The Philosopher’s TERF

What happens when your comfort franchise funds a TERF and your playlist pays a Nazi.

"Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."

I used to believe that. Like, genuinely. I’d hear that line and feel something shift. Not in a twee way. In the survival way. I’ve watched the Harry Potter films every year since I was a kid. Sometimes twice. Always in order. Always around Christmas. It’s one of the only rituals I have that doesn’t end in disappointment or debt. As a neurodivergent person, it’s basically my version of a weighted blanket with a British accent. I still laugh when Bellatrix walks into a room like a feral opera singer. I still shout “Aragoggggg” like it’s a valid coping mechanism. I still get the weird urge to whisper “Always” at inopportune moments. It was comfort. It was consistency. It was mine.

And now, it isn’t.

Not since she decided her legacy should be bullying trans women with a thesaurus. Not since she funded a legal case that got gender-critical beliefs protected in UK law. Not since she made herself the poster girl for moral panic in a cashmere jumper. I’ve been trying to untangle the guilt ever since. I love her work. But I love trans people more. And at some point you have to pick a side. This isn’t about taste. It’s about power. You can’t keep watching the films like nothing’s happened when the woman who wrote them is out here quoting Orwell like she’s the resistance. It’s not harmless. It’s propaganda with a theme tune. And if I’m uncomfortable now, good. That means I still have a conscience.

Rowling’s descent into full-time TERF cosplay wasn’t a sudden twist. It was a slow burn, and the clues were all there if you knew how to read the text. Her 2020 essay framed trans women as a threat to “vulnerable biological females” in language so smug it practically came with a branded panic button. She’s tweeted things like “People who menstruate. I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” as if dehumanising people is just quirky British wordplay.

She regularly retweets gender-critical accounts with the warmth of someone handing out cursed flyers in a shopping centre, and she publicly supported Maya Forstater — the woman whose case redefined gender-critical views as “protected beliefs” in UK law. She donates to anti-trans organisations while crying censorship from her castle. But none of this is shocking if you actually paid attention to her writing. Harry Potter wasn’t just whimsical British escapism. It was a middle-class fever dream stuffed with stereotypes that aged like a baguette in a bathtub. Let’s review:

• House-elves love slavery. Hermione tries to liberate them and is laughed off like a hormonal veganuary girlboss.

• Griphook and the goblins are antisemitic caricatures: long hooked noses, obsessed with gold, run the bank, dress like old tax demons.

• Cho Chang is her only major East Asian character, and she gave her a name that sounds like it was cobbled together by someone who’s only been to Asia via a Wagamama menu.

• The Patil twins are identical in the films. They are not identical in the books. This is just lazy, exoticised costuming.

• Lavender Brown magically turns white when she becomes relevant, then dies. Cheers for that.

• The fat characters are evil or comic relief. Usually both. Dudley Dursley’s character arc is basically: fat, mean, fat, nearly dead, goodbye.

• Rita Skeeter is a gossip columnist coded with every trope used to paint trans women as deceitful and grotesque. Her Animagus form? A literal bug.

• Remus Lupin’s werewolf condition was widely read as a metaphor for HIV/AIDS — and what did Rowling do with that? She made him poor, isolated, feared, and killed him off.

• The centaurs are angry, mystical half-breeds who refuse to be civilised and live in the forest. That’s not even a metaphor. That’s just racism with hooves.

• The goblet of fire selects Viktor Krum, who is written like he’s never seen a woman before. Eastern Europeans, apparently, are all hot but socially lobotomised.

• Dolores Umbridge, a hyper-feminine, cat-loving woman in power, is the most sadistic character in the series. Subtle.

• Muggles are painted as dumb, grey, and constantly in need of magical correction. It’s giving eugenics with robes.

• “Squib” is literally used as a slur.

• There are no visibly queer characters unless you count Dumbledore’s posthumous outing… which she announced years later, unprompted, like a PR cleanse.

