A play about JK Rowling and trans rights has opened at the Edinburgh Fringe. The play’s producer, Barry Church-Woods, told Sky News that Rowling’s comments towards the trans community are “unforgivable”.


A play about JK Rowling and trans rights has opened at the Edinburgh Fringe. But what has the Harry Potter author said on the issue?

Edinburgh Fringe theatre play reimagines JK Rowling trans row | The Star

A new play criticising Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s views on transgender issues has opened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.

The comedy production TERF imagines the Harry Potter film actors staging an intervention with the British author about her view that biological sex is immutable.

“It is an intervention by Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint to Jo Rowling” to get her to change her position on the trans debate, Trelawny Kean, who plays the role of Emma Watson, told AFP.

Rowling’s frequent posts on X on the subject have made her a hate figure among many transgender rights campaigners. They argue, for example, that she has repeatedly misgendered a British trans broadcaster.

That has led them to dismiss her as a terf, a term of abuse that unpacks as “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”.

US writer and director Joshua Kaplan nevertheless argues that TERF is not a character assassination on Rowling, but about both trans rights and the loss of nuance on social media.

“It’s about how social media has infected the way that we have conversations, the way that nuance has been lost in almost every conversation,” he added.