Aurora Ball 2023 Speech - Combating Anti-trans Disinformation
Transcript of a speech delivered at the Aurora Ball on 24 June 2023.
Good evening everyone! What an honour it is to be here with you all tonight and thank you Sam for your beautiful remarks. I too would like to pay my respects to the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation, their elders past and present. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. In speaking about disinformation, it’s critical for us to remember that First Nations communities have been the targets of disinformation since invasion.
So to begin, I would love to say a huge thank you to anyone that contributed to the Amplify Pride Fund. We are all aware of the growing influence of the anti-trans lobby and their use of disinformation and hate speech in genocidal campaigns that essentially aim to eliminate trans people.
In this context, at this critical moment, it is incredible that we get to do a project about online anti-trans disinformation led by people with lived experience and technical expertise, including Jackie Turner (she/they) - an absolutely epic trans rights campaigner and organiser and Founder/Director of the new organisation, the Trans Justice Project, and myself, Dhaksh Sooriyakumaran, I’m a genderfluid Tamil person (my pronouns are they/them). I have a background in digital rights and technology policy.
What is disinformation?
Now, before I tell you a bit more about this exciting project, I want to explain a bit about what disinformation actually is. We often hear disinformation described as false information that is wilfully fabricated and disseminated with malicious intent. This is true, but there is a bit more to it than that.
The earliest example of anti-trans disinformation is in fact, the literal invention of the sex and gender binary for the purpose of categorising, ordering and controlling society. It is this original multi-century disinformation campaign that has led very directly to the misconceptions about gender and sex we have today.
We now understand that dividing billions of humans into categories of a man or a woman, male or female - is a social decision, a political choice, not a biological truth.
Colonisation and white supremacy erased long documented legacies of people existing outside of the gender binary across the world. However, it is important to remember that some pre-colonial societies like Tamil Nadu in India also had limited gender categories - for example, Thirunangai for trans women and Thirunambi for trans men, but none outside of that.
Understanding the sex and gender binary itself as disinformation allows us to see disinformation for what it really is: a central strategy for maintaining social hierarchies and structural power. This is why merely existing as a trans, non-binary and/or intersex person is such a radical and beautiful act. And this is what makes our project an urgent one.
The Project
In my former role as Director of Policy at Reset Australia, I was part of a team that documented the surge of anti-trans disinformation during the recent Federal election. In order to undertake this research, a team of data analysts conducted social listening and OSINT analysis across a range of mainstream social channels (Twitter, Facebook etc), as well as alt social platforms (Telegram, Rumble and BitChute etc).
What we observed was that a well-resourced and connected set of actors were able to rapidly escalate their anti-trans campaigning, mimicking content and ideas from the US and UK.
Prominent accounts featuring this hateful content included not just candidates such as Deves, civil society organisations, Facebook groups and media commentators.The Christian Right obviously playing a central role. A major propagator of anti-trans content, Binary Australia (formerly known as Marriage Alliance, a group instrumental in the fight against marriage equality in Australia and also a major funder of the racist No campaign), appears to share the same Facebook ID as conservative political lobby group Advance Australia, and spent between $37,000 and $48,769 on Facebook advertisements in the four months leading up to the election. We also observed the rise of exclusionary language on Twitter and Facebook - such as the use of the terms, ‘biological male / female / woman / man / boy / girl’.
Building on this election monitoring project and method, this new project, funded by Amplify Pride Fund (undertaken by the Trans Justice Project and myself, with help from Purpose), will focus specifically on medical disinformation that seeks to undermine gender-affirming care.
What is different about this project is that we are going a step beyond just monitoring anti-trans disinformation, to using these insights to respond and counter disinformation. Excitingly, part of the project also involves convening a global meeting with leading anti-trans disinformation researchers to share learnings and coordinate efforts, hence bolstering the capacity of our global resistance movement for trans justice. If you would like to learn more, please find Jackie or myself later on tonight. Thank you so much for your time.