A grippingly personal analysis of J. K. Rowling’s rise as an anti-trans activist, its media and pop cultural context, and trans resistance to the moral panic she has stoked.

In J. K. Rowling and the Anti-Trans Panic, Gina Gwenffrewi weaves her own experience as a trans woman living in Edinburgh, Scotland, with analysis of political and pop cultural discourses and artifacts to deliver a trenchant study of how fellow Edinburgh resident J. K. Rowling’s emergence as a major anti-trans campaigner and the years-long entrenchment of existing anti-trans forces have converged. Analyzing Rowling’s output since 2020, a series of anti-trans events at the University of Edinburgh, the transphobic comedy of Ricky Gervais within the British media landscape, YouTube commentaries, and more, Gwenffrewi creates a potent taxonomy of the rhetorical devices and foundational assumptions of anti-trans discourse. While the 2020s UK has proved fertile ground for “gender-critical” feminism, she argues, it has also provided the foundation for sites of resistance and for bolstering transgender voices worldwide. In celebrating trans activism and trans joy amid adversity, Gwenffrewi beautifully captures the light and dark of being out as trans in the city that—if it can fairly be called ground zero for anti-trans fervor—also embodies liberatory possibilities for trans people worldwide.

Gina Gwenffrewi is a researcher and lecturer in Media Studies and English Literature through the prism of trans and queer studies at the University of Edinburgh.