Abstract

This is the first in a series of three articles in which I aim to help colleagues in the library and information science (LIS) field, and in particular cisgender colleagues, understand what the current informational landscape looks like around transgender people and transgender identities. Having cultivated this understanding, colleagues will be able to more effectively recognize anti-transgender misinformation and deploy counterstrategies as they engage in LIS work. Transgender and gender diverse people who are not familiar with the topic of anti-trans mis/disinformation and related counterstrategies might also find these articles useful. Using real-world examples to illustrate, the first article in my series focuses on the general principles of how anti-trans misinformation is constructed and spread. My goal is not to debunk discrete instances of anti-trans misinformation, but rather to equip readers to recognize the systemic mechanisms at work underneath the misinformation. Having established this foundation, my second article will examine the impacts of anti-trans misinformation on libraries in particular and suggest practical actions for libraries and library workers to take moving forward. My final article will include some ethical reflections I believe my colleagues must consider in regards to confronting the crisis of anti-trans misinformation.

Author

Heath Umbreit (they/them), MLIS, is an adult services librarian at a public library in the Northeastern U.S. Their work focuses on communication and mis/disinformation, specifically: popular narratives about mis/disinformation, epistemology, the intersection of disinformation and systemic power differentials, and anti-trans misinformation from an LIS standpoint. Heath is trans/nonbinary and genderfluid. Learn more or get in touch at www.heathumbreit.com.

License

A Library Worker’s Guide to Anti-Transgender Misinformation, Part One: Understanding Anti-Transgender Misinformation © Heath Umbreit is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Recommended Citation

Umbreit, H. (2026). A Library Worker’s Guide to Anti-Transgender Misinformation, Part One: Understanding Anti-Transgender Misinformation. Murmurations: A Trans and Gender Diverse Library Journal.

Downloadable PDF

Introduction

A momentous conversation is currently happening at the local, state, and national levels in the United States of America. This conversation is about transgender people—namely, how, where, or whether they fit into U.S. society, or even whether trans people exist, or should exist, at all. The conversation started because anti-trans activists want to erase trans people from society in the U.S. and globally, as comprehensively as possible. As a result, these anti-trans activists have injected extraordinary amounts of misinformation about transgender people into all levels of the conversation.

My colleagues in libraries are neither immune from exposure to anti-trans misinformation, nor exempt from the wider conversation taking place about trans people. In fact, U.S. libraries are directly involved in a subset of the broader conversation, a subset that asks how, why, or even whether libraries should include or serve trans people. Library workers must navigate the impacts of pervasive anti-trans misinformation on collection development, cataloging and classification, programming and presenters, patron and staff restroom and facilities usage, and library policymaking and implementation. Anti-trans misinformation also significantly affects library workers’ communication with patrons, community residents, local business or community partners, fellow library workers, library consortia, professional organizations, boards of trustees, local and state politicians, and others. Thus, it is necessary for library workers to understand the patterns and prevalence of anti-trans misinformation so that we can recognize and avoid spreading it through our professional roles. How colleagues and the library and information science (LIS) field as a whole choose to act—or fail to act—significantly impacts transgender patrons and library workers like me.

Positionality statement and content notes

In this series, I am writing about anti-transgender misinformation as a system that I have both experienced and studied, as a gender non-conforming trans/nonbinary person and a professional public librarian living and working in the Northeastern U.S. While I share some common experiences with other transgender and gender diverse people, the trans and gender diverse community is not a monolith. My personal experiences and circumstances influence my perspectives on this subject, and I am not speaking or attempting to speak on behalf of other trans and gender diverse people.

Throughout my articles, I refer to cisgender and transgender people. By cisgender (or cis) people, I mean people whose gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth. By transgender (or trans) people, I mean people whose gender identity does not align with their sex assigned at birth. For purely practical reasons, I use transgender and trans as umbrella terms, but both should be understood to include transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid, agender, and other gender diverse people, as well as intersex people who identify as transgender and/or gender diverse.

I center transgender identity as a primary vector of marginalization throughout the series, because anti-trans misinformation is my central topic. However, it is crucial to recognize that the project of anti-trans misinformation is not a siloed one. Anti-trans attitudes and actions exacerbate and are exacerbated by racism and xenophobia, ableism and fatphobia, misogyny and homophobia, discrimination against disfavored religious groups and non-religious people, and other forms of marginalization (Human Rights First, 2023, p. 5). My concentration on trans identities exists within these intersections, not outside of them.

To any transgender and gender diverse readers, my articles directly address the implicitly and explicitly discriminatory, misleading, and harmful anti-trans rhetoric, tropes, and stereotypes that are present in U.S. culture right now. Please take care of yourselves as you read.

Locating ourselves in present reality

Hostility and discrimination against transgender people has always existed in the U.S. (Pelecanos et al., 2026, para. 2). However, since the presidential inauguration in January 2025, anti-trans hostility has expanded and accelerated to an alarming degree. Straightforwardly, the current federal administration is pursuing—as an explicit political goal—the legislative, social, cultural, informational, and physical erasure of transgender people. Our situation is grave enough that, in 2025, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued two red flag alerts about the “genocidal process against the transgender community” emerging from and within the U.S. government (Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, 2025a, para. 1; Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, 2025b). A third warning, issued on March 11, 2026, states that the Lemkin Institute “believes that the United States is squarely within the early to middle stages of a genocidal process against trans people, the goal of which is to completely erase transgender people not only from public life but also from existence in the U.S. and globally” (Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, 2026, para. 2).

