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 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

Some of the high-ranking Nazis were gay or cross-dressers. Burning those archives was in part to destroy those officers' patient records.

Yes but that's like saying the fact that the Nazis burned Einstein's books is evidence that they had a problem with his theory of relativity.

When did we start using the term 'trans' for cross dresser.

Some men get a sexual kick out of dressing up as what is seen as a woman. Its not new and its not news that its not new.

It was a deliberate tactic which has been discussed by the likes of C. Burns, who was one of the architects of the GRA. They brought in that law, based on the fiction that it would only really apply to transsexuals who were undergoing or would undergo proper medical transition. They always intended to extend it to cross dressers and transvestites and they introduced the term transgender, then shortened to trans, in order to achieve that.

However, back to Dawn French. I know a lot of people felt she was late to speak up and suggested people doing so now were doing so in the knowledge it’s much safer, but this goes to show there is never going to be an easy time to speak out.

You’re probably not reading this, but if you are, thank you Dawn for having the courage to join us. I note you have done this at a time when you have a book coming out, so a time of maximum publicity and maximum risk of your work being cancelled. The more strong and reasonable women we have at the forefront, the more others will feel able to speak up.

So, on the basis of Godwin's Law, the TRAs have formally lost the argument.

Oh dear, how sad. Never mind.

This puts things into proportion. Thank you.

It's an insult to those who were rounded up, starved, tortured, abused and murdered by the Nazis to misuse the horrors of the holocaust in this way. It's sickening. And it's a lie.

YES - primitive and horrifying 'cross-sex' surgeries were indeed attempted, the most evidence comes from Ravensbruck.

They were also routinely carried out, and again we have access to decent evidence (with evidence of many more documents that successive Japanese governments suppressed) at Unit 731 (if you've not heard of Unit 731, don't look at the wikipedia page. It's not the sort of thing you ever forget.)

Being able to change your sex at will fits in well with the Nazi interpretation of the Ubermensch, especially Goering's interpretation (Goering was a cross dresser, so firmly under the trans umbrella according to Stonewall).

I was slightly critical of Dawn earlier on in the thread for what I saw as an attempt to soften what she was saying with the whole "I need you young people to explain it to me" schtick. Perhaps she hoped that if she sounded suitably apologetic for defending JK Rowling she wouldn't get piled on.

If that was her intention then she's had her eyes well and truly opened to the viciousness of Team "Be Kind" and she is having none of it.

"Nope", indeed.

I thought the Nazis DID have a problem with the theory of relativity, which they branded “Jewish physics” and opposed to good, solid German physics…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Einstein/Nazi-backlash-and-coming-to-America

Not least because Goering was one.

Yes but would they have had a problem with the theory of relativity if it had been the theory of an Aryan physicist? Or did they brand it as "Jewish physics" because of whose theory it was?

Similarly, when they burned (gay, Jewish) Hirschfield's books, I highly doubt they read them first to find out which ones were about homosexuality, which ones were about cross dressing and which ones were about experimental surgeries before deciding which ones to burn.

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.

Yes. And Rosie Duffield was their main target just for liking a post by Graham Linehan saying this. A formal complaint of "antisemitism" was investigated against her by the Labour Party, bizarrely, because the TRA logic went from "Rosie is a holocaust denier because she doesn't believe the Holocaust was about trans people" to "the Holocaust was about Jewish people (well yes) so Rosie in denying it shows she is antisemitic". As if Rosie denied the Holocaust ever took place! Deeply manipulative.

Edited.

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.

///

This absolutely, and it's highly offensive to make out it's the same.

Fair point about the book burning but let's be honest TRAs have been comparing simply questioning trans ideology to a literal trans holocaust for years now. Not specifically the contents of books.

But yes - loved Dawns sweater too

I think a lot of people have misread JKR's tweet. To me, she's not saying that the burning of material on trans issues didn't happen. She accepts that it happened, but it is one incident set against the incomprehensible scale of the Holocaust.

Just my interpretation, but Rowling genuinely doesn't seem to me to say "that never happened", just that it wasn't centre stage.

Agree.

Not denying that there was some book-burning, or that some trans people died - just pointing out that they weren't specifically targeted because they were trans. They were, if anything, incidental and it was other aspects of their behaviour that led to their deaths.

