4 Euphemisms Our Media Uses to Avoid Talking About the Rightwing Incitement Campaign Against Trans People

We cannot name the hate campaign against LGBTQ people, because to do this we would have to acknowledge it’s not simply a “gender issue”—but a campaign of extermination.

Last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis appointed one of the country’s foremost homophobes and transphobes, Christopher Rufo, to the board of trustees of the New School in Florida. The Sarasota, Fla. liberal arts college was chosen by DeSantis, no doubt, because of its reputation as a bastion for progressive, queer, and anti-racist activism. As part of DeSantis’s so-called “anti-woke” agenda leading up to his inevitable 2024 presidential run, the governor has decided to make an example out of the college by appointing Rufo and other right-wing anti-LGBTQ apparatchiks to head up the college. 

Mainstream media reports on the appointments from The Washington Post, Axios, and Tampa Bay Times couldn’t even bring themselves to use the word “transgender,” “gay,” or “LGBTQ.” Rufo was simply a “conservative activist” with “a focus on racial and gender issues.” The party he, DeSantis, and their funders were set on attacking wasn’t even mentioned, much less described as being under attack. (Similar issues exist with how our media discusses Rufo and DeSantis’ “opposition to Critical Race Theory,” and the obfuscation of their racism, but I will save this for another article.) 

Increasingly, our nominally objective reporters are falling into a pat routine of euphemism, obfuscation, omission, and permitting of cynical hate preachers to define their own movement in the vaguest, most P.R.-shop language possible. 

We cannot combat a coordinated hate campaign if we cannot name it. And we cannot name it if our media makes this framework unintelligible to the average media consumer. One could easily breeze through The Washington Post, Axios, and Tampa Bay Times write ups of DeSantis’s appointments and come away thinking these figures want to modestly push back against a cohort of fringe, far-left Marxists who have infiltrated our colleges, and nothing more. There’s no mention of who they are openly targeting, much less any effort to describe or make clear the incitement effort itself. 

And it’s not just because reporters refused to even use the words “transgender,” “gay,” or “LGBTQ” when discussing attacks on queer people and institutions—it’s that they’ve developed a whole linguistic ecosystem of faux-objectivity to discuss this topic. Our media, with its institutional dogma of permitting the far right to self identify, is uniquely ill-equipped to address the ongoing, increasingly emboldened and potent incitement campaign against gay and transgender people. These are their four favorite euphemism when discussing the right’s incitement campaign against gay and trans people 

1. “Culture War” “Education Culture Wars” “Gender Battle” “LGBTQ Battles” “Cultural Fires” 

• “[Rufo] Fuels the Right’s Cultural Fires”, “...battle over L.G.B.T.Q. restrictions in schools” - New York Times, 4/22/22

• “Battle over gender issues remains center stage in Florida schools” - Tampa Bay Times, 1/6/23 

• “DeSantis a willing warrior as conservatives lean into gender and sexual identity fights” - Miami Herald, 8/5/22

Did you know there’s a war but not on a particular group? It’s, instead, a symmetrical “cultural (read: of secondary importance) battle” between two evenly matched parties on “the right” and “the left.” This is the most popular go-to euphemism for corporate media. Indeed, it’s so popular, I've written about it before on this blog twice, and did an entire episode on why it’s a problem for my podcast, Citations Needed. I won’t rehash my argument here except to say that our media culture would be exponentially improved overnight by retiring the useless label of “culture war/battle” to discuss policy initiatives targeting vulnerable populations, and how those populations are materially harmed.   

