Outgroup-directed dogwhistles

Here’s a predicament you might find yourself in if you hold bigoted views. On the one hand, it’s usually not socially acceptable to express them. On the other hand, sometimes you want to express them anyway: say, you’re a politician, and you think it’s really important to communicate to fellow bigots that you’re one of them in order to get their votes. The problem is that you now have to get your message to your ingroup audience while not alienating the much larger outgroup audience.

Enter dogwhistles. These are phrases which, at face value, mean something seemingly unproblematic, but can communicate a second, hidden meaning, to audiences with the right background assumptions. Well-known examples include “inner city violence”, “illegal immigrants”, and “family values” used to covertly signal that the speaker is bigoted against Black people, Mexicans, and LGBTQ individuals, respectively.

The vast majority of the literature on dogwhistles treats them primarily as devices for reaching the ingroup while navigating around the outgroup audience. And, correspondingly, most philosophers who write on dogwhistles (with two notable exceptions) focus on the message intended for the ingroup, while it’s implicitly assumed that the surface-level meaning does little more than function as a decoy. However, I think there’s a whole subset of dogwhistling speech acts that are directed primarily at outsiders, and may even be used in the complete absence of ingroup members. I call these outgroup-directed dogwhistles, or ODDs.

Here’s an example. Imagine Helen is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Most of her friends are generally accepting, albeit not very knowledgeable about transgender issues. To get them on her side, Helen starts by talking about how sports should take into account “biological differences” (a transphobic dogwhistle), which is a reasonable enough premise, so all her friends agree with it. Then, she gets her friends to also agree that trans women and cis women are biologically different, which also strikes everyone as true. And since Helen’s friends agreed with the reasonable, commonsense premises, it’s not hard to see how they might feel compelled to accept the conclusion that trans women shouldn’t compete in women’s sports.

This case illustrates how dogwhistles, precisely because they’re designed to blend into mainstream discourse seamlessly, can be generative, rather than purely concealing. And what’s interesting about the argument Helen makes is that the conclusion is explicitly transphobic, while the premises are explicitly not. In other words, Helen has successfully used a dogwhistle in order to add a transphobic belief to the common ground. And she’s been able to do so by exploiting the surface-level meaning of the dogwhistle: it’s only because the premises are things her friends already believe that she’s able to sell them the conclusion.

If you pay attention, ODDs are used around us all the time. One of the most frequently asked questions in gender critical spaces is how to ease trans-inclusive friends and family members into gender critical beliefs, and the advice is usually to bring up the same talking points, down to the phrasing being used: e.g., say you’re concerned about “the safety of women and girls”, about minors making “irreversible medical decisions”, or, indeed, about “biological reality”.

Additionally, ODDs can normalize certain ingroup-specific patterns of both thought and language. When J.K. Rowling published an essay in 2020 arguing that trans women shouldn’t be included in women’s spaces, the claim that trans women are biologically different from cis women did a lot of work in her arguments. And that helped set the terms of the conversation for a large number of people whose first exposure to transgender issues was the very same essay: as far as newcomers were concerned, the dispute between trans allies and transphobes was “really” between one side that denies basic biology, and another one that doesn’t.

And normalization can go even further. Executive Order 14168, issued earlier this year by President Trump, uses much of the exact same terminology that I was exposed to on the TERF side of Tumblr as early as 2016. This is striking, because trans-exclusionary radical feminism, where the “biological reality” talking point and other similar ones originated, is nominally a far left movement. But, once you consider the work of Rowling and other popularizers of transphobic beliefs, it becomes unsurprising how such niche jargon can pass into all segments of society.

The lesson is this: the use of dogwhistles reflects the broader aims and practices of the ingroup that issues them. That’s why I think that the overwhelming focus on racial dogwhistles in the literature, while understandable, can also obscure the fact that different hate groups have different relationships to outsiders. Some may want to stay undercover, in which case their dogwhistles will tend to be of the “hidden code” variety. But others might have aims such as proselytizing, or getting outsiders primed to accept more extreme ideas. In these cases, we should be on the lookout for the outgroup-directed dogwhistles coming from them.