The (Dis)Information Playing Field is Completely Out of Balance
Additional commentary by Riki Wilchins on the Jack Turban interview.
by [AUTHOR]
During my recent interview with Jack Turban, MD for Assigned Media one thing that didn’t make the final edit was a moment when Dr. Turban brought up the profound inequalities in the production and dissemination of trans information/disinformation.
In an aside he noted, “The sad reality is that as doctors, academics, and researchers, we’re not good at communicating with the public. We’re not trained to get our findings out there. And there's this huge anti-trans media machine at work that is not matched by the same machine for the evidence-based side. So despite that the facts are against them, their media machine is so good that they're winning…”
As the Southern Poverty Law Center has documented in its exhaustive 50k-word report, Project CAPTAIN, Alliance Defending Freedom—at $100m easily the largest white Christian nationalist nonprofit in the world—has been working at least since 2014 building a complex, 57-member network that can manufacture, publish, and promote anti-trans pseudoscience.
That means they’ve been at this for at least a decade now.
To punch holes in all this disinformation, for the “big guns” the trans community has the NYTimes, the Atlantic, and other mainstream media who should be fact-checking but instead are only too glad to launder ADF’s pseudoscience for a mainstream audience if it will get them one more digital subscription.
The good news is, real scientific studies are finally catching up with the ADF’s lies.
For instance, as regards affirming care, Turban himself has published a highly-accessible overview of 16 studies for Psychology Today in 2022, all of which contain positive findings. (In fact, no reputable study I’m aware of has ever found that affirming care harms kids.)
But the bad news here is three-fold.
First, only three of Turban’s 16 studies were published before 2020. That means 13 of the 16 had been published just in the last 24 months (!) before his article appeared. Science is entering the ballgame in the 4th quarter.
Second, as Mark Twain said, “a lie will fly halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on.” (For some reason, truth never wears high heels in these folksy metaphors). On nearly every topic, the Christian right got a huge head start and have been able to dictate the frame.
Third, because it can manufacture “alternative facts” at will, pseudoscience is easily and quickly to manufacture as needed.
But studies based on data take a lot of time and funding and care to produce. This means it’s going to be quite a while before the academy can publish a large enough corpus of definitive studies to rebut all the pseudoscience.
Making matters worse, as noted above, doctors, academics, and researchers receive no training in how to publicize their findings.
Even worse, they’re not even incentivized to do so.
The rule in academia is “Publish or perish” NOT “Promote or perish.” So, after you publish a new study that points to trans kids being helped by blockers, there’s no compelling reason to pause and promote the findings. Instead, what there is there’s a lot of counter-pressure to forget it, move on, and start working on your next study or paper.
Besides the academics and doctors, the big civil and women’s rights groups should be the other counterweight beside the media challenging bad information and replacing it with good science.
But as I found in the research for my book “BAD INK: How the NY Times Sold Out Trans Teens,” the big civil rights and women’s rights groups are largely sitting this one out.When researcher Chloe Souchere and I examined the public statements, materials, and websites of 18 of the largest and highest profile organizations, we found that 100% made multiple statements supporting abortion and gay marriage.
But less than half—just 44%—did so for affirming care.
And the volume of statements by these organizations dropped as well, plummeting from about 70 for abortion rights and a similar number or gay marriage, to just 10 for affirming care– a drop in volume of 84%.
It’s the dog that didn’t bark. The big civil and women’s rights groups are They’re either ambivalent or unwilling to risk the kind of political capital they did for gay marriage or abortion.**
Perhaps both.
In any case, what that means is most of the job of fighting the information war will fall on LGBTQ+ groups and websites, and the trans community itself.
It is deeply unfair. It’s like we’re fighting a war against misinformation with one hand tied behind our backs, one person sitting on our chest, and a dozen with megaphones shouting us down.
It may be an unequal fight, but truth is still on our side. Eventually, that does count for something.
** The sole exception was the reliable National Women’s Law Center which issues multiple states of support for trans kids.
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.