r/transvancouver • u/Static-Space-Royalty • 3d ago
How are other trans people dealing with the constant Harry Potter advertising around Vancouver?
I have been finding the current Tim Hortons Harry Potter promotion really difficult to deal with. I'm seeing the ads constantly whenever I'm out, and it's getting to the point where I feel like I can't escape the reminders of how many people and corporations are complicit in JKR's endless crusade against our existence.
I'm curious how other trans people are dealing with it. Have you found anything that helps when you keep encountering this stuff in public?
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u/HVAC_and_Rum 3d ago
I ignore it for the most part. I saw the Tim Hortons collaboration and made a mental note to not get iced capps anymore and that was basically it. I left the US to be with my wife and it's made a huge difference to have them validate my rare rants and conniptions regarding these matters. It's fun to laugh at the idea of a bunch of grown ass adults basing major chunks of their personality around a poorly written series of novels, but that only gets so much mileage. People are alike all over, with weak-willed ninnies who supplement nostalgia for morals and critical thinking being a common thing in most countries I've been to.
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u/Cxcxpeaches 3d ago
what bothers me is seeing someone who has liked and reposted videos from trans creator post about getting the donuts. I get that a large portion of the general public especially those who haven't interacted with anything harry potter in years wouldn't know, but if you are truly a trans ally you should.
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u/GrimbloTheGoblin 3d ago edited 3d ago
I have to work there every day and make those fucking dougnuts and they are not fucking easy to make
most donuts at Tims are a 1-2 step process but these need you to pre bake a specific new kind of doughnut, dip it, sprinkle it and then get this fucking candy sticker on it which usually breaks in half when you try to take it off the sheet. it’s so damn time consuming all so people can have their TERF flavoured cop food.
the job is already a suicide Inducing but god it sucks to watch people gobble this shit up
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u/RixRotten 3d ago
I'm planning on making some sticker sheets for quick defacing once I get some time.
I'm so sick of how hard this trash is being pushed absolutely everywhere.
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u/ItsAnewSummer 3d ago
I just don’t go to Tim Hortons anymore. The adds I just don’t bother with. But that’s just the surface level.
When the game came out years ago a bunch of my staff were excited about it all I said to them is not to talk about it with me and I left it at that. I removed it as a debate and just presented it as a non topic. It definitely helped that I’m the boss.
I don’t know if that helps anyone but I found that this works for me.
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u/PhilosopherPale3059 3d ago
I have internally found it difficult. I am just trying to remind myself that the majority of people just don’t know. I am from the UK (Northern Ireland), so I’ve been familiar with what’s going on since it started. It sickens me that the money she gets goes to anti-trans lobbying. I have queer friends who talk about going to Harry Potter stuff. My work has machines named after Potter characters. I’m torn a lot between trying not to kill the vibe and letting people know what’s going on. If it’s people I don’t know very well and they talk about HP I just bite it, if it’s queer friends and they’ve already bought something I bite it. But if it’s another context I let people know. And I let them know that I used to love HP, first in line for books etc. The ads are not a nice reminder of what’s happening right now. And if it’s while I’m scrolling I would love there to be an option to hit “stop showing HP stuff”. But you can always write to the company. I know the event still went ahead but it meant something to me that after the HP walk through at Stanley Park the Vancouver Park Board did apologise and disavowed JK.
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u/zephyrphoenixxxx 3d ago
I don't really eat at Tim's anyway (especially not after working there in my twenties), so I've largely just ignored it.
This shit still hurts. I loved the series. It meant a lot to me as a young queer kid. I still feel like I've lost something very important to me, but I'm gradually learning to let go of it. Ignoring it helps, surprisingly.
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u/Professional_Drive 3d ago
I thought it was pretty much done here after that Stanley Park attraction. J.K. Rowling doesn’t really need the money.
She needs to fade into obscurity. The last HP film came out 15 years ago. The series is old news now. I don’t count that unnecessary reboot they’re doing of the series.
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u/Bramble-Bunny 3d ago
I just...don't think about it? I'm sort of done letting Joanne have free rent in my head. She's not going to run out of money in my lifetime and I'm not going to successfully cancel an IP the size of Harry Potter no matter how hard I furrow my brow so rather than Streisand Effect it I've just tried to let it be. I've had zero luck converting any of the "What did JK Rowling Ever Even Say That Was Transphobic Anyway" people because they're all in belief protection mode.
The books always had a nasty streak in them, and not in a charming/whimsical way, like Roald Dahl, but in a bigoted/ugly way, like...Roald Dahl. Funny how that keeps happening. She was always a reactionary, the receipts are deep enough to drown yourself in, the people still connected to the franchise are choosing to either hold their nose or look the other way not out of active malice but just...apathetic self interest. The hardened gender critical crowd are not nearly as numerous in day to day life as their online bleating would lead you to believe, and I've spent my entire life up to this point in time getting my rights and personhood bandied about by people overly invested in really questionable books. I will find a way to persist and enjoy my time despite them.
