Orgs like Environmental Progress and Deep Green Resistance show the need to study the labels on ‘green’ groups to avoid carrying water for fascists and other far-right reactionaries.
Part One: Anti-Trans Disinfo Creeping on Climate Justice Spaces | Part Two: Manufacturing Doubt and the Case of Environmental ‘Progress’ | Part Three: Deceleration Guide to Anti-Trans & Anti-Climate Disinformation
Marisol Cortez
On the last day of February, I join a small gathering at Brackenridge Park in San Antonio. We’re there on a damp and frigid evening to grieve the death of Nex Benedict, a Two Spirit/trans 16-year-old of Choctaw heritage who died after being jumped in a school bathroom in Oklahoma.
Details are still murky at that point. We know that after hospitalization for head injuries sustained during the beating, Nex collapsed at home and died. It will be another two weeks before Oklahoma’s medical examiner releases their findings: an overdose of over-the-counter and prescription medications. The autopsy also shows “contusions, lacerations, and abrasions on his head and neck.”
We don’t know any of that yet. All we know is he died after being beaten in a bathroom in a state not unlike our own. We know the country has gone mad the way Texas and Oklahoma have gone mad, a rising tsunami of sports bans and health care bans and bathroom bans and book bans and bomb threats at children’s hospitals gleefully egged on by a far right influencer tapped to serve on Oklahoma’s library advisory committee just weeks before Nex’s death. Our own family members have gone mad, seemingly infected by some mind virus.
It’s a small vigil, organized by a local Indigenous group. We’re in the part of the park where the city has been engaged in a war with migratory birds for the past five years, the birds and the people trying to protect them. Two young Two Spirit people sit on a Mexican blanket in front of Nex’s picture, which is surrounded by copal, sage, and a scattering of other offerings.
One of the young folks has a bright red handprint painted over their mouth, an international symbol of shock and outrage for missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit relatives. No one speaks for a long, long while.
Then someone does—a teacher with a sharp fade shaved into short black hair, reminded by Nex of her students—and then another person, and another. It’s like a Quaker meeting where you worship in silence until moved to speak.
Why do we have to be the ones who have to do this for ourselves? cries a trans kid around Nex’s age, leaning on a friend for support. It’s a question that troubles the edges of everyone’s words: Why is it no one else can see what is happening in plain sight—that they’re killing us, our children, partners, friends, siblings, students?
All of us gathered have some connection to Nex’s experience, a lived intimacy with the inside of emergency rooms and psych wards, with the stories behind the polling data released in 2023 by the Trevor Project, a leading suicide prevention organization for LGBTQ youth. Nearly 90 percent of trans youth surveyed reported worsening mental health in the wake of anti-LGBTQ legislation, with half saying they had considered suicide recently. In Trevor Project’s 2024 national poll of over 18,000 LGBTQ young people, almost 2 in 5 reported that they or their families have considered fleeing for friendlier states. According to the National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2022 US Trans Survey, about 4,600 trans people surveyed have already been internally displaced within the U.S. on account of anti-LGBTQ legislation.
In other words, the anguish collectively expressed at Nex’s vigil is no hyperbole. Legislative efforts to eliminate trans people from public life are working as intended—and the results have been as fatal as they’ve felt.
Interrupting this wave of legislative eliminationism will require more than electoral strategy or policy work. More fundamentally, it will require cultural organizing at the community level to help everyday people recognize and disrupt anti-trans talking points and tactics before they take root, and especially to distinguish slick and often reasonable-sounding pseudoscience from actual scientific consensus.
For environmental movements in particular, this means understanding how anti-trans disinformation has increasingly come calling dressed up in green packaging—even as it draws on the well-worn tools of climate denial’s infamous “merchants of doubt.”
‘I really think you should read it’
The launch of the new Defeat_Project_2025 subreddit was a good sign. For too long this policy blueprint for Christian nationalist-ing the federal government—should the GOP return to the White House in 2024—had been flying under the radar of movements organizing against anti-democratic and white nationalist forces. A subreddit meant people were now actively organizing against Project 2025.
I came across this new space in QAnon Casualties, another subreddit I’ve had to frequent in the last couple years. Like that subreddit’s nearly quarter-million members, I’ve unfortunately had to learn a lot about the ways conspiracy thinking can destroy once dependably solid familial relationships; in the process, I’ve learned a lot about online ecologies of disinformation—organizations, talking points, tactics—as a driver of movements that are not only hateful but also profoundly anti-democratic, if not fascist.
If I hadn’t had to learn these things, I might not have recognized it in the Defeat Project 2025 subreddit. At first glance, the post seemed to sympathize with the tenor of the thread, which expressed fear for LGBTQ family members should Project 2025 come to pass. I hear you, it read. And then: Take a look at this. Below, the poster linked to something called the “WPATH Files,” released by an organization called Environmental Progress.
