Hello everyone, and welcome to the Why We Fight series. I’ve asked some of our favorite wrockers from around the world to talk about what they’re feeling now that JK Rowling is openly transphobic. Please feel free to join the conversation in the comments, but do remember these are sensitive subjects and real people you’re talking to.

I’m Alex, short, vegan, and queer. I have a wrock band called Luney Tunes and I write songs about magic, life, and shipping.

~*~

There’s quite nothing like rocking out.

I should know, because I’ve been rocking out a lot. Ever since I was 13, I’ve been playing in bands, standing on stages and riffing that guitar. It’s awesome. I love it.

Music is art. Art at it’s most purest, I’d say. But throughout the years, I’ve learned that art can be tainted. It comes with associations. Memories. A lot of times, it’s beautiful, it comes with memories of the song that plays during prom night, or the gig you played with your best friends. But sometimes, music brings painful memories and dangerous associations.

That has happened in bands for me before. Bands I now have difficulty returning to, memories I’d like to not touch. Such wasn’t always the case with my own Wrock band. This was Harry Potter, my safe haven and heaven. The fandom that brought me friends for life, and memories to cherish. As I started my band in 2017, it was all I had left in music. My final stand.

But now, as I’m writing this, I feel like I’ve lost that very same final stand, my only gateway between me, my guitar and a stage. Because art can be tainted, and that has, against all odds, happened to Harry Potter.

To say that JK Rowling is ill-informed about the trans experience, to say that she shouldn’t speak up and claim herself a champion of woman’s rights while at the same time express thinly veiled resentment against the queer community, is a massive understatement. The fact that the woman who gave us the very books that says that ”You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be” is now weaponizing trans people who detransition, proclaiming trans women are people who make cisgendered women ’unsafe’ and resorting to old and tired arguments against transitioning is something so otherworldly bizarre, offensive and outright despicable that it’s disheartening at best and terrifying at worst.

I have experienced no shortage of harassment, ill-mannered behavior and transphobia during my almost 6 years of being who I want, and always wanted, to be. It feels like every single eye I catch on the streets is wondering the exact same thing, and every time someone has approached me and uttered concerns about my gender identity, it’s never without ill-will and disgust. Friends misgender me despite knowing me for years and years. I can’t exist online anymore, except for in select safe spaces. I’ve had a friend I thought had my back outright dismiss me, and he’s only one among others.

When you’re in that headspace, that reality and life, the places where you can find solace and comfort run scarce, few. Harry Potter has been one of the very few things from my past life that I’ve been able to hold on to. A place where, yes, “You fail to recognize that it matters not what someone is born, but what they grow to be”.

But I can’t anymore. Like places and spaces before it, Harry Potter is now also associated with strings of painful memories and associations. 

I can’t read the books without screaming inside: I can’t believe she is weaponizing people who detransition. I can’t believe she thinks trans women are harming the safety of cisgender women. I can’t believe she is worried about the huge influx in numbers of people who wants to transition.

When I go on stage, I don’t think I’m going to make it all an unforgettable experience for me and my audience.

When I go on stage, I think: People detransition for a myriad of different reasons, and I assure you every single one can attest that a transitioning process is a valid and important part that lead to that particular decision. Everyone that wants to transition should be able to, and should be provided the necessary medical resources they need in order to do so, because health is at stake here. In no way is the amount of people detransitioning a counter-argument against the availability of transitioning and transitioning treatment – using it as such is simply wrong, and harmful.

When I go on stage, I think: Everyone who feels like they’re not the gender they were born as should be able to live and become who they want to become. It is a human right, and a freedom every single person should be allowed to have. Thinking that people will falsely claim to have a gender identity in order to predate is not only a harmful point of view, it’s a baseless assessment, and a fear that is only validated by one’s own fiendish assumptions. And fear is something that can lead to harm, and danger. When that fear, literal fear, is concerning something as trivial as gender identity, it is nothing short of transphobia.

When I go on stage, I think: People are concerned about the increase in individuals who want to transition, concerned and worried based on nothing but fear, and assumptions. As if the fact that a growing awareness and visibility in and around the trans community and transitioning process isn’t an obvious answer.. And something that should be a delightful answer as well – wanting to transition is to find oneself, a feeling that people comfortable with the body they were born with think they can judge, when the truth is that they can’t. 

There used to be quite nothing like rocking out, and I feel saddened that that has to come to these thought patterns.

I do my best to stay afloat in the world of Wrock. I spend time with the friends for life I have earned, and that I love. Positivity. Ignoring ignorance. Separate art from artist.

It is hard, but it’s a battle. I’ve broken thought patterns before, and I hold on to the thought that I can do it again. I want to one day reach a place in my Wrock career where I can keep the negative thoughts at bay and safely say that all is well.