JK Rowling

Cataloguing resources about her which I originally collected on Twitter.

Opposition to trans liberation

• The 2020 “TERF Wars” letter
• In dialogue with her fiction
• The UK context
• More anti-trans commitments

Harry Potter worldbuilding

Opposition to trans liberation

Rowling is probably the most prominent individual opposing trans liberation in the Anglophone world

The 2020 “TERF Wars” letter

After several years of trans liberation advocates saying they had seen hints and dogwhistles, in 2020 Rowling wrote a famous open letter, which she linked in a tweet saying simply “TERF Wars”

The letter

Rowling’s essay declaring her position: “I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.”

Andrew James Carter's fisking

Capture of a Twitter thread which was one of the most prominent detailed early responses breaking down the particulars, calling it a “litany of half-truths and transphobic dogwhistles”.

Annotating Rowling

An even closer line-by-line fisking of the letter, published early on, by Cassie LaBelle. The author says: “Rowling wants cis women to see trans women as gross aggressive men who need to be confronted, Me Too style. She talks about being assaulted by a man, and then paints trans women as sneaky men with an abusive agenda.”

The Mermaids Team Open Letter To J. K. Rowling

A response to the overall argument of the letter and its implications: “If you haven’t listened to trans children, don’t speak about them.”

A Reasonable Person’s Guide to the J.K. Rowling Essay

“I could see the countless points in which many reasonable and well-intentioned people likely found themselves nodding along. Not because they are transphobic, but because they don’t have access to the full story.”

Everything Wrong with JK Rowling’s Open Letter

“inaccuracies, omissions, and logical errors”

In dialogue with with her fiction

a single sentence

Capture of a Twitter thread by Q. Pheevr which observes that when Hermione's consciousness magically inhabits Harry's body, Rowling employs the pronoun “she” and considers the implications

JK Rowling's Anti-Transgender Stance And Hogwarts Legacy

"With a brand-new Harry Potter game on the way, now is the time to unpack and try to understand the impact of franchise creator JK Rowling's discriminatory behaviour."

JK Rowling’s latest book is about a murderous cis man who dresses as a woman to kill his victims

On Troubled Blood

The Midnight Society on Troubled Blood

The Midnight Society is a series of funny, spoofy dialogues between fictional authors published on Twitter which often features Rowling. Archiving it here:

JK Rowling: Ssubmitted for the approval of the Midnight Ssociety, I call this The Tale of the Murderer Who Wore a Dresssss
Stephen King: you mean a wizard robe? are you returning to harry potter
Rowling: NO
Rowling: but sssee I'll clearly ssstate up front that the dressss-wearing murderer iss actually ciss
Rowling: so even though it's a clear allegory for my feelingss about the inherent evil of transs people, you can't complain
Thomas Harris: fiendishly clever!
Clive Barker: hm this is a pretty long story JK
Rowling: yess
Barker: been working on it a long time, no doubt
Rowling: yess
Barker: probably started working on it when you started being transphobic
Rowling: yesss
Rowling: where are you going with thisss
Barker: did you become transphobic as advance advertising for this book
Rowling:
Rowling: maybe
Rowling: but it'sss better that it'ss transsphobic just for PR right?
Barker: i kinda think it's worse
King: yeah kinda seems worse to me
Poe: definitely worse
King: this thing is 900 pages long? that's a little much, why did you write a 900 page book?
Rowling: I LEARNED IT FROM YOUUUUU
King:
Barker: i thought you were dead
Barker: twitter said you were dead
Rowling: i'm not dead
Rowling: i was merely engaged in brumation under a rock

The UK context

Opposition to trans liberation has a distictive relationship with media and feminist culture in the UK

J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is a product of British culture

This Vox explainer references a paywalled New York Times article. Here’s the heart of that:

If the idea that transphobic harassment could be “feminist” bewilders you, you are not alone. In the United States, my adoptive home, the most visible contemporary opponents of transgender rights are right-wing evangelicals, who have little good to say about feminism. In Britain, where I used to live, the situation is different.

