Muggle muddle
Harry Potter fans stand with LGBTQ community against a Rowling tweet
The January meeting of the D.C. chapter of the Harry Potter Alliance took place at East City Bookshop, a store just blocks from the U.S. Capitol where you can buy Ruth Bader Ginsburg baby onesies and bring your children to Drag Queen Storytime. More than a dozen attendees — almost all women in their 20s and 30s — formed a circle near the fantasy and young adult sections downstairs. Organizers called it an unusually good turnout for their niche activist group, in which fans of J.K. Rowling’s wizarding world promote literacy, human rights and civic engagement in Washington and beyond.
About a half-hour in, communications director Danielle Ternes offered another suggestion. “It might be a good idea right now to do something for transgender rights,” she said, “in the current climate.”
The “current climate” originated in December, when Rowling tweeted in defence of Maya Forstater, a British tax researcher who lost her job for making statements widely perceived as anti-trans. Rowling’s #Istandwithmaya tweet sparked a firestorm on social media, as LGBTQ advocates rose up in condemnation. “Trans women are women,” the Human Rights Campaign tweeted. “Trans men are men. Non-binary people are nonbinary. CC: JK Rowling.” Critics labelled the author a bigot and a “TERF” — a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Vox went so far as to say she had “just ruined Harry Potter.”
Many Potter fans joined in the denunciation. On Facebook, the D.C. chapter of the alliance posted that Rowling ’s “transphobic views are completely unacceptable and hurtful to so many who have been inspired by her work.” It wasn’t the first time Rowling had drawn political criticism: She’d previously been accused of transphobia for liking a tweet referring to “men in dresses,” which her spokesperson blamed on the author “holding her phone incorrectly.” But nothing had caused this level of blowback.
It may seem unusual for literary fans to be speaking out against the political views of the author of their beloved books — but none of this should be a surprise. Since its founding in 2005 as a “novel” approach — pun intended — to social change, the Harry Potter Alliance, now active in 30 countries spanning six continents, has tried to push Rowling ’s fans beyond writing fan fiction and adapting the sport of Quidditch for ordinary humans. Its most famous effort was a successful “Not in Harry’s Name” campaign, which in 2014 ensured that all Potter-themed chocolate products from Warner Bros. would be fair trade.
(Rowling’s) transphobic views are completely unacceptable and hurtful to so many who have been inspired by her work.
Potter fandom includes a large number of LGBTQ people, especially young people, who felt deeply hurt by Rowling’s actions. Jackson Bird, a New York-based activist who spent half a decade as the alliance’s national communications director, credits fellow fans with embracing him when he came out as transgender in 2015 at 25.
In a December op-ed in The New York Times, he wrote that Rowling ’s tweet was “like a punch in the gut” and a stark contrast to his fan community, which “adhered to the values we learned from the books about being yourself, loving those who are different from you and sticking up for the underdog.”
The Washington Post