PU #257 - LEAVE IT TO LEGEND - Why We Have To Stop Giving Money to J.K Rowling
It should be obvious by now that paying any money for anything Harry Potter-related anymore means that you are funding J.K. Rowling, and as J.K. Rowling has repeatedly used their money to make trans people’s lives more difficult, if not to campaign for their outright erasure, then paying any money for anything Harry Potter-related anymore means actively funding Rowling’s sustained attack on trans rights.
Unless you also wish to deny trans people their status as human beings worthy of dignity, respect, and the same basic rights as everyone else gets, then it seems fair to say that paying any money for anything Harry Potter-related anymore is unethical. So unethical, there are no more arguments to keep doing it. It needs to stop.
Such a stance might seem strange from someone like myself who has often argued that the art is separate from the artist and that we can enjoy one without doing a moral wrong in our tacit support of the other. However, as I spent much of my half term reading Stephen King (and Peter Straub)’s final book in the Talisman trilogy, with all its talk of “echoes” across worlds both fictitious and non-fictitious, and thinking a lot about King’s epic Dark Tower body of work, which also wonderfully interwove so many classic works of fiction within his own new stories, I realised that there is a difference in the case of Harry Potter and previous musicians and artists I have argued we can turn a blind eye on for their transgressions.
In the case of visual art, most famous (or infamous) pictures can be enjoyed without giving the questionable artist a penny, such is the strange economy we have created around art and the fact that most of these artists are now dead. In the case of music, a specific sound recording can be so particularly evocative that little can be done to stop our emotional responses to it from changing with the addition of new knowledge about its creator. And playing a sound recording you have already purchased adds no further money into the pockets of the monster who made it.
But stories are different.
A lot of the tension around people like myself, who loved Harry Potter before Rowling decided to obsess on her bigotry instead of her art, and found the author’s cruelty and unkindness souring our fond memories of those magical stories she once wrote, comes from the fact that, like songs, the stories themselves have made their indelible mark on our souls even as we find ourselves newly repulsed by the words and deeds of their author. We want to stop loving Harry Potter, but feel torn by its emotional grip on some previous time in our lives. We know Rowling is wrong, and want to protest her attacks, but we also don’t want those memories destroyed. The same way a Michael Jackson or Marilyn Manson fan might find it difficult to eliminate entirely a piece of music that means so much to them from their lives.
Some — parents — also want their children to share in the same magic they once enjoyed, and maybe long-dreamed of reading them the Harry Potter books, the same way our own parents once shared their favourite fairy tales and books with us.
Over half term, I came up with a solution to that tension. One which acknowledges that our emotional connections to art make it not so easy to simply cut it out of our lives, even if our moral compass tells us that we should. For I realised that, unlike music, which can be covered but never truly recreated by other artists, stories have always been so much more than the specific words written down by their author. Stories are legends, which can be told, and retold, by many different voices in many different ways. Indeed, that is the whole point of stories, which first emerged in caves and around fires, passed down verbally from generation to generation, embellished, edited, transformed, with every telling, but with the same essential bones remaining.
Indeed, let’s be honest, Harry Potter is good…but it is still basically Narnia, or Star Wars, or The Stand, or The Thief of Always, or The Bible. It is any superhero story. It is Ghostbusters. It is The Lord of the Rings. It is The Wizard of Oz. A rag-tag minority rise up against an impossible evil, far bigger than themselves, discovering they have special powers that were inside them all along and overcoming the odds so that good triumphs in the end. It is just so many Roald Dahl books all rolled into one.
None of this is to say anything bad about Harry Potter or to call it uncreative — it is a great series, and fun to read. But I say all this to remind us that good stories never die, even if we lose the book we first read them in. And what’s more, that they can be told, and retold, time and time again, without ever having to return to the original source.
Enough of us who read Harry Potter or saw the movies in the before-times know the story well enough by now to pass it on without ever having to give J.K. Rowling another penny of hate-money for her anti-trans campaigns. There exist sufficient numbers of the physical books circling around the second-hand bookstores and charity shops of the world for at least a generation more to read the tales of that young boy wizard without ever paying a bigot for the pleasure again. DVDs and even video tapes of the movies too, if that’s your preferred delivery system. And, most importantly of all, the stories themselves, once known to us, as they already are to so many, can be retold to our children, our friends, our families, and even strangers if they choose to sit and listen, without the need to refer to the original texts and pay Rowling for the pleasure.
