Trans Erasure Fuels Scott Wiener's Moral Panic
The manufactured outrage trap everyone is falling for
Scott Wiener threw the first brick at Stonewall.
That is an absurd statement. But you could be forgiven for believing such a thing, based on the tenor of the reactions to a viral video of the gay congressional candidate being hounded out of the San Francisco Trans March for the first time in twenty-two years.
Scott Wiener has long participated in trans pride specifically, not just the generic pride parade. On trans rights, Wiener is widely recognized as a strong ally from his tenure on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors up to his current term in the California State Legislature. Even in this confrontation, the ringleader filming the action first celebrates Wiener’s baseline pro-trans credentials.
But trans allyship alone does not guarantee a politician access to movement spaces – particularly politicians with spotty records on that movement’s core principle of universal human rights. That’s who Scott Wiener is: a zionist running for higher office who got woke on Palestine about five minutes ago, who has yet to address – let alone repeal – his own authoritarian legislation suppressing Palestinian activism.
At a January candidate forum to succeed the retiring Nancy Pelosi in California’s ultra-liberal 11th congressional district, Wiener declined to raise his hand acknowledging the genocide in Gaza. He called Israel’s actions a genocide several days later in a video many voters and activists – on both sides of the issue – perceived as disingenuous damage control. The reversal cost him his co-chairmanship of the legislature’s Jewish caucus and bitter rebukes from Jewish community leaders. These real personal losses are cited by Wiener’s defenders as evidence of his pro-Palestinian bona fides, as even more evidence that his haters will never be satisfied. But this analysis centers the personal relationships and coalitional positioning of the politician, not the regular Californians suffering the brunt of his illiberalism or the Palestinians his zionism holds in harm’s way.
The criticism of Wiener runs far deeper than him being disqualifyingly late on calling a genocide a genocide. As Jewish caucus co-chair, Wiener advanced a law engineered to qualify critical Israel education as discriminatory in California public schools – over the opposition of the entire academic establishment and a broad civil liberties coalition led by the ACLU. California already has robust anti-discrimination protections in public education; the sole purpose behind these efforts is to deprive students of a safe environment in which to study politics and foreign affairs.
Wiener also used his legislative power to defame and constrict nonviolent pro-Palestine activism on University of California campuses, in league with the Trump administration’s assault, arrest, and deportation of students exercising their first amendment rights.
Wiener is indicted in the video as being “so positive on trans rights, but a piece of shit on Gaza.” Denying the empirical reality of Israel’s genocide until it becomes politically impossible makes you a piece of shit. Deploying the power of the State of California to eliminate core constitutional freedoms in service of that genocide makes you an entire mountain of excrement.
Scott Wiener’s awakening on Israel politics isn’t merely not credible. His Israel politics are unrepentantly fascist. Allowing him to profit off of a public pro-trans performance would have been inexcusable; asserting boundaries and ejecting him from trans pride was a necessary preservation of the integrity of pride itself.
Wiener claims the confrontation turned physical – “including physical contact,” in his statement. Yet no footage corroborates it, and event organizers maintain that he was at no point in danger. Politicians are supposed to be made uncomfortable; Wiener appears to have puffed up that discomfort into a nonexistent threat.
Yet in response to the video of his confrontation and ejection, liberal media figures and politicians have responded en masse with accusations of antisemitism, hand-wringing about optics, and the assertion that no amount of evolution on Palestine will ever satisfy the irrational angry mob. A chorus of right-wing Israel supporters have unsurprisingly seized on the narrative, but a disconcerting number of true progressives and otherwise savvy pro-Palestine figures have also fallen in line to defend Wiener and discredit trans activists.
Peter Beinart is so thoughtful and salient on these issues that I have written him into the record as the Israel discourse GOAT – the greatest of all time. But even the Steph Curry of antizionism occasionally misses. Beinart addresses the video, in good faith:
“The people who are captured in these videos…are kind of behaving like assholes. You know, they’re not physically attacking, but they’re really, really acting in a very intimidating and really kind of nasty way, and I think it’s just worth saying that I think the people that we admire, most people would admire, that certainly I admire, are people who have deep moral conviction and moral passion and fervor and are unyielding in it about what they believe is right, but still, in their interpersonal relations, in the way they treat people, act with a certain level of dignity, a certain level of decency. And I think these folks just didn’t. And I don’t think there’s a justification for just treating people that way. I don’t think you should be an asshole.
“Secondly, being an asshole is not, I think, good politics. You know, Wiener is a classic liberal zionist guy. He was far too late to recognize that what Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide, far too late to support cutting off military aid to Israel. But now he actually has come to take those positions. He’s moving in his views in response to public opinion, in response to all the work that pro-Palestine activists have done.
