Black and white thinking
The BBC does a much more adult job of reporting on Prime Suspect JKR’s conversation with Megan Phelps-Roper.
Rowling has attracted extensive criticism for a series of comments voicing concerns about how trans issues affect women’s rights, and her opposition to Scotland’s gender recognition bill.
How refreshing it is to see a news outlet say that in a way that doesn’t nudge the reader to recoil in shock at a woman’s defense of women’s rights.
Her position has been interpreted by some as transphobic, leading to calls for a boycott of the Harry Potter franchise…
By some. Not all, not most, not even many, just some.
The Beeb even allows her to make a persuasive, thoughtful case.
Rowling later said many questions do not necessarily have clear-cut answers.
“There is a huge appeal, and I try to show this in the Potter books, to black and white thinking.
“It’s the easiest place to be and in many ways it’s the safest place to be. If you take an all-or-nothing position on anything, you will definitely find comrades, you will easily find a community. ‘I’ve sworn allegiance to this one simple idea.’
“What I’ve tried to show in the Potter books, and what I feel strongly myself, is that we should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain.”
This is a good sign.
Such a boycott would likely send HP sales into the stratosphere and beyond. Martians might even finish up reading the full series.
I listened to both available episodes of the Rowling podcast yesterday, and I found myself moved to tears in parts. The quote the BBC excerpted was one that struck me, and I wrote it down in full so I could share it with friends:
Conscience speaks in a very small and inconvenient voice. It’s words like that which have drawn so many people to love the Potter books, despite their flaws. I really distrusted Potter at first, exactly because it all seemed very black-and-white-thinking, but I’ve come to admire a lot in the story, especially later on as both Rowling and her characters developed, learned, and changed. In the podcast, she went on:
It was probably Snape’s development from a cartoon villain to a fully human, complex figure that finally opened my heart up to the books. (But also, I mean, who doesn’t want to love and root for a villain when he’s played so deliciously-wickedly by Alan Rickman on the screen?)
Agreed about Snape–he’s by far the most interesting character in the Potter books, and Rickman captured him perfectly. And if I recall correctly, he was also the victim of some vicious bullying by ostensibly good characters, including Harry’s father.
(Also, he inspired this.)
The same section passages made me really think deeply about the messages in the book series, @artymorty, and I can relate as a deeply flawed person to what she said about Dumbledore and Snape. The scariest time for me as a skeptical person is when I feel dead certain that I am right, and in part because that is so rarely the case. It makes me think I’ve missed something obvious, and especially in the case of the trans issue. What am I missing that the famous skeptics can see? I am still checking myself.
But in the meantime, I am not going to stop speaking on how it affects lesbians and gays, women and girls, and the boy children who are steered towards a life of being boxed in as being trans for having epxressed feminity in front of the wrong people.
@Maroon,
Yeah, everything that started out so black-and-white (the “good” Gryffindor tribe and the “bad” Slytherins; the oh-so-perfect Potter family and the nasty-from-birth Malfoys; wholesome Dumbledore and bitter Snape, etc) eventually gets shades of grey. Many “good guys” turn out to have been serious assholes a lot of the time, and a lot of the “bad” characters ended up much more sympathetic. By the eighth story (the all-day-long four-act West End play), Harry Potter himself is a middle-aged jerk with a plum job in the government, who rests on his reputation, snaps at his troubled son, lies to his constituents, and fails to defend a bullied kid partly because of who the kid’s father is; and the supposedly “bad” tribe, the Slytherins, save the day, and it turns out that the young Malfoy, rather than the young Potter, is the hero of the story.
@Artymorty,
I didn’t know that about the 8th story; I guess I’ll have to track it down.
I’ve seen the books criticized a lot for using hackneyed fantasy tropes, but I think she does a good job of undermining those tropes. Even the notion of Harry being the chosen one–he’s not chosen because of any preordained or supernatural reason, but only because Voldemort literally chose him.
@Mike,
That’s just it — we’re checking ourselves all the time. Exploring our niggling doubts; thoroughly exploring opposing points of view. The so-called “skeptics” clearly aren’t doing that at all when it comes to the trans debate and gender identity theory. There is no coherent opposing point of view. There’s no there there. Part of the reason this is so maddening is that I’m going mad trying to see how the hell everyone else is so mad that they don’t see it. It’s like we’re living in a world of magic not unlike the world of Rowling’s books, and someone’s cast a powerful spell over everyone but us.
This is a good discussion. Food for thought.
Like Arty, I really like that. That rush of adrenaline could be called the glow of self-righteousness, and yes, it’s a flashing red warning sign.
Mike @ 4
On the trans issue the thing I find most checkable in my thinking is what it feels like. Maybe the feeling is so intense, so agonizing, so impossible to get rid of, that…well, that what? That it becomes true that men can be women? No. That it’s fair for men to claim to be women and help themselves to everything that belongs to women? No again. What then? That it’s ok to “live as” the other sex up to the point where you’re doing harm, maybe. But I’m not at all sure about that either, given the effects on people’s ideas about sex & gender. But at any rate, I can agree that I don’t fully understand what it feels like.
Meanwhile I also wonder how the famous skeptics manage to miss what we can see – the entitlement, the bullying, the sneering, the furious misogyny.
@Artymorty #2
What about what Bruce Willis did to Rickman in Diehard?
@Colin #10
I will always Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber in Die Hard. “Karl. Shiess dem fenster. Shoot. The glass!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDK9aKu0O9A
I think that the most obvious tell is the complete lack of understanding or empathy for women and girls’ desire for spaces away and separate from men. If they were truly women, or girls trapped in the wrong body, they would understand and acknowledge that their presence causes problems for women and girls. They would certainly not lecture anyone to “refrain their trauma.”
