Transcript for MuggleCast Episode #707, A New Trio, and That Same Author
Show Intro
[Show music plays]
Andrew Sims: Welcome to MuggleCast, your weekly ride into the world of Harry Potter. I’m Andrew.
Eric Scull: I’m Eric.
Micah Tannenbaum: I’m Micah.
Laura Tee: And I’m Laura.
Andrew: We are your Harry Potter friends talking about the books, the movies, and the upcoming TV show, so make sure you follow us in your favorite podcast app; that way you’ll never miss an episode. And this week, we’re chatting about some major Harry Potter TV show news, and then spending this first episode of Pride Month talking about ongoing issues with J.K. Rowling, because it’s been five years since we last discussed her opinion on trans people, and she has continued to be awful about it, which presents an issue for many Harry Potter fans, so we wanted to talk about that today.
News
Andrew: So let’s get to the bright and cheery news first. The Harry Potter TV show, which is slated to start filming this summer, has found its Harry, Ron, and Hermione. And we imagine many of our listeners have now seen the photo; we posted it on the MuggleCast Instagram. Dominic McLaughlin, Alistair Stout, and Arabella Stanton have been cast as Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Showrunner Francesca Gardiner and Director Mark Mylod said, “After an extraordinary search led by our casting directors, we are delighted to announce we have found our Harry, Ron, and Hermione. The talent of these three unique actors is wonderful to behold, and we cannot wait for the world to witness their magic together onscreen.” Any initial thoughts on these three?
Eric: Kids are cute.
Laura: Yeah, and I think… I don’t know. It feels very spot on; it felt very similar to the first trio casting all those years ago, where you could automatically see them in those roles, and I feel really similarly about these three. I think what’s really exciting is that Arabella Stanton does have acting experience, and I did see a clip of her – it was just a very brief clip of her – either auditioning for something, doing a live reading, and she sounded just like Hermione. It was a little bit creepy. So I think they really hit the nail on the head there.
Andrew: Arabella Stanton is also a woman of color, which I was hoping would be the case after Hermione became a woman of color in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in the UK and in every iteration of Cursed Child since then. This photo of the three of them together… like we said, they look super cute. It’s a cute photo of the trio, but it immediately reminded me of the original casting announcement with Dan, Emma, and Rupert those 25 years ago, because that cast photo had the three of them together looking this young at the time. So it’s like, “Wow, time is a flat circle.”
[Micah laughs]
Andrew: And yeah, I mean, we don’t know… like you mentioned, Laura, Arabella has some theater experience. I believe she starred in a version of Matilda? A stage version of Matilda?
Laura: Yeah, on the West End. So I mean, yeah, it’s pretty serious.
Andrew: Yeah, and I don’t know if the other two have acting chops. I know that Dominic, who is playing Harry, has blue eyes, I think. [laughs]
Micah: Uh-oh.
Eric: It looks like it.
Laura: Oh no, here we go again.
Eric: They did it again.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: Somebody said green; I was like, “I don’t know if those are green. I think those are blue.” I personally do not care, but it’s something you look out for. [laughs]
Eric: Well, we’ll just have to see what the color grading is like for this TV series, because maybe it’ll look green. You know how they messed with all the color grading in the later films.
Andrew: Right.
Micah: I am wondering, though, looking at these names for these actors – Alistair Stout, Arabella Stanton – do you have to be a Harry Potter character in your first name in order to get cast in this series?
Eric: I’m sure it’s a plus, right? It’s like relevant experience?
Andrew: That was part of the audition’s paperwork, Micah. You didn’t…? I thought you saw the audition notice.
Micah: I didn’t read close enough; was that in the footnote, maybe?
Eric: You have to have a name like a fictional character, yeah.
Micah: What I do like about this, though, now is that we pretty much have the main cast, for Sorcerer’s Stone, at least. There’s still probably a few more that we could add in that maybe we consider to be in sort of that top tier category, like a Draco Malfoy. But for the most part, we’re there. And did it say in that article, what, 2026 they were going to start filming this? Or, sorry, they were going to start filming this summer with a release for 2026.
Andrew: That’s what they’re saying, yeah.
Laura: That’s exciting.
Andrew: And there were actually some photos of Privet Drive being built – I don’t know if y’all saw those aerial photos – so it’s all really coming together at this point.
Micah: Well, it does exist if you go to Leavesden. It’s still there.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: But they’re doing a whole different version, a bigger version, it looked like to me, but it’s nice to see that coming together as well.
Micah: Well, those are other characters, too, that we still haven’t heard about, the Dursleys.
Andrew: Yeah, well, it’s going to be a lot of fun seeing all these casting announcements over the next couple of months. I hope they do create some… they actually make some formal announcements about as many characters as possible, because as has become very clear at this point, people talk about all these casting announcements. So let’s just keep throwing these names out there.
Laura: Yep. We’ll keep an eye on it. Certainly more casting news to come.
Andrew: Stick with MuggleCast for continuing Harry Potter TV show coverage. We’ll be covering it as casting announcements continue to be shared. And of course, once filming gets underway, I’m sure there’s going to be more aerial photos that we’ll be able to enjoy. I have a drone; maybe I should head over there and report for MuggleCast with my drone.
Laura: Oh, man.
Eric: Man, you were just over there.
Andrew: I know. I know! Why didn’t I bring my drone?
Laura: Yeah, you could have done this.
Andrew: What are the drone rules over there?
Eric: You were setting up your drones, weren’t you?
Andrew: I need to… yeah, that’s what I was actually doing. [laughs]
J.K. Rowling’s transphobia
Eric: So as Andrew mentioned at the top of the show, it’s Pride Month once again, and as the Harry Potter fandom and franchise continues to expand, we did want to spend this episode revisiting a difficult subject, but of course, an important one, and that is the relationship between the Harry Potter books, their author, J.K. Rowling, and the current state of freedoms and rights of transgender people across the globe, whom Rowling continues to malign every chance she gets. So also, as mentioned, we did first discuss this five years ago. It was in January of 2020, between Episodes 447 and 448, and again in June of 2020, on Episode 469, when J.K. Rowling’s views – if you’ll call them that – first became known and she began talking about them more openly. And just like with those two MuggleCast episodes, for which we were joined by amazing guests, today’s episode also features a wonderful guest. We want to welcome to MuggleCast for the first time, Sunny Williams! Hi, Sunny.
Sunny Williams: Hi! Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be here. I’ve listened on and off since the beginning, so that’s how long I’ve been around too. I am an instructor of philosophy; I specialize in ethics and social and political philosophy, especially gender and race. And I got my master’s degree from Queen Mary University London; I studied critical theory, which is very aligned with philosophy and literature, of course. Wrote my thesis on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, so I have a theme here of fantasy series.
Eric: Oooh.
Andrew: You have some nerd cred.
[Eric and Laura laugh]
Sunny: Yeah, for sure. I’ve got some tattoos to prove it. [laughs] I am studying philosophy now; I will finish my PhD this year at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, but I’ve also studied philosophy at Oxford and at the University of Texas at Dallas, so that’s what I’ll be relying on here.
Eric: You’ve been all over the place, and I think you’re the perfect guest for this subject matter, with all your philosophy and ethics experience. And that said, we mentioned you also go way back with your fandom chops. You are an ex-wizard rocker, isn’t that right?
