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a beautiful little family.

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Sirius waved his wand idly, not even thinking about it, and James’s entire uniform turned Gryffindor red and gold with a silent flicker of magic.

The class stared.

Fliywick sputtered. "Mr. Black, you—you realize nonverbal magic is meant to be taught in sixth year?"

Sirius frowned at his wand like it had personally betrayed him.

"Oh, is it? My mistake."

James just grinned. "Can you make my tie sparkle too?"

Sirius obliged.

McGonagall stalked through the classroom, voice clipped. "Human transfiguration is a complex and delicate art. It must be handled with the utmost precision and care -"

Sirius felt something prickling on his left hand and glanced down before yelping. His hand was now a lion’s paw.

McGonagall whirled. "POTTER!"

James smirked, twirling his wand. "Yes, Professor?"

Mcgonagall only huffed in annoyance. "You are not supposed to be this good."

Slughorn peered into Sirius’ cauldron, stroking his mustache with a mix of bemusement and awe.

"This is a highly advanced potion, one that even skilled potion-masters struggle to perfect," he said.

Sirius glanced at his cauldron, where his potion swirled in a perfect shade of amethyst. "Huh. Guess I got lucky."

Slughorn shook his head in pure disbelief. "I don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on your process?"

Sirius, who absolutely had not followed the instructions and had just thrown in ingredients based on gut instinct, smiled charmingly.

But here’s the thing: that’s probably not true at all.

Pretending it is discounts the harsher, scarier truth: that even decent, well-meaning people can be radicalised by dangerous, hateful, predatory groups, and given enough time they can become truly hideous versions of their former selves.

It can happen to me. It can happen to you. It can happen to any of us, given the right mix of circumstances. And over the past few years, we’ve seen it happen to one of the most famous children’s authors of our age.

This isn’t to apologise for her behaviour or rehabilitate her into some former activist who is still worthy of saving; it’s to contextualise her recent descent into TERFdom compared to her previous political stances she’s openly held. She was probably never going to be a staunch ally for equality and diversity, and yes, a lot of the HP series were very problematic in retrospect, but she could very easily have gone the other way and at the very least turned out to be less of a bigoted shitbag she is now. The fact that her politics in late 2000′s/early 2010′s were similar to so many people who are now activists and organisers for queer, BIPOC and vulnerable communities should tell us to be all the more careful about radfem ideology and transphobia in progressive spaces. 

It’s comforting to say “we should have known in hindsight that she was always going to become a TERF, the early signs were all there!” but that’s also not true. We have to recognise that the toxic ideology, the active harm she chooses to participate in, was a deliberate choice; this was a path she chose to go down, not one that was pre-determined for her. It’s also an easy way to separate ourselves from being critical of radfem influence; “JKR was always a right-wing bigot and that’s why she became indoctrinated with radfem bullshit. I’m not a right-wing bigot, therefore unlike her, I will never fall for radfem bullshit.” 

Two birds on a wire

One tries to fly away and the other

Watches him close from that wire

Lily Evans