How to Not be Voldemort

Courage, Wisdom, and Kindness in "The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling"

"There are all kinds of courage," Dumbledore tells Neville Longbottom, in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. "It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.”

It’s easier to write wise words than to live by them, but J. K. Rowling has shown both kinds of courage over the past few years.

Rowling is a self-identified leftist and feminist, who is pro-choice and fully supportive of the LGBTQ movement. So when she came out as a defender of the reality and significance of biological womanhood, she took a lot of heat and venom from what she considered to be her own side. It cost her more than the attacks she received from the religious right (regarding the witchcraft in her books), because she felt that she could dismiss those people. It’s a lot harder to be hated by people who are supposed to be in your corner. But Rowling has shown herself to be someone who will do what she believes is right, even at the cost of being vilified by her own “side.” And that is something very rare.

Rowling started speaking out in late 2019 against the social and economic persecution of people who insist that biological sex is real, and in 2020 she made that her own public position. She was met with a level of vituperation that would be hard to believe, if you didn’t already know the current sociopolitical climate. She was compared to Lord Voldemort, accused of wanting trans people dead, threatened with death, threatened with rape… and a lot of other stuff that can’t be posted here. But she didn’t back down.

Rowling goes in depth about her views and responds to her critics in the podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, which came out this past spring. If you like podcasts—or even if you don’t—I recommend it. The podcast is produced by The Free Press, which was founded by ex-New York Times editor Bari Weiss, who left the Times in 2020 because she felt the environment there was increasingly oppressive and antagonistic to free speech. The interviewer is Megan Phelps-Roper, a writer who was raised in the infamous Westboro Baptist Church but left as an adult after coming to question her worldview through a series of productive (!) arguments on Twitter.

The podcast is only seven episodes long, but a lot is packed into those seven episodes. It covers: the dark origin story of Harry Potter and J. K. Rowling’s meteoric rise to fame (episode 1); the backlash against the books from the religious right in the 1990s and early 2000s (episode 2); how internet culture became increasingly mob-like and intolerant of opposing viewpoints as the 2000s wore on (episode 3); the rise of the trans movement and the “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists” (TERFs) who refused to get on board with the movement (episode 4); and finally, in episode 5, how J. K. Rowling decided to jump into the fray on the side of the reviled and hated TERFs. Episode 6 doesn’t feature Rowling at all and is instead dedicated to interviews with some of the more thoughtful transgendered critics of Rowling. In the last episode, Rowling responds to some of their criticisms, and Phelps-Roper and Rowling discuss the difficulty of knowing when you’re wrong.

The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling is far more than just a debate over transgender ideology, although it certainly does contain that. It’s a social history of the last 30 years, as well as a thought-provoking discussion of how one can come to know the truth, and what it means to respect people who disagree with you.

Who Are the real Death-Eaters?

A recurring theme in the discourse surrounding Rowling’s unacceptable views is that fans accuse her of betraying the principles of Harry Potter books, or even of becoming like the villains in them—the Dark Lord Voldemort himself, or the vile Professor Umbridge. To those people, Rowling has this to say:

I suppose the thing I would say, above all—to those who seek to tell me that I don’t understand my own books, I will say this: Some of you have not understood the books. The Death Eaters claimed, “We [wizards] have been made to live in secret and now is our time. And any who stand in our way must be destroyed. If you disagree with us, you must die.” They demonized and dehumanized those who were not like them.

I am fighting what I see as a powerful, insidious, misogynistic movement that I think has gained huge purchase in very influential areas of society. I do not see this particular movement as either benign or powerless. So I’m afraid I stand with the women who are fighting to be heard against threat of loss of livelihood and threats to their personal safety.

In fact, one of the main themes of the Harry Potter books—and of every book Rowling has ever written, she says—is authoritarianism. It was not any opposition to trans people themselves that made Rowling speak out. In fact, Rowling—who after all is no conservative—is quite affirming of people’s right to live as transgender if they want to. Rather, it was the burgeoning authoritarian tendencies of the trans movement that made Rowling finally decide to take a stand against it.

