I write this as a friend of John Nettleship, your science teacher (and, for what it’s worth, as one of the primary canon-analysts in the Harry Potter fandom). I do not have an obvious way of contacting you, so I post this publicly in the hopes that it may come to your attention. You have said that you want to take a scientific stance on gender issues, but it is clear from some of the things that you say about sex determination that John failed to teach you much about how the science actually works.

For example you say that male is what produces sperm and female is what produces ova, and that’s true for a very basic, reproduction-based definition of male and female, but it doesn’t map well to male and female people, because there are people with one ovary and one testicle, people with fused ovo-testes, people born with no gonads at all, and people who are born with a vagina, are hyper-feminine and live their entire lives without ever knowing that they had undescended testicles instead of ovaries. The truth is that there is no scientific or cultural definition of male and female which doesn’t leave some people as both, some as neither and some as “Do you mean anatomically, genetically or neurologically, because they don’t match?” John should probably have taught you that, or at least prepared you for it: but our understanding of biology leaps ahead every six years or so, so a lot of this stuff just wasn’t known in the 1970s, and in any case biology was never really John’s thing. Even when he was dying of cancer I had to explain to him what “metastasis” meant, and he used to send me his medical notes so I could interpret them for him.

The idea that XX = female and XY = male is an example of what we call “lies to children” – an over-simplification taught to young children to get them vaguely on the right page. It’s the biological equivalent of making models of atoms out of pingpong balls and cocktail sticks. To understand what’s wrong with it I need to explain some grown-up, university-level biology, but I’ll try to keep it clear, and explain any maths with examples rather than numbers.

Bear in mind that what I’m going to tell you applies to therian mammals – that is, placentals (such as humans, cats, horses etc) and marsupials. Don’t ask about monotremes (the echidna and platypus). Just don’t. The little bastards have nine or ten sex chromosomes joined in a chain and use totally different genes and hormones from the rest of us.

Any mammal embryo will develop with a broadly female anatomy, with a vagina and usually a womb (although it may or may not develop functioning ovaries, depending on other factors), unless certain biological switches are thrown which cause it to develop male anatomy. The switches have to be thrown in sequence to generate a functioning male, and every one has to work.

The usual process in therian mammals is that the soon-to-be-male embryo has a Y-chromosome, on which are situated a gene called SRY, which throws the first switch, plus some other genes that affect sperm production. The SRY gene causes the embryo to develop testicles instead of ovaries. The testicles then produce high levels of androgens, which cause the embryo’s tissues to respond in a way which results in it developing a penis and scrotum, and not developing a vagina. You may or may not already know this but it’s really the same anatomy, slightly tweaked: a penis is a vagina turned inside out, or vice versa, and a scrotum has the same anatomical origin as labia. The testes also produce high levels of a hormone called AMH (Anti-Müllerian Hormone), which blocks the development of a womb.

There are any number of exciting things which can go wrong with this process.

The embryo may have a Y-chromosome but the SRY gene is missing or defective. In this case the individual will become an XY female – in some cases fully fertile and able to get pregnant normally. We don’t actually know how common this is, because in most cases a fully-fertile XY woman will never know that she is XY; although if she were to have sixty kids, like the famous Russian woman, she might notice that on average she had two girls to every one boy, instead of one to one. We can only say that in some species of mice (who like all rodents are quite closely related to us), fertile XY females are common – and that it’s very unlikely that Molly Weasley is XY, since she tends so heavily towards having sons.

The embryo may not have a Y-chromosome, but one of its X-chromosomes has a functioning SRY gene, or another gene which has mutated to act like an SRY gene. In this case the individual will become an XX male, but they will be sterile because they don’t have the other genes for sperm production.

The embryo may be XX and without an SRY gene, but be exposed to androgens which came not from them but from a male twin whose placenta has become cross-linked to theirs, causing them to develop male characteristics as if they themselves had testicles. This is especially common in cattle, where the intersex calves produced in this way are called freemartins, but it can happen in any therian mammal including us. If I remember correctly, some freemartins still have female external genitals, but a blind vagina and no womb.

The individual may be XY but their body may fail to masculinise fully due to a shortfall of AMH, leaving them with a penis, testicles, a scrotum, a womb and fallopian tubes (called Persistent Müllerian Duct Syndrome). As far as I know these individuals don’t menstruate, because they don’t have an ovarian cycle, and don’t have a fully connected vagina unless one is created surgically: but they could certainly carry an implanted foetus to term if given the right hormones. In some cases incomplete masculinisation may also be due to exposure to excess female hormones during development.

The individual may have Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. To understand this you need to know that everybody, male or female, produces some androgens (and some AMH) – men just produce more. Those androgens masculinise the embryo during development: to a small extent in normally-developing females and to a large extent in normally-developing males.

If a person has Androgen Insensitivity, their tissues fail to masculinise in response to androgens. They will be born with a vagina, regardless of whether they have an SRY gene or not, and regardless of whether they have testicles or ovaries inside.

If they do have an SRY gene, and the insensitivity is only partial, their bodies may masculinise when they get the hormone surge at puberty. There’s a community in the Dominican Republic where a significant proportion of the children are what they call Guevedoces – “Penis at twelves”. They are born apparently as girls, with a vagina, but inside they have undescended testicles instead of ovaries, and at puberty these testicles drop and they suddenly develop a penis and scrotum. No apparently female child in this community can be sure that they really are a girl until puberty: then they either start to bleed or grow a penis.

If the Androgen Insensitivity is total, their body will experience no masculinisation at all, regardless of whether they have an SRY gene or not. These individuals are the most feminine that they can possibly be, not only with a vagina and big breasts but with ultra-delicate feminine features and very feminine behaviour, because they don’t experience even the slight androgen-induced masculinisation seen in hormonally normal women. But because the gene for this is what’s called an X-linked recessive, then as with ginger cats, two thirds of them will be genetically male (except in marsupials, but we won’t go into that). They will have XY chromosomes, an SRY gene, undescended testicles instead of ovaries and no womb – but without a detailed medical examination they will probably never know that they were ever anything other than a barren woman who failed to menstruate. Throughout history, these ultra-feminine individuals have lived and died without ever knowing that two-thirds of them were intersex.

Then of course there are all kinds of sex-chromosome duplications or deletions – X0, XXX, XXY, XXXY, XYY – each leading to different developmental changes, some of which result in individuals who are to some extent sexually intermediate. XXY, for example, produces an anatomical male but with very small testicles, and often with a feminised body-type and behaviour and female musculature. X0 sometimes results in an individual who is anatomically female but with neither ovaries nor testicles, and this is also sometimes seen in XY women as well, although other XY women have working ovaries.

Then there are also mosaics and chimaeras. A mosaic is where the embryo includes a mutated cell line which is different from the rest of its body: if the mutated line was X0 (chromosomally abnormal female with one unpaired X-chromosome) in an otherwise XY individual their body will be a random mix of male and female. A chimaera is where fraternal twin embryos fuse and merge: again, if the twins were of different sexes the resulting body will be a mix of male and female. In extreme cases an individual may be born who is divided vertically down the middle, male on one side and female on the other, with a lopsided penis and womb, a vagina, one ovary, one testicle, one big breast, one small breast and a face which is craggy and masculine on one side and delicate and feminine on the other. My university textbooks included a photo’ of an unfortunate black South African person who was vertically divided in this way, and in Italy circa 1600 there was a divided chimaera, a soldier named Daniel Burghammer, who had penis, vagina and womb and who bore a child, but could only breastfeed his daughter on one side.

