safety.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 5: The Tweets

Again, I haven’t read the books, but those who have know exactly what she means by this. I find it interesting that Megan, in her tweet, chose to describe the group that Rowling depicts at the end of her quote and not in the middle. She very clearly means trans people, as trans people “have been made to live in secret.” Their cis allies in the movement have not. She’s also said that to cancel someone is to say, “I obliterate you. You are dead.” On the contrary, Rowling seems very much alive.

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Episode 6: Natalie and Noah

After what Evan Urquhart describes as a “master class in transmisogyny,” episode 6 is like a short, restless nap of a break in the nightmare that is this podcast.

Natalie

While the podcast as a whole is by no means balanced, it was refreshing to hear Megan talking with Natalie Wynn, also known as ContraPoints, whose video on Rowling I quoted earlier. Megan’s aim in talking to Wynn was to “embrace humility” and to “really [listen] to people and where they’re coming from.”

Wynn explains for a while her experience of being a trans YouTuber, and before long she’s telling Megan how she, like Rowling, has been at the receiving end of a trans “Twitter mob.” Her tweet in question is nothing compared to some others we’ve seen; it simply calls out how uncomfortable it can be when a group of cis people all state their pronouns simply because there’s a single trans person there and they feel they need to. She’s not most trans people’s favorite person, but it doesn’t seem that that many trans people online are still angry with her.

(They also discuss trans teens online using canceling celebrities as a scapegoat for the pain that they face in their lives, but do not acknowledge that trans people are Rowling’s scapegoat for her own pain of abuse at the hands of cis men.)

And this experience that Natalie had, which she used to make one of my favorite of her videos called Cancel Culture [sic], gave her a deeper insight into why it is that speaking about trans identity and gender issues online so often leads to these vicious public shaming, even towards allies to the trans rights movement.

Megan Phelps-Roper, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 6: Natalie and Noah

Is she implying that Rowling is similarly an ally to the trans rights movement? I can’t tell anymore.

Speaking of Rowling, Megan then plays sound clips from Wynn’s video about her—including one where Wynn articulates how Rowling sees herself as the victim of a witch hunt, no less. But Wynn may have also predicted this podcast when she used the Westboro Baptist Church as her example of what direct bigotry looked like. Direct bigotry, Megan understood to be bad. Indirect, not so much.

Indirect bigotry

Following an audio clip from the video, Megan asks, “When it comes to those ideas of direct and indirect bigotry, when it comes to Rowling and her views about, you know, prisons or childhood transition, is your claim that Rowling was being transphobic indirectly and maybe even unknowingly?” Natalie replies that she would engage with someone who is merely skeptical about trans women in sports, but that “My willingness to engage with that is going to decrease if it’s with someone who I think doesn’t really believe in trans acceptance at a much more fundamental level, which is kind of the feeling that I get from Jo Rowling.”

They play a clip from Natalie’s video:

So J.K. Rowling frames her position, as “I’m just saying, the fact that sex is real, it’s not hateful to say a fact. Why is everyone so mad at me? A fact can’t be bigoted.” And I agree that a fact cannot be bigoted. But a fact on its own doesn’t mean very much. Usually when we discuss facts, we’re using those facts to tell a story and facts can be used to tell a bigoted story.

Natalie Wynn, J.K. Rowling

To this, Megan responses in the most critical way she’s responded to anyone in the whole series, saying, “This was, I think, one of the hardest parts of your critique to consume.” She elaborates:

I just wanted to ask you to help me understand where you’re coming from. So one critique you made clear in the video, seeing it as the coded language of indirect bigotry is the danger of people who say that they’re just asking questions. And I totally see what you’re talking about, because there are, for sure, bad actors and also just people with really bad ideas and all these people online who make their whole careers out of using the “just asking questions” idea as a smokescreen, essentially. Right. But there are a lot of people and I’ve met many of them while working on this project who just genuinely have a lot of questions. And sometimes they’re afraid to ask them. And I think asking tough questions and pulling apart arguments is obviously a cornerstone of reasoning and it’s actually a thing that you do so well on your YouTube channel. So I just wonder, why is it that you see Rowling and other people in this debate… Why do you see that as if they’re just clearly trying to disguise bad intentions?

