In the first month of the 2022 election race, an archive of Liberal candidate Katherine Deves’ deleted tweets went viral. The general public was appalled at the crude and dehumanising ways she talked about trans people and the broader LGBTQIA+ community, referring to surrogacy as “reproductive prostitution” and the bodies of trans children as being “mutilated”.
However, this also served as the moment when many people in Australia learnt about trans people for the first time. In the weeks ahead we saw a slew of increasingly sympathetic articles and interviews, recasting Deves as a victim, entertaining her lies, and giving her opportunities to repeat her dangerous claims about us.
Commentators had the privilege of asking whether her beliefs were truly “anti-trans” or if she was just misunderstood; meanwhile, trans people were denied a similar platform to explain the impact of her words on our lives.
The thing that the media missed during this time was that the issue for trans people was not just that Deves’ tweets were offensive, it was also her promotion of dangerous anti-trans disinformation groups like Genspect and Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM).
You have probably never heard of them before now, but these groups are some of the leading voices against trans health care globally.
Anti-trans disinformation groups like this have provided testimony in important court cases such as Tavistock v Bell in the UK, lobbied against bans on anti-trans conversion practices in New Zealand, Canada and the UK, and their work has been used as the “scientific” basis for legislative attacks on the trans community in the US.
These organisations are not recognised medical bodies, do not work with established trans health organisations, and are not working in collaboration with trans communities. The issue is that these organisations give the impression of being reputable science to anyone unfamiliar with trans health.
Much like the ex-gay movement of the 1980s and 1990s, these organisations support a number of debunked, discredited, and bizarre theories.
For example, the “trans social contagion” theory (simply repackaged gay panic) has been widely debunked and discredited as pseudoscience, yet the originator of the theory, Lisa Littman, serves as an adviser to Genspect.
Despite this, their work has found influence in the anti-trans, far-right, and QAnon communities — communities that have long searched for a scientific rationalisation for their bigotry.
This kind of organised disinformation poses a huge threat to trans people, the broader LGBTQIA+ community, and our democracy.
In Australia, this disinformation has appeared on paid ads by Binary Australia (formerly known as Marriage Alliance, a group instrumental in the fight against marriage equality in Australia), is being circulated through far-right conspiracy groups, and is a key part of the ongoing media campaign against trans health care.
Astroturfing dissent in trans health
Globally, there are a number of groups focused on developing and distributing anti-trans disinformation. They mostly work to publish media (whether it be podcasts, reports, blogs or studies) for the general public on trans health care, make submissions to government and regulatory bodies, advocate in the press, and engage in public seminars — serving as “experts” for the TERF and far-right movements.
They all oppose the established standards of care for trans people and many argue that trans-ness is generally rooted in mental health issues rather than being an intrinsic and deeply rooted sense of self.
Out of the 10 organisations identified below, seven of them were launched in 2021. Additionally, there is a large amount of overlap in their membership and leadership. Genspect and SEGM share seven of the same advisors.
Stella O’Malley (founder of Genspect, psychotherapist), Lisa Marchiano (Jungian analyst), Sasha Ayad (counsellor), and Roberto D’Angelo (psychiatrist and psychoanalyst) all feature prominently across the organisations, serving as clinical advisors or directors for multiple organisations. In fact, five of the most prominent organisations feature all four of them.
Multiple organisations were officially founded by O’Malley, and all of them involve O’Malley as either an adviser or a director.
| Founded | Stella O’Malley | Lisa Marchiano | Sasha Ayad | Roberto D’Angelo | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Genspect | 2021 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) | 2019 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Gender Exploratory Therapy Association | 2021 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Wider Lens Counselling | 2021 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✘ |
| Rethink Identity Medicine Ethics | 2019 | ✓ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| Paediatric and Adolescent Gender Dysphoria Working Group (now defunct) |
2018 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| International Association of Therapists for Desisters and Destransitioners (now defunct) |
2021 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✘ |
| Institute for Comprehensive Gender Dysphoria Research | 2021 | ✓ | ✓ | ✘ | ✘ |
| Gender: A Wider Lens [Podcast] | 2021 | ✓ | ✘ | ✓ | ✘ |
| Thoughtful Therapists | 2021 | ✓ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
This appears to be an exercise in astroturfing.
Astroturfing is a deceptive practice where an organisation or lobby presents an orchestrated marketing or public relations campaign as if it is a genuine grassroots movement. The tobacco industry famously used this approach to give the impression of spontaneous grassroots opposition to smoking reform by creating fake “smokers’ rights” groups.
While the tobacco industry used astroturfing primarily to protect their economic interests, anti-trans disinformation groups are using this strategy to help socialise their extreme views on trans health, and give far-right and anti-trans groups an air of scientific legitimacy.
Their intention is to pass off a small, orchestrated group of anti-trans medical practitioners as a legitimate and science-based movement against gender-affirming care.
