Candace Owens is a conservative American writer and anti-transgender activist. Owens is part of a group of conspiracy theorists involved in “transvestigations,” where they make claims that public figures are secretly transgender.
Background
Candace Amber Owens was born on April 29, 1989. Owens grew up in Stamford, Connecticut, graduated from Stamford High School, and attended University of Rhode Island, dropping out before completing a degree. After an internship at Vogue, Owens worked at a private equity firm in administration.
Owens married George Farmer in 2019. They have two children.
In 2021, Owens joined The Daily Wire and hosted Candace, a political talk show. Owens left Daily Wire in March 2024, reportedly over remarks about Israel.
Anti-transgender activism
In 2017, Owens supported banning transgender people without bottom surgery from serving in the United States military.
In 2022, Owens falsely claimed the Robb Elementary School shooter could be transgender.
In 2022, Owens described Drag Queen Story Hour as “child abuse,” adding that parents who take their children “should have their children taken away from them.”
In 2022, Owens said that society would benefit by discriminating more against transgender and non-binary people.
In 2023, Owens said “It is worse than Jim Crow laws because we are mutilating the bodies of children. […] It is Frankenstein. These are human experiments that are being performed on children.”
In February 2025 Owens released Becoming Brigitte, a “transvestigation” into Brigitte Macron, First Lady of France and spouse of French president Emmanuel Macron. Owens concludes that Brigitte Macron is trans, and there’s a vast conspiracy to keep this information hidden.
Angel Eduardo is an American anti-transgender activist.
Background
Angel Lemuel Eduardo was born in March 1985 and grew up in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Eduardo earned a bachelor’s degree from New Jersey City University in 2008 and a master’s degree from Hunter College in 2015.
Eduardo was in the band Blue Food from 2008 to 2016 and contributed to NewsCult.com while doing research for TitleVest. Eduardo the wrote for Action Without Borders (also known as Idealist) from 2019 to 2021.
Eduardo has been a columnist for Center for Inquiry since 2020, and advisor for Greenhouse Scholars since 2022.
Anti-transgender activism
In 2021, Eduardo defended a transphobic special by Dave Chappelle.
Since 2022, Eduardo has been writing for anti-trans publication Quillette.
Bev Jackson is a Dutch anti-transgender activist. Jackson is a founder of UK anti-trans hate group LGB Alliance.
Jackson promotes the conspiracy theory that trans people and gender recognition based on self-identification are erasing or eradicating lesbians.
Background
Beverley Ruth Jackson was born in June 1951. At 11 years old, Jackson reportedly experienced antisemitism at a new school.
Jackson studied math at the London School of Economics. Jackson was a founding member of the UK Gay Liberation Front, the only woman to attend the first GLF meeting in October 1970:
I was a student at LSE. I started there in 1969, I was studying maths, and I walked down the corridor and I saw a poster which said: âFirst meeting of the UK Gay Liberation Front.â It was the most astonishing thing because I had to translate it in my head as to what it might mean. I had heard that âGayâ was a new word for homosexual, and I knew âLiberationâ was about freedom and âFrontâ sounded a bit militant. It sounded very exciting and I thought âI think I want to be on there that sounds right.â I went to this first meeting and there were 19 men there, and just one woman â me â so I was immediately voted on to the steering committee.
[…] I was among the minority of lesbians who decided to work within gay liberation; most lesbians worked within womenâs liberation because of feeling more in common with other womenâs issues. The fact of lesbians being doubly oppressed both as women and as homosexuals is just a really important part of understanding what it means to be a lesbian.
Jackson has worked as a translator and writer. In 2015 Jackson was mostly involved with refugee rights, writing A Month with Starfish, a book about volunteering to aid refugees for a month on the island of Lesbos.
Anti-trans activism
In late 2016 Jackson began criticizing transgender youth and was surprised that other disagreed. Jackson’s radicalization happened in 2018 when Angela Wild went to the front of the Pride march with the âGet the L Outâ group.
Jackson wrote a letter to Stonewall president Ruth Hunt expressing concerns “about young lesbians having nowhere to meet, not being able to call themselves lesbians any more, about the way in which people were encouraging children to think that they might be born in the wrong body and a whole range of other concerns that really worried me.” The letter was ignored.
Jackson has said of trans women:
Look: you can be a lovely gentle male and you can wear dresses and you can call yourself Lilian and itâs absolutely fine. But youâre still a male and you can imagine you might be all sorts of things, but youâre still a male.
The final straw for Jackson was when Stonewall opposed ex-transgender activist Keira Bell, who sued the Tavistock GIDS Clinic.
