The Aftermath and Future Outlook

This episode is brought to you by Expedia and Visit Scotland. Start your story in Scotland. Experience the pool of wide untamed landscapes and fresh cuisine that feels rooted in place. Discover castles steeped in legend and feel the genuine warmth from locals you meet in a place that will stay with you long after you leave. Start planning your own Scottish holiday. Today at expedia.co.uk slash vesit Scotland. Imagine if today was the day your idea changed someone's life. Imagine if you could help someone pay for university, help your community build a new playground, or help a child make it to that dream competition. With GoFundMe, it's all possible. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform, trusted by over 200 million people. Every week, ordinary people meet their goals and do extraordinary things. Your ideas matter. GoFundMe isn't just for emergencies. Want to raise money for your kids' football team or raise funds for a small business, a charity or event? GoFundMe helps you turn ideas into reality. And help adds up. Fundraisers you start for someone else raise up to five times more. So think right now. Who could use your help? Don't wait for someone else to bring change. Today, start your fundraiser in just minutes at gofundme.com. That's gofundme.com to start your fundraiser. Gofundme.com. This is a commercial message brought to you by GoFundMe. Hello. Welcome to Origin Story, the show where we take an idea, person, event, or institution from history. We explain its origins and we discuss how it influences political discourse. I'm Dorian Linsky. This week we begin the story of JK Rowling and how the world's most successful and perhaps beloved author became its leading opponent of trans rights, and therefore I suppose it's most divisive author. Ian, I'm very interested in this uh topic, but it was actually your suggestion. Why? Well I'm just sort of injured I just sort of want to know the answer really. Like I do want to know how that happened. It's just such a weird story. Like I I I I can't think of anyone we've covered that has such a sort of the velocity of change and the steepness of the curve, you know, who's just so admirable . And then just starts and each there's bits I cause also I'm remembering my own history being like, no, hang on, you know, this is just you know, she gets to say this. She does. She gets to say whatever the f whatever she likes. But it's just like you just like, oh, and that it's almost like year by year, slice by slice, you're like, oh, that's quite a bit less kind than you were the year before. Oh, that's really quite a bit less kind than you have ever been before. Until you just sort of see this like this thing left over, and you and by the end of it, you sort of think like that is a proper story of our time. You know, that this is like what happens to the human brain when it comes into contact with tribalism on social media. And that so by telling it, you get to tell a much broader story to a certain extent about all of us, but then also quite specifically about a particular kind of political movement and the way that a particular political debate has evolved. Yeah, because this is not a history of trans identity or trans rights or the anti-trans movement. We obviously talk about all those things as context. I'm sure some people will think that in places we're too sympathetic and others will think we're too harsh. The goal, I think, is to explain, and in order to do that, you have to understand how she sees herself. Yeah. Because what's crucial here is that she still identifies as a liberal center-left feminist. It's very important for her to see herself as a good, compassionate, rational person, right? And it's true that she's not as extreme as as Graeme Linnahan or Sharon Davis, who have simply become right-wing and in Linnehan's case, just like viciously transphobic. She has she's not quite in that camp. Although I do think that she has become a lot meaner in the last few years. You know, that there is a hardening, and we can look into the reasons why that is . The context here is that Britain on this issue is very unusual. Like in America and Russia, the rest of Europe, you know, to be anti-trans is a right-wing position. Yeah. That goes hand in hand with general kind of culture war hostility towards LGBTQ people. Yes. That was what it was like in Orbans Hungary, you know, in Putin's Russia for the Republican Party. Here, the pushback starts with feminists um on The Guardian and the New Statesman. Yeah. Really. And she is she sees herself in that context. Now of course, if the outcomes are what they are, does it matter who's been pushing it? But so much has changed, and she represents a movement in the gender critical movement and also changes in just, you know, who who is endorsing this kind of view, right? Because it is no longer primarily feminists on The Guardian who are making these points. Yeah, exactly. Although you still see the, you know, you see ultimate why does the British government currently have such an anti-transposition? It's because they think that it's a split on the left, it's a split in their electoral coalition. It's the kind of thing that you just like, I just don't want to touch it, so we'll go with whatever courts are, you know, whatever we think courts are saying. And that is a product of the fact that it is seen as an internal left-wing debate as well as a left- right debate. Um, and also generational in that context. And generally speaking, when you speak to people, if someone says they're a feminist, you're not going to get it right all the time by any measure. But if you know their age, you would basically, sort of g make a guess on which side they fall by virtue of it. You know, I look at it and I think there there are different explanations of what has happened here. And our typical thing on Origin Story is just sort of like, you know, it doesn't really matter. You know, we don't really know what's going on in someone's head. You judge them by their actions and what they do. And that's the easiest thing you can do. And also where you can, look at the money, because very often the money will give you a pretty good indication of what the kind of things that they want to come out of their mouth. With her, it's funny because we we I think people do evaluations of her without realizing that they're mutually inconsistent. So a thing you'll very often hear is that she's been radicalized online, which is exactly how it looks to me. Just sort of think it looks like clear cut case of radicalisation. But at the same time, you'll get the sense of like this is a very cynical political operation where the nicer version of her, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020, was actually just a sort of mask, a concealment for the sort of snarling politics that were underneath it. And that there was no real radicalization. That's not a radicalization argument. That's the opposite, right? That's to say they're always this way, and this was just a very cynical ploy. Or there are other alternatives, which is to say that people believe in certain propositions to do with the subject and are not prepared or unable to think through the consequences of what happens if they are enacted in law or if they're insisted on socially and are not prepared to grapple with the morality of what happens once that takes place and their own sort of tribal identity. So it's to me it's like teasing out those different explanatory strands and trying to see which one of them is more valued, if any. Trevor Burrus And I think this is also a story about the internet, you know, and about polarization, free speech issues, extreme disagreement. You know, this is the first civil rights debate to play out on social media. It turns out that that's a really bad thing. And it's something that obsesses people that once I see a writer become obsessed with this issue, they cannot let it go. It becomes almost all they write about or they'll insert it into pieces about something else entirely. And yet we're talking about small numbers, maybe half a percent of the UK population. I think it's between half and one percent of the US population. So why does this consume so many people? I I do find that very strange. And the other angle to look at this is obviously through her work, right? And it is unprecedented for somebody this well regarded whose work is this important to become so divisive. So John Lithgow is playing role Dahl in this play giant about the um anti Semitism scandal around Dahl in the eighties, right? But then Lithgow was, while he doing this play, was announced to play Dumbledore in the new HBO Harry Potter TV series. Obviously. You could