Sunny: [laughs] That’s right.
Eric: We know each other from… we would see each other at conventions. The OG days, the early conventions, and you were in…
Sunny: Like, 2006.
Eric: And you were in Harvey Putter, in the film. You played Hernia Grunger. And your wizard rock cohost – or wait, co-band mate – Bryce, was in that, too, and you together were Alohomora. It was a good name for a wizard rock band.
[Andrew laughs]
Sunny: Yes, I still love that name. Yeah, Bryce Cone – who’s Neville’s Diary, Quaffle Kids – I dragged him into another project, and we did one EP, we played a couple of shows, and then we both became teachers, so here we are. [laughs]
Eric: Hey, wizard rock was, I think, a very educational experience the times when I saw it, except for seeing Harry and the Potters, which I learned and felt was more like wizard church, but in a good way.
Sunny: In a very good way.
Eric: Anyway, here’s a question for you about regular Harry Potter stuff, though. I was looking up Alohomora on YouTube and saw that you had a song called “Draco Malfoy Is Really a Sweetheart.”
Sunny: Yes.
Eric: My question to you is do you still stand by that opinion these many years later?
Sunny: I think I could still defend that opinion. Many years later after writing the song, I wrote… I’ll see if I can convince you, or at least maybe bring you to the middle. We’ll see. I wrote a paper years later in undergrad on this, and I argued with a French philosopher named Louis Althusser, and he has this idea that there are these apparati – apparatuses, right? – that control our ideological status as social beings, right? So the government is one, and the other is the family. And so I based it on… the Blacks and the Malfoys are very much threatening punishment if you do not agree with their ideological ways of life, right? So Draco is born into that; we see Sirius fighting this a lot, right? And then you see through the series that Draco is really hesitant about some things, about killing Dumbledore, right? Oops, spoiler. I argue that there’s a lot of evidence that he doesn’t really want to be the person he’s expected to be, and so that maybe there’s a sweetheart under there that got kind of corrupted and suppressed by the ideological apparatus of his family.
Eric: So he could have been a sweetheart.
Sunny: Could’ve been.
Andrew: As a Slytherin, I approve of this idea.
[Eric laughs]
Sunny: Right? I know; I’m a Slytherin too.
Andrew: Excellent.
Eric: Well, Andrew, we know many sweethearts who are Slytherins.
Andrew: Aww.
Sunny: At least the two of us. And Draco.
Eric: And I’m uncrossing my fingers right now.
[Sunny laughs]
Eric: Yes, so that’s really awesome. Welcome to the show.
Sunny: Thank you for having me, and Happy Pride.
Laura: Yeah, Happy Pride.
Andrew: Happy Pride!
Eric: If any of our listeners are asking why now? It’s been five years for the show – the short answer – and we mentioned this a few weeks ago, but the time to talk back about J.K. Rowling was ripe. Just like we’re finding during our Order of the Phoenix Chapter by Chapter episodes now, there are startling parallels between a government which is lying to or actively harming its citizens, a for-profit media system that fails to maintain journalistic standards of integrity, and also – this part hurts me the most – a populace that’s largely susceptible to gossip, libel, and identity politics. Unfortunately, this is the world we live in, and what might have seemed like a fringe group or unfortunate thing on J.K. Rowling’s part five years ago – she’s, okay, checking in with some exclusionary feminists over in the UK – it’s just continued nonstop and involved into a full on onslaught, and TERFs now are cozying up with members of the alt-right for power. It’s this huge political push that would see trans people removed of their access to healthcare – that’s really happening – stripped of their dignity and identities, forced fully out of public life – that’s really happening – legally discriminated against, marginalized, and at higher risk of assault, murder, suicide, all of that than they were five years ago. So yeah, it’s come back around, and it’s time we revisited the topic of her problematic views. And there’s actually a news item about this, because hand-in-hand with the casting announcement that came this week, we also got an announcement over the weekend that J.K. Rowling has now formed J.K. Rowling’s Women’s Fund, which will directly impact court cases against transgender folks. These cases would normally not be deemed financially viable; it’s a fund set up specifically to fund them, and the line in the release says, “Individuals or organizations the fund is designed to support include individuals who are facing tribunals -“ sounds a lot like “witch hunt” to me “- because of their expressed beliefs, are being forced to comply with unreasonable inclusion policies regarding single-sex spaces, have issued legal challenges to legislation which, it says, takes away the freedoms or protections women are entitled, or who otherwise cannot afford to bring actions to court to defend themselves.” And the fund is coming directly from Jo’s pocket. They do not take donations based on the way it’s set up; it’s just Jo. So we have some new evidence in the struggle to continue to just figure out where our place is in all of this, because some of this is really scary.
Laura: Yeah, I mean, at this point, I’ll just say I think that she is full on grifting. I think she’s really found a whole new audience to appeal to, and I think she gets fueled by fighting with people on X, usually people who have 12 followers; I don’t know why, but that’s, I guess, where she likes to spend her time. She’s also amplifying and funding – obviously, as you said, Eric – a lot of harm against the trans community, and I ultimately think it’s a giant double down on her part. It just feels like ego plays a part here. And that’s just my interpretation; I’m not besties with her, obviously. I can’t say what she is or isn’t thinking. But I guess the sad reality is maybe she doesn’t have another Harry Potter in her, so this is what she’s turned to to get attention and be relevant, and I just think it’s sad that she’s chosen to go down a path that is so antithetical to the stories that made her famous.
Andrew: I don’t really think it’s that she doesn’t have another Harry Potter in her. I think when you become a billionaire…
Laura: I mean…
Andrew: Well, the Robert Galbraith series has done pretty good. Nobody has another Harry Potter in them.
Eric: But I thought a man wrote the Robert Galbraith series?
Laura: But here’s the thing: There’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t think anyone would ever expect someone to have a second one of these in them. But it feels like there is a desperate attempt to remain relevant not for something that is 30 years old at this point.
Andrew: So I think… the main point I wanted to make was when you become a billionaire, something chemical happens to your brain…
Laura: Yes.
Andrew: … and it’s rarely good. There are some good billionaires out there, but it seems like when people become billionaires – the ones we’ve followed over the last couple of decades – they lose their minds. Laura, you asked why she’s fighting with people with 12 followers on X; it’s because she’s a lonely loser who legitimately has nothing better to do than sit on Twitter for ten hours a day. Twitter, the tenth largest social network in the world – not even the biggest one – and just fight with people. That’s loser behavior. Go out and do other stuff. You don’t have a life.
Eric: Yeah, no, and she still has millions of followers, though, who will see her points and gradually, by the way we’ve seen repeated falsehoods, wearing people down into maybe partially believing them. Her influence, unfortunately, is still too large to ignore. But I completely agree; she’s gone off the rails. But you can just tell by looking at any day of her tweets that this is a compulsion. This is a need.
Micah: I’m curious to look back and see what the defining moment was, because when I think about J.K. Rowling on Twitter, I think about the way that she would engage with the Harry Potter fan community, answer questions; we were always interested to see would she respond to one of us and give us a little bit more information on a particular character, right? She would always celebrate the Battle of Hogwarts. Maybe that’s the inner child within me, just wanting to hear from her, but to go from that to what we see now – and this builds on what Laura was saying – it’s really sad, because she is contradicting one of the core tenets of the Harry Potter series, which is inclusivity. And so many fans, especially those in the LGBTQ community, grew up seeing themselves in these characters who fought for justice in a world that often misunderstood or mistreated them, and so how do you write that and then continue with the rhetoric that we see each and every day on X?
