Antisemitism Meets Transphobia

We live in an age of conspiracy theories. In the wake of the January 6 insurrection in the U.S. Capitol, and with movements like QAnon on the rise, it’s clear that millions across the United States subscribe to theories that a diabolical cabal of elites is secretly controlling society, and that they are willing to take violent action against these imagined enemies.

Now, more than ever, antisemitism and transphobia are becoming deeply connected, making it vital for progressives to fight both together.

These types of conspiracy theories have long been a cornerstone of antisemitism—which insists that this cabal is Jewish—and today, they’re seeping into antitransgender activism as well. Now, more than ever, antisemitism and transphobia are becoming deeply connected, making it vital for progressives to fight both together.

On the radical right, white nationalists are obsessed with fears of “white genocide”—the imagined fast-approaching biological extinction of the “white race”—and are convinced that Jewish activism is the prime mover of this existential threat. One of the main ways they believe Jews advance “white genocide”—in addition to engineering increased immigration of Black and brown people, orchestrating racial justice movements, controlling the government and giant corporations, using space lasers to start California wildfires, and other dastardly schemes—is by liberalizing societal attitudes around gender and sexuality in colleges and universities, media, and other cultural institutions.

In order to “secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” as their slogan goes, white nationalists believe they must defend a status quo rooted in patriarchal violence—undergirded by cis-heteronormative gender roles, straight white nuclear families, a culture of warrior masculinity, and more—from Jews, who foster feminism, LGBTQ+ liberation movements, and multiculturalism to undermine this “natural order.” Movements for transgender justice, white nationalists believe, represent a key cultural front of Jewish-backed “white genocide.”

“By undermining the meaning of what it is to be male and female,” white nationalist Andrew Joyce put it in a 2015 article published on the movement publication Occidental Observer, “one undermines the healthy concept of the family. And when the healthy concept of the family possessed by a given group is undermined, that group is pushed ever closer to [being the vicims of] genocide.”

While prominent Jewish transgender activists like Jazz Jennings and Jennifer Pritzker, and Jewish-themed shows like Transparent, serve as one face of this imagined conspiracy, white nationalists believe the real power is wielded behind the scenes by Jewish billionaires, talent managers, media and entertainment executives, journalists, and advocacy groups like the Anti-Defamation League. They think this shadow network is working patiently to normalize transgender acceptance in popular culture; as another Occidental Observer writer put it, “the stunningly disproportionate Jewish involvement in the ‘transgender rights’ movement reveals it as yet another form of Jewish ethnic warfare.”

This Jewish activism, they are convinced, is laser-focused on attacking white, Western society at its most vulnerable and sacrosanct point: the sexuality of children.

As Henrik Palmgren, leader of the white nationalist multimedia company Red Ice said in 2015, the Jewish parents of Jazz Jennings, by supporting their young daughter to become a trailblazing advocate for trans empowerment and acceptance, were enacting “one of the most disturbing agendas the Zionist elite have ever created.” This attempt at “normalizing the abnormal,” Palmgren wrote, “will sacrifice the physical and mental health of numerous children for decades to come.”

Like the QAnon conspiracy, these myths of an elite cabal preying on children carry glaring resonances to the ‘blood libel”—the medieval European Christian lie that Jews murdered Christian children and used their blood to bake matzo during the Jewish holiday of Passover.

White supremacists have found allies among anti-transgender feminists (also known as TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists), who are similarly convinced that transgender activism is part of a Jewish plot to “overrid[e] biological sex with the amorphous concept of gender identity.”

Evidence of antisemitism by anti-trans “feminists” is present throughout its academic history. In 1979, Janice Raymond referred to transgender men as the “ ‘final solution’ of women” in her book The Transsexual Empire, often cited as the basis for anti-trans feminism.  

