Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 27

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, it's Megan Devine, host of Hereafter with me, Megan Devine, on the Amy Brown Podcast Network. There's a lot going on lately, which is a massive understatement. It's a really human thing to hope that things get better, even when you're not sure how they possibly could. Join me for conversations with interesting people about difficult things, with new episodes of Hereafter with Megan Devine every Monday on the Amy Brown Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Back in 1999, a young woman from South Carolina vanished. Seven years passed. She was presumed dead. Then a tip came in. He said, I think I found your girl. She's alive. She's in New York. And I said, really?

The detective on the case, he didn't buy it. He came to believe that he was dealing with an imposter. Who was this woman, really? Listen to deep cover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm weird. You're weird. We're all weird about money. I'm Paco De Leon.

I'd like to proudly present to you a brand new podcast called Weird Finance, a show to help us all feel a little less weird about money, one conversation at a time. So if you want to feel a little less weird about money, and you also want to hear people have honest and real conversations, tune in to Weird Finance, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.

If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey everyone, this is Garrison Davis from It Could Happen Here. For this week of episodes, the team has put together a sepastial group of episodes all focused on the broad topic of the escalating war on trans people. We'll cover historical background, the international turf movement, and all the new anti-trans legislation trying to be made into law here in the United States. We won't have time to cover everything, it's only five episodes, but we tried to cram

more stuff in, and we don't want to make the episodes all like two or three hours. So I'm sure we'll cover all these topics more in the future, but we tried to create five episodes here that cover a lot of our bases. Also, we've tried not to make the episodes super depressing, because yeah, it's five episodes based on a kind of upsetting topic. So we tried to keep them more information-based and throwing in some jokes here and there. But it is still not a fun, fun topic, so just keep that in mind. But we've tried to space things out and not make them too long and not too depressing.

So without further ado, here is episode one of the war on trans people. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart, and in the case of this week getting very angry at people doing really shitty things to a specific subset of the population. All right, Garrison. Wait, isn't that every week? Well, no, sometimes we talk about other stuff, like 3D printed guns, but that ties in. Garrison, take it from here, I'm done for the week.

Yes, so welcome to It Could Happen Here, we're talking about, well, one of the big It Could Happens Here is- It's Could Happen Here? Yeah, in relation to the ongoing war on queer people in general, and how, yeah, that sure seems to be like it's happening. So here, here right now. But before we get to the actual right now points, I do want to do a little bit of background on how it's kind of gotten to this point in the past few decades and the various precursors

to the current moment that has seemed to be really focused on trans people specifically. But for a long time, a lot of the focus was on protecting, quote unquote, the sanctity of marriage, which was one of the big, one of the big talking points. And to help us talk about this fun and engaging topic, I asked on Kieran and Eve from the Kitchen Table Cult podcast to assist us in this horrible endeavor. Greetings. Hi, and I'm sorry. Hi.

Yes, we are gays who grew up in that universe. So hello. Yes. As was I, as was probably a few other people of this call, yeah, we all have varying experiences growing up in the evangelical movement while also realizing, huh, maybe we are not straight and or cis children. So yeah, but we're going to be talking about the kind of the escalating war on gay marriage and how that kind of moves over to trans people at a certain point and specifically talking

about kind of the combination of religion and politics. Because this is something I've discussed before on my two part focus on the family episode. This really is going to tie into a lot of that stuff. It's a lot of the same people, but I would love for everyone else to kind of fill in the gaps where I have stuff missing because I definitely have a good point on like the family research council kind of side of things, and I would love for people to fill in the gaps on the other other kind of stuff. But yeah, we're going to start off by talking about family research council and that whole

kind of side of things because I mean, they don't hate Josh Jugger. Oh, oh, yes. Josh Jugger is coming up. Don't don't show it. Oh, yeah. Both research and families. So this seems unproblematic. I'm going to just mute things from now on.

