By Ashley Stahl
The Roaring Fork Tranny
When we were growing up, we all asked: “How did people let the Holocaust happen?” Teachers talked about Hitler’s charisma, economic desperation, and propaganda. But they never explained how millions of ordinary people watched their neighbors disappear and did nothing. We’re not asking anymore. Because we’re watching it happen right now.
Trans people are living through the early stages of what happened in 1930s Germany. Not the death camps— we’re not there yet — but the lead-up. The legal framework. The social permission. And when people accuse us of being hysterical for making Nazi comparisons, they’re telling on themselves. Trans people are the canary in the coal mine for authoritarianism. And right now, the canary is screaming.
In 1933, the Nazis burned the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, the world’s first center for transgender health care and queer research. They had decades of research on gender identity, performed gender-affirming surgeries, and maintained patient records for hundreds of trans people. Those iconic images of Nazis burning books? Most of the books were from the Institute. They destroyed our history, our health care, our documentation in one night.
On his first day in office in January 2025, Trump signed an executive order declaring the United States “will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another.” By December 2025, the administration had cut off federal Medicaid and Medicare funding from hospitals providing gender-affirming care to children. Twenty-five states banned or restricted this care. Scientific research grants mentioning LGBTQ+ topics were revoked. A suicide prevention lifeline for trans youth was canceled.
After burning the Institute, the Nazis erased trans people from official records. They made it illegal to present as a gender different from your assigned sex. They confiscated identification papers.
On January 20, 2025, Trump issued an executive order mandating the federal government recognize exclusively “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female,” declaring gender identity “false” and “corrosive.” The State Department stopped issuing passports with “X” gender markers. In November 2025, the Supreme Court allowed this policy, forcing trans people to carry documentation that outs us. The Social Security Administration no longer permits gender marker updates.
The Nazis used “protecting children” to justify anti-queer legislation. They claimed we were corrupting youth, groomers and predators.
Listen to today’s rhetoric: “Groomer.” “Protecting children.” “Gender ideology extremism.” Trump’s January 28 executive order froze federal funding while assessing grants for “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies.” Hundreds of books about gender were removed from Department of Defense school libraries.
By 1935, the Nuremberg Laws had legally defined who was Jewish and stripped them of citizenship. The laws also targeted queer people. You could be arrested, imprisoned, or institutionalized simply for being queer or trans.
We’re watching the legal framework being built now. In January 2025, Trump banned trans people from the military, forcing out active duty service members. Commander Emily Shilling, a naval aviator with nearly two decades of service, was forced out in June 2025. Trans service members were told to choose “voluntary” or “involuntary” separation. As Shilling said, “Nobody feels like this is voluntary. This is coercion.” The Department of Justice instructed prison inspectors to stop using standards protecting transgender prisoners from sexual assault. Trans women in federal prisons are being transferred to men’s facilities. ICE stopped reporting data on transgender people in custody. This past week, Kansas passed a bill allowing citizens to collect $10,000 bounties for reporting trans people using bathrooms. Sports bans. Drag performance bans. Together, they make it functionally illegal to exist as a trans person in public.
The death camps weren’t where Nazi Germany started; they were where it ended. It started with legal discrimination, neighbors turning on neighbors, ordinary people making small choices that built the infrastructure of genocide. Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor in Dresden, wrote in March 1933: “It is shocking how day after day naked acts of violence, breaches of the law, barbaric opinions appear quite undisguised as official decree.” His neighbor, Berger the greengrocer, was “anti-Hitlerist, but of course pleased at the good exchange” when he received Klemperer’s confiscated house. Not a Nazi. Just someone who benefited.
How many people do we know who aren’t actively transphobic but are comfortable with trans people losing rights as long as it doesn’t affect them?
When the Nuremberg Laws passed, most Germans accepted them, hoping “legal boundaries would at least end the lawlessness.” Today, people say, “I don’t agree with it, but it’s the law.” “ICE is just doing their job.” The same deference to legality over morality.
Klemperer’s diaries prove ordinary Germans knew what was happening. By 1942, people were talking about mass shootings, about Auschwitz, about millions dead. They knew. After the war, they claimed they hadn’t. Everyone knows what’s happening to trans people right now. They know about health care being denied. They know about the violence. And people are already practicing the excuses: “I don’t follow the news.” “I can’t handle more bad news.”
Trans people are called hysterical for making Nazi comparisons because people don’t want to confront what those comparisons reveal: that they are ordinary Germans. They are the neighbors who stayed silent.
We’re not in 1945; we’re in 1933. The camps aren’t built yet. But the legal framework is being constructed. Social permission is being granted. The small choices that make atrocity possible are being made every day by ordinary people who think they don’t have the power, they are just staying neutral, they are just following the law.
Trans people know what’s coming because we’ve read the history. We know we’re the canary. And the canary is dying. The question isn’t whether anyone would have resisted the Nazis; the question is what people are doing right now, today, while trans people are losing health care, losing documentation, being forced out of the military, losing the legal right to exist in public. This is when the choices are being made.
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