Eden, and the Humanity J. K. Rowling Wants You to Ignore
by Evan Urquhart
In this episode of the Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, trans people’s humanity is reduced to a threatening, anonymous, sexually dangerous online mob.
If episode four of The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling was a speedrun through anti-trans propaganda talking points, episode five is a master class in transmisogyny. The genteel dehumanization of trans women and their reduction to the worst excesses of an anonymous online mob is particularly difficult to take on a day when the transgender community on Twitter is greiving the loss of Eden Knight, a Saudi trans woman whose violent abuse at the hands of her family and forced detransition resulted in her taking her own life on March 12.
I don’t like listening to Witch Trials, and I don’t want to talk about Rowling. So let’s talk about Eden, and the humanity of trans women, first.
Before her death, Eden was just one of thousands of isolated trans people who find community mostly online. If you look at Eden’s Twitter account as a trans person, it’s familiar. If you didn’t know Eden, but yo’re trans and online, you’ll know trans people like her. She has discussions around trans issues, jokes, memes, and strong sexual language. It’s a trans woman’s Twitter account.
Eden was loved by her trans friends in a way that she wasn’t loved by her family. In her suicide note, she describes living in America illegally, and how precarious and vulnerable her situation was. She says that her wealthy Saudi Arabian family hired American fixers to bring her back, and through a slow process of isolation and manipulation they succeeded. She says she tried to live as a man in her home country of Saudi Arabia, but could not. She says tried to lead a secret life, sneaking hormone therapy behind her family’s back, connecting to her trans friends online, hoping to escape, but her family grew increasingly abusive and invasive. They searched her belongings daily, found her hormones, berated her, called her names. She says she once wanted to be a leader for other trans people, but in the end she gave up hope. While the details and circumstances remain hazy, Eden’s death has been confirmed by transgender reporter Erin Reed.
This is the vulnerability of trans women, the humanity of trans women, and a reality that Witch Trials methodically and intentionally goes about concealing from view. In its place the podcast presents a caricature of threatening difference instead. Eden never tweeted at or about JK Rowling (her account was created in 2021), but she could easily have done so. She did make jokes about AGP, and about fucking people’s wives. She engaged in the sort of behavior online that transphobes routinely use to present trans women as sexually depraved monsters, as less than human, as an undifferentiated mass of deviance and threat. None of her gallows humor or attempts to survive made her a predator. None of her jokes made her a monster. Nothing about her body or her sexuality was disgusting, or wrong. None of it made her deserving of death.
Like Eden, like so many of us, J. K. Rowling’s own behavior has also strayed from the straight and narrow online. She once liked a tweet mocking trans women as “men in dresses.” That incident isn’t mentioned by the podcast, but another one is. In the discussion of a mocking tweet of Rowling’s, one in which Rowling made fun of the idea of including trans men in discussions of menstruation, Rowling is given time to explain how she was responding to the oppressive atmosphere of the COVID-19 stay-home orders. She says she was “angry and flippant” and not thinking ahead or planning her words.
The possibility that trans people might also exist in oppressive atmospheres, that they too might feel angry, or become flippant, is never raised. Not by Rowling, not by host Megan Phelps-Roper, not by interviewee Kathleen Stock, and not in the few seconds of an interview from Jackson Bird, a trans man who says he still holds out hope that Rowling could come to understand how her transphobia hurts people like him.
Instead, there are quotes of tweets, purportedly from trans women representing the broader transgender rights movement, that reference a desire to sexually assault Rowling. They are graphic, disturbing, and wrong. But the podcast never once reads out the violent, threatening, or degrading tweets targeting trans people, from Rowling’s side. It never suggests that Rowling’s activist friends engage in this behavior routinely, or asks Rowling to account for that.
Rowling is also not pressed on the meanness of her tweet mocking the idea that people who aren’t women menstruate, or asked to justify her attack on inclusive health services for trans men. Rowling calls the trans rights movement “a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement” with no pushback from Phelps-Roper or anyone else.
The episode’s concern is with free speech, that of Rowling, and Stock, and other anti-trans feminists. But there’s no conversation about whether anti-trans speech is being suppressed. In the reality of the Witch Trials, The speech of individual trans people doesn’t exist as something that could be suppressed, or as something worth being preserved. The podcast raises a few high profile cases of anti-trans activists being fired or leaving their jobs, but never contends with the widespread discrimination in housing and employment against trans people, and how that might impact their ability to speak. It never suggests that online harassment might silence trans people as well. In Witch Trials, trans people are an onine monolith, replaceable and indistinct, while opponents of trans rights are individual human beings, each with a voice, each valuable in themselves.
Eden will never speak again. The trans people who survive and speak out at the horrific circumstances that led to her death cannot replace her voice. This is what it means to say that Rowling’s transphobia dehumanizes us. It robs us of the position of individuals, with individually precious, individually valuable voices and lives. It flattens us into a monolith, then presents the worst examples from that monolith as being representative of us. If we say they are not representative they insist that we use our voices and our energy to denounce and condemn the bad actors, instead of speaking up for ourselves. Rowling isn’t asked to waste her energy that way.
The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling, episode five, is an artifact of extreme dehumanization and transmisogyny. Portraying a minority group as being responsible for or represented by its worst members, as Rowling and Witch Trials do throughout this episode, is what prejudice is. It’s what bigots do. It’s what hatred looks like. Witch Trials wants you to believe that calling Rowling a bigot is extreme, and that speech to that effect isn’t real speech. But that only works if trans people’s speech is suborinate to Rowling’s, and if efforts from Rowling to silence trans people by portraying death threats as representative of our voices, but not of hers, don’t really count.
UPDATE: Reporting by Rolling Stone and Vice confirmed many of the details of Eden Knight’s story, and provided circumstantial evidence for all or most of what remained.