The Trans Panic Clickbait Economy

Attacks on trans rites are obviously not new and have steadily risen the past ten years, but this recent collection of worrying claims are especially grim or outright genocidel justice months, I've seen viral posts citing online articles saying that ICE is going to round up and quote unquote disappear trans people, that the FDA is making a quote unquote registry of trans women, and that an adult trans healthcare ban is imminent. Welcome to it could happen here? A show about things

falling apart. I'm Garrison Davis for this episode. I'd like to emphasize the could in it could happen here. It's not. It will definitely happen here, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. These panic inducing claims and the articles they're sourced from are referring to real things or movements happening in either right wing activism or anti trans policy and legislation, but are framed in a way to maximize catastrophe, rather than actually understanding what's happening at the

moment and what we can do about it. Left unchecked, panic clickbait reduces the process of staying informed to being in a state of constant doom and feeling hopeless against an unstoppable enemy. Or it makes someone completely check out and not believe anything they see online even if there is a real pressing threat, both of which cloud our

ability to assess and respond to very real threats. For the book of this episode, I'm going to focus on an article that claims ICE is now permitted to detain anyone for quote unquote looking trans. This reporting and the online discussion around it is a microcosmatic example of how we understand both the Trump Administration's attacks on trans people

and how and why ICE operates as an agency. This story could be traced to a sub stack post with the headline trump administration opens the door for ICE to target anyone suspected of being trans. The sub headline continues by reading quote under a new rule, the State Department will be able to revoke trans people's visas over quote unquote misrepresentation. It'll give ICE grounds to suspect all trans

people of being in the US illegally unquote. The information contained in this headline is the furthest many people will engage with the content of this article. Combining that headline with preconceis notions about how ICE functions under the second Trump administration makes us a very frightening claim. So what evidence does the substack article include to support this claim?

Earlier this month, the State Department updated its policy for the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, also known as the Green Card Lottery. The new rules require that applicants upload a scan of their foreign passports, biographic and signature page to cut down on fraudulent Diversity Visa Program entries. The policy update also changed the gender entry to sex on application forms.

In the policy rule update, the State Department wrote the marker reflected in the sex field on any visa application, including the entry form, should match the applicants' biological sex at birth, even if that differs from the sex listed

on the applicants foreign passport or other identifying documentation. The substack article claims this could form, say, quote, mismatch between trans people's applications and their passports, something it can then use to declare their applications fraudulent and disqualify them entirely.

deemed fraudulent and then denied. The kind of fraud this rule change is trying to combat by requiring a passport scan is not unique to trans people, according to Malita Picasso, staff attorney for the ACLUS LGBTQ and HIV Rights Project.

Picasso said in an email that the new rule quote seems to more directly target fraudulent activities involving third parties, basically entering the lottery on behalf of individuals without their knowledge and consent, shorting them for large amounts of money if they are selected.

reflect an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female unquote. There's just no basis for the claim that a mismatch between the gender listed on a foreign document and the sex marked on application forms will itself quote

unquote disqualify someone from receiving a visa. ACLU staff attorney Melita Picasso told me that the new policy itself recognizes this could cause discrepancies, and that she doesn't see a quote new or heightened risk of being accused of fraud or wilful misrepresentation if a transgender person follows the instructions by listing their sex assigned at birth on the application, even if they also file a per certificate that has been updated to reflect.

In such cases, the adjudicator should confirm the applicant sex as defined in the executive order, indicate that sex on the visa, and add a case note documenting any discrepancy between the passport and the visa to prevent issues at the port of entry unquote. Later, in April of twenty twenty five, the United State States Citizenship Immigration Services officially updated their policy on requiring quote unquote biological sex on

immigration applications. The policy also states that quote USCIS does not deny any immigration benefits solely based on a failure to properly indicate that benefit requesters sex unquote. A sale U staff attorney Milita Picasso told me that USCIS officials have quote unquote a lot of discretion and that the policy says that failure to list biological sex quote will cause delays in processing the application while USCIS tries to

verify your sex assigned at birth unquote. Now, the State Department has said there are grounds to deny these applications for trans people if they make a quote willful affirmative material act of misrepresentation by misrepresenting their quote unquote biological sex at birth in application forms or to a consular officer to gain entry to the United States under false pretenses.

