Politics & Society
My mixed emotions on Transgender Day of Visibility
Anti-trans attitudes have existed for years, but organised disinformation campaigns are increasingly driving them
Disinformation exists across all parts of the global political spectrum, but it goes far beyond simply lying
Published 29 April 2025
As a professor and cognitive scientist at the University of Melbourne and Director of the Complex Human Data Hub, much of my research focuses on the study of misinformation: false ideas spread because of ignorance, error or mistake.
Misinformation is often grouped with its more malicious cousin – disinformation – which according to the Australian Electoral Commission is “knowingly false information designed to deliberately mislead and influence public opinion or obscure the truth for malicious or deceptive purposes”.
Disinformation exists across all parts of the political spectrum. Nobody is immune – indeed, people who take pride in their intelligence or ability to detect ‘fake news’ are often the most susceptible to it.
Propaganda campaigns are powerful in part because they prey on universal (often unconscious) aspects of human cognition and take advantage of the structural incentives and constraints in our social and information systems.
As a trans person, I know that disinformation about transgender people is often especially effective. There are multiple reasons for this.
A coordinated campaign of disinformation
Firstly, trans people are a tiny minority (around one per cent of the global population), which means most people don’t have any direct experience to contradict what they hear.
Secondly, the truth about us is complicated and often unintuitive, so false ideas and frames can go unchallenged – even unnoticed.
Finally, topics involving gender and identity are highly emotional for most people, and emotions make us especially vulnerable to manipulation.
Anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ propaganda has existed for a very long time, but an explicitly funded, organised and coordinated campaign of disinformation emerged in the mid-2010s as a reaction to advances in marriage equality around the world.
This campaign is driven and funded largely by right-wing organisations and people whose ultimate goal is to remake the world to align with their ideal of white, conservative Christianity.
US President Donald Trump’s Project 2025 agenda is designed and funded by many of the same voices.
Disinformation campaigns go far beyond simple lying, in both breadth and scope.
They are designed to weaponise our values and institutions against us, so that treasured norms like freedom of speech and scientific openness become the instruments by which those things are destroyed.
We can see this very clearly in the case of anti-trans disinformation.
Manufacturing doubt
One of the primary tactics of all disinformation campaigns is to create the appearance of doubt around expert consensus while also undermining trust in that expertise.
The reason is that in human brains, uncertainty is often processed as a threat. We freeze. Our default position becomes to not act, to wait, to fall back on tradition, to be more resistant to trying new things or hearing new ideas.
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Most people are highly averse to uncertainty, which makes simple solutions even more appealing.
Anti-trans disinformation has the creation of doubt as its cornerstone.
For instance, according to consistent expert consensus since at least 2011, the most effective treatment for gender dysphoria (that is, the distress of someone who feels a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity) is social acceptance and affirmation, coupled with medical transition (hormones and surgery) when appropriate.
Anti-trans organisations and individuals conduct scientifically invalid research (based on invalid data sampling, flawed logic and incorrect measures), misinterpret high-quality research, and apply biased standards of evidence – all with the goal of building narratives that undermine the expert consensus.
These narratives are designed to appeal to the intuitions and emotions of the average person.
The dangers of action (transitioning) are widely discussed, minor side effects are elevated into major concerns, and documented dangers of inaction (not transitioning) are downplayed.
Even people who don’t fully believe this swirl of propaganda often become uncertain enough that they act like people who do.
Worst of all, these messages are embedded in a frame in which experts are the ones who are painted as dogmatic activists.
This creates an unwinnable Catch-22 for experts.
Those who engage in good faith are called condescending for trying to explain elementary mistakes, while the fact that they are engaging at all is used to lend legitimacy to the criticisms.
Those who refuse to engage are taken as ‘proof’ that scientists are acting as elitist ideologues rather than objective truth-seekers.
Information laundering
Non-experts play an important role as well.
Some of the most high-value targets of propaganda campaigns are laypeople with large social media followings, pundits or podcasters with big audiences, political leaders and media outlets.
For instance, anti-trans disinformation was greatly accelerated with the participation of people like Elon Musk and JK Rowling.
People like this not only become high-volume amplifiers of disinformation themselves, but also launder dubious lies into the mainstream.
How do they do this? Well, for much of the media, the simple fact that an important person is talking about something is sufficient justification that it is newsworthy. If not, the angry discussions they provoke are worth reporting too.
But powerful fools are not the only way information moves from dodgy to credible.