And yeah, you guys continue in terms of all of the save the children rhetoric. Yes, Josh, Josh Jugger will be coming up. So yeah, but I do want to actually open up with a quote from Mike Rose Bush, who was the vice president of Focus on the Family from 1995 to 2004. And then a few years ago, he came out as as gay and as a surprise, so called affirming like Christian who like loves Jesus and endorses rights for gay people. He left. He left.

He left his family. Is he you see side A or side B to see is he in favor of the celibacy model or is he like show with marriage? He seems to be excited about fucking. Oh, OK. So we like side B. We like side B. Yeah. It is definitely the better side.

But I want to start off with more fun by him just to kind of set the stage for how this type of thing kind of really got got started for combining, you know, the evangelical kind of biblical world worldview with political organizing. So anyway, I'm going to read a quote here, quote, the Dobson even more so than Focus on the Family. And that's a that's James Dobson, by the way, Dobson even more so than Focus on the Family as an organization strongly encouraged all evangelicals to support and express their values in the public arena as background before about 1970, evangelicals often confide themselves

within their own like cloistered communities. Political involvement was viewed as a secular enterprise and suspect at best. And this changed during the Dobson era. He and others encouraged evangelicals to learn and apply the biblical worldview. The evangelical person was coached in applying the apologetics debate method in publicly sharing the biblical worldview voting in every local and national election became seen as a Christian's duty. So at Focus, I learned that the evangelical leaders like Dr. Dobson considered the Republican

Party to be the political machine best equipped to endorse a biblical worldview in delighted harmony. Republican Party strategists salivated to win elections by securing the evangelical vote. That's a mutual agreement was formed. The plan became that evangelical leaders would introduce a hot button issue onto ballots at every local and state election. Evangelical ministers would provide voting guides on how to influence evangelicals to vote for the only correct Christian choice.

In turn, the elected Republican candidate would champion the corresponding biblical worldview and this strategy worked. And what was the most reliable hot button to place on the local and state voting ballots? Anything that would ensure evangelicals in mass to show up to vote, yep, anti-gay rights bills. Gay rights were viewed by evangelicals as a threat to the biblical family and society in general. So yeah, that's kind of how I want to open up in terms of kind of the shift in like

the 70s and 80s and especially in the 90s from kind of evangelicals being pretty divorced from like political mainstream action to them becoming a crucial part of the Republican machine and this kind of circle that completes itself at this like at this point afterwards. Because yeah, this combined with a whole bunch of save the children rhetoric and like saving the family, like like the unit of the family as a sacred thing to protect. It's really like that that idea really carries over now into into the trans stuff. Because obviously they kind of lost a lot of the stuff they wanted to do on gay marriage after a long, long fight, you know, decades and decades, but it's still the same core

idea at the heart of it. Yeah, I just want to put an evergreen footnote on all of that and say thanks and fuck you to Phyllis Schlafly for getting us down that road. Yes. Yeah. That was like, blame can definitely be passed around. Yeah, like originates there. Like, I mean, like before all of that, like the evangelical church was not even united

on the idea of abortion being bad. Like like we have come so far to merging these these universes in this really fucked up little marriage that they got going on. No, and you can't you cannot divorce the ideas of like the escalating war against abortion and then also like with the save the children like protect the family idea, right? These are the these are the same issues like these these do go together in terms of people, you know, making this like fake version of the family that they are swearing to protect, whether that be from gay people or that be from, you know, women's bodily autonomy or,

you know, women's rights or like feminism, all of it's in the same is in the same package. It's like that meme of like two pictures and pimps like these are the same picture. They could say it's the same exact rhetoric and it's just like re-skinned slightly to for whatever topic of the day. The other other big thing I want to mention before I get into Family Research Council is the 2004 book Marriage Under Fire by by Dr. James Dobson, which was definitely one of the other kind of key points in escalating the idea of the culture war and, you know, that type of that type of like more like almost like tactical rhetoric.

