J K Rowling, der er forfatteren til de populære børnebøger om Harry Potter, har længe anstrengt transtransmiljøet for sin insisteren på at mennesket kun eksisterer i to køn. Senest han en ‘bog-kunstner’, Laur Flom, sat sig for at slette Rowling, fra hendes eget Potter værk, ved at indbinde bøgerne uden hendes navn.

 It brings to mind Stalin’s airbrushing from photographs of party officials who had fallen out of favour. Like those problematic commissars, Rowling is judged to have thought and said unacceptable things. And so her name and likeness must be deleted.

Some people really do want to see a great forgetting of JK Rowling. Last year the New York Times put out an advert that featured one of its readers ‘imagining Harry Potter without its creator’. This was the actual NYT saying this; engaging in the warped fantasy of keeping Harry Potter but erasing JK Rowling.

There’s a dark urge here – to punish Rowling for her wrongthink. To make her name mud, to cast this wicked woman from polite society, to save poor Harry Potter from her demonic clutch, all because she thinks and says things that ‘good people’ disapprove of. It is remarkable that the Rowlingphobes seem blissfully unaware of how tyrannical they sound to the rest of us.

Dette er særligt ironisk, da en af de bærende pointer i Harry Potter bøgerne – udover vigtigheden af venskab, inklusion af halvblods, grænser (folk uden magi er stadig mugglere og skal forblive udelukket for magiens verden), mod og kampen mod ondskaben – er at man skal kunne identificere det onde for at kunne bekæmpe det. Men frygten for det, er så stor, at den onde troldmand Voldemort, omtales som “Ham-I-ved-nok”. Som den kloge og venstreorienterede Hermonie Granger påpeger, øger frygten for et navn kun frygten i sig selv.

Frygten for at kalde mænd og kvinder, for det de er, uanset omfanget cirkus-kirurgiske indgreb afstedkommer sine egne problemer. I Skotland vil en notorisk sex-forbryder skifte køn, så han kan afsone sammen med den type sårbare kvinder, som var hans foretrukne ofre. 

Det er ikke let at tage trans-miljøet alvorligt, de de end ikke kan identificere sig selv. Hvorledes kan man titulere folk korrekt, hvis køn er flydende? En trans argumenterede forleden for, at den værste form for transfobi, var at fejl-kønne, bruge et forkert pronomen om, en trans. Det var langt værre, end at afvise at date en transkønnet. Han kan i øvrigt ikke forstå, der mennesker, der påstår at at acceptere transkvinder som kvinder, men alligevel afvise at date dem. Deri har han helt ret, hykleriet er en del af frygten. Og derfor straffer man rask væk folk, der ikke underlægger sig zeitgeist, som irske Enoch Burke en kristen lærer, der blev bortvist fra sin skole og siden fængslet, for ikke at titulere folk foretrukne pronominer.

Flere kan spille det spil, som René Salinas Ramos fra Ecuador, der har skiftet køn, for at få mere samkvem med sin søn.

“The laws say that the one who has the right is the woman. As of this moment, I am female. Now I’m also a mom, that’s how I consider myself,” Salinas Ramos told La Voz del Tomebamba outside the Civil Registry office on December 30 in the city of Cuenca. “I am very sure of my sexuality. What I have sought is that I want to be a mother, so that I can also give the love and protection of a mother.”

Den slags kan man dog ikke have

But the man’s legal change from male to female has surprised and concerned LGBTQ activists who fought to have Ecuadorian laws changed in 2015 to allow the change of gender.

“This man’s private matter, to obtain custody of his daughters, isn’t the spirit of the law,” Diane Rodríguez, one of Ecuador’s most prominent trans activists and the national director of the Ecuadorian Federation of Organizations LGBTI, told VICE World News.

Rodríguez, who became Ecuador’s first trans Assembly person from 2018 to 2021 and also helped spearhead the 2015 law, said that with her understanding of the law, a judge would certainly not give custody because of a change of gender “because it does not make sense that you have changed your gender in the identity document without being a trans person, only with the objective of taking advantage to obtain custody.”

Rowling, det røde apparat, skal have ros for at insistere på virkeligheden.