Happy One Year Anniversary!

CW:  Transphobia and trans misgyony 

I can’t believe it’s been a year since I started writing this series. I published the first chapter of The Temporary Spouse (the first book in the series) on a very auspicious day of September 11, 2024. Writing The Temporary Spouse started as an outlet for me. I just broke up with my partner, whom I thought I would spend the rest of my life with. And I was left heartbroken and aimless.

How It Began

And then, as I always do when my life is full, I started to read fanfiction. For some reason, I decided to re-read my old Draco/Harry fics, and that led me to reading crossovers. My favorite crossovers are Harry Potter/Avengers crossovers, and in particular Harry Potter/Tony Stark, because I always felt that deep down, these two characters would have wonderful chemistry together.

I think what cemented my decision to write Temporary Spouse was three fics in particular: “Holly Potter and the Mid-life Crisis” by Enigmaris, “Proof That Tony Stark Has a Heart” by Somewhere’s Sword, and “Ripped at Every Edge (but you’re a masterpiece)” by Lissy.

It didn’t take me long to come up with an idea. I am a romance author, and one of my favorite tropes is waking up married in Vegas/accidental marriage.

From Playing Hero to The Temporary Spouse

Now, let’s pause to talk about the name change, gender change, and Kendis’s race. Because that is something I do get asked quite about. People can understand a Harry Potter crossover. Hell, it’s people expected me to make Harry Potter a trans woman because I have done that before in my Batman/Harry Potter fanfic ‘Playing Hero.‘

Writing ‘Playing Hero’ was my first time that I ever wrote a non-binary character, and that character was a non-binary side character named Loren. Writing Loren’s character in particular was one of the reasons I later came out as non-binary myself. My gender and sexual orientation have changed a bit since then.

Right now, I’m a genderfluid non-binary trans man with they/them pronouns. But I don’t think I would have ever realized that without taking that first step by writing ‘Playing Hero’. With The Temporary Spouse, I wanted to make Harry Potter a non-binary character.

J.K. Rowling Is A Hateful Bigot

And right around the same time, something that truly cemented my decision to write this story. J.K. Rowling, the author of Harry Potter franchise, has been openly bigoted towards trans people (but trans women are her favorite target), but during the previous Olympics, J.K. Rowling decided to attack a gold medal Olympic boxer Imani Khalif, for being a man in women’s sports. The problem? Imani is not a man (by the way she has only doubled down a year later)

Imani is an Algerian woman (a cis woman of color) who does not meet Eurocentric beauty standards. And J.K. Rowling tried to ruin this woman’s career because she didn’t look like what she thought a woman should look like.

It pissed me off so badly that I decided to write Harry Potter as Kendis Black, a butch trans femme non-binary person, and use the Harry Potter books and the J. K. Rowling platform to uplift trans people by fundraising for trans rights organizations, mutual aid organizations, and directly to trans people’s transition funds.

In short, I wanted to piss all over her sandbox and reclaim Harry Potter out of spite. Yes, I am a trans romance author who is already writing trans stories, but I really wanted to infuriate J.K. Rowling in the worst way. And while J.K. Rowling was using her money to fund an anti-trans lobbying group in Scotland. I was going to use her intellectual property to do something that would absolutely piss her off while turning her self-insert and white cishet icon of the light into A Black queer non-binary person that J.K. Rowling would absolutely loathe.

And that is how Kendis Black was born. I changed Harry Potter’s name as a radical way to reclaim something that is harming my community into something of my own creation.

The Irrelevance Game

And when I published it, I am not going to lie: I was nervous because I thought that trans people would see it as a betrayal. One of the biggest opinions within the trans community is that we should leave the Harry Potter fandom, not talk about anything Harry Potter, and ignore J. K. Rowling at all costs, so she will lose relevance.

And for a while, I believed that too. Then Warner Bros. and HBO decided to announce the new Harry Potter TV show. They decided to give this woman more money even after everything she had done. And then HBO came out with a statement that basically said that they didn’t give a shit about Rowling’s politics.

This is when I personally knew that the whole plan to make J. K. Rowling irrelevant was never going to work. But understandably, a lot of trans people didn’t feel the same.

And I did get a few people who unfollowed me and blocked me. But to my surprise, there was a swell of support for this fanfiction. When I pushed publish on Ao3 and Wattpad last year, I thought to myself, “Nobody is going to read this.” I remember frantically reloading ao3 page, and I had zero expectations about Wattpad at all.

The Best Surprise

Yet, here we are a year later. The Temporary Spouse has hit the top 10 in quite a few categories and has almost 10k reads and 300 votes on Wattpad. And I decided to throw my story up on Wattpad on a lark. I have had that account since 2020, and Temporary Spouse was my first story on that site.

But what blew me away was the reception on A03. My story isn’t even done, and it has 400 kudos. It’s so wild to me that this lark of a story took off and resonated with so many people. The comments that I have gotten from readers who told me how this story made them feel seen have touched me deeply.

This story has changed my life. It helps me heal my broken heart and makes me a better writer. It renewed my belief in the power of love. It also gave me the courage to embrace my identity of a genderfluid trans man, even though, much like Kendis, I am gender non-conforming. This story made me proud of being a GNC trans man.

The End Is Only The Beginning

Now, we are so near the end of The Temporary Spouse, and this story has spawned into a special interest for me (I’m autistic), and I have so many plans and story ideas for With This Ring. I am only getting started, folks!

Thanks so much for sticking with me this far. It’s truly been a blessing and an honor to get to tell Kendis and Tony’s story.