In this op-ed, Kacen Callender, a bestselling and award-winning author of middle grade, young adult, and adult fiction, unpacks their personal connection to the Harry Potter series, and why J.K. Rowling’s transphobic and transmisogynist views mean we must denounce and stop supporting her and her work. Callender is the author of the recently released Felix Ever After, a novel that celebrates transgender and nonbinary youth.

I understand the stakes when I write for children and teens. I understand that books can save lives. When I accepted the Stonewall Book Award for Hurricane Child early last year, I gave an emotional speech, telling a room full of strangers that J. K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series had saved my life. Isolated, bullied, and feeling zero hope for the future, I’d been planning to die by suicide as a child. I never planned to live past the age of sixteen. There are multiple reasons I didn’t follow through with my plan: I was afraid to die, I was worried about how my family would feel — and, as silly as it might seem now, I told myself that I couldn’t die yet, because I needed to know how the Harry Potter series would end.

Harry Potter, at times, offered the only light I could see in years spent within a vortex of depression and anxiety. I hadn’t begun to fully understand my queer or trans identity yet, but in retrospect, the books offered the foundation I needed to love myself at a time when I hated everything about me. The series helped me see that being different from most of society is powerful and magical. It gave me hope that hateful ignorance could be defeated and showed that love, literally, is the force that would save us all. There were studies that revealed Harry Potter taught its readers empathy, and speculation that my generation, the millennials that were Harry’s age when he first went to Hogwarts, had been revolutionized because of the books. I had been proud of this. Read more via them.us