How to lose a culture war: Social media, trans disinformation and the authoritarian right
Avery Rose Everhart, Theodore S. Davenport · Dialogues on Digital Society · 2025
Digital technologies are foundational to the authoritarian Far Right plan to “eradicate transgenderism” from public life. In this commentary, we sketch out how the Far Rights has weaponized digital anti-trans disinformation to bolster authoritarianism in the United States. Far Right actors have framed social media platforms as causing transness at the same time that they wield the same tools themselves to create and distribute disinformation about trans people and wage a culture war against “gender ideology.” We note how anxieties over both reproduction in service to the nation state and the potential fertility of gender nonconforming children and adolescents have been central to the production of this trans moral panic. Second, we ask, how might trans people create digital information ecologies beyond mere opposition to anti-trans disinformation? Rather than perpetually taking a reactive, or reactionary, stance to the constant influx of trans disinformation, we consider the political potential of alternative trans information ecologies.