The scene is Parliament Square in London. It’s a beautiful spring Saturday and, as is now habitual on Saturdays in London, protesters have taken over the road with a parade of hate-filled banners and chants.

This time, however, the crowd has not gathered to protest against Israel, which they have been doing most weeks since October 7. No, this time, three days after the UK Supreme Court issued a transformative ruling on the definition of a woman, the crowd is made up of transgender activists and their fellow travelers. The protest is directed against the judges’ ruling that the word “woman” in Britain’s Equality Act refers only to biological women—in one fell swoop destroying years of success by trans activists in superseding women’s rights and in forcing public and private organizations to adopt the fiction that a woman is anyone who asserts that he is a woman.

But it would be more accurate to observe, rather, that the crowd has not gathered primarily to protest Israel. Because the chant that dominates the demonstration is deeply revealing about both trans activism and anti-Israel activism—and it shows that they are, in essence, the same thing. The chant: “One struggle. One fight. Palestine and trans rights.”

Leave aside the incongruity that anyone openly identifying as trans in Palestine would more likely be thrown off the top floor of a building than embraced as a tribune of progressivism. The chant is, in its own way, utterly revelatory, since it shows how two of the modern world’s most grotesque obsessions should be viewed not just through the same prism but as part of the same framework of delusion. Because in almost every way, trans activism and Palestinian activism are identical. A Venn diagram of the two sets of activists would look more like a solar eclipse, with near total overlap.

This was illustrated by chants suggested by Trans Aid Cymru (a “mutual aid group for trans, intersex, and nonbinary people in Wales”) for attendees at the Cardiff March for Trans Liberation a few days later. One asserted the link clearly (throwing in Kashmir, too, for good measure):

No pride in genocide, too many queers have died, charge Israel with genocide.
From Cardiff, to Gaza, a queer intifada!
Get those Zionists out of our gay clubs!
Every Zionist is ugly at heart and no one will f*ck them.
From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!
From Kashmir to Palestine, occupation is a crime!
Intifada intifada! Globalize the intifada!

A further chant does not merely assert that the two causes are linked but rather adopts the Islamist language of martyrdom for trans people:

We will honor all our martyrs, all the children, sons and daughters.
We will honor all our martyrs, all the parents, mothers fathers.
The women of Gaza are revolutionary!
One struggle, one fight— Palestine, trans rights!

One of the key features of both these ideologies is their cult-like quality, which leads not only to an inability to engage in rational debate or calm protest but to activists who cannot comprehend that you do not win converts, let alone an argument, through ever-louder screaming and asserting moral superiority while labeling your opponents as inhuman. This notion that only those who support your cause are righteous is so blinding that it leads to contradictions that would be amusing were they not, paradoxically, so obviously driven by hate.

So, for example, Jo Grady, the general secretary of the University and College Union (the trade union for British academics, which is one of the leading promoters of the trans agenda), posted pictures of trans activists at the Parliament Square demo with the caption, “Hate will never win.” One of the photographs showed a placard reading “The only good TERF” (which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”)—here, there was a picture of a stick figure on a gallows, followed by the word “TERF.” Another slogan seen on placards at the demo was “Suck my d—k”, a progressive slogan so long as it comes from someone who says he identifies as a woman. Another appeared to show bullet holes with the message “I will make you listen.”

The protesters also vandalized many of the monuments in Parliament Square, including the iconic statue of the early-20th-century suffragette Millicent Fawcett holding a banner reading “Courage calls to courage everywhere.” It is the only statue of a woman anywhere outside Parliament and has become a rallying point for women’s rights campaigners. This made it a compelling target, and trans activists painted the words “fag rights” on the banner, neatly demonstrating their contempt for actual women.

At a demonstration in Dundee in Scotland on the same day, a trans woman called Sophie Molly gave a speech in which he described J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author who has been one of the most consistently outspoken defenders of biological science and women’s rights, as a “bitch” and declared, “We should all take a shite on you.” The crowd cheered. Last year Molly—who describes himself on his X profile as “pro-gressive”—posted that Rowling was a “torn faced cow.” This idea that trans and pro-Palestine activists are the real progressives gives them license to go after their opponents in the most garish manner, since by definition their opponents are bigots who deserve no respect. In December 2024, Rowling wrote about the “thousands of threats of murder, rape and violence” she has received. “A trans woman posted my family’s home address with a bomb-making guide.…My eldest child was targeted by a prominent trans activist who attempted to doxx her and ended up doxxing the wrong young woman.…I could write a twenty-thousand-word essay on what the consequences have been to me and my family.”

