Thursday, June 11, 2020

Captain's Log, Day 19: A Rug Gets Pulled from Under My Feet


Date: June 11, 2020
Time of post: 2:20 AM
Quarantine Day: 78
Last Song I Listened To: “Better” by Ben Platt
Last Person I Communicated With: GroupMe chat! (Talking about The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta)
Last Thing I Ate: chips and quseo
Last Thing I Read: I read song lyrics, does that count?
Current Mood: sad, scared
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: helped Mikayla and Tyler move their new mattress out of my apartment (they had it shipped to me while they were out of town)
One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: again, feel less sad (a common goal)
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: the world is a dumpster fire (x2)
One Reason I’m Happy Today: Mikayla and Dustin came over last night and we talked and watched Pitch Perfect 3 and Ben Platt’s Radio City Music Hall performance

Dear Apocalypsers,

(Trigger Warning: This post discusses transphobia and J.K. Rowling’s recent statements. Also, I use a few choice words, so please pardon any harsh language.)

I know that this isn’t the most important thing right now, but I’m kind of feeling like my life is unraveling because of J.K. Rowling’s recent statements. I do not recommend reading her full post/essay that’s on her website. It’s super hard to get through. It’s not an apology. She’s trying to define “womanhood” based on her own experiences, and I know the Internet used to joke that she was “the queen,” but she sure as hell isn’t God, so I don’t know why she thinks she has the definitive say on what makes a “real” woman.

As anyone who knows me knows, Harry Potter has been a huge factor in my life. It has, quite literally, shaped who I am as a person. I read the second book when I was 7 (approximately 2003), because the library didn’t have the first one, but I knew my mom had read them, and I wanted to, too.

The books and movies were foundational to my childhood; they helped me form my morals. They taught me that love is more powerful than hate; they taught me that discrimination should not be tolerated; they taught me about friendship and loyalty and doing what’s right even if it means breaking some rules; they taught me that even those in authority can be corrupt and fallible. Every book, especially fantasy books, that I tried to read after Harry Potter fell flat. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I finished another fantasy series. I read all of Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy books (including the Bloodlines spinoff) that spring, and I read Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series and The Infernal Devices prequels that summer. (Side note: when my friend was trying to get me to read TMI and TID, she told me, “They’re my Harry Potter.” I’ve never forgotten that. In an instant, that explained how much those books meant to her.)

Harry Potter followed me into my academics. My senior year of high school, my AP Lit teacher told the class—but mostly me—that we only needed to write about works of “literary merit” on the AP exam, and Harry Potter wasn’t considered literary merit as of 2014. (To this day, I stand by my opinion that the third essay question was begging for me to write about Harry Potter. [Am I allowed to say what it was? They told us that it was a big “no-no” to talk about the essay question topics. Is there a statute of limitations on AP exam questions? You know what? Screw it. I’ll tell you. I already got a 5 on it and now have 2 college degrees in English. They can’t stop me.] The question basically said, “Write about a work where a character’s sacrifice shapes the narrative.” I could write a book on sacrifice in Harry Potter. Instead, I wrote about The Crucible, and kind of how John Proctor’s death [when he could have lived had he have just lied and confessed to witchcraft] was the culmination of themes in the play.) In undergrad, I didn’t have much opportunity to write about Harry Potter, but it made up a chunk of the paper that I used as my grad school writing sample. I was analyzing Shakespearean references in pop culture, and I talked about the parallels between the graveyard scene in Goblet of Fire and a scene in Macbeth. I wrote “Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic” on my undergrad graduation cap, because that’s what I’ve lived by since 2011. (I know it’s a movie quote; don’t hate me.)
The rest of this quote is, "...capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it." I feel like Rowling has proved the former this week.
But grad school—yeah, I was kind of the Harry Potter girl. Everyone knew. My statement of intent opened with a riff off of the opening of Sorcerer’s Stone: “Miss Katie Cline, of Jacksonville, Alabama, was proud to say that she was perfectly abnormal, thank you very much. She was the first person you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or magical, because that was just the kind of “nonsense” she held to.” I wrote my Master’s Project on the gendered relationship between cats and women in the series. I took an entire Harry Potter class (where I ended up writing the paper that formed about a third of my Master’s project). I wrote two other major papers on the series, one in my Intro to Grad Studies class and one in my Illustrations seminar. Every single one of my conference presentations (that haven’t been cancelled by COVID) have been about Harry Potter.
Me (center) last April at the Harry Potter-themed re-opening at The Dusty Bookshelf. (You can support them here if you want!)
But the things Rowling said are terrible. Now, I by no means think the series itself is perfect. I’m able to critique it and complicate it, but to see the disgusting things that creator said about transgender people breaks my heart, and it’s unacceptable. How fucking dare she say those things? Does she not realize what her books have done for people in the LGBTQ+ community? (I am not a member of this community, but I’ve seen posts from people sharing how Potter helped them.) Does she not care? Did her millions of dollars make her feel safe or make her forget her humanity? Or, worse, does she honestly believe these things?

