A thing I think about a lot is how my backwoods stepdad's reaction to the anti-trans ads during the 2024 election was a genuinely confused "whadarthey talking about that for?"
Casey Explosion
Free political advice, most people are fairly tuned out when it comes to trans rights yet find it deeply weird to be obsessed with trans people, transphobia is the remit of billionaire pedophiles, and if you're adopting anti-trans stances, that's who it looks like you're serving the interests of.
Sep 12, 2026 at 5:00 PM
What Were We Thinking? The Top 10 Most Dangerous Ads
Often the criticism of vintage ads focuses on their inherent sexism, racism, or other displays of social prejudices, which we find laughable today, despit...
Opinion | Stop Googling. Let’s Talk. (Published 2015)
What have we done to face-to-face conversation?
The Trump Administration Group Chat, Signal: The Coke of Secure Messaging, Transparency Versus Security
The Trump administration’s Signal gaffe raises fascinating questions about secure messaging and the trade-off inherent in transparency.
Welcome to the anti-trans outrage factory — Jessica Kant
When I first wrote Anatomy of a moral panic in February 2024, I had only a faint glimmer of what was to come.The astronomical rise in stories about trans people that I’d collected over the previous year told a different story. This massive, messy dataset I had collected was brimming with increasingl
NYT Misses What’s True and Important About an Anti-Trans School Resolution
Like most New York Times articles about trans politics that FAIR has analyzed, the piece marginalized the voices of those most impacted.
What do they put in those things?
68K votes, 906 comments. 719K subscribers in the NonPoliticalTwitter community. Twitter and Bluesky without the politics. Come vibe with us as we…
Seen but not heard: The New York Times failed to quote trans people in over 60% of 2023 stories on anti-trans legislation
A new report from Media Matters and GLAAD finds that The New York Times excluded the perspectives of trans people from two-thirds of its stories about anti-trans legislation in the year following public criticism for its handling of the topic. Media Matters previously reported that the Times helped fuel a right-wing anti-trans panic in 2022 by platforming anti-trans extremists, painting rising transgender identification as a social contagion, and fearmongering about the costs of transgender acceptance. In February 2023, the paper received two separate open letters: one from a coalition of 150+ organizations and leaders, including GLAAD, and a separate letter signed by hundreds of Times contributors that criticized the outlet's contributions to a deadly anti-LGBTQ culture war. The newspaper attempted to conflate both efforts, dismissing all criticisms of its coverage as merely “protests organized by advocacy groups.” Between February 15, 2023, when those letters were separately delivered to the Times, and February 15, 2024, the Times published at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs. We counted how often the paper quoted openly trans or gender-nonconforming sources, cited anti-trans misinformation or talking points without context or adequate fact-checking, and accurately represented the records of anti-trans figures mentioned in its stories. Our findings: 66% of the articles did not quote even one trans or gender-nonconforming person. 18% of the articles quoted misinformation from anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional context. 6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.
The Alt-Right Playbook: The Reverse Gish Gallop
'A directive from above': Former NYT editor lays out how the paper pushes anti-trans bigotry
In this in-depth interview, former New York Times editor Billie Jean Sweeney details how the paper shifted towards openly promoting anti-trans hatred, how some staff tried to stop it, how it's directed from the very top and the damage this legitimization of bigotry has done
NEW: Some Dems are adopting anti-trans rhetoric in their campaigns While Republicans learn they can’t rely on it to win like they did in 2024 Inside how each party is navigating trans issues in 2026 — in ways they never have before w/ @alexroarty.bsky.social washingtonsun.com/campaigns/republican-transgen…
Republicans' Trans Attack Ads Aren’t Hitting the Same Way This Year
www.washingtonsun.comSo much I could say about this. Safe to say all combined spend on anti-trans political ads/mailers/digital is easily north of a *half billion* since 2024. That has real political and human cost. Even when the ads are diminishing returns on actual persuasion. Tired.
Gillian Branstetter
Republicans have spent $184 million on anti-trans advertising this midterm cycle, per AP/AdImpact, which is more than they did in 2024. They've aired over 217,000 TV spots which, at 30 seconds each, equals 75 straight days worth of agitprop back-to-back
Amusing how if you read X, Facebook, most of NYTimes and The Atlantic, all of The Argument, and so forth, yesterday was a huge surprise and you have to reset everything from the past two years. But if you joined BlueSky in November 2024 and clicked on any politics-related starter pack, you're good.