I note these alerts to underscore the urgency of this series’ subject matter; the gravity of trans people’s circumstances, not only here in the U.S. but worldwide; and the fact that U.S. society has progressed to this point primarily due to persistent inaction and a failure to take anti-trans sentiments and actions seriously on the part of cisgender people as a whole.

Construction and interpretation of information

To understand the underlying mechanisms of any type of misinformation, we must first understand how information is constructed and interpreted—because anything that can be constructed can be reconstructed, and anything subject to interpretation can be reinterpreted. Here I introduce two theories I feel are relevant, with the caveat that this section provides the simplest possible summary of each. (Readers who want to learn more about the nuances of these theories should read the source texts on their own.)

1. Hallin’s spheres and the public construction of information

In 1986, Daniel C. Hallin developed Hallin’s spheres, a visual depiction of how information is constructed by mainstream journalists within the media. Hallin’s spheres consist of a set of two concentric circles. The center circle represents the sphere of consensus, which encompasses ideas mainstream journalists consider so widely accepted—capitalism is the best economic system, for example—that a writer could advocate for these ideas in their work and still be considered objective. The first ring of circles represents the sphere of legitimate controversy, which focuses on litigating “both sides” arguments—for example, conservative versus liberal economic policy—and is boundaried by prevailing contemporary cultural norms. Finally, the space beyond both rings represents the sphere of deviance, which includes ideas mainstream journalists view as illegitimate or unacceptably controversial—for example, the idea of establishing legal workplace protections for gay people prior to the 1990s (Hallin, 1986, p. 116-117).

Significantly, these spheres are not static; journalistic work, public discourse or advocacy, and changing cultural norms can all shift ideas toward or away from the sphere of consensus, as ideologies, controversies, and preferences shift on a broader scale. Lewis Raven Wallace attributes this to news judgment, which he defines as the process by which “split-second decisions [are made] about what is a story, and just how big and new that story is, [and] how much airtime or word count it deserves” by and within newsrooms (Wallace, 2019, p. 17). Though Hallin’s spheres focus on journalists and journalism, I feel that the theory can be reasonably expanded to encompass public and political discourse more generally, especially now that the internet has expanded the average person’s access to information as well as their ability to create, share, or manipulate information for other people’s consumption.

For example, Time’s article “The Transgender Tipping Point” (Steinmetz, 2014) can be viewed as an effort to move positive trans representation from the outer Hallin’s spheres toward the sphere of consensus; the 2016 political discourse about North Carolina’s trans bathroom ban, HB2, demonstrated simultaneous opposing efforts to shift discourse about trans people in either direction (Ari, 2016; Burns, 2016); and The Atlantic’s article “When Children Say They’re Trans” (Singal, 2018) is just one example of reactionary coverage attempting to move positive trans representation back toward the sphere of deviance. Additionally, and alongside these journalistic efforts, online information and misinformation shared on social media platforms have had a significant effect on public attitudes about trans people and identities (Everhart & Davenport, 2025; Fiennes & Matloch, 2025).

2. Framing and its influence on individual interpretation

Framing theory, which originated with sociologist Erving Goffman, is the theory that how information is presented to people influences how those people process and interpret the information (Goffman, 1974, p. 10-11). Goffman proposes that every person interprets information through frameworks—i.e., the way we individually interpret what is going on around us—and that our individual frameworks are shaped by the way different concepts are framed within our culture (p. 24-27). In other words, cultural framing instructs how we “should” think about different issues, events, organizations, and even people, and influences how we react to them. Notably, the trick with framing is that it is largely invisible to us. We tend to assume that our frameworks are normal, universal, and incontrovertible (p. 38-39). This is, by and large, how our biases and areas of ignorance form—especially when our frameworks are reinforced by the broader cultural framing around us.

For example, U.S. culture frames cisgender identity as normal and natural, a framing known as cisnormativity (Berger & Ansara, 2021). As a result of cisnormative cultural framing, many people have developed frameworks that assume, without evidence, that every person they meet is cisgender; and that they can tell, at a glance and without error, what every other person’s sex and gender is. As an implied corollary of cisnormativity, U.S. culture frames transgender identities as abnormal and unnatural, resulting in many people developing frameworks that assume that trans people are not actually real, or that trans people are deceptive, delusional, and/or dangerous (Serano, 2026).

To summarize, information is extremely manipulable, on both the individual and the public levels, sometimes in ways that are not apparent or conscious. It is this malleability that allows misinformation to function.

Examining U.S. frameworks about trans people

Above, I outlined broad U.S. cultural framing about gender identity as such: That to be cisgender is natural and normal, and that to be transgender is not. Because this cultural framing has deeply influenced many people’s individual frameworks about trans people, and therefore how they approach trans-related issues, I want to examine these individual frameworks more closely. Generally, I have found that people tend to gravitate toward one or more of four individual frameworks:

Trans people do not exist. People with this framework doubt the existence of transgender people and identities altogether. For example, someone with this framework might believe that trans women are actually cis men who like to wear makeup and dresses, that being trans is a mental illness, that children cannot possibly be trans, that biological sex is the only authentic indicator of gender, or that there are only two genders.
Trans people are not reliable narrators of their own stories, experiences, or identities. People with this framework assume that trans people cannot be trusted to relate their stories or to provide analysis on trans-related issues, and that cis people are more objective and therefore better positioned to understand and speak about gender. For example, someone with this framework might believe that trans people are lying about their identities or bodies; that people are trans because they want attention; that children are pressured into being trans by their peers, parents, or predatory adults; or that trans researchers are incapable of objectively studying or analyzing data about trans people.
Trans people are to be pitied. People with this framework project cisgender expectations onto trans people’s bodies and lives, measuring trans people according to cis standards and finding trans people wanting—and therefore pitiable. For example, someone with this framework might believe that every trans person has been born in the wrong body; that every trans person who pursues medical transition does so with the goal of passing as cisgender; that medical transition represents a form of mutilation; or that trans people are obsessively fixated on gender, pronouns, trans rights, and so on.
Trans people represent a threat. People with this framework assert that trans people are a direct threat to cis people, figuratively and/or literally. For example, someone with this framework might believe that trans women and girls in sports or single-gender facilities represent a danger to cis women and girls; that the safety and efficacy of medical transition care is questionable, and therefore dangerous; that adopting trans-inclusive language erases the categories of man and woman; or that trans activists are violent extremists who want to destroy society.

