Of all of the times to attempt to make sense of J.K. Rowling’s anti-trans rhetoric by humanizing her, the new stage play TERF (Assembly Rooms Ballroom, Edinburgh, through Aug. 25) has debuted at both the most opportune and unfortunate one.
Premiering at the Edinburgh Fringe, mere blocks from the cafe where Rowling infamously finished writing the first of her “Harry Potter” books, the play by Tokyo Vice and Designated Survivor script coordinator Joshua Kaplan has taken advantage of the location for maximum publicity leading up to last weekend’s curtain raising.
And yet the satire of Kaplan’s stagecraft has been upstaged by Rowling’s real-life online meltdown during the Summer Olympics over the medal-winning run by Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who fights for the woman’s welterweight gold in Paris on Friday.
Rowling continues to have a row about on the platform that transitioned from Twitter to X, posting, reposting and promoting false allegations suggesting Khelif, born female, is in fact a man, despite the truths of both her national documentation, and illegality of being trans in Algeria.
In TERF (an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist), Kaplan imagines the three young stars from the Harry Potter films—Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint—cornering Rowling in a meal-time intervention of sorts, hoping to convince her to sign paperwork that’ll put a stop to her hateful rhetoric.
That’s not likely to happen in real life. In April, Rowling responded to a fan on X who typed, “Just waiting for Dan and Emma to give you a very public apology … safe in the knowledge that you will forgive them …,” Rowling replied: “Not safe, I’m afraid. Celebs who cosied 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 traumatised detransitioners and vulnerable women reliant on single sex spaces.”
Later that month in a profile in The Atlantic, Radcliffe said this of Rowling: “It makes me really sad, ultimately, because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”
Kaplan’s play does try to show empathy to Rowling, re-enacting scenes from her past in which she confronts her Portuguese ex-husband and her father, and the scene in which executives at Bloomsbury Publishing persuaded Rowling to identify as something other than female because the imprint believed boys wouldn’t read a wizarding book written by a woman. At various points, characters force Rowling to defend her perhaps antisemitic portrayal of the goblin bankers in the Potter books, and whether she as a woman is even qualified to tell a boy’s story.
There’s also an unidentified trans woman providing scene segue narration and haunting over the entire production, with Kaplan’s play suggesting some psychological or emotional thread tying the trans woman’s trauma to Rowling’s. For the most part, though, this trans character has her mouth taped, not allowed to speak and forced to watch silently as others speak for and against her very existence.
Played by Piers MacKenzie (Daniel), Trelawny Kean (Emma), and Tom Longmire (Rupert), the Hogwarts kids all-grown-up are doing their best with the material they have to debate Rowling (played by London-based American actress Laura Kay Bailey). When Rowling dismisses her “surrogate children” for virtue-signaling, they retort: “At least we’re signaling virtue. You should try it sometime.”
Their secret meeting gets blown up by the tabloid media (The Daily Beast getting a shout-out), with crowds heard outside the window below shouting “TERF!” and “C—t!” as Daniel, Emma and Rupert hope to get J.K. to see things their way. Alas, they cannot.
As Rowling herself posted just a few weeks ago: “Amazed this still needs saying, but some don’t seem to have got the memo. If calling me ‘transphobe’ and ‘fascist’ was going to scare me out of speaking up for women’s rights, it would have happened years ago. Whatever the square root of not giving a fuck is, that’s where I am.”
In the play, Emma is left devastated. “I’m just trying to make sense of it. I want it to make sense!” she says. “We are one trauma away from becoming her. Ahem. Them.”
TERF is unlikely to change your mind, and definitely won’t change Rowling’s. All of which somehow makes this all feel like a big waste of time.
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