The Queen of broken Potter hearts

Somewhere around the queue to see Platform 9 ¾ is a bemused gaggle of Londoners wondering what all the fuss is about. What started as a harmless book about an orphan boy having a magic adventure spawn a whole world of joy for many of its readers, becoming the astrology of their times with sorting hats and houses. Amidst Pottermania its author rose to prominence, her support for the dispossessed and less fortunate seemingly written in the stars. Yet, as the augurs and outliers suggested, in reality this support was superficial, a ripping off of cultures she barely bothered investigating, laying racist tropes on top of shying away from including any LGBT characters. Potterverse is a conservative world, where those on the margins are caricatures, and where its creator made bank on her own prejudices. None of this is news, yet the fact that J K Rowling sees fit to use her billions to wail on trans women shows how her conservative values have slipped into reactionary politics. Where once she was the Queen of the best seller list, now she is merely the Queen of broken Potter hearts.

None of this would matter if she had the cultural footprint of Orson Scott Card, a man shunned because of his reactionary values, yet because Rowling has both wealth and cultural cache her personal beliefs attract attention whenever she decides to speak. Her attacks on the trans community come from a position of personal trauma, and she has publicly used her own history of sexual violence to explicitly advocate for excluding trans women from women’s spaces. Indeed, while superficially she uses gay characters as central characters, in reality she is afraid of alienating her right wing audience lest they spend their money elsewhere. By doubling down on her anti-trans values she seeks to reinforce her audience, reminding them she is indeed attuned to their wants. In doing so, she turns her back on the core demographic who made her rich in the first place, gutting them of a central part of their identity. Rowling clearly does not care, neither do her publishers and other financial backers.

Potter alone would be a tragedy, but it is her Comoran Strike books where the real Rowling emerges, a writer devoid of any empathy towards trans folk, and using her bestselling novels to further attack a vulnerable minority. This personal power play is obvious and in plain sight, and the fact the novels have been turned into a TV series clearly shows that there is a willing audience for such spite. Where once was a boy under the stairs, now there is a man on a mission to spread transphobia and fear. Rowling clearly does not care about how people perceive her anti-trans values, otherwise she would have not written two books where trans women are the antagonists. Indeed, those characters are cyphers for the travails she has experienced due to her transphobia, grist for her money-making mill.

Unlike writer such as Card and Ayn Rand, where the right-wing pipeline is clearly, Rowling still does not perceive herself as sitting on the political right. Indeed, for her attacking trans rights is simply upholding liberal values and freedom of speech, hence why she gave £70,000 to For Women Scotland’s legal fund. She also finds succour in Matt Walsh, and gave flowers to Marilyn Manson, not exactly guilting the liberal lily here. For all her professed progressive values, the reality is that she has always been small c conservative, while happy to appear liberal to her young audience. Magic is cool, until you realise that the hierarchy in the Wizarding world is still inherently patriarchal and exclusionary no matter how many muggles become magic users. For all of Hermione’s words, it is the male characters who are champions. No subversion, women are simply the support staff allowing the men to succeed. Again.

And it is telling that Rowling’s tweets rarely, if ever, support actual issues impacting women around the globe. No call for a ceasefire in Palestine, no aid for Ukrainian refugees, no railing against the UK’s proposed Rwanda bill. Indeed, the only thing she deigns to talk about is a handful of trans women who have irked her. Rowling’s power has not softened her values, it has made her exclusionary and jaundiced in her worldview, someone who only sees the world through her trauma lens. In doing so she has indeed broken all the Potter hearts, reducing the seemingly progressive books into the actual conservative values they always were.

Rowling is also litigious, going after anyone she believes has libelled or slandered her in public. UK newspapers regularly treat her ex cathedra, her words delivered with little critique or negative commentary. As such, while online she is treated to heavy critique of her views, the wider world only sees sales charts, Pottermore, the tanking Fantastic Beasts franchise, and hack novels grinding whatever axe she wishes in a given moment. Any public dissent against her beliefs and values is treated as confected noise without any real engagement of the issues at hand, leaving Rowling with her platform intact.

All of this matters because she is using her position to punch down on trans women, who make up less than 0.5% of the UK population. Attacking trans rights and trans individuals results in her being used as the platform for every other transphobe to launch attacks, all of which she blithely ignores when called out on it. It is only when she is called out by individuals with public platforms that she turns around and launches a broadside, at which point a transphobic dogpile emerges. Rowling must be aware of the impact she is having, as why else does she choose to engage when she does. Prognosticating about her intentions will always be fruitless, as we are best judging her on her words and actions, all of which point to a deep personal dislike of the trans community rooted in her own personal trauma. Rowling has chosen to become the Queen of broken Potter hearts, and has been crowned as such by many of her former fans.