Pretend Mulling and the Obsessive Hate Threads Has For Harry Potter in Those Public Entries

Yesterday, I deleted Threads from my phone. Again. Not because of anything major; if I can give it anything, it’s more chill than Xitter ever was. Except for two topics: JK Rowling and Harry Potter. And.... I’m so fucking sick of logging onto Threads, trying to do some “QT with a .gif of your favorite movies/characters/books/clearly neurodivergent way of flirting” games, only to be bombarded with thread after thread after thread after thread after thread after thread after fucking thread about one of three topics: (a) JK Rowling is bad and transphobic, (b) Harry Potter is bad and transphobic, and (c) Anyone who still likes Harry Potter, or ever liked it in the first place, is also bad and transphobic.

(To be fair, I always knew this was how Threads would go. It’s more than just entropy; I genuinely believe, based on having used the internet for almost 23 years now, that microblogging platforms, if they didn’t lead to the enshittification of the entire internet, definitely helped speed it up. Microblogging platforms are dying, and I’m glad.)

Now some of you might know that I was a massive Potterhead. Was. Because I actually agree with Threads on this point: It’s not okay to keep supporting Harry Potter or JK Rowling anymore. Especially Rowling. She’s been slowly losing her mind for years about trans people because… Well, she claims it’s a PTSD thing (which I can only imagine rubs most of the people with PTSD and no obsession with other peoples’ genitalia the wrong way), but the truth is, she’s a control freak who showed us who she really was when she sued abused the legal system to bully an autistic fan over his plan to publish his fan site, which Rowling admitted to using when she couldn’t keep track of her own story, and claimed that it was a violation of her intellectual property. (Quick note: It’s not on the record anywhere that Steve Vander Ark is autistic, but the Lexicon is still up. Take a gander at it and tell me, with a straight face, that it’s the work of a “normal” mind. If you can, you are an amazing liar, and you probably have a bright future in American politics.)

And for a while, Rowling cloaked (pun not intended) her transphobia in plausible deniability. Well, a few days ago, she misgendered India Willoughby, the UK’s first openly trans news reader, and said, “India didn’t become a woman. India is cosplaying a misogynistic male fantasy of what a woman is.”¹ (Bitty dubs, if you need a line for anyone who’s still like, “Show me OnE rEaLlY tRaNsPhObIc ThInG Rowling’s said,” there it is.) So yeah, screw her. I haven’t bought any Potter-related merchandise since at least 2020, and I don’t intend to buy any again. At least, not until she kicks it, and only after the details of her will are made public and I know she’s not left any trust funds to transphobic orgs, or to Maya Forstater or especially to that California Raisin doing bad Marilyn Monroe cosplay, Posie Parker.²

There’s nothing wrong with pointing out that Rowling is a bigot and a bad person, nor is it wrong to point out that a lot of her beliefs are reflected in her writing. When done in a healthy way, these discussions are useful. Even when they’re cropping up all over the place and shitting up my timeline, when all I really want is to do the QT games. And I wouldn’t have minded it so much, except that even adding “Harry Potter” and “Rowling” and other related words to my “muted” list did fuck-all to keep me from seeing it.

What I’m seeing on Threads isn’t healthy at all. It’s obsession. It’s like the people who are discussing Rowling and Harry Potter and Harry Potter fans are doing it because there’s literally nothing else going on in their lives or their heads. Like they are still obsessed with the books and hate themselves for it, but instead of, you know, reading any other book like they’re constantly bitching at everyone else to do, they just pick and pick and pick and pick at this wound.

Seriously, Thriends, go read Dune. Or A Wizard of Earthsea. Or His Dark Materials. Or the Oz books. Or Discworld. There’s like thirty Discworld books, and there’s no real order in which they should be read, so just, like, pick a Discworld book and read it. Or how about Neil Gaiman’s books? Or Stephen King? Octavia E. Butler? bell hooks? Audre Lorde? Xiran Jay Zhao? Seriously, take your own advice and read 👏🏻 another 👏🏻 fucking 👏🏻 book 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻. Signed, “I read the Harry Potter books, and hundreds of other books before, during, and since. If I can do it, so can you.” (Of course, I wasn’t someone for whom HP “ignited my love of reading.” I already loved to read; they were just books that, for reasons I’ll discuss in a bit, grabbed me and held on.)

