In the ongoing culture wars, nothing is quite as attention-grabbing as transgender people. Even though trans and gender diverse individuals making up a tiny fraction of the population, they are given an outsized amount of concern no matter what the topic of the day is. Whenever a story pops up that touches on people who identify as something other than cis, the entire world has to have an opinion about it.
The latest is a study that has gone viral on The Bad Place because it draws a link between violent behaviour and what it defines as “gender ideology”. According to the headlines, the study has proven that people who support the broad concept of non-traditional gender identification are also more prone to be violent and support violent action.
As someone who has supported some form of “gender ideology” in the past, I was very interested in this argument. Could it be true that there is a social movement that has caused the “promotion of extreme narratives of harm for those who refuse to affirm transgender identities both socially and medically”?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, no. This is all based on a fairly ridiculous survey which was funded by the Trump administration. There’s no good reason to believe that people who support “gender ideology”, however you define it, are more likely to be violent extremists. If anything, the data suggests quite the opposite.
The Paper
The study that is being promoted so heavily on X is in fact a report commissioned by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). This is the same HHS that released a farcical review into gender services at the start of the Trump presidency which had very little connection to science or evidence.
The report itself is quite simple. The authors recruited 1,192 people through an online research platform who answered a series of questions about their demographics and political identity. They then answered some short surveys asking about their agreement with what the authors termed “gender ideology”, their support of “left-wing authoritarianism”, and whether they supported several violent actions including the murder of Charlie Kirk, killing Donald Trump, setting ICE buildings on fire, and a few others. Finally, the authors ran a series of simple regressions looking at correlations between these questionnaires.
They found that there was a weak association between the support of statements such as “Parents should support their children’s transgender exploration.” and the belief that Donald Trump should be killed. There was a much stronger connection between what the authors called “left-wing authoritarianism”—we’ll get back to that in a second—and support for various violent acts against right-wing people or institutions. The authors of this overtly political publication concluded:
“People who strongly endorse gender ideology positions score dramatically higher on left-wing authoritarianism than their political identity alone would predict. Furthermore, both [left-wing authoritarianism] and [gender ideology] predicted support for political violence, these findings support the paper’s core claim: gender ideology may function as an ideological accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is, why the situation is urgent, and—in those already disposed toward force—that violence is legitimate.” (square brackets denote expansion of acronyms).
In other words, “gender ideology” makes left-wing people more prone to violence because it signals to the group the people deserving of that violence.
This is, in a word, ridiculous. The first obvious problem is what all of these terms actually measure. For example, “left-wing authoritarianism” was measured using the 13-item LWA scale, which asks people to rate these questions from 1-7 (with 7 indicating strong agreement):
1. The rich should be stripped of their belongings and status.
2. America would be much better off if all of the rich people were at the bottom of the social ladder.
3. When the tables are turned on the oppressors at the top of society, I will enjoy watching them suffer the violence that they have inflicted on so many others.
4. We need to replace the established order by any means necessary.
5. Anyone who opposes gay marriage must be homophobic.
6. People who are truly worried about terrorism should shift their focus to the nutjobs on the far-right.
7. The “old-fashioned ways” and “old-fashioned values” need to be abolished.
8. All political conservatives are fools.
9. Classroom discussions should be safe places that protect students from disturbing ideas.
10. University authorities are right to ban hateful speech from campus.
11. To succeed, a workplace must ensure that its employees feel safe from criticism.
12. I am in favor of allowing the government to shut down right-wing internet sites and blogs that promote nutty, hateful positions.
13. Getting rid of inequality is more important than protecting the so-called “right” to free speech.
Some of these are potentially arguable. You could say, for example, that supporting the replacement of the established order by any means necessary is support for authoritarianism, because it implies violent and suppressive action. Similarly, being in support of stripping “the rich” of all belongings and status does imply that you have some authoritarian leanings, even if the eventual aim is equality.
That being said, most of these questions just measure left-wing political beliefs. Most people of any political persuasion believe that their opponents are fools. Banning hateful speech from campus is a fairly complex political topic, especially in the US, and has a variety of meanings to different people. It’s not a straightforwardly authoritarian argument, except to a specific group of right-wing people who frame those ideas in a certain way.
In addition, some of the questions are just ignorant. Any reasonably well-educated person who was aware that the vast majority of terrorist acts in the United States are and have always been committed by right-wing individuals would at least partially agree with question 6. While it’s true that there are possible arguments against gay marriage that are not based on homophobia, the overwhelming majority of such arguments are unquestionably homophobic. A rational human being would therefore agree—perhaps at a 5 or 6 out of 7—with both questions 5 and 6, which calls into question whether the scale is measuring anything worthwhile.
It’s also important to note that despite most of the media discussing “gender ideology”, the correlation between support for transgender people and violent beliefs was very weak. In fact political affiliation - that is, voting Democrat - was a better predictor of support for violent action against Donald Trump, arson of ICE buildings, violence against the police, and the killing of Brian Thompson. Age appears to also have been at least as good if not better at predicting this perspective as well.
What Are We Really Measuring Here?
The main issue here is that the study was so nakedly political that it’s hard to infer any real meaning from the results. For one thing, the authors claim that their survey measured how much people agreed with “political violence”. But that’s obviously false—they asked whether people supported specific acts of left-wing violence.
There are plenty of forms of political violence that right-wing people generally endorse. For example, right-wing people are highly supportive of police violence against protesters, something that left-wing people on average disagree with. By only asking about violent actions that no right-wing person would ever endorse, and ignoring the violence that is generally popular in right-wing circles, the authors have created a useless, biased view of what “political violence” means.
There’s also no close connection between the questions asked about authoritarianism and actual support for authoritarian actions. They are more a marker of generic left-wing beliefs than any clear indicator of support for an authoritarian system of governance.
In my opinion, all the authors have done in this farce of a survey is measured political affiliation. Had they asked, say, whether the attack on Paul Pelosi was justified, they probably would have seen markedly different responses from their participants. Had they asked straightforward questions measuring adherence to authoritarianism, such as “should people who disagree with you be put in jail”, they might also have seen completely different answers.
Instead, what we’ve got here is a garbled, useless set of questions that mostly tells us one thing: the Trump administration continues to support pseudoscience. This is not particularly surprising, but it remains a very unfortunate fact.