Dax Shepard Podcast Ep Reveals How Uninformed Even Many Trans Allies Are
On an episode of Armchair Expert podcast, Jonathan Van Ness wound up defending trans youth as Shepard revealed the way anti-trans talking points had impacted his thinking.
by Evan Urquhart
One of the subtler ways anti-trans disinformation warps the conversation on trans issues is in the ways the volume and tone of the conversation is transmitted to people who don’t entirely grasp the details. This warping was on full display in an episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, hosted by actor Dax Shepard, which went live yesterday, September 25, and featured nonbinary podcaster and Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness.
The conversation started amicably enough, but took a turn when Van Ness mentioned that much of the anti-trans sentments on the right are due to an intense ongoing disinformation campaign, one which has confused people on the right about trans issues and cut them off from good information about the topic. This disinformation campaign is well-known (and just so happens to be the subject of this very website), but for Shepard it was controversial for Van Ness to say that right-wing media is full of misleading and often outright false narratives about the trans community and trans rights issues. Shepard objected, saying that conservatives aren’t uneducated, they just have a difference of opinion on this topic.
The belief that conservatives have a nuanced and defensible position on trans issues is itself a myth, one that has been promoted by mainstream outlets that have taken a trans-skeptical editorial stance such as the New York Times and the Atlantic. In reality, conservative opinions are based partly on prejudice, and partly on outright falsehoods in right leaning media. These include the frequently repeated lie that gender affirming care causes sterility, the lie that allowing trans women to play women’s sports lead to them dominating the competition, the lie that trans women transition due to a sexual fetish, the lie that young people with gender dysphoria are getting treatment too quickly and easily, and many others. The right’s lies and distortions on this subject are so blatant, and so incessant, that even our daily website covering that very topic can’t stay fully abreast of it. But, although disinformation about trans people and related topics is omnipresent in right-wing media, ordinary people like Dax Shepard aren’t aware of it. They may know, dimly, that there’s an attack on trans people from the right, but the precise form of the attack and the dishonesty being used to sell it to the base isn’t actually clear to them.
Enter the myth that conservative opinions are based in honest disagreement. This myth is one of the ways mainstream outlets clean up the ugliness on the right and sells it to the public.
In the podcast conversation, Shepard echoed all of the talking points from this mainstream media effort to whitewash an anti-trans disinformation campaign and sell it as something more honest. Shepard objected to trans women playing sports, but seemed not to have considered whether the sorts of rules that would protect fairness at the highest levels were equally appropriate for an elementary school where none of the children had even gone through puberty, which is central to the reality of sports bans that impact children playing noncompetitively. Shepard brought up conservative’s discomfort with adolescents transitioning, but expressed confusion when he learned, apparently for the first time, that bans on gender affirming care were forcibly detransitioning young people who expressed that they were trans from a young age and had undergone extensive medical and psychiatric assessments before accessing treatment.
The greatest myth about trans issues in the American mainstream and left right now is the myth that conservatives are operating honestly and in good faith when it comes to trans issues. When a person believes this to be true they retcon the situation faced by trans people to better fit their idea of what a rational anti-trans actor would do, and what they get is nothing like the reality of what Republicans are actually doing. By the end of the conversation with Shepard, Van Ness was in tears over having to defend trans youth and their families from a supposed ally, one whose knowledge on the topic was so shallow he didn’t even understand the stakes before their conversation. Like many people on the left, Shepard clearly means well, and considers himself an ally. But meaning well isn’t enough when people on the left are determined to attribute good faith to anti-trans extremists for no reason other than that makes them feel more comfortable.
UPDATE: A previous version of the article referred to Jonathan Van Ness as being formerly of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. There is an ongoing version of the show, called Queer Eye, on Netflix, so we updated to reflect the current/ongoing state of the show.