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The producers of a controversial Edinburgh Festival Fringe play about JK Rowling’s trans views are preparing for protests ahead of the show opening next month.
The play, titled TERF, imagines the stars of the Harry Potter film franchise staging an “intervention” for the author who has repeatedly argued online that trans women are not women.
The show’s Edinburgh-based producer, Barry Church-Woods, spoke about security measures they’d taken at the play’s Assembly Rooms venue.
“We expect that most people, if they’re intending on disrupting what we’re doing, that will happen in the auditorium of the theatre. We have processes in place that are going to deal with that,” Church-Woods said.
Writer Joshua Kaplan has denied that TERF – an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist – was a “hit piece” on Rowling and said that any “preconceived ideas” about the author being a “pantomime villain” should be dismantled early in the production.
Rowling will be played by Laura Kay Bailey, a Texan actor 15 years younger than the Harry Potter creator. Piers MacKenzie features as Radcliffe, while Trelawny Kean and Tom Longmire star as Watson and Grint respectively. A trans actor also features in the play but has not been identified due to fears she will become a target for abuse.
Kaplan previously told The Independent: “I would absolutely welcome JK Rowling – and India Willoughby. Everybody is welcome.”
Willoughby – a trans woman and broadcaster – has been locked in an online feud with Rowling since at least 2023. Rowling has repeatedly misgendered Willoughby and called her “Himdia Stillaboy.”
Kaplan said he wanted to create a piece of theatre that would encourage the audience to “take a step back” and “see why they have come to the opinions they have come to”.
“It’s not just about what we say, it’s about the way we say it,” he explains, admitting that he was inspired to write the screenplay after the author first expressed gender-critical views in 2020.
“A lot of that interrogation [about] how we communicate with each other has been completely lost when we are sitting behind our computer [and] typing these awful, often terrible things out to each other and not stopping and thinking about [the] people on the other side of the computer.”
In 2020, Harry Potter actors Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint each released statements in support of trans people in response to Rowling’s comments.
In April of this year, Rowling accused Radcliffe and Watson of being “cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights”.
A month later, Radcliffe made a rare comment about his deteriorated relationship with Rowling.
“It makes me really sad, ultimately,” he said, “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.”
JK Rowling has denied being transphobic, but previously said she would “happily” spend two years in prison for misgendering a transgender person.
