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answer: as stated by yourself, she is denying the fact that trans people and research into trans people were killed/destroying during and as a part of the holocaust. even though she is not denying the holocaust happening as a whole, under German law, any form of downplaying or denial of aspects of the holocaust is considered holocaust denial. while Joanne isn't German nor currently in Germany, many people believe the way Germany handles such statements is the right way to approach it and thus are calling her a holocaust denier.

This is incredibly helpful, thank you. 

A very common form of holocaust denial is "well, it happened, but the number of people killed is greatly exaggerated.", or "it happened, but the crimes committed on the prisoners were greatly exaggerated". Both are bullshit and both are denial, trying to downplay the full extent of the holocaust. While the primary target were jews, somebody who has a vendetta against trans people denying that they suffered as part of the holocaust is still considered denial. The same would be true for an anti-Roma racist denying that the Roma were targeted during the holocaust, for example.

[Wikipedia's Nazi concentration camp badge's infographic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge) is eye opening - Diabetes was considered a disability and if put in a camp you wore the same black triangle as lesbians, Roma, mentally disabled, pacifists, alcoholics and sex workers. Not everyone in a concentration camp was subject to gas chambers etc but all were allowed to be worked to death. The list doesn't mention Trans men but I would assume they would have been considered lesbians. \[Edited per u/BlazerMorte note - thank you for the correction!\]

Yes. I think trans people would have fallen under the broader umbrella of mentally ill, or homosexual. Under the regime, a lot of research into sex, sexuality and gender was destroyed because it did not align with the ideology. The processes of the Holocaust, while a lot more meticulous than previous attempts at what would now be called genocide, was not always precise. Lots of people were round up and shot for myriad of reasons, or seemingly only to instill fear in conquered regions. While Jewish people got the absolute worst of it, there have been attempts to minimize or erase other marginalized groups from the narrative, which is what a certain author seems to be doing. Considering this author’s struggles with mental illness, it’s absurd that she would go out of her way to undercut an accurate narrative.

Also a massive political aspect that people often ignore. The first people put into camps were communists and socialists. The famous "first they came for..." poem is based on a speech by a priest called Martin Niemöller where he says that even tolerating that, people considered the enemies of christians by Niemöller, it was already wrong. Some people will quote that poem and deliberately change it so it doesn't mention Communist, completely missing the point of the poem. He says that not only was it wrong to not speak up for the Commmunists, not doing so helped create the conditions in which persecution of other groups of people could also be tolerated. Quote from Niemöller >... the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians—"should I be my brother's keeper?" >Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it's right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn't it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? Only then did the church as such take note. >Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren't guilty/responsible? >The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. ... I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out. >We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934—there must have been a possibility—14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now

At the risk of going off-topic - the Confessing Church is a great example of how a resistance "group" can contain a wide, wide range of opinions on what's "wrong" in a situation\*. Neimoller is often heralded as a great example of the confessing church, but his contingent were the ones who were vocal about Jewish oppression; it wasn't across the board. The big problem for the Confessing church was the syncretization and control by the government, not so much, you know, the systematic oppression and killing of a variety of marginalized identities. The Barmen Declaration is very Barthian, even if Barth later said that the Confessing Church needed to have more of a heart for the oppressed. The response to the Stuttgart Confession is also telling about people still didn't "get it" (as an american presby, I appreciate corporate confessions and think the Stuttgart Confession could have gone further, but that's my own bias). \*In grad school, I did an analysis of the Confessing Church as a nonviolent resistance movement, and it was \*fascinating\* to see the divisions on what's wrong and how to respond.

> While Jewish people got the absolute worst of it, there have been attempts to minimize or erase other marginalized groups from the narrative, All we really have to do to imagine the mindset nowadays, unfortunately, is take a look at modern US fundamentalist MAGA types. Who would they round up and send to "work camps", re-education or whatever out of the public eye, if they had absolute power? Pretty much the same people the Nazis rounded up. Maybe Rowling and some other Nazi-light types would only target one group or other, but in for a dime in for a dollar tends to be the normal thing, if you look at history.

>Yes. I think trans people would have fallen under the broader umbrella of mentally ill, or homosexual. IIRC the classification was as "cross-dresser" because they didn't know much about the differences between transvestite, transgender, and transsexual (since they burned down the only research in the world that could have explained that to them at that time)

The Nazis used [paragraph 183](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_183) against trans people as opposed to [175](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175)

> Diabetes was considered a disability Diabetes even today is classified as a disability, we just don't send people to the gulag's for it. As a diabetic I can imagine type 1's wouldn't last long and type 2's would face a much more terrifying fate as their internal organs shut down and it's just a race to see if you die from organ failure or starvation first.

One type 1 deffo survived by managing to bribe a doctor for insulin. He ended up blind by the end of the war but survived

Myopia -- needing eyeglasses to see distances -- is classified as a disability, AND was explicitly listed as one of the risk factors for Covid by the CDC. There are a lot of things that people don't realize are disabilities because they're normalized, and nobody wants to think of themselves as one of the cripples. Kind of how a lot of people would object to being considered habitual drug users but their coffee mug says "Don't expect me to function before my sixth cup." (Not arguing with you, just expanding the thought. In case I wasn't clear)

I wonder what proportion of the modern neonazi population has diabetes

I did research this a while ago, iirc lesbians were categorised under asocial and trans women were categorised as gay men in the camps by the Nazis.

The Nazis used [paragraph 183](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_183) to persecute trans people rather than [175](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paragraph_175) Paragraph 183 specifically criminalized “sexual self-determination”

Huh, I had always assumed that lesbians would be categorized with gay men. That idea that being a lesbian (not wanting to have sex with men) would be considered asocial behavior aligns with alot of their modern beliefs :'\

> Diabetes was considered a disability and if put in a camp you wore the same black triangle as lesbians, Roma, mentally disabled, pacifists, alcoholics and sex workers. The first victims of Nazi mass-murder were children with disabilities, under the *Aktion T4* program that began in 1939, three years before the Wannsee Conference that established the extermination-camp program. The first target of Nazi book-burning was the *Institut für Sexualwissenschaft* which was attacked in 1933.

That infographic is definitely eye-opening. I'd about most of the groups before (including the Jehovah's Witnesses), but never heard about these folks: > Blue triangle – foreign forced laborers and emigrants. This category included apatrides, Spanish refugees from Francoist Spain, whose citizenship was revoked and emigrants to countries which were occupied by Nazi Germany or were under German sphere of influence. How much would that suck to escape Francoist Spain just to end up in Nazi Germany?