These discussions all hang on one idea: “Harry Potter Bad, so everyone who ever liked Harry Potter Also Bad! (Except me, because I’m special.)” When people (not me, I learned that lesson a long time ago) try to point out that, no, a lot of Harry Potter fans are actually good people who have spent a lot of time disavowing Rowling, participating in discussions about the books’ more problematic elements, donating to trans charities, and supporting and loving the trans people in our lives, we get shouted down and told that most beloved line of all narcissists, emotionally immature adult children, and emotional manipulators: “If you reeeeeaaaaaallllllllyyyyyy loved trans people, you’d stop liking Harry Potter!”

Or even better, for those of us who were dumb enough to get Harry Potter tattoos: “You need to get them covered up or removed!” Mah sweet tangerines, do you know how expensive tattoos are? Do you know that it costs about five times as much to get a tattoo covered up as it does to get one in the first place? Do you know how much work is involved for the tattoo artist, who needs to either incorporate the design being covered into the new one or to cover it completely? And do you know that it costs about ten times as much to get a tattoo removed as it does to get it in the first place? Not only that, but a lot of people with Harry Potter tattoos, myself included, are working adults in our thirties and early forties. We have other, more pressing and important expenses than trying to appease some internet rando we’re never going to meet and can’t be made happy anyway. My furnace just shit the bed; between fixing it and covering up an embarrassing tattoo, not even in the same conceptual area as sorry, my furnace is more important. I live in Vermont, it’s fucking cold up here.

And I get why they’re like this. A lot of trans people were Harry Potter fans. To quote Natalie Wynn, “So many trans people have found comfort in this story, and an escape from a world that doesn’t offer a lot of comfort to trans people. So for [Rowling] to use [her] fame and influence to rally the backlash against trans acceptance, it feels like a betrayal to a lot of people. And I don’t blame them for feeling that way. I feel it too.” I am not trans, but it’s not hard for me to imagine just how much Rowling’s words and actions hurt for trans people who were Harry Potter fans. Many of whom, as Natalie said, found comfort at Hogwarts that they couldn’t, and still can’t, find in the real world. She’s basically stabbing them in the back, and worse, she’s using her massive amounts of money and influence to actively make life harder and more dangerous for trans people. None of that is okay, and none of it is acceptable.

I’m also someone who found a degree of safety and comfort at Hogwarts that wasn’t afforded to me in my real life. Being a girl was hard. Being a girl with divorced parents, one of whom (my mother) was deeply traumatized and too emotionally immature to realize that she needed therapy, not to join the Assemblies of God, the other a narcissistic cry-bully, was hard. Being a girl whose older brother had anger issues that he’d take out on her was hard. Being a girl who was being bullied by other students and too many teachers, was hard. And to top all of that off, I was dealing with untreated ADHD. Do you know what being neurodivergent is like? Imagine you’ve been invited to a party. You roll up to the house, open the door… And realize you’re the only person in jeans and a tee shirt, because apparently this is a black-tie party, and everyone knew that but you. Not only that, but everyone at the party is speaking French, and you don’t know any French. You have no idea how to communicate with anyone, you’re under-dressed, you don’t know the rules, and everyone is giving you filthy looks and sneering, “C’est quoi ton problème?!” Everyone else understood the rules of this party innately; you’re the odd one out.

Is it any wonder I wanted to be someplace where none of what was “wrong” with me mattered? Where I could forget about how much I hated my life and myself for a little bit? Fantasy offers a respite to those of us who feel disconnected from other people, or who find it difficult to navigate in a world where everyone else seems to know what they’re doing and we’re just floating around, trying not to fuck everything up by saying anything. The appeal of something like Harry Potter isn’t difficult to understand, and clearly, most of us weren’t immune to it.

