Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 2022 – gender:hacked
I posted the first half of this piece on my birthday last month. But had a few more thoughts along these lines today, thinking about the 25th anniversary of Harry Potter.
I was 11 years old when I picked up The Sorcerer’s Stone, the same age as the main characters, and so we were children together on the cusp of adolescence.
I remember falling into that book and knowing it was fantasy and knowing what fantasy meant and knowing that Hogwarts didn’t really exist and yet—that summer—a part of me thought: But perhaps a letter will come by owl. The universe of Harry Potter fitted so neatly into the universe I inhabited that nothing ruled out its existence. Invisible edges separated the two worlds. Perhaps I would find such an edge and peel it back. Of course, I would never have said such things out loud. I knew those fantasies were ridiculous and yet—
—if there were witches—and witches don’t exist, of course, I knew that, everybody knows that—but if there were witches, I was surely a witch, and if I were a witch, everything would make sense: that misfittedness I could never shed, that shapeless longing I had…
In any case, I was terribly lonely then. My runaway imagination kept me company, nourished me. I clung to the possibility that fantasy could be more than fiction.
Take the 11-year-old girl I once was. What if my desires had taken some other form? What if I had wanted to be not a witch but a boy? Could I—at that age when I couldn’t quite separate fantasy and reality, no matter how cleanly I would have divided the two if asked—have consented to trade my open future for the circumscribed one transition offers? Even if adults had made the limits of transition clear to me—even if I said I understood—would I have understood what inexorability means? Wouldn’t my fantasies of transformation have survived underground, out of sight, nurtured by the strength of feeling that made those fantasies necessary to me?..