Erin Reed has a piece [gift link] detailing the ever more radical anti-trans comments of JK Rowling:
In recent years, millions of LGBTQ+ fans of the Harry Potter series have watched with dismay as its author, J.K. Rowling, has become a prominent figure in anti-trans activism. Her increasingly hostile rhetoric has ranged from referring to a transgender woman journalist as “a man… cosplaying” to dismissing the historical targeting of transgender people during the Holocaust as “a fever dream.” On Saturday, Rowling escalated her attacks further, making the baseless and easily disprovable claim to her millions of followers that transgender youth do not exist at all—a falsehood that directly contradicts decades of research and lived experiences of transgender people.
Rowling, responding to a commenter who implored her to “use her power for good” and end her “hateful focus on transgender youth,” denied the very existence of transgender youth. She replied: “There are no trans kids. No child is ‘born in the wrong body.’ There are only adults like you, prepared to sacrifice the health of minors to bolster your belief in an ideology that will end up wreaking more harm than lobotomies and false memory syndrome combined.”
It used to be that rich idiots didn’t have an immediate way to transmit their verbal diarrhea to the masses. Perhaps their publicist, or remaining sane friend from the pre-wealth days, would sometimes intercept their word vomit and chuck it in the trash where it belonged. Now we get it fast and hard, directly from the source.
I read all the books and watched all the movies and, by the absolutely debased standards of a parent who saw mostly terrible books and movies marketed to my kid, they weren’t bad. She could have built a dozen homes and jetted around between them, with breaks for fan veneration at Comicons and the like. Instead, she decided to travel to TERFlandia and document her travels in the form of tweets.
wonkie
It’s really weird to me when people latch onto something that has no real harm or benefit to them (but very much does to others) and decide that it is going to be their life’s work to influence negatively on that issue. Why? Why did she ever start talking about trans at all? Why did she ever consider it any of her business? I don’t get it.
Baud
Speaking of lobotomies, she’s making me reconsider whether we should bring them back.
KatKapCC
She is trash. Nothing but trash
Also, there are other middle grade books your kiddos can read that aren’t written by nasty bigots. Trans people are more important than Harry Potter.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
“JK Rowling” doesn’t exist. It’s just a nazi propaganda account on Twitter. “Harry Potter” was written by a spontaneously generated fandom in the very earliest days of the internet and the copyright was stolen by the people behind that nazi propaganda Twitter account.
We shouldn’t acknowledge its existence beyond this.
hrprogressive
The entire Harry Potter franchise really passed me by, but I’ve had friends who maintained fandom well into adulthood, and I am aware of the cultural impact it has had on society over the last 30+ years.
I say all that to say that I’m not sure anyone who built their reputation and fortune off such a widely beloved intellectual property has ever shat on and shredded that reputation quite as thoroughly as Rowling has with her transphobia.
She could have gone down in the annals of history as “one of the best fantasy authors ever” and instead, she’ll likely only be immediately remembered as “that vile rich woman who tweeted transphobia to the masses for reasons best known only to her”
Maybe she caught a brain worm similar to RFK. Because holy shit what a fall from grace.
twbrandt
It’s astonishing to me how thoroughly she set her reputation on fire.
KatKapCC
@Jacqueline Squid Onassis: Much as I understand the motivation behind this meme, this really isn’t helping. Her bigotry is important to point out and discuss, and any time someone buys any official HP stuff — books, DVDs, games, clothes, etc, anything licensed — she makes money off of it. You can play at her being fictional but she is earning real-world money off of people seeking jokey excuses to keep engaging with her work.
Steve LaBonne
You know what harms minors? Driving them to suicide because you insist that their pain doesn’t exist. But scum like Rowling don’t want to know about that.
Omnes Omnibus
@wonkie: To me, that’s a sign of a true believer.
The Audacity of Krope
@KatKapCC: That train has already left the station and we have naught but a single strand of spider’s silk to try to stop it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jacqueline Squid Onassis: Quoi?
eemom
Was never a fan myself, but my daughter was growing up, and she has pointed out that there are antisemitic and other disgusting bigoted tropes in the HP books that nobody seemed to notice at the time.
The Audacity of Krope
@Omnes Omnibus: My sister once told me the same thing substituting “spontaneous generation by fandom” for Daniel Radcliffe.
It’s a cutesy little joke to justify continued Harry Potter fandom.
scav
Oh, look, another rich person has an opinion and expects everyone to cheer and obey.
The Audacity of Krope
@eemom: Oh, the fat shaming. Unless we’re supposed to like the character, then they’re pleasantly plump. In JKR world, people are inherently good or evil, characters are basically stagnant, and how you treat people is just or not depending entirely on that facet of their identity.
Kent
It continues to amaze me how social media has compelled some people to literally set their reputation on fire. Rowling, Musk, Wolf, etc.
Maybe they just get too used to being around sycophants. I dunno. Michael Jordan had it right. He was probably not that great of a person but he kept it all buttoned up and focused on what he was actually in the public eye for in the first place.
My kids were into Harry Potter for a spell when they were younger. But they all quickly moved on to stuff that interested them more. They only really had one good female character which was pretty lame for a book series in the 21st century aimed at kids.
KatKapCC
@eemom: Yeah, even before her transphobia became obvious, there were other issues in the books that kind of got ignored by most of the fandom. Antisemitism, racism, fat-hate, etc. I admit I found the books enjoyable to a point (though at times a little too obvious even for the target age range), but I was always uncomfortable with those aspects and how little notice they seemed to get.
eclare
@eemom:
I’ve never read them, aren’t there also mentions of slavery?
@mistermix.bsky.social
@eemom: So, let me get this straight: your kid is saying that a series of books set in an English boarding school have anti-semitic content. I think I’m going to have to hit the bottle early today, my worldview has been rocked. (/s in case it’s not clear.)
Also, Hermoine, the “smart girl” who for whatever reason decides to pair up with idiot Ron and wipe his butt for the rest of her natural born life, was another classic 50’s era throwback.
Chris Johnson
That mold colonizing Rowling is a dick.
Old School
I enjoyed the books when they were released, but as my own children are now at the age they were intended for, I find myself reluctant to encourage them to read them.
Baud
@eclare: There’s the whole house elf saga.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
@KatKapCC:
Rowling is going to make that money whether we acknowledge her existence or not. Treating her as simply a nazi propaganda account on Twitter serves to ridicule her, distract her, and lessen her power. She makes it increasingly easy to believe that she isn’t the author of “Harry Potter” given that she, herself, seems determined to be Dolores Umbridge. She has no understanding of the meaning of the world created in Harry Potter.
The fandom will continue because there are powerful messages in there that resonate. Especially within the LGBTQ+ community. I absolutely love that the fandom has discarded Rowling and taken ownership of that world.
Given all of the above, I see no reason not to deny the existence of Rowling the person. I’ve never met her, she could be purely a media creation for all I know (were conspiracies a thing that could actually be kept secret). And so we get to “Rowling is just a nazi propaganda account and not a real person” in response to that account’s claim that trans kids aren’t real. Fuck her and let her swallow some of her own medicine.
The Audacity of Krope
Indeed there are. But these creatures long to be slaves, you see, and resistance to this was literally portrayed as a ridiculous act.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Baud: Yeah, and Ron beats the shit out of Dobby whenever he feels like it, yet, again, supposed smarty-pants Hermoine overlooks this massive character flaw when Rowling gets out her literary soldering iron to melt those two disparate characters together.
kindness
Does JK’s belief extend to there are no gay kids? I hope not but that is the next logical step any good Nazi would take.
sab
@twbrandt: Yes. She has totally lost her mind on this. Her Strike novels are actually rather positive on trans characters (even the one that attacked Strike had reason to think she had good reasons.)
Daddy issues, domestic abuse and doesn’t have a thick enough hide? Who knows, but disturbing to those who loved her books as kids.
I still like the Strike books.
Harry Potter not so much, but I came to those as a step-grandmother who had never raised littler kids. (Cliquiey little beasts in those books. And those kids lied every time they opened their mouths! Husband: that’s kids.) And I had a year of boarding school which I absolutely loathed although I very much liked my classmates. Don’t romanticize those places. Children governed by administrators and bureaucrats, not people who care about the child or fairness.