There, the most vocal trans-exclusionary voices are, ostensibly, “feminist” ones, and anti-trans lobbying is a mainstream activity. Case in point: Ms. Parker told the podcast “Feminist Current” that she’d changed her thinking on trans women after spending time on Mumsnet, a site where parents exchange tips on toilet training and how to get their children to eat vegetables. If such a place sounds benign, consider the words of British writer Edie Miller: “Mumsnet is to British transphobia,” she wrote “what 4Chan is to American fascism.”

The term coined to identify women like Ms. Parker and Dr. Long is TERF, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In Britain, TERFs are a powerful force. If, in the United States, the mainstream media has been alarmingly ready to hear “both sides” on the question of trans people’s right to exist, in Britain, TERFs have effectively succeeded in framing the question of trans rights entirely around their own concerns: that is, how these rights for others could contribute to “female erasure.” Many prominent figures in British journalism and politics have been TERFs; British TV has made a sport of endlessly hosting their lurid rudeness and styling it as courage; British newspapers seemingly never tire of broadsides against the menace of “gender ideology.” (With time, the term TERF has become a catchall for all anti-trans feminists, radical or not.)

The split between the American and British center-left on this issue was thrown into sharp relief last year, when The Guardian published an editorial on potential changes to a law called the Gender Recognition Act, which would allow people in Britain to self-define their gender. The editorial was headlined “Where Rights Collide,” and argued that “women’s concerns about sharing dormitories or changing rooms with ‘male-bodied’ people must be taken seriously.” Some of The Guardian’s United States-based journalists published a disavowal, arguing that the editorial’s points “echo the position of anti-trans legislators who have pushed overtly transphobic bathroom bills.”

A curious facet of the groundswell of TERFism in Britain is that, in fact, the phenomenon was born in the United States. It emerged out the shattered remnants of the 1960s New Left, a paranoid faction of American 1970s radical feminism that the historian Alice Echols termed “cultural feminism” to distinguish it, and its wounded attachment to the suffering-based femaleness it purports to celebrate, from other strands of women’s liberation.

The movement crossed over to Britain in the 1980s, when cultural feminism was among the lesbian-separatist elements of antinuclear protest groups who saw themselves as part of a “feminist resistance” to patriarchal science, taking a stand against nuclear weapons, test-tube babies and male-to-female transsexual surgery alike.

In America, however, TERFism today is a scattered community in its death throes, mourning the loss of its last spaces, like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which ended in 2015. And so the strangely virulent form that TERFism takes in Britain today, and its influence within the British establishment, requires its own separate, and multipronged, explanation.

Ms. Parker and Ms. Long may not know it, but they’re likely influenced by the legacy of the British “Skepticism” movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, which mobilized against the perceived spread of postmodernism in English universities as well as homeopathy and so-called “junk science.” Hence, the impulse among TERFs to proclaim their “no-nonsense” character; witness the billboard Ms. Parker paid to have put up last fall dryly defining a woman as an “adult human female.” Such a posture positions queer theory and activism as individualistic, narcissistic and thus somehow fundamentally un-British.

It’s also worth noting that the obsession with supposed “biological realities” of people like Ms. Parker is part of a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire. Imperial Britain imposed policies to enforce heterosexuality and the gender binary, while simultaneously constructing the racial “other” as not only fundamentally different, but freighted with sexual menace; from there, it’s not a big leap to see sexual menace in any sort of “other,” and “biological realities” as essential and immutable. (Significantly, many Irish feminists have rejected Britain’s TERFism, citing their experience of colonialism explicitly as part of the reason.)

But perhaps the biggest factor in the rise of TERFism has been the relative dearth of social movements in Britain over the past three decades. It’s telling that Ms. Parker thinks it was the United States that exported “political correctness” and ideas like “gender identity” to Britain; it might even be fair to say that she’s right.

In other parts of the world, including America, mass movements in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s around the effects of globalization and police brutality have produced long overdue dialogue on race, gender and class, and how they all interact. In Britain, however, the space for this sort of dialogue has been much more limited. As a result, middle- and upper-class white feminists have not received the pummeling from black and indigenous feminists that their American counterparts have, and thus, their perspectives retain a credibility and a level of influence in Britain that the Michigan Womyn’s Festival could have only dreamed of.

