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Description
My Magical School - and a statement about The Harry Potter Paradox

The Harry Potter books had always been very suggestive, and maybe there are the acme of the magical school trope. But I’ve always liked to reimagine them with different premises. For example, mixed species, everyone gets a chance to be schooled. Especially cuddly orcs like Bolt, a character created by Hogs. Secondly, magic requires physical performance too, to get rid of that squishy mage trope. In third place, no fucking wands. Watching people pointing sticks at one another is BORING.

Harry Potter teaches us an important civility lesson: discrimination is bad.

When practiced against white, straight people.

The recent transphobe tweets from JKR , more infamous than ever because related to the COVID-19 global emergency, plunged the fandom of Harry Potter’s franchise into chaos.

How could such an engaging and heartfelt story that helped so many kids and teenagers to cope with the anxieties of growing up, and inspirated so many homoerotic fanfictions with the blessing of the author, being written by such a reactionary person?

How to live with that?

Let’s find out. But first…
My experience with Harry Potter
My first Harry Potter book was The Globet of Fire, a gift for my 15th birthday from the then companion of my mother, so I happened to be more or less of the same age as the protagonist.

And I loved it.

It was to the perfect compromise for an insecure queer teenager scared like hell by sex. Whimsical enough to lure the inner child that still couldn’t accept that childhood was over, and with the drama and action needed to satisfy the adolescent.

No one other book of this saga gave me the same sense of wonder: The previous books were too childish, and the subsequent ones so gritty and dramatic to the point of being dull and just lowering my empathy for the characters. Especially Harry.

Oh my, I would have slapped him silly so many times.

(After a few years, I had to admit that The Globet of Fire had the most contrived plot of the entire saga, just to understand the power of novelty and nostalgia.)

The point is that I really loved the saga, and I really appreciated it for having ignited my joy for reading in an era where YA literature wasn’t yet a thing. There were silly books for children and tedious books for adults. A teenager could spend his high school years without reading a single book of his own free will.

We can say that Harry Potter ignited the YA phenomenon.

I just didn’t love it enough to get into the fandom. Let alone that the first internet connection in my house had still two years to come, but when I found it, I was kind of baffled.

Harry Potter books were great, but not that great, right?
The Queer Analogy
Ha, how many of us dreamt to receive the letter from Hogwarts and leave their boring and frustrating muggle life for studying friggin’ magic?

(I didn't, because I read the books out of order and I spoiled the scene, but that was my fault.)

That’s to say that the fantasy of a boy with an unsupportive family that feels out of place, has not defined personality and all of sudden receives the call from a world of wonder, is very much cathartic to a queer teenager.

It’s the age where a lot of us feel that they can’t fit the mold, we restrain ourselves to don’t let our queerness come out and as a consequence, we didn’t develop a strong persona, we feel like our parents won’t accept us entirely and we build a protective wall of silence that maybe will never be dismantled.

We just want a place where to feel normal, accepted, maybe even considered special in a positive way. Get true friends and discover our talents. Keep our parents at a safe distance and preserve only the childish and caring memory of them.

Let’s call it acceptance fetish.

That’s the fantasy that Harry Potter served.

But there’s a problem. Harry Potter isn’t about being a queer teenager.

It’s about being a teenager. Period.
The Fanfiction
Before going on, I must mention that there’s even a pro-queer element outside the fourth wall: the author explicitly endorsing fanfiction about her characters. Something that not everyone does. Anne Rice (the grandma of sexy vampires) and George Martin don’t for example.

Fanfiction is mostly romance and male on male romance if we consider the statistics of Archive of our Own as representative. Explaining why M/M romance (and yaoi if we consider the visual equivalent) is so popular between young women a topic on its own. And not, as a gay man, I’m not against it.

Let’s say that this phenomenon contributed to the attributed queer allegory of Harry Potter without having clear analogies for queerness in the actual story.

Because it has never been the author’s plan from the beginning.
A story about Wish Fulfillment
Before proceeding…
Let’s get the funny contrivances out of the way.

Inhale…

Hogwarts is a nightmarish deathtrap, teachers don’t care about the activity of Voldemort’s minions that infiltrate every year, nor about the safety of their students, but they shouldn’t because if a bunch normal 11 years old kids had the possibility to learn friggin’ magic, they would all be Hermione Granger, able to throw fireballs and burn the Basilisk to a crisp within the Christmas break, but they would still graduate with a 5th-grade understanding of literature, science, and math, and maybe that explains why the economy is run by goblins.

