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J.K. Rowling Edinburgh Play: Producers Brace For Protests Over Story That Imagines Trans Rights Row Between Author & ‘Harry Potter’ Stars


The producers of a buzzy Edinburgh Festival play about JK Rowling’s trans views are preparing for protests ahead of the show opening next month.

Penned by Joshua Kaplan, a Hollywood writer whose credits include HBO’s Tokyo Vice, TERF imagines a confrontation between Rowling and the stars of Harry Potter over her views on transgender rights. Her posts on X (once Twitter) have put her further at odds with Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint in recent months, and Kaplan sees TERF as a “family conversation” between loved ones with differing views. Staged by veteran Edinburgh Festival Fringe producers at Civil Disobedience, TERF(an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist usually deployed in a pejorative context) had to change venue from Saint Stephens Theatre to the Assembly Rooms amid concerns over the controversy the play was attracting.

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