“And it’s not effective in moving people even further – and I would like him to go further than he is now – by treating people this way. In fact, what you do, I think, is you just allow people to turn the attention in a different direction, and you just make it a lot easier for those people who want to claim that the pro-Palestinian activist movement is motivated by hatred and by, you know, that it’s a kind of mob of hooligans, whatever, that it’s antisemitic. You just make all that a lot easier with these kind of videos. So, I also think it’s counterproductive.”
Beinart does not deem the activists antisemitic, but he is concerned that their conduct empowers those who would claim that they are. He calls them assholes, validating the message but arguing against the efficacy of the way it is presented. It is a peculiar critique, given that Beinart titles his piece “Reckoning with Anti-Israel Rage.” The rage, he says, is justified – only don’t express it, because, you know, it makes you look bad.
Beinart goes on to lecture the people acting in bad faith – the people he’s most worried about seizing on content that he considers alarming. He laments that those who would capitalize on bad press to discredit the entire pro-Palestine movement refuse to reckon with the underlying realities that justify the rage. They would understand and even empathize with that rage, according to Beinart, if only they would stop reflexively defending Israel long enough to actually sit with its conduct.
Now this is not a bad take, in a vacuum. I love a good Beinart lecture; this kind of moral clarity made him the GOAT that he is. The problem with this particular lecture tucked inside this particular rebuke is that it is a wish, a dream, a fantasy. Serious analysis must operate within the realm of existing pro-Israel political dynamics. Beinart balances earnest tone-policing and respectability politics against a desired outcome he knows will never occur.
It is also wildly off the mark to dismiss those confronting Wiener as “assholes.” It is indeed a confrontation. They hurl expletives at Wiener. Watch the video: the passion and the rage are palpable. Beinart judges these regular people the way one would judge a politician at a debate or in a committee hearing on C-SPAN. Beinart has been singularly effective in challenging Jewish pro-Israel dogma precisely because he practices the politics of dignity. And it’s not an act; zionist interlocutors truly cannot handle him because kindness and empathy are who he is.
But that’s not a reasonable standard to project onto strangers. And it’s a particularly irrational standard to demand of constituents whose basic liberties – not just their values – have been under attack from Scott Wiener. I don’t mean to pick on Peter Beinart. But his response encapsulates so much of the widespread misread on this ejection, including the notion that Wiener’s movement on genocide should inoculate him from criticism – and that criticism betrays an impossible standard or outright antisemitism.
Others have argued that the widespread accusation that Scott Wiener is supported by AIPAC is untrue, a defense Wiener has leaned on himself in reaction to this event and in previous appearances. This claim is worth debunking explicitly, since the technical answer to the very narrow question of direct funding from the official AIPAC organization is in fact “no.” But as I have explained previously, AIPAC has become shorthand for the Israel lobby as a whole. That includes individual members of AIPAC who hold private fundraisers – Wiener’s campaign has taken $34,000 from large AIPAC donors and $93,000 from large donors across all pro-Israel PACs, per TrackAIPAC’s FEC analysis – and it includes J Street, the liberal zionist outfit that endorsed Wiener, bundles donations to his campaign, and ran independent expenditures boosting him in the primary. TrackAIPAC, which tracks candidate funding across the entire Israel lobby, has correctly identified Wiener as an AIPAC-aligned politician.
Wiener’s liberal defenders refuse to engage with voters’ recognition that the Israel lobby moves together, that J Street is just another shade of AIPAC, that Wiener’s claim to be AIPAC-free is itself a dishonest distinction that only insults the intelligence and morality of anti-genocide voters. Furthermore, the assertion that support from J Street should be lauded by anti-genocide voters alongside the recognition that support from AIPAC proper should be disqualifying undergirds the claim that Wiener is not a target as a result of his record, but because of his identity. Even Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett cashed in on the antisemitism claim:
“I think if you’re following around an elected official who is pro-gay, pro-trans, at a trans-supporting event, and you’re yelling at them and saying ‘you are oppressing queers because of your position on Israel’ even though [their] position on Israel is that [they] believe Israel has committed a genocide in Gaza, then what you are doing is being an antisemite. If you are following Scott Wiener around, yelling at him in this park, it is because you are being antisemitic. You are an antisemite. That is why you are yelling at this man.”
Neither Pod Save America, nor Peter Beinart, nor any of the now hundreds of voices across the political spectrum crying antisemitism and bad optics are interested in telling the truth about Scott Wiener’s actual record. And none of them are interested in what a confrontation filmed a few days prior actually reveals.