TERF Wars: Why Transphobia Has no Place in Feminism.

Laurie Penny article contextualizing Rowling’s position in the tendency toward the particular history and forms of opposition to trans liberation in UK feminism and media

Inside the Great British TERF War

Vice Magazine with more on the cultural politics in the UK

A telltale Twitter ♥︎

“JK Rowling just liked a tweet opposing a bill that will criminalise conversion therapy (both sexual orientation and gender identity) at the federal level in Canada. If you were on the fence or thought people were overreacting before, now is the time to take a stand.”

More UK context

Lacking another archive of this Twitter thread from Katherine Cross, I am capturing it here:

British transphobia’s virulence derives from its acceptability among British liberals, full stop. J.K. Rowling doesn't fit American liberals’ idea of an anti-trans bigot (who they prefer to envision as a MAGA-spewing right-winger). Thus, all the softpedalling in press coverage.

They literally don’t know what to do with her. “Wait, I thought you were one of the good ones?" The problem is that now this bigotry risks becoming more acceptable because of who’s spouting it. It breaks the partisan priors held by many cis American liberals.

Their assumption was that transphobia seemed bad because it was a conservative thing. Now J.K. Rowling offers them ideological cover--as long as they don’t look too closely, which they probably won’t. They’ll be inundated with whitewashing headlines and ledes.

Meanwhile, the fact that she’s approvingly quote-tweeting people with open homophobia on their timeline will not be remarked upon in much of the coverage. It’ll instead be framed as “Rowling expresses controversial views on transgender rights."

The thing is, Rowling's liberalism has always been pantomime. It's her brand. Her tweetsona, if you like. But she's never been genuinely progressive--see the thousand and one critiques of anti-Semitism, racism, homophobia, etc. in HP.

What grates about her retcons--“Oh Dumbledore was gay, I just never told you" or “Oh Hermoine could've been Black" is that no genuinely decent person would've tried that. They’d have acknowledged they have a lot to learn and strive to do better in the future.

Instead of being honest about her implicit biases and working to correct them in future work, she retcons and doubles down on her ignorance. The retcons reconcile her past with her current liberal persona in the lowest-cost way possible. She was never wrong, oh no.

We all have to learn and grow. But her unwillingness to admit that she was ever mistaken is telling. It’s all about the brand for her.

But her transphobia? Like all Twitter TERFs, she’s got religion on this. This is who she really is and what she actually cares about.

A personal memoir relevant to Rowling’s claims

A Twitter thread by Lina Morgan:

Hi. It’s me. Your friendly neighborhood trans person who detransitioned and has serious health issues. JK Rowling and other TERFs are using people like me as ammunition against other trans people. My sickness is not a result of transition, it is because of the lack of true care.

In my late 20s, after being on hormones and anti-androgens for several years, my body finally started cooperating and I started to look and feel like the person I knew I always was.

Then I got sick.

I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. It’s a hereditary thing. My grandmother had ulcerative colitis, she passed the predisposition, genetically, onto me. At the time, I was too poor to handle being full-time sick on my own so I had to lean on support from my disapproving family.

I made the decision to detransition at the time because I was afraid to be on so many medications while I was getting a new disease under control. I had no real support, so all I could do was guess and I was desperate to get the Crohn's under any semblance of control.

In my 30s, I tried to transition again but discovered a stumbling block in the form of bizarre allergic reactions to all estrogen pills and anti-androgens. To this day there is no perfect explanation for my condition.

I tried a lot of different treatments, all had the same result: I couldn't breathe, I would swell up and even break out in hives. My lungs are permanently damaged. I already had asthma but my breathing is much worse now.

The closest I’ve ever gotten to a diagnosis is that the Crohn’s (plus the medication I take for it) has altered my body chemistry creating an extreme reaction to estrogen and anti-androgens (and I'm sure a whole lot of other random things).

