The True Crime-ification of Gender Panic

The girlies are transvestigating. So what?

Last spring, something weird happened (besides the entire world grinding to halt and asking #whereiskate???). I was talking to a longtime business-y friend about Conspiracy, She Wrote when she casually suggested I check out Candace Owens’ YouTube channel. Not in a here’s what NOT to do kind of way—she genuinely found Owens’ conspiracy content…entertaining.

I wasn’t sure if she knew about Candace Owens’ well-documented history as a far-right commentator–the homophobia, anti-Blackness, anti-semitism, anti-feminism, etc. I wouldn’t necessarily expect this friend to know who she was. On the rare occasions Owens infiltrated my feeds, it was because she’d been dunked on, decried or namechecked in a mass shooter’s manifesto. But before I could ask, my friend was filling me in on Owens’ baseless and unoriginal conspiracy theory that French First Lady Brigitte Macron is her husband Emmanuel Macron’s biological father.

Transvestigation–a portmanteau of transgender and investigation–refers to a genre of far-right conspiracy theories wherein all celebrities and public figures are secretly trans. Think: trans panic Illuminati. Male celebs and athletes occasionally get caught in its crosshairs, but cisgender women (and First Ladies) are its usual suspects.

My friend didn’t suggest she believed Candace Owens’ transvestigation of Brigitte Macron, just that Owens told it so intensely she was hooked.

I didn’t take my friend’s advice. But it stuck in my brain like an earworm. It wasn’t just that she had stumbled onto Candace Owens. It was that she found transvestigation—this hyper-specific strain of gender conspiracy—so engaging. At the time, it felt like a bizarre blip, an algorithmic fluke. Unladies, if only.

Enter the true crime girlies

Last week, Media Matters’ Abbie Richards reported Candace Owens’ “transvestigation” series targeting France’s first lady is reaching new audiences on TikTok. Just in time for the literal outlawing of gender nonconformity, Owens is spinning the same unhinged story about Macron, except now it’s a 7-hour long, true crime-ified “investigative” series.

The tonal shift is part of Owens’ broader entree into lifestyle influencerdom aimed at attracting a wider (ie, unradicalized) female audience, and the strategy appears to be working. Owens’ latest series on Macron has yielded tens of millions of related TikTok views, a surge in YouTube subscribers and as Richards reports, word-of-mouth recommendations from one of the most coveted podcast demos, “women who enjoy true crime content.”

Nevermind the inherent transphobia, girlies. A head of state could be married to his FATHER. It’s a shocking psychosexual mystery that must be monetized solved!

Transvestigation 101

How can you tell if someone’s “secretly trans”? You can’t. The end. Goodbye. But transvestigators will tell you all about skull measurements, eye spacing, anatomical ratios and the minutest protrusions in pelvic regions that pseudoscientifically “prove” someone is lying about their gender. The conspiracy tactic follows an old blueprint: claim a marginalized group secretly controls world (in this case via the “trans agenda,” of course). Then invent some junk science to justify it.

“It is so tied into antisemitic tropes,” Lexi Webster told me last year on Conspiracy, She Wrote. “That kind of Nazi propaganda of if somebody looks a certain way then they're part of this elite cabal that controls certain aspects of society and the world.”

Lexi is the deputy director of digital humanities at the University of Southampton in the UK who has studied transvestigation content and its trollish role in digital extremism.

“The new political discourse around trans people is just a dilution of the kind of point of transvestigations, or what looks to be the point of transvestigations, right?” Lexi said. “It's a dilution of the…ideology around trans identities at the moment that is some kind of social contagion in relation to trans people.”

This is why transvestigation, ‘woke mind virus’ and related gender conspiracy theories are popping off. Not because they’re substantive or necessarily sincere, but because they’re all spokes in the wheel of organized transphobia, which scapegoats trans folks and their allies as the enemies within.

“That is what ties into fascism,” Lexi explained. “It's that [trans identity] is inherently threatening to the standard ways of being and working, the natural order of things or the natural way of being, and it's therefore an inherent danger because it presents an alternative world, or that we're not in control of our own world.”

Case in point: women’s sports.

The Transvestigation Olympics

While “gender-critical” lady cops would probably take as much offense to being called conspiracy theorists as they do to being called terfs, tranvestigation is the logical next step in their villainizing of trans women and girls as predatory. Once you ban them from bathrooms and athletic competitions, how do you know they won’t try sneaking back in? You must transvestigate.

