The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups, released an in-depth report this week combating what they call LGBTQ “junk science.”

The introduction reads: “...as this report and accompanying documentation detail, the actors funding and using anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience are also lynchpins of political campaigns to dismantle gender and racial equity, the rights of pregnant people and rights to privacy and bodily autonomy. Many of the same actors also sustain political movements to expand white Christian privilege, undermine confidence in science and medicine, dismantle public education, and, ultimately, limit the political engagement of marginalized people as well as democratic accountability.”

The report looks at America’s history with eugenics, or the forced sterilization of the “insane,” the “feebleminded,” the “dependent” and the “diseased.” At one time, 32 states had laws allowing the government to do this.

“Pseudoscience is an enforcement mechanism for systemic inequality, and it is not victimless. In the case of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience, the goal is to reinforce hetero- and cisnormativity, most recently by perpetuating disinformation about gender-affirming health care and equating transgender identity with an ideological contagion,” the report reads.

The report, CAPTAIN, stands for Combating Anti-LGBTQ+ Pseudoscience Through Accessible Information Narratives.

The stated goals from the report include:

• Analyze the proliferation of anti-LGBTQ pseudoscience in the U.S. and report on the predominant sources and purveyors of anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience.
  
  
• Support LGBTQ people by creating a repository of information cataloging debunked myths and junk science studies that are used to justify anti-LGBTQ public policy and medical practices.
  
  
• Explicitly name and unpack anti-transgender extremism to better track groups that traffic in pseudoscience targeting trans, gender-nonconforming and intersex people, and understand the experiences of marginalized groups at the intersection of gender identity.

The report also identifies the organizations that are major culprits of this pseudoscience, which include Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.

Read the entire report at SPLCenter.org/captain.