Here's what I know -- the lack of medical professionals available to incorporate crohn's treatment with my ongoing transition is what caused me to detransition. And it's what destroyed my health. The actual medical transition is not responsible for any of that.

Gatekeepers to my transition did not help me stay healthy -- they, quite genuinely, ruined my health. And seeing people claim care when I know, first hand, what their “care” really accomplishes infuriates me.

Trans people need doctors and medical scientists to do the research and incorporate medical transition seamlessly into every day life. Trans people will have other health issues because trans people are human. It is not our fault scientists aren’t doing the work.

And it’s not trans people’s fault that cis people who are scared of the big, bad tran get in the way of us getting any care whatsoever. That’s what’s making us unhealthy. That's what’s killing us. So spare me the sanctimonious speeches about protecting kids.

JK Rowling doesn’t care about trans kids. In point of fact, she’s made it very clear that she doesn’t want trans people to exist. Anyone who allies themselves with her and calls it “care” might be fooling themselves, but they’re not fooling me. I hope you won't be fooled either.

More anti-trans commitments

Glamour magazine’s backgrounder

An outline of events starting before the letter, including many tweets and public statements from Rowling.

Laura Kate Dale on later extremist alliances

So, I want to be clear who JK Rowling was having lunch with yesterday, while LGBT rights groups protested for trams rights mere miles away.

Get The L Out are an anti trans hate group who hijacked London Pride to hand out trans women are rapists leaflets under police protection. Get the L Out were featured prominently in the BBC’s “trans women are raping cis lesbians” article. They were behind the 80 person self selected survey which formed the backbone of that bigotted article.

Rowling met them for an excited best friend lunch.

Get the L Out are a group who actively claim trans women are dangerous, and should have their legal rights removed.

Rowling met up for drinks with them, while a united LGBT community begged the government to ban the torture of trans people under the guise of protection.

There are few groups more actively engaged in fighting against trams rights in the UK than Get the L Out.

You don’t have a best friends lunch with them without being vehemently committed to the anti trans rights rabbit hole.

Shit like this is why I’m boycotting Hogwarts Legacy. I cannot support anything connected to someone who is so clearly, unashamedly, best friends with those who see me as a monster to be eradicated. She’s not just “a little bit anti trans”, she’s besties with extremists. Rowling isn’t just innocently following these people on Twitter. She’s going out of her way to celebrate with them as a collective.

J.K. Rowling Denies Pen Name Is Inspired by Anti-LGBTQ+ Conversion Therapist

Offering evidence that this is implausible

My Words to Joanne Rowling Above the Towers of Hogwarts: Performing Transgender Civility

“your apparently blameless movement of frustrated common-sensers, has been infiltrated at every level by the kind of vicious, hostile bigots whose entire business is to defame and degrade the lives of trans women”

On Rowling's sense of her own gender

Kathryn Brightbill says:

I didn't read all of JK Rowling's extremely long essay because I got tired of slogging through bad writing, but the part where she said that if she'd been born later, she might have decided to transition stood out like a blinking neon sign, and yet hardly anybody talks about it.

This isn't a, "bigots secretly are what they hate," scenario speculating about somebody based on no evidence other than the bigotry, this is what Rowling told us about herself to explain why she wants to wall off trans men from

JK Rowling explained her motivations, and spelled out that they're partly rooted in panic about what the ability of trans men to transition means about her own identity and sense of self, and yet hardly anybody wants to talk about it.

This is not to speculate about Rowling's gender, just to say that she full on told us that she doesn't feel sufficiently secure in her own womanhood to not feel threatened by the fact that other people question their gender, conclude they're not women, and do something about it.

Anyway, this tweet is what got me thinking about the topic again — Evan Urquhart says:

Well, I read this, and I must confess to being disappointed that trans men, and Rowling's specific targeting of trans men in her statement weren't mentioned at all. Who Did J. K. Rowling Become?

What is it going to take for people to realize that bathroom predator panic is only half of the transphobe's worldview (and way less than half of Rowling's actual statement)?