In 2018, anti-trans feminist pundit Jennifer Bilek wrote a column for The Federalist in which she claimed to expose the “rich, white men institutionalizing transgender ideology.” Bilek’s essay named several prominent progressive Jewish funders, including George Soros, Jennifer Pritzker, Martine Rothblatt, and Jon Stryker. This article and similar articles Bilek has written for other rightwing publications have spread the conspiracy deep within anti-trans feminist movements.

On her own blog, The 11th Hour, Bilek furthers the “Jewish funder” conspiracies, claiming that Rothblatt and Pritzker are behind a “transhumanist” movement not only to erase women, but ultimately to morph the human species, Matrix-style, into a terrifying techno-globalist future.

Similar fears of an elite “transhumanist” cabal, using transgender advocacy as a dystopian social engineering experiment, have gained recent popularity among the radical right, thanks to white nationalist Scott Howard’s 2020 book, The Transgender-Industrial Complex, and are recycled regularly on far-right conspiracy platforms like Infowars.

Bilek isn’t the only contemporary anti-trans or “gender critical” feminist, as some activists are calling themselves, who openly expresses antisemitism. In 2018, Jen Izaakson erased the history of genocide of transgender people and the destruction of decades of research into transgender health during the Holocaust to discredit people using the term TERF. In 2019, prominent British anti-trans feminist Kellie-Jay Keen (also known as Posie Parker) joined Canadian white nationalist Jean-François Gariépy on his podcast to talk about anti-trans activism.

Christa Peterson, a Ph.D. student of philosophy at the University of Southern California, has extensively researched the spread of antisemitic rhetoric within anti-trans feminist circles. She says anti- trans ideology has “solidified over time” into embracing more explicit conspiracy theories.

“Today, this rhetoric provides an entry point into far-right politics,” Peterson says. “When you add a legitimization engine on top of the conspiracy theory, with people affiliated with universities or with degrees in higher education promoting these ideas, there’s a real danger they can move further mainstream.”

In a March 2 opinion piece, former New York Times columnist and supposed antisemitism expert Bari Weiss echoed the antisemitic “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, claiming that “feminists who believe there are biological differences between men and women” are being oppressed by a “zealous cabal . . . . that has control of nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life.”

In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, researchers have noted that anti-trans rhetoric has fixated upon a “children’s blood cult,” “children sacrificed to appease trans lobby,” and an “international, all powerful, wealthy, and totally out-of-control trans lobby.”

British conspiracy theorist David Icke, who has long held that global politics are run by a cabal of lizard people, recently claimed that these lizard people are in turn run by a cabal of transgender people—a connection Bilek has cited approvingly.

And it’s not just pundits or activists. In 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro claimed in a speech to the United Nations that gender ideology “was installed in the field of culture, education, and the media” in an effort “to destroy the innocence of our children, perverting even their most basic and elementary identity, the biological one.”

Similar conspiracies are trafficked by rightwing Christian leaders in Poland and elsewhere. These trends fuel institutionalized discrimination and state violence against trans communities around the world.

Today, conspiracy theories targeting Jewish and trans folks invert reality, demonizing marginalized communities as if they are all-powerful oppressors, while allowing those who actually perpetuate oppression to cast themselves as victims of “the cabal.”

In our era of creeping authoritarianism, conspiracies casting elite cabals as sinister enemies of “the people” are on the rise across many sectors of society. This isn’t surprising: Authoritarianism relies on those it governs believing they are being protected from something even worse than the authoritarians who govern them.

Conspiracy theories about a shadowy cabal behind trans activism are not only antisemitic—they’re also transphobic and racist, erasing the powerful grassroots organizing of trans folks, especially trans people of color.

Despite cloaking their rhetoric under the guise of plausible deniability and finger-wagging at the supposed excesses of “wokeness,” anti-trans activists are lifting their conspiracies from a familiar far-right arsenal, and are comfortably aligned with white nationalists in their choice of the “enemies” they name.

Forget lizard people and transhumanists—the real threat to democracy comes from those who point to the monster under the bed, while begging you to ignore the fire they just set to the curtains.