Untangling the threads of the assault on trans people

Wisdom from Paula Ramos and a bunch of other folks

I promised you several weeks of book reports, and most of them really will be summaries with a couple of highlights. But this one, featuring Paula Ramos’s book The Defectors, is much heftier.¹ Thanks in advance for bearing with me. I suspect you’ll read this and share some things I missed (and ideally some strategies or resources you recommend). If you can include those in the comments I would be thrilled. (And as a caveat, I want to note that the landscape in Britain on this issue is very different and also identical, but I had to leave that part out of an already unwieldy newsletter. Maybe I’ll write about it another time, but here’s a link about the Cass report limiting young adult and youth access to trans affirming health care if you’re interested.)

I’ve been meaning to write a newsletter about trans rights since before Sarah McBride, the first trans woman to serve in the US Congress, talked in this interview with Ezra Klein this spring about her perspective on what caused the decline in support for trans rights in recent years after an uptick in support.

It was a pretty heartbreaking interview at the time. I recently revisited it and was reminded a few things she said that were less “blame the activists” than I remembered; she noted this is part of a larger attack related to gender with the hardest impact being on trans people, and she noted the decline in support for gay marriage and women’s rights as well. She said up front: “Candidly, I think we’ve lost the art of persuasion. We’ve lost the art of change-making over the last couple of years. We’re not in this position because of trans people. There was a very clear, well-coordinated, well-funded effort to demonize trans people, to stake out positions on fertile ground for anti-trans politics and to have those be the battlegrounds — rather than some of the areas where there’s more public support. We’re not in this position because of the movement or the community, but clearly what we’ve been doing over the last several years has not been working to stave it off or continue the progress that we were making eight, nine, 10 years ago.” (ital/bold mine)

But she did say that support for trans rights was “soft” and, from her perspective, driven by (a) “well, T’s part of the acronym so I guess I support trans rights,” and (b) fear of being wrong about trans rights in the way they had been wrong about marriage equality. And that those of us involved in LGBTQ+ rights work thought we didn’t need to keep doing the hearts and minds work that had gotten us this far. (She used the phrase “overplayed our hand” in reference to our efforts to shift the culture away from assuming a gender binary instead of focusing on winning specific rights—asking people to use their pronouns made it about them as cis people instead of about the rights of other people, she argued.)

McBride has a job to do that involves a broad array of policies and constituents; trans rights is not the only issue on her docket. In an interview with the New Yorker in December, she talked about right-wing Congresspeople’s efforts to ban her from using the women’s bathroom in the Capitol and noted that wasn’t where she wanted to spend her political capital. She said she would fight for her trans constituents—and for working constituents, and senior constituents—but that she wasn’t going to fight for herself as an individual.

Obviously she is allowed to determine her own place in the policy arena and in relationship to trans rights, particularly in conversation with her constituents. I do think her bothsidesism² is a dangerous myth perpetrated by right-wing media that has been absorbed in unhelpful ways by moderates and even the left. I disagree with her argument that the art of persuasion is and has always been the only means by which just policy has been enacted (and I believe that argument is most often used against people of color after decades of us doing exactly that). But her job isn’t to shape our collective strategy about protecting trans people and trans rights or about shifting the culture regarding trans inclusion. The problem is, for a lot of folks who care about trans rights and aren’t directly plugged into activist spaces, she’s going to be one of the most substantive voices they hear.

I worry about this because McBride’s concerns echo the talking points of so many moderate Democratic pundits (and also many of us) immediately after the 2024 Presidential election; Democrats lost, they said, because the party had ceded their focus on working class people in favor of promoting pronouns and trans people in sports.³ Don’t get me wrong—I agree that the Democratic party has largely ceded their focus on the working class, and that’s been happening since the 1970s or so. But those aren’t mutually exclusive efforts—no matter what the opposition wants to train us to believe, particularly in light of the fact that almost all trans folks want to see more robust worker protections, and no small number of trans people are working class.

So I wanted to take a moment to share some of the information that’s been helping me think about what tools have been pushing for the elimination of trans people (and no, that’s not hyperbole; it’s a stated goal and desired outcome for those most active in anti-trans activism), how they’ve been using those tools, and why (that’s the book report piece). And finally, a little about what I think is a foundational aspect of the success of anti-trans activism that we don’t include in our analysis.

