In 2015, I was briefly a YouTube celebrity. I decided that over the summer, I was going to record myself reading Harry Potter, upload my recordings and promote myself as a voice actor that way. As it turned out, recording them took significantly longer than a summer, and then I was copyrighted and had to take them all down (though I continued to make them and send them out to my mailing list). But I was actually quite excited when that happened; the main reason was because my videos were significantly more popular than I'd expected (I don't think I'd have been flagged otherwise, they were starting to become high on the search results).
Anyway... with the dedication it took for me to do this, you've probably guessed by now that I am a massive Potterhead. Not so much the films, but I've read all of the books numerous times, I like to quiz my friends about obscure bits of Potter knowledge, I immerse myself in that world (I'm a Ravenclaw) and until a couple of years ago I really admired JK Rowling as a writer. I remember talking about this when I introduced myself on the first day of Uni. It wasn't just because of HP, but also I loved The Casual Vacancy and was really getting into the Strike books. For me, JK Rowling could do no wrong.
It's quite astonishing how suddenly she seems to have taken such a U-turn that she can almost do no right. For me, my disappointment in her started in 2015 when she opposed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions action against Israel. She explains her reasoning in the linked article, but many of my comrades were astonished by this; I remember one of them saying that they always felt certain that they were on the same side as Dumbledore. This issue with Rowling's politics then significantly increased in the public's mind with her vicious opposition to Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party. I myself never understood this; to me, the flaws of centrist politics are outlined very clearly in the characterisation of Cornelius Fudge, who is weak but relatively competent up until the rise of Voldemort, before descending into absolute chaos in the attempt to maintain order. This is the centrist curse - it works when circumstances are mild enough to get away with it, and is hopeless during any sort of crisis. This was something I felt JK Rowling understood (and was reaffirmed by her depiction of the character Barry Fairbrother in The Casual Vacancy) so I was baffled by her insistence that Ed Miliband or Owen Smith would be a preferable opposition. Truth be told, I am still baffled by this.
I actually understand her anger towards the transgender community more than I do her opinions about centrist leaders, though I am astounded by how far she is apparently willing to take it. Before I grew close to some transgender friends and became a trans rights activist, I used to have some issues with transphobia myself - thankfully I met some amazing people who made me realise my errors. So when I meet transphobic people, I think I'm mostly quite good at understanding why they think the way they do and directing them to the resources that will help educate them. We should all do that, I think, as long as we have the energy and patience. However, everyone has the right to their own opinion, and most of us can avoid bullying people as a result. We can avoid blocking children who adore our work because they challenged us on something. We can avoid supporting people whose contracts have not been renewed because of hate speech on social media. We can avoid weaponising our own experiences of domestic abuse to make a point about something completely irrelevant (as much as I recognise how difficult it must have been to speak out about this, the person who abused her was not a transwoman, therefore it has no relevance to the subject at hand). We can avoid cutting off all contact with someone we'd previously claimed to revere because they called us out, even if we think they were wrong to do so.
I think JK Rowling is a very unwell person actually. I'm not going to speculate on the state of her mental health because it wouldn't be fair to; however, I think something important to mention is that there is no one on the planet who is able to empathise with what this woman has experienced in her life. I remember Daniel Radcliffe was asked in an interview once about the relations between himself and his co-stars, and he said, 'There is the knowledge that no one else in the world knows what we've been through' (paraphrased - I can't remember the correct quote). Radcliffe summed this up; he has lived an astonishing life, but he can lean on his co-stars who have experienced the same thing, and anyway they were all young enough that it was normalised for them. Rowling doesn't have this. There is no one else who achieved success on that level at the age that she was at the time of the release of the first Harry Potter book, having lived a fairly normal life before that point. I don't think the emotional strain of living with this kind of thing is something that any of us are able to relate to. I should also make clear that I am by no means defending her; whatever you've been through, it doesn't give you any excuse to bully and victimise people. Lots of us have been through horrible things and DON'T behave like that. That said, I think it's really important to always try to establish people's reasons for doing a certain thing - because if we don't, how can we ever improve the world?
So, the question remains, how do we handle our opinions of her work? Do we stop reading them, try to disassociate her from them or read them anyway? I know people who have totally extended their dislike of Rowling personally to her books, and I understand why someone might do that; if these books were a haven that made you feel safe, why would they continue to feel like that if the author is making you feel the opposite? I also know people who continue to enjoy the books, but try to forget that she wrote them. Whilst I understand that this is the best of both worlds, I don't think that's very helpful. She did write them, there's a lot of her personality and her life in them, and if you like them that means there is something about her that you like, even as there is much that you don't.
My decision is to unapologetically continue to enjoy JK Rowling's works. I have acknowledged many things I dislike about her - but to me, the underlying problem here is our approach to celebrity culture generally. If we like a famous person's work, we think they must be a wonderful human being, and if we find out something we dislike it sours our previous view that butter wouldn't melt in their mouths. This isn't how the world works. As we walk through the world, we see a brief snapshot of the people we come across; we decide whether or not we like them, but most of them have qualities that would make us come to the opposite view if we'd seen those first. I don't like JK Rowling, I don't dislike JK Rowling; the reason for that is that I do not know JK Rowling, and if I ever met her I would give her a clean slate and make my judgement then, based on how she behaved towards me and others around me. I would speak up against anything I disliked, and see how she reacted - just as I do with everyone. But I enjoyed her work before this, and I cannot change my view on it with this additional knowledge about her. For the same reason, I still enjoy Roald Dahl's books, despite the fact he was hugely anti-Semitic. Like JK, he was neither a good man nor a bad man; just a man with flaws and some writing talent.
I would also say that some people have pointed out some problems with the Harry Potter series itself, such as anti-Semitic tropes in the depiction of goblins. There is plenty out there if you'd like to find out more about this - I've read it, and some I agree with, and some I don't. I've come to the conclusion that ultimately the books' strengths outweigh their weaknesses. I feel the same way about The Casual Vacancy. However, I am considering not continuing to read the Strike books (that she writes under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith) because I am beginning to see the more unpleasant sides of her personality coming out in them. The first book, The Cuckoo's Calling, I myself did not see any problems with, but I have heard reviews objecting to her depiction of people of colour - perhaps as a white person, I just can't see it. But The Silkworm contains a bizarre depiction of a transgender person, Career of Evil contains a rather uncomfortable subplot abotu the BIID community and in Lethal White, every character who is politically against the state of Israel is portrayed badly. With these depictions of vulnerable groups, and the fact that the characters generally are a bit more caricatured, I've liked each successive Strike book less.
Ultimately, the ironic thing for me is that this generation of ours that is coming out in support of transpeople was in large part created by JK Rowling. Her books tell us something that she herself is not. To quote Dumbledore, 'Not something [s]he intended to do, I'm sure...'