Jesus “Frisco Lens” Coba has pursued Wiener for years. In 2024 he filmed himself confronting Wiener on a flight, posted it with an inverted red triangle over Wiener’s head, and chased him through the airport. Wiener has received bomb threats at his home. Last week Coba encountered Wiener at a World Cup event in his neighborhood, turned on his camera and demanded that Wiener say “Free Palestine.”
Had Wiener sat in silence, the defiance would have been defensible – no politician owes a performance to a man who once marked him as a target. But Wiener did not sit mute: he spoke exactly once, to deny taking AIPAC money, and went silent only when invited multiple times to say “Free Palestine.”
“Free Palestine” is no different from “Black Lives Matter.” In the video Wiener is under pressure, he is not in control of the situation. But he is a public official at a World Cup event in the district he seeks to represent in Congress, being asked by a constituent to affirm on the record that Palestinians are also deserving of the freedom they are yet denied.
And he cannot bring himself to do so. This is no different from an ultra-liberal politician in an ultra-liberal district somehow failing, in the summer of 2020, to voice the words “Black Lives Matter.” After a highly visible failure to clear the lowest bar of common humanity, Scott Wiener came back several days later to stir the pot. He got what he came for, and now everyone from Beinart to Crooked Media is falling for the trap.
His fundraising is through the roof. Friendly media has given him priceless coverage. In the midst of a hotly contested race to succeed the most important congressional Democrat since Lyndon Johnson, Scott Wiener cultivated a spectacle in which he could be cast as the sympathetic victim. His defenders will protest that he was simply walking to a Shabbat service, at a march he has attended for twenty-two years. But if it was all so incidental, why did he capitalize on it so fully, and so immediately – the press release by morning, the cable hits, the fundraising appeals, the record donation days his own campaign rushed to announce? And everyone is falling for it.
Former J Street staffer Debra Shushan had the audacity to smear activists as "thugs" and "zealots," omit the actual record they're confronting, then scold them for hurting their own cause:
Credit to the San Francisco Chronicle, which actually bothered to interview the Trans March organizers in the wake of the controversy. “Trans March participants holding politicians accountable is nothing new,” they wrote. The organizers’ response quoted a community member: “His very recent shift to finally admitting there is a genocide in Gaza holds no water without accountability for the harm he has caused regarding censorship around Palestine. I’m disgusted that Scott is using this moment to center himself and fundraise for his political campaign.”
StormMiguel Florez, the quoted community member, is correct. That’s all this is: a shameless, amoral ploy to center Scott Wiener and elevate his chances of ascending to a hugely symbolic seat in Congress. But as with all cutthroat zionist politics, the collateral damage extends far beyond one politician’s opponent.
The shameless maneuver, the breathless coverage of the video, and even the good-faith pro-Palestine allies’ repetition of Wiener’s defenses – at core, they all erase transgender political agency. They warp pride from a radical injunction against a bigoted state into a platform for politicians to comfortably preen no matter how autocratic their actions. They denigrate the practice of human solidarity, when one oppressed person refuses to abide the oppression of another. They slander justified righteous fury as base antisemitism at a time when the federal government is hunting down and killing people based on nothing more than that very charge. They’re not just emboldening pro-Israel fascism. They’re erasing the sacred trans political agency that gave birth to pride in the first place.
“You stopped being queer the moment you started supporting Israel,” screams one of the activists in the video. To the outsider, to someone ignorant of the history or incurious on the verbiage, the revocation of allyship might sound like an assault. It may seem like an unhinged claim against one’s immutable identity. But queer has always been more than a bucket term for anyone who is LGBT+. Queer is different. It’s radical. It critiques corrupt systems and challenges the status quo.
Scott Wiener weaponized his queerness in defense of the indefensible, then moved in concert with a genocidal power structure rather than challenging it. As a gay man, a part of Scott Wiener will always be technically queer. But he has taken direct aim at queer liberation, at the origin and enduring purpose behind pride parades and marches. He will never be welcome in any self-respecting queer space again. That’s his choice. We don’t have to follow him there.
Previously, on Certain Thoughts:
Mamdani the Prophet Has Arrived
At a June 18 Get Out the Vote rally, New York’s superstar mayor Zohran Mamdani made waves not only by calling out AIPAC, but by naming the organization’s malign influence in the starkest of terms: monsters.
Zionism Is an Assault on Western Civilization
White supremacists have so consistently presented their authoritarian agenda as a “defense of Western civilization,” you could be excused for wondering if “Western civilization” is even a good thing.
This is an excellent piece, Evan. I don't think people understand, or want to understand, that trans people have also kicked out cops at Pride for routinely killing our Black neighbors. This is solidarity in action. If people don't want to be faced with angry trans people, then don't fuck with our neighbors who, like us, are also under genocidal threat. Every single person calling trans people thugs for kicking out a man who trampled on civil liberties to defend a genocide can go stuff a turducken.