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Episode 144 [PATREON EXCLUSIVE] -- TERF Island 3: Enter Rowling (Patreon)

Published:
2026-07-14 17:22:29
Imported:
2026-09

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Content

For the third installment of our TERF Island series, we use the case of JK Rowling herself to trace TERFism's "march through the institutions". It's an episode about TERF self-staging as singular and "deeply personal" apostasy from "gender orthodoxy", which belies an increasingly sophisticated, well-connected and well-funded network pushing anti-trans talking points in public.

PLEASE NOTE: we recorded this episode before the latest re-emergence of Rowling as TERFism final boss with the release and subsequent suppression of the Amnesty International report on anti-trans hate groups.

Comments

Kathryn m

Oooh I've been waiting for this one!

Haley

Elementary school teacher here: The creator of the minions has explained in interviews that all minions are boys. They don’t need to reproduce because they don’t age. Kevin, Bob, and Stewart (the main minions) spent WWII frozen in an ice cave near the North Pole.

Maggie

I regret to inform you that the one named Jewish student in the Harry Potter books did in fact have the last name Goldstein 🫣 (His name was Anthony Goldstein and he was very much a background character. I apologize for inflicting this information on you all, I don't like that all this niche Harry Potter info still lives in my brain either)

sophie

Mm, I do disagree on the point that men wouldn’t “”degrade”” themselves to abuse women. SEE: sissy fetishists and Kristi Noem’s husband. There’s no length many men won’t go to hate women. That fetish is just in service of positing themselves as weak, defenseless women who they hate just to get themselves off. 🫩

rock dove

Lol thank you I was also about to comment this because for some fucking reason I remember this too

Louzie

Reg. the "effects" the trans rights movement may have (had) on "education and safeguarding" in the eyes of JKR: I very much agree that grooming was a fear of hers, but I also believe that the fear of children being exposed to trans people in their everyday life may have had to do with the Lucy Meadows "case." (Lucy was a primary school teacher who came out as trans in late 2012 and wanted to continue to teach in her old position. She was bullied into suicide by the Daily Mail within a few months.)

Dylan Stephens

Is there a higher tier of Patreon I can subscribe to for more in-depth analysis of the sexual and gender dynamics of the minions?

Helen McCallum

I seem to remember he was Ravenclaw? As in the smart house.

Wendy Ashmun

Did Kristi Noem's husband use his "degraded" state to go rape women? I sure never heard that part of the story!

Mother of Kitties

I am not kidding when I say I Google “what the hell do I do with all my goddam Harry Potter books” at least once a week. Donate to Library? Put in recycling? Use to fire up the Weber? I’ve asked my husband to bring them to the art college free shelf where he works, but he is too embarrassed. I thought the students might be able to make it into some kickass transgressive art piece. On second thought, perhaps I will do this myself!! I will make these books into a frightful JK TERF scarecrow! Might be too much for the Star Fair competition but perfect for my pollinator garden!

Stevie T

Hi , A dear friend of mine had a Painting by Rolf Harris , he just binned it after the truth about Rolf came out ..

morecoffeeplease

One of the things I was thinking while listening to this is that the discussion of trans men (and non-binary people) seems heavily inflected by infantilization—the reason why the discourse around them seems so focused on youth care, assertions that young people are being “deceived,” but also when they do manage to surface in the media they’re described as shrill or annoying (the right’s “shrieking nonbinaries”). So while the rhetoric around trans women is more openly violent (and blatantly unhinged), there’s something that feels familiarly insidious about the soft-focus given to trans men—it’s very consonant with the religious right’s “protective” assertions towards those it views as women. Which seems to either speak to the relationship between the avowedly patriarchal religious right and these nominally-feminist groups, or to the influence the religious right is having on these groups and the way they’re able to effectively use this as a wedge issue to advance their goals.

