Merging Pseudoscience and Politics

The anti-LGBTQ+ Movement is known for divisive political tactics. For example, anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns led by the National Organization for Marriage attempted to use religion to pit people of color against LGBTQ+ people in a racialized version of the “divide and conquer” strategy.[36] In 2022, anti-LGBTQ+ organizations, including the American Principles Project - whose founder, Robert P. George, is associated with Heritage Foundation, Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, American Enterprise Institute, and Center for Urban Renewal and Education--targeted Black and Spanish-speaking voters with conspiratorial campaign ads designed to stoke division and anti-trans animus.[37] The anti-LGBTQ+ movement is also known for trying to split the LGBTQ+ community by extolling “ex-gay” groups like Liberty Counsel’s (whose leader, Matt Staver, serves on CURE’s board with George) “Change is Possible” campaign, which has promoted stories from LGBTQ+ people who claim to no longer be LGBTQ+ thanks to conversion therapy programs.[38]

Neither Kilgannon’s comment at the 2017 Value Voter Summit nor ACPed’s 2018 board meeting are the first time the divide and conquer strategy of targeting transgender rights to split the LGBTQ+ community was discussed. Earlier in 2017, it came to light that the group Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF), founded by Lierre Keith to advocate an exclusionary anti-trans interpretation of feminism,[39] had employed a media firm associated with the anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-abortion group Focus on the Family.

In 2016, WOLF received a donation from Alliance Defending Freedom to support its lawsuit against the Obama Administration‘s Title IX guidance advancing transgender rights in education.[40] In 2021, ADF’s largess had grown to $50,000, funding WOLF’s work related to ”religious liberty.”[41] In 2022, the group partnered with the Independent Women’s Forum to author the ”Women’s Bill of Rights,” a document that serves as ”model legislation” to codify binary sex identity in state laws with the effect of excluding trans people from sports, public accommodations and civil rights statutes.[42] Among other politicians, the document was signed by Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt – the state where David Bullard introduced the ”Millstone Act” in 2023.

At the 2017 FRC summit, Kilgannon cited the formation of the anti-trans group Hands Across the Aisle Coalition (HATAC) as an example of effectively weaponizing lesbian and feminist voices against transgender rights.[43] HATAC worked with WOLF and Concerned Women for America in 2019 to oppose the Equality Act in the U.S. Congress because it included protections for transgender people. In 2017, the Heritage Foundation hosted a panel called “Biology Isn’t Bigotry: Why Sex Matters in the Age of Gender Identity.” That panel featured HATAC co-founder and lesbian activist Miriam Ben-Shalom and other speakers who veiled anti-transgender comments in feminist rhetoric.

At one point during the proceedings, another HATAC co-founder, Kaeley Triller Haver, whose group Just Want Privacy Campaign was accused of exploiting a sexual assault survivor’s story to promote anti-transgender legislation,[44] seemingly spoke to the discontinuity between promoting lesbian rights and attacking transgender rights. Haver noted that Ben-Shalom is “here at the Heritage Foundation, which I’m guessing is probably not all that comfortable,” and praised the lesbian rights activist for arguing against trans rights. In 2018, the Heritage Foundation also published an article promoting division within the LGBTQ+ Movement in the United Kingdom over transgender rights, celebrating that the movement was “on the brink of schism.”

Like the “ex-gay” approach, anti-LGBTQ+ groups have partnered with or co-opted the voices of LGBTQ+ people who deny transgender rights, or even that transgender people exist. In another Heritage-sponsored panel arguing against transgender rights in 2019, the group featured detransitioner Hacsi Horvath on a panel billed as feminists “from the left.”[45] The group Genspect administers a ”Beyond Trans” program to pair transgender people with conversion therapists and to recruit detransitioners to write for their blog and make video content for the group.

Anti-LGBTQ+ groups are quick to platform people who are willing to use their experiences to limit the rights of others while obscuring the overwhelming evidence that supports gender-affirming health care and social acceptance of transgender people.[46] Despite the far-right platforming of anti-transgender detransitioners and the promotion of ROGD and the desistence myth, for example, transgender identification has increased following the removal of barriers to accessing care, which keeps many trans people closeted. While some people may detransition (about 13%), the experience is nowhere near the rate anti-LGBTQ+ groups imply.[47] Of those who do detransition, nearly eight-in-ten say social barriers to “living authentically” inform their decision to detransition, not that they are no longer transgender.[48]

In the past three years, these aspects of the “divide and conquer” strategy continue to produce division as a budding movement of right-wing LGBTQ+-identified activists emerge online to promote the claim that transgender people and LGBTQ+ people who support them are counterfeits or threaten the rights and progress of the gay and lesbian movement.

