Mick Hartley

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has, long since, wandered from its original remit of fighting Southern racism. The Ku Klux Klan is no longer a force to be reckoned with. Like other organisations that have lost their original purpose – Stonewall springs to mind – it has now refashioned itself as a trans advocate, battling the outrages of "transphobia". Its latest production is a report on “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.” [CAPTAIN}, which purports to reveal how "pseudoscience has become a tool of the far right to manipulate public opinion and advance legislation and legal action targeting the LGBTQ+ community".  

The problem is that, apart from being late to the party, it's all nonsense. From Quillette:

The fact that the SPLC is attempting to market its report as a blow against the “anti-LGBTQ+” movement, writ large, is itself quite laughable, since many of the activists who’ve been arguing for a more balanced approach to gender rights are themselves either gay (as with Navratilova and Julie Bindel) or (as with the founders of the GDA) transgender.

Others on the SPLC gender-enemies list are author Abigail Shrier, and therapists Sasha Ayad, and Stella O’Malley. These women openly broadcast their views in best-selling books, as well as mainstream magazines and newspapers. The idea that the SPLC has successfully “exposed” these women through some kind of investigation, as suggested by the title that’s been slapped on the CAPTAIN report, would be ludicrous even if they’d said anything scandalous (which they haven’t).

And what course of future action does the SPLC endorse? For one, it concludes that educators should stigmatize gender-critical views as analogous to “racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.” The report's authors also want academic journals to sniff out groups that “espouse an anti-LGBTQ+ ideology” (as that latter term is speciously defined by the SPLC). And in a final flourish, the group urges reporters to “be aware of the narrative manipulation strategies and the cooptation of scientific credentials and language by anti-trans researchers when sourcing stories about trans experiences.”

With this last point, we get to the real nub: The apparent goal is for this report to be read as a catalogue of people, ideas, and groups that must be shunned….

While the SPLC does its best to heap blame on America’s conservative Christians, many of western Europe’s governments (none of which are in thrall to the Heritage Foundation or the Charles Koch Foundation) have been following a more gender-critical path for years.

Just a week after the SPLC put out its report, in fact, the UK government published new guidelines advising teachers that they have no duty to automatically “affirm” a child’s assertion that he or she is transgender; and that, in considering such situations, teachers should speak with a child’s parents and consider whether the child is under undue influence from social media or peers. Sweden, Finland, and Norway—hardly bastions of Christian conservatism—have also rolled back policies that rush children into transition. In Canada, several provinces have recently enacted rules that require parents to be notified when a child seeks to transition, even in the face of a sustained media campaign that repeats lurid claims to the effect that such policies will cause an epidemic of trans suicides. Are all of these foreign governments also complicit in the vast “junk-science and disinformation campaign” against trans people that the SPLC claims to have “exposed”?

Does this descent into the trans rabbit-hole ring any bells, in the context of US civil rights organisations? Ah yes.

The SPLC would hardly be the first progressive organization whose reputation has suffered by going all-in on the gender issue. The American Civil Liberties Union, which also was rooted in traditional liberal values before succumbing to more faddish progressive tendencies, has attracted ridicule due to its parroting of slogans such as “men who get their periods are men,” and the claim that males have no “unfair advantage” over females in sports.

Now, under transman Chase Strangio, the ACLU spend their time, for instance, complaining about the refusal to supply death-row killer Duane Owen with the necessary "gender-affirming care" after he "came out" as trans.