JanaKat

So what I'm hearing is that, as with Epstein and general lack of accountability, the UK's anti-trans panic is mostly about elite class solidarity. Lovely. Re gender and fixed self, yeah that gets complicated, and I really resent how transphobia has kind of sucked all the oxygen out of the room and made discourses other than "born this way" sound sketchy. I'm a trans woman, but have often thought I might not be if I'd known any decent men growing up, and likewise that I'd probably be transmasc if I were AFAB. There's a way in which it's as much a rebellion against gender roles period as against the specific one I was assigned. But good luck explaining that to my family, let alone anyone leaning more conservative.

JanaKat

Re men pretending to ID as women in order to assault women, sadly there is a context where that happens (at least in the US), and that's all-female homeless shelters. From talking to (trans) friends who have relied on those shelters, there's a kind of dude who will pretend to be a trans woman in order to get into women's shelters; they don't transition in any medical or social way, usually don't even bother giving a fake name, and prey on trans and cis women alike. They probably also do this in part to avoid the (even more) violent environments of men's shelters. The thing though is that even without this, women-only homeless shelters have sexual violence from (usually male) staff, and even from some of the women sheltering there, and *don't care* because they are run on a for-profit basis and/or are super reactionary religious institutions. Banning trans women from the shelters would expose them to even more violence and would barely protect cis women at all. The only real solution is to legally force shelters to give a shit about sexual abuse. Which they currently do not at all, whether the victim is cis or trans. (And from what I understand it's a similar situation with women's prisons in the US; like men's prisons they're rife with sexual abuse, most but not all of it done by male staff members. That transphobes' interest in preventing this abuse starts and stops at the subset committed by trans women says everything we need to know about how committed to feminism they actually are.)

JanaKat

Yup, and at the end of the day they can shrug that semblance off the second it stops being convenient. Their fantasies don't follow them home, don't follow them to work, don't follow them anywhere that might cause them to come to harm.

morecoffeeplease

To be more explicit—it’s echoes of the anti-abortion movement, especially in the assertion that young people are being deceived into something that they’ll regret. Or you could say the focus on each group (trans men vs. trans women) centers on what they claim they’re protecting women from: Sexual violence via surgical intervention (in their minds) or sexual violence interpersonally. I also think the focus on youth soft-pedals fertility and birth rate concerns—they’re there in the materials for supporting conservative Christian orgs, of course. But they’re able to smuggle that in under agreement with the idea that young trans men are being “destroyed” as women by surgical intervention. For whose ultimate ends, they don’t have to state out loud.

Haley

Jamie Loftus is the premier scholar on this topic.

sophie

He certainly abused her! Weird aggressive reply, stranger!

Coryelle Pondy

Idk if any more books are needed, but there is an artist who makes portraits of trans people using cut up Harry Potter books

kathleen

This is on my To Listen Playlist for a drive tomorrow... BUT! I felt the urge to say. Today I was listening to a thing about the Freikorps & Reichswehr situation in Germany in 1934. As a result I texted one of my sibs, who did a comp-lit dissertation on related subject matter, the following: "Have you read Klaus Theweleit?" And they sent a photo of a sliver of bookshelf with both volumes of Male Fantasies visible. They are next to _The Mirror and the Killer Queen: Otherness in Literary Language_, _Black May_ (on the battle of the North Atlantic), and MFK Fisher's _How to Eat_. Which... makes me think I need to ask if they listen to In Bed With The Right.

Chantelle

I know it's a very little thing, but it always interested me that the Maya Forstater thing was that her contract wasn't renewed. I'm guessing there are a lot of trans people who've had contracts not renewed, or not been given jobs, or whatever, and their transness has been a factor in that, but they don't have the societal power to make that this a big legal battle. And this was the argument that Rowling used to "come out" as a TERF.

