Yes, J.K. Rowling, the Nazis persecuted trans people, burned books

J.K. Rowling, well known for her anti-transgender stances, recently questioned a social media post that said Germany’s Nazi regime burned books on trans health care, suggesting it might be a “fever dream” and that the poster should do some fact-checking. Well, the information is actually easy to check, and it’s accurate.

Famed German gender and sexuality researcher Magnus Hirschfeld was an advocate not only for the rights of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people but for trans people as well. His Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin housed “an immense library on sexuality, gathered over many years and including rare books and diagrams and protocols for male-to-female (MTF) surgical transition,” according to a 2021 article in Scientific American.

Hirschfeld’s institute, founded in 1919, offered sex “education and health clinics, advice on contraception, and research on gender and sexuality, both anthropological and psychological,” the article notes. Hirschfeld also fought to repeal Germany’s law against homosexuality and helped trans people obtain “transvestite” ID cards, which allowed them to cross-dress in public without fear of arrest, an arrangement available under the pre-Nazi German government, known as the Weimar Republic. He hired a gynecologist and surgeon to perform gender-affirming surgeries for trans people.

But after Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in 1933, the institute became one of their victims. Soldiers, joined by private citizens, attacked the institute on May 6 of that year. “Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street,” Scientific American reports. “Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people. … It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings.”

“The collection was irreplaceable,” the article notes, adding that while images of the burning still exist and are frequently reproduced, most viewers don’t realize the attack had anything to do with trans people or their medical care. Hirschfeld and his colleague Karl Giese fled to France and continued their work there, but both died in the late 1930s.

Likewise, the history of trans people’s persecution under the Nazis has often been erased, with trans women classified as men. But recent research has clarified the matter.

In 2022, a German court heard a civil lawsuit that arose from an argument on social media about whether trans people were victims of the Holocaust; it is generally acknowledged that gays and lesbians were.

“The court took expert statements from historians before issuing an opinion that essentially acknowledges that trans people were victimized by the Nazi regime,” Laurie Marhoefer wrote in a 2023 article for The Conversation, republished by Smithsonian and The Advocate. Soon afterward, the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, issued a statement recognizing that both cisgender queer people and trans people were among the victims.

The Nazi government revoked the “transvestite” ID’s that were available under the Weimar Republic, and then trans people were often arrested and sent to concentration camps, where many of them died, Marhoefer’s article notes.

One of those whose experience is documented is Liddy Bacroff, a trans woman and sex worker. Police wrote that she was “fundamentally a transvestite” and a “morals criminal of the worst sort.” Bacroff was clear about her gender identity; she told the police, “My sense of my sex is fully and completely that of a woman.” She was killed in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

“Attacks on trans people are nothing new,” Marhoefer concluded, adding, “Many of them are straight out of the Nazi playbook."