I'm writing a paper that in part deals with how conservatives talk about transgender healthcare. It engages with some conservative scholarship that makes demonstrably untrue statements about that topic. Despite the fact that I had clear evidence of both malice and an untrue statement, I had to think hard about whether calling these statements a lie was crossing some sort of genre-related line.
We've developed a genre of writing where even calling a clearly malicious untruth a "lie" is something one has to think hard about before doing. This sucks.