There are other things which can go wrong which produce, for example, a woman who is a normal woman in all ways, genetically, anatomically and behaviourally, except with a penis. The sex assigned at birth is often arrived at by comparing the baby’s genitals to a chart of intermediate possibilities called the Prader scale, and then squinting and trying to assess things like exactly where the urethral opening is – and that’s without even knowing what’s going on inside, or genetically. Note that all the possibilities on the Prader chart have a womb, except the one at farthest right, but genetically male individuals with Androgen Insensitivity will look like the “Typically female” specimen at farthest left, but with no womb, just a blind vagina which ends at the cervix, and genetically female individuals exposed to excess androgens in the mother’s womb may also have no womb of their own.

In fact it would make more sense to call it the sex assumed at birth, because while it’s not as purely arbitrary as calling it “assigned” suggests, it does often depend on just making a best guess from conflicting evidence. We’ve always known this – it’s why traditional Judaism recognises seven sexes. It assigns two to “definitely or mostly female, at least for purposes of religious observance”; three to “definitely or mostly male”; one to “definitely both but we treat them as male for most ritual purposes”; and the seventh, rather amusingly called tumtum, to “I have no idea: let God sort it out”.

Also bear in mind (this will become relevant later) that to a large extent high testosterone is the result of dominance, not the cause of it. Experiments with monkeys showed that if you manipulated their dominance hierarchy to promote a subordinate animal to leader, that animal’s testosterone shot up. In the mid 19^thC Dundee ran an accidental social experiment. The mines where the men worked were in decline, but the textile mills where the women worked were booming, so they did full role reversal and the men became house-husbands while the women went out to work. The result was that the women acted exactly as the men had done, hanging around in pubs and getting into fights – probably because their new, more dominant role had raised their testosterone.

[Incidentally, I’ve noticed a few times in the Harry Potter books that you don’t know the difference between e.g. “the 19^thC” and “the 1900s”, or between “his sixteenth year” and “when he was sixteen”, resulting in e.g. setting the witch persecutions a hundred years too early, by saying they began in the 15^thC instead of the 1500s, and having Voldemort kill his father when he was fifteen which is a year younger than you probably intended. Just remember that the first year of a child’s life is the year between its birth and its first birthday, and that that keeps going all the way. The fourth year of its life is the year between its third and fourth birthdays, and so on. The mid 19^thC means “Around 1850, give or take about 15 years”.]

When it comes to transgender individuals, some are obviously intersex to begin with. I encountered a trans woman who was halfway through transitioning before her doctors discovered that she had a womb, and another who had been born with female hormones in an otherwise male body, and spent years trying to correct this chemically, before giving up and transitioning. Many trans women develop naturally with superfine feminine features, and trans men with craggy ones, indicating that they were born with a degree of hormonal/developmental intersexuality. We only tend to notice the ones who stand out, but most in fact don’t, and look exactly like the sex they feel they are.

For the rest, there is evidence that many, probably most are born with neurological wiring which is trying to connect to the body parts they feel they should have, rather than the ones they do have. Remember, your brain is meat, not mind. A person who has the external anatomy of one sex and the neurological wiring of the other is arguably as much a physical intersex as the person with one ovary and one testicle, and we usually let intersex people pick whichever side they prefer, if they wish to do so. Unfortunately research on this is still at an early stage, because at present the relevant brain structures can only be examined in sufficient detail by post mortem dissection, and because our understanding of what causes people to be transgender was set back when the Nazis destroyed fourteen years’-worth of early research. When you see the famous photographs of Nazis burning books at the Opernplatz in Berlin in 1933, a lot of the material that was burning was the research notes and archives of the Institute for Sexual Science: fourteen years of work on why some people are born transgender, literally gone up in smoke. That’s presumably why one of the American transphobes you spoke up for uses a doll dressed as a female concentration-camp guard as her avatar.

And yes, cisgender and transgender (or strictly, the German versions of cissexual and transsexual) are the correct scientific terms, and have been since 1905. Cis means “on the same side as”, and trans means “on the other side from”, as in Transnistria and Trans-Continental. Being called cisgender is no more an insult than being called right-handed or neurotypical.

At any rate we do know that being transgender is something that occurs in the womb and that becomes manifest as soon as the child is old enough to experience itself as having a gender (i.e. usually three or four) and that, like homosexuality, it appears to occur in many different mammal species. Of course, we can’t ask a horse or a dolphin what gender it feels, but wherever there is a strong behavioural difference between male and female in a species, if we look we start to see individuals whose behaviour is that of the sex that doesn’t match their visible anatomy. This is especially common in lions – or perhaps just especially noticeable, because their normal behaviour and appearance is so strongly gendered. Transgender humans have always been with us, in all societies: for example Nicholas Stuart Gray, one of the greatest and most influential of 20^thC British children’s fantasy authors, was a trans man, and one of the first trans men in history to have a surgical reassignment. If you ever return to the Potterverse and write about Ilvermorny, you should probably be aware that one of the most widespread and also best-known of Native American beliefs about magic is that transgender people make the best witches/wizards, because they already exist between two worlds.

And yes, very occasionally there may be people who pretend to be transgender but aren’t: as well as a few who think they might be transgender but are just really, really gay, which is why people wishing to transition get assessed by an expert therapist first, and aren’t allowed to make any hard-to-reverse changes until they are at least 18. There are also people who pretend to be doctors or policemen but aren’t. The answer isn’t to ban doctors and policemen, but to check their credentials.

Note that claims that young children are being given “gender-affirming surgery” in fact relate to young boys with gynaecomastia (the development of female-type large breasts in anatomical males) having their moobs removed. Also to corrective surgery performed on children with intermediate genitals: although modern thinking is that that too shouldn’t be done until they are old enough to decide for themselves, so long as they can urinate and, where relevant, menstruate.

Given what we know about embryological development, and the female form being the default, you might have expected (or at least, I might have expected!) that trans women would be a lot more common than trans men – that they started as male embryos which failed to fully masculinise, and so retained some female characteristics. In fact, however, there are nearly as many trans men as trans women, which suggests that in many cases something else is going on.

We know that autistic people are more likely to be transgender than neurotypicals are, and trans people are more likely to be autistic than cis people are, suggesting a connection between being autistic and being trans. We also know that autistic people are autistic because surplus nerve-connections in their brains which should have been pruned before or soon after birth were left intact.

That suggests that probably all embryos start with a set of nerve-connections for both male and female parts and then the ones that don’t match their anatomy are meant to get pruned away, but in many transgender people the wrong set got pruned, as part of the general incorrect pruning which often leads to autism. Probably in gender-fluid and non-binary people, either none of the connections were pruned, or all of them were. Differences in nerve-pruning would also explain why some cisgender people have a very strong sense of their sex as being hugely important to their identity, while others, like me, are just male or female by default because hey, my body is (very, very) female so I just vaguely go along with that. Probably the nerve connections I do have are to female anatomy, but I just don’t have that many of them.