As it turns out, I was already well acquainted with the trove of leaked message board postings purporting to show a vast conspiracy at the heart of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the medical association that issues international standards of care for trans health. These conclusions had been debunked by the relentless, real-time investigative reporting of trans journalists Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart—so I was already familiar with the talking points recirculated by the Files.
Nice try, I typed back, before reporting the comment to the subreddit moderators. But this is anti-trans disinfo. Spoiling for a fight, the poster wrote back immediately:
I really think you should read it. It’s just a compilation of WPATH emails, videos, and internal presentations. If you don’t support it, then you are the real tranphobe [sic].
Lol, I replied. What else can you say to someone “just asking questions” about a people’s right to exist? But I was worried. Reddit offered no option for selecting “disinformation” as a rationale for reporting the post; I’d had to report it instead as hate.
That was not untrue. As rigorously documented in “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience,” a December 2023 report by hate group watchdog Southern Poverty Law Center, scientific disinformation about trans people and their health care has become an increasingly central part of anti-LGBTQ organizing by the Heritage Foundation and the Alliance Defending Freedom, the latter designated a hate group by SPLC. Notably, the ADF and Heritage are also primary drivers of Project 2025, devoting a whole chapter of their 920-page policy document to their plans for denying trans people health care and legal recognition.
Not coincidentally, these proposals rest on the same medical disinformation echoed and recirculated by Environmental Progress in the WPATH Files. Yet such connections between disinformation and organized hate movements easily go unnoticed by those unfamiliar with trans communities. Folks who lean green may be especially susceptible to the scientific stylings of a group calling itself “Environmental Progress” or its ostensible concern with over-medicalization and Big Pharma. And therein lies the power of disinformation.
Fortunately the Project 2025 subreddit was well moderated. A few minutes later, moderators removed the post with a note of thanks for bringing it to their attention.
Legislative Eliminationism
It’s important to recognize anti-trans disinformation when we see it. For in the past few years, trans people and their closest supporters have been subjected to a targeted campaign of dehumanization and elimination too often invisible to all but those living through it. According to the SPLC, the 2015 legalization of gay marriage prompted religious conservative movements—with key support from anti-trans clinicians, parent groups, and “gender critical” online communities—to regroup and embark on a divide-and-conquer strategy of “isolat[ing] transgender people from the LGBTQ+ community.”
This has led to a tsunami of anti-trans moral panic legislation since 2016, with around 510 bills introduced in 2023, a three-fold increase over 2022, and 75 passed into law.
Most of these laws ban medically-recommended health care, participation in school sports, and preferred pronoun use at school for trans youth, but they also eliminate health care for trans adults and even criminalize bathroom access and legal recognition.
This trend continues in 2024, with 515 anti-LGBTQ bills tracked by the ACLU just five months into the year and Republican-ruled states competing to pass ever more extreme restrictions on trans people’s civil and human rights—including a bill that would make it a felony to provide information about trans health care options in other states, a pretext for cracking down on LGBTQ organizations that inches closer to Russia’s criminalization of all public expression of LGBTQ identities as “propaganda” or “extremism.”
A number of commentators have rightly seen this panic around “gender ideology”—a term that encompasses not only opposition to trans identities but also to abortion, birth control, feminism, and LGBTQ rights broadly—as a central plank of authoritarian and white nationalist movements both in the US and globally.
“As a fascist trend,” writes feminist philosopher Judith Butler,
“the anti-gender movement supports ever strengthening forms of authoritarianism. Its tactics encourage state powers to intervene in university programs, to censor art and television programming, to forbid trans people their legal rights, to ban LGBTQI people from public spaces, to undermine reproductive freedom and the struggle against violence directed at women, children, and LGBTQI people. It threatens violence against those, including migrants, who have become cast as demonic forces and whose suppression or expulsion promises to restore a national order under duress.”
FARTs in Green Clothing
While the connection between these legislative developments and scientific disinformation has been well established by queer and trans journalists and scholars, what I find most striking and underexplored as an environmental justice writer-activist is the growing prominence of purportedly environmental organizations in circulating anti-LGBTQ medical disinformation. In fact, Environmental Progress’s publication of the WPATH Files arguably suggests a growing convergence between climate and anti-trans disinformation in fascist movements.
This is not without precedent. It’s been recognized for some time in organizing spaces, for instance, that even the most self-avowedly radical environmentalists can harbor deeply anti-trans politics. Such is the case with Deep Green Resistance, a “revolutionary political organization,” according to their website, which aims to “stop industrial civilization from killing the planet … and advocate for a culture of resistance based on love and action.”
Sounds swell—except that DGR co-founder Lierre Keith is well known for her long-time involvement in “gender critical” or “TERF” circles. “TERF” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” a name that emerged from within radical feminist communities to distinguish those who support including trans women from those who don’t (sometimes parodied online as FARTs, or “feminism appropriating reactionary transphobes”).
