this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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I'm sorry, but as a cis heterosexual man who has trans friends and has turned away from all things Harry Potter and JK Rowling in utter disgust, this strikes me as attempting to ignore the obvious transphobia of the TERF author in the hope of keeping your head in the sand and residing in a place of nostalgia solely because transgendered people aren't the majority.
I get your desire to grow the Fediverse, but if you want to create a community around a fandom, perhaps you should choose a piece of media that embraces inclusion rather than one that is simply popular?
Stop looking into your past fandoms with nostalgic rose tinted glasses, acknowledge that you can't have Hogwartz without the hatred, and find media that is straight up more inclusive.
Holy fuck. I like Harry Potter and want to speak about it, so what? Because JK made a few announcements? Words do damage and I get that it's already hard being trans and she isn't helping. But acting like this is just building more walls, dividing an already fucked humankind for no good reason.
I respect anyone's choice to be trans, but then you'll have to let me discuss HP without judgement as well. And if you won't, then you're the problem. Because I will still respect anyone trans, but I won't respect you.
Seems like a pretty good to reason.
And choice to be trans? I dunno if it’s a choice anymore than I “choose” to love the same sex.
I don't mean you can't choose to stay clear of HP yourself. What I'm hinting at is that you can disassociate with a group without the drama. HP fans aren't all bigots, that's obvious right? I like Wagner's music, I'm not a fucking Nazi. It's such a weird hill to die on with everything going on.
It's not the point, and I hope you got that but just couldn't leave without slapping my wrist.
Yeah words matter. But thanks for clarifying it wasn't your point.
Nobody's gonna call you a Nazi for liking Wagner. But I will say you like Hitler's favorite musician and if you start hanging out with other Wagner enthusiasts, you might very well find yourself in the company of Nazis. Sure they aren't all Nazis, and I'm sure that if you were to find out some or most of them were , you'd rightly distance yourself from the group. Right?
My original argument isn't about the quality of the works in question, it's about whether it's okay to ignore the hateful rhetoric of JKR and the harm she causes trans people with said rhetoric, solely in the interest of creating and engaging in community around her work.
It's insensitive to a group already marginalized in societies at large because to form a community around HP inherently excludes them, not because trans people can't see the value in HP or it's literary quality, but because they can't disassociate the work from the author. JKR is a TERF, has helped spearhead a TERF movement amongst her accolades, targeting trans people specifically with hate speech, all within recent memory.
Additionally, Wagner, while a controversial figure as Hitler's favorite musician, was never explicitly anti-semitic. The same cannot be said of JK Rowling and her transphobic rhetoric. So the comparison isn't quite as astute as you might believe it to be.