One of the defining absurdities of the modern West is not that human beings imagine things. Human beings have always imagined tribes, roles, myths, masks, costumes, and symbolic identities. The deeper absurdity is that entire political and moral systems are now expected to reorganize reality around subjective feeling and declaration.
If enough of the “right" kind of people assert something loudly enough, emotionally enough, and long enough, the claim is no longer treated as a claim. It becomes an identity. Then it becomes sacred. Then questioning it becomes “violence."
This is the twisted age of imagined identity.
The pattern is visible in the most radical corners of transgenderism. Human gender is not assigned by mood, costume, declaration, or bureaucratic intimidation. In ordinary human development, XX chromosomes are associated with female development and XY chromosomes with male development, with the Y chromosome and SRY region typically directing male development. Yes, differences of gender development exist. Medicine recognizes chromosomal and anatomical variations. But those conditions prove that biology is real, not that sex is an inner feeling detached from the body.
The existence of medical exceptions does not abolish the biological categories by which the exceptions are understood. This is not an attack on people who suffer from gender dysphoria. Serious people can recognize real distress without cruelty or mockery. But compassion for suffering is not the same as surrendering reality to the tyranny of personal or group fantasy.
Yet the new doctrine demands more than kindness. It demands metaphysical obedience. A man becomes a woman because he says so. A woman becomes a man because she feels so. Some now float identities so untethered from biological reality that the self becomes an act of private invention, while the rest of society is commanded to applaud.
This same civilizational pattern helps explain another modern invention: the myth of an ancient “Palestinian Arab people."
Arabs lived in the Land of Israel. Families, clans, villages, Muslims, Christians, and others lived there. That is not the issue. The issue is whether there existed, before the modern war against Zionism, a distinct ancient Palestinian Arab nation with its own sovereign history, language, kings, institutions, literature, currency, religion, or national consciousness.
There did not.
Even Arab and pro-Arab sources repeatedly said so both before and after the mythology hardened into international theology.
-In 1919, the General Syrian Congress told the King-Crane Commission that there should be “no separation" of “the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine," from Syria.
-In 1946, Lebanese-American historian Philip Hitti testified that there was “no such thing as Palestine in history."
-In 1977, senior PLO official Zuhair Mohsen told the Dutch newspaper Trouw that “the Palestinian people does not exist" and that a separate Palestinian identity was maintained “for political reasons."
-More recently, Hamas official Fathi Hammad acknowledged that many 'Palestinian' Arabs trace their origins to Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
These are not “Zionist extremists" denying Arab humanity. They are Arab and pro-Arab voices acknowledging what history shows: “Palestinian" was long a geographic and political label before it was retrofitted into an imaginary ancient nationality. The books Phantom Nation by Shai ben Tekoa and From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters document this reality exceptionally well.
Under the British Mandate, Jews were called Palestinians and Arabs most expressly were not. The Jerusalem Post was originally the Palestine Post. The Palestine Symphony Orchestra was Jewish. “Palestine" was a place-name used by foreign rulers, not the name of an ancient Arab nation. The term itself was imposed by Rome after the Bar Kokhba revolt as part of an effort to erase Judea from the map using the name of the Jews ancient enemies, the Philistines, to further the humiliation of the conquered Jews.
Then came the alchemy of modern propaganda about the ancient and proud “Palestinian Arab People". Repeat a political invention long enough and it becomes sacred memory. Teach it in universities. Chant it in the streets. Print it in UN resolutions. Fund it through NGOs. Place it in the mouths of celebrities, academics, diplomats, and journalists. Eventually, what began as a political instrument is treated as ancient truth and revered dogma.
The common thread is not that Palestinian Arab nationalism and the modern ideology of Transgenderism are the same thing. The common thread is the method: subjective assertion or even fantasy are treated as a substitutes for objective reality.
In radical transgenderism, inner feeling is elevated above biological fact.
In Arab Palestinianism, political assertion is elevated above historical realities.
