fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #6643 ]

[ SECRET POST #6643 ]

⌈ Secret Post #6643 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #949.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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I only read HP once as a wee child, can someone explain what the canon-typical transphobia in the series was? I was under the impression JKR's crap gender views came after it ended, and she was mainly garbage about race, some "beauty equals goodness" tropey IIRC, and other things in HP's run.

I'm 100% not doubting it, I'm just asking if any fans can explain so I can get this secret.

In the original book Rita Skeeter was described pointedly having especially large hands '(man hands? I guess the implication was). Oh and Aunt Marge having a mustache. (Ironically the kind of things you could imagine either character pointing out about others)

Thats all i can think of in the books

There was also some Not Like Other Girls™ vibes regarding Hermione and later Ginny. (And i say this as someone who otherwise liked Ginny as a character. . I will say that in regards to fanfic i also LOATHED the fandom's tendency to reduce Ginny to some kind of 'shameless slut' who would sleep with any guy. Two sides of the same misogynistic coin imo)

. I will say that in regards to fanfic i also LOATHED the fandom's tendency to reduce Ginny to some kind of 'shameless slut' who would sleep with any guy. Two sides of the same misogynistic coin imo)

Me too! I didn't get why she was labeled a slut for doing what many teenagers do. I had friends with multiple boyfriends in one school year, she had three boyfriends over the course of two or three years.

Admittedly til 20 i was almost entirely ficto-sexual and disliked/resented most of my classmates too much to consider dating them but i still didn't see why it was so weird bc i felt like dating was a thing that was typical of teens

But i suppose i also learned from fandom that internalized misogyny and shaming other girls for dating/liking guys "too much" was a hell of a thing.

DA - I read the books and never got into fandom or discussing them, they were just fun books to read and then I moved on. Later I made a friend that was into the fandom and we got to talking and I was shocked how hated Ginny was. Then she went on to tell me other things and I realized I had a very different experience with those books than most of the fandom seemed to and was happy I never looked into it.

Yea honestly from what i recall Ginny seemed to get it from all sides. She dated too much, but she was also supposedly a 'stalker' to Harry according to some (i recall seeing someone lament that Harry "married his stalker" and i was like 'literally when??? Aside from that one time she was possessed.) and a bunch of people tried to claim she was a Mary Sue but i recall even in the 6th book when Harry was crushing on her a lot of the time it was shown she could get nasty when her temper was provoked. Thats a flaw.

But yeah. The Ginny hate just came from all sides. I will say book 6 had its flaws in the romance writing department but i hardly think Ginny is entirely the problem.

I personally didn't like the romance between Harry and Ginny but I didn't hate her for it, I just though JK really fucking sucked at romance, lol. Ginny herself had some cool moments even if she wasn't a character I had much in the way of an opinion on. But I also wasn't in the fandom so I have no idea how bad it was towards her, but given how shippers can be I can fully imagine. And yeesh.

Yeah i mean tbh i do feel she has a tendency to write many of the major relationships we see ... incredibly flawed. Its probably just a thing with her writing.

I mean personally i feel both Lily's early relationship with James AND Snape came across toxic in some way.

Oh Lily/James is a whole thing that for got retroactively ruined for me, not that I shipped it but it was a romance that existed in the series when it turned out the guy was a colossal dickhead? Shape wasn’t any better but there was nothing about James that even slightly sold me on him being much of a catch, like sure people can change but we didn’t see that, because it wasn’t the story for it, so I ended up wondering what the hell Lily liked about either of them.

Describing unsavory female characters as having certain male characteristics = transphobia?

I mean the writing of the series has a tendency to describe unpleasant characters as being ugly or visually flawed in some way. And with what we've seen JKR say lately...its hard for me to believe that making a point to describe Rita's hands as large didnt mean something.... considering her writing pattern.

This is batshit crazy even by FS standards.

(no subject)

dani_phantasma - 2025-03-15 00:58 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2025-03-15 23:30 (UTC) - Expand

Maybe not directly, but a lot of transphobia is rooted in general misogyny. Won't be surprise if her transphobia take the same root from this.

Maybe not necessarily on its own, but have you gotten a load of Rowling's batshittery these last few years? Like, I wouldn't have thought twice about it had she kept her fucking mouth shut. Now it's one of those things you can't unsee or unlink.

OK but I have a hard time believing the average person, who doesn't know about JKR's views, would read the book and identify transphobic content. The fatphobia, misogyny, and racial stereotyping, on the other hand, seem like they would be pretty obvious to "not terminally online" people. They were obvious to me when the books were released.

