It wasn’t just the goblins — is J.K. Rowling doing Holocaust denial now?

The Nazi German Student Association’s Institute for Sexual Research, a pioneering center and a place of support for trans, queer, and gender non-conformist people, raided it in 1933 without a fever dream. Additionally, it housed a catalogue of study on sexuality and gender-affirming surgery in general. The students piled the institution’s full collection in the street and burned the books, destroying study that would not be replicated for decades after the attack. One of the earliest and largest book-burnings during Hitler’s rule was the one at the Institute for Sexual Research.

At the time of the attack, Adolf Hitler had just become chancellor, and enacted a plan of eradicating Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives undeserving of living”. The fact that many of the experts at the Institute for Sexual Research, including its leader Magnus Hirschfeld, were Jewish, just fueled the anger.

But why did this even surface? Also, Rowling has been leading a campaign against gender-affirming care and transgender people for the past few years, often tweeting and writing essays that argue that trans women are not actual women, stoking concerns about transgender bathroom use, and opposing hormone use for children and teens.

This is why an X person asked Rowling why she was “so eager to preserve their ideology around identity” when she brought up the Nazi book burnings.

In the comments under Rowling’s post, many people asked her to look up Hirschfeld or the Institute for Sexual Research. She has since doubled down and twisted the original assertion, arguing that the evidence doesn’t “support the claim that trans people were the first victims of the Nazis” or that all study on trans healthcare was done in 1930s Germany. No one had actually claimed either of those things, just that the Nazis were against trans and gay people, and burnt books on their medical care.

Rowling doesn’t need to align with the Nazis, Nazis are very commonly agreed-upon to be bad by most of society, including the writer. But she wound up distorting the Holocaust by instantly rejecting Nazi ideas about gender and trying to distance herself from them.

The truth is that Holocaust denial is denying that transgender and gay people were victims of the Nazis. In 2022, Germany’s parliament also released a declaration affirming that point, an extension of yet another online debate. Perhaps if they hadn’t, we are aware that transgender and gay people were targeted by the Nazis and that many of them were murdered in concentration camps.

However, distorting and revising the specifics of the Holocaust is the only way to avoid denying the Holocaust and also making the claim that being anti-trans has nothing to do with Nazi ideology.

The Nazis preached a lot of ideas, some of which were terrible, while others were merely thoughts that were abused in terrible ways. For example, Hitler preferred classical art — but plenty of people dislike modern art, they just don’t persecute those artists for being “degenerate” and destroy their work.

Similarly, Rowling can — quietly — have whatever beliefs she wants about gender, and, however disagreeable people may find them, the fact that they align with Nazi beliefs about gender doesn’t make her a Nazi. She didn’t need to distort the Holocaust. But now we have to put that to her list of sins, which falls under those racist snobs.