Garrison Davis

What panicked assertions of an impending total ban on trans healthcare tends to overlook is that going from a state ban on Medicaid coverage for surgery

Straight to an all-ages ban on gender-affirming healthcare skips a lot of steps, and those steps are crucially important.

The panic-clickbait-induced doomer mindset treats every horrific potentiality as an inevitable eventuality.

This undermines our ability to accurately assess risk and effectively dedicate resources to oppose what are pressing threats.

So what purpose does this sort of posting serve?

And why are people so primed to believe it?

These panic-driven claims rest on the very real fact that trans people are facing present danger.

Oftentimes, people boosting these panic stories are genuinely trying to help inform their own community of potential harm.

In the case of that ICE story, it was based on the assumption that there was a legitimate recent rule change enabling ICE to target people under suspicion of being trans.

It makes sense that people would want to raise the alarm about ICE gaining new powers.

But ACLU staff attorney Melita Picasso cautioned, quote, we are supporting our community by trying to warn people, but these warnings need to be clear and accurate.

Otherwise, we end up inadvertently contributing to the chaos and fear, unquote.

Other times, these panic stories are spread with the hope of scaring allies into caring about the ongoing attacks on trans people.

Perhaps this is successful in some cases, I don't know.

But as a side effect, this strategy deals significant damage to the people it's trying to protect.

Forecasting doom 24-7 can drive people into hopeless despair and push them away from strategies to fight against the current attacks on trans rights.

panic-driven agitprop could also contribute to a girl-who-cried-wolf scenario where allies start to discount concerns about certain attacks on trans rights due to previous unsubstantiated viral claims.

Though many people spreading these claims may have genuinely good intentions, the people creating these claims may develop certain material incentives.

Traditional mainstream journalism has failed to question the massive government overreach into the lives of trans people, and in some cases helped manufacture consent for the stripping away of trans rights.

This state of affairs has made trans people lose faith in the big outlets, leading to small upstart outlets filling in the information gaps in trans news coverage, but without any institutional backing.