do an origin story about that on its own. I know, right? And so people are drawing comparisons. Children's author, controversial thing. Dahl's was like one interview in the New States pretty much, and I think an article that had preceded it, very anti-Israel, and then in the interview becomes out as more anti-Semitic, right? It's basically that, right? Royal Dahl was not talking about anti-Semitism a lot for several years. He didn't use his royalties to fund anti-Semitism. He didn't become the world's most famous anti-Semite. There weren't protests when his books were turned into movies, like when they made the Matilda movie. It wasn't like how could you be in this, right? That is not to say that Rowling's opinions are analogous to anti-Semitism. I want to point that out. I'm talking here in terms of the controversy, rather. Yeah, sure. The issue. So okay, that's not a precedent. Like what is? Because now anybody who works on something to do with Harry Potter or the Cormoran Strike novels, they can't do an interview without being asked about her. Yeah. And so I think what we've got here, and which is incredibly unhealthy, is a sort of proxy war over a celebrity. I don't think that every actor who appears in the show should have to speak about trans rights. And I don't think it is helpful that trans rights is often seen now in terms of what do you think about J.K. Rowling. Yes. I mean that is a I can't again, I can't think of any other time that that has happened. Where because as if , you know, campaign for women's suffrage or civil rights was all about what you thought of like one very famous person. You know, I don't think those two things should be entangled, but they are, inevitably. Of all the ways there are to debate this issue, doing it through the prism of one celebrity via the medium of social media may not be the most sensible way to present it. So Ian, have you read the Harry Potter books ? Uh I have well okay, so I tried to read the first one a couple of times. I'm just like a couple of years too old for it, three years probably, three or four years too old for it. And I haven't got kids, right? So I'm I'm in that little I'm the ham in the sandwich that hasn't touched it, you know, on that basis. And because everyone talked about it, I tried to read the first one several times. I did get to the end. I did not think very much of it. I tried the films and I made it to the one that everyone says is good. Is it the third one? Yeah, and I thought I still didn't enjoy that and I'm out. Well I've read the books with my kids and I've seen the films with my kids and one one of the arguments that I think just doesn't really land is the idea that she's just a shit writer. And her work is rubbish. Because like obviously it is extremely popular. I think it is the most popular and lucrative IP among millennials. Not among everyone, but among millennials, right? I can say yes, she uses rather too many adverbs or she repeats certain terms. People can't just say something. They have to say it in a you know sharply or or whatever, right? You can certainly critique the prose, but I think to say like, oh, it's all just garbage and she was always bad, there is always that the always like this myth where you almost have to go back and go, there was never anything of value here. Oh, I think that's a bit mad. And I think it's I think it kind of just avoids the reason why this is so difficult for people. It's a bit like just saying like, oh, you you disagree with Morrissey and you go, oh well the Smiths were shit anyway. And it's like, well they they weren't and that's why a lot of their fans are kind of torn, right? I did once read um The Casual Vacancy, which is the one sort of I guess literary sort of attempts you made. And I thought it was really good. Like I really liked it. Oh cool. And I remember thinking at the time, your prejudices are mine, and it's very enjoyable for to see me though. She basically At that point, right. To clarify. Yeah. No, because it was basically because it's that sort of thing of like she doesn't really doesn't like that kind of like mid-market tabloid reading middle class type. You know, like the the adopted parents and Harry Potter are of that type. And they sort of go there's there's a layer of the middle class that she detests that I also dislike. And I remember getting a lot of pleasure from that. And just generally thinking she was an empathetic writer who's interested in getting inside of people's minds. I cannot connect that writer really with the person that I see online. So to finish the table setting, we have to talk about language. We're always interested in language and origin story. In this case, the terminology is is so contested. This is so much about the language we use. It's impossible to be completely neutral. I mean it it just is. Sometimes there are these competing terms. But I think it's just useful to turn to the OED, which we love to do. But I think in this case it's sort of like, you know, let them do the work rather than than us, right? So I'm just gonna run through some terms and which and I think also the first citations give you a good idea of like when people started talking about these things. So transgender. Designating a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond to that person's sex at birth or which does not otherwise conform to conventional notions of sex and gender. First citation, 1974. The first citation for trans is a year earlier. But that's because of these older words, transsexual, 1949 and transvestite, 1911. They're not the same thing, right ? So transgender becomes the more common term. Right, right. Cisgender. Designating a person whose sense of personal identity and gender corresponds to his or her sex at birth, that is basically just the opposite. Yeah. Like first citation is on a usenet group nineteen ninety seven and it's popularized in the noughties. Still content some people don't like this word, but there it is. Yeah. It's uh describes somebody who is not trans. Because it's used much more obviously by one side of the discussion than the other. But the thing is I was trying to avoid it in this in the script. I was like it's really quite hard It's a fairly valid and useful word. I mean some people find it somehow insulting or something, which is mad. Like I'm we're both cisgender. It's like whatever. Uh gender identity . An individual's personal sense of being or belonging to a particular gender or genders or of not having a gender, gender identity is generally regarded as distinct from biological sex or sex as registered at birth . You see, they've said or and those are the two - that's what I mean about you can't be neutral. Biological sex tends to be the more anti-trans phrase. Sex registered or assigned at birth tends to be the tr- the pro-trans phrase. In later use it is also often and for some commentators controversially the OED's getting sweaty now distinguished from gender as a socially or culturally constructed state and from its manifestation in gender, expression, or presentation So the first citation is 1964 by American psychiatrist Robert Stoller. You know, he first develops it. He's working with people who have differences in sex development, or DSD, then also applies it to trans people. And he also proposed the idea of being non-binary. The word doesn't appear until the 90s, but this idea that you might, you know, not have a gender at all. Transphobia. This is just a straightforward one. Hostility towards, prejudice against, or less commonly, fear of transgender people. I think the less commonly is because people go phobia means fear. I'm not scared of them. I just hate them. First citation, 1993 . Now Stonewall's definition is much the same, but it adds including denying their gender identity. I see . Um, which of course is is very important, but also very controversial. Tre Yevor Burrah.us Gender critical, second meaning. Critical of the concept of gender identity or the belief that gender identity outweighs or is more significant than biological sex. First citation 2018.. Hmm God, it's very, very, very recent. Yeah, existed before then. Makes I think I thought it existed a little bit before then, but perhaps not. The movement I felt did. But definitely it's gender credit is based people who do not believe in gender identity. So I'm gonna have to use sometimes the term anti-trans as a term meas it meaning anyone opposed to the movement for trans rights and the concept of gender identity. And the problem is that you there is no term that that you can choose except the one they invented themselves that they will not find annoying. It's kind of so I'm not gonna say transphobic, but I think anti-trans, as in a post-trans, right, is