• And of course, the central message: power corrupts unless you’re the chosen one born to fix it, in which case, go off king.

None of this was random. It wasn’t “just the times.” It was narrative ideology. It was baked in. The stories softened us to a worldview where otherness equals suspicion, and where the oppressed should either be grateful or be gone. So when Rowling stood up and said trans women aren’t women, the books didn’t gasp. They clapped.

Rowling didn’t just write a world. She built a franchise, a platform, and a very lucrative hill to die on. Her fans gave her the scaffolding, and she turned it into a pulpit. She now uses her legacy not to tell stories, but to shape policy, rewrite public discourse, and bankroll legal campaigns like she’s doing cosplay as a soft-spoken Tory think tank. She’s not just a woman with “controversial views” who once tweeted through a Chardonnay. She’s a lobbyist in a publishing cloak.

Her reach is institutional. Her rhetoric is being quoted in Parliament, scribbled into school guidance, and parroted by media outlets that treat trans lives like an opinion segment. She even wrote herself into a novel (The Ink Black Heart), where a brave female creator is targeted by online trans activists and eventually murdered — because nothing says literary nuance like fantasising about your own cancellation in paperback. It’s not satire. It’s projection with a word count.

And the irony is excruciating. A billionaire writing victim porn while positioning herself as some silenced martyr for free speech (in The Times no less) is the kind of plot twist even Bellatrix would find excessive. But this is what happens when fiction becomes PR. It stops asking questions and starts issuing statements. Cultural psychologists will tell you stories shape beliefs. Especially the ones we grow up with. Repeated tropes become emotional muscle memory. Bigotry wears costumes. And if you want to sell it to children, just put it in a castle.

We need to talk about the spell nostalgia casts. Because half the people defending Harry Potter aren’t defending the books. They’re defending who they were when they loved them. And fair enough. I get it. Letting go of a story that cradled your nervous system and made school holidays bearable isn’t easy. But nostalgia isn’t a moral exemption. It’s just a very cosy form of avoidance.

When people say “we made it ours” or build entire fanfic universes where Voldemort runs a vegan café and Hermione marries Ginny, I get it. Those are survival tactics. Queer reclamation. Feminist rewrites. All beautiful. But let’s not pretend they change the reality of what’s on the page. You can’t edit away ideology like it’s a typo. Cognitive dissonance is real. It’s hard to hold the truth that something shaped you and also harmed others. But you have to. Otherwise, you’re not mourning a book. You’re protecting a fantasy of innocence. And that’s not solidarity. That’s sentimentality with a superiority complex.

And then there’s Kanye. A man who made graduation music for the soul and now livestreams Nazi bar crawls in Yeezy shades. Yes, he’s bipolar. He’s spoken about it. In 2018, he said, “You’re not crazy if you’re actually mentally ill,” which, while poetic, is not a hall pass for antisemitism. His recent behaviour hasn’t just been “erratic” or “problematic.” It’s been ideologically violent. He told Alex Jones he likes Hitler. He posted Nazi-adjacent Superbowl graphics like it was performance art. He’s gone on rants about Jewish control of the media like it’s a bedtime story, and let’s not forget the lawsuits from ex-staff describing cult-like work conditions.

Even Kim Kardashian, not exactly the poster girl for nuance, has expressed concern about him bringing their kids around men with violent or criminal pasts. But people still call him a genius. Still stream his music like it’s divorced from reality. At some point, you have to ask yourself why. Why is harm always allowed to ride shotgun if the playlist slaps? Why do we keep dressing up violence as brilliance and calling it “visionary”? Genius is not a get-out-of-morality clause. It’s just a shinier excuse.

Genius is the oldest cover story in the book. Especially when it comes with a penis and a tragic backstory. Our culture loves a brilliant man in crisis. Bonus points if he’s rude to waitstaff or refuses therapy. Genius turns harm into mythology. Once you’re labelled a visionary, you can say anything and people will squint and call it layered. We’ve been here before.