Like I said before, I think a lot of these obsessive Threaders don’t know how to reconcile their feelings about Rowling being a TERF and their remaining affection for the books she wrote. I don’t blame them for that; it’s not an easy thing for most people to figure out or navigate. But instead of taking time offline to sit with their discomfort, instead of just having a long, dark night of the soul and decide what they, themselves, can and can’t accept, they point the finger at everyone else who likes, or at one point liked, the series, ignoring the three fingers pointing back at their own chest.

And then there’s also the big, pressing question I have, which is, “Do these Threaders not realize they’re part of the problem?”

In the first place, talking about Harry Potter at all, even to criticize it and its creator, is engagement. Threads is just as much an algorithmic beast as Xitter, and it has its own trending topics. Any discussion of HP, for or against, feeds into the algorithm and keeps serving it up into peoples’ timelines. Joanne Rowling knows this. Threaders, apparently, don’t, and I don’t think they’d listen even if someone brought it up to them, and worse, I think they’d choose not to understand if someone did explain all of this. So if you want to stop being triggered by Harry Potter discussions shitting up your TL, stop obsessing over it. Stop making threads about it. Stop engaging with other peoples’ threads about it. Add it to your list of muted words on all of your socials. Just don’t give it any more of your life, time, or energy. At this point, your obsessive hate-threading of it is just as embarrassing as Joanne’s obsessive TERF tweeting. (Of course, that’s a pretty big “if”. Most people on Threads and Xitter are people who not only haven’t reconciled their own trauma, but are probably reluctant to, because not only is reconciling it a long, difficult process, they’re also probably scared that if they don’t have their trauma at the core of their identity, they don’t have an identity, period. I try to be patient and understanding with other peoples’ trauma, but the moment you start using your trauma as an excuse to be an immature asshole and buck your responsibility to yourself? Is the moment my patience with you ends.)

Not to mention, a Google Trends search shows that Harry Potter isn’t gaining in popularity. If anything, it’s dropping, and has been dropping steadily over the last five years, apart from a brief spike from January 2-8th, 2022. Additionally, Joanne herself isn’t gaining in popularity. Another Google Trends search shows that, since 2019, searches for her name spiked in June 2020, when she wrote her “TERF Wars” manifesto on her website, and then dropped off sharply and haven’t spiked since.

In the second place, Rowling actually doesn’t have as much support as she thinks she does. According to a Pew Research poll from 2022, 80% of Americans agree that trans people face discrimination, and 64% favor legislation that would protect trans people from discrimination. Those numbers aren’t great, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is promising that a majority of Americans both see and oppose discrimination against trans people. Around the same time, a YouGov poll from the UK showed that 62% of Britons disagreed with the government attempting to exclude trans people from a wider ban on conversion therapy. Additionally, half of Britons in 2022 agreed that anti-trans discrimination was a big problem in the UK, 55% say people should be allowed to socially identify as the gender they are most comfortable identifying as, and 40% believed that change should be made legally as well. An Ipsos poll says that 77% of Britons support protecting trans people from housing and employment discrimination, and 47% agree that passports, birth certificates, and other legally identifying documents should have more options for gender identity than “male” and “female”. Again, not wonderful numbers, but it does show that Rowling is absolutely not on the right side of the present, never mind history.