Laura: Yeah, and to add on to that point, Micah, I think what makes it… I think it’s just an additional level of hurt that comes with it. I mean, J.K. Rowling is someone who has supported and funded incredibly good causes in the past. She’s someone who has stood on the right side of history and the right side of humanity, so I think that’s another way in which this switch just can still feel jarring sometimes, because we all grew up looking up to her.
Eric: Right, and myself included. And I’ve called her queen on this podcast, and not like, “Yaasss queen,” but like, our queen, our empress.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: It was before that verbiage was really around. But yeah, I mean, this is the same woman that wrote through Albus Dumbledore, “It matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be.” That’s from Goblet of Fire. That was written 25 years ago, or published 25 years ago, and that person… and also, if we’re talking about her X presence, she used to rip Donald Trump every new day when he did something crazy. Nowadays, guess what, guys? She’s retweeting and celebrating his actions in the Oval Office.
Micah: There’s a word that you used, Eric, which is “unrecognizable,” and I think that’s really the best way to describe this shift. She is unrecognizable from the person that wrote these books.
Eric: Yeah. And Andrew mentioned, lonely. I think she also has complained loudly about how Dan, Rupert, and Emma, her previous trio, have all and fairly swiftly – we covered in our last episode – all released statements kind of just, well, really contradicting her and saying, “No, trans women are women. Erasing their lived experience is not okay, and we stand with them,” and she has not spoken with them. Recently on X, she said… there was a meme that was like, “Oh, if you could reboot a movie franchise without a lead actor, what would you do?” And she said, “I’ll give you three answers.” And it’s so clear that they’re dead to her and that she can’t get over that they may have a different opinion than her. It’s pretty toxic. Sunny, what are your thoughts?
Sunny: I agree with all of y’all in that it’s such a switch, as Laura said. I was talking to a friend about her this weekend, and my friend said, “Well, she’s like Trump. She’s a provocateur.” And so the comparison to Trump kind of works here. But you’ve made me just realize something, Eric, that because she’s lost support of maybe the trio and other people, right, who have spoken out against her – David Tennant, just to think of people who are coming off the top of my head – I feel like now it’s about pride. She’s like, “Well, I’ve lost these people, and I said these things, and now I have to double down, and this is who I have to be now.” There’s a part of me that wonders how much is… and the reason I say pride is because there seems to be no inclination to consider that she might be wrong, to consider science.
Eric: Five years ago, it seemed like she might listen, right? That she might be open to listening. She said, “I’ll march with you,” referring to trans people.
Sunny: Right? Where is that girl?
Eric: And it seemed more nuanced. It seemed, at least, that there was some level of thought, and yet at the time of the immediate backlash from the public and trans people, she shut down and has not stopped doubling down ever since. And in fact, it’s immaterial what her intentions were, because the harm she’s causing and continuing to cause – I have stats on it, which I’ll talk about in a minute – but yeah, it’s just been really bad.
Sunny: It seems gleeful, too.
Eric: She’s gleefully… she’s cruel.
Sunny: Happily, gleefully mean. Yeah, it’s alarming, and very discombobulating.
Andrew: There was one time – like y’all were saying – early on, where she was talking like she is supportive of trans people and wants them to be included, and now it feels very exclusionary and very hateful at every turn. And like y’all are saying, it’s like, “What happened to those views you had just a few years ago?” I mean, all this is on record on her Twitter, if you really wanted to dig into it. But she tweets a lot, probably by design, so it’s hard to keep up with.
Laura: Also, because she doesn’t have anything else to do, apparently.
Andrew: Yeah, she’s a loser.
[Laura and Micah laugh]
Andrew: And I know people are going to be like, “I can’t believe you’re saying that, Andrew; you do a podcast about her,” but you imagine being a billionaire and spending all your time on Twitter, then tell me if that sounds like something you would do.
Micah: [laughs] I mean, just think about the person who owns Twitter.
[Andrew and Laura laugh]
Andrew: A billionaire.
Micah: That’s my point. I do think, though, it is important, because I kind of fell a little bit into this trap a couple of years ago with… I listened to the podcast, “The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling,” which is hosted by Megan Phelps-Roper, former spokesperson for the Westboro Baptist Church, and it was so interesting listening to the conversation between the two of them. And when I say I kind of fell into this trap, is J.K. Rowling, when you listen to her… X is such a very different platform because it’s written word and it’s so reactionary, but when you sit there and you actually listen to what she has to say, and she answers these questions and she talks about these particular topics, I think the scary thing is you can leave it actually feeling like, “Oh, you know what? The way that she’s framing all of this isn’t actually coming across as being that bad.” And so I’m just curious – Eric, Sunny – if you could speak to the danger of somebody like that who is such a good wordsmith and can kind of talk around issues, but still be doing so much damage underneath the surface.
Sunny: Well, the first word I thought of is… Eric and I were talking about this word that we keep seeing her use, “sophistry,” which is a very ancient philosophical word that really just kind of means good arguments, good reasoning, good rhetoric, right? And the word “rhetoric” is now kind of a negative word too. She’s using it in a negative way to mean fallacious arguments, like the arguments don’t make any sense; there’s no reasoning. And then she proceeds to do that herself. So I find it really interesting that she’s using words, right, that are… and words are so convincing, especially if they’re crafted in the right way – like you said, Micah – to spread falsehoods, really, and to make arguments that are really volatile and incorrect, and they’ll play on people’s emotions, right? So we see that politicians do this; that’s why we think of rhetoric as a negative word, when it’s really just good reasoning, good arguments, originally, right? We’ve kind of lost track of what those words mean. So yeah, I think it’s incredibly dangerous. I said this to Eric early on; she’s basically a politician at this point.
Eric: All right, so to start off our main discussion here, I wanted to talk about how pressing the situation is for trans people. In 2020, when we last did those episodes on MuggleCast, there were 100 bills introduced that year in the US targeting LGBTQ people. In 2025 so far, there have been 850 bills, and the year is not half over. That’s not including executive orders from Trump himself. They are all cruel, many of them based on lies and assumptions that are just not backed by science. In fact – again, recent news; I was like, “Wow, this is great, but awful” – the “Big Beautiful Bill” that you hear Trump talking about, that passed the House and has yet to pass the Senate, bans gender-affirming care for not just trans youths, but at the last minute, to appeal to some of the more right wing members, they actually struck a word saying transgender “youths,” and now, under the ACA and Medicare, are going to ban all gender-affirming care on those health plans from all trans Americans. This bill has passed the House, and it’s coming. If this happened, look, it would affect me; I have one of those plans. And so it’s been feeling pretty dire lately, but this is all coming out of a snowball effect that started, namely, with J.K. Rowling. She’s the figurehead, and she has been pushing for this and pushing for this. The UK has just reversed or changed its ruling around a court case about folks with gender recognition certificates. These are people that have legally changed their gender in the UK. The Supreme Court, in a case that was partially funded “For Women Scotland,” was funded by J.K. Rowling – £70,000 pounds, I think, that went to them – have now reversed that decision, and now there’s a lot of ambiguity that has to be figured out about where trans people are going to be allowed to use the bathroom in spaces that surely will make them unsafe and the target of harassment. So listen, the thing about this and why I wanted to talk about this as a main part of the discussion is that the policies that are being put out there are all based on bad science. TERFs and J.K. Rowling will herald the latest report, saying, “This gets to it.” She retweets constantly; “This is the answer. This is exactly why men are pretending to be women.” It’s all fake. It’s all not true. There was something a year ago called the Cass Review that came out; it was commissioned by the National Health Service in the UK, and it was said to be this exposé on what they’re calling “radical gender ideology.” It completely ignored the findings of many, many peer-reviewed studies; it smudged the findings of studies that had been done so that they wouldn’t as favorably show the reasons and results of transgender people seeking care. Sunny, why is it important to have peer-reviewed sources in a scientific report? I’m curious; I have to ask the nearest professor about this.