If Harry Potter is that important a story, it deserves to become the stuff of legend, passed down verbally from generation to generation until the original texts fall finally out of copyright and, if it be so desired, the book can be reprinted once again without the immoral baggage of its publication and purchase funding anti-trans hate.
If we don’t love it enough to pass it on in this way, it can, like so many other stories over time, fade out of existence until its next evolution as something similar, but slightly different, comes along. Another “hero’s journey” about a child who realises they are special and somehow saves the world…
It really isn’t that deep: those of us who already love the stories have the stories. They can’t be taken away. They are inside of us and can be retold over and over again without having to be complicit in the original author’s decision to dedicate the profits from their writing to attacking a small minority of vulnerable people in our society who have done nothing wrong but try to exist. We don’t need the branded merch, the new TV series, or the new editions of the books to keep the stories alive. Publishers don’t need to keep printing the books and producers don’t need to keep churning out adaptations. The West End will survive without its Cursed Child. Rowling was just the conduit, and it has become all-too apparent that she has sadly proved herself unworthy of our continued patronage.
But our decision to boycott Rowling does not need to equate to a decision to boycott the wonderful story she gave voice to. We just have to recognise that no story has ever been the sole propriety of its original teller. All stories derive from our collective imagination, our shared culture, its tropes and its themes, and all the stories that came before it, and Harry Potter as told by J.K. Rowling is just one iteration of a legend that, if it is worth keeping, it is completely within our power to ensure continues, free of the hate it is currently entangled with.
…A child who’s parents are dead and who lives with some dastardly relatives who treat them very poorly one day gets a letter that tells them they are special…
…A great evil we once thought defeated is now trying to return and can only be stopped by one person and their friends…
…Along the way there will be trials and tribulations, betrayal and moments of great courage…
Such a story will never die.
But what can’t go on is our pretending that it is OK to continue to give money to a person who is using it so explicitly to fund the sustained public bullying and intimidation of a whole group of people. Paying money to J.K. Rowling for Harry Potter is a choice in 2026. It is a choice to intentionally harm trans people, and it is no longer a choice any of us have any ethical reason to make given the critical mass there is in the world of people who already know the Harry Potter story.
One option is to erase the story entirely. Never read or speak of it again. But that is not desirable to most readers of the original who found it moving, powerful, or transformative. The story remains righteous, even if its author does not.
So I offer this second option: to turn Harry Potter into the stuff of legend.
J.K. Rowling has, for too long now, abused our financial support of her work. Through her aggressively anti-trans actions and words, Rowling has told us she is no longer a worthy custodian of her initial piece of storytelling. For all people concerned with ethics and doing the right thing, it is therefore time that others take on the mantle and start telling the story instead.
As with all legends, it is now time to release the original tale from the shackles of its authentic, original, and morally flawed, storyteller — ditch the books, stop giving her our money — and tell the legend ourselves.
Author: DaN McKee (He/Him)
If you liked this post and have enjoyed what I do here at Philosophy Unleashed - and have been doing every year since 2019 - and want to buy me a coffee or cool philosophy book as a gift to say thank you, feel free to send a small donation/tip my way here.
My book, ANARCHIST ATHEIST PUNK ROCK TEACHER, is out everywhere on paperback and eBook. You can order it direct from the publisher or from places like Amazon. Paperback or e-book. I also have a short horror story in the new anthology, HARDCORE HORROR, also available to buy from Earth Island.
My other book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers, either in paperback or as an e-Book. I also have a chapter in THIS BOOK on punk and anarchism.
Listen to me on The Independent Teacher podcast here. Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. My paper - ‘An error of punishment defences in the context of schooling’ - is in the Journal of Philosophy of Education (behind an annoying paywall!) here. Listen to me on the Philosophy Gets Schooled podcast here. Listen to me talk anarchism and wrestling here or anarchism and education here.
For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com