Witch Hunting | I’m Trans. Stop Attacking Hogwarts Legacy, And People Who Play It, On My Behalf.
To start, I’d like to tell you a story.
One summer day when I was eight years old, I got sick. Very sick. Even before I knew it was a staph infection (one that could have potentially killed me, in fact), I knew something was wrong. A fever, a sharp pain in my right leg- needless to say, I didn’t get up from the couch for three days before I was eventually admitted to the hospital for a week, and then a few more days after that because I was allergic to the antibiotics they gave me.
So what did I do with all that time? I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. But that took me only a couple of days, and so I read Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets after that. I wasn’t reading these books, it was more like I was DEVOURING them. Again, I didn’t have much else to do. Even when I was sick, my TV time was still limited, and I was in too much pain to move.
By the time I made it to third grade, I was completely hooked on the Harry Potter series. I read the books and watched the movies on repeat. The story, the world, the characters, it was perfect escapism.
As I grew up I moved on to other series, but I’m still grateful to these books for being a huge part of my adolescence. But all that time, I hadn’t really given much thought to the person who wrote them, not even later in my life.
Yeah, can’t beat around the bush much longer. Let’s address the elephant in the room: J.K. Rowling is transphobic. She regularly associates with transphobic people. She is, quite possibly, the most influential TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) in the world as of now.
And yes, people have claimed to be able to find various traces of her conservatism within the Harry Potter books. Some things I agree are arguably problematic (ex. the house elves), some things I don’t (ex. the character’s names (except for Anthony Goldstein)), and some are more up in the air, with the blame not solely falling on Rowling’s shoulders (ex. she wasn’t the first one to portray goblins as greedy cave-dwellers with long noses).
NOTE: I do not mean to relegate allegations of Rowling’s racism and antisemitism to a footnote; I simply wish to steer the direction of this editorial mainly towards Rowling’s stance against trans people, because that is her primary mode of activism and where she spends most of her time and resources.
But all of this was basically white noise to me, who had… not necessarily moved on from Harry Potter, but mostly kept it in the back pockets of my mind unless something new related to the series came up, like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (hated it), or the Fantastic Beasts spin-off movies (watched the first one, thought it was okay, didn’t bother with the others).
So the announcement of Hogwarts Legacy caught my intention. I had no intention of playing it myself, but an open-world RPG where you play as a Hogwarts student has obvious appeal.
And clearly, that appeal has not gone unrecognized.
So Hogwarts Legacy has gone on to be extremely popular, selling very well and being praised not just by audiences, but by critics…sometimes.
Some sites aren’t reviewing the game because of its association with J.K. Rowling. When a site actually does its job and reviews the game, which is a widely-held expectation of gaming journalists (can’t imagine why), even a disclaimer regarding J.K Rowling isn’t enough to fend off accusations of supporting transphobia.
Dear God, I’m actually defending IGN. What even is going on any more. But in all seriousness, credit where it’s due. This is a fair disclaimer, and anybody complaining about a game reviewer reviewing a game is not worth listening to.
But it’s not just journalists getting heat for playing and talking about Hogwarts Legacy. Multiple online personalities have expressed their distaste with the game, and anybody who plays it, on principle.
Then there was a website where you can search Twitch streamers to find out if they had streamed Hogwarts Legacy. This can only be used for good things, I’m sure.
Thankfully it was later taken down.
Now, here’s the thing. Jessie and Brianna are (to my knowledge) transgender. Sam Gibbs, the person who created “Have They Streamed That Wizard Game?”, is (to my knowledge) not. Many trans people are excited about this game. Many cis people are telling people not to play it.
To be clear, whether you want to play it or not, that’s fine. If your concern is giving J.K. Rowling money, just know that you do so every time you give money to Universal Studios. The “Harm Reduction” aspect of “No ethical consumption under capitalism” shouldn’t extend to abstaining from all arguably problematic non-essential purchases.
Thought experiment: What if somebody wanted to play Hogwarts Legacy…on a charity stream to raise money for a good cause, maybe even a pro-LGBT+ cause? Would that be a net benefit for marginalized people?