Thirdly, and possibly the most important thing: Joanne Rowling is a narcissist. I’m not using that in the way a lot of digital natives do, as a term for “someone I don’t like and doesn’t agree with me.” I’m talking she meets the DSM-V criteria for narcissistic personality disorder. From the NIH (I’ve bolded the traits I’ve seen in Rowling, but keep in mind, I am not a psychiatrist):

Per the DSM, NPD includes:

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and with lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood, as indicated by at least five of the following:

• Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements, expects to be recognized as superior without actually completing the achievements).
• Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, brilliance, beauty, or perfect love. (Seriously, her books are full of this.)
• Believes that they are "special" and can only be understood by or should only associate with other special people (or institutions).
• Requires excessive admiration.
• Has a sense of entitlement, such as an unreasonable expectation of favorable treatment or compliance with his or her expectations. (I do think that expecting social trends to follow one's personal opinions also falls under this umbrella.)
• Is exploitative and takes advantage of others to achieve their own ends. (I might add, they're prone to becoming useful idiots for horrible causes, because they think they're too smart to be exploited and susceptible to flattery.)
• Lacks empathy and is unwilling to identify with the needs of others.
• Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of them. (I'm holding back on this one, because I don't know Rowling personally and can't say for sure if she either envies others or thinks other people envy her.)
• Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors and attitudes.

Narcissism is driven by insecurity, and it’s often a response to childhood emotional abuse and neglect. Rowling has stated, many times, that she had a terrible relationship with her father (whom she has described as a narcissist, so, well, that apple didn’t fall, so much as it rolled. …I sure do think I’m funny, sometimes), that she was expected to be “The Boy” by virtue of being the oldest, and that her father told her he’d have preferred her to be his son instead of his daughter. She was married to a horrifically abusive man who broke into her apartment and raped her while they were in the process of divorcing. “TERF Wars,” interestingly, also has Rowling describing her “ambivalence” towards being a woman, which, as Lindsay Ellis pointed out, shows that she has some gender baggage of her own. I don’t say any of this in defense of Rowling. Bad things have happened to her, and she’s made up her mind about trans people. She’s a big girl, she can deal with the consequences of her actions on her own. No one held a gun to her head and made her become a TERF, and maybe someday, she’ll grow the fuck up and realize that. Probably not, but I’m not about to spend any time out of my one, short life on this planet fretting on her behalf or praying for her redemption. I’m saying it to point out that narcissism has a backstory. It doesn’t come out of nowhere.

All of which is to say, any discussions of Rowling and Harry Potter feed her ego. One of the most important, yet seemingly most forgotten, outward hallmarks of a narcissist is the idea that “it doesn’t matter why they’re paying attention to me, it matters that they’re paying attention to me.” If you bash Rowling/HP, she can say, “Do you see how badly they treat me? Do you see how much they hate my fans, who did nothing wrong?” and get sympathy from her supporters. If you praise her, it flatters her and feeds her already oversized ego. Either way, the attention both validates her views and her need to be the Main Character of Reality at all times. This is why a lot of people are so angry that news outlets are falling over themselves to report on the Orange Shitgibbon, when the best way to deal with him and get him to crawl back to his penthouse would be to ignore him completely. Narcissists crave attention and validation at all times, and there’s not much they won’t do to get both things.

So between that and the algorithm, it should occur to Threaders who hate Rowling and HP that if they just stop talking about these things, and if they don’t interact with other peoples’ posts about HP/Rowling, then the problem will solve itself, right? But Threaders don’t think like that. It’s a combination of “Someone is wrong on the internet!” and “But if I don’t feed the trolls, how will they know I disagree with them?!”, and it fundamentally misunderstands how engagement works.

Or they’ll say, “But if we don’t talk about how harmful Rowling’s views are, how will people know she’s wrong?” Which isn’t the core problem. Most people probably know, whether they’ll admit it or not, that transphobia is just an overreaction to and projection of their trauma and hang-ups about their own gender identity and sexuality onto other people, if they think that deeply about it. The core of the problem is that most people don’t think that deeply about anything, including themselves, and most of us live our lives in a state of barely-controlled panic. Fear is the driving emotion behind nearly every choice we make: What we wear, what we eat, which car we drive, how we drive, where we live, whether or not we quit our jobs. And a lot of people, especially those who are generally incurious and don’t think much about anything, are easily manipulated through that fear. Scaring gullible people is easy and profitable, especially if you can convince them that some mysterious “other” is coming to hurt them or their family and loved ones. People like the Orange Shitgibbon and Alex Jones and even Joel Osteen made their careers on this very principle: “Scare stupid people.” Tell them the feminists and godless heathens run everything, and that’s why immigrants are coming to “took er jerbs!” and the Jews control the banks, and that Sandy Hook was a black op to “took er gurns!” and that the drag queens are gonna trans your kids and force HRT down their throats, and watch the money roll in. (If nothing in that last sentence made sense to you, good.)

