Overton Morals and My Accepting Harry Potter Again

In 2017, I felt a gut punch. I heard Trevor Noah discuss how Mahatma Ghandi was openly sexist. The comment made me angry. At the time my morals were absolutist. I was burning with the pain of being seen as brown and I could not let go of the few heroes in my heart. As always the man born a crime made me reconsider. Almost a decade later, I remember the pain of his denounce.

Feynman

Seeing Ghandi as racist hurt me. Because another baby Jose hero of mine was Richard Feynman. The most expensive book I own is a first edition of Feynman and Hibbs (1965). I bought the first edition because there was no other available at the time, I kept a tracker for the price and bought a version for $ 200, I also read every biography and propaganda I could from Dick.

Alas, Feynman was a bad person and a great physicist. The shine finally faded away as I read chapter 8 of The Pleasures of Finding Things Out. The chapter provides a talk Feynman gave at the 1966 National Science Teachers' Association. The talk discussed the topic of "What is Science". I copy the section in full, as he said ir worst.

I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up–that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line–a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn’t realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.

She went on and said, “Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect.  Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart,” etc.–I was flabbergasted.  She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks.

I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.

Now I will go on with my own experience as a youngster in mathematics....  (link to text)

Plato

Feynman was not alone in his thinking. Similar arguments plague the history of human thought. However, Feynman gave highly dated view of the argument. See below a quote from the fifth century BCE.

the gifts of nature are alike diffused in both; all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man... the same education which makes a man a good guardian will make a woman a good guardian; for their original nature is the same. - Plato's Republic, book V

In his argumentation Socrates was miles ahead in nuance compared to Feynman. Both disagree that men and woman are equally capable. But Socrates knew that the average matters little in social settings where sorting into professions makes comparative advantage shine.

Overton

However, there is a difference. By 1966 CE, Betty Friedan's, The Feminine Mystique (1963) had already sparked the second feminist movement. The movement was on full swing at the time Richard spoke to a room full of teachers (a profession overly represented by women). Feynman spoke out against the equality of the sexes in a world that was starting to accept it. Plato did the opposite, he spoke out for equalirt of access to education in a world that still needed multiple millenia to accept his claims.

I find the idea of an Overton window immensely important here. The window tells us the breadth of topics in public debate that are acceptable at every time. The window moves, left, right, up, and down. But at every point in time some opinions will be at the center and some at every extreme. See below an example.

With this in mind, one could argue Feynman's view were still within the window. Indeed, his discourse is still available online, and the book I read the talk is a collection of his "Best Short Works" published in 1999. Had his views deemed the passage too contentious, the editors would had needed a note in their reprint.

Potter

I share this story because the same analysis can be given to J.K. Rowling and her self-inflicted demise. I am the first to admit I see her views problematic and hurtful to all of humanity. Indeed it is our empathy and humaneness that redeems us as a species even in the face of the filth we have done.

It was Rowling's empathy for Harry, Hermione, Snape, Dumbledore, Ron, and many others that endeered people of my generation to her books. JK even admited in a press tour that "[she] always thought of Dumbledore as gay." The books have helped millions of alienated children grow up and find meaning in themselves. And then...

TERF

Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who'll have you. Live your best life in peace and security. But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real? #IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill - Tweet in 2019

Sex is real, these three words gave us a peak at a unexpectingly inhumane mind. The official term is Trans-exclusionary Radical Feminists. A stream of feminism that accepts the pursuit of equality among the sexes but sees every person as being defined by the size of gametes a body organizes itself to produce in utero. Big gametes --> woman, small gametes --> men. Gamete type not lived experience defines sex.

I find it stupid and mean. Men and women are labels for people we meet and interact with. If a person calls themselves a man, I can assume some behavior and that helps in some interactions. But ultimately it is their thing. If anything, the effect their choice (or lack thereof) has on me is in adding or removing someone from my dating pool. And alas, I left the dating market a decade ago.

Rowling's views placed her books in conflict with her readers. A decade after the last Potter book was published, we could no longer separate her actions from her views. In the same way as I did with Feynman, I distanced myself from my views on Harry Potter. However, this did not work well. While I could distance myself from the values shared in Feynman's multiple biographies, his quantumelectrodynamics is still the most precise theory known to humankind. His work lies at the foundation of reality.

The Hogwarts universe is different. Trains in Germany will still be late if one cares for Neville or not. But still, my intuition is filled of Potterian references and fully separating never worked well.

