GROUP DYNAMICS AND DIVISION OF LABOR WITHIN THE ANTI-LGBTQ+ PSEUDOSCIENCE NETWORK

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GROUP DYNAMICS AND DIVISION OF LABOR WITHIN THE ANTI-LGBTQ+ PSEUDOSCIENCE NETWORK
December 12, 2023
In this article

Defining the Pseudoscience Network
Division of Labor in the Pseudoscience Network
A New Orthodoxy
The Funding

Before the campaign to end gender-affirming care, anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience was cultivated and disseminated in campaigns to discourage funding for HIV/AIDS programs, limit access to comprehensive sex education curricula, prevent marriage equality and recognition of LGBTQ+ families, institute and maintain the U.S. military’s ban on openly gay and lesbian troops known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” defend the conversion therapy industry, and attack gender identity protections in public schools.

Anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience must also be understood as part of the historical legacy of white supremacy and the political aims of the religious right. First, as we detail in Chapter 1, pseudoscience has been wielded by white supremacists and eugenicists to substantiate false claims about their racial superiority for centuries. A component of that mythical racial superiority has always been a supposed sexual purity – the idea that sexual immorality dilutes white power. Pseudoscientific justifications for pathologizing LGBTQ+ identities, then, help “diagnose” and “cure” threats to whiteness, specifically threats to the perpetuation of the so-called white race through the heteronormative white family.

Secondly, 20th and 21st century anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience emerged from a movement to provide scientific justification for the political priorities of conservative Christians. Proponents of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience cannot divorce it from the white Christian nationalist political movement that seeks to tear down the separation of church and state and ultimately encode their conservative interpretation of Christian scripture into American law. There are numerous examples of this throughout American history, including:

The creationist and intelligent design movements that encourage public schools to undermine the scientific consensus of evolutionary biology by “teaching the controversy” of creationism cloaked in the rhetoric of so-called intelligent design. Contemporary anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience draws heavily on the essentialist “biblical binary” notion of male and female sex and gender “complementarity.”[1]
The anti-abortion movement and opponents of stem cell research, who share organizational and philosophical ties to the anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscientific movement, and similarly seek to replace medical science with conservative religious policy positions.[2]
The climate denial movement, which, at its most extreme, draws a connection between a millenarian theology and disregard for the climate crisis, but also borrows from the creationist movement in seeking to undermine scientific consensus about the history and causes of global climate change.[3]
As the most prominent research topics fluctuate over time, each iteration of this pseudoscientific industry overlaps with the next. The institutions established to wage war on secular science in previous decades pass on their knowledge, networks, and organizational strategies to their ideological progeny.

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More at link:

https://www.splcenter.org/captain/defining-pseudoscience-network