• Picasso abused women like it was his pre-painting ritual.

• Michael Jackson’s alleged crimes were broadcast in documentary detail, yet “Thriller” still plays at every wedding like no one’s read a single headline since 1993.

• Roman Polanski literally fled the country to avoid sentencing for raping a child, but still wins awards and gets standing ovations.

• Woody Allen married his adopted stepdaughter and still gets write-ups in the New Yorker like he’s a misunderstood jazz gremlin.

• Karl Lagerfeld fat-shamed women, called Adele “a little too fat,” said “no one wants to see curvy women,” and died a fashion icon with his sunglasses intact.

• Chris Brown assaulted Rihanna and responded by dropping an album called F.A.M.E., which stood for “Forgiving All My Enemies.”

• Johnny Depp lost a libel case where the court found he did assault Amber Heard… and still became the face of “male victimhood” while signing perfume deals.

• R. Kelly was called the “Pied Piper of R&B” after marrying Aaliyah when she was 15. That wasn’t subtle. That was marketing.

• Elvis Presley started dating Priscilla when she was 14. The world called it “romantic.”

• John Lennon admitted to hitting women and abandoning his child, but we sing Imagine every Christmas like it’s a prayer.

• Salvador Dalí praised Hitler and Franco, called himself an anti-Semite, and still sells tote bags in the Tate gift shop.

• Drake keeps texting teenagers and somehow still gets nominated for Grammys.

• T.S. Eliot was a known anti-Semite, and his work is required reading in English departments everywhere.

Fans become co-defendants. We rewrite the narrative for them, smooth out the edges, polish the monster until he’s misunderstood. We fight harder for the artist’s redemption than the victim’s recovery. And we call that being nuanced. But really, it’s just fear dressed up as complexity. What if we’ve become so obsessed with separating art from the artist that we’ve also separated harm from accountability? What if we’re more comfortable dancing to someone’s trauma than actually reckoning with it?

And the thing is, even if you care, the machine doesn’t. The algorithm does not respond to morality. It responds to clicks. Spotify still pays Kanye. Warner Bros still earns millions off Harry Potter IP, and that includes every Halloween costume, every late-night rewatch, every TikTok where someone says “Wingardium Leviosa” in a crop top. The art gets immortalised. The harm gets politely ignored, then quietly deleted. Streaming doesn’t just let you “enjoy things.” It makes harm scalable. Every view is a receipt. Every listen is a dividend.

Publishing houses still greenlight harmful creators if the fanbase is loud enough and the merch sells. And the truth is, you don’t need to buy a new Rowling book to contribute. Quoting her, cosplaying as her characters, gifting the box set to your niece — it all loops back into the machine. It all reinforces her cultural currency. It’s not about cancelling childhoods. It’s about recognising that consumption is never neutral. You’re not just reading a story. You’re keeping someone powerful enough to bankroll bigotry. If you think you’re not involved, check your algorithm. It’s already voting for you.

The idea that we can separate the art from the artist was always a fantasy. A neat little coping mechanism dressed up as critical thinking. Separation requires distance, and these artists aren’t gone. They’re not irrelevant. They’re not retired. They’re on timelines, in courtrooms, at summits, at fashion shows. Still talking. Still trending. Still profiting. Art doesn’t live in a vacuum. It has pipelines. It has victims. When you defend the work, you defend the empire. And that empire doesn’t just sell stories. It sells power. It sells legitimacy. It sells ideology gift-wrapped in nostalgia and handed back to you like a comfort blanket you’re too old to need.

Loving something once doesn’t mean you owe it loyalty forever. We all have our origin stories. That doesn’t mean we build altars to the people who wrote them. Maybe the real question isn’t whether the artist and the art can be separated. Maybe it’s whether you still want to be standing that close when the damage becomes impossible to ignore.

Who are you protecting when you say “it’s just a book”?

Who pays the price for your comfort?

And why is it always the same people?