The SPLC and the no good very bad white Christian nationalist but also just unpopular anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network

My latest for UnHerd on the SPLC’s bizarre report on the “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network,” which could have been produced by a ChatGPT prompt: “Create a dozen infographics linking everyone on my burn list and denounce them using the very latest DEI terminology in the style of Joseph McCarthy but also add a lot of wacky spelling errors so it has that homebrewed manifesto feel.”

Excerpt:

This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) dropped a major investigation into “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience”. Dubbed Project Captain, the report declares that the “network we identify supports and is supported by white Christian nationalist ideology that seeks to privilege straight, white, cisgender Christians in public policy and replace science and American law with Christian theology”. 

The authors cast a strange and internally contradictory set of aspersions over the Enlightenment and “science” (their quotation marks, not mine), while deploying all the strategies they accuse their political opponents of practising. Then again, making sense of the opposition is not what this report is about. 

Rather, it is the product of political necessity — the need to discredit the growing pushback to youth gender transition and gender self-ID policies that put males in girls’ sports and women’s prisons. One way to dismiss political opponents is by attaching as many of the following labels as possible: conservative, Christian nationalist, cisheteronormative, white supremacist, male supremacist, creationist purveyors of misinformation and pseudoscience. (In case that’s not enough to convince you, these views are also “unpopular.” We’ll come back to that.) 

This is a ham-fisted attempt to lump all opponents together, regardless of their distinct values, approaches, or political orientations. The report then moves on to accuse the “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network” of “manufacturing doubt” by, for instance, using “critical reasoning and attention to detail” when evaluating counterarguments (guilty as charged?) and pointing out that developmental psychology and growing numbers of detransitioners suggest that trans identification may, in some cases, be transient and thus an unwise target of life-altering hormonal and surgical interventions. 

The authors make the bold move of defining pseudoscience (“knowledge or conclusions we assume were produced by following the scientific method or best practices within a specific field of study — like psychology, psychiatry and various fields of medicine — but are not actually scientific”) while peddling it themselves, passing off unverifiable concepts like gender identity as established and unquestionable “scientific” facts.