The what, who, how and why of anti-trans tools (on the right and on the supposed left)

The thing McBride alluded to but didn’t focus on was who’s behind the anti-trans agenda and what they’ve been doing. To me, this feels like important content as we assess the landscape in which we work for trans protections and trans rights. Here are a few of the moving pieces I wanted to share (and please add more in the comments—I’d love to revise this to make it more inclusive if that’s helpful).

In 2023, the 5-4 podcast featured a tremendous interview with trans rights expert and journalist Erin Reed—you should definitely listen to it, and here’s the transcript with links at the top to listen. In the interview, Reed talked about the ways in which the Right had been playing whack-a-mole with anti-trans legislation to see which issue (bathrooms, sports, youth, legally mandated gender binaries) would get the most traction with the public. At the time, “parents’ rights” was the hot strategy—children couldn’t ask to go by different pronouns without their parents’ consent.⁴ Some of the episode captured the moment that led to our current moment. This information by Reed is particularly significant:

“In 2015, early 2016, we had the very first bathroom ban. It was... I always, whenever I deliver talks in this law schools and stuff, I always mark this as the beginning of the modern anti-trans legal movement. This was off the back of the Obergefell decision. Gay marriage had just been won and they had to pivot to a new group of people that were in the LGBTQ community to focus on trans people were the main people. And so HB 2 in North Carolina was passed that banned trans people from bathrooms. It never was fully allowed to go into effect. It went into effect, but got challenged, got paused, and there was an outcry because immediately on its passage, NBA All Star game pulled out. PayPal pulled out, Deutsche Bank pulled out. The state lost $3.76 billion over this bill, and no other state wanted to deal with that. And so for four years we saw a complete rejection of anti-trans bills. They tried things, they tried birth certificate bans, more bathroom bans that all failed until around 2020, 2019, 2020. And what we saw is a group of organisations and people essentially get together and plan, they had a new strategy. The American Principles Project was one of the major ones.”

I want to pause here to note that the map of anti-trans legislation and who was driving it came on my radar maybe a couple of years after the beginning of this legislative assault—around late 2022, maybe. That was also when the Alliance Defending Freedom came on my radar, thanks to a major exposé in a posh magazine. I can’t remember it for sure, but here’s a similar article from the New Yorker in 2023 bringing attention to how they were pulling the strings of anti-trans and anti-drag legislation in states across the country with almost identical language. (Reed points out in the 5-4 podcast that you could see the language evolving in subsequent state legislation as earlier versions faced various legal challenges.) The ADF, as a reminder, is from whence House Speaker Mike Johnson emerged. Among their many foci was advocating for sterilization of trans people in Europe.

Reed continues,

“Terry Schilling [of the American Principles Project] actually, you can look up interviews that Terry Schilling had with CNN as well as the New York Times. They don't keep any secrets about this. They monologue it like bond villains. They explain how they're gonna basically eradicate trans people and they tell you exactly how they plan to do it. And so what Terry Schilling had said is that they started with sports and they also started with business-friendly states on the new attempt because they saw what happened in North Carolina. Bathrooms were too far for people. And so if they could get you to accept an asterisk on trans people as their gender identity for one thing, then it's no longer a matter of are you a woman? Are you a man? Period. It's woman with an asterisk or man with an asterisk. And then it's all about taking that asterisk and applying it to a lot of other places in life until all of a sudden you've erased all legal rights for trans people. And so that was the idea. He essentially said that, we're gonna start with sports and sports are an easy way to get the foot in the door.”

Reed also talks about the fake medical organizations created in order to legitimize bad medicine and bad science, which you can check out in the podcast if you’re interested in that aspect of the strategy.

So that’s some of the strategy laid out in a tidy fashion. But I had mentioned that sometimes we have been co-opted into that campaign, with seemingly progressive outlets doing the ADF’s and the APP’s work for them. In May of 2023, journalist Tuck Woodstock was a guest on the “You’re Wrong About” podcast. The title of the episode was “We Need to Talk About the New York Times.”

In it, the host (Sarah Marshall) introduced the subject this way:

[F]or better or worse, the New York Times arguably is the paper of record for the mainstream and left of center United States. And their handling of trans issues, and really gender and sexuality generally, has been consistently horrible. My summary of their discussion of trans rights is basically, “Should trans people exist? Or, should they exist to such an extent? Experts disagree.” And you're just like, [sighs]. That's how I feel about it.

