a research library Trans Rhetoric
Library

Where anti-trans rhetoric comes from, who spreads it, and how often it appears online.

Content note

This library quotes slurs and anti-trans claims in order to document and count them. Quotes are kept to what is needed to identify a talking point.

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Talking points

Talking points and slurs

Each entry: what it claims or does, who documents it, and what we measured. Rebuttals are linked, not rewritten. Counts are explained in Measurements.

Slurs

“Troon” / “troons”

  • What it is: a slur for transgender people. Listed with “tranny” in Beth’s Transphobia Glossary (checked).
  • Measured: about 2,550 original posts a day on Twitter in English before 8 October 2026 (daily range 1,713 to 4,321), plus thousands of reposts. About 10 a day on Bluesky.

“Groomer”

  • What it does: paints LGBTQ+ people as child abusers.
  • Documented by: CCDH and the Human Rights Campaign (2022) counted 989,547 tweets using slurs such as “groomer” about LGBTQ+ people in January to July 2022, and a 406% rise in “grooming” talk in the month after Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” law (checked).
  • Measured: about 41 posts a day on Bluesky; a hand check of 47 posts found none using it this way (mostly pet grooming and abuse call-outs). Not yet counted on Twitter.

“Zippertits”

  • What it is: a slur for trans men, about mastectomy scars. In Beth’s glossary (checked). Not measured.

Claims

“There’s no such thing as trans (kids)”

  • What it claims: that trans people, or trans children, do not exist.
  • Documented by: The 74 (14 December 2023) reported a New York City education council member writing “There is no such thing as trans kids” in a parents’ group chat; the city’s education department called the remarks “despicable” (checked). This is a single documented incident, not research on how common the claim is. Beth’s library has no page dedicated to it.
  • Measured: about 150 original posts a day on Twitter (“no such thing as trans” or “no such thing as a trans”, English, before 8 October 2026; range 72 to 243). Under 2 a day on Bluesky.

Bottom surgery as a “wound”

  • What it claims: that vaginoplasty leaves a wound the body keeps trying to close.
  • Documented by: LGBTQ Nation (Gwendolyn Smith, 11 April 2019) reports Christine Burns MBE describing it as a myth; dilators are needed while healing and are largely replaced by ordinary activity later (checked). Burns is reported to trace the claim to Germaine Greer’s The Whole Woman (unverified: seen only in a search summary).
  • Measured: too rare to track. “Gaping wound” with a trans term appeared about 2 times a day on Twitter; the phrases are mostly used about injuries, games and fiction.

“Gender ideology”

  • What it does: frames trans people as an ideology or movement rather than people.
  • Documented by: GLAAD’s online-hate glossary has an entry (unverified: not opened). Beth’s glossary has “Transgender ideology / trans-rights activist (TRA)” (checked: the entry exists).
  • Measured: about 15 posts a day on Bluesky in English; 0 to 5 in German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. Not yet counted on Twitter.

“Protect women” / women’s sports

  • What it claims: that trans women threaten women’s safety or fairness in sport.
  • Documented by: Beth’s GC Arguments has pages on sports participation and on the claim that women’s and trans rights clash (checked: pages listed).
  • Measured: on Bluesky, “women’s sports” about 82 a day and “protect women” about 35, but a hand check found 1 to 3 of 50 and 0 to 2 of 48 posts using the framing; the rest were fans or critics. Not yet counted on Twitter.

Other gender-critical terms counted on Bluesky

“Gender critical” (about 20 a day), “AGP” (about 24), “what is a woman” (about 6), “trans ideology” (about 6), “biological male” (about 3), “adult human female” and “autogynephilia” (about 2). Beth’s library covers autogynephilia, “What is a woman?” and the film Adult Human Female (checked: pages listed). None counted on Twitter yet.

“Sex-based rights” and “single-sex spaces”

  • What it claims: that trans people’s rights take something away from women’s rights.
  • Documented by: Mendelsohn et al. (ACL 2023) list “sex-based rights” as a transphobic dog whistle, citing a Medium post by David Allsopp (checked: paper and glossary). Related entries in their glossary include “sex is real”, “biological woman” and “mixed sex”. “Single-sex spaces”, “single-sex rights” and “biology-based rights” were proposed by Emma; no source documenting them has been checked yet.
  • Measured: not yet. “Single-sex spaces” also appears in ordinary discussion of toilets, changing rooms and services, so it needs a hand check before any count means anything.

“Trans violence” and the “trans shooter” myth

  • What it claims: that trans people are disproportionately violent, especially as mass shooters.
  • Documented by: Transitics (Aleksandra Vaca, 11 February 2026) reports public figures blaming trans people as a group after the Tumbler Ridge shooting and calls the narrative a hoax, citing FactCheck.org that trans people were behind under 0.1% of mass shootings since 2013 (checked: Transitics; FactCheck.org not yet read). Transitics (19 September 2025) reports “transgender extremist” moving from a right-wing media dog whistle toward an FBI label (checked).
  • Measured: not yet. Counts of “trans violence” would include reporting and rebuttals.

Influence-operation topics

“Trans youth”, “Woke Wars”

  • Documented by: DFRLab (September 2024): a fake LGBTQ+ outlet run by the Russian operation Doppelganger filed stories under the topics “Trans youth” and “Woke Wars” (checked).
  • Measured: “trans youth” about 27 posts a day on Bluesky; “woke” about 1,826. Both count every use of the words, so they measure the topic, not the operation.