LGBTQ+

In recent years, opponents of trans medicine have increasingly presented themselves not as oppressors—intent on denying care to individuals whose gender identity they reject—but rather as the righteous critics of a corrupt “gender identity industry.” Big Pharma and Big Tech are to blame, they allege, for warping the fragile psyches of vulnerable youth via social media platforms and then selling them expensive, “experimental” puberty-suppressing medications, hormone replacement therapies, and surgeries as salves. This populist-in-form critique has spread rapidly, along with state bans on trans health for minors that now cover over half of the country. Criticisms of this so-called “transgender treatment industry” can be found in conservative states’ litigation defending their bans, as well as in a recent executive order that questioned whether such care might constitute consumer “deception” or “fraud.”

In a forthcoming essay in Signs, I have sought to understand the origins and ideological power of this anti-industry narrative. The fear of a predatory “transgender-industrial complex” clearly draws from due skepticism of industries that many understandably abhor. Pharmaceutical and social media companies do indeed hold dominion over our wallets, health, and attention spans. From there though, the narrative spirals into baseless paranoid suspicions about the perverse motivations of gender identity clinicians and their professional associations, complicit bureaucrats in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and trans subjectivity itself, which in this account is a blend of psychic pathology and a shopping disorder. Perhaps that it why this conspiratorial idea was at first confined to the fringes of the blogosphere—mainly in the writings of gender-critical, anti-transhumanist, and Catholic and Christian fundamentalist authors from around 2018-2021—before right-wing politicians, media outlets, and think tanks adopted a version of the idea to ground their anti-trans scapegoating policies.

Here, I want to focus on one voice in the anti-gender identity industry chorus, the ostensibly libertarian Manhattan Institute, and ask what its leaders and donors might gain from fomenting distrust of healthcare professional associations and bureaucrats. [...]