George Takei Forced to School J.K. Rowling on Basic Queer History Regarding the Holocaust

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 14, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | March 14, 2024 |

If there’s one thing we’ve learned over watching the years-long downfall of J.K. Rowling going from a beloved children’s author to a mouth-frothing transphobe, it’s that there is truly no limit to her cruelty and hatred. It’s almost impressive how she finds new depths to sink to. She’s crawled so far into the dirt that she’s passed the Earth’s molten core, emerged on the other side of the planet, and continued to scramble through space as she bellows misgendering insults at trans women. Still, even I was shocked to see her engaging in a casual form of Holocaust denialism.

Rowling shared a Twitter thread from a known transphobe, who tried to claim that ‘trans healthcare was pioneered by a champion of eugenics’ and that trans people weren’t a key target of the Nazis. Many people called out the obvious rewriting of history. Rowling, of course, doubled down. She then claimed that there was no source for one person’s claim that the Nazis burned books on trans healthcare and research. She said it was ‘a fever dream.’ It wasn’t, as writer Alejandra Caraballo showed her by linking to, you know, sources. Rowling said Caraballo was lying because her articles didn’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.’

Blessed be to George Takei, a man who lived through the internment of Japanese-Americans and who himself is gay, to call it out on Twitter.

When Hitler rose to power as German chancellor in 1933, he enacted policies to rid the country of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” His targets included Jews, Roma people, disabled people and communists—but also specifically homosexuals and transsexuals.

While…

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) March 13, 2024

I just … what do you even say to this? It’s a lie, it’s hugely offensive, it’s a form of Holocaust denialism, and it’s part of a decades-long hard-right propaganda campaign against queer people. In 1995, a book called The Pink Swastika was published that perpetuated refuted lies that the Nazi Party was not only permitting of homosexuality but that queerness was a key part of their ethos. The Gay Nazis myth is pernicious and beloved by hard-right losers who otherwise love the racist stuff Hitler pushed. QAnoners and anti-LGBTQ+ bullies love to push this horrendous falsehood because it justifies their efforts to strip us of our rights and to legitimize the idea that those evangelical Christians are the ‘real victims.’ Oh, and it’s also SUPER anti-Semitic, shock horror.

The Southern Poverty Law Center described The Pink Swastika as a form of Holocaust revisionism that overlooks how ‘huge numbers’ of gay people were targeted and exterminated by the Nazis. Hell, after the war was over, a lot of those imprisoned gay people stayed in jail because being queer was still illegal! So, to see Rowling get on board with this insidious denialism that smudges away trans people’s well-documented suffering during the Second World War is genuinely ghoulish and, to put it bluntly, f*cking evil.

Let’s have a mini history lesson here. According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, the Nazi German government ‘brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures.’ Trans people were targeted under Paragraph 175 as part of the wider persecution of homosexuals in Germany. Laurie Marhoefer, a historian who focuses on LGBTQ+ histories of the Holocaust, detailed how ‘people with trans identities were violently policed by the Nazi State.’ She also noted that the Nazis shut down several magazines published by transgender people, as well as nightclubs where trans and crossdressing people worked and socialized.

As to the ‘fever dream’ Rowling spits on, the burning of trans research by Nazis? That 100% happened. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was a pioneering sexology research clinic that was the first of its kind in the world, and they did a ton of work on trans issues. The term ‘transsexual’ was coined there. Early forms of gender reassignment surgery and hormone therapy were offered there. And the Nazis shut the institute down, razed their research, and burned it. The works destroyed included rare medical documents on topics like intersexuality. It took a long effing time for doctors to reclaim that lost knowledge.

You can see in those tweets that Rowling knows she cannot defend a lie, so she moves the goalposts. Uh, I totally didn’t say that the Nazis were big on trans stuff, you’re the liar who claimed that trans people ‘were the first victims.’ Nobody said that in those tweets but she doesn’t care.

The Nazi doctor that they’re talking about in those tweets is Erwin Gohrbandt, who was one of the first surgeons to perform sex reassignment surgery on trans patients and later became one of the doctors conducting human experiments on prisoners at Dachau. This is a bad gotcha attempt, a way to delegitimize all of trans medical history by connecting it to Nazism. If one must dismiss all medical advancements based on the involvement of abusive sh*ts then we’re going to have to start all over again with several fields of health (just look at the history of gynecology.)

I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the highly transphobic press, especially in the UK, to realize who they’re propping up as allies and heroes. I’m deeply skeptical about this, yet even I am shocked at this story of one of the most famous authors of our time engaging in Holocaust denialism. And no, I don’t feel that term is unwarranted as it pertains to Rowling. The abject refusal to accept extensively documented history because it refutes your own views is dangerous. There is no difference between this and the Gay Nazi myth.

And some people will still claim they just had to keep giving Rowling money for all those Hedwig plushies.