J.K Rowling has been criticized in recent years for her stance on trans people. Courtesy of Getty Images

By Mira Fox March 13, 2024

The most famous forms of Holocaust denial and revisionism tend to focus on Jews, casting doubt, for example, on how many were exterminated in the camps. But denying the impact the Nazis had on the other groups they targeted, including queer and trans people, disabled people and Romani people, is still Holocaust denial. Maybe someone should tell J.K. Rowling. (I’m just kidding — obviously everyone online is already yelling about it. The Harry Potter author is always reliable for generating discourse.)

Captioning a screenshot referencing Nazi book burnings that targeted trans research and healthcare, Rowling wrote “I just…how? How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?”

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It was not a fever dream; in 1933, students from the Nazi German Student Association raided the Institute for Sexual Research, a groundbreaking clinic and place of support for trans, queer and gender non-conforming people. It also housed a library of research on gender-affirming surgery and sexuality more generally. After the raid, the students piled the institute’s entire collection in the street and set fire to the books, destroying research that would not be recreated for decades. The book-burning at the Institute for Sexual Research was one of the earliest and largest book-burnings during Hitler’s reign.

At the time of the raid, Adolf Hitler had just become chancellor, and enacted a policy of eradicating Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” The fact that many of the researchers at the Institute for Sexual Research, including its founder Magnus Hirschfeld, were Jewish, only encouraged the hatred.

But why did this come up at all? Well, Rowling has, for the past several years, been on a crusade against transgender people and gender-affirming care, regularly tweeting and writing essays variously characterizing gender-neutral language as misogynistic, arguing that trans women are not real women, stoking fears about trans bathroom use and advocating against hormone treatment for children and teens. 

This is why an X user brought up the Nazi book-burnings, asking Rowling why she was “so desperate to uphold their ideology around gender.”

In the comments under Rowling’s tweet, numerous users urge her to look up Hirschfeld or the Institute for Sexual Research. She, meanwhile, has doubled down and twisted the initial statement, arguing that the evidence offered doesn’t “support the contention that trans people were the first victims of the Nazis or that all research on trans healthcare was burned in 1930s Germany” — though no one had claimed either of those things, simply saying that the Nazis stood against trans and queer people, and burned books on their healthcare.

Rowling doesn’t want to align with the Nazis; Nazis are pretty widely agreed-upon to be bad by most of society, including the author. But when she instinctively denied Nazis’ ideas about gender, to create distance between herself and them, she wound up distorting the Holocaust.

The facts are: Denying that trans and queer people were victims of the Nazis is Holocaust denial. In 2022, Germany’s parliament even released a statement affirming that fact, an outgrowth of yet another online dispute. And even if they hadn’t, we know that trans and queer people were targeted by the Nazis and many were murdered in concentration camps.

But the only way to avoid denying the Holocaust, while also arguing that being anti-trans has nothing in common with Nazi ideology, requires distorting and revising the facts of the Holocaust.

The Nazis preached a lot of ideas; some of them were awful, while others were simply opinions applied in awful ways. For example, Hitler preferred classical art — but plenty of people dislike modern art; they just don’t persecute those artists for being “degenerate” and destroy their work. 

Similarly, Rowling can — quietly — have whatever beliefs she wants about gender, and, however disagreeable people may find them, the fact that they align with Nazi beliefs about gender doesn’t make her a Nazi. She didn’t need to distort the Holocaust. But now we have to add that to her list of sins, under those antisemitic goblins.

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