Legally qualifying as willful mess representation is a relatively high bar, and this language was specifically written with the intent to restrict trans athletes from entering the country to play sports. The sort of misrepresentation the State Department is talking about is if a trans woman quote unquote misrepresents her birth sex to procure a visa or admission into the United States for the purpose of competing in a women's sports competition.

This same sports related memo, dated February twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, also states, quote if there is a discrepancy either in the applicants documents or in electronic constantly records, or if other evidence casts reasonable doubt on the applicant sex, you should refuse the case under two to two one G and request additional evidence to demonstrate sex at birth unquote. Section two two one ng G of the Immigration and Nationality Act is a temporary visa refusal pending further documents

or information provided by the applicant. For an athlete visa, the bar is very high and the burden is on the applicant to prove they have the special un rare qualities required to be eligible for a visa. But the substat article doesn't just claim that being trans could disqualify

you from receiving a visa. The article escalates its claims, stating that trans people who already have a valid visa could have it revoked and be deported for misrepresenting their sex in the past, citing US law that if an alien is found to have obtained a visa quote by fraud or wilfarely misrepresenting a material fact, they are ineligible

to be in the United States. The article also refers to a section of the Foreig Affairs Manual which includes providing quote a fake birth certificate in support of an

immigrant visa application as misrepresenting a material fact unquote. The article goes on to assert that the Trump administration could refuse to recognize trans people's amended birth certificates from foreign countries and essentially consider them quote unquote fake, thus making their visa eligible to be revoked by quote unquote misrepresenting

a material fact. The author of the substack links to another one of her own articles on a new policy regarding the issuing of US passports with sex markers reflecting biological sex at birth. The passport policy instructs the state department employees to check birth certificates for signs of being amended, and if they are amended, request more documents that list sex at the time of birth, such as medical records,

hospital records, or early school records. ACLU staff attorney Picasso says that this does not mean entire amended birth certificates or quote unquote fake for the purposes of establishing fraud or willful misrepresentation, which is again a high and that Trump administration has never argued this as such.

order will remain valid through its expiration date. The visa holder does not need to apply for a new visa with an amended sex marker until the current visa expires unquote. So the first half of this article covers what I argue are gross misrepresentations of State Department visa policy. The second half of the article speculates on how this misrepresentation

could be enforced by ICE. In it Supreme Court ruling last year, just as Kavanaugh wrote that ICE could detain people based on a combination of factors such as working a certain kind of job, ethnicity, and speaking Spanish or talking with an accent, Kavanaugh said that ICE can detain someone for questioning quote if they have a reasonable suspicion based on specific articulable facts, that the person being questioned

is an alien illegally in the United States. The author of the substat article argued that Kavanaugh's concurrence quote unquote, effectively permitted ICE to use the fact that someone looks trans as the quote specific articulable fact, allowing its officers to question, harassed, detain, and even deport both citizens and non citizens as long as it has a reason to claim that being trans makes a person more likely to be in the US illegally unquote, with this substacker adding

that because of State Department policy requiring applicants to list biological sex at birth on forms, quote, ICE now have the enforcement rationale to assert that trans people are more likely than says people to have misrepresented themselves during the visa process and therefore are more likely to have entered the country unlawfully unquote. This assertion from this substacker rests on the idea that looking trans makes someone more likely

to be in the US illegally. This idea is not supported by any immigration policy memo or guideline that also assumes that the justification for a Kavanaugh stop is the same as the legal process of removal, which it is not. This idea was invented by the author of this article. It's not based on any enforcement directive from ICE, and misrepresents what the State Department means by intentionally misrepresenting biological

sex in the visa application process. Discrepancies in gender markers across government documents is not its self grounds for detention or deportation. In fact, it's federal policy to create such discrepancies. Furthermore, dealing with potential discrepancies between gender markers on foreign documents and the Trump Admin's insistence on only using biological sex at birth on federal documents is handled by State Department consular officers and USCIS employees, not ICE Enforcement and Removal

operations officers who work under an entirely different agency. But the main thing that makes me believe that ICE will not suddenly start targeting people for being trans is that this state department policy requiring sex at birth on visa applications isn't actually new. It's existed in some form since February twenty twenty five for both immigrant and non immigrant visas. The only recent change is that the Green card lottery rules have been updated to use this same language.

