Hogwarts Legacy trans representation reportedly labelled “performative bulls***” by developers. Hogwarts Legacy’s increased diversity hasn’t been wholly well-received.
Attempts to increase diversity in Hogwarts Legacy have reportedly been described as “performative bullshit” – added to the game in response to the backlash against it – by people who worked on the project.
In our Hogwarts Legacy review, we said that the game “takes steps to more closely reflect the inclusivity at the heart of the Harry Potter community,” introducing a student from Africa, a blind student, and a transgender witch who lives outside Hogwarts in the village of Hogsmeade.
However, according to Stephanie Sterling, that transgender character was described by an acquaintance who worked on the game as a “token,” added “to pivot the conversation away” from J.K. Rowling. That was corroborated by Did You Know Gaming’s Liam Robertson, who says that “there was apparently some trans representation added after some of the initial controversy.” The presence of that character – described as a pillar of the community in our review – was apparently described by one of Robertson’s sources as “performative bullshit.” Sterling’s source says that the character is “barely” in the game.
HogwartsHogwarts Legacy is not so much a video game as it is an attempt to resolve what was a particular writer’s very specific point of view into a “universe” that will please everyone, regardless of whether that ever coheres into something that makes sense.
Disappearing into Hogwarts Castle doesn’t render this ongoing debate invisible. In fact, the world of Hogwarts Legacy – in particular, the game’s conspicuous attempts at diversity – illuminates Rowling’s hatefulness in stark relief. Somehow, Hogwarts as it existed in the 1890s, when the game takes place, is more diverse along every axis than it is in 1995, when the Harry Potter novels begin. When I read the books as a young girl, I longed for more Indian representation than just Parvati and Padma Patil. In Hogwarts Legacy, multiple professors are Indian, as are my classmates. There’s a potion vendor in one of the small hamlets that has the same name as my mother. Rather than providing comfort, it makes me skeptical. While Rowling’s racial representation has never been good, tossing a half-dozen Indians into the Scottish countryside willy-nilly isn’t exactly better. Where did they come from – India, which was still under British rule in the 1800s? And where did they all go by the time Harry got there?
How Hogwarts Legacy fits into the overall fiction of Harry Potter becomes thornier the more you think about these contradictions. If the witch that I met south of campus is, along with her wife, openly a lesbian, then why didn’t Dumbledore ever come out of the closet? If it’s possible for non-British witches and wizards to teach at Hogwarts, why didn’t they in the ’90s, when Harry was there? Many, many characters remark on how unusual it is that you’re a new student starting as a fifth-year, which is not something that the Potter books ever indicated could happen. But none of the other characters talk about how strange it is that Hogwarts has a transfer student from the Ugandan school Uagadou. In the one book where witches and wizards from other schools showed up, from France and Bulgaria, their presence was treated as a rare oddity.
