The Anatomy of a Moral Panic Ft. Dr. Julia Serano

thirty edition of Whipping Girl is about. So, I guess I wanted to ask, what do you see as the biggest shifts in sort of the struggle for transliberation between the end of the sort of Mitchfest like fighting over Mitchfest era that you wrote like Dream, which you sort of wrote the second uh, the forward, the preface of the second edition, and then the stuff that's happening now is the sort of three edition is coming out.

Janis Raymond's book The Transsexual Empire the late nineteen seventies nineteen seventy nine, I think, and that influenced a lot of people, what say, places like Mishfest that had trans women exclusion policies. And I felt like during the nineties through the Zeros, we were constantly making gains that was largely due to people learning more about it and then

recognizing basically shared goals, shared things in common. I think that trans people are marginalized because of you know, mainstream assumptions about sex, gender sexuality, and those assumptions also hurt LGBTQIA plus people more broadly, they hurt you know, in a sexist world, they hurt you know, CIS women, you know, all women, all people who move through the world perceived

as female feminine. So we all have this kind of shared thing that we're working towards, and I feel like that was where a lot of the progress was happening.

And I think what really changed in the mid two thousand tens, especially two year twenty fifteen, which is literally the year after the so called tipping point Time magazine declaring the transgender dipping point, was when it was the beginning of what I would describe as organized anti transactivism, where it wasn't just that people didn't like us or they detested us, but it was where there was actual

coordination between different groups. In the afterward, I describe there's the social conservatives and far right who have always been anti LGBTQ plus who took an even more intense focus on trans people. There were groups that at the time that I wrote Whipping Girl, the term turf wasn't around, of the term gender critical wasn't around. Now we would call them gender critical or trans exclusionary feminists. They've become kind of a part of that, and both those groups

working together in a lot of ways on policies. I think one of the things that the average person might not know if you're not really in kind of highly aware of trans communities and issues is that probably behind the scenes, the anti transparent movement as probably aid more of an impact than any other group, and they are very much like the anti vax parent movement, where it's a lot of people who are from their standpoint, they're just concerned about their children, they want what's best for

their children, but they actively seek out and often get involved in you know, websites, social media forums and sometimes actual activist campaigns that buy into a lot of ideas that of children being indoctrinated into gender ideology or being infected by social contagion, and there's all this pseudoscience that

grows out of that. So I would say that that was the main difference, that there's this organized campaign, and this campaign has just grown and grown and grown to the point now where it's just this astoundingly large moral panic that the types of things that like thirty percent of people in our country believe about trans people is abhorrent. But that's kind of how it played out.

not contagious. If it was, like, you know, trans people would have infected way more than like the less than one percent of us that actually exists.

out anyway. So in twenty eighteen is when the Lisa Littmann paper on rapid on set gender dysphoria came out, and I wrote this essay at the time talking about all the things wrong with it, and then in twenty nineteen, I'm like, where did these ideas come from? And I should say that rapid onset gender dysphoria is basically transgender

social contagion wrapped up in a medical sounding diagnosis. Okay, so if you read the initial descriptions of transgender social contagion and the description of rapid onset gender dysphoria, they're basically the same. It's that kids are infecting one another. But the idea of rap it on set gender dysphoria was meant to describe this quick infection of transness that supposedly was happening. And so in twenty nineteen, I basically

did a deep dive. I'm not an investigative reporter, but that's kind of what I did into like where the origin of this was. And basically all of this kind of came down to the website Fourth Wave Now, which often worked in coordination with two other anti transparent websites. So Fourth Wave Now is an anti transparent website, arguably the very first one that came out, and a parent posted the idea that her child was like being infected

by transgender social contagion, and it's almost definitely clear. Now I will leave a little caveat even though I think the evidence is pretty strong that that was Lisa Marchiano, who's anti trans therapist who's very very involved in anti transactivism right now, Okay, so and like all everything points to that being her, and she also seems to have

