An alliance of pseudo-scientific organisations is working to undermine the rights of trans people everywhere — and they're becoming active in Australia.
This appears to be an exercise in astroturfing.
Astroturfing is a deceptive practice where an organisation or lobby presents an orchestrated marketing or public relations campaign as if it is a genuine grassroots movement. The tobacco industry famously used this approach to give the impression of spontaneous grassroots opposition to smoking reform by creating fake “smokers’ rights” groups.
While the tobacco industry used astroturfing primarily to protect their economic interests, anti-trans disinformation groups are using this strategy to help socialise their extreme views on trans health, and give far-right and anti-trans groups an air of scientific legitimacy.
Their intention is to pass off a small, orchestrated group of anti-trans medical practitioners as a legitimate and science-based movement against gender-affirming care. History repeating: anti-trans disinformation is the new climate denial
Throughout the early 2000s, an organised group of far-right think tanks funnelled billions of dollars to climate deniers, sceptics and geo-engineers. Their sole aim was to undermine public trust in the established science by spreading confusion about the facts of climate change, and casting doubt on the motives of scientific bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
For a public that was still learning about the realities of how fossil fuels were cooking our planet, the huge influx of disinformation, alongside legitimate scientific work, made it incredibly hard for people to discern fact from fiction.
A similar scenario is now playing out in trans health care.
Out of the 10 organisations identified below, seven of them were launched in 2021. Additionally, there is a large amount of overlap in their membership and leadership. Genspect and SEGM share seven of the same advisors.
Stella O’Malley (founder of Genspect, psychotherapist), Lisa Marchiano (Jungian analyst), Sasha Ayad (counsellor), and Roberto D’Angelo (psychiatrist and psychoanalyst) all feature prominently across the organisations, serving as clinical advisors or directors for multiple organisations. In fact, five of the most prominent organisations feature all four of them.
Multiple organisations were officially founded by O’Malley, and all of them involve O’Malley as either an adviser or a director.