Heather Brunskell-Evans: Body Politics; Transgenderism and Zionism
From Real Left’s Conference ‘Critical Fronts of the Class War in 2026’ on 3 October
Transcript
Morning everybody. Just hot-footed it down from the East Midlands. I’m here, thank goodness. So today I want to talk about how the ideologies of transgenderism, so well elucidated by Emily, and Zionism are ostensibly unrelated. The one concerns the transformation of an individual’s sexed body, while the other concerns the transformation of Palestine into an ethno-nationalist state for Jews.
I argue, however, that the two ideologies are politically connected. Each ideology undermines the normative values of liberal democracy and helps create a ‘New Normal’ enforced by similar technologies and tactics of power and of silencing. If we are to resist the horrors unfolding before us, whether that is young girls cutting off healthy breasts and pumping themselves with opposite sex hormones, in the vain hope of liberating themselves from their bodies and becoming men, or the slaughter of thousands upon thousands of Palestinians in the name of Western values, civilization and freedom: it’s important to conduct a historical analysis of the present moment, asking, who are we now and how have we become this?
Does this distinction between left-wing and right-wing help us answer this question? First I’m going to deal with the issue of transgenderism. Between 2015 and October 2023, I was accused of transphobia, largely by the liberal left. I’d written extensively about transgenderism as a harmful ideology. In particular, I’d argued that the transgender child is not a real figure, but a fabricated identity, however painfully real that identity might be experienced by the child, her or himself. Perhaps even some of you here at this conference classified me as a transphobe. And you might still do. I was initially shocked by the accusation that I hate people who experiment with gender norms. Throughout my life, my identity, if anything, has been that of a left-leaning liberal progressive who has, for example, in my own life, attempted to raise my four children, boys and girls, outside of gender identity stereotypes. The enforcers of the New Normal that disciplined and policed me operate at two interconnected levels with regard to blocking free speech, and shaping our thought away from any criticism of the transgender ideological project. Wrong think, as we’ve heard earlier, includes beliefs such as biological sex is immutable, transwomen are men, women don’t have penises, and children aren’t born in the wrong body. Because of our gender critical heresy, lobby groups, LGBTQ+ activists and their allies interrupted our free speech events and conferences, and in some cases successfully demanded that gender critics be dismissed from our employment, have our contracts terminated, or be forced out by institutions or group affiliations.
Trans-activists could not appeal with such power without support from enforcers of the New Normal at the level of the government, the law, the police and the judiciary. In 2018, Theresa May, the Conservative Prime Minister, backed reform of the Gender Recognition Act of 2004 in favour of legal gender self-identification and she described herself as “woke and proud”. The police recorded gender critical speech as non-crime hate incidents, and in some cases arrested people for alleged offences linked to gender critical views. And judicial guidance encouraged courts, for example, to refer to male defendants who identified as women, including convicted rapists, with female pronouns. And Keir Starmer, as leader of the Labour opposition, insisted that transwomen are women, and that that wasn’t just his view, he said, but that was actually the law.
In the name of cultural identity, human beings have long transformed their bodies through piercing, cutting and removing healthy flesh. For example, the brutal cutting of girls’ genitals, or indeed the removal of boys’ foreskins. What distinguishes this 21st century form of cutting of healthy sex bodies and the transformation of the body through opposite sex hormones?
The idea of transgenderism, as we’ve heard already, is driven through the culture by a commercial medical-industrial complex. Not by clinical need or by civil rights. An expanding infrastructure of clinics, hormones, surgeries such as phalloplasty, vaginoplasty, facial surgery and related procedures, turns young people into lifelong medical patients and can indeed sterilize them. This market-driven industry, disassociated from biological reality, treats the sexed body as an object, disconnected from what it means to be human, and yet ironically, recycles traditional tropes about what it means to be male and female. Transgender ideology is mobilized by the bro-oligarchy of Silicon Valley, philanthropic billionaires, and a transhumanist movement that imagines melding human beings with machines. In doing so, gender is not becoming more fluid, but rather, male dominance is reinscribed.
In conclusion to the transgender section of my paper, LGBTQ+ activists and governments – both left and right – pushed for social acceptance of the fiction that an individual can be born in the wrong body. And in taking up this newly constructed truth as a civil rights issue, ignored, overruled and stripped the liberal democratic rights of women and children.
You’ll be interested to know, I’ve now been assigned a new identity, one incommensurable with my previous one as a right-hand bigot. Since the Hamas attack on October 7 2023, and drawing on my brief experience living and working in Bethlehem in the West Bank, I began writing about Zionism, the consequences for the Palestinians of the Nakba, and the war on Gaza. I am now accused of anti-Semitism, largely by the right. And largely nowadays, the left has left me alone, apart from my new epithet by them, which is that of loony-lefty.
I was initially shocked by the charge that I hate Jews, but I quickly realized that defending myself on this count is of no use whatsoever. Jews themselves who oppose Israel’s war on Gaza and the ideology that sustains it are themselves branded antisemites, often by non-Jews! So enforcers of the New Normal who watch the pain and suffering of Palestinians as if they’re not human, and grant Israel impunity to drop 2000 bombs on the caged civilian population, include in this country lobby groups such as the Board of Deputies. And organisations who support Israel transcends party politics, including Friends of Israel, to which I might add many of the left-wing feminists previously spoken about are now signatories.
