"I don't want anyone leaving this play saying that JK is a bad person. I want them to leave thinking she's a harmful person" - talking JK Rowling with Anna Piper Scott
Anna Piper Scott is currently touring her play 'An Evening With JK', a satire about the queen of the terfs.
The radicalisation of extraordinarily successful children’s author JK Rowling (or as she’s also known, Robert Galbraith) has been fascinating and appalling to watch in real life.
It was only a few years ago when she tried to laugh off liking a transphobic tweet as a “senior moment”, but now she’s so far down the extremist pipeline that this morning she engaged in some delightful Holocaust revisionism
JK’s galvanising effect on the gender critical movement can’t be discounted - not only does she have a bigger platform than most mainstream newspapers, but she’s also beloved by the more swayable demographic of well-meaning liberal types who aren’t particularly informed about trans and LGBTQIA+ issues, meaning her words hold sway with them. Plus, without her the movement is basically left with a bunch of male comedians using easy trans dunks as materials and Macy Gray who sang that one song from the nineties.
Her influence and effect makes trans and gender diverse people’s lives worse all around the world, as well as tanking her reputation for thousands of people daily. Which could be why comedian Anna Piper Scott decided to write a satire about her.
“In this rare and exclusive literary event, join world-renowned children's author JK (as played by transgender comedian Anna Piper Scott) for an exclusive, hard hitting one-on-one interview. Some consider her to be the saviour of modern feminism. Others consider her to be the face of a hate movement.
This original play places two oppositional forces against each other in an attempt to unmask the millionaire and reconcile the feelings of former fans and those on the fence. Often illuminating, sometimes infuriating, she finally answers the questions she never gets asked, and gives the answers she's always wanted to give.
A must-see for book-lovers, feminists, and women of all backgrounds.”
Anna Piper Scott is a Perth-born, Melbourne-based stand-up comedian with over 10 years of experience across Australia. She describes herself as “a trans woman of remarkable wit and social insight, a skilled writer and bold performer. She’s the guaranteed highlight of every festival she’s part of, whether hosting comedy line-ups, cabaret shows and game shows, or performing solo.”
I sat down with Anna to talk about everything JK.
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PATRICK: I remember seeing your show come up when you were doing it in Melbourne, and I was like, this is a very funny idea. But also, like, an incredibly… controversial idea for a certain demographic of audience, such as the Terfs. So, tell me about the show.
ANNA PIPER SCOTT: So it's called ‘An Evening With JK’, it’s me, a trans woman, playing the queen of the terfs, a best selling children's author called JK, being interviewed by a trans woman interviewer who is played by a cis woman. And people say “Oh, you’re doing JK Rowling” and we're like, “No, we're doing a character who is completely original and legally distinct named JK”. But definitely very heavily inspired by JK Rowling, and other big Terf names and in a sense the whole ideology. It’s exploring how with JK Rowling, everyone tries to talk about separating art from the artist. So part of the premise of the play and how we cast it, is to show you how you can't really do that. You know, like, there's no way to watch this show and forget who I am or forget who's playing the trans woman that I'm up against.
PATRICK: what inspired you to write the show? And like, and why did you decide now is the time to perform it?
ANNA PIPER SCOTT: It’s very ADHD, but if I have an idea that just captures my attention, I have to do it just to kind of get it out of my head. You know, kind of like playing a song so you don't have it repeating in your head, you have to listen to it.
I was trying to figure out what my next comedy show was going to be, and I thought wouldn't it be funny if I did a comedy show as JK Rowling for an hour? But then I realised very quickly that it wouldn't work as a solo performance, because a lot of what JK Rowling has done over the past few years is deliberated obfuscated as to what her actual position is. Rather than saying “I don't want people to transition” or anything like that, it's always been like, “I just have concerns”, you know, and you know, saying stuff like, “I'd support trans people getting rights, I'd happily marched alongside them to protect their rights” without specifying which rights it was that she would protect.