But I still don’t understand why she went off the deep end. Possibly because of the physical threats to her family. But she was and is hanging with a crowd that is more than okay with people who are themselves threatening and deceitful.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@kindness:
I find it highly ironic that someone who has the same position on trans issues as the Nazis doesn’t realize that her chosen political movement wasn’t exactly keen on radical feminism, either.
Kirk
It saddens me, actually. She did a good thing, whether intended or not, and the squandering of that legacy just saddens me.
The good thing? I was still a librarian in 1997 when the first book came out. Within a year the reading habits of young adults (and older children) absolutely spiked. The hold lines for those books were huge, but the same people getting them and reading them went on to get more books. Library usage number went up measurably.
eclare
@Baud:
Yes. House elf.
CHETAN R MURTHY
I read her books twice thru during Trump’s first term. Since, I’ve thought of doing so again, but every time, I am reminded of her transphobia and … I don’t. What a filthy excuse for a human being. It’s got morning to do with her, and yet she keeps on going, digging that hole.
KatKapCC
@Jacqueline Squid Onassis: But she IS the author, and she IS making money because of people pretending like she doesn’t exist because they’re stunted emotionally and cannot let the hell go of a child’s book about a boy wizard.
Denying her existence means not talking about the pain she causes. You should care about trans people’s pain, not pretend it’s not happening.
Old School
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
Are you sure that is true?
sab
@eclare: Dobby and the house elfs were slaves, somehow genetically predisposed to tolerate or even crave slavery.
KatKapCC
@sab: She wrote the Strike novels under a pen name taken from the man who basically invented gay conversion therapy. Those books can also go in the fucking bin.
Ruckus
@wonkie:
It’s power in their universe.
It’s them aging out and looking for that constant following.
It’s them aging out and having a harder time fitting in with other old farts, many of whom, trying to conserve as much of their lives as possible, seem to act more and more like age has given them wisdom. Take it from this old fart that for most of them it hasn’t in any way.
The take away is that people as they age out often wish, beg for the times when they “grew up.” And that’s part of the problem they didn’t actually grow up. They have to fit in somewhere. With someone that has public appreciation for something they’ve done, they will do pretty much anything to maintain that. The who appreciates them is less important than the appreciation itself.
You get up into senioritis your world grows smaller. You lose friends, in one way or another. If you have a public following you lose that as well, so what is left depends on how big the following was in the first place. For some that is close to dying. Because their personality has been adjusted to appreciation and applause. Some start to wonder where it all went.
Suzanne
I used to really enjoy these books, when Spawn the Elder was little. It was massively disappointing to find out that she is a terrible person. But….. I don’t have to give her another dime. So I don’t.
I will note that many, many artists throughout history are terrible people and I’m a hypocrite, because I don’t cut them all out. I have Guns and Roses songs on my playlists, even though Axl Rose beats women, for example.
Ruckus
@twbrandt:
If your personality demands rewards for whatever and the rewards fall off, you are going to scream and cry and demand attention.
If your personality enjoys the rewards for whatever and the rewards fall off, you very likely are going to still enjoy the ones you’ve gotten.
The Audacity of Krope
@Ruckus: There are 20-somethings acting in the way you describe and 80-somethings who don’t.
JFC when did age bigotry become the cool thing?
eemom
On a random pleasant note, the child actor who played Ron grew up to star in a pretty good Apple series called The Servant. Except his character was American and he kept slipping to Brit speak.
Tim C
JK and Orson Scott Card occupy the same space for me. They wrote some good…ish… stuff at one point, and then for reasons I don’t fully understand, lost their damn minds over nonsense.
Sister Golden Bear
It’s a short step from saying trans people don’t actually exist to saying trans people should not exist. Sadly both the Tories and now Labour are trying to make that happen.
Not only has the National Health Service has essentially banned healthcare for trans youth — and is sending them to conversion therapy to convince the kids that they’re not actually trans — they’ve barred parents from getting trans health for their children via private doctors, threatening prosecute parents who do, and seize their children.
British TERFs have talked opening about the need to “reduce” the trans population.
It’s the blueprint for Republicans plans to eliminate (with extreme prejudice) trans people here.
Citizen Alan
@sab: It’s slightly worse than that, because dobby was literally depicted as an aberration for wanting to be paid a nominal sum for his services. But I don’t recall a scene of Ron abusing one if only because the story hook for the weasleys was that they were too impoverished to ever be own a house elf themselves.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
Some people have egos that Demand attention.
If that attention drops off, there will be hell to pay for someone or everyone within the bounds of communication. Those bounds have of course gotten a lot bigger in the last couple of decades.
Gretchen
@The Audacity of Krope: It’s not age bigotry to for us old folks to observe how our contemporaries react to the passing of time.
indycat32
I read them and was surprised they were considered appropriate for kids. In addition to slavery, there’s child abuse, torture and murder.. Plus, she killed off the only character I liked (Dobby).
Shalimar
@KatKapCC: Rowling will never spend all the money she makes, she gives a lot to charities, and she has 3 children. Maybe this is an Elon situation and she has taken her extreme views from an adverse relationship with one of the children. They do not seem to seek any publicity, so we have no way of knowing.
Sister Golden Bear
@Jacqueline Squid Onassis:
Data point of one, but all the LGBTQ+ folks I know (youth and old) have renounced Potterdom and are enraged by Rowling’s complete betrayal.
VFX Lurker
Plus, non-Disney folks are desperate for a cash cow IP that approaches anything Disney owns (ex: Star Wars, Marvel, Muppets, Lion King, Frozen).
Games, films, TV series, merchandise, home video sales, streaming, theme parks. I expect these to go on for as long as Warner Bros and others can milk that cash cow. I also expect them to downplay Rowling if they think her abhorrent behavior threatens those profits.
I don’t know if Harry Potter can keep going like Star Wars, or if it will go the way of Al Capp’s Shmoo (another mega-hit by an awful person).
I can’t look at Potter now, so I can’t say.
sab
@KatKapCC: That is typical of the slanderous BS that her detractors are all spewing. The Galbraith surname is John Kenneth Galbraith, a leftish economist, nothing to do with conversion therapy, which wasn’t even invented in his lifetime.
If you want to argue against her books, do it honestly, not by lying. The negative reviews of the Strike books obviously hadn’t even read them. Just following the herd.
She has done a good bit of lying herself (her Glamour defense of her position.) Attack those articles she quotes in defense of her position instead of misrepresenting her own writing.
She wrote one novel Casual Vacancy, which I rather liked, and got completely skewered by critics because it was an adult novel not YA, so not what they expected. So she wrote the first Strike books under a pseudonym to give them a chance.
Citizen Alan
Personally, I think Rowling’s problem is just that she made too much money. I am of the firm and deeply held belief that wealth product above a certain level drives people insane and makes them turn evil. A lot of people sing the praises of J.B pritzger, but I have to believe that he’s just doing a better job than most billionaires of hiding whatever fuckedupness is lurking beneath the surface. I actually worry about the strong possibility he’ll be the Dem nominee in 2028.
The Audacity of Krope
@Gretchen: It’s not ageism, it’s just a fact of life.
It’s not racism, it’s identitarianism.
It’s not sexism, it’s gender essentialism.
It’s not homophobia, it’s standing for tradition.
Kay
I read the first Harry Potter book because my daughter loved it so much. It was then I remembered I don’t like children’s books (although I did as a child).
cmorenc
WADR, I doubt holding a virtual book-burning of Rowell’s works is going to be the most effective way to advance the cause of gaining respect and protection for trans folk. Keep in mind that the complaints above Rowling in this post speak to the choir, not the heathen masses of the general population who are inclined to view the Harry Potter books on their own merits as an extended entertaining yarn.
The core issue is how to best go about defusing most normie’s fears about having trans folk in their midst, including the grossly outsized fear of the very remote possibility of a trans-girl on their daughter’s sports teams, or being in the girl’s bathroom with their daughter. Trans folk are a specimen example of disturbing “other-ness” in most normie’s minds, and somehow that needs to be overcome. Not so long ago, within living memory of thouse of us middle-age or older, that was also true of normie perceptions of gay folk, but that has been successfully defused to relative normalcy among a majority of normies. OTOH there’s a vastly higher % of recognized gay people in the population that helped in substantial part through sheer nonthreatening familiarity. Not nearly so many people have a trans member in their family or circle, and trans is more “other” to normie sensibilities than gay, so it’s going to be a harder climb.
