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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The psychology behind anti-trans legislation: How cognitive biases shape thoughts and policy

Protesters fill the Iowa state Capitol to denounce a bill that will strip the state civil rights code of protections based on gender identity. AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

Julia Standefer, Iowa State University and L. Alison Phillips, Iowa State University

A state law signed Feb. 28, 2025, removes gender identity as a protected status from the Iowa Civil Rights Act, leaving transgender people vulnerable to discrimination. The rights of transgender people – those who present gender characteristics that differ from what has historically been expected of someone based on their biological sex traits – are under political attack across the United States. There are now hundreds of anti-trans bills at various points in the legislative process.

But why?

Reasons given usually center on protecting children, protecting cisgender women’s rights in bathrooms and sports competitions, and on removing funding for gender-affirming care. Some efforts appear to stem from fear-driven motives that are not supported by evidence.

Bias against trans people may not always feel like bias. For someone who believes it to be true, saying there can only be biological men who identify as men and biological women who identify as women may feel like a statement of fact. But research shows that gender is a spectrum, separate from biological sex, which is also more complex than the common male-female binary.

We are social psychologists who study and teach about the basic social, cognitive and emotion-based processes people use to make sense of themselves and the world. Research reveals psychological processes that bias people in ways they usually aren’t aware of. These common human tendencies can influence what we think about a particular group, influence how we act toward them, and prompt legislators to pass biased laws.

Root of negative views of transgender people

Social psychology theory and research point to several possible sources of negative views of transgender people.

Part of forming your own identity is defining yourself by the traits that make you unique. To do this, you categorize others as belonging to your group – based on characteristics that matter to you, such as race, age, culture or gender – or not. Psychologists call these categories in-groups and out-groups.

There is a natural human tendency to have inherent negative feelings toward people who aren’t part of your in-group. The bias you might feel against fans of a rival sports team is an example. This tendency may be rooted deep in evolutionary history, when favoring your own safe group over unknown outsiders would have been a survival advantage.

A trans person’s status as transgender may be the most salient thing about them to an observer, overshadowing other characteristics such as their height, race, profession, parental status and so on. As a small minority, transgender people are an out-group from the mainstream – making it likely out-group bias will be directed their way.

Anti-trans feeling may also result from fear that transgender people pose threats to one’s personal or group identity. Gender is part of everyone’s identity. If someone perceives their own gender to be determined by their biological sex, they may perceive other people who violate that “rule” as a threat to their own gender identity. Part of identity formation is not just out-group derogation but in-group favoritism. A cisgender person may engage in “in-group boundary protection” by making sure the parameters of “gender” are well defined and match their own beliefs.

Once you hold negative feelings about someone in an out-group, there are other social psychological processes that may solidify and amplify them in your mind.

The illusion of a causal connection

People tend to form illusory correlations between objects, people, occurrences or behaviors, particularly when those things are infrequently encountered. Two distinctive things happening at the same time makes people believe that one is causing the other.

Some superstitions result from this phenomenon. For example, you might attribute an unusual success such as winning money to wearing a particular shirt, which you now think of as your lucky shirt.

If a person only ever hears about negative events when they see or hear about a transgender person, an immigrant or a member of some other minority group, then an illusory correlation can form between the negative events and the minority group. That connection is the starting point for prejudice: automatic, negative feelings toward a group of people without justification.

Of course, it is possible that individuals from the group in question have committed some offense. But to take one individual’s bad deed and attribute it to an entire group of people isn’t justified. This kind of extrapolation is the natural human tendency of stereotyping, which can bias people’s actions.

‘That’s exactly what I thought’

Human minds are biased to confirm the beliefs they already hold, including stereotypes about trans people. A few interconnected processes are at play in what psychologists call confirmation bias.

First, there’s a natural tendency to seek out information that fits with what you already believe. If you think a shirt is lucky, then you’re more likely to look for positive things that happen when you wear it than you are to look for negative events that would seem to disconfirm its luckiness.

If you think transgender people are dangerous, you are more likely to conduct an internet search for “transgender people who are dangerous” than “transgender people are victims of crime.”

There’s a second, more passive process in play as well. Rather than actively seeking out confirming information, people also simply pay attention to information that confirms what they thought in the first place and ignore contradictory information. This can happen without you even realizing.

People also tend to interpret ambiguous events in line with their beliefs – “I must be having a good day, despite some setbacks, because I’m wearing my lucky shirt.” That confirmation bias could explain someone with anti-trans attitudes thinking “that transgender person holding hands with a child must be a pedophile” instead of “that transgender mother is showing love and care for her kid.”

