Funny what a little bit of Holocaust denialism will get you trending with.
Also, worth noting that calling it “Holocaust denialism,” as Aye and Alejandra Carabello (and myself) have, is not hyperbole.
JK Rowling is denying that trans people were targetted by the Nazis, and promoting the tweets of known anti-trans activists screeching that any insistence that we were is “the LGBTQ+ lobby” revising history. That is, by a 2022 ruling on a case regarding similar tweets by the Regional Court of Cologne, (translation) “a denial of Nazi crimes.”
She is, by German court precedent, quite literally engaging in an element of Holocaust denial.
In case anyone is unfamiliar with the Nazis’ destruction of both gay and trans culture in Germany, Germany had a sympathetic gay and trans health clinic in the early 1900s. The Nazis destroyed it and burned literature studying homosexuality, gender noncomformity, and what we now understand to be transgenderness or transexuality. This took place only 3 months after Hitler came into power.
In addition to homosexuality, crossdressing was illegal under the Hitler regime even though trans people had (albeit limited) rights prior to his rise to power. And before anyone says it, the trans holocaust victims we talk about weren’t misidentified crossdressers, drag artists, or gender-nonconforming people. One trans woman, Liddy Barcroff, died in a concentration camp for her “crossdressing” after telling arresting police “my sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.” The queer community, all of us, suffered huge losses both in individuals and in education and understanding during the Holocaust. Denying any part of that is offensive and dangerous.
It’s also important to add that the founder of that institute was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who was a gay Jew. This allowed Nazis to claim that Jews were promoting homosexuality to “destroy the family” and weaken the white race.
You know, pretty much exactly what Republicans are saying now, just in dogwhistles.
ALT