There’s Nothing Centrist About Make-Believe: The Politics of Pretending
Esther Panitch “stands with” John Walker Flynt—aka “Brianna Wu”—but support for Israel doesn’t turn a man into a woman.
On October 12, Georgia State Representative Esther Panitch—the only Jewish member of the Georgia legislature—tweeted:
She posted this after John Walker Flynt (“Brianna Wu”) drew attention for pro-Israel statements on the Oct. 7 anniversary. Panitch’s voucher read as if Flynt/Wu’s stance Israel could redeem a public record of support for “transsexualism” and child gender medicalization.
Support for Israel does not turn a man into a woman. It does not excuse an ideology that erases sex or pressures women and girls to accept male intrusion.
Flynt/Wu is the 6′4″ male grandson of Larry Flynt, and he has publicly advocated the gender medicalization of minors and has been accused of entering women’s spaces without consent. “Standing with” him affirms the fiction that womanhood is a costume men can wear and be rewarded for. It signals approval for dismantling the boundaries women need and the safeguards children deserve.
Wu’s Contradictions: The “Reasonable Transsexual” Myth
As Jack Jewell & Pear Joseph detail in Can We Trust Trans Activist Brianna Wu?, his “moderation” is a branding exercise. He warns that delaying transition for boys causes “irreparable harm,” calling testosterone “a one-way street,” while showing little urgency about girls pushed toward mastectomy and chemical sterilization. That asymmetry isn’t science; it’s bias marketed as compassion. Jewell and Joseph also flag his “true trans vs. ideologues” posture as a self-serving way to seem credible while preserving the very system that harms kids.
Even the Industry Can’t Keep Its Story Straight
In April 2025, the LGB Courage Coalition & LeAnne Owen covered Flynt/Wu’s clash with Marci Bowers (ex-WPATH president) in When Brianna Wu Is the Sane One. Bowers acknowledged that blockers at Tanner 2 can sterilize children, yet defended the pathway and misused detransition data. Flynt/Wu challenged the contradictions. But when the most “grounded” voice is a man who has promoted puberty blockers for boys to grow into “hotter transwomen,” the bar for sanity has collapsed.
The Mask Slips
In The Reasonable Troon: Brianna Wu and Male Nonsense, Kat Highsmith maps a pattern: severe mental-health struggles answered with plastic surgery and cross-dressing; bullying women in gaming; victimhood for clout; contempt for detransitioners. Highsmith writes that Flynt/Wu “knows he’s a man” and relishes attention as one of the “good ones,” reducing womanhood to hair, makeup, and “cool-girl” compliance.
The Pattern: Fantasy as Moral Virtue
Across sources, the through-line is clear:
Shift the persona to suit the room—radical on Monday, “reasonable” on Tuesday.
Lecture women on womanhood.
Defend medical experiments on children while claiming to “save” them.
Exulansic puts it plainly:
“‘Brianna’ Wu is a male man with male DNA and a male body and brain. He likes fantasizing about being oppressed like women, Jewish and Black people, because as a famous and powerful white man, he’s never had to face that hardship.”
This is whom Esther Panitch elevated on October 12—not for clarity on sex, but because he posted the “right” thing about Israel.
Delusion Isn’t Diplomacy
Calling a man a woman doesn’t make him one. It mocks truth and every woman who has borne the costs of being female. Sex is immutable. Denying it invites the erasure of women’s rights and the medicalization of children.
Genevieve Gluck warns:
“Transvestites are men with a sexual pathology that escalates towards public predation. Transgenderism is an attempt to rebrand their behavior by including women and children under a more ‘inclusive’ term, thereby providing cover for male fetishes that overlap with pedophilia.”
Georgia Has Seen This Before
This isn’t abstract. In March, I documented another Georgia legislator on the House floor wearing a trans pride flag neckerchief to honor Monica Helms—a man whose own writings include fetishism and forced-feminization erotica. Elevating Helms normalized male sexual entitlement to women’s bodies.
In the same piece, I traced how the ideology lands on girls: a Deerfield, Illinois middle school forced girls to undress in front of a boy in their locker room, then punished the girls who objected. Administrators didn’t protect boundaries; they enforced compliance. That is gender ideology in practice: coerce girls to accommodate male demand, then market the coercion as “inclusive.”
These are two ends of the same pipeline: male validation over female safety. If you “stand with” that, you stand against a girl’s most basic freedom—to say no.
Georgia Can Do Better
Panitch’s tweet fits a broader pattern inside Georgia’s Democratic Party: ideology over reason. This is the caucus that walked out rather than vote on ending taxpayer funding for sex-trait surgeries in prisons and overwhelmingly opposed the Riley Gaines Act protecting girls’ sports. It’s the same party that brought Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker—architect of child-medicalization “shield laws”—to headline their 2025 Carter-Lewis Dinner.
Georgia needs leaders who can say woman and mean female—leaders who value truth over trend.
The Line to Hold
If a politician can’t speak the simplest truth, that men are not women, he or she can’t be trusted to defend any truth at all.
A man in lipstick is still a man. Standing with him is not allyship with women—it’s a betrayal of reality.
Georgia deserves leaders who know the difference and refuse the humiliation ritual of pretending otherwise.
If you’re a Democrat who believes in women’s sex-based rights, you’re not alone. Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG) is fighting to hold Democratic lawmakers accountable and advocate for reality-based policies that uphold sex-based protections. Likewise, the Democratic Women’s Declaration affirms the urgent need to recognize sex-based rights in law and policy—Democratic women are encouraged to “Sign Today for Tomorrow’s Future.”
What! How did I forget/not know he's related to Larry Flynt?!