The Legacy of Harry Potter

Seven months ago, J. K. Rowling — the billionaire author of the Harry Potter books — published her support for Maya Forstater, a researcher who lost her job because of transphobic comments she’d made on Twitter. Rowling felt that the woman’s rights had been violated, and implicitly commended her for “stating that sex is real.” Not only did these words reveal Rowling’s profound ignorance of the basic facts of trans identities, and encourage violence towards trans people: they served as an indirect attack on her legions of LGBTQ+ readers and their allies.

Nine weeks ago, she decided to make matters worse. Rowling published another criticism, this time of an article that used the phrase “people who menstruate” — a term designed to include trans and non-binary individuals alongside cisgender women. After making a broad, uncomprehending leap, Rowling publicly suggested: “If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” And then, to ensure that the damage had been done, she wrote a three-thousand and six-hundred word essay in which she opined that allowing trans women into single-sex spaces is “dangerous.”

So the saga stands; apparently the war against darkness didn’t end with Voldemort’s death. How ironic it is — and by “ironic,” I mean devastating — that the person who was credited with doing so much to further child literacy at the turn of this century has proven herself to be crushingly illiterate.

All of this is to wonder at how those of us who love J. K. Rowling’s work might reconcile her triumphs as a novelist with her failures as a person. I believe that it’s possible to hold the two apart from one another, but what fascinates me most about Rowling’s transphobia is its proximity to anxieties that are present throughout the Harry Potter series. I recently revisited the eight films based on her books, and paid close attention to the role of the body in each installment: what does it mean, in Rowling’s imagination, to occupy a body? When and how is gender reinforced, and how much weight is it given? Ultimately, my assessment is that Rowling heavily identifies with patriarchal points of view (she’s yet to write a novel from a woman’s perspective) and tends to vilify, punish and/or terrorize women’s bodies. Misogyny is as characteristic of her work as are the themes of “otherness” and transformation.

In her essayed response the term “people who menstruate,” Rowling stated she that feels that the term is demeaning. Less demeaning, I suppose, is a narrative that allegorizes menstruation via domestic terrorism and pubescent hysteria. In Chamber of Secrets, the second book in Rowling’s series and adapted to the screen by Steve Kloves, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) is suspected of perpetuating a string of terroristic attacks against his fellow students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. His efforts to uncover the real culprit lead him to the eponymous chamber, where he finds a young girl, Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright), within an inch of death. It turns out that she was behind the attacks — writing bloody messages on school walls and opening the chamber to release a giant snake that preyed upon her classmates.

However, Ginny was not personally responsible for her actions; rather, she did these evil things “under a kind of trance.” These words are meant to reference the influence that the evil wizard, Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), held over her — but in real life, such language is often used to belittle the behavior and experiences of people during menstruation. Indeed, in Chamber of Secrets, Ginny is an eleven-year-old child who falls under the sway of a giant serpent that resides in a girls’ bathroom.

This conflation of biblical imagery with processes of hormonal growth emerges as one of the more arresting examples of a constant theme in the Harry Potter series: bodily transformation. In the same film, Harry drinks a potion with his best friends, Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), that morphs their whole bodies until they resemble three other people. Also, the phoenix — a mythological creature that is reborn from its own ashes — plays a key role in the action, flying in to save the day when Harry, ahem, enters the chamber to rescue Ginny. These details, paired with the rampant allegories for masturbation employed throughout the third film, Prisoner of Azkaban (e.g., wands waved under bedsheets, fast broomsticks, beasts that one must “stroke” to master, etc.), reveal an author who is preoccupied with the processes by which sex — and, by a certain extension, gender — is “determined” during adolescence.

Both as an expression of J. K. Rowling’s latent fears and as an assessment of teenage consciousness, these early installments are troubled yet fascinating illustrations of how a person can project individual anxiety onto their environment. In Chamber of Secrets and Azkaban, Harry’s physical uneasiness is exacerbated by a host of public embarrassments or crises that place him squarely in the middle of significant political turmoil. Perhaps the crowning achievement of J. K. Rowling’s literary career is the fact that her focus on the body remains intact as Harry’s story turns toward more worldly matters. If nothing else, the Harry Potter series is a vital representation of how personal biography unfolds in tandem with historical incident: the intimacy of trauma is directly tied to the failures and corruption of the state.

In Goblet of Fire, the fourth entry in the series, Harry is mysteriously selected for the Tri-Wizard Tournament, a set of competitions between wizarding schools from various countries, in which he is technically too young to participate. Only when he’s seen the competition to its conclusion does Harry realize that Voldemort has infiltrated the games and rigged them to facilitate his and Harry’s reunion; he’s nearly killed by the Dark Lord and watches helplessly as his fellow competitor, Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson), is murdered. The following school year, in Order of the Phoenix, the Ministry of Magic — the wizarding world’s equivalent of a parliament — vehemently denies the possibility that Voldemort has returned and imposes authoritarian censorship at Hogwarts via a Ministry administrator, Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton).

When it becomes evident that the powers-that-be have turned against the interests of Hogwarts’ students, Hermione persuades Harry to secretly train a group of their friends and prepare them for a likely war with Voldemort’s growing forces.

Between the easy corruptibility of the wizards’ games and the fascistic leanings of their government, J. K. Rowling creates a damning, semi-allegorical portrait of modern bureaucracy. Harry is chosen to endure grueling physical tasks in Goblet of Fire, putting him in a position that leads to his being cast alternately as a champion and as a cheat: at first, his fellow underage classmates resent him for getting into the tournament, but then their ultimate celebration of Harry keeps everyone distracted as sinister forces continue to work behind the scenes. When Harry becomes more outspoken in Order of the Phoenix, urging everyone to believe him when he says that Voldemort has returned, he is tortured by Umbridge and forced to take matters into his own hands.