Woodstock jokingly responded,

Yeah. You're totally right. The one thing that I would add is when you're like, “Experts disagree on whether trans people should exist”, it's not really even experts so much as “we found a woman on a forum called, I Hate Trannies.biz, and she says that trans people shouldn't exist.”

When Woodstock was interviewed, he noted that other newspapers have actually put in the effort to doing better in their trans coverage, while the NYT remained (remains) deeply committed to their current practices while denying that they have a negative influence on the discourse regarding trans rights. All of this while NYT articles are regularly quoted in Supreme Court cases to justify curtailing trans rights. I wonder what type of retrenchment Woodstock has observed as the media has struck agreements with the current administration.

Woodstock wanted to bring attention to this particular newspaper, I think, for a couple of reasons. First, many of us tend to defer to the Times as a reliable and responsible reporter of the facts. Secondly, the Times has a repeated pattern on this subject in particular of interviewing someone who is pro-trans and someone who is anti-trans without including actual trans people in the article, and without needing the anti-trans person to come from a particular area of expertise relative to trans healthcare or mental health. This is not a standard they would use on other medical or science-related coverage. Regarding the need to include anti-trans voices for the sake of “representing all sides,” Woodstock said, “What if you were writing a profile on someone named Janet and I was your editor. And I was like, ‘I'm sorry; for balance find someone who wants to kill Janet.’ It's just not how you do things.”

I wanted to share this because it’s important to be aware that in our hypervigilance to be fair and balanced when the right says we’re not, we forget what objectivity and balance actually is, and instead use a measure that was created for us by the right (who are not using the same measure themselves). As a result, the news sources we rely on can do the right’s work for them.

I think Woodstock highlighted why this matters incredibly well with this quote (and I’ll talk more about this in a different newsletter on the need for a free press and the dangers of a less-than-informed press):

The concept of objectivity and balance is noble in a vacuum, but it's being used in manipulative ways to dodge accountability and shield against critiques of power, and just maintain the power of the status quo.

So while we think about who’s shaping the messaging, it’s also important to be aware of who’s carrying it, which is not only sources like Fox News and the Alliance Defending Freedom.

It’s a culture war, and they’re the invading force

At the 2023 Conservative Political Action Committee annual conference, Michael Knowles of conservative outlet the Daily Wire stated that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.” When people and organizations such as Rolling Stone magazine demanded a retraction because the language was genocidal, he responded on his own show that their accusation was wrong, because he wasn’t calling for the elimination of people based on their genes (which Rolling Stone pointed out isn’t how anyone defines genocide); he was demanding the end to coddling a delusion.

I recently heard someone say (possibly Larry Wilmore when he was a guest on Audie Cornish’s show The Assignment but I’m not 100% sure) that policy lives downstream of culture. That’s part of why the strategy of the Right against trans rights has worked on two different fronts. Trans people are estimated to make up between 1 and 3% of the general public (although as more youth recognize gender as a spectrum and identify in gender-diverse ways, that may be a slightly larger number as we approach Gen Alpha). But that means we are less likely to have a lot of direct experiences with trans people and rely more on popular media to help us create a narrative. And our lack of relationship with trans people (according to Paula Ramos, less than 45% of Americans know a single trans person, and one trans person is not enough for an adequate sample of diverse experiences) means we don’t get as many counternarratives from the people most affected by these policies. That creates lots of space to shape the culture that shapes the policies.

The Defectors

Paula Ramos recently wrote a book called The Defectors, in which she studies why certain segments of the Latine community have begun shifting to the right, including the extreme right. As a visibly queer person, Ramos notes that in her research, she has been aware of the discomfort people from her community experience in her presence. She sees this as an effective leverage point regarding the trans community:

“I believe that when the colonized Latino mind contemplates LGBTQ+ people, particularly trans folks, it can become deeply unsettled. People may feel threatened by the disruption of a patriarchal system that has been a source of comfort and pride for centuries. The economy, politics, immigration, racism, and other external factors may be outside of Latinos’ control. But the colonial patriarchal system—with its rigid, fixed, and binary norms—has offered countless Latinos in the U.S. a minimal sense of order and power. The world outside your home may denigrate and disrespect you, but inside you can feel like the man of the house or like the ultimate patriarch. That’s a powerful feeling. The unapologetic presence of queer people in U.S. society produces a sense of loss among some Latinos who feel like the structure they’ve come to expect and depend on is waning.” (p121)

