Joanne Rowling and the Cruel Legacy
Malice Managed.
Yesterday, HBO released the first trailer for their upcoming Harry Potter TV series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Taken on its own merits, it looks…fine? No one has answered the question of how these adaptations will be significantly different from the movies aside from including more stuff from the books. But adaptation isn’t simply a matter of porting narrative. It’s also about look and feel, and Chris Columbus, who directed the first two Harry Potter movies, did an exemplary job of casting and giving this world a distinct visual look. It doesn’t help that Warner Bros. has built out entire theme parks and merchandising lines based on this look, so the ability to reinvent it seems somewhat limited. From this brief teaser, it looks pretty much like you would expect Harry Potter to look but now with different actors in the roles.
And yet this all feels secondary to the larger narrative involving author J.K. Rowling, who has gone from beloved author to terminally online transphobe in the span of a decade or so. Much has been written on whether or not Rowling is truly anti-trans or not, and her explanations on her views feel particularly labored. If we look at her actions, it’s clear that she does neatly match the label of “TERF” or “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.” She’s pretty much fallen for the propaganda that trans-women are actually male predators, lurking bathrooms to abuse innocent women. The more people push back on Rowling, the more certain she becomes that the trans community are villains and she’s righteously defending women.
Now people are wondering how to greet the new Potter series considering that its author spends most of her time railing against a beleaguered minority group. I feel like Rowling’s turn particularly rankles because she gained her fame and wealth in the “right” way. That is to say she didn’t inherent anything or come from a famous family. She didn’t concoct some worthless Silicon Valley fever dream or build up a cushy lifestyle through finance. She came from an ordinary life and used her imagination to conjure a beloved book series. However, you feel about the books themselves, it’s clear they connected with a huge audience, likely because it had such universal values like friendship, family, grief, and fighting against discrimination.
The books, movies, and Harry Potter empire brought Rowling an immense amount of wealth. Her net worth is pegged at around $1 billion. I sympathize with the argument that avoiding anything Harry Potter is a way to not give money to Rowling, which she uses for anti-trans causes. But the economics of that kind of wealth means whether you tune in to the new show or not, she’ll never run out of money to be malicious towards the trans community. Boycotting can be a symbolic gesture—and an important one as it signals to WB that Rowling is too toxic to adapt at this moment—but it’s not a financial one.
Rowling’s heel turn presents a greater challenge than whether or not her financial power rests on viewership. Instead, she presents the problem of what to do with toxic artists, and it’s not a problem confined to just her. The easy thing to do is just shout, “I never liked her anyway!” and if that’s true, then bully for you, but that’s not really engaging with the problem. We could say, “Well, we just need to separate art from artist,” but I don’t find that to be a solution either as art comes from somewhere. We can try “death of the author,” but we can’t unknow what we know. I’m always going to know that the author of Harry Potter is a massive bigot whose brain was likely rotted by a combination of being called a genius for roughly 20 years and then falling for the same anti-trans propaganda that’s taken hold of Britain.
Instead, I think we have to take the totality of her Rowling’s actions and be honest with the hard fact that sometimes people create great art and then become despicable in such a way that it undermines the themes of their original work. Rowling today would likely be appalled by the Rowling who wrote Harry Potter because in that world, the bad guy is a racist. Voldemort and the Death Eaters judge people based on their birth, not who they become or what they can do. Just as Draco Malfoy thinks Hermoine Granger is a “mudblood” due to having non-magical parents, so too does Rowling think that trans people are inherently bad and unworthy of the same rights as everyone else.
On some level, she clearly understands this prejudice because you can even see it as recently as the Fantastic Beasts movies. In those films, Rowling furthered the notion of an “Obscurus,” a repression of magical tendencies that then erupts in violent fury. Just like LGBTQ+ kids who are taught to hate themselves by bigoted parents, so too does Rowling understand that hiding your true self is harmful. And yet if a man believes his true identity is to live as a woman, that’s a bridge too far for the Harry Potter author.
This outward venom thus undermines the messages of sympathy and love that run throughout the books. Perhaps in time, this bigotry is forgotten. We all show up for the latest Roald Dahl thing despite his antisemitism. The author’s literal death somehow absolves our actions as they’re no longer here to remind us of their vile actions. The art papers over their lifetime, and perhaps after Rowling passes away, that will be what happens to Harry Potter. But for the time being, she’s very much alive, and we have to grapple with what that means for her most popular work.
Personally, if people continue to buy Harry Potter stuff or tune in for the show, so be it. As I said at the outset, I don’t think the show looks particularly imaginative, but I also don’t think someone hates the trans community if they watch a TV program (unless in the first episode Hagrid says something like, “You’re a wizard, Harry, but you’re also a boy, which is a fixed gender construct and while many things are possible in our world, changing genders is not, and it would be an affront to the many witches if it were. Anyway, let’s go to Diagon Alley.”) But I also think the show’s relevancy will diminish, not just because there are eight faithful movies, and the three prequels had so little interest the studio decided to abandon the last two they were going to make. It will diminish because Rowling is authoring a new legacy of demonizing a minority group. HBO will keep pumping out marketing for the new show (it’s currently serving as a bumper for almost anything you want to watch on HBO Max), but Rowling left the Wizarding World behind a long time ago. She’s now deep in the trenches of online bigotry, and every time she attempts to erase the existence of trans people, she reminds us there’s nothing magical about such inhumanity.
Matt Goldberg
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