I cut my teeth on betrayal. Or at the very least, I lived with the ghost of it as a creepy companion, like children might keep an imaginary friend.
Let me explain: I was raised in an expansive extreme-fundamentalist community in the evangelical south. I was socialized as girl, and with that came certain expectations: my role in life was to submit, to obey, to stand up for Right (but only as Right was defined by others), and to look forward to a life of relinquishing agency and following the orders of leaders who I often observed to be abusive and corrupt.
The adults around me loved me, but it was very clear in my mind at all times that they loved and unconditionally supported a certain version of my body and self: one that propped up and served an often exploitative patriarchal ideology. Stepping outside that prescribed role meant straying into an arid no man’s land of “love the sinner, hate the sin” (or, more often expressed, “I don’t agree with your lifestyle choices, but I love you.” )
It was a smug, arm’s length love, and once you got the label, it was a stink that often didn’t rub off at a community level—at least not until you betrayed yourself by recanting. And even then, folks still viewed differently for the rest of your life, concerned you might backslide into “dangerous” queer behavior.
If you wanted to be in the circle of community, it was important to perform your prescribed role.
(I’m not sharing to illicit sympathy—it’s just how it happened, and therefore important backstory.)
Still, looking back, little tells peppered my life: Every Tuesday for a while, I dressed up as a boy named Eric “so my little sib could know what it was like to have an older brother.” I had a fascination with horror re-runs, which I watched at my grandparents’ house, and with characters I now recognize were queer-coded. I wore approved conservative t-shirts that were several sizes too big in the name of ‘modesty’ to feel comfortable with my body. I obsessed over the gritty sadness in the voice of Jennifer Knapp, a Christian alt-rock artist who later came out as a lesbian. In conservative college, nearly every single friend I gravitated toward was in the closet. We joked about queerness, dangerously close to The Line, often. These were creative, childish ways of keeping my soul intact, and as “cringe” as they ring now, I have to hand it to myself—it did the trick.
But there were still ominous reminders, constantly, that rejection lurked. A bisexual visitor to our youth group was gossiped about mercilessly and never came back. Jennifer Knapp was put through the conservative ringer when she came out. The radio told me gay people were “an encroaching threat.” Incorrigible kids were sent to conversion camps. Altar calls were held for demons of homosexuality to be cast out of those “being tempted.” One of my college friends, an enthusiastic leader and dedicated student, was unceremoniously kicked out of school for being gay. My dorm hall was scandalized when someone’s computer history had lesbian content. Two weeks later, she dropped out of school. No one talked to the openly butch girls at school for fear of being associated and called to the disciplinary office.
When you were young, constant aggression and microaggressions kept your behavior in line, along with a heaping dose of physical and verbal punishment. When you were older, same, but with lasting social and often economic consequences.
Love and acceptance had a ticking clock, and a clearly defined expiration date. It lasted as long as you could grit your teeth and hold out.
(Irony: carousing with your straight boyfriend was mostly fine, provided no one found out about it. In fact, some folks might feel relieved on your behalf: you’re batting for the right team! )
Enter J.K. Rowling. In the midst of this, local churches held book burnings of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s noteworthy that magic was largely forbidden in my childhood, which naturally meant my most purposefully rebellious act was seeing the first Harry Potter movie at the dollar theater. Everyone was obsessed with the books and films, and the college crowd was no exception.
Rowling’s magic broke so many rules. You could be different! Somewhere, there were people—YOUR PEOPLE, just waiting to do marvelous, glorious acts of daring and creativity that you didn’t have to suppress. Fight Voldemort, defend the muggles, insert yourself in between the lines, and find safety within the thick, dreamy walls of Hogwarts.
In my early twenties, I worked up the courage to divorce myself from fundamental extremism and became outspoken about it, knowing darned well it would mean losing many relationships. (I did.) Bowls of ice cream and HP movies saw me through.
In my mid-twenties, I came out to my trusted community as bisexual, and then pan. I questioned out loud gender roles and how itchy they made me feel, and felt my soul chafe at polarized gender identities within the pagan community. (The word TERF wasn’t on my grid yet.) I threw HP themed Halloween parties for my then-tiny children, and told them they could be anything they wanted: Don’t let the muggles grind you down.
I lost friends when I came out.
In 2007, Dumbledore was GAY, and we all congratulated ourselves for having inferred the correct subtext: Hogwarts was a safe place for queer folk.
