Still, you say that you feel the Harry Potter world sends a positive message overall, and you know what? I agree with you. The main moral message of the books is this: We shouldnât live in a supremacist society. We shouldnât be like Voldemort or like the Death Eaters, who believe âpure-bloodâ wizards and witches are inherently better than everyone else. We shouldnât discriminate against people who are Muggle-born (like Hermione) or who are poor (like Ron). We should recognize that everyone (even Snape, the Slythiest of Slytherins!) has the agency to choose who they want to become and ultimately do good.
This is the core message that made so many of us fall in love with the Harry Potter world as kids. It made us feel that itâs okay to be different â that difference should be respected and even celebrated. Even though Rowling often undercut that open-hearted message with nonsense like ârightfullyâ enslaved house elves, most of us picked up the main moral message in spite of these flaws. And in that way, the books successfully achieved what good fiction is meant to achieve.
âIn the war against moral obtuseness, the artist is our fellow fighter, frequently our guide,â writes the contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum. By exposing us to scene after scene of characters encountering moral conundrums, Nussbaum argues, good fiction trains our capacity for moral attention â the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately.
The Harry Potter books successfully trained a generation of young readers to be exquisitely sensitive to discrimination and to reject it. And itâs on precisely that basis that many of those young readers, now all grown up, reject Rowlingâs anti-trans views.
These readers can choose to reject her books, too. Some do, and thatâs totally alright. But some donât â and I think thatâs totally alright too.
In a 2020 episode of the popular podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, co-hosts Casper ter Kuile and Vanessa Zoltan interviewed trans author Jackson Bird. They drew an analogy between reading Harry Potter and reading the Bible: Just as the Bible contains anti-gay statements that can make it painful reading for queer readers, and yet some of those readers still lovingly engage with the text, the same can be true for the Harry Potter books. As Bird said of such texts, âWe continue to interrogate, but we still acknowledge and accept the ways in which they are useful for us, or healing.â
The âcontinue to interrogateâ part is key here. Any fandom â whether itâs centered on the Christian canon or the Harry Potter canon â is responsible for continuously revising how its canonical texts do and donât get to guide action. If youâre going to continue to engage with the Bible, then you have to keep grappling with all the ways itâs enabled harm, and you have to try to heal that harm. And if youâre going to continue to engage with the Harry Potter world, then you have to continue to wrestle with its wrongs, too.
The good news is: Thatâs doable! Religious communities have been proving that for ages. As early as 2000 years ago, Jewish theologians were inventing a genre called Midrash, which is basically ancient fanfiction; it reimagines problematic bits of the Bible in ways that make them more palatable or meaningful. And over the centuries, many Muslim and Christian theologians have been busy transforming their traditions, giving us everything from Islamic Modernism to Black liberation theology.
So, for you, what can interrogating the Potter canon look like in practice? Iâd suggest connecting with other Potterheads so you can both enjoy and interrogate the content together. Whether thatâs a book club, a movie-watching marathon, a video game night with friends, or a Harry Potter and the Sacred Text episode that you listen to with your partner in the car, the point is to engage with the content and then critically discuss it.
The benefit of doing this in community is that it can actually generate social good. If you end up discussing the house elves, say, you might end up talking about how even the good guys in Rowlingâs books are way too content with maintaining the status quo rather than calling for systemic change (Dumbledore treats his enslaved house elves nicely, but he still enslaves house elves!). That could lead you into all sorts of discussions about how you are or arenât challenging the status quo in our Muggle world.
If you engage with Rowlingâs work this way, I think itâs plausible that the positive social value youâll be generating will outweigh any negative social value you might create by continuing to be a Potterhead. And, crucially, I suspect youâll stop feeling guilty.
Right now, your strategy to ward off guilt is to focus on the financial aspect of all this â how your Potter-related purchases end up materially benefiting Rowling and, through her, the type of organizations she might support. On a dollar-for-dollar level, this is something you can âoffsetâ by donating to the Human Rights Campaign. In fact, since Rowling is already a billionaire, buying a video game now is not appreciably moving the needle for her, while donating hundreds or thousands of dollars to the HRC could plausibly make a difference to that nonprofit. So this strategy is nothing to sneeze at.
But itâs not enough. And we can tell itâs not enough because you still feel guilty. You probably have some intuitive sense that you canât just buy moral absolution (Accio clear conscience!). On its own, offsetting feels cheap, and the reason it feels cheap is that itâs not demanding that any transformative work take place â either for you personally or for society more broadly.
To reiterate a common critique of philanthropy: Just writing a check does not represent a commitment to a broader project of solidarity or justice. Itâs letting you throw a pittance at the problem without requiring you to participate, through your own hard work, in changing the status quo and creating systemic change.
Remember, shying away from systemic change is how Rowling deals with problems in her books. You can do better.
