JK Rowling podcast – latest: Author dismisses concerns trans backlash will harm her legacy

You can read a timeline of Rowling’s comments about women and transgender rights here.

With the highly anticipated release of the video game Hogwarts Legacy on 10 February, there has been some hestitancy among a number of gamers as to whether or not buying the game supports JK Rowling and her anti-trans sentiments.

However, according to the game’s official website: “JK Rowling is not involved in the creation of the game.”

In fact, Hogwarts Legacy introduced the first transgender character to the iconic wizarding world.

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Rowling opened up about her marriage to Portuguese journalist Jorge Arantes in the first episode of the podcast.

She recalled sneaking the Harry Potter manuscript out of the house as she prepared to leave him for the third time as she feared he might destroy it.

“He knew what that manuscript meant to me, because at a point, he took the manuscript and hid it, and that was his hostage,” she said. “When I realised that I was going to go – this was it, I was definitely going – I would take a few pages of the manuscript into work every day.

“Just a few pages, so he wouldn’t realise anything was missing, and I would photocopy it. And gradually, in a cupboard in the staff room, bit by bit, a photocopied manuscript grew and grew and grew.”

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JK Rowling has not spared much time thinking about her legacy and the impact of her views on trans matters on it.

For the podcast, Megan Phelps-Roper travelled to JK Rowling’s Edinburgh castle and, for six days in May and August, conducted intimate interviews with the author.

But who is she, and how did she land such a big interview with Rowling?

Megan Phelps-Roper is 37 and she lives in rural South Dakota. She is best known for escaping what Louis Theroux called “the most hated family in America” in his 2007 documentary on the extremist Westboro Baptist Church, led by Phelps-Roper’s grandfather Fred Phelps.

The hate group, founded in Topeka, Kansas, picketed the funerals of soldiers and Aids victims. It is known for its hate speech against atheists, Jews, Muslims, transgender people, and numerous Christian denominations. Their theology and practices have been rejected almost universally by Christian churches.

Phelps-Roper distanced herself from the group in 2012, largely thanks to discovering other points of view on Twitter, which she had joined three years earlier to spread the church’s message.

She has written a book about her experience, Unfollow, and is now a speaker and activist.

In a comment piece for The Independent, Julia Bell writes: “Rowling has become a lightning rod for the anti-trans discourse that proliferates online...

“Key to a lot of the arguments is Rowling’s insistence on the idea of biology defining gender, in the name of defending women against men posing as women in order to carry out abuse.

“But as Judith Butler points out in an interview in The New Statesman: “The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that ... the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise.”

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Days before the new podcast aired, it was reported that the BBC had received 200 complaints after a radio host failed to challenge a guest who called Rowling “transphobic”.

Stacey Henley, a transgender woman and editor-in-chief of The Gamer, spoke about Rowling’s “nasty views” and accused her of pushing “transphobia” and a “campaign against trans people”.

The BBC, which “must remain duly impartial” per its own guidelines, later apologised for the exchange, after listeners said it presented an “unfair characterisation” of Rowling’s views.

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In the second episode of JK Rowling’s new podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, she and host Megan Phelps-Roper discuss the 1997 release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and the negative response it received from some Christian activists.

Evangelists in the United States attempted to clamp down on the popularity of the wizard story, leading to a legal battle on the matter of censorship in children’s stories.

“Extreme words were being used, that I was harming children, that these books were poison for children’s minds,” Rowling recalls in the episode titled “Burn the Witch”.

According to Phelps-Roper, Harry Potter’s legal win created a “precedent” that now protects LGBT+ literature.

Read more below:

JK Rowling podcast host argues Harry Potter saved LGBT+ books from being banned

A 2003 legal victory over Arkansas school censorship created precedent, Megan Phelps-Roper says

While the podcast between JK Rowling and host Megan Phelps-Roper touches on the author’s controversial remarks related to trans people, the intimate conversation additionally touches on Rowling’s personal life.

Not only does she talk about how her mother’s death was like a “wrecking ball” to her life, Rowling also discloses details about “violence” in her first marriage and her traumatic miscarriage.

Read more about the latter here:

JK Rowling opens up about traumatic miscarriage before having her daughter: ‘Another massive loss’