The harm Rowling has done has been less widely publicized than it should be, although it has, at least, been met with passionate opposition by many fans and ex-fans. But there are also barriers to properly recognizing and combating that harm, even among people who have heard about Rowling’s politics and find them execrable. People are often tempted to wander down the conversational dead-end that is “separating the art from the artist.” Harry Potter has historically boasted the kind of approval numbers usually reserved for, say, pizza or “the concept of joy”; fans are, accordingly, defensive about enjoying something so synonymous with childhood nostalgia. Surely watching a show doesn’t make you a bad person, does it? We all love something made under morally compromised circumstances. Can’t someone just pirate the show, or watch it through a friend’s account, and call it a day?
On the other side of the equation, some people are overly eager to pat themselves on the back for having never liked Harry Potter, deriding the books as vacuous, or picking out specific oft-criticized elements of the books as evidence that any fan must have always been morally bankrupt. (See also: people who responded to the Neil Gaiman sexual assault allegations by proudly declaring that they’d always gotten bad vibes from The Sandman.) What both of these reactions share is a focus on varying levels of emotional investment. And while it can be useful to unpick your own feelings about cultural products, at least for the sake of living a life that isn’t riven by contradiction and unease, I personally do not actually care if people like Harry Potter or not. It does not matter if you have emotional investments in the books, the films, the other, worse films, the theme parks, the merchandise, or anything else connected to the franchise. I mean that in both the callous and the benevolent sense: It does not matter. What you feel in your heart towards the series is almost entirely irrelevant. What matters is what you do, because J. K. Rowling is out there doing a lot of things.
Rowling has fashioned herself into a very powerful enemy of transness. Her intellectual properties, particularly the ones under her control that she directly profits from, are thus, in a very literal sense, tools of the enemy. But Rowling is also in an unusual position of having accrued not just mountains of cash but a particular form of cultural capital; she is often seen as incapable of serious harm because of her association with popular books for children. She is the kindly wizarding lady. If we maintain a space for Harry Potter as a positive, nostalgic bastion of kindness and liberalism, no amount of caveats about the author’s politics will matter. Nothing is adequate to the situation except the truth. There is no way to watch the new Harry Potter show subversively; whether or not you believe you're being responsible, if you're watching, you are buying in. Harry Potter is now a byword for the industrial-scale erosion of the limited rights trans people had managed to win or squat in, and the equally galling mass indifference to that erosion. She has ruined it utterly.
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titsay
