The Daily Signal is a conservative American media organization. By 2025, they had published over 2,500 anti-trans posts.
Background
The Heritage Foundation started a blog called The Foundry in 2008. In 2014, The Foundry was redirected to The Daily Signal (dailysignal.com) in June 2014. In June 2024, it became an independent publication.
Ad Fontes Media rates The Daily Signal in the Strong Right category of bias and as Unreliable, Problematic in terms of reliability.
Contributors
Contributors who have covered trans topics include
Corinna Cohn is an American software developer who identifies as transsexual and gender critical. Cohn frequently appears in media to share conservative opinions and criticize various aspects of the trans rights movement.
In 2018 Cohn was triggered by Twitter’s revised policies that prohibited deadnaming and misgendering trans and gender diverse people. Cohn began making media appearances soon after.
In 2021 Cohn and fellow gender critical activist Nina Paley began the podcast Heterodorx.
In 2022 Cohn published a regret narrative in the Washington Post, suggesting that minors and young adults considering transition should “slow down.” Cohn has expressed the following regrets:
“a lifetime set apart from my peers”
“I wasn’t old enough to make that decision”
“I have resigned myself to never finding a partner”
“became a medical patient and will remain one for the rest of my life”
“intercourse never became pleasurable”
“I’m still working out how much regret to feel”
Via Media Matters for America:
Cohn, who hosts the podcast Heterodorx, has recently begun to put her anti-trans views into action. In late January, Cohn spoke in front of the Indiana House of Representatives in favor of HB 1041, a legislative effort that Cohn claimed would “strengthen the rights for girls and young women competing in sport” by excluding trans student athletes from competition. In her testimony, Cohn defined herself as “a transsexual,” arguing that her “sex is male, and neither science nor medicine can change that.” In the months since, Cohn has served as an expert and a witness for legislative efforts to restrict gender-affirming care in both Alabama and Ohio.
Cohn signed her testimony to the Ohio General Assembly as the secretary and treasurer of Gender Care Consumer Advocacy Network. GCCAN was founded in 2019 under the stated mission “to empower recipients of gender transition-related care to become healthy and whole,” but it has rapidly aligned itself with the right-wing campaign against gender-affirming care policies, with Cohn serving as a board member.
Downard, Whitney (February 22, 2023). Anti-trans medical care bill passes Senate committee. Indiana Capital Chronicle https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2023/02/22/anti-trans-medical-care-bill-passes-senate-committee/
Steve Hammer and Chuck Workman (September 3, 2003). 30 under 30: Innovators in the arts.Nuvo https://www.nuvo.net/arts/30-under-30-innovators-in-the-arts/article_c99ebd9c-ae71-5c71-93dd-4f0f26bc75bc.html
Liftable Media is an American right-wing media organization. Their outlets have posted consistently anti-transgender content.
Outlets include:
Liftable (Christian website) – launched in 2014
Western Journal – acquired by Liftable in 2014
Thoughtful Women – acquired by Liftable in 2014
Conservative Tribune – acquired by Liftable in 2015
Tea Party News Network (TPNN) – acquired by Liftable in 2015
Liberty Alliance – acquired by Liftable in 2017
The Wildcard
Patriot Depot
Flag and Cross
LTV Streaming / Patriot.TV
According to Media Matters for America, “Conservative Tribune is a right-wing fake news site that publishes deliberately false stories and misinformation, especially anti-Muslim conspiracies.”
Background
The Western Center for Journalism was Founded in 1991 by Joseph Farah (who later created WorldNetDaily.com) and James H. Smith (former publisher of the Sacramento Union). They launched the Western Journalism website in 2001.
Floyd Brown founded Citizens United and was executive director of the Young America Foundation. Floyd Brown’s child Patrick Brown founded Liftable Media in 2014. It was created in response to the success of UpWorthy, a left-leaning clickbait site that posted “uplifting” content (called “glurge” in internet slang). Starting in 2014, Liftable acquired several right-wing website during a time when Facebook and other social media platforms made clickbait a lucrative business model.
They later moved into streaming via liftable.tv and patriot.tv.
Jesse Singal is an American podcaster, cultural critic, author, and anti-transgender activist. Singal launders anti-transgender extremism into mainstream media and is a prominent figure in America’s moral panic about transgender healthcare for young people.
See this biography for background. After initially working at progressive publications, Singal found success criticizing progressive public policy, media, and medicine. Singal then began getting even more money and attention by attacking transgender people, especially gender diverse youth.
Singal’s activism against the trans rights movement centers on several anti-transgender tactics:
amplifying outliers and edge cases in controversies to derail broader discussions
undermining critics, especially trans and gender diverse critics
getting support from anti-transgender activists, media figures, professionals, and legislators, among others
Singal seeks to influence healthcare decisions about our minors with the same rhetoric and tactics used by activists who seek to restrict reproductive healthcare options like contraception and abortion. Singal attempts to disrupt conversations between healthcare providers and the families they serve by demanding more gatekeeping.