Nerve-pruning would also explain why some trans people have a strong sense that their body should be e.g. male without having very male behaviour, while those who feel and act socially transgender without especially hating their anatomy are probably intersex in other ways. But, well, you have said that you think that a trans woman cannot understand a cis woman’s experience, but a cis woman doesn’t understand another cis woman’s experience, either, except for purely physical things such as menstrual cramps. You don’t understand my experience, as a retired Information Analyst for whom science and maths are as natural as breathing, who was raised to believe that if a man tried to abuse me I should hit him with a frying pan, and who trailed round town with my mother trying to sell our transistor radio because there was no food in the house except a packet of gelatine; I don’t understand your experience, as somebody who grew up with two parents and a sibling and went swimming at the Marriott Country Club and for whom numbers are a closed book, except to know it’s completely different from mine. We are not defined by whether we have an innie or an outie between our legs, and everybody’s experience is different.

At any rate we know that trans people have a very strong sense of gender, it’s not the one that matches the external anatomy they were born with and it can’t be changed. We don’t know any way to alter the neurological wiring to match the anatomy, so the only known treatment is to alter the anatomy to match the wiring (and despite what you may have been told, the proportion of people who transition and then regret it is very, very low: much lower than for people who have e.g. knee surgery). Imagine if, during the Polyjuice chase in Deathly Hallows, something had gone wrong and Hermione had got stuck as a duplicate Harry. Would you expect her to just shrug and say “OK, I’m a boy now” and then happily live the rest of her life as a man, or would you expect her to feel disoriented and as if her body wasn’t what she expected to feel and she was really a girl? That’s what it’s like for trans people.

You may have heard about the horrible case of David Reimer, a Canadian boy born in 1965, whose penis was wrecked as a newborn in a botched circumcision, so a decision was made to surgically reshape him as female and raise him as a girl, including giving him female hormones. Despite this he declared at fourteen that he had always known that he was a boy, demonstrating that a child’s sense of their gender does not depend on their genitals or on what hormones they may be given or on how others behave to them: they just know, at least if their sense of gender is a strong one.

[David Reimer was suicidal all his life and killed himself at 38, but it’s not clear how much of that was due to being brought up in the wrong body, how much to having been bullied and forced to simulate sex-acts with his twin brother by the therapist who was trying to prove that a child’s sense of their own gender could be changed by conditioning, and how much to the break-up of his marriage.]

Trans kids feel like David, except for them it feels as if was some misstep in the womb which took away the body their brain is telling them they should have (even though it may arguably be the brain that’s misaligned), and the people who want them to accept the sex that was assumed at birth are the abusive therapist screaming at them that they have to force their mind to fit the wrong body. And I know it would be so much neater and tidier if everyone was either a man or a woman, bang, bang, throw the switch this way or that, but science isn’t like that. Much of science requires accepting ambiguity. There’s no clear definition of what a species is, although species clearly do exist; atoms are made up of clouds of the probability that an electron which has no solid existence will be in a particular place; and biological sex isn’t two separate blocks but a wavy curve with two bumps – like a bra where most people fit into the male or female cup but there are also a lot of people in the cleavage, and a few in the armpits. It would be so much easier for everyone if everyone’s neurological wiring, hormones, genes and anatomy matched: but the world is not required to be tidy for our convenience.

When it comes to your campaigning, it gets difficult because the problem is fundamentally one of risk-assessment, which is a form of mathematics, and I know that that’s a closed book written in ancient Sumerian to you. John could never understand that your maths blindness was hard-wired: he saw great potential in you and thought that if he kept on trying to get you to engage with science you would suddenly “get it”, because he didn’t realise that your brain just didn’t and couldn’t work that way – just as you didn’t realise that his sometimes odd or insensitive behaviour was due to autism, or that his apparent rages were simulated because a lecturer at teacher-training college had told him it was a good way to keep order, and being autistic it took him a long time to realise that this had been bad advice. [He loved the Potter books, incidentally, and said that Snape was his Horcrux, through whom he would achieve immortality. He was hugely proud of you.]

I’ll try to explain with examples rather than scary numbers. I expect that the fact that a couple of gay men have just been convicted of adopting a baby and then sexually abusing and murdering him won’t make you assume that all gay men are dangerous paedophiles, because you know that this is a vanishingly rare event. Even though the killer in this case was a teacher, you will not suddenly assume that Dumbledore was perving over Harry. I imagine you can also see that far-right activists rioting and attacking every Sikh, and then every brown person, and then every immigrant including white Ukrainians, because a single Sikh committed a murder, when Sikhs are overall probably the most law-abiding and public-spirited group in British society, is a wild over-reaction.

You do understand that, right: that when there are over half a million British Sikhs nearly all of whom are exceptionally law-abiding, getting scared to be around Sikhs because one Sikh out of half a million turned out to be a thug would be out of proportion? Half a million is slightly more than the population of Edinburgh, by the way.

I understand that you have had bad experiences with men which make you think that even somebody who is only vaguely male-adjacent must be a threat, and also that Nicola Sturgeon’s suggestion of letting people self-certify their sex without a professional assessment, on the basis of just three months living as their target gender, panicked you – especially as some wanker immediately pretended to be trans to try to get access to a women’s prison. But Wee Nicky was never serious: she was flying a kite, suggesting a position so extreme that Westminster would have to reject it, so she could say “See, see, once again Westminster overrules the will of the Scottish parliament!” in the hope that that would get Scots to vote for independence. I don’t personally know any actual trans people who think her suggestions would be a good idea.

Now, there are probably about 173,000 trans women in the UK, based on the usual estimate that about one person in 200 is trans, and assuming just over half of those are trans women. That’s enough to fill a fairly large town, such as Sunderland or Milton Keynes. With that many people it’s inevitable that a few will be bad apples. But as with the Sikhs, what’s important is not whether there are a small number who are bad apples, but whether they as a group are more likely to be dangerous than anybody else, and as far as I know there’s zero evidence that they are.

[The idea of men as dangerous is also really a “maths thing”. Yes, it’s true that most women will have a few really bad experiences with men in their lives. But if you live in a city you will interact with tens of thousands of men during your life, so it’s not surprising if a few are bad apples. If you had ten thousand dogs you wouldn’t be surprised if three of them were biters.] [Ten thousand is about the population of South Queensferry, or half the population of Musselburgh.]

And yes, you see trans women as a specific threat because you see them as men in a women’s space. But even if that were true, cis women are also a potential threat to cis women, and there’s no strong reason why trans women should be more of a threat than cis women, just because some of them still have a penis. There are predatory lesbians who prey on other women – and yes, the proportion of lesbians who are predators is small but since there are nearly twenty times as many lesbians as trans women, you’re considerably more likely to be attacked by a lesbian.

Do you understand that? I realise it’s a form of maths so maybe it makes your brain stick. Think of it this way. Even if a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost might, just possibly, be more likely to run you over than an ordinary family car (because it was so quiet you couldn’t hear it coming!), if you compare them one for one, still if you are going to be knocked down in the street it will probably be by a family car, because there are a lot of family cars out there and only a few Rolls Royce Silver Ghosts.

I know that I am simultaneously saying that there are a lot of trans women and that they are rare compared to lesbians, but that is because a very small proportion (one in 200) of a humungously enormous number (about 35 million women in the UK) can still end up as a fairly big number. If you think of those huge flocks of starlings that used to fill the air when we were young, a quarter of one of those flocks is a lot less than a whole flock, but it’s still a lot of wee birds.

In addition there are a lot of teenage girls, regular cis girls, who rape other women as a form of bullying. For example, a woman I used to know had, when a schoolgirl, come within a hairsbreadth of being gang-raped with the handle of a duster by a gang of teenage girl bullies. Only the timely arrival of a teacher saved her. I’ve never forgotten a horrible case in London about thirty-five years ago where a gang of teenage boys were raping girls, but were doing so to please their girl leader, because she liked to watch. And again, there are enormously more teenage cis girls than trans women.

