“A Shameful Chapter”: How Anti-Trans Disinformation Drowned Out Science and Gripped the Mainstream
A pipeline of pseudoscience funded by powerful right-wing hate groups has undermined medical truths with the help of big media. “A shameful chapter,” a critic said.
by Billie Jean Sweeney
When Michelle Cretella appeared on a video-cast produced by the Family Research Council earlier this month, she accused trans people of promoting an “ideology” driven by profit and argued that the “secular world” was determined to upend traditional values.
They were familiar talking points for Cretella, an architect of the right wing’s assault on trans people and, more broadly, on abortion rights, gay rights and bodily autonomy. Her appearance on a program hosted by a group known for its promotion of junk science and false claims about queer people, was in keeping with her decade-long role as a spokesperson for intolerance on the hard edges of the right wing.
The host of the video-cast, Tony Perkins, introduced Cretella as “doctor” and identified her as the “chairman of the adolescent sexuality committee” for an official-sounding organization of pediatricians.
The problem is, the organization, the American College of Pediatricians, is an extremist political group devoted to a religious right agenda that opposes same-sex marriage and abortion rights and promotes conversion therapy. It’s traded on an “aura of medical authority as Mother Jones put it in 2023, to pump out political statements and court briefs.
Cretella has traded on that same aura. Licensure records in Rhode Island, where she first practiced, show that her medical license expired in 2020. In Connecticut, licensure records show that she was at least briefly affiliated with a practice there, but that her license was “inactive.” Cretella is not listed as a pediatrician in any nationwide certification database.
Her lasting prominence offers a window into the reach and coordination of right-wing lobbying groups, their determination to spread medical disinformation to promote political goals, and their success in getting that message adopted in mainstream media — not simply in friendly outlets like Fox but in emerging power centers like the Free Press, and even traditional media like The New York Times.
This pipeline of disinformation, which has elevated extremist views and undercut medical science, has had devastating effects on hundreds of thousands of trans Americans, most acutely young people, and their families.
“People are scared,” said Arielle Rebekah, a survivor of conversion therapy whose advocacy organization specializes in trans issues. “Young people are losing access to surgeries or losing access to hormones, and they are distraught.” Even in progressive areas, they noted, care is being interrupted by institutions fearful of the Trump administration.
What has vanished in the wave of disinformation? For one, the perspective of trans people themselves. “Why are we not talking about how young people know themselves best? Young people deserve the right to be who they are,” Rebekah said.
“It's been a shameful chapter,” said Kyle Pope, who was editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review for seven years. As the hard right’s message has been integrated into the mainstream, the obligation to incorporate empathy in news coverage has often been disregarded. “What does this mean for people who are not like you?” he asked. “Where are the people you’re covering? Who are you writing for?”
“The right became very comfortable with the whole idea of ideological journalism,” Pope said, even as other big national outlets grew shy of “calling out injustice in a way I found surprising and perplexing — and not really doing what the press is all about.”
Pope, who now leads a non-profit focused on climate change journalism, said the deterioration of the nation’s once large and vibrant network of highly trusted local news organizations, coupled with the corporatization of big outlets, has “solidified the sense that national media is part of the ruling class.”
“I think it’s had a profound effect on the coverage,” he said, “and not in a good way.”
“Young people are losing access to surgeries or losing access to hormones, and they are distraught.”
It’s unclear why Cretella allowed her license to expire, although renewing a license ordinarily requires continuing education to stay abreast of current practices.
As recently as last year, Cretella submitted written testimony to the Connecticut General Assembly, twice, in opposition to gender-affirming care, in one case identifying herself as a “pediatrician consultant.” In the other, she used the letterhead of the “College of Pediatricians” to say the “state must not protect physicians who harm children.”
She did not respond to queries from Assigned Media, submitted through the right-wing organization with which she has been most recently affiliated, the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Integrity, or to messages sent to the practice that Connecticut records identified as being her most recent professional affiliation.
