Fans still love Harry Potter, but try to leave J.K. Rowling behind

Harry Potter fans are grappling with how to feel about the series they love after J.K. Rowling’s recent transphobic comments. But is there any going back?

Last week, J.K. Rowling — author of the historically successful Harry Potter series — posted an essay on her website. Long story short, she wrote about her belief that trans people are not valid in their identities, peddled in regressive and disproven lies about them being a danger to others, and generally confirmed the worst suspicious parts of the Harry Potter had held about her for years.

And she did it during Pride Month, and also in the midst of a pandemic and a worldwide outcry against racial violence. But really, her terrible timing is the least of her transgressions.

Anyway, this caused a massive backlash among fans, not to mention people closely associated with the franchise. Many actors from the Harry Potter movies spoke out against Rowling’s views, including Rupert Grint (Ron), Emma Watson (Hermione), and Daniel Radcliffe, Harry Potter himself, who responded to Rowling’s comments in an essay on the website for The Trevor Project:

"Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I. According to The Trevor Project, 78% of transgender and nonbinary youth reported being the subject of discrimination due to their gender identity. It’s clear that we need to do more to support transgender and nonbinary people, not invalidate their identities, and not cause further harm."

The Harry Potter series was formative for a lot of people of a certain age, including me. It was about the power of friendship, celebrating our differences, and fighting dogmatic beliefs about any one group’s superiority over another. I think that’s part of the reason why it’s been particularly difficult for fans to grapple with Rowling clarifying her transphobia. It seems so at odds with a lot of what her books are saying, and it has fans asking some hard questions.

Namely, they’re wondering whether they they can go on being fans when the person who created this world has revealed herself to be a bigot, or at least, whether they can continue if she doesn’t change her views or apologize. That’s basically the position of transgender actress Ela Zora, who filmed scenes that run at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme park in Orlando, Florida and is now demanding they stop being played.

The New York Times talked to some other heavy hitters in the fandom, and the general sense I get from their responses is that while they still love Harry Potter and the community that has sprung up around it, they have no further desire to acknowledge the woman who created the original story:

• Renae McBrian helps maintain MuggleNet, a very popular Harry Potter fansite that’s been running since 1999. She said that while Rowling “gave us this world, [w]e created the fandom, and we created the magic and community in that fandom. That is ours to keep.”
• Talia Franks is a nonbinary member of the Harry Potter Alliance, a non-profit originally founded to draw attention to human rights violations in Sudan, who said simply, “I don’t need J.K. Rowling at all.”
• The creators of The Gayly Prophet Podcast, a queer Harry Potter podcast, said they will keep loving Rowling’s world, but won’t do anything to enrich Rowling further. That means not seeing the upcoming third Fantastic Beasts film, not seeing any productions of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and not attending the Harry Potter theme parks.
• Rori Porter, a trans Harry Potter fan, is still up for reading books already purchased. “I don’t want to give J.K. Rowling the satisfaction of taking away from me something that I loved as a kid.”

I think all this is fair, and certainly I’m not going to tell anyone whether they can or cannot read something they’re interested in, no matter what the author has said or done. But I wonder if it’s really possible to separate what Rowling has said and done from her work, or indeed what any author has said and done from their work.

J.K. Rowling, H.P. Lovecraft, and problem authors

Take the example of H.P. Lovecraft, an author credited with inventing the genre of “cosmic horror.” There’s no question that this guy is influential and talented. There’s also no question that he was a flagrant, unapologetic racist — like, he was active in the early 20th century, and even by the standards of his time he was considered bad. You can still read and enjoy his stories, but for me, it’s hard to read them and not think about what might have been behind them. In The Shadow over Innsmouth, he writes about the villagers of a seaside town who are forced to breed with a subhuman monster race who pollute their bloodlines. It smacks of fear of miscegenation, which would have been illegal in most states during Lovecraft’s time. I don’t know if that’s what he was really writing about, but knowing what I know about him, I can’t not think of it.

There may be a similar crossing-the-Rubicon effect with Rowling. Once you know that J.K. Rowling is an active transphobe, is it impossible not to see hints of that thinking crop up in her books whether you want to or not? I don’t think there’s anything as blatant as in Lovecraft’s stories, but that might not matter. For example, in Harry Potter, Hogwarts students are assigned a house when they get to the school and can’t change for the rest of their time there. Does that reflect Rowling’s essentialist views on gender?

And there are other reasons her books could be seen as problematic completely separate from her transphobia. For instance, Rowling has long received criticism for her depiction of House-elves, a race who live to serve their human masters. Although the movies wisely cut out the worst of it, in the books it kind of comes off “slavery but the slaves like it and it’s funny.” Readers can and have gloss over this part as just a weird patch, but knowing what we know about Rowling now, that it might be harder to write off.

I want to stress that none of this is to say that anyone should stop reading Harry Potter if they don’t want to. But I do think it’s more complicated than just taking Rowling out of the equation and moving on.

I also think there’s truth to the idea that if you’re reading the work of pretty much any author who’s heyday was more than 50 years ago, they probably had some views that are out of step with modern standards of decency. Of course, Rowling doesn’t have that excuse; her bigotry is up to the minute. She’s an inextricable part of what makes Harry Potter what it is, and I think we can benefit from grappling with all the questions that raises rather than ignoring it.

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h/t Vanity Fair