fair enough. It's about as neutral as one can get. And we have to warn listeners that we will be quoting some potentially offensive statements as is one of those episodes, right, in order to show what people are thinking. So we're going to tell a two-track story. We're going to go year by year. I think that's really important. I mean, particularly once we get to 2017. Yeah. Where where the kind of the real story starts. One is what rolling is up to, and the other is the political events and ide as that influenced her and indeed the science. Her interest in the issue becomes public in 2017, so we're going to start with uh her story uh up to that year and then move on to a sort of history of transition So Joanna Rowling is born 1965, Gloucestershire, to a middle class family. Her father Peter is an engineer at the Rolls Royce plant um in Bristol. Mother's a science technician. They met on a train from King's Cross, charmingly enough, in a foreshadowing of her fiction. Her family live near the city. They moved to a place called the Forest of Dean when she's about nine. And she I think she feels- I mean she basically says I always felt like an outsider. Clearly that movement, you know, at nine years old uh made her feel really quite distant from the people she was around. She says my voice wasn't Forest of Dean, although it became Forest of Dean, believe you me, pretty damn quickly. Not really exceptional at this age, like an English teacher at secondary school says, uh, one of a group of girls who were bright and quite good at English. Okay . Um, and she wasn't really that happy as a teenager, she says. Um, I think it's a dreadful time of life. Just having a pretty rotten go of it at that stage. So yeah, she said she was quite unhappy. She said home was a difficult place to be. And partly , this is because uh her mum was diagnosed with MS when rolling as fifteen, quite young. I think that her mum had her when she was twenty . And we should say Hermione in the books is a version of rolling when she was young. Yeah. That kind of light, very bright, but kind of awkward and you know and swatty and a and uncertain. But she also says that she grew up in quite a misogynist household and didn't feel particularly feminine. She brings this up in this essay crucial essay we're going to come to. I wondered whether if I'd been born thirty years later I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he'd have prefer red. Now, the whole question of whether people are actually out there persuading kids to transition is something we'll we'll come to. But it's interesting that she had a sense that, you know, her her her mum is very ill, it's a very what's called a galloping form of MS. And her dad doesn't seem to like like her that much. No, I mean her dad sounds dreadful, continuing the tradition that we have of having awful fathers on Origin Story. She says I didn't have an easy relationship with my father. We know that in December 2003 he sold his first edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire at Sotheby's for forty eight grand . It was given to him on Father's Day two thousand by her with an inscription saying, Lots of love from your firstborn. Really, mate? Like that was worth that was worth a few grand, was it? My firstborn, she's got a sister, I think, two years younger, Diane. Now, she didn't really talk about in all these early interviews, she really doesn't talk about politics at all. But on this podcast, it's a very useful resource, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, came out in 2023. And I think because of the title, because it was Oh god. I did not listen to it at the time. I thought it would be extremely biased. It's somewhat biased. Um , but it's just a very, very interesting resource. Huh It's presented by Megan Phelps Roper, who used to belong to that horrible church that used to abuse people at funerals. Okay. Yeah, yeah. The Western Borough Church. And I think even though you can hear the bias in kind of the editing and some of the choices, the structure of it, I think our interviewing in it is very good. And anyway, we find out a lot of stuff that was not talked about. That's fascinating, right? So rolling talks there about reading when she was young, these feminists like Kate Millette, Jermaine Greer, Simone de Beauvoir. She says she was an idealist, but never really an ideologue. So she was somewhat interested in, I suppose, the classic s of feminism at that point. But not enough that this ever came up in subsequent interviews. So nineteen eighty two she takes an entrance exam to Oxford but doesn't get in. So she goes to study French at Exeter. She finds it very posh. Um she sort of later says I was really quite glad I didn't up in Oxford because if I could barely open my mouth in Exeter, like what would have happened to me? You know? She says she reacted, quote, not with the rage of the revolutionary, but with the smouldering hatred of the peasant. At this point, she starts wearing heavy eyeliner, listening to the Smiths, she's reading Dickens and Tolkien. She basically sounds like all of my best mates at uni at this stage. Very interesting. Desert Island Discs, the Smith song she chooses is Big Mouth Strikes Again. Now I know how Joan of Arc felt. But this was back in two This was back in 2000. So it was unintentional musical foreshadowing. And when she graduates in 1986, she works briefly for Amnesty International in London. And then in nineteen ninety, on a delayed train between Manchester and London, she is overwhelmed by the thought of a boy who learns at the age of 11 that he is going to be a wizard . A year later, she has the year from hell, basically. Like her mother dies, I think 10 years after first realizing that she had MS. Yeah, she's 45 rolling speciality. She's really love. Yeah, it's grim. Really grim. Um, she's in a long relationship that comes to an end. She was in a job, she gets made redundant, so she decides to up her sticks to Portugal, where she becomes an English teacher. In Porto, she meets a T V journalist and they marry in nineteen ninety two. She becomes pregnant, she gives birth to her daughter Jessica, nineteen ninety three. Named after Jessica Mitford.. Oh, right Okay, who she's a huge fan of. Yeah. And then she breaks up. And now we know that this relationship involved domestic violence. So in an interview to the Daily Express about the night of the breakup, the husband said she refused Well she later claims, like in the Witch Trials podcast, that he was also very controlling, that she couldn't have her own house key, he would search her bag when she got in. Um he hid her manuscript for the first Potter book. Jesus. And she was terrified he would burn it, so she would sneak pages out a few at a time, photocopy them at work. So she had a whole other copy of the manuscript. Just in case he held it hostage, you know, he destroyed it. And this stuff comes out much later. At the time we know that there was some violence and it was obviously a very bad relationship. Um, but a lot of the other claims she keeps quiet, perhaps do with her daughter, perhaps 'cause she doesn't want to to be beccomeome that the narrative. She does say at one point, you know, I did have to talk to my daughter before I talked about this stuff, because it's not just mine. But also I think it's fair to say that she is she's quite cautious about what she says, particularly about her own life. She's not someone that likes putting all of her own life out there. And this includes many of the things that she has done that are extremely kind of morally honourable, like lots of the charitable giving that she's done. She literally gave so much to charity that she stopped being a billionaire. Really, she didn't make a big song and dance about any of that stuff. You actually have to look into it quite hard before you actually get lots of this information. She returns to the UK after the end of that relationship in the end of 1993 with her daughter, and she settles down in Edinburgh. Which is where her sister is living. Exactly, yeah. She says at this point, I mean she is having an absolutely miserable time. She is clearly very poor at this point. She writes, uh later, this is actually when she was doing a speech to Harvard students. I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me and that I had had for myself had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure that I knew. I mean it's like there are other men of. I mean she was thinking postgraduate certificate in education, she became a teacher, she was on benefits in a period where benefits gave you, you know, a bit more than they do right now. She was working in a when she was writing, she was writing in a cafe owned by her sister's husband. I mean, you know, this is probably not a full reflection of how it is. But she was clearly very, very miserable and didn't have much money and you know had just left a relationship as a single mother. And clearly what what what goes into that first Harry Potter book is this grief, because she comes up with the idea, I think, six months before her mum dies, and this period of kind of this awful marriage, and then this feeling of of having failed. And you know, it's it's it's interesting wonder how much that gives it this sort of that there is a kind of emotional heaviness. Interesting. Um to it. That's that's the context for writing it. So she finishes that. