Daniel Radcliffe is Trying to Save Your Love of 'Harry Potter' From J.K. Rowling
By James Sainte-Claire June 9, 2020
Are you a Harry Potter fan who is pretty bummed to find out that the woman who wrote it is terrible? As someone who wrote a book report in seventh grade on Bill Cosby's Fatherhood, I feel your pain. Cosby's stand-up is still really funny even if he did become a tedious moral scold and, oh yeah, a convicted rapist.
Daniel Radcliffe, who vaulted to fame by playing Harry Potter in the big-screen Hollywood adaptation of the books, is also pretty bummed, and he made a statement about it through The Trevor Project.
Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I. According to The Trevor Project, 78% of transgender and nonbinary youth reported being the subject of discrimination due to their gender identity. It's clear that we need to do more to support transgender and nonbinary people, not invalidate their identities, and not cause further harm.
Now, I'm just an opinion writer and there's not really one single definition for any kind of bigotry, but I can tell you that if you don't accept that trans women are women and trans men are men, you're a transphobe. And if you feel the need to hem and haw and equivocate about that and go "Okay, but don't women have the right to spaces without trans women in them," well, then, you're a transphobe.
Radcliffe also hopes that the absolute cuntery of its author doesn't ruin Harry Potter for you if it meant a lot to you growing up.
To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you. I really hope that you don't entirely lose what was valuable in these stories to you. If these books taught you that love is the strongest force in the universe, capable of overcoming anything; if they taught you that strength is found in diversity, and that dogmatic ideas of pureness lead to the oppression of vulnerable groups; if you believe that a particular character is trans, nonbinary, or gender fluid, or that they are gay or bisexual; if you found anything in these stories that resonated with you and helped you at any time in your life — then that is between you and the book that you read, and it is sacred. And in my opinion nobody can touch that. It means to you what it means to you and I hope that these comments will not taint that too much.
Sometimes bad people make art that we enjoy. In fact, it's almost exclusively bad people who make the art that we enjoy. At a certain point, you're going to find out that something you love was made by someone you consider to be a bad person. Probably a song. You can pretend it was made by Hatsune Miku or you can accept that human beings are all flawed but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy the things you enjoy in your limited time on Earth. I guess you could also burn them like those weirdo Christian groups did with the Beatles. As a last resort, you could try reading a book written for adults, that might be a nice change of pace. Just not The Corrections, that is like 1,500 pages of boring. I mean, maybe something interesting happens eventually, but when I realized I was reading a detailed description of dust I just tapped the f**k out.
#daniel radcliffe
#harry potter
#j.k. rowling
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