Imaginary Worlds - Dumbledore's Army (Updated)

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

In 2016, I put out an episode about how JK Rowling’s themes in the Harry Potter series inspired a generation of progressive activists including Jackson Bird, who was the spokesperson for the Harry Potter Alliance. Jackson is also trans. Recently, JK Rowling has alienated many of her fans and supporters with her views on transgender rights. I catch up with Jackson Bird to discuss how he’s handling the cognitive dissonance of being inspired by the messages in the Harry Potter books while feeling profound disappointment in JK Rowling. Jackson Bird’s Op-Ed response to JK Rowling in The New York Times Responding to JK Rowlings Essay | Is It Anti-Trans? by Jamie Raines and Shaaba  Harry Potter Saved My Life. J.K. Rowling Is Now Endangering Trans People Like Me by Kacen Callender Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. And see what crypto can be. If you've got five minutes or 50, Peloton Tread has workouts you can work in. Or bring your classes with you for outdoor runs, walks, and hikes led by expert instructors on the Peloton app. Call yourself a runner. Peloton All Access membership separate. Learn more at onepeloton.ca slash running. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. Four years ago, I did a miniseries about how the Harry Potter books had impacted millennials. The last episode of that miniseries was called Dumbledore's Army,

and it looked at how young progressive activists were inspired by the Harry Potter books and by J.K. Rowling herself. In that episode, I interviewed Jackson Bird. At the time, he was the spokesperson for the Harry Potter Alliance, which is a social justice organization. Jackson is also trans. And as you probably know, J.K. Rowling has recently alienated a lot of her fans, people who run her website, people who worked with her in publishing, and the stars of the Harry Potter movies with her anti-transgender views. Although she says she is not anti-transgender. So I want to play the original episode, and then I'm going to catch up with Jackson Bird, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times responding to J.K. Rowling.

We'll also talk about how he and other fans are trying to balance their love of the books with their disappointment in the author of those books. Now in the episode from 2016, I also interviewed Andrew Slack, who created the Harry Potter Alliance. At one point, Andrew read from an essay that he wrote about his friendship with Jackson. And in that essay, Andrew mentioned the name that Jackson was assigned at birth. I mentioned it too in setting up the essay. We checked with Jackson before the episode went out, and he gave us permission. But in the years

since, I've learned that as a general practice, it's not appropriate to mention a trans person's old name or their dead name, as they're sometimes called. And I was going to cut that section in replaying the old episode. But in my new interview with Jackson, we had a good conversation addressing that issue. So I decided to leave it in

because I think it's a teachable moment on how to be a better ally. But first, let's hear the original episode from 2016, which is already a time capsule in so many ways. In 2008, J.K. Rowling was invited to speak at Harvard's graduation ceremony. She was charmingly self-deprecating, as usual. Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. have made me lose weight.

Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners, and convince myself that I am at the world's largest Gryffindor reunion. I've been watching a lot of interviews with J.K. Rowling lately, and I've just been so impressed by how humble she is. I mean, we all know her backstory. She was a single mother on welfare before she became the most successful writer in the world. But that day, she talked about a very humbling experience she had in her 20s, working at Amnesty International in London. This was right around the time she started imagining Harry Potter and started brainstorming how

the story would play out. And working with Amnesty influenced her thinking about Voldemort and his minions and what kind of oppressive system they wanted to implement. Every day I saw more evidence about the evils humankind would inflict on their fellow humans to gain or maintain power. on their fellow humans to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read. And yet, I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before. Now, I've always believed that whatever influences an author

going into their work comes out the other side. If we're open to it, if we're absorbed in the narrative, we may not know exactly what specifically influenced them, but we'll feel what they felt. We'll feel their hopes and their fears just at the frequency that they were feeling them. Now, Jack Krasinski teaches political science at the University of Vermont, and he studies something very similar,

how politics gets embedded into fiction. There is a theory called a narrative transportation theory that argues that when we really get immersed in a story, we're not really counter-arguing things we come across. Our defenses are down, and we walk away with some of the lessons and values and perspectives that are in those stories. It's an interesting field because politics is so toxic today. People are really distrustful of the mainstream media. But politics and fiction can pass through those psychological firewalls.