2. “Debate” 

• “[Republican strategist Tony] Fratto acknowledged that the gender debate in America is a ‘complex issue.’” - Washington Post, 5/22/22 

• “debates regarding transgender athletes have grabbed headlines and raised questions about how transgender children participate in sports.” - New York Times, 4/12/22 

• Fears of Violence Rise on New Front in Gender Debate: Drag Shows - New York Times, 12/7/22 

The quintessential New York Times headline, “Fears of Violence Rise on New Front in Gender Debate: Drag Shows,” pushes the limits of what constitutes a “debate.” Over the past year, there’s been a 120 episodes of drag shows being subject to violence or the threat of violence, backed by the most popular cable news show on the most popular cable news network in the country. What’s the “debate” here exactly? One side has decided to wage a war against transgender people for simply being who they are, going to their spaces and threatening them—and sometimes actually carrying out—acts of violence. Are transgender activists showing up to Tucker Carlson’s country club with assault rifles? There’s zero symmetry, nor is it simply a “debate”. It’s an incitement campaign by one group aimed at another. Our media should say this in simple and direct terms.

3. “Conservative activist” 

• “Rufo, a conservative activist who helped turn critical race theory into a conservative rallying cry” - Tampa Bay Times, 1/6/23 

• “Rufo is a conservative activist…” Washington Post, 1/7/23

• “Rufo is known for his activism on transgender and racial issues, making him a leader in the new wave of conservative culture wars” - Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 1/7/23 

“Conservative activist” is, strictly speaking, a true statement, but it does a ton of work in practice, obscuring what the goal of this “activism” is. In the aforementioned Washington Post, Axios, and Tampa Bay Times articles reporting on DeSantis’s appointment of Rufo, all three used some version of “conservative activist” without saying what, precisely, he was advocating for. Was it supply-side economics? Privatizing Medicare? Lowering the capital gains tax? Or was it, perhaps, something more bigoted, urgent, and potentially deadly? Who’s to say. They’re just “conservative” or “Republican” activists “waging culture wars” around “gender issues.”  Which brings us to number (4):

4. “Issues” 

• “Several of the appointees are vocal opponents of gender- and race-related education issues that have fueled the right’s culture wars in schools.” -  Tampa Bay Times, 1/6/23 

• Now [Rufo] says he sees L.G.B.T.Q. issues as a deeper and more explosive line of attack,” “Now he has moved to the front of another culture war: gay and trans issues in schools” - New York Times, 4/22/22

• “Rufo is known for his activism on transgender and racial issues”  - Sarasota Herald-Tribune, 1/7/23

One popular way of obscuring the power dynamics and harm being waged against vulnerable populations is to discuss not humans, or victims, or those under assault, but “issues” to be “opposed.” Transgender people’s identity is an “issue” to be “debated” and, thus, abstract; its victims are not people with lives and parents and friends and partners and humanity—they are simply the battlegrounds for these so-called “gender wars.” No one is subject to incitement campaigns, attacks in the public sphere, or discrimination. There’s no oppressor and oppressed, there is simply a debate club with differing opinions. The human stakes are lost, and the cruelty and dehumanization being promoted by the likes of DeSantis and Rufo is obscured in favor of anodyne-sounding policy “issues.”

The stakes of this most recent campaign are high: Discrimination against transgender people has long been an acute problem in this country. Transgender people face discrimination when seeking a home, when finding a job, and face staggering rates of homelessness and poverty. State lawmakers, according to NPR, have introduced over 300 bills targeting trans people in the past two years. Attacks on power substations have been linked to anti-trans bigotry. For Black transgender and gender-nonconforming people, homelessness and poverty are especially acute. The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey found that “46% of respondents were verbally harassed and 9% were physically attacked because of being transgender.” A 2020 study concluded that “82% of transgender individuals have considered killing themselves and 40% have attempted suicide, with suicidality highest among transgender youth.” 

Meanwhile, the media charged with explaining the world and describing it in clear terms refuses to engage, much less center, the core bigotry animating these far-right incitement campaigns. One reads these articles detailing plans to forcibly detransition and discriminate and it sounds like two city council members debating where to put the new post office. People’s basic humanity is not something at risk, or under attack, but an “issue” to be “debated” by “conservative activists” in a “culture war.” It all sounds so sterile and theoretical.