So, the bottom line is that if a woman is going to be sexually attacked in a women’s loo, it’s enormously more likely that the attacker will be a cis woman than a trans woman. You might well still feel, “Why allow an additional unnecessary risk, even if it is small?” and that might make sense, except that in trying to eliminate that tiny extra risk you are doing enormous harm, and to cis women as well as trans women.

Again, it’s a risk-assessment thing, but I’m staying away from the scary numbers, other than assuming you have a mental concept of big and small, and common and rare. Consider, for a moment, the anti-vaxx movement. They are fixated on the very small risk from being vaccinated, which to them seems horrifying and all-consuming, to such an extent that they ignore the far bigger risk from not being vaccinated. In the same way, you are so fixated on the very small risk from trans women, which to you seems all-consuming – to a large extent because the Murdoch press and Elon Musk have manipulated the media, Skeeter-fashion, to make it appear all-consuming – that you are blind to the much greater harm which is being done to cis women in the attempt to exclude trans ones. This is very evident in your campaign against trans athletes.

I do understand that it must be frightening to live in a world in which you don’t understand the numbers, because it makes you very easy for dishonest journalists to manipulate. The classic example is called “checking the baseline”. That means that if an article tells you that e.g. food additive X doubles your risk of developing cancer Y, you should ask whether that means doubling it from one in ten to one in five, or from one in ten million to one in five million. Just as a small proportion of a very big number is still a big number, so a multiple of a really tiny number is still a tiny number.

Similarly, an article in the press recently trumpeted that a trans woman had beaten six thousand cis women in a marathon – but there were about twenty thousand women in the race, meaning the trans woman had come in behind fourteen thousand cis women. If you find it easier to visualise without the thousands, in proportion, the trans woman came fifteenth out of twenty, or sixth from last. In the first case, the baseline is “What was the risk of developing cancer Y before taking additive X?” and in the second it’s “How many women were there in the race?” I could draw you up a list of published authors who have been racists, rapists, torturers and murderers that would convince you that authors should never be left alone with anybody vulnerable, if you didn’t already know that the baseline – the number of authors in history – is so large that the number who have been physically dangerous is a drop in the ocean.

There was one case, just one, about fifteen years ago, of a male weight-lifter who cheated by declaring themselves to be a trans woman in order to enter and win a women’s competition without first having had any hormonal treatment. But real trans women who are undergoing chemical transition, once they have been on feminising hormones for about eighteen months, generally perform in the bottom third of female athletes, because they no longer have male muscle and their new, female muscle doesn’t quite gel with their skeleton. Trans people evidently tend not to become athletes in the first place, since their bodies don’t really perform well: it’s reckoned that about one person in every 200 is trans, but In the US, less than one college athlete in 50,000 was trans: nine in total, I believe, out of a US population of a third of a billion. In proportion, that means that if you had a sports team the size of the entire population of Scotland, all the people of Glasgow and Edinburgh and Dundee and Aberdeen and Stirling and Inverness and all the lesser towns and all the villages and all the farms, the number of them that were trans would all fit into one double-decker Stagecoach coach.

As a result of your campaign to eliminate this non-existent threat, sporting authorities are now saying that no-one with an SRY gene may play professionally in a women’s sport – including cis women who happen to have an inactive SRY gene, but who are completely female and have been pregnant and born children. They wouldn’t succeed competing against men, since they are women in all respects, but now they aren’t allowed to compete against other women either, so they have lost their careers. Understand that unless you have had a full genetic screening, any cis woman including you or me could have an inactive SRY gene, probably situated on a Y-chromosome, and could suddenly be reclassified as a man for the purposes of sport. The fact that you’ve had children and that I used, many moons ago, to have heavy periods is no guarantee of anything except that if we do have an SRY gene it doesn’t work.

Worse, thanks to your campaign against Imane Khelif, some sporting authorities are likely to exclude anyone with high testosterone, in case they are intersex. But successful female athletes nearly all have high testosterone, both because exercise tends to increase testosterone and because being dominant and successful definitely does, so you are at risk of creating a situation in which only women who are physically weak and behaviourally submissive will be allowed to compete, since they are the only ones with low testosterone, fuelling the narrative of women as the inferior, weaker sex. It somewhat reminds me of those Americans in the Deep South in the 1970s who were willing to fill their swimming pools with concrete, rather than risk sharing the water with a black person. And again, because success and dominance increase testosterone, and you have become rich and powerful, if you were to be tested you would almost certainly be considered to be a man for sporting purposes, based on your elevated testosterone levels.

[For whatever it may be worth, my personal opinion is that we should scrap gendered competitions in sports, except for those involving a lot of close physical contact, and instead stream athletes by size and strength and ability, the same way we do with boxers and racehorses. Then it wouldn’t matter whether athletes were male or female, cis or trans or intersex, they’d just be Class Three Middleweight, and it would have the added advantage of allowing very small men to compete alongside middle-sized women, whereas currently small men don’t have a chance in most sports. I don’t believe it would deter people from watching competition levels which had mostly women in them, because people still watch Third Division football and the paralympics.]

Because, like Musk, you chose to use your money and influence to promote division and “othering”, you must bear at least some responsibility for what the transphobes do, including in the US. You may or may not care about the trans teens who have been murdered, but it is to some extent because of you, because of the hatred you helped to whip up, that an old cis woman with a moustache was beaten so badly that she had to spend the rest of her life in a nursing home. Partly because of you a tall cis girl was sacked because her boss was afraid people might think she was trans. Partly because of you two butch lesbians ended up in hospital after each accused the other of being trans, and a fight broke out (that one at least is funny). Partly because of you some girls are now afraid to cut their hair short, or wear mannish clothes or have jobs or hobbies that might be considered in any way masculine. Partly because of you, if people have to use the loos associated with their so-called biological sex (which nobody can actually define) any man – any man at all – will be able to walk into a women’s loo and say he is a trans man. To counter this, people are talking about having to check every woman’s genitals before she is allowed to pee. If that actually goes ahead all women will be being molested to reduce an already tiny risk that a tiny proportion might be molested.

Or is your thinking that gendered public spaces should just exclude anyone whose gender appears ambiguous? That will of course allow in most trans people, since most trans people look exactly like the gender they feel they are, whilst excluding butch lesbians, effeminate gay men, most people with an abnormal chromosome count and many people who just have a non-conformist dress sense, thus forcing women to wear makeup and girlie clothes to avoid confusion.

Partly because of you, women with Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, women who were born with a vagina and are ultra-feminine, women who have been known as female since birth and had no reason to even begin to think there might be something odd going on until they were in their mid teens and hadn’t begun to menstruate yet, are being reclassified as men in some US states, meaning that if they commit a crime they’ll be sent to a men’s prison and, US prisons being what they are, probably be raped to death. That ruling, that people with Androgen Insensitivity are men if they have undescended testicles deep inside, even if they are women in every visible and behavioural way, certainly fits your assertion that anyone who could even potentially produce sperm is a man: but it means that we basically have to throw out much of female history and female achievement.

