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Abstract

In recent years, there have been concerted efforts in the United States to spread false information against sexual and gender minorities and, consequently, social and political gains have retracted. Here, we introduce major concepts and findings in false information scholarship to consider: (1) important but largely understudied intersections between the scholarship on social movements and false information; (2) examples of how false information is deployed against sexual and gender minorities, who have recently been the targets of widespread false information campaigns; and (3) how such campaigns can potentially be mitigated. Throughout the article, we highlight how sociological insights can offer new tools for analyzing and dispelling false information. We conclude with future directions at the cross-section of scholarship on false information, social movements, and sexual and gender minorities.

Keywords

false information social movements narratives sexual and gender minorities

In recent years, there has been an uptick in research on the role of false information in shaping our everyday lives, the media we consume, and how we make sense of social issues (Freelon, Marwick, and Kreiss 2020; Ha, Perez, and Ray 2021). Of concern to social scientists is that false information creates moral panics, widens gaps between groups, creates mistrust, undermines democratic governance, and marginalizes people by reigniting stereotypes and tropes (Campos-Castillo and Shuster 2023; Moran and Prochaska 2022; Pascale 2019).

Most scholars generally understand false information as being comprised of at least two subtypes: misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation is commonly defined as unwittingly false information while disinformation is deliberately false information (Keller et al. 2020; Weeks and Gil de Zúñiga 2019). Both intersect in important ways with the concept of a conspiracy theory. Briefly, a conspiracy theory is an “attempt to explain the ultimate causes of significant social and political events and circumstances with claims of secret plots by two or more powerful actors” (Douglas et al. 2019:4). When conspiracy theories are undergirded by false information, as is often the case when used against sexual and gender minorities, they can be classified within the broader scholarship on false information. We thus consider conspiracy theories in our discussion of false information.

In this article, we introduce major concepts and findings in false information scholarship. We centralize (1) important but largely understudied intersections between the scholarship on social movements and false information; (2) examples of how false information is deployed against sexual and gender minorities, who have recently been the targets of well-funded and widespread false information campaigns; and (3) how such campaigns can potentially be mitigated. Throughout the article, we highlight how sociological insights can offer new tools for analyzing and dispelling false information. We conclude with future directions at the cross-section of scholarship on false information, social movements, and sexual and gender minorities.

Peddling False Information for Political Mobilization

Recent attacks against sexual and gender minorities in the U.S. policy landscape have been framed by false information campaigns, thereby catalyzing the mobilization of the far-right to retract rights protecting LGBTQ+ people (Murib 2025). At a most basic level, a premise of social movement scholarship is that to mobilize people a condition must be defined as unjust (Gamson 1992). Moreover, what people know, or think they know, about a social issue affects their willingness to participate in social movement activities (Einwohner 2009:408). In turn, false information can affect, “what people believe, how they behave, and the social and political consequences of it” (Weeks and Gil de Zúñiga 2019:3).

Despite the connections, social movements literature does not have strong explicit overlaps with the literature on false information. One reason for this is that while much of the sociological scholarship on social movements has tended to examine mobilizations on the left (Bertuzzi 2021), scholarship on false information has focused on the far-right (Freelon et al. 2020). Studies consistently find that both ends of the U.S. political spectrum are susceptible to false information but there are some important differences (Lewandowsky, Ecker, and Cook 2017). Individuals on the far-right are more likely to share false news (Guess, Nagler, and Tucker 2019), prefer echo chambers (Jost et al. 2018), and use dogwhistles, which are coded expressions that “convey one meaning to a broad audience and a second one, often hateful or provocative, to a narrow in-group to evade political repercussions through plausible deniability and algorithmic content moderation” (Mendelsohn et al. 2023:15162).

False information can become pernicious as people are increasingly exposed to carefully curated news and information that is congruent with their existing beliefs (Rhodes 2022), which can lead to skepticism about alternate explanations or perspectives. In line with this, when AIDS first became a known illness in the 1980s, it took a massive mobilization by gay activists to convince public health administrators and policymakers that what was initially referred to as “Gay-related Immune Deficiency” did not only affect gay men (Epstein 1998). In the contestation over knowledge, stakeholders were initially unwilling to listen to gay activists as “lay experts” because their perspective was not aligned with emergent public health and scientific knowledge.