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in 199 5 . It is published by Bloomsbury. She appears on the cover as J.K. Rowling because the publisher thought that it if she had a normal name there, it might put off the boys. Rowling said it Yeah, well because she'd been rejec it'd been rejected twelve times quite famously. Largely I think 'cause it was too long for a children's book. Oh wow. Traditionally. I mean they you know, you ain't seen nothing yet. It gets longer . Um and the she doesn't have a middle name. I didn't know I didn't know any of this. So the K is partly because it comes after Jay and is quite pleasing, and it's partly a nod to her grandmother, Kathleen. So that is her literally I know people bring this up in a kind of slightly snide, uh ironic way, but it it is obviously a gender-neutral name that she has chosen that she has been asked to choose. Yes. It's published in nineteen ninety-seven with an initial print run of five hundred. Her first royalty check is for six hundred quid. Right. Her second royalty check about a year later is for one million quid. She will never know poverty again. Much like the last time I put a book out. Very similar. It's extremely similar dynamic. Yeah, well she's been but she's already been like transformed because you know, she gets this auction in the US for publishers. So it's a hundred thousand dollars advanced there. Immediate movie interest. I mean the deal isn't signed for another couple of years, but the the guy David Heyman who ends up producing the Harry Potter movies, he's interested almost as soon as as soon as he's read the book. Right. So it takes off in a way that feels almost like is the publishing equipment like Beatlemania? Yeah. It's so fast. It's so big. It's so unprecedented. Oh, it's just fucking huge. I mean, look, I was working in a bookshop in 2001. Straight out of school, just before I went traveling. I think probably at that point about forty percent of the books we sold were Harry Potter books. I mean it was just everything. There was there was nothing else there. People were absolutely obsessed by it. She starts I mean initially she's publishing a book a year. Um she slows down. I mean she part of the reason she slows down is because actually the extent of the attention freaks her out. She's on a she's on they sort of set up for the goblet of fire in two thousand, this this sort of for the promo tour. They set her up in this sort of fake Hogwarts Express train in King's Cross Station. And it just sort of turns into chaos, really. One of the organizers said, I mean, she she escapes through the rear of this fake train. One of the organizers said, she loved bits of it, but I don't think any of us quite realized quite how freaked out she was. She was quite thin skinned about something that we thought was quite funny. I think she thought we'd put her in jeopardy. And then she just starts to put these layers of people around her Yeah. But the books keep on coming out and the books keep on being unbelievably successful. By the end of the series, she's receiving around two thousand letters a week. She's almost univers ally adored. Like the left love her, they especially love the story of, you know, single mum on benefits in Scotland writing in a cafe. The right love her is a British success story. Well, uh the the the first print run of the seventh novel , so if you got a first edition, I've got bad news for you. Uh it was twenty five million compared to five hundred for the first. So a little a little less uh rare. So yeah, to two really interesting things about her reaction to this. One is that she really she says she never wanted to be famous. She found it very frightening. She didn't know anybody who was famous. She didn't have anybody to talk to. By the way, and I believe her completely. All of her behaviour suggests that that must surely be the case. She seems quite scared. She really dislikes doing the publicity. She's like I said she's described as as thin-skinned, uh controlling, closed off, but this is all coming from that same impulse. She's a if you've if you've heard a clip of that Harvard speech, she's quite a nervous public speaker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's good with children. Not so great with you know talking to adults. At this point, she is like the most successful author on earth talking to a bunch of students. And yet she looks nervy. Her ex-husband um turned up in her flat in Edinburgh. She had to get a restraining order. I didn't know that. Then in nineteen ninety-nine, uh, he goes and speaks to the mail and the express, who she's already sus picious of the media. So there is a sense that he hasn't gone away and he's sort of come back to um fuck up her life. And there's a really interesting thing in a in I think the New Yorker profile of a rolling where Ian Rankin fellow. Yes. So she is wary of situations you can't always control in the real world. Yeah. As opposed to in the novels, where she can control everything. Um so so it sort of sets somebody up here who is quite who is very private and nervous and fearful, overwhelmed. They said she spends three years to write the fifth novel, which is the longest and probably the worst. You know, she's really discombobul ated by it . Also, this incredibly intense fandom is the world's first big online fandom. It's fascinating that a lot of people the first time they went online was to be part of a Harry Potter. Oh, no way , right. Attracts a lot of sensitive outsiders, including a lot of LGBTQ people . Because it's the story of a boy who fights these bigots and bullies and fanatics to find this more welcoming substitute family and become his true self. And that's that's the way that the the way that they read it. And she kind of endorses that because at Harvard, she talks a lot about empathy and says those who choose not to empathize enable real monsters. This is who she represents at that point. And funny, the flag she's getting is from the Christian right. Right. So around 2000, she starts being demonized by evangelicals in America, including members of the Bush administration later, for promoting witchcraft, literally for promoting witchcraft. And I had no idea about this, but some of the legal battles over book bans set legal precedents that are now being used to protect LGBTQ books from being banned. It was like a major thing. So she thought if she had any enemies in the world, it was extreme right-wing Christian evangelicals. Yeah. She has her like it's almost it's hard to imagine what it must be like to be this person. You know, the stories that you hear of when fans approach, it's basically saying, Can I hug you? Yeah. And then they hug and just say, You were my childhood. She must I mean she probably is told dozens of times every day for years, you were my childhood. You have essentially formed all these human beings. And that's how they see you, and increasingly it might be how you see them. And yet you constant no matter what happens, that description of her character stays very, very similar, right? So here's her her she has a second husband called Neil Murray who she meets in 2001. They have two kids. He's a doctor. His only public comments about his wife, caught by a documentary crew. Joe detaches herself. When she's very stressed, she will detach herself and only trust one person, and that's herself. So everyone else gets blocked out and she becomes more and more stressed and less and less able to accept any help. It's also then pertinent to think that later on, I mean she publishes a book called The Casual Vacancy. At one point, three characters read critical comments about themselves on a local website. A accurate comments about themselves, although, you know, critical. And then completely fall apart in outrage. And to quote the New Yorker, the novel seems to treat extreme touchiness as a default psychological setting. Trevor Burrus, Jr. Given that it's being written at a time, you know, half a decade before any of this stuff emerges. Aaron Powell So that's