History repeating: anti-trans disinformation is the new climate denial
Throughout the early 2000s, an organised group of far-right think tanks funnelled billions of dollars to climate deniers, sceptics and geo-engineers. Their sole aim was to undermine public trust in the established science by spreading confusion about the facts of climate change, and casting doubt on the motives of scientific bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
For a public that was still learning about the realities of how fossil fuels were cooking our planet, the huge influx of disinformation, alongside legitimate scientific work, made it incredibly hard for people to discern fact from fiction.
A similar scenario is now playing out in trans health care.
“Gender-affirming care” is simply a patient-centred model of trans health care. Services may include medical (hormones or puberty blockers), surgical, mental health and non-medical services like voice training. Gender-affirming health care seeks to empower people with the resources and information to make their own decisions about what they want to do with their own bodies and lives.
There is an established consensus among almost all major medical organisations that gender-affirming care is necessary treatment, and that it is harmful to not allow a person to affirm their gender.
Disinformation groups are working to undermine this consensus and cast doubt on the efficacy of treatments.
For example, a key tactic used by these organisations is to weaponise the stories of people who decide to detransition. The number of people who “detransition” is incredibly low. It is hard to get accurate figures, but it seems to be somewhere between 1% to 3% of those who have transitioned, with the majority of people doing so reportedly due to discrimination, difficulty finding work or housing, or other hardship — not simply because they are not trans.
When compared with regret rates of other life-changing decisions (like the 8% of people who regret having kids, or the 30% of first-time marriages that end in divorce), it’s clear that the standards of care for gender-affirming care are very solid.
All the evidence points to the fact that trans people know who they are.
Despite this, we are seeing a sustained attack on trans health care in Australia by people and organisations with relationships to known anti-trans disinformation groups.
For example, on August 24 2022, The Sydney Morning Herald published an article telling the story of Jay Langadinos, who detransitioned after seeking medical gender affirmation as an adult and is now suing the doctor that cleared her for surgery. The central narrative of the story was that trans health care is harmful and that it needs tighter restrictions.
It turns out that Langadinos’ psychiatrist is Roberto D’Angelo — the president of SEGM. At no point in the article did the journalist engage with the “unscientific” nature of SEGM’s research and the potential for bias in their reporting due to the patient’s proximity to a known anti-trans organisation.
Furthermore, the legal clinic Langadinos is using is the so-called Feminist Legal Clinic, a group that lost its tenancy grant with the City of Sydney due to refusing to remove offensive anti-trans material from its website. The material in question reportedly conflated “transgenderism” with “child abuse, rape and paedophilia”.
Influencing policy with lies
With the proliferation of anti-trans disinformation, many in the trans community are concerned that it will begin to be passed off as reputable science, as has happened overseas.
In Texas, reports from SEGM were used to justify a governor-issued directive for the state’s department of family and protective services to investigate the parents of all children accessing gender-affirming care, and to treat these cases as child abuse.
In a report published by the Yale School of Medicine debunking the evidence brief from the governor, researchers noted that the brief contained “medical claims [which] are not grounded in reputable science and are full of errors of omission and inclusion”.
Additionally they noted that SEGM was a “biased source”, was “not a recognised scientific organisation”, does not produce a journal, and, at least with regards to its representation of one report, had “badly mischaracterised” the underlying source, constituting “a major violation of the scientific method and the accepted conventions of research”.
Additionally, in the UK last year, trans people were excluded from protection under a proposed ban on conversion practices after lobbying by the notorious anti-trans group the LGB Alliance, which in its meetings recycled talking points from Genspect, saying that it was important that therapists “could ‘examine’ the ‘reason’ for young people being trans”.
Organised disinformation is now starting to impact Australia.
Since the federal election, we have seen an uptick in the promotion of anti-trans disinformation by the media, groups like Binary Australia and the Australian Christian Lobby. Over the past couple of months, The Australian has published articles platforming disinformation about trans health care, such as a recent piece attacking gender-affirming care at Westmead Hospital.
The piece itself was founded on a highly dubious report, featuring a number of disproven theories and outdated terminology. In refuting the piece, AusPATH, Australia’s peak body for professionals involved in trans health, stated: “Overall, AusPATH is highly concerned by the outdated and offensive language used, the clear biases demonstrated, misrepresentation of data and unfounded conclusions based on this small sample.”
It is deeply concerning to see such a vicious and sustained campaign against the trans community.
It only took a few short years for anti-trans politics to escalate to fever pitch in the US and the UK. Already this year 300+ anti-trans bills have been introduced to state legislatures banning access to gender-affirming care, undermining our rights, and excluding trans people from public facilities. Disinformation has proven to be a gateway to attacking trans people’s civil liberties and safety.
This is not inevitable — we still have a chance to turn this around in Australia. But something must be done now to stop the spread.