in some capacity worked with Lisa Littman. So basically the first paper about rapatan sat gender distory that came out was not Lisa Littman's, it was actually Lisa Marchiano's, which came out in twenty seventeen. So basically kind of grew from these anti HRIS transparent websites. It really quickly within

six months. Not only was Lisa Littman doing her survey, Lisa Littman, being someone who has no experience in trans health ever before then just decides to go in and only survey parents from an from three anti transparent websites, and it gets taken very seriously just because the media fan the flames. A lot of these groups were very excited to have something that seemed to be a case study on their side. The paper was heavily critiqued when it came out. There are now and I described this

in an all nine SI have. It's free if you google my name, and all the evidence against social contagion it's in there. There are now ten papers that have tested the idea of rap it on set gender dysphoria and or social contagion and found evidence that contradicts the hypothesis. So it's still being talked about that Pamela Paul, it was an alped that looked like an article in the New York Times. It's not the first time Pamela Paul

and or the New York Times has done this. They seem to have a particular acts to grind against trans people and putting out specious articles suggesting that gender firming care, especially for trans use, is bad, when actually all the evidence points to the opposite. So so yeah, that's a brief discussion of rapid on set genders, for which I think is the most popular of these kind of pseudoscientific ideas.

But there are definitely others that are like about like four or five others that I could get into, and I do get into in the Afterword and in some of my other writings, but uh yeah.

questions and do more studies. Junk science is when you do kind of a crappy study that doesn't really interrogate all the possibilities, that either doesn't use controls or you know, only looks at you know, a bias sampling size or a bias sample or small sample sizes and comes to a conclusion that it wants to come to. That's junk science. And then pseudoscience is when multiple independent groups all find something different to what you're saying, but you keep touting

the thing you're saying is science. And that's definitely where our GD is right now. Same thing with one of these ideas that I talked about way back early and Whipping Girl, and I've written other, you know, both academic papers and online essays about this concept of autoginophilia, which is this really old theory that just like it's kind of like this zombie. It doesn't matter how many groups

find evidence to the contrary. It jibes with what basically certain you know, gender disaffirming practitioners, practitioners and researchers and anti transactivists. It jobs with what they want to say, so it just kind of continues to be out there.

the same study as the first anti VAC study. Like it has almost exactly the same It's the same thing where you find a group of people who think their kid has autism because they got vaccinated, or you find a group of people who think their kids are trans because social contation or something, and then you ask them about it, and then you report the results of the study, and it's like, well, now and you report the results of you asking the people the thing that they believe,

and now it's a study, and it's I don't know, it drives me insane, they extent to which he is literally exactly the same thing.

not cause autism. A lot of that is just like a coincidence of the time that you first start noticing that children maybe autistic is like right around the time after they've had vaccinations. But but yeah, it wasn't until the h bomber Guy video that he talks about that the Wakefield study is a study of parents, not the children.

A study of the parents, and the parents already had were already suspicious of the vaccines, and so they said, oh, well, it happened right after they had these vaccines, just like rap it dont set genders for it happens. Oh, it happened right after. You know, one of my child's peer, their cheer peers came out as trans. It's like, yeah, maybe they're connected. Maybe that's why they're good friends. You know, most of my friends, you know, like when I go

out and stuff like that. You know, a huge chunk of my friends, way higher than the average person, are trans people. And it's not because any of us infected each other. It's just that you have that thing in common. You also, really importantly, when you're part of a stigmatized group, being around other people who won't stigmatize you often because they're part of that same group, that can be really freeing and really supportive.

