Transphobic misinformation is a gateway drug
On my fellow journalists’ dangerous credulity regarding anti-trans bullshit
Over the last week more people have — perhaps for the first time — noticed the fascist lean of their news diets and social media feeds, if not social circles. This is a dangerous situation trans media professionals such as myself have long been decrying, however much we’ve been heeded.
Earlier this summer I called out a few literal former colleagues of mine by name on a popular media podcast in hopes they’d at least cut it out with their committed anti-trans propaganda. After doing that appearance, and publishing 8,000 words in my own newsletter to accompany, I heard nothing back.
This confirmed my sense that such people have siloed themselves off amongst others who’ll agree with them, which in this case necessitates ignoring the likes of even me: a trans man they do know. I sometimes use the analogy of drunks in a bar who surround themselves with other alcoholics who agree none of them have a problem.
What to do about all this, I do wonder? I keep thinking about this helpful shorthand I just heard — Magda Goebbels baked great strudel — for that tendency of the mainstream media to help in normalizing the fascists.
The afternoon of Kirk’s murder — before anything was known, but already some anti-trans angle was being spread even by mainstream outlets — I found myself thinking back to a particular moment from my past, twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate at Brown.
A guy who was the same year as me, I believe, made a point of making his anti-queer stance known almost as soon as we arrived on campus. In response to a rainbow flag hanging in the student center, he argued in an op-ed published by the student daily paper that this was essentially like hanging a Nazi flag.
He maintained a reputation for himself amongst our left-leaning student body as he published takes that regularly seemed to upset many of my peers. Back then, I was morbidly fascinated by this prolific conservative campus pundit — if not genuinely confused by his whole deal — before trolling the libs
was a national pastime. In my memory, his pieces contained this constant seeming surprise as to where he’d gone to school: Brown, a progressive, diverse, and queer-friendly campus and student body. I approached him senior year and asked for a sit-down, recorded interview. To my surprise: he agreed.
My recollection is we met on a weekend at a mostly empty on-campus cafe. I turned on my cassette tape recorder. I asked why he’d gone to Brown of all places, considering that he was such an outlier, his views so obviously unpopular. Why not go to some other Ivy League for example, where his viewpoints may be more normal, even welcomed?
As I recall, he described his family’s history with the state. I listened, and he shared his opinions — including how Brown had been a better school before, when it was just for white Christian men like him. At the time, given I was then fully closeted, a “straight woman,” I was surprised that he had the gall to explain to my face that Brown had gotten worse after it had merged with its sometime sister school. Brown had only unified with Pembroke in 1971, which to me always seemed startlingly recent.
I forget how I responded to all he’d said. If that recording still exists, I don’t know where. Another detail I never forgot is he spoke about preferring when women wore dresses, and men the likes of khakis and collared shirts.
I’ll add I was not naive then in regards to dealing with sexist men. I’d worked as a server and barista, for example; if I walked down a city street I was often cat-called. I didn’t know what I had planned to write about my conservative classmate but then I didn’t write anything. I’d think back to our conversation, though. I’d remember him saying his sexist views right to my face, on record. He either didn’t realize how offensive he was being — or he truly didn’t care.
Even then, I knew my classmates and me at Brown: we were in a lefty-liberal bubble. I knew the world was actually run in great part by men who felt, variously, more like that guy had. Not long after, the Tea Party movement rose, as did reality host Donald Trump’s racist conspiracy theorizing about President Barack Obama on Fox News. (By then I lived in Iowa, where I’d started grad school in 2009.) In hindsight, it can look so obvious where this was all headed, perhaps. Even Brown itself, just this summer, stooped to selling out trans students’ rights as it compromised with the second Trump administration — events I decried in an op-ed for The Boston Globe.
I contemplate often how ultimately lots of white people in particular misunderstand loud voices as impolite, never mind if one is defending what’s morally right. In truth, silence and complicity with fascism is more rude. Some folks would rather listen to a reasonable
seeming fascist if he is wearing khakis and a button down. Or if he doesn’t say things their ears find offensive — never mind his many unconscionable views.
These last weeks, I have thought about my sometime pundit classmate. I also often contemplate those colleagues of mine in media who’d rather write edgy
conservative takes for the likes of the New York Times — rather than go on Fox News where their views may be more welcome and, indeed, normal. I similarly contemplate those politicians who’d rather run as Democrats than as Republicans but who want to nonetheless repeat anti-trans talking points. I think about why such folks would rather pretend, to themselves and/or their audiences, that they’re not allied with the fascists — even as they launder right-wing rhetoric. And I think about Goebbel’s wife’s great strudel.
Cis journalism colleagues especially: I invite you to reckon with our own biases and to learn about the enormity of the right-wing media effort to propagandize us all.
If you’ve believed some anti-trans bullshit, that’s okay.
What matters is what you do now. Improve your own media diets. Unlearn the hate.
The only wrong move, in my view, is further silence, further complicity.
Sandy Ernest Allen is an author, essayist, journalist, and speaker focusing on mental health and gender from a human rights perspective. He’s contributed to many outlets, including Esquire, The Boston Globe, Cosmopolitan, Them, 99% Invisible, and This American Life. His debut book is the acclaimed A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story about Schizophrenia. Allen has long been at work on a sequel, about the future of mental health care. He writes a newsletter about his life, garden, self-care strategies, and more called What’s Helping Today. Follow him on Bluesky.
This in an opinion. While this piece contains factual information, it is the author’s point of view.
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