The Girl Who Lived

August 18, 2021 7:04 PM

Molly tried her best. When Harry had told them, Arthur had asked excitedly, "is this a Muggle thing?" and Hermione had hurried out a "no!" and a frantic history of gender diversity in the wizarding world.

"It's just that I'm a girl," Harry had said. and Arthur had nodded and asked her about how telephone booths worked. He would call her by the right pronouns until the day he died at the respectable old age of one hundred and thirty three, and he would make it seem easy.
posted by simmering octagon (38 comments total)

Was this algorithmically-generated or am I just missing all the references?
posted by aesop at 7:41 PM on August 18, 2021 [9 favorites]

*wipes eyes, sniffles a lot*
Thank you for sharing this reclaiming of a series I raised my children on.
posted by Flight Hardware, do not touch at 7:51 PM on August 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

aesop - This is referencing Harry Potter, which was written by someone who has a reputation for being anti-trans.
posted by aniola at 8:29 PM on August 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

Headcanon fucking accepted.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:35 PM on August 18, 2021 [22 favorites]

I made it to the cavern and burst into uncontrollable sobbing. Thank you for sharing this. It has been a hard year two.
posted by Callisto Prime at 8:46 PM on August 18, 2021 [4 favorites]

An Aladdin fic I wrote in a similar vein.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:47 PM on August 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

The author, dirgewithoutmusic, has produced some of the most excellent fanfic I've had the pleasure of reading. This is one more example. Thanks so much for sharing.
posted by Alensin at 9:01 PM on August 18, 2021

I get that this may be the author's thing (previously) but I'm struck by how little changes. Harry spends more time with the Patils and Blaise and Sprout, but all the same characters die at the same moments, and so on. Not until after graduation does Harry's life trajectory change, and that only as compared to the epilogue. But I guess this format doesn't really allow for more than that... you start changing the plot, you have to explore the ramifications and treat major events as more than throwaway lines ("lost Dobby") to hang emotional scenes on. Also I guess the implications are sort of weird: if anything bad happens in one timeline but not the other is it somehow Harry's gender's fault?
posted by one for the books at 9:18 PM on August 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Personally I read a ton of fanfic that explores the same plot points over and over simply because it explores things in a slightly different way. The plot being pretty much the same is just fine because I'm more focused on the actual changes than in the story I know.
posted by AlexiaSky at 10:57 PM on August 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

Thanks for this. I've had an unexpectedly rough gender week and it was a cathartic thing for me to read tonight.
posted by potrzebie at 11:32 PM on August 18, 2021 [10 favorites]

The first paragraph (about students' needs and the library, in spite of any authorities), and what Sprout says about shelled creatures, are so great.
posted by brainwane at 11:45 PM on August 18, 2021 [6 favorites]

Also, Trans Wizard Harriet Porber.
posted by acb at 1:36 AM on August 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Oh, this is very good. I love opportunities to revel in the ways that transformative fiction can spin up new ideas out of something else. The "what if" genre of fanfic is one of my favourites, especially when it's used to critically examine ideas like this.

(Obligatory "fuck you, JKR".)
posted by fight or flight at 4:29 AM on August 19, 2021 [5 favorites]

What if, 100 years from now, the only thing HP is remembered for is the flowering of trans-inclusive fan fiction triggered by the narrow-minded crusades of its long-forgotten author?
posted by acb at 5:00 AM on August 19, 2021 [25 favorites]

To read "you're perfect" and try to stay calm. How many kids in general want to hear that.
posted by datawrangler at 5:47 AM on August 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

Heck, I'm 40 and still want to hear it
posted by Jacen at 6:18 AM on August 19, 2021 [14 favorites]

Hey, Jacen, you’re perfect.
posted by Ghidorah at 7:21 AM on August 19, 2021 [41 favorites]

That was utterly lovely. Thank you so much for posting, shimmering octagon.
posted by widdershins at 7:40 AM on August 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

Peeves is still my hero
posted by skippyhacker at 7:54 AM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

"she and Harry bent their heads together and figured out what words Harry felt best told her story" :sob:
posted by lloquat at 9:24 AM on August 19, 2021

