“Transgenderism” and the Anatomy of a Moral Panic
How the concept of “transgenderism” has been used in ads to target conservatives with a mindset that trans people are something less than human.
by Evan Urquhart
How is a moral panic sold? How do you advance the dehumanization of a group of people? We wanted to understand more about how the far right uses language to further eliminationist ideas, so we took a deep look into one word: “Transgenderism.”
Looking at this specific word was a way to see how the sausage is made, how conservatives go from recoiling against the possibility that trans people are people who might have rights to creating private language to help distance themselves from that idea emotionally, to justifying that language in their polemics, and including it in their advertisements to try and sell the public on the idea that trans people aren’t people, but an abstract, threatening, nefarious concept. We looked at how it’s been used by conservative organizations in targeted ads on Facebook, how it’s defined by Michael Knowles, who has called for transgenderism to be “eradicated,” and how it was used when it came up in the private emails of anti-trans activists.
“Transgenderism” isn’t widely recognized as a slur, and it wasn’t created by anti-trans activists. Its most common usage until recently seems to have been in medical contexts. For example, the current International Journal of Transgender Health was known as the International Journalism of Transgenderism between 2005 and 2019. For conservatives, however, it serves as a way of talking about transgender people without granting their humanity. This specific conservative use of transgenderism broke into the public consciousness in a big way in early March, when Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire used the term to call for trans “eradication” at CPAC.
Working with Leanna Garfield, Social Media Safety Program Manager at GLAAD, we pulled US advertising data from Meta's Ad Library that included the keyword “transgenderism.” This initially produced 730 ads, spanning from May 2018 - March 2023.
Assigned then analyzed the data, finding 220 ads that ran on Facebook using the word “transgenderism” in an explicitly anti-trans context in their copy; these were the messages conservatives explicitly want to give their audiences, which seemed like a good starting place. We found a further 180 explicitly anti-trans ads which included the word somewhere in their metadata, which we did not look at as closely. (Of the remaining 330 ads, the bulk of them were conservative political ads which did not reference trans issues directly in their copy, a handful of additional ads were hard to categorize, and about 40 ads which had the keyword were trans-supportive.)
Media Matters previously spotlighted the way Meta has allowed ads containing hate speech to slip through its content filters. In our dataset the most explicitly hateful of the ads containing “transgenderism” generally came from fringe groups, and reached a relatively small number of people. For example a semi-Christian cult-like group’s publication, the Philadelphia Trumpet, ran an ad in January 2020 reaching between 1000 and 2000 people. It reads, “We are experiencing a global campaign to make gender perversion normal. Entertainment, news and advertising media are full of homosexual, bisexual, transgender and other sexual deviance. One gets the impression that millions of average people are experimenting with their sexuality or gender, and millions of others have no issue with transgenderism and gender fluidity.”
Larger ad buys by more established players in conservative media and politics tended to be a bit more careful. One set we were particularly interested in were ads from the Daily Wire, and the lead-up to Michael Knowles comments. The Daily Wire ran 39 ads containing “transgendenderism” during the five year period, garnering nearly 3.5 million impressions. The biggest of these was for a racist Matt Walsh stunt which used members of a Maasai tribe as props for Walsh’s “What is a woman?” schtick. Ad buys referencing transgenderism in the copy increased in size and frequency over the period.
Other ads using “transgenderism” came directly from activist groups. For example, Protect Texas Kids, an anti-trans conservative nonprofit, ran one saying, “Our kids must be protected from a radical leftist agenda that pushes transgenderism onto them. Like our page if you agree that kids need to be kids!” On the website, Protect Texas Kids brags about founder Kelly Neidert’s appearances on right wing news outlets.
One large batch of ads targeted specific political races, with 28 mentioning a candidate by name, and over thirty less specific “issue ads” targeting an election cycle. A typical example of a campaign ad is one that went after Democrat Phil Murphy of New Jersey saying, “Governor Murphy has gone TOO FAR. Now, parents no longer have a say in their child’s curriculum. Sign the petition NOW to tell Murphy: STOP promoting transgenderism in our schools!”
Of course, these ads aren’t confined to Facebook. A similar set of data was recently discussed in a thread by Jessica Kant on Twitter. She highlighted the way Alphabet is profiting by the increasing extremism of the anti-trans movement. The same charge, that big tech are profiting off hate, was also made by Media Matters, specifically about the Daily Wire’s ad buys from Meta.
So, what does “transgenderism” signify, to conservatives? Anti-trans writers have made it clear what they believe transgenderism is: Not a group of people, but a dangerous idea, one many of them believe needs to be banned. Michael Knowles, who called for the eradication of transgenderism to thunderous applause at CPAC, defined the idea in a follow-up essay entitled “How to Eradicate Transgenderism.” Transgenderism, according to Knowles, is the idea that “a person with all the physical signs of a man might really be a woman, and vice versa.” In the essay he calls for the idea itself to be banned on the theory that, while society can tolerate a lot of eccentricity, some ideas are too dangerous to be allowed, even in a free society.
screenshot from the Daily Wire
Ah, but if transgenderism is an idea, where does that leave transgender people? Knowles hand waves that part away, calling trans people a “dubious ontological category that nonetheless refers to real persons” before going further into an abstract, philosophical discussion of his religious ideas about the soul, and why “transgenderism” is in opposition to them.
This betrays the purpose of the word, for Knowles. While it cannot possibly refer to anything other than trans people (making it more useful for the purpose of driving anti-trans hate than its synonym “gender ideology”), it presents trans people as an abstract idea that can be argued with and defeated, rather than as human beings whose lives have an inherent dignity.
“The anti-trans folks don't like surrendering language. They view whoever controls the language and terms as winning a big part of the fight. And a thing that I observed time and time again was they wanted to call transgender women: " transgender men." That's totally disruptive and confusing in the context of established terms, but it was their way of refusing to call or recognize transgender women as female,” explained Elisa Shupe, a trans woman who was once part of the anti-trans movement as a detransitioner.
Shupe was behind a recent release of private emails between anti-trans activists from her time spent in that camp, and she correctly highlights the obsession with language as a major strain of these activists’ behind-the-scenes conversation. In Mother Jones’ investigative deep dive into these emails, they highlighted the way activists sought to avoid even using the word transgender:
screenshot from Mother Jones
Looking for where the word transgenderism was used in the emails, I found one exchange involving Shupe particularly illuminating. As part of a discussion about how to pass legislation banning gender-affirming care Shupe says. “...the ACLU will claim the bill is targeting a ‘people,’ and that it's singling them out for discrimination. That's what they did for the gender dysphoria ban with trans military service.”
Andre Van Mol, a conservative family doctor and anti-trans activist replies, “There is no right to serve in the military. They exclude the overweight, sleep walkers (somnambulism), bed wetters (enuresis), and so forth. Those are far more defined classes/conditions than is the self-defined transgenderism.”
Even in private emails, anti-trans campaigners reject the idea that trans people exist, that they might have rights or perspectives worthy of consideration. What Van Mol does in the private email, instinctively reacting to the idea that trans people are people and shouldn’t be discriminated against by putting an “ism” at the end of transgender to make it more abstract, as if it can be cured or dealt with separately, is the same thing Knowles is doing in his writing, and it is exactly the approach to trans people that hundreds of ads are trying to promote to millions of conservatives.