Once, when Link was even smaller than he feels, he'd knocked his shoulder out of its socket in a terrible fall.
Terrible in that he'd cried about it, ashamed and at the then-height of pained, not that it was a particularly horrific tumble. He'd just landed wrong, he remembers someone telling him — frantic and almost apologetic in their reassurance. Too much has happened for him to reconstruct a face for the memory, but Link can still recall the stutter in their words. You're g-gonna be okay. Y-you're gonna— gonna be f-fine.
And he was. Someone had gone to fetch a healing fairy while others came to keep him company. It'd been the right shoulder, burning at the joint and numb all the way down to his fingertips, but he'd found a spot of hurt he could grit his teeth through; then breathe through; then eventually speak through. By the time the fairy was brought over, Link had been so deep in the rhythm of holding himself together that he'd nearly slapped her away when she broke it.
He remembers her, he thinks, the most out of everything. There's a distinct clarity associated pain will give you with any recollection. She was rose-pink, a little darker than he was used to, and she'd bristled when he whimpered through a fresh wave of tears and pushed at her with his pinky.
"Stop that," she'd said. "Bones aren't easy, you know. It'll only hurt for a pinch, it has to for me to fix it. You're already being so brave! Can't you be brave a while longer?"
Outside the memory, Link lays crumpled on cold tiles, eyelids like crushed butterfly wings and the cave of his chest barely moving as he looks up and up and up. He thinly wonders, for a fixing like this, how long he'd have to keep being brave for.
Neither of his shoulders took the landing this time, but he knows many things are wrong with both of them. By extension, many things are wrong with all of him. He should take stock, a part of him understands. He'd like to take stock, another part realises, if only he had the capacity to. Each breath shifts the slivers and splinters his bones have shattered into. Agony twists through every vein like a replacement for the blood he imagines paints his trail from platform to windows to the far below floor. He can't feel his fingers, which twitch as if to grip something — his left hand, mangled, rests as if in graveyard dirt.
There is no amount of searching in this sea that will land him in a place where this might be bearable.
"Link!" Navi yells, a trilling bell that drowns out the sound of dying. His heart threads an extra thump, like he still has it in him to be scared alongside everything else, before it fades back into a whisper of a pulse. She wheels above him in panicked, powdery circuits: hair to boots and back. "Get up! You have to get up!"
He does. He does have to. Link doesn't get to think he's gonna die now. He doesn't get to be tired enough — small enough — for that. He draws a rattling inhale, head practically cracking open with how the air presses against its seams. He's sixteen. The world will end if he's nine. He's sixteen, sixteen, sixteen.
He chokes on liquid rising in his gorge, coughs it up, and closes his eyes when gravity brings the blood down in blotches on his skin. It's— really gross, and that's such a mundane thought in the face of what he has to reckon with that his chest starts spasming with strangled laughter instead.
"Link!"
Navi, he replies in his head, 'cause that's all he can do. He traces over more names: Sheik, Zelda, Saria, the Sages, the Kokiri, the list goes on as his voice dips into hitching, searing gasps. It's an awful thing to realise — that's all he can do. Link has to get up, has to be Courage, has to be more than what he is.
And he can't.
Sound drifts down from above, mocking. Cruel. It's a laugh getting louder and louder, and Link prises his lashes apart with the sheer will borne from a unique dread. A kind of fear, if you felt it not in sensation, but in the dizzying spiral that is the certainty of where this will all end.
A kind of fear — and a kind of fury.
Link is nine, thrown to the ground, battered and muscles stinging with a magic he tastes as something crackling on his tongue. He glares up at the tall man on the tall horse, smouldering so brazenly with protective, frustrated outrage that he shakes with it. He is not unafraid of the sneer that answers him, but he does not look away.
Link is nine, broken over the ground, near dead and stuck in a body he's tried to make his. His eyes are cold as he watches Ganondorf descend, burning with tears dyed red from failure. The brand on his left hand glows, resonating with a magic he no longer has the nerves to feel. Navi doesn't leave. There are a thousand things he wishes he could scream.
Large fingers fold around the wrist of his gauntlet, deliberate in their ignorance of the softness a joint that bent must be afforded. As his arm is lifted, the pain dragged along every passing second like some horrible, continuous song-note that eclipses even his fears, he pretends none of the noises coming from him are his and thinks everything that could mean: I hate you.
He thinks everything that could mean: I'm so sorry.