The world is chock-a-block full of children's/YA literature involving magic, the wielding of magic, and the effects suffered by angsty teenagers wielding magic. Much of it has better world-building than the Harry Potter universe. Nearly all of it is written by people who aren't irredeemable transphobic shitheels. And yet folks insist on staying within JKR's universe. I understand that it has nostalgic tones for a lot of people, but no one's romanticizing (say) Ender's Game after its author outed himself as a terrible human. Why the treatment for Harry Potter?
posted by Mayor West at 9:34 AM on August 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

I think it’s because there aren’t a lot of kids who fantasized about going to Battle School, but millions who dreamed about going to Hogwarts.
posted by notoriety public at 10:11 AM on August 19, 2021 [15 favorites]

I don't know why Harry Potter captured so many people's imagination. There are many better books in the world that by rights should have the fame and fortune that Rowling owns. But it did. It's a touchstone for so many, and reclaiming that work in the face of Rowling's transphobia is cathartic and valuable.
posted by that's candlepin at 10:20 AM on August 19, 2021 [8 favorites]

Why the treatment for Harry Potter?

I was going to link you this MeFi post with a great link about reclaiming it and lots of comments talking about it but you are one of the first posters there having the same complaint so I'm not sure there's anything I can write that could help you understand.

(I'm not saying your point of view is not valid but if you don't like the explanation there's not much else to do)

This youtube video is another exploration of the issue that may help you.
posted by simmering octagon at 10:45 AM on August 19, 2021 [9 favorites]

Why the treatment for Harry Potter?

Honestly, as a trans person who spent countless hours of my youth reading/talking about/writing fanfic for/queuing to get midnight releases of HP books, at this point it's roughly 10% fondness for the source material and 90% spite.

We can't do much about the fact that Rowling has made billions from her novels or the fact that she keeps being given a platform to express her personal hatred of trans people and desire for us to be stripped of our human rights, but, damn it, we can reclaim those lost hours and spend them talking about trans kids going to Hogwarts instead, and hope that JKR's evil energies are diminished a tiny bit every time we do so.

Fuck JKR. Hogwarts belongs to us now.
posted by fight or flight at 10:54 AM on August 19, 2021 [42 favorites]

Why the treatment for Harry Potter?

Also, people love what they love, and they don't necessarily want to chew off a limb to get out of a trap set by an author/musician/director/whatever who turned out to be a terrible person. Finding a way to reclaim it is a way to make peace with yourself. Speaking as someone who has consumed a lot of Lovecraft- and Lovecraft-related media....
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:21 PM on August 19, 2021 [6 favorites]

There's really no need to misrepresent Rowling's views.

This is a bit opaque, but if you're saying that it's a misrepresentation to call JKR a transphobic bigot who wants to take away trans people's right to exist (and who cares about seemingly little else), you are flat out incorrect. We have to listen to trans people on this one, and the vast majority of trans people would concur: she is transphobic and she does not want us to exist.

As for why the treatment for Harry Potter? These books were a refuge for many, many queer kids. Reading them with adult eyes, her bigotry is pretty obvious, but as a kid that was hard to see. What was very clear in that text was the magic of being able to belong and not being literally shoved in the closet by your own family. That was incredibly enticing, and letting go of that after learning what a bigot the author is... it has been like a death for many of the queer people I know.
posted by twelve cent archie at 12:23 PM on August 19, 2021 [17 favorites]

The most cathartic cry of my week. Thank you for sharing!
posted by hapaxes.legomenon at 12:27 PM on August 19, 2021

Lovecraft is dead, though; not a penny of any Cthulhu Mythos book is more likely to go towards white supremacy than any other random book, and if more people pick his books up, he doesn't get a platform to hector people about why Italians are loathsome vermin or whatever. Rowling, not so much.

The biggest risk in reclaiming HP while she's still alive is that it may boost her earnings (and ability to fund evil causes with them) or boost the audience of her views.
posted by acb at 12:34 PM on August 19, 2021 [4 favorites]

Peeves, though he was nasty about everything else--ickle firsties and orphan girls--got it immediately. For all six years of her Hogwarts tenure, he dropped water balloons on the heads of anyone who misgendered her. Thanks for this post, I loved it.
posted by Bella Donna at 12:40 PM on August 19, 2021 [3 favorites]

The biggest risk in reclaiming HP while she's still alive is that it may boost her earnings (and ability to fund evil causes with them) or boost the audience of her views.