Inhale again…

Wands look campy, no matter how much solemnly the actors of Voldemort and Dumbledore try to wave them, and they’re just a catch to make a mage unable to cast spells or to swindle three times the Dark Lord, because Harry is able of pretty impressive wandless magic, when the writer needs it. And guns and rifles would have been a better choice in the battle scenarios. RIP.

Wheeze…

From the fifth book onward, the author starts making shit up at the last minute.

Fun, right? It always is. But all those contrivances I’ve listed have a purpose in common: serving the wish-fulfillment trope of a group of teenagers outwitting (and Disarming) over and over trained adults and give to the readers the sensation of control and power they can’t get with their parents, teachers, classmates and so on.

And that’s the point. Teenagers. Not queer teenagers.

You don’t need to be queer to don’t fit the mold, because this mold is so rigid and narrow. You don’t need to be queer to feel like your parents won’t support you in everything you’d want to say and do.

Being queer only ensures and magnifies this hardship. But it’s something that every kid that sees their childhood collapsing under the weight of disappointments and hormones gets to experience.

Some cope with that feeling turning complete tribalistic and obsessing with their mates and dad about sports, cars and cunt. Some have their catharsis watching B-movies with dudes punching and shooting their way through a personal affirmation, some others develop the acceptance fetish, and prefer stories where the protagonist travels to a magical world where everyone appreciates them and they save the day with the power of their common sense and birth-given talents.

Assuming that Harry Potter had actual queer subtexts, has a name: disidentification .

The art of identifying with fictional characters and stories that weren’t made for you and have just vague and unintentional analogies with your problems and desires.

Like flipping through a Men’s Health magazine and believing that all those photos of ripped men were shot for homoerotic titillation. Or that Darth Maul from Star Wars is the space opera analogous of a leather daddy.

Given how little we are fairly represented, or represented at all in mainstream fiction, we become pretty good at disidentification.

Queer Harry Potter readers have seen a queer allegory in a story that was just about dealing with the anxieties of growing up.
A story about Equality?
Then, what about the theme of discrimination that’s present in the story? The bad guys are literally nazi-wizards. Isn’t that a story that encourages the reader to be welcoming and open-minded to everyone different?

Yes and no.

First of all, people can differentiate their discrimination. Although it more frequently overlaps and openly racist people are also misogynistic and homophobic (yeah, that uncle), somebody can be anti-racist but homophobic. Anti-homophobic but biphobic, and so on.

So, yeah, it may be possible that while she was writing the books JK Rowling was thinking about queer people while describing the discrimination against mudbloods, that pop up randomly from families without having a heritage.

But if it was the case, she was thinking about the more innocuous variant of queer people: gay people. The one that can be more easily tolerated because their existence doesn’t contradict the traditional views on gender roles that much, compared to a bi person or a trans person for example.

I’m gay so I can say that.

By the way, using fictional emarginated classes that are all white straight people never convinced me, it was used to exhaustion by the X-Men comics, and we should really move on from this trope.

Especially when the marginalized trait is something that in reality would make you just cooler than the others.

Also the “half-blood” term: sometimes it baffles me to think how this word evolved from being a slur against the children of raped slaves, to the warranty that this character will end up doing something very cool that none of their parent species could do. Like wielding Tessaiga or combining wizards’ power with muggles’ common sense.

Talking of slaves…
The parade of red flags
For a story about “discrimination is bad” the case of house-elves being happy about their condition of servants, and Hermione mocked for trying to fight for their liberation, is contradictory.

Dobby is an elf who rebels to the control of his masters and gets freedom, but he’s the exception, not the rule. His rebellion is the result of strong morality and the physical mistreatment of his masters, suggesting that slavery is ok ‘till you don’t beat your slaves or they have a submissive nature.

That sounds so Gone with the Wind, that was a revolutionary movie for its view about the rights of black people.

In the US during the 50s.

Here we are talking about UK during the 90s.

The entire tolerance moral is undermined by the fact that in the entire saga there are are only two characters explicitly mentioned as a person of color, a team member of Gryffindor’s Quidditch team — yeah, that irrelevant — and Cho Chang, the exotic beauty from the East that doesn’t make good wife material.