Megan Phelps-Roper, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 6: Natalie and Noah

Bad faith

Considering the kind of person that Bari Weiss is and who Rowling is, it is very hard for me to see Megan’s question here as genuine. She and her publisher are the epitome of bad faith, of “bad actors.” But Wynn’s answer was admirable: “I’m less concerned with the intentions than I am with the consequences.” She emphasizes that Rowling posed “loaded questions” which were “beyond any question” “harmful to trans people.” Notably, I don’t recall Rowling actually asking any questions in her tweets other than “Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” and those don’t sound very good faith to me.

But Megan still doesn’t see it, asking, “Is it that you believe that it’s dangerous to ask the questions or just that you don’t trust that she’s actually engaging in good faith?” To which Wynn has to essentially spell out that what Rowling and Megan are doing is the exact definition of indirect bigotry that Wynn had given.

I’m glad, however, that Wynn got the opportunity to correct some of the misinformation that Rowling and others had propagated in earlier episodes, such as that trans kids get rushed care, that Self ID allows “men into women’s spaces,” or that trans people can somehow be authoritarian when they don’t even have a position of authority or power. She even calls out how hard it is for her to “politely answer every question [you] have about isn’t giving you health care dangerous for children, isn’t allowing you into bathrooms, is going to leave women vulnerable to rape, like, it takes patience to answer these questions and to not feel insulted or attacked.” But for so many Harry Potter fans like Wynn, “There’s part of me that still cares what she thinks, you know?”

Canceling

Other than the fact that Natalie Wynn is one of the most popular trans people on the internet, I do not doubt at all that Megan reached out to her because she truly did love her video titled Canceling. One theme that stuck out to me in the video was Wynn’s emphasis on trying to reach across and understand people in good faith conversation:

The point is that sometimes people who seem ignorant or hateful just need to be given a non-judgmental space to learn and grow and think. 

And to just condemn them as hopeless bigots actually prevents that growth from happening. […] 

I guess the moral is to never talk to people you disagree with, because it will only lead to pain. […]

What I’m trying to say is I really do believe in conversation, which means hearing out multiple perspectives. I don’t want my audience to get all their information about trans people from me, and I think it’s important to listen to criticism. 

Natalie Wynn, Canceling

So she was the perfect choice to interview in a podcast that claims to do this. The problem is that Wynn expected a good faith conversation with Megan, and that’s not what she got.

Natalie’s tweets

In Wynn’s own words, going on the podcast was a “serious lapse in judgment,” in which she endured a “miserable three-hour conversation” with Megan whom she told not to “frame the conflict as a debate between two equally legitimate sides.” She writes, “The fundamental problem is that Megan only understands bigotry from the bigot’s point of view,” and “She needs above all else to believe that bigots are misunderstood & redeemable.”

Of course, when asked about this, all Megan really said was that Wynn would probably feel differently once she’d listened to the whole series, and Wynn had just been “responding to an understandable misreading of the show’s title.” But when pitching the idea to Wynn, it was Megan’s responsibility to accurately explain what the podcast aimed to do.

Noah

In the second half of episode 6, Megan is interviewing a 17-year-old transmasc kid named Noah. “Interviewing” might be too generous, though; it played out more as an interrogation into a specimen whose otherworldly transition story and trauma were utterly fascinating for her. He was “the embodiment of one of Rowling’s concerns.”

Noah is by far the most genuine, well-meaning person on the entire podcast. He is young enough to still have faith in both Megan and Rowling; he engages earnestly with Megan’s inappropriate questions and expresses hope that Rowling will come around to be the person he’s always imagined she is. She asks him whether he was seeing a therapist when he discovered he was trans, what mental issues he had, how his parents reacted, why his coming out made them uncomfortable, why they allowed him to transition, whether he was familiar with detransitioners, and how his experience was different from “people [who] like to break with social norms, like, you know, women who shave their heads or guys who wear eyeliner” or Megan’s own initial disgust when she learned about female puberty at age seven.

