Can Harry Potter Save Trans Kids? (Part 1)
JK Rowling and the death of God.
I was scrolling through the JK Rowling timeline and found nothing unexpected. It was a bunch of anti-trans tweets. Specifically, she was lambasting the doctors for trans-ing all the kids.
JK Rowling is against hormone blockers and breast dissections. Big whoop. Nothing earth shattering here. I generally have no critique of this kind of “culture war” myopia. Black crime exists, as do car crashes. People die of COVID, and you should wear a seatbelt. Brush your teeth. Don’t do drugs.
The problem here is not that JK Rowling is a typical conservative mom. The problem is that JK Rowling has a billion dollars. Something has gone horribly wrong. It’s as if Bilbo Baggins has been made King of Gondor.
Firstly, JK Rowling should not have a billion dollars. This isn’t “capitalism,” by the way. Copyright law is welfare for artists. I don’t have anything against art — I’m the most pro-art person in the world. I think JK Rowling should be nagged until she transfers all her wealth to real artists.
Copyright law is a wealth transfer away from real artists toward mass artists. In the past, if you wanted to make money as an artist (or a scientist, very often) you had to find a rich guy who thought you were hot stuff. The rich guy would have various eclectic interests, and your job would be to show up at dinner parties as a prop. Afterwards, you could go back to your studio or lab and he would commission you to do cool things.
Copyright law eliminates the need for this kind of brown nosing and cocktail partying, and replaces it with an “algorithmic” industry. JK Rowling is famous and rich because her books appealed to the lame sentiments of teenagers. I say this as someone who was once a cringe and lame 12 year old reading Harry Potter. Satisfying the artistic sensibilities of 12 year olds should not warrant a billion dollar payout.
The entire argument behind copyright law is based on a false premise, the idea that Rowling wouldn’t have written her cliche fiction without a billion dollar check. That is demonstrably false. When she started writing Harry Potter, she had no money at all. She wrote because she enjoyed it, and maybe hoped to make some modest, middle class wages. She had no expectation of receiving a billion dollars.
If you’re willing to fight and die on the hill of children’s literature, don’t worry. A world without copyright law will still have lots of silly stories to consume. I know that’s a big concern right — what if we don’t have enough new content to consume? What if we had to read something boring, like the Bible? It’s a scary thought.
I have no problem with Rowling making a million dollars. I think she did a splendid job of entertaining children, and she deserves a nice, comfortable, upper middle class lifestyle. The problem is that her entire personality has devolved into a daily obsession with harm avoidance. Such a mentality is unbecoming of a billionaire.
protecting kids.
The job of a mother, first and foremost, is to protect children. If you can’t do that, you’ve entirely failed as a mother. But this instinct is local, parochial, and limited in scope. You cannot take this primal instinct and project it as a protective blanket over the whole of society and expect good results. This is what is meant by gynocracy, the longhouse, Big Mother, the matriarchy, and so on.
How many people’s lives are ruined because of severe obesity? Over 30 million Americans. What percent of Americans are trans? Probably less than 3 million. Both can be attributed to the greed and malice of “experts.” The experts said seed oils are good for you. The experts said cut off your dick.
The reason why anti-trans activism is a bigger moral panic than childhood obesity is not because one is more destructive than the other, but because of a metaphysical, spiritual, and religious conception of gender. The anti-trans activists say that gender is forever — transitioning will destroy your life, whereas obesity can be solved and overcome, and return you to normal.
This is simply not true. People who are obese as children will be debilitated their entire lives. Most of them will lose the weight, just as some people who de-transition can live normal, happy lives. However, childhood obesity cases can destroy a person’s entire life:
Around 55% of obese children go on to be obese in adolescence, around 80% of obese adolescents will still be obese in adulthood and around 70% will be obese over age 30.1
According to the CDC, over 14 million children were obese. 30% of these children will still be obese by age 30. For women, this has extreme implications for fertility:
a 60% decrease in the spontaneous pregnancy rate;
The risk of miscarriage was found to be 38.1% in obese women, whereas this rate was 13.3% in patients with a normal BMI.