Sunny: Yeah, we didn’t used to back in the day, so now we’ve realized that people make mistakes. But it’s also… as a reader, if you’re reading this work, you’re not going to trust whoever wrote it if they don’t have all of these sources that have been double looked at by at least two of your peers, right? It’s usually two. But the reason for that is that we as an academic community, hopefully as a scientific community… I went to a Philosophy of Science conference last year, and they’re even more so intent on this kind of peer review, so that everything that they release, they can say is true, right? And there’s a lot of trust in science issues that we have, especially since COVID, because information was released that was not true or was half true or was paid to be true, right? So peer review helps to prevent that kind of information from circulating.
Eric: I think it’s safe to say that there is a lot of that going out there, not just about the trans issue, but a lot of misinformation and a lot of people weaponizing social media posts and other lies. We all have seen that recently, so peer review seems a way to really cut through that. Sunny, one of your articles… and you’ve recently started a Substack, which absolutely we’ll be linking to; Sunny Anne Williams on Substack. One of your articles that you wrote was about how J.K. Rowling, much as she may be this convincing person on Twitter, never cites a source that has been reviewed or has any real evidence behind it.
Sunny: Right, or she’ll cite a source, but there’s a source that is better reviewed, right? Or has better information that she completely disregards. So we’re back to fallacies, right? She kind of lives on them. You even said, Eric, that she would start with, “Oh, we’re protecting women,” and then there’s all this stuff, right? That’s a red herring, right? Get you involved, you’re really excited about this thing that you agree with, and then maybe you’re also going to buy into the next thing, which is the harmful thing, right? So she works this way a lot. Now, as a person… so my master’s degree is in literature, and this is how literature works. She’s used to writing literature. You want to be provocative, you want to get people emotionally involved, you want to use words that are really sexy, and in academia, we don’t do that. It’s all factual; it’s unbiased, as much as we can be, right? We want to state things not as opinions, but as claims that we then must prove with evidence. And so she makes tons of claims, no evidence, so I found some for her. [laughs]
Andrew: We were talking about social media earlier, and social media rewards the outlandish talk. And this is why, unfortunately, no matter where you stand on this and many other issues, you see everybody throwing themselves as far to the left or as far to the right as possible, because that’s the only stuff that gets attention. When you start introducing, God forbid, nuance into conversations, you get no attention, because it’s like, “No, that’s not outrageous enough, so I’m not going to engage with it.” And Rowling – to your point, Sunny, being a writer, being creative – she comes up with stuff that she knows is going to get attention on social media.
Sunny: Absolutely.
Eric: Well, so getting back to this Cass Review, it was… Dr. Hilary Cass is the stated author of it, who actually consulted with Ron DeSantis in Florida to help write this, by the way. That’s how you know. There was a previous thing in Florida where they tried the same thing.
Laura: Sounds about right.
Eric: The idea is: Publish a report that slams transgender care, talks about things like regret rate, talks about things like the side effects of hormone replacement therapy on minors and all this stuff, quotes and misquotes, doesn’t include actual trans people in any of its interviews, that kind of thing. Publish it, scare people, get all the TERFs to retweet it, and then what you start to see is not just federal but local governments, little governments reading this review, which is, by the way, published, again, by the NHS – we have the Health and Human Service here that’s run currently by RFK Jr. – and it has this credibility to it, not because it’s credible at all, but because of where it’s coming from. And in this way, bills are being passed, laws are being passed or attempted to be, and a lot of them in the US have historically gotten defeated, but not all of them, and certainly the lose rate is lower now, with 47 in the office. So here’s the thing: The Cass Review was a nightmare. This year, in fact last month – again, lot of new stuff happening; this is why we’re talking about this – the HHS has published a report now. This report won’t even list an author, and tricksy Hobbitses over on the Internet have looked into the EXIF data… I don’t even know what half this stuff means…
Micah: Is that Dr. Tricksy Hobbitses?
Eric: Dr. Tricksy Hobbitses. My favorite, yes.
Micah: PhD.
Eric: MD.
Micah: Oh, MD. I’m sorry.
Eric: The EXIF data shows that the HHS report – which doesn’t peer review, which doesn’t cite an author – was written by a lobbyist and no doctors! A lobbyist who worked in the anti-trans advocacy. So look, there’s bias. There’s people who are probably biased, and then there are people that are absolutely biased, and then, a thousand feet down the road, there’s somebody who’s been paid to spread disinformation. And if you know this administration, and if you know the kind of stuff they’re pulling… I’m going to say it; if you have to rely on lies, half truths, and falsehoods to convince people what you’re doing, what you’re doing is not just. Can’t wait to talk about ethics. But it’s wrong, and unfortunately, it’s continuing to be used to strip trans people of their rights. So here’s the problem: It’s political. It’s not scientific; it’s masquerading as science. J.K. Rowling said science is real. No one’s arguing that. You’ve got to learn how to read it, though. Things like regret rates, we mentioned, they’re actually the lowest of pretty much any surgery, some of the lowest rates. In fact – by the way, as an aside here – whenever they try and track regret rates for gender transition and gender-affirming care, the rates are so low that the people who are in charge of discrediting gender-affirming care have instead suggested that we measure transitioning – and whether it should be allowed to be done by people – as to whether those people are employed instead, right? So not their happiness, not their experience at all, but whether they have a job. And it’s like, well, that actually pertains to societal factors, which are caused by hatred and prejudice, and so that number is sure to be lower than the very infinitesimally small number of people who regret. And the people that do regret doing this; first of all, a lot of it’s reversible. Second of all, they regret it because it’s so hard to live as a trans person in society. So there’s so many factors. The bottom line is the state of the world, and what has happened the last couple of years, is not based in science. It’s pulling at your emotion. It’s lies, and it’s being held up because the people that are in power today are in the business of promoting lies and promoting division and wanting you to be scared about trans women in sports or trans women in your bathroom. It’s all a smoke show, and none of it is scientifically true.
