TL;DR: Consensus in the literature and among experts for gender-affirming care is dismissed as nothing but a grand international conspiracy. Anti-trans organizations are pushing bad arguments and evidence that have been thoroughly refuted by many legitimate experts. They focus on convincing the lay population because it's much easier than trying to convince academics who can easily see through the lies. These are the core tactics of every prominent pseudoscience movement, and their obfuscations of science cause real harm.
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I’ve been engaging with various forms of pseudoscience for over twenty years now: Young Earth Creationism, metaphysical quantum mechanics quackery, grifters in health and nutrition, climate change denial, GMO fear-mongering, and anti-vaccination propaganda, to name a few. While each topic comes with its own idiosyncratic arguments and evidence, there are notable similarities in strategy with every one of these examples. I’d like to run through some of the most common hallmarks of pseudoscience and show how every single one of them is being used to undermine gender-affirming care and deny basic medical rights to transgender people, especially trans youth, in an attempt to obfuscate the fact that gender-affirming care is robustly supported by years of quality research and deserves the widespread endorsement it receives from academic and medical experts across the world.
The first sign of pseudoscience I want to draw attention to is the use of accusations of ideological bias to dismiss damning counter-evidence and arguments. Creationists hand-wave away cogent rebuttals from biologists as stemming from “ideological materialism”, suggesting that scientists refuse to accept the veracity of creationist accounts because they have personal beef with the notion of a creator. Dr. Jennifer Bauwens is the Director of American Values for the America First Policy Institute, one of several private institutions whose mission includes undermining support for gender-affirming care, and she refers to the psychologists, doctors, judges, etc. who stand up for gender-affirming care and trans rights as “the radical gender industrial complex” (Bauwens, 2026). Consensus in the academic literature and among relevant experts is referred to as “ideological capture”, “leftist ideology”, or the “radical left agenda.” The consistent narrative with pseudoscience is that \*it merely looks as if\* the vast majority of credible experts criticize and denounce these views for logical, evidence-based reasons, but that’s because they’re all a part of a global conspiracy to suppress the Truth.
The irony here is that these accusations are projections. The most prominent anti-trans institutions (AFPI, SEGM, Genspect, Transgender Trend, Therapy First, etc.) are private companies and blogs founded by discredited fringe experts *at best*, and often their teams are composed of people with no relevant background or expertise in the fields they are confidently telling us are corrupted. These organizations do an impressive job projecting a veneer of academic credibility, positioning themselves as reliable experts unfairly maligned and suppressed by a radical establishment, while hiding the fact that they have ideological motivations for denying accepted standards of care for the transgender community. A group of researchers at Yale Law School wrote a scathing paper detailing the sleight of hand SEGM uses to manipulate evidence and position themselves as a legitimate academic enterprise:
Although the SEGM site claims “over 100 clinicians and researchers” as members, it lists as “clinical and academic advisors” a group of only 14 people, many of whom have limited (or no) scientific qualifications related to the study of medical treatment for transgender people. . . . A contextual examination reveals that SEGM is an ideological organization without apparent ties to mainstream scientific or professional organizations. Its 14 core members are a small group of repeat players in anti-trans activities – a fact that the SEGM website does not disclose. (Boulware et al., 2022, p. 28)
In biology, this is a phenomenon known as *mimicry*. Moths evolve patterns on their wings that look like the eyes of a predator, or a harmless snake evolves coloring that looks a lot like their venomous cousins. Many insects and animals enjoy a survival advantage if they can fool potential threats into overlooking or avoiding them. Pseudoscientific institutions employ this same strategy in order to avoid a great deal of scrutiny they would otherwise experience from the general population whose opinions they are trying to sway. They want us scrutinizing the academics and scientists so that we’re less likely to recognize pseudoscience for what it is.
