I want to take a date, here, now, and to affirm that I feel deprived of a pleasure that I could reasonably hope for by the fault of 1) the forces of intransigence which extend their imprint and 2) institutions not having the necessary spine to resist the onslaught of the absurd.
I’m talking about author JK Rowling’s absence from HBO’s nearly two-hour special on the 20th anniversary of the show’s first film Harry Potter. This victory for the culture of cancellation affects me more than any other. Because JK and Harry have been a part of my life for 30 years. At home, for my children, reading every new book in the series was an event – you bought it the day it was released – and it was forbidden to watch the movies without reading the books.
I believe that JK Rowling is responsible for the fact that my children, like hundreds of millions of others, have become habitual readers. I believe that I owe him hours of fun and discovery with my toddlers, of debate, fear and giggles.
More broadly, we owe him for having instilled in an entire youth the desire to lose themselves in a saga as vast as life. His characters are young, a little whimsical, but loyal, persevering, resourceful, altruistic. Their relationship to authority is complex. They respect the wise old man, who passes on knowledge and skills to them, but learn that authority can be wrong and that there are just rebellions. There is an important development on racism, too, on the coexistence of differences, on the strength of love.
No one has done more than JK Rowling since Gutenberg for reading. Among the 20 best-selling novels of all time, his works occupy seven places. She should, for this feat, receive a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Yet she only appears furtively, via archival footage, in the televisual celebration of her work. She was invited, claims HBO. She declined the invitation, she said. It’s a PR dance step to hide the trans elephant in the room: the controversy his presence would have sparked. Because, you see, Rowling has been wrong for the past few years to express her disagreement, not with the rights of trans people, which she supports, but with some of their demands. Their proposal that we should no longer say “women”, but “menstruating”. Whether trans women who still have penises are allowed to go to a women’s bathroom (Rowling confessed to being sexually assaulted, hence her reluctance) or whether they participate in women’s sports teams, despite a build and a level of testosterone that few women born to women can achieve. She has published a nuanced and informed essay on all of these issues worth reading (bit.ly/JK-trans).
These are debates. There are strong arguments in each camp. But for some trans activists, any reluctance to face part of their list of demands is not an unfortunate disagreement between reasonable people, but an unbearable affront to their dignity. And this justifies sending the deviant author enough death threats so that she can line her house, whose address is published by the demonstrators who come to bother her permanently, as last November.
The problem is that in the United Kingdom, the country which nevertheless gave us the fair-play, an uncompromising position developed by spokespersons for a trans population estimated, in total, to be less than 0.6% of humans, has become almost mainstream. The main actors of the series Potter – Daniel Radcliffe (Harry), Emma Watson (Hermione) and Rupert Grint (Ron) – denounced as transphobic the words of the one who made them international stars. They could have disagreed while also defending Rowling’s right to hold a different, but respectable point of view. Rather, they succumbed to the ambient air of rectitude. Their presence alongside Rowling in the HBO special, even two meters apart, was therefore unthinkable under these conditions.
My opinion ? They – Harry, Hermione, Ron – should have, along with the producers of HBO, come together. Declare that this meeting could only take place in the presence of the person without whom it would have no reason to exist. That disagreements between reasonable people on divisive issues should in no way obliterate camaraderie and recognition. If the principles did not weigh in the decision of the protagonists, the fact that the films personally enriched Grint by 60 million American dollars, Watson by 70 million, Radcliffe by 110 million and made WarnerMedia (owner of HBO) realize a a net profit, so far, of more than a billion dollars should have aroused, at least, the primary reflex which is crudely called recognition of the belly.
The normalization of intransigence in the Anglo-Saxon world therefore means that instead of joyfully celebrating the author of a remarkable work of the modern world, all those who are grateful to her must, on the contrary, experience regret, frustration. , in my case a cold anger.
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