I think there are many people who have deliberately chosen to put the worst spin on it they can.

How could anyone sentient believe that

TBH you could just apply this across the board to pretty much all the TRA claims.

I've just been reading about this on Wikipedia, i.e. not from an in depth or reliable source.

Would someone like Gohrbandt would have had any choice as to whether to participate in the experiments at Dachau? Was it a case of, "You're a doctor, we want you to come and work on this project, and if you object you can join the test subjects"? Or would it have been something he had some free will over?

He is described on Wikipedia as a war criminal, but he doesn't appear to have ever been prosecuted, which suggests if nothing else that he was never one of the ringleaders.

I am really reluctant to draw parallels between doctors who participated in Nazi experiments and doctors pioneering gender affirming surgery.

However, I do wonder whether there is a certain type of doctor who, perhaps without having strong views about either Jewish people or the importance of gender affirming surgery for trans people, is simply attracted to working in an environment where they are allowed to experiment on the bodies of living people, free from the usual ethical constraints that would normally apply.

The doctors who conceived and took part in the Nazi experiments were free from those ethical constrants because the people they were experimenting on were completely dehumanised and not expected to survive the experiments, which meant they really were free to push human endurance to its very limits. It's nauseating to think about.

Doctors pioneering gender affirming surgeries are of course in a different situation. They are performing these surgeries on willing, consenting patients, in an environment where the narrative being pushed is that the treatments themselves are essential and life saving. But they are still experimenting on people's bodies. This is still true today; it was even more true in the 1930s. And they are still doing so in an environment free from the usual ethical constraints. This time it is not because their patients have been dehumanised and it does not matter if they die, but because the medical world in which they exist has declared that their patients will die if they do not receive these treatments. I imagine that makes it easier to justify carrying out surgeries they know have a high complication rate and frequently cause bodily disability, on patients whom they know or suspect are not competent to give informed consent. Or perhaps it is the money that helps to justify it.

Anyway. Bit of a derail from Dawn French. Sorry.

I think that the TRAs should sit down and watch 'Allo 'Allo.

What the fuck!

How on earth can it be antisemitic to point out that Eddie Izzard would not have been a primary target for the Nazis? Or, more likely, not a target at all.

Eddie isn't Jewish. That's the whole fucking point.

Retrospectively claiming that trans people would have been a primary target for Hitler if "trans people" as a group had existed back then in the way they do now is a form of historical revisionism which I do actually think is very offensive to Jewish people.

Interestingly - back on Wikipedia - this article explaining the Holocaust and this article explaining Holocaust denial both very much focus on Jews as being a primary target.

However, this article about Holocaust victims says that 17,000,000 people were killed in the Holocaust, of which 6,000,000 were Jews and 11,000,000 were Gentiles. Apparently the biggest group of people killed by the Nazis were Slavs, mainly Soviets and Poles. Other groups such as disabled people and Romani people were killed in the hundreds of thousands. There were somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 gay victims. I would expect this number to be small given that gay people make up a small percentage of the general population and many gay people would not have been out in the 1930s.

So it seems to me that there is some confusion over what the word Holocaust actually covers. Does it mean primarily the Nazi genocide of Jews? Or is its definition expanded to cover everyone killed by the Nazis?

I think I struggle with the expanded definition, particularly when it includes large numbers of Soviet civilians and POWs. Not because their deaths weren't tragic, but because we killed plenty of people in the war too. My own grandfather dropped bombs on German civilians. It kind of goes with the territory of being at war.

So when we are talking about the Holocaust specifically, or genocide in general, I think it's probably best to adopt a narrower definition to ensure that it is meaningful. I would include gay people in the definition, because it is clear that they were specifically targeted by the Nazis because of their sexuality in the same way that Jewish people were targeted because of their religion and ethnicity. But if you want to make a case that trans people were also specifically targeted because of their gender identity - a concept which did not exist in the 1930s - I think the evidence is quite poor.

😂😂😂

"Allo, 'Allo - I love it.

Totally politically correct and inoffensive to anyone, obviously.

(We cherish our Box set here at Chateau Viper - there about 4 billion episodes, and every one a gem!)

Mr Eresh and I recently watched the whole series again from start to finish.