Generating controversy is a playbook some have perfected to keep their audiences engaged in an era where distractions are plentiful, and few have quite mastered it as Blaire White. For the bulk of her YouTube career, Blaire was essentially a pawn for the conservative movement that they can play to undermine trans people’s claim to their rights–their attempts have known mild success, but it wasn’t without its pains.
The genius of Blaire’s process is how she launders vile transphobic rhetoric through what might seem like completely-innocuous political punditry. Almost every video there is a new character for the audience to latch onto, and myriad methods are used to activate their political animus. It isn’t too dissimilar from what the rest of the New Right does on YouTube, only with sharper focus on a few individual actors rather than broad cultural issues as the platform’s cabal of Koch-funded faux-intellectuals tend to.
Further bolstering Blaire’s visibility is the scarcity of trans public figures to begin with–because mainstream recognition of trans people is a recent occurrence, it means that Blaire may have possibly been many people’s first exposure to the relevant literature. One might instinctually…
