TERF play about J.K. Rowling to debut at Edinburgh Fringe Fest

A new play debuting at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is raising hairs on both sides of the Atlantic.

TERF, a new play by American writer Joshua Kaplan, explores the debate over trans issues between disgraced Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling — who now spends nearly all her time attacking trans people online — and the actors who starred in the movies based on her books.

Strangely, The Hollywood Reporter reports that the play seems to take a "fair and balanced" approach to the issue of anti-trans bigotry and hate. While right-wing media thinks the play is a hit piece aimed at Rowling, THR, which obtained the script and talked to the author and star of the play, indicates that it's much more conservative than that.

"There's some kind of impulse in me to take a word that people are throwing around in a derogatory way and throw it back in their face," Kaplan, who is gay, told THR.

Words like "TERF," "racist," and "bigot" are not being thrown around in a derogatory way. They simply describe the beliefs and behavior of the person being described.

Laura Kay Bailey, the actress who plays Rowling in the play, said she was "woefully uninformed" about trans issues before she got the role.

"I did a deep dive once I was offered the role," she said. "It's an electrically charged topic in the U.K. and people are really divided… The play tries to be as balanced as possible."

Kaplan told THR that the premise of the play "is that Daniel, Emma, and Rupert organize an intervention." However, after the debate, no one's mind was changed. "In a lot of ways, the play is a family play," he said. "In my mind, the three of them were 11-year-old siblings, and Jo was a parental figure… We all have this kind of Freudian obsession with her."

According to The Hollywood Reporter, a publication that obtained the script, the play portrays Rowling as "strong-willed and sharp-tonged but far from a villain" and depicts the former Harry Potter actors' relationship with her as being "torn apart by a mother figure who has veered into potentially dangerous and increasingly extreme oratorical territory."

The play also features several flashbacks meant to explain where Rowling's bigoted views come from. In these flashbacks, she faces off against male figures in her life, including her first book editor, her abusive ex-husband, and her father. As these are all cis men. The only thing they have in common with the trans women Rowling loves to attack is the circumstance of their birth.

Kaplan has said that he wants his play to encourage people to "see why they have come to the opinions they have come to."

"It's not just about what we say, it's about the way we say it," he said to The Independent. "A lot of that interrogation [about] how we communicate with each other has been completely lost when we are sitting behind our computer typing these awful, often terrible things out to each other and not stopping and thinking about people on the other side of the computer."

Rowling has said that she is not willing to have a conversation with the actors about her transphobia.

"Celebs who cozied up to a movement intent on eroding women's hard-won rights and who used their platforms to cheer on the transitioning of minors can save their apologies for traumatized detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single-sex spaces."