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

JK Rowling’s controversial remarks on transgender and womens’ rights surprisingly only dates back to a 2019 tweet.

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A timeline of JK Rowling’s comments about women and transgender rights

Harry Potter author took part part in a podcast where she discussed her stance with Megan Phelps-Roper

On the podcast, Rowling spoke about the period when she was planning to leave her husband and removed her Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone manuscript from her home, “a few pages” at a time.

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

JK Rowling has denied any worries about how her legacy may be affected in the wake of her views on trans people.

The Harry Potter author has come under fire in recent years for sharing her ideologies on sex and gender. Many, including stars of the Harry Potter adaptations, have accused her of transphobia, and some fans have ended their support of the wizarding franchise as a result.

In the new podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, the author shrugs off concerns about her legacy.

“What a pompous way to live your life walking around thinking about what your legacy will be,” she states. “Whatever – I’ll be dead! I care about now.”

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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.

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JK Rowling has spoken out about her feelings of grief when her mother died in 1990, when she was 24.

The author is currently discussing her life, career and controversies on the new podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.

At one point, she describes how the “early Nineties” were a difficult time in her personal life, as she was dealing with losing her mother to complications linked to multiple sclerosis.

“She’d been ill for a very long time, but none of us realised that death was imminent,” she told host Megan Phelps-Roper. “That kind of took a wrecking ball to my life, really. To me, this decade now is infused with loss.”

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JK Rowling has spoken in more detail about her experience of domestic abuse in the first episode of a new podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling.

The podcast, hosted by Free Press and presented by Meghan Phelps-Roper, explores the author’s life and the controversy surrounding her statements about transgender rights in recent years.

Rowling, 57, first revealed that she survived domestic abuse and sexual assault in 2020, when she wrote a personal essay defending her comments about transgender people.

Speaking to Phelps-Roper in the first episode of the podcast, which dropped today (Tuesday 21 February), Rowling claimed that her marriage to ex-husband Jorge Arantes became “very violent and very controlling”.

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JK Rowling shrugged off concerns that she may have destroyed her legacy over her views on transgender rights.

Asked by Megan Phelps-Roper if she thought about her legacy and how things she said impacted how she’d be viewed in years to come, the author said: “Whatever. I’ll be dead.”

She added: “I think you could not have misunderstood me more profoundly. I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy, what a pompous way to live your life thinking about what my legacy will be. Whatever! I’ll be dead, I care about now, the living.”

JK Rowling has criticised “black-and-white thinking” in her new podcast, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, which is partly intended to address the backlash over her comments about the transgender community.

The Harry Potter author has faced repeated criticism in recent years over her various statements about gender ideology, which some have characterised as “transphobic”.

While not explicitly calling out the backlash she has received over her comments about trans people, Rowling said the question went to “the very heart of much of my worldview”.

“There’s a huge appeal – and I try to show this in the Potter books – to black-and-white thinking,” the author said. “It’s the easiest place to be and in many ways, it’s the safest place to be.

“If you take an all-or-nothing position on anything, you will definitely find comrades, you will easily find a community... What I feel very strongly myself [is]: we should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain. And we should question ourselves most when we receive a rush of adrenaline by doing or saying something.”

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JK Rowling has described sneaking the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone out of her house “a few pages” at a time while she prepared to leave her husband.

The author opened up about her marriage to Portugese journalist Jorge Arantes in the first episode of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling, a new Spotify podcast documentary series about her life and career.

Rowling, who has previously spoken about her experiences of domestic abuse, said that she “left him twice before I left for good”, and was planning to leave Arrantes for the last time while pregnant with her daughter.

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