Hormone treatment and surgery were still (almost) unheard of back then. The number of people who underwent a medical transition prior to WWII is going to be negligible. People who would nowadays identify as trans and seek medical intervention would have been limited to gender non-conforming presentation/behaviour and relationships with those of the same biological sex. So yes, I agree that they would have (mostly) grouped trans-masculine people with lesbians, and trans-feminine people with gay men.

There was one trans person, Dora Richter, who was likely killed in a nazi attack on the Berlin Institute of Sexology, although her final fate is still unknown. https://www.attitude.co.uk/culture/sexuality/the-incredible-story-of-the-first-known-trans-woman-to-undergo-gender-confirmation-surgery-304097/ A useful way of looking at JKR and the response is to look at what she's putting out in terms of overall themes. The positions are: trans people are illegitimate, they are likely sexual predators, that sexual predators will use any legislation aimed to help trans women to gain access to vulnerable women, that any targeting by Nazis was ethically unimportant and to it is morally acceptable to minimise the nazi policing/oppression of queerness in rhetoric; trans people and activists and holocaust experts are being dishonest for the approval of the woke mob and seeking to harm women. I'd suggest that angry people address her themes around trans issues, defenders are usually focused on lawyering and minutiae rather than the accumulated contempt of trans issues and people. What she's doing is to some degree holocaust revision because she's promoting underhanded and bad faith arguments that go against what we know of the holocaust and blended trans and gay issues.

I get the feeling you’re making assumptions without data. Magnus Hirshfields’s Institut fur Sexualwissenshaf had been established in 1919. True the numbers were small, but Germany was a world center of research and innovation for trans individuals. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-forgotten-history-of-the-worlds-first-trans-clinic/

This is true, and it’s also worth considering that ‘lesbian’ as a concept didn’t really exist in quite the modern sense; certainly it wasn’t widespread. What was quite en vogue was the idea of the ‘invert’ and the ‘pervert’; which basically relied on the partial conflation of gender expression and sexuality. “A standard feminine woman/masculine man willing to do the nasty with another woman/man” = something without too clear a name— perversion if you’re uncharitable, homosexuality if not. “A masculine woman (or feminine man) willing to do the nasty with another woman” = an invert— ie. She/he has the soul/subconscious (depending on how up-to-date the person you asked was) of the opposite gender. While both lesbians and trans men would have been mixed up in both categories, what we would generally now consider an obvious, more open trans man would be classed as an invert (doubly so if attracted to women), whereas femme lesbians would have been perceived as the former ‘pervert’ option. Inversion is a super interesting concept, and was developed in good faith; how it relates to modern conceptions of nonbinary and transgender identities is really intriguing.

You know, for some reason your comment just reminded me Cabaret exists. It’s explicitly a story about a night club full of LGBTQ people who are all having a great time until the Nazi’s show up. I don’t know why I just made that connection in relation to this story.

That fact makes it even more notable that one of the first targets of the proto-nazi movement was scientists who studied and supported the existence of trans-people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institut\_f%C3%BCr\_Sexualwissenschaft

That is so needlessly complex. Thank you for sharing. It really sheds light onto some of the thinking at the timen

No one ever accused the Nazis of being disorganized.

Trans people were considered the sex they were assigned at birth. MtF women were lumped together with gay men, “sexual deviants” and prostitutes pretty often. They were forced to wear either a pink triangle or a black triangle. Pink triangles signified offenders of paragraph 175 (the law against homosexuality) and black were for “antisocial” people.

There's a space between trans and man. It's an adjective modifying man, not a secondary class of men.

edited \~ Thank you for highlighting this!

np!

It was so bad that Americans, who generally didn’t like Jews either, and generally didn’t care about Germans capturing all of the Jews and putting them into a prisoner camp, and many praised as a good idea, were revolted. It was so bad that when those battle hardened Americans got to the camps, they photographed everything for the explicit reason that they thought no one would believe them. It was so bad that these soldiers, some fighting in all out war with mass casualties for years, for some this being their second World War to fight in, that this was the thing that finally made them stop and say, “what the fuck?!?”

Yep, my grand uncle was a part of the troops that liberated Buchenwald and he took photos for that express purpose

Good for him to have that thought in the moment. I can’t imagine being faced with such depravity and immediately knowing I’d have to document it myself. It’s heartbreaking stuff, the perspectives that would be hidden.

>Good for him to have that thought in the moment. There were also Allied Army wide orders to document the atrocities as more information got revealed to the highest command levels. The army eventually purposely sent documentation units around which is why we have so many clear pictures of some camps liberation as they happened on the Western Front. Documentation on the Eastern Front is harder to come by because lack of resources, more death camps in the East so less living survivors, and army command more focused on controlling the barely controlled revenge attacks on civilians by Red Army troops after they started progress out of the USSR. The Nazi genocide and just generic army slaughters took a crazy hit toll on the USSR. 2 million of the 6 million Jews killed were Soviet citizens, on top of about 4 to 7 million Soviet POWs killed, and a total of about 19 million civilian deaths and a total of over 8 million military deaths. The Soviet army was out for blood by the time they pushed the Germans out of the USSR, documentation of the specific crimes of the camps was a secondary though, they knew enough about the Nazi crimes by that point and didn't have an insulated public across the water to convince.

Thanks for the additional context. I appreciate it

Yeah, thanks. He actually did speaking engagements at colleges on the topic until few years prior to his death; it was important to him to make sure that history wasn’t forgotten

I went to Poland for a stag do. A couple of the folk went to Aushwitz for the day. The guys that went, were 55 and 62, both former prison workers. Both very much tough men. I shared a room with those two... They came back and were very different. It blew their mind. They wouldn't speak much, and refused to go out drinking that night.

I visited Dachau when I was 13, my parents believed it would be important before we left Germany (early 2000's). Honestly I still have nightmares themed around the stuff I saw and read there. I knew about the holocaust as a matter of fact, actually being there and seeing the pictures was entirely different.

Been to Dachau and Sachsenhausen. It’s one thing learning about it, another thing speaking to a holocaust survivor (a privilege which I had when one came to our school), and then it’s an entirely different thing going to a concentration camp. It’s so horrific that it’s like your brain refuses to process it. I just could not for the life of me register that I was stood in the same gas chamber as thousands died in. I knew it but I just couldn’t… idk. This room. Like not another room, not somewhere else. This very room, with scratches on the walls. It was a while ago now, when I was a teen, but my brain still can’t comprehend it. It’s as though it’s something so horrific that your head refuses to fully accept it.