It may be assumed that a social movement built on a disinformation campaign will have limited appeal to those who do not share ideological perspectives. However, scholars have found that seemingly disparate groups may come together in support of a common cause, even if the information that mobilizes people is false. For example, Moran and Prochaska (2022) found that supporters of Q’Anon and those concerned about child trafficking coalesced to support the #SavetheChildren campaign. While a central concern of Q’Anon is that the world is governed by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles (Cohen 2022), others involved in #SavetheChildren did not share this perspective but still joined the mobilization to work against child sex trafficking.

Attempts to legally ban gender-affirming care have similarly been influenced by disinformation campaigns that bring seemingly disparate groups together: far right conservatives, (some) feminists, and outlier medical professionals. For example, commonly cited disinformation suggests that an explanation for trans youth identifying as such is the “rapid onset of gender dysphoria,” which is fueled by social contagions within both online and offline peer groups. As McNamara et al. (2024) concluded in an expansive review of disinformation campaigns against gender-affirming care, there is no empirical evidence to corroborate “rapid onset of gender dysphoria.” Instead, these campaigns draw upon moral panics to inculcate fear among different groups. Among conservatives, disinformation campaigns sow fear that trans youth are being coerced into gender-affirming care that could be sorted out with the simple passage of time. Among feminists, that fear is trans youth seek medical interventions because of misogyny. Among medical professionals, the fear is that being trans is not real and, as such, offering gender affirming care is unethical. While these groups may form an unlikely coalition, they are united in their efforts to thwart trans youth from accessing gender-affirming care and in positioning those who oppose such bans as colluding in the harm of vulnerable children.

False information has also been mobilized to undermine scientific knowledge and/or misapplied to sexual and gender minorities through conspiracy theories. A conspiracy theory that surfaced in 2010 and came back into circulation by 2024 presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Turner and Kaczynski 2023) is that industrial chemical pollutants in the water from careless and greedy manufacturing companies have caused the increasing prevalence of sexual minorities. The story had appeal because it misattributed research about the effects of endocrine disruptors runoff on the genitals of nonhuman animals, thereby creating false conceptions of a public environmental health crisis, while also contributing to panic over the increasing prevalence of queer people (Boast 2022).

How False Information Spreads Through Stories and Characters

Beyond the empirical connections that demonstrate how social movement organizing against sexual and gender minorities is mobilized through false information campaigns are studies that offer a lens through which we can understand how and why false information campaigns may appeal to a broad audience. Narratives, or more simply stories, are cognitive tools that help people parse through information and facilitate communication about the explanation and justness of a social movement’s cause while discrediting or delegitimizing the opposition (Lewandowsky et al. 2013). Stories offer familiar plots that mobilize people when they feel a group they identify with is treated unjustly (Klandermans 2002). To be effective in a false information campaign, stories must be believable and familiar because those that “depart from story lines risk being heard as unbelievable, idiosyncratic, or unintelligible” (Polletta 2009:1491). Stories are more persuasive than statistical information or fact-checking and are easier to fabricate or manipulate (Doan, Candal, and Sylvester 2018), which makes them a particularly compelling means to spread false information.

A prevalent story told about sexual and gender minorities is that being queer, nonbinary, or transgender is indicative of a mental illness. While “homosexuality” was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) in 1973 after gay and lesbian activists launched a massive campaign to remove it, “gender identity disorder” conspicuously appeared in the DSM for the first time the same year. Since the 1970s, it is now widely believed that being transgender is a mental illness (Shuster 2021). This claim perpetuates mental health stigma and erroneous ideas about the threat that people with mental illnesses pose to society. As Locantore and Wasarhaley (2020) found in their experiment-based study, “Individuals who strongly believe that gender is characterized by mutually exclusive categories may view deviations from this system as unnatural and disorderly, possibly conveying mental illness” (p. 394). The stigma research supports this finding. When people are labeled as having a mental illness, they are more likely to be perceived as dangerous, violent, unpredictable, and a threat to the social order (Pescosolido, Manago, and Monahan 2019). Repeating the false narrative that sexual and gender minorities are mentally ill plays into the idea that they are dangerous and a threat to society.