for non citizens and visa applications harder to navigate and subject to delays. This policy from the State Department is bad, but turning that into saying that ICE is now going to round up trans people and vcode them doesn't understand how this will actually affect immigrant trans people or trans people currently in federal custody. Side note vcoding refers to this systematic enabling of sexual abuse towards incarcerated transwomen to

please male prisoners. Near the end of the substackic article, the author suggests that transpeople in Kansas could be at extra risk of getting detained by ICE because of a new law invalidating driver's license and birth certificates with amended gender markers, possibly leaving some US citizens temporarily unable to

prove citizenship with a valid birth certificate. This new law is certainly dangerous, and any attempt to strip away people's legal id is very worrying and carries potential for abuse. In the case of Kansas, already, having a passport would be really ideal. Otherwise, a hospital birth certificate or early school records can theoretically be used to help prove citizenship, and it is worth saying that a citizen temporarily losing documentation does not put them at the same level of

marginalized risk as an undocumented immigrant. The new Kansas law does direct the Office of Vital Statistics to quote reissue birth certificates when necessary to correct this sex identification unquote. Similarly, DMVs were instructed to reissue a quote unquote corrected license once the invalidated one was turned in. We'll be right back after these messages welcome back to it could happen here.

The unsubstantiated claims made in that substack article went viral across multiple social media platforms like TikTok, blue Sky, and Twitter,

bolstering further speculation. Social media posts further extrapolated the potential harm facing trans people by ICE agents beyond the claims made in the article by saying that ICE will now deport or disappear trans citizens anyone who tried to push back on the legitimacy of those claims, were labeled dangerous or fence for trying to quote unquote downplay the threat posed by ICE assertions of new pressing danger In this

back and forth, discourse largely took three forms. One saying that because ICE is already doing ex bad thing, that means they could also start doing this new bad thing. Two people asserting that ICE is in fact actually already doing this, and three arguments based on distrust of the

government and ICE's general lack of legality. Much of the discussion emerged from the genuine belief that ICE has been granted new power or has been quote unquote authorized to detain someone for looking trans, that Trump has quote unquote opened the door for ICE to start profiling trans people, that like the stream Course ruling last year, profiling has been essentially greenlit for trans people, or that checking the consistency of gender markers has been added to ICE's quote

unquote jurisdiction. And to be one hundred percent clear, there's not been any new ICE memo or policy related to transpeople, gender markers or documentation being in their jurisdiction. State Department policy on requiring biological sex on applications has existed for over a year. The real danger posed by this policy is that more trans immigrants could have their visas delayed or, in extreme cases, denied, and people may need help navigating

this increasingly confusing application process. Still, people have tried to assert that ICE's intentional targeting and profiling of people for being trans was quote unquote already happening. In the past year, ICE has detained transpeople. It's hard to to get exact numbers on this because I stopped collecting detention data for trans people last year to comply with Trump's anti trans executive orders. Though we do know of attempts to deport

trans people from news reporting. Last August, ICE detained a transwoman who over stated a visa by six years, and in November, a transwoman who lost her lawful permanent residence status in twenty twenty three after pleading guilty to a felony was quote unquote inadvertently deported to Mexico despite a court order specifically barring her from being sent to Mexico. We have no evidence that these women were targeted for removal on the basis of being trans.

as reasonable suspicion of illegal presence. When I voiced skepticism about the claims sourced from this substack article, people responded to me saying that even if this has yet to happen, one could argue that ICE still could expand their operations to include profiling and targeting trans people for detention, since they're already profiling and rounding up quote unquote random brown people.

After all, this podcast is called it Could Happen Here, and ICE has detained both citizens and legal immigrants and sent them to quote unquote camps. Though this show is called it Could Happen Here, that doesn't mean we should spread unsubstantiated doom spiraling, disconnected from the material reality of

real policies advancing a fascist project. The Trump administration has been very clear and open about targeting groups of people flooding through our southern border, that is who ICE is designed to target, and they have policy directing them to do so, and new permission from the Supreme Court. It is true that ICE has temporarily detained US citizens when

looking for people they suspect our undocumented immigrants. This has been for two reasons, US citizens accused of interfering with ICE activity while protesting, or because ICE suspects US citizens may be undocumented based on factors like skin tone, occupation, or speaking a foreign language, usually Spanish. This second group of people then must demonstrate proof of citizenship or, if