And all the other fantasy races are very stereotyped, some of them plainly evil or opportunistic, like giants and goblins. And some other just not trustworthy friends or allies, because sooner or later their twisted mentality and culture kicks in and makes them do stupid things.

If we can consider the whiteness of the cast as just a product of its time (it was), there is another narrative choice that makes the worldbuilding very conservative and kinky at the same time.
Be fruitful and multiply

Maybe her divorce and period of poverty with a child to raise all by herself made JK Rowling develop some issues with her parenting. Because she imbibed her fictional society with norms about family and motherhood that we could call… nostalgic.

At 20 years the average wizard considers himself realized and satisfied with sexual and emotive exploration enough to marry and have children.

That’s so conservative from one-side, but also very appealing to teenagers that have developed idealization of parenthood. Both as a cute fantasy and as a fetish.

Especially with mothers. JK Rowling gives much more relevance to the role of mothers compared to fathers.

Mrs. Weasly is the second best example. Her entire character is just “mama bear”, and her desire to protect her children makes her able to defeat Bellatrix (to disintegrate her in the movies, like she was a friggin’ vampire exposed to sunlight.) Like motherhood was a power enhancer.

While Lily Potter is the prime example. Her sacrifice to protect her child creates a meta-magic able to reflect the killing curse from Voldemort and keep all the Death Eaters away from the neighborhood of her sister.

James Potter too sacrificed himself for protecting his beloved ones, but it didn’t create a super-protection. Why? Because he was just the father? Because a father cannot reach the intensity of the bond between a mother and his child?

The idea of motherly superpowers isn’t progressive, because it reduces a woman, a person, to her role as a mother.

It can be quite convincing to a teenage girl because that’s an age where you still didn’t have many accomplishments to build your sense of self-esteem on, and at least you know you gonna have the privilege of carrying a child into the world.

But it is alienating to women that for one reason on the other can’t or don’t want to have children in their lives.

It’s convoluted also because this plot device (the magic protection of Lily) could have been fixed quite easily, as the writer FayOnix suggested in the Mythcreants Podcast :

Make her a very skilled make (Professor Sloughhorn stated that in the sixth book) and make her cast a very powerful spell that requires the sacrifice of the caster to operate. It’s still a sacrifice, but a sacrifice that works because it’s a deliberate choice made by a thinking person, not a fortunate coincidence motivated by the force of motherly love.

An actual spell of this magic system, and not some romantic meta-magic, would have made much more sense having the arbitrary limitations it shows in the story.

The first one: Voldemort can evade it through dark magic in the fourth book. The second one: the meta-magic and its incommensurable effect of keeping away every ill-intentioned wizard from Privet Drive fade away after Harry Potter comes of age in the last book.

What? Lily Potter is ok with taking care of your children but only until you’re legally obligated?

And speaking about giving too many responsibilities to twentysomethings…
Severus Snape, you suck

Inhale…

Severus Snape is a bully teacher that abuses his students, especially the ones already with self-worth issues. He shouldn’t have been a teacher, no matter how slightly less incompetent than the other teachers he is in tracking Voldemort’s infiltrates. The reveal that he was bullied by the father of Harry and was stalking his mother makes him just a very sore loser that can’t get over high school mentalities and takes squalid revenge over an 11 years old boy.

Inhale again…

Redeeming him at the end of the saga is taking advantage of the above-mentioned high school mentality or the average reader, that’s still too young, or at least immature, to know that personal responsibility is a thing and you can’t get away with mistreating others just because you were mistreated when you were a teenager. Everybody hurts, it’s a reason to be kinder to others, not complete assholes.

Saying that he’s a good person because he is a counter-spy on the side of Dumbledore is like saying that Goku is a good father because one time he defeated Freezer.

I suggest imagining the story with inverted genders: if Snape was a woman, would have been still considered a flawed but sympathetic character? She would have been hated and called c*nt all the time.

In the end, Severus Snape is similar to Edward Cullen and Christian Grey. A dark and broody guy, with creepy stalking habits, who needs the help of an innocent woman to heal his soul and open his earth to the world. The only difference is that Severus didn’t get the girl and went bitter.

Because he hasn’t nice hair.

The contrivances I’ve listed so far are quite different than the others about wish-fulfillment and are the ones that made me not grow an obsession over these books.

