The Right Boosted Trans Hate — And Ran Up Their Follower Counts
A few minutes into the documentary What Is a Woman?, Matt Walsh is seen striding into the woods with a fishing rod, his plaid shirt, vest, and close-cropped beard, giving off lumberjack dad energy. “I like to come out here to think,” he intones as he casts his line into the water. “Nature seems to always tell the truth, even when we don’t want to hear it.” He then asks himself a series of rhetorical, seemingly joking questions about gender and identity: “Is there a son trapped in my daughter’s body? If so, how do I get him out? Are any of my kids who they claim to be?”
So begins that film, which premiered in June 2022 and features Walsh peppering a series of health-care providers, politicians, and LGBTQ activists with questions intended to expose what he refers to as the “insane ideological cult” of “gender ideology.” Walsh travels the world asking people to define the word “woman”; in a climactic moment, in which Walsh speaks at a Virginia school board meeting about a policy that would, among other things, require teachers to refer to trans kids by their preferred pronouns and allow them to use bathrooms that align with their gender identity, he proclaims, with sober piano music in the background, that those who support the policy are “child abusers” and “predators.” It ends with Walsh posing the question to his wife, who defines the term as “an adult human female” and then hands him a pickle jar to open.
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Prior to What Is a Woman?, Walsh, 36, was a right-wing radio-shock-jock-turned-pundit known for advocating for a nationwide porn ban or arguing against abortion even in the case of child rape. Though he had been hosting his multiplatform show on the Daily Wire since 2018, he lacked the star power of his boss, Ben Shapiro, who has one of the highest-ranking podcasts in the country.
That changed, however, with What Is a Woman? In early January 2022, a few months prior to the film’s debut, Walsh had a little more than 767,000 followers on Twitter; by January 2023, he had reached 1.24 million. Over the past month alone, Walsh has gained more than 100,000 followers, and he now has over 2 million.
The film did tremendous damage in terms of helping to “amplify anti-trans ideology, making it mainstream, providing it to a bigger audience,” says R.G. Cravens, senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “[It] took advantage of the underlying transphobia that exists in the country.” It also helped legitimize Walsh as a political authority, leading to an invitation for him to testify in front of the Tennessee House Committee regarding a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors in February 2023, “giving him entrée into places” that he would never have had access to before, says Cravens.
It’s difficult to quantify the actual success of the film. The Daily Wire boasted it garnered more than 170 million views on Twitter during a streaming event earlier this month, but that metric, according to a tweet from CEO Elon Musk, takes into account whether one saw the post on the app, not how long one watched. (Musk also claimed that view count is actually “understated,” since it doesn’t include views through third-party apps.) Regardless, its reach has been extensive: Data provided to Rolling Stone by Darren Linvill, a lead researcher at the Clemson University Media Forensics Hub, suggests that the actual phrase “What Is a Woman” was shared on Twitter about 837,800 times over the past 120 days.
But the impact the film has had on Walsh’s reach has been undeniable. Walsh’s content largely dominates not just discussion of LGBTQ issues, but political discourse in general, on many social platforms. According to Media Matters data shared with Rolling Stone, Walsh’s Facebook page was one of the top-five pages posting on transgender-related issues this year, a list that also included the right-leaning Breitbart, Fox News, Young America’s Foundation, and Walsh’s boss, Ben Shapiro. In fact, nearly 70 percent of all interactions on Facebook related to transgender issues came from right-leaning pages, as opposed to left-leaning pages, according to Media Matters data. Additionally, a video titled “Matt Walsh STUMPS Transgender Woman With One Simple Question” is among the 20 most interacted-with political posts on Facebook this year, earning more than 20 million views and 620,000 interactions.
Peddling transphobia seems to have been immensely profitable for Walsh. In the past, he has said he was making $100,000 a month off YouTube ads, and SocialBlade data estimated his annual YouTube revenue to be between $900,000 and $1.6 million a year. While YouTube demonetized his channel this spring, his full videos now appear on Twitter as well as behind a paywall at the Daily Wire.
What Is a Woman? was a huge boon not just to Walsh, but to the Daily Wire itself. Ari Drennen, LGBTQ program director at progressive watchdog Media Matters, says the launch of What Is a Woman? marked a watershed moment for the brand, with the company spending more than $5.4 million on its marketing budget on Facebook by “shifting a lot of their resources that they had been using to promote materials for Ben Shapiro,” she says.
Walsh did not directly respond to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment, saying on Twitter that he would only reply if we publicly defined the term “woman.” He pointed out that one of the authors on this story was once employed by Media Matters, which supplied data and analysis for this article, and addressed our request for comment on a recent episode of his show, referring to the story as a “hit piece.”