they are immigrants, their legal status. The period they're detained is supposed to be relatively short, usually a few hours, though in extreme cases that's stretched into multiple days. When I posted about this online, someone sent me a Wikipedia article claiming it proved that ICE has deported one hundred and seventy US citizens during Trump's second term. The article actually said one hundred and seventy citizens have been detained since Trump took office. Again, there have been a few

reported instances of US born citizens being deported. These are citizen children who are deported with immigrant parents to avoid child separation, though many many children do end up being separated from their parents when their parents are deported. The last argument that people fall back on is simply that ICE is a completely lawless agency, and they can do

whatever it wants, including going after trans people. After all, ICE has murdered US citizens on camera in broad daylight, but it's important to remember that happened for a reason. Those weren't random acts. ICE and CBP murdered people protesting ICE rates targeting their immigrant neighbors. Federal agents killed people because the protesting was an inconvenience, and there was use of force policy and training directing them to do so. For decades, CBP agents have killed people at the border

and gotten away with it. The Trump administration may not carible the law, but this analysis is not based on any assumptions about legality. It's based on the administration's own stated goals, which they've been very open about, and the policies and practices currently in effect, none of which relate to ICE targeting.

of battle. While the administration has repeatedly ignored courts and judges' orders, people have also been successfully released from ICE custody by filing habeas corpus petitions. It's not that I believe in

the personal integrity of ICE agents, far from it. But this concept of ICE as this vague fascist desk squad that will go after any group the Trump administration hates turns ICE into this abstract idea rather than a single material agency with concrete motivations and limits that leaves a wake of destruction in the course of achieving their purpose. ICE does raids where there's high concentrations of immigrant workers.

The targeting isn't actually random. ICE is going after undocumented immigrant workers, sometimes using skin and language as a rough proxy to do document checks to assert the inevitability of ICE going after trans people, People invoke comparisons to the Nazis, and as rhetorically useful as it is to equate ICE to a modern version of the Gestapo. This is not Germany in the nineteen thirties. Ice is a contemporary version,

but the current world is different. The chronically online doomer may retort, but once ICE is done with immigrants, then they will go after transpeople. After all, what's the purpose of increasing ICE's staffing and funding, or building a network of detention camps across the country if not to use them against the undesirables. There's about fifteen million undocumented immigrants in the United States and about three million trans people.

That's five times as many undocumented immigrants than trans people. Last year, ICE reached a record high number of deportation, over six hundred thousand. This number still leaves millions and millions of undocumented immigrants. ICE will never be quote unquote done with immigrants. This logic again reduces ICE to this vague, abstract evil and fails to consider the purpose of ICE and why it currently operates as it does. So what motivates ICE. Do individual ICE agents share the same motivations

as the agency itself or the people directing it. Individual agents certainly could be motivated by racism, political ideology, a paycheck, or a combination thereof, but the motivating factors across the entire agency cannot solely be based on ethnicity itself, else you wouldn't see as many Hispanic ICE and CBP agents. People tend to think of hate as a vague causal force itself, rather than it being the result of complex societal factors shaped by material forces like the economy, in security,

and housing shortages. These material forces are often expressed as racial or ethnic prejudice, but the underlying motivation of ICE as an agency and by extension, DHS still rests on

material forces, not racial hatred as an abstract ideal. Rank and file employees could have entirely different motivations compared to some of those at the top of the agency or the agency as a whole, and people in charge of the agency may themselves even be confused as to the material motivations that underline the existence of immigration enforcement agencies.

But this lack of alignment is a weakness in the agency and DHS more broadly, as demonstrated by the fallout of Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis, which left ICE and DHS in a compromised state. So why does ICE exist? What material role does it fulfill? It seeks to stabilize the social order by target surplus populations, and what's the most efficient way to do that By going after the most marginalized populations with the least amount of legal and

economic protections, which are undocumented immigrants. This operation may be sold to the public, and indeed it's enforcers by marketing it in the language of race and crime categories, which are often equated, but underneath that, it's still an attempt to solve problems caused by material economic forces. In reality, this material motivation establishes a certain direction of impact, as well as material limits like budget, personnel, and balancing between

