There’s been a lot of talk about the upcoming series featuring a British boy wizard named Harry Potter and his little wizard friends, premiering on HBO in December. Yes, it’s months away, but stills from the show1 have been released, so people are already discussing whether they won’t watch it or can’t wait to watch it. We are the former. The latter are shitty assholes who value nostalgia and “entertainment” over people’s actual lives and well-being. Don’t know what we’re talking about? Let’s dive in.
Joanne KKK Rowling2, aka JK Rowling, aka Jake Hay Rowling, aka aka Robert Galbraith3, wrote an extremely successful book series that took Millennial childhoods by storm. Those books were turned into an extremely successful movie franchise. As his relevance started to fade, Robbie (you know, Bob Galbraith?) took to Twitter to publish his hot takes about the series that he could have, but absolutely did not actually include in his books.
One of the biggest revelations was that the headmaster wizard was secretly gay THE WHOLE TIME! I remember the ripple effects of that tweet and so many conservatives reacting with some variation of, “See? Those books were always evil!” Many other readers of the series and I reacted with something like, “Okay, but why didn’t you actually put that in the books? It would be a lot cooler if you did.”
Maybe that was the turning point, because after that, Robby-Bobby G-braith just went down the conservative rabbit hole. Under the guise of “protecting women,” Jerk A. Rowling has taken up the mantle as the #1 Hater of Trans People, especially trans women, in England, though his hate loudly reverberates around the world. To not know Bobby is a TERF4 in the year 2026 is either an active choice you’re making or you’ve just woken up from a 20-year-long coma. (If you have just woken up from a coma, wow, how did you find Dirge so quickly? You’re cool as fuck.) To know he is a TERF and support him anyway means you’re a horrible person.
Why do I say that? Well, quite simply, Bobster has made his feelings abundantly clear and has outright stated, multiple times, that he uses his vast wealth to directly fund anti-trans initiatives with his own foundation, and he directly sponsored a huge anti-trans legislation that passed in England in April 2025. He then celebrated on Twitter with a cigar, of all items. We won’t psychoanalyze that today, as much as he’d like us to (cough).
Maybe you don’t care about trans people. Well, I suppose you can decide that’s fine for you to feel that way. I don’t care about anti-trans activists and fascists (hint: they’re often one and the same), and I don’t consider any of them people, either! But my hatred is out of love for a super minority group of people who literally harm nobody by being their true selves, and an MA in English that was actually in gender studies/feminism, wherein I wrote my thesis on gender performativity and subjectivity in Rocky Horror. Once you realize that we perform literally every aspect of our lives every single day, you realize that the people who cling the tightest to the expected social norms are the ones most afraid of them.
I’ve seen people discussing how, even though it looks bad, they’re still going to hate-watch the show, and I am begging you to ABSOLUTELY DO NOT DO THAT. Every bit Bobby Galbraith receives is used to fund anti-trans initiatives, the main one just being his life. I’m just going to keep platforming the idea that actual trans people’s lives are more important than your nostalgia fix/hate watch just to keep yourself relevant.
If you must consume Harry Potter content, you can buy the books and DVDs at a local thrift/vintage store for basically pennies (RIP). The books and movies are at your local library. You can download anything from any number of torrent sites at your own risk. Basically: Don’t give Bobbers any more money. Ideally, stop consuming anything related to this nonsense world we just HAVE to keep rehashing because no other person has ever written a sci-fi or fantasy book, let alone one about people with magical powers!!!!! NOBODY!
Oh wait. Go read some Octavia Butler instead. Or NK Jemisin. Toni Morrison! Tananarive Due! Oyinkan Braithwaite! If you’re a horror-loving adult, Rivers Solomon or T. Kingfisher could scratch your creepy itch. There are so many cozy mystery stories out there, you can just Google; I can’t name them all! If you need a sci-fi/mystery/fantasy/kids having adventures series to watch, have you tried getting really heavily invested in almost every season of Dimension 20? Worked for me! I’m currently rewatching Fantasy High: Junior Year for the *redacted* time.
The world is vast, and there are so many other, cooler things to spend your time watching or reading than a rehashing of the same boring plots we all know. Plus, this whole series was always supposed to be FOR CHILDREN5. YOU’RE ADULTS NOW, and you should CARE ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, EVEN IF YOU DON’T KNOW THEM, AND DON’T BE SO AFRAID OF TRANS PEOPLE WHO LITERALLY JUST WANT TO EXIST IN PEACE.
Expand your mind. Drop the wand. Grow the fuck up.
- They look like hot garbage. Also, anyone involved in this show is dead to me. ↩︎
- Her racist-ass names for anyone who isn’t white in the Harry Potter series make me think this is a suitable nickname. Example: One of the only Black people in the entire series is a Black man named Kingsley Shacklebolt. The prosecution rests. ↩︎
- It will never not be absurd to me that this woman published under their initials to make people think a man wrote these books, and then, after becoming famous, decided to write more “adult” books* under a different, absolutely recognizably “male” pen name, and they’re also the most massive TERF on the planet. If only JKR understood irony!!!! But, to honor the pen name, we’re going to use he/him pronouns for this person, as they clearly want to be thought of as a cis man. As always, Jinkx Monsoon was right.
*These books are not good. Yes, I read the first one that was written, about boring white English people in a neighborhood being boring and conservative. It was bad. Ditto the follow-up book to the original wizard series; pure derivative garbage, as was most of that original series, now that I’ve gotten older and read a lot of the books that were blatantly stolen from to “write” that first series, which was for CHILDREN. WE ARE ADULTS NOW. A lot of shit from our childhoods has since been shown to be awful, and we’ve given it up; I think we can collectively decide this series is not worth it anymore. Daniel Radcliffe has left Harry Potter behind, and we can, too. ↩︎ - Trans-exclusionary radical feminist, though I, along with Kate Nash and others, argue that being anti-trans means you are anything but radical. You’re also definitely not a feminist if you only think cis women are women. GERM is definitely better, and I think we should start using that instead. ↩︎
- And if you’re a parent whose kid enjoys Harry Potter content, explain Bobert’s views and see how they feel. If you’re all bigots, great job; put on your red hats and enjoy. If you’re merely forcing your kids to try to feel the feelings you felt reading these books and watching these movies as a kid, spoiler alert: they won’t, because the world you inhabited as a child is absolutely and completely dead, like you will be at some point in the not-too-distant future. 🙂 ↩︎
