Is Hogwarts the Model for the Trans Glitter Utopia?

Is It All J.K.Rowling's Fault?

One of my favourite authors, American memoirist Annie Dillard, wrote somewhere “If you like metaphysics, throw pots.” I adore that line. As it happens, I like metaphysics, so I immediately imagined pulling pots and pans out of the kitchen cupboards and throwing them against the walls. It suited my mood at the time. The frustration of metaphysical inquiry!

It actually took a few months for me to realize she meant that if you are prone to metaphysical speculations, you should get your hands into some clay and become a potter. The cure for head-in-the-sky is hands-in-the-mud.

My task today, though, is to analyze the boy, Harry, who when we first meet him resembles nothing so much as a cracked and dusty pot abandoned on the reject shelf in some potter’s studio.

Given all the transactivists who claim J.K.Rowling is betraying the ideas and ideals of her Harry Potter novels, it seems past time for an in-depth analysis of the world of wizards, the world of muggles, and the relationship between those two worlds.

I had never read the books, which came out in the late nineties when I was already making my living teaching literature to young adults. Children’s lit? Not for me, thanks, but I’ll take something metaphysical, something mystical, something from the pen of Jalaluddin Rumi, say, something like the Song of the Reed Flute:

 Ever since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves, understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back . . .

That’s the good stuff, yup.

 But since I joined the battle for the inexplicably disappeared women’s rights on social media, Rowling has been, not to be delicate about it, in my face. Almost daily.

 So when I spotted a used copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in one of my local free “little libraries” last year, I snapped it up (along with a rather big hardback by some guy called Robert Galbraith).

The Prisoner was fine, an enjoyable enough read for an adult of my years, better than the bits of movies I encountered from time to time as I scrolled through late night television listings. But The Prisoner of Azkaban is volume 3, and I thought I was missing important things by jumping in mid-series, so I ordered the first two volumes from my library.

I had at least one expectation of the novels, based on trans-activist claims that Rowling was betraying her own books.

I expected that there would be a clear delineation between the world of “muggles”, average Joes and Josies living on the wrong side of platform 9 ¾, and Hogwarts, the magical home of the special people who could commune with ghosts and ghouls, cast spells and generally enjoy a life not as constrained by material reality as the muggles’ world.

 I thought that Hogwarts would be a utopian ideal, populated only by the beautiful and the good. No need for rules, for child safeguarding, for the word “no”. A safe world, in other words, of glitter and rainbows and magic unicorns.

There are unicorns, but in every other respect I was wrong.

I realized my error first when Rowling makes it clear Hogwarts is no different than the ordinary world in its number and distribution of people who behave badly. When Harry is called to Hogwarts to begin his wizard studies, he gets to escape from his uncle and aunt who deprive him of almost everything necessary for life. He also escapes his cousin, the porky Dudley, who bullies him relentlessly.

But he no sooner arrives at wizard school than he is confronted with Dudley’s doppelganger, Draco Malfoy, who comes with two beefy sidekicks. Harry will also have problems with one of the professors, Snape, who hates him for the simple reason that he hated Harry’s father.

 Instead of a utopic world, this one is more or less the same as the other. Injustice coexists with justice, compassion with hatred. And it’s up to each occupant to find a way to cope – no one is there to rescue them from petty abuses.

But still, the novels must portray Hogwarts’ inhabitants as above ordinary mortals, right? Surely muggles would be portrayed as, well, “cis”, straight, white bread kind of people -- soccer moms, barbecue dads, (or maybe in the UK that would be takeaway dads) suburban duds to be held in contempt.

It turns out there isn’t a clear separation between muggles and wizards. Some wizards, like Hermione, are offspring of two muggle parents. And some children of two wizards show little to no evidence of wizard talent. A government department is responsible for making sure muggles aren’t accidentally harmed by wizards or their wizardry, and students can take muggles studies at school.  Safeguarding of muggles is taken seriously.

Voldemort’s crime, which is duplicated by Malfoy, is to believe in the superiority of “pure blood” wizards. They believe the gulf between them and wizards with muggle parents (whom they refer to contemptuously as “mudbloods”) is so great, that they must be expelled. And violence and trickery are acceptable in pursuit of that goal.

What really struck me – hard – as a difference between the magical world of Hogwarts and the glitter paradise of the trans cult appears in book two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when Harry is in deadly confrontation with Tom Riddle. Riddle tells him, “So. Your mother died to save you. Yes, that’s a powerful counter-charm.”

And in book three, Harry is saved by the apparition of his father, in the form of a deer, nicknamed “Prongs.” Dumbledore tells him:

You think the dead we have loved every truly leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly then ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself most plainly when you have need of him . . . Prongs rode against last night.

This is no Jeffrey Marsh “go no contact” seduction. The bond between parent and child is both life-giving and life-saving, even when the parents are dead.  Those who have, or ever had, a parent’s love will never be alone.

All the bullies, from Voldemort down, are attached to the Slytherin House (one of four school houses). And all of them are shown to be controlled by their hatred, unable to process old griefs. Tom Riddle was so twisted with hatred for the muggle father who abandoned him, that he transformed himself into the arch villain, Voldemort. His hatred destroys many other people, but finally it destroys himself.

If the trans cult has any place in the Hogwarts world, it seems to be in this house where actions are determined by intergenerational hatred, where sons hate their fathers and grown men hate sons. It may not be so much that trans activists misread the Potter novels, as that they misread themselves. They imagine themselves to be “stunning and brave” Gryffindors but are actually Slytherins in the mold of Riddle/Voldemort.

The young victims of the trans cult though, the ROGD kids, may be too much like Harry, with their noses pressed against the Mirror of Erised, longing and longing for a past torn away from them, or for a future of illusory dreams.

Maybe it’s our job, as adults, to dumbledore them, to pull them away from a mirror that “will give us neither knowledge nor truth,” to tell them, “Men have wasted away before it, entranced by what they have seen, or been driven mad, not knowing if what it shows is real or even possible.”

As Dumbledore says, the happiest people are those who, when they look into a mirror, see themselves exactly as they are.

That’s no small feat.

J.K.Rowling is surely a graduate of Harry’s Gryffindor House, where those with courage, talent, intelligence and a thirst to prove themselves go. So, by the power invested in me, I award Gryffindor 50 points for each of her novels.

And another hundred for the work of that Galbraith guy.