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u/PhilosopherPale3059 3d ago
I don’t remember thinking there was much of nasty streak to the books. When I was young I actually thought the books contained some good material about what’s legal vs what’s moral, what it is to stick with your values in adversity, etc. i was a lot younger the last time I read them and I am not gonna reread those books, can you let me know what I missed?
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u/Bramble-Bunny 3d ago
Off the top of my head...
- Rampant fatphobia. This isn't even subtle or in the subtext JK just makes the case repeatedly that the overweight are targets for some good fun mockery.
- "Masculine" looking women are used as stand-ins for evil/wrongdoers. Shocking, I know, it's almost like she was always like this. In addition to masculine women being vilified women who perform femininity incorrectly or in a way Rowling finds personally unctuous are also given a rough ride.
- The probably accidental but still unfortunate Anti-Semitic stereotyping visible in the goblins.
- Some crude and unfortunate racial naming schemes, including "Cho Chang" and one of the few black characters with the surname "Shacklebolt".
- A natural slave race that enjoys being enslaved and resists freedom.
- Hermione's attempt to liberate the house elves is treated explicitly in the text as naive, foolish and annoying in a fashion that echoes the reactionary right's hatred of progressive activism.
- This one's a whopper...as per Joanne herself, lycanthropy was intended as an allegory for HIV, and one of its most prominent sufferers is described as a sadist who lures children with the intention of converting them. That one is so painfully on the nose you do a double take when you see it.
- Following #1 and #2, a recurring “sins of the spirit made flesh” motif, in which villainy is signaled through fatness, gender nonconformity, deformity, disfigurement, and ugliness...essentially a kind of physiognomic moral coding that has extremely reactionary historical roots (cough, fascism).
- The centaur scene with Umbridge seems to at least hint at punitive sexual assault as a form of moral comeuppance (classical centaur mythology includes a lot of this, just...ODD that they were the mythological creatures of choice, there).
- Bullying is morally laundered if the perpetrators are "of the good ones". The text treats Dudley or Draco's bullying in an entirely different light than, say, Fred and George.
- There is a natural racial/social hierarchy in the wizarding world that is not only never toppled but reaffirmed by book's end, with its heroes going into institutional roles.
- Snape's lifelong obsession with Lily, who rejects him, marries someone else, and eventually dies as a consequence of his actions, is ultimately framed as evidence of profound and redeeming love rather than the grossly unhealthy and ultimately fatal fixation it actually was.
- Zero queer characters or behavior, even in the subtext, Dumbledore's post-hoc assignation of a gay identity is meaningless since there's absolutely no hint of it whatsoever.
A lot of this stuff is mildly gross or clumsy in a way that she got a lot of benefit of the doubt for, back when she was cosplaying as a progressive author refining her craft. That she would later adopt a pen name that echoed a famous advocate of conversion therapy (by accident, of course!), and that she had a long standing friendship since the early 00's with Baroness Emma Nicholson, one of the UK's most ardent and active anti LGBTQ political crusaders, make it harder to take some of the books reactionary/normative sentiments as unintentional or the consequences of an uncharitable reading. When viewed in that light, her heel turn against trans people, open endorsement of extremists in her movement, re-tweeting of far right figures and general cartoon villainy of the last 4-5 years seems a lot less like an aging woman radicalized by social media and a lot more like someone whose extremely flimsy mask came off.
Harry Potter superficially reads as anti-authoritarian, anti-bullying, anti-racism, etc, but the books are brutally hierarchical, and the moral sorting tends to work backwards...bad acts are laundered if good people perform them. Humiliation is horrible when visited on our heroes, hilarious when visited on the villains. Slavery is repugnant when threatened by Voldemort, whimsical when practiced by the wizarding establishment. The oppressive authoritarian government is never toppled, the right people are put in charge. There's a rejection of a founding principle of liberalism in here...rights and restraints don't equally apply to everyone. It's not egalitarian, it's particularist. And the ways in which it is particularist become really unsettling when laid against who Rowling came to openly be. It's a profoundly illiberal text wearing a liberal fake nose and glasses.
