There’s a new Harry Potter show out, and honestly, if I didn’t have to keep tabs on pop culture for work, I probably wouldn’t even know. I’ve never been the type to lose myself in fandoms, but I’ve met plenty of “Potterheads” over the years. They’re whimsical, sure, and I can appreciate that, but I can’t help but side-eye the folks who are still clinging to J.K. Rowling’s universe. It’s wild to watch Rowling go from dropping hints about her views to openly bankrolling groups that want to make life harder for trans people. For all the queer kids who saw themselves in Hogwarts, it’s hard to ignore that the same universe is now funding some of the worst villains in their real lives. After a series of successful books, video games, and films, the series is being revamped for a new, younger audience to tell the story more faithfully, with a much more politically compliant cast. Like Tom Felton, who returns to this new HBO series, many millennials refuse to move on from Harry Potter. If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m less than sympathetic towards this genre of person, who have made it clear that they will always place their love of media above the survival of their trans neighbors.

@mr_bluddI’m getting backlash, because I like the New Harry Potter Show #harrypotter #jkrowling #transgender #voiceactor #fyp

When this TikTok video by Bludd Rush came into my feed, it both surprised me and it didn’t. As a transgender content creator, I’ve been talking about stuff like this for so long that it often feels like a conversation I’ve had many times before, because I have. However, his rant provides a great foundation for responding to many people who have found themselves at odds with how some people feel about those who continue to watch Harry Potter after JK Rowling has made her stance even clearer. So I figured I would use it to frame my general thoughts about JK Rowling and the idea of ethical consumption under capitalism. I’ll respond by quoting him, and then following it up with my response.

Here’s what I wish more people understood about bias: it doesn’t just show up as outright hate. Sometimes, it’s about who gets to be seen as fully human. For trans people, that can mean being targeted with violence or shut out of spaces, but it can also look like being put on a pedestal; treated as some kind of symbol instead of a person. I’ve seen this in the way people talk about trans women, praising us for having a “more beautiful” understanding of womanhood, as if we exist only within their range of understanding. It’s easy to throw out a ‘yas queen’ or say you love trans people, but it’s a lot harder to actually make space for us in your life. It takes real work to truly examine a bias you’ve been socialized into that often encourages you to view the marginalized person as an inherently unfaithful narrator of their own lives. It’s one thing to shout your support for theoretical trans people online; it’s another to actually see us, listen to us, and recognize when, despite your best efforts, you are indeed still causing harm. I’m immediately struck by the fact that within this video, his criticism is primarily for trans people, not the billionaire funding their oppression. What does your allyship really mean when you insist upon supporting the work of an openly transphobic person?

JK Rowling has openly supported and defended people who seek to harass transgender employees. So to spell it out, Rowling is not only defending the right for transgender people to be discriminated against in employment, but she’s also defending their right to be excluded from many of the social services they may need once they’ve lost their employment, if they’re able to secure it, which most of us aren’t. Then, in addition to that, she’s writing books under a male pseudonym that just so happens to be the same name as a pioneer in anti-LGBT conversion therapy about crossdressed killers who may or may not have been transgender women. So she’s feeding cultural bias and defending it financially. She’s getting paid on both ends.

It’s not lost on me that as trans people are fighting for our lives, Rowling’s empire just keeps growing. Books, movies, theme parks, now a TV show! There’s always something new for fans to latch onto, even if it means looking the other way while real harm is being done. I’m not here to say that watching Harry Potter automatically makes you a bad person. But when I see how loudly Rowling has broadcast her bigotry, and how many people just shrug and keep watching, I’m confident their genocide will be successful. You’ve got grown men fighting tooth and nail for their right to watch the same derivative story they’ve already been told, who truly believe that JK Rowling’s financial support of transphobia shouldn’t be a big deal to trans people; and that we should trust them and their intentions. As those who harm us are humanized, those who suffer beneath them are dehumanized for standing up for themselves.

This video by Bludd was heavily criticized, and the only person who got him to shift some of his thoughts…was a cis man. Not the hundreds of trans people who communicated to him that they did not feel supported by him- a cis man. Bludd only liked comments from trans people who affirmed his own feelings about the show. You’re always going to find marginalized people who are eager to prove how submissive they are to the dominant narrative, and many of them are willing to loan their identity to rehabilitate the image of those who hold power over them. Finding the rare minority that agrees with you is tokenization, which is still a form of dehumanization that comes from transphobia. You should expect that trans people will feel more than one way about various things. But like many cis people, he’s not very interested in humanizing trans people beyond how they fit into his narrative. You know how much he loves them by how few of them he wants to listen to.

People love to say there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, and sure, that’s true. But let’s be real: most of the time, folks only bring that up when they’re defending something they just really want, not something they actually need. Take anime, for example. I think a lot of us could benefit from looking more closely at our relationship with it. Japan’s history is full of violence and colonization, but you wouldn’t know it from the way anime gets packaged and sold to us: cute, sparkly, and sanitized. It’s easy to forget the messier truths when you’re caught up in the fantasy.