Astraea

I don't want to oversimplify, but I will say, a lot of the "grooming" rhetoric around trans people and trans treatment really just feels like a copy-paste of the "grooming" rhetoric about gay people from when I was a kid. As far as I can tell, the mental math is simply: "this person has a sexual orientation or gender identity different from the cishet norm" -> "this is perversion" -> "therefore this person is a pervert" -> "all perverts are a literal sexual threat to children, so this person is a sexual threat to children." That's all it is, really: you're different, so you must be criminal. I'm sure your average transphobe wouldn't express it this way, but that's honestly all I can hear anymore when people go off about "trans grooming."

STEFANIE DAVIS

YES bring in the bechdel cast for a minion collab episode!

Brian

Some of your best work, and I’ve listened to every episode, paid and free. Moira, a few of your lines in this episode very neatly distilled and debunked the anxieties and bullshit of this entire movement and will stick with me. So glad y’all are out there and happy I get a small role as a supporter.

charlie @lgbtqiautistic

been wanting to subscribe for a while and honestly hating jk rowling was the greatest motivator

Z F

Has Kristi Noem actually said that her husband abused her?

Louzie

I do agree, but I also think that people still make a difference (for themselves) between situations when they (or their imagined children) have a chance to escape the accidental exposure to random gay/trans people (like public bathrooms) on the one hand - where they fear being actively "pursued" - and situations on the other, where they are put into the same room with us "perverts", but where the shared space is over something unrelated, so it's hard(er) to make an issue out of our "perversion" (like schools, workplaces). I'm not sure if that difference is just communication (they need to dog whistle over schools but not public bathrooms in order to appear reasonable), or if it's an actual one where the bigots themselves don't interrogate their vague uneasiness and can thus maintain their self-perception of being "simply concerned." Ultimately, the difference is miniscule, but it can be relevant to asses how far gone the radicalization pipeline a person has already progressed. For me, it's mostly a timing issue in this case: did Joan start entering the rabbithole in, say, 2016, or did her bigotry and hatred begin to grow years earlier?

Charley

I wouldn’t be too sorry about Magdalen Berns. By many accounts she was a hate-filled racist/anti-Semite who said all the quiet parts out loud about terf ideology, and the people who defend her are dodgy AF (rabid British anti-trans groups like For Women Scotland).

Charley

Is there credible evidence that “sissy fetishists” do that to abuse women? 🤔 As far as I understand it, in terms of sexual kink, guys who like to be “sissified” want to be dominated & controlled by women in a sexual scene, and are appropriating the perceived powerlessness of femininity to do it. (They may separately be abusive but it’s not what attracts them to being “sissy”.)

Astraea

I think infantilization is a great way to describe this. And to me it also seems like it is all, under the surface, about whether you are putting your female body to the "correct" use, i.e. using it to make babies. Honestly, it sometimes feels like the anti-trans men arguments are maybe a bit more honest - they don't try to pretend that trans men are a threat to cis men, because that would be wrong according to their own preferred "biological truths." But they can't come out and say "You're not allowed to be a man because we want you to use that uterus as God intended." So they end up with this "softer" in-between of "we don't want these poor vulnerable girls to do something they might regret because they're too young to truly know themselves," which is another way of just saying "We don't believe you should be allowed to live in a way that deviates from established cis gender norms." That's all it is - it's not at all about safety or regret for these kids, just the adults' unshakeable belief that biology is and ought to be destiny. (How the supposedly feminist TERF groups pushing this don't see what they're opening the door to is beyond me. Like, honestly . . . Never start a land war in Asia, never ally yourselves with the religious right. Simple as.)

Charlotte

Ooooh yeah! Going to re-listen to the first two and then savour this one. 🙂‍↕️

Charlotte

He was Ravenclaw, yes!

Charlotte

(Sorry if this sounds too gleeful, I just really enjoy listening to Adrian and Moira take these assholes down. As a former UK resident AND former Harry Potter fan, it's cathartic.)

Elizabeth King

Don’t the minions speak Portuguese?

JanaKat

Sexually submissive abusers are common enough; I daresay most people in the trans community have encountered at least one. What someone wants in a scene doesn't always translate into what they want overall, or who they see as subject vs object. I don't think transphobic legislation affects this stuff at all though. Like I said earlier, these guys can shrug off their kink whenever it's convenient; trans people can't shrug off their transness like that.

