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The most prominent critic being interviewed is Natalie Wynn, a transwoman who runs the YouTube channel Contrapoints, who made a video about JK Rowling. Often associated with BreadTube, an umbrella of YouTube creators with a hard left stance, Contrapoints’s videos cover a variety of contentious topics, particularly transgenderism. Because she endured backlash over her comments about cancel culture and even had some heterodox opinions about being transgender, this could give her sufficient authority to not just strongly criticize Rowling but to understand where she was coming from. Watching some of her efforts, Wynn has proved that she’s capable of delivering measured thoughts about these issues that don’t always come from dogma.
This seems very easy for someone who is frequently acclaimed by progressive media outlets for deradicalizing young men from the alt-right but is ultimately unconvincing from someone capable of restraining her partisanship from the conversation. Now, during a continuous age of religious and spiritual decline, these groups do not have the same amount of cultural purchases they once had before.
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The Long Take: The Witch Trials of JK Rowling - A Review
I moved into my fourth primary school when I was 12 years old. I was a very quiet kid, and it gave bullies a reason to physically and verbally abuse me. My educational performance was very poor, and English was one of my most inadequate subjects. At one point, I didn’t even attempt an important writing exam that was instituted in public schools everywhere. During that time, a small library at my newer school had a series of books about a boy who was born with the power to eliminate a tyrannical dark lord that killed his parents. It was called Harry Potter and was one of the first books I’ve repeatedly read from beginning to end. The story was simple; a young orphan, who has suffered abuse by his aunt and uncle, is transported into a new environment, making new friends along the way, and defeating his biggest enemy to become the very best in his area. But each entry is well-written, and it taught me a lot about narrative and creativity, compared to most of the English teachers I once had. I became so enamoured with the books and films that I also learned to communicate with more people who shared the same interests.
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To many, Harry Potter is their hero, so for them, J.K. Rowling is the individual that made each instalment and related spin-off possible. As the face of the franchise, Rowling has recently become more divisive following her opinions on sex and transgenderism, which involves her concerns about transwomen appearing in female prisons, the attempts to make inclusive terms like ‘menstruating persons’ and ‘pregnant people’ transpiring, and her support for Maya Forstater and other gender-critical feminists. Fandoms have treated the author like the villain Voldemort, who is nicknamed He Who Must Not Be Named, publicly shaming her and attempting to reclaim their beloved property for themselves. One example of this includes Quidditch League changing the name of their sport, depicted in the books, into Quadball.
This is what an audio documentary series called The Witch Trials of JK Rowling attempts to explore. A production of The Free Press and presented by Megan Phelps-Roper, this podcast is not simply about the recent tribulations of JK Rowling, but how she grapples with her huge influence, as she went from a struggling single mother to one of the most well-known authors in the world.
Reviews of The Witch Trials were swiftly critical of the podcast for being hagiographic towards its subject. The Washington Post described it as an ‘exhausting listen’, while Vulture claims that it “displays little urgency in engaging with the perspectives of trans people.” But they weren’t written once the series finished on the seventh episode on 29th March (an epilogue will be released in a few weeks). As someone who has listened to all of the series, my opinion is that it’s a delicate and sensitive look into one of the world’s most famous women who became an active player in the new version of the culture wars that reveals far more about her, as soon as she gets the chance to speak. The Witch Trials aren’t just targeted at people who are labelled as TERFs and have uneasy stances on transgenderism. They also aimed at anyone sceptical that Rowling is coming in good faith. And its accomplishment is that the more you listen, a dispassionate and careful enquiry around a rather anxious issue comes around that becomes complex and balanced.
The Witch Trials was made possible after Megan Phelps-Roper receive some correspondence from Rowling over a letter that she sent her. But that connection does not begin there. Phelps-Ropers grew up with Harry Potter , while Rowling read Phelps-Roper’s memoir Unfollow, which is about moving away from her father Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, which notoriously picket events with signs saying God Hate Fags. Both had their fair share of experiencing extremism, whether they are confronted by it or had participated in it, which Phelps-Roper once did.