But this isn’t just about Walsh. It’s about how a whole crew of right-wing pundits went hard on anti-trans talking points, seemingly all at once — building huge audiences by capitalizing on that carefully constructed rhetoric.
“If we separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success”
To hear those on the right tell it, anti-trans rhetoric isn’t new. In a separate series of tweets, not addressed to Rolling Stone, Walsh appeared to take umbrage to the suggestion that his interest in transgender rights was born from opportunism, screenshotting a 2015 piece he wrote in the conservative outlet the Blaze with a headline that read calling Caitlyn Jenner a woman is an “insult to women.”
“Not only have I been talking about gender ideology for years, but I’ve been arguing that it is one of the central issues of our time,” he wrote. “The people claiming I came late to this fight might want to consult Google.”
On one hand, it’s true that the right is familiar with trans issues — as trans visibility has grown, right-wing activists have consistently campaigned against their rights. As far back as 2014, when some districts suggested allowing children to use the bathroom that matched their gender identity, a group called the American College of Pediatricians was threatening school boards with lawsuits. Within a few years, that had metastasized into a wave of “bathroom bills,” which aimed to criminalize the offense, framed around the notion that men would post up in women’s rooms and attempt to assault them. As more prominent representation in television (Orange Is the New Black) and film (Tangerine) brought trans people into the mainstream, and government agencies began considering them in policy (the military officially opened up enlistment to trans people in 2021; Joe Biden brought Dylan Mulvaney to the White House last year to discuss federal policy) the community has also been exposed to a growing level of vitriol — including increased harassment and violence.
At the same time, there have been indications of prominent right-wing figures planning to harness anti-trans rhetoric. In 2017, at its annual Values Voter Summit, the right-wing Family Research Council held a panel in which FRC senior fellow Meg Kilgannon explicitly suggested attempting to essentially pit the trans community and the gay, lesbian, and bisexual community against one another: “Trans and gender identity are a tough sell, so focus on gender identity to divide and conquer,” she said, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report. “If we separate the T from the alphabet soup, we’ll have more success.”
That “divide and conquer” mentality has also manifested itself in physical threats targeting spaces catering to gender-nonconforming individuals. Hate groups such as the Proud Boys and Patriot Front, which have held high-profile armed protests at events like Drag Queen Story Hours, found the increasing amount of transphobia online “helpful in intimidating target populations, and also helpful in recruiting,” says Cravens.
Infamously, right-wing commentators — including Walsh — led the charge against Boston Children’s Hospital’s Gender Multispecialty Services Clinic, leveling false claims that the hospital provided genital surgeries to minors, and accusing the hospital of mutilating children. The onslaught of harassment against the hospital resulted in at least one documented bomb threat. (Walsh dismissed an earlier bomb threat, which turned out to be false, as a “leftist hoax.”) Last fall, he also organized a Nashville-based “rally to end child mutilation,” in which protesters were reportedly seen carrying signs calling for the deaths of doctors who perform gender-reassignment surgery.
While anti-trans rhetoric seems to be at a fever pitch, according to Drennan, the biggest cultural shift toward legitimizing anti-trans hate took place around the 2020 election. Republican strategists, defeated on the issue of same-sex marriage and fresh off the failure of a Donald Trump reelection campaign, were looking for alternative avenues to tap into the anti-LGBTQ sentiment that had been percolating among their base since Obergefell v. Hodges. Following polling led by Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, a conservative advocacy group, strategists landed on transgender athletes. (Schilling did not return a request for comment sent to the American Principles Project.)
“It was the issue that they poll-tested and was the most favorable for them, not because it’s a genuine issue,” says Drennen. “Transgender athletes have become this sort of cultural avatar for the anxieties of the modern era, and the spiraling crisis of college affordability. So it’s one thing if your kid loses to somebody who you perceive as an undeserving competitor … and then it’s been supercharged by the idea that there’s this competition for scholarships that trans athletes are unfairly getting in on.”
In Drennen’s observation, the panic about transgender athletes morphed into something far more sinister over the spring and summer of 2022, leading up to the midterm elections, when prominent right-wing influencers took up the narrative that transgender people were “grooming,” sexualizing, and abusing children.
The end result of such anti-trans discourse was that terms like “groomer” — which previously had mostly been used on Twitter in the context of dog care or personal hygiene — saw a tremendous spike on the platform, from 500,000 mentions in 2021 to more than 2.5 million mentions in 2022, according to data provided to Rolling Stone by Linvill, the Clemson professor. These mentions were most commonly associated with terms such as “drag,” “children,” and “hell for eternity.”
