Transphobic Truth Markets: A Shared Ideological Code in British TERF and American Right-Wing Anti-Transgender Discourses

Debates around transgender issues are increasingly a central part of both British and American culture wars (Castle, 2018; McLean, 2021). Two contexts in which anti-trans discourses are particularly strong are in British ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist’ (TERF) spaces and on the American right. Despite coming from oppositional discursive contexts with regards to gender issues, both discourses on the surface appear to utilize similar frames when discussing transgender people and issues, as well as frequently mobilizing similar appeals to concepts such as truth, science and reality when discussing transgender people and issues (Hong and Herman, 2020; Williams, 2020). Centering the paradox of the similarity of these discourses, this study utilizes a critical frame analysis to examine and compare case studies of these two discourses, highlighting in particular their relationship to truth, and the key truth claims which underpin the problems they highlight with transgender people and issues surrounding them. Focusing on expressions of TERF and American right-wing discourses on Twitter and the right-wing platform Parler respectively, analysis reveals that very similar themes and truth claims are present in both discourses, although some ideologically- and contextually- motivated differences are present in how issues are prioritized and victim roles are assigned in narratives. This paper contextualizes the similarities between discourses using Dorothy Smith’s (1995) concept of the ideological code and Harsin’s (2015) notion of ‘truth markets’, in which actors compete to instill their truth regimes as dominant. In both American right-wing and TERF discourses, variations on a nefarious enemy of ‘gender ideology’ are named and constructed as in opposition to truth, fact and/or science. This manifests as a shared ‘Gender Ideology’ ideological code which regulates the organizes the terms of discussion around truth and untruth. Speech and acts named as ‘Gender Ideology’ are grafted to the notion of untruth, a process which is underpinned by ‘fact signaling’ appeals to reality (Hong and Hermann, 2020). Grafting biologically essentialist truth claims which defend a binary gender regime to the widely supported notion of truth allows them to become ideologically malleable and move easily from right-wing to feminist contexts. This accounts for not only the paradox of shared frames and truth claims in two ideologically oppositional discourses, but also provides an account of a mechanism by which truth claims can travel and sustain themselves in various ideological truth market spaces.