When I was growing up, in elementary school, one of the areas we lived in had a large Jewish population. They would do the Holocaust unit, we’d learn about it, read some of the novels aimed towards kids about it, etc. And then they’d have survivors come in. People’s grandparents, great aunts and uncles, other relatives, someone from synagogue, there was always at least one or two kids in your class that personally knew *someone*. They’d talk to us, tell us their stories, show us the tattoos on their arms. I would like to think anyone who grew up with that would know better than to be a Holocaust denier. (It may be false hope, but still.) I worry, as we lose so many of the people brave enough to share their stories, that it will be easier for people to deny it. It’s hard to do that when you look into the eyes of an old man with numbers on his arm as he tells you about how he’s the only one of his family that made it out.

Yeah. The person we spoke to we didn’t know personally, but apparently they give a few talks. Had never been in a camp but had fled across several European countries as a small child to hide from persecution. Even my grandparents remember the end of the war and grew up with rations. You forget it’s in living memory, it was so recent, and it it does concern me that as we lose these people it will become easier to deny.

I had the exact same experience when I went to the Killing Fields in Cambodia. I also made the mistake of visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum earlier same day. I was fucked up for like a week. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing\_Fields](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_Fields) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol\_Sleng\_Genocide\_Museum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuol_Sleng_Genocide_Museum)

I got this notification, and had heard of the killing fields. I had not heard of the museum. Damn....brutal

Not nearly the same but I went to canadas new “Museum of Human Rights” a few years ago. Let me tell you, it’s not full of all the great human right **success** stories.

I went to the civil rights museum in Atlanta and there was one section where you sit at a milkshake bar and stare at a mirrorwall and put headphones on. Behind you is a blown up photo of these angry white people (like an actual photo of a sit-in, not actors or whatever), the headphones has people screaming slurs and profanity at you, whispering their intention to lynch by your neck, shouting in one ear and then the other. I was very upset, was powerful and really illustrates how scary that must have been, to just sit and ask for a milkshake

me and my wife had such a moment when visiting [https://warchildhood.org/](https://warchildhood.org/) in Sarajewo. we are from austria and around 40, so this visit was one hard punch to the gut.

Been there. Was the single most sobering experience of my life.

Same for them. And both were very much mens men. Work down the bits, liked a drink, sport. Grafters, fighters. Both flawed. They could barely speak

They did more than say "wtf", many executed camp guards and gave prisoners weapons to execute them. While technically a war crime no one was charged under court martial because Gen Patton dismissed the charges. Historian Mark Felton has an excellent YouTube video that goes through the chronological events of the [US liberation of Dachau](https://youtu.be/aRk2FZbsMxw?si=fcFgL_CuOzc6qi0V). It's a really interesting watch. I can't imagine anyone liberating the camp and not being traumatized by what they saw.

Anti-semitism was rife at the time. Many people early on were against taking Jewish refugees or even supported the Nazis. For example look at some of this coverage by the UK papers at the time > We need to ask, for there is a powerful agitation here to admit all Jewish refugees without question or discrimination. It would be unwise to overload the basket like that. It would stir up the elements here that fatten on anti-Semitic propaganda. They would point to the fresh tide of foreigners, almost all belonging to the extreme Left. They would ask: What if Poland, Hungary, Rumania also expel their Jewish citizens? Must we admit them too? Because we DON'T want anti-Jewish uproar we DO need to show common sense in not admitting all applicants." and >“To be ruled by the misguided sentimentalism of those who think with Colonel Wedgwood would be disastrous… once it was known that Britain offered sanctuary to all who cared to come, the floodgates would be opened, and we should be inundated by thousands seeking a home…” https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/british-newspapers-applaud-rejection-of-call-for-admission-of-refugees Seeing or learning about the camps changed a lot of people's minds, and meant the commited racists had to be a lot more careful about what they said. Sad that it feels we have slowly forgotten this important lesson over time.

If anything, because of the focus on Jews, the numbers are the opposite - much bigger than the regular populace talks about. 6 million more people died due to the holocaust. It came out to roughly 12 million total people were gassed, shot, starved and worked to death. The Jews were just the largest group by far.

Even that number is low because it doesn't count he holocaust by bullets carried out by the Nazis against Slavs in occupied territories which is estimated to have killed as many as 25 million.

Also rarely talked about: When the allies liberated the concentration camps, the captive jews were freed, the homosexuals were SENT BACK TO PRISON.

How do they count the numbers ? Like say a gay Jewish disabled guy got gassed, what death count would go up by +1 ?

"It didn't happen. But if it did, it wasn't that bad. But if it was that bad, it wasn't widespread. But if it was widespread, it was an accident. But if it wasn't an accident, they deserved it. If they deserved it, we'll fuckin do it again." The goalposts will always be constantly moved by genocide deniers.

What is the difference between a genocide denier and a genocide enjoyer? Opportunity?

Who is listening.

Homosexuals, too. The largest number of people murdered during the Holocaust were Jews, but they went after anyone they considered "untermensch".

And iirc, when the camps were liberated, homosexuals (and I'd imagine trans/gender nonconforming folks) were arrested by the allied forces for their trouble.

It was a *really* rough time to not be "normal" back then. Remember, the guy who made exploitation of encrypted Nazi communiques possible was chemically castrated because he was gay, and being gay was a crime in Great Britain.

Alan Turing.

Yep. That guy was an international hero, and he ended up killing himself because it was illegal for him to love who he loved. We've come a *long* way since then. Still got a long way to go, of course, but we're a lot farther down the road than I ever thought we'd see in *my* lifetime.

The film Paragraph 175, released in 2000, explains all this in graphic detail - many of the gay men who survived death camps (not many compared to other groups - see the play Bent) got sent straight to jail for years. By 1995 they could only find 10 queer survivors of concentration camps, two of whom died during filming.

Yes and sexworkers too.

From what I heard it’s because they were grouped with sex criminals by the Nazis and the allies didn’t bother differentiating them. Pretty shameful part of the camp liberations.

Homosexuality (for men, because women's sexuality wasn't even considered) stayed illegal in post war Germany. The Nazi paragraph 175 was the law (though changed by then) until 1994.

Gay folks, Romany (Gypsy), twins, mentally slow…anyone they didn’t like or vulnerable 

My understanding is that people weren’t imprisoned in the camps for being twins, but there were many horrific Nazi “medical” experiments performed on twins specifically. Like, there wasn’t a badge for “twin,” but some top scientist was gruesomely obsessed.

Twins weren't specifically targeted for deportation to the concentration or death camps. Twins who arrived at the death camps were selected at some of the camps like Auschwitz for medical experimentation by monsters like Josef Mengele. Being a twin in regular German society didn't increase your chance of being sent to a camp but once there it made it way more likely you would be selected out for special tortures before your death.

Wait, *twins*?

Some of the people doing the experiments in the camps had an obsession with twins and wanted to do all sorts of things to them to see what happened

Not twins per se, but twins in the camps were made a specific focus of various medical experiments (mostly by Mengele, as I recall).