Practicing physicians are typically barred by law or ethics from using a medical title if they do not have a valid license, but such prohibitions would not necessarily apply to those with medical degrees who are acting in other capacities, such as political advocacy.
For someone with such a high public profile, remarkably little has been reported about Cretella’s own credentials. The website Trans Advocate reported in 2018 that she did not have a valid license at that time either. In a video produced five years ago by the trans rights group, Essence of Thought, Cretella said in a clip she had chosen to focus on advocacy over clinical practice.
But few of the questions over her certification or licensing have broken through into mainstream news coverage, where she is typically identified as “Dr. Cretella” and a pediatrician, as The Hartford Courant did in reporting on her testimony to the Connecticut legislature last year.
What has been well-documented — by Wired, Mother Jones and The Washington Post — was Cretella’s central role in providing hard-right groups, notably the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom, with pseudoscientific arguments and the guise of medical respectability in their campaign against transgender and abortion rights.
In effect, the American College of Pediatricians became a junior if highly important partner in the effort to tear down established rights over bodily autonomy during Cretella’s tenure as president in the late 2010s.
Despite its clinical-sounding name, the group is devoted to hard-line conservative political advocacy. It supports conversion therapy, for example, a notoriously homophobic practice that is widely banned, and it opposes vaccine mandates, sex education and parental rights for queer people. It has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
This “college” has not only been wildly out of step with medical consensus on a range of societal issues, its media clout has extended far beyond its actual professional heft: A membership database leaked as part of a trove of documents in 2023 reflected the group had just 700 members, according to Wired, which first reported the leak.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the leading mainstream professional group, has 67,000 members by comparison. It supports gender-affirming care for young people, as does every other major medical group in the country.
But on a topic poorly understood by the general public and ripe for exploitation by political groups, Cretella and her group understood that disinformation, reframing the terms of the debate to focus on “protection” of children against a “radical secular ideology,” was the key. Right-wing media cited the group more than 200 times between 2016-23, The Washington Post reported.
“Disinformation is not just an academic exercise,” said Kellan E. Baker, executive director of the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the nonprofit Whitman-Walker.
“This isn't just a question of science versus pseudoscience, though of course that is very important for us as a society and for the practice of medicine. It's important that there are measurable, determinable facts in the world about what type of health care helps.”
“But there are also any number of young people, families and health care providers fleeing states that have active bans,” he said in an interview with Assigned Media. “And you have many, many young people and their families trapped because this is also an issue of racial and economic justice. Not everyone can move.”
“You have many, many young people and their families trapped because this is also an issue of racial and economic justice. Not everyone can move”
By February 2021, Cretella was a headline panelist at the Heritage Foundation’s “Promise to America’s Children.” During the virtual meeting, she characterized gender dysphoria as a “passing phase” reflective of confusion, or more ominously, as indicative of “an underlying psychopathology.” Among her colorfully inflammatory assertions, she called gender affirming care “institutionalized child abuse” involving “toxic drugs and mutilating surgeries.”
Her group began lobbying intensively in state legislatures against gender affirming care, gaining its first big victory just two months later when Arkansas became the first state to restrict care for young people. By June of this year, the number had grown to 27, leaving 40 percent of young trans people without care, the nonpartisan health policy group KFF reported.
Cretella would leave her group in late 2021, describing feeling burned out, but the biased and highly charged lexicon she promoted had taken root with hard-right politicians and a network of influential and well-financed conservative groups.
Most notable among those groups was the Alliance Defending Freedom, which had taken the courtroom lead in bringing anti-trans litigation. It was just a short step from the ADF’s press releases and court filings to mainstream media coverage.
The ADF is the “most influential arm” of the conservative Christian movement, The New Yorker’s David Kirkpatrick wrote in a 2023 investigative report. The group had won a string of Supreme Court victories, most notably the overturning of Roe v Wade, but also rulings that restrict birth control and codify a right to discriminate against gay people.