Before the invention of reliable contraception, most cis women were pregnant or nursing for most of their adult life, which soaked up most of their energy and attention, and as a result a high proportion of female achievements before about 1930 were made by women who were celibate or sterile. Since we don’t usually know whether those women menstruated or not we can’t know whether they were genetically female, or genetically male but with Androgen Insensitivity. So any woman in history who didn’t get pregnant – Hypatia, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Karni Mater, Elizabeth I, Jane Austen, Emily and Anne Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavell, Margery Allingham, Virginia Woolf, Mother Theresa – might really have been a man, by your standards. We can no longer point to them and say “Here was a woman!” because according to your definition of a woman, we just don’t know.

Worse, Trump won by a very slim margin, and transphobia was used to whip up opposition to Kamala Harris because she supports trans rights, with the slogan “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you!”. You can see it in the way the MAGAts accuse Michelle Obama of being trans just because she is tall: being tall is no longer allowed, as it is insufficiently girlie. It’s difficult to assess how much this contributed to Trump’s victory, but it’s at least possible that the transphobia which you helped to stir up put Trump in office, with all that that has brought. Many thousands of children in the third world will die of starvation and disease because of the cancellation of USAID food-aid and vaccination campaigns. Children in the US have been dragged from school buses and deported. Women in the US are dying for want of medically necessary abortions, or because they’ve been deprived of vital cancer treatments because if they happened to get pregnant the treatment would harm a foetus that doesn’t even exist yet; and now there are moves in some states to execute women who have an abortion, and prosecute and imprison those who miscarry. Women are being sacked from high-status jobs just for being women, information about women who work in science and technology and about acts of service by female or non-white soldiers has been deleted from official websites, non-white and female soldiers are being denied promotion, a Trump appointee has openly declared that all government must be in the hands of “competent white men”, and members of the regime have openly called for the forced sterilisation of the poor, and for women to be deprived of the vote. All of this was brought in by means of votes won at least partly by whipping up fear of trans women, to which you contributed.

Trump is trying to force though a bill which bans people from voting unless their legal name matches their birth certificate or passport, meaning that any married woman who took her husband’s surname won’t be able to vote unless she has a passport – which very few Americans have. Disenfranchising women is of course the goal, not a side-effect, because women are more likely to vote Democrat. Arkansas introduced a bill which would make it illegal for girls to have short hair. The US government is going out of its way to sabotage any attempts to alleviate climate change. Research in the US to cure Alzheimer’s Disease has been halted because Trump thought that transgenic mice (mice who have had some human genes added to make them a better model for human diseases) were transgender: so in this case transphobia will definitely lead to thousands of early, miserable deaths which could potentially have been prevented. Patients, some of them children, are dying in the US because Trump has abolished the rules that kept the cost of insulin and asthma inhalers low, and the Center for Disease Control in the US has been forbidden to communicate with the public in any way, so that if another pandemic comes millions will die for want of information. There have already been outbreaks of ‘flu’, measles and tuberculosis, but the CDC is not allowed to tell people where the danger zones are or to recommend vaccination. Latinos have been locked up in detention centres where many die, and protestors have been killed in the street: and not forgetting the war in Iran, the abandonment of Ukraine to the wolves, the burial of the Epstein files, and permitting or even encouraging Musk and Putin to foment the rise of far-right hate groups worldwide. All this at least to some extent was brought in on the back of the anti-trans campaign, and yet you were, as I recall, willing to praise Trump – rapist, child-abuser, a man who treats cis women like dirt – because amidst all of this death and oppression he made time to make the already difficult lives of nine transgender kids a bit more unhappy by preventing them from playing sports.

I love the Harry Potter books, and being an expert on analysing the plot, unravelling all the puns and literary in-jokes and plugging plot-holes with rational explanations is a major hobby of mine: even Charlie Weasley’s confused and confusing dates can be made to make sense if he left Hogwarts after OWLs and transferred to Durmstrang to study dragons. Being a pensioner I have time to indulge in hobbies, and I have made many good friends through the fandom. The Potter books have also encouraged a lot of kids to read, and they have made John immortal. But I can’t help thinking that the world would be a better place if you had never written them, and that their influence has on the whole been baleful: and not only because you have used the money they made you to set back the freedom and equality of women by about seventy years and force girls back into the “sweetly-feminine ickle girlie” box that our mothers’ generation worked so hard to escape from, for fear that if they aren’t tweely girlie enough somebody might think they were trans and beat or kill them.

Even without that, the books promote the idea that good and bad are purely arbitrary and that any atrocity is acceptable if it’s done by Our Side because Our Side are Good by definition, so e.g. it’s OK for Harry to scatter Unforgivables around like confetti because he’s been designated Good, but a hideous crime if the other side do it because they’ve been designated Bad. Hermione carries out the equivalent of an acid attack and scars a girl’s face for life to punish her for being more loyal to her mother and her government than to a teenage gang leader she barely knows, and this is presented as a Good Thing because Hermione is designated Good, so any atrocity she may commit is also Good. The real-life corollary is “It’s OK for the CIA to torture suspects because Americans are the designated Good Guys” or “Our gang are allowed to shoot and stab that other gang because they’re The Enemy”: many people do already think like that, and the books we read as children shape our world view.

You said after the event that many of the children who followed Slughorn to fight for the school were Slytherins but it doesn’t say that in the book, at all: and of course after you stated that Cursed Child was canon, despite it clashing with the books in numerous ways, many people no longer put any faith in your supplementary pronouncements. [And yes, I know that you said Cursed Child was canon partly because you thought people were being racist when they boggled at black Hermione, because you’d forgotten that in the books you had repeatedly described her face as white or pink. With her brown eyes and bushy hair the Hermione in the books could very easily be mixed-race, but she is definitely described as fairly pale-skinned. Meanwhile, can we have a black Poppy Pomfrey, please? Her colouring is never mentioned, other than the grey hair, and having grey hair means she’s probably the right age to be the Muggleborn daughter of one of the Caribbean nurses who came over on the Emperor Windrush.]

At any rate, many people these days do not accept your statement about the Slytherins who fought alongside Slughorn as being canon. In the book it says that many Slytherins joined Voldemort and the rest just went home, so many people are left with the impression that Slytherin = Bad and therefore that it’s right and correct to demonise a quarter of all children from eleven years old and again, Our Side Good, Their Side Bad, and the Bad can never be redeemed. So the fact that these books had a formative influence on a lot of people who are now in their thirties probably helps to drive political division. That’s not an exaggeration: I know that I am to a considerable extent what Rudyard Kipling, PG Wodehouse and Nicholas Stuart Gray made me, and a lot of younger people’s worldview has been equally informed by you.

I know you were pleased when you heard that people still argued over Snape, but it’s really not a good thing. On the one hand, I’ve been active in fandom since 1981 and I have never seen a character be loved as intensely by as many people as Snape is loved: not even Spock in his prime. He became a hero to the poor, to the dispossessed, to everybody whose life was endless drudgery in a job they hated, and we hoped for him as we hoped for ourselves. The downside of that is that while I understand exactly why you killed him, from an artistic point of view, and even think that it was a good artistic choice, doing so may well have resulted in some real-life deaths. For me, for example, he was very like an old boyfriend of mine who died in 1992, as well as dying at the same age as my father, and Snape’s fictional death caused me to relive Norman’s real-life death until I had a minor nervous breakdown. There will have been people for whom hoping for Snape to get a happy ending was one of the few things still anchoring them to life.

