#started being openly transphobic. I have so much fucking knowledge about this book series that will never leave my brain. and yeah it was
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Hey if you’re still enjoying and engaging with Harry Potter in any capacity you can unfollow me 😊 please and thank you
Like. I get it. I was super into it as a kid too. I did not have the social context to pick up on the antisemitism or transphobia or sexism or fatphobia or bioessentialism or racism or anything else. I also picked up on surface-level language of Fighting Back Against Evil and ascribed my own values onto what that meant and thought we were all on the same page. I remember when the original kids who grew up with the books started becoming adult fans and picking up on the (blatant!) antisemitism and everybody was still mostly willing to give JKR the benefit of the doubt on it. (“She was writing kids books!” They said. “She didn’t know she was penning a global phenomenon! She picked a common literary trend in European fairy tales (antisemitic caricature) and didn’t examine it closely. It’s a mistake anyone could make,” we said. “She would probably do things differently now. After all, she word-of-god confirmed the vaguest hints she dropped that Dumbledore might be gay,” we said.) There was actually a span of several years where biases inherent in the actual real content of the Harry Potter series were coming to light and even the people pointing them out still seemed mostly to think it was an unfortunate accident.
That time has passed. Years ago! We are long past the first months of “maybe she doesn’t realize this seemingly-feminist tweet she liked was made by a noted TERF” and then “how could she not realize that these many veiled TERF-y things she’s retweeted have implications for the many queer fans of her work” and finally “oh wow okay JKR just dropped an entire transphobic manifesto on twitter. I guess the transphobia was the point.”
Yeah, there were a few months after that where people were still processing and still working through how they felt about Harry Potter and all of its flaws with the context of the now open transphobia of the creator. I was there for that. Remember how I was one of the kids who built it up into something noble and worthwhile based on my own beliefs about what messages it was probably trying to convey? Turns out it wasn’t trying to say any of those things, and when you take the time to examine all of the terrible shit that made its way into the text whether JKR intended it to be there or not, the whole series falls apart. It’s weird to discover that there’s a room in your house that’s rotten to the core, but eventually you figure out you can’t live like that, still going in there and holding your nose and pretending it’s still the same room you thought it was when the termites were only inside of the walls and hadn’t yet started chewing their way through the furniture. Because what’s going to happen is that they are going to infest the rest of your house. If you decide you can ignore transphobia and antisemitism and everything else just because you liked the color of the wallpaper, the rest of your principles are going to crumble too. You get rid of that fucking room. You put those books on a high shelf in the back of your closet behind other outgrown clothes and interests and you move the fuck on.
JKR uses the money made from her transphobic antisemitic children’s books to actively funding hate groups and to lobby for legislation that will and has actually affected the actual lives of trans people in an entire country. We are past the point of grieving something you were wrong about in childhood. Kids are wrong about a lot of stuff. You grow up and you learn new information and you change your behaviors based on it. You have to choose. It is transphobic to pretend there is not transphobia where there is. It is transphobic to support the work of someone who is using those funds to take rights from trans people with every fucking dollar. It is hateful to continue to engage positively with a story that at its very core is rooted in hate and bigotry and prejudice. You can choose to do all of those things but you cannot claim ignorance of them and you cannot choose those things and still pretend that choosing them upholds the values we convinced ourselves that Harry Potter stood for over a decade ago as uninformed children. You cannot choose to do those things and pretend to still support your trans and queer and Jewish neighbors. I do not want you in my neighborhood. Leave.
#mine#Harry potter cw#yeah I don’t want to see or think about this shit either and I’m sure most of my followers are on the same page of just like. let’s wipe it#from the public consciousness and do our best to just completely ignore it and forget it existed and in doing so take away JKRs platform and#influence and also stop the continued harm the series will do by propagated hateful biases in people who continue to read it#but despite heavily culling my feed over the course of the past several years and thankfully mostly not seeing HP fandom things anymore#I’ve been seeing a lot of responses today to people defending it and honestly I forget that there are still people out there doing that who#think they are just fine and normal fandom people with non-hateful and terrible interests and it makes me so angry#maybe more so because like. I was there too! I was annoyingly obsessed with Harry Potter from the ages of idk seven? up until whenever JKR#started being openly transphobic. I have so much fucking knowledge about this book series that will never leave my brain. and yeah it was#weird and hard to have to rethink things and realize that no actually it does feel bad and uncomfortable to continue to be a fan even#passively of these books. it was a big part of my childhood and several of my friendships. I fully get it. I was the weird kid also.#it was weird and hard to say oh actually this sucks and I don’t want to be a part of it anymore. but I did it! I got there! because it was#more important to care about real actual things and people than it is to fondly remember a book series for children.#and at the time it felt like maybe I did hang on a little longer than I could have and was a little later than some people and figuring out#my feelings and moving on from the whole thing. but it was still fucking years ago. and you’re still here?#because you like the color of the wallpaper in this shitty rotten broken down tacked on room? because we used to spend time there together?#buddy the room was giving us lead poisoning the whole time and the rest of us have accepted that and we are all outside doing other things.#you will find connection and community in so many places in your life. I promise. get the fuck out of that terrible awful room#and for gods sake stop bring out handfuls of mold you found under the floorboards and shoving it in our faces#nobody fucking wants this. we did it. we’re done.#so yeah I think I have an extra level of disdain because I know from personal experience that it’s not *that* fucking hard to care more#about real life trans people than about antisemitic children’s books.
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