Well, some people didn’t think so because- surprise, surprise- this isn’t just a thought experiment, it actually happened!
Girlfriend Reviews, a popular video game review channel on YouTube, received a Hogwarts Legacy Steam code for free and saw fit to do a stream to raise money for the Trevor Project. However, several viewers decided to harass Matt and Shelby in chat for daring to play this game, to the point where Shelby was driven to tears and had to leave the room while Matt finished the combat area.
Keep in mind, this is not the only time something like this has happened. Other streamers, most notably popular VTuber Pikamee, have experienced dogpiling and harassment over their choice to stream this game as well.
And that’s not even counting the streamers who have openly voiced concerns about being bullied for playing this game on stream.
Clearly this is indefensible, right?
Well…
NOTE: Stacey Henley has published, to my knowledge, three other editorials about Hogwarts Legacy, and they’re all an ironically hilarious read because they’re somehow in the seemingly impossible state of both being repetitive and also sometimes blatantly contradicting each other. Most obviously, TheGamer’s promise to not review the game won’t stop them from typing up several useless think pieces about it, apparently.
When I first read this, my reaction was “What? Are you for real right now?”
This was a throwback to when my middle school bullies were never punished because they actually managed to convince the school administrators that I was just making myself too easy of a target.
So here comes Stacey Henley, Editor-in-chief at TheGamer, ready to gaslig- I mean reassure people that not only is nobody being bullied, but if they are, they deserve it, and if they didn’t, they just need to suck it up because trans people get bullied all the time.
No, I’m not kidding. She’s not the only one to say this, either.
People are actually defending harassment with excuses they would have never let slide in the GamerGate era.
Like, can you imagine how Henley would react to harassment of women in the gaming space being brushed off with “eh, it can’t have been that bad. I need 43,275,079 pieces of evidence spoon-fed to me before I take this seriously”?
Believe all women… unless you don’t really feel like it.
Which reminds me, Girlfriend Reviews also received harassment over their coverage of The Last of Us 2, and that was bad, but this is good because it’s for a “good cause”. People on Shelby’s side who passed this story around also made sure to highlight the fact that she was a girl, and surely that was the main factor behind her harassment.
So Shelby is a “female gamer” sometimes, and a “cisgender white girl” when it’s otherwise convenient.
The big news in the wake of Hogwarts Legacy’s launch is that a cisgender white girl cried about it.
This is the dark side of intersectionality. Your “marginalized statuses” are emphasized when convenient, but your “oppressor statuses” can be held against you whenever you step out of line. Anything you’ve ever done to show support for communities you’re not personally a part of can be discarded at a moment’s notice.
But again, the worst part is that people have to accept being bullied, have to gaslight themselves into thinking it’s all “deserved criticism”, because nobody cares when trans people get bullied, except that’s not true.
Now, I’m planning on going more in-depth with this some other time, but the reframing of people in minority groups attacking innocent straight/ white/ cisgender/ etc. people as “long-overdue payback for past oppression” is growing more and more prevalent in progressive spaces, and I have to at least say something now because I’ve been meaning to for a while.
If you consider abuse, harassment, marginalization, etc. to truly be as wrong as you say they are, the correct response to other people going through similar things should be “I’m sorry, this shouldn’t happen to anybody”, and if your response instead is “well, other people go through the same thing, and worse”, something is wrong with you.
Look. Whether you do or don’t play the game, it doesn’t make a grand statement about you as a person (unless you’re one of those douchebags who makes a big show out of buying the game ten times to stick it to the “woke mob”). Allyship isn’t something you are, it’s the grand total of things you do. Just buying and playing this game is not an offense worthy of deeming somebody a bigot.
“Groups are not monoliths” works both ways. Not all trans people are on the side of those bullying streamers, and the ones who disapprove of harassment campaigns shouldn’t be lambasted as “traitors”.
And please, save your dogpiling efforts for people who actually deserve it. If a person is not provably hostile towards any marginalized group, attacking them in the name of said group hurts your image, but more importantly it leaves you worse off as a person.
Have fun in the wizarding world, or don’t, but let’s leave witch hunts in the past.
Thanks so much for reading. Until next time, stay on the hook!