Tenar Arha
I was too old for these books to really take hold of me, but I remember reading the first two and going meh that’s really derivative, and I stopped reading. But they weren’t meant for adults who were familiar with Lewis, Tolkien, Greek mythology, & even movies like Goodbye Mr. Chips, that is, they weren’t meant for those who did pick up on all the very direct cribbing from those influences.
I did later read them all after they became a phenomenon & I was selling books. I bent over backwards being less critical then, because it was clear a lot of children were loving them and reading more because of those books. Can’t tell you how often “like Harry Potter” was getting kids hooked on lots of other books in the SFF genre because her 7 book structure took time to complete. Unfortunately, unless or until people get bored with filming her work, & those sales start slumping, I don’t think she’ll ever STFU. Though there’s always the tough British defamation laws to shut her up—so maybe if it costs her hundreds of millions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ /sigh
ETA what @VFX Lurker: said
The Audacity of Krope
I’m torn between my sister who has fully renounced her and won’t justify any purchases that will directly bring JKR money, though I haven’t heard a complaint about my HBO subscription yet, versus my friend, a fellow gay man who empathizes but recognizes any current monetary contribution to her IP is just a drop in the ocean.
I will say, eventually JKR won’t be with us anymore and her work still will be. So at some point, her opinions need not be a consideration when deciding whether to embrace her work on its own terms.
Not that feeding a corporate franchise money beast is that great either…
Geo Wilcox
@Old School: It isn’t Ron Weasley it is Lucius Malfoy who beats up Dobby.
eemom
@sab:
I was going to mention Casual Vacancy, but couldn’t remember the name. I liked it too, except I remember thinking she unfairly fucked over one of the characters in the end. I think it was a mom character.
Glory b
@The Audacity of Krope: I know, right?
I think it was Patty Murray who lamented that women (and other discriminated against groups) had to spend years, decades, fighting for a seat at the table, only to have those fights taken for granted by the next generations who tell them they have to now step aside because they are too old.
I guess it’s fortunate that black people have still been raised to have more respect for their elders. We still have a “circle the wagons/us against them” mindset.
Lots of us recall being warned that we couldn’t do “what your little white friends do.”
Melancholy Jaques
Rowling is putting her ignorance on display. The things she says about transgender youth are exactly what was said – and is still said – about gay & lesbian youth. No one is born gay or lesbian, they were made that way because their mom let them play with the wrong toys or wear the colors assigned to the opposite sex or some other stupid shit.
Wapiti
@eemom: Rowling is British.
different-church-lady
Thank goodness not everyone is going to just roll over and show soft white underbelly:
KatKapCC
@Shalimar: She has extreme views because she is a bigot. I don’t give a damn how much money she gives to charity.
sab
@Suzanne: The late great Alice Monroe (the Canadian short story writer) had a series of stories where her character was divorced from a horrible person. He wrote amazing, sensitive stories, which always amazed her because the sensitivity in what he wrote was so different from his toxic actions in real life. He wrote sensitively about characters who were modelled after people he was tormenting in real life. He understood them, he just didn’t care because they inconvienced him.
To me that is now JK Rowling.
I think Rowling is better and yet worse than that. I think her father and first husband damaged her so she is sincere and intense about her beliefs.
But she is so wrong and divorced from reality in her beliefs. She is a billionaire so she will be okay but it’s still very sad for her and especially her former young readers.
ETA Moved a phrase up in the comment, editing error
to me that is JK Rowling.KatKapCC
@sab: Wrong. Look up Robert Galbraith Heath.
And why in the absolute fuck are you coming to the defense of a hateful bigot? Her “detractors”? Seriously?
VFX Lurker
That’s horrifying and horrible.
Captain C
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
As compatible and well-thought-out a couple as Penny and Leonard from The Big Bang Theory (but with the genders reversed).
Old Dan and Little Ann
My 9 yo fell hard for Harry Potter just within the last year. We watched every movie and she has made her way through about half the books. I’ve made it clear to her that jk rowling is a rich, contemptible piece of shite. We still like the movies and the books.
Cheez Whiz
Just want to mention that a trans woman named Natalie Wynn has a YouTube series called Contrapoints (which are posts mostly on philosophy and mostly too long, but very, very good) who does a deep deep dive into J. K. Rowling which is worth your time. The British Trans Panic is WAY more insane than the American version.
Old School
@Geo Wilcox: That must be what mm is thinking of.
Mike E
I won’t waste another minute on that asshole.
eemom
@Suzanne:
You’re absolutely right about innumerable artists through history, who nobody would ever dream of “canceling”, doing horrible things IRL. (Charles Dickens for random example.)
i personally believe in separating the art from the artist. Nevertheless on a visceral level I enjoy Pink Floyd less than I did before Waters outed himself as a flaming antisemitic asshole. And Clapton’s music less than I did before he outed himself as a bigger asshole than he’s always been with his pandemic concerts.
The Audacity of Krope
Charity, at least nowadays, mostly exists to shelter wealth and provide tax free vehicles for influence by the wealthy. It also provides an excellent deflection for why we don’t need the government to provide a better living for more people.
Raoul Paste
Apropos of nothing, Toby Jones voiced the character of Dobby in the HP film series.
That’s the same actor who played Red Skull’s top scientist in the Captain America movie
Gvg
@Old School: no it isn’t. He is mixed up. Ron was a go along, the elves want to be slaves, which was pretty much true.
There was one elf who wanted to be free. Harry eventually outsmarted the master and tricked that one free.
Hermoine was trying to free a whole race against their will.
It was a really weird subplot.
I have always felt slavery damaged slave owners as well as slaves. That it rotted their whole character and downstream affected themselves, family and society. So it still made slavery evil was what i saw, and how people reacted was revealing. Some people had principles and some people just followed friends.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I loved the Potter books. The house elf thing was a way of showing how good people can just tolerate injustice and people can be conditioned to accept a status where they are mistreated. Honestly, her books came off as anti-Nazi. It has been shocking just how much she has gone off the deep end on this issue. I do have to wonder if one of her kids is trans, and this is a Musk type situation where she cannot accept it.
sab
@Citizen Alan: I think so too. She has this semi-fiction of her deprived childhood.
Yes her mom had MS which must have been horrible for the whole family. But their childhood house looked really way above average. Too bad she didn’t get into Oxbridge, but she went to an okay university.
She made a bad bad marriage choice in her twenties and it took her years to dig her way out. Her sister helped. So did other friends. That is bad luck and bad choices, not a childhood out of Dickens.
She is really having a huge bad impact on actual transpeople in America and the UK. She really is bright enough and informed to not have allowed herself to be sucked down that rabbithole.
I am appalled by her activities, but so far I haven’t seen it reflected in her adult fiction.
UncleEbeneezer
@Melancholy Jaques: This is what makes Martina Navratilova’s TERF bullshit so disappointing. She herself had her body, femininity, gender questioned for years in a very similar way that people are now policing women athletes’ bodies. She engaged in really disgusting behavior about that Olympic boxer recently, along with Chris Evert and Judy Murray (mother/coach of Andy Murray). All three are damn-near tennis royalty on the women’s side of the sport which makes it so gross.
Billie Jean King, naturally is on the right side and even calls them out on their bullshit.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Citizen Alan:
Heh heh, this kind of “that author really went off the deep end” can be observed in plenty of other sci-fi/fantasy authors.
Two/three come to mind and they were nothing like Rowling in terms of sales and subsequent wealth:
Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven. I can’t remember which one was the complete, rightwing, glibertarian nutjob (maybe both) but damn I loved many of their collaborations back in the day.
James P. Hogan. British sci-fi writer who’s book “The Proteus Operation” was one of the earliest and still great, “multiverse/alternate history” novels ever. Hell, our small group of beer brewers once hosted a room party at a Balticon he attended and he sat on our bed drinking the entire night. Wonderful to talk to but later in life? Total rightwing nutjob.
Gretchen
@The Audacity of Krope: People don’t change their race over time. Their bodies, thoughts, and attitudes do change over time and Ruckus was making an observation about his contemporaries to try to explain their behavior. Everything isn’t a simple -ism.
Matt McIrvin
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Both, but Pournelle was worse and maybe the driver of it.
Hogan was a textbook example of crank magnetism, how when you decide to believe one ridiculous conspiracy-adjacent thing you start subscribing to all of them at the same time. He wrote a nonfiction book called “Kicking the Sacred Cow” that was just endorsing a different piece of pseudoscience in every chapter. Toward the end he was flirting with Holocaust denial.
