Transing the...Holocaust
Even I didn't think the LGBTQ+ lobby would be so shameless as to try to rewrite the story of the Holocaust in order to centre a handful of cross-dressers.
Yesterday, I was accused of Holocaust Denial and I don’t mind admitting that I gulped. Sure, I’ve been called a bigot, a hate figure, personally responsible for causing young trans people to commit suicide and even being ….“just like the KKK” whatever that means. But Holocaust Denier? No one wants that on their cv.
I quickly reminded myself though that the allegation was not only disgusting but absurd. It's not just that many of my best friends really are Jewish (some who lost family in the Shoah). I’ve studied the Holocaust for years. I’ll never forget my trip to Wannsee where the Final Solution was presented to Nazi top brass by Richard Heydrich in January 1942. Under glass panels on the table where the delegates discussed the extermination of millions you can read the minutes of the meeting. On one page there is a list of countries including those the Nazis intended to occupy such as the nations of the UK with exact numbers for the number of Jews to be murdered. Chilling doesn’t do it credit.
I’ve a shelf full of books about the Holocaust, been to Dachau, traced the scientific roots of German anti-semitism for a TV series about anthropology and visited the Topography of Terror on the site of SS headquarters. Deny the Holocaust? I wish I could get it out of my head.
It’s because Germany was one of the most advanced nations in the world and put its cutting-edge technological and organisational prowess to the singular purpose of eliminating an entire people that the Holocaust is the great crime of the modern age; and unparalleled. Nowhere else did a modern state obsessively and minutely plan genocide on the scale and with the detail of the Final Solution.
I’d never heard of the organisation Labour for Trans Rights until it made the slanderous claim. It came in their response to a thread I posted on Twitter about a hobby-horse of mine, the sexologist and historical LGBTQ+ icon, Magnus Hirschfeld.
You can read the thread …here.
Hischfeld, you may remember, was the gay Jewish sex researcher who set up the Institute of Sexology in Berlin in 1919. In any sensible world he would now be dismissed as a charlatan. I mean he tried to cure homosexuality with tiny grafts of tissue from the testicles of dead heterosexuals! His anthropology department promoted colonialism. He was a major figure in eugenics. He argued homosexuality was Nature’s way of stopping bad genetic material from being passed on to the next generation, surely an argument that would have benefited from a second draft if you were trying to improve the lives of homosexuals, which Hirschfeld claimed he was.
Nothing Hirschfeld did has stood the test of time. Except, of course, he organised the first sex change surgeries. And that means he must be revered.
Every time I return to Hirschfeld’s story and do more research I’m more appalled at how he has been taken up as an icon of the LGBTQ+ movement. At the weekend my thread explored my latest discoveries, which included the fact he’d visited the States in 1931 to meet the two most influential eugenicists in America. Two years later it was their work that would form the basis of the compulsory sterilisation campaign of the Nazis.
After my thread Labour for Trans Rights called for an ex-MP, Mike Gapes, to be thrown out of the Labour Party. His crime was he’d liked my thread which Labour for Trans Rights was now claiming was Holocaust Denial. The reason? I’d pointed out that, despite claims to the contrary, trans people were not a key target of the Nazis.
I didn’t expand on this in my thread because many others have. If I had I would have explained that unlike the Nazi regime's declared enemy, Jews, and to a lesser extent gays or the disabled there were no laws targetting 'trans' people. That's why it's fair to say they weren't a KEY target. There was however a statute specifically against homosexuality, Paragraph 175 of the Penal Code, which the Nazis inherited from the Weimar Republic and which they strengthened, which led to up to 15000 homosexual men being interred in concentration camps. Lesbians were not targetted in Germany, though they were in Austria after the Anschluss.
Now of course it’s possible that some people who believed they were the opposite sex …were imprisoned on the basis of their homosexuality, but that surely only proves that it was homosexuality the Nazis were prioritising.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that life would have been anything but horrific for someone who was gender non-conforming. I’ve seen some material online that suggests the Nazis were supportive of cross-dressing and “trans” people. I don’t buy that for a minute. Just because some soldiers like dressing up in drag or the occasional cross-dresser got a license to permit their behaviour doesn’t take away from the vicious, unrelenting conformity that the Nazi regime sought to enforce on German society.
Anyone who's read histories of the period (and I’ve read many) knows laws are not the whole story. The Nazis were not notably law-abiding. In a police state that was obsessed with 'breeding', with a Gestapo officer for every 10000 citizens, and where people were encouraged to inform on each other, being a cross-dresser or "gender non conforming" would feel and be dangerous ...whatever the law specifically said.
Anyone who was quirky or different in the Germany of the 30s was at risk of being informed on by their neighbours who stood to gain from getting them thrown out of their house. Blackmail was a continual threat. So I assume that people who might call themselves trans now…would indeed have been victims of the Nazis. But KEY targets? No.
People who played Jazz music, for example, were also likely to be rounded up and imprisoned. Some Jazz musicians ended up in concentration camps. That however is very different from being a key target of the brutal apparatus of the Nazi state.
By contrast the degradation of the rights of Jewish people can be traced step by highly publicised step …from the limits placed on Jewish employment to the seizure of Jewish wealth. The Nazis even levied a massive fine on the entire Jewish community for the costs of Kristallnacht, for example. From the early race laws that prevented “inter-marriage” and the calculation of how much Jewish blood a person had through to the appalling crimes of the Final Solution…the Holocaust slowly and relentlessly unfolds into the greatest crime of the modern age.
Nothing has ever been found to compare with this extensive, uncontested and explicit evidence about the targetting of Jews that involves trans people, the gender non conforming, ‘queer’ or any other word that might have covered today’s residents sheltering under the trans umbrella. That’s because the Jews were considered an existential enemy by the Nazis and it was a strategic goal to eliminate them. Trans people were not.
Labour for Trans Rights followed up their denunciation of poor Mike Gapes and me with a link to a video that they said proved trans people were a key target of the Nazis and therefore by extension I was a denier of… you know what.
It was with some trepidation I settled down to watch it. I imagined it would be uncomfortable, not least because it was hosted by the ‘Musuem of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust’
The blurb underneath on the website claimed,
“Hitler’s Nazi government, brutally targeted the trans community, deporting many trans people to concentration camps and wiping out vibrant community structures. As transgender people are now increasingly targets of discriminatory legislation and hate, join the Museum for a program exploring these stories and experiences prior to and during the Holocaust.”