The parallels between the abuse suffered by women at the hands of extreme trans rights activists and what Jews endure from self-professed Palestinian supporters are striking
April 24, 2025 14:36
When the UK Supreme Court ruled last week that, for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, a woman is defined by biological sex, Judge Lord Hodge warned no group should see it as “a triumph”. That advice was, unsurprisingly, ignored by women campaigners across the country, including those who brought the case. They celebrated wildly.
Who could blame them? Certainly not any Jewish person who’s endured the surge of left-wing antisemitism over the past decade. These women were living their version of the 2020 Equality and Human Rights Commission report, which found Labour responsible for illegal harassment and discrimination against Jews: a long-overdue legal vindication after years of misery.
Once the champagne bottles hit the recycling bin, those jubilant women might heed a warning from us: their fight for a fair shake isn’t over. Just as in our case, the ideological capture of what used to be liberal institutions by their adversaries ensures it will continue.
The parallels between what these women suffer at the hands of extreme trans rights activists and what we endure from self-professed Palestinian supporters are striking. We are both targets of lies, abuse, threats, projection, gaslighting, and victim/abuser reversal – enabled by onlookers who either stay silent or mutter spineless platitudes about “both sides”.
We’re denounced as bigots and persecutors for asserting that our rights are not more, not less, but exactly as important as anyone else’s. The Good People™ are outraged that we have the effrontery not to surrender our much-needed and hard-won place in the world to whoever they deem more entitled. In their worldview, women and Jews are privileged classes – a claim so absurd it would make a dog laugh, assuming, not unreasonably, the dog has a better grasp of history.
Women and Jews are now familiar with being smeared as dupes or agents of far-right conspiracies, or outright branded child-killers and Nazis
Women and Jews are now familiar with being smeared as dupes or agents of far-right conspiracies, or outright branded child-killers and Nazis. Those once at home in the arts, academia, charities, or left-leaning media – territory ruled by The Good People™—find themselves blacklisted, careers and lives destroyed. Unless, of course, they nod along with the fig-leaf factions who deny the reality of biological sex or condemn Israel’s existence. Like Jews who converted under Spain’s Inquisition, they may remain. And we know how that turned out.
Supposedly sensible types – often middle-aged men like the prime minister – prefer to dismiss the conflict between trans rights activists (TRAs) and gender-critical feminists (GCs) or, as their foes would have it, “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (Terfs, exclusively used as a slur) as a storm in an internet teacup. The evidence suggests otherwise. Online struggle sessions, torrents of abuse, calls to punch, rape and kill Terfs – these are bad enough. But the real-world consequences are clearer still: consultant Maya Forstater, academic Kathleen Stock, professional littérateur Jenny Lindsay – each now “former” in her occupation. Countless women, speaking only anonymously, live in fear of defending sex-based rights. The issue of who can access safe spaces designed to protect biological women, including certain hospital wards, rape centres, or sports leagues, directly affects half the population.
Whether this is what most trans people want is an open question. We only hear the loudest, most extreme advocates of a cohort whose national numbers are unclear, and whose consensus view is thus unknowable. How many trans people are more concerned with, say, the lack of tailored healthcare, but have very good reasons not to put themselves in the issue’s white hot spotlight, we can only guess.
It’s worth noting that trans rights are not inherently incompatible with the interests of women. To navigate a way forward between the sex-based rights of women and the equally valid civil rights of trans people is possible. But not when one side forever rejects – furiously, implacably, intractably – any hint of such an accommodation. If that sounds familiar to any Jewish person who supports a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and despairs at just who Israel is supposed to negotiate with towards such a goal, then well it might.
This is what happens when an initially legitimate cause becomes a quasi-religious hybrid of a fandom and a cult. Thus does Hamas’ butchery of Jews and cruel oppression of its own people become “legitimate resistance”; thus does misgendering a rapist in a blond wig become a more grievous offence than the predator’s own. The welfare, the real lives, of the people involved are sidelined in favour of what gratifies their self-selecting advocates: the thrill of absolutism; the utter absence of doubt or self-reflection; the gleeful, self-valorising flights of grandiose rhetoric; the cosplay; above all, the joy of lighting upon an enemy for whom one’s exultant hatred far surpasses one’s advertised compassion for those one champions.
It is revealing that at the apex of The Good People™’s demonology stand the twin evils: Zionist and Terf. Jews and women. Jack Holland’s 2006 book Misogyny, which bears the subtitle The World’s Oldest Prejudice, details the frequent historical conjunction with the second-oldest. This unholy alliance offers a perfect example of what The Good People™ would call intersectionality; one to which their cognitive dissonance blinds them, given their camp’s delight in directing vitriolic abuse towards insubordinate Jewish women in particular. Antisemitism and misogyny: hand in glove down the ages, long before the state of Israel was ever dreamt of, long before gender identity was conceptualised. There is perhaps no vanity more risible than the unblinking conviction of The Good People™ that they are “on the right side of history” as they refashion for the 21st century its two most archaic wrongs.
David Bennun is an author and journalist
