This is specifically asking about how your enjoyment of the work has changed based on your knowledge of the author's politics. Vote based on that, not based on whether you think the quality of the work itself has gone down.

TERF = trans exclusionary radical feminist. JK Rowling has been very openly anti-transgender in recent years and has poured unfathomable amounts of money into funding anti-trans legislation in the UK.

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Exactly this, exactly this.

Some of her ideas were still bad to say the least but I don’t think she was quite as bad as she is now.

She ain't even subtle anymore lmao

had these images attached

she's outright saying she believes queer people are murderers when all we want is to be treated equal. from the murders of queer people, we know murder does not create equality

What happens when someone who is deeply antisemetic and racist writes Wizard Hitler and "slavery is Good Actually" plotlines. It's always been unhinged, folks. It's just harder to hide now than it was back then.

I've rarely seen a more validating sentence in my entire life.

The funniest thing about people like this is when they act "disturbed" by the hate theyre getting while simultaneously ignoring how much THEY disturb their surroundings

Mercury Stardust on TikTok a great example of a trans woman discussing this problem and exactly why you shouldn't support JK R*wling in a way I think is simplified enough for ppl to understand- it doesn't matter if you enjoy the world or the books, the money actively supports her and goes towards anti trans legislation in the UK. Worth a watch.

i think what many people fail to realize about hp as a whole is that it has reached 100% cultural saturation. everyone has either seen the movies, read the books, or at the very least, they have some vague understanding of the overarching story line. but, still, most people are unaware of jkr’s vial bigotry, unless they are both: chronically online and in our hp-related/fandom adjacent spaces. i was actually having a conversation with a co-worker today who had no idea about jkr’s views/the active damage they have caused. yet, she’s not only queer, but also an ally to the trans community. and i think a lot of the people who go out of their way to send anon hate do so with a “white-lens” view of advocacy. that is not to say that every hater on the internet is a white person, but what i mean to say is: most of these individuals have never actually done the tedious and often exhausting work that real advocacy calls for.

it reminds me of when people think they can hastily plan for a strike, where they publicly announce that they are going to stop financially supporting a multi-billion dollar corporation for three days and assume that will “hit them where it hurts” and incite significant change. when, in reality, advocacy takes months of planning and preparation and prioritizes the needs of vulnerable populations first. people are reasonably angry, but they fail to turn that anger into action because our society as a whole makes “on the ground” advocacy work seemingly impossible.

what we do here in fandom where we dissect, pick apart, inspect, and transform canon from a critical lens or create joy and inspire imagination are quite literally revolutionary tools, and i say that with no exaggeration. this is not a new idea, in fact, it is something black activists, trans women of color, and other marginalized populations have been saying for decades.

i don’t believe fandom spaces are inherently revolutionary and i don’t think they are the end all be all of advocacy work, but i do believe them necessary specifically because they incite joy and create space for imagination. instead of a breeding ground for revolutionaries, they are a "practice-ground" for these revolutionary tools. they allow us to deconstruct the things that have caused harm and transform them into something joyful and imaginative, which is important because it does not erase the reality of what exists, but instead, allows us to engage with it under a new lens.

to want to denounce and erase all media for how problematic it is would be to disengage with works that have both failed us and brought us to where we are today. popular fiction and culture is a powerful reflection of social problems, and to erase them is to both denounce how far we've come, but also to leave us with nothing to look back on. what would the world look like if we had nothing to reflect upon? nothing to consider? nothing to dissect and say: this is what we've gotten right so far and here is what we've done wrong. it is specifically why disney+ has not removed content that is blatantly racist media, but instead added a black screen with words that read: "this program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions" with the stated intention of sparking conversations about harmful stereotypes. while disney is not a shining example of allyship, this corporation has still managed to grasp an important concept: to erase, denounce, and disengage with content that is problematic is to remove examples of racism, transphobia, xenophobia and disallow the critical conversations that fandom spaces can be host to.

when we erase examples, and therefore critiques of these things, we stop being able to identify them, becoming first oblivious and then desensitized to tropes and stereotypes that find its way into the imagery of the world around us, even when they are right in front of us.

big thank you to @saintgarbanzo for your input and for helping me find the courage i needed to post this

louder for the people in the back

"what we do here in fandom where we dissect, pick apart, inspect, and transform canon from a critical lens or create joy and inspire imagination are quite literally revolutionary tools, and i say that with no exaggeration. this is not a new idea, in fact, it is something black activists, trans women of color, and other marginalized populations have been saying for decades."

don't leave these in the tags @the-starryknight

Two transphobic horrors mocking someone’s PTSD.

