How Breanna Stewart struggles to balance love of Harry Potter with combating J.K. Rowling

Stewart is aware of the discordant note any collaboration that benefits J.K. Rowling sounds, a decision at odds with her consistent work and public statements in support of trans people. It is a painful balance for Stewart, whose connection with the Harry Potter books and films stem from core memories.

“I appreciate you having this conversation with me, because I want to be able to like voice to everyone what it really means to me,” Stewart told The Next in an interview on Wednesday night. “Harry Potter is something that reminds me of my youth and the magic and the storytelling behind it, and when, from the memories of first going to the movies with my cousin and my aunt, and reading the books when I was little, to getting the wand tattooed after my first Achilles surgery, it’s something that brought me joy and happiness.

“And at the same time, I feel like I have to say, with loving Harry Potter and the magic behind that, I don’t align with anything that J.K. Rowling believes or her views, because it’s completely harmful to many different communities.”

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This conflict is not new. The release of the Stewie 3s was met with backlash from fans upset about Stewart working with the brand of Rowling, who for nearly a decade has been the most famous and publicly outspoken transmisogynist and transphobe in the world. Stewart responded to the criticism at the time by affirming her desire to be an ally, noting her past support for trans people and asking for “grace and understanding.” There did not seem to be any acknowledgement of the material harm caused by the collaboration.

It was a surprising decision from Stewart, given her outspoken criticism of efforts to remove trans women and girls from participating in sports alongside their cisgender counterparts; Stewart said in 2018, “I firmly believe we should be passing laws and establishing policies that are inclusive of the transgender community and afford them every opportunity to succeed both in sport and in society.” In 2024, she partnered with Athlete Ally and UNINTERRUPTED on Q & Athlete, a safe space for queer and trans athletes to receive support for questions of identity and queerness with out pro athletes.

Those are directly antithetical to a collaboration with Harry Potter. Several sources familiar with the financial details of such deals, but independent of Stewart, told The Next that amount of money generated for J. K. Rowling out of any such partnership would be negligible.

But all profits made by the Harry Potter brand directly contribute to Rowling’s evangelism of transmisogyny, a connection made explicit by her announcing last month that she was establishing a legal fund to fight for the exclusion of trans women in workplaces and social spaces. The legal justification for this fight is a concept called “sex-based rights,” which inherently precludes equality under the law between men and women. This concept fueled an update to education curriculum by the UK government this week to focus instruction of gender and sex on existing laws, laws which generally do not set blanket equality outside of public agencies and institutions of higher learning or research and specifically exclude trans women from treatment as women.

Stewart described to The Next her shock at seeing the fan response to her first Harry Potter shoes and what she then saw Rowling was saying last year.

“How can I have a world where I can do both, where I can talk about my shoes of Hedwig and [Nagini], but also continuing to actively show support in the transgender community and making it so these shoes are a direct reflection of that, to counterbalance everything that J. K. Rowling has done and said,” Stewart told The Next. “Because there should be a platform where people from all communities, LGBTQ+, transgender communities, can also love Harry Potter and stick up against J. K. Rowling and her peers.”

The conflict between the magical joy of childhood joy and the iniquity of adulthood and its politics is not a new theme, but its salience is underscored in a society that has become increasingly cruel, or has at least lost much of the shame which held such cruelty in check. As such, the ability to separate the art from the artist is both an often-necessary one to enjoy countless standout works and an inordinate feat when, in the case of Harry Potter, the art is part of the monoculture and the artist is one of the most famous individuals on the planet. This is to say: this is a Breanna Stewart struggle, but she is hardly alone in needing to make these calculations. She’s just forced to do it in a more public way than most.

Stewart sees a path to doing so through direct action. She said that discussions with her agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, led her to decide that the royalties from sales of the Harry Potter Stewie 4s would be donated to organizations, especially local ones, which support trans people and fight against Rowling’s efforts, though those plans have not yet been finalized yet. Stewart specifically wanted to ensure that “youth in the transgender community have the resources to be able to live their lives equally and fulfilling and follow their dreams.”

“I want to have a way to be able to love both [the trans community and Harry Potter], and to counterbalance [Rowling],” said Stewart. “Supporting that community here in Brooklyn, that’s something that I would want to do, because I want everyone to have access to the things that I have access to, and be able to find their magic in different ways.”

But the actions of J.K. Rowling may have rendered that equilibrium impossible. What remains to be seen is whether truly balancing art and commerce as it relates to Harry Potter at this fraught moment is the most magical thinking of all.