And he was particularly interested in Harry Potter because it wasn't just a one-off book. You have a generation of people who aged in real time with the characters. And he had the perfect group to test his hypothesis, his own students. We came up with different ways to measure fandom and exposure to the Harry Potter series. We borrowed survey questions that were tested and used in the discipline of political science to measure some political values like political tolerance or authoritarianism. So now in your survey, you obviously can't say, are you a bigot? Are you tolerant of other people?

So how do you test for that kind of thing in terms of the, how do you craft those questions? No, you don't ask people directly. What you do is, for example, on your acceptance of diversity, what we did is we identified some groups that had been discriminated against and that were the target of animosity in society. And then we asked people to, on a feeling thermometer, say how warmly or coldly they felt towards those groups. Two other academic papers confirmed his findings. There was a study at the University of Pennsylvania that tested whether Harry Potter readers reacted more negatively to Donald Trump and his talk about Muslims and Mexicans.

They did, although some Trump supporters were offended because they like Harry Potter too. But there was another study in the UK and Italy that took a very different approach. They didn't quiz adults who read Harry Potter as kids. They measured how Harry Potter affects kids who are reading the books in real time. One group has read passages that showed the value of tolerance and acceptance of diversity, and another passage that didn't have that, and they found that those passages actually caused greater tolerance among the children and acceptance of diversity.

Now, J.K. Rowling has been criticized for not featuring enough minority characters in prominent roles. But Jack says the book's lessons on diversity are mostly told through metaphor. I was fascinated by Professor Lupin and that he was in the closet as being a werewolf and what kind of effect that could have. And there were some parallels about that tied into some research on tolerance of homosexuality

that really followed the story of Professor Lupin, including, like, if it gets out, he's a werewolf, he won't be able to teach in the school kind of thing. It was the same thing for the gay community in the past in terms of having to stay in the closet, you know, if they were teachers or so on. And then in the end, he did follow-up interviews to ask if the test subjects agreed with the findings. They did.

A student who was from a high school in Texas told a story of how her high school had banned Harry Potter, had banned the series. It was not allowed in the school or in the library. They learned the lesson from that challenging, unreasonable authority. And they basically formed their own Dumbledore's Army and figured out ways to thwart the ban on Harry Potter. Dumbledore's Army was the name of a makeshift class that Harry Potter taught his fellow students in their downtime because their defense of the dark arts teacher was evil and not teaching them anything. But does this play out in real life? Are Harry Potter readers actually organizing

and putting their time and energy towards making the world a better place? Yeah, some of them really are. All right, so first of all, I love your job title. Tell me what your job title is. My job title is the Director of Wizard-Muggle Relations for the Harry Potter Alliance. Yeah, and how's that going, the relationship between muggles and wizards these days?

Oh, you know, it's pretty good. I think it could be a little bit tighter, you know, maybe a little bit more trust now. Unlike the Minister for Magic, Jackson Bird does not have to tumble through a fireplace to communicate with muggles. He uses the Internet for most of his work with the Harry Potter Alliance, or HPA. They organize fans towards causes like preserving net neutrality and community service like donating books to libraries. Jackson first learned about the HPA in 2010 after there was a massive earthquake in Haiti. They did a big campaign called Helping Haiti Heal. And the thing that really caught my attention was the fact that they brought together a ton of YouTubers, young adult authors, every like fan site personality, just all these people who I had been following separately. And I didn't know they all knew each other. And then I just got to see like all of these people that I looked up to coming together for really good cause. The person making all that happen behind the scenes was Andrew Slack.