Finally: The idea that “Harry Potter Bad, so everyone who ever liked it Also Bad!” is just so obviously, blatantly wrong that I hardly know where to even begin addressing how wrong it really is. Maybe by comparison? In that case: No one ever says that Wizard of Oz or Wicked stans are bad people, even if they think the book, movie, or play are bad. But… L. Frank Baum was pretty fuckin’ racist against Native Americans even for his time, Victor Fleming (who directed most of the 1939 movie) was, by some accounts, a Nazi sympathizer, and… Okay, admittedly, I can’t find any dirt on Gregory Maguire or Stephen Schwartz. Good for them. But again, if I say “Oh yeah, The Wizard of Oz is one of my favorite movies,” no one ever tells me I’m ~clearly~ pro-genocide, or that I ~clearly~ love Nazis. Maybe it’s because both Baum and Fleming are dead, most people living today have never read the Oz books (or the one thing they know about them is that Princess Ozma is trans, which is canonically true), and the movie is, apart from a few moments that haven’t aged well, pretty inoffensive and apolitical.

I’ve also heard “the Harry Potter books have bad ideas in them!” This is the more solid argument, and I do, in fact, agree with it. I think Ursula K. Le Guin put it best: “…[It] seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a ‘school novel’, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.” There’s a lot to be said about the goblins being antisemitic stereotypes that support the conspiracy theory that “the Jews run the banks”, or how the house-elf subplot was basically “Hermione is wrong for wanting to free an enslaved group!” (and Hermione is supposed to be Rowling’s author avatar, so… The call was always coming from inside the house), or how “fat” is used as a code for “definitely has committed, or is committing, at least one of the Seven Deadly Sins,” or how Harry never once uses his vast amounts of generational wealth to make any of his friends’ lives easier, even the poverty-stricken Weasleys, because Rowling is the only person in the world allowed to take financial assistance from people and the government it would insult them for Harry to even offer, or how women aren’t actually portrayed as feminist-y as we used to think/there’s definitely a massive streak of what is and isn’t “acceptable” for women and girls to do in Rowling’s mind (i.e., how literally every named girl in the books grew up to get married to men and have kids, not a single one became a career woman or was a lesbian or even chose not to procreate). All of that is true, and there’s no harm in discussing it.

…But again, the Harry Potter books are not the only piece of media Millennials have seen with these ideas, nor would they have been the first. Far, far, far from it. Our popular media is, and has always been, lousy with these ideas. As Ms. Le Guin and others have pointed out, HP is derivative, and if the media Rowling consumed in her life leading up to writing these books had these ideas in them, and they absolutely did, then yes, Rowling, being an incurious, empathy-lacking narcissist who doesn’t take criticism kindly or with anything even remotely resembling grace and doesn’t have the capacity to self-reflect, would have put these ideas into her writing, consciously or not.

Let me compare HP with my favorite novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith. This is a great coming-of-age story -one of the all-time great coming-of-age stories, actually- about Francie Nolan, a girl who grows up in Brooklyn, New York, at the turn of the 20th century, and how the environment shapes her. It is also rife with first-wave feminism, “acceptable womanhood,” slut-shaming, antisemitism, and racism. The average Thriend literally wouldn’t make it past the first chapter without immediately running to Threads to say “everyone who read this book BAD!”