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(Anonymous) - 2025-03-15 02:26 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2025-03-15 02:44 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2025-03-15 03:33 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2025-03-15 14:23 (UTC) - Expand

Yes, Patrick, "the bad women all look like trannies" is transphobia.

Ginny canonically going through lots of boyfriends later in the series was one of the things I think was handled extremely well. When other characters called her a slut (in child-friendly terms, but that's obviously what they were going for) it was always portrayed as them kinda being jerks and the text itself never shamed her for it. That's really counter to Not Like Other Girls, where Other Girls are usually seen by the NLOG as slutty while she's the special good one for not going after boys.

Well I guess was thinking in other ways. I feel like JKR has a disdain/dismissive view of girls who are TOO overly girly (re the treatment Lavender Brown and Parvati Patil got. They weren't treated as bad people and had redeeming moments but book 6 kinda just....it felt very mocking of Lavender especially abf I always felt like Hermione was pretty nasty to Lavender and it felt like we were expected to agree . Thats just me though. Also the way Harry (who is mostly the narrator) was to/about Cho was very...ick.

Idk. It just feels like to me that JKR has an issue with girls who act TOO typically feminine and i vaguely recall times when Ginny was lauded or just compared favorably against other girls as well as Hermione. I may be remembering wrong.

Granted, I haven't read the books since the last one was published. But even back then, there was a decent amount of fandom commentary about how there was clearly a "correct" way to perform femininity in the Potterverse. The women that you're supposed to like are all naturally pretty and feminine without being prissy, or else older and motherly. Some of them are athletic, but the pretty, Sporty Spice kind of athletic. They're never sweaty or butch.

Meanwhile, the antagonistic women are all either described as looking mannish (Petunia, Marge, Pansy), exaggeratedly feminine (Narcissa, Harry and Ron's ex-girlfriends, Fleur until she loosened up and Our Heroes decided she was cool) or both (Rita, Dolores). Lots of big square hands covered with jewelry and big square jaws covered with makeup in the HP rogues gallery. Back then, people just figured that Jo had some unexamined sexism and homophobia going on. (Not just because of that. There was, for example, that whole thing where Remus turned out to be the only good werewolf and most of the rest of them are violent pedophiles. Or that thing where Dumbledore's gay crush had him siding with the wizard nazis for a little bit.)

In retrospect, there were signs of things to come.

your examples are excellent but as a counterpoint: plenty of authors have been describing women with those very attributes for decades before Rowling was even old enough to hold a pencil. The hands/jaws/oh no hairy face has been part of western culture as shorthand for ugly/unfuckable for a very long time without it directly coming from a place of transphobia. If anything it's, as you say, extremely sexist and misogynistic and always has been. Rowling was just maintaining her spot in a long line of people who write ugly people as evil, and there's lots of that still going on.

TERF rhetoric as exemplified by JKR is extremely sexist and misogynistic at its core, but even ignoring that, HP's version of this trope is not just "beware the masculine-looking woman" because the pretty, overly feminine women are also not to be trusted. At Hogwarts and around, only the girl next door types and their motherly counterparts can really be good. Anyone who's too feminine, or too bad at being feminine is wrong. Now, is it possible that JKR was just trying to put her own twist on ugly=bad and it backfired horribly? Sure. After all, this is the same woman who decided to "improve" the traditional stories about brownies by turning them into a race of beings who love being enslaved actually. But given how much time she spent over the course of seven books establishing that a woman's value and morals are tied into the amount of effort she puts into expressing her gender and how successful she is at it, it's not exactly a shock that she wound up where she is now.

Go give your head a wobble, this is all a massive reach.

Yeah aren't Sponge and Spiker from James and the Giant Peach described similarly?

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2025-03-15 03:04 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2025-03-15 16:14 (UTC) - Expand

my dearest, please consider that "lots of other artists have done this throughout history" is like. the opposite of a defense against it having some shitty believes in it

while the specific words for transpeople are newer, society's hatred for "crossdressers" and gender non-conforming is NOT new at all. sexism and misogyny and transphobia ALL existed before we named them, and were always connected. the fact that JKR didn't invent them very much does not mean that she isn't participating in a fucked up tradition steeped in those cultural prejudices.

The only thing that comes immediately to mind for me was Fleur's reaction to being polyjuiced into Harry when the Order of the Phoenix wanted six decoy Harry Potters in the first Deathly Hallows movie (I didn't read that book and have no idea if there's something like that in there). It didn't make any sense to me and I was so annoyed by it.

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