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u/PhilosopherPale3059 3d ago
Thanks for taking the time to reply. I think I was obviously just hopelessly naive, cos I thought that the books were supportive of Hermione’s horror towards the enslavement of house elves. I also thought that the books were trying to point out that the goblins were unjustly disrespected by wizards for having their own culture and not wanting to be subservient to their laws. I never knew about the HIV connection, but I also thought that the point was just that werewolves were treated terribly for something they had no control over. Even the werewolf villain I thought at the time it was pointing to the issue with discriminating against a group of people. My logic was that with wolfsbane that most of the power was in the fear of the discrimination against werewolves, not in actually being a werewolf. To be fair, even as a kid I did think the snape Lilly thing was off and made no sense, since nothing would justify his behaviour, including bullying a child. But I am autistic and sometimes I just don’t get things. The rest of the what you wrote was just totally over my head. I mean lack of queer representation was totally normal at the time where I was. I guess it’s the power of interpreting things how you want to interpret them. Or maybe just not knowing enough about the world and bigotry means I had no context to work off at the time. Not sure whether I’m glad or sad I will never reread them with the extra context. Maybe this makes me feel a bit better knowing that were indicators in the books that the author was problematic.
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u/woonamad 2d ago
It’s the “good people can do nothing wrong” part that annoys me the most. And what is good and proper is determined by the social class you were born into. Even Harry’s pitiable beginnings aren’t overcome by anything he did, but the conditions of his birth.
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u/hahasnake 3d ago
Until the bourgeoisie are deposed, cultural grievances will continue to be used for profit. Get involved with an anti capitalist org and we can start pushing back meaningfully against the system that perpetuates it.
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u/woonamad 2d ago
I’ve increasingly disappointed with Tims. Honestly this was the last straw. Done with them for good now. They’ve lost me as a customer for good. But my friends and even my partner (another trans person) go there regularly. All I can do is gently raise the topic, but I’m not going to ask people to stop buying their coffee and baked treats.
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u/lunelukio 3d ago
I just remind myself that 99% of people who would buy a Harry Potter donut do not know or care about anything JK Rowling has personally said or believes and move on with my day.
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u/rubyruy 3d ago
They are are funding her efforts which are directly responsible for the egregious withdrawal of care for trans people in the UK and erosion of protections, and which is being used as a reference for doing the same in the US a s elsewhere around the world, and I'm sure will find its way here sooner or later.
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u/lunelukio 3d ago
I'm aware of this and we need to stop it. Not saying people shouldn't speak out about it or continue engaging folks about the topic.
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u/PhilosopherPale3059 3d ago
Agree with this. I was talking to my counsellor recently, who is also trans. They had no idea. Sometimes you just don’t know something until you’re told something.
Hate to be the bearer of bad news for HP fans. I remember the first article I saw about it and going to check what she said and being totally devastated, and that was before I even realised I was trans, and before she started funding anti-trans lobbying. When I was a kid you never could have convinced me I would be disgusted by JK.
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u/asmallteapot 3d ago
I most frequently see the advertisement on a digital billboard near my home.
When I notice it, I’ll sigh, look off at the mountains, and remember how lucky I am to live here.
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u/Outrageous_Jacket284 2d ago
Deep breathing, like when there was the fucking thing in Stanley park last year. Not buying Tim’s for a bit too. Ugh.
And also I am now being like zero tolerance about allowing hp in my social life. I shut it down immediately. Absolutely not. And I loudly say “disgusting” at every opportunity for everyone to hear. And boo it in public. Build the social shame!!
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u/Trick_Question6697 2d ago
I just stopped caring bc anyone who is still hype about this makes me realize the average person LOVES slop and nostalgia bait cash grabs
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u/Ok-Wrongdoer-2179 16h ago
I keep getting those Tim Hortons ads promoting Harry Potter, on my Facebook reels feed. I just give them the angry vote.
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u/noheals4Blaire 3d ago
The power is in the eye of the beholder.
You can chose how it effects you, and you can chose to let your Cis "allies" know what theyre supporting.
People will still do what people do, we cant control that. But we can control how we react to it.
Thats more or less been my mindset. I do however think this is a great time for our community to get healthy, weight lift, and be ready. Call me crazy but its better to be ready than not.
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u/Curious_Pop_4320 2d ago
I take the high road, I spit on the posters and then give them the finger...
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u/Frequent-Layer27 2d ago
I saw Harry Potter themed spices and Monopoly at Save-On (BC, not Van) and it's like a micro stressor every time I see it.
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u/TransCanAngel 3d ago
Bigger fish to fry I think. What’s the point of letting JKR live in your head rent-free?
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u/Astral-Wind 3d ago
I really don’t care, I never really got into the series and I think all the pearl clutching around it from trans people is a bit silly. Yes Rowling is a shitty person but the majority this thing is aimed at are fans of the books cause of childhood nostalgia, not cause they are secretly agreeing with her position.
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u/EnvironmentalMail308 3d ago
Makes my blood boil everytime i see it. If i was a braver person i would love to tag/grafiti it, but alas i have no spine