These were the red flags that made me understand that the author wasn’t completely in line with a theme of tolerance and acceptance.

Because horrible people get forgiven because they had a troubled adolescence. Because women are reduced to their roles as mothers. Because the condemned racism is between white and straight people, and fuck house-elves. Because wizards fucking marry and have children at 20 years!

Maybe I was just old enough to start noticing it, and keeping myself critical about this universe and its rules, and I really can’t blame people who accepted those tropes without judgment.

It happened something similar to me quite recently to a smaller scale. An artist that I frankly adored and inspired me a lot, came up in those days with some pro-police tweets about the BLM movement in the US. And some other people reported to me that he had quite a controversial opinion during the shitshow that was the gamergate a few years ago.

It was an hard hit, way worse than the JK Rowling statements because I was resonating with him and glossing over his use of potentially harmful tropes, hoping that they weren’t meaning anything about the ideas of their creators.

Well, they were. I got burned
Conclusion
In the end, can we still enjoy Harry Potter even if the author is transphobe?

Yes, if we contextualize it. If we admit its nostalgic glamour (it was already nostalgic when it came out!) and recognize that it was published in the early 2000s. The years of 9/11, George W. Bush and Avril Lavigne. The bar for being progressive or even radical was set at a different point.

If an author can create innovative storytelling in a time frame, but the same author wasn’t able to keep up with the times or even with the trends they themselves created, that doesn’t completely undermine the quality of their past works, when they were up with the times.

Also, there’s a lot of spec-fic literature to consume nowadays. Some of that is older than Harry Potter and aged better, as the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett.

Yeah, JK Rowling exhausted the magic school trope, and nowadays isn’t yet found an author capable of invoking again that sense of whimsy and wish-fulfillment without looking like an emulator of JK Rowling. I think that we weren’t going to find another magic school saga any time soon.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep exploring and step out of our comfort zones, explore new literary worlds and growing attachment to new archetypes, maybe even find of creating more fitting depictions of discrimination and acceptance.

(Depictions where the “discriminated minority” isn’t a bunch of white straight dudes with blue hair. Just saying.)

Just, don’t get obsessed over any o them.

Description
My Magical School - and a statement about The Harry Potter Paradox

The Harry Potter books had always been very suggestive, and maybe there are the acme of the magical school trope. But I’ve always liked to reimagine them with different premises. For example, mixed species, everyone gets a chance to be schooled. Especially cuddly orcs like Bolt, a character created by Hogs. Secondly, magic requires physical performance too, to get rid of that squishy mage trope. In third place, no fucking wands. Watching people pointing sticks at one another is BORING.

Harry Potter teaches us an important civility lesson: discrimination is bad.

When practiced against white, straight people.

The recent transphobe tweets from JKR , more infamous than ever because related to the COVID-19 global emergency, plunged the fandom of Harry Potter’s franchise into chaos.

How could such an engaging and heartfelt story that helped so many kids and teenagers to cope with the anxieties of growing up, and inspirated so many homoerotic fanfictions with the blessing of the author, being written by such a reactionary person?

How to live with that?

Let’s find out. But first…
My experience with Harry Potter
My first Harry Potter book was The Globet of Fire, a gift for my 15th birthday from the then companion of my mother, so I happened to be more or less of the same age as the protagonist.

And I loved it.

It was to the perfect compromise for an insecure queer teenager scared like hell by sex. Whimsical enough to lure the inner child that still couldn’t accept that childhood was over, and with the drama and action needed to satisfy the adolescent.

No one other book of this saga gave me the same sense of wonder: The previous books were too childish, and the subsequent ones so gritty and dramatic to the point of being dull and just lowering my empathy for the characters. Especially Harry.

Oh my, I would have slapped him silly so many times.

(After a few years, I had to admit that The Globet of Fire had the most contrived plot of the entire saga, just to understand the power of novelty and nostalgia.)

The point is that I really loved the saga, and I really appreciated it for having ignited my joy for reading in an era where YA literature wasn’t yet a thing. There were silly books for children and tedious books for adults. A teenager could spend his high school years without reading a single book of his own free will.

We can say that Harry Potter ignited the YA phenomenon.

I just didn’t love it enough to get into the fandom. Let alone that the first internet connection in my house had still two years to come, but when I found it, I was kind of baffled.

