Dawn French under fire on Instagram

[DungareesAndTrombones]

She posted a link to a podcast with Fearne Cotton where she briefly mentioned JK Rowling and then something else about cancel culture and the comments section is rife with people telling her JK is a holocaust denier and that she sides with people who want to eradicate trans people from the face of the earth.

I mean 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

https://www.artbook.com/9783775744836.html

'In the course of his researches into war photography and the impact of images on how history is written, the German artist and collector Martin Dammann came across numerous amateur photographs of German soldiers dressed up as women. Dammann’s discoveries are now presented for the first time in Soldier Studies: Cross-Dressing in the Wehrmacht, with pictures that provide surprising insights into the everyday lives and desires of German soldiers in World War II—from playful scenes of young recruits clowning around, to improvised disguises among close friends at the front, to carefully prepared performances in Allied POW camps.'

So, when people say, "The Nazis burned books which contained research about trans people" they mean, "The Nazis burned the entire research library of a man who was both Jewish and gay."

🙄

I suspected she was quietly making a point, too. Her post today with the 'Nope' t-shirt supports that.

I looked into the whole Holocaust denial thing last night. It seems an important library of gender/sex studies was burned, a prominent researcher killed, and the Nazis certainly targeted gays and lesbians as well as other minorities, the disabled, and Jews. So the idea seems to be that if trans people had existed in their present day iteration back then, the Nazis would have targeted them...

ETA - oh and German law states that denying any part of the horrors of the Holocaust should be seen as Holocaust denial - which is where this whole idea comes from. I can see what they're getting at, but I feel it's a bit of a reach.

Erwin Gohrbandt was a surgeon who was a pioneer of 'sex reassignment' surgery (who operated on Lili Elbe - orchidectomy IIRC) and worked with Hirschfield. He went on to be a Doctor at Dachau, where the infamous Hypothermia experiments were carried out.

I'm sure I read that Hirschfield was a Eugenicist.

I think possibly Fred Sargeant has written about Hirschfield if anyone wants to look it up.

FFS monitors are here. Back to our national treasure Dawn i hope she is okay.

It's a reach, alright.

And the reason why it's illegal to deny any part of the Holocaust in Germany is because six million Jews were killed. (Alongside other groups of course, but mainly Jews.)

It's not so that trans activists can rewrite history by claiming that trans people were specifically persecuted by the Nazis and then accuse anyone who disputes that assertion of holocaust denial.

They are appropriating the atrocities committed against other groups during the Holocaust for their own political gain AND trying to weaponise a law put in place to respect the memory of those who were murdered to stop people from calling them out on it.

Pretty despicable all round really.

Are there any depths they won't sink to?

In the scientific american article, it states that 'The Nazi ideal had been based on white, cishet (that is, cisgender and heterosexual).'

I would like to know when the use of 'cisgender' began? I have doubts that it was used in the 1930s and 1940s. Was being 'cisgender' an important part of being an Aryan, or was it a concept that hadn't yet been thought of?

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/aryan-1

I miss the good old day when having a different opinion was allowed.
If you don't agree with people then just scroll on.
I'm glad Dawn and JKR are voicing their opinion

The thing is, transgender people were specifically persecuted by the Nazis for being transgender. This is widely accepted, including by the museum of Jewish Heritage. No one is claiming that they were uniquely targeted (everyone making this claim also accepts that gays, lesbians, Jews, communists, Romas etc. were also persecuted).

Using this very real history to accuse modern day opponents like Rowling, of being Nazis or Nazi-successors is a different thing, of course, and maybe is in bad taste.

I read a bit about this when it all blew up a few weeks ago when the Novara journalist made the allegation. Malcolm Clark has a long tweet thread about it. Thread by @TwisterFilm on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

The key point he makes is that hardly any people who might nowadays call themselves transgender were sent to concentration camps, and most of those who were were Jewish and/or gay and/or political opponents of the Nazis, so would have been sent there whether they were crossdressers/gender nonconforming or not.

As Malcolm says, if the Nazis had considered being transgender a serious problem and identified trans people as another group they could try to eliminate in their death camps, they'd have legislated about it, as they did for the other groups. But they didn't.

Like most other sources, this doesn't clearly distinguish between gay and trans.

Is there a record of how many trans people who were neither gay nor Jewish were sent to concentration camps?

Malcolm is a gay man with a distinguished career as a documentary film maker. He has gone through all the known cases one by one.

Is there a record of how many trans people who were neither gay nor Jewish were sent to concentration camps?

Something tells me that Aryan heterosexual cross-dressers were not living under the same fear in the Third Reich as those specifically targeted in the Holocaust.

Thank you for posting that thread, it's an interesting read.