He founded the group in 2005. He had just graduated college when his younger friends were urging him to read Harry Potter. The kids got me, so just, they just wore me down. And I picked up the book and read the first chapter of the first book and something shot through me. And I felt this book just changed my life. And when he read that J.K. Rowling had worked with Amnesty International, it made total sense to him. Because you see Sirius Black and all the discussion around how he was denied habeas corpus, which is such a huge issue at Amnesty, and how there's prison torture in Azkaban,

such a huge issue in Amnesty. And I began mapping these parallels out. And then when I looked at the Harry Potter fan community, I was in disbelief that no one was doing anything about these parallels. They were doing incredible things. They were doing music through Wizard Rock. They were doing sports through Quidditch.

And it was incredible. But then I asked the Harry Potter fan community, if Harry Potter were in our world, wouldn't he do more than simply talk about how awesome it is to be Harry Potter? But he was creating a non-profit organization based on a set of characters that he did not own the rights to. And he kept wondering, would J.K. Rowling be okay with this? A few years later, she was asked about the Harry Potter Alliance during an interview.

And I was with my then-girlfriend, who actually was one of the co-founders of the organization. We were at a mall, and I said, can you watch my things? And she said, sure. And I ran through the parking lot of the mall screaming, expecto patronum, at the top of my lungs. I mean, it's possibly the nerdiest thing that anyone could do, but J.K. Rowling had just talked about us in Time magazine and had mentioned us on her website and telling us that we're awesome,

and it felt amazing. And with time, I began to become more afraid. What happens if we don't, what happens if we upset her? This was put to the test as well. Andrew found out that the Harry Potter chocolates were being made with unpaid child labor. So the HPA partnered with another organization called Walk Free to pressure Warner

Brothers to change the labor production on their chocolates. People told us, don't do this. You know, you've got the favor of J.K. Rowling. You should go to Warner Brothers for money. But when a member of ours said to us about the realities of deforestation, when it comes to the cocoa trade, economic slave wages, and child slavery, we felt we had to do something. It's pretty weird if people are eating Harry Potter chocolate that's made by kids their own age who have been kidnapped and are slaves. So we went on this crazy path, and after six years, we ended up winning. And that did involve some help in the background from J.K. Rowling.

For a long time, Andrew was the face and the voice of the Harry Potter Alliance, and he liked it that way. And then he met Jackson Bird. You know, normally I'm used to young people trying to imitate me when they speak about the harry potter lines jack never tried to imitate me ever i mean like the idea of imitating me was ridiculous to him you know he would make fun of me saying you don't know anything about tumblr how do you know anything about fandom and i would look at myself and be like wait he's right i don't and here you got jack staying up till two or three in the morning on Tumblr just because he wants to, like falling asleep on Tumblr.

So they put Jackson to work posting videos on YouTube and they were a hit. And through that, that was the first time that I started kind of gaining a little bit of a following and realizing that like, oh, there are people who actually like listen to what I have to say and will support the goofy things that I want to do online. But they had no idea that Jackson's personal story would become a part of the organization and its identity. Andrew Slack won't stop texting me about what a beautiful human being Daniel Radcliffe is. This is one of their first videos. Good morning, VEDA. Hello, it is April 2nd, the second day of VEDA,

and I am not quitting the Harry Potter Alliance. I am not moving to Los Angeles. I did not book a role in a pilot, and Draco Malfoy did not hack the Harry Potter Alliance's social media. Now, you recently came out as trans on YouTube and everything. Do you feel like, is there any connection to your work with the HPA and the way that you came out very publicly and with lots of community engagement? Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, uh, if I weren't working for the HPA, it's possible I would have been able to be

a little bit more stealth in my transition and in coming out. I was in a slightly unusual place, you know, a lot of trans people, less and less these days, which is great just because the world's being more accepting. But a lot of trans people, you know, when they come out, they might move, get a new job, like just sort of leave their old life behind because that's easiest because of all the discrimination and sort of dysphoria that you'd face. But with me, with such an extended professional network and with a lot of my life being out there online, that really wasn't an option. I am transgender. This is the coming out video from 2015. Yep. Okay. Set it on the internet now. So that's that. Can't put that smoke back in the jar. Cool. Break open the gummy bears now.

