J.K. Rowling Says She’s Been 'Misunderstood' When It Comes to Trans Issues

In the new podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, the transphobic author is trying to defend her transphobia by saying that people have misunderstood her.

“I never set out to upset anyone. However, I was not uncomfortable with getting off my pedestal,” Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter book series says in the trailer for the new podcast.

She says that when people on social media say she’s ruined her legacy by speaking out against trans people, “I think you could not have misunderstood me more profoundly.”

The podcast comes from controversial writer Bari Weiss’ The Free Press and is hosted by ex-Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper.

According to The Free Press, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling is an “audio documentary that examines some of the most contentious conflicts of our time through the life and career of the world’s most successful author.” In interviews that Phelps-Roper conducted at Rowling’s home in Edinburgh, Scotland, the author “speaks with unprecedented candor and depth about the controversies surrounding her — from book bans to debates on gender and sex.”

Based on the preview, it seems like Rowling still sees herself as a victim and martyr in the fight against trans people. However, it will be hard for her to convince anyone that her words were not meant to be taken as disparaging and violent towards trans people.

In 2020 Rowling defended her anti-trans beliefs in an essay she published on her website.

In the essay, she says that she’s been “interested” in trans issues for years, but when she started to like tweets by people who are “great believers in the importance of biological sex” and don’t “believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises” she says she started receiving increased levels of hate online.

This shouldn’t need to be said, but trans people as a community or group have never argued that a lesbian who doesn’t date a trans woman is a bigot. Trans people have argued that people should question why they equate genitals with gender, but that’s it.

She also claimed that businesses were “allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms,” and tried to defend TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) from accusations of transphobia by misgendering trans men and saying they aren’t trans-exclusionary as “they include trans men in their feminism because they were born women.”

She also said that she was “concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition,” and even pulled out her ableism card to point to autism as a potential cause of girls thinking they are trans.

Rowling ends the essay by saying “‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive.”

Again, it shouldn’t have to be said, but nowhere ever have trans people argued that being a woman is equal to any of those things.

“I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe,” she wrote, implying that allowing trans women into women’s spaces will make cis women less safe. “When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.”

I'm not sure how Rowling could argue that these statements have been misunderstood. My guess is that she will instead say something about how she is just a poor, misunderstood feminist, fighting for the rights of women, but only the women who are like her.