Welcome to Bulgarian Bon Bon
10.11.21
It occurred to me a while back that, since I have some Harry Potter fanfiction on the site, it might have become necessary to add a note to the site regarding J.K. Rowling and her seeming insistence on repeatedly using her Twitter platform to do real, active harm to transgender folks, allegedly in the “defense” of cisgender women. Knowing exactly WHAT to write was much, much harder.
Terry Pratchett would likely allow me the small joke that he’s not terribly active on Twitter these days on account of being, regrettably, still dead. GNU, Sir Terry. By the way, if you’re a Potter fan and you’ve not yet been introduced to the joy that is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, by all means, try him. It’s wonderfully written comedic fantasy that also has emotional wham lines that will hit you like a truck. I have hysterically cry-laughed within the same paragraph. Don’t be scared off by how many books there are. Start with Mort or Guards! Guards! and go in chronological order in subseries or just publication order. Mort kicks off the Death subseries, Guards! Guards! begins the City Watch series. Or at least do yourself the favor of reading the City Watch books in order for the glory of Sybil Ramkin and Sam Vimes. You’re welcome. Discworld is diverse and LGBTQ+ friendly. He’s wonderful at writing women of all sorts. He gets better and better with each book. He’s not currently being Problematic On Twitter. And in the unlikely event that he pulls a Reg Shoe, I wouldn’t expect him to start.
By the time I post this, you may also have seen the Internet Kerfuffle™ over a large number of entirely clueless folks trying to claim Terry would have agreed with them, and Discworld fans, collectively, channeling their best Granny Weatherwax impression, telling them we can’t be having with this. Not only did Terry write a number of characters and plot lines that can easily be seen as something of a parallel to/metaphor for the trans experience (Cheery Littlebottom), he wrote an entire damned book where there is a very explicitly a transgender character, no interpretive wiggle room, thanks very much. And I think 90% of the reason you haven’t seen that book/character mentioned nearly as often as Cheery in said Kerfuffle is because, look, it’s a really awesome book and a really awesome character and it’s a delight to discover it organically while reading.
One of the immense pleasures of the last few extremely cruddy years has been getting to re-experience the Discworld books after introducing a dear friend to them. A dear friend who, as it happens, is transgender. She had only come out fully not-quite-a-year before encountering Cheery. She was (as I expected) rather delighted by Cheery’s storyline and I can hardly wait for her to read the other book. The one I hate to spoil. The one where its “transgender character” isn’t subtext any more… it’s just… TEXT.
And because life is nothing if not complicated, said friend is also a Harry Potter fan. Neither of us, obviously, are fans of Rowling’s recent behavior. I’m rather ticked off that Rowling claims “90% of her fans agree with her”. Um, no ma’am, you are definitely NOT speaking for me when you seemingly act as though transgender women pose a threat of some kind to cisgender women’s rights. You just have the platform of an extremely wealthy author and threaten others with legal action when they point out said nasty behavior. You’re just spouting this stuff into a bigger megaphone. Beats me why you would want to use it to actively hurt people, many of whom were fans, but here we are. An author wrote some quite nice YA books and apparently some of the themes in them about love and acceptance and prejudice somehow whizzed on by. We’ve been here before. Looking at you, Orson Scott Card.
I’m always going to have something of a fond spot for the books themselves because, if nothing else, Harry Potter fandom helped introduce me to someone I consider one of my best friends, even though we’ve never actually stood on the same continent. I’m sure not going to be putting any of my money in her pockets from this point forward and I can easily recommend other books, though. Not a penny to anything Rowling has had a creative hand in, for me. (If that’s not where you land, that’s fine, it’s just not something I prefer to put *my* money into.) I pretty heavily considered yanking down all the Potter-related fics because it feels uncomfortably close to “promoting” her, amplifying the harmful statements she’s been making, thinly veiled as “just asking questions” or “protecting cisgender women”. I’ve only held back because… well, our relationships with authors and their works are often complicated. An author that actively harms in their public conduct may also write the exact thing/characters we needed to read at some point in our lives. I can’t possibly put it into words better than this.
Please see the Tiffany Aching series for all your YA magical book needs if you’re not comfortable reading Rowling's books. The Tiffany books are infinitely better written in my opinion. For a start, the author didn’t feel the need to continually amend them for the next decade plus via the medium of interviews and Twitter. "She couldn’t be the prince, and she’d never be a princess, and she didn’t want to be a woodcutter, so she’d be the witch and know things, just like Granny Aching—"
Hopefully there’s zero confusion on my personal stance on these points. Transgender women are women. Transgender men are men. Supporting transgender rights, access to medical treatment, access to public spaces, and gender-inclusive language does nothing whatsoever to harm, lessen, or diminish my rights as a cisgender woman. Attacking transgender people, particularly transgender women, via “imaginary threatening scenario that has nothing whatsoever to do with transgender women” isn’t something I want done in the name of “protecting me” or “keeping me safe”. It’s not like there’s a shortage of human rights out there, there’s plenty to go around. We’ve got an infinite supply. You can, amazingly enough, acknowledge that not everyone who gives birth identifies as a woman and STILL be totally against people having negative birth experiences due to poor treatment or even abuse. WE CAN DO BOTH.
So, TLDR: I’m hopeful Rowling will eventually pull her head out of wherever she’s currently got it wedged. Until then, I’ll point out that back in 2005, she claimed she hadn’t realized Harry Potter was supposedly fantasy. Perhaps after she’s completely worked that out, she’ll realize that the idea that acknowledging transgender rights (and existence) somehow “threatens” women’s rights is every bit as much a fantasy as the books.
I leave you with the delightfully snarky comment Sir Terry had on the idea that Potter being “fantasy” was somehow a surprise to the author.
"I would have thought that the wizards, witches, trolls, unicorns, hidden worlds, jumping chocolate frogs, owl mail, magic food, ghosts, broomsticks and spells would have given her a clue?" – Terry Pratchett