The probability of pregnancy is reduced by 5% per unit of BMI exceeding 29 kg/m2;
The risk of infertility is threefold higher in obese women than in non-obese women
A 10% reduction in the success rates of IVF in overweight women.2
The effects are also dramatic for men:
"Overweight men were 11 percent more likely to have a low sperm count and 39 percent more likely to have no sperm in their ejaculate. Obese men were 42 percent more likely to have a low sperm count than their normal-weight peers and 81 percent more likely to produce no sperm.”
The condition of having no sperm at all is called azoospermic. This is a condition which affects around 1% of men, and the likelihood of azoospermia nearly doubles for those with obesity. The likelihood only increases with severe obesity.
Obesity is literally sterilizing our children. Assuming that of the 14.7 million obese children, only 30% remain obese by age 30, and only 1% of these adults come infertile, this is still the effective sterilization of 44,000 Americans every year. And the rate is likely much higher.
By contrast, according to the American First Policy Institute, only 5,063 children were put on puberty blockers in 2021. If you want to stop children from being subjected to life-altering biochemical experimentation, you would focus on obesity, not puberty blockers.
Harry Potter and the Death of God
I’m not accusing Rowling, or any other conservative woman, of not caring about children. They clearly care, and as women and mothers, it is their right, duty, and evolutionary or God-given purpose in life to care much more about children than I ever could. The love that a mother has for her children is unique.
But to project this love out onto society as a matter of policy, as a matter of politics, as a matter of statistics — this is where the trouble begins. When you myopically hyper-focus on one edgy political issue, to the exclusion of much more important problems, you are not helping the world. You are satisfying an internal desire to be a moral person, a hero, a savior, a fighter for truth and justice and the American way… but these are chairs on the deck of the Titanic.
The reason why kids are being put on hormone blockers isn’t because of technology. The hormone testosterone, for example, was first identified in 1935. To make a long story short, the change between 2024 and 1935 is the collapse of Christianity. Rowling is especially blind to this as a milquetoast Christian.
Despite the accusations of witchcraft, Harry Potter is a profoundly Christian world. Father Peter Fleetwood, a member of the Vatican's council for culture, said it best:
"[Rowling is] Christian by conviction, is Christian in her mode of living, even in her way of writing."
But if this is not apparent, let me spell it out for you:
Harry, like Jesus, is raised by non-divine humans who are “not his real parents.” The analogy is actually more apt in the case of Moses, who was an orphan.
Harry, like Jesus, is genealogically, by prophecy, destined to save the world.
Harry, like Jesus, is subjected to attempted infanticide at the hands of Voldemort, who plays the role of King Herod, because of a prophecy.
Harry, like Jesus, is part of the “chosen people” (the magicians), but he is merciful toward “the dogs” (the muggles).3
Voldemort, like the Pharisees, is obsessed with “blood purity.”
Since Harry is Christ, Voldemort is anti-Christ. Characteristics of the anti-Christ: prideful, boastful, seeks to form his own cult and be worshipped, genocidal.
The mark of the “Death Eaters” is the “Mark of the Beast” in the Bible.
Voldemort’s real name, Tom Riddle, indicates that he is a “riddler,” one who deceives, like the anti-Christ.
Daniel 11:37 states that the anti-Christ has no desire for women — Voldemort never shows any interest in girls or romance.
The early Christians had a high proportion of “Hellenized” Jews or “half-bloods,” as in, The Half-Blood Prince.
Hermione, a “mudblood,” represents the Greek convert to Christianity, since she was born from muggle parents. Rowling’s defense of Hermione is in the spirit of the Epistles of Saint Paul, defending Greek converts from the “Judaizers.” Rowling, as a gentile, says that Hermione is the character she personally identified with the most.
There are also analyses of Harry Potter which make it out to be a Nazi-Jewish dynamic, with Harry being Churchill or FDR, the muggles are the Jews, Voldemort is Hitler, and so on. In fictional allegories, two analogies can be correct at the same time. However, in this case, the Nazi-Jewish mythos is itself derived from Christian mythology, and so similarities to WWII do not invalidate the Christian allegory, but strengthen it.
Harry Potter was first published in 1997, four years before September 11th and the start of the New Atheist movement. This period, between 1991 and 2001, was remarkably peaceful. The Yugoslav Wars, which occurred during this period, killed 140,000 people over 10 years, or roughly 14,000 people per year. This is relatively small compared to the 30,000 people killed this year in Gaza, or the 100,000 people killed per year in the war in Ukraine. This is the utopian period in which Harry Potter exists, at the end of history, without a Cold War. It is during such a period that Harry Potter became a sensation, because it represents, in a sense, a conflict between good and evil outside of any sort of civilizational struggle. Harry Potter is about seeking out the evil within our own society and confronting it — both a fundamentally Christian message, as well as a liberal one.