So why do I love this book, if it’s so problematic? Easy: I’m not a blank slate with an empty mind. I wasn’t a blank slate with an empty mind at 13, when I first read this book, and I’m not a blank slate with an empty mind at 35. “Tabula rasa” is a philosophy that goes back as far as Aristotle, but has since been debunked by genetics and better “nature versus nurture” arguments and theories. Frankly, not only do I think the “tabula rasa” argument is wrong, I think it’s dangerous, as it claims that we only are who we are because of socialization alone, when we now know that genetics and environmental factors play important roles in how we develop as people.

I know who I am. I know what my values are. I know what I will and won’t tolerate. And most importantly, I work at being media literate, so that when I’m reading a book or watching a movie and I encounter “bad” and “problematic” ideas, I can recognize them for what they are and not let them worm their way into my brain. That’s an option, but it’s also a skill you have to learn and continually work at. Which is where I think most Thriends and Xits have the problem: Media literacy is hard, and they’re not interested in hard, they’re interested in complaining, which is the easiest thing in the world to do. (If anyone was interested in hard, microblogging would never have existed in the first place.)

In spite of its flaws, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is, at the end of the day, a well-written story with engaging, realistic characters, some of the most well-written women I’ve ever read, probably the most empathetic portrayal of families in poverty and people with substance abuse issues in all of American literature, and a message of perseverance and the values of education and hope that isn’t at all insincere or out-of-touch. It doesn’t have to be morally pure to tell its story, and frankly, I don’t expect any book published in 1943 to be morally pure, especially by the standards of 2024. That’s like expecting the hunk of cheese that’s been sitting in the back of the fridge since before the first lockdowns to still be perfectly good to eat: If you make that mistake, you can’t blame the cheese for making you sick.

“Harry Potter has bad ideas” is an argument with merit, and again, I do agree with it. What I do not agree with is the idea that just because someone has read these books, they’re now “bad”, or that the books somehow made them “bad.” That’s not how this works. Star Wars has bad ideas; look at the Jedi. Look how their rigidity and ideology ended up destroying democracy and leading to a war that lasted almost two decades and cost who knows how many lives, and they’re still regarded as the heroes of the story, even after TLJ’s brilliant takedown of them (which was one of the only things about TLJ I actually liked). But no one ever says that watching Star Wars automatically means you’re a bad person with bad ideals, which is laughable when you consider that the Star Wars fandom is a hotbed of misogyny, racism, transphobia, and other right-wing fucknuttery.

Whereas Harry Potter fans, nine times out of ten, are more than happy to criticize the story’s problematic elements, absolutely hate Rowling, will bash her and her stupid Xitter feed and transphobia at every turn, and are generally kind and socially progressive. After Rowling went public with her transphobia, I saw literally every fan group I was involved in put out messages of vehement disagreement with Rowling’s views, stating that all trans identities are valid, these spaces are trans-inclusive and will always be, and that any transphobia and support of Rowling’s views would result in a permanent ban from that group… And they followed through on all of it. Fandom Forward, a human rights advocacy group, was started in 2005 by Harry and the Potters singer Andrew Slack, as the Harry Potter Alliance. It was originally started to raise funds for Amnesty International, and over the last 16 years, has helped raised funds and resources to help survivors of the genocide in Darfur, promote literacy and distributed books to underserved communities, and, in 2016, partnered with the National Center for Transgender Equality, with whom they remain partnered. In fact, they changed their name from the Harry Potter Alliance to Fandom Forward because of Rowling’s transphobia and to make it clear that they did not stand with her.

What the fuck have Star Wars fans done like this?! Go ahead, give me an example, I’ll wait. (And no, their involvement with and folding into Fandom Forward doesn’t count here, because I’m talking in terms of, “People who watched Star Wars, and were inspired become better people and do charitable work to support and elevate marginalized groups and impoverished people, and started their own charitable orgs and drives because of the movies.”) And to be clear, I love Star Wars. It was the gateway drug to me being a Harry Potter stan, and you’d best believe I saw the parallels between them. But let’s just be real, here: Star Wars is no more ideologically pure than Harry Potter. It just has worse fans.