Laura: Well, and I think one of the other unfortunate things about it… we were talking about all the unfortunate things in this realm, but I think what really sucks about it is I think there are good faith questions that people can have about trans people and what it means as a society to move forward together, and I don’t think there’s anything bad about having questions about those things. I think what is bad is when you say, “Well, I don’t know how we can equitably allow trans girls to play sports in schools, so because I can’t personally explain how that could be handled, I guess that means these people just don’t get rights.” That doesn’t make any sense to me. Somebody could probably come at me with a million and one intentionally inflammatory questions about trans people and where they’re going to the bathroom and what sports they’re playing, and the honest answer I would probably have to a lot of their questions, apart from saying, “Hey, I think you’re being intentionally inflammatory,” but would also be to say, “I don’t know, because I’m not a doctor. I’m not a scientist. I’m not a pediatrician. And I think that we should rely on the experts in these areas to continue developing and learning more.” Because while there’s nothing new about the existence of trans people, I think a society really trying to integrate their existence in a way that is fair and equitable and happy and healthy, I think there are going to be misses. There are certainly times that we have stumbled as a people in the past when it came to other hard won civil rights. We haven’t always been perfect at it; we’re not going to be perfect at this. But I think holding up the nightmare scenario of “Well, because we can’t be perfect, it means that men are going to be in women’s bathrooms trying to assault them,” it’s ridiculous. That’s what I think is unfortunate, because I think it makes otherwise well-meaning people who have just genuine, good faith questions, it makes them shy away from the conversation, and it only leaves the extreme. Anyway, that’s my take.
Micah: Well said.
Sunny: You’re spot on, yeah.
Eric: So another thing I want to mention is that Rowling isn’t really protecting the people that she thinks she is. Let’s get to the cruelty aspect again; here’s a hypothetical that was given to Rowling the last week. It was a woman who’s transgender that had done all the surgeries. Under the new UK law, she could be imprisoned with men. Prison rape is already a problem; this person would surely be attacked and harmed. Rowling, in response to this hypothetical, referred to the trans woman as a surgically-altered man, and said, “No, what the real human rights violation is is for people to say that you can change your sex.” And she constantly refers to trans women as trans-identified males. They’re all males; they’re all men that are here to ruin your life. And it’s degrading, it’s dehumanizing, it’s absolutely absurd, because she has no empathy for the results. In fact, if a trans woman gets assaulted or raped in prison, as they do, it’s not her problem, because those people were born boys and they’re just men, and it’s not her purview. She’s a hero and a champion of women. And I’m sorry, but I cannot align myself with anybody that is that cold and cruel, and it’s simply not in my nature to find those things convincing when you watch what she is saying and the viciousness of it all. And in fact, she has claimed that she has never gone against cis women, but she does it all the time, and the most recent time is the Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, and she viciously spread rumors that this woman was trans, calling her a man who’s boxing the woman. It was this whole controversy thing. Elon Musk retweeted it; it was a whole thing. And actually, that was nearly a year ago. She’s still going on about it. She just yesterday posted that there still hasn’t been a genetic test for… I mean, this is like Trump, who used to go on and on about a birth certificate, right? It’s just absolutely insane. She’s still obsessed with this. There are intersex conditions that would cause somebody to be born with entire female anatomy, never had a penis, you can even give birth, and you could be intersex. You could have a Y chromosome. It’s this whole thing. Science is not simple; it’s complicated, and there are these issues. And here’s J.K. Rowling calling Imane Kelif a man – viciously, violently, cruelly – and women are suffering. Again, this comes back to this whole backlash. How are you going to police trans women in dressing rooms, in single-sex spaces? Whereas normally they’re just minding their business, now it’s giving a warrant for people to burst in and assault people that they accuse of being trans. And Laura, you’ve actually found a number of examples of that recently.
Laura: Yeah, I mean, there have been a number of examples particularly since 2020 of women and girls being, at the best case scenario, just verbally harassed, all the way up to physically assaulted because someone saw them playing a sport or going into a bathroom and decided that they looked more like a man, or they looked more like a boy, and those people took it upon themselves to interject and try to tell someone what bathroom they should be in, or what recreational sport, by the way, they’re allowed to play; not even competitive sport. And I mean, this has happened. I mean, one of these stories involves a 9-year-old girl who had a 67-year-old man trying to get her disqualified from playing shot put because she had short hair, and he thought she looked like a boy. So this kind of rhetoric is really giving people permission, and it’s really emboldening people to think that it’s any of their business to get involved in people’s personal identities. I don’t know. This woman, she is so obsessed with gender testing, genetic testing… if she’s so obsessed with that, she should go get one done for herself and be done with it. I don’t know. You don’t get to tell other people they have to do that.
Andrew: And on television, in right wing media sources, you see a lot of outsized coverage about trans athletes, and they’re making it into a bigger issue than it actually is. If you believe what you hear on Fox News, you would think every sport team in every middle school has a trans woman or a trans man on the team, when really there’s maybe a handful across America. [laughs]
Sunny: Ten, in college sports.
Andrew: Ten! There you go. Thanks for the exact number, Sunny.
Eric: Yeah, the executive order that Trump posted affected ten. But because “Oh, it’s so easy to say men who have a strong, burly, competitive advantage over women,” which, after two years of hormone therapy, that’s been disproven. Still, nevertheless, it hooks you and it makes you think, “Oh my God, we’ve got to protect the women.” It’s just cruelty. It’s trying to… I mean, the solution to this other problem where all these cis women are put in terrible situations, because now the public at large has this license to go and police their gender, all these gender non-conforming or really just women who happen to be a few inches taller than the norm, all are at risk because of this rhetoric. So J.K. Rowling is not saving women at all. And her solution… this is probably a short-term thing, because she’s like, “Oh, in a few years, trans people will be completely eradicated, and it won’t be a problem.” It’s a pill she’s willing to swallow.
Laura: Oh, yeah.
Eric: That’s the goal here! It really is. I’m not hyperbolizing. I wish sometimes I make an exaggeration; I’m not hyperbolizing. The laws that have been enacted and the bills that have been passed, even in the last month in the US and the UK, are designed to do exactly that. There’s no bathroom for us to go to. There’s no safe space!
Micah: Just on the sports piece for a second – and this is kind of combining some of the things that have already been touched on, and I think Sunny brought this up, the rhetoric being so toxic, and this also layers on what Laura was saying – because it is so toxic, you can’t have the conversation. And I think that there are people who would be open and more than willing to have meaningful conversation about transgender youth in sports, but it can’t happen because the narrative has become so polarizing, and until we get to a better place, people aren’t going to come together and have a seat at the table to hopefully advance something that really shouldn’t be that big of an issue at the end of the day.
Eric: Yeah. Sunny, I wanted to ask you; this whole purity test thing for women and gender conforming and stuff, it seems pretty exclusionary to me. I don’t know. What’s your take on it?
Sunny: Well, I think about Kelif a lot, actually, because… and you mentioned this, Eric, that there are up to, we think… “we think.” Scientists think; I’m not a scientist. 40 different variations of sex hormones that you can be born with, right? So Kelif is born with sex hormones, as we all are, that perhaps affect phenotype. That’s kind of what Laura was saying. So phenotype is how you appear; your hair is short, you appear a boy, right? This came about through philosophy of race, this idea of the one drop rule, right? You’re a little Black, so you look it or you don’t, right? Are you passing? So this plays out in the trans world too. We think about when integration was happening and how volatile those conversations were, and now we’re having another change, right, in integrating a different group into society that is based in fear, and that we had the same fear during segregation when integration began, right? So now we’re doing it again with a different group. And so the purity test is based in that binary that isn’t even real. Gender is not binary, sex is not binary, and science shows that. So leaning into this binary that… Rowling even said recently, “You’re either a woman or you’re not,” and then she gave some kind of reference to “The female body is made to produce eggs.” There are many cis female bodies that do not produce eggs. [laughs] So what creates this binary for her is arbitrary and untrue, and she leaves no room for any nuance of gender expression, phenotype, sex expression, and that harms more than just trans people. The whole queer community, in my opinion, can be harmed by that.