After a meeting commemorating the 50th anniversary of Gay Liberation Front was cancelled, Jackson and Kate Harris decided to have a secret meeting to start LGB Alliance. “But everyone kept the secret. Not one of the 70 people we invited gave away the meeting at which we formed LGB Alliance.”
Jackson remains committed to separatism for lesbian and gay people:
Gay men and lesbians need spaces of their own and they have a right to spaces of their own â and that we have to say this now in 2021 is an absolute outrage. We could really lose a lot here if we donât stand together and fight against this madness.
Bridle, David (February 18, 2021). The first woman in the Gay Liberation Front in 1970 is fighting again for lesbian and gay rights in 2021. Lesbian and Gay News https://lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/02/the-first-woman-in-the-gay-liberation-front-in-1970-is-fighting-again-for-lesbian-and-gay-rights-in-2021/
RĂłisĂn Michaux is an Irish anti-transgender activist based in Brussels who claims to be “researching the explosion of the gender identity movement in EU/global institutions.”
Background
Michaux reportedly grew up experiencing poverty in a housing estate in a single-parent home.
Michaux “wrote for culture magazines in Belgium and abroad” before becoming a “Twitter TERF.”
Michaux is married and is a parent of children, one of whom was born in 2012.
It has also been a pipeline for anti-trans radicalization.
Ribeiro 2019 study
“Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube” examines how YouTube algorithms in the 2010s infected viewers with recommendations from the alt-right, alt-lite, and intellectual dark web. The kinds of radicalization included anti-trans radicalization. Below are the channels analyzed.
Broadcasters also mentioned transgender identity in roughly 3 out of 10 videos, with hosts Bet-David and Rogan discussing the topic in more than half of their most-viewed videos. The podcasters and their guests â particularly comedians â often portrayed trans people as aberrant, and reinforced ideas of a gender binary.
Thirty percent of videos discussing transgender identity also mention children. Hosts criticized public schools for letting children explore their gender identity, and staunchly opposed gender-affirming care for minors. According to the American Medical Association, physicians providing gender-affirming care are bound by their ethical duty to act in a patientâs best interest, and clinical guidelines help them carefully consider whether care is medically necessary for improving the physical and mental health of patients.
In one April 2024 discussion on Fridmanâs show, the former US Representative Tulsi Gabbard argued that advocating for the rights of transgender individuals infringed on the rights of women. âThey,â said Gabbard, referring to Democrats, âare actively pushing for boys who identify as girls to compete against girls in sports. Changing our language so that the word woman, the identity of being a woman, is essentially being erased from our society.â As she spoke, Fridman, dressed in his signature dark suit, listened intently.
The arguments have already built support for sweeping policy changes across the nation. In 15% of videos mentioning transgender identity, hosts also mentioned sports, arguing that it is inappropriate for transgender and intersex athletes to compete. In January, House lawmakers passed a Republican-led bill that would prohibit federally funded schools from allowing transgender students to participate on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
Studied podcasters
Adin Ross â Adin Live
Andrew Schulz â Flagrant
The Nelk Boys â Full Send Podcast
Logan Paul â Impaulsive
Joe Rogan â The Joe Rogan Experience
Lex Fridman â The Lex Fridman Podcast
Patrick Bel-David â PBD Podcast
Shawn Ryan â Shawn Ryan Show
Theo Von â This Past Weekend
References
Davey Alba, Leon Yin, Julia Love, Ashley Carman, Priyanjana Bengani, Rachael Dottle, Elena MejĂa (January 22, 2025). The Second Trump Presidency, Brought to You by YouTubers. Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-youtube-podcast-men-for-trump/
“Mr. Menno” is the stage name of Menno Kuijper, a Dutch anti-transgender extremist and separatist based in the UK.
Background
Menno Kuijper was born June 19, 1976. Kuijper held numerous roles in marketing and social media from 1996 to 2012. From 2012 to 2021 Kuijper was head of design and production at mobile marketing firm Gappt.
Menno appeared in theatrical productions before focusing exclusively on anti-trans content. Performances include Brixton Batty Boy (2012).
Anti-trans activism
Since 2022 Kuijper has been director of communications for anti-trans group The Gay Men’s Network.
Kuijper considers the trans rights movement to be “gender woo woo,” promoting the outdated terminology “homosexual male” and other binary ideas about traits and behaviors.
In 2022 Kuijper created a âsea shantyâ for queer trans-exclusionary group LGB Alliance.