[You once asked whether people loved Snape because he was a bad boy. No, we love him because he’s a good boy, brave and loyal and protective and self-sacrificing and also brilliant and witty, and he stays for as long as Lily tells him he’s her best friend and then goes away when she tells him to go, and that’s far more important than the fact that he’s a petty, bad-tempered bastard with a tendency to seize the wrong end of the stick and then hang on to it. In any case that part could probably be fixed if anybody in his entire life, other than sometimes-Lily when he was ten and some of the Death Eater crowd, had ever shown him any kindness or respect. We see him as like a dog that’s been beaten until it became snappy, then beaten again for snapping.]

[My father, who died at 38 like Snape and was possibly assassinated owing to his connections with Indian Intelligence, was at Ampleforth like your cousin: but much longer ago, when it still had its own steam train and tiny private station. My dad rode the Hogwarts Express for real.]

Much worse, a substantial minority of the fandom not only believe that Slytherin = Bad, without exception (think Israeli = Bad, Muslim = Bad, gay = Bad, person who votes for another party = Bad, woman who has an abortion for any reason = Bad), but never adjusted to the fact that Snape turned out to be on the good side. Those of us familiar with the tropes of Golden Age detective fiction always knew he was on the Order side, but the haters had never read Christie’s Dumb Witness, didn’t know that the person who seems to be the villain in the penultimate act rarely is, and just couldn’t and can’t accept it. Some are consumed with hatred to the point that they will call anyone who likes Snape a Nazi, threaten them with death or rape, or vandalise their car. They insist that he never loved Lily but only lusted after her sexually, even when he was nine – with a side order of “Boys aren’t allowed to mind being sexually assaulted, so it’s creepy for Snape to not want a photograph of the man who stripped and sexually humiliated him”. They rage at and mock the idea of Harry calling his son after Snape. They insist that if somebody used a bad word when they were sixteen they can never, ever be forgiven but must be cancelled forever, regardless of how much good they may do in later life.

They insist that he committed hideous atrocities and prolific murders during the about eighteen months that he was a real Death Eater, despite there not even being a rumour that he was one, and in general make up wild stories about terrible things he didn’t do in the books and then attack anyone who disagrees that their inventions are canon and call them a Nazi. That is, they’re the exact equivalent of the Qanon mob screaming that Hilary Clinton abused children in the basement of a pizzeria that doesn’t have a basement, and that anyone who disagrees is a paedophile. Most insist that James and Sirius never bullied Snape at all, and even claim that in some mysterious way he bullied them, one on four; others admit that the Marauders did bully him, but say that bullying him was Good and deserved because he would have a difficult personality twenty years later. The worst ones say that bullying is in itself an actively good thing, especially if you like the bully.

Again, this has real-world consequences because some people carry these attitudes through to their offline life, and it mirrors the way that in real-life abuse situations many people side with the abuser. I once encountered a Snape-hater who claimed to be a qualified lawyer, and who devoted all her free time to writing poems about torturing Snape to death. She quite seriously argued as follows:

Add to that that the Twins commit appalling crimes – terrorising their brothers, carrying out dangerous experiments on children, poisoning a Muggle, torturing animals, trampling on the body of an injured captive – and are portrayed as being Jolly Good Fun (and most fen don’t get the point that you killed Fred because he was “more cruel”). I know your intention with the Marauders and Dudley was to show “Even bullies can grow out of it and be redeemed”, but a high proportion of readers just don’t get it. As a result you’ve basically spawned a sub-culture who believe that bullying “little oddballs” is a positive good which should be celebrated, and the fact that your influence now includes “It’s not OK to be different: all must conform to 1950s gender norms!” only reinforces the “Attack anyone who doesn’t fit in” and “Pain and humiliation happening to people we don’t like is delicious” vibe. Not for nothing is one of the loudest, most hysterical of current Snape-haters also a Hamas supporter. She is, in the real world, OK with women having their breasts chopped off and used to play handball with, so long as those women belong to a group she has designated as Bad.

Then there’s the whole thing with James. Yes, he’s meant to have improved later, but we’re not told how he improved, or shown it, and the James we see at sixteen has more red flags for coercive control abuse than a Soviet parade. You yourself said that he picked on Severus partly because he didn’t like the idea that Severus might have feelings for Lily, which means he was policing Lily’s friendships and treating her like property long before they began dating. He hexes anyone who annoys him, which means he’s equivalent to the sort of boy who swaggers around town punching people in the face for “disrespecting” him. He saves a boy’s life only to go on treating him like a toy, as if he owns him. We see that he likes to humiliate and even torture a victim (the scene where he chokes Severus with soap is essentially waterboarding, and is a couple of rungs worse than the scene at the World Cup which Voldemort calls “Muggle torture”), and rub their noses in their own helplessness. We see that he likes to trample on people’s sexual boundaries, publicly stripping Severus and using him as a hostage to try to strong-arm Lily into dating him against her will. When she fights back he tells her that if he hurts her it will be her own fault because she “made him do it”.

If Hogwarts had a yearbook James at sixteen would be “Boy most likely to grow up to be a domestic abuser” (and Peter would be “Boy most likely to grow up to be a serial killer”), but because James is portrayed as a perfect partner for Lily, and we never actually see how he improves, there’s a real danger that some readers will be led to see his behaviour at sixteen as normal, or even romantic, and will end up in real-life abuse situations as a result. Lily too comes across as harsh, cold, judgemental and inclined to blame the consequences of her own actions on others, and altogether a lot like her sister. They will at least not spoil another couple, but because they are portrayed as some kind of ideal pairing without any indication of how they might have improved with age then, as with the Twilight books, there’s a serious risk of romanticising toxicity and encouraging youngsters to sleep-walk into abusive relationships they may not live to regret.

Then there’s the unbelievably dangerous bit of business with Snape being knocked out in the Shack, being unconscious for almost an hour, Remus saying he’s fine without really checking, and then Harry finding it funny when Sirius causes or allows his head to bang against the ceiling again. Lives have been saved by people remembering medical scenes they read about or saw on TV, but this one will kill somebody if they use it as a model. In reality any period of unconsciousness due to blunt-force trauma and lasting more than ten minutes is considered life-threatening, and if a person is knocked out and then suffers even a very slight additional blow to the head during the next several weeks there’s a serious risk of Second Impact Syndrome, which is instantly fatal. Sirius was toying with Snape’s life (again) and Harry was enjoying it.

Finally, the books encourage a weird kind of self-hatred: a cultural cringe, if you will. Right from the outset, Hagrid uses “Muggle” and “Squib” as insults, treats Muggles like semi-sapient cattle and viciously attacks a terrified, cowering Muggle child because he doesn’t like the kid’s father (yes, we know Dudley is a shit – but Hagrid doesn’t, so that can’t be used to justify his behaviour). Arthur treats Muggles like clever pets doing a trick, and Dumbledore treats us like naughty children who need to be disciplined by the almighty wizard. We are encouraged to see all these attitudes as right and proper, or at least as amusing – but everyone who reads these books is a Muggle, so we are being encouraged to approve of our own denigration.