This idea that “Harry Potter has Bad Ideas, so everyone who read it Also Bad” relies so heavily on the “tabula rasa” theory, that I have to wonder if the people making this argument know just how close it is to actual arguments used by the Nazis and Republicans to ban books. “These books is bad and we must protect da children from them!” This argument is not about protecting kids, and it never has been. It is, always has been, and always will be, about adults who aren’t media literate and refuse think critically about anything not being able to handle any media that even lightly brushes up against their own close-mindedness, and blaming “the children” for that. Less effective and appealing, isn’t it, when you put it that way?

If you are a reasonably intelligent person, if you know what your values are, if you know where your heart lies, if you have at least a modicum of media literacy, you cannot get brain worms from consuming media with problematic elements. You just can’t. It’s not possible.

I think it’s a valid criticism to say, “If you still buy Harry Potter merchandise, stream the movies, go to the Wizarding World, and otherwise give money to Rowling, you’re supporting her transphobia and, by extension, supporting transphobic organizations.” It’s valid because you know who gets that money at the end of the day, and you know what she puts that money toward. And I’m not an innocent bystander in all of this; the only reason I haven’t renewed my HBO subscription is because I’m waiting to see how much my stupid fucking furnace is going to cost to fix. But hey, that’s a few less dollars going to Queen TERF, so there’s that. (FWIW, I subscribe to HBO for Last Week Tonight. If it moved to another streaming service, I would drop that subscription and ask for a pro-rated refund in less time than it would take John Oliver to make the announcement.)

I’m not here to tell anyone how to feel about Harry Potter. Like I said, I’m done with it, at least for now. I’m perfectly happy to tell you that I think Rowling can get bent, I will not be buying any HP merchandise or movies or going to the Wizarding World, and that trans peoples’ safety and legal rights matter far more than whatever lingering nostalgia I have for the series. Those are the decisions I made for myself. I’m just tired of being told I’m a bad person because I, like literally everyone making this stupid argument, once bought these books and the tickets to the movies and the movies on DVD and Blu-ray, but unlike them, I’m not special. Like, no shit, Sherlock, of course I’m not special, but by the terms of this argument, neither are you. Either everyone including yourself who ever liked HP is a Bad Person just because they liked HP at one point, or HP and Rowling are bad, but the people who read it probably aren’t unless they keep giving her their money. You can’t have it both ways, so make your own decision and make your peace with it. If you can’t, that’s on you, and you alone.

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¹I want to state this clearly: I am aware that India Willoughby may have said some shitty things about immigrants (though considering that the person claiming this is Robert Galbraith herself, you’d best believe I’m taking it with all the salt I can find), but that doesn’t make her not a woman. Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, Kari Lake, Candace Owens, Nikki Haley, and Kim Davis all have shitty political beliefs, and they’re still women. “Being a woman” doesn’t preclude having terrible beliefs and politics, and frankly, I think it’s misogynistic to say otherwise. It’s more of the “Acceptable Womanhood” argument.

²…Dear Parker Posey: Please, for the love of all things good and holy, sue dis bitch for defamation of character. I know, I just know, that a lot of well-meaning people have tried googling your name, only to stumble across her steaming pile of transphobic shit, and then got mad at you, thinking you did it, and then they subtweeted you and… Oh honey, you don’t deserve that. (For the record, Parker Posey, the actor, appears to be nothing but sweet and lovely and supportive of the entire LGBTQIA+ community, so I just feel so bad for her sharing a name with that… thing. And it’s not even it’s real fuckin’ name, either; that’s Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull. …Pick one name to hyphenate, Lord Adult Human Fuckwad. If you’re going to pretend to be turn of the 20th century British nobility, at least get the naming conventions right. And drop the fayke Cawknee acksent, righ’ guv’nah. Again, if you’re gonna play the part, play it right. As Dean Parisot once wrote and Jason Nesmith said, “It doesn’t take a great actor to recognize a bad one.”)

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Last updated March 11, 2024