As A Trans Person, Anti-Semitism Affects Me - Reissue
On "transvestigation" and other conspiracies.
For Taurus Season, I’m reposting some of my older essays that I think deserve more love. This one on anti-Semitism from last year is definitely worth revisiting as conspiracism takes over popular discourse. This was also a paid post when it was originally released, so if you want to read more essays like this in the future, consider becoming a paid member!
Amid accusations of anti-Semitism in the pro-Palestinian youth movement—the very idea of “Donald Trump: Defender of Jews” should be setting off alarm bells—it’s worth remembering that Jewish hate deserves to be taken seriously. I have no doubt that many college protestors are on a learning curve when it comes to Jewish hate, and I refuse to hand-waive away such accusations as only political pageantry; anti-Semitism must be condemned.
Why do I care so much about this topic? Well, I’m not Jewish, so I definitely shouldn’t be taken as an authority on anti-Jewish bigotry; I strongly recommend following Jewish voices for learning about that. However, I am transgender, and I know my history, so I can say pretty confidently that as a trans person, Jewish hate affects me directly. Here’s how.
First and most obviously, all bigotry should be condemned because an attack on one group is an attack on everyone. Even if none of the below were true, and Jewish hate had no meaningful connection to transphobia, I would still fight for the liberation of all Jewish people just as I do for all Arab people, women, people of color, disabled people, etc. There are very few single-issue bigots, and if the state can marginalize even one group of people, nobody is safe. As long as one person is in prison, I am not free, that sort of thing.
The real gag, though, is that anti-Semitism is fundamental to transphobia, especially as it exists today. To understand how, we need to look at the phenomena of “transvestigation”.
A portmanteau of “transvestite” (ew) and “investigation”, transvestigators are people who actively try to determine whether certain people, usually famous people, are secretly transgender. This topic was covered in-depth by Mia Mulder a few years ago in a video that’s worth a watch if you’re unfamiliar! A basic summary of the theory is that all famous people (or all successful people, or even all people) made some sort of Deal With The Devil to switch genders and become trans in exchange for power and influence.
The main form of transvestigator content involves a picture of a celebrity—usually at unflattering angles—overlaid with straight lines, triangles, and skeletal diagrams meant to “prove” that someone has either a male skull/bone structure or a female skull/bone structure. They point to features such as the jawline, hips, brow ridge, and nose to determine, conclusively, that a person was assigned male or female at birth. (Yes, these people are insane and need help.)
The sheer absurdity of this conspiracy shouldn’t be passed over. This is not how biological sex works. Things like skull shape and hip flares are widely variable among populations; there are many cis women who have “masculine” features, and many cis men with “feminine” features. The mere fact that transvestigators are performing these analyses on conventionally-attractive celebrities—those held up as literal masculine and feminine archetypes in our media, the people who are put in the movies to manufacture our cultural ideas of “this is what men and women look/should look like”—shows just how idiotic this practice is.
Every few months, a trans content creator will stumble upon this phenomena and be baffled by the sheer incorrectness and bigotry of it all. The most hilarity ensues when transvestigators get it wrong, failing to detect when an actual trans person is trans, or even going so far as to claim that trans people who are out as trans are actually biologically female and are “double flippers” (see below). However, the average trans content creator doesn’t always have the cultural content to understand just how dangerous these ideas are, or the core beliefs they stem from…
The worst parts of this practice are in the misogynoir; these are the exact people who claim that Michelle Obama, Serena Williams, and other Black women are “secretly men”, taking away their womanhood and thus their humanity. For a long time, sexual dimorphism—the differences in appearance between males and females of the same species—was thought to be higher in white people than in other races. In other words, white men and white women are (supposedly) more different from each other than men and women from other races, and that’s stated as one of the reasons why white people are “superior”. Hence, Asian men being feminized. Hence, Indigenous women being treated as just as “savage” as Indigenous men. Hence, Black women being denied womanhood, partially because they’re denied humanity, but also because they needed to be slotted into the same category as men to justify their enslavement hundreds of years ago. The stereotypes about white women—that they’re frail, non-sexual, feminine, etc.—don’t always apply to Black women, who are characterized as brutish, hypersexual, and masculine, all under the guise of “science” to “prove” that they needed to be controlled through forced manual labor (and to justify their rape, of course). Transphobia, sexism, and racism are inherently connected.
So, what does this have to Jewish hate, specifically? To answer that, we have to get to the question of why The Devil (or some other shadowy group) would be “transing” the population. Even if they’ve never seen a transvestigator meme, a hyper-conservative will tell you that someone or some group is trying to turn people, especially kids, into gross trans people in order to destroy Western society.
