A strange spin on 'No debate' takes the stage at Melbourne Fringe
This week, Melbourne Fringe will host An Evening with JK. For just $28 a head, theatregoers will finally be able to hear how “one of the world’s most celebrated authors become one of the most hated,” as JK Rowling sits down for an “exclusive, hard-hitting, one-on-one interview” with a trans journalist, where Rowling “finally answers the questions she never gets asked, and gives the answers she’s always wanted to give.”
Well. Sort of.
This will not be an evening with the actual flesh-and-blood JK Rowling, but rather an evening with Anna Piper Scott, a transgender playwright who has taken on the burden of both scripting and reading Rowling’s lines.
In an interview with The Age, Scott said: “If we all stay quiet until it’s safe to talk about it, it’s going to just become more and more unsafe to talk about. I have to say something now — I think everyone has to say something now”. The playwright went on to describe the play as an act of “empathy”:
“It’s definitely not a show that’s going to redeem TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] or anything like that, but I do want to understand how they’ve gotten where they’ve gotten, because a lot of these people they were originally proper feminists arguing for women’s rights, fighting really important battles around abortion and everything like that. And then suddenly, their entire lives become consumed by this one issue.”
Opposite Scott’s “JK Rowling,” a “cisgender” actor will play the transgender interviewer, a gimmick Scott hopes will ensure that the audience’s “natural empathy for cis people is placed on the trans character, and people’s natural distrust of trans people is placed on the TERF character, and we’re able to exploit where people’s empathy normally lies.”
The Age observes that the play’s “interview format allowed Piper Scott to write a conversation where an anti-trans character has their views challenged in a way that doesn’t normally happen”— perhaps because trans activists have a pesky habit of pulling out of debates at the last minute.
“They don’t say what they really mean,” Scott says of gender critics like Rowling. “And if they were just on stage for an hour, they’re never going to let the mask slip, they’re never going to drop that charade, and tell you what they really believe [or] where their beliefs ultimately end up.”
Wow. That’s appalling and seems like it ought to be illegal or slanderous. I’m curious if the real JKR has or will make a statement.
This stunt sounds like a natural progression of the Transgender Language Reclamation and Sole Authority project. If even JKR "doesn't mean what she says", then how can any less-than bestselling author be trusted to mean what we say? When even our most considered and considerate utterances of the required "Be Kind" variety can be translated as the inauthentic hate speech of bigoted transphobes. Thus are claims validated of "trans genocide" and ultimate victimhood, as intended by even the most innocuous utterances. Especially as compelled speech: we can be accused of "not really meaning it". This is the existential weak spot for all narcissists: authoritarians are seldom loved. Remember that Queer Theory aims at world domination by the most aggrieved. "We demand that you love us and REALLY MEAN IT! OR ELSE!"