On Rewatching the Harry Potters: Dinner for One Transphobe?

We're going through them, one by one, the teenagers and me--also dipping into "Harry Potter in 99 Seconds" and other charms on You-Tube (if you haven't seen this entertaining re-cap, lose no time). We utter Snape's long drawn out "obviously" before he does in the fifth one--Umbridge needling him about why he didn't get that defense against the dark arts position. We know about Emma Watson actually punching Tom Felton during the filming of The Prisoner of Azkaban, and why Buzzfeed says she did. As we eat our tacos or our fish or our tofu, chanting along with the dialogue, we forget, for very small moments, all the ills of our world. Until we start wondering why J.K. Rowling is saying what she's saying about transgender people--why she would imagine that transgender women would be a danger in a public bathroom. The notion brings me back to a story deemed newsworthy back when I was a teenager--I may have seen it on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, or I may have seen it elsewhere, but I saw it on some network news outlet back before CNN was founded: somewhere in Europe, at some bars, there were unisex bathrooms! Patrons of bars would enter a cubicle, do their business, and find themselves soaping their hands in a sink next to a person of what was then coyly designated "the opposite" sex. 

And this was news. People were talking. ("I mean, what would I do? A guy at the next sink? But if he's cute . . ." was the level of discourse.)

Oh, we've come a long way. I tend to see J.K. Rowling as more disturbed than hateful. The questions running through my head include "what's really eating her? Did she have some bad experience in a public bathroom?"

 Let's go to the bathroom scenes in her novels for insight. The troll shows up in a bathroom and he's a tough challenge for a bunch of first years. Moaning Myrtle messes with the U-Bend and the toilets in a girl's bathroom so unpleasant for her remarks and the constant flooding that it becomes a great place to hide out and brew polyjuice potion. And that's the bathroom with the faucet leading to the big bad basilisk in the basement. Monsters--snakes--a lollapalooza of interpretation here? Then Myrtle gigglingly appears when Harry's naked in the prefect's bathroom on the fifth floor during his efforts to solve a riddle involving an underwater egg. Not a girl to discreetly look away, Myrtle (also the animated stained glass mermaid in the window) wink and stare, making Harry most uncomfortable.

There's definitely bad stuff going on in the bathrooms of Harry Potter. We've only just finished the fifth one. Maybe I'll have an insight while watching the last three films . . . .or maybe I'll just wish Rowling would remember the advice emerging from the coy, or just lonely, Myrtle: "you're always welcome to share my toilet!"