TWIBS: Wacky Wizarding World Woman Denies Holocaust
Once beloved fiction author JK Rowling tries her hand at Holocaust denial by pretending the Nazis never targeted transgender people. Unfortunately for her, history disagrees!
by Alyssa Steinsiek
Holy shit JK Rowling is a Holocaust denier!
I can’t believe I get to type that, yet somehow in my heart of hearts, or whatever, I knew this day would come. See, every good Gender Critical™️ warrior is a brave soldier in the war against the scumbag degeneracy and weirdo commy nonsense that trans people espouse (See: Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism). Therefore they will eventually tumble into the same conservative pit that any good conspiracy theorist falls into. At the very bottom of that pit lies Nazi stuff.
See, if you hate trans people and start calling yourself Gender Critical™️, you’re gonna start hanging out with a crowd of other Gender Critical™️ weirdos (since they’re the only ones who will have you). Pretty soon they’ll be recommending certain podcasts and websites and newsletters to you, and then one fine morning oops you think vaccines cause autism and Jewish billionaires created transgenderism as a psy op to effeminitize pure-blooded Aryan youth. I mean, you can buy into the idea that kids are infected with transgenderedism by Tumblr, it’s like an advertisement that your gullible ass can be tricked into anything.
That in mind, I was certain that sooner or later JK Rowling, famous author of eight or nine thousand terrible books about how empty headed schoolboys become magic cops—as well as some other books absolutely nobody cares about—would announce a fabulously braindead conspiracy theory to the world and we’d all get to point and laugh.
For what it’s worth, I truly thought she’d be a flat earther first. I was imagining JK Rowling angrily quote tweeting me to call me a globehead.
But no, she went straight to Holocaust denial.
I suppose I should clarify that Joanne isn’t denying that the Holocaust happened (yet). She’s just denying the verifiably historical fact that transgender people were targeted during the Holocaust. Many of her defenders claim that, while transgender people may have been killed by Nazis, they were not the targets of the Holocaust, who they believe to be wholly Jews.
As a transgender Jewish woman, I must state without reservation or condition that transgender people were targeted by the Nazis during the Holocaust, alongside other queer people, Romani peoples, and the disabled. To name a few.
It is simply a matter of fact.
The Weimar Republic, a more tolerant democratic government that preceded Hitler, granted transgender citizens a permit to “crossdress” in public. This was exceedingly progressive for the era. When Adolf Hitler rose to power, of course, these permits were revoked and abolished.
In this shockingly progressive pre-Hitler republic, sexologist Magnus Hirschfield—this was a period of history in which sexologists were not quite so fucking weird and transphobic—founded Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science and advocated for the rights and respect of transgender and homosexual people. He also founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization that campaigned for the rights and legal protection of LGBTQ+ Europeans.
In the early 1920s, a fledgeling Nazi Party began assaulting Hirschfield publicly and privately, trying to discredit his work by condemning his Jewish heritage and trying to fucking kill him. So many attempts were made on Hirschfield’s life by fascists that he stopped making public appearances altogether.
Much like many of our allies now, in the 21st century, Hirschfield was made to fear for his life and livelihood for the cardinal sin of publicly supporting transgender people, even before the Nazi Party openly enacted genocide.
Then, in May of 1933, when Hirschfield was out of the country, the German Student Union broke into, looted, and burned the Institute. They stole or destroyed much of the Institute’s library of twenty thousand books or more, then sang Die Fahne hoch in the streets.
Four days later, Hitler’s Storm Troopers hauled what remained of the Institute’s library into Berlin’s public square and burned it, destroying decades of scientific research into transgender and gay people’s lives, health and experiences.
Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-14597 / Georg Pahl / CC-BY-SA 3.0
The lives of queer Germans would continue to decline as Hitler and the Nazi Party ramped up their persecution efforts in the years that followed. During the Night of Long Knives, suspected gay men were purged from the ranks of the party. Laws against homosexuality became more and more punitive.To be queer in Nazi Germany became a death sentence.
Hirschfield never returned to Germany, dying in 1935, living in exile in France.
So while Rowling likes to pretend she’s just a thoughtful, logically consistent liberal woman, she’s denying a tremendous amount of verifiable history. Undeniable history. You might find yourself more enlightened as to the seriousness of her statement if you take a look at the kinds of people who are on her side.
I think this is personal for Joanne, or JK, or Richard Galbraith. Whatever the fuck her name is. She can’t abide the truth, that the Nazis targeted transgender people and their allies, because she’s doing the very same thing. She is a catalyst of hatred and a proponent of bigotry against transgender people, and she has been for years, and that puts her squarely in the same camp as Adolf Hitler and the fucking Nazi Party.
And let me just say, Joanne, as a trans Jew? I hope your abhorrent turn towards fascism is the only thing you’re remembered for.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer and video games nerd who hails from Appalachia but lives, laughs, loves in South Dakota.
