Christopher F. Rufo will be publishing anti-transgender propaganda beginning today and continuing for the next six weeks, concluding his messaging in mid-August just before U.S. kids return to school.
I later wrote more: "'Radical Gender Theory' is Itself a Social Construct". It's a 5-minute read on Medium.
I've showed you their stuff already. This is about to be the driving story across news cycles, and they will get it plenty wrong. pic.twitter.com/3BpRcPhMdl
— Buttered Jorts (fka kelly jensen) 🐱🐰 (@veronikellymars) July 19, 2022
For context:
A history of “wokeness”: Stay woke: How a Black activist watchword got co-opted in the culture war.
Aja Romano. Vox. October 9, 2020.
Also:
These people do not remotely care about facts. All they care about is building political power on the backs of some of the most vulnerable people in this country. And they have so little fear of accountability that they’re willing to admit it in plain sight. Irredeemable. pic.twitter.com/wQOoQ4v5io
— Ari Drennen 🏹 (@AriDrennen) June 17, 2022
On July 28 Jennifer Bilek will be presenting her latest conspiracies about Big Pharma & trans people at the Hillsdale College in DC. It's being promoted by the director of the DeVos Center at Heritage Foundation, which receives $250,000 a year from her host AWC Family Foundation. pic.twitter.com/xHaktjc5mZ
— “Bespoke” Lee (@thatweirdolee) July 25, 2022
Related to that reference to Big Pharma:
Iker Seisdedos, interviewing Judith Butler in November 2024, states: "One of the main criticisms of gender ideology is that the pharmaceutical industry has interests in it..." Butler (at least in what El Pais published) doesn't argue over this use of the term "gender ideology," but instead challenges the claim on two points. First, Butler points out the hypocrisy of the claim by observing that "Pharma has interests in hormone replacement, but my understanding is that hormone replacement therapy for women who are postmenopausal is a much bigger industry. Of course, Big Pharma is an issue for many health issues, including depression..." Second, Butler accomplishes a redirect, saying that Big Pharma's profits are "not the main reason why kids are questioning gender norms, including the version of masculinity that Trump represents." In other words, even if Big Pharma were profiting off trans kids even more than it profits off myriad other people in various situations, this wouldn't entail that it succeeds in motivating kids to want its product for reasons apart from the kids' own desires.
Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’, Iker Seisdedos, El Pais, December 14, 2024
The English are the ones with a "gender ideology" so-called, one they've forced on countless millions through both internal government oppression and the bloody, baby-snatching nightmare of colonialism. They're less a culture than a single giant knot of sublimated self-loathing.
— Gretchen Felker-Martin (@scumbelievable) April 4, 2023
Update
July 12, 2023: Chris Rufo made a 12-minute video about a "transgender empire":
https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1679143593238462464
I'm not making it a clickable link because he doesn't need the SEO.
Don Moynihan on Bluesky, April 15, 2024: "Rufo is posting dozens of tweets of the NPR CEO, the NYT makes it a story, and Rufo claims victory. They are not falling for his game, they are co-producing it."
Kevin M. Kruse on Bluesky, April 16, 2024: "There's no rational reason for the New York Times to have turned all its editorial decisions over to a right-wing partisan who has been transparent about his bad faith motives. Therefore, I think it's only fair to assume that Chris Rufo has been blackmailing A.G. Sulzberger."
New piece: America’s Elites Fear the Ghost of 1968 Mainstream elites are adopting a reactionary tale about the “leftist” indoctrination of America’s youth that verges on the conspiratorial and is destined to give the Right a major boost. Some key points: 🧵1/
— Thomas Zimmer (@thomaszimmer.bsky.social) May 4, 2024 at 7:04 AM
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The story George Packer presents in The Atlantic is very much in line with what Christopher Rufo has been propagating. A straight line of evil ideas from the “cultural Marxism” of Critical Theory (Marcuse!) to the protests of 2020 – in Packer’s telling: to Columbia 2024. 8/
— Thomas Zimmer (@thomaszimmer.bsky.social) May 4, 2024 at 7:14 AM
Bryn Nelson gives this history:
"Far-right activist Christopher Rufo, who once worked for the anti-evolution Discovery Institute, has repeatedly trotted out the disingenuous narrative that educators should teach diverse viewpoints in the supposed interest 'of reasoning toward truth,' while recommending a newsletter that promotes scientific racism and eugenics. Simultaneously, he has led a crusade against academic fields and ideas he opposes, like gender studies and critical race theory, and incited a cynical moral panic by reinforcing a 'deep story' that portrays drag queens and transgender individuals as sexual predators.
Fox News has aided the effort by helping to resurrect and amplify the long-debunked homophobic slur that LGBTQ+ people are pedophilic 'groomers.' The stubborn lie has now become a one-word mantra providing cover for anti-trans and antigay laws. Some far-right activists have even begun pairing the 'groomer' slur with words like 'contagion' or 'social contagion.' Many of the same peddlers of disinformation, like Fox’s Laura Ingraham and U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green of Georgia, repeatedly minimized the actual contagion of COVID—remorseless dishonesty that arguably contributed to hundreds of thousands of excess deaths among Republicans in the pandemic."
— We Must Face Down the Expanding Anti-Reality Industry: Exposing the antiscience playbook reveals the antiregulatory motives of its deep-pocketed bankrollers, Bryn Nelson, Scientific American, May 24, 2024
September 2024: Rufo perpetuating a lie that people are eating cats. Is he a credible source? No.
Chris Rufo is a paid operative for billionaires and corporate interests. He’s not some maverick journalist-turned-activist. He’s paid. To protect the interests of elites.
— Walker Bragman (@walkerbragman.bsky.social) October 21, 2024 at 1:31 PM
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"Erin Reed, a journalist and activist who tracks LGBTQ policy, described it [North Carolina's 2016 bathroom bill] as "an unmitigated disaster for the Republican Party in the state."
By 2017, the bill was rolled back.
"And so, following that," explains Erin Reed, "there was a good four year period where anti-trans legislation sort of took the back seat. They kind of licked their wounds and they stepped back. And they started planning."
At first, Republicans across the country tried to distance themselves from the issue. In 2016, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized the North Carolina bill during a TODAY Show town hall.
A year later, he rescinded guidance that offered legal protections to transgender students who want to use bathrooms that conform with their gender identity.
"There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go, they use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate," he said at the time.
Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said at a Florida Family Council GOP gubernatorial forum in 2018 that "Getting into the bathroom wars — I don't think that's a good use of our time."
But five years later, DeSantis signed a bill making it a crime for transgender people to use public restrooms that do not correspond with their sex assigned at birth."
Transgender bathroom bills are back, gaining traction after past boycotts, Deena Prichep, NPR May 6, 2024
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