J.K. Rowling Adds ‘Holocaust Denialism’ to Her Transphobia
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 and homosexuals and transgender people. According to the Holocaust Remembrance Day Trust—a charity established and funded by the United Kingdom’s government—May 6, 1933 marked the infamous day when Nazi-supporting youth 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 Holocaust Remembrance Day Trust describes the Institute of Sexology as having “achieved a global reputation for its pioneering work on transsexual understanding and calls for equality for homosexuals, transgender people and women.” Scientific American, meanwhile, notes that the organization contained the world’s first trans clinic.
When Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic, confronted Rowling on X for, as she put it, “engaging in Holocaust denial,” the author came back with a strange reply, in which she chided that neither of the articles Caraballo had included in her response “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.”
Afterward, when Caraballo pressed Rowling to explain how her original post insinuated as such, Rowling responded with a screenshot of an entirely different post. Caraballo pointed out as much in her final comeback, and included a GIF of soccer players moving goalposts across a field. As of the time of writing—five hours later—Rowling has not responded.