This week, the Metro published a piece on a new Harry Potter TV series which included the claim that JK Rowling has “engaged in Holocaust denial”. The article focused on Nicholas Hoult, who left the show after receiving backlash for appearing in a work by Rowling’s because of her “criticism of the transgender community”, as suggested by the Metro. The publication has now added a correction to the article, stating that it wrongly claimed Rowling had engaged in Holocaust denial.

This slur is something that Rowling has had to deal with in the past. In March 2024, a journalist from Novara Media called JK Rowling a “Holocaust denier” after the author had responded to a tweet on trans healthcare during the Holocaust. After Rowling threatened legal action, the journalist apologized for the tweet.

That accusations of Holocaust denial are being used to attack Rowling again speaks volumes about the mindset of her enemies. No event in history, including the murder of six million Jews, is so tragic that 21st-century gender warriors can’t appropriate it. The same line was even tried two years ago, when the website PinkNews also published an article in which it claimed that the “persecution of trans people by the Nazis was devastating” and “echoes down the ages”.

Trans activists are clearly happy to push aside victims of horrendous violence to create a disproportionate narrative of persecution. But the Metro article has appeared at a moment when Jewish people are under unprecedented attack, including a fatal assault on a synagogue in Manchester last year. Weaponizing the Holocaust to smear Rowling, who is a long-standing opponent of antisemitism, was bad enough two years ago. Doing it in the current atmosphere of fear and anxiety in the Jewish community is unforgivable.

It also smacks of desperation. Six years after the author became a prime target for trans activists, Rowling is still standing. Her career continues to flourish, and she has set up a fund to support women who take legal action to protect their own and other women’s rights.

The Metro article also targeted For Women Scotland, describing it as “the campaign group pushing for the Scottish law to exclude trans women from the legal definition of ‘woman’”. This is a wholly imaginary version of the Supreme Court judgment, which posits that trans-identified men had the right to be treated as biological women until a bunch of spoilsports came along and ruined their lives. This is obviously not the reality, as feminists know the law, which is why the rhetoric used against us is so vicious.

But the Metro is not alone in this attempt to undermine those who are skeptical of trans radicals. According to the website of TransLucent — a transgender advocacy website — many feminist organizations that organize protests “have solid links with the far-Right and “dark money” from the US and Russia”. This is an attempt to impose a false narrative on contemporary politics, using slurs and false accusations to excuse attacks on women who don’t want men in single-sex spaces.

Tragically, a generation of young people has been brainwashed into casually repeating blatant untruths. If they do nothing else, the attacks on Rowling expose the narcissism — and the moral vacuum — at the heart of trans activism.

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Joan Smith is a novelist and columnist. She was previously Chair of the Mayor of London’s Violence Against Women and Girls Board, and is on the advisory group for Sex Matters. Her book Unfortunately, She Was A Nymphomaniac: A New History of Rome’s Imperial Women was published in November 2024.

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