The US Is Exporting Anti-LGBTQ Hate Online

About once a fortnight, David Ermes gets an email from a journalist or fact checker along the lines of “Boys have to dress up as girls in queer week at school, is it true?” “Of course I can say it’s not true—it isn’t even lawful, since we don’t have school uniforms,” says Ermes, who is head of communications at the ministry of education in Schlewig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost state. Over the past year or so he has had to deal with a steady flow of misinformation spread on social media that misrepresents conversations about LGBTQ rights and attempts to “paint a picture of sexualized schools in Germany.” He has dispelled rumors circulating in Hungary of German children being forced into “crossdressing classes” and debunked a viral video in Serbia and Bosnia showing a woman claiming the education ministry demanded boys wear dresses to school or parents be fined. Discussions of trans rights, and touch points like “drag queen story hours,” which are the nexus of immense cultural conflict in the US, have been imported into Europe. “Pride has become a time of obsessive focus by the right-wing media on LGBTQ people,” says Ari Drennan, LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America, which monitors conservative misinformation. “LGBTQ people celebrate who we, are and that is intolerable to people within the right-wing media.” “Drag queen story hour,” a children’s event started in 2015 in San Francisco but which is now an international network of events and organizations, features drag artists reading children's books and promoting gender inclusion in public libraries, schools, and bookshops.