The sexist belief that trans men are being tricked into transitioning (because we all know "girls" can't make decisions about their own lives) is a huge part of the transphobic narrative.

We cannot allow it to fly under the radar or be presented as respectable and measured.

I'll go further and say:

You do not understand Rowling and have not adequately profiled her descent into transphobia if you ignore the part of her essay where she says that if she'd been born earlier, she might have transitioned herself.

Shying away from it is cowardly. It'si a core part of where Rowling situates herself in relation to trans people: Rowling feels threatened as much by the possibility of exploring her own gender identity as she does at the possibility of being a victim of abuse.

For anyone who's new to my own work, here's the piece I wrote about Rowling's transphobia towards trans men when her essay first came out: J.K. Rowling and the Echo Chamber of TERFs

You do not understand Rowling and have not adequately profiled her descent into transphobia if you ignore the part of her essay where she says that if she'd been born earlier, she might have transitioned herself.

We're watching a very public freakout from one of the richest women on the planet, all because she's decided she'd rather fight to destroy other people's lives than to see a therapist and work through her own issues, because she's afraid of what she'll find if she does.

And the thing is, if she ever actually dealt with her own gender issues, she might very well conclude that yes, she is a binary cis woman, but she's so terrified about the prospect that she might find otherwise that she's decided she'd rather be a hateful bigot.

As a final note, as someone who grew up in the Christian homeschool subculture where my parents were in the minority for teaching their daughters math and expecting college, I think I know a thing or two about growing up in a misogynistic world.

The idea that experiencing misogyny makes somebody want to change their gender is patently bullshit. I spent too much of my childhood and young adulthood pushing back against the idea that womanhood is a limitation to take the time to stop and question my gender growing up.

And lest somebody decides to pop in here and suggest that as a homeschool kid, I was too sheltered to be aware that some people transition because they're not the gender they were assigned at birth, my mom watched daytime talk shows in the '80s, I knew trans people existed.

Not that the trans representation on 1980s daytime talk shows was exactly great, but ever since elementary school, I've understood the concept that not everyone fits the gender they were assigned at birth, and that if that gender doesn't fit, you can do something about it.

Not that I was aware of the concept of nonbinary genders back then, but it's not like the English language even had terminology back then. Just because there weren't labels doesn't mean nonbinary people didn't exist though.

And contrary to what people think, it's not just Kids These Days who are describing themselves as nonbinary and using pronouns like they/them. People felt that way before, they just didn't have words in English to put a label on it.

I mean, comics legend Grant Morrison, who's in their 60s, recently came out as nonbinary by basically saying that Kids These Days came up with a term that fit how they'd always felt, and that that's why it's good language evolves over time.

All that to say that it's a hell of a lot of projection for JK Rowling to argue that there's some kind of social contagion around gender and base the argument on the idea that she might have transitioned if she'd been born decades later than she was.

I want to reiterate that I have no idea what Rowling's actual deal with her gender is and I'm not speculating. I'm just saying that her own words say that this is something that distresses her personally, and that fact needs to be included in the discussion.

Clare Willet on Rowling supporters

some of the ugliest, nastiest, most vitriolic, "lock your account and log out for the week to cope with the anxiety attacks" harassment i've gotten on here has been for criticizing JKR, which honestly just proves why it's necessary for allies to keep talking about this

remember when the terfs were brigading a thread about my dead mother because they were pissed i said that if we were deplatforming trump for inciting real-world violence with tweets that we should deplatform her too?

good times

and by good i mean i had to call my therapist

transphobes frequently hold up cis queer women as the very victims they are defending ("protect the poor lesbians by keeping men out of women-only spaces!"), only to lash out viciously if you don't uphold their narrative and permit yourself to be used thus, which i loudly do not

and i mean this is the tiniest drop-in-the-bucket example of how their tactics are so violent they hurt even the people they purport to be helping (see also: cis butches getting harassed in public bathrooms!), but JKR really normalized falsely framing this as "feminism"

right-wing transphobia and left-wing transphobia have the same ultimate aim (the erasure of all trans people from society) but they see themselves differently; JKR bears a lot of responsibility for popularizing the notion of a "progressive" case against supporting trans people

and i sincerely mean it when i say she should be deplatformed under the same rules for which twitter removed trump's account: namely that real, bodily harm in the real world, in addition to perpetual daily online harassment, is being purposely, gleefully instigated by your tweets

JK Rowling Holocaust Denialism: Author Pushes Claims That Trans People Were Not A Target

On Twitter JKR quoted someone saying correctly …

The Nazis burnt books on trans healthcare and research, why are you so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender?

