Dr. Colin Wright, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an academic advisor for the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine, was a co-author of the HHS report. He told the “Washington Watch” program that this study addresses a bias in psychology literature.
“A lot of psychology literature is looking at the psychological features of people who oppose transgender ideology, asking whether these views are usually prejudiced or based in right-wing authoritarianism,” Wright said.
He noted most of the literature treats left-wing views as “the correct view” or the default human condition, with right-wing views as “terribly wrong” and in need of an explanation.
This study examined the conspicuously absent flip-side question: what psychological traits are associated with strongly endorsing these gender-affirming beliefs and ideologies? It searched for association between gender ideology and left-wing authoritarianism and whether either of these views were correlated to political violence.
“What we found was that support for these gender-affirming ideologies was strongly associated with left-wing authoritarianism, and that this wasn't because these respondents were just simply liberal. It went above and beyond in explaining this variation,” Wright said. Both groups “were associated with greater willingness to justify political violence, even murder of people like Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk, to firebomb ICE facilities and to strip rich people of their wealth, things like that.”
The authors of the study say this is because the ideological framework of rejecting same-sex belief opens the door for left-wing authoritarianism to focus on threats and identify sources of harm, leading to a moral justification of coercive or punitive action.
Critics of left-wing gender ideology point out that people would rather have clinical recommendations based on evidence rather than ideology and that the party claiming “to follow the science” is actually not.
According to Wright, there is zero good evidence for these false beliefs in biology being used to justify the invasive gender mutilation of adults and children based on a whim.
Instead, the systematic evidence reviews, which are the highest threshold of evidence one can have for this topic, have all found these claims of benefits to be completely false. The reviews were conducted in the Netherlands and Scandinavia — so not a bastion of conservatism, Wright said.
“We have this mountain of risks and known harms that these procedures cause, but they still kind of go with them anyway, because the ideology says they must,” Wright stated.
Wright said the most bizarre part of the ideology is that it makes people unable to say what is known as truth, and this is mostly driven by fear.
As he described, this is a political and social movement masquerading as medical protocol, which also has a civil rights cause tacked to it. Because of this, someone who is against it is not just wrong or misinterpreted medical evidence.
“You're considered to be a raging bigot who's attacking on the LGBTQ plus community. Blood is on your hands because everyone's going to commit suicide if they don't accept these procedures,” Wright said. “It's the most insane level of blackmail I've ever seen. You'd hope it would be just this dry scientific and medical debate, but it has just left that realm completely into this moral panic.”
