Private Emails of Anti-Trans Activists Leaked
Emails between prominent detransitioned activists, conversion therapy proponents, Christian conservative politicians, Alliance Defending Freedom, and others provide am inside look at the campaign to drive trans people out of public life.
by Evan Urquhart
Mother Jones today published an investigation into the roots of the ongoing campaign to ban gender affirming care for trans youth, drawing on emails leaked by an ex-detransitioner who was once part of a group of activists who helped write and promote the bills. Their story details the efforts of South Dakota Republican state Rep. Fred Deutsch to draft and attempt to pass legislation banning gender affirming care for youth under 16 in his state in 2019. Although Deutsch’s crusade against trans youth failed to result in a ban at that time, the group of activists he put together went on to shop the language and sentiments behind the bill to legislatures across the country. They pushed cookie-cutter legislation and held eerily similar hearings in state after state, all featuring activists drawn from the group, creating the all out attack on the evidence-based treatment of gender dysphoria which has resulted in bans in 5 states thus far.
Soon after publication, a journalist unconnected to the Mother Jones story tweeted about having seen the emails which the Mother Jones story referenced. An hour after that another account, @_nyancrimew, which has over 80,000 followers and whose bio describes the holder as an indicted hacktivist/security researcher, artist, mentally ill enby polyam trans lesbian anarchist kitten robot, tweeted that it was releasing the full collection of emails that tese reporters had seen. The webpage where the emails are collected describes them as “2600 pages of hate, a collection of emails from 2019-2021 between dozens of anti-trans expert witnesses, US right-wing lawmakers and conservative legal groups.”
Assigned has not read all the emails, and has not independently verified their provenance, but we have decided to sharing a link for our readers. We’d like to help spread this information through the trans community, for the research minded among us. In our judgement, the collection seems vastly more likely than not to be legtimate, based on the fact that this is being widely shared by researchers whose work we have always found accurate, and because the journalists who are known to have recieved the emails haven’t disputed this drop. (If our judgement turns out to have been in error we will remove the link and update this post.)