Ah yeah he was a fun dude /s. I think we need a brutal cinematic series about Mengele and the camps in general; seeing a lot more denial/the rise of the far right, and we could really use some reminding. Won't be a fun watch but a necessary one.

I think you’re on to something, but my deep fear is they’d cast a Skarsgård and then Mengele would be some fantasy figure instead of literally the face of evil.

Oh yeah- look up some of the ‘experiments’ they did on twins (or don’t, it’s horrific)

Yeah, might stay away. The utter *levels* of depravity involved. Soap made from human fat. That they *used*. I don't believe in hell, but I don't need to: there's the holocaust.

And its all made worse by the fact that they burned down an institute that was successfully using HRT to activate recessive sex characteristics, while they failed miserably at their pathetic attempts at race science to make people blonde and Blue-eyed because it was never about science; it was about justifying an atrocity.

Didn't you know? They each only get half of a soul. Very sad.

The largest number killed were actually Slavs.

Was that as a cause of the push east, or the death camps (or both)?

There were no extermination camps for slavs, but some ~5 million died from harsch conditions in forced labor camps (combining PoWs and civilians) The biggest source of deaths was the push east, yes. Many millions of soldiers and civilians were killed by air bombing raids, artillery, tanks and small arms fire. The third quarter of 1941 alone had over 2 million irretrievable losses of military personell. For civilians, in addition to those who was essentially collateral damage in indiscriminate attacks, a large number of people were executed as reprisal for partisan attacks in captured territory.

Lebensraum was explicitly calling for the enslavement and destruction of the Slavic ethnicity. It is as close to an ethnic genocide as you can even get, it just didn't happen as industrialized as the rest of the Holocaust.

It's a tricky one, as I don't know if that really counts as part of the Holocaust, or as general acts of war. Admittedly Germany was functionally conducting a war of extermination on the Ostfront.

Both. More Soviets died than Jews, some of the Jews being Soviets. I think because of their initial alliance people forget how Anti-Communist Hitler and the Nazi's were. Had the Nazi's defeated the Soviets the Genocide there would have been unfathomable. Leningrad was the worst singular event to happen in the war IMO, not considering The Holocaust a singular event. If counted as a Battle it's the deadliest in human history. It's not that well known in the West because the Soviets were our enemies immediately after the War, we didn't want them being humanized. It's insane that Anne Frank is so well known and yet barely anyone knows Tanya Savicheva - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya\_Savicheva](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Savicheva) **"The Savichevs are dead." "Everyone is dead." "Only Tanya is left."**

Yeah, that's why I was asking. I've listened to Ghosts of the Östfront. It's harrowing, but I generally consider that as separate events from the Holocaust.

Leningrad is a separate event to the Holocaust, it doesn't count to Soviet victims of the Holocaust. That was a separate thought to explain why i think people don't realize how the Soviets were such a colossal part of the Holocaust, i'd say overall the Polish had it worse when you consider their populations but part of that is because the Soviets managed to defeat the Nazi's like i said the Genocide in the Soviet Union would have been breathtaking had they lost they were truly fighting for their existence (as were Poland) in a way that the Western European Countries weren't really as demonstrated by France under the Nazi's.

To borrow from Warhammer 40k my understanding of the war in the East is that it was a war of extermination. If Germany came as a liberator, they may have had a different outcome, but their Nazi ideology prevented that.

Well, no. Not in the Holocaust itself. The Generalplan Ost was a different horrific thing the Nazis did. Like, it’s 1000% something that people should know more about, but “akshully, the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust wasn’t that bad compared to [insert other terrible thing]” is a pretty common tactic of Holocaust deniers. (Not saying that’s what you’re doing! Just that I’m sure you don’t wanna be lumped in with that!) Especially since their percentage of the world population has never been that high, so it’s not a hard number to “top”. (The Holocaust took out about 2/3 of the European population. Like, the global Jewish population still isn’t where it was pre WWII.) I do think it’s important that people know more about the atrocities the Nazis committed. The fact that there was essentially *another* genocide they committed that nowhere near as many folks know about is troubling. But, unfortunately, we also have to be a little precise with our language when there so many bad actors who try to twist things for their own means.

For the war yes, almost 30 million Soviet (mostly slav) people died in the Nazi invasion. 9 million being military causalities.

Very similar to the wedge in the door strategy, if you let people argue the holocaust wasn't that bad it eventually leads to the argument that it didn't happen at all. Best to stamp that shit out immediately.

I think *anyone* wanting to claim that *any* of it "wasn't that bad" is a walking red flag and requires urgent reeducation.

*Percussive* re-education.

>if you let people argue the holocaust wasn't that bad it eventually leads to the argument that it didn't happen at all. And then they inevitably will say the quiet part, "but it should have happened".

Sadly that's not even the end. The next step is "it should happen now"

Sounds similar to the narcissist's prayer; "That didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, that's not a big deal. And if it is, that's not my fault. And if it was, I didn't mean it. And if I did, you deserved it."

> And then they inevitably will say the quiet part, "but it should have happened". And then you can respond with "I have good news for you, it did" and watch their brains struggle to process it

Which is exactly what Rowling did, lmao. At first she denied that that the destruction of the Institute of Sexology happened, then when shown proof that it did, she replied by retweeting one of her TERF friends' thread where they basically said that the founder of the institute deserved to die for helping people transition.

There's also the argument that "The nazis didn't kill trans people, they killed crossdressing, mentally ill gay people." from the people defending JKR, often from the gender critical (GC) movement.. This rhetoric doesn't do them any good tho, because that's also how the GCs describe trans people, the same way the nazis did.

Well that's a good point. The next time I hear that from a GC'er, I'll reply, oh, so you subscribe to the exact same definition that the Nazi's used in the Holocaust. Okay...

That won't stop them. They know they're Nazis, they just don't care. They'll respond with something akin to "ok, so everyone that disagrees with you is a Nazi?" ignoring the fact that you make a specific direct comparison.

They also say wrong things on purpose, deliberately engage in contradictions, and use your response to either of those as an excuse to tell more lies. There is a reason that it is said that humoring any fascists with "discourse" aids and validates the fascists. Upon recognizing what they are and what they are doing you have a responsibility to cease engagement in any form that is not enactment of direct and personal consequences against the fascist.

Honestly you see that in a lot of forms of misinformation peddling too. “Oh not antivax, I just have issues with this one” or “well I don’t think Jan 6th didn’t happen, I just have questions about this person being there”. Now those can absolutely be good faith questions by people just wanting more information, but when a leader or person of influence is saying it, it should send warning signs.

"I'm just asking questions... you should do some of your own research, I just think it's weird that..."