In her second chapter on “the culture warriors,” Ramos lays out how, in the immediate aftermath of the Club Q shooting in Colorado Springs in 2022, a local trans activist there learned from other community members that they were being bombarded by Spanish language flyers about how the Biden administration was “indoctrinating your children to make them believe that biological sex is not real” as well as other flyers with even more horrific lies about forced genital removal and more, as well as Spanish language radio ads with similar anti-trans propaganda in specific Congressional districts. Ramos talks about how on its face the strategy is about gaining a religious voting bloc, but to her mind it is more wrapped up in the reaction of disgust that stops any conversation before it starts.

Here’s the paragraph that has stuck with me since I first read the book several months back:

“Microbiologist and science writer Bryn Nelson argues that attacks like the Club Q massacre and other abuses suffered by the LGBTQ+ community amount to stochastic terrorism, which is uniquely driven by messaging and propaganda that dehumanizes and vilifies a person or a group. Put simply, stochastic terrorism is different from other forms of terrorism in that it is provoked by a gut, visceral feeling and not necessarily by a calculated effort. “At its core,” Nelson wrote, “stochastic terrorism exploits one of our strongest and most complicated emotions: disgust.” Nelson has spent years studying disgust, even writing a book about poop to better understand the emotion and psychology of disgust. He argues that disgust is “even more powerful than fear.” I found this fascinating.” (p136)

Ramos notes that the combined messaging of Moms for Liberty, Proud Boys, Gays against Groomers, and all the Christian nationalists contribute to the dehumanization and contempt and ultimately disgust that creates the landscape for the waves of anti-trans legislation and stochastic terrorism in our midst, and also people’s apathy towards it—the greater the disgust, she learned from scientists she interviewed, the further the person feels from their objects of disgust.

I suspect you have already heard the solid logic and science disputing the right-wing policies around trans bathroom bans, trans athletes, trans youth health access, access to correcting gender markers on legal documents, erasure from history, and gender-exclusionary science curricula. (And if you haven’t, those links take you to the pro-trans cases on each issue in case you’d like more context. I had to use “The Wayback Machine” for the history link since the National Parks were forced to remove trans-inclusive content.)

But disgust short circuits a lot of that information.

Because Ramos is focused on the Latine community, she connects disgust to colonization, and she lifts up organizations like Laboratorio para Vatos, which work on decolonization, and reframing gender and masculinity in healthier ways. For many of us, having conversations about why certain constructions of our gender and expectations and limitations are a place to start, if we’re working to help individuals build out their capacity for compassion. The fine balance, though, is that there are many places we need to confront lies (which is why GLAAD’s journalism fact sheets are so helpful), and that work is different than the small group or individual work to help people escape the web of disgust-reliant messaging that has shifted or hardened people’s tolerance for anti-trans violence (physical, cultural, and legislative).

McBride is right that bridge-building is actually important. Stories are important. Talking to people across difference is important. Treating people who don’t agree with us as potential allies rather than enemies is important. But it’s also important to distinguish between (a) people who are not aware they’ve absorbed right-wing narratives that play on their instincts rather than their reason and (b) the people creating and profiting from those narratives. I believe the information above helps us to do that, without placing an impossible burden on the shoulders of trans people specifically.⁵

Sarah McBride said, “We decided that we now have to say and fight for and push for every single perfect policy and cultural norm right now, regardless of whether the public is ready. And I think it misunderstands the role that politicians and, frankly, social movements have in maintaining proximity to public opinion, of walking people to a place.” I wish she could have heard Rinku Sen at the 22nd Century Initiative conference when she said, “don’t apologize for having won when you’re accused of overreaching.” (You can read more about that talk in an earlier newsletter.) In fact, Sen may have been responding directly if not by name to McBride’s much-discussed interview.

Here’s what I think, when it comes down to it: it is always important in our organizing and policy and culture shift work to evaluate what worked and what didn’t, and what we should try differently. So as we look back and note how easy it has been to overturn some trans legal protections and stop others from going into place, we should absolutely ask why, and how we should adjust our strategy in order to change the culture and the policies.