Laura: Definitely. And I think at the end of the day, it also blows back on women as a larger group, I think, to your point, Sunny, right? If a cis woman’s phenotype doesn’t match the way J.K. Rowling personally feels a woman should look like, then who has the power to say that person’s not a woman? I guess J.K. Rowling thinks she’s been bequeathed that particular privilege, which is just wild to me.
Sunny: She’s the queen, so…
Laura: Yeah, but I’ve always wondered, has she ever considered that the same script can be flipped on her? In the whole wide world of people, does she think there’s not a single person who might have a different take on her gender than maybe she does? And does she think that person should feel emboldened to publicly question her in that way and demand genetic tests? It’s just very bizarre.
Micah: I’m thinking about just some of the responses I’ve seen her put out on X. I wouldn’t be able to have an opinion on any of this. If I voiced my opinion, she would just say, “Well…”
Eric: “Man.”
Micah: “Man? No, sorry.” It reminds me of the “Shut up and dribble” type of narrative that came towards certain NBA players when they spoke out about political issues.
Eric: Oh, God. It’s on a bad trajectory, and it’s gotten really worse. But actually, we mentioned at the top of the show that doing our Chapter by Chapter of Order of the Phoenix, it has been illuminating, and just like in 2020, now we really find a lot to compare current politics to in the books. We thought we would actually come up with a few scenarios, or mention a few scenarios from the Harry Potter books that echo this moment in time, and also the actions of Rowling or the situation with trans people.
Andrew: This would be like if Lucius was lining the pockets of the Ministry to get a court trial or outcomes that he wants, instead of what’s actually right. He would be putting the right pressure in the right places. And of course, Lucius is a Death Eater, so that tracks, and Lucius’s actions caused a hippogriff to be sentenced to death. That was unfair.
Eric: Lucius did do this.
Laura: I wanted to draw a comparison between what’s happening right now and what we see happening in Order of the Phoenix with Umbridge and the Ministry interfering in schooling and in the curriculum, really limiting that curriculum and leading a campaign of intimidation to stop people from talking about ugly realities that don’t reflect favorably on the Ministry. And we see this reflected today with things like “Don’t say gay” bans, where literally no conversation about identity is intended to be allowed in schools and states where this has happened. Or you look at states like Texas that were trying to ban furries from elementary schools and ban litter boxes because they said the furry children were being accommodated with litter boxes, and that literally has not happened.
Eric: Never happened.
Laura: So they’re literally taking Facebook chain letters and using them to justify legislation that has pretty major downstream impacts on society in the way kids are educated, so that is something 100% that we see represented in these books right now.
Eric: Another thing that’s happening now a lot – and this has happened in Texas and Florida and Utah, to name a few – snitch forms. Government snitch forms, and turn your neighbor in. If you’re in Texas, it was like, “If you see a family fleeing the state to protect their trans child, turn them in.” This is reminding me a lot of Umbridge’s personal favorite Inquisitorial Squad, right? You will curry government favor for essentially betraying your community, your people. And it’s disgusting, and it’s a shame that due to fear and the right intimidation and the right manipulation of news coverage, you can actually get people to do this.
Sunny: They did this in Germany in the 1930s. Just saying.
Laura: Yep.
Eric: Oh yeah, I was going to say, what decade would that have been in? Anything else happening that year?
Sunny: Oh, 100 years ago, yeah.
Eric: Yeah. Here’s another thing, or another connection to Harry Potter: It’s basically… I was thinking, what would happen if Muggle-borns were held up to the scrutiny that trans folks are being, right? So say that there was this edict, and the government was like, due to a pressure campaign, “Okay, Muggle-borns are no longer witches and wizards.” But you know somebody like Dumbledore would be still interested in teaching them, right? “All are welcome here” kind of thing would be the Hogwarts motto. The Ministry would then use all the tools at its disposal – like their Fox News, the Daily Prophet – to say, “Dumbledore is off. Dumbledore needs to go.” They would say horrible lies about him, and it would get the public to turn against Dumbledore for his political choice to protect the students. Oh, we’re seeing that with Harvard now and the state of Maine. These people are being incentivized to turn in their constituents and go against and restrict the rights of people, and the government and the news is attempting to discredit and slam what they’re doing. Pretty serious.
Laura: Sunny, I’m curious for your perspective there, as a professor. I mean, this has to be something that’s very much top of mind for you and your students right now.
Sunny: Yes, definitely. And I think education in general has this kind of… J.K. Rowling – I just wrote about this, too, because it made me so angry – she wrote, “Academics are speaking out against me, and they’re doing it thoughtlessly, and they’re all…” what’s the word… “brainwashed into being liberals,” right? So there’s this idea that education exists for you to come into my classroom, and I’m going to put all this information in your head and tell you, “Go forth with my liberal ideas,” which is not at all what education is. My goal as a teacher is to help you to think critically, you leave my classroom; I don’t tell you my views at all, really. I tell you, “These philosophers say this and that, and you can choose for yourself.” But the idea is that I hopefully send people out into society so that they don’t come across these kinds of ideas and just take them into their heads and go. I want people to spend some time with ideas they encounter in the world, and then I think we’d have a lot less of the kind of reactivity that Micah was talking about earlier, where people can’t have a conversation because they’re just immediately emotional about it. The amygdala is on fire, right? So the amygdala will not let you reason if your emotions are so heated. So we’ve kind of cut off reasoning at the start of any conversation. So yes, as an educator, I’m trying to combat this, that if you go out into the world and maybe you have spent a lot of time – Nietzsche calls this “Wiederkalens,” so it’s like chewing over and over again, ruminating on ideas – that you know how to do that, and then maybe you do decide you hold some conservative ideas, but you have really good reasoning, you can cite your sources, and then you can have a reasonable, civil conversation about it with someone who disagrees with you.
Laura: Right.
Sunny: So I think education is the core. I don’t think that education is perfect, [laughs] especially at the university level. But the reason I’ve started this Substack, the reason I really wanted to come and talk with y’all, is that education is not just “You come to my classroom and pay me.” I want you to have what I know for free so that you know it too, and I think that that’s the future of education, to the kind of individual learning. And then, Laura, as you said earlier, everybody thinks they’re – I’m going to use a very technical term – the arbiter of truth. J.K. Rowling thinks she’s the judge and jury as this one person, right? And we see that a lot; one person is like, “This is my opinion, and it’s right. I don’t know why because I can’t explain it, because I haven’t ruminated, but here it is, and I’m going to stick with it, and I’m emotional about it and I’ll fight you.” And that’s fairly new, I would say. It started kind of at the renaissance that people started saying, “Well, I’m an isolated individual separated from society, and I have these opinions and they’re tantamount, and I don’t have to reconsider them at any point,” and that’s the kind of thing that I hope education can start to chip away at.
Laura: Yeah. Well, thank you for everything you do, because it has to be a challenge right now.
Sunny: It is, but it’s so worth it. I love it. It’s a calling.
