Transphobic Truth Markets: Comparing the Anti-Trans Rhetorics of the American Trumpian Right and British ‘TERF’ Communities

Debates around transgender issues are increasingly a central part of both British and American culture wars, and a key battleground in which understandings of sex and gender are negotiated. Particularly hostile rhetoric towards transgender people can be found firstly in what is here termed the Trumpian American Right – the segment of the American right which is highly defined by support for Donald Trump as well as populist anti-liberal sentiment, hateful rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking. It is also concentrated in the so called ‘Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist’ (TERF) community in the United Kingdom. Existing literature lacks an updated descriptive account of transphobic rhetoric on the American right which takes into account not only the impact of Trumpian populist rhetoric, in which issues of (trans)gender play no small part, and also the mobilization of truth claims and appeals to notions of naturalness and reality in contemporary anti-trans rhetoric, which are prominent and sit oddly against a backdrop of conspiracy and misinformation. Conversely, scholarly accounts of TERF anti-trans discourse increasingly exist and address the role of ontological claims, but often contextualise this only within the history of feminist thought, neglecting how it may be contextualized alongside, or interact with, other contemporary transphobic discourses. Despite highly different ideological leanings, these two communities appear to have some similar themes and, critically, make similar truth claims about the nature of sex and gender, and particularly the nature of womanhood. Concerning gender, similar appeals are made to truth, science and reality in both discourses, despite the fact that one is mired in conspiracy and misinformation, and despite the fact that American conservatism and feminist thought have historically advocated different gender regimes. Following Harsin (2015), this working paper understands the contemporary condition as one in which Foucauldian ‘regimes of truth’ have been replaced by ‘regimes of post-truth’ in which various actors compete for control of ‘truth markets’. A critical frame analysis is applied to two distinct sets of data: a sample of posts mentioning the term ‘transgender’ or ‘trans’ on the pro-Trump, ‘free speech’ platform Parler and a sample of tweets containing common British TERF hashtags on Twitter. By applying sensitizing questions to data, critical frame analysis helps to render descriptive accounts of the data which are more easily comparable, in this case identifying and comparing the problems, solutions and victims each groups identifies when objecting to transgender people, rights, and pro-trans policies. The most common truth claims of each discourse are also identified and compared, allowing for the role of truth to be centered in the analysis. Finding the distinctions and commonalities in these themes and truth claims contributes to a deeper understanding of contemporary transphobic trends internationally, and assesses the degree to which these two nationally and ideologically distinct, prominent sources of anti-trans discourse are attempting to defend a now more widely-challenged ‘gender truth regime’ (Rahilly, 2015), and thus internalizing and perpetuating a shared truth market.