Quinnehtukqut McLamore , Kat Fuller

Original Article

Beck Corby

This article argues that transphobic disinformation is strengthened by structural ignorance about transgender identities and experiences. While disinformation is often defined as intentional spread of false information, a narrow focus on intent obscures the role of structural oppression in producing both knowledge and ignorance about transgender communities. This article analyzes disinformation appearing in Brandt v. Rutledge, a US court case addressing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors in Arkansas, to argue that anti-trans experts leverage gaps in legitimate research about trans people to produce disinformation. For example, fearmongering about the rapid growth of trans youth populations relies on the longstanding historical invisibility of trans people in survey data that assumes a male/female binary. Similarly, disinformation about transition as decreasing quality of life draws on pathologizing research frames that emphasize suffering, thus producing structural ignorance about transgender joy. Understanding ignorance as structural implies a need to shift strategies for correcting disinformation. While critiquing disinformation is necessary, mitigating the harm of false claims also requires grappling with the impact of oppression on “legitimate” knowledge production.

Original Article

Lydia Channon , Nicola Mathieson

How has transphobia entered mainstream discourse and media? And can the detection of mainstreamed transphobic content be automated? We argue that transphobia on social media platforms has undergone a process of “mainstreaming” that actively transformed historically fringe and extreme narratives so that content no longer appears taboo or inappropriate. Consequently, the mainstreaming of hate speech presents unique challenges for its detection and removal from social media platforms. This paper introduces a content classifier designed to identify transphobic content online and categorize the emergent mainstreamed narratives that currently typify transphobic content. To test the classifier, we utilize an original dataset of over 49,000 comments from five YouTube channels known to post transphobic content and identify nine mainstreamed transphobic narratives that fall below content moderation policies.

Alyssa Hasegawa Smith , Sagar Kumar , Yukun Yang , Pranav Goel

Mainstream news outlets set the agenda and terms of discussion for public discourse. As transgender people experience increasingly vitriolic attacks on their fundamental rights in the US, understanding the dynamics governing media discussions of transgender people becomes even more salient. Intermedia agenda-setting theory suggests that the interplay between news outlets with different geographical scopes—national and local—is an important aspect of media discourse circulation. We analyze this interplay by leveraging a mixed methods approach, employing a combination of causal inference methods and critical discourse analysis to determine whether, and how, transgender discourses spread across local and national media. We find that transgender discourses on a particular topic propagate from national to state-level outlets; however, this process often involves two steps: national outlets influence particular state(s), which, in turn, influence the other states. Therefore, local outlets play a more complex role in agenda-setting for transgender discourses than previously thought. We conclude by presenting recommendations for interventions to reduce transphobic misinformation and uplift transgender voices in the US news ecosystem.

Chris Jingchao Ma , Heng Simone Wang

Trans-antagonism and transmisogyny have gained increasing visibility on social media globally. In this article, we explore how trans-antagonism and transmisogyny have developed among Chinese feminist communities, called jijin nüquan (“radical feminists”) on Chinese social media. We argue that the trans-antagonism and transmisogyny displayed on Chinese social media must be understood through a historical and transnational lens in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of it. We contend that the increasing policing of queer feminist organizations has confined all feminists to social media spaces where misinformation and disinformation are widely circulated, contributing to the trans-antagonistic views widely held by jijin nüquan feminists. Using case studies from Douban, one of the primary social media platforms used by jijin nüquan feminists for mobilization, we examine how the politics of translation—specifically, the histories of translating the concepts of sex, gender, and trans into Chinese—have contributed to jijin nüquan feminists’ trans-antagonistic views. Finally, we investigate how the trans-antagonistic trope of trans women invading women’s bathrooms has localized trans-antagonism into a particular form of transmisogyny. Through this analysis, we call for a rethinking of the process of transnational knowledge production and the political coalition between trans, queer, and feminist movements in contemporary China.

