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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 9 months ago

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By: Void If Removed

Published: Oct 6, 2024

In May 2024, The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) added the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) and Genspect to its list of hate groups.

Unsealed evidence in the US court case Boe vs Marshall (dealing with access to paediatric transition) earlier this year contained snippets of internal WPATH emails revealing their concern over academic critics like SEGM:

I think we need a more detailed defense that we can use that can respond to academic critics and that can be used in the many court cases that will be coming up. […] we know that some of the studies we have cited in support of our recommendations will be torn about by organizations such as the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine.

SPLC are representing the plaintiffs in this case, so at the same time as they are waging a legal campaign which relies on WPATH’s evidence, they are also formally designating groups who WPATH privately fear will tear apart that evidence as “hate groups”. Rather than being impartial and evidence-based designations these labels are little more than reputational attacks as part of an ongoing legal strategy in the highly polarised political landscape in the US.

The more US-based lobbyists can publicly discredit SEGM, the more suspicion can be cast on anyone with any connection to them, any evidence they produce, and now on the findings of the Cass Review. The fact is that the Cass Review’s damning assessment of the evidence for the efficacy and safety of puberty blockers fatally undermines legal cases based on arguing the opposite. The Cass Review is already being cited by their Republican opponents, so in the absence of any actual response grounded in evidence, SPLC’s huge resources are turned to an international smear campaign - one that is exemplified by their CAPTAIN report, which as I’ve previously discussed is built on an echo chamber of activist groupthink and conspiracist logic.

SPLC’s attacks on SEGM serve as a foundation for critical commentary directed against the Cass Review. Since the release of that report - and the later “hate group” designation that it led to - links between SEGM and the Cass Review have been played up in media reports, and by activists like Erin Reed in an effort to undermine public reception of Cass’ findings:

Most recently, members of the newly designated hate group, Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, helped advise the Cass Review in the United Kingdom,

This week, Reed brought further focus on the NHS, complaining that several clinicians connected to the Cass Review will be speaking at the 2024 SEGM conference in Athens.

Three times in this piece Reed draws attention to SEGM’s “shared funding streams” with the far right:

Notably, SEGM’s funding streams include the same groups that fund the Heritage Foundation, the Alliance Defending Freedom, and the Family Research Council, far-right organizations capitalizing on Christian nationalism.

The source for this is SPLC’s CAPTAIN report, where the basis of this allegation is that in 2020 and 2021 SEGM received donations from four large charitable foundations - American Online Giving Foundation, Fidelity Investments, Vanguard, and the Edward Charles Foundation - which have also either a) received money from bad actors or b) donated money to bad actors:

a large part of SEGM’s funding in 2020 came through a $100,000 donation from the Edward Charles Foundation … Analyses of additional financial records from 2021 reveal that SEGM’s total revenue nearly quadrupled from the previous year to nearly $800,000, and that funding appears to have come primarily from donor advised funds. The largest contribution, which came from Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund, totals over $350,000. Notably, Fidelity and Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program (which also donated to SEGM in 2021) have a history of directing money to anti-LGBTQ+ groups, such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Family Research Council. … [In 2020] In addition to Heritage Foundation, that year, the Charles Koch Institute contributed […] $1.3 million to the Edward Charles Foundation (which funded SEGM that year).

So, taking the Edward Charles Foundation as an example, SPLC cannot outright say something like “SEGM are funded by the Koch Institute” - because there is no evidence of that. All they can say is that in the same tax year as the Edward Charles Foundation received $1.3 million from Koch, the Edward Charles Foundation gave $100k to SEGM. That’s all - and all they do is present these numbers near each other, and thereby strongly imply a financial connection between the Heritage Foundation and SEGM, without actually saying so - which then, in the hands of activists like Reed becomes definitive. There’s nothing here but insinuation - and seemingly false, since according to this Undark report, it was an individual donor who gave money via the Edward Charles Foundation, who simply wishes to remain anonymous:

The donor, a 68-year-old woman from California who asked to remain anonymous because she feared harassment, described herself as a non-religious feminist who had supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

However, in the case of American Online Giving Foundation, Fidelity Investments and Vanguard the accusation of “shared funding streams” becomes quite staggering hypocrisy. These are huge foundations, collectively worth $21 billion annually, that make thousands and thousands of donations every year, not only to dubious organisations like Alliance Defending Freedom or Family Research Council, but also to SPLC themselves.

