The Art, and the Artist

As I’m looking to import all my reading into my personal website, I’m coming face-to-face with my prior representations of JK Rowling’s work, and so I want to talk about it a little bit.

I credit Rowling with reigniting my interest in reading. But please don’t stop reading here, because that’s not really the thing I want you to take away here.

I loved to read when I was younger; I was one of those kids. A formative memory is another kid sneering and saying “who would want to read a thousand-page book about bunnies?” as I held my copy of Watership Down. Then came computers, and then came dating (in that order? are you sure?), and by the end of high school I was mostly skimming chapters or skipping them altogether and reasoning that—never mind the quiz—I could learn what I needed for the test in class discussions.

It was sometime in undergrad when I picked up Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, right where I’d left it somewhere during the Quidditch World Cup, and remembered that reading was fun. Rowling had created a world that took time-worn tropes and used them to build something simultaneously comfortable and thrilling, for me. From there I raced through the others in the series, and then as any college student would do I moved on to “thinky” books. I sat in cafés and read Love in the Time of Cholera and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I continued to devour genre fiction, but I also tried to improve myself, expand my horizons.

When Rowling (ironically, in retrospect) adopted a male pseudonym to start a detective series, I was hooked. Being a white, cis, straight, man, I didn’t see the clues that were peeking through (the connections in the pseudonym, the trans character in The Silkworm). It wasn’t until a few years later still that I started to understand what was happening, and even then, as a fan, I wanted to believe this was someone who was just misunderstanding, misrepresenting herself.

From a position of privilege, I personally gave the author many, many chances to clarify her viewpoint, to state clearly that trans rights are human rights and trans lives are valid and that any insinuation to the contrary was a misunderstanding or a misreading of her words.

Instead, she has doubled down time and time again. One of the richest people on the planet has made it her life’s mission to drive a tiny, disenfranchised, and mistreated minority back into the shadows to contemplate the astronomically-high rate of suicide in their cohort.

As a supporter of human rights, it’s heartbreaking. To see someone so prominent and with so many resources (of course, she’s not the only one) take aim at an already-hurting community with so little power to push back is awful.

As a reader, it’s disappointing. I liked her books. They meant something to me. But with her still making millions (billions?) on her IP; with companies still lining up dump trucks of money at her door; now isn’t the time to “separate the art from the artist”¹. When fall comes around, I usually have a moment of sadness as I remember that a “comfort watch” is no longer viable. But it isn’t viable. It’s tainted; even if I’m not giving her money at this point, I can’t look at her work the same way again. Her work’s greatest attribute was the feeling of safety it gave me, and Rowling has made sure the world is anything but safe, so that’s that.

I want to be clear on this because since I started to write this I’ve encountered someone declaring that boycotting authors like JKR for their views and actions is “cultural vandalism”:

No.

There is no blame on my shoulders for the destructive and hateful actions JKR has chosen to take. I owe her nothing, and any direct or indirect effect on “culture” her actions have is hers to own, including but not limited to her recent success in making it harder for trans people and gender-nonconforming cis people to exist in the UK. Any attempt to shift the blame for societal harms from the people causing the harms to the people upset about it is, on its face, ridiculous and whether or not you intend it (as many of these statements come alongside an “I don’t agree with the author, but” caveat) only benefit the person causing the harm.

As an aside: if this hasn’t taught me to be careful about putting celebrities on a pedestal nothing will, but I do credit the three young actors who started their careers in the Potter film franchise for having the courage not to bow to Rowling—who clearly sees herself as their creator and master—and to speak out frankly and unequivocally for trans rights.

Trans rights are human rights. In denying that, in forcefully coming out in opposition to human rights—in the process making allies of misogynists, white nationalists, and homophobes—Rowling has betrayed her readers (many of whom were trans) and made the world less safe.

I will leave my old reviews in place because I believe in being transparent about these things, but they will be linked to this post.