… commenting …

I just… how? How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?

Rowling is, of course, entirely wrong, and fascist transphobia is a very serious concern in our current moment.

Harry Potter worldbuilding

On closer examination, the setting and storytelling in Harry Potter shows troubling implications

Shaun on Harry Potter

A long video-essay on the cultural politics and politics politics of Harry Potter and what they imply

On house-elves and goblins

Not quite my own read, but illuminating on how JKR’s sloppy worldbuilding gives rise to moral horror in her work:

So I kind of want to go off on a couple Greatest Hits topics in relation to the Wizard Book Lady’s books that aren’t her grotesque transphobia or fatphobia, but often get criticized. (House-elves and goblins, to be specific.)

Should I?

Alright, easymode first: Goblins.

So time to annoy.

Goblins in Harry Potter are antisemitic! They are not, however, a sort of antisemitic which particularly bothers me, compared to a number of more common & popular antisemitic cliches?

(glares at Vampires-as-evil-rich)

Harry Potter’s goblins aren’t even especially particularly Jewish-coded in terms of physical appearance in the books’ overt descriptions, partly bc JK’s descriptions of people are frequently potentially awkward, gawky, or nebulous.

By contrast the films, of course...hoo boy.

Bluntly: if you’re primed to see Goblins in Potter’s text-only as especially Jewish, it’s entirely due to wealth & banking associations - unlike, say, Tolkien’s dwarves, who are obviously Jew-ish analogs in language, culture, and virtues. Potter goblins are all vices, no virtues.

To be clear here I absolutely agree that Potter’s goblins are antisemitic. But as harmful antisemitism goes, in text alone, they were pretty easy to dismiss as relatively inconsequential compared to many quite popular conspiratorial symbols-of-evil-wealth-and-power.

If you’re already looking for the many ways Rowling’s books replicate and praise normative Western & British bigotries, you’ll spot clear parallels between goblins and antisemitic-caricatures-of-Jews.

But they’re too crude and inconsequential to rank among Rowling’s biggest harms.

I can already feel some well-intentioned angry person coming at me with one of the grotesque movie or publication stills of a Potter goblin and its resemblance to the “happy merchant” antisemitic grotesquerie, so please - don’t.

(I have some bad news about pop goblins in general.)

And - until later in the series - Goblins aren’t a particularly significant element of the setting. There’s one noteworthy goblin character & it takes until the last book for him to become impactful - and oh boy the Gringotts heist is Peak Didn’t Think About This Antisemitism

But basically, if we’re talking about normalized antisemitism, Potter is a blip. South Park did infinitely more, and more harmful examples, to popularize it than Potter ever did. Blade and the big 90s-00s “vampires as decadent queer greedy chameleonic ur-white ‘others’” did more.

(The latter, especially, because they are comparatively more primed for acceptance within a fig leaf of socially-conscious coding than Potter goblins, imo; if you recoil at a depiction of a Potter goblin, it just means you hate ugliness, not that you don’t hate Jews.)

Why do I bring this up? Mostly because it’s a good example of something that you see a lot in Gentiles’ criticisms of media antisemitism: the use of charges of antisemitism as a rhetorical condiment to season an already trenchant objection rather than an issue in itself.

Someone who condemns Potter for antisemitic imagery is probably throwing it in bc they see all the other extremely objectionable things in Potter & is just tossing it in to augment the far-more-overtly-damning condemnations of her thoughtless racism, fatphobia or transphobia.

Which...well, it doesn’t do the crusade against antisemitism any favors. It ultimately disparages it as a cause in its own right.

