J.K. Rowling Meets a Boggart

It turns out J.K. Rowling and I have a lot in common. We are both educated, white women. We are both mothers. We both love fantasy and Harry Potter. However, she has argued against many of these similarities in a rather lengthy essay and other posts on social media. Apparently to her, I am not a woman, certainly not a mother, but we are both afraid of men in dresses.

Our reasons might be different. I am terrified of the rampant homophobia and transphobia in our cultural narrative and media; a media where a man in a dress is the ultimate cheap laugh. Every time I see a hollow and dehumanizing portrayal of a feminized man or a transgender woman in the media it sparks all the old terrors and dysphoria that kept me in the closet for so many years. Rowling turned to this gag in her own books when Neville uses the riddikulus charm to summon an illusion of Severus Snape in a dress to fight his own boggart.

She didn’t invent this gag, it’s been around for what seems like an eternity. You can’t stop racism by ignoring race, you can’t stop transphobia by ignoring the entrenched vilification of the “man in a dress”. Our culture is sick with a narrative that harms transgender women, and all of us who don’t fit into the traditional gender roles.

Some people try and define away transgender folks with semantics and with biological ‘facts’, but we’ve been around as long as such storytelling has tried to portray us. At the end of the day, we are just women who don’t fit in. J.K. Rowling's writings about transgender people are an illusion. A spell. Confabulation. She summons a monster to frighten or mock. Maybe it makes her feel safer? I’d like to understand why she uses her place of privilege and the pulpit of her fame to perpetuate misleading narratives that injure an oppressed minority.

Sounds like a move worthy of Slytherin…