You're soaking in it

So much is being done to foster and manipulate hatred right now in the U.S., it can be hard to keep up. But this week, I want to look at the way hateful propaganda creates social shifts, because the implications are vast.

Lately the political climate has been reminding me of a commercial from my childhood about a manicurist who shills soap by soaking her clients’ hands in a bowl of it it before telling them it’s dishwashing liquid.

What does this have to do with propaganda? Day in and day out, we’re soaking in some dubious information. It might be pretty terrible for us, and it’s hard to remain unaffected by it.

Last week at the Hoover Building in Washington, DC, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. headlined an announcement banning hospitals that participate in Medicare and Medicaid—nearly all hospitals—from providing gender-affirming medical care to trans minors.

Meanwhile, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill last week that criminalizes the provision of gender-affirming medical care for any transgender person under eighteen. This bill is unlikely to make it through the Senate (which at least shows there are still limits on the current reach of the administration’s transphobia).

Yet even on the state level, we’re seeing more and more extreme proposals, as with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton creating a tip line for callers to report trans women using a women’s bathroom. These attitudes lead to ridiculous and humiliating enforcement measures, as when Texas Department of Public Safety officers were sent to guard the entrance to a women’s bathroom. Trans people suffer most, but everyone is demeaned by this.

Institutional powerholders are ginning up hatred against trans people for political gain in ways that parallel other movements in the U.S. and abroad. And the more deeply that propaganda gets entrenched, the harder it becomes to do anything about it, or even to realize we’re surrounded by it. Over time it becomes difficult to have a reality-based conversation about any group that’s been the focus of this kind of long-term propaganda.

The U.K. example

Across the last decade, left-leaning women and self-identified feminists bought into the the wave of hate, joining the ranks of right-wing bigots accusing trans people of everything from molesting children to turning lesbians extinct. The unfortunate result was that a deeply hateful ideology was laundered through major media, including several women in influential publications facilitating the assault on daily existence for trans people.

The situation got bad enough in November 2018 that the staff of the U.S. Guardian wrote a public response to an editorial from the U.K. Guardian.

It’s important point to note that as late as September 2020, the UK government published results of a public consultation, which showed wide support for all aspects of reform. 64% of respondents were in favor of ending a requirement that those who wanted to legally change their gender had to first receive a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and 80% expressed favor of removing the medical report requirement. But the U.K. decided not to change its existing law and left the stringent requirements in place.

In a poll from February, the kind of damage caused by the five subsequent years of propaganda since that poll became clear. There’s now just a one-percentage-point difference between those who believe that trans folks should be able to change both their public or their legal gender and those who believe they should be able to change neither.

The myth of protection

What is going on? Today’s poisoned rhetoric most copies that used against gay and lesbian folks in prior decades and includes the same just-asking-questions approach that actively undermines reality and distorts debates about public policy.

Before a group can be fully demonized, some kind of mythology has to be spun up. In the case of trans people, they’ve been fighting for decades and have slowly made institutional progress toward rights and respect. Doctors and hospitals have worked out treatment plans. Pediatricians have consulted with researchers to determine best practices. Legal frameworks have evolved, along with rules for competitive sports.

But demonization requires that this kind of slow deliberation and careful determination be disregarded entirely. Political players who seek to use a targeted group for political gain first have to pretend that any expansion or even protection of rights for the targeted group is taking place secretly, quickly, and dishonestly.

One of the first kinds of attack is to strip people of autonomy. The language of protection is often a first path to doing this. We are protecting this vulnerable group from that other, undesirable population. This is the framework that has been brought to bear in the U.K.—that women’s rights as a whole would be threatened by recognizing trans women as women.

Sometimes, the actors trying to harvest political benefits from bigotry will be claiming to protect the undesirable group itself. This is the model in use against gay people in Russia for more than a decade. It’s now also the dominant framework in the U.S., where the government and too many media outlets pretend to be protecting trans children.