Narratives can also be effective when used by social movement actors to represent celebrated or despised characters. Familiar characters such as the villain, victim, and hero populate the stories we tell about social issues (Bergstrand and Jasper 2018). Character tropes are additionally effective because they can dramatize the boundaries between in- and out-groups, making out-group villains appear more threatening, in-group victims more threatened, and in-group heroes stronger and more admirable (Bergstrand and Jasper 2018). Along these lines, the “stranger danger” narrative insinuates that racial, gender, and sexual others in public spaces are “villains” who will harm children. Children are often used by social movements to create sympathetic “victims” (Jasper, Young, and Zeurn 2018). Stone (2019)examined how the stranger danger narrative was developed by religious right organizations, notably Anita Bryant’s 1977 “Save our Children from Homosexuality” campaign, to persuade the public about the risks gay men supposedly posed to children, especially gay men who were teachers in primary schools. This same trope appears in more recent campaigns to ban trans people, usually with the emphasis on trans women, from using bathrooms which align with their gender identity. Whereas gay men are frequently depicted as confusing vulnerable children or perpetrating sexual abuse and/or pedophilia, trans women are often portrayed as “men in dresses” who are invading women’s spaces (Stone 2019:1163–66). The use of the stranger danger trope is disinformation because those who invoke it seek to instill fear about the presumed “Other” while protecting the sanctity of children. Legislators are portrayed as “heroes” in this story as they claim to be acting in the name of protecting vulnerable people such as children and women.

Child protection narratives have also been used more recently in legislative battles over gender-affirming care. These are well-coordinated efforts from conservative political and legal organizations who seek to create uncertainty about the state of scientific evidence and expertise in trans care (Shuster 2021; Wuest and Last 2024). They are united by the conspiracy theory that trans youth need to be protected from sinister healthcare professionals who seek to experiment on the bodies of youth. This conspiracy theory promotes the false conception that trans youth will regret their decision, and evil maniacal doctors are coercing trans youth into transitioning. For example, speaking before the U.S. House Judiciary hearing on gender-affirming care, known far-right activist Cole (2023) shared the following testimony:

The adults in my life whom I trusted. . .caused me lifelong irreversible harm. I speak to you today as a victim of one of the biggest medical scandals in the history of the United States of America. . .I hope that you will have the courage to bring this scandal to an end and ensure that other vulnerable teenagers, children and young adults don’t go through what I went through. . .I came out as transgender and my parents were immediately concerned they felt like they needed to get outside help from medical professionals. It immediately sent our entire family down a path of ideologically motivated deceit and coercion.

From this stance, banning gender-affirming care purportedly helps youth avoid regretting transitioning and evade the clutch of sinister medical professionals. How regret is mobilized by the far right in the discussion of trans youth is similar to how it is mobilized by those seeking to advance an anti-abortion agenda. As Doan et al. (2018) suggested, “Misinformation premised on abortion regret continues to be introduced into legislation, suggesting that examining the concept’s legitimation is central to understanding how unscientific evidence has overshadowed scientific evidence in abortion policy debates” (p. 37). This prescient observation was published before the Dobbs decision, and currently U.S. v Skrmetti, which seeks to ban gender-affirming care for youth, is under review. In both cases, false information is embedded within stories to portray pregnant people seeking abortions and youth seeking gender-affirming care as vulnerable actors in need of the State’s protection. As a result, the stories that are told about sexual and gender minorities, and the tropes used to depict them, drive false information while compelling those who believe it to mobilize against these groups.

How to Fight False Information Campaigns

Many scholars have invoked fact-checking as a crucial strategy for undermining false information campaigns. While fact-checking may correct people’s beliefs (DeVerna et al. 2024), there are several explanations for why, once misinformation has dispersed, it is difficult to correct. People do not easily overcome misinformation and may react negatively when they perceive they are being told what to think (see Lewandowsky et al. 2013). Information that is repeated becomes difficult to correct, even when it turns out to be false.

