Faith that the internet would be a force for good

In 2011, around the time of the Arab Spring, Maria Ressa believed that social media would aid grassroots movements and revolutions. A decade later, she wrote:

“Social media’s instantaneous nature had accelerated the speed at which the revolutions had taken place. Authoritarian governments couldn’t keep up or control the messaging because those protest movements were modeled on the networks of the web: loose, nonhierarchical, leaderless. Dictators didn’t know whom to arrest; there were no political parties to tear apart, no underground revolt to dismantle. This was the people, and any government that fought its people would ultimately fail.

I cringe now when I remember that presentation. Those very same developments I welcomed in 2011 would soon be fine-tuned by the platforms’ business models, co-opted by state power, and turned against the people, fueling the rise of digital authoritarians, the death of facts, and the insidious mass manipulation we live with today.”

— Maria Ressa. How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future. New York: HarperCollins, 2022. p. 105.

Maria Ressa is awesome. She won a Nobel Prize in 2021 for safeguarding freedom of expression.

This sounds similar but isn't

In 2023, Yascha Mounk recalled:

“In the spring of 2014, I taught a first-year seminar called ‘Democracy in the Digital Age’ at Harvard University. My understands came from every state in the country and many parts of the world. They were planning on majoring in every subject from history to physics. But they also had a few things in common: they were smart, ambitious, unfailingly polite, and deeply convinced that the internet would make the world a better place.

It is now difficult to remember to what extent the conviction that the internet and social media were forces for good had been nurtured by virtually everything my students read as they went through middle and high schools. This positive view first took shape in the late 1990s, when a few writers made a name for themselves as internet evangelists.”

— Yascha Mounk. The Identity Trap. Penguin, 2023. Chapter 5, “The Identity Synthesis Goes Mainstream.”

It may sound similar to Ressa's recollection. However, Mounk, for the record, blames people who began identifying too strongly as members of certain groups, like race and gender. He goes on to blame Tumblr users specifically. Tumblr, founded in 2007, "quickly became a place for its predominantly teenage users to experiment with new identities," at first as music and TV shows, then "to explore their gender and sexual orientation," then to promote anorexia. Citing Katherine Dee, whom he identifies as "a culture writer who has interviewed more than a hundred early users of Tumblr about the role it played in their lives," he writes that

"Tumblr developed wondrously protean properties: a heartfelt manifesto or even a casual joke could become the kernel of an entirely new identity. Tumblr was where new ways of describing one's own sexual orientation (like 'demisexual'), new ways of referring to one's ethnic identity (like 'Latinx'), and new ways of thinking about one's gender (like 'libragender') first reached a large audience."

He then quotes Dee: These days, "for every strange (or even just unfamiliar) proclamation about identity...there's a Tumblr post from the early 2010s introducing the concept."

Mounk goes on to say that on early Tumblr there reigned a version of "standpoint epistemology" in which it was "an article of faith that members of dominant groups, like whites or heterosexuals, could not in any meaningful way understand the experiences of members of disadvantaged groups," allowing individual members of those disadvantaged groups to "claim special authority" even if "most members of that group" would disagree with them, and there also reigned a version of "intersectionality" in which "each group...define[d] a correct set of views in its area of presumed competence while demanding unquestioned fealty to that new orthodoxy from everyone else."

This drew my attention because I recognized the Tumblr complaint from J.K. Rowling's anti-trans apologia via a podcast series, about which I wrote at length ("I’m disappointed in the ‘Witch Trials’," 16-min read).

So I looked up who Katherine Dee is, and indeed, she's anti-trans (they call themselves "sex realists" these days) and writes for anti-trans publications. This is indeed the same complaint against Tumblr that Rowling was pushing when she alleged that Tumblr was the origin of (::waves hands::) all the transness.

Mounk's concern is that "Tumblr proved to be at the vanguard of the internet" in at least one way, as "one of the first online spaces in which users regularly experienced a sudden and dramatic fall from grace on the basis of some minor violation of ever-shifting community norms." By the early 2010s, "Tumblr ideology had reached an important milestone: its offshoots were now so visible and influential that even relative 'normies' like me were starting to stumble across them."

