Disclaimer: I CANNOT speak for all trans people. I CANNOT speak for all Harry Potter fans. I CANNOT speak for all trans Harry Potter fans. I can only speak for myself, and what you are about to read are my personal feelings on JK Rowling, as well as pure facts and logic.
I started reading the Harry Potter books in Kindergarten, and I finished reading the entire series about a year later. Since then, I have read the books about 17 times total, including the narrations by Jim Dale and Stephen Fry. So yes, one could say that I love the Harry Potter books.
Last year, in sixth grade, I was going to write a fan letter to JK Rowling, and I saw all of these comments on Twitter and Fandom calling JK Rowling a TERF. Being the blind-sighted little gay frog that I was, I had no idEA what a TERF was. So, with a bit of Googling, I learned that a TERF is a Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, or someone who says that they are a feminist and therefore are an advocate for women, but really only support cisgendered women! (Cisgendered means those who identify with their sex assigned at birth.) Still, I had no IDEA why anyone in their right mind would call the creator of such a wonderful world a TERF! So I had to do some research.
Oh, by the way, my name is Gigi, and I use they/them pronouns; I am a self-proclaimed ‘Potterhead’ which means that I am a huge fan of Harry Potter and whoop all of my GAYmer’s asses in Harry Potter Trivia.
What I learned in my research was that it all started with this person called Maya Forstater. She worked for a think tank in the UK, and has very strong opinions on what it means to be a woman. She believes that to be a woman, you have to have what are generally known as ‘female’ body parts. She was tweeting daily things that are found as ‘transphobic’ (hatred or fear of trans people) and make me incredibly depressed, to the point where I sometimes lose touch with the world.
Here are a few examples of the things she was tweeting:
You see, she just doesn’t believe in the fundamental idea of transgender people! She truly believes that trans women are men dressing up like women, not women stuck in a man’s body.
If you think that what these tweets are saying makes any sense at all, let me give you a little lesson about sex and gender:
- Biological sex is whether you have a penis or vulva (or something in-between if you’re intersex) and is what is originally put on your birth certificate. It has to do with chromosomes.
- Gender identity is how you identify. For example, I identify as a non-binary person, but I was Assigned Male At Birth, which means that at birth, male was put on my birth certificate.
- ‘Woman’ is a gender identity. It is different than a sex. ‘Woman’ does not pertain to the vulva; it pertains to one’s gender identity.
Now that we have cleared that up, back to Maya. She was tweeting these really offensive things, and the think tank that she worked for sent her a warning email, saying that if she continued doing this, she would lose her privileges. She did not stop. So, after many more weeks of tweeting as well as purposefully misgendering her coworker/refusing to call them by their preferred pronouns, her contract with the company was not renewed.
Here is one statement from Maya Forstater that makes sense for a lot of people, and I want to clear some things up:
Okay, so at a first glance, this may seem like a valid claim. Although, I can say that the vast majority of transgender women aren’t walking around in public waving around their penises, because of something called gender dysphoria, which in the dictionary is “a term that describes a sense of unease that a person may have because of a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity, this sense of unease or dissatisfaction may be so intense it can lead to depression and anxiety and have a harmful impact on daily life.”
Although most trans people do experience gender dysphoria at some point in their life, not all do. The penis is usually the part of the body that trans women feel most uncomfortable with, to the point of using compression underwear, and they aren’t going to go around terrorizing women and young girls when it has taken so long for us to even be able to use the same bathrooms as they do.
Okay, now back to Maya Forstater. Where were we? Oh yes, she just got fired. Here’s where JK Rowling comes in: Maya Forstater was just fired and was hiring a lawyer for her lawsuit against the think tank for gender discrimination, and JK Rowling brought her case to the public by tweeting:
Let’s dissect this: the first few lines sound okay. However, the last line is incredibly wrong and offensive on so many levels. First of all, she was not forced out of her job, she was given multiple reminders and warnings, and was told what she could do to not get fired in the first place. But, she refused. Secondly, she wasn’t “stating that sex is real.” We all know that sex is real. Sex is what you are assigned at birth and what was originally put on your birth certificate. She wasn’t *said in a snooty, sarcastic voice:* “stating that sex is real.” She was incredibly transphobic on Twitter and in her workspace environment, refusing to call a colleague by their preferred pronouns (they/them) and stating that she ‘wouldn’t call a man something that he isn’t.’ And JK Rowling supports her.
JK Rowling supports this person? WHAT?! This person, this creator of a wonderful world that I escape to daily, believes that I and all of my people don’t exist. Wow.
To be clear, it wasn’t just that one tweet. She was silent for a few weeks, and then came out with an essay backing up her transphobia, and further enforcing her TERFieness. Then, just recently, she added a fourth volume to the Cameron Strike series, about a man who dresses up as a woman to seduce his victims, drawing them in with his appearance before murdering them. If that isn’t transphobic, I will eat a raw lobster. (And I don’t like fish.)
This makes me feel like absolute shit. This originally made me almost want to burn my Platinum Edition Platform 9 3/4 Noble Edition Exclusive Harry Potter Boxed Set, but I didn’t. Imagine that your role model, the person who you look up to and always have, suddenly shouts in your face that they hate you and you don’t exist and don’t deserve basic human rights.
When I think about JK Rowling’s transphobia/TERFs, I feel lonely inside. I don’t feel adequate, I feel like I don’t matter. I feel stuck between love for Harry Potter and hatred for JK’s TERFiness. No one should have to feel this way.
Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint all spoke out against JK Rowling, supporting transgender people and apologizing to those who were hurt by her transphobia. This is amazing, and makes me feel alot better when I’m reading about JK Rowling.
I hope you enjoyed this, it took months to formulate all of these ideas, and I have been pondering these hateful comments for almost a year.
For more writing, check out my blog: quarantineoccasional.com.
