Cynthia McKinney, who was a member of Congress and the Green Party’s 2008 presidential candidate, posted an antisemitic and transphobic infographic to social media that claims Jewish people are “behind the rise in transgenderism.”

The image shows a rainbow-colored Star of David with pictures of several trans rights leaders and points out that they’re Jewish, including NCTE founder Mara Keisling and GLSEN director Eliza Byard, who isn’t transgender. Non-Jewish trans rights leaders are not included in the image. 

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At the top of the star is Magnus Hirschfeld, the gay, Jewish, and German sexologist born in the mid-1800s who was a pioneer in researching LGBTQ+ identities. In 1933, his sexology research institute was looted by the Nazis, who beat up the institute’s staff and burned its books. The Nazi party revoked Hirschfeld’s citizenship, and he was forced to live the rest of his life in exile in France.

Hirschfeld was “a JEWISH ‘sexologist’ in Weimar Germany,” the infographic states. “Since then transgenderism has exploded in popularity.” 

The image also contains several “facts,” like that the Talmud “recognizes EIGHT genders.” That “fact” – with a number that varies – is popular among antisemites online but is a simplification of hundreds of years of rabbinical commentary that sometimes mentions gender.

McKinney ran for president with the Green Party in 2008 after having served in Congress for several years as a Democrat. Her platform focused on ending the war in Iraq, repealing the Patriot Act, and containing the national debt. She won no electoral votes and got fewer in the popular vote than five other candidates, including former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who ran as an independent in 2008.

A search of her account on X shows that she started posting about Jewish people in 2022, but she has been posting transphobic messages since 2018, when she posted a trans person’s deadname and called her “a celebrated TRANSgender.” In 2021, she called former Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Rachel Levine, who is transgender and Jewish, a “transgender man.”

McKinney doesn’t appear to have a great opinion about gay people either, claiming in 2019 that “US television is running an ad to encourage people to come out as gay saying that they won’t believe the welcoming party waiting for them.” It’s not clear what ad she was referring to.

She also said in 2024 that the rapper Sean Combs’ “real crime was that he recorded the trysts of the aged Jewish homosexual owners of Hip Hop engaging in illicit acts” and not operating a sex trafficking operation, which is what his trial was actually about.