Academic research sometimes reveals new and interesting things. Other times, it validates what many of us have long known or suspected. Recall the studies in the 1990s and early 2000s on whether chicken soup helps in treating the common cold. Rigorous scientific research found that generations of moms and grandmas were right; chicken soup is good for you when you’re sick. In that vein, new academic research has found a demonstrable link between transgender ideology and violence.
Researchers found that “gender ideological-belief measures were strongly associated with left-wing authoritarianism.” The study further determined that left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) and gender ideology were “positively associated with justification of political violence,” specifically when it involved murder, arson, property destruction, and violence against police.
These findings may not be surprising to those who wept over the murders of children in Christian churches by people suffering under transgender ideology. Transgender ideology was also evident in the attempted assassination of Supreme Court Associate Justice Brent Kavanaugh, the triple homicide earlier this year at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, hockey rink, and other assorted crimes.
Cutting through the gobbledegook that invariably accompanies academic research, the study itself was pretty straightforward. A group of 1,208 adults was asked how they felt about a series of statements involving medical responses to people expressing transgender ideology, which the researchers called a Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale (CGAS). This battery of questions consisted entirely of statements from the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, all of whose members stand to make a lot of money promoting medical treatments for gender ideologies.
The participants were then asked how they felt about political violence. Specifically, they were asked about the murders of Charlie Kirk and health insurance executive Brian Thompson; killing President Trump; arson at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities; violence targeting police; and destroying wealthy people’s property. The results showed that those more prone to agree with transgender ideology were more likely to justify political violence.
In the vanguard of left-wing defenders of this ideology is the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which promptly denounced the findings, calling it junk science because it was funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and because researchers included a couple of people from the Manhattan Institute and the Network Contagion Research Institute, a pair of center-right think tanks. Mind you, the HRC didn’t say what was wrong with the study, just the people involved with it.
Not unsurprisingly, the HRC failed to mention that one of the co-principal investigators in this study is Lee Jussim, Ph.D., the Distinguished Professor at Rutgers New Brunswick’s Psychology Department. The study also included two Rutgers doctoral candidates. Sixty percent of the researchers in this study are affiliated with one of America’s premier universities, so this was not the product of a bunch of right-wing hacks asking loaded questions. It was a thoughtful piece of academic research.
The HRC’s response to the study’s findings is entirely predictable. Launching attacks on the researchers instead of the research has been a staple of crisis communications for decades. Nobody is saying that everybody deceived into transgender or related ideologies, or those supporting them, are violent or prone to violence. There’s an old saying that correlation is not causation, which is true, and which the study explicitly states.
But there’s another saying: where there’s smoke, there’s fire. That’s the next step for investigators seeking to better understand “radicalization pathways” that may be connected with gender ideology. A second study is planned to “take the causal direction issue head on by using an experimental design to test whether exposure to CGAS-consistent content produces the patterns predicted by the present theory.”
Interestingly, the study concluded, “People who strongly endorse gender ideology positions score dramatically higher on left-wing authoritarianism than their political identity alone would produce.” This association with “coercion, punishment and norm enforcement” isn’t limited to those with declared center-left affiliations. This might account for the antisocial behaviors of pro-trans allies when confronted with someone who thinks otherwise.
The researchers concluded that related work in their analysis “further suggests that when a political conflict is framed as a moral emergency involving dangerous or demonized outgroups, violence can come to seem permissible or necessary.” The study specifically identified “Trans-Genocide Belief” as a perceived threat that is “associated with elevated justification for political violence.” The threat of such heated political rhetoric inciting partisans to violence is very real, and this Trans-Genocide messaging is standard fare for Democrats and socialists seeking elective office, along with their allies.
HRC is denouncing this study because it indicts some of their favored talking points. But the shocking examples of murder and violence by transgender men and women did not happen in a vacuum. They happened in an atmosphere of rhetorical lunacy designed to mislead and inflame LGBTQ radicals and their fellow travelers. Words are not necessarily violence, but they can clearly encourage it.
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