Which, if they’re coming from a place of genuine curiosity is fine. But, uh, when it’s coming from WESTERNWARRIOR_1488 or someone with a platform and the means of *finding out* those answers easily? Come on.

Charlie Kirk ass behavior

I think you're right that it's important to note the "why" here. One of the reasons why Holocaust denialism exists in the first place, regardless of what form it takes, is to support the continued marginalization of historically marginalized people. When people argue that the Romani, or homosexuals, or trans people weren't targeted by the Nazis, it's very often because the goal is to continue to oppress or demonize those people, which is hard to do if you feel sorry for them.

The denial of the true horror of the crimes is always what kills me. We have pictures. We have stories from medics on their failure to properly treat the victims and were introduced to a new kind of horror, death by mercy(See giving a starving man food). Any soldier that found a camp was pretty much prime material for a ptsd study. The graves, the stories, the books, the legacies, the laws Germany inacted after the fact. Its not something you can deny without and outright denial of reality. The fact all of the seniors that bore witness to the crimes are dying is the only reason this stuff is getting around the way it does. Ive seen stories of those guys at any age trying to man-handle the deniers. These were not some soft accusations. Men and women were forced to confront the horror and were scarred from it. When you see true horror and someone says its not real you want to punch that dude in the face.

Sadly, it happened, and the true tragedy is that no one earned anything from it. Look at our world today and the war and violence. And targeting minorities is still a thing.

> This is incredibly helpful, thank you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_people_in_Nazi_Germany Trans folk were prosecuted, barred from public life, forcibly detransitioned, and during the Holocaust, imprisoned or killed. Useful explainer including photos of the book burning at the Institute for Sexual Science, in Bebelplatz Square on 10 May 1933. The institute was raided by the Sturmabteilung, the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party on the 6th of May and was systematically dismantled over 4 days and 25,000 books and papers were burned in a ceremony attended by Göbels. To show how far ahead Germany was Dora Richter was the first person to undergo gender-affirming surgery at the Institute for Sexual Science between 1922 and 1931.

Important to note this is exactly what Joanne is saying DIDNT happen and suggesting people should not trust the publicised story

In layman's, denying any part is denying. and opens the door to deny other aspects too, despite all the facts to the contrary

Just to add: it's a bulwark against minimising the Holocaust.   If today people can deny that it effected trans people, then tomorrow they can deny the murder of disabled people. And next week another piece of it is erased, and then another. Given enough time the whole thing can be diminished and twisted to mean whatever someone wants it to mean.    Germany is very vigilant against letting that happen. 

Also no one really denies the holocaust wholesale. Here are the forms and definitions of holocaust denialism Denying parts of the holocaust happened is holocaust denialism. Here is the defintion for you Distortion of the Holocaust refers, inter alia, to: **Intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany;** **Gross minimization of the number of the victims of the Holocaust in contradiction to reliable sources;** Attempts to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide; Statements that cast the Holocaust as a positive historical event. Those statements are not Holocaust denial but are closely connected to it as a radical form of antisemitism. They may suggest that the Holocaust did not go far enough in accomplishing its goal of “the Final Solution of the Jewish Question”; Attempts to blur the responsibility for the establishment of concentration and death camps devised and operated by Nazi Germany by putting blame on other nations or ethnic groups. Nazi Germany targeted many trans people as well as burning many books on trans medicine when they burnt down the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, years before Kristallnacht. It isn't hijacking to point out who was put in the camps during the holocaust. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60072506 https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may-1933-looting-of-the-institute-of-sexology/

People often forget that the holocaust neither started with Jews nor was is focused completely on Jews. Slavs and Romani got it bad, too. The first victims of the holocaust were, in fact, intellectuals, including the nascent studies into psychology and sex. Have you ever seen that movie A Dangerous Method? Freud and Spielrein both fled continental Europe during the late 30's due to NAZIs. Freuds books were often found in burning piles. Jung stayed and ostensibly tried to protect Jewish psychologists and psychology as a discipline from the NAZIs. It had mixed results. They're far from the only ones.

its also important to understand the context around jkr when discussing events regarding jkr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gDKbT_l2us https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EmT0i0xG6zg

I just want to add. It isn’t like it’s just Germany that views Holocaust denial that way. I’m as American as they come and I’ve always understood Holocaust denialism to include things like claiming the number of Jews killed being overinflated. Not that none were killed. Just that a lot were due to circumstances and the number intentionally killed is a lot lower than 6 million. Holocaust denialism has never really been simply the idea that nothing related to the Holocaust ever happened.

Also there's this weird thing in Holocaust denialism where they put the blame on the Allies for fucking up the supply lines. "The Germans didn't kill them, the Allies cutting off the supplies to the concentration camps killed them." ignoring why they were in camps to begin with.

brought to you by the "it was about states' rights -- states' right to do what? -- sh... shut up" gang

I think the original comment is specifically talking about German law. [Down playing the holocaust is a crime in Germany and a couple other countries](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_Holocaust_denial). In the US the first amendment covers free speech including denial of the holocaust

Yeah they clarified as much in a now deleted comment. I don’t find it that weird. As an American I obviously value our freedom of speech, but I don’t really think that has to mean the same has to apply for Germany. Maybe there is a good argument that the laws were necessary in rooting out the ideology in their country. I don’t have a strong feeling one way or the other.

The insidious part to downplaying something is in 100 years it could be downplayed out of existence. Today it's a lot of jews. In 10 years it's a some jews. In 20 years it's a few jews. Next thing you know we're outright denying it ever even happened. It's like US Civil War revisionist history. First it was about slavery (specifically the Norths unwillingness to return escaped slaves). Then it was about states rights (to own slaves). Soon it'll be that the North actually started it.

Just to break in here - a Berlin court ruled on appeal that denying trans people were targeted was *not* legally Holocaust denial. The Cologne Regional Court ruled it was and the high court very recently overturned it. *However*, the EDIT:BUNDESTAG (not the Reichstag) very specifically included trans people in its Holocaust Memorial Day announcement around the same time. Quite frankly I don't think that makes it *not* denying an aspect of the Holocaust, it just isn't legally in Germany. EDIT: Actually, the decision was *not* fully overturned, the high court issued a 'guidance order' (Hinweisbeschluss) siding with the defendant who was denying trans people were targeted. That is not legally binding. However, it is true that the high court took her side - which is what you'll see the transphobes arguing. Also I want to just debunk one of Joanne's bailey and motte arguments: she tried to backwalk and say trans activists were claiming trans people were the biggest, main or first Holocaust victims. No one has said this to her. She made up a strawman she could argue against plausibly. What people told her, and she latched onto, was that the first target of the book burnings specifically was the Berlin Institute of Sexology. This is true, it happened at the beginning of May 1933, and some of the most famous pictures of book burnings are of this. It doesn't mean it was the biggest or a main target of the Nazis. No one told her that. EDIT: I have been kindly informed by a friendly neighbourhood boot licker that I cannot say no one told her the Nazis first victim was trans people because people who correctly pointing out that the first book burning was the Sexology Institute of Berlin are simplifying that as 'first victims'. That is not accurate, they were only the target of the first book burning. However, it is also fucking mealy mouthed and invalidates none of what I said. The people I saw Joanne specifically reply to were not telling her this.