Gina Gwenffrewi

In the backlash against trans rights in the UK since the late 2010s, the LGB Alliance has been implicated as a leading exponent of the new moral panic, typified by its newspaper campaign against GRA reform, “Self-ID Gives Predators the Green Light.” My article analyses evidence of the LGB Alliance’s pattern of anti-trans campaigning, before demonstrating via a content analysis and close textual reading of four national newspapers how outlets in the UK legacy media have been boosting its public profile, at the expense of larger, more established LGBTQI+ charities such as Stonewall. My findings reveal how the UK legacy media coverage reflects the “strong hegemony” model conceptualized by Gitlin, in which the legacy media undermines already-disempowered social movements and portrays them as a danger to the public, a dynamic exemplified by the contrasting coverage of the groups that support and oppose trans rights. This “strong hegemony: model in turn reflects UK-based political structures in which the advocacy groups of disempowered communities must struggle for influence against counter-groups like the LGB Alliance, which represent “social movement(s) from above… seeking to defend or enhance dominant power structures” (Aked 2023, 16).

PB Berge , Madison Schmalzer

Following the closure of the anti-trans subreddit r/GenderCritical, gender critical (GC) internet users have migrated to more obscure, invite-only spaces. A side-effect of this GC dispersal is that activity in online anti-trans spaces has become increasingly obfuscated and insular. In this project, we provide an overview of the current landscape of GC activity on social media as it exists in the post-r/GenderCrticial era and analyze how GCs are radicalized in forums online. Using computationally-assisted discourse analysis, we examine how users on two anti-trans community forums—Ovarit and Mumsnet’s Feminism: Sex and Gender board—condition members to interact with trans people and reshape their own identities. The study is presented in two parts. First, we expose how GCs discursively position themselves as victim-aggressors, framing GC ideology as a marginalized identity while deploying far-right language and rhetoric. Second, we demonstrate how GC forum users narrativize their own lives through anti-trans storytelling practices, appropriate the language of queer identities through “coming out” narratives, and encourage anti-trans abuse through dramatized “encounter” stories. Through these disciplined discursive practices, we argue, GC forum posters remediate anti-trans ideology as personal and epistemic, further entrenching them in organized transphobia and rendering them increasingly dependent on GC communities.

Gabriel Knott-Fayle

Contemporary gender debates have crystallized in and around sport. The discrimination of transgender people is particularly potent in sport due to the relentless male/female categorization and the consistent somatic inspection. Whilst the role of cisgenderism—that is, the systemic discrimination of transgender people—has been explored in relation to legacy media and sporting policies, little has been written on how it functions in online sports talk. In this article, online posts about transgender athletes are examined using feminist discourse analysis. The analysis highlights three important discursive patterns related to misinformation and conspiracy theories. Firstly, a “Confused Medicalization” spreads misinformation about gender-affirming care and bodily morphology, misgendering and marginalizing the experiences of transgender athletes. Secondly, a “Pseudohistory of Gender Fraud” pathologizes transgender athletes through accusations of cheating to enter women’s sport. Thirdly, these discursive patterns feed into a broader conspiracy theory about a plot to destroy cisgender women’s sport. Fundamentally, these discursive patterns function to exclude and erase transgender athletes as well as obfuscate the workings of cisgenderism.

Walker West Brewer

This study investigates the effects of visual misinformation on attitudes toward transgender inclusion. By examining how exposure to EGI (Elite Gender Inversion) conspiracy theory posts influences individuals’ perceptions of transgender people and related policy opinions, the study highlights the interaction of race and gender in shaping attitudes. Utilizing a factorial design experiment, the research explores how both visual and text-based misinformation affect individuals’ certainty in determining a celebrity’s transgender status. The findings reveal that misinformation, whether visual or text-based, leads to increased uncertainty in determining a celebrity’s gender identity, with visual misinformation having a slightly more pronounced effect on participants’ certainty compared to text-based misinformation. Importantly, the race of the celebrity was found to play a significant role in moderating these effects, with participants displaying varying levels of confidence depending on the racial identity of the celebrity. This highlights how misinformation can exacerbate racialized perceptions of gender. Given the increasing visibility of transgender individuals and the growing impact of misinformation on digital platforms, this study underscores the importance of exploring how racial and gender biases intersect and shape social perceptions, contributing to transphobic assumptions and attitudes.