I mean, the series is done. Everything Rowling has done since it ended (or even before, depending on how much you dislike the later books) has been to the detriment of the brand. I'm sure there are a few kids getting into Harry Potter these days but it's nothing compared to what it was.

It's not like the fandom trying to reclaim itself (because it stopped being about the books a long time ago) is going to make the franchise a thing again.
posted by simmering octagon at 12:45 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

JKR is still making money off tie-ins and merchandising and she and her estate will keep doing so until the heat death of the universe or the abolition of Disney's iron grip on copyright law, whichever comes first. There's a new Wizarding World store in Manhattan; I believe there's a big Potterverse videogame in development.

I don't think people keeping the HP fanfic scene alive are really influencing this either way. If every trans fic writer downed tools tomorrow and moved on, ticket sales at Harry Potter World (or whatever) aren't going to take a hit. Let people work out their feelings in fic if they want.
posted by BungaDunga at 12:58 PM on August 19, 2021 [12 favorites]

Also, there's a line of Potter-themed clothing in the windows at H&M these days. Whether or not a few cents of each item literally goes towards the LGB Alliance, Hands Across The Aisle or other anti-trans hate groups, it's probably safer to consider it as doing so.
posted by acb at 1:35 PM on August 19, 2021

no one's romanticizing (say) Ender's Game after its author outed himself as a terrible human

Sure, they are. Maybe it's because I spent high school in Utah, but I know a ton of die-hard Ender's Game fans.

Lovecraft is a bit different from Card and Rowling, in that so much of what was horrible about him ended up directly, unambiguously in the stories. I think that's made neo-Lovecraftian work that explicitly confronts his awfulness such a rich vein.
posted by gurple at 2:00 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Note that this fanfic was posted in 2016, before it was widely understood (to the degree it is today) just how the author would feel about it. The incidents of 2019 and beyond helped crystallize for us that the creator of this world had created a set of works, a world, that exceeded herself (a lesson familiar from the Magicians trilogy).

I am trans, and I've known I was trans for the entire time that these books have existed, and I would take no shame in recommended the books today if asked. Not because I support her, but because she is no longer relevant to her works. They have moved beyond her grasp. They are ours now, and this story represents that. This .. overlay .. of new memories of the novels leaves all of my memories intact, and simply adds the nuances, the shadows and depth, that let me find myself in these great works and feel accepted in my imagination.

I understand why many want to discuss her, and name her and shame her and campaign against her, but in the moment of reading this story, I did not think of her. I did not think of her negativity. I thought of my life, and I thought of Harry Potter, and those similarities bridged and for one shining moment I felt like everything had ended up alright. I still feel that way today, even now having read this discussion, with so many mentions of her above.

She'll always be a presence in this story, and I respect that. But, as an M->F trans Potter fan, I wish that we could decouple her from her works, in some way that is successful for human beings, and I have realized how we can do so. She gave us the clue herself, written throughout every one of the books, on how to strip away the fear and anxiety and shame of great harm done, on how to move on when someone good turns bad. Let us call her by the name she created to fulfill that need in her world, which has grown beyond her and now has need of that name again:

She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.
posted by Callisto Prime at 2:12 PM on August 19, 2021 [27 favorites]

I can't think of anything that could possibly be a bigger middle finger to Rowling than trans fan fic of her IP. Even if that fic somehow gets her hundreds of additional dollars in merchandising. If she notices at all it must drive her crazy and she will not notice more money on her pile.
posted by Mitheral at 2:13 PM on August 19, 2021 [2 favorites]

Make it so.
posted by Hermione Granger at 3:30 PM on August 19, 2021 [7 favorites]

Ow, my heart hurts. Thanks for sharing. It helps untarnish the stories after all the transphobia from Rowling these last few years.

I nearly broke down when Harry goes and hides in the greenhouses and Sprout talks to her. But it's probably because I've always been a hufflepuff.
posted by allium cepa at 10:16 PM on August 19, 2021 [3 favorites]