Here in The Witch Trials, Phelps-Roper has a more active role than being the narrator and presenter. Her questions are detailed and are often on the opposite side of the equation to make Rowling clarify her opinions better. She appears introspective about her own past, and considering Rowling’s history of charging back against bigotry before the recent controversies (including a tweet criticizing the Westboro Baptist Church for objecting to same-sex marriage), it makes the relationship between the interview and interviewee more interesting.
This theme would feel familiar in Episode Two, where one of the first controversies that Harry Potter encountered was from Christian fundamentalists, accusing the books of spreading Satanism and paganism. It’s hard to forget how much these fringe groups, were more likely to be associated with creative control and censorship. Now, during a continuous age of religious and spiritual decline, these groups do not have the same amount of cultural purchases they once had before. What accommodated that gap is a combination of accelerant digital platforms and political justice that allows much of the backlash towards Rowling possible.
Rowling is not just a feature of this way of life, but a symptom. The topic of a ravenous online split between 4chan reactionaries and its progressive users of Tumblr is explored in Episode Three, with a curious range of talking heads that includes Kat Rosenfield, Angela Nagle and Helen Lewis. Each of them has written previously about the Internet’s transformation into a machine that incentivises the relationship between the author and their fans. Rosenfield has written a lot about the plight of Young Adult authors being pressured by their fans to conform to the ideological orthodoxies of diverse and authentic representation, while Nagle explored the transgressive aesthetic of the online Right in her book Kill All Normies . This shaped an important context for how these controversies intensified and how Rowling became an engaged player in these conflicts. Various platforms, particularly Twitter and Tumblr, facilitated many precocious fandoms that include Harry Potter . It gave Rowling an opportunity to communicate with them, who made the franchise their identity and used it to develop their cultural beliefs. After all, she did hint that Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of the wizarding school Hogwarts, was gay in 2009.
As these issues become bigger than JK Rowling, her answers with Phelps-Roper come off as understated but are nonetheless revealing. Rowling tells Phelps-Roper that she started questioning the effectiveness of her own side when hard-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos was greeted with violence, upon descending into the campus at the University of Berkeley in 2017. She condemned the violence, and it’s surprising to hear this from her nowadays, since around that time, her books and her views have become a substitute for opposition against Donald Trump, who she once described as Voldemort. She was also sympathetic to the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, but loathed Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership at the Labour Party, bemoaning that he turned it into a cult and his positions on Brexit that were sympathetic to the Leave argument.
The most prominent critic being interviewed is Natalie Wynn, a transwoman who runs the YouTube channel Contrapoints, who made a video about JK Rowling. Often associated with BreadTube, an umbrella of YouTube creators with a hard left stance, Contrapoints’s videos cover a variety of contentious topics, particularly transgenderism. Because she endured backlash over her comments about cancel culture and even had some heterodox opinions about being transgender, this could give her sufficient authority to not just strongly criticize Rowling but to understand where she was coming from. Watching some of her efforts, Wynn has proved that she’s capable of delivering measured thoughts about these issues that don’t always come from dogma.
Before the release of the podcast, Contrapoints made a Twitter thread expressing regret for her appearance, feeling that it would endanger trans people along the way. However, listening to her interview, you would not know the specificities of what makes Rowling a transphobe, unless you’ve seen Wynn’s video that calls her an indirect bigot, compared to a direct one, which she associates with the Westboro Baptist Church. That video frequently distorts these concerns further, before hurling insults at Rowling at every opportunity that she gets. This seems very easy for someone who is frequently acclaimed by progressive media outlets for deradicalizing young men from the alt-right but is ultimately unconvincing from someone capable of restraining her partisanship from the conversation.
Contrapoints comes in the second last episode, which is delivered alongside another interview with Noah, a teenager who transitioned from female to male and is far more measured and understanding of Rowling’s claims about transgenderism, even if he strongly disagrees. They bring a solid representative of her critiques and it allows the podcast to allow opposite sides to speak out. But given that their journeys to satisfactorily embody their new bodies is yet to be complete, it leaves a lot to be desired. Noah says he still struggles with some mental health issues, following his transition, which only reinforces Rowling’s point about whether or not they do stem from the event.