I used HP as a comforting, familiar escape when dysmorphia and an unnamed frustration with my own body and presentation kept rearing its head. It was a substitute and haven from the urge to burn my skin, starve myself, rage at the mirror, and roar over the indignity of feeling dishonored.
As I devoured books and articles on social justice, history, culture, gender theory, racism, religion, deconstructing toxic worldviews, and healing psychology, the familiar HP books were often the only fiction my exhausted, stretched-out brain could process.
When I hit thirty, I fell into a deep and frustrating depression, and I began to write as a healing/coping exercise. Lots of my friends began coming out. A found-family (if often long-distance) started to form. I began to recognize signs that one of my children wasn’t cis. My sibling came out to my parents with me in the room, and it went exactly as expected: you are loved, but you are less to us. That’s…a very tame version (shared with permission.)
A friend I’d always felt kinsmanship with came out as non-binary, and my head struggled to process pronoun changes. Partly, because I wanted desperately to ask for that for myself, and doubted anyone would honor it. And the prospect of another round of rejection? It seemed worse than dysphoria. Internalized ideas that I was damaged—that I would cause damage, that my want to self-express was damaging—dogged my heart and mind for several years.
I made friends who were unabashedly accepting and self-expressing. I began to express my truths “I don’t identify strongly as ‘man’ or ‘woman’, honestly” very bluntly, and lost ties with my extended family, eventually my own parents. My found family and I bonded, mourned, tattooed, analyzed, and processed through the canon of Harry Potter. (Among other books, of course.) It gave us a common room. It was our accepting Burrow. And even though we were adults, many of us with children, the Potterverse was a reparative form of play and healing nostalgia.
Donald Trump won the election. In an act of furious grief, like so many people at the time, I shaved my head. And, as a happy accident, I started to recognize the person staring back at me in the mirror. Meanwhile, JK Rowling was trashing the Trump administration on Twitter.
There were more protests at a local level (I lived in TN at the time) than there ever had been, and lots of signs had HP and muggle themes. We marched together.
The winter I started editing CATTYWAMPUS, I listened to all the HP books on audiobook in an endless loop. My kid was harassed at school. Potter-themed Halloween parties with our local queers and heathens were a touchpoint and a balm for my entire family.
A friend and I started a magic-themed kidlit podcast, Raising Hermione, unpacking the problems of white feminism, our culpability as white folks socialized as women, weaponized tears, making space for girls to live their truth…and problems within HP’s own limited worldview.
But still. It was a safe-feeling lens. This highlights my own white-perspective error: It’s one thing to see someone else burned by goofy rep. It’s another thing entirely to be the one getting zinged.
And then, JK started liking TERF-themed tweets. It was a gut-punch.
This year, in the midst of a pandemic, Trump attacking trans health rights, a national outcry about police brutality against Black folks, and global job crisis, the thing Mama Rowling decided to use her platform for was: an essay-long message about how trans and nonbinary folks are confused, harmful, damaging, and, in a word, wrong. The timing was awful: I’d dropped my guard, and it felt like a blow to the chest (even though I saw it coming.) Helping my kid process it added another layer of heaviness to an already-heavy year.
And a beautiful thing happened. My community and found-family immediately kicked the TERF out of The Burrow. We realized that our parties and tables and conversations and podcasts and soul-searching had never been JK’s doing to begin with: we who had already experienced a thousand rejections in the world had built a community based on trying to listen, trying to accept, trying to hold space, trying to honor the deep magic in one another. Of course. We’d read queerness into JK’s narratives as a rallying point, but it had always been us, speaking truth to ourselves, within that framework.
She can’t kick us out of magic; it was never hers to own or keep. We were always writing our own beautiful stories between the lines.
Magic has always been about the subversion of ‘normal’ expectations, overthrowing oppressive rules and systems in need of reform, and the dedication to healing the whole self at the risk of being burned at the stake for it. Hogwarts doesn’t own magic. It never started there. Marginalized people have always created our own magic, and we’ll continue to do so. We’ll write until no one lives in a closet under the stairs with the fear of neglect and rejection.
And the way we make sure we don’t repeat the mistakes of our aggressors is by continuing to believe that no one single person or people group owns “magic”. We listen. We listen more. We center Black voices. We center Indigenous voices. We listen to Black trans women. We respect that there are many experiences within a single identity. We refuse to sacrifice one child’s safety for the sake of soothing our own anxieties and hidden prejudices.
We’ll make mistakes, and hope the next generation who reads our work feels loved enough to question us, too. <3
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