It's yeah, it's it was definitely it was definitely a turning point. I remember the same time when fireproof came out. Oh, I think so. Yeah, it was close. Yeah. Fireproof and all that came out between like 2004 and 2006, 2007. So that was all around the same time period because they were losing. Like you said earlier, they were losing the battle against gay rights.

Yeah, that was around the time queer I was coming out. That was when they were starting to get nervous that maybe they could not stop this particular like like forward slide. But yeah, like on the back cover of their Robert, did you have something to say? No, I was just thinking back to that period of time when it it seemed positive progress in that regard seemed inevitable and unstoppable. Yeah, that was that was nice. I think the the note on martial language as used for this is really important here.

Like this is a battle it is under fire. Like that's yeah, that is something that was definitely employed to the fullest. On that point, I'm just going to read a little bit of the back cover of a marriage under fire. Here we go. In this succinct analysis of the issue, Dr. James Dobson presents a compelling case against the legalization of marriage between homosexuals and the dire ramifications our nation could face. Same sex marriage will destroy the fundamental principles of marriage, parenthood and gender.

Marriages will be increasingly unstable as their definition expands to incorporate multiple moms or dads in quotation marks. Legalization of gay marriages will lead to polygamy and other alternatives to one man one woman unions. The divorce rate will be higher, making our children left safe. Marriage under fire provides the foundations of a battle plan for the preservation of traditional values in our nation. Our response cannot be clearer, the well-being of the family and thus our nation hangs in

the balance. Now's the time to speak out in defense of marriage and the American family. So yeah, it is particularly like the battle plan, right? You know, one thing I really loved during this time was the like libertarian Christian response to this kind of conversation where they're just like, or we could just, you know, not have marriage be tried to the state at all. You know. Oh yeah.

Yeah, that was great. I don't remember that. This is the like, this is the backup plan for like, okay, if like, if marriage, you know, gay marriage goes forward, then we can just like do that if we want to, you know, just like completely eliminate it. No, absolutely. Yeah. I absolutely remember that, that type of rhetoric, even, even, even around like 2013, when like

those Supreme Court cases where we're going forward, they were like really set on like, this is like, you know, last resort, we have to make sure that, make sure that it like, like, like church marriage is just completely separate, which even that, that still is the case and like, and like a lot of places like churches is still in a lot of states like reserve the right to not marry people and you can only, you can do it through the courts but not through the church. There's also the subtext in that, that I think should be unpacked, which is that the multiple moms and dads kind of image that's given is not a signal of like the non-traditional

family being bad, but more of a, there was this myth that was pushed really hard in the conversion therapy circuit, that like, if you didn't have a good father figure, you were going to be gay, you know, if you didn't have a good relationship with your mom, you're going to be gay. So like having this as like, this, these coded statements in there are giving the clue of like, we're trying to stop the cycle, we're trying to not create more gay kids. And that's why this is important. Yeah, I was reading a lot earlier today from the Heritage Foundation, because I remember

them being a key part of, yeah, it was so bad. And their whole thing was like, you have to have a mother and a father otherwise everything is terrible. And then you get gay kids and that also like goes into the whole other theory that was like, well, which I think Robertson either made up or repeated was like, well, people who are gay were abused as children. Yeah, that is, that is definitely, I mean, then of course, all these, all these evangelicals are also all like beating their kids.

Yeah, it's like, well, which people were you abusing your child because they were gay or because, did you make them gay? Yeah, I mean, I was and I am, but I don't think they're actually related. Full circle moments. Yeah, exactly. And they're related in the sense that you being gay is the, is the, well, I mean, one of the triggers for the parents, but it's not, the causal relationship runs the opposite direction.

Right. Exactly. Anyway, we are going to take a break and hear from all of our lovely sponsors who don't support child abuse, probably. Well, I mean, unless it's, unless it's, which, which does, you know, does run that island off the coast of Indonesia, where you can hunt children for sport, but we prefer not to see that as abuse. I don't think you're allowed to say that, Robert.

