Welcome to the anti-trans outrage factory

Two years later…

When I first wrote “Anatomy of a moral panic” in February 2024, I had only a faint glimmer of what was to come. While I knew that as a country we were on the precipice of authoritarianism, I was assured that my great fear that this would accelerate during the upcoming election — with propaganda about trans people ultimately forming a primary rhetorical cudgel for fascism, was an overreaction. I was also assured he wasn’t going to win or that it wouldn’t make a difference.

But the astronomical rise in stories about trans people that I’d collected over the previous year told a different story. This massive, messy dataset was brimming with increasingly vile headlines that only seemed to metastasize with time. 2023 was nothing compared to 2024, and 2025 showed no signs of slowing down. Two years later we know how the story turns out. Our annihilation has become a central organizing principle of the Republican Party.  

Every time I think I’ve scratched the surface of what I’ve come to call “the outrage factory”, I lose an entire weekend combing through stacks of awfulness that takes a whole bank of monitors to see. The following are my newest notes as I try and make sense of how we got to where we are. How they manufactured the illusion of a dangerous all-powerful enemy out of a tiny demographic with no political influence, financial resources, nor social capital. 

To create an enemy, make them seem ubiquitous

Restricting to the six conservative outlets I cited as indices of the rising tide of anti-trans sentiment, and only using the 3 mainstream keywords which made the core dataset: 3,453 unique URLs were added to the index during the time the bot has been running. 1,787 are from Fox News alone. In every day of the year since 2023, Fox News has run more articles referencing transgender people than there were days in the year.

This is equally true for the UK, where both the Telegraph and the Daily Mail outstrip even the BBC by 2-5x in any given month.

(Note: using the expanded dataset, 2,157 unique URLs were recorded from foxnews.com. For most of this post, I focus on the core dataset, as Fox News’ reliance on A/B testing can give multiple hits for the same article.)

Controlling language

While the 3-keyword design of the original scraper only provides a sample of the links served via RSS based on specific keywords, the design did pay dividends as can be seen below. With respect to the initial question surrounding linguistic/discursive drift, patterns we all experienced in real-time are immediately visible. While the term “transgender” produced far more hits in general, filtering those out shows a background process of updated style-guides and competing opinions about which keywords to emphasize related to “biological sex” and “gender identity.”  

The linguistic drift I’d talked about in “Hate in a post-information age” has come full circle, and it was the word “transgender” itself that was hurled as invective in the 2024 election that happened 8 months after publication. How did this happen? Does it even matter?

A large part of destigmatization of transgender people and our lives hinged on cleaving apart the discussion of “sex versus gender” from our basic existence as transgender people. Put most simply, for the briefest possible moment in time rather than providing qualifiers or over-emphasizing assigned sex at birth or equivocating on whether we know we are who we say we are, the word “transgender” became a proper adjective.

And as small as it may sound, the strategy to undo this progress therefore hinged on emphasizing sex and gender strategically at different times. Wherever possible, many outlets would add both of these pieces of information, such as: “[she] identifies as a woman but is biologically male.” Whereas “Sophie is a transgender woman” immediately communicates all the information the average person needs to know, and communicates those other pieces of information just as effectively without emphasizing their primacy, combining these has the opposite effect. In the previous example, everyone knows “Sophie” was assigned male at birth— it’s communicated by saying she is transgender the same way saying that someone is short communicates that they are not tall.

Adding all three of these words appears to have become the norm again in outlets like the Washington Post, (eg: “she is transgender, and identifies as a woman but is biologically male.”) emphasizes subjectivity, delegitimizing the concept of transgender people in the eyes of many who had started to acclimate to the idea. Words are powerful. 

But in addition to the words used, the sheer volume continued to astonish as it did in 2024. Like Fox News in the US, the Daily Mail provided more coverage of trans people than any other outlet in the UK, followed only by the Telegraph— equally trans-hostile, and not shy about it. When Trump latched onto the phrase “gender ideology” in his EOs, it stood out as overtly eliminationist language. But popularized originally as an anti-feminism slogan by the Vatican, it became endemic in the UK in the past decade and has become arguably the most visible explicitly anti-trans term.

