It’s Time To Grow Up

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?