This Trans Woman Says “Play Hogwarts Legacy”

Phaylen Fairchild
8 min readFeb 4

Over the last year I’ve received countless messages and had more than my fair share of conversations with so many people about a video game- specifically, Hogwarts Legacy, a new high end role playing game set in the magical world of Harry Potter.

Of course, it was none other than the controversial author J.K Rowling herself who wrote the books that would become an intergenerational phenom, now forever embedded into the annals of pop culture. The books spawned a series of mega-successful movies, two spinoff films and a play that takes place in the same universe, and how could we fail to mention an entire themed attraction devoted to recreating the wonder and mysticism of the words brought to life on the page back in 1997.

Today, Rowling is equally- if not more- famous for her extremist views regarding gender. Noticing a frightening trend of the author “Liking” tweets that made inflammatory remarks about trans people, both personally and politically, I wrote an article outing her bad habits. At the time, I had locked horns with the vicious gender critical lesbian, Magdelene Burns, who had called trans women “men in blackface” and kept an infinite timeline of violent and vulgar rhetoric targeting the trans community. That’s when I received the notification “J.K Rowling liked a tweet you were mentioned in.” I was horrified to see the world famous Millionaire and beloved liberal aligning with such radicalized, untethered hatred. She didn’t just do it once, despite the statement that liking such content was the result of “Fumbly fingers” or a “Middle-Aged moment” she later claimed they were. She kept at it, having hourly middle-aged moments, and all the likes flying from her “fumbly fingers” landed on tweets that were cruel and degrading toward the trans community, specifically trans women. That’s what pushed me to write “J.K. Rowling: The Blatant transobia of a Beloved Social Justice Hero” back in early 2018.

People didn’t like that. I was bombarded on twitter by Harry potter fans and conservatives alike who sent me everything from death threats to pornographic material. Articles were written about me by Harry Potter devotees, with one referring to me as “He/she/it.” Yet, still, despite the clamor and new-found attention, Rowling maneuvered herself further down the rabbit hole of gender conspiracy and…

Phaylen Fairchild

Actor, Filmmaker, LGBTQ+ & Women’s Rights Activist All work copyright phaylens@gmail.com