Harry Potter books were great, but not that great, right?
The Queer Analogy
Ha, how many of us dreamt to receive the letter from Hogwarts and leave their boring and frustrating muggle life for studying friggin’ magic?

(I didn't, because I read the books out of order and I spoiled the scene, but that was my fault.)

That’s to say that the fantasy of a boy with an unsupportive family that feels out of place, has not defined personality and all of sudden receives the call from a world of wonder, is very much cathartic to a queer teenager.

It’s the age where a lot of us feel that they can’t fit the mold, we restrain ourselves to don’t let our queerness come out and as a consequence, we didn’t develop a strong persona, we feel like our parents won’t accept us entirely and we build a protective wall of silence that maybe will never be dismantled.

We just want a place where to feel normal, accepted, maybe even considered special in a positive way. Get true friends and discover our talents. Keep our parents at a safe distance and preserve only the childish and caring memory of them.

Let’s call it acceptance fetish.

That’s the fantasy that Harry Potter served.

But there’s a problem. Harry Potter isn’t about being a queer teenager.

It’s about being a teenager. Period.
The Fanfiction
Before going on, I must mention that there’s even a pro-queer element outside the fourth wall: the author explicitly endorsing fanfiction about her characters. Something that not everyone does. Anne Rice (the grandma of sexy vampires) and George Martin don’t for example.

Fanfiction is mostly romance and male on male romance if we consider the statistics of Archive of our Own as representative. Explaining why M/M romance (and yaoi if we consider the visual equivalent) is so popular between young women a topic on its own. And not, as a gay man, I’m not against it.

Let’s say that this phenomenon contributed to the attributed queer allegory of Harry Potter without having clear analogies for queerness in the actual story.

Because it has never been the author’s plan from the beginning.
A story about Wish Fulfillment
Before proceeding…
Let’s get the funny contrivances out of the way.

Inhale…

Hogwarts is a nightmarish deathtrap, teachers don’t care about the activity of Voldemort’s minions that infiltrate every year, nor about the safety of their students, but they shouldn’t because if a bunch normal 11 years old kids had the possibility to learn friggin’ magic, they would all be Hermione Granger, able to throw fireballs and burn the Basilisk to a crisp within the Christmas break, but they would still graduate with a 5th-grade understanding of literature, science, and math, and maybe that explains why the economy is run by goblins.

Inhale again…

Wands look campy, no matter how much solemnly the actors of Voldemort and Dumbledore try to wave them, and they’re just a catch to make a mage unable to cast spells or to swindle three times the Dark Lord, because Harry is able of pretty impressive wandless magic, when the writer needs it. And guns and rifles would have been a better choice in the battle scenarios. RIP.

Wheeze…

From the fifth book onward, the author starts making shit up at the last minute.

Fun, right? It always is. But all those contrivances I’ve listed have a purpose in common: serving the wish-fulfillment trope of a group of teenagers outwitting (and Disarming) over and over trained adults and give to the readers the sensation of control and power they can’t get with their parents, teachers, classmates and so on.

And that’s the point. Teenagers. Not queer teenagers.

You don’t need to be queer to don’t fit the mold, because this mold is so rigid and narrow. You don’t need to be queer to feel like your parents won’t support you in everything you’d want to say and do.

Being queer only ensures and magnifies this hardship. But it’s something that every kid that sees their childhood collapsing under the weight of disappointments and hormones gets to experience.

Some cope with that feeling turning complete tribalistic and obsessing with their mates and dad about sports, cars and cunt. Some have their catharsis watching B-movies with dudes punching and shooting their way through a personal affirmation, some others develop the acceptance fetish, and prefer stories where the protagonist travels to a magical world where everyone appreciates them and they save the day with the power of their common sense and birth-given talents.

Assuming that Harry Potter had actual queer subtexts, has a name: disidentification .

The art of identifying with fictional characters and stories that weren’t made for you and have just vague and unintentional analogies with your problems and desires.

Like flipping through a Men’s Health magazine and believing that all those photos of ripped men were shot for homoerotic titillation. Or that Darth Maul from Star Wars is the space opera analogous of a leather daddy.

Given how little we are fairly represented, or represented at all in mainstream fiction, we become pretty good at disidentification.