Ben Schwabe

I just spent some time looking for any evidence Kristi Noem claims abuse and am not finding anything. Sissification fetish is absolutely a product of a misogynist culture, but we all exist inside that.

morecoffeeplease

You’d think it’d at least give them pause! And yet.

Moira Donegan

*pounds table* one of us! One of us!

Ariel

I never questioned my assigned role of “woman” besides thinking, “I wouldn’t mind being referred to by they,” until I moved to a new city at 19. Suddenly I could feel gender influencing my life much more heavily, and within the year I had come out as nonbinary. Life is weird.

Katie

3 terf 3 island!

Donald Ball

An aspect of the modern British anti-trans moral panic I’d love to see explored is the revelations about Saville, perhaps the most prolific sex predator in recorded history. He played an important role in selling Thatcherism; he was intertwined with the highest echelons of British power: royal, political, and media, in particular the BBC. If I recall correctly, while an open vague secret for quite a long time, they only became definite and more well understood in their scope to the public not long before this moral panic got underway. It seems very reasonable to think both that the British elite would enjoy a new salacious target to focus on rather than their complicity, and that the public might be all to willing to transfire their ire to a more available and vulnerable target.

kathleen

A follow up text in summary said "thankful KT read a bunch of bad books by worse people so I didn't have to. At the time I thought he might have oversold psychological literary analysis but 'subsequent events have refreshed the thesis' that it's reactionary race/gender politics all the way down with the guys KT writes about and to whom we've given all the guns and money." One of us indeed.

kathleen

Well! Never in the year 2000 did I expect that the author of some mildly bad and definitely bigoted school story × fantasy mixtape kids' novels would turn out to be dangerous AND awful but here we are. I knew JKR is a disaster but my goodness the details really are odious. For as long as I've known trans* is a thing (and that's a while since I saw Rocky Horror in a movie theater when Kurt Cobain was an up and coming musician), I've been aware that: Adults who care what's inside kids' chonies are weird and usually gross. That poem about "first they came for..." applies to sexuality, too. I'm not even the smartest person in my family much less anything else and I could see the minute it's convenient for the likes of Chris Rufo to run cis women over with a bus, he will. TERF Island could turn out to be a crummy place to live. Do the women mainstreaming mumsnet TERF ideology think they'll be exempt?

Kasspatz

I’m dying to know what points Moira disagrees with M. Gessen on…

Kemplify

Yessss it took til the end but you got to the immortal "I need to know how the library alien fucks!" moment from Maya Forstadter (h/t to Contrapoints for the line). Also Moira's friends at the Minions movie sound like my kind of hang.

Matt

You are the first people I’ve heard say in regards to the people who say they may have been tempted by transition if they were born in a different time that that would be fine. The first I’ve seen who have argued in a straightforward that identity is historically contingent. Thank you for it

Pascale Andor

Unfortunately, you missed the part where, in June of 2020, in the height of BLM and COVID, she made a text using George Floyd’s murder to push transphobia. It was a very mask off moment.

pixlaw

I'm just impressed that you guys did this episode about a week before the whole "JKR sues and/or browbeats *Amnesty International* thing happened." You must use these awesome precognitive powers only for good. Or for bankrupting Kalshi, whichever you choose.

Nat Molyneaux

"I NEED TO KNOW HOW THE ALIEN FUCKS BEFORE I CAN SHOW IT TO MY CHILD!"

Katie Pruitt

Also to sort of answer your joke question at the end: the Minions get sent to a men’s prison in one of the Despicable Me movies (why do I know this 🙃)

Murphy

Also, how does Pierce Morgan still have a job? And he keeps showing up on my feed talking about Trans folks. He was so gross about Megan Markel. The look of disgust he had on his face during that Susan Boyle audition during that talent show, when she made a little sexy joke. When is he going down for being a predator?

