While reading Troubled Blood last week and doing all I could to avoid being ‘spoiled,’ I was unable to avoid learning that the new book by Rowling-Galbraith had been tried and found guilty of transphobia — and that some transgender activists who had been Harry Potter fans had chosen to burn their books to demonstrate their displeasure with J. K. Rowling.
I spoke with Louise Freeman this morning at the Queen City Mischief and Magic Festival about Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike. She closed our conversation with a brief discussion of whether the Strike series as a whole and Troubled Blood specifically was transphobic. Prof Freeman offered several links to reviews in UK papers that discussed and dismissed this charge as unfortunate and unfounded; she explained how someone might have imagined this in the character of Dennis Creed, but that it was an unjustified overreach to classify the book or the series in any way, not to mention “transphobic,” based on an aside about this year’s psychopath.
I offered the historical parallel of the Harry Haters during the Potter Panic of twenty years ago who believed earnestly and zealously that the Hogwarts Saga was the ‘Gateway to the Occult’ because they read the book through the Never Blinking Eye of the culture war. Harry Potter, as readers of my books and this weblog know, turned out to be a profoundly challenging and transformative work of Christian story-telling.
Today’s transgender activists, secular fundamentalists and puritanical ideologues akin to the religious Harry Haters, are now reading Cormoran Strike in search of transgressions against their dogmas and creedal cultic touchstones. Like those who burned the Potter novels for being hurtful to the soft souls of children, so today’s book burners do so in the name of oppressed and maligned transgender women. Sadly, they miss Rowling-Galbraith’s message of personal narrative and identity in the Strike books, themes of transformation as up front as her Christian symbolism was, frankly, in her first seven book series.
The reaction to Rowling’s ‘This Witch Doesn’t Burn’ tweet followed the usual lines, which is to say, “Hurrah for the Queen!” and “Burn in hell, TERF!” Both missed, I think, Rowling’s point in posting this image and message when she has.
In brief, it is a response to the book-burning and equally fiery criticism of her as a “transphobe.” Harry Potter fan sites and transgender Twitter Ustachi have done their best to “cancel” her as something of a caste Untouchable or eta. Rowling in her tweet simultaneously says she cannot be cancelled (“Doesn’t Burn”) and equates the online mob with the superstitious, violent, and dogmatic witch-burners of the legendary ‘Middle Ages.’ In one stroke, she captures what she feels is the violence, ignorance, and misogyny of those criticizing Troubled Blood, a book few have read and re-read, for a fault it does not have.
If those critics want to know how Rowling thinks and feels about their leftist laments, I think they should read chapter 42 of Troubled Blood and Strike’s reflections on the idealist college-student dinner guests at Robin and Max’s house. They reminded him of his biological mother’s greatest failings. Her political activism, he recalls, like those of the students he’d met and despised the night before, “had mostly taken the form of enthusiastic exhibitionism.” “The basis of her life’s philosophy, if such a word could be used for the loose collection of whims and knee-jerk reactions she called beliefs, was that everything of which the bourgeoisie disapproved must be good and right” (500).
The responses to Rowling’s tweet confirmed those who now despise her are of that very camp, alas, of “enthusiastic exhibitionists” and that Rowling indeed cannot be burned like a witch or cancelled. Troubled Blood now tops the best-seller lists in the UK and US. About which, “Hurrah!”
To hear my conversation with Professor Freeman at the Queen City Mischief and Magic Festival, check out their FaceBook page on which the talk will be posted.
