The “Harry Potter” franchise is one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. The novels and movies have been critically acclaimed for decades, and the fandom continues to grow despite how old the series is. These achievements are all credited to J.K. Rowling– the creator of the series’ magical universe so many have immersed themselves in over the years. While Rowling has been praised for her writing and the creation of the Harry Potter Wizarding World, she has also gained immense amounts of criticism due to her poor views and opinions of issues in the transgender community.
Rowling has not always been innocent when it comes to the LGBTQ+ community. In 2007, after the completion of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows”, Rowling announced that Dumbledore, a key character in the series, was gay. However, she never actually represented his sexuality in any of the novels. While some may argue that it was too late now that the series was over, it was very clear that she did not want to have this LGBTQ+ representation in her novels. The two-part sequel play, “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and the prequel series, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” both have Dumbledore in them, but not a single mention of his sexuality. This effort is more often than not known as queerbaiting. Queerbaiting is a marketing technique in which films, novels, tv shows, etc. will hint at LGBTQ+ relations but never explicitly depict them.
This act of queerbaiting has always been more hurtful than helpful in the community. It creates a false image of what an actual LGBTQ+ relationship looks like and undermines the communities trust in a franchise to give them the representation they both want and deserve. A perfect example of this would be Supernatural. After 15 seasons, many fans truly believed that Castiel and Dean Winchester would end up together, but of course, this is not what happened. For years, the show continued to depict these two as possibly being romantically involved, but never actually gave it any nuance. Fans felt as if they were robbed of a relationship that could have easily been, and the same applies to J.K. Rowling’s statements on Dumbledore’s sexuality. I think this could have easily been avoided if she very clearly said that Dumbeldore was gay at the start of the series. She should have delved deeper into his sexuality and at the very least hinted at his supposed relationship with Grimwald. It all seems like a tacky ploy to keep the community believing in her and continuing to keep the story popular years later.
Rowling continued to double down on his sexuality over the years, but still has not explicitly shown or even hinted at a gay relationship between Dumbledore and his alleged lover Grindelwald in a Harry Potter book or film. To me, it feels as though she is using his sexuality to continue to gain support from a left-leaning audience as well as gay fans of the book. And while I believe that it is important to have these sexualities portrayed in the media, I also believe that it has done nothing to help give LGBTQ+ people a sense of normalcy in a rather heteronormative society. However, if she truly is making this a characteristic of Dumbeldore to gain support from the LGBTQ+ community, why is she suddenly making hurtful comments to the trans community?
Aside from the revelation of Dumbledore’s sexuality, J.K. Rowling has had more discourse surrounding the transgender community than any other author in the past year. Starting in June and continuing to get out of hand throughout July, Rowling dug a rather large hole for herself that she can no longer seem to get herself out of. Her comments regarding transgender women, hormones, and conversion therapy were unreasonable and only seemed to be intended to hurt rather than help. This, paired with her upcoming book titled “Troubled Blood” in which a cisgender male murderer kills his female victims by dressing up as a woman in order to catch them off guard, only painted her out to be unmistakably transphobic.
As a full-time transsexual woman, this article is self-important, echo chamber nonsense. You speak of facts when it’s only your opinion. You say JK fails to understand when she simply has a different point of view.
And to refer to being pro-LGBT as being left-leaning simply demonstrates your lack of political knowledge and understanding and simply echoing the same political ignorance of those in the social media threads and articles you read (hence ‘echo chamber’). Being pro-LGBT does not make you left-leaning and being left-leaning does not make you pro-LGBT.
Finally, you talk of the ‘trans community’ as if we are all one voice, one opinion and that YOUR way is the ONLY way. It’s people like you, with your pontificating and supercilious finger-wagging that gives us a bad name and creates hate and dislike for us. That’s right – people like you – and not the regular or, as you would call it ‘heteronormative patriarchy’, engeders the ill-feeling towards us – with your po-faced lecturing, disapproval, insistence that you;re right and everyone else is wrong, insistence that the tail (the 1% of the world that’s trans) wags the dog (the remaining 99%), and uber-sensitive, humorless natures.
Have your opinions and have your beliefs but DON’T mistake them for anything else other than your opinions. Not even when you’re surrounded by like-minds in your echo chambers.
I suppose you would want J. K. Rowling to just change her opinion to satisfy people on Twitter. That’s a bad stance in general, because shaming/shunning isn’t a truth-seeking process, only a (vocal)-majority-confirming one. This might tend to be aligned with the truth, but it’s not inherently. It kind of doesn’t matter what J. K. Rowling believes.
I guess if you give her money by buying her books, you’re supporting her beliefs. But it seems to be against the spirit of democracy to make people’s beliefs hinge upon how much money they get. The spirit of democracy is important because social mechanisms like shunning aren’t truth-seeking, so we should allow all beliefs to be at least stated (even if not acted upon). And this applies to both government and people in everyday life.
Also, a nitpick; one could say “gender and sex are different” to support the usage of “women” instead of “people who menstruate” by saying that in this context one is using the menstruation-relevant definition of “women” (which is sort of Rowlings argument). That doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch for language and would be less verbose. On that note, I don’t think it makes sense to call her Tweet ignorant; she knows exactly what she’s trying to say.
Then again, I don’t pay attention to pop culture celebrities’ personal lives.