Baud
@Gretchen: Age isn’t the same as race, which is why we tolerate minimum and maximum age limits in various areas.
Blanket social stereotyping and making unsubstantiated ad hoc assessments about a particular individual based on age are inappropriate just as they are when based on race (or sex, etc.).
NutmegAgain
Both disappointing and disturbing. My kid was exactly the right age for the Harry Potter books. (I remember going to an English language bookstore in Scandinavia that had some unopened boxes of the 2nd or 3rd book. Of course we got one, and kid had her nose in the book for the next part of our trip.)
I feel badly for the actual people she is harming currently, and I feel sad for the kids who grew up with HP, and now can’t bear the thought of anything associated with JK Rowling.
How do you start out seemingly OK, and end up so thoroughly toxic? Dunno.
sab
I loved the Narnia books as a child and yet I would probably not give them to a child now. Terrible sexual stereotypes. (Most girls grow up to be socially obsessed dingbats (Susan) and the only way to save yourself is stay a non-girl tomboy for life ( Lucy.) Same for Harry Potter (girls are over-emotional and cry all the time.)
Wizard of Oz books I still love. Dorothy was Dorothy, and the witches and princesses had real agency.
Mom let us read James Bond when we were ten ( she said the sex would go over our heads. It did.)
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The books are basically the worst sort of power fantasy with the elite of the world living in a gated community. Rowlings being a reactionary should be no surprise.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@Geo Wilcox:
OK, I think I used the wrong word for how Ron treated Dobby — he treated him poorly, pushed him around, etc, but I guess he didn’t give him an all-out beating. Still, not impressive, and another reason why Hermoine’s choice of Ron was weird. I mean, the logical pairing was Harry (more-or-less nice guy, when he wasn’t under some spell or other) and Hermoine, right?
Anyway, enough Potterology for now.
Gretchen
@Baud: I didn’t think the original comment was a blanket stereotyping. I thought it was an interesting observation about how some people change over time, an it applied to a couple of people whom I know. I am an old person myself so am sensitive to blanket dismissals of old people, but this wasn’t that.
ColoradoGuy
The lifestyles of the extremely wealthy must have something to do with it. No more contact with the real world: somebody does your shopping, you get chauffeured around everywhere, you don’t go through commercial airports any more since private jets have their own airports, and no more waiting in lines, for anything, ever again.
Almost everyone you interact with is a servant who can be dismissed at whim. The other billionaires you meet have attitudes of contempt and entitlement, and the politicians you meet bow and scrape just like their personal servants.
The hangers-on who circle the billionaires are the worst of the worst, as we’ve seen with Musk fanboys and the whole MAGA cult. It’s not just the billionaires; it’s the whole social circle around them, and the malign influence they have on entire countries. Think of the grotesque case of Russia; a whole country that exists to serve the fantasies of a KGB/Mafiya thug and the court around him.
SiubhanDuinne
@sab:
My mom managed our family bookstore, which featured (at her instigation) a huge children’s section. She reviewed children’s and juvenile literature for the Chicago Tribune, and in greater Chicagoland was considered something of a kidlit specialist. She never once censored what I read at any age. Her reasoning was similar to your mom’s: if the content was too adult, I’d ignore it; if it made me curious, I’d look it up or ask questions; if I understood, I was ready for it.
Omnes Omnibus
@Cheez Whiz: I have a friend from college who moved to London 30+ years ago. She is deep into the TERF world from left feminism. I told that I cannot really understand because I am not a woman. It is true that I am not a woman, but I can recognize bigotry when I see it.
rikyrah
Her hate has made me unable to separate the art from the artist. I can’t watch anything Harry Potter anymore. And, I’m not going to buy the books for my great-niece, who would be coming of age where I would have bought her the entire collection.
rikyrah
@Omnes Omnibus:
I am a woman and it’s phucking bigotry. Ugly bigotry at that.
Llelldorin
@ColoradoGuy: True, but you don’t really have to be all that rich anymore to get at least some of the experience. All it takes is not interacting with people outside your own generation for a little too long. Sign up for a few streaming services and you can watch It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas and watch Twilight Zone marathons every Thanksgiving. You can sit and pretend that it’s still 1987 or 1992 or whatever your personal favorite year was, and worse you won’t notice yourself doing it unless you invite over younger guests.
Radio stations have always done what social media gets blamed for these days — over time a “top 40s” channel will become a “greatest hits of <specific decades>” station, then an “oldies” station. It happens so subtly you have to really pay attention to notice new music isn’t getting added to the playlist anymore.
It’s terrifyingly easy to detach from modern life without noticing, then suddenly be stunned by how popular culture has changed. It’s probably easier if you’re rich, but it’s not mandatory
EDITED TO ADD: And in case this isn’t clear, none of this excuses bigotry in the slightest. I can understand what’s happening without thinking it’s a good excuse.
Betty Cracker
@SiubhanDuinne: My mom had the same rule — we could read anything in the house. I think she kinda regretted that when I read “Portnoy’s Complaint” at age 10 and had questions!
Llelldorin
[deleted and added to above comment instead]
SiubhanDuinne
@Betty Cracker:
LIVER??!!
Princess
I regret that their author has tainted books that my child and step-children loved to bits back in the day.
That being said, I read all of them and while Rowling knows how to write a story that makes you keep turning pages, the books themselves were always both flawed and problematic. Try Diana Wynne-Jones instead.
Oh, and trans women are women and trans men are men.
zhena gogolia
@SiubhanDuinne: Yeah, I read that one at too young an age as well.
Not that I have any desire to reread it now.
VFX Lurker
I loved the first book as a kid. I heard only praise for the series as an adult. Learned later that Princess Ozma (AFAB) grew up as a boy named Tip, which impressed me.
I’ll have to read the rest of those books.
Betty Cracker
TERFism is an ugly manifestation of the crab bucket mentality. People are complicated, and there’s no single explanation, but I think that’s part of it, maybe a major component. I’m old enough to remember how the topic of gay rights sometimes roiled feminist circles in the 80s and 90s.
VFX Lurker
Yes to all of this.
Miss Bianca
@Kirk: I’m with you on this. (I was working in libraries myself at the time.) The Harry Potter series opened the door for enjoyable reading for *so many kids*, and infected them with the reading bug early and hard. I really wish that that could have remained JKR’s biggest contribution to the world and the thing on which her reputation would have remained founded.
Ruckus
@Citizen Alan:
For every aberration positive or negative in humanity there are people that can work through it rather than have it work through them. Just as there are people that can’t work through anything – positive or negative.
Llelldorin
@Betty Cracker: Could you expand on that? It sounds like you have a better bead on TERFism than I do.
I’d always chalked it up as something like: “You can’t start with nonsense like ‘separate spheres’ and turn it into anything that isn’t poisonous—you can’t just throw away the part that says that women naturally like all the shitty and boring jobs and then try to repair the rest. If you try to just sub in ‘and we have the awesomest sphere’ instead of starting over from ‘people are pretty damn similar regardless of gonad location,’ you’re going to wind up somewhere you don’t want to be.”
Your “crab bucket mentality” comment makes me think I’m missing something important.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
It still does in some areas.
Old Man Shadow
The books themselves do have some problematic themes: the slavery of house elves, discrimination against non-human sentient beings, torturing prisoners, and how the problem with Voldemort was more that he took power illegitimately than with his wizard supremacist views.
Miss Bianca
@eemom:
@sab:
I read Casual Vacancy when it came out and I think I even own it. Was impressed with it at the time but I have a feeling that if I went back and tried to reread it now, not so much…there was more than a faint whiff of classism in the way JKR outlined certain characters and situations, as I recall.
Suzanne
@eemom:
Me too…. but again, I can’t always be absolutely evenhanded in that. I loved the Cosby Show as a child, and now I can’t watch it. It makes me sad that a work that, IMO, has a great deal of merit is now something I can’t bear. Caravaggio murdered someone, and I still enjoy his paintings. So.
So where I personally fall with HP is…. I already own the books, but I won’t buy anything else. But I get that others make different decisions, and that’s fine.