Did the hard part. Now I'm hungry hungry. Everyone's gonna stop watching now anyways. I already had been kind of making videos, uh, so I guess sort of to soothe the fact that I wasn't ready to come out yet. I was making a lot of LGBT-oriented videos for a couple of years and had been getting a lot of messages from people about how much those videos helped them and both from that response and just from knowing how much I could have used more trans role models when I was growing up, I knew it would be worth it in that way to be able to help out more people. And I think, you know, what I've learned from the Harry Potter Alliance and in becoming an activist and realizing the importance of sharing personal narratives and the power of story, that definitely sort of helped me, like me grow the confidence and strength to be able to go forth

and be so open and personal about this part of my life. There's one really powerful video where Jackson reads a word from a poem every day during his first year taking testosterone. In the last stanza, he recaps the whole year with a condensed timeline. In 365 days or 365 words. Now, before all that happened, Jackson had come out to his boss, Andrew Slack. And that was such a big deal for Andrew that he's writing an essay about it, and you read some of it for me. So to set the context, Andrew had always considered himself very progressive on gay rights,

but he admits that he had a blind spot on transgender issues. He thought transgender people had some kind of personality disorder. So we get into arguments about transgender issues with Jackson, who was called Lauren at the time. And Andrew thought these arguments were purely intellectual. And at one point, he confronted Lauren and said, how can you speak for trans people? You're not even trans yourself. Lauren looked at me and said, because I'm trans. For a moment, I thought that Lauren was clearly joking. I almost began to smile. But Lauren's steely expression showed there was no humor. I almost fell out of my chair. I had known Lauren for three years. We went to conferences together. I had been mentoring Lauren. I had cried to Lauren after my father had had a stroke. Lauren was one of my very close friends. How could I not know that Lauren was trans? But it suddenly made sense why Lauren cared so deeply. I looked up at Lauren and said, are you being serious?

Yes. You're trans. Yes. Seriously. Yes. Suddenly every transphobic thing I had ever thought or felt went out the window. I asked, how long have you known? He said, a long time.

I asked, what keeps you from coming out? He said, I'm terrified. I wanted to hug him so deeply and hold his hand. What can I do to help you feel safe? He said, what you're doing right now. When Jackson finally uploaded the coming out video, Andrew was so impressed he began to wonder if it was time for him to step away from the organization to pass the baton to the next generation. Yeah, it was watching that video that's

that's still the deal more than anything else was alright this is this is going to be fine they're going to be great. Figuring out how to continue the balancing act of who I feel I am and who society tells me I should be has become harder and harder as I've started my professional life. Meanwhile, Jackson learned that Eddie Redmayne was talking about Jackson's video when he was promoting The Danish Girl, where Redmayne played a trans woman. Of course, Redmayne is also starring in the new Harry Potter prequel, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. So this is him on the press tour for The Danish Girl. I was looking around Potter things and I found Jackson coming out, which was just wonderful and funny.

I'll link to that video below. That's a great video. It was very surreal. And there's definitely, you know, there's a lot of controversy about cis men playing trans women in movies. So it was nice to see that even though he was a cis guy playing a trans woman, and that's not the ideal, he was at least being counseled by a lot of trans women. And then it was really cool for the Harry Potter community as well to see that he was diving so deep into the fandom to do his research on that community, which frankly is not even too relevant to his

role as Newt Scamander. So that's pretty cool that he really wanted to be able to see what the kind of conversation in those two communities was like and do them justice. There's actually a large overlap between those communities. Jackson says 40% of their members don't identify as straight and 14% identify as trans. It could have a little bit to do with me, but I mean, I think it could also just be not even like me being visibly as trans, but, you know, myself and some of my co-workers early work on making sure that we were always using inclusive language. They came out early for marriage equality, which was controversial within the organization.

