No, JK Rowling is not a Holocaust denier

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The LGBT lobby has found yet another sickening way to attack JK Rowling. Trans-activist bullies, who so often delight in sending death and rape threats to the Harry Potter author, are now suggesting she is a Holocaust denier. It should go without saying that this is an absurd and defamatory slur. It is also one that’s being increasingly employed against anyone who dares to question the trans lobby’s latest attempt to rewrite history.

Rowling was accused of Holocaust denial last week, after she wrote a post on X that doubted claims that the Nazis made trans people a specific target for genocide. This argument is part of a wider attempt by activists to place trans people at the centre of the Holocaust. But the truth is that they weren’t. At least, not in any meaningful sense.

This claim has been around for a while now, but it arguably first came to prominence back in 2021, when trans comedian Eddie Izzard announced that he would ‘have been murdered’ by the Nazis for being trans. When gender-critical writer Graham Linehan quipped back that the Nazis were famously not bigoted against ‘straight white men with blonde hair’, all hell broke loose. Trans organisations and their mouthpieces in the mainstream press denounced Linehan, insisting that trans people really were targeted by Hitler’s regime. But where is the evidence for this?

Digging into these claims, I soon discovered that activist historians have been sewing together a patchwork story of an alleged trans ‘genocide’ that is breathtakingly misleading. In fact, their entire narrative is built on only a handful of trans victims. Crucially, most of these victims were also Jewish or homosexual.

In response to Rowling’s comments, Pink News published an article claiming that ‘the persecution of trans people by the Nazis was devastating’. The proof for this? The names of five trans victims. What Pink News fails to disclose is that three of these people actually survived the war and fortunately lived to a ripe old age. One victim – Liddy Bacroff, who was arrested as a male prostitute – did sadly die in a concentration camp. Another, Gerd R, took his own life.

Of course, even one death is one too many. But it is also important to maintain a sense of proportion. The numbers of those who were systematically exterminated by the Nazi state is staggering: six million Jews, 500,000 Roma, 300,000 disabled people, 80,000 Freemasons, 15,000 homosexuals and 3,500 Spanish Republicans, among many others.

Transvestites and crossdressers were treated poorly by the Nazis for their non-conformism, as were millions of other people. They were certainly not systematically persecuted, as the trans lobby claims. The evidence points to a far more complicated picture.

Take the case of Gerd R, one of the victims mentioned by Pink News. Gerd was a married, heterosexual man who had a history of crossdressing. He was arrested multiple times for public indecency after his neighbours grew tired of finding him hiding naked in their communal bins. He was later rescued from a concentration camp by the intervention of his doctor, who pointed out that he was heterosexual. This action saved his life and he was moved to a mental institution. There, Gerd took his own life.

Gerd’s fate was tragic. But it is almost certain that he would have ended up in an asylum for this behaviour anywhere across Europe at that time. The idea that a non-Jewish, heterosexual man like Eddie Izzard would without question have been murdered when Gerd R was not is fanciful, self-serving nonsense.

Another victim, Gerd Kubbe, a woman who identified as a man, had a very close brush with the authorities. In 1938, she was arrested for wearing men’s clothes and sent to a concentration camp. But a few months later, she was released and permitted to dress as she liked and to adopt the gender-neutral name of Gerd. One ‘queer’ historian admits that ‘police at first reacted harshly but later showed surprising leniency’. Even gay transvestite Fritz Kitzing, who was repeatedly arrested for soliciting, was sent to join the army rather than killed in a concentration camp. Kitzing survived the war and ran an antique shop until the 1990s.

So far, the mixed fortunes of the handful of named trans victims suggest that it was entirely possible to be ‘trans’ and elude persecution. If you were heterosexual, considered ‘Aryan’, followed the rules on public crossdressing and avoided prostitution or public indecency, you at least had a chance of surviving the brutal regime. No such leniency was afforded to the Nazis’ key targets, like Jews or disabled people, who were ruthlessly sought out for elimination.

When trans activists describe this truth-telling as ‘Holocaust denial’, they do a disservice to all Holocaust victims – including the few trans victims who really did suffer at the hands of an evil regime for their other characteristics. We must resist this blatant rewriting of history and the trans appropriation of the Holocaust.

Malcolm Clark is a TV producer.