SiubhanDuinne
@zhena gogolia:
Well, I was in my late 20s when it was published, so I can’t claim to have been too young for it. M
I suspect, though, if I had read it at a much earlier age, I would simply have been bored rigid and abandoned it.
sab
@sab: Eric Loomis over at LGM visited L Frank Baum’s grave. Baum’s wife was an adamant ardent feminist and a loyal believer in him. She supported him forever and gave him the space to write his books. And fhe books included her views.
That makes the Oz books make perfect sense and why I loved them so much. Girls were people who mattered.
Suzanne
@Miss Bianca:
I remember, when the books first came out, that kids in the countries that used to be Yugoslavia were finding them very meaningful, and likening Voldemort to Milosovic.
sab
While we are scewering books we loved as children and hate now, where does Ursula Leguin’s Earthsea Trilogy fit? Beloved then, beloved now?
Martin
@Baud: And how Hermione is trying to advocate for the end of the system, which Rowling treats as annoying, and literally every other character thinks slavery is fine, if not dandy, with many defenses for slavery offered up by the good characters.
The books have some terrible messages in them, and are actually pretty poorly written.
Maxim
@sab: Interesting, given that Munro has her own skeletons:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/12/alice-munro-abuse-canada-reckoning/
I watched the tv adaptation of the Strike books and liked it a lot, but didn’t know it was based on her books until I’d seen the whole thing. Finally spotted her name in the credits and felt dirty.
UncleEbeneezer
@Suzanne: Johnny Depp used to be someone I would watch in any film role…
I don’t really have much desire to watch Cosby stuff nowadays anyway, but even if I did I don’t think I would be able to get past my feelings about him as a person.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: UK is a very weird place. Trompling herds reading their papers. Minimal independent thought.
Llelldorin
It’s hard to discuss the HP series as a unit, because at least to me they fall into three groups: The first three books (tightly edited, few problematic elements), The Goblet of Fire (more loosely edited, some deeply questionable writing around the House Elves), and the last three books (no apparent editing, problematic elements are more apparent, plot maunders around aimlessly from chapter to chapter, and by the seventh book we’re apparently reading the adventures of side characters while Neville Longbottom, The Most Interesting Man On Earth, saves the day off-page).
Suzanne
@sab:
Funny you mention. I literally read the last chapter of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to Spawn the Youngest last night. I think there’s a ton of value in those books — even though I share your opinion on the failure with the Susan character. But I think there’s a ton of value in the Potter books, too…. which is why it’s so upsetting to see J.K. Rowling be a bigot.
But, I personally fall on the side of more. Read more, watch more, hear more…. even if it’s got problems. Then talk about the problems. Honestly, most art has some problems. It’s all created in specific times and places, and there’s prejudices everywhere. Hold fast to what is good.
Harrison Wesley
@Matt McIrvin: Strangest transformation of a SF author I’ve observed was the late Barry Malzberg. A full career skewering SF convention followed by a swing to a final period of reactionary bullshit.
Ruckus
@Betty Cracker:
I’ve seen all of this up close because my oldest sister was gay. And came out in her mid 20s. That’s quite a few decades ago. I have no idea how open or unbelievable it is now but I’d bet it is a lot different now than back then.
sab
@Maxim: Washington Post paywall so your comment isn’t useful, at least to me.
Wilson Heath
Being a “feminist” in the same ways David Chapelle is–that’s radical feminism indeed.
sab
@Suzanne: the s in sab is my actual name, so I am very angry at Lewis. Ruined it.
Gretchen
@Ruckus: I thought your comment about people losing power in their universe as they age was wise. I know a couple whose adult children are thriving, but they have a constant stream of advice and criticism for them. They almost seem to deliberately undermine. The idea that they miss running the show and being needed for help and advice tracks, and if they can cause problems and then run in to fix them, they’re needed again.
And apparently I have to specify « not all old people ». I’m a 70-something parent of adult children and have come to realize that they are pretty good at running their own lives without me telling them how to do it.
sab
@Suzanne: Agree. Flawed writers address issues. Unflawed writers (are there any?) are probably boring. Read the flawed ones and then think.
In my childhood Baum would have been shocking to male educators had they read the later books.
ETA I am still holding out for Jodi Picoult. Only found her this year from Ali Velshi’s banned books, and I am hooked.
The Audacity of Krope
@Wilson Heath: Chapelle is bad, but he is nowhere near as far around the bend.
Another Scott
@Tenar Arha: I read the first one, and kinda enjoyed it, but there were so many things about the worldbuilding that bothered me – like I was missing parts of the UK culture that were obviously the basis for so much of it. My J loved it and devoured all the books.
I saw a few of the movies but was turned off from the beginning that Hagrid was so much smaller than he was in the book (which was inevitable, I guess). I couldn’t really get into the characters. Similarly with the Fantastic Beasts film that we tried to watch.
But, in all of this, I recognized that I wasn’t the intended audience. I thought it was great that there were so many excited kids lining up to get the book and read it when it first appeared.
I’m sorry she’s hurting so many with her horrible activism now. :-(
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I agree.
Problems are not solved by sweeping everything under the rug. Humanity learns by exposure to the whatever. Not running away from it. Also I believe that discussion opens those doors to understanding, acceptance and growth. Most of humanity, what and who we are has been with us for a lot longer than anyone alive today. What we see and do with this is or should be a lot different than how it was not dealt with decades ago.
bcwbcw
@wonkie:
From Rowling’s wiki page. I expect angry at men, and unwilling to accept any overlap of roles.
Rowling experienced domestic abuse during her marriage.[66][97] Arantes said in June 2020 that he had slapped her and did not regret it.[98] Rowling described the marriage as “short and catastrophic”.[41] She says she was not allowed to have a house key and that her husband used the growing manuscript of her first book as a hostage.[99] Rowling and Arantes separated on 17 November 1993 after Arantes threw her out of the house; she returned with the police to retrieve Jessica and her belongings and went into hiding for two weeks before she left Portugal.[11][100] In late 1993, with a draft of Harry Potter in her suitcase,[32] Rowling moved with her daughter to Edinburgh, Scotland,[8] planning to stay with her sister until Christmas.[53]
Seeker
@sab:
I think those books are still excellent. And I assume that JK ripped off the school for wizards idea from them.
I don’t feel qualified to comment on what is feminist and what isn’t but I think the second book was pretty cool.
sab
@Miss Bianca: That was the hub of her books. And I always have read her as anti-classism.
Turfism in UK must be amazingly strong.
I wonder why.
Betty Cracker
@Llelldorin: I’m no expert on anything germane to this conversation! But I’ve seen internecine skirmishes break out among members of out-groups before (wrote a post about crab bucket politics here). The conflicts inconveniently arise when vulnerability for all members of the out-group increases.
Wilson Heath
@The Audacity of Krope: Fair. Especially as Rowling gets more and more into the worst sort of spittle-spraying bigotry.
It should have been an early check, though, when he lined up with Team TERF. It’s like all the assholes who thought Title IX was horrible and wanted to end it until they concluded they could weaponize it to hurt trans kids. These are huge, flashing red lights that protecting girls and women is not part of the project.
Llelldorin
@Betty Cracker: Thanks! That link is what I wanted, I think — with apologies, my memory works reliably for about 30-40s, so a month is basically impossible.
Ruviana
@sab: Don’t know of you’ll hit a paywall here but here’s another https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/30/alice-munros-passive-voice
jefft452
When I was the age that Potter was written for, I mostly read books from the late 19th early 20th centuries because they were out or copywrite and therefore cheap
HG Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Chambers, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burrows, and of course my favorite, H P Lovecraft
As far as I know wells was a decent human being, I don’t know enough about Verne to say, and Burrows was as much of a bigot as you would expect for someone who grew up in the post Civil War south – but not much more than you would expect
The rest (especially Lovecraft) were horrible human beings
But their stories hold up
Sure, the cutting-edge science of 1910 that they based stuff on has been proven wrong (or in Lovecraft’s case he didn’t understand it in the first place), and sometimes you have to flip the script and, for example, read Machen’s heroes as the villains, but they hold up
Will Potter hold up? Isnt it full of plot holes?
eemom
@Miss Bianca:
I think I remember that as well. There was a lower class family with a heroin addict mother who was basically a stereotype of dysfunction.
However, I also remember being impressed by her depiction of a character with OCD, having that myself. Not something you often encounter in fiction and I thought she got it right.
frog
@Ruckus:
Sounds like Al Bundy from Married With Children.
sab
@Omnes Omnibus: I am a 70 year old woman feminist, and Terf screams bigotry to me. I am not a cultish lesbian. I like some men and want them in our world. I want trans-women safe in the bathroom. Yes because they are women, but also I want them safe, and they aren’t safe in the boys and they are safe ( as are we, with tnem) in ours.