People remember different things about internet optimism

And they do different things with it.

Two big anti-trans and anti-gay events in 1970s California

The final paragraph of Chapter 3 of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema by Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner (Repeater, 2024):

“The end of the 1970s foreshadowed the incoming political and cultural backlash against the LGBTQ community. Gay men and women were the target of many discriminatory firings that made the news around this time. In 1976, physical education teacher Steve Dain made national news when he was fired from his position due to being a trans man. For years, Dain was the most visible trans man in the United States. He was blackballed from teaching for the rest of his life, despite having won his court case against the Northern California school district. The positive gains seen in the election of Harvey Milk for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978, and his role in leading the successful fight against the homophobic Briggs Initiative/California Proposition 6 soon turned to tragedy when Milk and pro-gay rights San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by disgruntled Supervisor Member Dan White. The subsequent 1979 White Night Riots in San Francisco, in reaction to White’s light sentencing, showed widespread anger. These systems and institutions of authority had no interest in protecting queer and trans people. This would only get worse in the Reagan years of the 1980s.”

I didn't know Steve Dain, and I don't remember ever hearing of him before. I grew up on the opposite US Coast. Dain died in 2007.

What interests me about this is that, in addition to Renee Richards playing tennis, here was another 1970s U.S. sports "scandal" where the scandal was that the person in sports was trans. Indeed, one website says: "Steve lost his job and went to court. He was briefly a media topic, but the very next day the Renée Richards story pushed him off the front page."

Of course, transphobes got overexcited at the 1936 Berlin Olympics too.

Another thing that interests me is that Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978, while Dain was fighting in court. The paragraph is telling a history that links transphobia and homophobia in California: the transphobia that ousted Dain, the homophobia that killed Milk and Moscone.

More about his trial at the website The Berkeley Revolution.

Project 2025 says 'porn' to mean 'imagined enemies of the family'

What does Roberts mean by "children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries." What is this "pornography" that Project 2025 says should be "outlawed"?

Melissa Gira Grant reminds us today in "The Real Targets of Project 2025’s War on Porn" (The New Republic):

"The prominence of pornography in Project 2025 is no mistake, of course; it’s absolutely core to the authors’ agenda for Trump. The attack on porn is inseparable from the attacks on abortion and contraception, on marriage equality and trans rights, and of course on drag queens and library books—all of which, they believe, threaten the straight, married family as the natural bedrock of society. All of these threats, to them, constitute pornography. By calling on the president to outlaw porn, they’re calling for the eradication of all these imagined enemies of the family.

Though Project 2025 does not define 'pornography,' their concern clearly extends beyond porn itself. Pornography, according to the Mandate, is responsible for the 'normalization' of non-normative gender expression and identity among young people—what the right often calls 'gender ideology.' Pornography could be anything that contributes to that purported normalization. 'Pornography,' Roberts continues, is 'manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.' And how should it be outlawed? '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.' Project 2025 is not targeting 'pornography' as something that’s harmful to children per se, but rather redefining anything concerning sexuality and gender that they say is harmful to children as pornography."

Pay attention:

"Behind all this is what philosopher Judith Butler calls anti-gender ideology and movements, which is how we should understand Project 2025’s anti-pornography rhetoric. It’s a transnational movement, fueling and also fueled by the reassertion of patriarchal order, of a return to normative sex and gender roles, and of ordering the world by sex and gender hierarchies. Gender in this movement has come to be regarded as a code, as Butler has described it—for pedophilia, for the destruction of the family, 'a plot by urban elites to impose their beliefs on ‘real’ people,' a threat to civilization, a threat to masculinity. When the fight is defined that way, a fight to save not just children and families but society and civilization, nearly any crackdown can be justified."