I think you have to bleep that. No, no, Garrison, we're not going to bleep an ad. That's what sponsors this show is child hunting Island, which you cannot say that is designed to do every week. More gay kids. Um, well, it's designed to make happier billionaires. Oh, okay. Yeah.

There's nothing, there's nothing Elon Musk loves more than hunting children on his private island reserve off the coast of Indonesia and, and like Elon Musk, you too can hunt children if you buy anyway, here's, here's the ads. Yes, we are back. And now we're going to, we're going to move on to probably the most unfun portion of the show today. Um, FRC, the family research council, I'm going to actually talk about like what they are and what they did and how they're kind of important in the evolution of rhetoric

and various other stuff. So yeah, family research council emerged from a 1980, a White House conference on families that James Dobson kind of co-led with the president of the United States. So that's fun. Um, yeah. So he, he met and prayed with a group of like eight Christian leaders at a Washington, DC hotel, ultimately leading to the creation of the family research council, um, under the direction of a Gerald Regener.

I mean, that's how that, that's how I'm going to say it. That's how I'm going to say his name because he doesn't reserve respect. So I'm not going to Google it. Um, and it, uh, it, it became a division of focus on the family in like the late 80s under a Gary Boyer. Um, and the reason there's a whole bunch of like complicated like tax stuff because focus on the family can't get too political because then it'll like sacrifice their tax tax, if they have status.

So there's a whole bunch of like really shady stuff happening in between family research council and focus on the family proper in terms of who they're not doing any lobbying. Right. Yeah. Like who runs what and like what crossover there is with like the leadership. They're basically the same organization, but they are like legally separate and kind of have different like operating strategies. Um, but they, they really are like, to be fair, lots of orgs do this.

This is not unusual. No, it's not unusual, but like it's important to know like they basically are like, like they are, they are very late. Like they are like, like sibling organizations. So yeah, this is, uh, this is, uh, the, uh, like Gary Boyer, the guy who took over in the late eighties of what was also the, was the undersecretary of education and a domestic policy advisor to president Reagan. Um, so again, already like fully, fully tied into like the Republican machine.

So, um, Boyer brought in several anti LGBT researchers who pumped out like defamatory material about queer people. Um, Robert Knight was a longtime conservative writer and journalist and the kind of major about propagandist against LGBTQ rights, he served as the, uh, FRC's director of cultural affairs in the nineties up until the early 2000s, um, while working there. He wrote, uh, along with some folks in the family editors, a 1999, uh, booklet called the, uh, the homosexual behavior and pedophilia. This is a very, very, very common thread and all their stuff is that gay people were abused

as kids and gay people therefore are like wired to also abuse kids. Like it's part of this like cycle that they like co-opted a whole bunch of research on it that they misrepresented that all of the researchers who did the actual stuff was like, no, you're totally wrong. Um, yeah. It's a spousy bingo right here. Yeah. It's, it's, there's, there's, I talk, I talk about this a little, a little bit in more

in depth than the focus of the family episodes for, for bastards in terms of like the actual like research they used. Um, but yeah, it is, uh, and the, what, what, one of the, uh, remarkable claims inside the 1999 booklet was, uh, was the, uh, assertion that quote, one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the profits of a new sexual order. So that's, uh, that's great. I heard that as profits with an FITS.

That is, that is, not profits, Ph. Oh, Ph. Yes, Ph. Okay. Yeah. This is just libertarianism. Basically. Yeah.

Yeah. Basically. Yes. Um, yes. The, uh, uh, uh, for some reason you cannot find this pamphlet on the F, uh, FRC website today. I wonder why. Shocked.