In 2020/21 the Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund gave SEGM $363,500, while also giving SPLC $4,065,459.

In 2020/21 Vanguard gave SEGM $22,000 and SPLC 45 times more: $1,084,650

In 2020/21, The American Online Giving Foundation gave SEGM just $15,201 and SPLC over 130 times more: $1,995,272

And while those much smaller donations to SEGM appear to be one-offs, SPLC have received similar amounts in preceding and subsequent years. Over the past three years, SPLC have received $22 million from these three foundations alone. If receiving grants from these foundations constitutes “shared funding streams” with the far right, as Erin Reed describes it, then the same is true many, many times over of SPLC.

The origin of these claims of "shared funding” go back to the highly conspiracist posts of Health Liberation Now, the activist co-authors of the CAPTAIN report, who cite themselves for these claims in the report itself. Originally they had SEGM in their sights, so I doubt they checked whether their conspiracist logic would apply to SPLC - but in December 2023, when SPLC gave their official stamp to this “research” - and the ensuing “hate group” designation - did they not realise they were implicating themselves?

There’s two possibilities. Either SPLC did not verify this information, in spite of their near-limitless financial resources, in which case why should anybody take anything they say seriously given this level of incompetence? Alternatively, they do know that these allegations of shared funding streams are far more applicable to themselves, in which case this is pure deceit on their part.

There are millions sloshing about in opaque funds, with wealthy US philanthropists funnelling money to pet causes or exploiting tax breaks, and SPLC is one of the fattest pigs at the trough, with three-quarters of a billion dollars in reserve, which they are now using to baselessly smear the reputations of clinicians in the UK in service of an ideological legal agenda in the US.

I think that anyone seeking to understand and address the misinformation and disinformation currently being spread about the Cass Review need to take a long look at the incredibly well-financed activists in the US who have been successfully traducing tiny organisations and blameless individuals, with no serious opposition, for years. As with feminist targets before, these attacks don’t stop at the door of SEGM - they spread, by relentless guilt-by-association, to contaminate absolutely everyone who touches them, or anyone connected to them. Unchecked claims like this are toxic to public discourse, spreading and gaining traction with zero corrective force, creating an unwarranted chilling effect around their targets. Bystanders are quick to believe there is no smoke without fire, and UK clinicians cannot realistically defend their reputations from this sort of partisan dreck from the US. Blandly wondering why the Cass Review has been “largely ignored” in the US misses the point - it is not merely being ignored, it is actively being undermined.

SPLC hasn't been trustworthy in decades.

#Void If Removed #SPLC #Southern Poverty Law Center #ideological corruption #ideological capture #misinformation #disinformation #Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine #SEGM #Cass review #Cass report #WPATH #World Professional Association for Transgender Health #medical corruption #medical malpractice #medical scandal #smear campaign #puberty blockers #religion is a mental illness

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sophieinwonderland · 2 years ago

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as far as some reading can tell me, anti endos wouldnt be considered a hate group officially because theres a *list* of hate groups documented by the SPLC, and they have specific criteria to be considered from and what i can see, online hate isnt considered. so anti endos arent a hate group in a technical sense, but they are a group defined by hate.

I don't know if I agree that an organization being excluded for being online makes it not a hate group.

Here's the SPLC's definition of a hate group:

A hate group is an organization that—based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders, or its activities—has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.

