We're making our own Hogwarts! With trans people! And minorities!

[bladespark]

The Dogbumps Academy of Wayward Wixards anthology is currently accepting story submissions.

So would you like to join in a giant "fuck you" to J.K. Rowling's TERFy ways? Would you like to get paid to do that? Please consider submitting a story!

Now admittedly, the pay isn't much, ten bucks would ordinarily make me shrug and pass on to something that might at least come close to minimum wage for my time. But I make exceptions for projects I feel strongly about and ideas that genuinely excite me.

And I've wanted to write a transmasculine sorcerer for aaaaaaaaaages, so, here we go. He's about to get his origin story in a way I never could have anticipated. But tbh him getting a really solid origin story makes the short I want to write of a particular post-school incident work about a million times better, so I'm thrilled.

I really, really, really hope this anthology becomes a huge success, they publish another half dozen volumes of it, and everybody gets to write the version of Hogwarts that frankly should have existed, where Dumbledore isn't in the closet (I agree with people who say he does read in text as credibly gay, but he's definitely not out!) and where the wizarding world is accepting of people who are different from the mundane. I mean gosh golly gee, I know it's a real reach to think outsiders in the Muggle world might, in fact, have some sympathy for queer folx, but we're authors, we're supposed to be able to imagine the impossible, right?

:D

(This topic makes me incredibly sarcastic and possibly a little incoherent. But seriously, if you can come up with an idea, write and submit. I want this thing to succeed! I want to it to get so many amazing submissions that my story isn't a shoo-in. Like, if this collects me my first official rejection slip, I'd be delighted, you know?)

Comments

[greghousesgf]

"Muggle" ALWAYS felt derogatory to me.

[alexseanchai]

I'm pretty sure that's always how JKR wizards have used it, it's just that "Muggle-born" is not very vile compared to other canonical phrasings of the thing, so the protagonists didn't really notice

[bladespark]

In a real world context, I feel like it'd be derogatory a bit the way "cracker" is, i.e. from a minority group towards a majority group, so without the bite of historical oppression. Although I suppose magic giving wizards literal power over the mundanes adds a more nuanced spin to that take.

As for how Rowling meant it...who knows? There may not have been much thought put into it. Mudblood certainly was meant as an outright slur, and it exists in contract to muggle, to a certain extent.

[greghousesgf]

I'm not so much thinking of it in the context of minority/majority as the context of have/have not.

[bladespark]

Yeah, that's a fair take. I mean, there's part of me that wants to dive down the rabbit hole of what it all "really" means in the bigger context. Does the history of witch-burning affect who's oppressing who here? What does it mean to have a slur towards a group of people who have and will literally never hear it? Does that make it harmless, or does that make it worse? But I mean, the actual reality is Rowling went "they'd probably have a word for that" and came up with muggle, and that was as much thought as it got. Even the intended in-universe slur, "mudblood", isn't really used in a nuanced way, it's just something the characters she wants to mark out as bad people (who may or may not get redemption arcs depending) say to establish that they're bad.

[greghousesgf]

what I found really off putting was a sequence fairly early in the first book where Harry reasonably asks why the whole wizarding world has to be kept a secret and is told something to the effect of "we don't want those people bothering us with their problems". If I were suddenly told I had real magic powers my day one agenda would be getting rid of a few diseases.

[alexseanchai]

*considers*

[cornerofmadness]

Thank you. I need to do this!