Don’t Dehumanize Yourself

Rowling is very wary of any simplistic or all-encompassing ideology, especially when it makes people no longer see their opponents as worthy of respect. The real world is complicated, and human beings are complicated. It’s a terrible mistake to strip that nuance away. Rowling says:  

The irredeemably evil character in Potter has dehumanized himself. So, Voldemort has consciously and deliberately made himself less than human. And we see the natural conclusion of what he’s done to himself through very powerful magic. What he’s left with is something less than human. And he’s done that deliberately. He sees humane behavior as weakness. He has reduced himself to something that cannot feel the full range of human emotion.

There’s 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 tried to show in the Potter books, and what I feel very strongly myself [is that] we should mistrust ourselves most when we are certain. And we should question ourselves most when we receive a rush of adrenaline by doing or saying something. Many people mistake that rush of adrenaline for the voice of conscience. “I’ve got a rush from saying that; I’m right.” In my worldview, conscience speaks in a very small and inconvenient voice, and it’s normally saying to you, “Think again. Look more deeply. Consider this.”

I believe this is a vital point, and something that is too often neglected—on all sides of the political spectrum. Getting swept up in your own ego is a heady thing, and addictive. But it doesn’t lead to wisdom. It’s certainly very unlikely to win anyone to your side.

And in dehumanizing other people, we really do dehumanize ourselves. If I believe that a group of people or a movement is all evil, that is a very dangerous thing—I am not actually opposing evil itself, but I think I am. That means I am treating something that has good in it as pure evil. So I am calling good evil, and I must become evil in some way to do that.

Love People Who Are Wrong

On the other hand, if I let go of my ego, and stop pretending that the world is black and white, then I can begin to see that the people I disagree with are human, too—and might even have some good qualities. Maybe I can even be friends with some of them. Rowling says that although she herself is pro-choice, she has a friend who is a pro-life Catholic. And even though she disagrees with him, she can understand why he believes what he believes. And they can be friends.

This idea is an important element of the Harry Potter books, Rowling says:

Harry has anger issues. Ron can be… I think I call him a “git” quite a lot in the book. But together they are more than the sum of their parts. Together they grow. They find family in each other. And there’s real human beauty in that. I suppose the Dursleys are my epitome of a very authoritarian and conformist world that demands absolute obedience. And that’s not the world you enter when you go to Hogwarts.

Rowling doesn’t mention it in the interview, but it’s worth noting that Harry and Ron considered Hermione something of an enemy at the beginning of the first book. It was only with time that they learned to look past each other’s obvious flaws and become friends.

And that’s where Rowling finds hope in all this mess. Because even a Twitter mob is made up of people, and people are more than just their worst ideas or actions. That was Phelps-Roper’s experience. Some people were able to see that she did want to do the right thing—even though cursing dead soldiers and gays was obviously the wrong thing—and took the time to reason with her as an individual worthy of engaging with. They didn’t have a duty to do that, Phelps-Roper says, but it changed her life.

“Every crowd, every mob, is made up of individuals,” Rowling says. “And it’s reaching the individuals, and not allowing this to become mob-on-mob, that will change things for the best, if we’re to have any hope.”

“There are more important things in this world than being popular.”

I suppose the alternative to that is to join a mob and let it rule you.

That’s what Rowling did not do, thank God. And in refusing to, she has set an example for a lot of other people.

As I watched this saga unfold, for a long time I was afraid that Rowling would finally cave and apologize or simply fade away from the public square. But she seems to know where she stands. And she isn’t budging. At the end of the podcast, she says this:

I know I won’t ever regret having stood up on this issue. Ever. You know, that’s the price you pay. If you want to be universally and eternally beloved, then you must curate your image in a way that I’m simply not prepared to do. I’m not in the business of doing that. And I’m not taking a long bet here. I’m not thinking, this cultural moment will pass, and therefore I will be vindicated. I don’t know what the future holds. I only know that I would have betrayed myself—and I passionately believe that I would have betrayed a lot of women and girls—if I had not stood up on this issue. There are more important things in this world than being popular. And that doesn’t mean it’s more important to me to be right. It means it’s more important to me to do the right thing.

There’s a lot more great stuff in the podcast. Give it a listen, and share it with your friends, especially friends who don’t share your worldview. They probably won’t agree with everything. You probably won’t either. But it might start a conversation.

Further Reading

• “Lessons from Pickpockets”
• “The Problem with the Maps”
• “Jezebel vs The Whisper”
• “The Wild & the Fear of God”

–Image credit: Daniel Ogren, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons