‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’ Is a Mind-Numbing Exercise in Digression

J.K. Rowling is not worried about what her anti-trans speech might do to her legacy. In fact, while speaking on the new podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author said that while she “never set out to upset anyone,” those who assume she cares about tarnishing her reputation “could not have misunderstood me more profoundly.”

“I do not walk around my house thinking about my legacy,” Rowling said on the podcast, which debuted its first two episodes on Tuesday. “Whatever, I’ll be dead. I care about now. I care about the living.”

In various tweets and manifestos over the past few years, Rowling has framed transgender women as a covert threat to cisgender women and spread widely debunked “concerns” about trans people’s identities and behavior. A healthy contingent of fans and even former colleagues, including the Boy Who Lived himself, Daniel Radcliffe, have since distanced themselves from her. The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling—from columnist Bari Weiss’ fledgling media company The Free Press—attempts to turn this fiasco into just part of an ongoing narrative in which the author’s detractors try to silence her. There were the fundamentalist Christians who rallied against Harry Potter during its heyday in the late ’90s, and now, the podcast posits, a vocal set of fans (and some entertainment industry professionals) have similarly renounced the author after years of anti-trans statements. Surely these are the same!

Read more at The Daily Beast.