In February, the International Boxing Association seized on the White House exec order banning trans women’s sports participation to file a legal complaint against the International Olympic Committee for Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s participation in the 2024 Summer Olympics where, crucially, she won gold. At the Games, Khelif’s Italian opponent withdrew less than a minute into their match. That was all it took for JK Rowling and “save women’s sports” types to go full transvestigation, unleashing a tidal wave of online harassment and threats of violence against Khelif. That Khelif was assigned female at birth, raised as a girl and has always boxed in the women’s category made no difference to them. Speaking to NPR in 2024, Payoshni Mitra of Humans of Sport highlighted how “women coming from global south countries are often the ones being targeted” by this kind of formalized transvestigation and invasive sex testing in elite women’s athletics (but NOT men’s, mind you).

As Julia Serano pointed out at the time, the outrage over Khelif’s targeting got major press attention partly because she’s cis. As if the shitstorm she’s endured is more egregiously wrong than if she were trans. Serano likened the panicky detective work of transvestigation–or what [she] more accurately calls ungendering–to straight folks and gaydar in the 90s. “[P]eople who have some (but not extensive) familiarity with trans people who develop an overactive or compulsive “transdar” that could readily be resolved if they simply recognized the vastness of human gender and sexual diversity, rather than dwelling on the existence of (real or imagined) trans people.”

Why Does “Transvestigation” Happen?

And now, that same reactionary surveillance is being mandated from the highest levels of state power. The difference is, they call it “defending women” or “safeguarding national security.”

If it’s true crime that girlies are looking for, how about the mass tranvestigations being carried out across the federal government–just for starters? The Pentagon has ordered the identification and expulsion of all transgender service members from the military, National Guard and Reserves. Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired more than 100 intelligence officers who’d used an NSA-sanctioned LGBTQ employee support group chat, calling it “disgusting” and “an egregious violation of trust.” The Department of Homeland Security updated its policies to allow for the targeted surveillance of people on the basis of their actual or suspected sexual orientation and gender identity. The Department of Justice has also been empowered to investigate public school educators who aren’t on board with the Department of Education’s mandate to eradicate any whiff of non-heteronormativity from the classroom (probably including use of the term heteronormative). IS THAT NOT SUS ENOUGH TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF? Meanwhile, this deluge of dehumanizing policies obscures the real crisis: normalizing violence against trans and gender nonconforming people, like Sam Nordquist, a Black trans man brutally tortured and murdered in upstate New York last month.

Womanosphere rising?

For all the valid discourse on the manosphere radicalizing young men to white male supremacism, are we overlooking the rise and hardening of a complementary anti-feminist womanosphere? We can’t talk enough about male loneliness and masculinity crises, but are transvestigators, tradwives and antivax moms pointing to a parallel “femininity crisis” indoctrinating cis women to gender panic?

I doubt true crime girlies are bingeing Candace Owens’ transvestigation TikToks and suddenly turning into Nancy Mace. Most probably don’t vibe with Owens’ politics and hate speech. That’s also what makes it so dangerous. Even if said girlies are unmoved by the general cruelty and fascist underpinnings of it all, at the very least they’re normalizing an even more impossible and punishing beauty standard. Trans misogyny will always bite cis women’s hands that feed it.

Recently, a childhood photo of Candace Owens started circulating online, and commenters began “just asking questions” about her gender identity. Transvestigation, in fact, is easy to spot. Look for the snake devouring its own tail.

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news worth knowing

• Mahmoud Khalil Is the First Activist to Be Disappeared by Trump | Laura Jedeed, The Nation. “The choice of the victim is extremely strategic.”

• Migrant Sex Workers’ Resistance Offers a Blueprint for Fighting Authoritarianism | Chanelle Gallant, Truthout. “If you want to learn how to resist authoritarianism in the United States, ask those already resisting it: migrant sex workers.”

• Health Paranoia and the Politics of MAHA | Hanna Goldberg, Jacobin. If like me, you’re catching up on the Make America Healthy Again agenda, this is a must-read.

• The Fight Against Cervical Cancer and for the HPV Vaccine | Abria Mobley, Ms. Magazine. Speaking of MAHA and Project 2025, eyes on HPV vaccine access and antivax misinformation.

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til next time… iykyk