Last week, I was stunned to hear that the legendary Dallas Denny quoted me in her TG Forum piece, which was from a keynote speech she delivered. (Link to the TG Forum pieces HERE)
On the extremely unlikely chance that you've never heard of her, the following bio is from her website (linked above)
"Dallas Denny has been a leader in the transgender rights movement since the 1980s. Her work as an advocate, writer, editor, and community builder have played a significant role in the advancement of rights for transsexual and transgender people in North America and around the world."
(from Wikipedia) "In 1990 Denny founded the 501(c)(3) nonprofit American Educational Gender Information Service (now Gender Education & Advocacy, Inc.). In the same year she started the Atlanta Gender Explorations Support Group and launched the print journal Chrysalis Quarterly. In 1993 she founded the National Transgender Library & Archive, which now resides in the Labadie Collection at The University of Michigan Library System. Also in the 1990s she continued the work of the Erickson Educational Foundation. She was a founder of Atlanta's transgender Southern Comfort Conference and provided start up funding, through AEGIS, for the first FTM Conference of the Americas. She was Director of the transgender conference Fantasia Fair for five years and from 1999-2008 editor of Transgender Tapestry Journal, published by the International Foundation for Gender Education.
Since 1989 Denny has produced dozens of flyers, booklets, and medical advisories, contributed considerable content to Chrysalis, AEGIS' several newsletters, and Transgender Tapestry, and written a column for TG Forum. She wrote hundreds of articles for transgender community magazines and newsletters, many of which were widely reprinted and eventually placed on the internet. In 1994 her book Gender Dysphoria: A Guide to Research was the first book-length contribution to the scientific literature of transsexualism produced by a transsexual."
Add to that, she's been a mentor and friend. I'm honored beyond words that she would cite my work. In any case, here's the piece, reprinted in full with her kind permission. Please hit the TG Forum link to give her some hit love there too.
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The following are my notes for the keynote I delivered at the third Paradise Conference, which was held in Atlanta from April 18-21, 2024. My thanks to TGForum contributor Sophie Lynne for her recent article here about anti-trans legislation and to Jamison Green, Chelsea Goodwin, and Lola Cola, for our conversations.
Here’s a link to Sophie’s article.
Disinformation, Misinformation, and Cognitive Dissonance
Keynote, Paradise Conference 2024
By Dallas Denny
Hello, everyone. It’s great to see old friends and friends soon to be live and in person.
I’m honored to have been chosen to give this keynote. I would like to thank Toni Cane and the board of directors of Paradise Conference for giving me this opportunity to address you.
Conferences like this are important. Contact with one another on social media and via e-mail is also important, but it doesn’t replace face-to-face contact. When we arrive here, we are with our tribe, and we know it and respond to it. We are loved without reservation and free to be ourselves, a luxury many of us don’t have in our everyday lives. So thank you, everyone, for being here.
I intended to talk today about something I have never really addressed in public—my life and my work. I have been an activist in this community since the 1980s and I have had a wonderful career and met many remarkable people and seen some amazing things. I have witnessed with joy the increasing freedoms and legal protections and growth of community that have occurred over the past 35 or so years— but due to recent conversations with Jamison Green, Chelea Goodwin, and Lola Cola—who is in the room tonight—I asked that my planned talk be moved to a workshop so that tonight I could talk about something more important than myself.
I’ll introduce this topic by telling you about a Facebook post I read on the airplane on my way here to Atlanta. A woman, a stranger, scolded the man who wrote the post. She said to him, “This is San Diego. You need to speak English.” He asked her, “How do you say San Diego in English?” The result? A dumbfounded expression. This is important, and I will work my way back around to it.
What I am talking about tonight is the incredible rising tide of anti-trans rhetoric, violence, and legislation that is being directed at us. We are not strangers to violence and hate, but we have become the subject of a vast coordinated and well-planned attack from the far right. Since Rowe vs. Wade was disposed of by the U.S. Supreme Court, we have become, as my friend Sophie Lynne wrote in a recent article on the website TG Forum, the new bogeymen.
