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Opinion | Quidditch’s new name might teach J.K. Rowling a surprising lesson - The Washington Post

J.K. Rowling cares a lot about words. “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people,” <a href="https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269382518362509313">she tweeted</a> last year in a fit of transphobic snark. “Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

Now, another word dear to the “Harry Potter” author is under threat: quidditch.

US Quidditch and Major League Quidditch <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/12/18/quidditch-name/" target=_blank>declared last week</a> that they would change their names — <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-59726281" target=_blank>partly because</a> they believe ditching the trademark will allow the sport to expand, and <a href="https://www.usquidditch.org/news/2021/12/usq-mlq-pursue-name-change-for-quidditch" target=_blank>partly because</a> they believe ditching its inventor will avoid any nasty association with her public bigotry.

The move is meaningful and meaningless at the same time — and could show Rowling what she’s been missing all along. But let’s back up a second to help out those who can’t tell a <a href="https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Bludger" target=_blank>bludger</a> from a <a href="https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Quaffle" target=_blank>quaffle</a>. (Ouch.)

Quidditch is the made-up sport of Rowling’s universe, in which witches and wizards fly around on brooms hurling some balls into hoops, hitting other balls with bats at other players, and trying to snatch one last little winged golden ball out of the air. Quidditch is also the real-life version of that sport, in which decidedly non-magical humans run around with brooms between their legs, hurling slightly deflated volleyballs into hoops and slightly deflated dodgeballs at opponents, and trying to snatch a tennis ball dangling in a sock from someone’s shorts.

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The second of these quidditches, however, will soon not be quidditch at all but rather something to be determined. The monetary motivation here is obvious: Warner Bros.’ trademark on the name has curtailed “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/20/sport/quidditch-league-name-change-scli-intl-spt/index.html" target=_blank>sponsorship and broadcast opportunities</a>” for broom-bearing competitors. Plus, it’s probably hard to convince an audience that this is a legitimate athletic pursuit rather than somewhat cardiovascular make-believe.

The moral motivation also isn’t difficult to suss out. Rowling has hardly hidden her animus toward transgender people. She tweets frequently about the sacrosanct nature of “biological sex”; she blogged a manifesto as unnecessarily long as “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” The sport formerly known as quidditch, meanwhile, is inclusive as a rule: A team may not have more than four players on the pitch who identify as the same gender, allowing even nonbinary people to participate without the hassle that haunts other contests.

Everyone, it seems, wants some space from today’s she-who-must-not-be-named. A January television special for the 20th anniversary of the first “Harry Potter” film will conspicuously <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/11/17/harry-potter-20-reunion-jk-rowling/" target=_blank>leave out of the lineup</a> the woman (not wumben, wimpund or woomud) who conjured the whole phenomenon.

This is an impressive transfiguration: “Harry Potter” has turned into something much more than a bunch of books and movies, and lives now as a creature all its own. The fan fiction that casts Hermione as a person of color, or Remus Lupin and Sirius Black as lovers, meets its match in a quidditch that doesn’t need Rowling anymore — indeed, would be better off without her. The art has outgrown the artist, and run away.

Yet is it really so easy as incanting “Evanesco,” and, poof, she’s gone? Quidditch will still be quidditch, regardless of the moniker these leagues invent. The players will still be running around astraddle brooms, still pinning their hopes of victory on grabbing a yellow-hued ball — inexplicably, unless “Harry Potter” explains it.

If quidditch could stand on its own two legs (Muggles can’t fly, after all), the name could have been discarded quietly. A year from now, you might have caught a contest of Broomkey, or Battenhoop, or Gibblewhomp on one of the lesser ESPNs, and wondered who thought up this oddball game. Yet the announcement came with fanfare, and all of it depended on the connection to the <a href="https://pottermore.fandom.com/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Lived" target=_blank>Boy Who Lived </a>and the writer who brought him to life.

Quidditch has the same problem Rowling has, which is that the arbitrary combinations of sounds and syllables that we call words only mean something in relation to the world they describe — and more than that, the way they’re understood. You can tweak a reference all you like, but the referent will stay just the same. The author herself should know this better than anyone; after all, she claims the name “quidditch” <a href="https://wamu.org/story/16/12/29/j-k-rowling-rebroadcast/" target="_blank">doesn’t come from any etymological root</a> but was the result of pouring random nonsense sounds starting with the letter Q into five empty pages of a notebook.

The leaders of the quidditch leagues can make a statement by disavowing J.K. Rowling, but they can’t make quidditch stop being, well, quidditch. Perhaps they will accidentally teach her the same lesson: that refusing to acknowledge transgender people for who they are will not magick them into something else, either.

