Transphobes Keep Using the Holocaust to Attack LGBTQ+ People

Last week, Matt Walsh posted a particularly disgusting Twitter thread, claiming that “the trans agenda” was invented by “pedophilic psychologists, degenerate quacks, lunatic sexologists, literal Nazi scientists, and other assorted deviants.” He lists five researchers from the 20th century, some of them good people with problematic traits, and some of them thoroughly bad. He then props them up as the five men supposedly responsible for the creation of trans people. The thread is an extremely dishonest rhetorical tactic, similar to attempts to “prove” that Jews secretly run the world by naming five random Jewish leaders. This kind of rhetoric is designed to delegitimize trans people, erase their ancient global history, and whip up hate against them.

It’s also, infuriatingly, the latest example of bigots using the Holocaust to mean whatever they want it to mean.

A quick history lesson: 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, along with up to 15,000 gay men, up to 500,000 Roma people, and hundreds of thousands of others. The inclusion of gay men in the Holocaust is a detail that modern-day homophobes and transphobes like to gloss over—especially because queer communities were one of Nazism’s main targets.

One of the people on Walsh’s list, Magnus Hirschfeld, was a gay Jewish man who founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Institute for Sex Research. Nazis raided the Institute in 1933, burning the contents of its library and forcing it to shut down. Hirschfeld, who was on a speaking tour at the time, never returned to Germany. In the Twitter thread, Walsh insinuates that Hirschfeld had Nazi connections, when in reality, Hirschfeld was one of the Nazis’ first targets.

This is why we need Holocaust education

There’s a larger problem that allows disinformation like Walsh’s to flourish: surprisingly few people actually know what happened in the Holocaust. There are many more people than you think who literally don’t know Jews were murdered. Very few people know about the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or the progressive queer culture that was thriving in Germany before the Nazis stamped it out. People know books were burned in Germany, but they don’t know which books were burned.

This is precisely how people like Walsh can claim that trans people are some new, completely unheard-of phenomenon, instead of a population that’s been part of human culture throughout recorded history. It’s also how right-wing bigots can use the Holocaust as an empty signifier. When your audience has no conception of Holocaust history, they won’t notice how absurd it is when you imply that Magnus Herschfeld aided the Nazis. Then there’s Walsh’s use of Nazi terms like “degenerates” and “deviants” in an ostensibly anti-Nazi thread. None of it makes sense; none of it is coherent; it’s just a giant hate-filled word salad.

And a frightening number of people are falling for it.

(featured image: Ted Eytan/Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)