Scott Wiener is a Democratic member of the California Senate and a prominent gay politician who has championed significant state legislation to expand the rights of transgender people.
But late Friday afternoon, as Mr. Wiener was on his way to a Pride Shabbat service led by a trans rabbi, he was run out of San Francisco’s annual Trans March by protesters accusing him of endorsing genocide in Gaza.
A man named Dimitry Yakoushkin filmed Mr. Wiener, castigating him for being “terrible on Gaza,” the video Mr. Yakoushkin later posted to social media shows. A half-dozen or so other people follow along, yelling a steady stream of invective at Mr. Wiener, profanely accusing him of being “genocidal” and having “Zionist handlers.” One waves a middle finger in his face.
“You do not belong here anymore, Scott,” Mr. Yakoushkin shouted. “I want to support someone who’s so positive on trans rights, but you’re a piece of shit on Gaza.”
Mr. Wiener, a front-runner in the race to replace the retiring Nancy Pelosi in the House, said that protesters never shoved or grabbed him, but that they did touch him multiple times. At that point, he said, he decided that attending Shabbat and the march could endanger him and his staff. “It was the first trans march that I have not participated in since the first one in 2004,” he said in an interview.
Debates over transgender rights and over U.S. support for Israel have divided the Democratic Party, with the war in Gaza growing especially contentious in recent months. Polls have found Israel and its government becoming increasingly unpopular with Democratic voters. Mr. Wiener has defended Israel’s right to exist, but criticized its actions in Gaza and has said it should not receive U.S. military aid.
Those fissures have manifested in a series of House primaries this year pitting the pro-Palestinian progressive wing of the party against more moderate Democrats who support Israel, backed by a flood of money from hard-line pro-Israel groups. This week, the pro-Palestinian side scored major wins in New York, when two vocal critics of the war, Brad Lander and Darializa Avila Chevalier, ousted incumbent Democrats who have been supportive of Israel. A third pro-Palestinian candidate, Claire Valdez, also won her primary.
During his victory speech, Mr. Lander said that Democrats need not choose between supporting Palestinian rights and taking care of marginalized groups at home. “Solidarity is not the same as unity,” he said. “Unity means we already agree. Solidarity means we do the work to build bridges even across significant differences.”
But in San Francisco, the episode with Mr. Wiener reflected how intensely some left-wing activists, emboldened by a surge of popular support for some progressive policy positions, are pushing veteran politicians to adopt their positions on a variety of fraught issues.
Mr. Wiener has been one of the most outspoken politicians in support of transgender rights — a wedge issue that many other Democrats have distanced themselves from as Republicans have made it an electoral liability — but that has not insulated him from criticism from the left on other issues like Gaza.
In a deep-blue district with two Democrats on the ballot in November, Mr. Wiener faces a fierce challenge from Connie Chan, a progressive San Francisco supervisor who has Ms. Pelosi’s endorsement. (Ms. Pelosi did not vote against aid to Israel, America’s strongest ally in the Middle East, and said that the F.B.I. should investigate whether some pro-Palestine protesters were connected to Russia.)
Both Mr. Wiener and Ms. Chan have now called the war in Gaza a genocide, and Mr. Wiener has said that he opposes military aid to Israel. Critics said that Mr. Wiener took those positions only in response to political pressure.
More than five million people have seen Mr. Yakoushkin’s video, which also underscores the normalization of the threats and intimidating acts that some politicians have faced.
This week, Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary, said that someone had falsely accused him of posing a danger to his young children.
Mr. Wiener said that he would be filing a police report about the encounter at Dolores Park.
“I’m used to being recorded, but then I could hear there was a group of people — a large number started shouting my name,” Mr. Wiener said. “They were sort of surrounding me, not preventing me from walking, but following along, screaming, saying horrible, vile, false things about my quote-unquote Israeli handlers.”
For his part, Mr. Yakoushkin, a 49-year-old sex and intimacy coach, said that he did not see the episode as harassment, but merely constituents who were engaging with a politician.
“It’s unfortunate that he feels, like, physically intimidated by his constituents,” Mr. Yakoushkin said. “If that’s the case, you should probably look for a different job.”
Mr. Yakoushkin, a political activist who supports Ms. Chan for Congress, said that he also disagreed with Mr. Wiener’s housing policies, even though he believed the senator had passed important legislation for the state’s gay and trans community.
“It’s up to voters to decide whether to compromise,” Mr. Yakoushkin said. “I would not.”
Mr. Wiener had been targeted by activists just two days before the Trans March event, when San Francisco police removed a man named Jesus Coba from the bar where Mr. Wiener was watching a World Cup game. Mr. Coba, who took a video of the encounter and posted it to social media, berated Mr. Wiener for not saying “free Palestine” on camera.
In 2024, Mr. Coba had followed Mr. Wiener as he exited a plane and said, “remember me” before asking him to comment on the children who had been killed in Gaza.
Mr. Wiener, who has criticized the war in Gaza, said that he believed that voters in the district want a champion for trans rights and for the rights of Palestinians. “Supporting the trans community is a very, very high priority for me,” Mr. Wiener said. He said his support for trans rights had also led to death threats and targeting from political activists and influencers, but on the far right.
While Mr. Wiener has the backing of several unions and important Democratic organizations and is one of the country’s most prominent supporters of trans rights, he has been criticized by the left as insufficiently progressive for San Francisco.
His opponents have pointed to support his campaign received in the primary from a super PAC tied to the tech industry. J Street, a more liberal and less hard-line pro-Israel group, also spent money supporting his candidacy.
Mr. Wiener, whose family fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe, has always supported Israel’s right to exist, but has been a critic of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Two years before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, he said that Mr. Netanyahu’s “aggressive, escalating airstrikes” in Gaza were “making both Palestinians and Israelis less safe, and jeopardizing world support for a nation that absolutely must continue to exist as a democratic haven for Jews around the world.”
When Mr. Wiener announced his run for Congress last fall, he had moved further to the left, saying he would vote against military aid to Israel, an issue that has split Democrats.
Nevertheless, this February, activists surrounded Mr. Wiener in a car and yelled that he was “funding genocide,” acting as a “genocide profiteer” and “killing babies.” (As a member of the California Legislature, Mr. Wiener does not have the power to send U.S. military aid to Israel.)
During a primary debate in early January, Mr. Wiener’s opponents unequivocally called Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide, the position of the progressive wing of the party. But Mr. Wiener demurred.
He said that Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians was “an absolute moral stain,” but one that people could label with “whatever noun or adjective they want to put on it.”
After critics blasted Mr. Wiener, he posted a video on social media that said the war in Gaza amounted to genocide.
“The Israeli government has tried to destroy Gaza and to push Palestinians out, and that qualifies as genocide,” he said.
But Mr. Wiener’s use of the term genocide evidently came too late for some pro-Palestinian activists. And some progressives in San Francisco said that his decision to call Israel’s prosecution of the war a genocide felt like a matter of political expediency.
Laurel Rosenhall contributed reporting.
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