All of these incidents point to the same exceptionalism Harry experiences in the series’ earlier installments. His is an irregular body; he is the “Chosen One,” who, as more than one character puts it, has a knack for being “at the wrong place at the wrong time.” As this irregularity extends to politics in Goblet of Fire and Order of the Phoenix, Harry finds himself once again standing outside the establishment — literally embodying a sort of grassroots “radicalism.” The vague yet contrasting parallels his personal traumas share with historical violence in Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban are here rendered quite urgent: the interests of the Ministry of Magic are revealed to be grounded in competition and complacency, whereas Harry emerges as an advocate for community and moral integrity. He is manipulated and punished for his compassion, but this abuse only strengths his willingness to identify as an outsider, or the “Other.”

Yet this role of “otherness” does not come without its more personal burdens. As he develops as a political body, Harry struggles to fend off the presence of the Dark Lord inside his actual body. He has night terrors involving dreams in which he looks through Voldemort’s eyes as he kills people, and undergoes training from Professor Severus Snape (Alan Rickman) to guard his mind against the evil wizard’s machinations. The process of fighting a moral “darkness” is directly tied to Harry’s metaphysical subjectivity; his radicalism — or intellectual queerness, if you will — is mirrored by an increasing alienation from his own body. I hope the reader will indulge me when I observe that Harry’s symptoms are not unlike those known by people who experience gender dysphoria, and that his proximity to evil (i.e., the implosive self-centeredness of bureaucratic society, represented not just through Voldemort but through his followers’ infiltration of the Ministry) brings this distress forward with even greater sharpness.

The more he participates in the wider world, the more Harry develops a dissociative relationship with his body. He can’t draw a clear line between himself (the Moral Other) and Voldemort (the Immoral Other), and struggles to understand whether this makes him “bad.” Again, J. K. Rowling harnesses transition as a metaphor for the psychic process by which all teenagers become conscious of their personal morality — but in so doing, she inadvertently creates a window for sympathy with real-life trans experiences. It is via her all-consuming preoccupation with processes of bodily change that Rowling accidentally elevates the Harry Potter series to a full-blown trans mythology: “darkness” becomes a reality from which one must divorce their understanding of themself as a positive, lovable “other.”

The Harry Potter story shows us that otherness does not make a person bad; rather, it makes that person uniquely strong, even as it places them — from the heteronormative point of view — within the sphere of “undesirability.”

The experience of alienation from one’s own body is a pervasive theme in the series, and not just for Harry: in Prisoner of Azkaban, Professor Lupin (David Thewlis) is a werewolf and suffers from the anguish of his monthly, unmanageable transformations; in Goblet of Fire, Bartemius Crouch, Jr. (David Tennant) drinks a potion to distort his face to resemble Professor “Mad-Eye” Moody (Brendan Gleeson); characters like Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), Minerva McGonagall (Maggie Smith) and Peter Pettigrew (Timothy Spall) regularly transfigure into animals; and Voldemort himself is a disembodied presence, having split his soul between eight precious objects in an effort to achieve immortality.

Through all of these examples, we are shown that the human (or wizard) body is a malleable, fluid entity, and that its inconstant properties are the source of its most powerful magic. Transitioning provides a unique opportunity to do good in the world — just as some characters use it to employ deception, or terrorism. But that sort of evil is not to be confused with power in and of itself, and as Professor Dumbeldore (Richard Harris) says to Harry in Chamber of Secrets: “It is our choices… that show what we truly far, far more than our abilities.” Trans is an opportunity to be more than what is expected.

While I doubt that these stories were constructed with matters of body politics in mind, it doesn’t change the impact that Harry Potter has made on thousands of LGBTQ+ youth all around the world. Of course, the series does encapsulate an exploitative, mainstream approach to the concept of transitioning: though transformation is often utilized as a metaphor for self-discovery, there is never space given to allow for transformation itself to be the discovery. Harry gains a great deal of insight by “becoming” other people, or by accessing other people’s minds — but it reduces outer-body awareness to a functional role. It becomes a tool, or means to a “greater” end. (This is par for the course in a media culture that tends to exoticize queerness as a “phase” through which one passes on the path to self-knowledge: Black Swan, High Art, Some Like It Hot, etc.)

That said, much of the wonder in these films arises from the moments of transition: it’s thrilling and memorable to watch Harry’s face contort until it becomes someone else’s in Chamber of Secrets… to watch him don an invisibility cloak and disappear before our eyes in Sorcerer’s Stone… to plunge into his dreams in Order of the Phoenix, or to dive with him into a magical pool of memories in Half-Blood Prince. All of these scenarios constitute the soul of Harry Potter, and contribute to its ongoing resonance with audiences more than twenty years after the first book was published.

We do not have to allow J. K. Rowling’s ignorance to destroy our relationship with this series. Authors are merely the vessels through which stories are told; once a story has been unleashed, it belongs to those who read, watch and remember it. The Harry Potter narrative has grown to such a height of influence that it renders any precept of authorship, or sole ownership, obsolete. Harry himself — the “Chosen One” — would be the first to say so: it’s never one person who saves the day. It takes everyone coming together to change our world. And more often than not, it’s the outsiders, the figures of transition, who lead us in that noble, moral direction.