Pulling Harry Potter's Legacy

Newsweek

a day ago

I discovered Harry Potter as an adult, when a coworker of mine pressed books 1-3 into my hands and told me I absolutely had to read them. I devoured them in the space of a long weekend; book 4 came out the same day as my husband's great-aunt's funeral. We emerged from the train station and faced a bookstore with its lights on, then immediately went in and splurged on two hardback copies so we could both immerse ourselves in a world of magic for a little while. Twenty years later, though, the magic feels like a trick, and one that now feels both evident and vindictive.
J.K. Rowling, Harry's creator, has vocally and financially supported anti-trans activism. As early as 2018, she claimed to have mistakenly "liked" a social media post calling trans women "men in dresses" and chalking it up to an accidental "middle aged moment." Her insistence on denying trans identity and trans rights, however, has escalated in the years since; she referred to this year's U.K. Supreme Court ruling limiting legal recognition of women to those biologically female at birth as "TERF VE Day," comparing it to the European conclusion to World War II.
J.K. Rowling speaks onstage at the 2019 RFK Ripple of Hope Awards at New York Hilton Midtown on December 12, 2019, in New York City.
J.K. Rowling speaks onstage at the 2019 RFK Ripple of Hope Awards at New York Hilton Midtown on December 12, 2019, in New York City.As the parent of a trans woman, I naturally detest this position: Rowling's refusal to acknowledge my daughter's identity is harmful and hateful. She has continually used her platform to denigrate and deny trans women, justifying her statements via her own experience with abusive men. However, I've long held that the art and the artist should be regarded separately, when possible. Pablo Picasso was a domestic abuser, but we don't see advocacy for abuse within his art. Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Good Night, Moon, reportedly had an intense dislike for children, but that's not reflected in her work.
Rowling's prejudice, however, extends beyond her personal anti-trans stance and into her work itself: the sole East Asian-identified character in the Harry Potter series is named Cho Chang; the goblins running the bank are described with stereotypically Jewish traits; the house-elves who Hermione seeks to rescue from enslaved labor speak with distinctly Jar Jar Binks-esque grammar (described in an article on babbel.com as "[reminding] us of creole [sic] languages"), fat is coded as evil (as in the Dursleys; Aunt Marge is also described as large, beefy, and possessing a mustache). Many were also skeptical about Rowling's de facto announcement of Dumbledore's homosexuality in October 2007, which felt toothless as it followed the completion of the book series (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in July of that year).
San Francisco's Booksmith recently chose to no longer stock the Potter books to avoid contributing to Rowling's stated intentions of using her money to create the J.K. Rowling Women's Fund, providing legal support to those "forced to comply with unreasonable inclusion policies regarding single sex spaces and services," or who "have lost their livelihoods or are facing tribunals because of their expressed beliefs." As an English teacher, I understand why San Francisco's Booksmith might have chosen to no longer carry the books for their messaging and as a trans parent, I understand the anger fueling a decision to deny any contribution to Rowling's already considerable Potter-derived wealth. In this case, the art and the artist are both complicit and deserving of refusal.
The books, movies, amusement park, et cetera will, of course, all remain available to the public. Those who believe that Rowling is correct or, if nothing else, that the Potterverse is blameless may continue to support as they see fit. But it feels like time to push back and refuse to contribute any further to the Rowling and Potter legacies. Booksmith's choice to make space for better, more tolerant books and better, more tolerant authors is a salvo in that direction, and one I encourage others to follow.
Madeleine Deliee is a writer and educator in the Washington, D.C., area. Her bylines include CNN, The Washington Post, Pacific Standard, and others. Follow her on Bluesky @mmdeliee.bsky.social.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.