Finally, people tend to remember things that confirm their beliefs better than things that challenge them.

Confirmation bias can strengthen an illusory correlation, making it even more likely to influence subsequent actions – whether compulsively wearing a lucky shirt to an anxiety-inducing appointment or not hiring someone because of discriminatory thoughts about the group they belong to.

Moving past biases

Awareness of biases is the first step in avoiding them. Setting bias aside allows people to make fair decisions, based on accurate information, and in line with their values.

However, this is not an easy task in the face of another social psychological process called group polarization. This phenomenon occurs when individuals’ beliefs become more extreme as they talk and listen only to people who hold the same beliefs they do. Think of the social media bubbles that result from interacting only with people who share your perspective.

Efforts to stifle or prohibit educators’ and librarians’ ability to teach and discuss gender and sexuality topics, openly and fairly, add another challenge. Education through access to impartial, evidence-based information can be one way to help neutralize inherent bias.

two women speaking to each other

Montana state Rep. Zooey Zephyr, who is transgender, in discussion with a colleague. AP Photo/Tommy Martino

As a final, hopeful point, social psychological research has identified one strategy for overcoming intergroup conflict: forming close contacts with individuals from the “other” group. Having a friend, loved one or trusted and valued colleague who belongs to the out-group can help you recognize their humanity and overcome the biases you hold against that out-group as a whole.

A relevant and recent example of this scenario came when two transgender state representatives convinced their fellow lawmakers to vote against two extreme anti-trans bills in Montana by making the issue personal.

All of these decision-making biases influence everyone, not just the lawmakers currently in power. And they can be quite complex, with particular in-group and out-group memberships being hard to define – for instance, factions within religious groups who disagree on particular political issues.

But understanding and overcoming the biases everyone falls prey to means that optimal decisions can be made for everyone’s well-being and economic vitality. After all, psychology research has repeatedly demonstrated that diversity is good for the bottom line while it simultaneously promotes an equitable and inclusive society. Even from a solely financial perspective, discrimination is bad for all Americans.The Conversation

Julia Standefer, Ph.D. Student in Psychology, Iowa State University and L. Alison Phillips, Professor of Psychology, Iowa State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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geteilt von: https://lemmy.ml/post/27169356

This thoughts were inspired by https://lemmy.ml/post/26866136 (Warning: go straight to the human curated translation in the comments.)

TL;DR Think-tanks with unlimited resources use different techniques to game social media algorithms. They are consistently pushing towards racist pseudoscience and Nazism. EU has the legal frameworks to stop targeted advertisement and hate speech, and the time to do is now. The consequences if it doesn't are dire.

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There are just to many think-tanks. It was only recently that the Heritage Foundation made news, but it was too late, wasn't it? Heritage has been around for many years, playing the field of fringe religious communities, and field-testing its policies overseas.

What most people fail to realize is that Heritage is a drop of an ocean of think-tanks, which are a mostly invisible power of political influence. And this raises the question, how the fuck are these foundations so well-funded, seemingly having unlimited resources. Well, who the fuck can even have this type of unlimited resources?

Many think-tanks have been active for decades in climate skepticism, and this provides perhaps the more familiar mind map to understand their operation. They are funding intellectuals, politicians, journalists. They organize seminars, publish books, make podcasts, all from behind the curtains. They have huge lists with public relation contacts.

Keywords and talking points from think-tanks find their way to every medium of mass communication in the Western world. This is not even a modern problem. This used to be a problem twenty years ago. Think-tanks have more tools and more powers today.

Let's not forget christian fundamentalists. This is a momentary interjection, to remind you that those were fringe creeps that stalked women outside abortion centers, held their own little cultish events. The fundamentalist modus operandi influenced to a degree the TERF movements, with impromptu entryist demos about bathroom bans. And then there were the Nazis, always lurking around, and waiting to usurp spaces and communities, such as video games and anonymous networks.

All three of them were fringe, marginalized weirdoes, until recently. What the fuck changed?

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We stand on a time point where we realize that the grim reality of our global politics has been influenced by an invisible, powerful player with zero oversight: Think tanks.

We can't understand how the deceptively grassroots facade of fringe movements came to the mainstream. We are witnessing a power takeover by Gamergater 4-chan flavor Nazi incels, nutjob christian nationalists, and oil companies.

