Dr. Martens Joins the Week-Old Insta to Libs of TikTok to Fox Pipeline

A custom pair of boots ignited controversy a week after it was first posted to Instagram in one of the more obvious examples of the right’s desperation to keep pumping out anti-trans content.

by Evan Urquhart

screenshot from the @drmartensusa instagram account

It’s silly season in the U. S. and U. K., a period in late summer when politicians, reporters, and the public alike all take their vacations and the desperation of those of us left manning the news helm grows increasingly transparent. It is in that context that I present to you an Assigned Media post about a Fox News story about a Libs of TikTok tweet about a week-old Dr. Martens promo.

An entire week ago the Instagram account for the U. S. branch of the British footwear and fashion company Dr. Martens posted a promotion offering a single pair of custom boots by a queer illustrator featuring rainbows, the word queer, and two gender- and even species-indeterminate cartoon figures, one of whom had surgery scars on their chest. Two days ago the days-old post was tweeted about by right-wing troll Ian Miles Cheong, yesterday morning it was picked up by Libs of TikTok (another right-wing troll account best known for having sparked bomb threats towards children’s hospitals), last night the tweeted outrage became a story on Fox News, at about midnight the Fox News story was republished by the New York Post, which I in turn saw this morning.

screenshot from the New York Post version of Fox News’ story

Does this controversy resemble the Bud Light backlash, really? Bud Light is (was?) a brand of beer heavily associated with frats, sports, and rural white masculinity. Dr. Martens is a brand of footwear heavily associated with the LGBTQ+ community that brags of 5 decades of that asssociation on their website. Bud Light was a mainstream product whose market share was flagging due to changing tastes and demographics that then imploded spectacularly when they failed to cater to the bigotry and fragile masculinity that characterized their core audience. Dr. Marten’s core audience? Literally lesbians.

The chances that Docs’ sales could be hurt by the right shining a spotlight on the brand’s queer marketing efforts seem, well, minimal.

To the extent that there’s a story here, it’s really the way this shows the sausage-making process of the anti-trans propagandists in all its dubious glory. A small number of right wing troll accounts on social media constantly trawl the internet for anything they can plausibly vest their outrage at trans people’s existence in because it drives engagement with their bigoted fanbase. Well-solidified talking points are grafted on to some bit of internet ephemera and recycled, endlessly. If there’s nothing obviously outrage-inducing in the news they look further and further afield until eventually they hit on something, however stale or minor. Lia Thomas wearing a cute tank top one week, Dr. Martens promoting a queer artist another, it feels interchangeable because there’s no foundation to it other than the same old grievances.

And while the troll accounts may seem lazy and low-effort that pales in comparison to the lazy, low-effort nature of reporting at right wing media outlets who repackage the mid-tier social media posts of a tiny handful of anti-trans Twitter trolls (Libs of TikTok’s tweet on this as 1500 retweets, Cheong’s has 130) as if they were news stories.

It’s not news that some trans people get surgery, or that anti-trans activists don’t like it. “What if thousands of kids were removing their right arms?” isn’t an argument, it’s a provocation by a Proud Boys linked hate group. If thousands of kids were removing their right arms it would be BAD, Tiffany, unless of course mountains of medical evidence showed it was the best option for those particular youth medically because it was associated with better outcomes on a host of measures, in which case it would be medically necessary and uncontroversial.

No one here, from Cheong to Chaya Raichik to Tiffany Justice to Fox News’ Lindsay Kornick is serious. This is silly stuff. Welcome to silly season.