The Appetite
Anti-trans obsessives won at the Supreme Court, they emptied the clinics, and their audience felt nothing. Then one trans actor promoted a movie.
I spent years at Media Matters tracking how right-wing media builds narratives about trans people. When I left, I built the tools I wish I’d had there — a monitoring system that watches tens of thousands of accounts across sixteen platforms and scores every post against how that account usually performs. A score of 1.0 means a post did exactly as well as expected. Above 1.0, the audience leaned in. Below it, they scrolled past. Watch those scores long enough and you stop learning what the right says about us and start learning what their audience actually wants. This month, the machine ran a clean experiment on itself, and the result deserves your attention.
Consider what the anti-trans movement won in the past thirty days. The Supreme Court blessed state bans on trans girls in school sports — the culmination of a five-year legal campaign. Children’s hospitals kept folding under federal pressure, with the Cleveland Clinic signing away pediatric care for decades. And then, on Monday, NPR revealed that HHS had quietly shelved the most aggressive health-care rule it ever drafted — a story about their own administration, on their signature issue.
By every theory of how movement media works, this should have been their victory month. The content wrote itself: we said we’d win, and we won.
Their audience yawned.
I watched it happen in the data, day after day. The Supreme Court ruling generated an enormous wave of right-wing posts — one of the highest-volume weeks I’ve recorded — and the wave landed with a thud. Post after post from accounts that reliably light up their followers came in at or below their ordinary performance. The engagement was there in raw numbers, spread across thousands of posts, but the heat wasn’t. Their audience treated the biggest anti-trans legal victory in American history the way you treat a rerun.
And the retreat? The rule their administration abandoned — the one that threatened every hospital in America over trans kids’ care? The accounts that spent December howling about “sex-rejecting procedures” have mentioned it barely at all. Not spun it. Not defended it. Just — nothing. Silence, from a movement that posts about us hundreds of times a day.
Then Elliot Page walked a red carpet in London, and the machine woke up.
You’ve probably seen some of it — the Odyssey press tour dogpile, a full week of misgendering headlines and gym-photo mockery from the same three dozen accounts. What you can’t see from the outside is the shape of it in the numbers: a fraction of the posting volume they spent on the Supreme Court, generating nearly identical total engagement, at per-post performance their policy content hasn’t touched in months. And as the Page cycle crested, a single post mocking a trans American detained in a Dutch asylum center spiked to eighteen times that account’s normal performance — the kind of number this machine only produces when it has found something new to feed on.
The anti-trans machine does not run on winning. It runs on people — and now that it is running out of policies to win, it will not wind down. It will need more people.
The numbers behind that sentence — how much more efficiently a pile-on performs than a policy victory, which stories the right is refusing to touch, and what’s about to replace the culture war they just won — are below, for paid subscribers.