A lot of the fandom has fallen away now, anyway. It started with the increasingly nonsensical entries on Pottermore – e.g. claiming that the Hogwarts Express was built, by Muggles, a hundred years before trains anything like that existed, or that it was possible to see a pub on Drury Lane from Charing Cross (spoiler alert: it really, really isn’t: it would be like seeing Bannerman’s on Cowgate from George Street), or that business about wizards shitting in corners and then Vanishing it – and the fact that over time you forgot what you had written and would say, e.g., that Harry never turned his back on anyone in pain when he does so repeatedly in the books. Harry in the books practises hexes on a Squib, leaves Draco’s gang distorted by magic and crammed into an overhead rack without food or water or a lavatory break for eight hours, is repelled by Aberforth’s grief, is mad keen on Sirius suffering in Azkaban when he thinks he is guilty, salivates over the idea of torturing Snape, thinks Snape might be dead in the Shack and doesn’t care, enjoys seeing Sirius brutalise an unconscious prisoner who had been trying to protect him, rejoices over a girl’s face being scarred for life in the equivalent of an acid attack to punish her for not being loyal to him, and gets an almost sexual thrill from torturing Amycus and dumping him onto broken glass. And yes, he has a grievance against all these people: but if you are only merciful to people you like, you are not merciful. If not for his near-total lack of self-interest, Harry in the books would have the makings of another Dark Lord – he even enjoys seeing animals being frightened – but over time you forgot who you had written, and so your statements became less and less compatible with the books.

Then came the debacle over Cursed Child. However moral your motives for proclaiming it canon were, now we were stuck with a situation where if we took your word on what was canon we had to accept that Harry was a bad father who believed in the perfect inerrancy of prophecy, bullied McGonagall and was scared of birds and the dark; Hermione couldn’t recognise the ingredients for Polyjuice when she saw them; Ron was dead weight; and Cedric Diggory, the parfait gentil knight of the books, was a secret narcissist who would become a Death Eater just because his pride was hurt – not forgetting the extreme changes in the way that Polyjuice and Time Turners worked. If we took your word that Cursed Child was canon then that basically meant trashing the original story, so people just stopped listening to you and decided that nothing you said outwith the published material could be canon.

[Admittedly you’re in good company: John Masefield completely trashed The Midnight Folk when he wrote The Box of Delights, and Pratchett did some pretty crude retconning too. Jasper Fforde has almost more continuity errors than plot, especially in the Last Dragonslayer series, and even Tolkien retconned his trolls.]

I try hard to like you, because John thought the world of you and raged over the fact that one of your partners abused you, and I loved John. But you do make it difficult. When you said that there was something of yourself in all your characters, we never realised that you meant Umbridge, but that is undoubtedly who you have become: accusing people of stealing the identities they were born with, because they don’t conform to an arbitrary magic/Muggle binary, and then justifying it with cutesy-folksy platitudes. All that “womb-an” stuff is every bit as sickly-twee as big-eyed purple kittens in pink bows, truly worthy of Beatrix Bloxam: quite apart from the fact that there are cis men and trans women born with a full set of male genitals and a womb, and genetically and externally normal females born without a womb. And I appreciate that, like Snape (or indeed Trump), you are really agonisingly insecure inside, so when you get hold of the wrong end of the stick, as you did when you accused Khelif of being trans, you feel you have to double down on it rather than admit to an error: but you wrote Umbridge to be hated, and you did a good job.

A few years ago, there was a sweet-sad meme you often used to see on the net. In it, somebody who had grown up reading the Harry Potter books as a child said that when they themselves were much older, decades in the future, their own children would ask “Why are you crying?” and they would say “I heard on the news that Jo Rowling died today”. I used to see it regularly, but I haven’t seen it even once since you began your campaign of high-profile science-denial. And it’s not that people actually want you dead – but there’s a general feeling of “At least when she does die, she’ll stop trashing her own legacy”. Like Musk, I guess: ten years ago he was the darling of the environmental movement, but his money went to his head, and because he’s a male supremacist he couldn’t handle the idea that one of his sons should identify as an inferior female and ruin his perfect record of using artificial means to ensure that he sired only what he sees as inherently superior males, so he went loopy and now he’s just seen as sinister and disturbed.

So far as I know you at least don’t have a ketamine habit, haven’t thrown any Nazi salutes and haven’t made a conscious decision to destroy democracy and declare yourself universal Führer: but you did support the woman with the concentration-camp-guard avatar, and mock somebody for saying that the Nazis targetted transgender people even though the Museum of Jewish Heritage records that the Nazis “brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures.” Enforcing conformity to traditional gender roles is a common feature of fascism, so historically the persecution of trans people often goes hand in hand with the suppression of women’s rights. Like Musk, fascists just cannot bear the idea that anyone who had the opportunity to live as a male might identify as what they see as an inherently inferior female: to them it’s like a lion choosing to identify as a pig and that’s how Musk, and Trump (who actually calls women he doesn’t fancy “Piggy”), see it, whereas they are more tolerant of trans men because they see that as a poor inferior creature aping its betters. And now, guess what, the US Heritage Foundation (which sets the agenda for Trump) has moved on from “Trans women shouldn’t be allowed to play sports” to “Women shouldn’t be allowed to play sports”, because they think it’s bad for our fertility which is all we are good for. Never think that they are your allies, just because you hate the same people.

Addendum, only vaguely relevant:

Incidentally there are some gaps in the biology in the Harry Potter books too. The fact that snakes don’t have eyelids; that the mounds of ferrets on which Hagrid feeds Buckbeak are loving little domestic pets, equivalent to feeding him on puppies, since there is no wild animal called a ferret in Britain; that a 20ft-tall Scots pine would be a mere sapling, not “towering”; that Aragog would almost certainly be female; that squid, even giant ones, are salt-water animals with a lifespan of two to six years; and that a horned toad is a spiky type of lizard, which resembles a toad only in the sense that a seahorse resembles a horse, doesn’t affect the actual plot. The fact that the branches of elder are flattened and bendy like a rubber strap can be got around by assuming that the Elder Wand was carved from the tree’s trunk – and it would certainly explain why elder wands are rare. Its main association is not with death but with alcohol – you can make elderflower champagne (which is only very mildly alcoholic, like shandy), elderberry red wine, Elderberry the Great port (which is incredibly strong) and also edible elderflower fritters, but if you’re using the flowers you have to pick them young because as they start to age they smell like cat piss.

But the real biggie is that in British English, a stag and a doe are the male and female of different species of deer: the mate of a stag (also called a hart) is a hind, and the mate of a doe is a buck. Also, if Lily’s doe is of a British species, they are noticeably different in size. Mating a stag to a doe is equivalent in both species-difference and size-difference to mating a wolf to a fox. The only message one can take from this, which I don’t think is what you intended, is “James and Lily may appear superficially compatible but they really, really aren’t”. Or Harry can’t tell the difference between a doe and a hind, since it’s only Harry who thinks of Snape’s Patronus, and by implication his mother’s, as a doe. A hind would be a lot bigger than a doe – pony rather than goat-sized – and much less cutesy-looking, with a noble patrician face.

Another really massive howler is the fact that McGonagall is a Catholic Irish name, from Donegal: the poet William Topaz McGonagall was the son of Irish immigrants. We must assume that Minerva’s father, who according to her back-story was called McGonagall but was a Protestant minister, was the son of an Irish Catholic father and Scottish Protestant mother, and followed his mother’s faith.

And no, it isn’t possible for the Beauxbatons carriage and Hagrid’s hut to be simultaneously next to each other and 200 yards apart. I assume you have no mental picture of how far 200 yards is, but it’s about the length of North Bridge from the old Scotsman building to the statue of Wellington. And a giant so tall that only his shins were illuminated by the light from the main door would need to be at least 60ft tall, not 20ft: if a giant is 20ft tall his knees will be about level with your face.