Queer Harry Potter readers have seen a queer allegory in a story that was just about dealing with the anxieties of growing up.
A story about Equality?
Then, what about the theme of discrimination that’s present in the story? The bad guys are literally nazi-wizards. Isn’t that a story that encourages the reader to be welcoming and open-minded to everyone different?

Yes and no.

First of all, people can differentiate their discrimination. Although it more frequently overlaps and openly racist people are also misogynistic and homophobic (yeah, that uncle), somebody can be anti-racist but homophobic. Anti-homophobic but biphobic, and so on.

So, yeah, it may be possible that while she was writing the books JK Rowling was thinking about queer people while describing the discrimination against mudbloods, that pop up randomly from families without having a heritage.

But if it was the case, she was thinking about the more innocuous variant of queer people: gay people. The one that can be more easily tolerated because their existence doesn’t contradict the traditional views on gender roles that much, compared to a bi person or a trans person for example.

I’m gay so I can say that.

By the way, using fictional emarginated classes that are all white straight people never convinced me, it was used to exhaustion by the X-Men comics, and we should really move on from this trope.

Especially when the marginalized trait is something that in reality would make you just cooler than the others.

Also the “half-blood” term: sometimes it baffles me to think how this word evolved from being a slur against the children of raped slaves, to the warranty that this character will end up doing something very cool that none of their parent species could do. Like wielding Tessaiga or combining wizards’ power with muggles’ common sense.

Talking of slaves…
The parade of red flags
For a story about “discrimination is bad” the case of house-elves being happy about their condition of servants, and Hermione mocked for trying to fight for their liberation, is contradictory.

Dobby is an elf who rebels to the control of his masters and gets freedom, but he’s the exception, not the rule. His rebellion is the result of strong morality and the physical mistreatment of his masters, suggesting that slavery is ok ‘till you don’t beat your slaves or they have a submissive nature.

That sounds so Gone with the Wind, that was a revolutionary movie for its view about the rights of black people.

In the US during the 50s.

Here we are talking about UK during the 90s.

The entire tolerance moral is undermined by the fact that in the entire saga there are are only two characters explicitly mentioned as a person of color, a team member of Gryffindor’s Quidditch team — yeah, that irrelevant — and Cho Chang, the exotic beauty from the East that doesn’t make good wife material.

And all the other fantasy races are very stereotyped, some of them plainly evil or opportunistic, like giants and goblins. And some other just not trustworthy friends or allies, because sooner or later their twisted mentality and culture kicks in and makes them do stupid things.

If we can consider the whiteness of the cast as just a product of its time (it was), there is another narrative choice that makes the worldbuilding very conservative and kinky at the same time.
Be fruitful and multiply

Maybe her divorce and period of poverty with a child to raise all by herself made JK Rowling develop some issues with her parenting. Because she imbibed her fictional society with norms about family and motherhood that we could call… nostalgic.

At 20 years the average wizard considers himself realized and satisfied with sexual and emotive exploration enough to marry and have children.

That’s so conservative from one-side, but also very appealing to teenagers that have developed idealization of parenthood. Both as a cute fantasy and as a fetish.

Especially with mothers. JK Rowling gives much more relevance to the role of mothers compared to fathers.

Mrs. Weasly is the second best example. Her entire character is just “mama bear”, and her desire to protect her children makes her able to defeat Bellatrix (to disintegrate her in the movies, like she was a friggin’ vampire exposed to sunlight.) Like motherhood was a power enhancer.

While Lily Potter is the prime example. Her sacrifice to protect her child creates a meta-magic able to reflect the killing curse from Voldemort and keep all the Death Eaters away from the neighborhood of her sister.

James Potter too sacrificed himself for protecting his beloved ones, but it didn’t create a super-protection. Why? Because he was just the father? Because a father cannot reach the intensity of the bond between a mother and his child?

The idea of motherly superpowers isn’t progressive, because it reduces a woman, a person, to her role as a mother.

It can be quite convincing to a teenage girl because that’s an age where you still didn’t have many accomplishments to build your sense of self-esteem on, and at least you know you gonna have the privilege of carrying a child into the world.

But it is alienating to women that for one reason on the other can’t or don’t want to have children in their lives.

It’s convoluted also because this plot device (the magic protection of Lily) could have been fixed quite easily, as the writer FayOnix suggested in the Mythcreants Podcast :

Make her a very skilled make (Professor Sloughhorn stated that in the sixth book) and make her cast a very powerful spell that requires the sacrifice of the caster to operate. It’s still a sacrifice, but a sacrifice that works because it’s a deliberate choice made by a thinking person, not a fortunate coincidence motivated by the force of motherly love.

