A major pillar of modern pop culture feels like it is headed for a reckoning. HBO and Warner Bros are beginning the marketing ramp up for their new, lavishly produced Harry Potter TV series, promising to give fans everything the film adaptations cut from the books.
Meanwhile that franchise enriches the author. And with her wealth, Potter creator JK Rowling has a primary political crusade she funds.
The dehumanization of trans people and the push to deny them basic human rights.
Rowling wrote in an essay on her website1 that the trans rights movement is “…seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.” and the advancement of trans rights causes her to “believe my government is playing fast and loose with women’s and girls’ safety.” Her vast fortune now fuels her push to deny those rights.
Furthermore, her private Women’s Fund describes itself as supporting people defending the belief that biological sex cannot change. Rowling describes her political work as defending women’s sex-based rights2.
Rights that do not extend to trans women.
You know, because transwomen are men in their true, essential nature.
For those who gravitated to the franchise because of its message of standing up to fascists and protecting the marginalized, this development has them looking at that story through a new critical lens.
And I am one of them.
I have no illusions about the fact that my fandom funds harm. Full stop. Today I’m not going to dig into that vein, rich as it is. Another time, perhaps.
No, I am looking into the lessons and assumptions baked into the Potter franchise, ones I certainly didn’t notice reading the novels, but now feel obvious with the revelation of how their author sees the world. A world where extending full dignity and rights to trans women harms “real” women.
A world where men choose to be trans, thus revealing their sinister nature.
(I never hear about Rowling going after trans men. The anti-trans movement never seems to acknowledge that as a thing that exists)
Today I am focusing on what is one of the more insidious messages.
Essentialism.
It has been used to remove rights from people. Women cannot be trusted to vote, lead, or govern. Some races are inherently better than others. A person comes from a good family and therefore are good, so they get mercy. A person from a bad family is bad and therefore cannot be trusted.
We see it across the novels.
Rowling tries to tell us that choices make us who we are. In her statements about the series and from the lips of the character we are meant to see as the wisest of all.
But what Rowling shows in the actual text (and subtext) is that who we are is already set, and it’s our choices that reveal who we are. The series tends to present crucial moral moments as revelations of character rather than transformations of character.
What defines Harry Potter?
He’s kind. Like his mother, whom he only knows from other’s memories and her final act. This is commented on directly by teachers Lupin and Slughorn.
He’s brave, like both of his parents. He’s told this by Sirius, Hagrid, and many more.
Harry’s greatest accomplishment, the thing that made him “The Boy Who Lived”, wasn’t his choice. He had no agency in it all; it was his mother’s love that protected him and from which he inherited his plot armor.
Rowling’s essentialism was voiced by Dumbledore in a way that I didn’t notice at first.
When comforting Harry after his annual traumatizing end of term ordeal, the “world’s greatest wizard” tells him, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities”
It’s easy to read something through the lens of existing belief. And I’d always read that line as a lesson that we define who we are with our choices.
But that’s not what Rowling wrote. Let’s read it again.
“…our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are…”
I can hear millennials clacking away with their Tumblr rebuttals. “Dumbledore was telling Harry that his choices made him not like Voldemort despite the similarities.”
Yes, that’s how Rowling intended the line to be received. But the moment Dumbledore holds up as proof of choice is itself an act of essentialist sorting.
Literally.
Harry was sorted into Gryffindor, the brave good guy house except for the one character placed there to add a little complexity, because he chose to not be Slytherin, the bad guy factory that had none of its students fight Voldemort in the climactic battle house.
Why did Harry choose “not Slytherin”? Because he’s told by the first magical person he meets that, “There’s not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn’t in Slytherin.”
Harry’s choice demonstrated his essential goodness.
While that doesn’t prove absolutely true, it is mostly true across the series. Its founder left a murderous monster in the castle to be let loose by his heir. The circle of Death Eaters in the graveyard when Voldemort returns reads like a Slytherin Parents’ meet n greet. Professor Slughorn is introduced as a “good Slytherin”…
in book six of seven.
Ole Horace is one of the good ones, see? The exception that proves the rule.
Voldemort cannot defeat a wizard in training because Voldemort does not understand love. The books then show us his inability to understand love is part of who he is. In an inversion of Harry he was born without love, the child of a union coerced under the effects of a love potion.
And thus was not conceived in love.
This inability to understand love is the root of his of evil. Sure, he could be redeemed, but he won’t be. Because he essentially cannot understand and thus accept love.
It is an essential part of who he is.
But Harry, whose parents deeply loved him and one another, Harry can leverage the magic power of love to win.
It is an essential part of who he is.
Essentialism robs both Voldemort and Harry of choice. Voldemort was going to be the evil manipulative villain. It’s his essential nature. Harry was going to be the all loving and caring hero. It’s who he is.
Essentialism does more than flatten core conflict of wizard school books.
Essentialism denies us the responsibility for choosing the person we want to become, it denies us the agency to implement that choice.
But we all have the choice. This doesn’t mean that everyone can be anything with the same application of effort. Circumstances determine where we begin and what resources we have to work with. Systems contort people to fit into prearranged roles.
Harry Potter is not kind because his parents (parents that he never knew) were kind. He is kind because he chooses to be kind. He is kind because he knows what it is to live without kindness, and with kind choice he makes the next one easier to make.
Harry is not brave because his parents were brave. Harry chooses to be brave. Harry knows the cost of not choosing bravery. And with every choice of bravery, the next brave choice becomes easier to make.
Harry is not loving because his parents loved him. Harry chooses to love. To love the friends who accepted him after a life of loneliness. To love the adults who showed him genuine care. To love the family that treated him as one of their own because they saw a boy who needed the love of a family.
Rowling may think that our choices reveal who we are, reveals our essential nature. But her boy wizard actually shows our choices do not reveal something already there, they build who we become.
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J. K. Rowling, “J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues,” J.K. Rowling, June 10, 2020, https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/.
“The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund.” The J.K. Rowling Women’s Fund, jkrwf.org/. Accessed 5 Sept. 2026.