And so I think most of us are familiar with the idea of stigma in terms of like feeling embarrassment or being made to feel lesser than other people because of some aspect of your person, right, And there is that aspect of it that's often called like felt stigma. But then there's the way that other people view stigma, right, And so you know, people weren't necessarily stigmatized in that way themselves. They might view people who are stigmatized in

particular ways. And one aspect of stigma that I learned a lot of this from psychologists, I think it's Paul Rosen, I know the last name is Rosin, and also Carol Nemarov and they both worked together and they had other colleagues who worked on this. But a lot of this comes from this really unconscious idea of contain agent that seems to be it's like pan cultural. It's just kind of a way that people tend to view the world kind of like a lot of people and a lot

of cultures have essentialist views. Contagion is sort of along those lines. It's often described as a type of magical thinking. And the idea is if something in your mind has this contagion, if you get too close to it or you interact with it, it can like permanently corrupt or

taint you. And so it has this kind of contagious like property in people's minds, and so people often view groups who are stigmatized, especially groups that are highly stigmatized, as essentially contagious, where that stigma that they have could rub off on you if you get too close to them. And so this happens like when I was really young, the idea of like if you were friends with the trans person, a lot of times people or even someone who is gay back then people be like, oh, so

what are you? You must be gay too, right, It's almost as if that stigma would then like kind of migrate to you. And that's a lot of why stigmatized groups face a lot of ostracization in society, and so so this idea of contagion has been around. I think groups who are lesser stigmatized, one of the ways that that plays out is they're viewed is less contagious. So you know, when I was really young, the idea of if you had a trans person in your life, people

would really question you. Whereas by the time I came out, you could have a trans friend and that would be fine. It wouldn't necessarily be contagious, unless, of course, you were interested in them, and then that stigma would If you were like attracted to them, then there's that stigma. And I think that stigma plays a lot into kind of dynamics of and I write about this and sex stuff that the whole idea of like fetishes and chasers and

all that. That's basically all this stigma that contagent stuff playing out in different ways anyway, So I also think that, and I write about and sext up, I think people view sex and stigma as really closely intertwined, such that I think people view the average person views heterosexual sex as a stigma contamination act where the male is the corrupting force and it's the woman who is corrupted by sex,

which is why you know virgins are pure. But then once a woman has sex, she's like, you know, she's become contaminated or tainted, and she has a lot of sex, then people view her as like ruined, right, So that idea is bell in there, And I think this combination of viewing sex and stigma is kind of intertwined leads to the sexual predator, the sexual predator stereotype that we're seeing play out in really strong ways with trans people

right now. But actually, if you look throughout history, like a lot of marginalized groups like deal in different ways with the sexual predator trope.

twenty twenty two. And if you listen to what people are saying, that they're using the word groomer, which sounds like a sexual predator thing, like there's a real thing of grooming children that sexual abusers do, but they're using it against trans people in a way that has nothing

to do with that. But what they're talking about is corrupting, you know, so their children who are presumed to be sisgender and who often I think this is why a lot of these anti trans discourses continue to paint like trans children as being girls, right like, because then it kind of plays into these feelings of like, you know,

transgender people are the adult men corrupting young girls. It plays into a lot of people's view like messed up, messed up heteronormative views of sex and fears of you know, sexual abuse, child abuse being a very real thing, but people greatly misinterpret it so that the people who are the usual perpetrators, which are usually you know, by and large, straight men who are like adults who are close or

sometimes even family members of the child in question. But like when they say grooming, they just mean corrupting or contaminating, And I think that both grooming and social contagion. I think both of these basically play off of this stigma contamination idea. Right, the kids are pure, but then transgenders like a type of coodies that if one kid becomes

trans then they spread it to the other kids. And so yeah, so I feel like it plays a really big role not only moral panics, which amost all moral panics are. There's some kind of corrupting force that is often attacking otherwise pure and innocent children. Sometimes it's technology, right, and so people will be like, oh, we have to ban you know, social media apps, you know, because it's

hurting the children. Or it could be transgender people who are the things we need to ban because they're corrupting the children. But I definitely think that both these ideas of stigma and contagion play a big role in the way in which moral panics, why they resonate with a lot of people, even though they don't make any rational sense if you just think about them kind of from a very realistic, practical point of view.

