This is going to be a bit of a long post, I apologize for that, but these are some things I feel needs to be said.
It is not easy to fall out love with a fandom you’ve gotten to know deeply, incredibly. Not even if the creator of it is proven to be an awful person. In fact, it’s quite difficult to be faced with the knowledge that the story you’ve loved for so long is the product of someone cruel. And sometimes that struggle is followed by the desire to stay in love with the story despite the creator, and the guilt of knowing that you love something made by someone that wouldn’t love you or someone you care about.
Personally, I have been in love with the story of Harry Potter since the books came out. I grew up with the story, I learned the backstories of characters I didn’t like and fell in love with those, too. I have spent decades getting to know them, that is decades of love. Decades of wonder, magic and creativity. So many things I thought up and daydreamed about were only possible because I’d read (and soon after also watched) Harry Potter.
Learning that the author of the books I’ve loved so highly is a transphobe (none of us can deny it, however much she seems to want to) was a smack in the face. The books spoke of promoting love and understanding (I didn’t really learn to read between the lines as a child and so the lack of LGBTQIA+ representation as well as the treatment of Dumbledore flew right over my head) and I couldn’t understand how she could write that and still choose to be a transphobe. It left me stuck between wanting to never support her again in any way, and fearful that loving the story and writing about them was supporting her.
It took me a while to accept that loving a story doesn’t mean loving the creator, or the other way around. Writing fanfiction and roleplaying the characters from her story isn’t giving her any money, so it is not necessarily supporting her as much as it is not throwing away decades of love for a story. A story that I have realized is incredibly flawed, but fanfics and roleplay has been able to let me fix that in my own way.
It is alright to drop the fandom and everything in it, if you want to. It is also alright to stay in the fandom, if you want to. Neither side should be throwing hate at each other (though it does unfortunately happen), it is better for both sides to just agree to disagree and understand that neither option means that they support Rowling (it can mean that, of course, but it is always good to ask first instead of just assuming).
All we can really hope for both those sides is that you choose to not support Rowling in a monetary or transphobic way.
