While the LGBT community and our allies have stood back and watched a rather ominous narrative form around JK Rowling, it has been without any direct confirmation or statement from the author herself. It’s as if she is conditioning the world to accept it rather than rebuke it. First she stuck her toe in the water, was caught, claimed it was a misunderstanding and we accepted that. Then, she persisted to do the same things… again and again.
Finally, we have some confirmation of Rowling’s stance against the transgender community. She has followed one of the most hateful and aggressive anti-trans radical feminists on Twitter, Magdalen Berns.
I’m sorry but you are kidding yourself if you can pretend Harry Potter is divorced from the author’s transphobia. Saying “Miku made this” is just glossing over the disturbing context given to elements from the series when you know that JKR is a raging transmisogyniat who follows one of the worst terfs on twitter.
In Hogwarts, the stairs to the girls’ dorms physically will not allow male students to enter. However girls can enter the boys’ dorm base apparently girls are inherently more trustworthy. This was written by a woman who believes trans women are men who prey on cis women and therefore should be forcibly removed from women’s spaces.
In Harry Potter only the girl students are allowed to pet the unicorns because they are more “pure” than the boys. This was written by a person who believes your sex assigned at birth IS your gender and believes it immoral or impossible to have a different gender from your ASAB.
The only time people are very shown using polyjuice potion to transform into a person of another gender, it’s mostly a joke about Harry’s friends making comments about his body + Fleur being embarrassed for her husband to see her as a naked man. Other than this scene, every use of polyjuice potion is intensely gender-conforming, and it’s not because of the voices because in the books polyjuice changes your voice as well.
There are elements of the Harry Potter books that people have tried to reframe as being trans-inclusive (“what if a trans boy couldn’t get into the girls dorm only the boys dorm?”) but we are lying to ourselves if we pretend her “opinions” aren’t present in Harry Potter.