Eric: We have two more connections to Harry Potter. This one I thought of: In Deathly Hallows, we have Mary Cattermole, who has to defend her blood status in front of Umbridge. She’s accused of stealing another wizard’s wand, because Umbridge says she’s not a real woman – uh, wizard – except in today’s world, it would be even worse than the scene we see in the Ministry, which the trio quickly acts to rid her and others of. I mean, with the Ministry “Magic Is Might” chapter, the whole environment that we see at the Ministry in Book 7 is meant to intimidate. It’s the Muggle-Born Registration Commission. Muggle-borns – who, by the way, are full witches and wizards, can do magic just as well as everyone else – are targeted, and they’re also preemptively taking themselves out of public life, going on the run or living in fear. That is exactly the situation for trans people here.
Micah: And I’ll bring us home.
Eric: Yeah, bring us home, Micah.
Micah: With Remus Lupin, if he and other werewolves were being punished for their identities and treated as less than. There are no advocacy groups we hear of, and the population is so scattered and dwindled, likely because of the lack of support services. This has very reminiscent themes of all the people lost in the AIDS epidemic while the government turned a blind eye.
Laura: Yeah, definitely.
Eric: So we have a very fun section talking about ethics with the ethics professor Sunny in just a moment, but before we do that, I have one final plea on the J.K. Rowling trans issue. And that’s that it’s real, and trans people are not lying, they’re not making it up, and they are not predators. I remember being seven years old and laying in bed at night praying to God to let me wake up the next day as a girl, and this was 30 years ago; it was several years before I ever knew what sex was. And every step that I’ve taken toward my transition that I’m doing in the last 18 months has made me feel more at home in my body and closer to my true self. So my appeal is: J.K. Rowling is wrong about trans women. She’s dead wrong about trans people. She’s wrong about the science. She’s causing so much more harm for cis women in victimizing trans people, and she doesn’t care. And she’s praising Trump. She’s hellbent on making sure trans women suffer as much as possible in their lives for things they can’t control, like how they were born. She’s not benevolent, and she’s not a hero. So you may not have an opinion on transgender people, you the listener, and you might wish the news would stop mentioning them. Me too. You might be swayed by some arguments – which, we’ve talked about sort of why that is – and it makes sense, and you might worry that a culture of outright acceptance might lead to some people making a mistake, but all I have to say about that is trust that people know themselves, and trust that a community that genuinely cares, not fake show cares, will have the kinds of well-educated and peer-reviewed responses with the right recommendations, which is how things were before all of this rhetoric got cooked up. That’s my plea, to just… it’s pretty rough out there, but trans people are real, and they’re not making it up, and they’re not mentally ill.
Sunny: Just to complement that beautiful statement, trans people generally – and this is a generalization – but tend to kind of… they refuse to subscribe to patriarchal ideas that are the things that make men dangerous in J.K. Rowling’s mind. She as a survivor is afraid of the phallus; I’ll use that term. I wrote a lot on this, so if you want to know more, you can look it up. But trans people generally also disagree with that way of violent living, and so the fear of them is really misplaced, and I think that’s incredibly important to know.
Eric: Well, thanks.
Andrew: Something that J.K. Rowling is always been talking about is, “Oh, men are going to be entering women’s bathrooms if they identify as a trans woman or it’s easy to transition,” which is something that’s been able to happen since the beginning of time. Now, she doesn’t really understand this, because she’s a billionaire and she lives in a castle and she doesn’t interact with other people in public spaces, but for the rest of us…
Micah: She has her own bathroom. That’s what you’re saying.
[Laura laughs]
Andrew: Yes. Well, no, but my point is…
Micah: She has many of her own bathrooms.
Andrew: She doesn’t go to a bar or restaurant and notice that there’s no locks on the doors because she’s in a private part of every bar and restaurant, if she’s going out at all. So for the rest of us, we know that if men want to enter a women’s bathroom to be a predator, they are going to. It doesn’t matter if they’re identifying as a woman or not, they’re going to. So that’s one of the biggest reasons for me that I have found her arguments to be so stupid, because she talks about that one a lot.
Eric: And how many trans people do you know…? I assume we all have friends who are trans or NB. They’re just chill, and you know what? It’s because they are able in some way, in this harsh, harsh world, to carve out a little space in their own bodies that is their own and that they feel home in. Just so… I’m thinking of all the chill NB’s I met at a wedding this past weekend. I was just like, “Man.” People who are allowed to be themselves are the people that are going to build, and not destroy, and create the accepting utopia that I think many of us want. People who are unafraid to question the old, and who can really just listen to their hearts themselves, to build it together in a community.
Andrew: It’s just about living as your authentic self. Eric wants to live as their authentic selves, as do all LGBTQ+ people.
Eric: Yeah. So let’s have fun talking about ethics. We’ve got the ethics professor on. I want to talk, because this is another component here. We have the TV show coming, and it’s a thing. So we said five years ago… we made some changes to the podcast; we started advertising and talking about gifts that were not official merchandise. Because here’s the thing: With the establishment of J.K. Rowling’s women’s defense fund, it is now more clear than ever that money going toward Rowling is going to harm, legally, the positions of trans people. So I wanted to bring Sunny on and ask her, what do these old, dead white men say about the ethics, and particularly around putting your money in different causes? Because I’m sure Socrates said something about this 3,000 years ago.
Sunny: Something close. And I have one dead white woman.
Eric: Oooh!
Laura: Oh, there you go.
[Andrew laughs]
Eric: You’ve outdone yourself! I wasn’t expecting that!
Sunny: That’s right, so all dead, so… [laughs] That will be an important argument later; I’ll come to that.
Eric: Okay.
Sunny: So we’ll start with Socrates. Make it easy. Socrates – I’ll quote from Gorgias, one of the many platonic dialogues – he says that it is better to have harm done to you than be the person who is inflicting harm, and the reason he says it is that he thinks that any self-aware person is not going to be able to live with themselves if they do harm. And so if you’re not doing harm, you can be harmonized with your conscience, and you can sleep at night and feel good about yourself. And so here’s my dead white woman, Hannah Arendt. She was a German who did a lot of work on post-Holocaust trials and things like that, and she noticed that most people are not self-aware, right? They’re not. Though we all think, right? She thinks there’s this deeper level of thinking – and is very Nietzschean, that rumination – that allows us to be good people and allows us to harmonize with our conscience, as Socrates would say. So she thinks that it’s rare that there are evil people, but there are so many evil deeds, and she thinks evil deeds come from people who don’t know how to think, who have the inability to think, she says. Deep think. And if we develop that ability and we practice it, then we’re going to be better people who think about our values and our ethics and try to live by them. We think about the needs and conditions of other people and try to do good by them. Kant would say we don’t use people as means to our ends; we make sure that we know that people are ends in themselves and that they deserve to be treated with that kind of dignity. So that was basically my ethics class in a couple of sentences there.
Eric: Thanks for the free lesson!
[Andrew laughs]
Sunny: Yeah, free lesson! I’ll put them on YouTube someday. I do want to give free lessons. It should all be free, because it’s so important. And I think that in considering J.K. Rowling, supporting her is generally quite… not always; certainly not amongst this group, right, and our listeners. And it’s not thoughtless, right? If we are thinking deeply about it, we’re going to still come to our own conclusions, hopefully. As I said, I don’t want to tell you what to do. I want to tell you what to… not what to think, how to think. There you go. I want to teach you how to think, so that now that you’ve gotten all this amazing information from this podcast about what’s happening with her money, where it’s going, you can start to think deeply about your own values, and does her use of this money agree with your values, or does it not? What does it mean for you as a Harry Potter fan? How will your support look in the future? Will it change? Will it not change? And it’s just important to ask those questions of ourselves, I think.