There are some promising studies that are beginning to demonstrate how to overcome false information campaigns that do not use fact-checking. Thorson (2016) examined the effects of corrected misinformation on political attitudes. Framed within the concept of “belief persistence,” which is when people do not believe the correction and maintain their belief in false information, Thorson suggested that combining a correction with an attitudinal shift is a more potent and viable strategy because it minimizes the belief in the false information and alters the attitudinal effects of exposure to negative information, such as becoming more open to the idea that trans people’s identities are real or that gay men are not sexual predators.

False information travels across networks and is amplified when it reverberates among those who share worldviews (Nikolov, Flammini, and Menczer 2021). Thus, social scientists might consider how to intervene within the networks themselves. The same tools used primarily by the far-right such as bots, deliberately placed misinformation, and influencers (Keller et al. 2020), can also be used to dispel false information on social media. However, instead of misinformation, deliberately placed corrective information combined with social psychological research on how to instigate attitudinal shifts may be an effective strategy. As Doan, Miller, and Loehr (2016) found from a nationally representative survey experiment that portraying a queer and loving couple can help shift heterosexual people’s attitudes about queer people and rights. From their study, love was a potent equalizer in shifting heterosexuals’ perceptions of what rights queer people should be afforded. Within the same logic, placing information about sexual and gender minorities in far-right partisan networks that combines positive emotions with linguistic reframing of false information about sexual and gender minorities may undercut the potency of false information while shifting—even subtly—attitudes held by those on the far-right. Recent work has also sought to construct “toolboxes” for potential interventions (Kozyreva et al. 2024) and to empirically evaluate a variety of strategies in a cross-cultural context (Fazio et al. 2024). Both works encourage the idea that we must construct strategies to combat false information campaigns which address the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels.

To begin disarming false information that circulates in the stories told about sexual and gender minorities, one strategy is to circulate different kinds of stories. Shuster and Westbrook (2024) found that telling stories of trans joy can reframe the conversation of what it means to be transgender by amplifying the positive aspects and offering a more holistic accounting of trans experience, thereby creating resonance with other groups instead of portraying trans people as always-already the “other.” Framed in this way, as Lewandowsky et al. (2013) suggest, casting an issue, person, or group in humanizing ways leads to less avoidance of contact with so-named “others.”

As mentioned earlier, false information circulates through the characters that populate stories told about sexual and gender minorities. Another strategy to dismantle false information is to reframe characters from villains to heroes, which can reduce worldview-threatening impacts. What might it mean to tell stories about the vulnerability and uncertainty that medical professionals may experience when working in trans care, but with characters that are not diabolical or manipulative, but caring and compassionate? Scholars have suggested that it is difficult, but not insurmountable, to change depictions of characters. From Whittier’s (2001) research on survivors of childhood sexual abuse, she found that victims needed to transform themselves into heroes, in the form of survivors, shifting a tragic narrative into one of re-birth (see also Polletta 2009).

For individuals who may be resistant to reframing characters or narratives about injustice, Feygina, Jost, and Goldsmith (2010) studied environmental protection resistance and found that “system justification,” which refers to a social psychological theory that people are motivated to defend and justify the status quo, can also help combat false information. Specifically, they found that when environmental protection was framed less from saving the planet—which appeals more to those on the left—and more from preserving the American way of life—which appeals more to those on the right—those on the right were more likely to endorse environmental protection measures.

Conclusion

In this article, we synthesized key concepts in false information scholarship by highlighting how false information is used to both mobilize people against, and tell stories about, sexual and gender minorities. By drawing on empirical findings from various subfields in sociology, we offered new theoretical vantage points from which to understand the precarities that sexual and gender minorities experience in social institutions and everyday life and empirically supported ideas on how to tackle, disarm, or undercut false information.

Currently, there is not much existing scholarship at the cross-section of false information and sexual and gender minorities. The few exceptions are from scholars who are concerned with the recent false information leveraged against transgender people. As we indicated throughout, bridging false information scholarship, social movements, and the scholarship on sexual and gender minorities produces numerous pathways for future research and methodological and theoretical innovation.