The Audacity of Krope
Protecting children is not the reason for opposition to sex ed.
Protecting life is not the reason for opposition to reproductive health access
Protecting Israelis is not the reason for sending billions of dollars of weapons.
Finding a sympathetic victim, however spurious their victimhood, is the reason a lot of bad policy continues.
Gvg
@Martin: i think the message was hermoine had principles while the others, even Harry, were not as good. Dumbledore was the only one who encouraged her.
There is a terrible argument that white supremacists make that slaves wanted to be slaves mostly or it was for their own good. I thought this was trying to make the point that no it wasn’t. They were mistreated at best. Tortured or killed at worst, and it made monsters of the owners, even the “nice” ones.
Hermoine wasn’t that good with words though.
And maybe rowling meant something else, and that is just my thoughts. It was a weird subplot i did not enjoy much.
zhena gogolia
Do not have and have never had any interest in Harry Potter, so having this post up all afternoon is sad.
hitchhiker
Whenever we get on this subject (usually after someone has amplified some remark from JKR) we say the exact same things. Is there maybe a useful direction to take the conversation? To me it seems like a lot of the HP hate plays into the othering of trans people, because come on — kids loved those books.
I was there. It was a wild phenomenon to witness. I remember the first winter, when we took our kids to a family snow camp in the mountains, and after dinner in every corner of the dining room there were little kids — 2nd and 3rd-graders — with their faces pointed down into that fat book. One guy whose kids were older asked me what was going on.
I knew families who bought two copies so their kids wouldn’t fight over who got to read it first.
So when we start talking about how we have to cancel them and the most common reason given (in the books themselves) is the house elf subplot and characters, I’m sorry. It makes no sense to me. Those books did not turn young readers into bigots, did they?
Like most people here, I don’t have a clue what motivates JKR on this subject. Unlike most of you, I don’t care. She wrote some wildly successful kids books. Now she writes mystery novels. She’s not running for public office. She’s not setting policy. She sees something I don’t, or she’s lost her mind, or she’s got an ugly soul, or she’s just a bigot — okay.
But it gets weird when the conversation about trans issues turns into whether or not it’s possible to suss out her deep ugliness in the pages of the HP books. Because I’d bet anything that if JKR were a champion of trans rights, there would be a lot of discussion about the charm and warmth of her characters and their imaginary world.
And to me that makes it all feel dishonest, which is why I’m uneasy that the whole JKR is horrible and so are you if you don’t hate her now POV can turn normies against the question of trans rights. As in … “Wait, do I have to hate the Harry Potter books now in order to show that I’m not a bigot?” It trivializes what ought to be a serious conversation.
Matt McIrvin
Universal is building a whole new theme park in Orlando–it really feels like they’re twisting the knife in against Disney, and it’s a really exciting project… except that one of the four “lands” in the park is yet another Wizarding World land. That probably seemed like a better idea when the park was in the early planning stages and they were hoping Fantastic Beasts was going to be a hit continuation of the franchise. But to me it just makes me reluctant to visit the place at all, at this point, because Rowling gets money.
It’s sad. The theme-park adaptations of the Harry Potter world at the Universal parks were some of the most impressive work I’ve ever seen in the business. Some of the best, most technologically innovative attractions ever built were involved. And it was all for this.
sab
@eemom: I also think she got high functioning autism right in a later book. We have that amongst us in my family, and her descriptions rang very true.
Her trans position is misinformed and terrible. But I think a lot of the press jumping on the bandwagon and villifying her is problems with her leftish politics. This is a way to take her down, and she fell into the trap. So her horrible trans positions remain intact and all her other decent comments vaporize. Wipe put everything good she ever said.
TBone
Holy shit youse guys, Governor Gregg Abbott sent condolences to Rosalynn Carter!
https://www.cbsnews.com/texas/news/texas-governor-greg-abbott-sends-condolences-to-rosalynn-carter-who-died-in-2023-following-jimmy-carters-death/
Steve LaBonne
@zhena gogolia: I gave up somewhere in the 4th one. The first one features somewhat readable prose, because she wasn’t yet too famous and lucrative to the publisher to submit to editing. After that the writing got shoddier and more prolix with each book.
Poe Larity.
Wonder what the residuals are for all Xmas replays. Can’t turn on anyything w/o HP.
Where’s the boycott?
Matt McIrvin
@jefft452: Jules Verne tried really hard to be anti-racist about black people. But… it’s… 19th-century white guy anti-racism, and when he foregrounds it in The Mysterious Island it’s pretty cringeworthy. Still, he was making the effort.
Suzanne
@hitchhiker: This is a really great comment.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
Ah, a Harmonium.
Sadly, no. Harry is the return of Arthur, so he has to be paired with Genevra / Guenhwifar. Which leaves Ron and Hermione as the spares pairing off.
Llelldorin
The House Elf subplot really showed the weakening editing of the series, more than anything else.
In book 3, it was there for a clear and solid reason: To show that the wizarding world had its own set of biases and blindnesses, and even “good” characters like Sirius Black were prone to them.
In book 4 it was probably meant to show that even well-meaning characters can have a hard time facing down insults and mockery when trying to stand up for what’s right — even Harry and Ron are only standing by Hermione because she’s their friend. The problem was that the editing was much poorer in book 4, and the writing gave the strong impression at times that Hermione was wrong to stand up for her beliefs.
By books 5-7, the editing was extremely poor, and House Elves were just kinda… there. Part of the setting, not the plot.
Poe Larity.
@TBone: Zombie Rosalynn with chainsaw chasing that derp and the terf should be a thing.
The Audacity of Krope
I loved these books as a young adult, introduced to them by my teenage sister who was damn near obsessed. I have never gone to a book release or a movie premier with the regularity I did for this series.
I’m very passive in my current distaste for JKR, my sister is somewhat more strident. She feels betrayed. I’ve been avoiding the seemingly very fun HP videogame released a couple years back out of respect for my sister.
I don’t think this is an accurate depiction of this conversation. I’ve seen a few people on this thread who decided or are considering cutting these stories out of their lives. Others are not. I haven’t run into anyone shaming anyone for the position they took.
Harrison Wesley
@TBone: Thoughts and prayers…,
Llelldorin
@hitchhiker: In my defense, I encountered the Harry Potter novels primarily as an adult. I was “too old” for them, nominally (although I’ve never stopped reading middle-grade fiction), and my kids were too young (or, at the start of the series, too nonexistent).
I mostly encountered them as four extremely good middle-grade books, and three much weaker YA novels. I was disappointed not because JKR “was horrible” (I don’t recall her being horrible online until later), but because she’d succumbed to the Famous Author’s typical malady of ignoring her editors.
Llelldorin
@Harrison Wesley: Kokkuri-san, kokkuri-san…
Matt McIrvin
@sab:
L. Frank Baum had some terribly racist real-life opinions, but it’s remarkable how much they didn’t seep into his Oz books. Feels like a lucky accident. He was a sort of proto-feminist though, and that does come through.
The second book, The Marvelous Land of Oz, has what can be read as a disparaging parody of first-wave feminism in it… but then the same book has an astonishing ending that has turned its protagonist into a trans icon and probably makes TERFs’ heads explode. And all of the books destroy the Bechdel test, with all of these powerful female characters seemingly not in the least concerned with patriarchy.
Ruth Plumly Thompson was apparently much much worse but I haven’t read any of hers.
twbrandt
I was in my early 50s when the first HP novel was published, so I am very much not the target audience. But I was favorably disposed to them because the religious right was so opposed. The promoted witchcraft! Kids who read them are going straight to hell!
As I am a gay man and a progressive Christian, I figured anything the religious right opposed can’t be all bad.
It’s extremely upsetting that Rowling has gone in this direction.
sab
@hitchhiker: I am with you. If her books shocked me I wouldn’t read them. So far they haven’t. Her public comments do. That is another world.
Matt McIrvin
@hitchhiker: Before JKR came out as a transphobe I recall that the problematic aspects of her books did get discussed in the fandom–the resemblance of the Gringotts goblins to old antisemitic stereotypes, the pervasive fat-phobia, the sometime traditionalist take on gender roles. But Rowling seemed to accept good-faith criticism, expressed generally progressive attitudes and was willing to learn, so none of it skunked the whole series. It was considered generally no worse than you’d find in other kids’ literature but was something people tried to fix in fanfic and such.