The asymmetry is astounding. Despite the widespread, undying claim to the contrary, mainstream news outlets produce news about trans people at a rate roughly a fifth of what the right-wing press churns out.

While the post-mortem of the 2024 election endlessly cited the “Kamala is for they/them” attack ad as the tipping point, this elides the fact that even if this were said tipping point, it was only because not a single day passed from 2023 onward where Americans weren’t bombarded with articles about trans people that were at best negatively-valenced, at worst outright libel and incitement. By the time that particular match was lit, the entire United States had become a densely packed powder keg.

To create outrage, emphasize the absurd

While the images above show just a cross-section of some of the hundreds of thousands of observations captured by the scraper, they also show how any attempt at accuracy or veracity has gone completely out the window, with a chillingly familiar trend towards the bombastic that has led to pograms at other times in history.

Through every iteration of this series, I’ve stressed the crucial fact that extremism research shows people with prejudicial viewpoints tend, on average, to vastly overestimate the size of the groups towards which they hold such prejudices.There are other versions of this effect as well: confirmation bias, in which humans tend to equate how closely something aligns with their pre-existing views with its veracity, leads us to believe things even when we have significant reasons to doubt their truthfulness. When Trump claimed that children were having “sex changes” at schools, the fact that this is not only absurd but logistically impossible did little to stop the spread. It nevertheless made the rounds of conservative (and especially evangelical) social media at an astonishing rate, and pushed the boundaries of what was normal to claim within reason without sounding like you’ve lost all reason. That procedures which take full operating rooms, a dozen staff and as many hours in the OR, alongside week long admissions and months of healing could be done in the course of a school day without anyone being the wiser should have permanently burned the credibility of the world’s most notoriously dishonest man. But it was rhetorically useful, and because it was useful, it made it to print.

As it happens, it also made it to print in one of the darkly funniest op-eds ever written, excerpted here from the Portland Press Herald:

“I’m glad it’s come out that teachers are performing gender-altering surgeries at school. So much curriculum dumped on us, the scheduling, a logistical nightmare. We have team time – what many call “homeroom” – to work it in, 10 minutes a day. We’re expected to do three or four surgeries between American studies and AP physics and in our haste, we sometimes botch. The other day a girl came in as a girl and left as a girl. Embarrassing!”

Why did Josh Hawley claim this week in front of congree that “almost half” of all kids content on Netflix contained trans characters? While I think it’s equally plausible he made the number up out of thin air, it’s also true that over 200 Stories about Netflix and trans content appear in the dataset, despite the highest count I’ve been able to find of verifiable trans characters on Netflix kids shows being possibly 3 appearances in the past 5 years, with only one show featuring a trans cartoon protagonist. This last was summarily shut down after Elon Musk and Libs of Tiktok demanded a boycott via social media. Both posts were themselves served by Google News in the expanded dataset.

But pushing the absurd isn’t only good for outrage, because outrage isn’t only good for mobilizing a base. The absurd sells, and things that are both absurd and outrageous sell even when the most common form of discussion is ridiculing believers. This is how you get headlines like “Schools grooming kids, kid ‘litter boxes’, transgender and more” from radio station WIBX 950 AM/92.3 FM in Utica, New York. While much of the article is about a local superintendent pushing back on the absurdity of the discussion, the headline itself leaves the question open. However, evidence of how damaged the discussion had already become in January 2024 is replete through the short text. After 2023, the year “grooming” came back into popular parlance as an accusation against LGBTQ+ people and our allies, the scare quotes have dropped completely. Even amongst the debunking, the idea that adults might be trawling classrooms to recruit young people is treated like a serious question.

Why do conservatives believe that we’re everywhere, hiding in the bushes? Because powerful people won’t stop claiming it’s true, even if evidence to the contrary is everywhere.

To create fear, make them seem dangerous

Whereas prior to 2020, the majority of UK news about trans people focused on the UK, this has largely ceased to be true in the conservative press where articles about trans people generate a huge amount of revenue.