Singal focuses on childhood “desistance” and adult “detransition,” two disputed conceptualizations of people whose gender identity or expression shifts over time. These cure narratives and regret narratives are collectively known as the ex-trans movement. These narratives are vastly over-represented in media coverage of trans issues, but Singal’s coverage often suggests to credulous audiences that these narratives don’t get represented enough.
Singal frequently gets money and attention by exploiting anxiety about trans and gender diverse minors, which gets framed as “concern.” Singal then gets more money and attention by implying that opponents and critics are incompetent, dishonest, or even dangerous. Biologist Julia Serano has described this as the “Dregerian narrative,” named after Singal’s role model, anti-transgender historian Alice Dreger.
Singal has gained a reputation for “sealioning,” or persistent and aggressive challenges to criticism. Singal typically focuses on a critic’s minor error, omission, or word choice and uses that detail to derail the larger points made about Singal’s work. Singal uncritically promotes any supporters, defending these ideological allies by challenging their critics with the same persistent and aggressive tactics.
Singal’s tactics have been especially harmful to trans journalists, writers, cultural critics, and experts. Through immense privilege and nepotistic connections, Singal has access to opportunities and backchannel conversations where trans people are often excluded. Singal holds forth in these trans-exclusionary spaces as an expert on “tricky science stuff,” while implying that trans people cannot competenetly discuss trans issues. Singal claims to be an edgy iconoclast willing to speak up against “activists,” which Singal uses as a thought-terminating pejorative against any trans critic.
Bad-faith cultural critics often become part of the story they attempt to cover. In The Anti-Trans Hate Machine, journalist Imara Jones outlined Singal’s historically significant role in attacks on hundreds of thousands of trans and gender diverse children. Singal is an inspiration for this site’s decade-long Transphobia Project. That project seeks to show that there are many ethical journalists, public intellectuals, cultural critics, and other creators of knowledge and culture who are capable of addressing controversial gender issues in fair and value-neutral ways.
Singal is a compulsive X/Twitter user who self-published over 125,000 posts, an average of about 35 posts a day for ten years. Singal’s reputation for online histrionics and causing harm to the trans community grew, and Singal soon began exploring other self-publishing options. In November 2017, Singal started a Medium account that mostly addressed topics related to trans people and to Twitter. In January 2019, Singal started a Substack newsletter titled Singal-Minded. In March 2020 Singal began a lucrative “drama” podcast called Blocked and Reported with anti-transgender troll Katie Herzog. These platforms generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue each year and allow Singal to continue this pattern of behavior without any editorial oversight or accountability.
In 2024, Singal joined Bluesky to troll its user base and quickly became the most blocked user in this history of the platform. Users made several unsuccessful efforts to get Singal banned from the platform.
Anti-trans activists like Jesse Singal are an enormous resource drain for a persecuted minority like the trans community. Singal is a once-in-a-generation problem for our children. We owe it to them to focus our limited resources on minimizing the profound harm Singal is causing. It is literally Singal’s business to derail the trans rights movement, and business is booming.
This information will be significantly expanded over the next decade. In 2025, this site phased out AI illustrations after artist feedback. The previous illustration is here.
The Economist is a British media organization that publishes consistently anti-transgender articles. Although most articles are unsigned, anti-trans writer Jesse Singal is the author of many of the pieces listed below after January 2024.
The only notable exception to its anti-trans content are essays by transgender Labour Party candidate Emily Brothers, published as part of a two-week series on trans topics.
Uncredited (November 6, 2021). Portrait of a detransitioner as a young woman.The Economist https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/11/06/portrait-of-a-detransitioner-as-a-young-woman
Azeen Ghorayshi is an American writer and anti-transgender activist. Ghorayshi is a key historical figure in the oppression of trans and gender diverse youth.
Ghorayshi has written about transgender healthcare for youth and other trans topics in several publications. In 2021, Ghorayshi became the point person laundering anti-transgender extremism into the New York Times, similar to Times health reporter Jane Brody, whose consistently anti-trans coverage in the 1970s helped get adult care shut down as “experimental” by the end of that decade.
Ghorayshi believes that affirmative models of care for trans and gender diverse youth are an unfolding medical scandal, echoing Times colleagues and contributors in the late 1970s who helped set the trans rights movement back for 25 years. The real medical scandal is that trans and gender diverse youth have never been able to receive appropriate care, and Ghorayshi’s reporting is a major factor in making this care unavailable to hundreds of thousands of minors.
Each year, thousands of American cisgender youth receive gender-affirming treatments like surgeries for unwanted breast tissue, but Ghorayshi is focused exclusively on banning the same procedures for transgender youth.
