So… I thought I could compromise with these Harry Potter fanfics. They were supposed to be fun, but they can’t be anymore. They can’t be anything more but a show of support of hate.

I think I was naive when it started, hopeful it was another out of touch celebrity who was bumbling through a complex topic. You know how those billionaires get, just saying things without research, thinking they must be right because their echo chamber insists they’re right. Don’t we all just hate to point out to the powerful how they’re abusing their power — surely it’s a mistake, surely they don’t mean it that way? Surely conflict avoidance is the answer, and the monster they have become will go away if we don’t acknowledge it? Just hide under the covers and Voldemort will go away.

JK Rowling has created an army of transphobes. She is the leader of a hate movement. She is emboldened as companies continue to profit off of her intellectual property and enrich her. She is not going away.

I first truly realized this shopping around the holiday season after I was starting to feel better, only to stop in front of a display with Potter merch and feel the sickening twist in my stomach as I watched people browse the contents. Were they fans before JK Rowling went full out TERF? Or were they “new” fans, people who bought the merch because they wanted an easily recognized symbol of hate to display but they could play dumb if anyone called them out on it? Was the store itself even safe when everyone knew JK Rowling was spreading misinformation and lies that were leading to violence against transgendered people? Did it matter anymore when anything connected to JK Rowling was a symbol of hate?

I can’t claim this is the first time I had to let go of an author, but it was never to this extreme. I didn’t really get into Orson Scott Card until right before he revealed his bigotry against LGBTQs. I never wrote fanfiction for his characters. Instead, as an adult, I was able to look at his work and see his struggle, see in his books how he was losing to the twisted memes his religious community instilled in him until he couldn’t see beyond it. But I also acknowledged that he was an adult making choices, choices that were spreading hate and bigotry against a marginalized community, and I, as an adult, had to make a choice in response.

It was a learning experience for me. I didn’t want to learn from what was happening to JK Rowling, which is why I fought it as long as I could. I wanted to stay a child and play make-believe.

It doesn’t matter what I want it to be; JK Rowling is a celebrated transphobe in 2023. She is making money off her intellectual properties to fund the hateful bigotry she puts out into the world. And her transphobic followers use her work to fund her hate, and they use her work to terrorize transgender people. It doesn’t matter the intentions of when those books were first written. It doesn’t matter the intentions of the fans who are not transphobes, who just want to be entertained by a story of an orphan boy who discovered he was “special”, deserving. Harry Potter and all other works created by JK Rowling and her other pen names fund hate.

The nazi symbol once represented peace until Hitler got a hold of it. It doesn’t mean it’s no longer only the nazi symbol of hate today. Things change, and I’m not so stuck in my ways that I’m going to pretend that it doesn’t demand I change as well.

There are better stories out there. There are far better writers out there. And the ultimate majority don’t have their works symbolize hate. I’m letting go of Harry Potter because I don’t support hate, and there is no compromising with a transphobe. JK Rowling is an adult making adult choices. Choices to say and do things things that exclude and outright harm transgendered people. She is not intellectually impaired. The color of her skin, perceived sex, and the gender she identifies with does not provide a justification for what she’s doing. She is not a victim, but a protected harasser who self justifies by hiding behind a story of victimhood to prevent facing the repercussions of her actions. Her class — her billionaire status — does not mean she is magically smarter and more correct than anyone else. She is capable enough to write a story, one that understands what is good and what was bad. She is not ignorant to these things. She is making a choice to target, harass, and create an atmosphere of violence against one of the most marginalized, at risk communities in the history of humanity. And she does it while claiming she cares about women, just so long as woman is defined by her limited, bigoted viewpoint.

JK Rowling doesn’t care about women. She doesn’t even know what a woman is.

For those who looked to Harry Potter as a hero, as someone you wanted to be when you grew up, to be such a hero you need to fight against the evil JK Rowling is spreading in the world. The hardest thing children must do when they grow is to become individuals separate from their parents’ and society’s antiquated and biased views, but it is the only way to bring needed change in a broken world.