Worth mentioning that JK Rowling is currently using her clout to oppose Gender Recognition Act reform in Scotland because of her hatred of trans people.

Unfollow her, stop consuming the merchandise that makes her wealthier. She’s drop 25,000 followers over the course of the weekend because of her repugnant views.

tags via @cosmic-day

real actual kirby anime footage of meta knight punching jk rowling. i cant make this up truth is stranger then fiction. also, jk rowling turns into a wolf and then blows up and dies

THAT WAS THE PART THAT WAS MADE UP?!

on the concept of ‘death of the author’ and JK rowling, by someone with a degree in literature who’s a fan of harry potter

ok, so i’m a fan of harry potter and, in part, that’s the reason why i have a degree in literature today. this series of books was fundamental to my trajectory as a reader, and to my decision of learning english at all. i’m grateful to harry potter and its universe; the friends i’ve made because of this series, and the ideas it’s given me throughout my life; the way it’s fueled my creativity and passion for writing all these years.

that said, i think it’s time to talk about the relationship between a work and its author. what roland barthes meant in his 1967 article was to incite people to abandon a traditional way of interpreting art work which connected a work’s interpretation directly to its author’s biography and intentions. in (perhaps overly) simplified terms, what that meant was that someone who wanted to truly interpret a work of art had to find out what the author had “truly meant” by it, and should dig into that author’s life and experiences to figure that out.

that made the interpretation options very narrow. it didn’t allow people to propose new theories about a piece of writing because there was a “correct” one, and that was the thing to strive for when reading something.

so what barthes advocated for was a reading that took into consideration that a text wasn’t a product of a single person’s ideas, but of centuries of culture that just “came to be” thanks to that author. that meant that a good piece of art (one that was worthy of being read and interpreted) was made of layers and layers of meaning and cultural background. and reading it critically would always be an enriching experience, because there would always be something else to find there.

which takes us back to harry potter, and JKR’s constant adding to the series, even after some of the books have been out for over 20 years.

(i’m choosing not to get into how late stage capitalism plays into this, or else we’d be here forever, but please keep in mind that JKR is the first novel writer to ever become a billionaire; and you don’t make billions just by selling some books people have forgotten about. she’s got several movie franchises, merchandise, games, etc going on, and that’s a big thing in this story, but we’re here to talk about books, so. back to that!)

in my humble opinion, barthes’ proposition makes a lot of sense. it democratises the interpretation of books; it makes them bigger than what their authors intended to do with them. and when you’re talking about harry potter specifically, there are things in the series that did not just appear there because JKR wanted them to, but despite what she wanted.

a third person narrator focused closely on harry tells us all about how attractive he finds men all the time. harry notices and has many opinions about cedric’s, bill’s, charlie’s, draco’s, and even sirius’ looks. it’s all there. and a critical reader may very easily argue that pointing out how attractive a man looks is... something a person who’s attracted to men would do. that’s something the text allows you to do. the literary evidence is all there.

remember the cultural tidbits part, though? that’s over there, too. the money thirsty, morally condemnable race that runs banks just happens to have long hooked noses. i honestly doubt that JKR consciously decided to be anti-semitic in her world. but it slipped. the heinous jewish stereotypes were lurking in the back of her mind and came forward when she was writing, despite what she might’ve wanted to include in her text.

so my point is: we, as a fandom, have already killed the “entity of the author” that is JKR, in a literary sense (legit science over here, btw). we’ve been reading and rereading her work for 20 years and finding out new things to pick apart every day.

what we need to do now is remember that, as critical readers, we are entitled to the opinions we have. we’re entitled to point out the contradictions, the bigotry, and the lack of representation that is a part of this text.

so TL;DR: you’re allowed to enjoy harry potter. you’re entitled to have opinions about it. JKR could have gracefully accepted that her views were a product of the time and the culture she was exposed to, and that her work was not perfect. instead, she chose to pretend to be “woke” to get our money. and now she’s come out as a blatant transphobe.

so fuck her. death to her opinions and her one holy interpretation. we’re all about being plural and inclusive around here. that’s what death of the author is about.

bringing this back as it’s (sadly) still relevant

that JK rowling is capable of multiple kinds of transphobia post i mentioned at 6 am this morning

alright, 17 minutes till i gotta leave the house to go to work. let’s see if i can get this done before then. 

