At first glance, the Department of Education’s October 27 X post seems like generic Harry Potter-esque slop.
It shows a trio of students walking toward a sprawling Hogwarts-like castle while a young girl with long, flowing white-blonde hair watches them from the foreground, accompanied with the text “There’s Magic in Learning!” and “Make Education Great Again.”
But for a hyper-online, highly radicalized subset of the internet, the state was not just communicating a vague policy stance—it appeared to be adopting the deeply-coded visual language of the “Malfoid.”
The reaction online was immediate. On X, Bulwark reporter Will Sommer quickly diagnosed the situation, posting that the Department of Education was “embracing the ‘malfoid’ meme, a right-wing fan fiction idea about a female Draco Malfoy who Harry Potter could fall in love with.” Others responded with Malfoid art and AI-generated clips, including some featuring President Donald Trump.
The Malfoid concept did not come from conservative think tanks but began in creatively chaotic fan fiction websites like Archive of Our Own (AO3). Gender-bending characters—taking a canonically male character and rewriting them as female or vice versa—is a time-honored tradition in fandoms. However, in these specific stories, the gender-flipped female Malfoy character is not just a narrative experiment for someone’s crackship. She is a potent avatar for toxic elitism, with a ruthless obsession with “blood purity.”
The term Malfoid is a portmanteau combining “Malfoy”—the last name of Harry Potter’s school nemesis Draco—with “foid,” which is short for “femoid” or “female humanoid”—a highly offensive incel term used to describe women.
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