Read also: Exclusive: Justice Amy Coney Barrett defends overturning Roe v. Wade and reveals Supreme Court dynamics in new book Joan Biskupic, CNN Chief Supreme Court Analyst, September 2, 2025

If you wed yourself to the gender binary, you can't see past it

Regarding:

Claire Dederer. Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Unlike people who transform their outrage into art, where it can be a "powerful and subtle hammer," Valerie Solanas

“is like a rat in a trap by the end. She understands, on some level, that material circumstances shape our lives, and must be altered if we are to improve the world. But she’s held back by the limits of her critique—she can’t see past gender. In this way, she exposes the limits of radical feminism. Seeing the world through a binary lens—men versus women—has its uses, but she can’t build a revolution out of that schism. The divide between male and female becomes a kind of spectacle she loses herself in.”

And by “taking us to the farthest extreme of a certain kind of radical feminism, she’s given us a glimpse of its limits. She sacrifices a true vision of liberation on the altar of gender essentialism.”

As Dederer phrases it: “She makes me wonder: How much is my preoccupation with the crimes of men blinkering me? What am I not seeing when I monster the monstrous men?

But as I’d put a slight twist or reemphasis on it: When we think in terms of a binary, and we preoccupy ourselves with monstering one side of it, we blinker ourselves. There will always be much that we’re not seeing.

You may also be interested: Metaphorical Gender in English: Feminine Boats, Masculine Tools and Neuter Animals, Language Matters - October 2, 2017 - 4 min

Three waves of opposition to transgender bodies

G. Samantha Rosenthal is a scholar of transgender history.

Here's a recent article:

Pseudoscience Has Long Been Used to Oppress Transgender People: Three major waves of opposition to transgender health care in the past century have cited faulty science to justify hostility. G. Samantha Rosenthal & The Conversation US. Scientific American. February 12, 2024.

Rosenthal argues that there have been "three waves of opposition to transgender health care". I organized this blog post based on them.

Eddie Clark phrased this simply (Bluesky):

"...one of the UK's most widespread colonial exports was its 19th century, homophobic criminal code, which continued to corrupt its colonies long after the UK's exit from them.
Now doing the same with transphobic laws. As in so many contexts, transphobia is plagiarised homophobia."

Wave 1: Nazi Germany

Rosenthal writes: "In 1933, when the Nazis rose to power, they cracked down on transgender medical research and clinical practice in Europe."

One important beginning in modern trans history: "In 1919, the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, which became the world’s leading center for queer and transgender research and clinical practice" just as "the new science of hormones was just reaching maturation and entering mainstream consciousness." Following an "Enlightenment-era effort to classify and categorize the world’s life forms," some scientists "developed a hierarchy of human types based on race, gender and sexuality. They were inspired by social Darwinism, a set of pseudoscientific beliefs applying the theory of survival of the fittest to human differences." Everyone was classifying queer/trans people, but some wanted to do so for political liberation and others for genocide.

See this thread on Bluesky (here's the first of several posts):

How gender critical was Nazi Germany? Let’s find out & compare some top gender critical “beliefs” with evidence from historical Nazi Germany. Each post has a GC position + a picture from a historical source or modern research paper. English translation & the source are in each picture’s alt-text.

— J3zz (@j3zz-g.bsky.social) December 2, 2025 at 9:05 AM

Gender-affirming care has existed in the United States since the 1940s. Rosenthal says: "Puberty blockers, hormone therapies and anatomical surgeries are neither experimental nor untested and have been safely administered to cisgender, transgender and intersex adults and children for decades," and opposition to this "has historically been rooted in pseudoscience."

In 2022 in Berlin, biology doctoral student Marie-Luise Vollbrecht tweeted that discussing how the Nazis treated trans people "mocks the real victims of Nazi crimes." The German Society for Transidentity and Intersexuality responded by calling her a denier of Nazi crimes. Vollbrecht later clarified that she did not wish to deny that trans people had been victimized by Nazis. The matter was brought to court; Vollbrecht crowdfunded a large amount of money for legal aid, supported by the German LGB Alliance and the UK biologist Emma Hilton, and presented the matter as an attempt to suppress science. Nonetheless, the court ruled that Vollbrecht's original statement indeed could be interpreted as a denial of Nazi crimes against trans people, and thus the trans organization had a right to levy that specific criticism. (the article, in German)

Learn more

This history is known. Historians can ask questions:

“So who are the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin? Were they the ambisexual performance freaks whose audacious and aggressive sexuality and playful confusion of gender norms triggered an entire society into fascism, as though the Nazis were an allergic reaction? Or were they people like Ernst Röhm, whose worship of masculine vitality… and who followed that impulse towards lifting fascists to power? Were they people like Friedrich Radszuweit, cautious and apolitical men who decided to stand back and stand by while fascism gained steam? Were they people like Hirschfeld, complicated and ambivalent men with deep reservoirs of idealism, knowledge, and compassion who were limited by their blind spots, shaped by and shaping racist and eugenic discourses, and often willing to accept rights for some at the expense of others?”

— Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller. Bad Gays: A Homosexual History. London: Verso, 2022.

In late 2022, for the first time, "a court acknowledged the possibility that trans people were persecuted in Nazi Germany." — New Research Reveals How the Nazis Targeted Transgender People, Laurie Marhoefer, The Conversation, September 21, 2023.

This result followed 20 years of activism. In January 2023, the German parliament "dedicated the [annual Holocaust] remembrance to those killed by Nazis because of their gender identity and sexual orientation. The body also acknowledged decades of post-World War II persecution against LGBTQ+ people in Germany." — The Advocate

For more information about the colonial-era and industrial-era construction of "homosexuality," please read "There Were Gay Nazis". It's a 7-minute read on Medium.

See also this 2008 report from Human Rights Watch, "This Alien Legacy: The Origins of "Sodomy" Laws in British Colonialism."

Gay Neo-Nazis in the United States: Victimhood, Masculinity, and the Public/Private Spheres
Blu Buchanan
GLQ (2022) 28 (4): 489–513.
October 1, 2022
https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9991299
The author said on Twitter: "This was YEARS in the making, and I hope it’s a valuable launching point for future scholar-organizers."
It's rentable from Duke University Press for $15 for 48 hours.

On evolving biological knowledge ("A Doctor’s Case Against Assigning Sex at Birth," Assigned Media, April 8, 2024), Emry Cohen, MD writes:

"It was not until 1923 that Theophilus Painter discovered the X and Y sex chromosomes, which was later confirmed by Tijo and Levan in 1956 where they were able to definitively describe human chromosomes. For those keeping track at home, this means that our knowledge of chromosomes and any of the resultant deeper understanding of sex occurred three years after Christine Jorgensen trail-blazed her way to international fame by transitioning to become a woman in the early 1950s."

Wave 2: 1970s

Rosenthal writes: "In 1979, a research report critical of transgender medicine led to the closure of the most well-respected clinics in the United States."

"In the 1950s and 1960s, transgender medicine bounced back in the U.S. Scientists and clinicians at several universities began experimenting with new hormonal and surgical interventions. In 1966, Johns Hopkins became the first university hospital in the world to offer trans health care.

By the 1970s, trans medicine went mainstream. Nearly two dozen university hospitals were operating gender identity clinics and treating thousands of transgender Americans. Several trans women and men wrote popular autobiographical accounts of their transitions. Trans people were even on television, talking about their bodies and fighting for their rights."

Rosenthal continues: A 1979 study by Meyer and Reter was "homophobic and classist in design" insofar as it defined the success of gender transitions by whether the people had "straight marriages and...gender-appropriate jobs." So: "The study exemplified the pseudoscientific beliefs at the heart of transgender medicine in the 1960s through the 1980s, that patients had to conform to societal norms – including heterosexuality, gender conformity, domesticity and marriage – in order to receive care. This was not an ideology rooted in science but in bigotry."

Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema (Repeater, 2024):

“The end of the 1970s, with the publishing of and support for The Transsexual Empire, the Johns Hopkins University halting trans surgeries and the closure of many other gender clinics, in addition to the HIV/AIDS crisis, heralded a dreadful new decade for many trans people. Indeed, transness was further pathologized by the medical community. After years of research, the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-III (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) was finally published in 1980 and employed the term ‘gender identity disorder’ (GID) to label those who were transsexual.