Molly was selected to stand for the Green Party in the 2024 parliamentary election, although he was later de-selected. The Green Party was long ago captured by trans and Palestine activists. At a demo in Aberdeen, Scottish parliamentarian Maggie Chapman, one of the country’s leading trans-supporting activists and the deputy convener of the Scottish Parliament’s equalities committee, attacked “the bigotry, prejudice and hatred that we see coming from the Supreme Court and from so many other institutions in our society.” Accusations of bigotry are the leitmotif of Chapman’s attacks on those with whom she disagrees. At an anti-Israel rally last year, she demanded that Israel be excluded from international sport: “Sport is meant to be for everyone, but Israel is a racist apartheid state.” Chapman posted on X after the October 7 attack that it was “decolonization,” not “terrorism,” and was “a consequence of apartheid, of illegal occupation and of imperial aggression by the Israel state.”

But it is not only Greens, of course. This twin-track ideology is repeatedly a feature of the rhetoric of Labour Party politicians in Britain. The current foreign secretary, David Lammy, once described opponents of self-ID (by which men could choose to be legally recognized as women, until the Supreme Court ruling invalidated the practice) as “dinosaurs”—and his first acts in office were to restore UK funding to UNRWA, to impose a symbolic arms-sales embargo on Israel, and to support the International Court of Justice’s arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.

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It is not an insult to call this student-level politics: It is a description. At the most basic level, both trans ideology and the pro-Palestine obsession are the result of developments that have been in the making for decades: the supremacy of postmodern thought on campus and the rise of moral relativism. Postmodernism rejects the very idea of universal truths and objective reality. If there is no such thing as good or bad, only different and equally valid, then science too is not objective fact but rather a product of social, cultural, and political factors, including gender. Sex is therefore not a biological statement of fact but an assertion of gender, power, and social structure. The rise of Palestinian activism has similar origins. Terrorism is not terrorism; it is resistance. October 7 was not a massacre; it was an uprising. To assert this is not to fall victim to an ideological fad but to be in possession of both superior intelligence and superior understanding—and to be on the right side of history.

These developments have many causes, but one of the most insidious and least commented on is the Russian and Chinese strategy of destabilizing the West through academia. The USSR played a long game and knew that the consequences of this intellectual poison would at some point be felt. Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has continued in the same vein, albeit using modern tactics such as the troll farms that turn social media into a propaganda vehicle for Russia’s destabilization agenda. China now has a similar but even more successful tool in TikTok. Gen Z spends at least 10 percent of its waking hours on TikTok, and it is the primary search engine for 40 percent of that age group. Social media exposes users to a deluge of content in which the West is evil, Israel is the real villain, and trans women are not just real women but heroic. Research last year showed that TikTok videos tagged #StandWithPalestine received more than 10 times the views of those tagged #StandWithIsrael —324 million versus 3.4 billion.

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at New York University, has described the influence of TikTok as akin to the Chinese Communist Party’s having “implanted a neural jack into every under-30.” This, he pointed out, is classic psyops: “In the Cold War, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in covert actions aimed at fomenting internal strife. Radio Free Europe, a CIA-backed initiative, broadcast pro-democracy messaging into the Eastern Bloc to encourage dissent. In the Second World War, Nazi Germany dropped leaflets on American troops that highlighted racial injustices in the U.S., hoping to demoralize troops and incite racial tension. Every nation has done, or is doing, this… actively.”

I have focused on British examples, but the same pattern—the same obsession, the same intolerance, the same verbal (and sometimes physical) violence—is evident in the U.S. and elsewhere. But Britain is especially pertinent because the Supreme Court ruling shows how, for all the noise and all the examples of organizations succumbing to the mania, the trans movement can be simply stopped in its tracks. A determined group of women, an ad hoc group called For Women Scotland, decided not to succumb and through dogged determination took their case through every legal tier, losing at every stage until it eventually reached the Supreme Court, which matter-of-factly ruled that “woman” means biological woman. Overnight, the legal edifice of submission to trans ideology was destroyed. Trans women can no longer simply assert that they are female and demand that male rapists be sent to female prisons, or force sporting bodies to allow biological males to compete against women. The ideology remains, obviously, as will the campaigning tactics. But the insistence that supposed trans “rights” be asserted above all others has had the rug pulled from under its feet by the Supreme Court. And the extremism of that stance has proved its downfall both legally and in the court of public opinion.

There are clear lessons in this for defeating the Palestine campaigns. The ideology remains. But there are legal avenues that can be used to neuter its impact, as President Trump is now doing. Here in the UK, it was former Conservative Home Secretary Suella Braverman who first labelled the regular demonstrations as “hate marches,” and the last government was in the process of passing legislation to bar public bodies from adopting boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) policies. But the current Labour government has dumped the anti-BDS law and, far from tackling the Palestine activists, many Labour politicians support them—while the mayor of London, Sir Sadiq Khan, has uttered not a word of condemnation of the hate marches.

But bleak as that may be, the reversal of a decade-plus of trans victories shows what can be achieved—and its twin ideology is no less vulnerable when the forces of reason assert themselves.

Photo: Alex McBride/Getty Images for Pride In London

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