I write this with little surprise at your ignorance. I was surprised that people were surprised, and a part of me thinks that you should crawl into a hole and die. You have made literal millions off Harry Potter, but somehow your person remains a talking point. Somehow, you are still relevant.
My association with Mrs. Rowling is very much the standard: Harry and I were pretty much the same age, and I read the books with much fervor in my youth. Well, in the sake of being totally truthful, I read the first five. I found them a bit meandering near the end. I am well aware that is not popular opinion, and I hear they were very good. I just moved from Harry Potter to Wheel of Time when I hit high school.
The reason for my dismissal of J.K. Rowling as a vocal piece is simply because she was never supposed to have a political agenda. In my life, she wrote a story that was important at the time, and I grew out of her influence very quickly. I do have friends, a good deal many friends if my FaceBook newsfeed is to be believed, who saw her books as a learning tool: a guide to reality, for lack of a better term. I can see how they could be: the words were about a child going into a world that he doesn’t know. From that standpoint alone, her statements on being against trans-rights make no sense.
On a side note, I am just going to label “trans-rights” as human rights from now on. To delegate importance to one diminishes the other in my head. I am probably alone in feeling that, but it makes little sense to differentiate trans-right from human rights.
To marginalize a group based on something as non-intrusive to your life as sexuality on the distant-tails of you getting huge off of a book written about how a wizard needs to fit in after not knowing that wizards even exist makes no sense to me. What makes less sense is people’s reaction to said ignorance. Destroy your existing copies of the book? It will make NO impact on Rowling. She has already been paid by you buying the book in the first place. The best way to impact her would be to stay away from anything she publishes in the future as a kind of protest.
That is why none of this makes any sense to me. Maybe I’m just cynical, but if she ever wanted to sell another property successfully, she should just keep her comments private. She already uses a pen-name for properties that she wants separated from the HP universe. Therefore, I find it ironic that she did not think to voice such bigoted opinions under a pseudonym? To be fair, this is an age where (if the impact was big enough) the internet would find out. Counterpoint; it might take long enough to distance yourself from the backlash.
FOR ANY FOLLOWERS WHO DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT:
J.K. Rowling recently (a month or two before I started writing this) posted some horrible things about trans people on her Twitter. Today, I found a storefront that she set up with anti-trans paraphernalia and her stream of bigoted remarks is showing no signs of slowing down. No, I am not going to put links to the sites in question, or her Twitter remarks. If you want to find them, you can. I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of watching her visitor counters rise.
End point: I should almost thank you, J.K. Rowling. I have been trying to tell people you didn’t matter for the better part of a decade, and in the period of two months, you have convinced more people than I could have ever dreamed.
plain text. 