They also set up a Protego campaign to create safe spaces for LGBTQ members. Protego is the name of the protection spell in the Harry Potter books. I find it interesting that Jackson Bird and Andrew Slack poured their energy into the Harry Potter Alliance because they wanted to make a difference in the world. But that work also changed them and challenged them in ways they never expected. And that makes sense to me because stories about magic are often about change and transformation and not accepting the world as it appears. Mrs. Weasley teaches Harry in his

first magical lesson at the platform of nine and three quarters that there is no such thing as a wall just being a wall that every wall carries within it a secret doorway and if you allow yourself to find it you will go through it and Harry he runs through that wall of the barrier platform nine and three quarters and he comes out to the Hogwarts Express

and he's on this magical journey and this magical adventure. And throughout the entire story, we're seeing magic, the proficiency of magic being expressed in this notion around finding the doorway in the wall, the doorway to get to the Sorcerer's Stone. And there are many to get to the Sorcerer's Stone, the doorway through the Chamber of Secrets, the doorway to get to the Sorcerer's Stone, and there are many to get to the Sorcerer's Stone. The doorway through the Chamber of Secrets. The doorway to get to the Ministry of Magic Department of Mysteries. And then finally, the doorway between life and death. And when Harry crosses that one, he ends up back at King's Cross Station. I have to admit, when I first came across the HPA, I was a little skeptical.

They just seemed like such earnest do-gooders. But after talking with them, I came away really humbled and impressed. And then I remembered I was part of an organization like this. After high school, I worked for City Year, an urban peace corps in Boston, which is now franchised across the country. I couldn't believe I forgot that. I felt like Robin Williams in Hook remembering, oh yeah, I was Peter Pan. Now City Year is still going strong, and I hope that 20 years from now, the Harry Potter Alliance is thriving as well. But no matter what, the words of J.K. Rowling will continue to resonate, because there will always be kids who haven't read Harry Potter yet.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice, if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless, if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.

A lot has changed in the years since that episode has aired, and I will catch up with Jackson Bird after the break. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection, free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH-balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't. Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. A special message from your family jewels brought to you by Old Spice Total Body.

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It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. Let's get to my interview with Jackson Bird from this summer. Thanks for coming back. It's good to see you again. Yeah, thank you for having me. I don't think I've ever done a four years later update on a podcast episode. No, actually, I don't think I've done one either. So before we started recording, we're discussing the fact that in that episode from 2016, Andrewack read from an essay where he mentioned your old name before you transitioned,

and I said it too in setting up the essay. I think we checked with you beforehand to see if it was okay? Yeah, you both absolutely checked with me. Yeah, and I gave my consent because at the time, I was sort of in a different place with how I personally felt about it, but I think also the society writ large, trans issues have become much more mainstream. Many more people know more about trans allyship these days. And so I thought I just wanted to bring it up really quick that that's not usually the best practice when you're talking about trans people to talk about their old names.

But certainly some of us as individuals are cool with it. It's just usually don't default to that. Yeah, no, no, I agree. I mean, I at the time, I just didn't know. I mean, how problematic it was. It wasn't until about, I think, a year later, I was reading about how inappropriate or even offensive it is to mention a trans person's old name or their sort of, quote, dead name. It's actually interesting to note that when this aired four years ago, I didn't actually get any comments on that, but there's no question if I was to do that now in an episode, like a brand new episode that was airing, I'd get a lot of comments about that. Yeah, I think you absolutely would, which is why I thought maybe we should address it. No, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, in terms of allyship, it's been a learning curve for a lot of us. Absolutely. Yeah, it's, you know, it's been a learning curve for a lot of us. Absolutely. Yeah, it totally is. Well, speaking of ally-ship, let's talk about J.K. Rowling. Yeah. When did you first learn that she had these, I guess we should sort of bluntly call them anti-transgender views? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, they were sort of bubbling to the surface for a couple of years. You know, she would like some tweets that either had transphobic sentiments or were by

well-known transphobic public figures. And usually her PR team would, I think they literally called it like a middle-aged moment. You know, she accidentally hit the like button on Twitter, which I was like the first time kind of willing to give the benefit of the doubt. You know, there's being such a massive Harry Potter fan as I am, I really wanted to kind of willing to give the benefit of the doubt. You know, there's being such a massive Harry Potter fan as I am, I really wanted to kind of be generous with, hopefully she doesn't really think these things. This past December, December 2019, she tweeted in support of a sort of known anti-trans activist. And even then, you know, that was really heartbreaking. But even then, I was like, well, maybe, you know, she's just been misled. Maybe we can have a conversation.

