The Right is Desperate to Keep Lies About Artemis Langford Afloat

With the case dismissed and the story falling out of the news cycle cries of censorship seek to insert it back in.

by Evan Urquhart

Apart from the crime of being a trans woman, Artemis Langford has never been accused of doing anything wrong. While a failed lawsuit that attempted to force her out of her sorority included paragraph after paragraph of slimy innuendo, when you break down what was actually alleged it amounted to innocuous things like Langford participating in a Christmas party, looking at some of the sorority members who want her out, or running into them in the halls of the sorority house. When paired with descriptions of Langford’s height (she’s tall) and repetitions of how uncomfortable some of the sorority members feel about her presence these innocuous behaviors were dressed up as allegations of bad behavior, but there’s nothing substantive that’s been alleged. The most Langford is accused of is participating normally in the sorority… and being trans.

That’s the context for a piece recently posted to the Federalist that claims, falsely, that Langford has been accused by fellow sorority members of sexual harassment. Repeating the false claim seems to be the primary purpose of the piece, the pretense for which is that that the author had a video removed from TikTok for repeating the lie. In the topsy-turvy world of anti-trans extremism, a trans woman who merely looks at a cis woman is a sexual harasser by definition, and standing up for women demands repeating this over and over again.

Are there so few cases of trans women behaving inappropriately that Federalist writers have to find creative ways to return to the same tiny handful of stories over, and over, and over again? Yes, obviously, because trans women are a delight and anti-trans angles are very thin on the ground. There’s a reactionary backlash to feed, and if there’s nothing new to feed it, cry censorship as an excuse to repeating yesterdays story again today.

Claims of censorship have had remarkable success in pushing far-right narratives into the mainstream, which seems to be their primary goal. As Republicans have begun to show their real intentions vis a vis free speech by banning books, dismantling public universities, and even attempting to ban performing while wearing gender-nonconforming clothes, mainstream hand-wringing over the rights of offensive people to give offense without criticism or consequence has become more muted, but somehow without being replaced by any soul-searching about how the free speech concerns of 2022 became the drag bans of 2023.

In the right wing press the free speech party never ends. Untroubled by the contradiction of attempting to impose their own ideology on others while screaming that they’re being oppressed, the Federalist marches on, crying that their right to smear an innocent trans woman with incendiary lies is as absolute as their right to unilaterally decide what a woman is, who gets to join a sorority, or what books a library can stock.