These frameworks function as the guide rails of anti-trans mis/disinformation; we will return to them shortly.

Misinformation and disinformation

Before we dive into anti-trans misinformation specifically, I want to talk about misinformation generally.

It is important to note that misinformation is an umbrella term that encompasses disinformation. While both involve the distribution of false, misleading, and/or de-contextualized material, disinformation is intentionally manipulative, while misinformation is simply factually incorrect (Freelon & Wells, 2020, p. 145-146; High Level Expert Group, 2018, p.3; Wagner, 2026, p. 4).

In my experience, people tend to assume that misinformation is less harmful than disinformation. Although that is often true, there are cases when misinformation is actually more dangerous, because “when people share information, they do so based on the justifiable default expectation that it is true” and therefore do not even think to doubt its accuracy (Lewandowsky et al., 2024, p.2). Misinformation is, by its nature, decontextualized—it is not apparent where any given piece of misinformation comes from, or how it may have been manipulated—and so it is harder for people to discern the misinformation’s underlying messaging (Arrigucci, 2026, paras. 2 & 6-7; Palfrey, 2025, para. 10). Additionally, studies of information-seeking behavior demonstrate that, in general, people are much more likely to believe information when it is shared by someone they trust, even if they would otherwise doubt the source (Media Insight Project, 2017, paras. 4-5); and that misinformation spreads much faster than accurate information online, which is now where a majority of people in the U.S. receive or interact with news (Palfrey, 2025, para. 3; St. Aubin & Liedke, 2025, paras. 2-5).

To illustrate what I mean, consider the false claim in 2022 that U.S. schools were putting litter boxes into bathrooms for students who supposedly identify as cats—a moral panic that quickly expanded to encompass public fear and skepticism about students who are trans (Donahue, 2022). Exactly who originated the claim is not clear, but the misinformation only gained traction because it was widely shared across social media (and, from there, into school board meetings and legislatures) by a public who did not question its truth (Czopek, 2022; Kingkade et al., 2022). Despite extensive debunking, including by journalists who discovered that some schools do stock litter for “‘go buckets’ that contain emergency supplies in case students are locked in a classroom during a shooting” [emphasis mine], this misinformation persists (Kingkade et al., 2022, para. 15).

Anecdotally, my partner often talks to people about trans rights. While in conversation about anti-trans discrimination with a coworker during a work trip in July 2024, this coworker suddenly asked something to the effect of, But all the trans stuff aside, can you defend litter boxes in classrooms for kids who identify as cats? Apparently this coworker had heard that his own child’s elementary school had a litter box in the classroom for that purpose. The coworker had not verified the rumor with any of the educators working at the school, despite presumably having direct access to them, but nevertheless confidently repeated the misinformation as if it were fact. Telling me about this conversation later, my partner was struck by the fact that this coworker so immediately connected a discussion of trans rights to a piece of misinformation the coworker had never even thought to question.

In 2023, North Dakota state legislators proposed a bill that would simultaneously ban trans students from school bathrooms that do not correspond to their sex assigned at birth and prohibit schools from providing “accommodations that cater to a student’s perception of being any animal species other than human” (Reed, 2023b, para. 1). That same year, Missouri schools considered a policy that essentially did the same (Reed, 2023d). In other words, this misinformation has not only suffused public discourse but has also been cited to justify official bans, all while its underlying messaging has real-world impacts on trans students whose dignity and identities are targeted by proxy.

In fact, people who design disinformation often do so with the express purpose of laundering it into misinformation—a tactic called trading up the chain—which, in turn, ends up infiltrating increasingly mainstream conversations, as third-party individuals and groups uncritically share it along (Friedberg & Donovan, 2020, para. 6; Marwick & Lewis, 2017, p. 38-39). Disinformation designers facilitate this process by using so-called “facts” that intentionally play into cultural framing and individual frameworks, because they know that makes people more likely to accept and spread disinformation without pausing to think (Kruijver et al., 2025, p. 8-11, 13-15; PEN America, 2023, paras. 2, 5-7). And once a piece of disinformation successfully trades up the chain, the resulting misinformation can help to shift the larger ideas it references from the sphere of consensus to the sphere of legitimate controversy, or from the sphere of legitimate controversy to the sphere of deviance, within the media and the broader public forum.

