Uncovering the Christian Right’s Anti-Trans Disinformation Network with the Southern Poverty Law Center
Quinnehtukqut McLamore traced the vast disinformation network poisoning the science on trans youth care.
by Riki Wilchins
Researcher Quinnehtukqut McLamore was part of a Southern Poverty Law Center team that developed its magisterial report, Project CAPTAIN, which documented the enormous network used by the Christian right to support its war on transgender people. This network’s goal was manufacturing anti-trans pseudoscience to undercut confidence and believe in affirming medical care, especially for kids. You can find links to the six chapters of Project CAPTAIN at the end of this interview.
Assigned Media: It's no accident that trans people find themselves in the forefront of the anti-gay culture war as Project CAPTAIN documents. How did you end up working on it?
Quinnehtukqut McLamore: The point of the project was to document how the meteoric rise in anti-trans bills over the early 2020s had occurred. We're now used to seeing gigantic numbers of incomprehensible bills that say ridiculous shit, but back then, we'd gone from double digits in 2021 to the ballooning explosions of today. And the bills and the court cases around them were reliant on pseudoscience, and that pseudoscience was largely being promoted by far right networks.
SPLC knew full well that rightwing groups were going to target trans people all the way back in 2017, because they documented that intent. What they were less familiar with was the newfangled, neutral-presenting science groups and feminist groups like Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), Genspect, Partners for Ethical Care, and so on, and how they fit into this ecosystem.
At the time, SEGM was not recognized as an SPLC hate group, and Genspect was relatively unknown to extremism researchers. It might seem wild to us today, but these groups kept a pretty low profile until about 2023. They were only founded in like 2020 and I'd been keeping tabs on them and their claims for some time. That’s when SPLC brought me in for CAPTAIN.
AM: These organizations and the extensive network of anti-trans clinicians they work with churning out pseudoscience “proving” affirming care is dangerous, experimental, or ineffective have been crucial to the wave of anti-trans bills and ruling—as we just saw when it was cited from the bench during Skrmetti.
As far as I know, CAPTAIN is the only really in-depth look we have on how the Christian Right built this enormous multi-layered anti-trans disinformation network of 57 organizations.
QM: They didn't really build it: what they did was pump lots of money into an existing network because they needed it for their pivot to trans. Take a group like the American College of Pediatricians: ACPeds is a known bad actor, which means they’re not taken seriously. For instance, judges will laugh them out of court. So to shift from gay to trans people, the far right needed a new tool.
Now the funny thing about many anti-trans groups like SEGM and Genspect and is that they didn't originate as far right projects but as disaffected, bratty, academic projects by people who did not like that trans people no longer understood as mentally ill, or that trans people had a say in their own care or in some cases that their own kids had come out as trans. Recall that it wasn’t until 2022 that the American Psychiatric Association officially declared that being trans was not a mental illness in the DSM (diagnostic manual), and that’s because it was the only DSM that did not involve Kenneth Zucker.
So conveniently, there were these pre-existing, disaffected anti-trans groups with credibility that the right could work with, fund, provide access and influence, and use as expert witnesses in hearings and legislatures. And they went to great lengths to keep their hands clean—not officially collaborating but working with individuals in the organizations. So unlike ACPeds, these are “independent” organizations whose statements and expert testimony that judges and politicians can take seriously.
So CAPTAIN tracked and analyzed thousands of anti-trans studies and citations to and from these groups and individuals to uncover and document how they connected and influenced policy.
AM: At the end of all that, what were your most important findings?
QM: First of all, most of these people cite the same stuff and reference the same body of literature. Second, they all make the same claims with very little variance among them. Third, about half of what they cite isn't research but are just editorials, letters to the editor and other narrative documents submitted to academic journals. They’re opinion pieces that then get cited. But unless you actually follow the citation, you just see the journal name and you go, Oh, wow, it's legitimate editor, it's legitimate study. But it's not a study at all. It's just a letter to the editor that happened to get published in The Lancet. And then the right will cite it as evidence that proves this or that anti-trans finding.
Plus the right actually own a few journals that are higher profile—like Ken Zucker is the editor-in-chief of Archives of Sexual Behavior, which was for a time the preeminent sexology journal in the English language. And because they're pals with the editor, they can basically get anything they want in there, which makes it look legitimate.
AM: The Cass Report was notorious for this technique: for instance, in one crucial juncture her citation is actually just her own progress letter to the NHS; But readers never find that out unless they follow the footnote and look it up the actual reference in the back of the 400-page Report. This kind of pseudoscience basically exploits people’s faith in real science to mask anti-trans disinformation as legit.
QM: A fourth thing we found was, about half the time, the papers that were being cited were real papers but did not say what they claimed. I think this is the finding matters most. They cite a lot of real science, but they don't actually examine it. The most common citation in articles we reviewed was a 2011 Swedish study by Cecilia Dhejne, and they argue that this proves gender transition is useless because trans people are still 19 times more likely to die by suicide after transition. (NOTE: Dhejne has publicly repudiated this misinterpretation and misuse of her study.)
But the study data is averaging across different time periods, and it was much worse for trans people in the 1980s. By the later part of the study around 2000, the suicide rates are equivalent to the general population. In addition, there was no control group because it was a study of the country’s National Register. And it ended in 2003. For the record, I was in elementary school in 2003, so I don't think that data is very current.
AM: But as Mark Twain said, a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has put its pants on. Headlines generated by this Disinformation Network are splashed across the front page of the New York Times and the rebuttal, if there is one, never gets printed.
I think one of the points CAPTAIN makes really effectively is that pseudoscience is not a victimless crime, but real people are hurt by it all the time. Whether it's used to deny trans kids care or deny gay parents adoption rights. The media need to get a lot better at debunking pseudoscience and not just buying whatever study happens to be published somewhere.
QM: Yes, and they also need to stop letting people do their thinking for them. Even academics often don’t check very far, because it takes too much time and no one has the bandwidth for that. And often what someone says a study found and what that study actually found are often extremely different things.
So imagine you're a doctor treating 50 trans kids and you find that before they started hormone therapy over half of them had depression, anxiety, and suicidal tendencies. But after getting hormones, only about 8% of them do. Would you call this treatment effective? Most people with any sense would say so.
But here's the twist: some of these kids had autism or ADHD and those still needed psychiatric treatment. So the authors of this widely-cited study concluded that gender affirming care did not improve psychological health because it didn't magically make their ADHD go away. And the person who first authored this study is Riittakerttu Kaltiala and she’s basically in charge of gender medicine in Finland. That's the punchline.
AM: And that study is now cited across the anti-trans political and research networks to justify denying trans kids care.
Links to Project CAPTAIN
Chapter 1: The Pseudoscience of Race, Mental Health, and LGBTQ+ Identity
Chapter 2: Foundations of the Contemporary Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network
Chapter 3: Merging Pseudocience and Politics
Chapter 4: Manufacturing the Doubt that Fuels the Network
Chapter 5; Group Dynamics and Division of Labor Within the Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.