How J. K. Rowling Became Voldemort

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It has taken two decades, but I am finally ready to admit that I was the world’s most annoying teenager. My parents are Catholic, and I used to delight in peppering them with trollish questions, preferably several hours into a long car journey. “Why does the Mass service refer to God as ‘he’ and ‘father’?” was a favorite. “Does God have a Y chromosome, then? Does God have, like, testicles?” I was openly dismissive about transubstantiation, by which the host is consecrated, and according to Catholic doctrine, literally turns from mere bread into the body of Christ. “But all the atoms stay the same!” I would insist. “That makes no sense!”

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My parents humored me, but predictably, I didn’t find their responses satisfying. Realizing that your omniscient parents are, in fact, just regular, flawed humans is a vital part of growing up. So is learning that their values are different from yours—that they are products of a particular time and place. Ideas and beliefs that they accept without question make no sense to you, and vice versa. As the 20th century ended in the liberal West, the tenets of feminism seemed irrefutable to me: Of course I would go to university and get a job. A family would come later, if at all. (My mother, by contrast, had her first child at 25.) Gay rights were the same: Why on earth couldn’t two men get married? In my 20s, when The God Delusion came out, I bought it immediately. I was proud to call myself an atheist. Religion was nothing but a tool of patriarchal oppression

Younger Millennials—those born around 1990, the same time as Harry Potter’s lead actors Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson—feel just as strongly about transgender rights. To many of them, it is the social-justice cause, their generation’s revolutionary idea. They see little difference between the objections of some older left-wing feminists to the idea that individuals alone decide their gender, and those of social conservatives: Both groups are reactionary, trapped in outdated concepts of what it means to be a man or a woman.

And Millennials dominate the Harry Potter fandom, a community large enough to have spawned hundreds of thousands of pieces of fan fiction. So it is unsurprising that two major fan sites, The Leaky Cauldron and MuggleNet, have distanced themselves from the books’ author, J. K. Rowling, after she argued last month that “woman” should remain a biological category. The two sites announced last week that they will remove her photograph from their sites, stop linking to her website and writing about her other endeavors, and tag Twitter posts that include news about her with the hashtag #JKR, so users can filter out triggering content from their social-media feeds. To preserve their love of Harry Potter, its fans must erase its author. Rowling, like Voldemort, is so evil that even mentioning her violates a taboo: She Who Must Not Be Named. (Dumbledore would not have approved of this practice. As he tells Harry in The Sorcerer’s Stone, “Always use the proper name for things. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

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The difficulty of adulting also includes the acknowledgment that people are fallible, and the world is complicated. Parents, and heroes, have feet of clay. Call it a loss of youthful idealism, or call it pragmatism, it is what allows us to survive in the adult world. And this is the struggle facing Harry Potter fans. They have long resented Rowling’s continued involvement in the Potter universe, which pollutes their pristine childhood memories of the work. There was disquiet when she only retrospectively made the original books more inclusive—announcing that Dumbledore was gay—and when she referenced “Native American wizards” in a story on Pottermore. Both incidents forced fans to confront the fact that the series is the product of Britain in the ’90s, a time and place whose unquestioned assumptions were different from those of the here and now. The first book was published in 1997, when British popular culture was startlingly white, the legalization of gay marriage was more than a decade away, and the country’s most popular newspaper carried a picture of a topless woman on its third page every day. At the time, the Potter books—with their well-rounded female characters and their rejection of the idea of aristocracy—were progressive. Now they are historical.

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Rowling’s views on gender, although compassionate, are undoubtedly challenging to the cherished beliefs of her Millennial fandom. Her post raised questions about sexual violence, early transition, and the climate of intimidation that surrounds discussions of these topics. She argued that her own experience of domestic violence had taught her the value of single-sex spaces, but also wrote about her sympathy for transgender victims. This counted for little to her critics. In Vogue, Raven Smith characterized the author’s post as “a long scroll of rhetorical emotion usually confined to those long-arse breakup texts from your ex.” In Vox, Aja Romano called it “a profoundly hurtful piece of writing, riddled with hand-wringing, groundless arguments about villainous trans women, outdated science, and exclusionary viewpoints. Especially gutting was the essay’s self-centeredness.” Romano, who uses both they and she as pronouns, recounted how she had removed Rowling’s books from her shelves, unable to reconcile her Potter fandom and her nonbinary identity.

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