And here's their reasoning for not including online groups:

This list of 940 active hate groups is based on information gathered by the SPLC’s Intelligence Project from hate group publications, citizen reports, law enforcement agencies, field sources, web postings and news reports. Only organizations known to be active in 2019, whether that activity included marches, rallies, speeches, meetings, flyering, publishing literature or criminal acts, among other activities, were counted in this list. Entities that appear to exist only in cyberspace are not included because they are likely to be web publishers falsely portraying themselves as powerful, organized groups. This list also does not document activism that takes place only online by individuals or groups, whether on Facebook, VK or similar online forums. Major online web forums have in recent years seen their comment sections and registered users grow, but such activity does not occur in real life and thus is not reflected in this count.

This doesn't actually say that groups not on the list for these reasons aren't hate groups. It merely says they aren't included on the list or that they don't "document" them.

I think there's an implication that online groups could still be technically considered hate groups even if they don't make the SPLC's list due to being based on the net.

I do think that anti-endos as a whole might still avoid this on the grounds of not being organized enough to be a "group."

A “group” is an entity that has a process through which followers identify themselves as being part of the group, such as donating, paying membership dues or participating in activities like meetings and rallies. Individual chapters of a larger organization are each counted separately, because the number indicates reach and organizing activity.

But then, I think individual anti-endo communities would meet this definition, such as anti-endo servers.

Really though, if someone's only counter argument to being called a hate group is "technically, we can't be a hate group because we're not organized enough to be a group," they've already the plot.

#syscourse #pro endo #pro endogenic #splc #hate groups #hate group

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unrelatedwaffle · 10 months ago

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https://www.splcenter.org/hopewatch/2024/08/23/voter-access-laws-affect-you

Voters casting a ballot in the South may encounter recently passed laws that could suppress the vote.

As the Southern Poverty Law Center continues to encourage voter turnout through its The South’s Got Now | Decidimos campaign, here are some laws Southern voters need to watch out for this election year:

Alabama

The Alabama Legislature passed two bills during the 2024 legislative session that limit ballot access. SB 1 makes voting absentee harder and criminalizes helping others apply for an absentee ballot if they receive any compensation or gift for such assistance. This particularly harms communities such as older people, college students, people with disabilities, low-literacy voters and incarcerated people. What’s more, the law doesn’t define what constitutes a gift. Ultimately, there may be a chilling effect as people choose not to help neighbors or family members due to fear of arrest.

Under Alabama’s HB 100, the list of felony convictions that can disqualify a person from voting is greatly expanded. The SPLC flatly opposes felony disenfranchisement as it exists today, much less massive expansions of it as seen with this law, which will take effect after November’s election.

Florida

In Florida, SB 524, a 2022 law, mandates that vote-by-mail ballot requests expire every two years.

The first major election this law affects is the November 2024 election. If you haven’t already done so, be sure to submit a new request this year. Also, tell others wishing to vote by mail to do the same!

SB 7050, passed in 2023, could leave more voters at risk of their registration being canceled. For example, the law’s voter list maintenance requirements could lead to voters having their registrations purged. It also places undue regulations on organizations that help individuals register to vote.

Georgia

SB 189 makes it easier for people to file voter challenges against anyone, potentially increasing the number of baseless voter challenges while driving up the cost in time and money for elections administrators who must consider these challenges.

Louisiana

The state Legislature used this year’s session to pass four new restrictions on voter registration and absentee ballot processes.

Under HB 506, people and groups that hold voter registration drives must register with the secretary of state to review related laws. However, as a news report noted, the specific requirements for compliance are vague.

SB 226 says any absentee-by-mail ballot missing required information that is not fixed by the voter in the time required under law will require a majority of members of the parish’s board of election supervisors to validate it. The law is part of a larger effort erecting barriers to voting by creating opportunities to reject votes on technicalities.

HB 476 states that unless you are a voter’s immediate family member, you can’t deliver more than one marked ballot to the registrar. And SB 155 says it’s illegal to witness the certificate of more than one voter who isn’t an immediate family member. This disenfranchises voters, such as people with disabilities or older people, who rely on help from neighbors or friends to cast their ballots.

