The Harry Potter novels saw me through very dark times in my life. It featured a boy whose name is the same as that of the series of books who goes through life with a mark on his head that sets him apart from everyone else in the Wizarding world – a mark set on him by the leader of a malicious group of people who saw him as a threat, in an act which also deprived him of many things that he would long for in life, which so many other people took for granted.
Granted – I did not have the same things taken from my life as Harry Potter did – but there are other things in life that I have longed for, but had no chance to ever experience – things that many other people also take for granted. And I know personally what it is like to go through life marked, as though with a curse, in a way that sets you apart from others.
To a large extent, the ones responsible for my predicament are transphobes – that being, people who feel threatened by anyone who does not fit their narrow view of who is a man and who is a woman.
Among the transphobes, there exists a particular subgroup whose members are distinguished by their tendency to cloak their transphobia in a thin, pseudo-feminist veneer. Those transphobes are known as TERFs, an acronym that stands for “Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists”.
And unfortunately, JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, has recently revealed herself to be a TERF. This has caused the Harry Potter novels to lose their ability to provide comfort to me, and probably many other people, some of who need them even more than I do.
In my latest YouTube video, I explain in more detail how Rowling revealed herself to be a TERF and discuss the devastation that results from it.