Eric: What does Henry David Thoreau say about this?
Sunny: Oh, yes, Thoreau is perfect for this. He wrote this piece called “Civil Disobedience,” and he’s basically saying in it, “I’m really annoyed about how the government is spending my tax money, and I think it’s unjust.” He’s like, “The Mexican War is going on, and slaves have just been freed,” and so they’re not being treated well, right? There’s lynchings; all these things are happening, and the government is involved. And so Thoreau is like, “I don’t think that I should be forced to pay taxes that fund injustice, and so I’m not going to do it, and you shouldn’t either.” And so he spends one night in jail because he’s a wealthy, educated, white guy…
Eric: Still white.
Sunny: Yeah, still white, still male, so there’s not really a consequence. But he’s sitting there in the jail, and he’s like, “Actually, jail is only for just people, because the laws are so unjust that if you break them, you must be just.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says this at some point, too, in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” that breaking unjust laws is just. So yeah, the idea that J.K. Rowling’s money is going towards fighting against just laws and fighting for unjust laws, it helps us to think more deeply about where our money’s going. I love that line from Hamilton; “Follow the money and see where it goes.” And like Micah said, you can’t always, right? But here with Rowling, it’s impossible to deny now. We have all this information about where the money’s going, so the onus is on us to decide our dollar is all we have now. Votes are murky, our voices are murky, but we have our dollar, and we are in a capitalistic world where our dollar matters.
Eric: And I think, too, for me, this will absolutely come down to what areas particularly. The Harry Potter store is open in Chicago. I’ve not gone; I’m not going to go. But we on MuggleCast will certainly be talking about the TV show. That is our plan; that is what we want to do. And as these different properties – Hogwarts Legacy, the video game – those people that worked in the game had already been paid. I was able to purchase the game a week later, used, and still caught up where everyone else was talking about that game. But yeah, there were ways in which I could morally… that my values could align with my dollar, and that felt good to do. And does it suck? Yes, it really sucks to have to think about this. It sucks to have to do another episode about J.K. Rowling, but it does need to happen, because our other values are inclusivity, creating a safe space on the show for people, and this is what we said we were going to do. We’re going to be the voice from within the fandom that talks about and can criticize her views, while at the same time being loving and supporting and uplifting of the stories that we grew up on that have messages of tolerance, inclusivity, and support.
Sunny: Ethics are hard. I think that… I always say that, right, as I’m going into an ethics class, right? “This is going to be uncomfortable, and you’re not used to this kind of thinking and questioning everything around you.” But I think it’s one of our greatest privileges as humans, because like Aristotle says, we are the animal with reason, right? So we’re the one animal that gets to have this kind of deep thinking and then mold our will to it, and it’s something no one can take from you, your ethics.
Laura: We do want to be that inclusive presence, and this fandom has always been an inclusive space, particularly for LGBTQIA people, and we want it to stay that way. That’s important. And it’s also important to remember that the fans made the fandom, and no one can ever take that away from us.
Eric: Yeah, wizard rock was not a corporate thing! Sunny can attest.
Sunny: I think I made one dollar.
Eric: [laughs] You made a whole dollar?
Sunny: If that!
Laura: So yeah, we don’t want to let it be taken away. And we want to be that voice, and we want to be here, but that’s not to say that it hasn’t come with questions and doubts about what does it mean to be doing a Harry Potter podcast? I know even back in 2020, when this was really first heating up, I remember having my own internal reckoning of, “Oh my gosh, what does this mean for me to be a Harry Potter podcaster?” And I think ultimately, each of us has to find that meaning within ourselves; no one else can give it to us. But what it means to me is this: It’s friendship, it’s people that we’ve known for decades at this point, and loving and uplifting each other every chance we can get.
Eric: Well said.
Sunny: I think it’s really important what you’re doing with this podcast, and that is keeping the thing alive that we all fell in love with in the first place, while responsibly doing it, right? It’s the best thing you can do.
Eric: And I’m sensing that the episode is concluding, which is always a lovely time to look forward to the future and time to thank so very much Sunny for coming on and being our guest this week, our expert on this show. And again, your Substack; Sunny Anne Williams is the username. You’ve written three articles specifically about this topic, which is cool because that’s what helped us plan this discussion on our whims. And I’ve really enjoyed talking to you the last month and a half or so since we reconnected, and thank you so much for coming on.
Sunny: Yeah, me too. It’s been a pleasure.
Andrew: And sorry that you’re here under these circumstances, but if you ever want to come on again to talk about just a chapter, you’d be more than welcome to.
Eric: If there’s a chapter you like. [laughs]
Andrew: But no pressure. We need you on for a Draco chapter.
Eric: Yeah, which chapter of the remaining books is Draco Malfoy the most a sweetheart in? When he chooses not to turn in Harry? That’s kind of sweet.
Sunny: That’s a good one. That’s one that I always think of, yes. That was sweet, right? Maybe sweetheart’s not the right word.
[Andrew and Sunny laugh]
Eric: It was sweet adjacent? I think it’s his whole family situation, yeah. The potential is there.
Sunny: Yeah, the crying in the bathroom scene before the big bloody fight.
Eric: What’s a boy doing in the girl’s bathroom, though?
[Andrew laughs]
Sunny: Better than a snake.
Eric: Better than a snake, yeah. No girl dies.
Sunny: Or are they the same thing?
Laura: Yeah, I was going to say the snake was clearly a boy.
Sunny: Clearly a phallus, yep.
[Laura and Sunny laugh]
Sunny: Literary metaphor.
Laura: The last thing I’ll say is just it’s funny because Quidditch is a mixed gender sport.
Andrew: Interesting.
Eric: Huh.
Laura: Yeah, it’s funny.
Sunny: Good point to make.
Laura: They beat the crap out of each other regardless of gender identity.
Sunny: There’s an article.
Eric: Sunny’s got her new article.
Laura: Yeah, get that up on Substack. [laughs]
Sunny: “J.K. Rowling fights with herself.”
Eric: Get it up! “Coeducational sports’ biggest fan turns her back.”
Sunny: That’s right. The truth behind Quidditch.
Eric: So we do do, occasionally, Muggle Mail episodes, and if you have feedback about today’s discussion, you can contact us by emailing or sending a voice memo recorded to your phone to MuggleCast@gmail.com. Next week we are returning to our Order of the Phoenix Chapter by Chapter – at least that’s the plan – Order of the Phoenix Chapter 28, “Snape’s Worst Memory,” where we get to meet a big bully.
Andrew: Sunny, thanks again. It was great having you on, and thanks for all your expertise today.
Sunny: Thank you all. It’s been wonderful.
Andrew: Glad you had a good time, and thanks, everybody, for listening. I’m Andrew.
Eric: I’m Eric.
Micah: I’m Micah.
Laura: I’m Laura.
Sunny: And I’m Sunny!
[Everyone laughs]
Andrew: You sure are. Bye, everyone.
Laura: Bye, y’all.