Goodbye, JK Rowling. We Don’t Need You Anymore

I was far from the only kid growing up with Harry Potter. An entire generation took their cues about right and wrong from those books, and that generation is now here to tell its creator the one thing we never thought or wanted to say: Goodbye, we don’t need you anymore.

We don’t need your thinly veiled racism (Cho Chang, really? Also, have you ever met a Latine person?), your stereotypes, or your lack of diversity, not to mention your lame attempts to justify your issues afterward, which have been more problematic than anything (Dumbledore is gay now! There are other wizarding schools!).

We don’t need your disgusting TERFness and your insistence that the way you see the world is the way we should see the world, just because so many of us grew up idolizing you.

We don’t need you anymore.

Here’s why: because the books you wrote taught us what to do when faced with the kind of bullies who believed they were better than anyone. They taught us how to react when faced not just with the Voldemorts of the world, but also with the Umbridges.

And you, the author of those books that changed so many lives, have now lived long enough to become the villain.

Not metaphorically, even, no. You are, very literally, a combination of Vernon Dursley and Dolores Umbridge, two of the worst – and more real characters in the series. Maybe, in a way, you always knew this. Maybe you based those two on the parts of yourself you were hiding from others.

And maybe it was the success that led you – and us – to this moment of revelation. There’s privilege, the one you were born with as a white woman, and then there’s money, and when you add those two, well …the sky’s the limit when it comes to ignorance. You don’t need to attempt to understand, anymore. There are enough people who will support you either way.

But not me. Not an entire generation of people that would have – who did defend you. I’m done now. I’ve been done for a while, this isn’t your first time on this bullshit, after all, but today I wanted to make it even clearer.

Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Remus, Sirius …they don’t belong to you anymore. They belong to us, to the fans who love them, and who will treat them better than you ever did.

You can keep your people: Vernon Dursley, Dolores Umbridge, and Cornelius Fudge.

The rest is ours.

Goodbye, JK Rowling. We’re not going to miss you. We already learned the lesson of acceptance, inclusivity, of friendship, and we learned it much better than you ever did. We’ll now use to do the thing your characters would have done to someone like you.

Shun them and walk away.