By David T. Valentin
At a Christie’s Auction sale, an auction house known for some pretty high quality wares, J.K. Rowling’s signed first edition of a Harry Potter set went unsold despite the price being as low as $119,500.
The set was signed by Rowling for some of the proceeds to go towards the Lumos Foundation, a foundation named after the Lumos lighting spell in Harry Potter and whose goal is to reform orphanage institutions to provide better care to the children.
As The Mary Sue points out, while the price may seem a bit high for the average Harry Potter fan, “this price is on par with what it costs for a single valuable book, let alone a set. In fact, t’s low for the Potter series, as in December 2021, Heritage Auctions broke records when it sold a first edition of just the first novel for $471,000.”
While Rowland’s quickly plummeting downfall might seem as something that was a long time coming, she’s recently been doubling down so hard that, somehow, she’s praised and even supports Matt Walsh, a man who openly and proudly self-identifies as a fascist. Seriously, go check out his Twitter, but don’t stay for too long.
Back in May, Rowling denounced the United Kingdom’s Labor Party when she openly critiqued director of public prosecutions and Labor Leader Keir Starmer. Starmer said, “A woman is a female adult, and in addition to that trans women are women, and that is just not my view, that is actually the law. It has been the law through the combined effects of the 2004 [Gender Recognition] Act and the 2010 [Equality] Act.”
In response, Rowling tweeted: “I don’t think our politicians have the slightest idea how much anger is building among women from all walks of life at the attempts to threaten and intimidate them out of speaking publicly about their own rights, their own bodies and their own lives.”
How Rowling doesn’t understand the very real discrimination Transwomen face through not only homophobia, but also eventually misogyny as a woman herself who has gone through such discrimination is beyond me. How exactly someone can call themselves a feminist while ignoring a marginalized groups oppression to prop herself up as if to say “my trauma is somehow more real” is almost laughable.
And yet, here we are: witnessing the author of a series that empowered so many become something she openly critiqued wholeheartedly throughout her entire book series.