This approach also parallels to the language of “protecting Jews” that underlies the Trump administration’s attempt to suppress free speech, as can be seen by the frequency that many of the people whom the White House is trying to silence are themselves Jewish. Perhaps most monstrous is this public pretense that the Trump administration has any interest in protecting children while the man in the White House desperately tries to cover up his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, the most notorious pedophile of our century. 

The Cold War,

When writing my first book, The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov, I struggled with how to get across to readers the degree to which Cold War propaganda and paranoia made any concrete discussion over how to engage with the Soviet Union almost impossible.

There were foaming-at-the-mouth types in the U.S., who were sure that anyone who wanted civil rights for Black people or women was a Communist about to open fire on the streets. There were cynical politicians who were stoking that kind of fear to garner more power.

It might sound pretty similar to today, but it had some key differences. The Cold War binary did tend to split everything into teams, like we see today, but the Soviet government was actually a dangerous geopolitical actor in ways that needed to be addressed. Unfortunately, the paranoia around the Soviet government and its sleeper agents in America dominated enough that conducting rational and useful policy discussions became incredibly challenging.

More recent events

Trans kids and adults, however, aren’t endangering anyone. The greatest possible harm out of all this will be to their ability to live their own lives and access medical care.

And that is what RFK Jr. and his henchmen went after so radically last week. Along with banning hospitals that participate in Medicare and Medicaid from providing gender-affirming medical care to trans minors, and Medicaid dollars from being used in these procedures, the agency is even threatening companies that make chest binders.

These attacks are a resurgence of weaponized homophobia from the 1970s and 1980s. Politicians and religious figures have used the tried and tested tactic of framing any shift in gender roles and rights to be an attack on evangelical Christians or even American society itself.

In both the U.S. and the U.K., it’s possible to see the nationalization and abstraction of the issue. People pick a team they’re on and then respond reactively to the opposite side. Sometimes there clearly are good guys and bad guys. In those cases, if you reactively oppose the people who are demonizing vulnerable groups, you run good odds of doing the right thing in terms of policy and voting.

Yet this very dynamic can be used by bad-faith actors to reinforce their propaganda and keep those they’ve brainwashed from ever rethinking what they’ve signed onto. The more straight up adversarial the conversation turns, the more entrenched people’s views become.

How to deprogram

To be clear, it isn’t your personal responsibility to un-brainwash those people who’ve been hoodwinked into believing that trans people are a threat to the country. But at the same time, we need to be aware of just how effective propaganda is over time. Millions of people in the U.K. who once supported human rights and respect for trans people have switched their views in the last decade in response to an ongoing campaign.

If you think such a campaign could never affect you, you might be right about this particular campaign. But after years of looking at how authoritarianism rose and how various groups were targeted around the world in the last 130 years, I can say that given enough funding and enough time, propaganda can remake society and draw support from groups and people who would have previously been completely opposed to the ideas it was presenting.

The longer this current attempt to use trans people as a way to terrorize and mobilize a political constituency continues, the more rooted it will become, and the more effective it will be. Even those very much opposed to it, after years of propaganda, will find their views shifting to accommodate the arguments and the rhetoric of people in positions of power and those who get the most oxygen to disseminate their views.

So, how do people interested in human rights and democracy combat the effectiveness of propaganda? In the expanding information deserts of the U.S., it’s very difficult right now. We’re far enough along in this process that a lot of shifting is already underway.

Our situation is made worse by the fact that so many vital parts of the remaining U.S. news landscape are now owned by or beholden to those aligned with the administration. Even the most powerful independent outlets have bought into the just-asking-questions model of reporting that fails to assess sources’ knowledge and motivations while amplifying the views of those who wish to roll back others’ rights to self-determination.

So, if you do want to be involved in how to address the rising wave of hate against trans folks, the answer in many cases is the same as how best to deal with hate against immigrants. Propaganda often gains strength wherever a shouting match is most likely to break out, wherever people are most likely to be reminded of which team they’re on. People’s minds rarely get changed by sound bites on social media.

