The Last Witch Trials Ep Hints at Rowling’s Sympathy for the Far Right

In episode 7 of the Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling the author makes excuses for young men who enter the far right, and seems to hint that violence against trans women in bathrooms is okay.

by Evan Urquhart

The 7th and final episode of the Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling is teased by Phelps-Roper as a chance for Rowling to answer her critics, but the content is more a doubling down than a coming together or softening of Rowling’s extreme views. It contains hints of the overt hatred towards trans people Rowling went on to display, before the episode aired but after it was taped.

(If you’re interested in our coverage of earlier episodes, you can find all of it here.)

Mere days before episode 7 dropped, Rowling went on a transphobic Twitter bender that included using a transphobic slur to refer to trans women, retweeting a meme referring to colors chosen to represent LGBTQ+ people of color and others “SHIT,” and voicing her strong support for Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, an anti-trans activist whose ties to far-right extremists resulted in National Socialist supporters of Keen-Minshull marching and giving Nazi salutes on the streets of Melbourne during an anti-trans rally she convened.

Rowling’s comments to Phelps-Roper aren’t quite as extreme as her later tweets would become, but they’re not that far off. In one extended monologue, Rowling expressed sympathy for young men in the extreme right wing, who she feels are being helplessly pushed into extremism because they feel they have no voice.

In order to avoid taking any of this out of context, we’ve transcribed all of Rowling’s thoughts on the subject of how she believes the left is driving young men into the arms of the far right:

The right has wanted for years and years and years—not all of the right, but certainly the furthest right and the religious right—have wanted to castigate the lesbian, gay, and bisexual movement as inherently degenerate, and part of the left’s broader degeneracy. When you defend the placing of rapists in cells with women you are handing the right a perfect opportunity to say ‘You see? We told you the moral degeneracy that would result if you say homosexual relationships are okay.’ I think for many leftists, for many feminists, we are despairing of the fact that people are, in our view, colluding with a deeply misogynist movement which is benefitting, politically speaking, the far right. And I worry very deeply that as the left becomes more puritanical and authoritarian and judgemental we are pushing swathes of people towards not just the right, it’s pushing them to the alt-right.

Particularly young men, when they’re being told everything in the world is their fault and they have no right to a voice and they are everything that is wrong with society, it is unfortunately a human reaction to go to the place where you will be embraced. And if the only place where you can make a joke or be accepted is a place that is full of poisonous ideas, then you’re likely to go there when you’re young. So I think that the left is making a tremendous mistake in espousing this kind of, in my view quasi-religious incredibly sort of witch-hunting behavior. Because there will be people who will just feel, when they’ve been shamed and abused, and they feel it was unfair, where are they gonna go? You know. That worries me very deeply. In my lifetime we’ve seen such a shift, on the left, and I still would define myself as of the left, but, you know, I was born in the 60s, when transgression really was the preserve of the left, you know when challenging authority and making the dark joke and breaking societal norms was very much the preserve of the left.

Of particular note is Rowling’s echoing of the talking point that the right has become the only source of social transgression. Rowling may have believed that as she said it, but it conflicts with something Rowling said to Phelps-Roper about bathrooms only a few minutes before. On bathrooms, Rowling admits that the left are breaking a social taboo, but calls for the taboo to be reinforced, even hinting that violent confrontation might be appropriate in response. Here’s that full quote:

There has been, until very recently, historically there has been a social taboo, so that if my husband decided that he wanted to use the ladies bathroom the women inside would feel confident in challenging his right to be there, and, I think, in my view most decent men watching a man walking in to the ladies bathroom might well challenge him too. That is now being eroded.

While Rowling explicitly says she still considers herself part of the left, this rhetoric is hard to distinguish from what we see on the far right. The right defend their racism and right to offend on the grounds that transgressing social norms is good, rather than defending them on the merits of the speech itself. However, they then turn around and insist that sexist social norms are good and important and natural, and must be retained at all costs.

Another theme Rowling returned to repeatedly during the podcast was the description of violent crimes which had been comitted by trans women, particularly sexual offenses. This also echoes the furthest right wing rhetoric, which seeks to tie any crime committed by an individual member of a minority group to the inherent inferioity and danger of the group as a whole. Rowling describes crimes committed by trans women at such length, and in such graphic detail, that at one point Witch Trial actually fades down her audio and cuts to the end of her tirade.

In truth, the 2015 USTS data, among other surveys, has shown that trans women are even more likely to be victims of sexual assault than cisgender women are (trans men and nonbinary trans people are likewise subjected to sexual violence at an elevated rate). As with other highly stigmatized minorities, trans women of color in particular are more likely to spend time in prison over the course of their lives. Arrests for prostitution are particularly common for trans women of color, and transgender activists have sought to make it more difficult for police to arrest women on suspicion of prostitution purely because they are trans. When in men’s prisons, trans women are extremely viulnerable to rapes and assaults, with many studies finding rates of prison assault far beyond that of other groups.

Although Witch Trials persistently attempts to portray Rowling as a victim and make her concerns sound reasonable, the show cannot ultimately contend with the author’s own words. From making excuses for right men who are drawn to violent extremism, to saying she believes trans women should be “confronted” by “decent men” if they’re seen entering the bathroom, to harping on stories of horrific crimes to cement a bigoted impression of trans people as dangerous criminals in the listener’s mind, Rowling’s extremism on trans issues has grown past the point where it can be nicely covered up by equivocating words.