For example, in 2018, anti-trans researcher Lisa Littman developed the concept of “rapid onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD) while seeking to explain her perception that there was a sudden rise in the number of youth who were coming out as trans in her hometown (Kesslen, 2022, para. 16). The extreme flaws in Littman’s methodology and conclusions have been rightfully critiqued, and her theory of ROGD has been thoroughly debunked and rejected by experts (Fenway Health, 2023; Public Health Communications Collaborative, 2024; Reed, 2023c; Restar, 2020). However, many people find the concept of ROGD compelling because it feels true to them—they already believe that children cannot be trans, that children are pressured into being trans, and/or that being trans is a mental illness, and Littman’s ROGD theory affirms these beliefs; and so, many people continue to believe in, support, and spread the theory of ROGD. KD Coldwater provides an excellent rundown of this phenomenon:

TER/GC [“trans-exclusionary reactionary”/“gender-critical”] echo chambers operate as the frontline in establishing misinformation that harms transgender people. They are tied to ideas … that transwomen are prone to violent behavior, that transgender people are delusional, and that transgender people are “grooming” children for the purpose of sexualizing them—an idea that closely adheres to the idea that “ROGD” is driven by social media influencers and celebrities that make being transgender look trendy. From these (misinformed) positions, further misinformation is likely to develop, thus constituting a cycle wherein information feeds in on itself and propagates more information while strengthening the crystallization of misinformed beliefs. For instance, although transgender people are more likely than cisgender people to experience violence in bathrooms, TER/GC sympathizers have called for policies that would result in segregation of transgender people from gender affirming bathrooms, locker rooms, and other sex-specific facilities. … Unsurprisingly, these echo chambers provided fertile ground for Littman to develop the concept of ROGD, an unsupported subdiagnosis of GD [gender dysphoria] that relies on pathologization and misinformed beliefs about transgender people, and which ultimately, lends an air of scientific credibility to TER/GC ideology. In migrating out of echo chambers and into peer-reviewed research streams, anti-trans misinformation can then be spread more widely. (Coldwater, 2023, p. 755)

Ultimately, the spread of anti-trans misinformation has been so successful because anti-trans mis/disinformation so directly resonates with the U.S. frameworks we discussed earlier; briefly: Trans people do not actually exist, trans people are not reliable narrators, trans people are to be pitied, and trans people represent a threat. Individuals who are invested in anti-trans efforts understand U.S. frameworks about trans people and identities—and have very successfully leveraged these frameworks to argue in favor of policies or laws that encompass everything from prohibiting people from expressing gender nonconformity in public (Comeriato, 2026, paras. 1-5, 19, & 23) all the way to codifying the notion “that people who are visibly trans in public are pornographic or obscene, because they might be seen by a minor” (Quinan, 2025, p. 538).

Foundations of current anti-trans misinformation

When interpreting any kind of information, especially information that activists have deliberately targeted with mis/disinformation efforts, it is extremely important to look beneath the surface-level discourse at its foundations—namely, what the actual message or animating goal is. Sometimes this requires us to read carefully between the lines; but oftentimes, if we simply trace an argument back to its origin points, we find the intent is plainly stated. With that in mind, let’s examine the foundations of the current anti-trans misinformation campaign, as articulated by just a few of the people involved at the very heart of anti-trans efforts. Note that my scope here defines current as the past decade or so. This should not be misconstrued as suggesting that the foundations of anti-trans mis/disinformation were only first created or revealed beginning in the 2010s—on the contrary, there is an extraordinarily long record of anti-trans mis/disinformation and suppression going back to before the U.S. was founded (Pelecanos et al., 2026)—but rather that I needed to pick a point at which to start my analysis. Since anti-trans activists such as Terry Schilling have openly stated that they pivoted to “transgender issues” after losing the fight against the legalization of gay marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges in June 2015, I chose to set my scope accordingly (Reed, 2023a, para. 9).

During a 2022 interview with Tucker Carlson, “Libs of TikTok” creator Chaya Raichik said:

The LGBTQ community has become this cult, and it’s so captivating, and it pulls people in so strongly, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And they brainwash people to join, and they convince them of all these things, and it’s really, really hard to get out of it. … It’s extremely poisonous. … I think they’re evil. And sometimes we try to break it down a lot and, you know, we discuss why this is happening, what’s happening, and whatever. And I think sometimes the simplest answer is, they’re just evil. They’re bad people, they’re just evil people. And they want to groom kids. (Based Media, 2023, 48:47)

This assertion connects directly into the framework that trans people are a threat, and it is a known fact that Raichik uses her platform to direct her audience to harass and threaten the individuals and organizations she spotlights as such (Ingram, 2024). For example, consider the San Lorenzo Library in Oakland, California. After Raichik posted about a drag queen story hour at the library in 2022, members of the white nationalist group the Proud Boys, wearing shirts with slogans like, “Kill your local pedophile,” physically interrupted the program, shouted slurs, and threatened violence—all in front of the children participating in the program, whom the Proud Boys were supposedly there to protect (Owen, 2022; Peet, 2022). This is not an isolated incident. Similar attacks on libraries and library workers have been increasing in frequency, and escalating in intensity, over the past few years (Chen, 2023; Savage, 2024; School Library Journal, 2023; Waldroupe, 2024). Nor are libraries and library workers Raichik’s only target; she has also directed her audience to threaten, harass, and/or doxx schools, educators, hospitals, and healthcare providers who serve or support trans people, as well as private citizens who happen to be trans or otherwise LGBTQIA+ (Tirrell & Gogarty, 2023).

In January 2024, Raichik was appointed to the Oklahoma Department of Education’s Library Media Advisory Committee, with then-State Superintendent Ryan Walters stating that her “unique perspective” would be “invaluable … to make Oklahoma schools safer for kids” (Oklahoma State Department of Education, 2024, para. 2). The committee’s goal is to “[remove] pornographic or sexualized content” from public school libraries (Wallis, 2024, para. 6). Raichik’s appointment came under scrutiny following the violent assault and death of a 16-year-old trans masculine student, Nex Benedict, who attended a school district in Oklahoma where a teacher who expressed support for trans students was targeted by Libs of TikTok in 2022 and subsequently forced to resign (Hurley, 2024; Riedel & Factora, 2024). In a particularly harrowing coda, on January 22, 2025, the White House deleted the federal webpage memorializing Benedict as part of its sweeping post-inauguration data purges of LGBTQIA+ information (Lang, 2025).

