For a Harry Potter fan, it's generally not a good thing if J.K. Rowling is trending in the morning. The writer behind the best-selling book series of all time—which redefined how lucrative properties aimed at kids could be—has never been able to let her series go. It means that one day she might reveal that Hogwarts once had no bathrooms, or that a Navajo legend is actually a sign of wizards—and usually nobody is happy about it.

On Thursday, however, the news was even worse than usual. In response to an employment discrimination case in Britain, the author tweeted her support of an anti-trans researcher, and immediately faced accusations of transphobia and backlash from fans. It wasn’t the first time;
in early 2018, she favorited a tweet insulting trans women, but later claimed it was an accident, a “middle-aged moment,” her reps said. For a single “like,” it drew a remarkable amount of criticism from the tight-knit and organized Harry Potter fan community in the U.S. “She is transphobic, at least in the ways that so many average cisgender people can be. However, because she’s J.K. Rowling, creator of the best-selling book series of all time and an idol to so many LGBTQ+ children and now adults, she gets called out for it,” writer Katelyn Burns concluded in March 2018, after citing an example from one of Rowling’s post-Potter novels.

The response to her latest tweet was even more intense. “JK Rowling is a TERF” (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) was trending within hours, and the conversation continued throughout the day. It led a handful of parents to question on Twitter whether it was appropriate to keep reading Harry Potter to their children, and may affect the way the books and their creator are seen by progressive Americans.

The Harry Potter franchise remains a massive cultural touchstone for many millennials, which means it’s used as a metaphor for just about everything—politics included. “[Rowling’s] politics were such a key part of building the political base of the Harry Potter fandom community in the beginning,” said Ashley Hinck, author of Politics for the Love of Fandom, pointing to Rowling’s public support for the Labour Party and the moment in 2007 when she belatedly revealed that Dumbledore was gay.

But the books’ political influence—as a story that some interpret as a parable about facism and the triumph of good over evil—has long existed beyond their author’s beliefs. “I see the Harry Potter book, that text, as operating in the same way union does or operating in the same way that a political identity does, [helping] people figure out what their politics are,” Hinck said. “The political commitments of the Harry Potter fandom are influenced by other forces besides J.K Rowling. I’m thinking of the great social justice culture on Tumblr…or [the Y.A. author] John Green. She’s just missing it—her influence just isn’t quite the same anymore.”

A vibrant DIY culture has long surrounded the Potter fandom, and has been encouraged by Rowling herself from time to time, though she and Warner Bros., which distributed the films, have also intervened to stop some unauthorized books and merchandise. That community has also already spent considerable time grappling with Rowling and her beliefs. Earlier this year, the artist Maia Kobabe attempted to address the divide in a fanzine called “Harry Potter and the Problematic Author.” Kobabe, who is nonbinary and uses e/em/eir pronouns, is a longtime Harry Potter fan but started to rethink things in 2016, when the first part of Rowling’s “History of Magic in North America” short story series drew criticism for a stereotypical and inaccurate portrayal of Native Americans. The zine explains how that auxiliary Harry Potter community reframes what fandom really means.

“She’s a loosey-goosey worldbuilder,” Kobabe said of Rowling in a recent interview. “The books, if you look at them plot-wise, are full of holes. There’s tons of things that don’t fully make sense and aren’t really completely logical. Because of that, fans have been able to read into the text and embroider it with their own meaning and their own interpretation.”

Rowling is also in a different place than her young American fans: She’s a 54-year-old, extremely wealthy woman in the U.K., where mainstream feminism is often far less accepting of trans people than in the United States. Rowling’s tweets about the 2019 general election suggest that she’s an avid reader of the center-left press, where anti-trans arguments are relatively common. Her views may be a disappointment to the generations of Americans who regard her series of books as a source of moral education, but perhaps not a surprise.

Among Potter readers of various ages and intensities, an air of frustrated resignation has settled. It’s summed up by something Kobabe said: “She’s going to get left behind in history…If she had never joined Twitter and just stopped adding after the final book was published, she would be idolized.”

Rowling probably won’t stop talking, and as of Thursday, her rep had rebuffed GLAAD’s attempt to have an off-the-record conversation about the comments. So while a conversation has begun among some fans about whether to keep the books as a touchstone, Harry Potter’s hold remains a strong one. We’re going to be doing this for a very long time.

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