There are also a few minor errors (assuming they are errors, and not deliberate) which suggest that the Muggle world in the books is not our world. Setting witch persecutions in the 11^th and 15^thC, when there were no witch persecutions (witch-killing was a 16^th and 17^thC thing, and in Britain witches were hanged, not burned), is one thing, and another is the Muggle Prime Minister thinking of his predecessor as “he” when his predecessor ought to have been Maggie Thatcher. And Merlin going to Hogwarts, when the real Merlin, if he ever existed in any real-life form, was around 500 years too early: but I wondered if your Merlin was based on the one in TH White’s The Sword in the Stone, who has also been shifted forwards several centuries.

Then there’s the statement that Dumbledore saw Snape as “the man who had sent Voldemort after an innocent child in the knowledge that Voldemort would kill him”. I’m guessing that in between writing the discussing-the-prophecy scene in OotP and the defection scene in DH you forgot what Snape had or hadn’t heard, but it makes Dumbledore appear to lack Theory of Mind, and not understand that other people are working from different information from him. Yes, Dumbledore knew that the prophecy referred to an unborn boy, because he had heard the entire prophecy, including “mark him” and “will be born”. But we know from what Dumbledore says to Harry that Snape heard only a short way into it, and not as far as the part about the Dark Lord marking “the one” as his equal. He only heard “The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches … born(e) to those who have thrice defied him … born(e) as the seventh month dies … and the—”

So the part of the prophecy which Snape heard does not say whether the word is “born” or “borne”; or whether the birth or conveying is in the future or thirty years ago (other than the very tenuous evidence that “dies” is in the present – not future – tense); or whether “the one” is a person or a weapon, or, if it is assumed to refer to a person, whether it refers to a human boy or a 300-year-old female Centaur; or whether the seventh month means July, September, seven months from when the prophecy was made, seven months of gestation, or the seventh month of the Jewish or Chinese calendar; or even whether it refers to the current Dark Lord and not to one who will be around in 700 years’ time. Also the use of the word “approaches” strongly suggests an adult champion or an object, physically travelling. You can say that a birth approaches, but I’m older than you and in all my life I have never, ever heard anybody, outside this one piece of fiction, say that the actual embryo approaches (and Harry was a six-week embryo, a mere baked bean, when the prophecy was made).

The times given for various events – Trelawney’s job interview, Snape’s defection and the attack on the Potters – clearly show that it took Voldemort a year to decide that the prophecy even might refer to a baby, and nearly another year to act on it. [In autumn 1995 Trelawney tells Umbridge she’s been teaching nearly 16 years, so probably since January 1980, so her interview was in December 1979. Snape defects during the winter after Harry’s birth, after the trees are bare but while the leaves are still blowing about, so late November or December 1980. The Potters are killed on 31^st October 1981.] So unless Snape is a Seer – and if he were he would make better choices – he absolutely would not have any reason to think that the prophecy referred to a child, until Voldemort decided that it did, and a moment’s thought should have told Dumbledore that. And of course, as soon as Dumbledore moved the Potters into hiding that would make Voldemort think that the second part of the prophecy, the part he hadn’t heard but Dumbledore had, confirmed that Harry was “the one”.

The only thing which is definite in the part of the prophecy which Snape heard is that “the one”, whoever or whatever or whenever it is, will be or has at some point in the past been born or conveyed to parents, or a family, or a group, who have or will have defied a Dark Lord who may or may not be Voldemort exactly three times, no more or less. That’s it. Presumably Voldie picked Harry because the Potters had defied him three times. And don’t even get me started on “neither can live while the other survives”, since Harry and Tom clearly were alive at the same time, and could have continued to be so just by ignoring each other. The whole thing is a masterpiece in prophetic vagueness. It only means anything, and only refers to a child, because Voldemort decided that it did: but that was nearly a year after Snape overheard it. He presumably expected that somebody would get killed but he had no reason to think they were anything other than an adult champion, and it was his duty to warn his commanding officer of a threat.

But even aside from that, Dumbledore is being an idiot in that scene, accusing Snape of only asking for Lily when there was no possible excuse he could have given for asking Voldie to spare James and Harry, and warning the Order should have been enough to save them. All Snape is guilty of in that scene is not emoting sufficiently over the fate of a baby he’s never met and a man who publicly sexually assaulted him, while he is (in theory) saving their lives by warning Dumbledore that they are in danger, and meanwhile Dumbledore’s emotionally abusive behaviour guarantees that no other young Death Eaters will ever defect. His abusive behaviour nearly killed Harry, because it made Remus too scared to tell him that Sirius was an Animagus. In his own way, he’s more of a monster than the Dursleys.

And then there’s the astronomy – oh boy. Despite what Harry seems to think, during the summer half of the year, from spring to autumn, the sun rises earlier and sets later in the north than in the south. We can hand-wave away the scene in early May where it’s sunrise at Shell Cottage and still dark at Hogwarts, since the Hogsmeade area is surrounded by mountains which could set the sunrise back noticeably (because the sun has to climb first above the horizon and then above any mountains in the north-east), and at that season the difference between sunrise in the Highlands and the later sunrise in Cornwall is not great. We must assume that when Harry thinks the sun rises later in the north, he’s just really bad at Astronomy. That’s something your editor should really have spotted [along with using “further” when you meant “farther”: it’s “farther” for physical distance and “further” for metaphorical, e.g. “In further news, the town is farther away than we thought”, and I didn’t learn the difference either until I was your age, but an editor really should know this kind of thing or what are you paying them for?]. At least the dawn scene isn’t wrong, owing to the mountains around Hogwarts: it’s only Harry’s interpretation of it which is wrong. But the scene where Harry and co. rise up on Thestral-back on or close to 21^st June and then immediately fly off into the sunset is much more problematic.

Sunset in the Highlands at Midsummer would be at about 10:20pm British Summer Time, or 9:20pm by Greenwich Mean Time. If we assume the school is using GMT that year (although for reasons I won’t confuse you with they have to have been using BST two years earlier), and that there is a big mountain close to the school and north-west of it, we can bring the sunset forwards to about 8:40pm. But even if we interpret “into a blood-red sunset” generously as “the sun was within forty minutes of setting”, that still leaves us having to explain how it took three whole hours to get from Harry’s vision at 5pm to mounting the Thestrals at, apparently, at least 8pm, when if you count up all the things that happen in between it should have been more like 7:15pm.

The only other rational explanation I could come up with was that it might have been dark due to an encroaching storm, the real sun was hidden by clouds, and in the poor visibility Harry mistook a summer brush-fire in the mountains for a sunset. But it’s a major fudge. If ever you correct errors in the books, I recommend having Hermione tell Harry it is 6pm, not 5pm, just after his vision. Then it would all work OK, assuming they are using GMT.

For those reading this who may be interested in such things, I have a fannish webpage with multiple essays analysing various plot-points in the Harry Potter books, and plugging plot-holes where possible. In particular there is a long series on the layout of the Hogwarts area which manages to tie in Jo Rowling’s own rough sketch with details contained in the books, and make them work together; and another series working out the location of places such as Little Whinging and Vernon’s island, partly based on the trains used to get there. There are also some articles of general interest, such as a Britpicker’s Guide to assist foreigners in writing a convincing British setting; and links to my own fanfics (not all Potter-related) and recommendations for other people’s fics.

[Oh and just to drive home the points I made in this post about the links between hatred of trans women, hatred of women in general and fascism, two days after I posted this I received abuse on Quora from an Australian transphobe calling me “pig girl”, even though I am probably old enough to be his grandmother or even his great-grandmother, and when I checked his profile the rest of his content was ranting filth about immigrants and “Pissrael”.]

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