NAIT’s Book Lovers Club is hosting a Harry Potter Reading Adventure, and I have complicated feelings about it. I’m a Queer millennial who falls somewhere on the nonbinary spectrum, so for me the J.K. Rowling of it all has been a constant source of disappointment.
I went through pretty much every stage of grief when Rowling began to reveal herself. I think I can chart the beginning of her descent when she began tweeting about wizard poop and that Dumbledore was in fact gay the whole time, probably for “woke points” back when that was desirable.
She Who Must Not Be Named has been vocally anti-trans for a while. She’s part of a wave of political types that have made the transgender identity a talking point, distracting from pertinent issues like the ongoing cost of living crisis. She’s even set up a women’s fund described as “a legal fund for women protecting their sex-based rights.” Translation: the dollars spent on her books go straight to making the lives of an extremely vulnerable group even harder.
The facts are, folks on the transgender spectrum are a vulnerable minority group statistically more likely to die by suicide. Sources like the Mental Health Commission of Canada cite that 1 in 3 trans youth may attempt suicide yearly and are up to four times more likely to experience violent hate crime, according to the Willams Institute.
Scare points lobbied against this community are baseless at best. According to the United States Sentencing Commission, most sex offenders are white men. In fact, Statistics Canada states that transgender Canadians are more likely than cisgender Canadians to be victims of violence and unwanted sexual behaviours from others. There’s a higher chance the kind of crap agitators like Rowling are worried about is happening in their church than from a transgender person.
One of the best take downs of Rowling’s hypocrisy comes from the singular Jinkx Monsoon, a drag performer and actress. She says, “I know that oftentimes, female authors use initials so that people assume it’s a male writer. So I have to presume that J.K. Rowling was unsatisfied with the way that the world saw her, and then she transitioned herself into a new personality so that the world would perceive her the way she wanted to be perceived.”
Almost 20 years after Rowling published the final Harry Potter novel, most of her identity now revolves around questioning the identities of others. The series comes with a lot of baggage now, to say the least.
So, is it okay to read her books? Great question. The short answer is “yes.” My brother once asked me a similar question about the Harry Potter video game. My advice for him was the same that it is for you: buy a used copy. That way you’re not contributing to a real, actual fund engineered to further the disproportionate suffering of a marginalized group.
The more interesting question is: can you separate a work from its author? It’s a question that has been written about for as long as we’ve had literary theory, and as you can imagine, every possible opinion exists.
Sure, the content of the book itself can be questionable, with racist overtones in characters like Cho Chang and the child abuse Harry continues to be subject to every summer from the Dursleys. The stereotypes and cruelty makes me wonder what kind of person Rowling is.
But what if the series is your comfort book? Maybe sometimes you read it in the wee hours of the night, after a particularly stressful accounting exam, and it just feels like home. It’s nostalgic; it reminds you of a time when things were simpler and it gives you a small spark of joy. That’s fine. Finding joy in the present circumstance is important. No one can, nor should, take that away from you.
We exist in a multifaceted world where both of those things can be true. The series can be your personal comfort while being morally questionable to purchase given the bad acts of its author. In other words: maybe you can separate a work from its author. But by the same token, I’d rather not contribute my hard-earned-dollar to a billionaire with some seriously unresolved issues.
I’m sure there’s no malicious intent behind the book club organizing this reading event. Still, I can’t help but sit back and scratch my head and think: it’s 2026 in the year of our saviour Heated Rivalry and we’re still platforming her?
There are so many other series out there. Off the top of my head, some series with a similar vibe might be Bridge to Terabithia, His Dark Materials, Redwall, Worst Witch and Wrinkle in Time.
So, if you ask me, and if you really want my honest opinion, I think it’s far past time we let the wizarding books go. Bye, Felicia! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. At the same time, I know it’s hard to close the door completely. I’ve kept my childhood copies on my bookshelf. But maybe 2026 is the year we start reading different magical series; ones that will give us that same cozy nostalgia when we look at our college-aged bookshelf years later.
Feature image with files from Angel Sanchez via Unsplash
