One thing that's always bugged me is the way JK gendered wizards and witches in the HP verse. Witchcraft and wizardry are two different kinds of magic, which is what sets them apart, and there can be male witches and female wizards. Yet she kind of just made wizards the male equivilent of witches, which they aren't.
Someone on Quora worded it better than I can:
"Sticking with the Harry Potter analogy, some people insist that wizards are men, and witches are women. These people are incorrect, of course, from a traditional standpoint - a nurse doesn’t stop being a nurse just because he’s a bloke, and a woman doctor is a doctor, not a nurse."
I know, I know, it's just a story. I'll be leaving now.
“This last is the situation, as I see it, between my A Wizard of Earthsea and J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter. I didn’t originate the idea of a school for wizards — if anybody did it was T.H.White, though he did it in single throwaway line and didn’t develop it. I was the first to do that. Years later, Rowling took the idea and developed it along other lines. She didn’t plagiarize. She didn’t copy anything. Her book, in fact, could hardly be more different from mine, in style, spirit, everything. The only thing that rankles me is her apparent reluctance to admit that she ever learned anything from other writers. When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise.“
Q: Nicholas Lezard has written ‘Rowling can type, but Le Guin can write.’ What do you make of this comment in the light of the phenomenal success of the Potter books? I’d like to hear your opinion of JK Rowling’s writing style
UKL: I have no great opinion of it. When so many adult critics were carrying on about the “incredible originality” of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a “school novel”, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
me: bullshit. all the characters went through extreme levels of trauma. i’m not even able to list them all because there are so many. they witnessed deaths, they were forced to kill, they were tortured, not to mention the emotional manipulation done to so many of them. all was not well. shut up.
Do you really support people sending death threats, rape threats and porn to a female author who expressed her worries about the treatment of dysphoric people and the protection of sex based rights? I liked your posts but if you can excuse that, I think I'm out
No, I do not support people sending death threats and rape threats to JKR. I don’t know anything about the porn but I wouldn’t support that either? I don’t excuse those threats. They’re horrible.
I am trying to listen to trans people. Trans people get to decide whether someone/something someone has said is transphobic. I have listened to the many many trans people who have said that JKR is being transphobic.
This is not a one time occurrence but I’m going to mention her most recent tweet regarding an article on ‘people who mentruate’. She made a comment that there’s a name for those people - women. She didn’t apologise but then made a follow up tweet using the good old ‘I know and love trans people, BUT...’
How can you say you love trans people when you’ve just shown them NO respect? She didn’t acknowledge the existence of people who aren’t cis women, who also menstruate. If you know trans people, that isn’t a difficult concept to grasp.
She talked about it being unsafe for women in single-sex spaces. That is NOT a problem because of trans people. That’s a problem because of men who are abusers/r*pists. She talked about trans people like they are the problem and it’s just not true. Could men potentially use the excuse ‘well I’m in this bathroom because I’m trans’? Potentially yes, but again, THAT DOES NOT MAKE IT THE FAULT OF TRANS PEOPLE.
When referring to her worries about the treatment of dysphoric people she made a comparison of transitioning to conversion therapy. If that doesn’t both alarm and disgust you, it should.
{Juno Birch also tweeted: "JK Rowling needs to be quiet immediately she is literally harming the trans community, she apparently just posted the clinic I went to as a child and said that they are experimenting on us, when in fact the Tavistock clinic saved my life.”} (I’ve taken this from an article in the Scotsman)
She says the clinic saved her life.
Anyway I’m going on too much because you shouldn’t be listening to me. Please go and listen to some trans people who have been openly speaking about this.
If you don’t feel any differently after reading my response (and hopefully doing some research) then please unfollow me.
TL;DR
I don’t support the death threats being sent to JKR. She has made transphobic comments and has not apologised or acknowledged the damage she has caused. Listen to trans people when they tell you something is transphobic.
I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this in the wake of JKR’s harmful comments about transgender people. Since that first supposedly ‘clumsy’ moment, I’ve stopped financially supporting the Harry Potter franchise but as JKR’s statements have become increasingly explicit and direct, I want to talk on this further in case it is helpful to people struggling with the same question.
Before I get into it, I want to make it very clear that thoughts on whether you can ‘love the creation and not the creator’ or whether you feel comfy continuing to create in HP fandom are clearly not the pressing issues with JKR’s statements. There is a narrative developing in the UK that has been around for a long time and it is getting ever more dangerous for transgender people the more powerful ‘voices of reason’ speak out against any meaningful gender reform. I will be dropping links at the end of this post for places to donate and offer your time to if you wish.