The Evangelical backlash against the “witchcraft” of Harry Potter has obscured its moral core. The reason why Evangelicals feel so threatened by Harry Potter is because it is better than they are — they are competing over the same niche. That is, Harry Potter makes Christian morality cool, and Evangelicals are lame. Evangelicals watched in real-time how Harry Potter was “stealing” their target audience: sensitive, idealistic, moralistic youth. Of course, the Evangelical movement would have declined whether or not Rowling provided an “alternative,” but Harry Potter was a useful scapegoat.
One of the issues with Harry Potter as a religious worldview is that it fundamentally lacks an exterior vision. One could object that Rowling did not set out to create a new Christian sect. “She was just writing a children’s book, for God’s sake!” The objection is the critique. I am attacking Harry Potter for its childishness, and its small mindedness, which has captured the imagination of a generation.
As a child, I liked Harry Potter. I am not unsympathetic to Potter fans and the feeling of coziness, wonder, merriment, suspense, love, drama, wistfulness, and a desire to be whisked away to Hogwarts. The Harry Potter universe contains many elements in common with Lord of the Rings: a Christian moral core, a deep respect for Anglo-Catholicism (the Latin language, boarding schools, uniforms, headmasters, prefects), Germanic and Celtic mythology, mystical creatures of the European tradition, Baroque or classical architecture, and so on. It is no coincidence that the three greatest children’s authors of the past century have been English Christians: Tolkien, CS Lewis, and JK Rowling. We (Americans) look toward the British as our ancestors, as our priests, as the keepers of ancient wisdom and tradition.
The lack of exterior vision, that is, the inability to “zoom out,” to see external enemies, to build a positive future, all of those problems were not an issue for a 12 year old boy. However, as time went on, I saw myself feeling a strange suspicion that Harry Potter was lame. Yet the girls I knew never had this revelation. They continued to have fond memories for the books and its universe.
Women do not understand why men fall away from Potterdom as they grow up. This is because women, generally, do not understand the male need for “exteriorization.” Men need a horizon, a vision, a great quest, and a dragon to slay. Harry Potter is about a liberal utopia, specifically an academic liberal utopia, which is perfect — there’s just one problem. Someone (he who shall not be named) is being intolerant, discriminatory, and supremacist. If we could just defeat those who are “mean,” we could go back to the utopia.
For men, this is no vision at all, and it does not map onto the challenges of our times. We don’t live in Hogwarts. The system isn’t perfect. The problem isn’t “mean” people. The problem isn’t that the world is threatened by violent sinners, but that everything is lame, pacified, and visionless. While Rowling hesitates to admit it, she is Hermione — pedantic, a busy-body, hyper moralistic, a know-it-all, and a smart-aleck.
That said, there is a place for Hermione, and a place for Rowling. I am not endorsing a society without hen-pecking women — they play an important role in the drama of life. The problem is that they should not be at the top of the hierarchy. They shouldn’t have a billion dollars.
Perhaps I’m too harsh on Rowling. But harsh times call for harsh prophets. Harry Potter isn’t a cure for nihilism, and neither is anti-trans activism. Rowling’s Christian-Feminist fusionism is entirely bankrupt. The fact that she can’t see this, and neither can her fans, is the same reason why she thinks she is “saving the world” by hyper-focusing on the fate of 5,000 trans kids, instead of the hundreds of thousands of children who whose personal, romantic, and sexual lives will be forever destroyed by childhood obesity, xenoestrogens, and TikTok.
One some level, complaining about any of these things implies that there is someone to complain to. A headmaster, a Dumbledore who will set things right. Or, alternatively, that “Voldemort has won!” and we must conduct some sort of guerrilla war against the forces of darkness. But, I hate to say it, the forces of darkness are not “doctors grooming your kids.”
