A few years ago, in the particularly stinky comment section of a Twitter post I’d made that had gone mildly viral among transphobes and MAGA types, I had my first interaction with a “transvestigator”. They’d copied my profile picture and circled my jawline, my left eye, and my jauntily co*cked leg, and simply captioned the picture with “inverted?”.
I had no idea what this meant, but I assumed it was not a transphobe taking the time to point out just how beautiful and sexy my features were. I never thought it would be part of a broader online conspiracy, lumping me in with such luminaries as Jennifer Lopez, Henry Cavill and Margot Robbie. Like those (also cisgender) stars, I’d just been tranvestigated.
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What even is transvestigation?
Extreme scrutiny of celebrities is nothing new – it’s why the paparazzi exist, it’s why gossip magazines and sites thrive, it’s why memoirs were invented. We’re fascinated by these rich and beautiful idiots.
Transvestigation takes this scrutiny a step further into somewhere weird and extremely bigoted.
“The ‘transvestigation’ conspiracy involves internet pundits using phrenology to ‘prove’ that apparently cisgender celebrities are in fact trans, despite pretending otherwise,” says Dr. Jay Daniel Thompson, a Senior Lecturer in Professional Communication at RMIT University, who is currently writing a book about the ethics of reporting on online conspiracy theories. The term these people use instead of trans or transgender or slurs is, I find out, “inverted”.
“This conspiracy movement has its genesis in sources that include ongoing rumours and urban legends about the sexual and sexed lives of famous people, and moral panics about trans and gender/sexual diversity, and specifically the allegedly harmful impact this is having on young people,” says Dr. Thompson.
He also points out that transvestigation shares a lot in common with other online conspiracies, and is sometimes based on the assumption that “trans” is a nefarious invention of sinister forces like Big Pharma or billionaires like George Soros. For most transvestigators, this process of mass “inversion” is just one aspect of societal corruption.
In their view, it is a practice sitting alongside other forms of widespread cultural breakdown, like pizzagate-esque child trafficking and adrenochrome consumption.
“The ‘transvestigation’ theory reads like a mash-up of QAnon, celebrity gossip and the myriad anti-trans conspiracies,” explains Dr Thompson. “In all of these theories, ‘innocent’ – read: apparently asexual-but-soon-to-be-heterosexual-and-cisgender – young people are having their livelihood threatened by duplicitous, sexually predatory elites. My sense is that ‘transvestigation’ conspiracy isn’t (yet) as well-known as some others, like QAnon or anti-vaxx. This doesn’t diminish the potential danger of this conspiracy.”
Who transvestigates the transvestigators?
When you loiter in transvestigation groups, like I’ve been doing for the past year – Facebook groups, discords, YouTube, subreddits, odd Twitter accounts – you’re swiftly introduced into a whole new language. One of the Facebook groups I’m in has over 17,000 members.
You’ll have Qanon and antivax terms like “pineal glands”, and a wealth of religious references, mostly centred around Satanism. But the bread and butter of every post is essentially digital phrenology – a delight in dissecting the physical characteristics of celebrities for clues of deviation from arbitrary gender norms.
The average post will be a picture of someone like Margot Robbie – flawless, beautiful – with a caption like “Man?”. They will then be followed by comments supporting this theory, from a baffling melting pot of different perspectives.
“Very strong features, straight wide shoulders, square jaw, open arch denture with very wide smile, wide-spaced eyes, male energy. Ironically he was cast to portrait the BARBIE doll!!!!!” says one comment, with multiple likes.
Some tranvestigators have different “tells” they rely upon in their research. I found one who seeks out what they call a “wonky eye”, who had posted hundreds of photos of celebrities squinting against the sun or a camera flash, judged as secretly trans.
And there is a breathtakingly broad scope to these investigations that often focuses on huge stars and celebrities, like Taylor Swift and Harry Styles and the Kardashians. But every so often a German politician or a local soap star will fall into the crosshairs, too.
“Yes, they do things like encourage ear piercing which is, I am told, [sic] helps separate the pineal connection and add all the toxins to the air, food, water and tell us to brush twice daily with their neurotoxins to calcify it etc” adds another commenter, helpfully, under the Margot Robbie post.
Amy Sargeant, an activist-artist, teacher, and the national convenor of Queer Unionists, has also spent a lot of time in these groups.
“I think the first time my attention was drawn to transvestigators was via Facebook’s algorithm, suggesting I join a bunch of transvestigator groups. I guess it sees I’m in some trans activist groups and can’t tell the difference between the two. I joined a few of them to see what was going on, and went down the rabbit hole…” she tells VICE.