@Maroon #6
That’s another fascinating thing about the Potter series. It’s like she sets you up expecting C. S. Lewis, but you get E. M. Forster instead. You do not expect such a deep level of humanism, and it’s all the more delightful because for a while there it looked like you were going to get stale Christian theology thrown at you.
It starts out very much hackneyed tropes and twee names and black-and-white characters. Although there’s an underlying pulse of some deeper ideas, right from the beginning. Which I think is what makes the development of the stories all the more surprising and enjoyable. Because the themes almost completely reverse themselves by the end. These rigid ideas from the first book that I reacted so negatively to, ended up systematically dismantled, and I ended up enjoying the end result all the more for it.
Neither can I. On the other hand, just because it feels like something doesn’t mean that’s what it is. People are not always the best judge of their own experiences. The explanations we reach for first might not be correct. We can be mistaken, or fooled; we can dream or hallucinate. Our subjectivity is no guaranty of accuracy or veracity; our proximity to the feelings and phenomenon might be the very source of our misperception rather than proof against it.
How can anyone feel that they “are” or “must be” something they’re not, and can’t ever be? I can understand that people feel terrible discomfort, but I don’t believe that they have any grounds to say “The discomfort I feel is because I’m really supposed to be, I really am the other sex.” How could they have any standard of comparison to make that claim? It’s like voting for the best restaurant in town when you’ve only ever been to one. Without eating at others, you can’t know there aren’t better. Well, when it comes to our selves we’re stuck in our one and only restaurant for life. The doors are locked, there’s no way out. I can only know what it’s like to be me. I will never have experiences as anyone but me. It’s like the old saying: “Wherever you go, there you are.” You can’t get outside of yourself. No taste tests, no test drives. You can use imagination and empathy to inform yourself, to imagine and empathize, but you can’t be someone else . Not really. Not ever. However distressed or agonized I might be, I can not believably claim that I feel this way because I’m not actually the only person I’ve ever been (and the only one I will ever be) able to experience. Certainly you can agree that my discomfort and distress are real without accepting my claims about their origin.
Amputees experiencing “phantom limb syndrome” are experiencing something, but it does not, can not involve a continued connection to the limb that has been removed. Similarly, people suffering from the mistaken belief that their arm is not their own, but some sort of alien or robotic imposter are indeed suffering, but not because their arm is not actually theirs. The arms are not the problem, and it would be cruelly destructive to patients to tell them that they were correct. Even without the neurological underpinning that we now have to explain these strange claims and perceptions, we would have been under no obligation to agree with the sufferers’ preferred, but impossible rationalizations for these sensations. Claims of being “born into the wrong body” or “being the other sex” are entirely internal and private; there’s no publicly accessible stump, or bodily contiguity we can point to to refute these claims, but I believe they are just as impossible as phantom or alien limbs.
Is there any reason to believe in a “gendered soul” that must be given priority over our material bodies, for which we have more than sufficient evidence? Are we really readmitting Cartesian dualism into neuroscience? It would be like reintroducing phlogiston into chemistry. Without very good evidence, it is reckless to carry on as if drugging and carving the only body we will ever have in order to conform to the unquestionable demands of a gender “entity” that likely does not exist, consitutes a “treatment” for anything. It is no more effective than clothing a phantom limb or amputating an “alien” one.
@YNNB,
If we’re talking about feelings, it really is complicated. I have worked at a trans bar, and I’ve known many people who identified as “trans” over the last 30 years. I don’t agree with the concepts and frameworks that these people have come up with to explain and contextualize their feelings. But that doesn’t diminish my sympathy for my friends. Many of these people certainly have experienced extreme distress over their ideas about “gender.” I had a recent friend commit suicide over it, after he had genital reconstruction surgery which didn’t alleviate his distress and which he regretted. That does nothing but strengthen my resolve to shed light on this crisis, but it also sometimes puts me at odds with some activists who perhaps don’t have such a personal relationship with some of this ideology’s victims.
To me, the distinction between the ideology and the people is crystal clear. But to some, it’s a bit blurry, and I see some activists cross the line and be jerks to decent people.
A probably unoriginal point about the books, but one I haven’t seen made here..
Harry is the viewpoint character. Harry is an unreliable narrator. Harry is 10 (11?) at the beginning of the series and the moral uncomplexity of matters such as the Houses is entirely down to Harry’s perception as a pre-teen abused child.
The increasing moral complexity presented as the series progresses is not just matched by Harry’s maturation, it is a result of it. Some attribute it in part to the growth of Rowling as a writer, but I think this is a little patronising, whether or not it was all planned that way.
Oh that’s interesting. I love an unreliable narrator. He can’t really be that in the literal sense since the books are third person (aren’t they?) but unreliable viewpoint character yes. That’s very interesting.
Arty @ 15 – but that’s just it, isn’t it? That “extreme distress over their ideas about ‘gender'”? Since the ideas are factually mistaken, isn’t it ultimately helpful to keep pointing out that the ideas that distress them are wrong? It reminds me a little of religious believers tormented by their belief in eternal damnation, the one that Luther made so much worse by insisting that salvation and damnation cannot be earned in any sense, that good works are completely beside the point, that Daddy God decides for his (definitely his) own reasons. All that anguish over a belief that is just a stupid human fiction.
Arty@13,
Lewis to Forster, I like that. Even as a kid when I was obsessively reading and re-reading Narnia (and not getting the Christian subtext), I was pissed at him for the way he treated some of his characters, especially Susan.
Ophelia@17,
Yes, they’re in the third person, and include scenes that Harry could not have known at the time. Still, Banichi has an intriguing point.
One other consideration with the series: she was consciously writing for a maturing audience. The first book was aimed roughly at 11 year olds, and each succeeding book assumed a year’s growth in the readership. So the writing and the themes get more complex.
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