In its press releases and court briefs, the ADF has crafted attacks on a broad range of civil rights, lauding, for example, the “demise” of diversity, equality and inclusion efforts. In a case reflecting both its extreme agenda and international ambitions, it went before the European Court of Human Rights to defend state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people.
This hard-right activism has often found a receptive audience in traditional conservative media like The National Review, which published a piece by one of the group’s top executives that called same-sex marriage protections in Virginia “a radical and novel gender-identity agenda.”
But more important, an Assigned Media analysis revealed, the ADF found a powerful friend in the emergent Free Press, an outlet backed by the right-wing venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and edited by the culture warrior Bari Weiss.
The Free Press helped rev up the ADF’s campaign against trans people in late 2021, when it provided the anti-trans author and staunch ADF ally Abigail Schrier a platform for a 3,500-word, grievance-filled screed against “gender ideology.” Weiss gave the ADF another big lift in spring 2023, repeatedly championing a supposed whistleblower, Jamie Reed, whose reckless claims about transgender health care were unsubstantiated and ultimately debunked.
The ripple effect was soon felt more broadly as The New York Times, whose publisher AG Sulzberger has been eager to court the same conservative audience as Weiss’s, raced to publish its own, deeply flawed version of the “whistleblower” story just months later.
Far beyond that, Assigned Media’s review has found, the Times and the ADF have struck a symbiotic relationship.
In March of this year, soon after the Times published an article that was harshly critical of Planned Parenthood, the ADF published a piece on its own site that asked, “Did The New York Times Just Make the Case for Defunding Planned Parenthood?”
The ADF-New York Times echo stretches back several years, our review found. In June 2022, for example, the Times attacked gender-inclusive language in a piece that demonized trans people, while quoting none. Just weeks later, the ADF wrote that the use of what it termed “preferred pronouns” had “vast implications for free speech.”
New York Times articles have been cited in ADF press releases and its other publications 35 times from Jan. 1, 2021, through today, nearly four times more than any other mainstream publication, our review found. Even Fox News, with six ADF citations, is far outpaced by the Times.
This close relationship with a hard-right litigant in the culture wars has pulled The New York Times ever further from journalism into a form activism itself: New York Times stories were cited 29 times in amicus briefs filed by a broad range of right-wing groups supporting Tennessee’s ban on youth gender-affirming care, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in June.
The Times rolled out an assembly line of tendentious stories in the aftermath of the ruling in the case, US v Skrimetti, but the harshest external criticism of its coverage has centered on a 11,000-word magazine story, which mimicked the ADF’s legal arguments and talking points. One passage, asserting that “the gender of a gender-fluid person might shift from hour to hour” hews closely to the complaints in an ADF piece last year of all those “new words like genderqueer and non-binary.”
More insidious, though, was the medical science disinformation the Times slipped into the piece, falsely asserting that trans health care raised “novel issues” because it could “require lifelong treatment.” The ADF used this same loaded framing in its court filings in Skrimetti.
Labeling gender affirming care “novel,” while a useful tactic for a litigant, is a false assertion that would not ordinarily slip through an unbiased new organization’s vetting process. Estrogen has been in use for gender dysphoria since the 1950s. The prescription of puberty blockers and testosterone has also been used for decades with wide medical consensus.
The recklessness of calling “lifelong treatment” a novelty has even wider ramifications in an era in which the Trump administration is undermining medical science and gutting Medicaid in ways that go far beyond transgender healthcare. The vaccines and boosters that have ensured the health of generations of Americans are under attack by the administration, while the benefits of anti-depressants have been perversely distorted.
Among the decidedly un-novel conditions that may require “lifelong care”: High blood pressure, thyroid disorders, myasthenia gravis, diabetes, heart disease, gout, perimenopause, Crohn’s disease, cholesterol, asthma, hemophilia, HIV, epilepsy, eosinophilic esophagitis, glaucoma, ADHD, immunosuppressants, organ transplant treatments and estrogen treatment for cis women.
The right wing’s campaign of pseudoscience reached a further inflection point with this month’s Federal Trade Commission workshop on the “dangers” of gender affirming care.