Some knew that think tanks were shifting the goalposts of public discourse. Aaron Schwartz had realized and wrote a couple articles about it: By scraping and analyzing climate change journal articles he came about to the conclusion that think tanks also manufacture consent about affirmative action and racial determinism.

People who say that Aaron would be a free-speech absolutist if alive are not only utterly oblivious about his progressive politics (he worked with Elizabeth Warren), but also with regard to “free-speech” being a modern Nazi dogwhistle for “race realism”, ie racism. The same race science promoted by such figures as Chris Rufo and Peter Bogoshian, who turned out to be funded by Danish white supremacist Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.

In case you don't remember, Chris Rufo's first successful propaganda project for the Republicans was a “critical race theory” outrage. This campaign revolved around motivating angry mobs of white people against the idea that “all whites are racist”.

Rufo boasted that he had "changed the meaning of the term" completely, and projected on CRT "everything Americans hate". He set out to repeat the successful experiment with "gender ideology", shifting the meaning of "transgender" to sexualizing children or exposing children to "pornography". Only willful ignorance or outright nazism can prevent seeing the Nazi undertones of this blatant propaganda at this point.

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It is an old Nazi trick to claim to be the victim of racism against whites. But the issue here is quantity, not quality. The critical race theory became huge, and it was one of the major pillars of Ron DeSantis early politics in Florida. It was also a test-case for the outbreak of “template legislation” we now witness with anti-trans bills.

It is easy to put the blame on public figures like Elon Musk, but it is also a premise to let him be the fall guy, the “excessive tormentor”, a scapegoat that will justify the system.

I tend to believe, no matter how much I despise Musk and deplore everything he stands for, that he is a fine example of the orchestrated Nazi radicalization process that happens online, with the funding of think-tanks, and the power of social media algorithms.

Musk probably fell into the rabbit hole by some anti-trans entry point, while obsessively scrolling during COVID, or even while possibly plausibly “researching” about his trans daughter. Can't we assume the same happened with Rowling? Katherine Cross makes an argument that Rowling's radicalization happened entirely within Twitter.

What we see with Musk, we see with thousands of white males online. It is the algorithms-gamed-by-think-tanks that have this effect. They might also have targeted billionaires to endorse their “cause”, in the first place. For obvious reasons, made now more obvious by chain-saw brandishing racists.

Starting out with being politically incorrect edgelords only to move on to adopting “national socialism” as a legitimate political ideology. Or starting out as Jordan Peterson fanboy incels, and by way of “evolutionary psychology” pseudoscience, delve deeper into “masculinist” criticism of “matriarchy”.

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Virtually every asshole you hate in the present day has big think-tanks bucks backing them, their tours, their books, their podcasts, their interviews. And a huge network of media outlets that provide visibility and legitimacy. It was not long ago when a right-wing commentator explained how this works: a nazi will tweet something, Elon Musk will quote, Carlson Tucker will report, Fox will amplify it, and Joe Rogan will bring in some one to provide a “reasonable”, if not “unorthodox”, or “politically incorrect” account of it.

In a matter of hours, millions of people will have adopted, well, Nazi takes, as absolute facts of nature.

Don't forget what politically incorrect originally, and inherently means: Racist. Don't let slip that Nazism was primarily a racist movement, as it construed Jews as a “race”. Don't forget that Nazi-funded Peter Bogoshian was among the earliest contemporary commentators to accuse “liberal universities” of imposing a “religious-like orthodoxy” against “minority conservative opinions”. Well, it ...kinda was about race?

It was about fucking racism. As Aaron Schwartz had pointed out, right wing think tanks move the goal posts. Two decades ago the anthropologist concensus that there is only one human race went down without any objections. “Race realism” was hand-down considered debunked pseudoscience. Now we have these people in government who want to breakdown on universities with figurative chain-saws, in order to “save civilization”. (They mean white supremacy, duh.)

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You may have noticed that these people are also seething climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers, anti-vegan, and huge transphobic bigots? These are all orchestrated campaigns, gaming the social media algorithms with solid funding and coordination. You know how it is constantly reported that social media push right wing bias?

Well, we can't know if it is the algorithms themselves, or think tanks are paying huge numbers of agents to feint engagement, or they use bots, or make sponsorship deals with social media companies. They might as well employ all those tactics together. We know that the think tank talking points were there in 2016, and 2018, and 2021, and they were never properly moderated. Especially the targeting and vilification of queer people was stunning, reflecting genuine Christian Nationalist doublespeak, eg conflating homosexuality with “pornography”.