In both cases, dissent is treated not as disagreement, but as moral aggression. Biology becomes bigotry. History becomes hate speech. Reality itself is put on trial.
Of course national identities can emerge over time. Nations are not fossils. Americans became a people. Italians and Germans consolidated as modern nations relatively late. But serious national identity forms through shared language, memory, institutions, literature, faith, law, sacrifice, and continuity.
The Arab Palestinian identity, by contrast, crystallized largely as a weapon against Jewish restoration. Its purpose was not merely to describe Arabs living in a geographic area. Its purpose was to indict Jewish sovereignty as theft and then to shift that Big Lie indictment into a modern blood libel.
That is why societal subservience to mythology matters.
The lie is not merely that there is an ancient Palestinian Arab nation where history records none. The lie is that the Jews are foreign colonizers in their own ancestral homeland. Once that Big Lie is accepted, every act of Jewish self-defense becomes “aggression," every Jewish neighborhood becomes “settlement," and every call to dismantle Israel becomes “justice."
This is what imagined identity does when institutions surrender to it. It does not remain private. It becomes coercive. It demands language. It demands law. It demands submission.
And it does not remain harmless fantasy. Once imagined identity becomes policy, real people pay a real price. In the gender arena, girls are told to share locker rooms with intact biological males or be branded cruel. Female athletes lose titles, scholarships, roster spots, and privacy to males who identify as women, and when they object, they are ostracized, blacklisted, or accused of bigotry for defending the boundaries of female spaces and female competition. The fantasy does not remain inside one person’s head. It becomes school policy, athletic policy, speech code, HR mandate, and institutional punishment.
The consequences become even darker inside prison systems, where the tyranny of imagination reaches its most grotesque form. A prison is not a poetry seminar. It is not a campus identity workshop. It is a closed institution filled with people whose bodies are controlled by the state. Yet even there, officials have pretended that words can dissolve sex, that declaration can override anatomy, and that a male inmate becomes a woman by declaring identity and then watching the collusive bureaucratic magic.
Increasingly, intact biological males - including some already known to the justice system as violent offenders or sex offenders - are being placed in women’s prisons after identifying as female. The result is not mysterious. It is exactly what rational people warned would happen: allegations of sexual assault, coercion, intimidation, pregnancies, and sexually transmitted diseases among captive women who cannot simply leave the locker room, choose another team, or walk out of the building. They are locked in.
And still the institutional mind calls this compassion. It calls it inclusion. It calls it respect. The bodies of women become less real than the feelings and declarations of identity by men. The obvious becomes unspeakable. The dangerous becomes enlightened. The captive woman must surrender not only her safety, but her right to describe reality itself. This is what happens when fantasy is not merely tolerated, but enthroned. It does not remain private. It becomes policy. It becomes punishment. It becomes a state-enforced demand that everyone bow before an imagined world, even when the cost is paid in women’s bodies.
The Palestinian Arab fantasy has been even more destructive. An invented national mythology has helped fuel generations of Arab war against Israel, waves of murderous terrorism, global antisemitism, and an international diplomatic machinery obsessed with condemning the Jewish state. The United Nations can barely rouse itself to moral clarity over the world’s worst tyrannies and actual atrocities, yet it returns obsessively to Israel, as if the tiny Jewish state were the central crime scene of human history. Here too, imagination does not remain imagination. It becomes foreign policy, terror justification, campus hatred, diplomatic warfare, and blood libel.
A mature and honest civilization can show compassion without abolishing biology. It can recognize the humanity of non-terror-supporting Arabs without inventing a false ancient nation to erase Jewish history. It can allow people to tell stories about themselves without forcing the rest of us to pretend those stories are facts.
Reality is not cruelty.
And a civilization that loses the courage to say so will eventually be ruled by fantasies.
Daniel Winston is an American-Israeli therapist, lecturer and former adviser to one of Israel’s prime ministers.