Mississippi

SB 2425 restricts who can witness a person signing their absentee ballot, how many ballots an individual can witness a person signing and who can return the ballots for another voter. This law, like some of those listed for Alabama and Louisiana, disenfranchises voters who rely on help from neighbors or friends to cast their ballots.

Don’t despair, vote!

These laws should not discourage you. They should inspire you to act. Remember, as a U.S. citizen, your vote is your superpower. Your vote helps democracy flourish. Cast your ballot on Election Day.

#vote #gotv #splc #voting rights #uspol

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protoslacker · 2 years ago

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A day after the 16th Street bombing – not the last one in the city – a lawyer named Charles Morgan famously called out the silent and the complicit, the people who stood by and accepted the status quo, the overtly racist and those too timid or distracted or speak. “Every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb,” he said.

John Archibald quoting Charles Morgan in an article at Alabama.com. What Alabama textbooks won’t teach about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing

The link Archibald shares is to a worthwhile video by the SPLC"s Learning for Justice.

#history #splc #16th street baptis church

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pennsyltuckyheathen · 2 years ago

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Gestapo Nerd Stephen Miller has been grinding the axe for white straight male grievance since he was in college. He’s used his elitist privilege to perpetuate racism and bigotry, two “qualities” inherent to MAGA Republicans.

He and his America First Legal organization ‘are on a mission to address “reverse discrimination” and erase corporate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs.

Miller has been labeled an extremist by the Southern Poverty Law Center for his white nationalist and anti-immigrant activities.

#StephenMiller #GestapoNerd #MAGARepublicans #RightWingExtremism #WhiteNationalists #SPLC #ReverseDiscrimination #DEI #MAGAFacism #FakePatriots #FakeChristians

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shipperwolf1 · 9 months ago

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SPLC Union | A message from our LFJ colleagues

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by SPLC Union (@splcunion)

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A message from the former staff of SPLC's now-gutted Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance) program.

#splc #splc union #union solidarity #union busting #labor rights #education #education rights #lgbtqia #immigrant justice #immigrant rights #civil rights #signal boost #Instagram

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year ago

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By: The Quillette Editorial Board

Published: Dec 23, 2023

The Montgomery, Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 with a mission to fight poverty and racial discrimination. Its early litigation campaigns, which targeted the Ku Klux Klan and other overtly racist organizations, met with success, and the group soon came to be seen as an authoritative source in regard to right-wing extremism more generally.

Another form of expertise the organization developed was in the area of marketing—especially when the market in question consisted of deep-pocketed urban liberals. As former SPLC staffer Bob Moser reported in a 2019 New Yorker article, the group has consistently taken on attention-grabbing urgent-seeming causes that its leaders knew could be leveraged as a means to gain publicity and—more importantly—donations. It’s no coincidence that the SPLC’s co-founder and long-time fundraising guru, Morris Dees, had previously operated a direct-mail business that sold cookbooks and tchotchkes. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same,” Dees told a journalist in 1988.

Dees’ big fundraising break at the SPLC came when he got access to the direct-mail list from the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. The SPLC co-founder went on to maximize the SPLC’s revenues through what would now be known as targeted methods. According to one former legal colleague, for instance, Dees rarely used his middle name—Seligman—in SPLC mailings, except when it came to “Jewish zip codes.”

Thanks to Dees’ slick marketing expertise, the SPLC was eventually taking in more money than it paid out in operational expenses. (As of October 2022, its endowment fund was valued at almost US$640 million.) But over time, his hard-sell tactics began to alienate co-workers, as there was an obvious disconnect between the real class-based problems they observed in society and the fixations of the naïve northern donors whose wallets Dees was seeking to pry open.