However, there are many trans allies, queer people and trans people within HP fandom and to ignore that also does a great disservice to the fandom and I wanted to put some thoughts down on that which are my opinions only.
guys im sorry. i know i’ve talked about this. but im still so salty about how jkr treated draco’s character. i will never understand her logic. I just. I genuinely do not get it. How does she see Snape and Regulus as redeemable but not Draco. Both of them did worse things and became Death Eaters entirely by choice. And both of them idolized Voldemort when he was active and not in the abstract whereas Draco idolized Voldemort when he was a concept but as soon as he was confronted with the reality he was horrified.
And yet Rowling somehow sees him as belonging in a separate category. To the point where she says that fans who want to see his redemption arc acknowledged are harboring “unhealthy fantasies.”
Even tho Draco, like Snape and Regulus ultimately rejected the ideologies he was raised to believe in and turned against them at great risk to himself. I just ??? Was she that threatened by the concept of drarry? Is that why she couldn’t bear to admit that Draco might actually have grown and changed???
do you have sources of radfems saying that they would prefer sex workers to be raped over people who haven't "agreed" to it. also did jkr really write that the centaurs raped umbridge. is there a source
Who’s got the tweet? I know someone who follows me has that tweet.
Wait, of course I reblogged it to my sex work blog:
Sure, this is just one person with at least 84 likes on her tweet but, like.
I scroll through the blogs of the radfems and swerfs and terfs I block. I read the tags. They aren’t super fucking public about it but they, at the very least, have some interesting revenge fantasies about sex workers and the way that sex workers have “betrayed” women.
The Centaur Rape thing is.
Well.
It is contextual and interpretive.
Given Rowling’s clear familiarity with and frequent references to Greek mythology (HMMMMM I wonder if SIRIUS BLACK has anything to do with this black dog following Harry? Does this three-headed dog that is calmed by music have anything to do with the dark lord trying to return from the dead? It’s a hoot that the character named NYMPHadora can change her shape) and her specific references to characteristics of centaurs in Greek mythology (Firenze, excellent educator and astrologer, seems like an homage to Chiron and is held up as a DIRECT FOIL to the way the rest of the Forbidden Forest centaurs interacts with humans) it seems incredibly unlikely that Rowling was not at least *aware* that people familiar with Greek mythology could easily interpret a herd of centaurs making off with a human woman in their forest as a precursor to rape.
(do a google image search for “Nessus + Painting,” for instance)
So, was Umbridge raped by the Centaurs?
Well. I guess that part wasn’t important to Harry’s Journey so that’s an exercise for the reader.
However love potion as date rape drug is 100% for real in canon with both Merope Gaunt and Romilda Vane who are, again, presented as A) Doing the wrong thing but still sympathetic and you should still feel sorry for her because her victim never wanted her and B) Silly Joaks.
Today, Jonno Roberts, Year 2 Draco Malfoy in the Broadway production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Drarry shipper and Scorbus shipper, and all-around amazing actor and human, said “Fuck you too, JK Rowling.”
Rowling making it sound like sexual assault only happens to women and only perpetrated by men when it’s been empirically proven women commit sexual assault at almost the same rate as men. You’d think her being a brit would know the laws in the uk is heavily soft on female offenders which is why you rarely hear women assaulters being exposed.
I find it interesting how love potions are essentially date rape drugs, yet this is overlooked in canon because the brewers are predominantly female and the victims are male. It’s also played for laughs in The Half-Blood Prince when Ron gets spiked instead of Harry by Romilda Vane. Something tells me it wouldn’t be as amusing if the genders were reversed 🤔
Even in PoA where the characters are thirteen and Ginny is twelve, Molly tells Ginny and Hermione about how she made a love potion when she was young. And the only remark about their reaction is:
Rowling making it sound like sexual assault only happens to women and only perpetrated by men when it’s been empirically proven women commit sexual assault at almost the same rate as men. You’d think her being a brit would know the laws in the uk is heavily soft on female offenders which is why you rarely hear women assaulters being exposed.
I find it interesting how love potions are essentially date rape drugs, yet this is overlooked in canon because the brewers are predominantly female and the victims are male. It’s also played for laughs in The Half-Blood Prince when Ron gets spiked instead of Harry by Romilda Vane. Something tells me it wouldn’t be as amusing if the genders were reversed 🤔
Is there anything that makes me happier than the Harry Potter cast basically saying "fuck you JKR" and speaking up against transphobia? The answer is no
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