please don't watch it
It's much worse than a few bad tweets.
I bet I can write a more emotionally devastating six word story than Baby shoes for sale, never worn. Here goes: Do you guys have Harry Potter?
I work at a bookstore, and I can’t imagine a worse six words to harsh my vibe. I hate that the answer is, yes, we have it right over here in our middle grade section. I hate that trying to sell alternative titles doesn’t work. No one asking about Harry Potter wants something like Harry Potter (my favorites are Inkheart by Cornelia Funke or Septimus Heap by Angie Sage). They want Harry Potter. Sometimes they want special editions, or a box set, or books about Harry Potter. This franchise is more resilient than black mold.
But the magic! The enchantment! The whimsy!
Many people don’t understand the magnitude of the harm caused by continuing to support Harry Potter. This is not an author who got canceled for a bad take. This author holds hateful, offensive and misinformed views about trans people (namely, that trans people don’t, or shouldn’t, exist) and is carrying out a strategy to enrich herself through the popularity of her intellectual property so that she can leverage her enormous financial and cultural capital to pursue the criminalization and eradication of trans people. She’s the heteropatriarchy’s dream player. And she’s sweeping the board.
Things started in 2018 with some social media scuttle — liking posts with transphobic language, following openly transphobic accounts. But things have escalated. A lot. Last year, she began bankrolling a legal fund singularly focused on uplifting legal challenges to trans rights. Basically, she’s trying to buy new legal precedents that are as hostile as possible to trans people trying to access secure healthcare, housing, education, employment and other social services.
And she’s still in her windup. Her harms will only continue to intensify. And scapegoating trans people means we all degrade our civil liberties.
She interprets support for her franchise as support for her. As she should. As long as we buy into Harry Potter, we power her cultural and financial relevance. And supporting the TV show takes things a step further.
After the success of the Harry Potter films, the faces of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson and the other iconic cast members were all over merchandise. This generated income for these actors. Every time a mug with Daniel Radcliffe’s face sold, he got a cut.
Notably, these actors largely condemned the author’s transphobia, and because her head is a terminally online hellhole riddled with black mold, she didn’t take this well. Rather than listening with an open mind to the people who loved her (and also, let’s say, contributed enormously to the scale of her success), she wrote nasty things about them on X.
Now, she has a new crop of cast members who know about her baggage going in, who are too young, too up-and-coming or too unbothered to call her out. And presumably their faces will replace the original cast on all the merch, meaning a significant decrease in the money still going to the original cast (although for sure they’ll all be fine). If the new series achieves a similar cultural ubiquity that the movies enjoyed, we are all complicit in her petty personal vendetta to come for anyone who dares tell her the truth — trans people exist, and she enables the type of totalitarian suppression she professes to critique in Harry Potter.
But the magic!
Disney adults will spew about the hidden mickey in their toilet bowl or whatever. Meanwhile, Harry Potter adults are out here insisting that their rights to be proud Slytherins are more important than trans people’s rights to exist. Don’t y’all know about astrology? Or enneagram? Find a new fixation. Or just, like, a better book series? Warrior Cats never went out of style. ThunderClan forever.
Look, I get it. Things are bad. There’s a lot to keep up with. If you weren’t totally sure why so many people are done with Harry Potter, you’re forgiven. But I’m begging you — don’t buy the books, don’t watch the show, don’t go to the theme parks, don’t even participate in the discourse (yes, this essay is feeding the beast). If you mention Hogwarts around me, you’re getting a howler.
Thanks for reading! Do you have thoughts? Do you know someone else who might? Please pass me around, and don’t hesitate to hit me up with comments, questions and fresh ideas. Catch you next time!
FSLUR READING REC
Both/And edited by Denne Michele Norris
I can’t recommend enough this series of essays on gender and identity by trans and genderqueer people of color. All at once beautiful, vulnerable, personal, expansive, groundbreaking and timeless. Readers deeply inhabit the individual perspectives of trans folks speaking on their own experiences in their own words. Of course, they’re written with broad audiences in mind, but I value that the pieces don’t dwell too much on defining terms, histories and cultural contexts. The focus is on humans striving for selfhood. In our current moment, compassion probably matters more than textbook understanding, and getting the vibe probably matters more than getting the language exactly right. This collection includes so much generosity and kindness, and should really be required reading for anyone invested in uplifting trans narratives.