Although anti-transgender (and anti-lesbian) ideologies have previously emerged from within left-leaning feminist movements,[49] the fervency of groups like Women’s Liberation Front (WOLF), and newer groups like Gays Against Groomers (GAG), Genspect, and LGB Alliance lend legitimacy to anti-transgender demonization and conspiracy theories especially among right-wing groups because they appear to be whistleblowers – people who are seemingly ”telling the truth,“ despite pressure to ignore what they see as wrongs.

The groups push pseudoscience to advocate against gender-affirming health care and, in the case of GAG, have dubbed LGBTQ+ people who support trans rights “groomers.”

GAG’s founder, Jaimee Michell, said her anti-trans activism is intended to stem the tide of attacks on gays and lesbians. In this truly utilitarian calculation, the needs of transgender people, who are fewer in number than LGB people in the United States, can be sacrificed during a time of moral panic by more privileged LGB people who view the trans community as a threat to their rights.[50] This internalization of the “divide and conquer” perspective assumes that anti-LGBTQ+ extremists will be content to simply stop contesting gay and lesbian rights once transgender people are suppressed. Most are not.[51]

GAG has also explicitly linked their false claims to racialized fears that “transing” is targeting white children, specifically. Former GAG “Ambassador” Sara Higdon, who is also sometimes listed as the communications director for Trans Against Groomers, has claimed that trans identity is likely to develop among “upper middle class white kids of progressive parents” (even though trans people are more likely to identify as Latinx).[52] Higdon also claims “critical theory” in schools has “conditioned” these white children to believe they are an “oppressor” and that the only way to “escape” their oppressed status is to “join an oppressed class” by identifying as transgender.[53]

In a blog post published on February 19, 2023, GAG Washington leader Alex Chrostowski continues this line of thought, claiming that “there seems to be a perverse race to the bottom” in which students seek to “prove their own claims about how ‘disadvantaged’ they are” by feigning mental illness and displaying “increasingly disruptive attitudes or behaviors in class.” These behaviors are brought about, Chrostowski claims, by access to information and a permissive social climate which “celebrates any divergence from the norm, ie [sic] white, straight, cisgender” and treats whiteness and heterosexuality as "if they are to be barely tolerated.”[54]

Like U.S. Senator John Kennedy, the group has also conflated drag performances, the satirical send up of restrictive gender roles and transgender affirmation, although GAG has cited both as evidence of the sexualization of children and threats to gay and lesbian rights. Chris Barrett, the leader of the group’s Missouri chapter, testified in support of a Tennessee ban on public drag performances by claiming that “exposing children to drag” is “making gay people look bad” and “hurting our reputation.” However, events like drag story hours teach reading skills and tolerance but are frequently targeted by right-wing violence that actually endangers children.[55]

In addition to rallying with the hate group Proud Boys[56] and antigovernment groups affiliated with the Three Percenters movement, Moms for Liberty, Moms for America, Parents Defending Education and Mom Army, GAG has welcomed praise from anti-Muslim activists.[57] Media Matters has reported that GAG’s founders and staff have a right-wing pedigree of employment and affiliations, including connections to former Trump advisor Steve Bannon and groups like Turning Point USA, which boosted the profile of anti-trans personality Riley Gaines.[58]

Michell also serves on the advisory board of Mom Army with the founder of the antigovernment group Purple for Parents, and Landon Starbuck, leader of the group Freedom Forever, whose complaint about a college drag performance led one Tennessee university to ban a campus LGBTQ+ group from holding future events.[59] The report also suggests GAG’s promotion of anti-transgender rhetoric represents an attempt to profit from the “divide and conquer” strategy as much as an ideological crusade.[60]

Other groups like Genspect, LGB Alliance, Moral Revolution and its Changed Project are multi-national organizations that claim to represent LGBTQ+ (and “ex-gay”) people and their interests. However, such groups disseminate anti-transgender rhetoric and pseudoscience and advocate conversion therapy, globally. For example, despite an advisory board full of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscientists and conversion therapists, Genspect bills itself as a “team” of parent’s groups, trans people and detransitioners, rather than a reactionary anti-trans organization with deep ties to the American Religious Right and numerous anti-LGBTQ hate groups.