Anti-Trans Propagandists Are Just Like Donald Trump Crying "Fake News"
The nature of propaganda is to steal language from the truth in order to sew confusion. But sincerity, honesty, and transparency cannot be faked.
by Evan Urquhart
This morning the National Review has a short piece on misinformation in health care. Surely this is understandable. After all, misinformation is something people from all walks of life should be concerned about in a time of pandemic. But what’s this? Oh dear. The premise of this piece is that the real misinformation is coming from the Biden administation’s assistant secretary for health, Dr. Rachel Levine, and that the misinformation consists of her saying that there’s a lot of misinformation around gender affirming care. Ugh. OK. Fine.
Here’s one paragraph that makes up roughly half of this dumb micro-piece:
The article actully so short it doesn’t even take the time to explain what Levine’s job is (although it finds the space to misgender and deadname her). It’s basically “I know you are but what am I” with barely enough sentences to say that much. It’s also a useful starting place for discussing how propagandists use language, including the very language other people are using to try and raise the alarm about propaganda itself.
To understand how this plays out think, for just a moment, about the phrase fake news. If your primary association with the phrase in 2022 is that it’s the meaningless insult Donald Trump uses to insult the mainstream press, I wouldn’t be surprised. But that wasn’t always the case.
In the lead up to Trump’s election in 2016 as well as in the first few years of his presidency, fake news was intended literally. It meant hoaxes. It was used primarily to describe websites that looked like news sites, but presented made-up stories as true to drive engagement. Unfortunately this became a partisan issue because Donald Trump and his supporters were more often than not the people who were susceptible to believing and propagating hoaxes. This led “fake news” to be associated with criticism of Trump’s willingness to promote false stories and urban myths as truth. The famously thin-skinned former president then adopted the phrase… and proceeded to denude it of all meaning. Still, the underlying criticism of Trump’s relationship to the truth has remained, with the cry of “fake news” towards a piece of journalism Trump disliked itself becoming one more of his many false or misleading claims.
The National Review, it seems, is trying to pull off a Trumpian reimagining of the word misinformation, claiming that “gender affirming care” is the real misinformation because it’s a euphamism for sterilization and mutilation. Let’s take a moment and break down what that would mean.
If gender affirming care was a euphamism for sterilization, then it would involve sterilization. However, most gender affirming procedures do not. The trans community has never made sterilization a requirement for being trans, and activism on behalf of trans people who do not wish to undergo sterilizing durgeries has often been controversial. In some countries very harsh legal frameworks require trans people to undergo sterilization before they can legally change their sex, and this is vehemently opposed by supporters of trans rights. Therefore, gender affirming care is not a euphamism for sterilization, full stop.
The other word used by the author is “mutilaton.” This one is can’t fully be parsed as factual or not. Mutilation refers to damage. If conservatives feel that trans people’s bodies are damaged when we obtain surgeries to look more cis-normative, I suppose they’re entitled to that opinion, but it’s not exactly a fact. To the extent that facts could support a person thinking of gender affirming surgeries as mutilation it would have to be by showing there was no medical benefit to such surgeries, only harm. All the medical evidence I’m aware of says the polar opposite. In fact, affirming surgeries are better studied and have more robust evidence in favor of them than hormone therapy does, although most trans people who have surgery also use hormone therapy so it’s very difficult to seperate the two.
So clearly, under the guise of decrying misinformation in health care, the National Review’s writer is introducing misinformation by conflating gender affirming care with sterilization and mutilation. If right wing outlets continue to use the word misinformation in this way we can already predict, from our experience with the phrase “fake news” how that will go: The word “misinformation” will start to be associated with far right lies, just as “fake news” is, and everyone else will have to shift to different words or risk being misunderstood. Meanwhile, the propagandists will have succeeded in confusing people who are looking to right wing outlets for facts. Ordinary people will continue to struggle to seperate accurate information from bad faith partisan bullshit, which is the propagandists’ true aim.
Perhaps this picture seems quite bleak? Actually, it’s not that bad. While there’s a lot of bad information out there, the effort to combat propaganda doesn’t depend on any particular word or phrase. Despite the changing meaning of “fake news” hoax news sites remained hoax news sites, after all. Outside the farthest extremes of the right, most people have continued to seek out good information and attempt to avoid bad.
What journalism has that propaganda does not is a committment to presenting the best information possible, correcting mistakes whenevery they occur, and updating stories when more information comes out, whether it confirms early expectations or upends them. The word “misinformation” could easily become unusable if the right wing press uses it to mean the opposite of what it is, and that’s OK. Accurate information doesn’t rely on any word or phrase, it relies on being a summation of a deeper set of facts, fact which anyone can go and find if they’re willing to follow the sourcing back.
The right wing media landscape is flooded with purveyors of shallow debating tactics and liguistic games. “What is a woman?” Matt Walsh asks, as if he’s really got us now! But a trans person’s life remains the same whether or a college student stutters in trying to play Walsh’s word game or not. The reality is that trans people exist. All these word games seek to distract people from a question right wing media doesn’t want to answer. That question is simple: Is it right to treat trans people as subhuman, or should we be accepted like anybody else. Everything the right does is to avoid posing that question frankly, because they know few people will agree with their opinion on it.