Bad Feminist

I always took it as a falling of myself. Indeed, my generation is one that came to love canclling their care for things. Be it Miramax movies, red haired comedians, Pepsi, the list goes on. But I never managed to feel part of these movements. Sure, I have not watched a football match since the Qatar worldcup. But it is not that I watched football before that. One game a year as a social outing, but I smoked more cigarretes due to peer pressure than that.

So I always had the feeling that I somehow did not care enough. Even as I served in a DEI committee, I just could not see myself as banning my children in the future from seeing the Harry Potter movies. These were movies that I liked and I still enjoy. So I kept feeling the BadFeminist state Roxane Gay told us about.

For Women Scotland

Things changed on April 16, 2025. That day, it was shared that:

The [UK] Supreme Court unanimously... holds that the terms “man”, “woman” and “sex” in the EA 2010 refer to biological sex. - UKSC

This ruling came after a FWS made an appeal to the UK Equality Act, an act that had a regulation to increase the number of women in company boards. The group saw the aims of the act as endangered if trans-gendered women were to take the place of people whose body were organzed in utero to produce bigger gametes.

The ruling is cruel. Since 2004, people who "for all purposes" live a life of a different gender they were registered at birth well allowed to file for a Gender Recognition Certificate. After the new ruling., they are left holding a document the state hollowed out.

RBG

A court ought not be affected by the weather of the day, but will be by the climate of the era. - On the Basis of Sex (2018)

The ruling points at a difference between the Feynman and Rowling case. A climate-based difference that allowed me to accept the Harry Potter books, and reject the ones from Richard Feynman.

The climate as RIchard Feynman spoke was one that rejected his sexism. It was not weather. Not a single shower a new normal. A change that has expanded giving legal rights to women worldwide, and even people of different races or religions.

Alas, weather is inherently localized. And what the 2025 ruling shows is the meanness of the land that let the Irish die of hunger, perfected slave trade, and drove, Alan Turing, among many others to suicide for their choice of whom they loved. A land in which the head judge in his ruling "counsel[ed] against reading this judgment as a triumph of one or more groups in our society at the expense of another." And who managed to say it with a straight face, and with hands that inked the rule of the law in the kingdom composed of Britain and a third of Ireland.

Anticolonist Xenophobia

Ultimately, what let me continue to like Harry Potter is my xenophobia. We are all xenophobes, and my being born in a former colony has cemented my feeling of "them" as the lands that formerly owned others. Sure, this is legally inaccurate. But these contries caused incalculable harm in their pursuit of extracting value from people who could not fight back.

Just as I am always afraid of meeting a very old German person. When I talk with a person born in a former colonist nation, I always know part of their value system is build on the rehistoricism that what their ancestors did was not a crime against humanity. I cannot go my life changing everyone's views on reality.

Every country rehistorized their past. I grew up being told that colony time was ultimately good because we got Catholicism in return (A, B). What this view gives Costa Rica is the idea that we were always fine. We were not the native americans who died. Costa Rica is the land of the catholics who grew from the Encuentro de Culturas. Not a land where 95% of inhabitants were killed on contact after meeting the Europeans. But a land of believers that just as Job endured to reach God's promise. #fuckthatnoise

CODA

Understanding that JK Rowling grew up in a cruel society, I can view her art in a different kind of contrast. Just as Ghandi was sexist, his actions helped India from the yoke of imperial serfdom. Sure, it would have been great if he had had the most egalitarian and progressive values. But for India, free was better than perfect.

Even today in the most egalitarian nations, there are things that happen that, I hope our children will be appalled of learning. Progress takes time. My grandma was racist. My uncle hit his wife. I got traumatized from meeting them and work to be better. Climate change, bans on the free movement of people, plastic pollution, are all areas we need society to broaden its empathy.

I still see her current actions views as wrong and cruel. But no person is required to be extraordinary. JK did a huge services to many communities. By adding people of migrant backgrounds, nonheterosexual, and mudbloods to her stories, the realm of empathy grew for many of us, her readers. These were actions she did. She could have written the whole series only with white heterosexual characters. These were actions compliant within the Overton window of the time but well in the more kind and humane side of the spectrum.

Ultimately, I see her TERFness is the results of growing up in a land that whose climate,, as the 2025 ruling shows, exhuded that specific form of hatred. I can still hate her views, enjoy her books, and denounce the UK Supreme Court's views.