Erin Reed, a transgender rights activist and author of the invaluable blog, Erin in the Morning, just posted a story today on J. K. Rowling's continued descent into the rabbit hole of anti-trans bigotry.
On Wednesday, J.K. Rowling implicitly denied that transgender individuals were targeted and that books about them were burned in Nazi Germany. This assertion contradicts abundant evidence that transgender people were among the first targeted by the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. This culminated in the looting of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute of Sexology and the infamous burning of the initial decades of transgender healthcare research, as well as the internment, forced detransition, and murder of transgender citizens. When confronted with numerous scholarly sources, she instead linked to another thread that labeled the first transgender patient a "troubled male.”....
The exchange promoting a denial that transgender people were targeted in the Holocaust was triggered by a tweet questioning why individuals like Rowling increasingly find themselves aligned with Nazis, who burned books on transgender healthcare and research in 1933. Rather than defending her position, Rowling seemed to dismiss the notion altogether that transgender individuals were targeted, asking, "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’?" When others provided her with sources, she responded by linking to an anti-trans account calling the first transgender woman to undergo gender reassignment surgery in Germany to a "troubled male.” The thread in question also denied that transgender people were targeted by the Holocaust.
This is the tweet that Rowland posted:
Alejandra Caraballo's response (https://twitter.com/Esqueer_/status/1767914998808953316):
Caraballo's links:
Smithsonian article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-reveals-how-the-nazis-targeted-transgender-people-180982931/
Article on Magnus Hirschfeld in the Holocaust Encyclopedia at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's website: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/magnus-hirschfeld-2
See also this article in Scientific American about the Institute for Sexology: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/
Rowling's response (clue: she's wrong):
Article on the looting of Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexology on the website of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust (UK): https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may-1933-looting-of-the-institute-of-sexology/
Continuing the exchange:
The issue of Der Stürmer is from February 1929. The slogan at the bottom translates as: "The Jews are our misfortune." Source of the page from Der Stürmer: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/front-page-of-the-nazi-newspaper-der-stuermer.
As Erin Reed writes, Rowling's anti-trans rhetoric and demands are getting more and more extreme.
The statements, while part of an ongoing history of escalating anti-trans rhetoric from the author, signify a shift towards extremist views against transgender individuals. Leading anti-trans voices worldwide echo these viewpoints. Meanwhile, conservative activists are advocating for transgender eradication and the cessation of all related care. Rowling's recent engagement with Holocaust denial concerning transgender individuals only fuels the same fires that incinerated books about transgender people a century ago.
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