Daniel Radcliffe made waves this past week by declaring that, when it comes to supposedly transgender children, adults should “trust kids to tell us who they are”. The remarks came during a charity roundtable run by The Trevor Project, a charity who work for suicide prevention amongst LGBT-identifying youth.

The Wizarding World is surprisingly full of responsible adults

Radcliffe is hardly the first to make this point — the line has become a contemporary shibboleth. Yet hearing the words from his mouth exposes something about them with a greater clarity than usual, due to a striking irony: Radcliffe’s entire career is built on playing a child who has to be told by adults who he is. The entire Harry Potter franchise turns on the moment when, on his eleventh birthday, Rubeus Hagrid sits him down and says, “you’re a wizard, Harry”. The Dursleys — perfectly normal, thank you very much — live in denial about the realities of the world, so much so that they flee the stream of Hogwarts acceptance letters filling their house and escape to a ragged shack on a rock out at sea. Hagrid is actually willing to tell Harry how it is, and his life makes a hell of a lot more sense afterwards.

In fact, a great deal in J.K. Rowling’s Potter stories rides on the importance of trustworthy adults making wise decisions for children that they are not qualified to make. Perhaps one of the reasons the Potter books have been so successful is because they are a far cry from the common trope in children’s fiction in which most adults are either stupid or evil, and those who are good are just big kids who, in reality, would be a massive liability and get right on your nerves. We probably have Roald Dahl to thank for that. The Wizarding World is surprisingly full of responsible adults, who are willing to treat children like children and to actually shoulder some of the responsibilities that adulthood brings with it. Professor Dumbledore, puller of all the strings, routinely (and rightly) withholds dangerous information from Harry and co. Most notably — to get into the nerdy ins-and-outs of it all — Dumbledore places Harry with the unsavoury Dursleys because he knows that Harry must be with a blood relative of his mother, in order for the protective spell triggered by her death to keep him safe from Voldemort. There is a rather conservative thought in there about the importance of blood relatives over any “chosen family” one may care to assemble for themselves — a thought that even J.K. Rowling might not have let herself get away with today.

Trans readers undermine themselves: Harry needs an adult to tell him who he is

Of course, Harry Potter has become something of a Rorschach test since Rowling fell afoul of trans activists after standing up for women-only spaces, because of her own experience of domestic abuse. Conservatives and liberals both see their own values reflected back in it. The creator of He Who Must Not Be Named is now regarded by progressive fans of the franchise as “literally Voldemort”. This last week also saw the announcement of a new TV adaptation of the novels, and Rowling’s touted involvement drew the scorn and pre-emptive boycotts of those who want to keep the books but dispose of the author. When these fans read Harry’s life-altering conversation with Hagrid, they see themselves and the moment that, somehow, they realised they were trans. They look at the Dursleys and see the bigots and homophobes who tried to quash their inherent gender identity, like Aunt Petunia trying and failing to brush Harry’s hair neatly.

Yet trans readers undermine themselves here: Harry still needs an adult to tell him who he is. It’s just the same with kids identifying as trans — it comes down to adults telling them that they are. According to Abigail Shrier’s excellent book Irreversible Damage, over 65 per cent of young people identifying as transgender now are known to have spent increased time on social media before coming out. The rest, presumably, were on it all the time anyway. When they’re on TikTok or YouTube, what do they find? Adults, convincing them that they are transgender — adults like Jeffrey Marsh, who uses his trans-affirming TikTok videos to encourage children to message him privately, without their parents knowing. Recently, when Shumirun Nessa, a British Muslim woman and comedy TikTokker, called Marsh out on this, she had pictures of her without her hijab leaked and received threatening messages with details of her children’s schools. Marsh’s tactics (and those of others like him) prove that Radcliffe and others don’t really believe what they say. They all know that kids need adults to tell them who they are; it’s just that they want to be the adults to do it.

It’s a sad fact of life that there are usually more than a few Dursleys knocking around — adults whose heads are so deep in the sand when it comes to reality that they’re even willing to neglect the children in their care to maintain their illusions. That’s why children need adults who will either sit them down and tell them how it is, or sit them down and tell them they’re too young to understand how it is and so the decision has been made for them. Children need grown-ups to be grown-ups. They need Dumbledores and Hagrids — now more than ever.