The Moral Abdication of J. K. Rowling
By: Joseph Hefner
Tags: J K Rowling, Literature, LGBTQ, Harry Potter, Transgender

At the time, I didn’t know the word for it, but I’m pretty sure I knew I was capable of being attracted to people of more than one gender by the third grade. To the extent that a nine-year-old can be, I was in love with a boy and a girl in my class. I know neither where these two people are now nor if they ever could have returned my feelings had we grown up together and my family hadn’t left Pittsburgh for rural North Carolina the following year.

The boy’s name was Rory. He had an older brother who was the same age as one of mine. Throughout that year of school, there was always at least one period of the day set aside for “free reading.” We could either bring a chapter book from home or borrow one of the teacher’s during that time. Rory was an avid Harry Potter fan. He read all the books in the series that were available by that point (late 2001 to early 2002) over and over again. So, every day during free reading, I would borrow one of the teacher’s books from the series (it never mattered which one), sit near Rory and pretend to read while stealing glances at him every couple minutes. (It was not until I reached adulthood that it would occur to me just how creepy this practice was.) I don’t think he ever caught on, but I know I definitely annoyed him on more than one occasion, whether it was during free reading or lunch or recess. I was a weird kid who didn’t know how to process wanting to know more about a person who didn’t share the same interest in me.

The reason I remember all of this so clearly has less to do with an elementary school crush and more to do with the fact that, as the weeks and months passed over the course of that academic year, as I wondered what it would be like to make Rory laugh or what might impress him, I actually started reading the Harry Potter series. In addition to being a little unusual compared to kids my age, I also had a set of severe learning disabilities. These ranged from a noticeably limited attention span to what I now know to be numerical dyslexia. So for these considerably in-depth fantasy books to ensnare my focus was a testament to how vividly they were written, along with how much their author, J. K. Rowling, understood the psyche and curiosities of a lonely child.

When the film adaptation of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Philosopher’s Stone everywhere outside the U.S.), was released that same year, Rory’s family threw him a birthday party at one of the local movie theaters. They invited all the boys in our grade. After pizza and cake, we shuffled in to see the movie. Even though Rory had already said this was his third time seeing it, I noticed every so often as I turned to look at him that he was just as engrossed in what was happening onscreen as the rest of us. I can still remember how his face looked, with his mouth half-open and the screen casting a flickering glow over his face. The following summer, just a few weeks before my family moved, Rory’s brother died after a prolonged struggle with cancer. My brother went to the funeral. I didn’t.

After we moved down south, the first movie I went to see with a classmate was the second in the Harry Potter series (“the one everyone hates,” as the Screen Junkies honest trailer would later refer to it). And as I moved through adolescence, the sporadic releases of the remaining books and films became benchmarks of growing up. My mom bought the fifth book for me on my last day of theatre camp. I saw the third movie (“the one everyone loves”) six times upon its release in the summer of 2004, and the fourth one on the last day of my seventh grade fall exams in 2005. To this day, I argue with some friends about how Nicholas Hooper’s score to the fifth movie is better than what John Williams wrote for the first three. I’ve shared plenty of hot takes about how the sixth book is the weakest in the series, but its film adaptation is somehow the strongest. The final book arrived right before I started high school, the seventh film the fall of my senior year and the eighth right after I graduated. I remember watching the last scene of that last movie alongside a big group of my classmates, my friends, many of whom I’d known since I was the same age as Harry when he arrived at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

It’s hard not to wish everything had simply ended there, with no more of the Potter-verse to explore beyond what fans added to it based on their own interpretations of the existing text (known as “head-canon”). Back in his day, Lewis Carroll embraced this phenomenon enthusiastically; Rowling has not. Even though many of us were ready to outgrow our need for these stories while nonetheless retaining their lessons about faith, courage and resilience, it soon became clear that enough would never be enough for J. K. Rowling. Like George Lucas before her, she has displayed a paranoid level of possessiveness over the property that made her the most successful writer in history.