Much of the effort of building and maintaining anti-trans disinformation networks comes from a stable of bloggers, second-rate academics, hurt and manipulated people, and a constellation of front organisations who work together to shape societal discourse in line with their own goals.
This is the corner that transgender people and allies have been painted into.
Because we do not have the numbers or power for a fair discussion, no matter how often or how eloquently we make our case, the lies continue.
Indeed, having the conversation at all threatens to make something newsworthy and thus launder it further into the mainstream. But if we refuse to debate or seek to diminish their platform, it’s called ‘cancel culture’ and a violation of free speech, which drives a backlash against us.
The result is the situation we are in.
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Conversation manipulation
You are probably beginning to get a sense of the difference between isolated pieces of disinformation and an organised disinformation campaign.
Uncoordinated, piecemeal lies can sometimes be defeated by providing people with facts. Disinformation campaigns are different.
They are less focused on specific falsehoods and more focused on shaping the entire conversation: not just what is discussed, but how it is framed, who gets attention and who is given the benefit of the doubt.
For example, there is a continuous deluge of articles and bills focused on topics like trans women in sport – despite the fact that this issue affects a tiny fraction of a tiny fraction of the population and has long been effectively managed by letting individual sporting organisations make the decisions that are best for them.
In fact, copious research suggests that after a few years on hormones, trans people perform in line with their hormonal gender rather than their assigned gender – but this is rarely mentioned.
Most importantly, though, organised disinformation campaigns are a big part of why we are talking about this at all.
The reason is that the goal of these campaigns is conversation control – to make it so when people think about trans rights they think about issues like this rather than far more important topics like the importance of bodily autonomy and self-determination.
People’s naïve intuitions about gender and athletic ability are so strong that most folks can be provoked to worry about trans rights if the framing is around ‘just asking questions’ about fairness.
The purpose of keeping trans sport in the conversation is to feed into a cognitive bias we have called availability: we make decisions based not on the objectively most important factors, but rather on the ones we can most easily call to mind.
And one of the best ways of making something leap to mind is to keep talking about it.
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Why are we so vulnerable to bad information?
The end goal is for people to make decisions about trans rights in general based on emotions left over from conversations that even they would consider unimportant in an objective sense.
But since they didn’t have conversations about other, more important factors, those don’t leap to mind – the unimportant ones shape their choice.
Repetition, repetition, repetition
The illusory truth effect is a cognitive illusion which says that the more often we see something, the more we believe it – whether it is true or not.
Everybody is susceptible to this, no matter how smart or rational we are. It occurs because of aspects of how our brains process information.
One of our mental shortcuts for deciding if something makes sense is how easy it is to process and how fluently we can think about it.
The problem is that complicated things are also hard to process, so this shortcut makes us prefer simplistic explanations. The more we feel overwhelmed – as happens often in today’s world – the more we prefer simplicity.
Another problem – and the one that disinformation campaigns take ruthless advantage of – is that simply seeing something more often makes it easier to process.
This is a fundamental aspect of how all brains learn: practice makes perfect.
It is not something we can turn off or stop from happening. And in many situations, it makes sense.
However, it does not make sense in an information environment where huge platforms can spread their ideas many thousands of times.
It does not make sense when some ideas are spread by deliberate campaigns, amplified by platforms, and artificially powered by algorithms and bots.
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It is very difficult to rationally fight the power of repetition, because it works on an unconscious level. Correction helps but does not fix it – not entirely – especially when the misinformation is repeated again or the underlying framing is implicitly endorsed.
Arming yourself against disinformation
As a disinformation researcher, people often ask me what the solution is.
I wish I had a magical answer. I don’t think we can solve it entirely through education. It is a systemic issue, and if disinformation is ubiquitous enough, people can no more withstand it than they can stand unprotected in the middle of a raging pandemic and avoid getting sick.
That said, education is at least a part of the solution.
My hope is that more and more people will become aware of how these disinformation campaigns work – not just on anti-trans topics but in other areas as well – because the techniques are similar regardless of the domain.
When you read the paper, or watch the news or doomscroll on social media, try asking yourself the following questions:
Why am I seeing this? Who wants me to have this conversation?
What conversation do they not want me to have? Who am I not hearing from?
What are my intuitions telling me? Are they reliable? How would I know?
Do I have the expertise to evaluate this? If not, do I need to have an opinion?
Does this issue matter to me? Where should I spend my energy?
Am I being manipulated?
It takes work, but it is worth it.
Perhaps if enough of us do this, we can make societal decisions based on truth, rather than what malicious actors want us to believe.