Harry Potter is violently transphobic? Wild. Not surprised that RHPS isn’t meeting the purity test these days. They have no idea how revolutionary it was.
The Year Zero ideologues never fail to astonish me with their idiocy and hypocrisy. I was shouting at a podcast the other day because it was attempting to grapple with a notorious trans identified male from the 70s - the subject was the movie Dog Day Afternoon. In that, the main character robs a bank, ostensibly to get money to pay for his lover’s sex change surgery. Now both of those men were entirely clear that they were in a gay relationship, and the TIM was clear that he was a man for most of the time they were together, and that he was latterly a transexual but this never wholly over rode his identification as a gay man. But the hosts just couldn’t bring themselves to do anything but overlay this with modern day sensibilities. They referred to the man as “she” throughout, that he was “transgender”, that he wanted “gender confirmation surgery” Etc. They barely contained their bafflement at how benighted they thought attitudes were “back then”.
I was fizzing. Firstly: most people were broadly “live and let live”, and people with different lifestyles and beliefs may have been curiosities but they weren’t being routinely chased down the street by pitchfork wielding mobs either. Secondly: your modern sensibilities are just one way of perceiving and explaining the world and other people in other times and places may well understand and perceive themselves very differently. But that doesn’t make them “wrong” and it’s hugely disrespectful to decide that your version of them is more truthful than their own, and inflict it on them posthumously. I love these podcasters but can’t stand this aspect. It’s so galling when the “kind” thing to do is supposed to be “refer to people and treat them according to how they wish to be referred to“ - not if it doesn’t fit, eh?
It’s like the posthumous re-writing of Marsha P Johnston and the stonewall riots. He was a gay man and never thought of himself as anything else and I can only imagine the horror he’d have felt at his posthumous recreation as a stunning trans woman icon.