And free speech organisations who defend the speech at their own ideological position, but define statements such as “Free Palestine”, “Israel is an apartheid state” and “Israel is committing genocide”, as hate. The media analyst Adam Johnson points out that within days of Hamas’s October attack, pro-Israel reporters, politicians, and commentators described/ treated the violence of Hamas as barbaric and invented a two-tiered moral system where Israeli violence in the past perpetrated on Palestinians for decades, and the violence promised by Israel as its military response is somehow quite different.
Two days after the attack, the Israeli defense minister said Israel was “fighting human animals” and ordered the blocking of food, fuel and water to Gaza. Rishi Sunak, the then Conservative Prime Minister, described the Hamas attack as “pure evil”, said Israel had an “absolute right to defend itself”, and added that Britain stood with Israel and the British Jewish community, “Not just today, not just tomorrow, but always.”
Keir Starmer tried to have it both ways, by supporting Israel whilst also upholding international law. He said, “I think Israel does have the right to siege Gaza”, although everything should be done “within international law”. His core principle was that, again, “Israel has a right to defend herself.” I notice he uses the female pronoun when he talks about a country but finds it very difficult to use it when talking about a woman. His core principle was, yes, that Israel has a right to defend herself and Hamas bears responsibility, not Israel. So, Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, has repeatedly said, Israel has a right to defend itself, that Israel is our democratic ally, and she claims it in terms of facing down Islamist terrorism on all our behalf. And she now criticizes the recent government and its sanctions under the new Prime Minister Andy Burnham as rewarding Hamas. And I add, through the last three years, the very legal regime, the United Nations and the Genocide Convention, set up after World War II because of the genocide of the Jews, so that such barbarism could never happen again, has given Israel complete impunity to carry out another one.
What distinguishes the genocide of Palestinians from other genocides? Genocides have occurred throughout history and continue to occur today in other parts of the world. Rape and sexual violence is carried out, as with Israel. And, what we also know, the Special United Nations Rapporteur for Violence Against Women, calls femicide, namely a specific attack on women and sexual reproduction.
So what is different about this genocide? First, the Palestinian genocide is unique in that it is carried out in the name of Western civilization and of Judeo-Christian values. It’s perpetrated not only by Israel but in complete cooperation with the US and European governments, who, by providing the military needs, technology and intelligence are complicit. Third, the victims themselves report starvation, slaughter and maiming in real time, even though the likelihood is that they will be murdered by the Israeli Occupying Force. And fourth, the genocide is accompanied by a vericide: the deliberate erosion of truth. Like the genocide itself, vericide holds a new neoliberal world order where mass killing of children, women and men is normalised and totalitarian censorship is made possible.
The Jewish Israeli historian, Ilan Pappé, insists1 that when we want to comment on the politics of Israel and Palestine today, or propose a vision for the future, we must relate it to what has happened in the past. If we misrepresent the past, adhere to distorted narratives, or fabricate the facts, our analysis of the present, and more important, our suggestions for peace, will go awry. Israel is not a liberal democracy fighting on our behalf against a murderous, genocidal Islam, but an apartheid, expansionist, colonial state. The attack by Hamas and the Israeli military operation in Gaza that followed cannot be understood outside this larger historical context, and the savagery into which the Israeli state has descended. Israel’s genocide is not an aberration, but the logical and inevitable outcome of its history and the creation of it as a nation. It is Israel’s brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing, not Islam, that drives Palestinian militancy.
Israel has been provided by its Western allies with billions of dollars and the most sophisticated weapons and technology to carry out the bloodletting of its atavism. Israel is experimenting with new forms of military annihilation of ‘the other’, which can be perfected and used in other war zones. The Bro-oligarchy are, as we speak, planning complete control of Gaza in the name of peace. The Jewish-Israelis scholar of genocide, Omer Bartov, reflecting on Israel since its inception, argues2 that colonization and occupation of Palestine since 1948, as with all occupations, has resulted in the brutalization and degradation of the colonizers themselves, as well as those who were colonized. It has awakened in the colonizers the buried instincts of covetousness, violence, racial, hatred and moral relativism. And this, combined with new technologies of slaughtering and murdering, is a terrifying prospect for our future.
I conclude that we must recognise that the left wing and the right wing both spring from the same neo-liberal state in which biopower and patriarchy intersect, as analysed by the theorist Michel Foucault. I argue that our main distinction should be between the moral and the immoral, rather than the left and the right, and that resistance lies not in the dream of revolution, I’m sorry to say for those revolutionary people present, but in examining how our paradigms of thought and morality are formed, through biopower.
And then what we need to do is intervene at the level of the body itself. Young people have begun to realise this and perform this kind of intervention. They’ve begun to realise that an escape from their sexed bodies was delusional and are beginning to mobilise against the medical profession and the harms done to them including sterilisation, and are beginning to speak out about the failures of the safeguarding authority and the adults who are ostensibly in control.
And since October 7th, direct action against the new terrorism laws brought in, by a Labour government, have emerged led largely by grassroots activists rather than institutions or left-wing political parties. Here we offer our own bodies for arrest. And in so doing expose the level the state has gone to to punish peaceful objectors to Israel as terrorists, while sanctioning and abetting Israeli terrorism.
One day, I hope, that everyone will be horrified by what the West is doing to children and young people’s sexed bodies and to the bodies of Palestinian people in the name of civilization. And we’ll wonder how our civilization could have become so corrupted. Thank you.
Pappé, Ilan (2016) The Myth of Israel, The Real News Network
Bartov, Omer (2026) Israel: What Went Wrong, p.16
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