Once more, J.K. Rowling makes anti-trans and uneducated remarks online. The Harry Potter writer’s brand started trending on X on Wednesday thanks to a poorly written post where she refuted the claim that Germans burned “books on transgender medical and research.”
“I just…how”? Above is a picture of a post by a hapless user, Rowling wrote. How did you type this out and push “Send me an email because it might have been a fever fantasy” without considering, “I should check my cause for this, because it might have been a cause for this”?
Shortly afterward, several X users—including the exceedingly online actor George Takei—replied to Rowling’s post to point out, as Takei wrote, “This is in fact true.”
As Scientific American notes, Adolf Hitler’s campaign to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben—meaning “lives unworthy of living” —led to the mass extermination of several communities, including Jewish people, homosexuals, and transgender people. According to the Holocaust Remembrance Day Trust—a donation established and funded by the United Kingdom’s government—May 6, 1933, marked the renowned day when Nazi-supporting youngsters broke into the Institute of Sexology. Days later, the Nazi youth groups burned the library’s looted contents (and tens of thousands of other texts) in the streets.
The Institute of Sexology is credited by the Holocaust Remembrance Day Trust as having “earned a reputation for its pioneer work on transgender knowing and calling for justice for trans people and women.” Scientific American, however, information that the business contained the world’s first transgender clinic.
When Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical professor at Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic, confronted Rowling on X for, as she put it, “interfering in Holocaust denial,” the author responded with an odd response, apologizing that neither of the content Caraballo had included in her answer supported the claim that trans people were the first victims of the Nazis or that all trans healthcare research was done in 1930s Germany.
After that, Rowling responded with a picture of a blog that was totally different when Caraballo pressed Rowling to describe how her original article was intended to be. In her last outing, Caraballo highlighted this and included a Clip of football players moving boundaries across a field. As of the day of writing—five times later—Rowling has not responded.
Rowling has been spewing anti-trans language for times, despite the fact that she has consistently stated that she has never intended to offend people. The artist was portrayed as a victim of a larger cultural conflict in Bari Weiss’s podcast The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, which was released last year. Quite naturally, the project contained only much Rowling opposition to keep things interesting but not enough to fully capture the argument. Regardless, it appears that Rowling won’t be letting this go anytime soon.
Editor’s note: This story’s article has been updated to more accurately reflect what Rowling wrote.
