“Genocide” was coined to describe the Shoah, but—for once—the statement “not only Jews were affected” applies here.
You know who suffered more deaths per capita than we did? The Rromani. Less than one percent of all Rromani living in Axis-controlled areas survived the Holocaust. It’s hardly disrespectful to Jews to call that a genocide.
You know who we retroactively apply the label to? The Armenians. Look up the 1900 Armenian genocide.
A few other things that accurately get described as genocide: Pol Pot’s Cambodian genocide, the Trail of Tears as an instrument of genocide, the Khmer Rouge on a smaller scale have committed genocide. Residential schools? Instruments of genocide.
When a group of people is deliberately singled out for stochastic terror and destruction because they are some kind of minority, THAT IS GENOCIDE. The reason it took so long for us to have a word for it is because groups being large-scale targeted for a specific (usually but not always) ethnic reason usually just…disappeared. Newsreel footage of the liberation at Auschwitz is what changed that. We put a face to genocide in a way that hadn’t happened before, but we weren’t the first. (Nor was this the first genocide against Jews, but we tend to call earlier ones pogroms.)
And as a side note: FUCK you, TERFs, for trying to claim my people’s tragedy as a way to put down trans people. Because you know one of the first groups targeted in the early days of the Shoah? TRANS WOMEN. Because the push for trans rights and recognition was being led by Max Hirschfeld, a gay Jewish man. And furthermore, yes, we can say definitively that they were trans, BECAUSE HE’S THE ONE WHO COINED THE WORD “TRANSSEXUAL.”
And it was women just like you who were trying to pop out beautiful blonde Aryan babies for the glory of Hitler while my people burned. And who, today, deride the ethnic features of cis Jewish women as being “manly” and who “out” cis Jewish women and our cis Muslim sisters as “men” based on common MENA phenotypes that don’t match your racist slender-white-Eurocentric femininity. You participated in genocide then and you’re doing it now.
Trans genocide is real. You were its enablers then, and you are its enablers now. With love from a Jew: may your names be blotted out, and may all your teeth fall out but one, to give you a toothache.
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