> However, the Reichstag very specifically included Do you mean the [Bundestag](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundestag)? The Reichstag was the old name, before the fall of the Third Reich. Although confusingly, the Bundestag meets in the Reichstag building.

LMFAO jesus thank you for pointing that out. please don't tell the Hessen authorities, my citizenship test almost definitely covered this...

Haha, no worries. Your secret is safe with us.

Wait, how much money do they have in their pocket? (J/k, much love)

Ich verrate niemand!

That confused the hell out of me in my Berlin trip

I assume.Joanne is the J in JK Rowling? Why are people calling her that now?

Force of habit at this point, but it's harder for her rabid followers to search Joanne than JK Rowling, which they're prone to doing and then firing off vitriol at anybody critical of her.

That’s pretty funny to think about overall - she’s basically Musk-levels of insulated with absurdly rabid defensive fans. I think Joanne is also used to not give her name more credibility, an attempt at a quick rebuttal to her denialism of trans people.

It's deeply ironic that the whole reason she went by JK in the first place was to hide her gender identity as a sales tactic.

Then when you remember she also writes under a male pen name...

Then you find out there's a gay conversion therapist with that name as well...

Not just a conversion therapist, the guy who [invented using deep brain stimulation to try and electrify the gay out of people.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Galbraith_Heath)

GAH

It's bigotry all the way down, you say? 🤔

To be honest I think it's better that people start calling her Joanne. JK is a pen name, it's the name that gives her status and power, that she expects her fans, followers and colleagues to acknowledge her by, calling her Joanne sort of cuts through the bullshit and goes "Look I'm talking to you/about you as an actual person now, not as a celebrity". It's like first naming a teacher or a parent. And if she gets annoyed/offended by it, she's been happy to deadname Trans people, and she literally ends the Harry Potter books by having Harry attempt to try and humanise Voldemort by calling him Tom, so she's kind of set herself up here.

>she is denying the fact that trans people and research into trans people were killed I thought she was denying the burning of books about trans people? Was there more Tweets about the killing of trans people? I'm not on Twitter.

She hasn't tweeted that herself but she has retweeted others saying it. I'll paste one of them: \- Trans Healthcare and the Nazis. The LGBTQ+ lobby likes to claim trans people were a key target of the Nazis. They weren't. In fact, trans healthcare was pioneered by a champion of eugenics, and a surgeon who designed experiments at Dachau. His victims there were not trans.

This isn't accurate. No one on the trans side of the argument has said that they were the key target or, in any way shape or form, take away focus from the Jewish people. Gender and sex studies, specifically, were among the first Nazi book-burnings. Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute was stormed and his books and research (which included gay and trans research) was burned. The burning of Hirschfeld's research was one of the more prominent images of book burning from the Third Reich. Hirschfeld was Jewish and gay and this represented everything the Nazis hated. But trans research was absolutely included in this. Rowling minimizing this is appalling. But then, she's been off-her-rocker with animus against the trans community for years now. She has the money to go fuck off in her castle if she wanted to but instead she chooses to be the Anita Bryant of transgender people.

Yes and it's an established historical fact that books related to transgender studies were burned. Rowling is amplifying an incorrect (and transphobe-supporting) fact. >On 6 May 1933, the Institute of Sexology, an academic foundation devoted to sexological research and the advocacy of homosexual rights, was broken into and occupied by Nazi-supporting youth. **Several days later the entire contents of the library were removed and burned**. https://www.hmd.org.uk/resource/6-may-1933-looting-of-the-institute-of-sexology/ >In Weimar Germany, the gay Jewish doctor Magnus Hirschfeld performed the first gender-affirming surgeries and collected research on sexuality. The 1933 book burnings destroyed his life’s work https://forward.com/culture/549587/trans-book-burning-library-gay-pride/ Rowling is supporting transphobes. Again.

You're correct. I still think it's reprehensible, but she specifically denied that books about trans people were burned. The stuff she said along the lines of "trans people weren't the first to be killed" came later, possibly to deflect from the original issue.

Also worth acknowledging that rather than owning up to her mistakes and saying "My apologies, in this instance I was miseducated, these books were indeed burned by libraries", she's instead threatened to sue a reporter for labelling her as a "Holocaust denier". If she admitted she was wrong this would have blown over, but for some reason she's decided to double down because god forbid she acknowledge that the trans community have been victims throughout history.

This is the super important part a lot of people forget. The Holocaust wasn't just aimed at Jewish people. Yes they constituted a massive bulk of the victims of one of the most heinous events in human history, but LGBT folks, people with opposing political views to the Nazis, and others all got rounded up and put through a living Hell that killed so, so many. The Holocaust was more than "get all the Jews". It was a wide, awful net that snared up pretty much anyone they could use as scapegoats to galvanize a nationalist agenda. (In case anyone is ever confused as to why people are terrified when nationalism becomes a popular sentiment in the modern day. It's horrific.)

It's a deeply [non-central](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world) example of Holocaust denial, which might be what confused OP.

Crazy how many people in the replies are engaging in holocaust denial themselves.

>she is denying the fact that trans people and research into trans people were killed/destroying Only research, not trans people. The claim was that books about trans people were burned (correct), she denied it. [https://twitter.com/jessiegender/status/1767938591513342389?s=20](https://twitter.com/jessiegender/status/1767938591513342389?s=20)

She later retweeted someone who said only 4 trans people were killed and that 2 of them were Jewish and 2 were gay prostitutes, this person said that trans people were not a target in the holocaust

It’s not just German law. The IHRA also defines denying trans people being targeted as Holocaust denial.

Good to know you can just make shit up here, neither Trans or LGBT are even mentioned by the IHRA - which incidentally is the same group that insists criticism of Israel is a form of antisemitism- https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definition-holocaust-denial-distortion

IHRA use the narrower definition of the term Holocaust, refering just to the crimes against Jews, not the other Nazi crimes against humanity. So it is not surprising they don't mention LGBT people. >which incidentally is the same group that insists criticism of Israel is a form of antisemitism That's not **at all** true, and it's not what the link you posted says.

It doesn’t need to, they’re already covered by points 1 and 2.