JK Rowling doesn’t know what it’s like to be an orphan, to be an outsider to the accepted class — that’s the irony I have always felt when I see so many of these 2 dimensional stories of child abandonment when I grew up in foster care and was later adopted. It’s a trope; few writers understand how complex abandonment is. How complex and devastating growing up on the outside of society is, having to negotiate with a world that will never fully see you as belonging just because you don’t have parents.

And if you think that sort of discrimination doesn’t exist, you have never lived it. Humanity doesn’t need a good reason to trigger their xenophobia; just like some see a spot on an apple and assume it’s bad, some see a child without parents and assume the same. Some see a presentation of a gender role that doesn’t match their expectation and are triggered. A tic of a hand or a stutter and some people are triggered. Some see tattoos or a style of clothing and are triggered because they don’t feel surrounded by the familiar, and therefore justify lashing out. Humanity is innately broken, and it is up to us to fight the rationalization of xenophobia if we ever want a better world.

And beware those who are already safe, are already protected by the world we are in, because as much as they might say they want “better”, human nature promises they will fight equality if it feels like they lose their privilege. We are flawed, a mashup of what evolution spat out of a species that conquered a globe and claimed ownership while causing mass extinction. Within us is understanding, but not without these deeply rooted instincts to hoard, to control and kill what we can’t control. And we’ll say it’s to be safe, to be organized and to have things make sense. But it’s because we are cowards who don’t want to be uncomfortable in an uncertain world.

When JK Rowling wrote a book about fighting against a system of injustice, she wrote a single villain and his henchpeople to defeat, instead of demanding change of an unequal system, because she has never lived being in a marginalized community. Instead she writes what she knows, protected, superior in her community, with special powers to control and harm others, in a secret world in the shadows where normal humans will never hold these special people accountable, only ever be victims. She doesn’t have the experience — the basic human empathy — to write a true hero of the people, never mind to be one, because she is too insulated by her class. She can’t even see the darkness in her own cowardly self.

And those who support her hate — for the fame, for the memes, because they like to hate and to feel sheltered by a righteous fandom that will protect them from the repercussions — they are very content to never grow as well. A society perpetuating the weakest of human character, insulating from change, attacking anyone who would demand they grow up and be better. That’s what the Harry Potter fandom has become. Pretending otherwise is just a fantasy. All you have to do is go online and see how this fandom harasses and attacks anyone who stands up against their bigotry.

This is who they are now. This is who JK Rowling is, and this is her fandom, comprised of tranphobes and bullies.

Yeah, it’s a shitty feeling being asked to grow up, to be a better version of yourself. Especially when most of the Harry Potter fans are of an older generation who is so certain they are grown. A generation catered to with all the toys, nostalgia, and petty, pretty little things consumerism can spoil them with. I’m of a generation so defined by marketing that we can’t even get a new movie out that isn’t full of some 40 something’s childhood fantasy to be a superhero.

Do you even understand how infantalizing that is? How pathetic that we are stuck playing childhood games pretending we have no power because these companies control us best this way? The world doesn’t ask us to be better because there are entire economies thriving on keeping us childlike and docile. So when a villain shows up — when someone in the real world is causing real, actual harm — it becomes about how to keep having the toys and childhood fantasies we love instead of telling that person to fuck off and stop causing harm. It becomes a negotiation of how to compromise with violence and bigotry, and I’m done playing this sick game.

Fuck off, JK Rowling. You don’t understand the bullshit you’re claiming to be science because you’re not a scientist. You aren’t qualified to talk on the human experiences you talk about because you have not experienced them. You don’t have the life experience to know anything about complex social situations because you never face the consequences of complex social situation, but instead fuck off to whatever castle you’re living in at the moment and have brunch with leaders of hate groups while you let your fans bully and harass anyone who calls you out. Your input is not wanted in regards to transgenderism. You are an outsider here, thinking you’re an insider because that’s the privilege you have lived your entire life with as a wealthy, white, cis AFAB, and no, that will never change. You don’t get to be the center of this conversation, no matter how much you think you should because “special”. The transgender community is not here to coddle you the way everyone else does. We don’t negotiate with terrorists, not even the ones holding our childhoods’ hostage. Fuck off; humanity has some growing to do.