The mention of anime was almost too perfect for me, as a former weeaboo. When I was a teenager, the coolest butch girl I knew at school introduced me to Rurouni Kenshin. She gave me some of her Manga, and eventually I made my way to the anime, and then ultimately the live-action movies. I have tons of red-haired original characters with questionable facial scars because I enjoyed Kenshin so much growing up. I have fond memories of myself curled up in a corner somewhere in my hometown, reading and falling in love with this character and those books. However, in 2017, the author of Kenshin, Nobuhiro Watsuki, was charged with having an obscene amount of child sexual abuse material. After I heard that, my fondness for the character completely faded, but I know it isn’t that easy for many people. Since his arrest, there have been several additional adaptations of his stories, and he’s still well celebrated by even some well-respected names in the anime industry, such as Eiichiro Oda, the creator of One Piece, who previously worked under him. Ultimately, Nobuhiro Watsuki was charged 200,000 yen (about 1,900 USD) and went back to making manga the following year even though he had enough child abuse imagery for authorities to suspect he was distributing it.

Japan isn’t unique in the way it treats women and children; most places in the world still have a long way to go. And sure, stories like Kenshin or Harry Potter can take on a life of their own, separate from their creators. But that’s not the same as asking whether supporting these franchises helps keep the door open for the same old biases. As long as the author is alive and cashing the checks, they’re benefiting. It’s a lot easier to separate art from artist when the artist isn’t around to profit or push their agenda. Right now, Rowling is very much alive and using her influence to hurt trans people. She’s not the only one. There’s a pattern here: the more I pay attention, the more I notice how often powerful people excuse or even enable harm. At some point, you have to wonder if that’s just how they keep their power.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying Rowling is the same as someone who collects child abuse material. But both situations have made people rethink their relationship with these franchises. If you’re a diehard fan, it’s worth asking yourself if your support is being used to fund hate. To me, JK Rowling is a pretty clear cut example as she is proudly and openly anti trans, but I get why people love Harry Potter. It’s the themes, the world-building, the nostalgia. Watching the new show doesn’t automatically make you a transphobe, but folks like Bludd Rush need to realize that plenty of trans people see supporting Rowling as crossing a line, and that’s a valid reason to step back from you. Trans people are so often dehumanized that we are villainized for rejecting even those who wish us harm.

When you’re deeply stigmatized for something you can’t change, society often decides you’re not worth saving. Making healthcare so expensive that only the most privileged can access it isn’t an accident. It’s taboo to discuss in mixed company, but many people do indeed want people of color to receive so little social and financial support that they simply pass away and their population shrinks. That is a long, repeated history in this country, and it’s why insurance is so expensive, healthcare isn’t universal, and education is financially inaccessible. Because a sizable portion of the population does not want the marginalized to have access to these things and survive.

Everything is political, and the stories that get greenlit are an outgrowth of the politics that those in power want to promote. There’s a reason why Harry Potter’s queer representation is an afterthought. There’s a reason why the white main character gets to be distinct while most of the characters of color are racial stereotypes. There’s a reason the audience was angered the few times they made Hermione Black, and this current iteration where they’ve decided to make Snape Black as well. Within a white supremacist culture, you’re only meant to see the white cis characters as layered and complex, and there’s a reason some hold empathy for white Hermione while remaining repulsed by the premise of black Hermione, regardless of the original character description. These things don’t exist in a vacuum.

It’s worth asking why Bludd Rush, a Black man, is so invested in defending a world where people who look like him barely exist. I’m sure he has his reasons, but it says a lot when white authors build entire universes and barely include people of color. If you scroll through Bludd’s content, you’ll see he’s deep into fandoms with the same problem, and he’s proud of his collection of nerdy memorabilia. When he talks about Harry Potter, he brings up the money he’s spent on wands as if that justifies his attachment. But at the end of the day, some of that money goes straight to Rowling, who uses it to hurt trans people. He has decided that his desire to sit in his room and wave a shiny piece of plastic around holds more value than trans lives that are negatively impacted by Rowling’s direct work with transphobic organizations.

Rush says he has a trans friend he cares about, but I wonder if he realizes that Rowling would be the first to back someone who wanted to fire her just for being trans. With her support of Maya Forstater, Rowling made it clear she wants to make life harder for trans people at work and cut us off from the help we’d need if we lost our jobs. The truth is, people like Rowling want a world without us in it. The ultimate goal of people like Rowling is indeed our death. Rowling does not want to live in a universe where transgender people exist, and you are indeed partially helping that come to fruition; not necessarily because you’re watching a show based on her IP, but because you are demonstrating through your support of it that you will do very little to oppose our genocide.

