Impossible Dialogues: a narrative experiment to find the cracks in hate speech against trans people

On 30 September 2025, at Komons we collaborated with LaIntersección, within Proyecto Hortensia, to carry out a narrative experiment we called “Impossible Dialogues”: sitting down to talk with several audiences impersonated by chatbots feeded on more than a million posts about trans people on X/Twitter in 2025. It wasn’t a role-playing game; it was a synthetic mirror of the public conversation. What’s interesting is not only what the bots said, but what became visible once you started asking them uncomfortable questions.

➡️ Download the report and access the chatbots ⬅️

1. Childhood as the ultimate battlefield

If there is one common thread running through almost all the answers from reactionary segments, it’s this: “Don’t touch the children.”

Childhood appears as a moral shield onto which everything is projected: fear, control, sexual panic, distrust of the state, and rejection of trans people turned into an “agenda.” Even when talking about adults, they circle back to children: treatments, schools, bathrooms, parental authority.

In contrast, trans and inclusive voices also talk about girls, boys and non-binary kids, but from another starting point: care, mental health, support, the right to exist. Both sides say “we want to protect them,” but they are not saying the same thing. There is a strategic key here: not giving away the frame of protection, but disputing it from the real experiences of trans children and the families who accompany them.

2. Fake science vs. real lives

Another constant is the obsessive invocation of “real biology.” Anti-trans discourses present themselves as guardians of science, but they use it as dogma, not as method: there are two sexes, full stop; anything that doesn’t fit is “ideology,” “a fad,” or “a medical anomaly.”

When the workshop participants introduce the question of intersex people, the script gets complicated. They acknowledge that they exist, but rush to classify them as an error, an exception without political consequences. It is precisely there that the narrative begins to crack: if science recognises bodily diversity, why does the discourse that claims to defend science need to erase or pathologise that diversity?

What the experiment shows is that the biologicist narrative rests on a radical simplification. It works in headlines, but it wobbles when faced with concrete examples, names, biographies, data. That is a narrative crack we can use, as long as we don’t stop at the fact and instead connect it to human stories.

3. Sport, bathrooms and other theatrical stages

In conversations about sport, a pattern repeats itself: women’s categories are presented as a territory under permanent siege from “men pretending to be women.” Participants’ objections —the very low actual incidence, cases like Semenya or Khelif, hormonal diversity among cis women— don’t get new answers; just more slogans.

This reveals something important: sport (like bathrooms) is not a practical problem, but a moral theatre. It is the place where certain sectors stage the defence of the sexual order as if it were a military border. The effectiveness of the narrative does not come from its coherence, but from the image it creates.

For pro-rights narratives, this implies two things:

• It is not enough to say “there are so few cases, nothing really happens.”

• We need to re-politicise these stages by showing who is truly left unprotected when laws are made from panic instead of evidence.

An interesting extra: when we bring intersex people into the conversation, the theatre falls apart. The black-and-white simplification stops working. Here a key insight emerges: TERF discourse collapses when it is forced to look beyond a rigid binary.

4. Major absences: trans men and lives in their full complexity

One of the most powerful findings of the experiment is what does not appear.

In hate speech, trans people are almost always represented as “men disguised as women.” In supportive discourse, centrality also falls on transfeminine experiences, especially when talking about violence and murders. Trans men appear late, rarely, and in a side role. Non-binary realities are even more absent.

The result is a double invisibilisation of transmasculine realities: neither as a threat nor as a visible political subject. That impoverishes the conversation and leaves out key dimensions (health, bodies, work, care, parenthood, sport, specific forms of violence).

A similar thing happens with everyday life: even among allied voices, the narrative is heavily loaded with suffering, struggle, rights and urgency, and much lighter on concrete scenes of friendship, humour, mistakes, precarious jobs, rents, bureaucracy, favourite series. Everyday complexity is missing —precisely the place where empathy becomes harder to switch off.

Our intuition is confirmed: if the public conversation only sees trans people as an extreme case (martyr or threat), never as a neighbour, a co-worker or the friend you play padel with, the frame gets hijacked by exceptionality.

5. Freedom, empathy and mourning: who deserves to be grieved

The exercise also reveals how the meaning of freedom is disputed.

• Freedom, for reactionary sectors, means that no one questions parental authority or the fiction of two immutable sexes.

• Freedom, for trans voices, is being able to exist without fear, without asking permission and without permanent supervision.

• Freedom is re-signified by hate speech as “telling you the truth even if you don’t like it” —that is, as a licence to deny your existence.

In the case of the murder of Victoria Strauss, some segments refuse to recognise her death as a political injustice: they minimise it, deflect it or instrumentalise it. This is the rawest expression of dehumanisation: not even mourning is granted.

The key finding here is not only moral, but narrative: anti-trans discourses can only hold if they restrict who is legible as a victim. Pro-rights narratives face the challenge of broadening who is seen as deserving of care and grief without falling into misery porn, showing whole lives, not just deaths.

6. What do we do with all this?

The experiment confirms that we are not dealing with isolated opinions, but with very compact narrative ecosystems, with clear moral frames and ready-made catchphrases designed to circulate. But it also shows cracks.

Based on what we observed, some (very summarised) narrative directions would be:

• Strengthen stories of everyday trans life: work, family, amateur sport, church, neighbourhood, care. Not just survival: also desire, humour, contradictions.

• Place trans men and other less visible identities at the centre, to break the single caricature of the “man invading the feminine.”

• Occupy the language of protection without giving it up: show, through real stories, what it means to care for a trans child, an intersex person, a diverse family.

• Use current science to reveal that biologicist simplism is propaganda, not evidence.

• Put pressure on symbolic theatres (sport, bathrooms, schools) with concrete stories that show who is left out when laws are made from fear.

• Connect freedom with collective responsibility, not with the privilege of a few to decide over other people’s bodies.
  
  

These “Impossible Dialogues” do not solve the conflict —nor is that their intention—, but they leave us with very useful reflections. Now we have a clearer sense of which phrases get repeated, which fears are triggered, which silences weigh heavy and where the first cracks appear to tell other stories.

Thank you to everyone who took on this artefact, which can be complex and at times opaque. Without your trust and curiosity, we would not have generated these learnings. We will keep imagining and creating ways for technology to serve our communities, together.