The push to make the general public more skeptical of “gender ideology,” as the right puts it, has been largely successful in impacting the general discourse around transgender people. According to data from Media Matters, provided to Rolling Stone, right-leaning pages in 2023 earned 10 million interactions as opposed to left-leaning or ideologically neutral pages, which earned 2.3 million and 2 million interactions, respectively.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Twitter, since being taken over by Elon Musk, has also seen a massive uptick of anti-LGBTQ hate. This is in part because under Musk’s leadership, many formerly banned accounts have been reinstated, including that of James Lindsay, a professional right-wing troll who has previously accused the LGBTQ suicide prevention organization the Trevor Project of being a “groomer” organization. “Certainly Twitter has become less responsive to reports of targeted harassment against trans people,” says Drennen. (Twitter responded to a request for comment with an auto-generated poop emoji, which has become the company’s standard reply to press inquiries since Musk fired a majority of Twitter’s communications staff.)
Walsh’s success on the beat has seemingly had a ripple effect. Other prominent right-wing influencers, who had previously used their social media platforms to harp on more traditional conservative topics like abortion and immigration, have also made a sharp pivot to transphobia. Even those who had previously expressed little interest in politics have cashed in for clout.
“It was the issue that they poll-tested and was the most favorable for them, not because it’s a genuine issue”
Influencer Oli London, for instance, was initially best known for making the rounds of the talk-show circuit after receiving multiple plastic surgeries to resemble BTS member Jimin, and launching a failed K-pop career on the back of that tabloid infamy. In the summer of 2022, London made headlines for asserting that he was “gender fluid and now living as a Korean woman,” and was planning to get plastic surgery to resemble Blackpink member Rosé. That fall, however, London announced he was detransitioning, appearing on Tucker Carlson’s now-defunct Fox News show to blame his own struggles with gender identity on the normalization of transgender people and claiming that “the alpha straight male has been eroded.” (Most medical experts agree that detransitioning is a relatively rare phenomenon, with one study review of 8,000 trans patients finding that only one percent of those who had gender affirmation surgeries regretted it. The right, however, has been laser focused on detransitioning, and has elevated a number of high-profile detransitioners to the level of celebrity.)
“Gender Ideology is causing irreparable harm across society,” London wrote in an April 2023 tweet. “How did we get to where we are now? What is behind [the] push to transition kids?… How can we push back and save children?” The tweet concluded with a link to his book, Gender Madness: One Man’s Devastating Struggle With Woke Ideology and His Battle to Protect Children, showing an unsmiling and turtlenecked London on the cover, for sale in August 2023. (London also did not directly respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment, other than to tweet, “Dear @RollingStone, Sticking up for Women & Children is not Transphobic. Thank you! Oli.”)
London saw a massive spike in engagement after latching onto the right’s month-long freakout over Bud Light sending transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney a beer can with her face on it. While his TikTok does not appear to have been impacted by his anti-trans pivot — with him staying relatively stable at 1.1 million followers since 2022 — since constantly tweeting about Mulvaney, he has gained upward of 120,000 Twitter followers over the course of April.
According to at least one of the right’s loudest anti-trans voices, however, London’s rebranding is seen as a disingenuous, if politically useful, attention ploy. “Here’s the thing, everything that Oli London is saying is correct. It’s music to my ears. It’s obviously a lot of the work that we do here at the Daily Wire in trying to expose this nefarious agenda on our children,” podcast host Candace Owens said in November. “My personal opinion is that what Oli London saying is true, but also Oli London just wants attention.”
While London represents a new figure in the space, even established mainstays of the online right are reworking their messaging to prioritize anti-trans viewpoints. One prominent example is longtime anti-choice activist Allie Beth Stuckey, the host of the Christian conservative podcast Relatable on TheBlaze TV. Since reworking her content to heavily feature commentary on trans issues, Stuckey’s social media accounts are experiencing an uptick in engagement.
Though previously best known for her virulent anti-abortion commentary following the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, Stuckey has made “a huge shift in focus from anti-abortion activism to anti-trans activism, in part because [anti-choicers like Stuckey] won on abortion,” says Drennen. “They got what they wanted.”
To be fair, Stuckey did not pivot to transphobia completely out of nowhere. In a lengthy Twitter thread in response to Rolling Stone’s request for comment, Stuckey, like Walsh, took offense to the idea that she may be capitalizing on trans hate for financial or career reasons, claiming that she has been writing about “gender ideology” since 2018, even devoting a chapter of her book to the subject.