“I felt that [Dees] was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target—easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on,” former SPLC attorney Deborah Ellis told Progressive writer John Egerton. “The Klan is no longer one of the South’s biggest problems—not because racism has gone away, but because the racists simply can’t get away with terrorism any more.”

On March 14, 2019, Dees—by now 82 years old, but still listed as the SPLC’s chief trial lawyer—was fired amid widespread rumors that he’d been the subject of internal sexual-harassment accusations. His affiliation was scrubbed from the group’s web site; and the organization’s president, Richard Cohen, cryptically (but damningly) declared that, “when one of our own fails to meet [SPLC] standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” (Less than two weeks later, Cohen himself left the organization, casting his resignation as part of a transition “to a new generation of leaders.”)

In describing his tenure at the SPLC during the early 2000s, Moser argued that the very structure of the organization betrayed its hypocrisy: Here was an entity dedicated to social justice (as we would now call it), yet which was run by an extremely well-paid, almost exclusively white, corps of lawyers, administrators, and fund-raisers who ruled over a mixed-race corps of junior staff. As far back as the 1980s, Dees was openly admitting that he saw the fight against poverty as passé, and admitted that the “P” in SPLC was an anachronism. Jaded staff began ruefully referring to their own flashy headquarters as the “Poverty Palace.”

Dees and Cohen may have left the Poverty Palace, but the SPLC’s tendency to betray its founding principles clearly remains a problem, as illustrated by a new SPLC report released under the auspices of what the group dubs “Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Informative Narratives.” (This verbal clunker seems to have been reverse-engineered in order to yield the acronym, “CAPTAIN.”)

The report purports to demonstrate “the perils of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” and “anti-trans narratives and extremism.” Much like the dramatically worded hard-sell direct-mail campaigns that the SPLC started up under Dees, it’s marketed as a matter of life and death: According to the deputy director of research for the SPLC’s “Intelligence Project,” the “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience” uncovered by the SPLC has “real-life, often life-threatening consequences for trans and non-binary people.”

At this point, it should be stressed that there is certainly nothing wrong with the SPLC—or anyone else—campaigning for the legitimate rights of people who are transgender. Such a campaign would be entirely in keeping with the SPLC’s original liberal ethos. Just as no one should be denied, say, an apartment, a marriage license, or the right to vote based on his or her race, religion, sex, or sexual orientation, no trans person should be denied these rights and amenities simply because he or she experiences gender dysphoria.

But the SPLC’s report hardly confines itself to such unassailable liberal principles. The real point of the project, it seems, was to catalogue and denounce public figures who’ve expressed dissent from the most extreme demands of trans-rights activists—specifically, (1) the demand that children and adolescents who present as transgender must instantly be “affirmed” in their dysphoric beliefs, even if such affirmation leads to a life of sterility, surgical disfigurement, drug dependence, and medical complications; and (2) the demand that biological men who self-identify as women must be permitted unfettered access to protected women’s spaces and sports leagues.

The SPLC’s authors seek to cast their ideological enemies as hate-addled reactionaries whose nefarious activities must “be understood as part of the historical legacy of white supremacy and the political aims of the religious right.” And it is absolutely true that some of the organizations they name-check are hard-right, socially conservative outfits that endorse truly transphobic (and homophobic) beliefs.

But many of the supposed transphobes targeted by the report aren’t even conservative—let alone members of the religious right. In a multitude of cases, they’re simply parents, therapists, and activists who argue the obvious fact that human sexual biology doesn’t evanesce into rainbow dust the moment that a child—or middle-aged man—asserts that he or she was “born in the wrong body.”

It’s also interesting to note who gets left out of the SPLC’s analysis. The most influential figures leading the backlash against (what some call) “gender ideology” are women such as author J.K. Rowling and tennis legend Martina Navratilova, both of whom come at the issue from explicitly feminist perspectives. Being successful public figures, neither woman needs a cent from the conservative think tanks that the SPLC presents as being back-office puppet-masters of the alleged anti-trans conspiracy outlined in the CAPTAIN report.