But she turned down any offers of conversations, even from folks like GLAAD, who, you know, this is kind of what they do is they help celebrities become better allies. And then most recently, when she just went on a tirade, and I was like, okay, this is definitely how she feels. She's made it very crystal clear now. I mean, I say crystal clear. I think if you're unfamiliar with the topic, it actually is kind of confusing what she's saying. There's a lot of doublespeak going on. Yeah. Well, why don't you explain for people that maybe they know something's going on. They don't know exactly what she said. There's been a lot of sort of confusing, contradictory things she said. Can you sort of lot of sort of confusing, contradictory things she said.

Can you sort of piece together through all of her tweets and comments what her stances are exactly? Right. Well, pretty much she's aligned herself with a movement that has been around for decades, but has grown in very organized ways sort of across like over the past five years in the United Kingdom specifically, which is, uh, ostensible feminists who are very anti-trans, mostly anti-trans women, um, but anti all trans people and basically just denying the realities of trans people's experiences. Um, what it kind of comes down to is they tend to see trans women as actually just men in costumes who are sexual predators and trying to take advantage of women. And they usually think that trans men are just, you know, lesbians who got confused and need saving. So it's very belittling and concerning on

both sides. I'm sure they just don't think that non-binary people exist at all. And the thing is that, you know, they couch it in a lot of language about how they support women, how it's primarily women, a lot of straight women who are involved in this, you know, how they are concerned. They talk a lot about their past experiences with men, you know, being abused by men and, you know, lots of very valid and real experiences that they've had, but they're sort of in some ways blaming it on trans people. I just personally don't think that that's how we should be conducting ourselves as a society. And that's certainly not the way that I would have ever thought someone like JK Rowling would be

thinking. You know, we all read, well, not we all, but you and I and lots of people out there read her books, which were filled with values about, you know, defending the underdogs and standing with people and inclusivity. I mean, in the original episode that folks just listened to, you played some of her clips from her Harvard commencement speech. She literally talks about people in power and how we can't just listen to them, of how we need to stick up for people who are not in power. And it's very almost like a cognitive dissonance to hear that back now, knowing how she feels specifically about trans people and potentially about other vulnerable communities. her views. I mean, given how much you were inspired by the Harry Potter books and dedicated to the Harry Potter Alliance, I mean, how did you make sense of this in terms of your own sort of personal relationship with J.K. Rowling as a fan? It's been tough. I think for me personally,

while I had always thought that she was a pretty decent role model and a pretty great person who, you know, gives millions and millions of pounds to charity. I had never like idolized her or put her up on a pedestal or anything like that. So I don't feel like there's some type of personal relationship that is broken right now. But I will say that through all the years, you know, the fan community and the original series have been what have mattered the most to me. The movies, the theme parks, you know, official merchandise, that's always kind of been second or third or fourth on my list. It's never been a huge priority. It's the things that people have brought to the series that readers have created in the communities that we've all built together

that have always meant so much to me. And the sort of magic and power of those original seven books. What I have lost in this, I think, is my ability to enjoy those seven books, at least for now. I would love to be able to go back to them someday, but right now, I just can't. I hear her in my head. I know that I'll be reading it with her bias that I'm imagining she had throughout all of it. More than just being a trans Harry Potter fan and it being very disappointing and painful, the thing that really gets me is the level of influence she has. And this is what she is choosing to promote and how many people are going to kind of come to her side, have been coming to her side. You know, people are going to use her stance on this as a reason why they can have this

stance too, of maybe they had some bubbles of prejudice or discrimination or misunderstanding about this issue and now they're like, well, JK Rowling said this. There was literally a congressman in the US who cited JK Rowling when he was trying to pass some anti-trans legislation. So it's already happening. There are real world effects of what she is putting out there. And that is really what gets me more fired up and more upset about this than the fact that, you know, the person who created Harry Potter turns out to hate people like me. You know, she said, like, let me explain myself. I've been taken out of context. How would you characterize her responses and her sort of attempts to defend herself?

