Now, media organizations like the Associated Press and Reuters have begun to call out such misinformation. But some experts like Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, explain that debunking misinformation doesn't necessarily undo the harm caused by it in the first place. Lewis says that while debunking can help create a factual record and dispel unsubstantiated or false information among the general population, it does little to stem the spread of that misinformation in online communities sympathetic to its sentiment. This is especially true in communities like the far right, where distrust of mainstream news media is high.
“You can’t really fact-check your way out of a conspiracy,” Lewis says. “And we’ve seen that time and time and time again. You have the traditional news enterprise that is built on fact-checking and accuracy and timely reporting, and all that good stuff. But then by the time the fact-checking article comes out two weeks later, you’ve already moved on. The church or the synagogue, or the school has already gotten a bomb threat.”
These repeated claims by the far right have led some extremism experts to use language like “stochastic terrorism” to refer to this particular kind of anti-trans campaign.
Ophir, Lewis, and other experts say the anti-trans misinformation about mass shooters actually serves two purposes that advance conservative agendas, especially during yet another consequential election year when trans rights are a hot-button issue. Not only does this scapegoating give far-right figures more ammo in their fight against the very existence of trans people, but it also allows them to deflect criticism from gun control activists while dodging the far-right’s own culpability in extreme acts of gun violence.
In a number of mass shootings — including those in El Paso, Texas, Buffalo, New York, Charleston, South Carolina, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — perpetrators have posted online or made statements that echo racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic sentiments often espoused by the far right. In the case of the Philadelphia shooting, Carriker repeatedly posted online about his support for Donald Trump. Right-wing activists rarely, if ever, acknowledge that these mass shooters share some of the same worldviews they espouse.
“If you persuade conservatives that LGBTQ people are inherently flawed, that they are violent, that they are a risk to society, then any legislation against them will be justified,” Ophir says. “And you don’t have to stop at legislation. Every act of violence against them will be justified.”
Although this kind of rhetoric seems distinct from other anti-trans arguments, like those against gender-affirming care or trans inclusion in sports, Drennen says it is all a component of a decades-old conservative fight to eliminate queer and trans people from public life, be it through legislation or stochastic terrorism. There’s a throughline, Drennen says, from conservative culture warrior Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in the 1970s and what we are seeing regurgitated by the right today.
“Throughout this entire current anti-trans panic, there’s been the slow raising of the stakes,” Drennen says.
“First, trans people are a threat to your daughter's ability to win a college scholarship. And after that, it's that trans people are threatening your child by trying to make them trans,” Drennen continues. “And then having failed to achieve the impact that they want, they have to now go with ‘trans people are a threat to you anywhere you go.’”
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