Those positioning themselves as our enemies are evangelistic Christians, white nationalists, a political party I will not mention, and a small group of women known as trans-exclusionary lesbian feminists. Sometimes they are even supported from within our own ranks. I’m looking at you, Caitlin Jenner! They are organized in ways we are not, and they are massively funded by billionaires and organizations including the Heritage Foundation, the Family Research Council, and the Alliance Defending Freedom. They lobby and influence local, state, and national congressmen and women and spread disinformation and misinformation about trans people to the American public.
Working in tandem, The American Legislative Exchange Council and the Congressional Prayer Caucus write anti-trans bills which they send to senators and congressmen in every state, who put them into play—and many become the law of the land.
In her essay, Sophie Lynne wrote “Anti- trans bills skyrocketed from 143 in 2021 (18 passed) to 600 (87 passed) in 2023. In 2024, there have already been 539 bills (20 passed) and we’re only one-third of the way through the year.”
These bills span a wide range: Here are examples of some of the more moderate state bills that have been brought forth, many of which have become law and more of which will soon be: requiring teachers to use the birth names of students who have transitioned and criminalizing them for any mention of homosexuality or transgender identity. Requiring trans students to use the bathroom and locker rooms of the gender they were assigned at birth—can you imagine how traumatic and damaging that would be to a transitioned boy or girl? Banning students from participating in sports as a member of their identified gender. Requiring teachers to inform on trans children to their parents. And again, these are the milder ones.
In Texas, parents who affirm their trans childrens’ gender are subject to investigation by child protective services. In Tennessee—this one is not due to law, but to a malevolent state attorney general—Vanderbilt University was coerced into turning over the medical records of the patients of their gender clinic. I went to graduate school at Vanderbilt in the 1980s and a decade before that was a patient of their gender clinic. I find myself wondering if my records are with the Tennessee state attorney general.
Bills in some states have banned changes of gender marker on identifying documents like birth certificates and driver’s licenses, and in Florida, I believe it is, those who have changed their markers will now have their documents voided and replaced by ones with their birth genders. In another state—I believe Texas—honestly, reports of these bills are coming in so fast I can’t keep up with them—the attorney general has suggested putting all trans people on the sex offender’s list. Also in Texas, the governor has stated his plans to prevent any transgender or nonbinary person from teaching in schools. And in some states, gender-affirming medical treatment—not only hormones are prohibited for those under eighteen, but medicines that delay puberty so families will have time to sort things out.
As a result of this hate and legislative malevolence, violence directed at us is on the rise.
It should be obvious to everyone here that we are in great danger of being criminalized merely because we exist. Around the country, at every level, local, state, and national, trans people are struggling and mobilizing to stand up to this tyranny. We each can and should do our part. That doesn’t necessarily mean outing yourself or engaging in direct action like lobbying your congressperson. If you’re not comfortable with such, your dollars will help. But above all, I beg you—whatever your political affiliation, VOTE. Please. VOTE.
Now, you might think this wraps up my talk, but we’re only at the halfway point. I will now attempt to briefly explain to you why this is a dangerous moment for the world and for America.
When I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans got their news from trusted sources—primarily newspapers, magazines, and the evening news on the three existing channels: ABC, NBC, and CBS. News was delivered by trusted commentators like Walter Kronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley. Being journalists, they did their best to give America the news, and, being human, they sometimes skewed it a bit. But listeners had a common point of view from which to take exception and talk or argue about local, national, and international politics, fashion, and the weather.
Those days are long gone. Today there are channels leading to the left and others far, far to the right, and many people get their information solely or almost entirely from single sources that cannot in any reasonable fashion be called news. That of course increased the divide, But to make matters worse, since the mid 2010s there have been increasing sources of disinformation and misinformation. Countries like Russia, North Korea, China, and Saudi Arabia hire hundreds and thousands of English-speakers to twist facts or, more often, just make stuff up. They reach millions of Americans through fake but convincingly serious-looking websites and social media accounts. This makes it difficult and sometimes almost impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff, and as a result Americans, and especially gullible and low information Americans, have come to believe and build their private realities on things most bizarre: The earth is flat; the moon landing was faked by Stanley Kubrick. As an aside, I knew Kubrick’s cinematographer for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey—Jack Malick, who, as Andrea Susan, was one of us. The moon landing was NOT faked. Jet contrails are a government plot to change the atmosphere or poison us. The Sandy Hook school shooting was staged and the bereaved parents are all paid actors. Democrats run a child pornography ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant that has no basement. Imagine the face of the MAGA shooter who showed up with his AR-15 and found that out. COVID vaccines are a government ploy to alter your DNA and allow the government to track you—as if they can’t already do that by pinging that cell phone in your hand. COVID itself, which killed more than one million Americans and left millions of others with long-term disabilities, is itself a hoax, Climate change is a hoax.
