In her book Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier explores the phenomenon of teenage girls trying to become boys by changing their clothes and names, as well as pursuing surgical and hormonal interventions. Naomi Schaefer Riley writes in her review:

Historically, gender dysphoria—“characterized by a severe and persistent discomfort in one’s own biological sex”—begins in early childhood. It affected a tiny sliver of the population and was almost exclusively found in boys. Around ten years ago, all that changed. Now the number of cases has skyrocketed, the sufferers are overwhelmingly girls, and none of it is happening until adolescence. They’re generally from white families with higher incomes. And there are “clusters of adolescents in a single grade, suddenly discovering transgender identities together.”

Ordinarily, we don’t go to doctors explaining that we think we have pancreatic cancer and just expect them to treat it. We go to doctors with symptoms and expect them to run tests and find the source of our pain. When anorexics tell us they are too fat, we don’t expect medical professionals to agree and help them search for a Weight Watchers meeting. But when it comes to gender dysphoria, therapists are supposed to adhere to the “affirmative-care standard,” which basically means telling a patient his or diagnosis is correct and then figuring out how to “treat” it.

It is not just the demand for self-mutilation that should tip us off to the cultish nature of this movement. . . . Take the way that the transgender activists treat apostates, for instance. If someone decides to “de-transition”—that is, she starts to believe that her biological sex was the right one after all—she is shunned, harassed, and threatened online. And current believers are warned not to have anything to do with her.

How bizarre it is that, after decades of giving girls the message that girls can do whatever they want and be whomever they want, what they have decided is that they don’t want to be girls.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.