Ghorayshi’s anti-trans views are colored by disease models of gender identity, particularly psychopathology models. Ghorayshi is a strong proponent of gatekeeping trans healthcare via psychology and psychiatry, especially for minors. Ghorayshi also disproportionately covers cases of regret and “detransition,”presenting people like Jamie Reed as brave truth-tellers instead of politically motivated anti-trans extremists.
Ghorayshi consistently and idiosyncratically presents anti-trans activists as a broad coalition from “both sides of the political aisle.”
Background
Azeen M. Ghorayshi was born in October 1988 and earned a bachelor’s degree from University of California, Berkeley in 2010. While there, Ghorayshi interned in UC Berkeley’s notoriously conservative and anti-trans psychology department and in the neurobiology department. Ghorayshi then earned a master’s degree from Imperial College London.
Ghorayshi began writing as an Editorial Fellow at Mother Jones, then worked at the weekly East Bay Express in the Bay Area. Ghorayshi freelanced from 2013 to 2015, placing stories in New Scientist, The Guardian, Newsweek, Wired UK, and other outlets.
Ghorayshi co-founded Method Quarterly, a publication about science with Christina Agapakis. Other personnel included:
Ellie Harmon (editor in 2014)
[Reo] Eveleth (editor – presence scrubbed from site)
Ghorayshi joined BuzzFeed in 2015 as a science reporter, rising to science editor prior to departing.
In 2026, Ghorayshi was promoted to a role with New York Times Sunday Magazine.
2016 BuzzFeed piece
Ghorayshi is a big fan of anti-trans activist Alice Dreger’s cover-up of J. Michael Bailey’s vulgar misuse of gender diverse children and the “Danny Ryan” fabrication that got Bailey tenure. In a since-deleted tweet from 2015, Ghorayshi expressed admiration for Dreger: “@AliceDreger happy birthday Alice! ps I am loving your book :))”
Shortly after expressing this love, Ghorayshi presented Dreger as a “liberal” academic instead of an inaugural member of the intellectual dark web, a gateway to the far right. In a “both sides” piece about trans healthcare for youth, Ghorayshi also presented transphobic psychologist J. Michael Bailey and geneticist Eric Vilain as objective or centrist scientists in the middle of the non-affirming coalition, and the transphobic American College of Pediatricians as “religious conservatives”:
But some doctors — as well as an unexpected mix of liberal academics, scientists, and religious conservatives — argue that we have no way of knowing with certainty which prepubescent kids who behave outside of gender norms will come to identify as trans, and which ones will not. Some worry that this approach could steer kids who are just going through a phase into a transgender “track” long before the kids know whether those feelings will really stick. Others say it reinforces outdated stereotypes — giving worried parents the false assurance that their girly boy is actually just a girl who was born in the wrong body. Conservative critics peg the increase in trans kids today to a dangerous new fad in parenting.
Ghorayshi also uncritically presented Jesse Singal’s false version of why Kenneth Zucker was fired (Zucker’s practices were outlawed in 2015 under Bill 77), and showcases Debra Soh’s claim that the affirmative model of care “reinforces outdated stereotypes.” Ghorayshi then cites a conservative Breitbart piece that quotes Zucker, summarizing their view that affirmative care is a dangerous new fad in parenting.
New York Times transgender articles
In the New York Times, Ghorayshi also published “cisgender person under siege” profiles featuring hospital CEO John Warner, surgeon Sidhbh Gallagher, and anti-trans extremist Jamie Reed.
The Warner piece was about the closure of Genecis Children’s Medical Center in Dallas following abortion clinic protest tactics targeting practitioners and leaders. Ghorayshi had described Genecis in the 2016 BuzzFeed piece.
The Gallagher piece was favorably shared by many fascist, gender critical, and cis journalist accounts, including white nationalist Richard Spencer and Daily Wire writer “Christina Buttons,” as well as anti-trans activists Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal, Kenneth Zucker, Cathy Brennan, Julia Mason, and Helen Lewis. It was also shared by a number of Ghorayshi’s current and former colleagues, including Virginia Hughes, Cliff Levy, Christina Jewett, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Ken Bensinger, Oliver Whang, Dan Saltzstein, Judy Rudin, Paul McLeod, Kadia Goba, Josh Barro, Ellie Hall, Derek Robertson, Alison Griffiths, Kinnon Ross MacKinnon, Tina S. Fondeles, Benjamin Goggin, Yeganeh Torbati, Steven Meiers, Jessica Garrison, Mark Yarm, Shannon Palus, Megan Twohey, and Michael Marshall.