Think tanks embraced gamers-cum-incels-cum-nazis, christian nationalists, TERFs, and gamed the algorithms, pushing the most backward, unscientific, and hateful vitriol, and leading to the ongoing, racist-theocratic “cultural revolution”, that if not strangled in its cradle right now, will set the West back not 50 but two- or -three hundred years back, and lead humanity to atrocities and barbarism we were raised to believe was only a disturbing chapter of history books.

They are already pushing for making being trans illegal, by way of "identity fraud" or "sex offense". We all know that if they say they make it a capital offense nobody will even be surprised. The US Bible Belt might be a lost cause for human rights. But for Europe there is still time.

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Europe is at a critical crossroads, to enforce and extend its Digital Markets and AI-Acts. Behavioral advertising technology applied to political propaganda is a terror, and leads to terror. It leaves voters and consumers, heck, it leaves whole societies helpless in an asymmetrical war of consent manufacturing, which leads to real violence, as Charlottevile has shown, as the rise in anti-trans hate-crime has shown, as the Southport riots in England have shown. Don't be fooled by the coverage: these riots were orchestrated by the far right very deliberately, and were influenced by racist think-tanks like New Culture Forum.

Europe still has time to take action. The Nazis made a fatal mistake: Concealing their true colors got them so far, they got the US government. But they were so wildly enthusiastic about it they dropped the act. Now Europe knows that it is, once again, fighting Nazis. And, in sharp contrast with the US, where Nazism is an abstract idea, Europeans know that humanity and civilization is at stake because of this repelling, murderous, sick-to-the-bone racist ideology.

Appendix 1

We have talked about this recently. Here is why Big Social platforms can't be protected by free speech laws.

  • Hosting a platform with millions or billions of users.
  • Exploiting algorithms that mine sensitive data to an invasive degree.
  • Control the flow of information, to a very granular degree of precision.
  • Experimentally collecting behavioral data in response to said control of information.
  • Modeling user’s life expectancy, sexual orientation, political beliefs, consumer patterns, terminal illnesses.
  • Selling said data and model outputs to private insurance companies as well as police states.
  • Addicting users to withdraw from real life, and get hooked to their screen where they can happily serve the company for data mining.

I hardly think that any of the above should be gauged by the standards of individual rights to free speech. Even corporate entities viewed as individuals with a right to free speech. This is something else entirely, and whoever owns it, out of whichever country must have their ass regulated off. Even harder than the EU did. Operations of this type and size should be eventually dismantled. They are inherently antisocial, corporatist, and totalitarian in their conception and daily function. Sometime ago I started a discussion about the “Role of Attrition” in the effort to dismantle Big Social enterprises

Appendix 2

I don't think hate-speech is free-speech. I think that hate-speech is slander against whole groups of people on the basis of protected, immutable traits. By protecting hate-speech, democracies provide its worst enemies the tools they need to dismantle democracy (Joseph fucking Goebbels said that).

As for moderation in Meta/X, here are the thoughts from a recent discussion:

Nazism is explicitly deemed unworthy of respect in some legal systems, like Germany or the UK. MAGAs, white supremacists, and alt-righters are objectively too close to nazism, therefore their opinions are unworthy of respect to start with. There is also the paradox of intolerance. If you let these people in, to respect their opinion, they will take over and deprive people of the right to live. They don’t play by tolerant society’s rules, so they they don’t get tolerated.

The value is having a society that is tolerant of diversity of opinion. Here is the opinion of the scientific consensus on transgender people, which is have been so for years, if not decades. We have been harassed, bullied, doxxed, and banned for bringing those up in all major social media platforms. TERFs, white supremacists, misogynists, racists, have always gotten away in these platforms with punching down on leftists, African and Caribbean reparations activists, feminists, and queer people. They were protected by equally bigoted moderators under the guise of entitlement to their opinion, at the same time that all these other opinions are bashed and framed as “overstepping”. This is in line with what the EFF and Techdirt, which are both vocal First Amendment absolutists, have already said that what X and Facebook do now is in fact amplifying hate speech and effectively suppressing the free speech of gender and sexual minorities. And this has been the situation for years, take for example the online harassment of feminists . It is a deeply systemic bias, due to centrist indoctrination in broader society, that it is the leftist and inclusive spaces that are called out for lack of diversity for responding to harassment and bigotry, when the voices and lives of people are simply dominated and evacuated in major platforms without an iota of moderation and responsiveness to punch-down harassment. Let alone that in the light of the most recent developments, which consolidates the above tendencies, makes the timing of the tolerance argument even more ironic and dishonest.

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