So, yeah, when she became a loathsome figure the microscope got turned back on all this stuff and people were less willing to give it slack.
mm
I respectfully disagree with most of the opinions on this thread. I don’t believe children are born in the wrong body either. You may believe there are women’s souls trapped in men’s bodies, but I don’t.
People are entitled to believe whatever they want, about themselves and others – but this shouldn’t mean that women are forbidden to ever say no to a few men who insist upon it.
Pink Tie
@Suzanne: I *loved* the Narnia series as a kid and will still occasionally pick one up and look through it. That said, The Horse and his Boy is absolutely filled with racist, anti-Arab stereotypes that make that book the darkest of the series. Naturally it was the one I found most fascinating, partially because even as a child, the racism was very evident, even for someone who didn’t know many Middle Eastern families in Newport News.
I really didn’t love the film adaptations, except for a few performances (like Tilda Swinton as Jadis and James McAvoy as Mr. Tumnus – charming). Maybe because I always found the Pauline Baynes illustrations to be perfection. No offense to Georgie Henley but she isn’t Lucy.
Our family just finished re-watching the Harry Potter movies over the winter break — JK already got our money years ago, so I don’t feel that bad about watching them on an HBO subscription we already pay for. In some respects, the later movies are much more tightly written than her later books.
JPL
@Betty Cracker: This was definitely not me, but my sister would buy cheap romance magazines. This was the sixties and anyway, my mother saw me with reading one, and made me stand and read it out loud.
WTFGhost
Um. If anyone suggested that the books were horrible, and not the person, I’ve never heard it because I don’t care.
But that’s a strange statement above. Why would people be upset with Rowling, *except* for her crapping on transfolk?
When anyone tells me I should hate someone, I know they’re already full of nonsense and MBE (Male Bovine Excretia), so I don’t listen to them *at all*. No one should tell you to hate JKR, though she has been pretty horrible.
I think if anyone is “turned against” trans rights, for any emotional reason, they’re a fookin liar who is either easily led by the nose, and knows it, or never wanted to do anything but hate transfolk in the first place. If you have *real* compassion, you don’t let it be interfered with by mere annoyance.
sab
@Wilson Heath: Rowling is a she, in
case you hadn’t noticed.
eemom
@The Audacity of Krope:
I think this is correct. Would also note that the OP is about Rowling’s transphobia and not the HP books at all. Mea culpa for introducing other problematic issues with those books into the thread.
As often happens, different things are being conflated: (1) Rowling’s transphobia itself and what it says about her and what damage it does to trans people; and (2) the question of separating the art from the artist.
sab
@Wilson Heath: R K Rowling ( ” he” ) lined up with team Terf.
I don’t know who the fuck you are other than a certified idiot and also too probably a troll. ( I hope calling you a troll does not get me banned. )
You don’t know JKRowling is a woman? Where have you been for the last twenty years? Learning English in Russia?
lowtechcyclist
@jefft452:
The thing about reading the works of dead people, no matter how horrible they were, they’re not going to benefit from your reading them.
To me, that’s the big difference with living authors. Given Rowlings’ readiness to X trans people right out of existence, I refuse to do anything to give her another dime, no matter how much I loved the Potter books when I read them (in my early 50s, IIRC). Same deal with Cosby: I have some of his comedy albums from back in the day, but I won’t be adding to my collection.
And frankly, I can’t bring myself to re-read the Potter books I have, or listen to the Cosby albums I own. Maybe I should donate them to a thrift store, so someone that wants to read/listen to them can do so without benefiting horrible people.
Matt McIrvin
@sab: I thought the “he” there was Dave Chappelle.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
@KatKapCC:
I am trans people.
Denying that there’s a person named “JK Rowling” doesn’t pretend that Rowling doesn’t exist – it pretends that Rowling is a nazi propaganda account and nothing more. Her output certainly doesn’t contradict the idea that Rowling is nothing more than a nazi propaganda account.
I’m honestly not sure why this line of defense against Rowlings outrageous, howling, hateful bigotry upsets you so much but I acknowledge your discomfort. I’m still going with it.
Steve LaBonne
@lowtechcyclist: I mean, I love Wagner’s operas, but at least I can console myself that I’m not contributing to his income.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
@Sister Golden Bear:
Nothing wrong with completely disengaging with the Potterverse. I’ve had nothing to do with it for ages other than a single purchase of a set of knock-off Potter related socks 4 years ago.
The fanfic and fan community is still chock full of queer fans and I’m okay with that, too. I’d hope they’d avoid putting money into things that benefit her. It’s becoming increasingly easy to do so what with the tremendous volume of fanfic out there and the number of unauthorized Potterverse items on the market.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: yeah… Roald Dahl (who I’m pretty sure was one of the major influences on Rowling) was a terrible bigot and a terrible person in many other ways, but he’s dead now. He also actually submitted to editing to revise the worst bits in his books, though there’s a lot that’s still in there that’s pretty questionable.
Also, he was ferociously and publicly pro-vax (after losing a child to measles encephalitis just before the vaccine became available).
Ruckus
@Gretchen:
That goes to what you showed and taught them when they didn’t know how to. But letting go is I believe one of the toughest things for some parents. My mom was the oldest in her family and her father passed away, right in front of her, when she was 18. My mom had to help raise her brother and sisters. When her kids were 18 she didn’t want to let go. Or when they were in their mid 20s. She also played the mom card on her siblings. Her brother walked away and I haven’t seen him since I was 7 or 8. And of course no longer can. Mom was a lot harder on my sisters than on me and while none of us walked away, I’ve always wondered if they wanted to leave as much as I did. Oh well, don’t have to worry about any of this any longer. I’m now only member left of my family, am the oldest in the extended family and one of my cousins (not the oldest in his family) has already passed. This getting old stuff gets old.
Miss Bianca
@Matt McIrvin: I don’t know that I would call RPT’s Oz books *worse*…but they are definitely more conservative/hierarchical in their outlook than Baum’s.
eemom
@Matt McIrvin:
As you likely know if you’re interested in Dahl, his books are being edited now, i.e., long after his death, to remove offensive material. Another controversial subject.
sab
@Matt McIrvin: Maybe so. I am often clueless.
Matt McIrvin
@eemom: Yes, I recall the flap about that. Dahl actually seems to have been pretty cool about that during his lifetime, though.
It was around the same time that Dr. Seuss’s estate agreed that there were a few old books they were going to pull over offensive cultural stereotypes. Seuss’s stuff got edited too–I think one of them was And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, and the Asian stereotype that was objected to had already gotten some revision by the 1970s edition I read as a kid to remove the word “Chinaman”.
Omnes Omnibus
@jefft452: I was reading Sherlock Holmes and the James Bond novels. I am sure that did its own damage.
Kayla Rudbek
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I always thought that Rowling’s vision of the world in Harry Potter was Scotch Calvinist, as opposed to Diane Duane’s vision of the world in Young Wizards/Feline Wizards which is Universalist. Rowling has very little redemption or mercy for anyone who’s not one of the chosen, and Duane has the very first book in the series give even Lucifer the Eldest Fairest a Fallen a chance to change his mind. I swear that there’s a PhD thesis that could be written to compare and contrast the series.
PatrickG
@sab:
AHEM:
THERE ARE SIX BOOKS! Die heretic!
/s
More seriously, I just can’t imagine anything coming out about Le Guin that would make me not reread those books once a year.
Kayla Rudbek
@mm: in this fallen and imperfect world where anything that can go wrong with the human body does go wrong with the human body, I don’t see why there would be any exceptions to gender of the mind not matching with gender of the body. Yes, it can make you feel all icky about it.
But if you’re going to say that being a woman is solely based on having breasts, a lot of breast cancer survivors (including me) are going to tell you to sit down and shut your mouth.
Omnes Omnibus
@mm:
Not sure what this has to do with the rest of your statement.
Omnes Omnibus
@Pink Tie: I read the Narnia books but saw them as pale imitations of LOTR.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
@Omnes Omnibus:
I believe she’s saying that I’m not a woman in a plausibly deniable way. If so, she has no idea what she’s talking about.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Tom Baker as Puddleglum was fun.
