“Gender-Critical” Discourse as Disinformation: Unpacking TERF Strategies of Political Communication

Abstract

I was conducting fieldwork for my forthcoming book at the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) in Washington, DC, when the infamous rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) article was published in PLOS One by Brown University public health scholar Lisa Littman in August 2018 (Billard, 2024). The gist of the article was that transgender identity is a “social contagion” spread among emotionally vulnerable youth who declare trans identities in order to be special or (conversely) to be trendy, or as a cry for help, but who are not actually trans. The article was quickly and near-universally declared illegitimate by members of the scholarly community on both theoretical and methodological grounds (see, e.g., Ashley, 2020; Bauer, Lawson, & Metzger, 2022; Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science, 2021; Restar, 2020). But much like the 1998 Andrew Wakefield et al. study that set off a misinformed panic about the connection between measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines and autism—which persists still today—the widespread discrediting of the research’s claims did nothing to prevent the study from being taken up by zealots as “proof” that “transgender ideology” (Faye, 2022) is a dangerous force that must be stopped. Within days of the study’s initial publication, it was being shared in disparate corners of the anti-trans Internet on both sides of the Atlantic—from neofascist YouTubers in the United States to British women’s networks in the ostensible parent support community Mumsnet (Kesslen, 2022; Lewis, 2019). From there, the “debate” over ROGD spread to the mass media and to state and national political parties, where it continues to inform how opponents of transgender rights justify everything from outlawing the provision of transgender health care to opposing the United Kingdom’s Gender Recognition Act (Billard, 2022; Johnson, 2022; Pearce, Erikainen, & Vincent, 2020b). The weaponization of recognized misinformation to oppose transgender rights that we see in the case of ROGD is not unique. In fact, it is typical. During the two years I was at NCTE, I observed situation after situation in which misinformation about transgender issues was mobilized for the sole purpose of justifying opposition to the rights— and often the very existence—of trans people. In the intervening years, I have witnessed it countless times. Misinformation—or, more specifically, disinformation—about trans topics has become the defining feature of public discourse on transgender rights. What the ROGD case illustrates particularly well, however, is the complex dynamics