The cursed franchise that won’t die the death that it should have years ago has returned to plague society once again. That’s right, I’m writing this the day of that the trailer for the new Harry Potter show dropped and I am so tired of this shit. I am so tired of the endless regurgitation of the same franchises over and over again, sure, but I’m more tired of seeing people spend so much goddamn time trying to find excuses or justifications for spending time and money on the latest method that JK Rowling has found to fund the fostering of her virulent transphobic views. The woman herself has made the tie between engaging with her creative work and endorsing her views, she’s spent millions advancing horrible anti-trans legislation, and turned “TERF” (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism) from a niche into a tentpole of modern “conservation” (but actually reactionary) politics. She has literally said that if people disagreed with her views, they’d stop supporting the franchise that propelled her into a position of money and power that appears to have entirely cooked her mind (not that she was a font of inclusivity ever, what with all the slavery, slurs, fatphobia, and thinly-veiled racism) in the way that anti-trans views seem to cook everyone’s mind when they begin to dabble in them. All of which is to say that all of these people looking for an excuse know that what they are doing is wrong or bad or hateful or antisocial or anti-trans and are hoping to find someone to absolve them of the guilt they feel by telling that it’s okay that they are prioritizing their nostalgia over the literal lives of a minority group that is no-longer-so-slowy being forced out of public life and, ultimately, killed (we’ve passed the point where we need to point to the definitions of genocide to call the eradication of trans people what it is since even the UN has started to timidly suggest that maybe the worst perpetrators, the US and UK governments, need to knock it the fuck off (emphasis mine).

The parts of the internet I still occupy have been nothing but discussion of all this for the past two days. It has been exhausting to exist anywhere, and the only reason I’m not curled up in an exhausted ball right now, letting my burnout chew on my blog buffer, is that I’ve been too busy with work and personal obligations to spend much time stewing in the pathetic and hateful juices of this latest attempt to find absolution for prioritizing the one book franchise someone’s read over the lives and existence of millions of people. Which isn’t super surprising, given that western society already made the same choice when it came to the pandemic and masking. Better to be able to do whatever you want than have to do even the tiniest thing to avoid actively making the world a worse, more dangerous place to live. Not engaging with Harry Potter shit’s even easier than that, though, so part of me hoped that more people would be willing to participate in starving the new show of oxygen, but they can’t even be botheredd to do that. Which sucks because that’s literally the easiest it will ever get. All they have to do is NOT do something. And yet here we are, waiting for this segment of the culture war to flare up again. It’s enough to make me want to go live in the woods just to get away from it all for even a day.

And yet here I am, writing about it. Ostensibly in an effort to excise it from the front of my mind, but also because this is the kind of shit that needs to be repeated, even if we’re well past the point that anyone could have a valid excuse for not knowing about all this. Well, I’m sure there are still some. Maybe someone just woke up from a twelve-year-long coma or recently left the woods they’ve been hiding away in for over a decade, but both of those situations feel very much like the sort of thing that crops up in hypothetical discussion and never in reality. I’m not giving anyone an out this time. I’m not being moderate about my rejection of this shit. I’m not going to reason with people. I’m just going to tell them that their choice is a bad one and move on with my life. I’ve done this song and dance before and I’ll do it again. No one who would endorse this shit or supports Rowling’s financial backing of transphobia is worth my time. You don’t need to earn the privilege of being in my life, but you’re never going to get the right to it. Shit like this will get you kicked out of my life faster than you can stammer out a shity justification. I’ve cut out almost my entire family, a thing I STILL feel bad about, and this won’t be even nearly as difficult.

I’m tired of this shit. I’m so tired of it coming up every couple of years. I’m so tired of the discussions and justifications and guilt or anger people feel when they talk about why it’s okay for them to watch. It’s so frustrating to see how many people are too weak to even resist this. Really doesn’t fill me with confidence that we, as a society, are going to be ready to do the hard work required to recover from our current political scene. We sure haven’t even grappled with COVID and that killed millions of people directly in front of us, left millions more struggling with debilitating lingering issues from loss of their sense of smell to physical infirmity or nearly unnavigable brain fog, and showed us just how good a world we could have if we could get our government to work for us instead of corporate interests and billionaires. I’m so worn out by the cognitive dissonance. My people’s limit ability to grapple with their place in the world and the knock-on effects of their actions. I am tired of feeling like I must be standing on a mountain to see as far as I do despite being merely above average in height and possessed of no unique abilities or insights. I am tired of being called a scold or a debby downer or a pessimist or a ruiner of people’s fun or whatever the fuck else I’ve been accused of just because I’m not going to let someone I once counted as a friend do something reprehensible and that will contribute to making the world worse without making sure they understand that this is, in fact, what they are doing. I don’t want there to be any ambiguity when I stop talking to them, you see. I want them to know exactly why. After all, that’s all the consequences I can really enforece for something like this. And I’m so tired of needing to enforce them. I miss having as many friends as I used to. But I’m not going to compromise on the rights and value of my friends and family just so some asshole who can’t think beyond their own feelings can enjoy an entirely adequate-at-best trip into nostalgia.