JK Rowling Shares Vile Ideas on Trans People in Nazi Germany on Twitter
RW Disinfo-perpetrators have been spreading these lies for years. Recently thanks to Dinesh D'Souza.
You might have seen transphobe JK Rowling has taken her hatred of transgender people to a whole new level, perpetuating the myth that Nazi's were pro-Trans.
The Harry Potter author shared a lengthy thread of disinformation about German history and how LGBTQ people were treated by LGB Alliance founder Malcolm Clark. LGB Alliance has been described as an anti-trans separatist organization. It was founded in response to the UK Charity Stonewall's support of Trans-rights.
I won't get into the specifics of the fact check on Clark's thread as excellent journalist Erin Reed has already annihilated it. You can read that here on Twitter, or better subscribe to her Substack.
What I wanted to briefly dig into was the seemingly recent resurgence of this myth, that the Nazi's were secretly gay and essentially created safe-havens for Trans and LGBTQ people. it's obviously horseshit, as LGBTQ people were amongst the first to be sent to concentration camps. Germany pre-Nazification was more friendly to LGBTQ+ communities and some of the first scientific research was done there in this time... but that did not last when Hitler and his brownshirts took over.
In the last decade the US has seen a rise of this lie, from [now] former Director of Issues Analysis for the [right wing Christian] American Family Association Bryan Fischer who claimed in 2020 on an AFA video post "the Nazi Party began in a gay bar in Munich" and that gays were the cause of the Holocaust. Nazi's were all gay according to Fischer because Hitler "couldn't get straights to be vicious enough to be his enforcers."
It was author and filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza, like many of the great cases of disinformation of the last 20 years is likely why the modern far right loves this myth. In his 2018 ahistorical "documentary" The Death of the Nation he blames the Democratic Party for slavery, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and... you guessed it the Nazis. The Nazi's were actually liberal, you know?
The promo material for the movie declares "They [Democrats] smeared him [Lincoln]. They went to war to defeat him. In the end, they assassinated him. Now the target of the Democrats is President Trump and his supporters." D'Souza, if you don't know the name was the director of 2022's big disinfo-doc 2000 Mules that claimed that thousands of "mules" were voting illegally for Democrats. A lie that was proven in court when Truth the Vote, it's source of such info couldn't come up with any proof. Like Death of a Nation (which in itself references a wildly racist 1915 film, Birth of a Nation) Donald Trump helped promote 2000 Multes, giving it a large audience of like-minded ready to be lied to supporters.
In 2023 I once again heard a version of the lie coming from the mouth of gun-cult leader Sean Moon (son of Reverend Moon, head of the Moonies). Moon, sharing a stage with former Trump staffer Sebastian Gorka (who has ties to actual Nazis) and Pizza-gate conspiracy spreader Jack Posebiec told the audience of literal cult members wearing red MAGA hats with "TRUMP 2024 I'LL BE BACK" stitched into them that:
"In Germany, the Nazis created the first homosexual rights organization, and groomed soldiers into abominable homosexual practices."
Later that evening the Rod of Iron Ministry which Moon leads burned a Trans flag on a pyre as he read passages from the Bible.
Now (once) beloved children's book author JK Rowling who has a worth close to a billion dollars, a multi-year TV series deal with MAX, her own section of an amusement park and 14 million followers on Twitter is spreading and aggressively defending this vile lie to her extremely devoted fans.
Let me end this with a couple paragraphs from the excellent 2018 Slate.com piece by Laurie Marhoefer, a historian at the University of Washington about this lie:
Like all dangerous lies, the myth of the gay Nazi is wrapped around a grain of reality. There was a closeted gay man in the early Nazi Party. He wasn’t a myth, and Hitler had him killed in 1934—in part, ostensibly, because he was gay.
What’s a myth is that we ought to talk only about him, and not about the thousands of other men the Nazis murdered for homosexuality. The underlying flawed, homophobic assumption is that a single famous closeted gay Nazi means there was something queer about fascism—despite the millions of heterosexual Nazis, and despite the fact that German fascists murdered more queers than any other modern regime.
If you only remember one thing about Nazi Germany and homosexuality, let it be this: On Hitler’s orders, the Nazis murdered 5,000 or more men for the “crime” of having sex with another man. Tens of thousands of other men were convicted of “sodomy” but not murdered. They did not get off easy: Some were forced to undergo castration. Queer Jewish victims of the Nazis suffered homophobia and had their histories erased. The violence engulfed people we’d now identify as trans women, too: They were often branded homosexual by Nazi officials, and a separate law banned cross-dressing. Lesbians and people we’d call trans men often—though not always—escaped prison or the camps, but they, too, were at risk.
In other words: Hitler was not pro-queer.
Some sources that you should read.
I would also highly recommend this article by Marhoefer in SmithonianMag: New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-reveals-how-the-nazis-targeted-transgender-people-180982931/
Marhoefer's Slate Article on D'Souza's bullshit:
This piece is linked in the article but wanted to make sure that you saw it: Persecution of gay people in Nazi Germany
https://wienerholocaustlibrary.org/2021/02/09/persecution-of-gay-people-in-nazi-germany/
Erin Reed's Substack on this twitter shitshow: JK Rowling Holocaust Denialism: Author Pushes Claims That Trans People Were Not A Target