In the same year as Raichik’s 2022 interview, the Christian fundamentalist legal group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF)’s Church & Ministry Alliance published an article titled “Should Schools Notify Parents If Their Child Claims to Be Transgender?” The article states: “Confusing a generation about biological reality is an existential threat to society. No society can thrive if it doesn’t understand the purpose of the body” (Womack, 2022, section 3, para. 6). (This begs an aside: What is the purpose of the body, according to ADF?) For context, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) formally designated ADF an anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group in 2016 (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2017). SPLC applied the designation because ADF has, among other stances and actions:

“supported the idea that being LGBTQ+ should be a crime in the U.S. and abroad and believes that [it] is OK to put LGBTQ+ people in prison for engaging in consensual sex” (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2020, para. 2);
“supported laws that required the forced sterilization of transgender Europeans” who seek to legally transition (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2020, para. 2); and
baselessly “linked being LGBTQ+ to pedophilia and claimed that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy society” (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2020, para. 3).

Yet the parents centered in ADF’s article were later uncritically featured in a 2023 New York Times article called “When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know.” The article describes ADF merely as “a conservative law group” with no further context (Baker, 2023, para. 22). A 2023 open letter signed by over 200 Times contributors concerned by the paper’s coverage of gender diversity points out that Baker “fails to make clear that court cases brought by parents who want schools to out their trans children are part of a legal strategy pursued by anti-trans hate groups” (Andrews et al., 2023, para. 5). The same letter raises serious concerns about reporting by Emily Bazelon (para. 4), Azeen Ghorayshi, and Ross Douthat (para. 6), even as the paper decided not to renew the contract of Jennifer Finney Boylan, “one of the paper’s most consistently published trans writers” (para. 7). These examples directly illustrate the way misinformation spreads into major news outlets via editors or reporters who fail to examine their own frameworks carefully enough—or who are themselves operating from a position of unacknowledged bias or, in some cases, active bigotry. Of course, once anti-trans misinformation has been successfully laundered into mainstream articles in the Times and other outlets, those same articles—with all the institutional reputation of the outlet behind them—are inevitably cited in anti-trans legislation or court cases as proof of the legitimacy of efforts to criminalize gender-affirming care, launch investigations into health care providers, target trans-affirming parents with allegations of child abuse, and require schools to out trans students as official policy (Andrews et al., 2023, paras. 6 & 8; Carnell, 2024; Owen, 2023; Urquhart, 2025).

A 2021 “report” written by Our Duty—a self-described “support group and advocacy organisation for parents of children who identify as transgender” (Our Duty, 2021, p. 1) that is connected to Genspect, an international organization which opposes social and medical transition for people of all ages—includes this recommendation:

Each ‘persister’ [trans youth who ‘persists’ in their transition to become a trans adult] that reaches ‘a point of no return’ with their Opposite Sex Imitation Medicine has been let down—let down by society, let down by the psychotherapeutic professions, and profoundly let down by the medical profession. It should be the objective of any advanced civilization presented with this problem to TARGET 100% DESISTANCE, and as early as possible. [emphasis theirs] (Our Duty, 2021, p. 9)

This connects to several of the previously outlined frameworks in its assertions that trans people are imitating a different sex via medication, that trans people are the victims of malpracticing doctors, and that a truly advanced society should view the existence of trans people as a problem requiring urgent solutions. Our Duty’s report was submitted to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, an influential, United Kingdom-based organization that assists with official policymaking around developments in the biological and medical research fields.

Since this document was submitted to the Nuffield Council, the U.K. has established a total ban on puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for trans patients under 18 years of age, shut down its only clinic for trans youth, and released the 2024 Cass Review (Hansford, 2026; Reed, 2026b; United Kingdom Department of Health and Social Care, 2024). The Cass Review was led by a physician named Hilary Cass; in a 2024 interview, Cass noted that she was selected for the position because “I had no experience with trans young people. I started it neutrally, with an open mind. That’s what the NHS wanted too: a neutral person who did not work in gender care. Because that field was so polarized” (Aqua, 2024, para. 10). Note the unquestioned assumption here that her lack of expertise somehow made her more, rather than less, qualified to lead this review, unlike the supposedly polarized experts who actually work in the field (recall: Trans people are not reliable narrators). Actually, Cass’ ignorance only served to make her more vulnerable to being taken in by anti-trans misinformation—because she lacked the ability to critically assess trans-focused information, because she lacked the self-awareness to understand how her own biases and frameworks influenced her approach, and because she dismissed existing knowledge as insufficiently neutral. As a result, in 2022, she “privately expressed an interest in the sham report against gender-affirming care commissioned by Florida’s AHCA [Agency for Health Care Administration]” (Jones, 20234, para. 2). The report in question was developed by the state of Florida to justify the passage of SB 254, “a law prohibiting gender-affirming medical treatment for [trans] minors and severely restricting access to care for trans adults” (para. 1). Florida officials deliberately worked with Genspect, the international anti-trans organization connected to Our Duty, as well as many known anti-trans activists (para. 2), including:

Vernadette Broyles, an attorney who founded the U.S. legal organization Child & Parental Rights Campaign to “protect children’s health, defend parental rights, and secure women’s privacy, safety, and equal opportunities against the harms of transgender ideology” (Child & Parental Rights Campaign, 2025);
Riittakerttu Kaltiala, a professor of adolescent psychiatry from Finland who supports and spreads a variation of the debunked theory of ROGD (Trans Data Library, 2024b, paras. 1, 6); and
Several members from the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM), an anti-trans political organization that creates and amplifies pseudoscientific misinformation and was included in SPLC’s 2025 list of anti-LGBTQIA+ hate groups (Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.-a, section 5; Trans Data Library, 2025, paras. 1-3).