Methodologically, there is a pressing need for more computational social scientists and social media scholars in sexual and gender minority research. There is a notable gap in this area of scholarship, although in recent years more population health scholars within sociology have begun to work in sexual and gender minority research. However, the field is at a disadvantage from a relative lack of quantitative scholars who can analyze large datasets found in social media, which is where false information is most likely found (Shuster et al. 2024). The creation of organizations such as Queer in artificial intelligence (AI) is an important step toward filling this gap.

There is a parallel need for qualitative researchers to analyze the content of widely dispersed false information to move the conversation forward in computational social sciences beyond the frequently examined limitations of machine learning and the consequences of clickbait or social bots. Qualitative scholars might leverage their skills by conducting discourse analyses to examine how false information spread on social media weaponizes language and further marginalizes sexual and gender minorities. Yet, a consistent problem in false information studies is empirically documenting “intent” (Keller et al. 2020). As Campos-Castillo and Shuster (2023) found studying the Equal Rights Amendment, claiming an opponent is deliberately spreading falsehoods is a more persuasive way to discredit a group than simply stating they are making false claims. Furthermore, suggesting that a group has an ulterior motive makes them appear more sinister. Future research might continue building on these ideas by examining the rhetorical framing of social issues surrounding sexual and gender minorities and how groups seek to discredit others in social movement mobilizations.

Theoretically, there is a noticeable dearth of scholars studying false information disseminated from the far left. While it may be difficult to imagine people on the far left engaging in false information campaigns against sexual minorities, ideas do not always stay contained within partisan networks. It may be a fertile ground for tracing how false information spans issues and groups and tracks from one side of the political spectrum to the other. There is an equally noticeable dearth of scholars who study far-right movements (Bertuzzi 2021), although in recent years, most of the false information campaigns launched against sexual and gender minorities have come from the far right. Moreover, social scientists have the tools to examine how false information might align with people’s preexisting beliefs, political ideologies, and affiliations (Jerit and Zhao 2020). Insights from the sociology of culture might be called upon to examine the contexts in which false information campaigns advance across social media platforms and empirically document when and how they recede.

We also encourage social scientists to consider the advent of new sources of information. At the time of this writing, ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are rising in popularity as a source of information, particularly among youth. The integration of generative AI into everyday digital tools, such as search engines and smartphones, stands to steadily increase the public’s exposure in the coming years. We see not only some concerns but also some opportunities. ChatGPT can be more persuasive than humans in part because the narratives it creates are more engaging (Chu and Liu 2024). A concern, then, is that generative AI tools can further propagate false information about minoritized groups, particularly information that aligns with the sentiment toward the groups that are implied by a users’ query (Busker, Choenni, and Bargh 2023). However, AI tools like ChatGPT can also be used for social good. Scholars have taken steps toward developing ChatGPT-driven tools to detect false information and enhance people’s media literacy so that they are better able to detect false information on their own (see Peng, Meng, and Ling 2024).

Finally, plots, characters, and narratives remain understudied in sociology, despite their relevance to policy debates (Polletta et al. 2011) and the spread of false information. Future scholarship might document the typical tropes invoked against sexual and gender minorities, while considering the historical legacies of these tropes and how they travel across groups and time. Narratives and tropes reveal cultural ideas about morality—what is right or wrong, and who is villainous or heroic (Jasper, Young, and Zeurn 2018). As such, examining their influence in the spread of false information would be a productive area for future scholarship.

Here, we offer the beginning of a conversation that we hope future scholars will continue to expand upon. As we have demonstrated throughout, there is a vital need to start bridging more fields within sociology to render novel insights in both the study of false information and sexual and gender minorities.

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Stef M. Shuster

Kenneth Joseph

Celeste Campos-Castillo

Statements and Declarations

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How False Information Is Used Against Sexual and Gender Minorities and What We Can Do About It

Abstract

Keywords

Peddling False Information for Political Mobilization

How False Information Spreads Through Stories and Characters

How to Fight False Information Campaigns

Conclusion

Footnotes

ORCID iDs

Statements and Declarations

References