this is definitely something other people have talked about before, so it’s not like i’m all that creative with new ideas but it IS something that bothers me so. here’s my thoughts. 

a lot of people, at least from what I’ve seen online, tend to just ignore JK Rowling’s transphobia specifically targeted at trans men and that’s a problem. 

now: to be clear - is she a transmisogynist? Absolutely. Let’s just knock that one out of the way. It’s impossible to deny that when she’s written a book specifically preying off of a transmisogynistic lie that trans women are predators. 

so, to be absolutely certain ya’ll don’t miss this: She is absolutely transmisogynistic and she is absolutely a problem that needs to be dealt with in that aspect. 

the problem, for me, lies in that she is ALSO transandrophobic to trans mascs and trans men, especially in regards to autistic trans mascs/men, and it is quite frankly, what I would call obsessive. 

and a lot of people. online at least, tend to ignore that. 

The most prominent time I can recall is her terf letter. She was very clear she thought autistic trans men were unable to actually decide if they were trans - that we’d been lured in, seduced, whatever you want to call it. She said that “girls” were being lied to and convinced that dysphoria was their problem, and that the “truth” was that they just hated how society treats women (….sound familar? that’s terf rhetoric. right there, that is terf rhetoric.) and they want to escape it. 

Neverminded the fact that we try living as girls and being cheered on with “girl power!”, “girls run the world!” and other encouragement in that vein. Is it necessarily all good? No, but there is not an entire absence of encouragement for girls to be girls even if it’s in untraditional ways that would explain the trans men we see today. 

Hey, Rowling, I tried living as a girl for 19 years. I tried being a spiteful girl who told the world to not tell me what to do because of my gender. 

And it still didn’t fit right because I am not one. 

So Rowling spreads the lie that we can’t decide for ourselves who we are because we’re autistic, and we’re mentally incapable of it, and therefore can’t declare ourselves boys, men - not a girl. 

that’s not targeting trans women. that’s targeting us. 

and when we get ignored, speaking out, when we get told that she’s obssesed with trans women, which I won’t deny she’s obssesed with them too, it is frustrating. i’ve seen that. 

but the damage she is responsible for to trans mascs and trans men in the UK alone? do you really think what she had to say about us didn’t have any influence on how gender clinics are now all but available to younger trans kids? do you think she had no impact on legal situations, do you think her tweets didn’t influence how public opinion and honestly legal outcomes resulted (because the people behind that ARE influenceable). 

Please just acknowledge what’s she’s doing to us. Please stop ignoring the hurt she’s causing us, and please stop telling us she’s only talking about trans women. 

If you look at her tweets, her letters, her public releases, you can’t ignore the focus on us that’s there too. 

She’s capable and proven she’s able to obsess and hate all of us. Please, stop trying to help her in her crusade against trans men, even unintentionally. 

Yes and also that attitude towards autistic people specifically is really pernicious.

Miss Jowling Kowling Rowling (1) is transphobic, (2) is islamophobic, and (3) thinks that when you eat halal meat it leaves detectable traces of halal residue in your stomach

(Walking into the kebab shop) Oi, boss, gimme one wit extra residue

THAT'S NOT HOW HALAL WORKS

@rosenrath I hope it's okay if I reply to your comment via reblog, because it reminded me of a video I watched a while ago and I couldn't link it in the comments.

I think things are more a bit more complicated than "whoever believes that trans and cis women are different is a transphobe". In fact, many transphobes use this exact argument—that trans people believe their biology is exactly the same as that of cis people—to discredit us, when in reality, trans people are very aware of their biology.

Here's the link to the video I mentioned, in case you or anyone wants to hear more about this. (The minute is 18:37, but I really recommend watching the entire video if you have the time, because it gives really good reasons as to why JKR's tweet—the one about Forstater—is transphobic).

JKR is a terf and furthermore she’s cordially invited to eat my ass. For further clarification, see 1. JKR is following other terfs 2. Trans people have said JKR is clearly a terf multiple times and 3. JKR parrots terf talking points. Being a terf is an indefensible stance predicated on transphobia. The only reason she doesn’t self identify as a terf is because terfs think being called a trans exclusionary radical feminist is a “””slur””” She’s still a terf and still perpetuates harm against trans people whether she believes or says that’s her intention or not. Happy to explain how if this is confusing. Evergreen reminder that identifying JKR for what she is, a terf, and identifying terfs as violent to trans people by nature of their beliefs isn’t controversial and this blog is run by a trans person and is for trans people and trans allies! I will do this as many times as some of you fucking clowns make me do it!