Ranting On...JK Rowling

I feel like any time an adult states "I love Harry Potter" some other person in the room immediately rolls their eyes, whispers something nasty under their breath or moves to another room in hopes that there might still be wine left in the bottle.  Harry Potter fandom comes with its own set of pejorative stereotypes, some fair and some less so, but there's definitely a bit of baggage that one becomes aware of as they get older from loving Harry Potter too much...which is why I don't talk about it very often on this blog.  I'm a big Harry Potter fan-I read the books as a teenager and then into my early twenties as they were released, and I was obsessed.  I'm someone who, when he gets into something, really gets into it.  This annoyed my parents to no avail when I was a child to the point where they would forbid me from owning an Oscar handbook, which I secretly bought on a school field trip; instead of having Playboys or Marlboros hidden underneath my mattress, I had a copy of the 1997 Academy Awards Handbook hidden there that I would read after I was supposed to go to sleep.  Suffice it to say, when I got into Harry Potter, I did so in a big way.

I wouldn't say that I'm as obsessed with it now, but the evidence to the contrary litters my house.  I just walked through and found Harry Potter merchandise of some sort in five rooms of my house, and that's not counting the Slytherin tee that for some reason is on my dining room table right now.  I loved the books-I read them all within 24 hours of starting them, and reread them every few years.  They are definitely one of the pop culture forces that I feel is part of my personality, and while I won't bring it up for fear of judgment, I'm always down for a two-hour discussion on the subject (Lost, my absolute top pop culture monolith, will invite a five-hour discussion if I'm allowed).

If you've paid attention to the news in the past few days, you know where I'm going with this.  The Harry Potter series, as well as the Cormoran Strike series (of which I am a devoted, if less ardent, fan) are written by JK Rowling, a British novelist who has had unparalleled commercial success with her novels in this century.  Rowling has been in the news recently for her (unsolicited) comments about transgender people, all of which are derogatory and head straight into the transphobic.  Upon an article about how Covid-19 will impact people on their menstrual cycles (the title and article made sure to use the less gender-specific "people" when referring to people who menstruate, to try to be more inclusive of transgendered men who still have a menstrual cycle), she wrote "People who menstruate. I'm sure there used to be a word for those people.  Someone help me out.  Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?"

Rowling doubled down on this repeatedly tweeting about transphobic and exclusionary comments, and received a round of criticism from both Harry Potter fans and from LGBT celebrities & allies.  This isn't the first time that Rowling has done this-she has made a point of underlining her stance on transgenderism, and has earned the descriptor of "TERF" (which stands for transphobic exclusionary radical feminist,"), which generally is given to otherwise progressively-minded women who are unwilling to accept transgender people, specifically transgender women, under the banner of "women."  Rowling has disputed this descriptor, but her public comments leave little room for doubt that it's well-bestowed.

This article isn't a conversation defending Rowling-she's wrong, and she should hear such from her fans & the people who have made her rich beyond her wildest dreams.  I do occasionally feel that the internet isn't a safe space for people to learn about an issue, but Rowling is not learning about this issue-she's a smart woman who has made these comments before, and is sticking behind them rather than growing in her attitude.  There is no defense here.

What I wanted to discuss, though, is how Harry Potter fans deal with this knowledge.  While Rowling still has books out, and so it'd be easy to boycott those if you so chose, you can't undo decades of love for a series that defined so much of you and meant so much to you.  As a young gay man who felt isolated and suffered from depression when these books came out, Harry Potter was more than just a book series-it was a retreat.  It was a way to get away from my world, where people were celebrated rather than ostracized for their differences, and where a magical escape was promised even if it was just pretend.  One of the great ironies in Rowling's transphobia is that I'm not alone here-countless LGBT youth read these books and used them as a building block to who they became as adults.  Harry Potter, by way of JK Rowling, gave them a confidence that the world could accept them, and thus the world started to do so...except of course for JK Rowling.

The gut instinct here is to "cancel" JK Rowling and move on, but I think that's dismissive of how much a work of art, and particularly a work as influential as Harry Potter, can impact your life.  I can't get rid of Harry Potter in my life-that's not possible.  I could certainly never buy the books again or get rid of my merchandise or try not to talk about it, but this is still latched onto who I am.  We need to understand that you can love the artwork of someone who is "problematic" or who in real life behaves abhorrently, and that doesn't make us bad people.  We can choose not to give any future money to Rowling or to not follow her and give her continued power & publicity, but I think it's dismissive of the impact of artists to just ask people "to hate Harry Potter now."  While your relationship with the novels is likely tainted or complicated by Rowling's real-life cruelty, it doesn't mean that the way it helped you or made you feel wasn't real, and wasn't valid.  JK Rowling may have written a book whose message she doesn't understand and certainly doesn't practice, but I'm not going to ask people who relied upon it to become who they are today to deny its role, or their passion for it, just because the author insists on making it impossible to uniformly love these books the way we once did.