An actual spell of this magic system, and not some romantic meta-magic, would have made much more sense having the arbitrary limitations it shows in the story.

The first one: Voldemort can evade it through dark magic in the fourth book. The second one: the meta-magic and its incommensurable effect of keeping away every ill-intentioned wizard from Privet Drive fade away after Harry Potter comes of age in the last book.

What? Lily Potter is ok with taking care of your children but only until you’re legally obligated?

And speaking about giving too many responsibilities to twentysomethings…
Severus Snape, you suck

Inhale…

Severus Snape is a bully teacher that abuses his students, especially the ones already with self-worth issues. He shouldn’t have been a teacher, no matter how slightly less incompetent than the other teachers he is in tracking Voldemort’s infiltrates. The reveal that he was bullied by the father of Harry and was stalking his mother makes him just a very sore loser that can’t get over high school mentalities and takes squalid revenge over an 11 years old boy.

Inhale again…

Redeeming him at the end of the saga is taking advantage of the above-mentioned high school mentality or the average reader, that’s still too young, or at least immature, to know that personal responsibility is a thing and you can’t get away with mistreating others just because you were mistreated when you were a teenager. Everybody hurts, it’s a reason to be kinder to others, not complete assholes.

Saying that he’s a good person because he is a counter-spy on the side of Dumbledore is like saying that Goku is a good father because one time he defeated Freezer.

I suggest imagining the story with inverted genders: if Snape was a woman, would have been still considered a flawed but sympathetic character? She would have been hated and called c*nt all the time.

In the end, Severus Snape is similar to Edward Cullen and Christian Grey. A dark and broody guy, with creepy stalking habits, who needs the help of an innocent woman to heal his soul and open his earth to the world. The only difference is that Severus didn’t get the girl and went bitter.

Because he hasn’t nice hair.

The contrivances I’ve listed so far are quite different than the others about wish-fulfillment and are the ones that made me not grow an obsession over these books.

These were the red flags that made me understand that the author wasn’t completely in line with a theme of tolerance and acceptance.

Because horrible people get forgiven because they had a troubled adolescence. Because women are reduced to their roles as mothers. Because the condemned racism is between white and straight people, and fuck house-elves. Because wizards fucking marry and have children at 20 years!

Maybe I was just old enough to start noticing it, and keeping myself critical about this universe and its rules, and I really can’t blame people who accepted those tropes without judgment.

It happened something similar to me quite recently to a smaller scale. An artist that I frankly adored and inspired me a lot, came up in those days with some pro-police tweets about the BLM movement in the US. And some other people reported to me that he had quite a controversial opinion during the shitshow that was the gamergate a few years ago.

It was an hard hit, way worse than the JK Rowling statements because I was resonating with him and glossing over his use of potentially harmful tropes, hoping that they weren’t meaning anything about the ideas of their creators.

Well, they were. I got burned
Conclusion
In the end, can we still enjoy Harry Potter even if the author is transphobe?

Yes, if we contextualize it. If we admit its nostalgic glamour (it was already nostalgic when it came out!) and recognize that it was published in the early 2000s. The years of 9/11, George W. Bush and Avril Lavigne. The bar for being progressive or even radical was set at a different point.

If an author can create innovative storytelling in a time frame, but the same author wasn’t able to keep up with the times or even with the trends they themselves created, that doesn’t completely undermine the quality of their past works, when they were up with the times.

Also, there’s a lot of spec-fic literature to consume nowadays. Some of that is older than Harry Potter and aged better, as the Discworld series of Terry Pratchett.

Yeah, JK Rowling exhausted the magic school trope, and nowadays isn’t yet found an author capable of invoking again that sense of whimsy and wish-fulfillment without looking like an emulator of JK Rowling. I think that we weren’t going to find another magic school saga any time soon.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep exploring and step out of our comfort zones, explore new literary worlds and growing attachment to new archetypes, maybe even find of creating more fitting depictions of discrimination and acceptance.

(Depictions where the “discriminated minority” isn’t a bunch of white straight dudes with blue hair. Just saying.)

Just, don’t get obsessed over any o them.