Yeah, I think that this is sort of part of the echo chamber of misinformation among the gender critical or trans exclusionary crowd that she is a part of, um, is some of them, not all of them, some of them will say things like, I have trans friends. I love trans people. I support trans people. Most of them will just send like absolutely vile and harassing tweets to trans people. They won't even pretend that they support trans rights, but JK Rowling is on the side where she will say, I support trans rights. If you look at her 3,600 word essay with zero citations in it, that the citations she slightly references are mostly led to studies that have been debunked. But anyways, in her essay, she does say a few things like, I stand with trans people, like I would stand with them at a protest if they were ever being discriminated against. It's like, yeah, we are being discriminated against. But also, you can't say that you support trans people in the same breath where you are denying the realities of

our existence in multiple ways. You know, she has a line in there about how like, we welcome trans men into our women's spaces because they are biologically women. Okay, well, that is denying the reality of trans men. Like, we are men. We don't want to be in your women's spaces. You know, the whole essay, in some ways more explicit than others, is talking about how trans women are men who are acting as sexual predators. You do not support trans people if that is your belief. I don't care that you say, I support trans people. Everything else you're saying is in contradiction to that. Well, what is your advice to Harry Potter fans who are having trouble figuring out how to separate the work from the author? And, you know, they can't separate J.K.

Rowling's words in the books from the words she's been saying in the media. Yeah, it's a tough question. I mean, you know, I think there are a lot of people out there who just they're done with Harry Potter. They have to be. It's it's too painful. And that's a tough question. I mean, you know, I think there are a lot of people out there who just they're done with Harry Potter. They have to be. It's too painful. And that's a absolutely understandable stance to have. I think there are a lot of us who it's been such a huge part of our lives that even if it hurts, we want to find a way to still enjoy it. those people, you know, I would say a lot of people are throwing around the phrase, the death of the author, you know, the idea that books belong to their readers, that the author's intent doesn't matter. It's what you take from the book. That's really important. And an interesting thing about the death of the author is that phrase comes from an essay by Roland Barthes, a literary critic from the 20th century. And in that essay, The Death of the Author, he ends it by talking about the birth of the reader. And I think that that's something that people don't bring to the

conversation about Death of the Author often enough, because I think that's a really wonderful thing to think about is, okay, Death of the Author, we're going to try to separate these texts from J.K. Rowling, but let's focus on what they mean to us and what our interpretations are, even if she doesn't agree with them. And let's talk about the magic that we have all created being inspired by these books over the years. And I think that's the thing to try to really focus on. Maybe you won't ever get back to reading the original text. Maybe I might even suggest you don't want to give your money to the franchise anymore, but let's focus on the good that they did bring to all of our lives over the years, what we have learned together, or even just as individuals engaging with the text. And that's a lot easier said than done. I can talk forever about how much we should separate texts from the

authors when I'm talking about just a random book that didn't mean so much to me. Harry Potter has been an inextricable part of my life for more than two thirds of my life. So it's much harder to say about Harry Potter. But I think that's the kind of thing to sort of strive for and focus on is what they meant to us and trying to just trying to separate it from her intent. So this episode is actually coming after an episode that was about how a lot of writers of color and specifically, I talked to some black creators who are taking the world of H.P. Lovecraft, who is a notoriously racist author from the early 20th century, and they're

reimagining his world from the point of view of black protagonists. As I was saying, it's not exactly reclaiming him. It's more like inverting him. Would you ever want to read some sort of a Harry Potter-like, well, I guess this already probably exists in fan fiction, but like some kind of Harry Potter or a Harry Potter-esque world that is in direct conversation with J.K. Rowling using the tools of fiction? Yeah, I mean, the fan fiction out there definitely exists. I will say there's even a YA novel called Out of Salem by Hal Shreve that I recently found out because I was tweeting with the author that they literally wrote it in response to what Hal saw as J.K. Rowling's sort of sloppy metaphor of Remus Lupin being an HIV positive gay man, which, you know, fan fiction loves Remus as a gay or bi individual.

