Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
My partner and I are having a disagreement about JK Rowling that we want you to weigh in on. For reference, we’re a same-sex couple, and despite our different upbringing, we tend to have similar moral compasses and political feelings.
I love the Harry Potter world — books, movies, broadway plays, video games, etc. He never did. We both agree that JK Rowling’s transphobia is problematic and not something we tolerate. However, I still want to engage in the Harry Potter world, which I feel sends a positive message overall.
To assuage my guilt, whenever I buy something Harry Potter-related that might make JK Rowling any money, I then donate a larger sum of money to the Human Rights Campaign. This is only in addition to what we typically give to the HRC. Is this acceptable? Is this hypocrisy? Am I an ethical Slytherin? Settle this for us.
Ah, the classic “can we separate the art from the artist” question! I’ve encountered this dilemma before, and I’ll tell you straight off the bat that I’m not the type to condemn you as a Slytherin just because you still want to engage with the works of JK Rowling.
I’m totally fine with reading books penned by problematic writers — even if their views have seeped into the books themselves — because I believe I’m capable of separating the wheat from the chaff in these works. And I think it insults readers’ intelligence to assume that they’re not capable of that.
In fact, so many of us have practically had to become experts at this sort of literary winnowing, because 99 percent of the books humanity has thrown at us contain that chaff. I’m a queer Jewish woman, and if I had to excise from my library every book whose writer was anti-LGBTQ, antisemitic, or misogynist, my shelves would be pretty much empty!
In the case of JK Rowling, both the writer and the books themselves present us with problems. We all know at this point how anti-trans the writer is and how much pain she’s caused her fans. And she’s not an author who lived centuries ago; she’s active right now, and she still profits from Potter-related purchases (more on that soon). Plus, the books themselves have flaws, too. Remember when the Dursleys are mocked by the text for being overweight? Or when the goblins are portrayed as an antisemitic stereotype? Or when the werewolves are presented as a metaphor for HIV? Or when we’re told that the house elves actually like being enslaved because their race makes them naturally subservient?
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Still, you say that you feel the Harry Potter world sends a positive message overall, and you know what? I agree with you. The main moral message of the books is this: We shouldn’t live in a supremacist society. We shouldn’t be like Voldemort or like the Death Eaters, who believe “pure-blood” wizards and witches are inherently better than everyone else. We shouldn’t discriminate against people who are Muggle-born (like Hermione) or who are poor (like Ron). We should recognize that everyone (even Snape, the Slythiest of Slytherins!) has the agency to choose who they want to become and ultimately do good.
This is the core message that made so many of us fall in love with the Harry Potter world as kids. It made us feel that it’s okay to be different — that difference should be respected and even celebrated. Even though Rowling often undercut that open-hearted message with nonsense like “rightfully” enslaved house elves, most of us picked up the main moral message in spite of these flaws. And in that way, the books successfully achieved what good fiction is meant to achieve.
“In the war against moral obtuseness, the artist is our fellow fighter, frequently our guide,” writes the contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum. By exposing us to scene after scene of characters encountering moral conundrums, Nussbaum argues, good fiction trains our capacity for moral attention — the capacity to notice the morally salient features of a given situation so that we can respond appropriately.
The Harry Potter books successfully trained a generation of young readers to be exquisitely sensitive to discrimination and to reject it. And it’s on precisely that basis that many of those young readers, now all grown up, reject Rowling’s anti-trans views.
These readers can choose to reject her books, too. Some do, and that’s totally alright. But some don’t — and I think that’s totally alright too.
In a 2020 episode of the popular podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, co-hosts Casper ter Kuile and Vanessa Zoltan interviewed trans author Jackson Bird. They drew an analogy between reading Harry Potter and reading the Bible: Just as the Bible contains anti-gay statements that can make it painful reading for queer readers, and yet some of those readers still lovingly engage with the text, the same can be true for the Harry Potter books. As Bird said of such texts, “We continue to interrogate, but we still acknowledge and accept the ways in which they are useful for us, or healing.”
The “continue to interrogate” part is key here. Any fandom — whether it’s centered on the Christian canon or the Harry Potter canon — is responsible for continuously revising how its canonical texts do and don’t get to guide action. If you’re going to continue to engage with the Bible, then you have to keep grappling with all the ways it’s enabled harm, and you have to try to heal that harm. And if you’re going to continue to engage with the Harry Potter world, then you have to continue to wrestle with its wrongs, too.
The good news is: That’s doable! Religious communities have been proving that for ages. As early as 2000 years ago, Jewish theologians were inventing a genre called Midrash, which is basically ancient fanfiction; it reimagines problematic bits of the Bible in ways that make them more palatable or meaningful. And over the centuries, many Muslim and Christian theologians have been busy transforming their traditions, giving us everything from Islamic Modernism to Black liberation theology.
So, for you, what can interrogating the Potter canon look like in practice? I’d suggest connecting with other Potterheads so you can both enjoy and interrogate the content together. Whether that’s a book club, a movie-watching marathon, a video game night with friends, or a Harry Potter and the Sacred Text episode that you listen to with your partner in the car, the point is to engage with the content and then critically discuss it.
The benefit of doing this in community is that it can actually generate social good. If you end up discussing the house elves, say, you might end up talking about how even the good guys in Rowling’s books are way too content with maintaining the status quo rather than calling for systemic change (Dumbledore treats his enslaved house elves nicely, but he still enslaves house elves!). That could lead you into all sorts of discussions about how you are or aren’t challenging the status quo in our Muggle world.
If you engage with Rowling’s work this way, I think it’s plausible that the positive social value you’ll be generating will outweigh any negative social value you might create by continuing to be a Potterhead. And, crucially, I suspect you’ll stop feeling guilty.
Right now, your strategy to ward off guilt is to focus on the financial aspect of all this — how your Potter-related purchases end up materially benefiting Rowling and, through her, the type of organizations she might support. On a dollar-for-dollar level, this is something you can “offset” by donating to the Human Rights Campaign. In fact, since Rowling is already a billionaire, buying a video game now is not appreciably moving the needle for her, while donating hundreds or thousands of dollars to the HRC could plausibly make a difference to that nonprofit. So this strategy is nothing to sneeze at.
But it’s not enough. And we can tell it’s not enough because you still feel guilty. You probably have some intuitive sense that you can’t just buy moral absolution (Accio clear conscience!). On its own, offsetting feels cheap, and the reason it feels cheap is that it’s not demanding that any transformative work take place — either for you personally or for society more broadly.
To reiterate a common critique of philanthropy: Just writing a check does not represent a commitment to a broader project of solidarity or justice. It’s letting you throw a pittance at the problem without requiring you to participate, through your own hard work, in changing the status quo and creating systemic change.
Remember, shying away from systemic change is how Rowling deals with problems in her books. You can do better.
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