I think, for the record, it takes a lot less effort to say “JKR is a pos and has caused unequivocal and irrevocable harm to a minority/marginalized community by using her money and voice to advocate against trans people, and I do not support her,” than it does to go on a rant about how no one is entitled to your “political opinions” on your poll blog. Because trans people should not be treated as a political novelty instead of real human beings. And even if your blog has “nothing to do with politics”, queer people are surprisingly not just whittled down to a political stance you can take, and I have no problem publicly stating that this blog is safe for the lgbt community and is not founded on bigotry.
Yes, I agree that, curating your internet experience is important, and that fandom is not necessarily made up of people likeminded to their creators. HOWEVER with HP, it is much more likely that you are transphobic when you publicly tolerate it. Seeing as that is the main trend when we observe blogs still circulating HP content.
I really never had intent to even allow JKR/HP to even appear on this blog because I wanted to be as far removed from it as humanly possible. Hence why I have, in the past, just deleted HP submissions without even ever stating they weren’t going to be apart of this poll.
All this to say, I followed a blog that allowed HP characters be apart of it’s poll (explicitly stated in the submission process), which was already a red flag. And then, to truly no one’s surprise, when they were (actually very politely, considering this is the internet) asked for their stance on JKR to make sure that it was a blog they were okay with following, they had a very long winded answer, without ever actually condemning JKR [links to give an example of my first thought of how their answer sounded] besides a throwaway line about “sins of the creator.” Which, if you publicly post HP, yeah you’re gonna be scrutinized on if you’re transphobic or not. That’s the risk you assume at the current time. Just kinda what happens when you support loudly transphobic people with no reassurance that you actually can separate the art from the artist.
Now, I have made a post about my views on separating the art from the artist, previously. And I still stand by that post. When I said “There’s some creators you can’t avoid how nasty they are, because they scream it from the rooftops,” and “There are some people who do things that are so far beyond wrong that they cannot be looked at without that standing out as the most important thing about them. Their failures as a human outweigh any good that has or could ever come from them.” I specifically had JKR in mind. It is common knowledge what kind of person JKR is at this point. There is no question on what she is.
I recognize that the person behind the poll blog, that this post is about, may not like my view on this or on their statement regarding it. And I do in fact classify them under my general “no creator is a good nor perfect person” umbrella. But I will not be attaching their name to this, as I do not want anyone to harass them about it. I do not want harm to come to them about this. I would hope they would rethink how they had answered and perhaps actually acknowledge that they aren’t transphobic. But considering that would have been the easy answer to begin with, they probably are transphobic, and that really sucks.
And to anyone reading this, please do not harass the person this is about, if you do find them, or know who they are already. They are entitled to their privacy and safety, they are not actively spreading hate nor harm.
The fault I saw was in the way in which they answered the question. Because while no one is entitled to their political opinions, trans people were largely not a “hot political topic” until JKR stuck her nose in it and changed the political landscape drastically to include the prosecution of trans people. So yeah, people wanting to know if someone posting content, from that monster, is in line with her way of thinking, is actually them making sure they can curate their internet experience, by giving you the chance to be a part of that experience, given you weren’t a transphobe. Because HP itself does not condemn people for their gender nor call for their removal in spaces specifically for their gender, the writer does. The creator is 100% the problem.
People are allowed to post about HP all they want. While HP has other issues beyond it’s creator, such as the antisemitism laced throughout (also at the hands of the creator, fancy that), it is possible for people to enjoy it while standing against the creator. But those who are able to do that, are generally the kind of people who could actually articulate that they do not support JKR. And if you can’t articulate that, then it’s pretty glaringly obvious why that is something you would rather not talk about. And people who enjoy HP, but do not support JKR and would like to ethically consume HP media (without the burden of JKR supporters) are absolutely going to ask if you support JKR when you don’t outright keep HP off your blog.
TLDR: JKR is a pos and has caused unequivocal and irrevocable harm to a minority/marginalized community by using her money and voice to advocate against trans people, and I do not support her. I don’t actually think anyone is a good nor perfect person in the black and white of things. Don’t harass creators who aren’t using their platforms to cause harm to people. I will not be advocating for the removal of any content, because I have a perfectly functional block button and so do you. Make sure to register to vote/vote in your elections. Queer people are not something you can be politically/socially/economically against or for, because queer people exist and deserve to be treated as humans. And uhhh cis/cisgender/cishet aren’t slurs.
