Combating and confronting the Harry Potter author’s false narratives.
BY: LILIAN THUM
Staff Writer
J.K. Rowling descended to a new low of bigotry on March 13. On that Wednesday, she denied aspects of the Holocaust on Twitter/X. Specifically, she denied that transgender people were targeted in the Holocaust and that research into them was burned. So, because she refused to acknowledge that important aspect of history, I will do so.
On July 6, 1919, during the days of the Weimar Republic (a period of German history before Hitler’s time), the world’s first institute for sexual research was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish gay man.
The Institute of Sexology was groundbreaking for its time. It held research on sexuality, sexual health, and gender. The institute performed a variety of services for the transgender community, including hair removal, early forms of facial masculinization and feminization surgeries and even performed the world’s first modern sexual reassignment surgery. The institute pioneered the world’s understanding of transgender people, including what we now call non-binary identities, and convinced police to give out “transvestite certificates” as a way to stop the arrests of transgender and gender nonconforming individuals.
On May 6, 1933, the German Student Union descended on the institute and destroyed much of what was inside then later pulled the research and books outside and burned them all with the belief that they were “un-german” and “indecent.”
The unification of Germany introduced “Paragraph 175” which banned sexual acts between men. However under the Nazi’s rule, they updated it and enforced it heavily to prosecute gay men and transgender women. Other queer and transgender people were labeled as “asocials” and forced to wear black were targeted through cross dressing, child abuse, and/or public disturbance laws, and intersex individuals were arrested and killed as disabled. 100,000 pink triangle prisoners were arrested through paragraph 175, with 7-10% being put in concentration camps as “repeat offenders.”
Historian Geoffrey Giles found that around 65% of them were killed. We don’t know the extent of gender nonconforming and transgender individuals because of them being classed in other groups.
When the Allies liberated Germany, things didn’t get much better. The surviving prisoners were simply moved to different prisons to live out their sentence. During the rebuilding of Germany, West Germany kept the updated Paragraph 175, while East Germany reverted it back to the original. The allies arrested another 100,000 men and transgender women until 1969. To add salt to the wound, queer individuals never got acknowledgment, compensation, or justice until 2002, and transgender people didn’t receive recognition until 2022.
J.K. Rowling is a bigot, but she is not an idiot. This is simply an attempt at denying the existence of transgender people and saying those who identify as transgender as perverts and deviants.