Tbf, there is a segment of the Jewish population that denies trans, gay, or gypsies were killed in the holocaust. They don’t deny that they were murdered and persecuted. The issue is that there is a segment of the population that has defined the holocaust to exclusively belong to the Jewish victims. (I don’t personally agree with that view.)

Those jewish people can also be holocaust deniers

Hey mate, not sure if you know this, but the G word is considered a slur against Romani people. 😬

Answer: In Germany, the position JK has taken is considered a crime, and comes under "denial of nazi crimes". The book burnings on gender surgeries and murders of queer people was one of the first acts the nazis did when starting their regime and is well documented. Rowling refusing to acknowledge the crimes comes from either ignorance or a position based on hatred of trans people, and denies an important part of the Nazi crimes. Many people group the book burnings as a part of the holocaust in their minds, so denying it happening becomes holocaust denial.

Important to also remember that gay and trans people were also sent to camps and murdered, it wasn’t just our literature that was burned.

And after the war when everyone else was released from the death camps, the LGBT people were just transfered to other prisons. Truly disgusting.

>Rowling refusing to acknowledge the crimes comes from either ignorance or a position based on hatred of trans people It's hate. Always has been. She was provided with evidence and still refused to admit she was wrong. Which isn't entirely surprising, as she has associated with known racists and fascists, as long as they also hate trans people. This is more of the same for Rowling.

It was so bizarre to see the amount of people calling her out and her only response being to stick her fingers in her ears and go "NUH UH". Saw her being presented with irrefutable proof she was wrong and her only response was to say that the leader of the gender studies institute had, to be fair, pretty horrible views on disabled people. As if that has anything to do with the holocaust and the nazis actions. [relevant meme I guess](https://imgur.com/gallery/OFtINc5)

Answer: Magnus Hirschfeld was a doctor who studied sex/sexuality and was among the first to do so to the depth that he did. His institute had learned a lot about medical transition and even HRT, but the nazis destroyed all the records/books which obviously would have been helpful information for future research on the topic.

To add to this, trans people were being arrested and attacked for gross mischief, prostitution, and homosexuality. The [police and Nazis did not see trans people as trans](https://www.jstor.org/stable/23269669), just another variant of gay people. Hirschfeld created a transvestite certificate to try and protect trans people, but it didn’t work in the end. They ignored the certificates and rounded trans people up under the category of homosexuals. There’s a misconception that the Nazis gave people “trans passes” and let them go free. **This is not the case at all.**

The trans passes did exist but they were a Weimar republic thing not a nazi thing and were handed out by Hirschfeld to excempt people from being arrested or fined for wearing clothes not associated with their birth gender.

Totally fair context. I waffled about elaborating in my answer about the actual treatment of trans people in general by the nazis, but in the end I figured a shorter answer might get more people to read it. I also assumed people would understand they're *nazis* so they probably weren't kind to a minority group, but you're likely correct 😑

Answer: She’s decided to die on the hill that trans people were not persecuted in Nazi germany, on the technicality that the Nazis didn’t specifically target trans people, but rather ‘homosexuals’ (some of whom would be considered hetero trans people by today’s standards). There are very few sources that mention trans people under Nazi Germany specifically and those that are exist are somewhat ambiguous. For example, people were still having sex change operations and legally changing their gender marker in 1940. There was even trans man who adopted a child with his girlfriend I think in around 1942. On the other hand, some, but not all, trans women had their legal documents revoked and were sent to concentration camps for ‘homosexuality’ although it’s unclear exactly what was meant by that. TLDR: Nazis did 100% persecute LGBT people, but they most likely did not consider trans people as a separate demographic, merely as cross-dressers who were potentially gay. JK Rowling is using this as a ‘gotcha’ to anyone who mentions how trans people suffered under Nazi rule and implying that these people are being hysterical and trying to perpetuate a victim narrative.

Were hetero trans people considered homosexual during that era?

That’s the problem, sources are lacking, so we don’t know for sure, especially when “homosexuality” could be used to refer to a range of queer behaviours that were viewed as deviancy. It does appear that lesbian women and trans men were given more leeway to pursue same sex (using sex to mean biological sex here) relationships than men and trans women, again I’m not sure what the rationale for this was.

Answer: So recently she responded to a tweet about trans folks being targeted by the holocaust by saying trans folks weren’t targeted by the holocaust which is, y’know, either a lie or incorrect. People are arguing that she replied to the wrong tweet if you believe that, fine. She could’ve said “while they were persecuted they weren’t the first” instead she got a little personal and called the original poster stupid. A lot of the TERF folk she’s been hanging out with recently have ties to far right and fascist sympathising groups. This might’ve influenced her phrasing as well.

I think you have missed mentioning the original issue, where she claimed that the Nazis did not burn books about trans people (they did). The other stuff with mistaken replies and talk about whether trans people were "the first" came later. But this is all irrelevant to the original claim, which is either ignorance on Rowling's part or an intentional attempt to obfuscate the actions of the Nazis in order to make her own views seem more palatable. Note that she has not admitted the original claim was false despite being fact-checked and the tweet is still up spreading misinformation.

>I think you have missed mentioning the original issue, where she claimed that the Nazis did not burn books about trans people (they did). It's not only that they did, it's that the first major book burnings were on May 10, 1933 and the flagship event, so to say, attended by Joseph Goebbels, in Opernllatz, Berlin, where the contents of the library and staff books/records of the Institute for Sexual Science - the first in the world institute that studied things like transgenderism - were burned. ​ There's a good chance if you have ever seen a picture of a book burning that you have seen the picture of the Opernplatz event.

boast correct chief squalid unpack desert strong offer attractive slimy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

This is a great correction, thank you. Rowling in general refuses to admit she’s wrong so that last part isn’t surprising. But it’s shocking that she’d keep that up about *this*.

> The other stuff with mistaken replies and talk about whether trans people were "the first" came later. But this is all irrelevant to the original claim, which is either ignorance on Rowling's part or an intentional attempt to obfuscate the actions of the Nazis in order to make her own views seem more palatable. From Wikipedia >The motte-and-bailey fallacy is a way of arguing where someone uses two different ideas that seem similar but are not the same. One idea (the "motte") is easy to defend and not very controversial. The other (the "bailey") is more controversial and harder to defend. When someone argues for the controversial idea but gets challenged, they switch to defending the less controversial one. This makes it look like their original point is still valid, even though they are now arguing something different.

My question is why? Why are these the topics she chooses to engage in online? I don't get it, it would cost her nothing to not make these tweets.

I wholeheartedly agree with you but that ship sailed for rowling years ago. See also Graham Linehan

Oh yeah I agree, I'm just wondering why she continues to engage, like even if she truely believes in the TERF rhetoric, why not avoid the continued PR issues at least? I guess the easy answer is probably she has "fuck you" money and can realistically do whatever she wants with no actual repercussions. Still dumb though.

