Queer content creator Erin Reed recently posted a viral Twitter thread arguing that ongoing anti-trans efforts and legislation in the United States meet the United Nations’ definition of genocide. The post drew attention in the wake of recent debates and proposals aimed at restricting access to lifesaving gender-affirming care for trans people, including a reply from Corinna Cohn, a leader of the Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network. Cohn, who has testified in support of legislative attempts to restrict trans medical care and participation in athletic competitions, denied the historical existence of trans people during the Holocaust.

The argument began with Reed’s Tweet: 

Cohn responded by claiming that Reed was guilty of “cherry-picking definitions” of genocide and “torturing logic” to benefit her political agenda, and asking that activists stop comparing “regulation” of gender-affirming care to violence.

Onlookers in the comments began to argue over Reed’s point and against Cohn’s reply, including the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Michael E. Hayden. The exchange culminated in Cohn stating that acknowledging transgender victims of the Nazi regime “is what the new Holocaust denialism looks like” and claiming that trans people “did not even exist in 1939.” 

Cohn, who hosts the podcast Heterodorx, has recently begun to put her anti-trans views into action. In late January, Cohn spoke in front of the Indiana House of Representatives in favor of HB 1041, a legislative effort that Cohn claimed would “strengthen the rights for girls and young women competing in sport” by excluding trans student athletes from competition. In her testimony, Cohn defined herself as “a transsexual,” arguing that her “sex is male, and neither science nor medicine can change that.” In the months since, Cohn has served as an expert and a witness for legislative efforts to restrict gender-affirming care in both Alabama and Ohio. 

Cohn signed her testimony to the Ohio General Assembly as the secretary and treasurer of Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network. GCCAN was founded in 2019 under the stated mission “to empower recipients of gender transition-related care to become healthy and whole,” but it has rapidly aligned itself with the right-wing campaign against  gender-affirming care policies, with Cohn serving as a board member. 

In April, Cohn published an op-ed in The Washington Post detailing her own experience of gender dysphoria and her regrets surrounding the medical transition she began as a teen. Cohn’s story has become a right-wing media go-to as a means of exaggerating public notions of transition regret (research shows that between 1-3% of people transitioning will stop or reverse gender-affirming care) and undermining the lifesaving benefits of gender-affirming care.  

Cohn’s recent denial of the historic existence of trans people is an attempt to bend history to  justify a right-wing narrative. Historians accept the existence of gender-diverse individuals throughout history and, in particular, note that gender and sexually non-conforming individuals were a target of the German Nazi Party. One of the first targets of the Nazi regime was Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, which provided support, counseling, and official documents for people of marginalized sexual and gender experiences. In 1933, Nazis plundered the Institute and publicly burned its books. People who expressed or practiced non-conforming gender and sexual identities faced targeted violence both during the Nazi regime and, for the survivors, in the following decades. 

Amid the recent wave of anti-trans rhetoric and the tendency of right-wing pundits to reach for historical justifications in the Holocaust, institutions including the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., have highlighted the experiences of gender-diverse people before, during, and after the Nazi regime. These efforts underscore the work of Hirschfeld and the relative freedoms of the Weimar Republic in the early 20th century, recognizing the atrocities of Nazism and post-war German oppression of gender non-conforming people and encouraging further understanding of gender identity in the historical record in the hopes that we not repeat its violence.