Exposing the Gender Identity Industry: Anti-Gender and the Paranoid Critique of Trans Medicine

Trans panic politics in the United States has taken a new paranoid form, one that places trans medicine at the center of a vast capitalist conspiracy. This “gender identity industry,” critics assert, sits at the nexus of Big Pharma’s and Big Tech’s capital accumulation strategies and those industries’ ideological capture by trans advocates. This essay investigates the power of this conspiratorial perspective and why it appeals to an ideologically diverse anti-gender coalition, an assemblage that has proven useful for today’s Republican Party and its populist self-image. Drawing from studies of conspiratorial reason and paranoid politics, the essay first excavates the psychic resonance and political economic foundations of the industry trope, examining what a paranoid politics perceives accurately about the health-care and tech industries and what it ultimately fails to comprehend, committed as it is to seeing trans subjectivity as nothing other than a manipulated consciousness and medicalized corporeality. It then maps the industry narrative’s discursive trajectory out from the fringe of right-wing blogs and trans-exclusionary radical feminist tracts and toward the center of US conservative politics. In doing so, it reveals how conservative media outlets, think tanks, and national politicians deploy selective critiques of so-called ideologically captured industries, criticisms that displace outrage toward those sectors’ exploitative practices and the deeper rot that characterizes the US political economy. By thinking with and beyond paranoia, we might see how anti-gender has taken an anti-industry form.