By the way, no one ever asks Rowling whether she’s seeing a therapist, but it’s clear she needs one.

Noah answers every single question with undeserved grace, sharing his stories of depression and of finding himself, of his parents accepting who he is, to the dozens of doctors he had to see and hoops he had to jump through in order to finally get the gender-affirming care he needed.

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Episode 7: What if You’re Wrong?

The final episode begins with Megan speaking with Stacy Schiff, who in 2016 wrote a book on the Salem Witch Trials because of the “obvious and not so obvious parallels between that moment and basically what we do today on social media,” and because “the ability to slander someone, to just really decimate someone’s reputation very easily was something that was a constant between 1692 and the world in which we were then [in 2016] living.”

Presumably referring to this interview with Schiff, Megan has told disappointed listeners that “the witch trials motif will be clearer by episode 7.” Together with Megan’s other comments about the title, it’s clear that she means that the title will be less one-sided—but there is only one group of people, and one person in particular whose “decimated reputation” we’ve spent any time talking about. In the previous episode, Natalie Wynn did tell Megan she’d been doxed and swatted and “received death threats, mutilation threats, anger, shaming, mockery, any kind of terrible online behavior you can imagine.” All Megan had to say about that was “Oh jeez.” (Notice that there was not a compilation of Megan reading these threats like there was for Rowling.) So I do not think Megan has done a good job of trying to make it sound equally likely that she sees trans people as the target of witch hunts.

This leads us to Megan’s final conversation with Rowling, at long last. It follows one more soundscape of various bits of conversations from the podcast, as if to remind listeners of all the fun we’d been having together over the past six weeks. Megan is here to talk to Rowling about discernment and sharing her own list of 10 “discernment” questions that she’s asked herself in order to be sure her beliefs are moral after how dismally immoral they were for her first 26 years. Megan had written in a tweet and shares in her Twitter Spaces interview with Bari Weiss that “people will be surprised by what she says.” So let’s see.

Digging an abyss

She starts off by asking Rowling, “What do you think is the crux of the difference between what you believe and what your critics say you believe?”

Oh, my God. I mean, the crux. There’s an abyss. I’ve been… I’ve been… I have to laugh because the hyperbole is… is so extreme. I’ve been told I wish for the genocide of trans people. I’ve been told, well, you want them to die. You don’t want them to exist.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 7: What if You’re Wrong?

Unmistakably, Rowling is not dumb enough to say, “I want trans people to die,” or as Noah noted that she’s never said, “I’m better than trans people.” But as Monica Hesse said in her essay, it wouldn’t do Rowling any good to just say those things. And actually, just saying it may cause less harm than the things she has done: normalize violent anti-trans rhetoric, support TERFs tied to right-wing causes, imply over and over and over again to her 14-million-member audience that trans women are predators who do not deserve to go to domestic violence shelters when they are harmed, which she knows they disproportionately are.

It’s very entertaining to see Megan bring to Rowling the criticism of indirect bigotry that Natalie Wynn had brought to her:

Direct bigotry is the sort of thing that my family does, being openly contemptuous and using slurs and demonizing people, marginalizing people openly. And indirect bigotry is things like people are just asking questions. They’re just concerned. They’re engaging in debate. “Activists have gone too far. Political correctness. Cancel culture.” In other words, it’s the idea that there are bad actors who can hide behind virtues or less extreme rhetoric, but who are still undermining people’s rights.

Megan Phelps-Roper, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 7: What if You’re Wrong?

What is Rowling to say except “guilty as charged”? Well, there wasn’t really any way around it.

I see this constantly and that the most frequent example of that is they’re pretending to be concerned about children. It’s not about the children. They really hate trans people. Now, if you’re saying that indirect bigotry is asking questions where you believe significant harm is done, if you’re saying indirect bigotry is standing up for women’s rights, then you know, guilty as charged. I think it is a very bad faith argument to say that people who are asking questions are being indirect bigots, because you know that that itself, in my view, is a very bad faith position.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 7: What if You’re Wrong?

