On Saturday, April 4, a new study landed in Acta Paediatrica. By Sunday morning, the "Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine" (SEGM) — a known hub of the "anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience network" according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — had posted about it on X. By Monday, it had 446,000 views. Conservative news outlets like The Federalist have already published on the study entirely without criticism, and it quickly made its way into the hands of centrist and anti-trans liberal journalists like Matt Yglesias and Benjamin Ryan.

It hasn't been covered by the New York Times or the Washington Post... yet. But it will be. And when it is, they will undoubtedly use their reputation among liberals to launder this latest installment of the anti-trans agenda into something more respectable. SEGM's own 2024 year-in-review boasts that New York Times columnist Pamela Paul described them as "one of the most reliable nonpartisan organizations dedicated to the field" of anti-trans lobbying. We know what's happening.

"Every time one of these studies drops, it gets laundered through policy bodies and court filings as settled science. It isn't," writes Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical law professor who provided a thorough analysis of the study on Bluesky, which forms the basis for much of what follows. (Be sure to subscribe to her journalism at The Dissident.)

In this installment of Rx Resist, I'll walk you through this pipeline, so we can start to learn how to analyze both science journalism and its underlying studies, to explore potential political bias, to demonstrate how this bias finds its way into mainstream media — how a politically motivated paper moves from a right-wing network through centrist amplifiers toward mainstream coverage.

Normally, this is where I would drop a paywall break! Today, you are getting this story for free, so be sure to subscribe and upgrade to paid to access the rest of this skill-building series and the media literacy course at The Well, launching in June!