State Sen. Scott Wiener is at least the third San Francisco elected official to be driven out of the Trans March at Dolores Park since 2016 — and the tradition has claimed a gay progressive senator and a moderate mayor long before Gaza became the flashpoint.

In the days since Wiener's confrontation went viral and Mayor Daniel Lurie labeled it "antisemitic," the debate has centered on a single event. What that framing obscures is a decade-long pattern at the Trans March — a space where the community has consistently held its supposed political allies to account, over issues that have shifted from homeless encampment sweeps to Gaza, while the tradition itself has not.

The oldest well-documented episode on record came at the 2016 Trans March, when Mayor Ed Lee, then-State Senator Mark Leno, Assemblyman David Chiu, and a then-Supervisor Scott Wiener — Wiener himself — were all booed off the stage before any of them could speak. The crowd's grievance that year was homelessness policy: Lee and Wiener had both supported more aggressive enforcement against sidewalk tents, and the chants from the crowd made it explicit: "Housekeys not handcuffs!"

The 2016 protests swept up even Leno, a gay man with progressive credentials, who was on stage trying to calm the crowd. "Are we about love or crowd hate?" he asked. Then, recognizing the answer: "Folks, I have to ask you, should I get off the stage?" The crowd responded and Leno walked off alongside the others. Ashley Love, a transgender journalist who attended that year, put the underlying sentiment plainly: "I'm tired of people using our community as a prop. A political prop. I'm tired of politicians coming here for five minutes and doing a sound bite and running off."

Nearly a decade later, the faces and causes had shifted. At the 2025 Trans March, Mayor Daniel Lurie was chased from Dolores Park by a crowd that included activist Dimitry Yakoushkin — the same person who filmed Wiener last Friday. Footage from that night shows Lurie and his security detail surrounded by people chanting "You are not wanted here" and "How dare you come here?" before leaving. The grievances in 2025 were not over Israel or Gaza; the pattern of confrontation looked identical.

Then came Friday's incident with Wiener. As the state senator walked through the park for the Trans March kick-off, Yakoushkin — who said the encounter was unplanned — began filming. The video spread across national media within hours, with Wiener surrounded by screaming and middle fingers. He issued a press release Saturday saying he was "verbally and physically" harassed, "including physical contact," and that he felt unsafe enough to leave. "I left the park and, for the very first time, did not participate in the trans march," he wrote.

Wiener's congressional opponent Connie Chan, by contrast, marched without incident.

After Mayor Lurie labeled the confrontation "antisemitic," Yakoushkin pushed back directly, telling Mission Local that he feared the characterization conflated the Israel-focused protest with the homophobic and antisemitic attacks that have already made Wiener a frequent target of the right. "I think homophobia is disgusting and antisemitism is disgusting, but what happened in the park is not that," Yakoushkin said. "It's unfortunate this is being conflated and that homophobes and antisemitic folks are hopping on this as a bandwagon. We hate him for very different reasons."

The historical record lends support to that distinction. The Trans March has pushed out politicians over homelessness enforcement, over perceived political opportunism, and now over Gaza. It did so to Wiener when he was a supervisor, to a progressive gay senator who had nothing to do with Israel policy, and to a sitting mayor whose trans-rights record wasn't the point. The confrontations have involved different crowds, different grievances, and different officials — the common thread is the march's longstanding insistence that elected presence is not the same as earned solidarity.

That context does not settle every question about the specific events of June 27 — Wiener's claim of physical contact, the degree of confrontation, where protest ends and harassment begins. But understanding what happened as a novel outbreak of antisemitism at a Pride event misreads a decade of Trans March history.