Yeah. So Boyle left the group in 1999, um, and then, uh, FRC had two presidents, um, and, and, uh, Merge and one of the most, one of them kind of resulted in becoming the most, uh, powerful religious right lobbying group in the country with tons of tons of policy researchers and writers. Um, and a lot of, a lot of like email, like email lists and like physical mailing lists was a big part of their political organizing, you know, Eve and Karen, we have talked before about, uh, the effective power of the rights, uh, mailing lists in terms of getting political

change. Yeah. Um, uh, Kenneth Connors was a Florida attorney and a leader in the pro life movement. He served as president in the early 2000s, uh, during his kind of 10 year, um, uh, FRC's agenda focused mostly on abortion and then also a traditional marriage, uh, other stuff was like religious liberty, which means Christian supremacy, not actual religious liberty. Um, and then like, uh, like, uh, protecting parents rights, right, protecting like parental choice, um, which we'll talk, we'll talk more about in the future, like how do they define

traditional marriage, is this involving like dowries and land transfers and treaties? I, I, I believe they just, I believe they want one man and then one woman and, uh, the woman doesn't really need to actually want it. But as long as the man wants it, then it's fine. Um, I think that's the title. And are they like the Catholics where they believe it has to be for the purposes of procreation? Um, I mean, they're, they're part of the mainstream evangelicals. So like there's definitely, there's like the courtship idea.

So yeah, like they are, they are, they are for that, but it's, I know it's, it is, it's a very like patriarchal thing. Um, and it depends on dumb here, but like these are, these are like important distinctions that it depends on congregation to congregation. I like the kind of the stuff that I grew up with wasn't super focused on tons of, on having tons of kids actually. Um, in fact, they kind of prefer just keeping it capped off at two kids because, you know, the more kids you had, the less loyal you were to the church because you had to focus

more on your kids actually. So it, it, it does, it does, it does really depend on congregation to congregation. I think family research council tried to keep themselves open to lots of interpretations. So lots of people could like glom on to their stuff, so they didn't get like super specific around like the role of child rearing and that kind of thing. It's important to note around the, this time or a little before it was when Pope John Paul's theology, the body was coming out, which is this tome, um, that's basically getting into like why, you know, the death penalty would be bad and why abortion is bad.

And there's all this like sanctity of the body and the body existing. And then like the sanctity of sex as for the purposes of appropriation, the pleasure. That was definitely a key point. Yes. In the atmosphere at this time. That was definitely a key point is that sex is just for making kids like that is definitely like a big, a big part of it, which like, they don't actually really believe, but they say, right?

Cause like, if you look at all of like the, all of the extra, like the people, like all of like these leaders like are not like faithful to their wives by any sense, no, yeah. But I think it is like, it is interesting, like the amount of stuff that's around like parental choice and like parent rights, which will come up over the course of the next episodes of the series. I'm right now at writing episodes about the current like book bannings going across the country. And a lot of those tied to like Sadia, like parents rights over their children, like

they decide what their children gets to read. So it's all, it's all this kind of stuff. I've never heard of that before in my life. That's definitely not also tied up with a bunch of the stuff happening in Florida right now. That's definitely not the right. It's all the same. They're not related to Mike Ferris at all.

Yeah. No. Yeah. I think what we're getting at is that the modern anti-trend stuff is they're just playing all of the sort of greatest hits of the NTA stuff, like the bathroom stuff and the CRT stuff. Yeah. It's all the same.

I don't worry. I'm planning to tie this up in a nice, in a nice little bow. Sorry for jumping in ahead of you. Just give me like 15 minutes and I'll do it. So yeah, up next we're talking, starting in 2003, they changed leaders again. And this is where they really kind of evolved into their current form with Tony Perkins who became president of the Family Research Council in 2003. Prior to that, he served two terms as a Louisiana State Representative in the 90s.