Honestly, I have no love for J.K. Rowling anymore. I can’t, in good conscience, support her. Not when she clearly doesn’t support her readers (and, like, people in general). I used to be the teen on the Internet who sang her praises. I thought she could do no wrong. But I’ve grown, and I’m not as naïve, and I know that she is far, far from perfect—and that she’s getting farther away from it with every tweet, it seems. Still, it hurt a little when I unfollowed her on Twitter and when I altered my bio and when I changed my Facebook profile picture to a graduation picture that didn’t include a Potter book. I thought those books would be a constant that carried me through every low in life for my whole life.

Now, I’m not sure. They may be just a memory.

(Every other sentence out of my mouth is a Harry Potter reference. I really wanted to write, “The things we lose have a way of coming back to us, if not always in the way we expect,” but it doesn’t feel right to use her words when she can’t even live by them. Did she ever mean them?)

I guess everyone has to rebuild their life from scratch at least once. For my parents, that moment was the tornado that destroyed my childhood home in 2018. They had lived there for 23 years, and we lost a lot in that storm. I feel like this moment might be my first (and hopefully last, but I’m not that optimistic) moment to rebuild mine—but in a different way.

My friend Dustin, who watched me try not to cry while I tried to explain all this, is a saint. Honestly, one of the best people I’ve ever met. We live in the same apartment complex, so he brought me a White Claw and when I said, “I thought this [Harry Potter scholarship] was one thing I had figured out in my life, but…now….” with my voice cracking and tears in my eyes, he said, “I know a lot of your academic work has been about Harry Potter, but you don’t have to decide right this second what you’re going to do about it. But, if anyone could find a way to still write about it in a way that matters, it’s you.”
One of my M.A. graduation pictures with my Master's Project...which I wrote on Harry Potter.

Like I said, Dustin is a saint. Because, I’m not sure if that’s true. I’m a cishet (cisgender-heterosexual) white woman. I don’t know if I’m the person who needs to write about Rowling anymore—and I cried as I typed that, because that’s been what I’ve wanted to do for about 10 years now. But I don’t know if I have the voice or the angle that the world needs to hear. I can’t speak to the series from a queer, Black, or POC perspective. And, frankly, there’s already been a lot of feminist scholarship on the series already. I’m afraid that I’ve come around too late. And I’ll eventually be okay with that—right now it just hurts like hell knowing that this dream has been derailed for a while, if not forever. 

 But I’ve loved reading these different perspectives so far. (I especially love Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’ discussions of Black Hermione in her book The Dark Fantastic (2019)!) And can’t wait to see the scholarship that comes out in the next few years that takes an explicitly queer and/or trans approach. I just feel like I might need to step back and let those people write from their perspectives. (I say that like anyone ever recognized me in the field, anyway. It’s not really stepping back as much as deciding not to take up that space.)

Right now—in the middle of a pandemic, political unrest, the Black Lives Matter movement, and just about 2 days after Rowling’s latest tweets went out—I don’t think I have it in me to say goodbye to Harry Potter completely, and I hope anyone who reads this can respect that I’m grappling with a lot inside me right now. I wholeheartedly disagree with her tweets and their message. Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Nonbinary identities (and all identities) are valid, and no one is entitled to more respect or humanity than anyone else. The books are just so much a part of me, as I’ve tried to explain. In a statement with The Trevor Project, Daniel Radcliffe wrote this:

“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.”

For me, at least, I can separate the books from the author. I completely understand if that’s not possible for everyone. (Trust me, I feel a little guilty and dirty, like I have to keep one of my biggest passions a secret now, because I can’t give it up cold turkey.) But I’d be lying if I said the books didn’t change my life. I honestly believe they made me a better person, a good enough person to see that Rowling is wrong.

I don’t know exactly how I’m going to go on from here. I don’t know what my academic career will be about. I guess I need a new series to become immersed in. (I’m taking suggestions.) Again, I know that this is the most trivial thing to be concerned with right now, with so much else going on. I contemplated even writing this, but, like I’ve said in other posts, writing this blog has been a way for me to cope with everything that’s happening, and I can’t ignore this. I can't leave these thoughts to fester in my head for any longer. My heart hurts too much already thinking about how this one chapter of my life has ended so forcibly and suddenly and painfully.

I’ll try to end this on as positive a note as possible.

There have been a lot of responses to Rowling’s tweet that have challenged her and flat-out disagreed with her and encouraged trans fans that they are valid and loved within the Potter community. Besides Daniels Radcliffe’s statement, Eddie Redmayne has issued a statement, and I’ve seen tweets from Emma Watson, Bonnie Wright, Evanna Lynch, and Katie Leung (hers is pretty cheeky, and as one tweet I saw said, "the most Ravenclaw thing"), and I’m sure I’ve missed some and that more will come. Other prominent Potter people, like the scholar Melissa Anelli and the band Harry and the Potters have critiqued Rowling’s tweets, too.






It’s nice to see that there are people who read the same books I did, who developed the same guiding principles, who see the value of all life and the beauty that transgender people bring to the fandom and the world,

I don’t have a nice, succinct “global statement” (like the aforementioned AP Lit teacher taught us to end our essays with). I’m not sure I’ve processed this enough for that. I need to cry some more.

So, until then, may the odds be ever in our favor,
Katie

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