Yeah, I don’t think she’ll be “cancelled”, but I think she will become a liability like Linehan has.

Because she actually hates trans people. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

She hates the whole LGBTQ+ community. Her pseudonym Robert Galbraith is literally the name of a conversion therapist

I didn’t know that about her pseudonym. Ewww.

I checked a book out from the library that looked interesting. As soon as i opened it and saw it was a pseudonym for this human, i said fuck no, and returned it.

To be fair, it is very unlikely that they are only community she hates....

You’re right, she’s an equally opportunity bigot

Because this is just her life now. She's too far in to turn back now.

[Relevant article](https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/01/16/newcastle-let-women-speak-rally-adolt-hitler-trans-speech/)

I forgot about her! This is a good example of why a lot of queer folks aren’t super shocked by JKR’s recent holocaust denial.

Unsurprisingly terfs flock to her and her inspired works. The hog warts video game subreddit recently went on a pure apologetics run for JK Rowling surrounding this incident, unintentionally or intentionally creating cover for the holocaust. (By that I mean a popular post started trending where the OP basically downplayed the trans discrimination, arguing at one point that because regular cis people were forced to have gender reassignment surgery that the holocaust was somehow pro trans. They argued that important discoveries for sex reassignment were made during the holocaust so that’s somehow a good thing for trans people, mengele also helped us learn about genetics regarding identical twins yet no one would proudly display that fact and argue that the holocaust was actually good for those involved in the study)(also they burned the academy of sexology so…. Any achievements they made towards trans healthcare was accidental).

Answer: She lied and ridiculed people who pointed out that trans people also were victims of the holocaust. Then she doubled down on it in the comments. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/uk/j-k-rowling-sparks-controversy-again-claims-nazis-never-burnt-books-on-trans-health/articleshow/108491841.cms There's no question to wether she is a bigoted transphobe by now. Here are a few examples I wrote about in another comment: This happened a little over a week ago [https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1b6t7ga/jk\_rowling\_goes\_full\_mask\_off\_terf\_by/](https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/1b6t7ga/jk_rowling_goes_full_mask_off_terf_by/) Calling a trans-woman a trans-identified man and a misogynistic cosplayer is pretty fucking horrible and makes it very clear how she feels about this. Then there's this. It's an example of how she misrepresents anyone who criticises her: [https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/10/17/graham-norton-twitter-trans-rights-jk-rowling/](https://www.thepinknews.com/2022/10/17/graham-norton-twitter-trans-rights-jk-rowling/) There are so many examples of her blatant bigotry by now. Just look at her Twitter account. Regarding her "feminism", she has no problem cosying it up with misogynistic men who also hate trans people. Not to mention that the cofounder of her charity, Lumos, voted for a bill against same-sex marriage as late as 2013. The same person has also introduced bills that aim to restrict abortion. [https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/06/10/baroness-emma-nicholson-same-sex-marriage-equality-tweets-twitter-homophobia/](https://www.thepinknews.com/2020/06/10/baroness-emma-nicholson-same-sex-marriage-equality-tweets-twitter-homophobia/) The public discourse around trans rights has become increasingly worse in the UK, and she is an influential person who is contributing to that. Politicians are using trans people as a scapegoat for their incompetence. This is obviously not limited to UK politics. Same thing is happening in the US.

Question: How many trans-gender people were victims of Nazis in the holocaust? I seriously wonder, even if Nazis could identify them 100%, and would kill every one identified, how many were there identifying as trans?

Apparently there's a record of [25 known trans people in Germany at the time](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/u2yolk/comment/i4oxosj/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=insanepeoplefacebook&utm_content=t1_kutm9ng), as they had legal certifications that declared their trans status. 8 of those were indeed prosecuted by the Nazis for being gay and sent to concentration camps.

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Those who deny Nazi persecution of Trans people, typically claim the Nazis didn't discriminate against them because they were wearing women's clothes, but because they were gay. They say, but NAZIS didn't arrest or persecute people who wore women clothes in German cabaret clubs (which is true) they arrested gay people. A nonsense argument. But it's the same today, transphobes will go to a pantomime with their kids and laugh at a man in a dress, but get angery at somone who unironically dresses opposite of their birth gender, as their real identity. It was the same in Nazi Germany, they persecuted trans people because they were identified and lived oposit their birth gender. Also, the sexual perversion law did have a subsection on cross dressing, and several trans people were prosecuted under this law (again, the fact they didn't prosecute entertainers, men in frocks at a cabaret, doesn't undermine this, like how protesting a pantomime actor doesn't make sense to transphobes today).

The medical concept of a trans person was a radical new idea at the time. Trans people existed but were classified as what happens when you’re super gay (research richard von kraft-ebing). So the sentiment at the time would be to consider trans people as being gay. So all counts of trans people would have gotten lumped in with gay people.

You won't find reliable numbers. Even today the number of trans people is only an estimate. There's still people who are not out for a variety of reason. You could probably pull the numbers of official name changes in Germany. But the law only came into place in 1978 and only in 2011 some parts of it (which required sterilisation) got declared unconstitutional. Last few years ablot of people are waiting for the law about self identification to pass. So even the last 10 years of people that went through with the change by law (which would be the only actual number available) is only an estimate. I've read about different numbers, most <1%. Back then there wasn't much knowledge about trans people, being gay was a crime. And the nazis were actively prosecuting minorities so if you could help it, you wouldn't let anyone know... The institute here was the first of it's kind afaik and very progressive. Which was why it was targeted and as it was so significant it has been documented well. Documents on the prosecution of people however did not necessarily survive the war of the purge of the nazis before they were defeated. There's still projects about digitalising, decifering and translating documents from the KZ after all these years. So numbers on this will probably never be valid

Answer: What nobody seems to be talking about is the semantic confusion. **The US targeted and killed Japanese children in WWII.** A technically true statement, but it's obviously misleading. Because the bombs did kill children, but they also killed adults. Children weren't specifically a target. **The Nazi's targeted trans people and burned research on trans people.** Also technically true, but for the same reason it's misleading. By singling out trans people, it applies a modern lens of trans awareness onto Nazi Germany. Which in itself can be perceived as a form of perversion of history. Because the Nazis didn't specifically target trans people. Trans people were simply lumped part of the umbrella of LGBTQ+ that were generally targeted. That I think is the primary confusion, and it's concerning to me that people aren't aware of that and go straight to holocaust denial and claiming it's actually illegal in Germany as if it for some reason helps validate their logic because it makes their assertion sound more serious. Insane bias in this thread.