then followed by the first Cormoran Strike detective novel in 2013, which is under the name Robert Galbraith. Originally she goes out under the pseudonym and then it gets leaked. And it's just not like she's unaware. She does speak about so she sort of says, you know, on those strike books, she says, I wanted to take my writing persona as far away as possible from me , so a male pseudonym seemed a good idea. I am proud to say though that when I unmasked myself to my editor, who had read and enjoyed the Cuckoo's Calling without realizing I wrote it, one of the first things he said was I would never have thought a woman wrote that. Apparently I had successfully channeled my inner bloke. Again, I was sort of Wow. I wasn't sure about whether to include this. I just thought is this just very superficial? But it it's just you just like how can you not mention those facts? It's staring you in the face. So she joins Twitter in twenty fourteen, which at the time and this go man, this is a time capsule, calls it an unmixed blessing. Because you can just have a good chat with people. Very very few people describe it in those terms now. And as she later explained, she gets very interested in online subcultures, particularly around Tumblr , which is very kind of it's young women, very left-wing. And she kind of gets in this involved in this sort of early anti-woke backlash around 2015. This go this quite sort of that tumbler tone, which is quite shrill and censorious. And to do with no platforming and cancel culture and things that are problematic, etc. etc . Um I think that is how she frames trans people and trans rights. Yeah. It's sort of that because soon she's reading about uh it's not just right-wing trolls that are being no platformed, it's left-wing feminists. Why is that? Changes in sexual performance are more common than most people realize, and support doesn't need to feel awkward. MedExpress, everything happens privately online. Start by completing a short consultation reviewed by UK registered clinicians. If eligible, treatment is delivered discreetly to your home, with ongoing support whenever you need it. You're not alone in this. Visit medexpress.co.uk slash podcast to learn more. Why go small when you can go grand? Meet the new Vauxhall Grandland Griffin. Striking alloys, sleek black roof, heated front seats, and 10-inch touchscreen. Everything you need for life on the move. Grand on style, grand on tech, grand on value. And during the voxel sales event, get a grand off the new grand on Griffin. Or any other new Vauxhall. On top of all other offers. Search Vauxhall Car offers. Offer to private individuals, £1,000, including the AT saving on new car orders between 15th to 31st of May must be registered by 30th of June 2026. 18 plus season to plot . Back in the 80s, one record label conquered the charts and turned outsiders into household names. In the 90s, that label turned rave culture into smash hits and owned the dance floor. Discover it all on the brand new podcast. Hit that perfect beat, the London Records Story. Out now, wherever you get your podcasts. So there is this idea that Rowling and her allies like to push that that that her position is the feminist position. Right. In fact, it has always been a divide within feminism. Yeah. Starts in second wave feminism about trans inclusion and who is a woman. So do you remember from the New Left episodes, the feminist Robin Morgan, who uh published Sisterhood is Powerful . Now, in 1973, at the West Coast Lesbian Conference, she denounces uh a trans folk singer and organizer, one of the organizers of the conference, Beth Elliott, she calls her an opportunist, an infiltrator, a destroyer. And she calls for a vote to have her ejected. Two-thirds of the attendees vote no, she can stay. So I thought it was quite interesting. This is 1973. Yeah. And you actually have a majority at this lesbian conference going, no. Yeah she she counts. So you've got these two different strands. You've got Janice Raymond's 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire. What a terrifying title. Describes transition as a form of rape and says the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence. Trevor Burrus Wow. In 1989, Jermaine Greer publishes an article called On Why Sex Change is a Lie, and says it doesn't matter if you pass or not, it doesn't matter if you've had surgery or not, because there was some division here about whether or not you had medically transition . Right. But Jermaine Greer is just like it doesn't matter. Okay. Then you've got this other tradition. So Catherine McKinnon, very important feminist, years later says anybody who identifies as a woman wants to be a woman is going around being a woman , as far as I'm concerned, is a woman. Crucially, in 1990, there's Judith Butler's book, Gender Trouble, which is a key text in queer theory and gender stud ies . Her position is still quite radical. She says it's not just gender that's socially constructed, but sex is as well. Um, most people would actually make a distinction still between sex and gender. I mean, I'm taking no picking position on this, I'm not expert. I'm just layyinging out. just tr to survive Laying out the terms here. So th there's this thing that happens in the late seventies, early eighties called the sex wars, uh which kind of breaks up second wave feminism. Mainly what they're arguing about is issues like pornography and prostitution. The trans issue is actually a relatively small part of that. Then in the early 90s, you get third-wave feminism, which is generally more sex posit ive on those issues I mentioned, and also inclusive . And there's a kind of famous disagreement at the Michigan Women's Music Festival about whether trans women should be allowed. There's a brilliant John Ronson Things Fell Apart podcast about this. We interviews some people who were there. I don't need to go into the details. The important thing is that in 2008, a feminist called Viv Smythe was writing a kind of online glossary of feminism. She's writing about what happened at the Michigan Women's Festival. And she needed a way to describe the anti-inclusion position without saying transphobia. So she consults with feminists on, you know, with different points of view, and they sort of agree together trans exclusionary radical feminist, abbreviated as TERF. Smythe said it was meant to be a deliberately technically neutral description of an activist grouping . Incredible. OED says a feminist whose advocacy of women's rights excludes or is thought to exclude the rights of transgender women. Also more generally a person whose views on gender identity are or are considered hostile to transgender people or who opposes social and political policies designed to be inclusive of transgender people. Now there's something about the abbreviation TERF which means it has become very derogatory and it sounds quite hostile when shouted out . The only way in which it is inaccurate is that a lot of these people are not radical feminists. But trans-exclusionally radical feminist was not meant to be an insult. It was meant to be like: how do we describe these radical feminists to a trans-exclusion rate. Yes, yes. So it's sort of weird the way it's treated like a slur, and yet it's not factually inaccurate. No, you it's it's about how onomatopoeic the acronym is. So nothing to do with the content. It's just to say that the once you turn it into turf, it just sounds like a bad thing. And then of course it's taken up by one's and now of course I think it's sort of basically been almost completely reclaimed by by the other. But and it it's sort of like if you even come into brief contact with this thing, you just think that's one of the words I will try never to use because it's gonna do absolutely no good to have any kind of sensible discussion. There's a lot of language wars uh going on. So the point I'm I'm making here, there is a genuine divide in feminism as, there is among gay men and lesbians. It is largely, but not exclusively, generational . And yet, some gender-critical feminists, you know, really argue that they are the only real feminists and, that the trans-inclusive feminists are then naive, they're deluded, they're treacherous, they're handmaidens is a term from you know the handmaid's tale. One of them, Victoria Smith, says: I think this particular belief, gender critical, is a prerequisite for being a feminist, not holding Right. In fact, the most anti-transdemographic is of course straight men . And there are huge numbers of feminists who do not hold that view. You know, that's really, really important because there's such an effort to go. Trans you know, Judith Butler's just going, it's not trans people versus