People are absolutely convinced these things are true. They of course are not. They make absolutely no sense and are easily disproven by those who care to look at reliable sources, which most conspiracy theorists refuse to do. Instead, they find confirmation through social media accounts, some of which belong to fellow conspiracy theorists, and most of which are run by foreign trolls. They find a couple of disinformative articles on Google that justify their conclusions while failing to cite any actual data, and they call it doing research. That is absolutely NOT research. Research involves going to primary sources, and they’re too lazy to do that. Meanwhile, they scoff at and discredit scientists who are doing REAL research. And let me be clear. Science is real. It is our most important tool. Without science, I would not have survived childhood, and neither would many of you. We would not be traveling to conferences like this in planes and cars, for there WOULD be no planes and cars. We would still be mired in illogical, superstitious beliefs that held humanity back for millennia.
To make matters worse, and soon to be far worse, now, suddenly, AI is upon is. We have already been told to believe what the bots are telling us and not our lying eyes and ears—now AI is being used to crank out disinformation in clever ways and create utterly believable images that DO trick our eyes and ears. I am forever seeing images on Facebook showing impossibly giant humans and female celebrities I know did nor pose in that swimsuit. They’re not real, but they LOOK convincingly real unless you count the fingers. But many people, I know, take it all in as fact.
This is the crux of our nation’s problem .
At this point half of the U.S. population believes Joe Biden, age 81, is too old to be President, and Donald Trump is not. Trump is three-and-a-half years younger than Biden and, should he win the November Presidential election, would be older than Biden is now at the end of his term. Half of the population believes Biden, who is extraordinarily mentally sharp and speaks in logically constructed sentences, is senile and Donald Trump, who shows clinical signs of senility and speaks in word salad, is sharp. I say this as someone with a license to practice psychology and who had a career as a psychometrist. Look at transcripts of Donald Trump’s speech. It wasn’t that way when he was younger. And compare it to transcripts of Joe Biden’s speech. Who is coherent?
I say this not to raise one Presidential candidate over another, but to point out that within a matter of weeks half of Americans came to believe Joe Biden is a decrepit, senile old man. Disinformation and misinformation. It’s devastatingly effective in the United States today.
As I conclude, I circle back, as promised, to the woman in San Diego. When her beliefs were challenged in a simple and direct way— “How do you say San Diego in English,”—what happened? Brain freeze.
In the mid-twentieth century, long before today’s sophisticated methods of mental manipulation came into play, a psychologist called Leon Festinger studied people with false fear-provoking ideas. He discovered that people with such beliefs were extraordinarily resistant to information that challenged their beliefs. They would in fact do considerable mental gymnastics to avoid even hearing data that was counter to their false beliefs. Festinger called this cognitive dissonance. And it perfectly describes the woman in San Diego.
This is why we’re in trouble. Half the population believes trans people are abusing children. Half believe we just want to invade bathrooms of the opposite sex. Half believe we are mentally ill, or sinners, or sexual deviants—and they will not be easily unconvinced.
However we identify—as crossdressers, as transsexuals, as transgender, as nonbinary—we must stand up for ourselves and our rights as Americans. And so I ask you again to, within the boundaries of your safety, do what you can to help being this country back into equilibrium. Contact politicians. Speak in public. Write letters to editors. And if you cannot do these direct things, consider working a phone bank, making calls that will not identify you, or mail postcards to voters. Provide financial support to organizations fighting for our freedoms—the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and new groups that are forming. And please, vote, vote, vote!
Thank you for your time and attention.
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