Transphobia is not harm reduction

Transphobic talking points have always struck me as odd, because it feels like such a coincidence that all the things they care about—children’s safety, women’s rights—all involve taking away trans rights in order to solve the problem, and yet it’s not about hating trans people at all somehow. (They even said as much about allowing trans women in women’s shelters in an earlier episode.) Would someone otherwise be arbitrarily interested in the fairness of women’s sports and the safety of women’s prisons?

And even then, she’s really not. As I’ve said, prisons are not safe places. They should be abolished, but if you want to reduce the greatest amount of harm within them, you would remove the male guards and staff, not the handful of trans women who are even there. And if you want women’s sports to be actually fair, you would advocate for better funding for public education and extra curriculars, for better facilities in underserved neighborhoods, and fighting poverty in general so that girls and women have more time to spend at sports practice instead of working to support their families. It’s also strange that they never mention men’s sports, in which by their logic, trans men would always be losing, but they have no problem with that. In their world, the proper order of things is that trans people stay at the bottom if they are there at all.

Next, Megan asks if Rowling can understand the pain caused by her constant implications that trans women are not women, and her constant support of people who literally say they are not. Rowling replies that “women are the only group, to my knowledge, that are being asked to embrace members of their oppressor class unquestioningly with no caveat.” Which, again, is a way of saying trans women are not women. Trans women are not cis women’s oppressors. (White) cis men are.

Rowling also says more clearly a position which she and her TERF cohort have hinted at: trans women can be considered women, if and only if they have had full gender affirmation surgery. (But she has never advocated for this surgery being easier to get, only more difficult.) Megan never pushes her on it when she calls “pre-op” trans women “a man [who] may have had no surgery whatsoever, but feels himself to be a woman.” She never asks Rowling if she believes trans women are women. But that would be an asinine question at this point. We all know the answer.

Unsafe in your own home

(Trigger warning: sexual assault.) Rowling then cites a Sunday Times article on abuse in unisex spaces, information clarifying which has been public since March 2021, despite her claims to have diligently researched these topics. “The Sunday Times issued a Freedom of Information request from the government. 88% of sexual assaults happened in unisex spaces.” Megan did specify that the data “compared the rates of incidents that occurred in single sex versus unisex changing rooms.”

It’s not surprising that the number is this high when you compare unisex (as in, including cis men) changing rooms and women’s changing rooms. If you compare the percentage of assaults in the unisex changing rooms to the percentage throughout the whole facility as the Times reported, the number drops to 67%. As YouTuber Ponderful calls attention to in her video on this, Britain’s Office for National Statistics estimated that about 150,732 adults had experienced sexual assault in the year ending in March 2018, and The Times themselves had noted that the ONS had only found 120 incidents occurring in unisex changing rooms that same year. Of all reported incidents, 63% percent were in either the victim’s or offender’s home. 0.08% happened in unisex changing rooms. It’s not about keeping women safe.

Fueling the fascist fire

Megan then asks how Rowling would respond to those who say she is “giving fuel to the right.”

She replies that, in essence, “as the left becomes increasingly puritanical, and authoritarian and judgmental, we are pushing swathes of people towards not just the right, it’s pushing them to the alt right” by “defend[ing] the placing of rapists in cells with women.” She sees that “the left is making a tremendous mistake in espousing this kind of, in my view, quasi-religious, incredibly sort of witch-hunting behavior, because there will be people who will just feel when they’ve been shamed and abused and they feel it was unfair. Where are they going to go?” The only way I read it is that she describes herself, blaming her own accelerating journey to the far right on trans people trying to take more than they deserve.

Rowling goes on after the next question:

I haven’t yet found a study that hasn’t found that the majority of young people, children and adolescents experiencing gender dysphoria will grow out of it. Now that I haven’t found a single study that contradicts that and I have gone looking, the majority of children will, if allowed to go through adolescence, many of them will grow up to, not all, but many will grow up to be gay. And they will… their gender dysphoria will resolve. Why then, if that’s the evidence, are we immediately putting children onto an affirmative path?

