A partial account of a very bitter controversy

• Published date: 18 March 2023

Perhaps Megan Phelps-Roper was turned down by the myriad trans people she approached to interview. If that was the case, I'd love to have been told who she asked and what their given reasons were. Instead, what we get is something very different entirely with this slickly produced, slippery podcast

To be fair, The Witch Trials of JK Rowling makes pretty clear what its agenda is, by its very title - Rowling is the persecuted one here, in a pointed nod to the misogynist, gendered persecution of women in 17th century Massachusetts.

Phelps-Roper, who grew up in the famously bigoted Westboro Baptist Church, considers herself particularly well placed to take on the thorny subject of Rowling versus trans people because: "Growing up, it was my community that thought JK Rowling was evil."

What The Witch Trials has is access to Rowling. Straight away, we hear her harrowing account of her mother's premature death, of her life with an abusive husband, of her economic struggles as a single mother. It's a sympathetic account, unusually candid from such a notoriously private writer. Rowling has experienced serious trauma in her life, and knows what it feels like to live in fear of violence.

From that particular episode one table setting, we move on to her rise to liberal darling, culminating in the delivery of a Harvard commencement address in 2006. She was beloved, largely for her creation of an outsider character who goes from life in a literal closet to a celebrated, powerful, magical wizard with the flick of a wand, so to speak. Marginalised people thought they'd found their champion. The inevitable conservative backlash is the subject of the second episode, with book burnings and allegations of satanism and...