And I always get frustrated, because she doesn't give a lot of interviews. She doesn't answer any questions she doesn't want to answer on Twitter. No journalist especially in the UK has the ability to challenge Terf ideology meaningfully, and get to the heart of it. And so the whole idea was like, if she's just there talking for an hour as herself, you're never gonna find out anything happening beneath the surface, you're never going to get anything revelatory about her. Or if you do, it won't feel like her. The only way a show like this works is if she feels real, and it feels like if she's portrayed honestly, and I think that's one of the things I feel that we've gotten right about the show.
So many people came up to me afterwards saying “I didn't expect to empathise so much with JK, I didn't expect you to be so kind to her”. The first 5-10 minutes of the show is the easy jokes that everyone expects us to make. And then after that, it's like llet's get deeper, and let's get deeper again. Without letting her off the hook without giving her a pass or saying it's okay, show here's how this happens to a human. Here's how someone who has these very justice driven ideals can fall down this radicalisation pipeline and lose touch with everything they used to hold dear.
PATRICK: There is such a big discussion to be had around the radicalisation of of Terfs and how much, agency some of them have, because there are some like Posie Parker who are clearly leading the grift, you know, and grifting to radicalise others, but then there are others who came into this with what we can imagine is some form of ethical reasoning and then sort of fell down that extremism pipeline.
ANNA PIPER SCOTT: Yeah, and, and I think it's really interesting that when you look at a lot of the important people in the Terf movement, they are a lot of older British white women who haven't been able to conceive of themselves as holding any power. They see themselves as fighting against sexism 30 years ago or whatever, and have defined themselves as being the victims of patriarchy, and haven't adjusted to new ideas of intersectionality, where they can be this AND hold power over other marginalised people, and have responded really badly to getting criticised. And it’s not just on trans issues, but racism or gay rights or whatever. And then will happily use those things as a cudgel against trans people, but they won't ever kind of like admit their own culpability.
And you won't ever hear Terfs say anything that they were ever wrong about, apart from trans issues where they'll be like, “Oh, I used to be sympathetic to trans people, but now they've gone too far with it”, but you never hear them say like, “I never really understood this about racism until it was explained to me”. And I think the resistance to criticism is what pushes them down this rabbit hole because they just double down and further and further and further and never admit that maybe they don't know as much as they thought they did about sex and they don't know as much as they thought they did about gender. And they end up looking for people to confirm what they already believe, rather than looking for someone who might change their minds.
PATRICK: Yeah. And do you think that that's the kind of pathway that JK Rowling went down as well?
ANNA PIPER SCOTT: It’s hard to tell because of how much she obfuscates. But when she said that she “accidentally” liked a tweet. I don't necessarily think that that's wrong - I think she may have liked a tweet not thinking that it was as transphobic as it was. But then what happens with all these Terfs is that they will say something that's mildly transphobic, or even just something that could be interpreted as transphobic, and they get criticism for it. And at the same time, they get love bombed by Terfs, saying stuff like “Oh my god, everyone is being so horrible to you on Twitter, all these trans rights activists are being so mean you didn't even say anything wrong. In fact, you're even more right than you realise. You let me send you some link”.
And they're getting criticism on one side and love on another side.
PATRICK: So would you say this is a comedy? Because obviously it engages with some pretty serious issues, such as the danger Rowling poses to the trans community.
ANNA PIPER SCOTT: It's satirical, because I don't think that satire necessarily has to be “funny”. Because it starts off quite comedic, but the whole idea of it is that frog boiling in the water. You know, that people are watching the play being like “this is very funny”, And then they realise as the ideas get unravelled and unpacked the true implications of everything that's been talked about, and it ends up being quite dark by the end. Because I think that's how a lot of people think of JK Rowling - and not just like allies - think of her as someone who's just a bit out of touch and is like fun to make fun of and laugh at as being a silly old transphobic boomer. So we do start making jokes about Harry Potter, make fun of the video game, whatever. and then slowly build so that as things get less and less funny, and they get more and more dark and then people are kind of a bit horrified by the end.