This would immediately have an impact, largely negative, and meet resistance. Much like homosexuals and their fight to have homosexuality removed from the DSM — a fight they ultimately won in 1973 — many trans people resented the pathologizing, medicalizing, and labeling entailed in having to be diagnosed with GID. The Standards of Care tied to being diagnosed with GID meant a long process full of contingencies and evaluation, often lasting years.”

In the 1970s and '80s, "neo-Catholic rhetoric" infused the patriarchal sexism of the "American far right white nationalist movement," Rachel Saunders writes, and "the first wave of gender critics ran with [it]." ("I am done with gender critics and am going feral," Rachel Saunders, Medium, February 11, 2025)

Wave 3: Post-Covid

"In June 2026 I had a conversation with a trans inclusive colleague and we discussed the Ur moment when gender criticism when from Janice Raymond’s deep underground miasma to becoming a mainstream cause. My suggestion was circa 2001–3 when one of Julie Bindel, Julie Burchill or Suzanne Moore had an encounter with a trans woman who was likely a bit catty or short with them, creating a toxic sliver of resentment which metastasized into what we consider gender critical belief today. All three wrote transphobic articles for The Guardian before being released from their contracts, with other writers taking up the cause in the background. From this a whole belief system was born." Rachel Saunders, June 15, 2026

"I’ve covered trans issues for nine years now, going back to 2016," Katelyn Burns wrote in early 2025. "As a trans freelance journalist, I was there when the US right wing shifted from attacking gay marriage to attacking trans rights. I was there for the North Carolina bathroom bill and Trump’s first election." ("The current ‘mindf*ck’ of being a trans journalist," guest column in The Handbasket, February 4, 2025)

Chase Strangio: "Though contemporary political assaults on trans lives began in 2016, it was only in 2019 that the right found a fruitful opening for attack: Since 2020, 24 states have passed bills barring trans kids from participating in sports aligned with their gender identities." ("Trans Visibility Is Nice. Safety Is Even Better," New York Times, Feb. 15, 2024)

Hil Malatino (Trans Care, 2020) refers to "the present moment, when trans lives are recurrently and brutally utilized as a political wedge issue in order to consolidate horrifyingly ascendant forms of ethnonationalism and the ongoing violence of neoliberal austerity. This produces forms of hypervisibility that wear us out, that cultivate hyperalertness and anxiety that, for so many of us, make getting out of bed and getting through the day difficult."

Malatino goes on to mention the 2018 New York Times headline "‘Transgender’ Could be Defined Out of Existence Under Trump Administration"; it was predictable, yet still felt shocking. Malatino explains:

"The strategy being deployed by the Department of Human Services under Trump — interpreting gender as reducible to biological sex, where biological sex is wrongly understood to be radically dimorphic and grounded, fundamentally and irrevocably, in the aesthetic appearance of the genitals at birth — is old hat. I lived and taught in the southern United States for years; I've listened to conservative politicians repeat this idiocy over and over again in order to attempt to push through transphobic legislation."

Rosenthal writes: "And since 2021, when Arkansas became the first U.S. state among now at least 21 other states banning gender-affirming care for minors, we have been living in a third wave."

See my article: 2024 anti-transgender initiatives in the US

As the anti-trans people would have it, as explicated by Charlie Jane Anders,

"The story goes something like this: Once upon a time, there were only a small number of trans people. And they were Good Trans People, who lived with dysphoria for years before going through the system and proving themselves, and at last having surgeries. They accepted that they weren't really ever going to be their real gender — they were going to be flawed facsimiles of men and women, and they knew that they were allowed to exist thanks to the charity of everybody else. These Good Trans People did everything in their meager power to walk unnoticed among the normal people, hoping for a modicum of tolerance and understanding. They were grateful for whatever crumbs the world tossed their way.

But then along came these Trans Activists, who are Bad Trans People. They imposed a heinous "gender ideology," which insisted that trans men are men and trans women are women, and non-binary people are valid. This is outrageous, and flies in the face of everything that good, decent people believe. But there are still Good Trans People out there, who do not subscribe to this harmful ideology — who know their place."

— Charlie Jane Anders, I'm Proud To Be a Bad Trans Person, September 8, 2021

The Lemkin Institute put out its third genocide warning in March 2026:

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