I think that’s is why we see Sarah McBride, the first trans member elected to the House of Representatives, respond the way she does to these issues. People have occasionally been angry that McBride hasn’t been more combative over certain issues, but I think she’s most interested in sidestepping the kind of combat she sees as unproductive.

Baited by her fellow representatives, she took away the bathroom issue entirely as a weapon, suggesting she was more interested in serving the district she had been elected to represent. In her speech on the Capitol steps last week, she kept the conversation on a human level, talking about her own history as a trans person and the way her existence is being used to distract millions of Americans who are about to lose their health care.

It’s an incredible challenge to try undo political framing established by propaganda, and I think she is taking the approach of simply refusing to participate in the standard arguments in the standard ways, because they’re likely to change nothing.

Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t express support for trans people on social media. You absolutely should. Public forums of all kinds can be a great place to help vulnerable people know that you have their back. And that larger conversation definitely has an influence on vibes about what is normal and socially acceptable.

I would also say that you should absolutely tell your elected representatives what you want them to support, and give to national organizations protecting the legal rights of trans people and everyone else to live lives of hope and freedom. And those elected representatives, as well as national organizations, need to be looking at how to limit the influence the billionaire class has on our information sphere, so that propaganda can be addressed at its root level.

Local FTW

But if you want to address that propaganda yourself, remember that propaganda is weakest on the local level and when confronting real lives. It doesn’t fare well in the context of real effects on individual human beings.

It’s very hard just to do good reporting at this point that doesn’t get swept into caricatures or horse-race reporting on who’s winning the culture wars. So it was great to see Hannah Seo reporting in Popular Science last week on a recent study showing that youth almost never 'detransition' in the first several years after a social transition. She explains the study, shoots down popular misconceptions and deliberate distortions, includes the caveats about what we don’t know from the study yet, and lays out what will require follow up to answer.

Being able to actually see the issue at hand and report on it are what propaganda tends to destroy, and doing honest reporting today is enough to make a publication vulnerable. So please support those who are out there accurately covering the existence of and issues confronting trans folks.

Panoramic overviews are a good way to understand the big picture, and they’re a way to create meaning, but they’re also the easiest place to tell lies and distort reality, because they’re removed from what’s happening on the ground. And once that overhead framework takes hold, no matter how dishonest it is—even if it’s completely wrong—opposing it rarely works. Even that opposition plays into the propaganda frame, inadvertently giving more weight and attention to those who wish to do harm to vulnerable people.

Which means that it’s often a better idea to find out who’s helping trans kids and adults on the ground near you. See what kind of support is most useful for those groups. It might be galvanizing local officials to act to protect services available to these kids. It might involve volunteering or giving money for or helping to organize community activities and resources—anything that lets them live more full lives and simultaneously normalizes them in your community as fully human, with equal rights to be present and public as anyone else.

The more present the support and love are in everyday lives, the harder propaganda has to work to dismantle those community networks and attitudes. And the more you can speak about actual human beings on the ground and matters you’ve experienced directly through your ties to vulnerable communities, the less the larger argument over these issues will devolve into the equivalent of two kids arguing politics based on what their parents have told them.

Instead of soaking in the ambient sludge all around us, make new connections and contribute in ways beyond online conversation. Where you can amplify the voices and history of trans folks themselves, do so.

In the meantime, shitpost online if you want to! It can build solidarity among those who are opposed to the current demonization of trans people. It can help to maintain a public space that isn’t given over to toxicity and hate. But if and when you want to actively dismantle the framework of propaganda, think of acting closer to home.

You’ll be hearing from me again before the end of the year. But in the meantime, I hope you have had or will be having beautiful holidays with those who are near and dear to you. We’re living in dark days, but despite everything, so many of you are shining brightly.

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