Since last June, however, around the same time What Is a Woman? premiered, her accounts have seen a marked uptick in anti-LGBTQ content. On Instagram, her feed has gone from posts about abortion to posts about transgender and LGBTQ people. Amid her coverage of topics such as the L.A. Dodgers hosting a drag event during Pride, Stuckey’s viewership has grown: She has netted almost 100,000 additional YouTube subscribers in the past year, according to SocialBlade data. Her Instagram following has similarly increased by about 90,000 over the past year.
In response to Rolling Stone’s request for comment, Stuckey wrote on Twitter that the trend of conservatives increasingly discussing transgender issues is “a reaction to its increasing prominence in the mainstream, thanks to the relentless activism of the left, and not the other way around,” before framing her interest in trans issues as genuine and heartfelt.
“I actually, sincerely believe the things I say,” she wrote. “I really do believe maiming people’s bodies based on the lie that they can switch genders is barbaric and evil. I really do believe confusing kids about their gender is destructive. And I know, just as most people know, that the entire ideology [is] powered by corporate interests, deceit, and ideological chaos.”
“The people that did care about me and did want to support me, they don’t want to take me back.”
Amid the success of right-wing figures speaking out against transgender rights, some creators have grown their audiences by repeating their talking points, only for the pivot to backfire in unexpected ways. Kelly Cadigan, a TikToker and transgender woman in her early twenties who in November 2022 had about 748,600 followers on the platform, largely posted chatty, casual videos filmed in the front seat of her car, discussing her upcoming gender-affirming surgery or speaking out against transphobia, such as defending Mulvaney against far-right harassment. “At the end of the day, what they really want is just for trans people to not exist,” she says in a video posted in January.
Then, this spring, Cadigan’s content took a sharp turn. Seemingly out of the blue, she started echoing many right-wing talking points about gender, saying that gender reassignment surgery for people under 18 is abusive, or that activists were encouraging kids to identify as trans. In March, Cadigan made a video saying that minors under the age of 18 should not be given access to hormonal replacement therapy, or HRT. “If you want to call me a conservative, call me a conservative,” she declared. “I believe in protecting children.” (Cadigan, who has herself spoken frequently about how she used HRT to transition when she was 15, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Cadigan’s pivot drew tremendous backlash from many commenters, who accused her of being a hypocrite and a “pick me,” a term used to describe women eager for external validation. But as her comments grew more negative, her subscriber count kept climbing, peaking at 911,300 followers on TikTok on May 23, 2023, and doubling her follower count on Twitter from roughly 8,000 to more than 19,000 between April and June 2023. In the midst of this influx of attention, she launched a new series: a countdown of “days of being on the right,” a parody of Mulvaney’s “days of being a girl” series documenting her transition. Cadigan’s April 20 “Day 3” video, in which she describes removing all the pronouns from her bio, racked up 1.9 million views; while her “Day 5” video, in which she claimed “the left really wants me to view myself as the same thing as a biological woman,” had 2.5 million views.
Despite her increasing popularity, Cadigan struggled to exist alongside right-wingers who made a point of misgendering her. “I’m so open minded to accepting right wing ideals,” she wrote on Twitter last month. “But if all you’re gonna do is belittle me and call me a man, what are you doing on my page? Wasting time? Wanting to argue? I don’t get it. We’ll never agree.”
Then, on June 1, Cadigan uploaded another video to TikTok, filmed in the front seat of her car, where she spoke candidly about her months-long pivot to the right. “Growing up, I always wanted to be friends with the people who hated me,” she said softly, “just because I wanted to be seen as normal so bad.” She said she still viewed herself as that 15-year-old who was “constantly looking for validation,” seeking acceptance from “people who don’t want to care about me.” She said that when she initially started getting attention from right-wing pundits for her criticism of children transitioning, it was intoxicating. But she was slowly starting to realize that the people who eagerly reposted her takes didn’t care about her, “and the people that did care about me and did want to support me, they don’t want to take me back.”
Since her “return” back to the left, Cadigan seems to be fairly ideologically adrift. She has deleted every TikTok video she made since March, and posted a video that she has since deleted claiming she was “done” talking about politics. “I feel like there’s no point in saying anything anymore,” she posted on Twitter on June 7. “The internet just hates me.”
On June 12, however, she seemed to have reversed her reversal. “From this moment forward tho, I’m not on the Left…and I’m not on the Right,” she wrote. “I’m not even gonna call myself a centrist! I’m done with the labels and I’m done caring about what others think of me.”
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