public approval and public opposition. So with that in mind, does it make sense to claim that Immigration and Customs enforcement is going to conduct the targeted massed attention of trans people as a class signs points to know. It's not that I disagree with the ide that trans people are under threat from the government, but they're under a different threat than that of undocumented immigrants or people detained by ICE based on profiling. Obviously, trans immigrants have an

overlapping threat vector. As such, migrant support should remain focused on things like ICE watch, rapid response networks, and providing immigrants legal resources, including to trans immigrants who made an assistance navigating the visa process, and working to get people out of ICE detention. The latter is especially important considering Trump's executive order forcing transwomen in federal custody to be detained with men, and the Trump Administration's plan to end

of federal prison rape protections for trans people. But most people engaged in this discourse genuinely don't understand how state department policy on visa applications will actually affect transimmigrants and what we can then do to support trans immigrants. But this whole discourse takes the phone away from the people most at risk of ICE, which are still undocumented immigrant workers. Lilith in Seattle with a one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year tech job is not at high risk

of being detained by ICE. Believing otherwise prohibits people who are actually safe and secure from using their wealth and status to support others who do not have the same safety provided by wealth or status, whether they're transgender and immigrant,

or both. Misleading articles in the larger panic driven information economy encourages people with financial or legal security to be scared into paralysis because they believe that any amount of opposition to the government will result in being disappeared to a concentration camp. This justifies a retreat from the world by framing it as safety, allowing one to focus on maximizing their own power and wealth to achieve security, retreating

solely into the rule of the victim achieved. It's a sort of emotional catharsis, But this also alienates you from the world and ends up doing propaganda for the enemy. In this discourse, there's a tendency to make the enemy out to be an unstoppable monster, which further justifies in action because it doesn't allow you to understand the limits of the enemy, whether logistical or ideological, and resigns us to cower before an omnipotent all powerful evil. Ice operations

are an expensive, unpopular, destabilizing thing. We must keep an eye on the fragility of power, as that informs us on how to fight it. When removed from action in the real world, people have no way to confront truth. It is a frightening time to be transgender. On top of what feels like never ending attacks on healthcare and

our ability to exist in public life. You now see news stories about a US state invalidating people's IDs at the same time as viral social media posts to claim ICE has been given new authority to detain transpeople and

deport immigrants for having the wrong gender marker. Various attacks on trans rights separated through time could be viewed as a coherent, centralized strategy towards a singular, horrific end, but they also may be in fact disparate, often petty attempts at cruelty, intending to demoralize transpeople and make translife prohibitively difficult.

The way Red States and the Trump admin Are trying to eliminate transgenderism, as Michael Knowles would say, is to simply make it incredibly difficult to socially and medically transition, like by not recognizing gender on government documents, be excluded from public bathrooms, and continuing efforts to restrict healthcare. We'll do one more break and return for a final segment.

The state of catastrophic fear I've been talking about is maintained by a near constant wave of articles with panic inducing headlines, which fuel social media posts that further escalate an abstract claims maiden headlines to a Nazi Germany esque level of potential danger facing trans people. One such impending danger circulating online this month is the claim that the FDA is making a registry of trans women and moving

to criminalize DIY estrogen. This claim originated from an article in a trans news outlet published March twelfth, reporting that anti trans lobbyan groups sent a petition to the FDA to create a registry of trans women who take estrogen and restrict the use of feminizing HRT, which, if implemented, could quote fast track pathway to criminalizing estrogen use. Importantly, this citizens petition is not US law or proposed government legislation,

nor is it FDA policy or regulation. It was written by an anti transactivist coalition and sent to the FDA over three months ago in December of twenty twenty five. The petition requests quote unquote immediate action by establishing a new docket for the public to officially comment on the safety and effectiveness of estrogen in gender transitions, and to schedule a public hearing on the subject. That is mainly what the petition is for, though it does make further

recommendations following the conclusion of a public hearing. These recommendations include adding a warning label to estrogen, conducting a safety review, having clinicians report adverse effects to the FDA, and requiring the drug manufacturers quote establish a patient registry as a part of a risk evaluation and mitigation study to capture real lials world safety data unquote, and that is the

registry mentioned in this panic headline. This article, or more accurately distorted versions of its claims, went viral across trans Twitter, with tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of quote unquote views, but the article received strong pushback on Blue Sky for being quote unquote sensationalist and inflammatory.

