Hate in Action: How Right-Wing Media and Pols Target Transgender Rights

By Jaden Satenstein, July 26, 2022

“What Is a Woman?”

That’s what Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee asked Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during her confirmation hearing in March. It’s the basis for a similar ‘gotcha’ question that her fellow GOP Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri directed at UC Berkeley School of Law professor Khiara Bridges as she testified about the consequences of overturning Roe v. Wade. And it’s the name of conservative commentator Matt Walsh’s recent film for The Daily Wire.

In “What Is a Woman?”, released on the first day of pride month this year, Walsh attacks the transgender rights movement and promotes debunked claims about gender identity and science. Before its release, numeroustransgender people said that Walsh’s team attempted to feature them in the film under false pretenses. One of them was a 14-year-old transgender girl whose mother said she was told her daughter would be interviewed for a documentary called the “Gender Unity Project.” A transgender man claimed that Walsh used a photo from his Instagram page in the film without his permission.

A Hate-Fueled Rise

Thanks in part to his anti-transgender agenda, Walsh’s popularity has skyrocketed in recent months. His podcast, “The Matt Walsh Show,” saw the largest second-quarter growth of any conservative podcast this year, according to TheRighting’s exclusive analysis of Castbox data. With one million Twitter followers, Walsh is now a prominent voice in right-wing media, which has increasingly targeted transgender people over the last couple of years. With incendiary stories on trans youth in sports, bathroom restrictions and pronouns, conservative media has successfully framed the transgender rights movement as a divisive, hot-button issue, inducing moral panic and outrage on the right.

TheRighting has aggregated a myriad of these pieces in just the past month. The Blue State Conservative claimed that Disney is indoctrinating children into “unholy beliefs” and “evil”  by using gender-inclusive language. The Washington Examiner ran a piece called “No one seems to know what a woman is.” And, without any data or evidence, FrontPage Magazine argued that the inclusion of transgender and gay people is to blame for the United States military’s low recruitment numbers.

FrontPage fails to mention that the Department of Defense has openly cited the possibilities of death, injury and psychological problems as the most common reasons young people are deciding not to serve. The piece also ignores the fact that the percentage of Americans who report that they have a “great deal” of confidence in the military is the lowest it’s been since 2001, according to Gallup Poll data. Instead, FrontPage explicitly scapegoats transgender people by baselessly claiming that “transgender pronouns, diversity training, and lesbian wedding ads” are at fault.

Real Life Consequences

It’s easy enough to dismiss this trend as simply more far-right nonsense, but transphobia is finding its way into laws across the country. In February, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed an order classifying gender-affirming care for transgender youth as “child abuse” and calling on citizens to report the parents of young people receiving such treatment .

The order mentions medical care such as puberty blockers and hormone doses, both of which have been proven to be safe and reversible for minors and are supported by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics. A study by researchers at the University of Washington found that this care led to a 73% decrease in suicidal ideation for transgender and non-binary people between the ages of 13 and 20.

Texas is not the only state to clamp down on gender-affirming care. Alabama passed a law deeming it a felony for those under the age of 19. The Missouri House recently debated a similar bill for patients under the age of 18, with many lawmakers arguing that the age minimum should be raised to 25 – seven years after legal adulthood under Missouri law.

Last year saw the highest number of legislative attacks on LGBTQ+ rights in recent history, with 2022 on track to beat that record, according to the Human Rights Campaign. The Campaign also reported that 2021 was the deadliest year on record for transgender and non-binary people, who are more than four times as likely as cisgender people to be victims of violent crime.

‘Small Government,’ Big Restrictions

As attacks on trans people skyrocket, rhetoric and propaganda from conservatives like Matt Walsh galvanize support for these laws. In a review conducted for the New York Times in March, news watchdog Media Matters found that seven of the 10 most-viewed stories about anti-trans legislation of the year at that point were from The Daily Wire, while two others were from Fox News. This data reveals the magnitude of right-wing media’s role in shaping opinions and perceptions of truth regarding transgender people.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, many liberals lamented that the U.S.  was becoming a divided, dystopian country, and wondered what other rights might be stripped away next. A quick survey of these transphobic articles and laws provides one answer.  

While claiming to be the party of small government, Republican lawmakers have mounted an  unprecedented attack on transgender rights, once again interfering in some of the most intimate, life-changing decisions that Americans make. And with every inflammatory article, biased interview and pseudoscientific documentary, the right-wing is aiding and abetting that injustice.

Jaden Satenstein (@jadensat) is a writer and producer currently based in St. Louis, MO. She has worked for WNYC, FRONTLINE PBS, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Straus News Manhattan.

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