The right has been ginning up hatred against transgender people for years now in order to pass bans on sports and gender-affirming care amid their War on Woke. But now that every state that could pass one of these laws has already done so, they’re looking for new targets… and they’re using artificial intelligence (AI) to make up new ones and keep feeding their hunger for hatred.
In just the past week, right-wingers have been outraged that:
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One thing that these news items all have in common is that the right clearly wants people to get angry about them, dropping words like “creepy” into their stories about them and complaining about “taxpayer dollars” going towards “woke” (even if their arguments about the funding make little sense). They want people to be mad at trans people, even though there is not much left to get mad about.
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Another thing these recent stories all have in common is that they’re not news: They don’t involve anyone being harmed. They don’t involve elected officials or celebrities. They’re not even originating in local news sources that might be interested in them because they tell locals about events happening around them.
Several of the non-stories I listed above originated in UK media and were almost immediately picked up by US-based outlets, hungry for something to be mad about, no matter where it happened. The last story, about the trans student in Florida, actually happened in February 2025, but it still went viral on social media this past month.
And when they can’t even find trans stories to get mad about in international media, the right will just make some up. I started seeing videos like the ones below on social media about a month or so ago. These videos are, to me, obviously fake, either made with actors or AI. They all involve a dad or a husband standing outside a public women’s room blocking a shouting trans woman (usually wearing multiple rainbows, usually with a deep voice) from entering the bathroom.
Sometimes I see them with an AI watermark, but not everyone notices those. Other times, those watermarks are cropped out.
Prime the audience with ai slop that tricks the boomers. Then pay an actor to recreate it.
Obvious psyop.
Anyways where’s the Epstein files? https://t.co/vPbxWwziSY pic.twitter.com/AWc07Yg8k0
— Nat Yandura (@NatYandura) July 23, 2026
It’s unclear how much of an appetite the public has for this sort of hate propaganda. The public has made it clear that they just plain don’t think about trans people as much as Republicans think they do. Surveys have shown that, while voters aren’t supportive of trans rights across the board, their votes are unlikely to be swayed by trans rights issues.
But if this propaganda continues to spread, it could make people care more. The extent to which people care about a given topic is co-productive with the media environment. The more they care, the more content they’ll see that feeds their beliefs, both because of how social media algorithms function and how media companies respond to traffic to certain topics. And the more content people see like that, the more they’re likely to be persuaded that this is something they should care about.
The bottom line is that there is little we can do about this.
One social media user – a person who is likely LGBTQ+ or an ally – posted a comment in response to Care Bears story (LGBTQ Nation posts links to its stories to a number of social media platforms that allow comments). This person said that the artist’s claim that Funshine Bear is trans is a “counterproductive action.”
“This kind of nonsense does nothing for supporting trans rights,” the anonymous commenter said. “It just gives fodder to the haters on the right, which they then use as a distraction and distortion. Focus on trans rights as human rights — not talking about the gender and pronouns of kids toys.”
I can understand their frustration. We’re in the middle of a crisis and someone is stirring up right-wing anger by talking about trans Care Bears?
But… there are tens of millions of queer and trans people. There is no way to keep every single one of us on message 100% of the time. Sometimes we’re going to talk about queer and trans representation in the media – what the Care Bears story was fundamentally about – and that shouldn’t be an issue. It wouldn’t be an issue if the right wasn’t scouring the planet for trans stories to get mad about.
And if anti-trans forces are using AI to generate videos for people to get mad at, there is no way to even pretend that this is about reality anymore. This is not a case of people getting mad about something that really happened that subsequently got blown out of proportion. This is about how targeted hatred against a group can make others feel powerful and united, and they want more of that feeling, no matter who gets hurt (or what has to get made up) in the process.
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