Food for thought, folks.

I will pause for comments before I step on the other land-mine labeled “house-elves and where Rowling fundamentally didn’t think about how to do xenopsychology“

Alright. Let’s crack open the fetid sarcophagus of the House Elf Problem.

First: A premise. Speculative fiction is absolutely full of “servant creatures,” and no, they’re not just the non-sapient ones. Every AI or robot created to Do a Job (that is, most of them) qualifies, too.

Folklore, likewise, is full of Servant Creatures, it’s ubiquitous, because servants were ubiquitous parts of the pre-industrial world. People don’t want to be forced to do the shitty jobs themselves. Even gods are expected to have had servants and vassals.

Modern works do it too. Most high-level wizards in D&D can summon bound spirits or create beings to assist them and provide either raw or specialized labor, and folks accept this.

So Rowling is drawing off a tradition that exists. The problem is she is really lazy and bad at it.

Basically the big thing - work with me here, it’s a story and social premise - is that most of these Magical Servants in folklore or mythology or literature are treated, by good people, like idealized human servants. Part of the household, appreciated, included and compensated.

Where Rowling Makes It Weird is introducing a level of malice, subordination & explicit exploitation into the relationship with house-elves.

In folklore you did not own, or abuse, a brownie or a domovoi or other Helpful House Fey. If you did, they possibly took revenge and left.

Rowling’s wizards abuse house-elves. They aren’t treated like members of the household, but beaten and enslaved and nobody comments on this other than Hermione. Who is mocked for it.

“But they don’t want to be free, they like it!”

Oh boy, let’s talk Discworld golems!

See it’s deeply unfair to compare Pratchett’s work to that of someone like Rowling, but Pratchett’s golems are a good counter-example of effectively writing the xenopsychology that Rowling cheaply employs as a defense.

Discworld’s golems like to work. They are literally made for it & will do difficult jobs without complaint as long as they’re given the Sabbath off. Mr. Pump spent who knows how many years in a dark hole turning a pump w/o complaint or resentment because it was useful & necessary.

And once golems who can released from the task they were designed to do arise, they start freeing themselves. They save up money, buy themselves or their fellows, and then hire out their labor. Protagonists treat them with respect and acceptance.

Crucially, free golems still self-identify as tools, but tools that merit respect. We get multiple treatments of golems’ psyches, which are different from those of humans, examining the nuances of their perspective and what labor means to them.

In one heartbreaking example, an eons-old messenger golem was late to its recipient, resulting in a city’s destruction by volcanoes. The golem, a figure of tremendous dignity, still carries the message because golems believe the universe is a cycle and one day he will get to try again.

There is nothing like this with house-elves. They are comical, undignified figures, doing labor the narrative considers unworthy of respect or admiration. Their mannerisms are servile and they lack independent culture or initiative - because Rowling doesn’t respect them.

So when Rowling and the narrative appeals to xenopsychology or different values with house-elves, it’s a very obvious dodge. You can’t say “house-elves think differently & enjoy being dominated, oppressed & forced to do menial labor” as a defense; the statement contradicts itself.

The central conceits that make Discworld golems work is that their psychology and values system are considered valid by the narrative.

Their labor-centric “I am a tool” perspective is alien to us, but it is presented as valid, and not as an excuse to deny them dignity.

House-elves are pathetic figures because the narrative and its author considers their labor not “necessary & useful” but pathetic. The house-elf’s job is not to Do The Work - wizards can do many household tasks relatively effortlessly - but to be an abused underclass made to do it.

Even Dobby, the house-elf who’s actually presented as “happy,” is happy in a decidedly pathetic, servile sort of way; he’s always the butt of the joke, except for his actual death scene.

Because Rowling thinks of servants (typically for modern audiences) as a punching bag.

House-elves don’t get anything from their servitude; even Dobby’s wages are pathetic. They’re made to do it & have basically internalize their abuse as normal. Nor are they considered valuable members of the household or people with voices in their own right.

