Yes it’s time to give up Harry Potter (it was time 10 years ago)
Swap your books for a backbone.
A long time ago, I lined up for a Harry Potter book. I'm telling you this so that you know that I was once a fan. Mainly because I was 14, and everyone my age was reading Harry Potter.
That was 26 years ago.
Now that I know what I know - and I've also grown up - I am no longer a Harry Potter fan.
Harry Potter is a franchise juggernaut. We are about to see a money-grubbing reboot television show because its author JK Rowling, a 61-year-old mould-poisoned billionaire, is angry at the cast of the film version of her series for being openly supportive of trans people.
Once again, people are grappling with whether it's OK to like Harry Potter in 2026.
It isn't.
Feel free to skip to the comments if you read this already in your email!
There is no separating the art from the artist here. If you watch the Harry Potter TV show you are directly funding a movement of hate; a campaign that aims to functionally erase trans people from our world.
It really is that simple.
And you don't have to believe me. JK Rowling will tell you in her own words:
The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund is dedicated to providing legal support to "retain women’s and girls’ sex-based rights in all aspects of life including the workplace, sports and clubs, and protected single-sex spaces."
This is a dog-whistle. It means ‘women and girls’ based on genitals alone - not gender. It is gross gender essentialism that doesn’t protect women or girls and in fact puts them at risk - as it reduces them to body parts.
"I looked into all options and a private fund is the most efficient, streamlined way for me to do this," JK Rowling said last year.
This is not the first time Rowling has openly funded legal attacks on trans people. She donated £70,000 (roughly NZ$163,000) to a Scottish anti-trans group in 2024 after the group lost its challenge to a law legally recognised trans women as women.
When the group appealed, again using funds from JK Rowling, the case was made in court that trans women aren’t considered women under Scotland's Equality Act.
As people with loved ones who are trans, and trans people themselves, held their devastation and heartbreak at the news, JK Rowling posted a photo of herself on a private yacht smoking a cigar, with the comment: “I love it when a plan comes together.”
If you watch the new Harry Potter show, or you buy Harry Potter merch, this is what you're supporting. This is where your hard-earned money is going. It's going to a woman who seems utterly consumed by hate for trans people.
This is a woman who has despised trans people for two decades. She has posted vile comments about trans people over and over and over again. She hounded Olympian Imane Khelif - a cisgender woman - and claimed she was a trans woman. She targeted literal children - Girl Guides- for having a trans girl in their troop.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's not the daily (yes, daily) misgendering and violent rhetoric she puts out. A billionaire, frothing on Twitter about trans people, 24-7.
Why on Earth would you support that? There's not a book on the planet worth that.
We have known for more than a decade now that JK Rowling is transphobic. There is no excuse now for consuming Harry Potter shit.
My son got into Harry Potter about six years back, and it was frustrating to know he wasn't old enough to understand why we don't support JK Rowling in this house. My husband and I discussed how you help an autistic child understand that we don't give money to transphobes.
We landed on a middle ground: We got second-hand Harry Potter crap and tried to steer him into another special interest. We managed to do it in a way that kept our values. At 11, he now completely understands why we don't support JK Rowling.
He knows trans people because our family includes trans people and we are friends with trans people. Because of this, he is immune to the transphobic rubbish pushed by people like JK Rowling. He also knows that, as a boy, he isn't a loaded gun - the view of masculinity held by transphobes. He knows that - as a boy with long hair - he has every right to wear his hair how he wants, without an unwell boomer screaming at him that they need to know what genitals he has.
Because while it's so important that we centre trans people when we talk about transphobia, we should also recognise that transphobia harms everyone.
Transphobes rely on you believing that girls and women are the sum of their parts. They are walking wombs. They need to look like girls and act like girls, and if they don't - well, they will be heavily policed until they do.
Boys act like boys, and they're swinging dicks, and every one of them is a potential rapist with a dress in his backpack, the better to sneak into a women's toilet (past the magical forcefield projected by the 🚺 sign that allows in anyone in a dress) to do some raping.
Transphobic views on segregation of gender and policing of gender are barely different to those stated by white supremacists and those that we heard during the Aids crisis about gay men. Which might be why so many transphobes are also incredibly racist.
The world of Harry Potter may once have brought you comfort or joy. I get that. But knowing it's inexplicably tied to those uneducated, incorrect, outdated, discredited views of gender essentialism - does it really still?
My son no longer likes Harry Potter because he is no longer six. He grew up. Just like Harry Potter fans were meant to. In fact, he recently made a speech about the anti-Semitic tropes in Harry Potter and the racism throughout the books. If an 11-year-old can understand this, Potter adults can.
It's been time to give up the Harry Potter books. Now it's time to show JK Rowling that transphobia will cost her. And more importantly, show trans people that their lives matter more to you than a garbage book.
Say it over and over again until people finally get it:
Trans lives matter more than Harry Potter.