Paper short abstract:

Discourse advocates on both sides of the hormone blocker debate publicly engage with and contest scientific information in order to advocate for social and legislative change. This is done via multiple discursive mechanisms, highlighting the malleability of scientific knowledge in the public sphere.

Paper long abstract:

Within the United States, the use of hormone blockers for trans youth has transformed from a niche medical protocol into a site of political and medical contestation within public debate. In doing so, discourse advocates, calling either for the allowance or ban of hormone blockers for trans youth. have revealed ways in which scientific information is generated, communicated, and interpreted both by stakeholders--such as parents of trans youth, politicians, and anti-trans activists--as well as the lay public. Using interview data in tandem with digital archival research of legal proceedings, media reporting, published opinion pieces, and public blog posts on sites publishing on anti-trans arguments, this paper highlights how the generation and presentation of scientific information is used in order to garner social and political support on both sides of the hormone blocker debate.

This paper highlights and explores three mechanisms through which scientific information is deployed in public discourse: (1) selective engagement with scientific information, in which discourse advocates strategically select what scientific dialogues they publicly engage in; (2) parallel use of factual and emotional rhetoric, in which discourse advocates will publicly engage with technoscientific and medical artifacts (such as academic articles and conference presentations), making them more intellectually legible to a lay public while also imbuing their analysis with emotional arguments; and (3) scientific equivocation, in which discourse advocates give equal credence to different forms of knowledge productions, platforming artifacts such as peer reviewed articles and personal blog posts in tandem with one another.