“Gender-Critical” Discourse as Disinformation: Unpacking TERF Strategies of Political Communication

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgmentsThe author would like to thank Rachel Moran and Walker Brewer for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.Notes1 Among the many criticisms of the study and its findings was the fact that study surveyed only the parents of trans youth, not the youth themselves, and parents sampled were found exclusively through websites specifically focused on helping parents "fix" their trans children (Restar, Citation2020).2 In keeping with other scholars of political communication, I understand disinformation as referring specifically to "false or misleading information intentionally spread for profit, to create harm, or to advance political or ideological goals" (Kuo & Marwick, Citation2021, p. 1). In contrast, misinformation refers to generally incorrect information that is spread without malicious intent.3 In this article, I maintain a focus on debates over trans girls and women, who are the central objects of TERF political attacks. Such a focus also allows a degree of analytic clarity in such a short piece, in which I cannot disentangle the web of complex social relations implicated in TERF politics. However, it is important to note that trans boys and men are often targeted by gender-critical discourses that position them as ruined girls and wounded women who are deluded by a patriarchal society into thinking the solution to oppression lies in becoming male. Nonbinary people take less predetermined roles in TERF ideology, as their identities are categorically dismissed as fictive.4 It is crucial to note that most of this misinformation is specifically health misinformation, and much of it focuses on transgender youth specifically, continuing a long legacy of "insidious concern" (Elster, Citation2022) that packages transphobia as interest in the welfare of children.5 The most prominent examples include technology investor Elon Musk and author J. K. Rowling.6 Spillers (Citation1987) further highlights a paradox in which Black women are denied womanhood while, simultaneously, Black bodies are used by white oppressors as "a living laboratory" (p. 68) in which to construct and reaffirm gendered categories. Much the same might be said of trans women in the ways they are simultaneously disavowed by (white) cisgender people and central figures to the categorization of "woman" (see also Bey, Citation2017).