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Nobody Asked for Harry Potter Donuts

The new Tim Hortons collaboration will only fuel J. K. Rowling’s anti-trans crusade

A few years ago, my parents were downsizing their condo and summoned my partner and me back to their city to get some of my old stuff out of their storage locker. Among the piles of old art projects and Build-A-Bears we found my Harry Potter books, dog-eared and worn from many rereads as a kid. I was admittedly a devoted fan—much of my earliest writing published online was Harry Potter fanfiction I’d written when I was thirteen, and, in high school, I even participated in a very 2011-era group YouTube channel themed around the series, the receipts for which are still online. But considering the path my life has taken since then—I am not only trans now but calling out the horrors that J. K. Rowling and her ilk are besetting upon my community and the world has sort of become my job—my first reaction was to toss them in the “get rid of” pile without a second glance.

This story was originally published by Xtra Magazine, with the headline “Tim Hortons and the no good very bad ‘Harry Potter’ collaboration.” It has been reprinted here with permission.

I ended up keeping the books, however. It was less about nostalgia and more so for academic reasons. While I would love to cast off everything Rowling has touched with the brazen rejection it deserves, there is always the chance that my work (which often involves writing pieces like this) might one day require some sort of reference to the books’ content themselves. The last thing I’d want to do is have to buy more copies or go through the public shame of taking them out of the library.

And so, my partner and I packed all seven books up into our rental car alongside my other childhood literary artifacts (shout out to K. A. Applegate’s Animorphs series, which has comparatively aged like fine wine), drove them home to Vancouver, and filed them away at the bottom of a bookshelf in our office where they have sat gathering dust, untouched.

If I had my way, that is how everyone should treat Rowling’s output in light of her pivot to full-time anti-trans crusading: as a regretfully significant cultural artifact of a moment in time, with which any present-day engagement should be treated as deeply embarrassing and problematic.

And yet as of August 12, Canadians will be able to snag various Harry Potter–themed items at Tim Hortons locations across the country as part of a brand collaboration celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first film.

“Harry........

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