The Cass Review has been widely criticized by numerous major medical professionals and associations for its deeply flawed methodology (Pearce, 2024; TransActual UK, 2025; WPATH & USPATH, 2024), and in 2026, Cass herself stated that the review found no evidence that puberty blockers cause harm to trans patients (Urquhart, 2026). Nevertheless, the Cass Review is now being cited as evidence by the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Health and Human Services Department in a conservative-led push to ban trans health care in the U.S., starting with trans minors (Simmons-Duffin, 2025, para. 12; United States v. Skrmetti, 2024, p. 24). The president of the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank at the vanguard of this push, has stated that the organization’s goal is to “outlaw” trans health care for people of all ages, no matter how long it takes (Reed, 2026a, paras. 1 & 3). For her work on the Cass Review, Hilary Cass was granted a peerage, which comes with a lifetime seat in the U.K. House of Lords that will allow her to “[sit] in on legislative meetings where she will help draft new laws, join committees that consider public policy, and ‘hold the government to account’” (Steinsiek, 2024, para. 7).

In 2019, ADF lawyer Gary McCaleb wrote in an email that legislation banning trans athletes from participation in sports and banning trans people from making changes to their birth certificates “is critical not just for the confused kids who might be spared an awful future, but for the broader movement” (crimew, 2023, p. 1323). Note the frameworks at play in McCaleb’s assertion that trans youth are “confused kids” destined for “an awful future” if allowed to mature into trans adults. The broader movement here referenced is deliberately attempting to shift U.S. governance toward greater alignment with Christian nationalist principles (Zoledziowski, 2023, para. 20). Per an exposé in Mother Jones, the email containing this quotation was part of a series of communications known as the Deutsch emails that spanned more than two years among a coalition whose express purpose was to figure out how to pass state bans on transition care across the country, starting with bans on youth transition care (crimew, 2023; Pauly, 2023, paras. 1-3, 6-7). The coalition included two senators and four house representatives from various states; representatives from more than 10 different anti-trans advocacy organizations that oppose social and medical transition for people of all ages, many of which promote the harmful pseudoscientific practice of conversion therapy instead; and several ideological detransitioners, one of whom ultimately disavowed the movement, re-transitioned, and apologized for the harm done in her name (crimew, 2023; Doyle, 2023; Zoledziowski, 2023, paras. 10, 21-23).

Throughout the correspondence, participants discuss how best to craft their language in order to avoid acknowledging that trans people exist, to effectively criminalize gender-affirming care providers, to discredit publications explaining the dangers of conversion therapy, and to coordinate the drafting and introduction of anti-trans laws across the country (Pauly, 2023, para. 18-23). They frequently frame anti-trans legal and political gains as victories in an ongoing Christian nationalist holy war (Zoledziowski, 2023). In 2019, the year McCaleb sent his email referencing the broader movement, a total of 32 anti-trans bills were considered in a handful of state legislatures, mostly focused on bathrooms, sports, and healthcare for trans minors (Trans Legislation Tracker, n.d.-c). By 2025, 1,022 anti-trans bills were considered in 49 state legislatures and at the federal level with potential impacts across a huge array of aspects of life: sports, healthcare for trans minors and adults, education, adoption and foster care, child custody, child welfare, bathrooms, identification documents, employment, incarceration, pronouns, military service, public performances, marriage, civil rights, and more (Trans Legislation Tracker, n.d.-a). At the time of writing in July 2026, there are currently over 800 anti-trans bills being considered in 43 state legislatures and at the federal level (Trans Legislation Tracker, n.d.-b).

In 2017, Kim Hutton, the mother of a trans child, testified against the inclusion of a doctor, Paul Hruz, as an expert witness in a court case related to trans medical care. In her deposition, Hutton states that she once challenged Hruz’s opposition to gender-affirming care by citing the significant risk of self-harm or suicide among trans youth who are denied support, and that Hruz replied, “Some children are born in this world to suffer and die” (Adams ex rel. Kaspar v. School Board of St. Johns County, Florida, 2017, p. 29-30). (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hruz was a participant in the Deutsch emails; searching the entire collection of emails for the term “Paul Hruz” returns 433 discrete instances (crimew, 2023).)

Hruz’s extraordinarily callous response to Hutton directly reflects the framework that trans people are to be pitied. Despite Hruz’s clear bias and his lack of experience treating patients diagnosed with gender dysphoria, Hruz has been consistently called to testify as a so-called expert witness in opposition to gender-affirming care when legal bans on care are challenged in state and federal courts (Trans Data Library, 2024a). It is crucial to note here that Hruz’s stance is deeply misaligned with medical consensus; transition care is endorsed by every major medical association in the country (American Association of Clinical Endocrinology, 2022; American Counseling Association, n.d.; American Medical Association, 2021; American Nurses Association, 2022; American Psychiatric Association et al., 2021; American Psychological Association, 2024; Endocrine Society, 2020; GLAAD, 2023; Wyckoff, 2022). Yet, most recently, at the end of 2024, Hruz submitted official testimony to the Supreme Court in United States v. Skrmetti, which ultimately ruled that trans youth do not have a constitutional right to access gender-affirming care and that state governments have a legitimate interest in “encouraging minors to appreciate their sex” (United States v. Skrmetti, 2024, p. 14; Riedel, 2024b). (Note that, although the Court and other anti-trans activists frequently use the term sex as a shorthand for biological sex—a phrase that appears 37 times throughout the Skrmetti decision—this is yet another piece of anti-trans misinformation that serves to erase intersex people and cast doubt on trans identities. The Court is actually, of course, referring to sex assigned at birth.) With this ruling, the Supreme Court has created a precedent that can be—and currently is—used to argue against access to care for trans adults, on the grounds that the government has a legitimate interest in compelling citizens of all ages to “appreciate their sex” (Reed, 2026c).

