Fantasy lives and Muggle dreams

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?

I think this gets underrated: the extent to which someone who feels stranded or desperate or alone in the world needs something that's not true to be true.

We run up against this all the time in the trans debate, these impossible imperatives: This must be true because I need it to be true. Transition must work because I need it to work. I must become—not merely pass or approximate—because I need to become. Whatever you do, don’t tell me it won’t work. Don’t tell me it’s just a fantasy.

Pain lines these desperate fantasies. That's what gives the constant injunctions to "be kind" their moral force: hold up the impossible desire for what it is and you uncover real pain. It’s tempting to play along, to enter into the fantasy ourselves rather than risk rupturing it. But that fairy-lit path darkens.