feminists. If you have to see it in versus terms, it's trans people and some feminists versus some other feminists. As you might imagine. To get us to 2017, right? It actually starts with the European Court of Human Rights. There's a nice little bridge. Yeah, nice here. In 2002, rules that a trans person's inability to change their their sex on birth certificate is a breach of human rights and they should have full legal recognition. Straight away, this is two thousand and two, some British clinicians write an open letter to paper arguing the decision is a victory of fantasy over reality. Right. Very against this. So as a result of this ruling , the UK has to introduce the Gender Recognition Act in 2004. It's actually one of the most restrictive systems in Europe. You can obtain a gender recognition certificate, three things. If you provide evidence of a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from your doctor, if you've lived in your acquired gender for two years, and if you make a statutory declaration you intend to live in your acquired gender for the rest of your life. At the time, some feminists uh are attacking this. It was not uncontroversial. I'm gonna kind of quote this piece, this viciously transphobic piece by Julie Bindle and The Guardian? It's quite unpleasant, but just to disprove the idea that it started as very moderate and compassionate and then got angry because of toxicity of social media and all that lot. Right. So it's called genderbenders beware. I don't have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women, in the same way that shoving a bit of vacuum hose down your five oh ones does not make you a man. It's pretty ugly uh stuff. There's a lot of obsession uh with genitals going on . Uh then you've got the Equality Act 2010, obviously very important later, where there's quite a lot uh this sort of very dangerous ambiguity about sex and gender, which of course a lot of people are using interchangeably, right? Yeah. It wasn't like a big debate, oh this distinction. It's not like Judith Butler was drawing it up. Then in 2015, the charity Stonewall becomes trans-inclusive. 2014, we've got the Time magazine cover Transgender Tipping Point with the actress Laverne Cox . What's telling is that it mentions a lot of advances in the piece to do with sports, restrooms, youth healthcare, all of which become these battlegrounds. And Julian Brandstetter from the American Civil Liberties Union says that what trans people experienced in that moment was visibility without protection. That the visibility moved so fast that it couldn't really build this kind of very solid public support and it nor the organizational strength to fight the political and legal battles that were coming. So it felt like, oh, we've we've been accepted. We're no longer stigmatized as like, you know, carotene science to the lambs or whatever. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Being accepted. But underneath, inevitably, there's this backlash brewing. And it gets wrapped up with attacks on DEI, abortion rights, gay marriage in America, right? So in 2016, Jordan Peterson . If you remember, he first gets international attention for posing a new Canadian bill protecting gender identity. Of course. And he says it is a proposition of radical social constructionists and must be met with outright conflict. Going in pretty hard. The same year, a North Carolina bathroom band causes massive uproar and boycotts. Literally, there are. I think Bruce Springsteen wouldn't play in North Carolina because of this. Ten years ago, this, which is now being on the verge of happening possibly in the UK, was considered completely beyond the pale. Of course. In the UK, it's really different. It starts, like I said, with feminists who see this sort of clash of identity rights and they've and it's totally wrapped up in the free speech issue. They feel they can't talk about it without being abused , or no-platform. 2015, Jermaine Greer is no platformed at Cardiff University . And you get these anti-trans groups forming, like transgender trend. There is still a sense that overt transphobia is wrong. I'm not sure if you remember this, but um this is what I wrote that blog post about. 2013, The Observer had to delete a column by Julie Burchill in which he called trans women a bunch of dicks in chicks' clothing and compared them to black and white minstrels. Right. And there was a massive backlash across the board, almost like no body thought that was acceptable. Trevor Burrus There was also a I mean because I've been back reading loads of these sort of like 2019 tweets from people . And you sort of what's notable is that the what is your starting assumption when you write a message on social media? And a lot of the time, if your starting assumption is I could, you know, that I could potentially end up under a an a mountain of abuse here and I could lose my job at you know where I'm so you have to couch things in a very careful, attempted collegiate, just asking questions kind of way. Now it could just be because that's really how you want to talk about it, and then you're later radicalized by the response and you become much more sort of rigid and fierce. Or it could just be that you sort of cynically just think this is the way of introducing these ideas into the bloodstream, you know, all happy, happy, and then later, you know, we'll do what we really think. But one way or another, the tone of the vast majority of critical messaging at that point is polite and inquisitive and broadly intellectual. So sort of following this kind of debate, which is sort of heating up, there's a network of bloggers and mainstream journalists begins to form. And these discussions produce the term gender critical. There's a piece called The An Oral History of the Gender War. And in it, one of them, Sarah Dytum, says, it was an alternative terminology by which to reject being branded anti-trans or TERFs. I and the women I shared intellectual ground with were not against trans people. We were critical of gender as a concept . But But it's very hard to separate those two things, considering that without gender identity , you know, the how do trans people make sense, right? How do they see themselves, right? You are you you c I don't think you can separate the people . One of the people in this piece compares the redefinition of women by gender rather than sex to gaslighting and abuse. It's very hard to not feel, therefore, that you are criticizing the people. So this activism solidifies in twenty fifteen around a report recommending self-ID by Maria Miller, the Tory Chair of the Women Inequality Select Committee. And self-ID is basically reform of the Gender Recognition Act to remove that that gatekeeping of the medical checks and so on. Backed in twenty seventeen by Theresa May, we have laid out plans to reform the gender recognition act, streamlining and demedicalizing the process for changing gender because being trans is not an illness and it should not be treated as such. A consultation is held in England and Wales with 100,000 respondents and finds that a majority are in favor of removing most of the requirements. This seems like a sort of broadly popular change being introduced by um not the most left-wing government we've ever had. It's extraordinary to think of like the the speed of change on this issue that Theresa May was saying that stuff when you and I were working together. Yeah, like in some distant period, you know. But during the consultation process on self-ID, you get this activism coordinated to oppose it in groups like Women's Place UK, which is rooted in the trade unions, and also on the feminism board at Mums net , which becomes what Vice calls a toxic hotbed of transphobia. Organizers against the girl guides becoming trans inclusive, gender recognition reform, but also, you know, lots of dead naming, misgendering, abuse. Some women wear badges saying radicalized by mum's net . Wow, what a thing. It got pretty nasty . And one of the women has said she was troubled by the concept of self-ID on the grounds of safety was JK Rowling. And this is where we get the first evidence of her interest in this subject. Wanna know the real story of how Oasis made Britain mad for it? How friends turned us on to coffee culture and super layered hair? The secrets of Nirvana, train spotting, gay hookups, Diana's revenge dress, and what it was really like to be a spice girl? Plunge back into the decade when the world fell for cool Britannia, Bumster jeans, and lemon hooch with talk 90s to me. Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you use Spotify, you can watch the whole show too. That's Talk Nineties to Me out every Monday. Like our new theme tune? Oh God, what now? The podcast that's been keeping politics addicts sane since 2016, has had a lick of paint. We've got a new sound and a new feel, and we're recording closer to release time, so we're even more up to date on the stories that matter. But we're sticking to the same job . One that's even more important as the stakes get higher in British politics. Exploring the big stories, dispelling the bullshit, and doing it all with a sense of humour. You need one these days. That's O God WhatNow, with me, Andrew Harrison, and the absolute A team of Politics Punditry. Get it every Tuesday and Friday on your favorite podcast apps. So 2017 and 2018 she starts to like post s that are critical about trans issues. Until now, she really doesn't tweet that much at all. It's not very particularly active on social media. And it starts in dribs and drabs and then it picks up momentum. So one of the tweets refers to trans women as quote, men in dresses. You will notice this language is pretty much always the same throughout this sort of period. It always has that kind of cartoonish , slightly vicious quality to it. Her spokesperson comes out. Her spokesperson comes out and says, I'm afraid J.K. Rowling had a clumsy and middle-aged moment, and this is not the first time she has favorited by holding her phone incorrectly. She later said, When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me as a way of reminding myself of what I might want to research later. On one occasion I absentmindedly liked instead of screenshotting, that single like was deemed evidence of wrongthink and a persistent low level of harassment began. Aaron Powell Well she says later that starting in 2017 , I mean she was immersed in this debate. She says, I've met trans people and read sundry books, blogs, and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers, and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. Weirdly, she says that one of the motives for doing this was that there is uh uh a female uh detective in the strike novels who is a rape survivor and that she would be very interested in this subject. Right. It's quite an odd thing to drop in there. Yeah. That somehow it was sort of like book research and the gone wrong. Book research gone gone wrong. And then she sort of admits actually, the course that it wasn't absent minded. I mean maybe the like was, but the reading of it. No, obviously not. Obviously . She wouldn't say radicalized, but she becomes more fierce about this because of this aggressive activism and this disruption of gender critical events. Yeah. That's that's the way that she's sort of framing it . And this is also the year twenty eighteen that Graeme Linhan first takes an anti trans position and is banned from Twitter for harassment. Right. I forgot that was so f so long ago. I still remember having friendly engagements with Graeme Linnehan. Me too. I mean to be honest, I I I I I've had uh friendly engagements with almost everyone that we're mentioning in the story on any side of whatever. Like you know, this is this is like a an area where social connections and blah blah blah blah blah. Including her. I mean I remember she would retweet me in a positive way on Brexit stuff. And every time it did, obviously you do gangbusters. I remember going on holiday with my family, my Latino family and my younger cousin just basically looking at me with a level of respect that he'd never had before in his life because J.K. Rowning followed me on Twitter, you could see the thing. You know, I mean it I remember that sort of stuff. And I remember Graeme Linnon, it would be so good for our traffic on politics.co.uk. He was brilliant on like prison reform. Whenever we did articles on prison reform, like just classic old liberal stuff. He would retweet it, take it to a new audience, it'd get movement behind it, which really hard to get attention on that subject. You know, that feels like a completely different era. Well they were people who were very interested in politics and very online. I mean you know. There we go. Um couple of things worth mentioning in twenty eighteen. One is um a trans woman and convicted rapist, Karen White, assaults multiple female inmates uh in a prison. That leads to a change in policy immediately, and then eventually the law. And I think that was one of those ones where, however transinclusive you are, it was it was quite hard to go that that that's somebody who like a rapist who then transitioned would just be put in there without any kind of like consideration. That was uh and so but obviously that that got brought up a lot . Also , healthcare for gender questioning uh teens becomes becomes a big issue. There is a Atlantic magazine cover story by Jesse Single, who writes, has written about little else ever since, called When Children Say They're Trans. And Dr. Lisa Lippman um publishes a paper on a contentious theory she's been floating for a while called Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria , which you're going to explain later, but this sort of idea of a sort of social contagion that sort of that something is weird is going on. The reason why they think, oh, something weird and scary is going on is because during the 2010s, just to take the UK for a minute, there's a huge increase in referrals to gender clinics like the gender identity service at the Tavistock Clinic, which is the only one in the UK, right? And something similar happening in the US. And for the first time, more of them are assigned female at birth. And there is no clear explanation for why there are suddenly so more gender questioning kids, right? And you could just say there's more awareness and people are just, you know, who were it's like, why are there more autism diagnoses? Are more kids autistic, or are more kids who are autistic getting recognized as such, right? And we still don't really know. But anyway, by 2015, kids, as the gender identity service is called, is getting overwhelmed. Waiting lists are up over two years, it's causing some sort of problems there. It's the numbers. If you actually look at the Jesse Single piece, the people he front loads are detransitioners, people who regretted transitioning, and anxious parents. Not so much satisfied transitioners and their families. It's very much like as the as the flavor of a moral panic. Yes. That it's going suddenly and there are all these numbers. And this is something that you should be worried about. And the fact is that more girls are going in there . This creates almost another front. This is the thing. It's almost like there are different sort of um not necessarily connected issues that that are grouped together, right? So trans women are are called misogynists for invading women's spaces, right? But trans boys and men, well, they're only transitioning because of misogyny, and they've been taught to hate being female. So it's misogyny, misogyny. It's all misogyny, right? And these distinct issues, sports, which we're going to talk more about later, trans girls and women and women's sports, single-sex spaces and youth healthcare. And they're different issues. It would be perfectly possible to be very concerned about women's prisons and actually think and not really mind about the Tavistock Clinic. But they get grouped together, and what yokes them together is the implication that there's something unsafe and dangerous and anti-woman about this. It all sort of comes it all comes as a package. This is all the stuff that's sort of swimming around as we go into 2019. So she becomes at the beginning of 2019 like a bit more confident. So she follows a self-professed transphobe, uh, YouTuber who makes videos with titles like There is No Such Thing as a Lesbian with a penis. Again, it's pretty much exactly the same language as we talked about before. This is Magdalene Burns. That's right, yeah. Um, Rowan calls her an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying and of an aggressive brain tumour, and she said she did it because she wanted to contact her directly. But it's pretty clear at this point. Of rhetoric that's been expressed there . But it's in December of 2019 that she takes a really big decisive step into this space. And she does it over a woman called Maya Forstatters, a tax specialist who lost her job at a think tank after tweeting critically about trans issues , kind of things she writes. I mean, loads of the stuff that she writes is not, you know, is is is not as aggressive as this. In fact, mostly at this period, as we were saying before, it's now would be considered incredibly polite given the what the kind of tenor with which it is discussed. For lots of that social media output, she's a bit more cautious. Here, she's saying things