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 7: What if You’re Wrong?

They won’t. And they’re not. Desistance is largely a myth that comes from the model which views being trans as a disease. She clearly didn’t look very far. She does, however, cite Carl Heneghan who called gender affirming care an “unregulated live experiment on children.” He’s an anti-masker.

And I would ask proponents of gender identity ideology who are so militant, who are so determined on no debate, I would ask them, What if you are wrong? If I’m wrong, honestly, hallelujah. If I’m wrong, great! People aren’t being harmed. But if you are wrong, you have cheered on. You have come. You’ve created a climate quite a threatening climate, in which whistleblowers and young people themselves are being intimidated out of raising concerns.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 7: What if You’re Wrong?

If you’re wrong, no one is harmed? You are wrong. The anti-trans bills that cite you, the TERFs that harass in your name, the parents who fall down the gender critical pipeline because of you and use Desist, Detrans, and Detox as a child abuse manual cause immeasurable harm. Because of you, we lose people whom we cannot get back.

A bit later Rowling actually says something that I agree with. Megan tells her that her critics say they just wish she would listen, to which she replies, “Because they think that nobody could possibly disagree with them if they heard what they were saying.” I think she hears her critics, and she does listen. She just doesn’t care. I never really followed Rowling or her work before this, so I don’t share the shock that many do that she would be this type of person. Well, this is all I’ve ever known her to be.

No one thinks they’re Umbridge

One widely-shared quote comes when Megan asks Rowling how she knows if they are “a Hermione or an Umbridge,” referring to the scene in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where:

Hermione, the hero, and Professor Umbridge, who is clearly in the wrong, have a showdown in class. Hermione says in a moment of defiance that she disagrees with something in her textbook and Umbridge berates her like, “Who are you to disagree with this expert who wrote this textbook?” and punishes her. Now, to anyone reading this, it is so frustrating and unjust, but I venture to say that no one thinks they are the Umbridge.

J.K. Rowling, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, Episode 7: What if You’re Wrong?

Rowling concurs. “No one ever thinks that. No one else thinks they’re Umbridge.” Megan tells her that “You have these younger critics online, and they see Hermione as standing up to an older person with power, and they see themselves as standing up to you.” Rowling’s odd method of ascertaining that she is not Umbridge is not whether she is perpetuating harmful stereotypes about a vulnerable group, or decreasing human rights for people, or willfully ignoring evidence and statistics. Her way of knowing is simply, “Am I having a lot of fun doing it?” If you’re having fun, you’re Umbridge. She says she’s not, so she’s… not.

From here, Megan finally shares her questions about discernment that she made for herself after leaving the tight-knit religious group. Here are her questions:

  1. Are you capable of entertaining real doubt about your beliefs or are you operating from a position of certainty?
  2. Can you articulate the evidence that you would need to see in order to change your position? Or is your perspective unfalsifiable?
  3. Can you articulate your opponent’s perspective in a way that they recognize or are you strawmanning?
  4. Are you attacking ideas or attacking the people who hold them?
  5. Are you willing to cut off close relationships with people who disagree with you, particularly over relatively small points of contention?
  6. Are you willing to use extraordinary means against people who disagree with you?

As she explains in a tweet, Megan wasn’t really asking Rowling to answer the questions, which is convenient; she is more telling her what questions she uses in her own discernment process. And that’s good because Rowling doesn’t really give any answers anyway.

Conclusion

Finally, finally, it is over. I did ask Megan for comment and she didn’t respond to me. Regardless, she can no longer say to me, “Well, listen to the whole thing,” or “It gets better,” or “Wait till the end.” I have. And you have. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you sitting through this stupidly long blog post. If you’ve made it this far, and you are feeling charitable, I ask that you donate to either Mermaids UK or The Outside Project.

I’ll see you on Twitter.

In solidarity.

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