In keeping with the conspiracist motif that runs through the document, the authors have provided spider-web diagrams that set out the connections binding this (apparently) shadowy cabal. In this regard, it seems that Quillette itself served as one of the SPLC’s sources: In a section titled, “Group Dynamics and Division of Labor within the Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network,” the authors footnote “an August 23, 2023 podcast for Quillette,” wherein

it was revealed that [Colin] Wright is in a relationsihp [sic] with journalist Christina Buttons, who is an advisoary [sic] board member of [the Gender Dysphoria Alliance] with Drs. Lisa Littman and Ray Blanchard, an editoral [sic] board member of Springer’s Archives of Sexual Research [a mistaken reference to the Archives of Sexual Behavior] with J. Michael Bailey. Notably, Buttons and Wright are interviewed by host Jonathan Kay. In addition to hosting Quillette’s podcast, Kay serves on FAIR’s board of advisors.

We’ve chosen to highlight this particular (typo-riddled) text from the report not just because of the absurd suggestion that our publication has enlisted in an imaginary “anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network,” but also because the above-quoted roll call of supposed gender villains illustrates the intellectual dishonesty that suffuses the whole report.

Let’s go through the references one by one, in the order in which they are presented. The Gender Dysphoria Alliance (GDA) is a group led by people who are themselves transgender, and who are “concerned about the direction that gender medicine and activism has taken.” Are we to imagine that its members are directing transphobia—against themselves? Lisa Littman, formerly of Brown University, is a respected academic who’s published a peer-reviewed analysis of Rapid Onset Gender Disorder. Ray Blanchard is a well-known University of Toronto psychiatrist. The Archives of Sexual Behavior is a peer-reviewed academic journal in sexology. Michael Bailey is a specialist in sexual orientation and gender nonconformity at Northwestern University. Colin Wright is a widely published writer (including at Quillette) with a PhD in evolutionary biology from UC Santa Barbara. (The SPLC’s claim that he is in a relationship with journalist Christina Buttons, who also writes about gender issues, is completely true. But the fact that the group saw fit to report this fact as if it were evidence of sinister machinations says far more about the report’s authors than it does about either Wright or Buttons.) FAIR, the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, is a classically liberal group led by a Harvard Law School graduate named Monica Harris. Do any of these people or groups sound like extremists?

youtube

The fact that the SPLC is attempting to market its report as a blow against the “anti-LGBTQ+” movement, writ large, is itself quite laughable, since many of the activists who’ve been arguing for a more balanced approach to gender rights are themselves either gay (as with Navratilova and Julie Bindel) or (as with the founders of the GDA) transgender.

Others on the SPLC gender-enemies list are author Abigail Shrier, and therapists Sasha Ayad, and Stella O’Malley. These women openly broadcast their views in best-selling books, as well as mainstream magazines and newspapers. The idea that the SPLC has successfully “exposed” these women through some kind of investigation, as suggested by the title that’s been slapped on the CAPTAIN report, would be ludicrous even if they’d said anything scandalous (which they haven’t).

And what course of future action does the SPLC endorse? For one, it concludes that educators should stigmatize gender-critical views as analogous to “racism, sexism, and heteronormativity.” The report's authors also want academic journals to sniff out groups that “espouse an anti-LGBTQ+ ideology” (as that latter term is speciously defined by the SPLC). And in a final flourish, the group urges reporters to “be aware of the narrative manipulation strategies and the cooptation of scientific credentials and language by anti-trans researchers when sourcing stories about trans experiences.”

With this last point, we get to the real nub: The apparent goal is for this report to be read as a catalogue of people, ideas, and groups that must be shunned. Indeed, the authors explicitly cite the work of one Andrea James, a once-respected arts producer who, as Jesse Singal has documented, now runs a creepy (“stalker” is the word Singal uses) web site called Transgender Map, which lists personal details of anyone whom James deems a gender heretic. When it comes to one-on-one communication, James’ manner of dealing with critics is exemplified by an email sent to bioethicist Alice Dreger, in which James referred to Dreger’s then-five-year-old son as a “womb turd.”