This arguably began in 2007, with her revelation that the character Albus Dumbledore, the headmaster of Harry’s school and his mentor-turned-father-figure, is a gay man. Though many were heartened by such an acknowledgment, more than a few others found it insulting. Not only is this detail completely unsupported by the original seven books, but it blatantly violates the Death of the Author principle, which, to oversimplify its academic definition originated by Roland Barthes, means that the intentions, biography and post-textual assertions of an author or artist should be irrelevant to outside assessments of their work. While I don’t believe Barthes should be treated as gospel, I do think his philosophy remains the only line of defense against what Rowling would proceed to do over the next decade.

After pushing a fictional character out of the closet without ever directly depicting said character’s personal life (an insidious, softly bigoted trend in pop culture as a whole), Rowling continued to squeeze every last cent out of the Harry Potter franchise, often confusing, confounding or offending her fans in the process.

2012 saw the full launch of Pottermore, a digital platform I have never fully understood. The best way I can summarize it is that it allowed people who were well-acquainted with the series, as well as those who were new to it, to experience the books in a completely different context, with interactive activities, notes by Rowling on the writing process and, most annoyingly, her own personal head-canon. Most people I know stopped using Pottermore after the Sorting Hat activity, which allowed users to be sorted into one of the four houses of Hogwarts, just like Harry and his friends. In 2019, the site was rebranded as WizardingWorld.com. Sweet Merciful God, I never thought I would long for the days of Pottermore, but that’s where Rowling’s actions have left me.

A considerable amount of controversy connected to Rowling stems from the author’s use of social media, over which she has directly engaged with her fans’ questions. As the media scholar Lindsay Ellis stated in a 2018 video essay on the subject, “Ever since she joined Twitter, Rowling has had a tendency to post-scripturally insert context, meaning and intent into her text long after the text has been published, which many fans love, but just as many take issue with. … LGBT representation in the Harry Potter-verse exists only in the paratext, in the authorial intent. Therefore, according to Barthes, it does not exist at all.” This larger practice has landed Rowling in hot water with several marginalized groups, from declaring that a character can only be of one distinct race to stating that a mythological affliction is a metaphor for AIDS, even though the only two characters in the Harry Potter series with said affliction are a straight married man and a sexual predator. Yes, even through symbolism, Rowling manages to exploit, and then erase, the experiences of queer people.

In 2016, after years of being asked by her American fans if magic existed in North America the way it did in Europe as depicted in the series, Rowling wrote History of Magic in North America, a four-part series published on Pottermore. In addition to being a blatant publicity stunt to promote the upcoming first film in the Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them franchise (which I’ll get to in a moment), Rowling fell under well-deserved criticism for her depiction and appropriation of indigenous cultures in these new works. The resulting anger was perhaps best encapsulated by Navajo writer Brian Young, who addressed Rowling directly over Twitter, saying, “My ancestors didn’t survive [colonization] so you could use our culture as a convenient prop.”

Then there are those Fantastic Beasts films. I don’t have much to add here other than that I find them unwatchable and they failed to replicate the excitement and magnetism of the original series. But more importantly, it’s worth noting that these were the first films connected to the Potter-verse for which Rowling wrote the screenplays. It speaks volumes about her priorities that she and many of her past collaborators would cash in on a whole new franchise based on a textbook that Hogwarts students were required to buy. (I could also describe my thoughts on her choice to sign off on the creation of that Harry Potter theme park, as well as her co-writing of the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, but writing this is already an exhausting effort, so I’ll leave it at calling both projects stupid and opportunistic.)

Finally, we come to Rowling’s most recent and egregious acts, which have nothing to do with Harry Potter, her obsession with maintaining control over her creations or her shameless money-grubbing. No, Rowling’s latest sins came with her shared thoughts (again over Twitter) on transgender identity. This started in December of last year, when she expressed her solidarity with Maya Forstater, a British woman who claimed through litigation that her employer severed ties with her due to her views on transgender people, which were considered by many to be transphobic. Then, this month, Rowling mockingly criticized a Devex op-ed (written by Marni Sommer, Virgina Kamowa and Therese Mahon) entitled, “Creating a more equal post-COVID 19 world for people who menstruate.” Rowling took issue with the trans-inclusive language of the article’s headline and contents, but not its fact-based argument surrounding the pandemic’s unequal distribution of suffering upon certain gender identities.