But yeah, this this novel, which uses a lot of like sort of similar themes to Harry Potter was kind of written in a in a direct critique. So that is happening, like even beyond fan fiction, which I think is really cool. I would love to see more of it. I don't know that we would ever get it officially sanctioned. How many years till Harry Potter's in the public domain? Should we? I know it's going to be like Steamboat Willie, like it's just going to keep re-upping. Yeah, exactly. But you could do like, I know like in fan fiction, they'll talk about something being

like, well, this is basically Harry Potter, but Harry Potter with the serial numbers filed off. I mean, that's very doable, even as like a published novel. Yeah. And, you know, given that the Potter generation, we're all, you know, in our 30s now, I think we're just going to keep seeing more and more of that, whether the authors, you know, maybe say it outright or not. I think there's certainly a lot of literature that we're going to keep seeing that is kind of in response

to this. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of, I mean, Jon Stewart once said, so some of the effect of, to this. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of, I mean, Jon Stewart once said, so some of the effect of, you know, we've gotten really good at telling everyone that racism is bad, but we're not good at explaining what racism is. And I think the same could be true with transphobia. Yeah. And I will say it is, it's not a complex topic if you have the perspective of, if you are not a trans person here is a marginalized community telling me their experience and i'm going to trust their experience and lift up their voices and believe them not a complex topic if you fall in line with that which is what most people are doing but if you are trying to dissect what she's saying and be like

wait why are people upset about that it is a little bit of a complex thing and tough to understand um so i i would say uh there are a number of trans people who have written articles and made videos that really break down line by line with lots of citations. Jamie and Shaba, which is a YouTube channel, they are doctoral researchers and they made an hour long video going line by line, breaking this down and explaining it in, I think, a very fair way that, in my opinion, maybe gave a little too much credit to J.K. Rowling. So that if you are like that's, you know, if you're skeptical, I think you should watch their video. It's very fair. And also Kacen

Callender, who is a black YA author, wrote a really wonderful, heartbreaking piece on them. So there's a lot of people out there who are explaining this much better than I can in this moment. And please go go seek out their content. Yeah, I'll put those links in the show notes. Yeah, I'll send those to you. All right. Well, thank you. Thanks for coming on.

And, you know, as we were communicating by email before the interview, you were saying that there's a lot of fans out there that are feeling hurt and confused. And, you know, this is an important conversation to have. Before we go, I just want to ask you if you have any more advice for people who are feeling hurt or confused or sad about this whole situation. Yeah, I mean, I think I would say specifically to any trans, non-binary or gender non-conforming fans of Harry Potter, if you are hurting because J.K. Rowling specifically is saying these things and because this series has meant so much to you, what I would say is she has clearly proven that she is not someone that we

need to listen to and that she doesn't have authority on our lives. And so don't, as painful as it is, try not to let her words affect you or have power over you. You matter and you are valued in this society no matter what J.K. Rowling is saying. And even if maybe we aren't going to identify ourselves as the Harry Potter fan community forever, there are lots of wonderful people that have been affected by this book. And we are all here to welcome you home

and love you for who you are. There's a link to the article and the video he mentioned in the show notes, along with a link to Jackson's op-ed in the New York Times responding to J.K. Rowling. By the way, Jackson also wrote a memoir called Sorted, Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place. It just came out in paperback. That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jackson Bird and everybody who took part in the original episode. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook.

I tweet at emolinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. And the show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org.