like she's talking about the credit suite's senior director, Pip Bums , who identifies as gender fluid, she calls them a white man who likes to dress in women 's clothes. She files a lawsuit against her employer under the Equality Act on the basis of being unfairly persecuted for her personal beliefs. The what the first judge will throw out the case, saying her views are quote incompatible with human dignity and fundamental rights of others, she appeals and she eventually uh wins the employment appeal. Uh what's interesting about Rowling's intervention here is that for the first time she is completely explicit. There's no more of that sort of dissembling, no more of the sort of disingenuous I was just screenshotting. I've got no real interest in this subject. I'm just asking questions. No longer clumsy thumbs. Yeah, no more clumsy thumbs. I'm glad to hear that her thumbs recovered their full capacity at this stage. And her thumbs tweet: dress however you please, call yourself whatever you like, sleep with any consenting adult who have you, live your best life in peace and security, but force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real. Hashtag I stand with Maya. Hashtag this is not a drill. This is not a drill, by the way, the name of a blog post by Kathleen Stock. Oh, is that where it comes from? So yeah, that's what she's um referring to there. So I mean it really isn't a drill. Because this is the starting gun on the rest of her life. You know, from this point on, there's really no other version of her that we get to see. There's almost no other subject she ever seems to wish to talk about very much. For the first time, an extremely prominent mainstream figure um on you know the on the left in Britain, with big public popularity has come out and aligned themselves to critical commentary about trans people. It's arguably the first step towards the mainstreaming of the anti-trans attitudes, going from, you know, Theresa May, hopelessly right wing on immigration, loves it, to where we are now, where even those who are pro-immigration, many would be opposed. Kathleen Stock has said that, said it this is what gave the you know the sort of uh gender critical or anti transfeminism credibility in politics in the media. Yeah, this th literally this intervention and then and then obviously more that what rolling went to do, but that this was the kind of break. Also , you know, there is quite a lot of criticism, you know, by Amnesty, where she used to work , um, by the muggle net, which as you can imagine, is a Harry Potter fan a fan site. Many Potter fans completely heartbroken and baffled because they go, well, this isn't what the book is about. There's a piece in the New York Times called Harry Potter Helped Me Come Out as Trans, but J.K. Rowling disappointed me and says the tweet was like a punch in the gut. There is like real pain because of people's invest ment in these characters and this world. Well she later says, I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Meyer. Well I mean look the thing is, I I have to say, having been at the bottom of pff, I don't know, a few sort of pylons, I I have to say I can't even imagine what a pylon is like at this level of fame, you know, on any kind of issue. It must just be so completely all encompassing. And then the thing is, it's not just the sort of quantitative nature of your fame. Yeah. It's the qualitative nature. So because of that thing of that was my childhood. People's sense of betrayal is almost biblical, right? Um, on this front. And I think with lots of these cases, I think you can see the same with Lynnham, you can almost see, you can almost imagine them sort of like at 2 a.m. by the laptop in the kitchen, reading all these mess ages. And like in the furnace and the fire of that kind of indignation and an emotional response, it's almost like it burns off the front layer of skin and this new personality is left over. that level uh of uh of either of those people. But um you know, I've had this uh a few times and the last time was actually on this issue. Hmm and I was being attacked by uh anti trans people. And I know that a lot of the messages were like, I'm very disappointed in you, why aren't you supporting women? Oh, you're just, you know, virtue signaling or whatever. Like, not abusive, not great., but not abusive The ones I remember, the ones that were calling me a misogynist, a paedophile, a groomer. It's like, oh my God. I apologize about those, by the way. I'm sure I said sorry after this. They were all coming from one sock puppet account. I did notice that. Cheeky D and um But but yeah, so obviously that is quite short and on the and on that scale, and it steps up. I think what happened there is in the same w that for a long time this was a story about free speech and it became a story about abuse. And it's like online abuse appear cuts in all different directions, right? It is um it is horrendous. Particular I mean the mis ogyny, no. Doesn't matter how much you disagree with her. Uh threats of violence. I mean it goes without saying, like not moral, not helpful, horrific for her to experience. But that almost becomes the story. There wasn't that much about what she was saying, the implications of what she was saying, and I guess because it for a while it wasn't that clear. She this was like this was like one tweet. And it's interesting that she the way she talks about in the witch trials this tweet, did she want to join the conversation much earlier, right? But she'd been advised against it by people close to her. Well done reason. She'd actually warned her management in advance before this tweet. Wow. The last time she would ever do that, I according to her. So as I was living in a state of real tension similar to when I'm planning to leave my ex-husband. I feel like the right thing here is to try and force this conversation on behalf of people I'm seeing shut down who do not have my insulation. So the way that she frames it is she thinks that transactivism is this dangerous, authoritarian, a liberal, it's created a culture of fear, and there are a lot of women who do not have the financial insulation to be able to speak out. So she is doing it for them. So this is her explanation for why she decided to kind of wade in. Because she was sort of financially protected. Whether she was psychologically protected is a whole whether it's a good idea on that level, is a whole different thing. But I mean maybe we should leave it because this was so seismic, right? Yeah. This was so important. And this is the point at which you know it becomes harder to talk about JK Rowling as just the creator of Harry Potter. Well she has turned the page, and nothing that comes afterwards will bear very much resemblance to what came before. You know, she will go from being an incredibly beloved children's author and an inspiration to lots of people to being an all-out political warrior, using language which is increasingly vicious. So yeah, this is this is the absolute turning point, basically this is this is the moment of her origin story. I should end every episode we do like that. How is that the first time I've ever done that? I mean obviously 'cause it's you know, shit. But like but I think that that works quite well. It was no it was amazing. You should just lower your sunglasses like the guy in CSI who would go and I guess that was uh origin story . Well thank you for listening and supporting work and quality observations like that. Um all our sources, many in the case of these two episodes are are in the show notes. Um if you'd like to support us in doing that work, then uh you can tell your friends, you can rate us on uh iTunes or wherever ratings occur, or you could back us on Patreon. That would be lovely. Uh we rely on Patreon sports so that we can do the research that goes into these things. Um patron supporters get access to our online community, get access to the book club that we do after the episodes, talking about the reading that we did and what it was like. They get first dibs on live show tickets. We're doing quite a lot of live shows at the moment, and they also get a pretty hefty amount off those tickets. Uh and our special episodes that we do occasionally with QA's uh with people where we sort of have a chat backwards and forwards, where we answer questions on things like dating advice and favorite music selection. Actually, we've never done that. These are the kind of things I want to be asked, but they're not. We always get asked about what do you think about Harold Lasky's view on late stage communism? Which is far less interesting. Yeah, no, we do need lighter questions. Anyway, we'll see you next time for part two of JK Rowling. Bye guys .