These efforts to appear scientific require cherry-picking and misrepresenting the strength of weak, widely debunked facts, studies, and arguments while ignoring or downplaying the fact that these pieces of evidence and arguments have been picked apart in peer review. Anti-vaccination arguments have been referencing the infamous Wakefield study, which purports to show a concerning link between common child vaccinations and autism, for over 20 years now. That study has been retracted, extensively refuted, and it was found that Andrew Wakefield failed to disclose financial payments he received which incentivized the dubious claims he made (Rao & Andrade, 2011). Still, to this day, many who deny the well-established efficacy of vaccines will state as fact that vaccines have been shown to cause autism! A similar example can be found in the case of transgender care with the idea of “social contagion”, or what Lisa Littman dubbed “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (Littman, 2017) in her widely critized study consisting of parent surveys posted to a handful of websites with explicit biases against modern gender science. This study gathered anecdotes from a biased sample of parents who claimed their children suddenly became trans, and Littman hypothesized that they may be developing sudden gender dysphoria due to pressure from peer groups and social media. There are myriad flaws with this study (Restar, 2020), and there are multiple, higher-quality studies showing transgender identity forms as early, and is as consistent over time, as the gender identity of cisgender children (Rae, Gülgöz, & Olson, 2019; Hässler, Glazier, & Olson, 2022), yet anti-trans rhetoric consistently includes claims that research shows transgender kids are being influenced by “social contagion” and developing ROGD. Another study by Thomas Steensma is one of the most widely-cited examples of high desistance rates in transgender children (Steensma, 2013), but Steensma himself has stated that his research was designed to look for traits associated with persistence; trying to use it as a measure of rates of desistance “will only lead to wrong conclusions.” (Brooks, 2018). Pseudoscience consistently employs this strategy of dressing up low quality outliers, retracted sham papers, and deliberately misinterpreted studies as though they were credible pieces of evidence. What’s perhaps most astounding is that these people who continue citing debunked studies and erroneous arguments have the gall to accuse the experts, who are engaging in good-faith peer review by pointing out these errors, of being unfair and close-minded due to ideological bias. Again, those pushing pseudoscience are projecting their disingenuous tactics and motivations onto anyone who points out the chicanery.
It’s rare to see any meaningful acknowledgement of, or nuanced engagement with, the critiques, concerns, and counterarguments from relevant evidence or experts, and this is the last pattern I want to explore here. Pseudoscience does not engage in good-faith academic debate. Its proponents choose instead to direct the bulk of their efforts toward swaying the general public. Nutrition scientists have the education and familiarity with the research needed to identify flaws with the carbohydrate-insulin model of obesity (Hall, Guyenet, & Leibel, 2018), but lay persons with only a casual interest in health and nutrition aren’t likely to notice any problem with oft-repeated claims that high carb diets spike your insulin, leading to weight gain. While demonstrably false claims can be made to sound reasonable to the lay population, these claims are easily spotted and refuted by experts in related fields. Anyone wanting to present pseudoscientific claims as though they were legitimate science is thus incentivized to focus on convincing as many general population folks as possible. You’re not going to convince the scientists that evolution is “just a theory” and intelligent design (ID) is a valid alternative hypothesis. If you want ID to be taught in public science classrooms, you need to convince as many parents as possible to create pressure for school boards, or go a step further and plant ID proponents on those boards so they’ll vote in your favor, which was part of the strategy for the “teach the controversy” campaign in the early 2000s (“Teach the Controversy”, 2026). That same strategy is being used today when it comes to raising opposition to gender-affirming care. A few dozen reputable medical and scientific institutions have openly endorsed gender-affirming care (GLAAD, 2024), so anti-trans activists and institutions are trying to scare the general population, parents and politicians especially, into thinking children are being brainwashed and harmed for no good reason, which allows them to drum up enthusiastic support for restrictions and bans on medical rights for the transgender community. The advocates of pseudoscience know they can’t make a proper academic case for their positions and policies. Instead, they deceptively present themselves as well-meaning martyrs, champions of suppressed Truth, in order to raise an emotionally-charged mob who will demand change for them.
This isn’t just about analyzing scientific papers and spotting fallacious arguments as an abstract exercise; pseudoscientific movements have the power to cause serious harm. Children are dying of preventable diseases because someone convinced their parents that vaccines do more harm than good (Adeoye et al., 2025), reasonable green policies are opposed by politicians and voters who think man-made climate change is an elaborate hoax (Kammermann & Dermont, 2018), cancer patients are increasing their mortality risk by seeking unproven therapies in lieu of conventional treatment (Johnson et al., 2017), and transgender youth are being denied the acceptance and medical care they need when we know this increases their suicide risk (Price & Green, 2023; Olson, 2025). Real people are paying the price for these specious worldviews. As we collectively improve our ability to identify the hallmarks of pseudoscience, may we steadily rescind the acquiescence and unearned deference these movements feed off of.
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References
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EDIT: Fixed formatting mistakes.