The outlet that originally published the story later updated the article, clarifying that the FDA receives hundreds of petitions a year and even if implemented, they can take years to.

The bill in question mandates insurance companies also cover d transition, and would require that care providers submit statistics on gender affirming care to the Tennessee Department of Health, which must quote not contain individually identifiable information defined in HIPPA unquote. The Tennessee Department of Health would then use that information

to make a publicly available statistics report. But online accounts are spreading this story as if Tennessee is making a quote unquote sex offender style public registry with the names and locations of all trans people in this state. A bill like this could potentially be used for harm and it may face court challenges for possibly violating parts of HIPPA by collecting data on county of residents and procedure dates. But the reporting on the bill and the viral reaction

online make it out to be something completely different. There's no reason to believe this bill would create a publicly accessible registry or list identifying trans people by name in this state. The bill has not yet passed the state Senate, and it may not in its current form. Right now, it's unclear what exact form the collected data will take within a statistics report and what level of anonymizing data

aggregation will be employed. This is something to keep an eye on if the bill does pass and the state Department of Health drafts guidelines for the mandatory statistics reporting,

but the way it's being reported is incredibly misleading. Interestingly, the source for this public list claim is the same the sub stec outlet that created the false story about ICE now being able to detain people for looking trans. Also earlier this month, multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that the Fourth Circuit Court approved state bans on gender affirming

healthcare for adults. On March tenth, a Republican appointed three judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that states can prohibit gender affirming surgery from being covered by Medicaid. The ruling affirmed ban on Medicaid coverage for quote sex change surgeries in West Virginia, with the panel arguing it doesn't discriminate against trans people because it applies

to specific procedures, not specific individuals. This is certainly bad news for trans people in West Virginia on Medicaid, but reporting that this decision could soon result in trans people losing healthcare in other states or nationally is misleading and removes key context. This is not a total ban on these procedures. It's a ban on state Medicaid coverage of

these surgical procedures. The ruling is not a ban on other forms of gender affirming healthcare like HRT, nor does it threaten the hospital's ability to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds for providing gender affirming healthcare, like the Trump administration

has threatened so far unsuccessfully. Still people postulated on how this ruling could be laying the legal groundwork to eliminate adult transgender healthcare, but trans journalist to David Forbes noted that this ruling will likely be appealed to the wider Fourth Circuit, which has recently ruled in the opposite direction

of this three panel ruling. What panicked assertions of an impending total ban on trans healthcare tends to overlook is that going from a state ban on Medicaid coverage for surgery straight to an all ages ban on gender affirming healthcare skips a lot of steps, and those steps are crucially important. The panic, clickbait induced doomer mindset treats every

horrific potentiality as an inevitable eventuality. This underminds our ability to accurately assess risk and effectively dedicate resources to oppose what are pressing threats. So what purpose does this sort of posting serve and why are people so primed to believe it? These panic driven claims rest on the very real fact that trans people are facing present danger. Oftentimes, people boosting these panic stories are genuinely trying to help

inform their own community of potential harm. In the case of that Ice story, it was based on the assumption that there was a legitimate recent rule change enabling ISO target people under suspicion of being trans it makes sense that people would want to raise the alarm about ICE gaining new powers, but acel U Staf Attorney Melita Picasso cautioned, quote, we are supporting our community by trying to warn people, but these warnings need to be clear and accurate, otherwise

we end up inadvertently contributing to the chaos and fear unquote. Other times, these panic stories are spread with the hope of scaring allies into caring about the ongoing attacks on trans people. Perhaps this is successful in some cases, I don't know, But as a side effect, this strategy deals significant damage to the people it's trying to protect. Forecasting doom twenty four to seven can drive people into hopeless despair and push them away from strategies to fight against

the current attacks on trans writes. Panic driven agit prop could also contribute to a Girl Who Cried Wolf scenario where allies start to discount concerns about certain attacks on transwrites due to previous, unsubstantiated viral claims. Though many people spreading these claims may have genuine good intentions, the people

creating these claims may develop certain material incentives. Traditional mainstream journalism has failed to question the massive government overreach into the lives of trans people, and in some cases helped manufacture consent for the stripping away of trans rights. This state of affairs has made transpeople lose faith into big outlets, leading to small upstart outlets filling in the information gaps