One way to describe the CAPTAIN report is as an SPLC-branded rehash of the information contained on Transgender Map. And one can understand why the authors thought that such a gambit might work. The SPLC already publishes other curated lists of hatemongers—e.g., its “Hatewatch” service, “Hate Map,” and “Intelligence Report.” It wasn’t such a long shot to imagine that this new report might convince readers to treat the listed “Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Network” acolytes as equally disreputable.

But if that was the authors’ goal, it doesn’t seem to have been achieved. The SPLC report landed with something of a thud—and has attracted little attention on social media except insofar as it was mocked by its intended targets.

This may have something to do with the report’s timing. For several years now, a backlash against this kind of gender agitprop has been building within many of the same liberal and progressive circles that the SPLC has traditionally targeted for donations. The trend is reflected by the rise of such groups as the LGB Alliance, a coalition of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who are fed up with the ideological takeover of LGBT groups by a militant subset of trans activists.

The same trend is playing out internationally. While the SPLC does its best to heap blame on America’s conservative Christians, many of western Europe’s governments (none of which are in thrall to the Heritage Foundation or the Charles Koch Foundation) have been following a more gender-critical path for years.

Just a week after the SPLC put out its report, in fact, the UK government published new guidelines advising teachers that they have no duty to automatically “affirm” a child’s assertion that he or she is transgender; and that, in considering such situations, teachers should speak with a child’s parents and consider whether the child is under undue influence from social media or peers. Sweden, Finland, and Norway—hardly bastions of Christian conservatism—have also rolled back policies that rush children into transition. In Canada, several provinces have recently enacted rules that require parents to be notified when a child seeks to transition, even in the face of a sustained media campaign that repeats lurid claims to the effect that such policies will cause an epidemic of trans suicides. Are all of these foreign governments also complicit in the vast “junk-science and disinformation campaign” against trans people that the SPLC claims to have “exposed”?

The SPLC would hardly be the first progressive organization whose reputation has suffered by going all-in on the gender issue. The American Civil Liberties Union, which also was rooted in traditional liberal values before succumbing to more faddish progressive tendencies, has attracted ridicule due to its parroting of slogans such as “men who get their periods are men,” and the claim that males have no “unfair advantage” over females in sports.

These organizations have never been shy about angering conservatives and reactionaries; indeed, they wear such anger as a badge of pride. But their cultish refusal to engage with the reality of biological sex also antagonizes progressive feminists seeking to protect female spaces from biological men, and LGB activists who see the attempted erasure of sex-based attraction as a species of progressive homophobia.

Which is to say that the SPLC’s report seems not only intellectually dishonest, but also self-destructive. While the SPLC leaders who green-lit this project once may have been able to bank on the popularity of pronoun checks and esoteric gender identities among the wealthy white coastal progressives who comprise the bulk of their donors, this is an ideological movement that’s decidedly past its peak. It’s a marketing error that the savvy Dees likely never would have made.

The SPLC obviously does a lot more than lend its name to sloppily edited gender propaganda: A review of its press feed shows that it still has staff working traditional legal beats such as voters’ rights, police accountability, and humane treatment for prisoners. But when an organization publishes misleading materials in regard to one issue, the natural effect is to raise serious questions about the group’s values and credibility more generally—questions that SPLC supporters will want to think about the next time one of the group’s fundraisers hits them up for a donation.

This is what institutional capture looks like.

#Quillette #Southern Poverty Law Center #SPLC #ACLU #American Civil Liberties Union #ideological capture #ideological corruption #gender ideology #queer theory #conspiracy theories #conspiracy theorists #institutional capture #biological sex #biology denialism #sex denialism #gender heretic #gender heresy #religion is a mental illness #Youtube

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