Hello and welcome to Origin Story. This week we begin the story of J.K. Rowling and how the world’s most beloved author became its most divisive. How did she become obsessed with trans rights and how did her colossal wealth and celebrity shape the backlash?

We’re telling two parallel stories. One is how Joanne Rowling transformed into J.K. Rowling. The first Harry Potter book comes out of dark times: a shattering bereavement, a terrible marriage, relative poverty and a crushing sense of failure. When it is published in 1997, it changes Rowling’s life beyond recognition: the publishing industry’s equivalent of Beatlemania. By 2000, the attention is overwhelming and the religious right is denouncing her for endorsing witchcraft. By the time she moves into fiction for adults in 2012, her life seems guarded but stable. But then she joins Twitter and becomes very interested in online discourse at the birth of “cancel culture”.

The second story is about feminism’s fraught relationship with trans inclusion and the concept of gender identity. This has divided feminists since the second wave in the 1970s but it came to the fore in 2010s as trans visibility reached an all-time high and so-called “gender critical” feminists rallied to oppose the introduction of self-ID legislation. Disparate issues such as prisons, sports and youth healthcare were pulled into a movement that fundamentally denied gender identity. In the US, anti-trans activism was another wedge issue for social conservatives but in the UK it emerged from the centre left — and that’s where Rowling came in.

This is also a story about social media and what happens when a disagreement about civil rights plays out on Twitter. That’s where, in 2017, Rowling begins quietly expressing interest in anti-trans voices. After some initial denials, she breaks cover in 2019 by supporting Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who claims to have lost her job due to her gender critical views. Overnight, this one tweet transforms Rowling’s reputation, mainstreaming the movement while dismaying many Harry Potter fans and horrifying trans people. This is the rupture. There is no turning back.

What can Rowling’s early life tell us about the path she has taken over the last decade? What is her relationship to fame and fandom? Why did the question of trans rights become all-consuming? What do gender critical feminists believe? And why can people not even agree on what words to use? It’s a story of obsession, polarisation, celebrity, Twitter and how people can radically change.

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Reading list

Articles

• Decca Aitkenhead – ‘JK Rowling: ‘The worst that can happen is that everyone says,‘That’s shockingly bad”’, The Guardian (22 September 2012)

• Julie Bindel – ‘Gender benders beware’, The Guardian (31 January 2004)

• Jackson Bird – ‘“Harry Potter” Helped Me Come Out as Trans, But J.K. Rowling Disappointed Me’, New York Times (21 December 2019)

• Theara Coleman – ‘A timeline of JK Rowling’s anti-trans shift’, The Week US (April 2026)

• Caroline Davies – ‘JK Rowling’s journey from Harry Potter creator to gender-critical campaigner’, Guardian (18 April 2025)

• Sarah Ditum et al. – ‘An Oral History of the Gender War’, The Radical Notion (Autumn/Winter 2024)

• Alona Ferber – ‘Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times”’, New Statesman (22 September 2020)

• Molly Fischer – ‘Who Did J.K. Rowling Become?’, The Cut (22 December 2020)

• Simon Hattenstone – ‘Harry, Jessie and Me’, The Guardian (8 July 2000)

• Paris Lees – ‘On Germaine Greer and the Hypocrisy of the “Left”’, Vice (20 November 2015)

• Eve Livingston – ‘How an Online Forum for Moms Became a Toxic Hotbed of Transphobia’, Vice (6 December 2018)

• Dorian Lynskey – ‘The Burchill Ultimatum’, 33 Revolutions Per Minute blog (14 January 2013)

• Ian Parker – ‘Mugglemarch’, New Yorker (24 September 2012)

• Aja Romano – ‘Is J.K. Rowling transphobic? Let’s let her speak for herself.’, Vox (30 May 2025)

• J.K. Rowling – ‘Text of J.K. Rowling’s Speech’, Harvard Gazette (5 June 2008)

• Amia Srinivasan – ‘Who Lost the Sex Wars’, New Yorker (6 September 2021)

Books

• Hannah Barnes – Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children (2023)

• Judith Butler – Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

• Shon Faye – The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (2021)

• Helen Joyce – Trans: Where Ideology Meets Reality (2021)

• Sean Smith – J.K. Rowling: A Biography (2001)

... reading list continues on Patreon

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Videographer: Connor Newson. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

www.podmasters.co.uk

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