in trans news coverage, but without any institutional backing. Independent news sites and sub stack style blogs have to build an audience to generate traction and stay operating. It turns out thousands of people constantly freaking out creates high social media engagement. This creates a loop where trans panic fear mongering boosts social media engagement, which further encourages more irresponsible clickbait framing. Those who are successful may slowly develop a

new class position, which then needs to be maintained. Financial incentive may even pressure journalists who have done good work in the past to fall back on panic driven engagement bait to attract new traffic. This isn't exclusive to trans outlet's either. Following the assassination of Charlie kirk Ken, Klippenstein reported on his substack that the FBI was about to quote designate transgender people as violent extremists. His report contained

no new verifiable information. The core evidence was an unnamed quote unquote senior official who told the Clippenstein he quote unquote feels like trans people could be labeled nihilist violent extremists. Clippenstein has previously misunderstood the nihilist violent extremists and label. The term actually predates the second Trump administration and refers to groups like seven sixty four Child's Extortion Rings and

communities like the school Shooter fandom TCC. Hours before Clippenstein's report was published, the Heritage Foundation and the Oversight Project publicly released a petition calling for a new classification of extremism called trans ideology inspired violent extremism to categorize attacks they believed are motivated by transgender ideology. The petition memo denied that all trans people and their allies would be

designated domestic terrorists. Under this label, only those who quote encourage, promote, condone, take, or insight unlawful violent action or threats based on this ideology unquote. The Heritage petition also runs contrary to Clippenstein's report by advocating against the use of the nihilist violent extremism label to describe transgender motivated violence. A Heritage petition to establish a new category of extremism is different from an unnamed official who feels like trans people as a

whole could be labeled as nihilist violent extremists. And it's important to un stand that distinction. That was last September. It's now half a year later, and neither of these

things has come to fruition. The closest we got was in late September, following Trump's Antifa terrorism executive Order with the National Security Posdential Memorandum Number seven, which listed quote extremism on migration, race, and gender as common recurrent motivations and indica of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self described anti fascism unquote, among many other threads

animating violent conduct. Regardless of that, people online interpreted both Clippenstein's report and the Heritage petition as meaning the FBI classified the entire class of trans people as domestic terrorists. Social media both amplifies and distorts already misleading claims, turning news into a massive game of telephone and the siloing of certain users and platforms. Mix Countering this misinformation incredibly difficult.

The social media economy carries certain incentives for the producers of panic bait that could be attention, status, and money, but the consumers of panic also stand to gain something catharsis justification for their actions or lack thereof, as well as attention from fellow consumers. These clickbait panic pieces explode around trans Twitter, which is still quite active, consisting of sex workers, gamers, TTT style posters, and zoomers who think

Blue Sky is crnch and liberal. Some of these panic stories, like the FDA Registry, don't do very well on Blue Sky because that's where a lot of trans journalists who do actual journalism are, but those journalists are not active on Twitter and TikTok, making it harder to counter our misinformation on those platforms. Countering trans panic clickbait also suffers from algorithmic suppression because it doesn't get people as ryled up.

Posting about perceived danger is essentially viewed as a form of activism, and if someone casts a doubt on what's seen as an existential threat, that person becomes emotionally equated with the enemy. Panic produces helplessness, but helplessness can actually be cathartic for the individual. It's not helpful for people currently in the most danger. So then what is there to do in terms of the trans panic information economy? Don't be afraid to openly question the legitimacy of certain

reporting due to fear of backlash from the community. If it's good reporting, it should be able to stand up to scrutiny. So when you see a new story that triggers an emotional response, stop a moment before clicking share and find out where this claim is coming from. A reliable journalistic outlet, an independent publication. What other reporting has this publication done? Has it been accurate? Who is the reporter? Are you familiar with their reporting? What else have they

reported on? Is it speculative? Are there logical jumps without supporting evidence? Again, I'm not trying to minimize the danger coming from attack on trans people. Quite the contrary. The right is continuing to take away trans rights, and these threats should be treated seriously. But when trying to counter these real attacks, one must be cautious about looking so far ahead into this speculative future that it takes the

focus away from the clear and present harms. This isn't about trusting the government, It's about understanding the world in order to change it. See you on the the other side. You can find a text version of this episode on the Shatterzone substack, with hyperlinks available for many of the terms or reporting referenced.