Molly Roberts writes about technology and society for The Post's Opinions section.

Molly Roberts

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Opinion Columns

Quidditch’s new name might teach J.K. Rowling a surprising lesson

Ghislaine Maxwell trial in New York

Reuters

Opinion | Elizabeth Holmes and Ghislaine Maxwell’s trials present a false feminism - The Washington Post

Two villainesses have captured the nation’s attention from the courtroom this week. Or is that two victims?

<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/30/holmes-testimony-cross-examination/" target=_blank>Elizabeth Holmes</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/maxwell-trial-opens/2021/11/29/a10aa1e4-511b-11ec-9267-17ae3bde2f26_story.html" target=_blank>Ghislaine Maxwell</a> stand accused of very different crimes. The now-disgraced <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/03/21/can-anyone-crack-elizabeth-holmes/" target=_blank>Silicon Valley golden girl</a> allegedly duped investors into thinking her company’s blood-testing technology could detect disease with a pinprick. The New York socialite-in-exile, meanwhile, allegedly trafficked teenage girls as young as 14 for financier Jeffrey Epstein and his rich friends to rape.

Yet these women have seized on similar strategies for their defense: Blame the men.

Start with the wannabe magician who lied her way to a $9 billion valuation. Holmes fooled doctors and funders and pharmacies and everyday folks. Now, however, she’s claiming she was the mark.

Her board of directors — mostly a bunch of distinguished, aging gentlemen including Henry Kissinger, Jim Mattis and George P. Shultz — didn’t give her good enough advice, she says. Those scientists and engineers who she claimed were changing the world? They didn’t trust her too much; she trusted them too much. They told her that her miracle machine worked. She, innocent and ignorant, merely relayed that information to the public.

And then there’s Theranos chief operating officer <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/11/29/elizabeth-holmes-testimony-day-four/" target=_blank>Ramesh Balwani</a>, her partner in (maybe) crime and, at one point, in love. Better known as Sunny, the right-hand man was, in his former girlfriend’s retelling, actually a puppet master. The subject is touchy, and serious: Holmes <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1059916883/elizabeth-holmes-testimony-trial-theranos" target=_blank>charges Balwani</a> with emotional and sexual abuse. She says he told her he was “astonished” at her “mediocrity,” that she had to “kill the old Elizabeth” to become stronger. He forced her to sleep with him, she says, “because he wanted me to know he still loved me.”

The reported conduct (which Balwani denies) is appalling. But can abuse excuse abuse? Or does exploiting trauma as an excuse for hurting others only cause more harm?

The case is simpler when it comes to those movers and shakers Holmes got to put their stamps on her sham. Holmes played on her femininity to impressive effect, even as she modulated her voice to a baritone and her wardrobe to a black-turtlenecked Steve Jobs sendup. She caught the notice of powerful men because she emphasized, in adopting these traits so incongruous with her appearance, that she wasn’t one of them — and that, all the same, she was playing their game.

When she succeeded, she was notable because she wasn’t a man. Now, in her ignominy, she suggests she wasn’t responsible for any of it — because she wasn’t a man. She can only have it both ways if society is still sexist enough to think this counts as feminism.

And if society is even more sexist than that, a jury will also acquit Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell, by all accounts, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/15/us/ghislaine-maxwell-epstein.html" target=_blank>ran Epstein’s monstrous life</a>. She managed his many homes, his glitzy relationships and his uncontrollable yen for so-called massages. The last, as it turned out, meant luring minors to Epstein’s estates, where he could undress them, touch them and worse. Beforehand, she might befriend a girl as a means of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-trial.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article" target=_blank>grooming</a> her for violation — gossiping with her, shopping with her, talking with her about sex. She’d sometimes watch as the rape took place, to put the child “at ease” with her presence, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/29/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-trial.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article" target=_blank>according to an indictmen</a>t.

But, of course, none of it was her fault! “Ever since Eve was accused of tempting Adam with the apple,” Maxwell’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/11/29/nyregion/ghislaine-maxwell-trial" target=_blank>attorney </a>proclaimed, “women have been blamed for the bad behavior of men.” So her team will try to blame a man for the bad behavior of a woman — when really there is more than enough badness to go around for each of the accused, dead and alive, to take their share.