The backlash was swift, with many accusing Rowling of being a TERF (trans-exclusive radical feminist), a group often, but not always, consisting of white, heterosexual, cisgender women, many of whom tend to be intellectuals or academics. In addition to several more defensive tweets, Rowling shared a personal essay, in which she casts herself––the wealthiest and most famous author in the history of letters––as the victim of online “harassment” and “social media abuse” and people “assuming the right to police [her] speech.” I won’t quote any more from it here, as Rowling already has a big enough platform for people to read her hateful narcissism masked as concern, philanthropy and bravery. To keep you from having to suffer through it, here are the four main paraphrased fears that Rowling outlines regarding the “dangers” of trans activism:

That trans efforts to swap the legal definition of sex with gender will undermine the work of one of her own charities in the U.K. A vaguely described concern over how trans-related discourse will impact children’s education. The false equivalency that justified criticism directed at her constitutes a threat to her freedom of expression. (It obviously doesn’t, since she’s still talking.) The shockingly ignorant statement that many people transition due to internalized homophobia.

None of this is new. It’s gender-based gatekeeping. It’s fair-weather feminism. We’ve heard or read or seen it all before. But somehow, Rowling saved her most unsettling defense for the finale––invoking the domestic abuse she suffered during her first marriage, long before she had achieved wealth, status or fame. In doing so, she expressed fear that those born with female sex organs will somehow be more at risk of sexual or violent assault in dressing rooms and restrooms.

Having spent my formative years in my adopted home state of North Carolina, I’ve become very familiar with this last argument. It’s the same one pushed by the state’s knuckle-dragging Republican legislature and its former Republican governor, Pat McCrory––that the presence of trans women in bathrooms posed a greater risk of sexual or violent assault to cis women and girls. They believed this so fervently that they codified it in HB-2 (largely known as the “bathroom bill”), a law passed in March of 2016. But despite the measure’s partial repeal a year later, the damage was already done. North Carolina’s national reputation for civility and practicality had been formally destroyed after four years of slow degradation. Several companies refused to do business with the state. Events that could have brought jobs and commerce to our major cities were cancelled or postponed. And worst of all, trans people––including trans children in public schools––were labeled as potential predators by their own elected officials.

To now know that the author of a beloved fantasy series, which informed so much of my personal growth and reaffirmed my belief in friendship and loyalty, is no better than these thoughtless conservative bigots is profoundly disappointing. But it is not the first time I have had to reconcile my admiration for a writer’s brilliance with horrific things they said or did: Edgar Allan Poe was a pedophile; e. e. cummings, Roald Dahl and Patricia Highsmith were vicious racists and antisemites; David Foster Wallace was a violent, misogynistic stalker. And all of us, regardless of vocation, have caused or will cause people pain in our lives.

The difference is that no writer or artist, living or dead, has ever had quite the same platform that J. K. Rowling has. So it is all the more baffling that now, during an unparalleled international civil uprising against systemic racism––and by extension, the horrific, global mistreatment of trans people of color––she would use that platform to endorse the already-widespread attempts to delegitimize trans identity.

In hindsight, I have no idea what Rory from the third grade took from the Harry Potter series that made him love the books and movies so much. I won’t presume to speak for him. Maybe it was just pure entertainment and escapism. Or maybe, as his brother’s illness progressed, he stared into those pages and onto those screens and identified with Harry’s desire for stability and a completed family––the reader or viewer’s equivalent of staring into the Mirror of Erised.

Of all the responses to Rowling’s recent commentary, my favorite came from Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who portrayed Harry onscreen and has debatably benefitted from the franchise more than any other artist other than Rowling herself. He published his statement on the website of The Trevor Project, an American non-profit dedicated to suicide prevention among LGBTQ youth, with which he has been affiliated for many years. The final paragraph of his statement reads:

“To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain [J. K. Rowling’s] comments have caused you. I really hope that you don’t entirely lose what was valuable in these stories to you. If these books taught you that love is the strongest force in the universe, capable of overcoming anything; if they taught you that strength is found in diversity, and that dogmatic ideas of pureness lead to the oppression of vulnerable groups; if you believe that a particular character is trans, nonbinary, or gender fluid, or that they are gay or bisexual; if you found anything in these stories that resonated with you and helped you at any time in your life––then that is between you and the book that you read, and it is sacred. And in my opinion, nobody can touch that. It means to you what it means to you and I hope that [her] comments will not taint that too much.”