(Contrapoints released a really long follow-up video that is titled after the podcast. I haven’t checked it out, but reading this rebuttal from Holly Lawford-Smith, there’s a chance that she’s not as capable of grasping nuance as her champions frequently state. Whether it’s because of audience capture, or a genuine regret in appearing on the show, my thoughts still stand)
The relationship between Rowling and her critics is of political and creative betrayal. But as I listened to the podcast, what they have in common is that each player possesses a vocabulary that was once applied within feminist and academic spaces. This language specifically revolves around fairness and equality, and that has now been broadly used by mainstream media outlets and corporate HR departments to spearhead these positions. This allowed both sides of this debate to express their vulnerability in the most performative way. But one will go as far as to remove another in those institutions if they don’t want to conform to these new rules.
In this day and age, it would be really tempting for anyone on the Internet to become activated by one particular issue before trading much of their worldview to reinvent themselves with their new audience into a truth-telling prophet. Hence, because of her gender-critical stance, there’s an assumption that Rowling has drifted rightward. She affirms that she has not stopped being a progressive, during the final episode where she answers all of her critics, including Natalie Wynn. She distinguishes herself from conservatives whose views happen to overlap with hers, saying that they are more interested in harming more vulnerable communities along the way, whether it’s the LGBT minorities or women, in general. This is in the wake of right-wingers currently taking the maximalist route around the issue; commentators like Michael Knowles declared that if transgenderism is false, then it should be “eradicated from public life entirely.” The distinction between Rowling and Knowles is he’s more than happy to own his position in simplistic and brutal terms, while she, as a broader public figure, has to be very careful in elaborating on their opinions.
A thing that could have made the podcast more compelling would be a more thorough assessment of Rowling’s future as a public figure. Since she elaborated on her opinions of sex in 2020, Rowling has continued writing a series of adult fiction novels under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith called The Cormoran Strike , and it has been a success. While her financial freedoms can withhold any controversy, the culture she has created with the Harry Potter fandom remains fraught. Upon the release of The Witch Trials , Hogwarts Legacy became one of the biggest console games of the year. This is in spite of the backlash towards the author, but also spreading to anyone interested in streaming it. For most people who are eager to excuse cancel culture, one aspect that is ultimately missed is that Rowling won’t be the one being taken down, but her fans that want to revisit their memories of reading the books. They do not have the same safety net to weather the storm that JK Rowling is able to.
An advantage that a long-form podcast has is that you can be interrogated directly by other people and allow yourself the chance to answer people who disagree with you. This is the goal of The Witch Trials of JK Rowling rather than cover for her because she has the correct opinion and it has achieved much of it. And it serves as a lesson for anyone within this fragile debate to remain restrained and grasp the complexity of the issue, when more parents who feel they don’t understand the topic well enough, enter the conversation.
As I grew up, I have a close friend from high school who transitioned and it initially confused me when I first heard about it. But knowing that our memories are not mine, I accepted this person’s transition and for us, it’s the best way to move forward. However, as the conception of being female is becoming fraught among researchers, it’s foolish to shut down anyone who makes this mild observation, nor is it wise to dismiss trans people, because they made a decision that ultimately makes them happy. That is the position that JK Rowling actually takes. And while she isn’t the best person to understand this topic, neither is anybody, especially the activists taking such matters very personally, they believe intimidating language against supposed extremists is the best way to bring the debate forward. And that has become larger than the witch in question.
Harry Potter will continue, however, its intellectual property allows them to, and Rowling will still reap the benefits. HBO has announced a TV series that is based on the books, which means that the stories are here to stay, so long as more readers younger than I am, are attached to what they are reading. This means that they’ll be some who would try to reclaim it from the monster holding it captive since 1997, and who grew up in hard times before it became a phenomenon.
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