The man raises his other hand, palm closing in, and Link forces another entire earth on the child he can't be even here — even now. He does not look away. Navi, oddly muffled, rings something wordless.
Link waits for the end of this story.
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Rowling isn't denying holocaust. She just pointed out that burning of transgender health books is a lie as that form of cosmetic surgery didn't exist. But of course you knew that already, didn't you?
I was thinking I'd probably see one of you! You're wrong :) Let's review the history a bit, shall we?
In this case, what we're talking about is the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or in English, The Institute of Sexology. This Institute was founded and headed by a gay Jewish sexologist named Magnus Hirschfeld. It was founded in July of 1919 as the first sexology research clinic in the world, and was run as a private, non-profit clinic. Hirschfeld and the researchers who worked there would give out consultations, medical advice, and even treatments for free to their poorer clientele, as well as give thousands of lectures and build a unique library full of books on gender, sexuality, and eroticism. Of course, being a gay man, Hirschfeld focused a lot on the gay community and proving that homosexuality was natural and could not be "cured".
Hirschfeld was unique in his time because he believed that nobody's gender was either one or the other. Rather, he contended that everyone is a mixture of both male and female, with every individual having their own unique mix of traits.
This leads into the Institute's work with transgender patients. Hirschfeld was actually the one to coin the term "transsexual" in 1923, though this word didn't become popular phrasing until 30 years later when Harry Benjamin began expanding his research (I'll just be shortening it to trans for this brief overview.) For the Institute, their revolutionary work with gay men eventually began to attract other members of the LGBTA+, including of course trans people.
Contrary to what Anon says, sex reassignment surgery was first tested in 1912. It'd already being used on humans throughout Europe during the 1920's by the time a doctor at the Institute named Ludwig Levy-Lenz began performing it on patients in 1931. Hirschfeld was at first opposed, but he came around quickly because it lowered the rate of suicide among their trans patients. Not only was reassignment performed at the Institute, but both facial feminization and facial masculization surgery were also done.
The Institute employed some of these patients, gave them therapy to help with other issues, even gave some of the mentioned surgeries for free to this who could not afford it! They spoke out on their behalf to the public, even getting Berlin police to help them create "transvestite passes" to allow people to dress however they wanted without the threat of being arrested. They worked together to fight the law, including trying to strike down Paragraph 175, which made it illegal to be homosexual. The picture below is from their holiday party, Magnus Hirschfeld being the gentleman on the right with the fabulous mustache. Many of the other people in this photo are transgender.
[Image ID: A black and white photo of a group of people. Some are smiling at the camera, others have serious expressions. Either way, they all seem to be happy. On the right side, an older gentleman in glasses- Magnus Hirschfeld- is sitting. He has short hair and a bushy mustache. He is resting one hand on the shoulder of the person in front of him. His other hand is being held by a person to his left. Another person to his right is holding his shoulder.]
There was always push back against the Institute, especially from conservatives who saw all of this as a bad thing. But conservatism can't stop progress without destroying it. They weren't willing to go that far for a good while. It all ended in March of 1933, when a new Chancellor was elected. The Nazis did not like homosexuals for several reasons. Chief among them, we break the boundaries of "normal" society. Shortly after the election, on May 6th, the book burnings began. The Jewish, gay, and obviously liberal Magnus Hirschfeld and his library of boundary-breaking literature was one of the very first targets. Thankfully, Hirschfeld was spared by virtue of being in Paris at the time (he would die in 1935, before the Nazis were able to invade France). His library wasn't so lucky.
This famous picture of the book burnings was taken after the Institute of Sexology had been raided. That's their books. Literature on so much about sexuality, eroticism, and gender, yes including their new work on trans people. This is the trans community's Alexandria. We're incredibly lucky that enough of it survived for Harry Benjamin and everyone who came after him was able to build on the Institute's work.
[Image ID: A black and white photo of the May Nazi book burning of the Institute of Sexology's library. A soldier, back facing the camera, is throwing a stack of books into the fire. In the background of the right side, a crowd is watching.]
As the Holocaust went on, the homosexuals of Germany became a targeted group. This did include transgender people, no matter what you say. To deny this reality is Holocaust denial. JK Rowling and everyone else who tries to pretend like this isn't reality is participating in that evil. You're agreeing with the Nazis.
But of course, you knew that already, didn't you?
Edit: Added image IDs. I apologize to those using screen readers for forgetting them. Please reblog this version instead.
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