“It was government-sponsored disinformation,” said Baker, of Whitman-Walker. “Typically these workshops are very carefully organized so they bring together a variety of different perspectives. At this one, though, every participant was essentially a professional advocate for anti-transgender disinformation.”
It came on top of a slapdash report on gender-affirming care issued in May by the Department of Health and Human Services that broke nearly every professional standard of research – from cherry-picking evidence to support a preordained outcome to failing to disclose its authorship. “It too was a very clear example of a fringe pseudoscientific agenda being cloaked in the veneer of authority,” Baker said. (An anti-trans campaigner later disclosed that he was among the co-authors.)
State bans on gender-affirming care, Baker noted, have typically had three bias-driven carveouts: allowing the very same medications to be prescribed to cis young people; permitting nonconsensual surgeries on intersex infants and children; and restricting mental health referrals to limit what a provider can do, thus opening a door to conversion therapy.
“The idea,” Baker said, “is that you as a therapist come into the room with a predetermined outcome and you proceed to force that outcome on the patient.”
“Typically these workshops are very carefully organized so they bring together a variety of different perspectives. At this one, though, every participant was essentially a professional advocate for anti-transgender disinformation”
For many on the right wing, most prominently the ADF, resurrecting the long-discredited practice of conversion therapy is a top priority.
Conversion therapy, which right-wing groups have tried to rebrand as “reparative therapy,” has maintained its grip across wide swaths of the United States, particularly in the South and Midwest, despite harmful, homophobic and unethical techniques that have been condemned by every mainstream medical association in the nation.
Although more than 20 states have outlawed its practice, a December 2023 report published by the Trevor Project identified 1,320 conversion therapy practitioners across the United States, nearly half of whom hold active professional licenses.
As its report noted, conversion therapy “emanates from false and outdated notions that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer LGBTQ people are unnatural and suffer from mental illnesses that need to be ‘cured.’”
“The whole point of these programs is to indoctrinate young people, and undermine your sense of identity as a trans person,” said Rebekah whose advocacy today is inspired by their experiences at a boarding school that used cruel, coercive and manipulative tactics.
The school’s administrators would conduct exhausting, days-long pseudo-therapy sessions intended to shame young people, Rebekah recalled in an interview with Assigned Media. Sleep was restricted, eating was restricted, contact with parents was monitored.
“They would show me baby pictures of myself and ask me why I wanted to let that little boy down, and where is that little boy inside me,” Rebekah said. “Their whole framework was that I was trying to be lovable by saying I was trans because I didn't feel lovable as a man.”
Tearing down one’s self-worth was central to the tactics. They recalled being forced to write a five-page essay “about how no matter what, I would never be a complete man or a complete woman. And I just had to accept that.”
Only one outcome was acceptable, Rebekah said. “Unless I stopped saying I was trans, unless I stopped talking about it in therapy, I was not allowed to graduate from the program.”
Cretella, the one-time president of the “pediatricians college,” found a new home with a purveyor of this disreputable tactic, the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Integrity, where she served as a board member and delivered its keynote address in November 2023.
P-Flag has described this group “as a new name for an old organization: the National Association for Research and Therapy for Homosexuality” and said “While the name has changed, the mission —to promote the antiquated view that homosexuality is a mental disorder, and to promote the use of reparative therapy — remains the same.”
The Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Integrity calls its version of conversion therapy, SAFE-Therapy, and it identifies one of its "partners" as “Michelle Cretella MD.” For $40 people can buy a single video of Cretella or a series of videos for $250.
Those who “complete” the full course are promised a “certificate” and “badge.”
Billie Jean Sweeney (she/her) is a trans woman who is a freelance editor, reporter and advocate. She helped direct international news coverage for The New York Times and coverage of New York City for The Associated Press. She also served as editorial director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where she advocated for international press freedom and journalist safety. At The Hartford Courant she led an award-winning investigation into the deadly use of restraints in mental health institutions, which led Congress to enact nationwide reforms.