Now, a more skilled author might have taken a perversion of the household spirit relationship - remember, they are not a servant and will make their displeasure known - and applied it as, say “the Wizarding world has colonized and enslaved fairyland.”

Rowling is not.

Rowling presents this debased and abusive relationship between house-elves and Wizards as the natural order of things!

Which raises *extremely troubling and damning questions* about “where did house-elves come from?” All the answers are horrible!

And there’s no effort to frame house-elves as like, a vital part of either their households or their communities. They have no voice, no dignity, no value.

I don’t know how much of this Rowling *intended*, but the results reflect her fundamentally thoughtless approach.

The best way to put it is that Rowling inserted malice into a stereotypical House Spirit relationship because she wanted to have magical creatures serve as magical labor-saving devices and service... but thinks that abusing servants is part of the privilege of having them.

She doesn’t even include this as a serious source of tension - it’s very obvious when she realized despite herself she’d created a society that relied not on servants but on slaves because she had Dumbledore, her moral compass, emphasize it as a part of the the Wizarding World’s rot.

But by then it was too late, if she even wanted to fix it at all.

(Notably, treating a servant the way that Wizards treat house-elves is not the way one should treat a servant if they don’t want to get killed in their sleep or have the servants piss in their tea.)

Moviebob on Rowling’s worldbuilding

Wait the Harry Potter game had basically cart blanche to make something that could get the brand out from under Rowling’s TERF bullsh-- somehow...

...and they went with “let’s make it all about the other super-offensive thing people were mad at before!“?”

It’s about a conspiracy by that one race of creatures that runs all the banks and looks, uh... not great considering that role

I mean it’s not even “treat” though... the Goblins just are exactly what “The Scheming Jews” are in the worst antisemitic folklore of Olde Europe that split off and became early 20^th Century “goblins” in fantasy fiction and “The Zionist Plot” in conspiracy circles 🤷‍♂️

I’m 100% non-joking convinced that all of J.K. Rowling’s problems stem from being a hacky writer who doesn’t realize how much of both her “creativity” and her beliefs about the real world are just absorbed from pre-existing fiction tropes that she never bothered to look into...

...Like you listen to how she frames her views on trans people especially before she was getting “policy papers” to parrot from actual politicians and academics (she’s not actually very... um, smart?) she basically just thinks “Oh, trans = the plot of Dressed To Kill’”

But she probly never watched that movie or the movies it ripped off or that ripped IT off, she’s just another hacky genre-writer who absorbed a lot of tropes and had a talent (and it IS a talent) for reassembling them, and thats also how she functions as a “thinker.”

So in Potter the Goblins are Jewish stereotype caricatures who run the banks and horde gold and are probably secretly evil so you have to keep an eye on theme because thats where the pre-1950s versions of “goblins” in fairytales came from - she just repeated it.

*(post-40s/50s fantasy fiction owes much less problematic image of Goblins as ‘bad elves/fae/humans’ to Tolkien more than anybody - don’t look to hard at the super-hairy short guys who’re obsessed with gold and wander without a homeland in that first book though 😉)

This is part of how we still haven’t reckoned with how the web is going to change our grasp of history: It used to be easier to forget where all our cliches came from and how far back they went. All the stuff comes from somewhere before, often with bad origins, and sometimes that means it turns benign and “settles” but then gets to “turn bad” again like cancer cells rallying back. “Goblins” being a caricature to demonize a minority race/religion turns into this harmless fiction creature over centuries - until suddenly it’s not, again.

A half-flippant observation from Leah Porter

It’s weird that JK is so concerned about trans people in bathrooms when so much of Harry Potter takes place in a girl’s bathroom with two cis boys 🤷🏼‍♀️

Had this thought a few weeks ago and was reminded of it when <@loieplautz> said something pretty similar it reminded me of it. It’s strange that JK also had kids going into an underground lair unsupervised looking for a snake and a bunch of strange men trying to kill magic kids 🤷🏼‍♀️

Oh and getting kids to throw a bunch of hard wooden balls at each other whilst flying through the sky at like 100mph, chasing a special gold magical winged ball 🤷🏼‍♀️