ETA link, just in case anyone missed it. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1768427557425234010.html

You see this is the bit I’m confused about. So far as I’m aware JK Rowling does not hold the view that trans people need to be incarcerated, enslaved or killed in a genocide in order to wipe out their existence. Nor does she have a problem with trans people as human beings or members of society, she simply wishes for women’s rights to be protected. It seems so pathetic to suggest she is a nazi simply because they believe she is persecuting trans people by disagreeing with the narrative that they are the same as her (as a biological women).

if I’m being honest the whole TWAW statement confuses me, because if you need a prefix to the word ‘woman’ then you are already recognising that you differ from a woman. If you insist on naming biological women ‘cis’ then you’re also acknowledging your difference from them. If you accept that forms must ask if you have changed your gender or were assigned a different one at birth to the one you now hold, then you also know that you are being distinguished from biological women. I don’t really see what the issue with being included as a category within the gender of women (but not as a biological woman) is for trans women as surely they can’t erase their past life and identity as a boy/man and that in itself sets them apart as different to women.

but I guess thinking that makes me a TERF 🤷‍♀️

P.s. the information in this thread about the nazis destruction of the literature as well as individuals from the LGBTQ+ community is incredibly sad and something more people ought to know.

It is entirely separate, however, to the modern issues we face with regards to women’s rights and their erosion.

@TerrifiedOfNoise, the specific accusation of holocaust denial isn't about Rowling's general position on trans people, but specifically about her denial that the Nazis "burned books on trans healthcare and research", which they clearly did do. Other people in this thread are saying that the Nazis burned the research because the researcher was a gay Jew, and that may be the case, but it doesn't change the fact that the research really was burned.

'May be in bad taste'? Fucking hell. If that's meant to be sardonic it doesn't land well.

I se why JKR has gone off on one about this because I feel so furious reading this shit.

The Malcolm Clark thread is salutary. I'm sure I'm not alone on this thread in having a son who would have been at risk in the Holocaust - he's not very Jewish but he would have been Jewish enough for Hitler. His best friend's sibling, who is a 'gay trans man', could have avoided Nazi persecution by putting on a fucking skirt. This is really, really not the same as going into hiding in a hole in the ground for five years, or paying a fortune to flee their country, or any of the other things that Jewish and/or gay people who survived the Holocaust had to do.

Also doesn't mean that the tras aren't massively inflating and distorting and appropriating, as per.

Anyway, with apologies for referring back to the thread title - I do hope Dawn French is OK. I'm also hoping she sticks to her (quietish) guns and doesn't end up in one of those ghastly struggle sessions, mouthing the mantra and promising to recant. She's worth so much more.

why are you so desperate to uphold their [Nazis'] ideology around gender?

How could anyone sentient believe that of JKR or Dawn F? It's unhinged. Hitler in 1933-34 as Chancellor introduced a 'Law for the Encouragement of Marriage' which financially rewarded married women's fecundity, and argued that for the German woman her 'world is her husband, her family, her children, and her home'.

There is no way on this planet that either JKR or DF uphold that shite. I'll tell you for nothing though which current gender ideology DOES uphold those sorts of stereotyped, narrow sexist roles ... go on, have a guess.

The exact same debate blew up last year didn't it when Eddie Izzard said he would have been persecuted by the nazis for being trans?
And people posted loads of images of nazi soldiers happily cross dressing. And also pointed out that as a straight white male Eddie would have been fine.

I located Fred's article.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/10/01/the-dark-legacy-of-magnus-hirschfeld/

Here is a section about book burnings.

'It was the second phase that targeted libraries and institutions of learning. In early April 1933, the German Students’ Union, dominated since 1931 by the National Socialist German Students’ League, announced plans to cleanse libraries of ‘un-German’ books and published materials. Nazi librarian Wolfgang Herrmann produced a blacklist of 310 titles of works in April 1933 to be used by the students’ union. Hirschfeld’s books were not on the list. Still, the students’ union raided the Institute for Sexual Research that May, spontaneously grabbing the titles that they found there. A third phase of book-burning followed, which targeted smaller local libraries, bookshops, schools and other institutions.
There has been much conjecture about the students’ union’s motives for raiding Hirschfeld’s institute. Some have speculated that the students and their Brownshirt supervisors were looking for records of Nazi officers who had received treatment at the institute in the 1920s. The Magnus Hirschfeld Society continues to dispute this rumour and, according to one eyewitness, the raiders were persuaded not to take any medical records because they were not un-German writings. Besides, the Gestapo had visited the institute several times in March only to discover that the institute’s director, Karl Geise, had already removed the most important personal records, documents and publications, and sent them to Hirschfeld, who was by then residing in Switzerland.
In late 1933, Hirschfeld relocated from Switzerland to Paris where he planned to re-open the institute. But after encountering innumerable difficulties, the now ailing Hirschfeld – diabetic and obese – resettled in a luxurious five-bedroom apartment facing the sea in Nice.'

twitter.com/michaelpforan/status/1743237231496605782
Not sure if the link works but Michael Foran has tweeted about a German court case which found there wasn't sufficient evidence to show trans people were specifically targeted by the nazis.

Highlights from the above block of text.

1. Nazi librarian Wolfgang Herrmann produced a blacklist of 310 titles of works in April 1933 to be used by the students’ union. Hirschfeld’s books were not on the list.
2. the raiders were persuaded not to take any medical records because they were not un-German writings.
3. the institute’s director, Karl Geise, had already removed the most important personal records, documents and publications, and sent them to Hirschfeld, who was by then residing in Switzerland.