“Often, their posts and discussions in these spaces are so ridiculous, they can be really funny. When I post screenshots from these groups on Twitter, a lot of people can’t believe there are really communities of thousands of people who believe this stuff.”
Sargeant says that one of the wilder posts she’s seen recently “was going wild at an AI generated photo of Emilia Clarke, claiming she was obviously ‘hiding something down there’ and critiquing the proportions of the AI generated illustration of her pixel by pixel to prove the actress is, in truth, really a man in disguise!”
“It wasn’t even a decent AI image,” says Sargeant. “It was a really obvious Midjourney rendering. I guess when you have no media literacy, and in particular no visual literacy, you are extra susceptible to conspiratorial propaganda.”
Is tranvestigationism a joke or dangerous?
While tranvestigation is objectively ludicrous, there is still a danger involved in them. Just like paedophile tunnels and beautifully flat earths, a lot of that danger is to the people who fall prey to these ideas, who are often marginalised and at-risk.
“This kind of conspiracy also contributes to a broader culture in which factually baseless information – including conspiracies, disinformation and ‘fake news’ – has become normative and reported on (sometimes uncritically) by mainstream media outlets,” points out Dr Thompson.
But the key danger with the transvestigation conspiracy is that it could further promote hostile and dehumanising attitudes about trans and gender diverse communities. Because that’s the thing about tranvestigation – while it’s defined by extreme examples, it still follows the same logic towards trans people that governs TERFs and other transphobes. It still relies on the idea that there is a correct or incorrect way of expressing gender – transvestigators have just decided it’s because of a huge, interconnected celebrity conspiracy.
Ultimately, it’s all about policing how people of certain genders should look and behave, which is precisely what more “moderate” anti-trans types still do to trans people and other members of the LGBTQIA+ community.
“Some TERFs/transphobes who want to present themselves as reasonable advocates for female ‘sex based rights’ would try to tell you that there is a clear distinction between their movement and transvestigator conspiracists,” explains Amy Sargeant. “In truth, there is not.”
“The only difference between your average transvestigator and a public facing, high profile TERF is that the latter know they have to craft the expression of their conspiratorial views carefully so as not to alienate. In other words, they know a reasonable person would hear what they really believe about trans people and laugh at them.”
Amy points out that the March 2023 rally featuring anti-trans campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull/ Posie Parker – which famously had Nazis turning up – was also riddled with attendees holding anti-vax and Qanon signs, along with their anti-trans rhetoric.
A common gender critical slogan is “we can always tell”, the superstitious belief that there is an inherent capability in transphobic women that can detect a trans person. Despite the fact this is commonly and gloriously debunked online, it’s a lynchpin of their ethos. An app called Giggle even made headlines by trying to use AI to discriminate against certain trans people trying to join the app.
Transphobic rhetoric along this TERF or “gender critical” ideology, that relies on appearing more moderate and sensible, is probably more dangerous than transvestigation. The first is trying to trick people into falling for anti-trans panic. The latter is just transphobia with the mask completely and disturbingly off, which few people take seriously. All transphobia is essentially based on conspiracy thinking – a hypothetical belief that trans people are, or could, be dangerous.
Surely it’s a joke?
I’ve been on the internet for long enough that I’m always wary of taking something seriously when it could just be the crispiest deep-fried meme that I don’t understand, or an inside joke, or some sort of weird fandom reference. I had to wonder if tranvestigation was an example of this, because the more I read and watched, the more it felt truly impossible to believe that adult humans genuinely believed these conspiracies.
I spent some time approaching the moderators of these Facebook groups, individual transvestigators on Twitter, and even some YouTubers, essentially asking if this was a joke. Most blocked me immediately, some politely told me to go away, and I was booted from one of the groups subsequently too.
Spending time in these groups ultimately made me feel sorry for these people, the more I realised that it was not something (that at least some of them) were treating as a joke.
Maurice Quirk is a 27-year-old Ph.D. candidate, researching religion and conspiracy theories, and has arrived at a similar position about transvestigaters.
“As I have a background in conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific endeavours, I understand the social conditions and patterns of reasoning that lead individuals to subscribe to these belief systems, and I have sympathy for those who are swept up in subcultures that inherently segregate them from the rest of society,” they tell VICE, echoing my unease.
“That being said, I also know that none of the people swept up in the transvestigation conspiracy theory have any intention of applying such critical thinking and empathy to others, especially not transgender people. These are people who have long made up their minds about queer people. There is the problem of simultaneously empathising with them, and knowing that they would never afford you the same humanisation.”