Also in 2022, Kuijper showed up to an anti-trans âSave Our Sex Jubilee campaignâ in a black morph suit and a diaper with a sign that said “Right Side of History.” Kuijper was apparently mocking black bloc protesters who interrupted the anti-trans âStanding for Womenâ protest in Manchester earlier that month. Transphobes mocked those protesters online as “Black Pampers,” a play on Black Panthers. Kuijper insisted it was not a blackface performance.
The New York Times is an American media organization. With some notable exceptions, their coverage of transgender issues has been neutral to negative. The Science, Opinion, and Books sections have been particularly biased on trans issues.
No transgender journalist has appeared on the New York Times masthead since its founding in 1851. Due to the hostile work environment, no transgender reporters work there as of 2023 according to a San Francisco Chroniclereport.
Assessments
It is considered a paper of record for the United States, along with The Washington Post.
Reliability: 47.50 out of 64 (32+ is “generally good”)
Bias: -4.01 (9.5% left-leaning bias)
NewsGuard (as of January 2020)
Approximate score: 100
Standards failed: None
Anti-transgender coverage crisis
Decades of anti-transgender coverage culminated in a newsroom revolt in 2023:
According to Times sources, there used to be open Slack channels where staff could discuss any issues they had with coverage, and they freely voiced objections at all-hands meetings with the masthead editors. But now, with the advent of virtual meetings, management doesnât pick the uncomfortable questions during Q&A.
And, that employee said, there are still no out trans reporters on staff at the paper.
Wemple’s opinion piece is a case study in how anti-trans journalists misunderstand and misrepresent trans and gender diverse minorities in their coverage, and how attitudes like Wemple’s keep trans journalists out of mainstream legacy media.
Background
Erik Wemple joined the Washington Post in 2011 and was a media critic there in 2023. See the main Erik Wemple page for additional biographical background.
Unlike the Times, the Post has generally limited anti-trans pieces like Wemple’s to the Opinion section. As an example, in 2022 the Post published an opinion piece by conservative therapists Laura Edwards-Leeper and Erica Anderson promoting their beliefs that “gender dysphoria” is a legitimate disease and that therapists like them should get paid to control who gets access to trans health services, not physicians.
Despite a few small issues like deadnaming, Post reporter Sara Solovitch covered this controversy fairly well in 2018. Solovitch centered the piece on a trans teen and spoke with Diane Ehrensaft, Joshua Safer, and Stephen Rosenthal, who represent the medical consensus, with Anderson as the conservative holdout.
2023 Post editorial
This section is being written.
The piece leads off with two tweets Wemple considers alarmist for their phrasing:
“jeopardizing trans folksâ lives” [quoting Minton 2023]
“genocide” [quoting Bond 2023]
In a great example of cis journalist groupthink, A.G. Sulzberger used the same journalistic and rhetorical tactic to lead off in the CJR:
Jones, Imara (July 17, 2023). S02E05: Capturing The New York Times. The Anti-Trans Hate Machine: A Plot Against Equality https://translash.org/transcript-capturing-the-new-york-times/
Doyle, Jude Allison S. (February 27, 2023). What went wrong at the New York Times? Xtra https://xtramagazine.com/power/what-went-wrong-at-the-new-york-times-246409
Sulzberger, A.G. (April 4, 2022). 2022 State of The Times Remarks.New York Times Company https://www.nytco.com/press/2022-state-of-the-times-remarks/
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American writer and anti-transgender activist. Khan comes to anti-trans “sex science” via “race science” and is best known for laundering extremist views about race into mainstream media.
Khan hopes to usher in the “second age of eugenics” through genetic screening and manipulation to increase “good” traits and eliminate “bad” traits. Many of Khan’s like-minded colleagues consider being trans and gender diverse to be undesirable traits to be eliminated from the gene pool.
Newamul K. “Razib” Khan was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1977. Khan’s family moved to the US in 1982. Khan lived in upstate New York as a child before the family moved to Oregon.
Khan earned two bachelor’s degrees from University of Oregon in 2000 and 2006. While there, Khan wrote a blog called Razib’s Rants, which later became Gene Expression. Following graduate work at UC Davis, Khan was a software engineer before receiving money from Ron Unz to write about hereditarian and eugenic topics.
Cussins, Jessica (June 26, 2014). Quantified and Analyzed, Before the First Breath. Center for Genetics and Society https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/biopolitical-times/quantified-and-analyzed-first-breath
Khan, Razib (June 18, 2008). Curing the Gay.Unz Review https://www.unz.com/gnxp/curing-the-gay/