Trans people are “destroying Western society” in two ways. On a direct level, medically transitioning (they believe) makes people sterile (note: it can, but not in all cases and there are ways to conceive even after starting HRT), thereby “irreversibly damaging” people’s bodies. The idea is that this is being done by Jewish people to white people to destroy the white race (there are homophobes of color, too, and the logic is similar; the being trans is a “white thing” and outsiders are trying to destroy their race through sterilization and grooming). Much like the false conspiracy theory that Jews have some control over Hollywood or banking, they may say that “big pharma” is trying to turn people trans to create “lifelong patients” (trans people need to take HRT medication for pretty much their entire lives once they start). Some will even claim that gender-affirming surgeries are being done by Jewish doctors. Basically, it’s blood libel—the idea that Jewish people are drinking the blood of Christian children—but for gender!
On an existential level, conservatives associate having strong, rigidly-enforced, binary gender standards with living in an orderly society. So, even if trans people weren’t sterile, trans people represent a threat to white supremacist patriarchy: if you can just change your gender, people will realize that the gender norms we use to oppress women are just made up, and we can’t have that, so of course we need to demonize or exterminate the trans people!!
If you know your history, you may even recognize anti-Semitic characteristics of transvestigation itself. Decades ago, anti-Jewish propaganda would accuse people of being Jewish by drawing them with over-sized noses or curly hair. Anti-Semites were the transvestigators of their day, they just didn’t have MS Paint yet.
It would also be a mistake to not bring up Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay Jewish scientist who ran a sexology practice that provided gender-affirming care to trans people in 1920s Berlin. One of the literal first things that the Nazis did when they came into power was destroy his practice, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (roughly, the Institute for Sexual Research) because it studied trans people in a sympathetic light, not as a disorder or disease to be cured. Adolf Hitler once described Hirschfeld as “the most dangerous Jew in the world”, all because he tried to help trans people.
This article by Mia Brett is indispensable when it comes to this topic; it outlines a few of these points and more, deepening the connection between Jewish and anti-trans hate. It’s worth quoting at length:
We are also seeing an extreme rise in antisemitism and Islamophobia worldwide at the moment in response to the war in Israel and Gaza. Transphobia, homophobia, and Islamophobia are being weaponized: Israeli propaganda is justifying their campaign against Palestinians by pointing to homophobia in Gaza. Bizarrely, far-right transphobes in the United States are doing the opposite and aligning groups fighting for trans rights with those supporting Palestinian liberation, obviously arguing that both are bad. Gay groups against trans people are twisting themselves into pretzels to say that trans solidarity with Palestinians is an attack on gay people. None of these people care about Jews, or gay people, or trans people.
Trans people existing will not do anything to shatter your white, Christian, heteronormative life. They are not making cis women unsafe, and they are not grooming children. Jewish people are also not encouraging people to be trans to further try to destroy your white, Christian, cishet norms.
So yes, even as a non-Jew, I am deeply invested in challenging anti-Semitism. I find it very interesting that bigots are conflating trans liberation with Palestinian liberation 1:1, like this loser in my Instagram comments section…
I one did a whole podcast episode about trans spirituality where I interviewed YM Carrington, an anti-oppression educator and Black Jewish trans person. In the show, they gave me an insight that will stick with me forever: Nazis hated the Jews because they were trying really hard to free not only themselves, but everyone else. Jewish people know oppression and marginalization—it’s built into the fabric of their culture—so it only makes sense that this group would empathize with the plight of trans people. I regularly argue on this very newsletter that trans people are trying to free cis people, too; we try so hard to show the world that binary gender norms are harmful, and that better, more equitable worlds are possible. After all, as Paulo Freire says, “it’s the role of the oppressed person to free their oppressor.”
It’s for all of these reasons that I stand in solidarity with the Jewish community, along with all other marginalized peoples. It’s also why I resent the idea that all the queer and trans people protesting for the liberation of Palestine are secret anti-Semites.
I write this having seen Jewish students and faculty attacked for supporting Palestine. At the same time, I write this newsletter hours after attending Northampton, Massachusetts’ annual Pride parade, which prominently featured Palestine supporters both in the parade itself and in the crowd. I write this newsletter days after seeing the UMass Amherst student encampment, who on Day 2 of their protest had a teach-in about the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I write this after seeing more encampments around the country host Seder events for Passover.
Right now, we are seeing what real solidarity looks like. And it’s beautiful. Keep up the amazing work, students!
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna
Thanks Anna. I’ve heard it argued that all conspiracy theories lead back to antisemitism, but I hadn’t considered before how directly transvestigation could be traced back to it.