Finally, at the 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference, Daily Wire host Michael Knowles stated:

There can be no middle way in dealing with transgenderism. It is all or nothing. If transgenderism is true, if men can become women, then it’s true for everybody of all ages. If it is false, then for the good of society, and especially for the good of the poor people who have fallen prey to this confusion, transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely. (Media Matters for America, 2023, para. 2)

This was spoken to the crowd at one of the most influential conferences on the political right, and it was met with cheers because it reflects an increasingly influential branch of U.S. conservatism (Leary, 2023). This branch is perhaps best represented by the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” an extensive operational playbook that the current administration is in the process of implementing. The playbook’s introduction states:

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children … is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. … The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered. (Dans & Groves, 2023, p. 5)

“Project 2025” proceeds to make the following recommendations in regards to trans people and trans identities:

Deleting the words “sexual orientation and gender identity (‘SOGI’), diversity, equity, and inclusion (‘DEI’), gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, [and] gender-sensitive … from every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation, and piece of legislation that exists” in the U.S. (p. 4-5).
Restricting or repealing anti-discrimination rules protecting people on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, trans status, or sex characteristics (p. 584).
Taking the official federal stance that there is “insufficient scientific evidence to support” gender-affirming care, eliminating federal funding for gender-affirming care, and withholding federal funding from hospitals that provide it (p. 474).
Banning trans people from military service (p. 103).
Banning teachers from using a name or pronouns for a student that do not match their original birth certificate without written parental permission (p. 343-346).
Defining “sex” to mean “only biological sex recognized at birth,” and establishing “male” and “female” as the only federally recognized categories of sex or gender (p. 333; p. 496).
Eliminating federal funding for DEI programs and ending DEI initiatives at federal agencies and higher education institutions (p. 258; p. 322; p. 582-586).
Banning the federal government, its agencies, and its employees from “promoting” “pro-LGBT initiatives” in other parts of the world (p. 89).

As of July 2026, community trackers indicate that many of these recommendations have been implemented (Project 2025 Tracker, 2025).

Reactions and repercussions

I have found that, when I communicate with individuals outside the trans community about the mis/disinformation campaign that is intended to eradicate trans people, a majority of those individuals express doubt on the grounds that it all sounds so extreme. However, the most extreme ideas in any given misinformation campaign are exactly as dangerous as their ability to effectively appeal to the average person’s existing frameworks—that is, the way a person individually interprets what is going on around them, as shaped by their broader cultural framing.

In the case of trans people, the extreme ideas beneath the surface-level discourse—that trans people are groomers or predators, that transness endangers the very concept of biological reality, that trans people are a violent threat to cis people and/or society, that total desistance must be our societal-level goal, that “transgenderism” must be eradicated entirely, and so on—have been so successful in appealing to the frameworks of the average person that they have become widely accepted. Even people who previously rejected these ideas outright have started to express support for them. Pew Research Center survey data show that the percentage of Americans who believe that gender is determined by a person’s sex assigned at birth has steadily risen, from 54% in 2017 to 65% last year (Brown, 2017; Horowitz, 2025).

Another survey released in February 2025 shows that, across the entire political spectrum in the U.S., support has increased for banning trans athletes from participating in sports, banning trans minors from accessing gender-affirming care, banning trans people from accessing bathrooms, and banning educators from teaching about gender identity in schools; and decreased for laws protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs, housing, and public spaces such as restaurants and stores (Pew Research Center, 2025). Note that cisgender minors remain free to access the exact same forms of medical care without interference, as long as that care affirms their cis identity—and that cis minors routinely do access that care, in far greater numbers than trans minors (Pauly, 2025; Riedel, 2024a; Schall & Moses, 2023). Note, too, that legal mechanisms give unsupportive parents of trans children a wide latitude to deny their children’s access to care, while simultaneously preventing and even criminalizing supportive parents who want their trans children to have access to care (Dawson & Kates, 2024; Planned Parenthood, 2025). And finally, note that bans on discussing gender identity in schools only ever apply to trans identity; these bans never prohibit educators from talking about cis identity (although presumably they would discourage educators from using the term “cisgender,” in the interest of upholding cisnormativity) (Bricki, 2026; Wilkins, 2026).