IvantheDugtrio

A reddit TIL post came up about the white feathers in WWI Britain and how that was related to the broader women’s suffrage movement and how it relied on nationalism to gain legal recognition. I wonder if this relates to how the TERF movement came about.

Philippa East

Thank you so much for this episode (which I have joined your Patreon to listen to, along with the two previous!). I am based in the UK and I’ve been involved in trans rights advocacy for the last three years. It is a terrible situation that we have here, and you quite rightly point out that we have a unique breed of transphobia, which masquerades as a form of feminism and weaponises the language of human/women’s rights against the trans community. Thank you in particular for highlighting the role of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) in what has happened in the UK over the last five years. You may be planning to cover this in your further episodes, but not only did the EHRC intervene to help Maya Forstater win her employment tribunal (resulting “gender critical beliefs” being protected under our UK Equality Act as “philosophical beliefs“ on a par with religion), but they also intervened in the 2025 Supreme Court case, which has resulted in trans people’s legal sex no longer being recognised under the Equality Act, nationwide bathroom bans and widespread exclusion of trans people from gender-aligned spaces and services. They have since intervened in another court case arguing that all trans women should be placed in the male prison estate — a case that they won. And as you say, this is our national human rights institute that is supposed to be protecting UK trans people, alongside other protected groups. Thank you again so much for running this series shining a light on what is happening. I’m a huge fan of your podcast already and so appreciate all the work that you do. If I can be of any help in sharing more information about the gender critical movement in the UK, please let me know!

Philippa East

Ps: you mentioned Elaine Miller (“Gussie Grips”). You might like the story about how she chose to protest the passing of reforms to the gender recognition act in Scotland in 2023 (demedicalising the process of legal gender recognition). Stood up in the public gallery, yelled and flashed a Merkin. https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/s/hCiCNm7Ha5 This positive step forwards for trans people was overturned when the UK government stepped in and vetoed Scotland’s gender recognition reform bill.

AdinaY

I thought I knew a lot about J. K. Rowling and her anti-trans stuff before listening to this episode, but I still found an incredibly informative. IMO, the most interesting and helpful framing Adrian gave was about what he called “hiding the ball,” meaning that when JK has talked about her radicalization story, though she wouldn’t call it that, she has classified it as the result of doing her own research, when in fact, according to Adrian, as far as I understand him, her tweets from the time show she was clearly spending time in anti-trans spaces and getting much of her wording and framing from them. She was part of “a movement,” but she was looking to obscure that.

AdinaY

Oh, and this is totally unrelated to my previous comment, one of the languages that the American Minions speak is Dutch, which, in some ways, is quite close to English, which is part of the reason we can understand them, sort of. See, e.g., “Mini-baas! Mini baas!”

Jen Mackessack

As a gender and politics scholar based in Scotland, it's great (well not great but you know...) to hear an in-depth outside perspective in these episodes! As the Scottish Government got a mention - Shona Robison's "doodling" - thought I'd comment to add a dimension of transphobia here which might be difficult to unpack without knowing about the UK's post-99 constitutional framework. Scotland (along with Wales and NI) has a devolved parliament, which means that most of the day-to-day policy decisions, including on healthcare, are made by the Scottish instead of the UK parliament. The Scottish Parliament passed (with significant cross-party support) a gender recognition reform bill in December 2022, which would have allowed self ID in Scotland. It is the only time the UK Government has ever used section 35 of the Scotland Act, which allows the UK Government to block a devolved policy decision. To add insult to injury, trans people have become a football in the constitutional argument between the two governments, and the Gender Recognition Reform Act never came into effect here. It's always been in the case that the UK Government can do this, but by convention (the Sewel convention for anyone interested) they do not normally intervene on devolved matters. Since then (for lots of reasons I won't get into here) the Scottish Government has been far less willing to diverge significantly from the UK on contentious issues, and the GRR bill has raised major questions about how much power the devolved parliaments really have, if the UK Government can overturn policy they do not like.

