HBO’s new Harry Potter TV series is premiering this Christmas Day. Under current plans, it will last at least a decade. The trailer looks like the original films were run through an AI generator, but quality isn't the point. The show is a transparent attempt to induct a new generation—and market—into the lucrative fantasy world while massaging the nostalgia of existing fans. The announcement of the show has triggered another repetition of the same cycle that has repeated, ad nauseam, since J. K. Rowling started calling random trans women men to her 13 million Twitter followers. Actors in the series dodge questions about Rowling’s opinions, smiling winningly while they pontificate about how Harry Potter teaches everyone to be nice. Those in the know debate the ethics of watching the show. Meanwhile, a vast, blithe section of the press considers Rowling’s activism—or any anti-trans activism—to be interesting only insofar as they can use it to wring out another ponderous essay on the terrors of so-called cancellation.
On the one hand, you have an imaginative property beloved by millions, and on the other, there are actually existing trans people. As one of the people tied to the train tracks in said artificial trolley problem, I’d like to raise a complaint: It is beneath my dignity to let myself be run over by any trolley, and particularly this trolley, burdened as it is by a cape and a stupid hat. But I digress. Many people are unaware, or only passingly aware, that Rowling has become a full-time agitator against trans people—particularly trans women and trans kids, who she expressly believes do not exist—and that she has used her personal wealth and platform to further a suite of causes to that end, including founding a trans-exclusionary rape crisis center. Rowling helped fund the case that resulted in the 2025 UK Supreme Court judgment defining “sex” in the Equality Act as “biological sex [at birth],” a judgment she publicly celebrated with an unspecified drink and a cigar. I myself have helped document the severe repercussions of that judgment for British trans people. The Verge’s recent piece on Rowling gives a good timeline of her activities in this regard, and makes a clinically precise case for boycotting the new show as a result.
The harm Rowling has done has been less widely publicized than it should be, although it has, at least, been met with passionate opposition by many fans and ex-fans. But there are also barriers to properly recognizing and combating that harm, even among people who have heard about Rowling’s politics and find them execrable. People are often tempted to wander down the conversational dead-end that is “separating the art from the artist.” Harry Potter has historically boasted the kind of approval numbers usually reserved for, say, pizza or “the concept of joy”; fans are, accordingly, defensive about enjoying something so synonymous with childhood nostalgia. Surely watching a show doesn’t make you a bad person, does it? We all love something made under morally compromised circumstances. Can’t someone just pirate the show, or watch it through a friend’s account, and call it a day?
On the other side of the equation, some people are overly eager to pat themselves on the back for having never liked Harry Potter, deriding the books as vacuous, or picking out specific oft-criticized elements of the books as evidence that any fan must have always been morally bankrupt. (See also: people who responded to the Neil Gaiman sexual assault allegations by proudly declaring that they’d always gotten bad vibes from The Sandman.) What both of these reactions share is a focus on varying levels of emotional investment. And while it can be useful to unpick your own feelings about cultural products, at least for the sake of living a life that isn’t riven by contradiction and unease, I personally do not actually care if people like Harry Potter or not. It does not matter if you have emotional investments in the books, the films, the other, worse films, the theme parks, the merchandise, or anything else connected to the franchise. I mean that in both the callous and the benevolent sense: It does not matter. What you feel in your heart towards the series is almost entirely irrelevant. What matters is what you do, because J. K. Rowling is out there doing a lot of things.
Rowling has fashioned herself into a very powerful enemy of transness. Her intellectual properties, particularly the ones under her control that she directly profits from, are thus, in a very literal sense, tools of the enemy. But Rowling is also in an unusual position of having accrued not just mountains of cash but a particular form of cultural capital; she is often seen as incapable of serious harm because of her association with popular books for children. She is the kindly wizarding lady. If we maintain a space for Harry Potter as a positive, nostalgic bastion of kindness and liberalism, no amount of caveats about the author’s politics will matter. Nothing is adequate to the situation except the truth. There is no way to watch the new Harry Potter show subversively; whether or not you believe you're being responsible, if you're watching, you are buying in. Harry Potter is now a byword for the industrial-scale erosion of the limited rights trans people had managed to win or squat in, and the equally galling mass indifference to that erosion. She has ruined it utterly.
Something being ruined doesn’t necessarily mean calling for a complete cessation of engagement under all circumstances. I’m a critic, after all. To paraphrase a better fantasy author, some days I watch as many as six objectionable things before breakfast. Certain students, analysts, and advocates may be able to make their case for watching the show. But adequately stigmatizing Rowling’s weaponization of childhood not only requires personal withdrawal for most people, it necessitates something much more difficult: being a giant fucking killjoy. You should tell people discussing the show that you’re not watching it, and why, and you should let yourself openly cringe at your sister-in-law’s Harry Potter tote bag, and you should bring up unprompted that the onslaught of legislation against trans people makes you sad and angry, presuming it does, and you should do this because, not despite, the fact that it will make you look annoying as hell and may make everyone present uncomfortable. (You probably won’t even get the kudos of looking like a cool ally, because you’re still ultimately talking about Harry Potter. Sorry about that.)
Most trans people, everywhere they go, have to be the outnumbered loser who cares about the anti-trans movement, and who notices how that movement lodges itself in “safe” territory, in order to make calling it out look crazy and unreasonable. The most powerful thing you can do in this situation doesn’t concern your attachments, or even your beliefs. It’s giving up on the idea that there is such a thing as safe territory. A kid’s book, a magic wand, even the idea of joy itself can be a tool used to club a kid back into the closet. Act accordingly.