conservatism and specifically how it functions as this. Yeah, this is sort of like moral panic and even social contagion. The way homosexuality was treated as this thing and this this sort of social contingent aspect is so common now. I mean, even even the way we've already alluded to Musk, even the way he mentions like the woke mind virus ist is exactly this thing, and as it really like

moral panics and stuff. Right, this was kind of predated by the critical race theory debacle, which then got you know, turned into the groomer thing, and now exactly and now it's even changed again. And these moral panics can have like devastating results in terms of pushing forward legislation that outlasts the actual moral panic, But the actual things themselves are very short lived. They don't seem to have very

much like staying power as as like cultural moments. They move on so quickly, Like no one talks about critical race theory anymore. You don't even hear this sort of groomer rhetoric as often as you did two years ago, and it's being replaced by new versions. And yeah, like Mia said, the DEEI thing is that is the current current thing that is wrecking American society if you ask

about maybe one third of population. But yeah, how do you feel about like the life cycle of these moral panics and how they relate to like the social contagion aspect.

And I do really appreciate the idea of the woke mind virus as being kind of like the perfect like the exemplar of this, and that you know, people were, you know, people were complaining about you know, stuff being woke for a while, and you know it is usually it's often coded as something that's woke, is like anti racist, or you know, is something like it's very much associated you know, infused with like when people complain about wocism, a lot of times they're like they're racist or or

there or at the very least they have fears about kind of the corruption of pure whiteness being corrupted by increasing you know, people of color and and you know, like making gains in society. Right, But the woke mind virus, because no one could really explain what woke is because then it keeps shifting and it refers to trans people or or critical race theory and et cetera. Yeah, and the woke mind is like perfect because that's how they think it all works. Like it's just this thing that

infects people, especially children. And the way in which there is a recent thing just today, I think it was Ackerman, the billionaire has been involved in a lot of this DII stuff, complaining about his child being infected in college with Marxism, and Elon Musk had similar issues with his trans daughter, like becoming pro marx or anti capitalists, and so they just assume that, like, no, my child was pure,

but now they're infected. It's like, well, maybe there are other ideas out there that are better than your idea.

But people will tend to kind of move on, like the Satanic panic of the eighties, you know, like that was a really big deal and then all of a sudden it was just gone and no one ever talked about it again. I think the difference here is that a lot of these moral panics are really tied together with what's happening in the country more generally, with anti democratic and authoritative, you know, views coming from you know,

particularly the right wing of the country. You know, like one of the two major political parties is really pushing a lot of just generally across the board. You know, they're against feminism, they're you know, against people of color, against LGBTQ plus people, and I think it's all wrapped up into the same thing. I think that while individual

parts of the moral panic may go away. They may talk about critical race theory for a bit and then shift to trans people being groomers, then shift to DEI but I think a lot of this is they're all intertwined.

And actually, I think that's like the last couple of paragraphs of the afterward, I talk about that as a potentially good thing, because even though it's been a horring time to be a trans person, with all the anti trans legislation and all the anti trans news stories, all the pushes back on gender firm and care, despite all that, I think the good thing is that I think there are clear sides here, and I think, well, this wasn't true early on in the anti trans backlash in the

late twenty tens. I think most people realize now that all these things are tied together from like kind of you know, the right wing perspective in this country is just against all these things. You know, they want a white, Christian, straight minority of people running everything about this country, and so I think the rest of us really need to recognize that and work together to defeat that.

should be in stores starting in March. As for me, my website Juliusarana dot com, particularly if you go to the writings page there, I have like literally links to everything I've written online over the years, so it's kind of a clearinghouse of free writings of mine. There are also links to my books there, and then if you're looking for me on social media, I'm at Julius Serrano on most platforms that I'm at.

spent so long writing about the Daily Wire movie, and like, oh this is hardly all this work has already been done.