The Audacity of Krope
Uh…
Agreed on a purely textual basis.
This makes simply existing as trans sound equivalent to rape in your view. This makes me believe about you, as you stated I am allowed to do above, that you are bigot.
Trans women, of course, have the right to say no to a few bigots who insist they have domain over others’ bodies. Those bigots always seem to forget trans men exist, a funny thing.
Omnes Omnibus
@Jacqueline Squid Onassis: Aha, If so, then, Christ, what an asshole.
The Audacity of Krope
@sab: Follow the replies. He was replying to my reply about Dave Chapelle. A slight digression from the main of the conversation.
jefft452
@lowtechcyclist: “no matter how horrible they were, they’re not going to benefit from your reading them.”
True
Also, even if they were alive, copywrite has expired
Thats why I could afford to buy them on a 12 year old’s allowance
stinger
@hitchhiker:
Weirder still when people start speculating about her children and their family dynamics. Jeez, people! Just don’t buy her books. Leave her kids out of it.
Gretchen
@Ruckus: Yes, this getting old stuff certainly does get old.
Gretchen
@Kayla Rudbek: 1/1000 babies born are intersex, which adds up to millions of people over time. Folks like this just ignore this fact, because it doesn’t slot into their black/white view of reality. Gray areas disturb them. Some people are genetic mosaics, and have male and female cells in one body. Some people have unusual hormone levels. I knew one woman who was told not to get pregnant until they could get her testosterone levels down to normal female levels because hers were well into the normal male range. These folks want everything to be simple, and don’t know enough to know what they don’t know about the complexities of human biology.
Wilson Heath
@sab: he was referring back to David Chapelle, radical feminist.
RevRick
@Omnes Omnibus:
@rikyrah:
Yeah, it’s bigotry that from what I understand is a deeply rooted fear that women are being erased. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism is based in what’s called gender-critical feminism, which asserts that women have experienced oppression throughout history simply because they are born female, and that—- and this is the important part—- genders are socially constructed categories. We are born male and female (or at least outwardly identified as such), but that femininity and masculinity are roles attached to people that are completely artificial.
The Trans Exclusionary part comes in with the belief that women need spaces solely reserved to them apart from watchful/oppressive male eyes in order to talk freely about their oppression. As a corollary to this belief comes the conclusion that since males who transition to female have been indoctrinated with masculine roles if they enter these exclusive, protected spaces they will inevitably bring their original status as oppressor into the space.
Basically, the conversation always degenerates into who is more oppressed and the rhetoric gets more heated and distorted.
Honestly, as a member of said oppressor class I am least qualified to referee this situation, but I do hear the pain coming from both sides: women having to deal with second class status from time immemorial and trans people dealing with the awful inner sense that who they are outwardly doesn’t square with who they are inwardly.
Martin
@Gvg: Not sure about Dumbledore encouraging it. All of Hogwarts ran off of house elf slave labor.
And after Rowling writes that Hermione starts this campaign, Harry inherits a house with decapitated elf heads on the wall that Hermione cheerfully decorates with Christmas hats.
Like I said, they aren’t well written books.
Citizen Alan
@Gvg: What bugs me about the house elf/slavery plot is that you could tell an interesting story about a magical race that because of some magical bull-shittery in ancient history really did desire above all else to be servants, and in the present day, the characters had to deal with the ethical ramifications of freeing people who considered freedom to be an awful curse. A common approach in HP fanfics is that the house elves were originally brownies from ancient myths, and the wizards bound them as servants because previously they would do random services for Muggles and then curse the Muggles whenever they gave thanks in some inappropriate way. Similarly, I’ve read several stories that do interesting things with house elves as disguised quasi-Lovecraftian beings that wizards keep downtrodden because they are terrified if what house elves (who are basically transformed Fair Folk) would do if they had their freedom. But JKR has never given any degree of thought to the issue, not even to the point of getting at least a comment from Dean Thomas, the most prominent black character in the series.
For what it’s worth, in the HP fanfic I’ve been writing on and off for years to entertain myself during periods of underemployment and/or depression, the house elves are secretly immortal and godlike extra-dimensional beings who play at being the cringing slaves of ignorant wizards as part of some incredibly elaborate point-based roleplaying game. And while any particular house elf could destroy the world with a snap of his fingers, they would never do so because “it’s against the rules.”
Citizen Alan
It is. But it is in those plot holes and unanswered questions and, yes, outrage over the author’s personal deficiencies that HP has given birth to by far the largest fanfiction community (by fandom) in the world.
Gloria DryGarden
@PatrickG: I love her too. The trilogy, and the next books that came awhile later, and had such an elegance to them. And both Patricia Mckillip, and Robin McKinley wrote some wonderful fantasy books.
I loved Marion zimmer Bradley, but later it came out she was quite horrible in real life, something about children.
And here’s another famous person who was awful in real life:
Abraham Maslow. I love his hierarchy of needs, it’s pretty useful, though I hear it’s been modified or updated some. His daughter lived in boulder, and was friends with a therapist I saw for many years. My therapist told me Maslow did incest with his daughter, on of the most vile forms of child abuse or sexual abuse. I can’t throw out his hierarchy of needs, but I feel I’ll at ease about him now.
Matt McIrvin
@jefft452: One thing the Harry Potter series has had on its side is some really good people working on screen and other adaptations. Often these improve the source material, particularly with regard to pacing. I was originally drawn in by Alfonso Cuarón’s movie of the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I still think is just a great piece of entertainment. Years later I read the book as bedtime reading for my daughter, and… I think the movie is better. It’s the same story in outline and it’s arguably the best book in the series, but Rowling rushes through material that Cuarón gives loving attention and spends multiple chapters dwelling on scenes that Cuarón blows past in a few minutes, and the movie version just flows better. The adaptation of the fifth movie, Order of the Phoenix, was a huge improvement too–the book is the point where the volumes became interminable doorstops and Harry Potter is an insufferable whiner in it, but in the movie it feels like the moment when he stops being a victim of fate and starts to come into his own.
And that’s before we even mention what a great cast of kid actors they found to breathe life into these characters–I feel a bit sorry for them sometimes, since they clearly don’t want to be associated with Rowling’s bullshit at all (though Daniel Radcliffe in particular seems to be living his best life, having been granted the ability to do whatever cool and weird project he wants).
Movies often age badly but I think those movies might hold up over time better than the books do.
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick: With women who see their TERFism primarily as feminist, I think it is clear that a more or less justified fear of men as abusers is at the root of it, but at least the original TERFs were open that they feared men in general and trans women were simply the invading agents of the man conspiracy.
Today, it sometimes feels like the worst transphobes realize it’s not socially acceptable to say that all men are just bad people, so they’re transferring this fear to a far smaller and more powerless minority of trans women, who they can say are sneaky crypto-men and therefore especially scary.
Matt McIrvin
@Gloria DryGarden: An extraordinary number of the major figures in physics were bad people. Isaac Newton, famously an asshole who had feuds going with everybody. Einstein got portrayed as a kind of progressive secular saint, but he was not great to the women in his life, a horndog and emotionally distant. Heisenberg, a Nazi. Schrödinger, a pedophile. Richard Feynman got celebrated for decades as an entertaining scamp for being horrible around women, down to extolling the virtues of negging as a pickup technique in his memoir.
I doubt there’s anything about physics that inherently attracts bad people, but its weird social status in the 20th century as the Manliest and Most Genius-y of the Sciences might have contributed.
Denali5
@RevRick,
Thank you for your comment. It was helpful.
Paranoid Android
@Gvg:
I saw Hermione’s depiction as: Her heart is in the right place, everyone else’s apathy is clearly wrong (the mistreatment of an elf ends up having terrible consequences for the heroes), but the way she goes about her activism is less than ideal, since she doesn’t really listen to those she wants to help. There was a lesson in there that good intentions aren’t enough and youthful idealism can go wrong sometimes.
Still, the subject of slavery is far too serious for such a treatment, and the author bit off more than she could chew there.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: Having flunked mind reading in seminary, I’m leery of speculating about people’s hidden motives. What I have observed is that having staked out positions, both sides have dug in and hurled increasingly inflammatory rhetoric at each other.
@Denali5: Thank you.
I might add that the problem with gender-critical theory is not that gender is culturally defined, but that there is no culturally neutral societies. Part of what defines us as humans is that we spin out cultures.