TERF Wars — Why I’m Forgetting J.K Rowling Authored Harry Potter
This post is about a break-up.
I’m being a little dramatic but allow me this much, since I’ve had to live with the constant embarrassment and anger of stanning an author who has more in common with LV (He Must Not Be Named, not Louis Vuitton, silly!) than her titular boy wizard hero.
As someone who works in the field of public relations for a living, we’re often advising clients to never post what you think online unless a) you’re absolutely sure about what you’re talking about, b) your post doesn’t cause a public skewering because the contents of the said post for a variety of ethical reasons and c) never post without your publicist approving it.
Over the past few years I’ve never quite seen an author so committed to destroying a beautiful legacy like Ms. Joanne Katherine Rowling.
Especially when she goes out of her way to retcon her own series, justify why the Fantastic Beasts movies made the problematic choice of casting an Asian actress to play a monstrous snake that eventually becomes the pet of a Nazi-adjacent wizard dictator and slap on an ethnicity to a very white Hermione in order to be what Rick Riordan is for the fantasy book genre.
There was a time where I genuinely loved J.K. Rowling being on social media, I used to live for her tweets taking on the Trump administration and bigots at large. I especially loved her quips and little references that were lovingly created into Buzzfeed articles, but that got old quick, when we realized that a lot of her posts were just to earn social capital and appear cool.
With time, it became apparent that Jo was more obsessed with retconning her legacy and turning it into something it was not.
As an ally, reading her transphobic tweets smack in the middle of Pride month felt like a personal attack on the queer community. It’s especially disconcerting to continue being a fan of a series that has provided so much of comfort, positivity and hope for people from all walks of life.
Which is why, I — a vocal, intersectional, feminist WOC is making the choice of forgetting that J.K Rowling authored the books I so dearly love.
This may come as an interesting but polarizing opinion, but I think that the Harry Potter series is a great series, reflective of its time. It represented the world she grew up in and it was fine the way it was.
Were there problems?
Sure.
But I can’t tell you how many times I lost myself imagining the looming castle that is Hogwarts, the Great Hall where Harry and Ron tucked into dishes made from Gordon Ramsey’s kitchen, Diagon Alley or even the smell of Mrs. Weasley’s phenomenal cooking.
You can appreciate and criticize something in the same breadth, and I don’t think there is any point in revising seven books because you realized nearly twenty years later that your series was extremely white and had no tangible LGBTQ representation.
No, giving Harry a love interest called ‘Cho Chang’ does not actually count and neither does making Dumbledore being gay matter, because the former is offensive, and the latter was an attempt to shoe-horn some form of queer representation because we’re living in a progressive society, now. I could go into detail on how racist Cho Chang’s name actually is but that’s not the point of this article.
If Jo really felt that bad over the well-deserved criticism, she would have done more with The Cursed Child (something I find very hard to not consider glorified fanfiction with its odious plot holes) and actually given us representation ala Rick Riordan.
Our idols need to be held accountable — especially when they play such a huge role in shaping the pop culture landscape.
We have the responsibility of doing more for our communities, especially for marginalized communities where its members are routinely discriminated, and murdered just for existing. I find her comments ill-informed, and it’s also not lost on me that she subscribes to the TERF school of thought that another famous author outed herself as a member of, a few years ago.
We need to question why this cisgender white “allegedly feminist” woman with a reputation of being a beloved, empathetic, smart and respected author goes out of her way to demonize transwomen and voluntarily tweet a lengthy blog post justifying her flippant transphobia.
I think, we should ask her why she hides behind the freedom of speech spiel that every personality loves to quote, when members of the trans community are murdered, left homeless and are routinely being denied basic rights across the world.
There’s no place in our culture for an author who’s slowly transforming into one of her most reviled characters — Dolores Umbridge, and there’s certainly no place in the fantasy genre for an author who’s unwilling to learn and change.
I mean, you created a potion that allows people to change their appearance at will, enchanted talking portraits and a bag that acts as a physical USB hard drive where you can drop anything and everything but you draw the line at trans folk?
Really?
Which is why I’m currently living life imagining Harry Potter as this amazing series that magically dropped from the sky one day, as opposed to having a raging transphobe for an author.