Maybe I’m missing it, but as far as books go, Harry Potter is perfectly average. I can see why it appeals so universally, since its narrative isn’t very polarizing; it’s derivative and full of predictable tropes, and in my opinion, not worth the lives of the transgender people targeted by Rowling’s hatred. The world Rowling has created is one many have lost themselves in, and I do occasionally wish they’d find their way out of Hogwarts and read…almost any other book. I have a fond memory of being at CSSSA (California State Summer School of the Arts) in 2007 when the 7th book came out. All the kids went to the bookstore to line up for their copy, and I stayed home, working on whatever I was working on then. In a way, I felt like a hater, and I wondered for a bit if perhaps I was missing out. However, I’m honestly quite happy I don’t have whatever strain of obsession the remaining Potterheads still have that has allowed them to put their enjoyment of this book over the survival of their transgender neighbors.

It’s clear to me that for far too many people, their identity has been replaced by what they consume; and what’s a bit interesting about the Harry Potter fandom is that I actually don’t think JK Rowling is what most of them enjoy about it. Rowling created a world that many people have inserted themselves into, and I’d estimate that many people appreciate not Rowling’s writing, but their own. The one thing I’ll give Harry Potter, and most fandoms, is that it does occasionally remind people of what is often the most powerful tool against the billionaires who want to divide us with culture war topics: community. For many queer fans of the series, community is what they got from being a Potterhead, and it’s how they found other queerdios who somehow saw themselves in that special boy with a lightning bolt scar on his forehead. I understand the emotional pull the series has on many, but I do wish they’d recognize that the author likely resents your interpretations of these characters, and in her real life, she’s much closer to the “who shall not be named” than to her own empathetic, self-insert character. I hope more Potterheads come to recognize that the thing they value about this fandom can, and probably should, exist independent of it. Transgender people are not being divisive for wanting the content creators who’ve stated they are pro-trans to remain consistent in their politics. It’s actually quite easy to privately enjoy the series without villainizing the trans people who correctly point out that supporting JK Rowling’s legacy has a directly negative impact on them, especially in the UK.

The truth is, JK Rowling’s transphobia fits right in with the long-term goals of far-right politicians everywhere. We’re seeing politicians all over the world cling to this idea of Western masculinity, where women are always seen as weaker and lesser than men. Bioessentialism is all about defining women as inferior by default. Just look at the way people talk about Lindsey Clancey, who killed her own children while experiencing postpartum. Instead of talking about the long history of cis male violence, people fixate on this one woman’s actions as proof that all women are dangerous because of their biology. They act like this one thing suddenly made them distrust women in leadership, but let’s be real; they were always looking for a reason not to vote for a woman. It sounds wild, but that’s genuinely how they think. Science has always tried to put those born female at the bottom, and that same thinking is behind the rejection of trans women in sports. This isn’t new; it’s just louder now because the culture war is a useful distraction from how billionaires are currently ruining our society. Transgender people are the perfect scapegoat in a culture that sees their existence as an inherent violation of the patriarchal order.

No matter how you feel about trans women in sports, let’s be real: most of the people complaining about “men in women’s sports” never cared about women’s sports in the first place. They’re uninterested because women are the ones playing. The Obama era made a lot of people forget that we’ve always lived in a deeply sexist culture, and it’s only been a short blip in history where women have had any real freedom to make their own choices. There are way too many people who want to drag us back to a time when women had no options outside of a man. The folks pretending to care about women’s sports aren’t fighting for its funding, and they’re not supporting women earning money through sports. They want things back to “normal,” where women are just pregnant until they can’t be anymore, and every move against abortion, education, healthcare, you name it, is about forcing women into a corner where a man seems like the only way out. Rowling’s campaign against Imane Khelif showed the white supremacist undertones of her transphobia. Khelif didn’t fit the white beauty standard, so she was accused of being a trans woman; and I say accused, because of course it would be a bad thing if she were. If you really pay attention to Rowling, you’ll see transphobia is just one of many biases she holds.

For me, transphobia will always represent the bottom of a tiered list of biases. Gender essentialism requires a type of misogyny that frequently defines everything that contradicts or challenges patriarchal structures. It manifests in homophobia, where people are punished for having an attraction that violates the gender essentialist idea that all women are attracted to men and vice versa. It manifests in transphobia, where people are shamed for not assimilating into their assigned gender at birth and acting accordingly. And with Imane Khelif, there’s the misogyny of judging her womanhood through her proximity to beauty, coupled with the racism of that white beauty standard, which isn’t remotely attainable for most women of color and is, in fact, designed as a tool to control white women themselves. I don’t think white women like Rowling frequently have an awareness of how they are complicit in reinforcing patriarchal structures that maintain the very things they claim to oppose. To me, Rowling has the illness of supremacy, and it shows up in her activism and her world-building. On a deeper level, I think the consumer should ask themselves whether or not it’s particularly useful for them to remain in a state of arrested development, clinging desperately to nostalgia over something that was, in truth, just okay. I think the Bludd Rushes of the world should recognize that stuff like this is small in the larger scheme of things, and the fact that you fight so desperately to cling to it makes it incredibly clear that your support of transgender people is entirely conditional; and I don’t think it’s unfair to say someone who feels that way isn’t an ally.