This Right Wing Media Myth Props Up Transphobia

There’s a key right wing myth that prevents their audience from recognizing the truth and leads to further radicalization.

by Evan Urquhart

Medical evidence is a key weakness in the case against trans rights, and especially in the case against gender affirming treatments. All major medical institutions support trans affirming care, and even mainstream news stories which strike a more questioning note agree: Gender affirming care for youth is absolutely necessary, and transformative in many or most cases. To the extent that there is some mainstream disagreement, it’s on whether it’s important to have doctors assess adult patients for gender dysphoria, or whether adults can decide for themselves to transition on an informed consent basis. In youth, the true disagreements are much narrower, centered around how comprehensive an assessment is necessary before going forward with some medical interventions.

In light of this, how do right wing propagandists build defenses in their audience against accepting the robust, widely agreed on, evidential picture?

A story today in the Christian Post (a far right evangelical Christian news site), by Billy Hallwell, provides an example. It employs a common tactic, suggesting that being called bigoted can never simply be an honest or accurate description, but is a scare tactic to silence people.

The above screenshot presents a quote by Dr. Andre Van Mol, a conservative family doctor of no particular credentials regardling trans people or trans youth. He speculates that people who do medical research are being silenced by false accusations of bigotry.

This line of thinking on the right verges on conspiracy theory, and can be a key step towards radicalization. It presupposes that there is “real” evidence, which is suppressed, leaving fake evidence being propped up by shadowy elites (a dog whistle for anti-semitism).

It’s a clever bit of propaganda, though, because it gently escalates a person (a mark) who feels bad about having been called a bigot (or about imagining they might be called one). They move from hurt feelings into much wilder and more extreme ways of thinking. The mark may start out refusing to accept the evidence, because it doesn’t fit their biases. Then, when the mark is accurately informed of the way their bias is operating on their reading of the evidence, anti-trans propaganda tells them the accusation itself is further evidence of their rightness. An idea is advanced, slowly and insidiously, that ALL accusations of bias are an attempt to silence the truth, which means that all forms of bigotry are presumptively valid. Seems bad!

The line of thinking may go on to become full-on conspiratorial after the mark engages with real evidence to a point where it can no longer be denied to exist. At this point the existence of realer, truer evidence that totally exists but has been unfairly suppressed is fantasized about. At this point the radicalization is complete, and the mark ends up full QAnon.