In 2025, Ghorayshi promoted anti-trans groups Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender and LGB Courage Coalition as being from the left: “In the United States, a coalition of critics of youth gender medicine from both the right and the lefthave argued for banning the treatments.” The first group is a coalition of parents who do not accept their gender diverse children, and the second is an LGB separatist organization led by anti-trans extremist Jamie Reed that purged all of its conservative trans members in 2024.
“Low-quality evidence”
Ghorayshi wrote a piece about the American Academy of Pediatrics that prominently featured their critics, including anti-trans activist Julia Mason of the hate groupSociety for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. Ghorayshi also parrots the “low-quality evidence” claim put forth by anti-trans activists, based on a scale devised by Gordon Guyatt. Federal judge Sarah E. Geraghty rejected these claims in a 2023 Georgia case where anti-trans activists Paul Hruz, Michael Laidlaw, and James Cantor testified against Yale University professor of pediatrics Meredithe McNamara:
The undisputed record shows that clinical medical decision-making, including in pediatric or adolescent medicine, often is not guided by evidence that would qualify as “high quality” on the scales used by Defendants’ experts. 30 (Doc. 70-1, McNamara Decl. ¶¶ 23–28; Tr. 74:11–75:1 (McNamara Testimony); Tr. 133:614 (Hruz Testimony).) In fact, the record shows that less than 15 percent of medical treatments are supported by “high-quality evidence,” or in other words that 85 percent of evidence that guides clinical care, across all areas of medicine, would be classified as “low-quality” under the scale used by Defendants’ experts. (Doc. 70-1, McNamara Decl. ¶ 25; Tr. 74:11–75:1.) Defendants do not refute Dr. McNamara’s testimony on this point, and indeed they “concede” that “low-quality” evidence “can be considered.” 31
Geraghty also noted the obvious biases of Hruz, Laidlaw and Cantor:
Defendants’ experts’ insistence on a very high threshold of evidence in the context of claims about hormone therapy’s safety and benefits, and on the other hand their tolerance of a much lower threshold of evidence for claims about its risks, the likelihood of desistance and/or regret, and their notions about the ideological bias of a medical establishment that largely disagrees with them. That is cause for some concern about the weight to be assigned to their views, although the Court does not doubt that those they express are genuinely held.
(“Dr. [Paul] Hruz fended and parried questions and generally testified as a deeply biased advocate, not as an expert sharing relevant evidence-based information and opinions. I do not credit his testimony.”); Eknes-Tucker v. Marshall, 603 F. Supp. 3d 1131, 1142–43 (M.D. Ala. 2022) (explaining that the court gave Dr. James Cantor’s “testimony regarding the treatment of gender dysphoria in minors very little weight”); C. P. by & through Pritchard v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, No. 3:20-CV-06145-RJB, 2022 WL 17092846, at *4 (W.D. Wash. Nov. 21, 2022) (noting that it was a “close question” as to whether Dr. Michael Laidlaw was qualified to testify about the medical necessity of gender-affirming care because he has treated only two patients with gender dysphoria and has done no original research on gender identity).
Ghorayshi also wrote an article centered on Jamie Reed, an activist who supports “a national moratorium on the medicalization of kids.” Reed is represented by anti-trans lawyer Vernadette Broyles, who has stated the transgender rights movement poses an “existential threat to our culture.”
2025 podcast series
Ghorayshi and Austin Mitchell produced a six-part podcast series titled The Protocol, which rehashes Ghorayshi’s opinion that healthcare for trans and gender diverse youth has become too easy to obtain, is based on “uncertainty in the scientific evidence,” and needs to return to the rigid gatekeeping that was practiced decades ago.
Francis, Matthew R. (June 5, 2025). Open Letter to Anti-Trans Science Journalists.Galileo’s Pendulum https://galileospendulum.org/2025/06/05/open-letter-to-anti-trans-science-journalists/
Urquhart, Evan (September 3, 2023). “You Betrayed Us, Azeen”: A story on the allegations of former St. Louis gender clinic staffer Jamie Reed left parents who spoke with NYT reporter Azeen Ghorayshi crushed. Assigned https://www.assignedmedia.org/breaking-news/you-betrayed-us-azeen-parents-of-trans-youth-reeling-after-speaking-to-the-nyt
Clark-Callender, Rebecca (August 11, 2023). How the Times Covers Trans Rights.On the Media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/what-we-missed-how-press-covers-trans-rights-on-the-media
Ghorayshi, Azeen (November 2015). Conversations With Anne Fausto-Sterling.Method Quarterly http://www.methodquarterly.com/2015/11/conversations-with-anne-fausto-sterling/
The Post Millennial is a conservative Canadian group blog with consistently anti-transgender coverage.
Background
The Post Millennial was founded in 2017 by Matthew Azrieli and Ali Taghva. In May 2022, The Post Millennial was acquired by Human Events Media Group, which also owns Human Events, an American conservative news website.