Maxwell, in seeking to capitalize on the stereotype of the weak woman bending and breaking in the hands of a savvy man, takes a page out of Holmes’s book — and rewrites it even worse. Because where Holmes may have hoodwinked mighty men who underestimated a gal’s ability to bamboozle their big old brains, Maxwell was deceiving the most vulnerable members of her own sex. Now, the real victims risk going without justice, because a fake victim has invented herself.

False feminism always hurts the cause of gender equality.  The suggestion that a woman guilty of wrongdoing can only ever have been under the control of a man deprives all women of agency. After all, to become less culpable, they must also become less capable. This is  an appeal to prejudice masquerading as progressivism.

The least sexist thing we can do is embrace the uninspiring reality: Women can be evil, too.

Elizabeth Holmes and Ghislaine Maxwell’s trials present a false feminism

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Women can be evil, too 

Tightening of coronavirus measures in the Netherlands, Amsterdam - 24 Nov 2021

Opinion | Molly Roberts: Our words did not do the pandemic justice - The Washington Post

Remember back in quarantine, when we self-isolated except for a few socially distanced meetups — unless, of course, we were essential workers?

This sentence reads smoothly enough today, but back before March 2020, it would have been mostly undecipherable. The coronavirus has obviously changed the way we live and the way we work. It has also changed the way we talk.

Some called it the novel coronavirus at the start. Soon, it became merely the coronavirus — and mind the article, please, because this bug was nothing if not definite and defining. After that, came covid-19, our name for the disease. Then, just covid.

We had plunged into a pandemic, the World Health Organization announced, to which everyday folks and newscasters alike answered: No, we had plunged into a global pandemic.

Was this redundant? Absolutely. Was it necessary, anyhow? Maybe so. The two-fisted description added an extra “bang!” to an already alarming situation, as though we needed the phenomenon to sound as pressing as it felt to those suffering through it.

This tendency to exaggerate recurs throughout our new vocabulary. When we talk about quarantine, we don’t really mean the 40 days of seclusion that gave rise to the term hundreds of years ago; we mean 14 or so days instead. We also don’t mean cooping up post-exposure to a pathogen to contain the threat.

Most of those who “quarantined” had little reason to believe they’d been exposed, except for those folks stuck on cruise ships. And most also used the word to describe a much more extended period of time than that miserable, malinformed spring when we all cowered responsibly indoors as the trees turned green, unaware that outdoors was actually the safest place to be.

We dreamed up another word besides quarantine to describe those initial six or so months of extra caution: self-isolation, during which few of us were entirely by ourselves or entirely isolated. Many were with their families, or, another invention, their “pods.” And they saw people away from home, too — doing something confusingly known as social distancing, though the distance was actually physical. The words we employed suggested we were limiting our fraternization; really, what it meant was we were still fraternizing but six or so feet apart (or even on a screen).

Crises have<a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-has-led-to-an-explosion-of-new-words-and-phrases-and-that-helps-us-cope-136909"> fattened our dictionaries before</a>. Snafu, you might have heard, comes from the World War II-era military acronym for “<a href="https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/10-new-words-from-world-war-ii">situation normal, all fouled up”</a> (or, you know, something fouler than “fouled”) — and the word “acronym” itself appeared in English at the same time. There’s comfort in being able to describe the utterly awful. We understand it better that way, or think we do, and we wrestle it under our control.

There’s comfort also in the human connection that comes with a shared lexicon. Amid all that quarantining and self-isolating, we’ve needed connection more than ever.

Still, the impulse to breed a vocabulary that makes bad things seem even worse seems perverse — as does the drive to hang on to these terms longer than they’re useful, even when we and almost everyone we’re close to have been vaccinated once, twice, three times. Normal life nears again. Yet we cling to the impossible days, and to the language carefully fitted to describe them.

Maybe the dreary covid-19 glossary has been a way of giving ourselves permission to ache over a reality whose day-to-day toll ultimately was small for those lucky enough not to lose anyone or anything of consequence, but whose cumulative effects could still be ghastly. Maybe by maximizing the problem rather than minimizing it, we registered a collective complaint that the situation was wholly unacceptable and miserable. The clinging, similarly, is a cry for acknowledgment: This happened to us, and that should count for something.

We can talk about the pre-pandemic world now. We don’t talk about the post-pandemic world yet, and in some ways we won’t get a post-pandemic world, because where we are going has already been changed by where we’ve been. Words aren’t only words. They both describe society and shape it. We’ll probably conceive another vocabulary to cope with whatever’s coming next. Yet some words from this era will stick with us even when we’ve discarded the behaviors they were supposed to capture, like little memorials. Or like scars.

Molly Roberts

Quidditch’s new name might teach J.K. Rowling a surprising lesson

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