On Wednesday, J.K. Rowling implicitly denied that transgender individuals were targeted and that books about them were burned in Nazi Germany. This assertion contradicts abundant evidence that transgender people were among the first targeted by the Nazis' rise to power in Germany. This culminated in the looting of the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute of Sexology and the infamous burning of the initial decades of transgender healthcare research, as well as the internment, forced detransition, and murder of transgender citizens. When confronted with numerous scholarly sources, she instead linked to another thread that labeled the first transgender patient a "troubled male.”
The claims emerged after Rowling argued that doctors providing gender affirming care to transgender youth should face prison time. She also advocated for imprisoning leaders of Stonewall and Mermaids, charities serving transgender and queer individuals. Recently, the author has adopted more extreme positions regarding transgender people, including describing a prominent transgender woman and journalist in the United Kingdom as "A man…cosplaying."