PATRICK: so you've already done a season in Melbourne? What has the response been like both critical, online, and you know… terfy?
ANNA PIPER SCOTT: We were worried when we first started the season that we were gonna get protests or death threats or bomb threats or anything like that. But I'm realising how small the Terf movement is, how many bot accounts they have and stuff like that. They do wield a lot of cultural power because there's some big money makers in the movement, but I don't think they actually represent the general public. I've never met a Terf in the real world. I've never had any of them come to my shows, I've never had any of my friends say that they support JK Rowling or anything like that. Not strangers or colleagues in the performing arts industry. I know I’m in a bit of a bubble, but even doing hundreds and hundreds of comedy gigs in regular stand up comedy clubs - no one has ever said a slur to me, no one's told me to get off the stage. You know these slurs that seem to only exist online like “troon” - I've never had anyone say that out loud in the real world. I think like right now is the first time I've ever heard anyone say that in real life.
I thought some transphobes might have come to see the play out of curiosity, but I've realised that it is a deeply incurious movement. They don’t even for one hour want to hear what the other side is thinking.
I think the biggest positive responses is being the allies telling me that they went in either sceptical, thinking that it would just be a bunch of cheap dunks, or went in hoping for a bunch of cheap dunks and be really surprised that we've pushed for something a lot more complicated. And the biggest surprise to me is that there were former Harry Potter fans who felt like this was a way to kind of grieve that part of their life. And grieve that fandom and grieve that kind of like love they had for JK Rowling as a person, JK Rowling.
I realised when we were developing the play that JK can't have an arc. Like JK as a character, as a Terf, can't have an arc because if she gets to the end and she either repents or apologises or anything like that, then that is the feeling that people are gonna pull on to the real JK Rowling.
PATRICK LENTON: A lot of the discussion around JK Rowling leads to boycotts - do you think that there is a very specific ethical reason to boycott Harry Potter products because of JK Rowling? Or do you think it's more of a nuanced kind of debate?
ANNA PIPER SCOTT: Yeah, I am not going to be someone saying you shouldn't read the books or watch the movies or whatever. You know, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, all that stuff. My goal was never to put this play on and have people be like, “you have to give up on a Harry Potter” - but at the same time, that relationship never should ever be comfortable for you.
I think that's what people want when they start saying stuff like you got to separate the art from the artist. They're saying I should be allowed to watch Harry Potter guilt free. And like, it doesn't work like that. You either are willing to pay that moral cost yourself, because you feel like that trade off is worth it, or you're not. But you don't get to pretend like it's not bad, you know. You don't get to let go of any feelings of guilt, you just kind of have to hold on to that have to hold on to the more grey area.
It's why I'm really sad that the internet has ruined the word “problematic”, because problematic used to be really useful as like “this movie isn't bad, but it is problematic”. It has problems that we should be aware - but certain people have flattened the term to just mean that it’s “bad”. Same as how we've conflated gaslighting with lying when they mean different things.
These movements are just devoid of nuance. It's why they all struggle so much with these ideas like sex and gender not being directly correlated, that sex is more complicated than just male and female, or XX and YX chromosomes. They’re just flattened out. And then like JK Rowling tweeting on Mother's Day, saying something like “Happy Mother's Day to anyone who's given birth to a child”, excluding step parents, adoptive parents, lesbian parents nothing like that. The Terf movement, the ideology, flattens out nuance and wants to have everything basic and binary - and the world isn't ever going to be like that.
And if you try and live in a world like that, you'll end up getting really, really sad and really angry. Which is why we've tried to write and perform An Evening With JK the way we have, where it's all nuance. I don't want anyone leaving this play saying that JK is a bad person. I want them to leave thinking she's a harmful person.
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An Evening With JK is currently playing at the Adelaide Fringe. Tue, 12 Mar - Sun, 17 Mar. You can buy tickets here!