TERF politics find a foothold in otherwise radical, even anti-colonial green movements through the lingering influence of bioessentialist 1970s white feminism—largely abandoned in the United States when queer women of color in the 1980s pushed feminism, including ecofeminism, toward more intersectional analyses. Trans-inclusive feminisms owe a debt of gratitude in particular to Black and Chicana third-wave feminists, who recognized early on that defining feminism solely on the basis of sex/gender oppression meant ignoring all the other oppressions that inextricably structure the lives of all sorts of women, in the process imagining Women-with-a-capital-W as implicitly white, western, affluent, straight—and cis.
But some corners of ecofeminism never jettisoned what’s known as cultural feminism, which holds that the roots of patriarchy lie in a cultural denial of “the feminine,” imagined as an essential or even spiritual quality linked to one’s anatomy—an idea strangely at odds with second wave feminism’s origins with Simone Beauvoir, who famously rejected notions of biology as destiny. For cultural feminists and the white lesbian separatist culture of the 1970s, feminism required trans-exclusionary “women-only” spaces as a practice of reclaiming women’s power and reconnecting with the Earth (also imagined as divinely feminine). Lest this seem innocuous, note that the trans-exclusionary Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF), founded and chaired by DGR’s Keith, has accepted $65,000 in grants from anti-LGBTQ hate group Alliance Defending Freedom for their anti-trans policy work.
Thanks to the work of queer and trans climate journalists, mainstream media outlets have recently begun to acknowledge the damage DGR’s toxic views on gender have done to anti-extraction movements, Indigenous solidarity work, and climate justice. In 2022, energy and climate reporter Jael Holzman documented for Politico the ways DGR’s anti-trans politics derailed an effort to support Indigenous opposition to lithium mining on Paiute and Shoshone land. This was followed by a piece by Molly Taft in the technology and culture magazine Gizmodo titled “The Environmental Movement Isn’t Ready for Transphobia,” which more closely examined the susceptibility of environmental movements to the infiltration of “left-oriented transphobia.”
Those less familiar with LGBTQ politics may assume that transphobia is the sole terrain of the deep-pocketed religious conservatives at the financial and legal helm of anti-LGBTQ policy. But it’s important to understand that transphobia on the left is just as eliminationist in its thinking. In fact, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention properly understands the “gender critical” ideology espoused by groups like WoLF and DGR as genocidal in its “den[ial] that transgender identity is real and seek[ing] to eradicate it completely from society.” In fact, this alliance between the far right and elements of the left is why Butler rightly recognizes the anti-gender movement as a fascist one:
“The anti-gender movement is not a conservative position with a clear set of principles. No, as a fascist trend, it mobilizes a range of rhetorical strategies from across the political spectrum to maximize the fear of infiltration and destruction[.] … It does not strive for consistency, for its incoherence is part of its power.”
DGR has been called out, then. But their influence remains insidious: the website of a South Texas regenerative agriculture group still celebrates DGR co-founder Derrick Jensen, whose podcast regularly features guests with views on gender similar to Keith’s. Unsettling America, a useful resource for decolonial movements, draws extensively from Jensen’s writings (though it also includes an editor’s note “highly concerned with and critical of DGR’s hierarchical authoritarianism, TERFism, and general colonial attitude towards indigenous and POC folks”). An invaluable book by Dr. Jack Forbes, one of the founders of Native American studies programs in U.S. universities, opens with a preface by Jensen. And only in the writing of this article did we learn, with heavy disappointment, that someone whose work we have admired and promoted—Thomas Linzey, an attorney affiliated with leading Rights of Nature organizations—remains allied with DGR and Jensen, who sits on the advisory board of Linzey’s Center for Environmental and Democratic Rights. (Deceleration reached out to Linzey for comment on these connections but received no response.)
As we’ve learned from Indigenous scholars and other decolonial thinkers, the binary, essentialist understanding of gender at the root of DGR’s transphobia is in fact deeply rooted in settler colonialism, one reason Native groups fighting lithium mining in Nevada ended their relationship with DGR, according to Holzman and Taft’s reporting on the split for Politico and Gizmodo, to the detriment of organizing efforts.
Indeed, it’s important to recognize green TERFism as more closely allied to eco-fascism than anything else—or, as defined by environmental scholars affiliated with the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative, movements that justify violence or reinforce existing systems of power and inequality in the name of environmental concern. In this moment of crisis for so many trans people and their loved ones, it’s high time we checked our movements at the door to make sure we don’t end up carrying water for fascists and far-right reactionaries.
In the next installment, we’ll look more closely at the case of Environmental Progress, which suggests a new convergence between anti-trans and anti-climate action disinformation, drawing on the long, ignoble tradition of science denial known as manufacturing doubt.
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Marisol Cortez is Deceleration’s co-editor. She writes across genre about place and power for all the other borderwalking weirdos out there, and has previously taught decolonial, environmental, and feminist studies at the university level. She is author of the award-winning South Texas cli-fi novel Luz at Midnight (FlowerSong Press 2020). For more info, visit mcortez.net.
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