Ammel SharonOctober 7, 2025 07:34 AM IST First published on: Oct 7, 2025 at 07:34 AM ISTJ K Rowling’s anger over what she calls the “public betrayal” by Harry Potter stars Emma Watson, Daniel Radcliffe, and Rupert Grint shows little sign of easing. On Jay Shetty’s podcast, Watson recently declined to “cancel” Rowling, saying instead that she would hold their incompatible views in tension, hoping they might one day be reconciled. Rowling swiftly rejected this conciliatory gesture on X. Claiming that Watson’s lifelong affluence meant she would “never likely need” single-sex spaces, Rowling suggested her own experience of poverty had made her more protective of women’s sex-based rights. Though she once acknowledged the vulnerability of trans people, Rowling’s stance that sex is biological, binary, and immutable has helped harden attitudes that endanger trans women’s rights and safety. The conflict feels almost like the fable of Pinocchio — Rowling’s creations have turned their gaze on their maker’s limits.A recent Saturday Night Live sketch captured this reversal: Dobby, Rowling’s fictional house elf, struggles to defend his master’s instructions to “define, once and for all, what a woman is”. “Master Rowling has done so much for Dobby and for inclusion in general,” he stammers. “Remember when Dumbledore was gay after the books came out? When Hermione was Black only on Broadway? And when Cho Chang was… wait, was Cho Chang Asian?” Watching her characters slip from Rowling’s grasp, we are reminded of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s reflection on Pinocchio: The puppet’s journey expresses the fundamental instability of human identity. In a similar fashion, perhaps this refusal to be fixed is what makes trans experience so threatening to those invested in certainty.AdvertisementThe question of whether facts alone can change minds isn’t new. It haunted W E B Du Bois, the first African American to earn a PhD from Harvard. Though he began his career countering racist pseudoscience with empirical research, Du Bois had to turn to a lyrical, multi-genre style to change hearts and minds.I think of this as a teacher navigating shifts in gender discourse, vocabularies drawn from social media, and the expanding possibilities of medical transition. When faced with confusion or disagreement in the classroom, I turn to literature, not for answers, but for language to hold contradictions. A Revathi’s The Truth About Me, an autobiography shaped before the idiom of rights became mainstream, illuminates hijra life, reminding us that recognition and empathy often arrive through narrative and not terse, uncompromising positions.Recently, my friend Aarohi suggested I read Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby (2021). It follows three women — Reese, a trans woman; Ames, her ex who has detransitioned; and Katrina, his cisgender lover. Peters writes with disarming wit about gender, love, and the longing to build a life beyond prescribed roles. I recognised that despite feminism’s gains, women are still offered only four routes to fulfilment — love, career, motherhood, or self-expression. The novel lays bare not just the limits of gender categories, but the emotional toll of trying to live fully within or beyond them.AdvertisementAs they navigate differences, my students, too, question whether the futures they are encouraged to chase are, in Peters’ words, “a big self-pleasuring lie that has little to do with their actual personhood”. In these moments, the classroom becomes a space to explore the instability of identity. Perhaps Rowling, a master of narrative, might also benefit from such stories that broaden our sense of vulnerability beyond the boundaries of our “lived experiences”.The writer is assistant professor (Social Sciences), NLSIU