There's No Special Ed At Hogwarts

Oh yes, I write essays sometimes.

Sometimes, they're even good.

There's No Special Ed At Hogwarts, available free online at Breath & Shadow, is a very personal nonfiction piece about confronting systemic and internalized ableism.

It's also, indirectly and unconsciously, about recognizing and dealing with the realization that the things you love do not always love you back.

I love Harry Potter. I was obsessed with it during a very hard part of my life and it still gives me warm nostalgia feelings of comfort when I think about that world.

But that world is not accessible to disabled people, and young me didn't realize that wasn't okay. The world wasn't accessible, but that was just the way it was. It was my fault for needing it to be different. So why should fiction be any different?

Because it can. Because it should. Because it needs to.

If our fiction, if our worlds full of dragons and magic, can't be open to people regardless of who or what they are, what the hell kind of chance does our real world have?

I wrote this a couple years ago. I knew the author was problematic, but I wasn't really… part of the discourse so I wasn't aware of the extent.

If I was writing this now, I’d add something about trans people not being welcome at Hogwarts either, since JK Rowling has continuously revealed that she is anti-trans and I am…

Well, to be honest. I don't super really know what I am. I’m not cisgender, which is the word for people who are comfortable in the gender they were assigned at birth. I'm definitely not a man. But not totally a woman either.

I've been using the word non-binary. I don't know if it's accurate, I don't really care what you call it. But I like the flag.

I just know that J. K. Rowling has another reason to hate me, but that doesn't mean I have another reason to hate myself.