First of all, thank you for engaging with me here in good faith. You could’ve been defensive about my characterization of your questions in my “direct reply” part, and I appreciate that you took that criticism without getting angry or defensive.

Second, I brought up my perspective as a child here because it’s such important context to why I wrote that essay. In the essay you replied to, I was an adult communicating an upset that my inner child needed to have expressed. Around that time, I also wrote an essay with a tongue-in-cheek assertion that we should “#cancel JK Rowling” and nobody quite understood that the remark about canceling was a joke. I find the general concept of canceling to be somewhat absurd since it never works on the people who need to be de-platformed, but I used the currency of that language to make a point that ultimately wasn't well written enough to translate my intent.

Most of the things I wrote about Rowling right after her transphobia came to light were most certainly written in anger. I was angry, and I expressed it openly. It was cathartic and rather necessary for me to express. It made me feel better, and it allowed me to connect with people who were feeling similarly.

I don't necessarily regret writing those pieces, but they are a slice of a moment in time when I was definitely living in my feelings. Much of this was also happening early in the pandemic and we all had more time to sit, ruminate, and doom scroll. I probably would’ve tried to be more thoughtful about what I was publishing if the world didn’t feel so much to be on fire.

JK Rowling at this point has gotten far too much attention, indeed, but look at us doing that some more and talking about her. Why? Because she’s become the most emergent vehicle to talk about transphobia. I would go as far as asserting that Rowling is a microcosm of transphobia in western culture. That is why we confront what she is spewing out into the world. People pay attention when her name is invoked.

And, interestingly enough, I’ve been incentivized time and time again to keep talking about her. I’ll probably be able to donate $30 to the Trans Lifeline from this piece at the end of the month because I published my response to you as a monetized essay and not a comment reply. That was strategic, because I don’t accept the money I earn from anything I write about the world’s most famous terf.

Ultimately, Harry Potter was not everything that I needed it to be as a kid, but it’s what I and many others had. That’s where the emotional reaction is coming from in a lot of people. It’s all we had as queer kids when media largely ignored us. Better works with queer characters were hidden and burned and kept out of arm’s length. I wish I’d had a show like Steven Universe or something, but even that has its flaws and missteps in representation despite being so recent.

I’m no longer all that interested in Rowling. Her books are representative of the 90s, and a lot of media that I liked from that era aged really poorly. I’ve made my peace with it, which is why I’ve not written anyway about Hogwarts Legacy and will continue to refrain from doing so.

I don’t care how people engage with the Harry Potter franchise. I don’t actually care if people buy the games or read the books. It’s immaterial.

At the core of what you’re saying, you are very right, I just think that you’re focusing kind of hard on queer fan reaction in a way that overlooked that my anger in that article was not based in astonishment—it was based in losing access to a franchise that, despite entirely sucking, actually used to bring me some comfort. Now it mostly just makes me bored and appreciative of how far my taste in literature has come.

We need to be supporting queer artists, of course, and I’m fortunately able to do that now. I am on a journey of re-parenting the hurt child that resides within my mind, and part of that was very angrily and loudly disavowing JK Rowling. Part of that is also acquiring a small library of queer literature. I had to go through those emotions before I could honor myself in the ways I am now.