The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a sweeping new report that details how pseudoscience has become a tool of the far right to manipulate public opinion and advance legislation and legal action targeting the LGBTQ+ community.
“Disinformation from junk science is dangerous,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas, deputy director of research, reporting and analysis for SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “When anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience turns into policy, it has real-life, often life-threatening consequences for trans and nonbinary people.”
The report, Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives, also known as Project CAPTAIN, unpacks the proliferation of biased and misleading information used — under the guise of science — in state and federal legislation and litigation over the last decade and exposes the far-right and far-reaching network behind it.
The report says far-right groups across the country have increasingly relied on pseudoscience to manipulate public opinion and influence legislation regarding the LGBTQ+ community.
Known as project CAPTAIN, researchers identified a network of more than 60 groups and the methods they employ to advance their goals.
Researchers from the SPLC’s Intelligence Project identify a network of over 60 groups, including Alliance Defending Freedom, the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine and Genspect, with nearly 1,000 shared connections that have mobilized their efforts to challenge the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) standards, advance the so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” and recruit for Project 2025.
Project CAPTAIN lists the 100 commonly cited sources used by anti-LGBTQ+ actors to make junk science claims, including research papers and letters to the editor, that attack the scientific consensus of gender-affirming care, defend conversion therapy and generate moral panic over trans people.
“We show how this network of anti-LGBTQ+ actors have built a political and PR machine that twists data and opinion from a very small minority of the medical community and positions it as mainstream,” said R.G. Cravens, senior research analyst for SPLC’s Intelligence Project.
Weaponizing science is not a new phenomenon. It is a longstanding practice, rooted in white supremacy, that disguises biases and myths using familiar scientific terms and language to limit bodily autonomy and eliminate the basic rights of LGBTQ+ people through legislative and legal campaigns.
“Each of us has a role to play in stopping the spread of disinformation and building resilience against supremacist ideologies and narratives,” said Emerson Hodges, research analyst for SPLC’s Intelligence Project. “This report affirms LGBTQ+ peoples’ existence and offers tools for our lawmakers, doctors, educators and media organizations to identify and directly challenge the false narratives that attempt to erase LGBTQ+ identities — especially as we enter state legislative sessions and the 2024 election cycle.”
This report identifies an anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network and makes clear that it is supported by white Christian nationalists who seek to privilege straight, white Christians hoping to replace science, public policy, and American law with Christian theology.
In addition to making public statements that influenced a fanatic to murder physician George Tiller for providing abortion services and defending Catholic priests convicted of sex abuse charges, Dr. Paul R. McHugh is a psychiatrist who argues that gender diversity is a lifestyle choice and that offering trans health services is collaborating in a patient’s delusion.
McHugh signed a 2018 letter from a hate group that demanded the Trump administration to begin “upholding the scientific definition of sex in law and policy,” adding that “an individual who identifies as transgender remains either a biological male or female.”
McHugh is just one member of the network promoting unfounded claims about the LGBTQ+ community.
The report navigates the perils of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience by analyzing the groups and actors using the language of science to attack the medical consensus supporting gender-affirming health care and provides resources to help counter such extremism.
Read the full Project CAPTAIN report HERE.
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