Melanie Mayne

Great episode! What I remember from the first Rowling incident was that she hadn’t liked or tweeted anything other than promos in like a year — EXCEPT for TERF shit. I could be wrong but that was the way I heard about it originally.

Joy

oh GOD I haven’t thought about that androgynous alien for years… we literally studied this in grad school for library science. Don’t have any memory of the lesson other than just “wtf is going in in the UK”

Lizbeth

I think this is where Moira and co fall down. It’s rare, but there have been cases of male rapists being allowed into female prisons. They need to tackle and we all need to tackle this is they want to open up safe spaces for women.

Lizbeth

A lack of understand that some people will do this is not acceptable. It has and does happen.

Lizbeth

They also just laugh off a lot of points like from lesbians without giving any intellectual arguments. I’m fully for trans people to be given the care they need, but there is zero acknowledgment that it intersects with women’s rights.

RedRoseWhite

Came to the comments section to say this. Magdalen Berns was an abrasive, cruel and hateful person whose extinction was no great loss, but a huge gain in peace and serenity. Adrian is so kind to extend his sympathies, but Berns did not deserve them, probably left few to mourn, and would have spit on him if she’d met him in the street. Good riddance to a person who chose to make a stinking nuisance rubbish pile of their life.

Cate Kneale

Speaking as a British person, this is a valid question! I'd forgotten the alien meltdown and it just went on and on. Another one was a bizarre objection to free sanitary products in public toilets. I'm pretty sure that was also Forstater but I forget why she found it anti-women to help out those of us who menstruate.

Cate Kneale

The weirdest JKR control thing for me is how she thinks she still has ownership of the actors who were in Harry Potter and gets all Frank'n'Furter, "I made you and i can break you just as easily, at them". Great episode, thank you from terf island!

Clara

So true.

Clara

I don't know if you guys are going to talk about Scotland which is very important in this story (also btw it seems Reem Alsalem was radicalised by Scottish terfs) as there were 2 consultations to reform the GRA, English and Scottish, as it is a devolved matter. In England the reform was finally shelved in 2022 but in Scotland the parliament actually voted in favour of the reform. However, with a lot of help from the EHRC, the Westminster government issued an unprecedented section 35 which is when Westminster can block legislation being made by the devolved parliament. To my knowledge this was never used before. The reasons was that GRA reform would change the relationship between GRA and the Equality Act which is not devolved. Anyways, Scotland deserves its own episode. Another point which is important is that the Forstater judgement recognised that 'grnder critical' belief can be protected under the Equality Act but not all manifestations are, and it explicitly mentions malicious misgendering. This second part has always being ignored by the press and ofc by the terfs themselves. But in cases where individuals have sued their employers for discrimination based on belief, they lost based on the fact that the manifestation was unlawful. So the Forstater case doesn't go as far as some of the terfa wanted and in fact there is a split in the movement because some think this was the wrong legal strategy and instead they should have straight to try to repeal the GRA. Finally, one of the most incredible things is that trans rights have been decimated in the UK without parliament ever voting on anything which is extraordinary.

Katrine Maritvold

To follow up on the point of it being the same 5 people being involved in all the TERF-groups, I really recommend Jasper Dasper’s video essay “Debunking Transphobia” on YouTube, specifically the chapter AT Network. The essay is really long, but fortunately divided into chapters if you need to skip parts, pause, or just view specific chapters. He also provides citations in a separate google doc, which I appreciate.

ESM

What I found particularly amusing - I too hate that I remember this - was that when fantastic beasts was inflicted upon us all, JKR explained that the lead characters were ancestors of Anthony Goldstein. So the only three Jewish people in the whole wizarding world are, in fact, related.

Elizabeth M Sieminski

‘Perhaps if I were alive in the 21st century I could have been a computer programmer ‘ said Neanderthal … Obviously modern technology is a problem that leads to doom! 😂😂😂