JK Rowling Let Us Down!

Social media can be a wonderful thing, it enables you to have a conversation with a stranger hundreds of miles away, it helps you to discover new aspects of life that you would have not previously considered, and it is an easy way to promote your views. Unfortunately, some people use their social media platforms simply as a vehicle for prejudice and hate speech. Unsurprisingly celebrities and people with influence are not exempt from this.

 

Many of you may have seen the tirade of antisemitic tweets by renowned grime artist Wiley this past month, and he isn’t the only one using his place in front of thousands of followers to spread hateful concepts and attacks.

 

It is just too easy to hide behind a screen; twitter users, in particular, have a hard time keeping their bigoted views to themselves. It is too easy for a public figure to blame ‘innocence’ or being ‘uneducated’ on an issue. But some are unapologetically prejudiced online. Online hate crimes are on the rise, but you can report this at stophateuk.org.

Just like JK ROwlin

 

Personally I have conflicted feelings about her. I grew up with the Harry Potter series, I felt akin to Luna and her quirks and the series was a friend to me in my formative years. I would like to detach the works from the author but that isn’t how it works. Over the years she has used    queerbaiting to gain the support of the LGBT+ community. When she announced that Dumbledore was gay it was framed as a win for us. Despite it not being in any of the seven books because it “was not relevant to Harry’s journey”. The same as hinting at the would-be relationship between Seamus and Dean but ended up not doing it because “it would take away from the trio’s ending”. This is itself is not the most dangerous disrespect of the LGBT+ community. No no. That comes from her irredeemable transphobia.

An Attack On Our Family

 

She has always had a questionable stance on the gender binary and Identity, most recently taking issue with the phrase “people who menstruate”. In a tweet relating to an article titled “Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate”. She responded “I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”.  In effect, by reducing a woman to her ability to menstruate not only does she actively reject trans people and Enbys but also tears down cis women with ovarian issues. It is a decades-old misogynistic view that a woman is a walking uterus. At this point, she is not lacking the knowledge to understand the difference between sex and gender but is willfully ignorant on this topic.

Poison Pen 

 

Many readers who have grown up with the Harry Potter series have revisited it as adults to realise there are other problematic caricatures within the plot. Take the goblins that work at Gringotts. These “hooked-nosed, gold-hoarding” creatures echo historically anti-Semitic caricatures and this has caused offence with a lot of the Jewish community. You cannot deny that even if she wasn’t being deliberately insensitive there are many elements that should have had more care and attention.  Another example is the only visible Chinese character is named Cho Chang. This is a mishmash of “Korean and Chinese surnames.” It is almost as if she shoehorned in for representation points.

While Harry Potter holds a place in my heart for evolving my childhood I can no longer ignore the blatant bigotry that it’s author presents.

Written by Rosella Hazledine