Finally, trans people make up an estimated 1% of the total U.S. population (Herman & Flores, 2025). That is not to suggest that these issues are less important because the fraction of people affected by them is minuscule, but rather to call attention to the fact that the trans community makes for an extremely easy target. We simply do not have the numbers to set or control the narrative in the way that cis people can and do. Additionally, as reflected in the frameworks discussed earlier, trans people are considered unreliable and unobjective narrators. For example, consider: Between 2023 and 2024, The New York Times failed to quote trans people in two-thirds of its reporting about trans people (Henry & Drennan, 2024), and Times leadership openly dismissed the open letter featuring over 200 contributors’ documented concerns about the paper’s anti-trans bias as “advocacy” (Urquhart, 2023, para. 2). Following the current administration’s first 100 days in office, the Trans Journalists Association reviewed and analyzed “a representative sample of nearly 300 articles” about trans people that were “published by selected key national outlets with significant reach” during those first 100 days, and found that “70% did not include a quote from a single trans person” (Trans Journalists Association, 2025, para. 4). Trans people have historically experienced extreme medical gatekeeping because (cis) doctors viewed the desire to transition with skepticism at best and hostility at worst (Verbeek et al., 2022; Wiegand, 2021). The so-called trans panic defense, which is still permitted in 30 states as of July 2026, is predicated on the fundamental assumption that trans people lie about their identities to trick partners into intimacy (LGBTQ+ Bar, 2026; Mallory et al., 2021, p. 22-23). As a result, trans people who do speak up are frequently dismissed, undermined, or attacked for doing so. And of course, the fact of the matter is that cis people are impacted by anti-trans efforts, too. As nonbinary artist and scholar Alok Vaid-Menon writes:

Babies are born and divided into one of two categories. These categories, boy or girl, affect how we treat the baby when they cry, what clothes we dress the baby in, what toys we allow the baby to play with, and so on. We teach that boys are strong and girls are weak, that boys are aggressive and girls are nice, that boys are rational and girls are emotional. Nothing is spared; we mark everything—the colors, the emotions, the relationships, even the food. And this is done so consistently and with so much authority that we don’t even recognize that we are doing it. At first, these messages might seem trivial, but compounded over time, they become serious. Depending on whether we call them a boy or a girl, we assign each a narrative—we tell some children that they are strong, and we tell others that they are weak. We tell some children that they can express themselves, and we tell others that they should not have feelings. We tell some children that their worth comes from doing harm, and we tell others that their worth comes from accepting it. And we tell the kids who don’t fit into our categories that they are wrong. … We punish them until they conform. (Vaid-Menon, 2020, p. 29-30)

Under this system, not a single person is spared from the disciplining influence of the gender binary. Later in that same work, Vaid-Menon notes, “While it is true that there are bodily differences, it is a political choice to emphasize certain differences over others in order to create categories” (p. 52). With the passage of every law and policy that formally codifies the supposedly inalienable biological differences between men and women in order to “defend” against trans people, we are re-inscribing a political system in which every single person who is assigned female at birth is considered legally inferior to every single person who is assigned male at birth (Banaji, 2025; Exec. Order No. 14168, 2025; Southern Poverty Law Center, n.d.-b). On a societal level, this has extraordinarily serious implications for everyone, and yet these developments are frequently referred to, dismissively, as trans issues—and subsequently ignored.

Conclusion

At the start of my article, I mentioned that understanding the function and prevalence of anti-trans misinformation is necessary for library workers so that we can recognize and avoid spreading it through our work. This article has, I hope, provided a strong foundational understanding of what anti-trans misinformation looks like, how it functions, and what it is trying to accomplish in broad terms. The next article in my series will narrow in focus to address anti-trans misinformation in libraries specifically, and to discuss some practical techniques library workers can apply at the intersection of LIS work and anti-trans misinformation.

Rather than leave readers to simply wait for part two, however, I want to wrap up by addressing some points for immediate consideration.

Whenever I speak to people about anti-trans misinformation, by far the most common question I receive is: So what should I do? Perhaps you, my reader, are sitting here at the end of this article wondering that very question: What should I do? I appreciate that people feel strongly moved to act after I speak to them. Candidly, I do hope that you, too, feel moved to act. The problem is that, beyond some general guidance and ideas, I cannot tell you what exactly you should do, because I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about your workplace context, or what professional duties you perform, or your level of power at work, or whether your administration or trustees or local politicians are likelier to help or to hinder you, or what your service community is like, or your personal strengths or weaknesses, or your risk tolerance, or your deeply held values, or your positionality to trans people, or how the information I’ve shared combines with or influences any of the things I’ve listed. But you know you, and so I think you would do much better and accomplish much more if, instead of asking me, you examine your circumstances and resources critically and ask yourself what you should do.

Sometimes I think that this question—What should I do?—isn’t seeking an answer so much as it is seeking permission. I would happily give you permission, but once again, I cannot do that. Only you can give yourself permission.

You might recall that I also mentioned, at the start of this article, that anti-trans misinformation has become so virulent, and U.S. society so trans-hostile as a result, primarily because cis people as a whole have persistently failed to act or to demonstrate that they (really, genuinely) take anti-trans sentiments and actions seriously. Sometimes cis people excuse their inaction by claiming ignorance of trans issues. Sometimes cis people excuse their inaction by claiming—falsely, as we’ve covered—that trans issues aren’t relevant to cis people. Sometimes cis people excuse their inaction by saying they aren’t qualified to talk about trans issues, because they are not trans. But information—and by proxy, misinformation—is a participatory system, not a passive one. Ignorance, apathy, and fear accomplish nothing and, in fact, only make it easier for disinformation to trade up the chain into misinformation, and then to spread further and further and further. So, while I cannot tell you exactly what you should do, I will say this: You need to find a way to overcome whatever reluctance you feel, and participate.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to the editors of Murmurations for curating a space for trans and gender diverse people to write and create on our own terms. More particularly, my heartfelt thanks go to Max Bowman, Joyce Gabiola, and Stephen G. Krueger for their considerable effort, patience, and care in helping to prepare and improve this article (and even to suggest, so compassionately, that perhaps what I needed to write was actually a series of articles, although it means more work for them). I would also like to thank Abbey Childs for their thorough copyediting work.

Conflicts of interest

The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding this article.

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