But when people who pretend they are on our side but say our mistake was in winning, then those aren’t necessarily our partners in organizing. They may be people we need to persuade. They may be people we need to help confront their non-rational disgust reflex. They may be people we need to organize around so that they don’t get in the way of the work either intentionally or because they think they’re being helpful. We need to assess that. But we don’t necessarily have to treat their recommendations as a guiding force for our work. And too many of us (myself included) have been sucked into that trap, especially in the days immediately following the 2024 election.

One or two concrete actions:

This issue calls on us to do two different things: get unstuck from the framing that folks like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Daily Wire have imposed on us, and start talking with folks who don’t realize they’re functioning out of that same framework, and who maybe don’t see why trans rights are connected to their rights. Also, for those of us with a voice in staff meetings or parents’ groups or religious organizations or other group spaces, we need to learn how to help people wrestle with the cognitive dissonance between their apathy, or their ick-response, and their actual beliefs about basic human rights.

Alec Karakatansis, whose

Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter

has recently become a book, notes that the people most susceptible to things like “copaganda” (the subliminal messaging in the media that promotes support for increased surveillance and incarceration) are middle class liberals, because we rely on the news to inform us more than other groups, we have been trained to have opinions about things, and we believe ourselves to bring more critical analysis to what we read than we actually do. (Guilty on all three—and it’s worth noting he says the first two are not bad things, but we need to get better at the third one.) In a subscriber-only edition of the 5-4 Podcast, Karakatansis also noted one of the best ways to build out our critical analysis about dominant narratives in the news: discussing what we read in groups. This may sound simple, but it’s important to build out our critical thinking skills in relationship to things like copaganda and also, it turns out, things like trans inclusion. The reason this works is that a group can often surface more than two ideas—and getting beyond the either-or can get us unstuck in our thinking and analysis. (I particularly love this in light of the fact that people who don’t identify as male or female—nonbinary folks—technically fall under the trans umbrella, and we are kind of the symbols of a third way of thinking. :) )

Karakatansis also noted the important role of long-form news that provides greater context instead of soundbytes. This is part of why for information on trans rights, I follow

Erin Reed

’s substack—Erin is considered one of the best journalists on trans issues in the US. (I quoted her earlier in this newsletter.)

There’s certainly more, but this newsletter is already way too long (and I’m doing a separate newsletter on the media. I hope you’ll include additional thoughts and resources in the comments.

I want to close with the best short-form strategy I’ve heard so far about (and this will be part of a future newsletter). This summer I got to learn from some amazing folks with the Amazon workers’ campaign. During Q&A something came up about trans rights. One of the workers was ex-military and formerly a FOX News viewer before getting political education as part of the worker campaign. He said, “I’m sick and tired of this.” I braced myself for the same thing I’d been hearing from pundits and politicians and even friends, about how trans issues had taken the place of worker justice and that was the problem with the left. Instead he said, “Why are people trying to force me to get mad at 1% of people who are doing me no actual harm when there’s a different 1%, billionaires, who are actively ruining my life?” And as far as a quick response to a massive wedge issue, I’m 100% here for it.

Grateful we get to figure this stuff out together,

Sandhya

1. BTW, I learned about the book from the author’s interview on the Daily Show, so if you want to check out the interview that got me interested, here it is.

2. acting as if both the far left and far right are equivalent

3. Note: in 2016 it was because we had talked too much about how Black Lives Matter instead of focusing on working class people. I do wish that the moderate pundits had to wear outfits like race cars where you knew who was paying them, but that’s maybe another newsletter. But spoiler alert: they don’t by and large actually care about working class people.

4. Now, if parents requested that change but a teacher didn’t want to use the new pronouns, parents’ rights did not trump teachers’ first amendment rights, apparently. But consistency is the hobgoblin of coherent progressive public policy.

5. In fact, I was struck in Anand Giridharadas’s The Persuaders how the initial well-documented research study on deep canvassing used the issue of trans rights in LA, but often with gay and lesbian canvassers rather than trans people themselves. That said, I know some reproductive rights canvassers have had success sharing their own reproductive justice experiences in deep canvassing work. For more on deep canvassing as a policy shift strategy, check out this solid summary.