Anti-trans activists are using ‘mirror propaganda'. Here's how to spot it
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50.50: OPINION
Anti-trans activists are using ‘mirror propaganda’. Here’s how to spot it
A technique deployed in Nazi Germany is now used to silence trans people while accusing them of silencing others
Natacha Kennedy
5 December 2022, 6.00am
The recent backlash against Graham Norton’s entirely reasonable suggestion that the media talks to more trans people was more revealing than people think.
He came dangerously close to exposing organised transphobia’s core campaign strategy, something they don’t want people talking about. In collaboration with mainstream media, its main strategy has been to liberally platform anti-trans narratives, hermetically exclude trans perspectives, and at the same time accuse trans people of ‘silencing’ transphobes.
For example, a transphobic group holds a rally somewhere – maybe a couple of dozen transphobes in a draughty church hall. There’s a protest outside. A journalist, with confected faux-indignation, then claims trans people are ‘silencing’ them.
Those claiming to be ‘silenced’ are then featured in every national mainstream media platform, something that caught the ire of Sara Ahmed, an independent academic and former professor of race and cultural studies at Goldsmiths University of London: “Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.”
material for mirror propaganda.
When you see anyone claiming trans people are silencing them, it’s part of a mirror propaganda operation.
For mirror propaganda to work, you need complete control over mainstream media. It is a hardcore, military-grade propaganda technique now being deployed by some of the most powerful people in the country against one of the smallest minorities. In a situation where mainstream media is entirely one-sided, its writers can no longer be considered ‘journalists’, but propagandists. Those who platform them while excluding those they target are not ‘editors’, they are censors.
Nazi Germany and Rwandan genocide
The invention of mirror propaganda has been attributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, and so far the earliest identified deployments of it are by Goebbels and Himmler in 1940s Germany, targeting Jewish people.
More recently, Alison Des Forges and Jean-Pierre Cretien identified mirror propaganda as a significant factor in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when hundreds of thousands of Tutsi men, women and children were slaughtered in a six-week orgy of murder.
Susan Benesch, director of the Dangerous Speech Project at Harvard University, has also identified mirror propaganda as one of the main techniques for inciting genocide.
However, mirror propaganda is also deployed in other ways against trans people – such as when anti-trans activists claim (without evidence) that trans people are a ‘danger’ to cis women. On the contrary, the real danger to cis women comes from the politics of the far right, particularly homophobic and anti-abortion fundamentalists that ‘gender-critical’ transphobes sometimes collaborate with, and are funded by, to the tune of millions of dollars.
In addition to safe and legal abortion, these extremist groups oppose contraception, equal marriage, equal adoption, IVF and ‘Gillick competence’ – the legal principle that young people have the ability to give consent to their own medical treatment.
Through the wedge issue of transphobia, self-identified gender-critical ‘feminists’ have opened the door for the far-right’s homophobia and misogyny. After investing all this money, are they really going to stop at just harming trans people?
So who is deploying mirror propaganda? Global Action for Trans Equality recently produced an analysis of organised transphobia in Britain. What’s most striking is how the connections between well-funded right-wing evangelical organisations, ‘gender-critical’ groups and mainstream media are so numerous that they appear almost indistinguishable from each other. Yet their modus operandi is where these groups most obviously align.
Mirror propaganda is an extreme right-wing political strategy now being deployed by ‘nice’ middle-class transphobes and ‘respectable’ establishment journalists normalising the exclusion of trans people’s voices. Transphobes, from their media bully-pulpits, with contrived self-righteous fervour, routinely claim we are silencing them while they are actually silencing us.
This tells you all you need to know about the complete absence of integrity and sincerity in those who oppose trans and non-binary people’s human rights.