If anything, this generation is the least “groomy” of any generation in history. The word “groom” ultimately comes from “man,” but came to mean “one who prepares,” in the sense of a man preparing for marriage. Women, including young women, have been “groomed” for all of history. If this is a crime against human rights, or an affront to God, I won’t disagree. But the idea that Western civilization is collapsing precisely and specifically because children are being “sexualized” is not even wrong in some sort of accidental way. Rather, this kind of hyper-fixation on harm avoidance, “saving the children,” protecting them at all cost, hand wringing over every little detail — it is this gynocratic attitude which motivates the entire transgender phenomenon, and also its opposition. It is “caducean.”
My position is clear. A healthy, growing, expansive civilization will colonize, imperialize, and look outward. Transgenderism and its opposition from TERF soccer moms is always inward looking. Scrutinizing the sex lives of children is not an argument which can be “won” — it is a topic which should be entirely avoided. Children will be confused, they will be gay, they will cross-dress, and do all sorts of deviant things behind closed doors. A small minority of doctors will prescribe unnecessary procedures, profit off plastic surgery, and prey on people’s insecurities. In a utopia like Hogwarts, such ugly realities would be abolished. But zooming in on every little perverted doctor or every little mentally ill teen is not going anywhere but down. This spiral into overparenting is a deep sickness. It is a bureaucratic mentality, the kind of spirit which forces a lapdog into a Santa costume.
You can’t fight liberalism with liberalism, or Christianity with Christianity. The solution is not to get sucked into polarization, but to let the dead bury the dead, and step over the debate entirely.
As an addendum, trans kids don’t pop out of a vacuum, and they aren’t random. Satan does not pop out of the ground and possess trans kids in some sort of arbitrary Russian roulette. Trans kids are the children of mentally ill parents, specifically BDS women, and they are generally mentally ill themselves. If it wasn’t for hormone blockers, they would be doing something else stupid and mentally ill. You can fight tooth and nail to stop the procedures under 18, and you might prevent a small percentage of trans kids from just waiting until they are 18 and doing all the same terrible things anyways.
This distinction is entirely one of “consent.” Children can’t consent to life changing decisions, but adults can. Consent theory is entirely downstream from Christian theology, which claims that there is an “age of reason” when a child can accept salvation by Jesus Christ. This is further exaggerated in Protestantism, where you have to read the entire Bible to truly “know” Jesus. Salvation is paywalled behind literacy, so only those with a Puritan college degree can be saved (the did start Harvard, after all). The Christian concept of marriage stated that only a Christian can be married — with the implication that only someone versed in the Bible could be married. This resulted in the Puritan age of marriage being quite high, compared to the relaxation of the Evangelical 1950s.
While there is a rational basis to the concept of consent, there is very little evidence that a child who, at 13 years old, wants to change their gender is somehow going to turn out completely normal as an adult. I’m not saying this is impossible, but this sounds a lot like criminal justice reform to me.
Most people who commit crimes go back to jail after 5 years of being released. In fact, 80% of all violent crime is caused by people who have already been put in jail for violent crimes, and then released.
In a sense, kids who want to take hormone blockers are a lot like violent murderers (hot take, I know!). You can delay them from doing anything deviant for 5 years — until they are 18 — but don’t be surprised when they end up committing suicide, mutilating themselves, or being gay anyway.
For JK Rowling, this is just fine. She has no problem with homosexuality, suicide, or self-mutilation, so long as it is done between consenting adults. I, personally, fail to see the difference.
That said, I am not immune from the mothering instinct. I, too, would react with the same rage and immeasurable disgust if anyone I personally knew was facilitating, encouraging, or enabling the mutilation of their children. I don’t associate with anyone like that. Considering that there are 73 million children in America, and only 36 million are white children, and there are only 5,000 children on hormone blockers, my chances of encountering such a child is 0.007%. Even if I hang around liberals exclusively, I really only increase my chances to 0.01%. It’s not something anyone “randomly” encounters. It has nothing to do with me, and it is not a grand political problem worthy of a billionaire’s focus.
People who make this issue, which is an issue of mental illness, and make it the centerpiece of their political ideology, without any sort of comprehensive or coherent opposition to homosexuality as such, are at best well-intentioned losers. They are deeply confused, contradictory reactionaries, who have no positive vision. They simply want to go back to Hogwarts. A place that never existed.
Predicting adult obesity from childhood obesity: a systematic review and meta-analysis, 2016.
Impact of obesity on infertility in women, 2015.
Matthew 15:26.