And even when he was president of Family Research Council, he served two years as State Representative. He's also a former police officer and a television news reporter. So overall just sounds like quite the dude. Yeah. He authored a whole bunch of, you know, like all these guys writing tons of like Christian books that get published by like weird Christian publishers. He also served as the senior pastor of a church in Maryland called the Hope Christian Church. And he was a leader of an effort by white and black religious right preachers to work

together against LGBT equality, specifically like in like the east coast in the south. That's where there's all there's all like cross organizing between like historically black churches, of course, not all of them, but like Perkins really tried to like reach out on that front to get like that coalition going, which was kind of unique at the time. So yeah, a big part of FRC strategies to pound home the false claim that queer people are more likely to sexually abuse children, but then heterosexual people. This is a, yeah, this is not, not scientifically true. You can look up like stats and you can look up, you can look up like a American Psychology

Association has a lot of research on this topic because it was such a big point in the early 2000s that people had to like talk about it. Yeah. So like it's like one of these things that like was a myth, you know, ambiently as a scare tactic and a slippery so slope policy, but I think there's also, it has its roots in a particular misunderstanding of Romans too, which is the passage that most people point to as their anti-gay rhetoric and the context of that is like most like centrist and liberal like biblical scholars will agree that that passage was more about the pedophilia that

was happening in the Roman Empire and speaking out against that and not specifically against like consulting adults, even in the Old Testament, a lot of new people going into like the actual translations of stuff and like even like Leviticus, it is definitely pointing towards it being about specifically like fathers not abusing their like, like, you know, like prepubescent like sons who are like more like androgynous, like it is specifically targeting like this type of idea, it's not it's not against like gay men who are like adults. Yeah, there's there's this theological conversation on the right that was happening that kind of was like trying to account for that historical context and was like, it's both clearly it's

both because they go together. Right. And obviously, like, we have to find a way to justify demonizing gay people in order to protect the sanctity of marriage. So we have to save the children in multiple ways. Save the children. Yeah. So Perkins has continued to defend the kind of gay men as pedophiles idea.

He had a he had a televised debate on MSNBC in 2010 about this. So like, yeah, that's I mean, that is like 12 years ago at this point, but still 2010 feels much more recent than stuff, you know, talking about like the late 90s. Yeah, debating with the Southern Poverty Law Center, like on the issue of gay rights. I remember that now. Yeah. Yeah. So some other anti LGBT kind of propagandists at at FRC includes Peter Sprig, who joined

in 2001. He authored the brochure called Top 10 Myths About Homosexuality, which was a pretty popular around the time. Such claims inside the book include that like ex gay therapy or conversion therapy works, sexual orientation can be changed, LGBT, LGBTQ people are mentally ill because being LGBTQ makes you ill and that the sexual abuse of boys by adult men is more common than consensual sex between adult men, which is not obviously not true of that is quite I have questions. That is so many questions that is quite quite the stat.

And like Sprig's sources are a mixture of like junk science issued by groups that support conversion therapy and also legitimate science coded out of context or cherry picked, which is a long use tactic by anti gay kind of groups to bolster their the debulter like their claims and their general like rhetoric. Right. If you mix in like a hint of truth, it can make all of your outrageous stuff seem more like legible. We knew that from the screwtape letters.

Yeah. No, like, yeah. Sorry. One of one of one of one of his better books. I actually enjoy the screwtape letters. I think it's pretty fucking funny. It's good. So like just like an Easter egg for those who know what we're talking about.

Like he was extremely kinky. Carry on. Anyway, one of the main researchers they kind of misused research for was Judith Stacey, who was like since issued lots of public statements condemning the condemning what, you know, family research council advocates for and has endlessly requested that anti gay groups to stop misrepresenting her work. Yeah. So we're going to jump forward to 2008 because this is this is, of course, the election of

Obama has really kind of frightened a lot of people. This is when the Dobson sent out that letter detailing like what a post Obama future could be in which he included gay marriage as a part of like the dystopian nightmare he was imagining. This is the future that gay people want. Yeah. Yeah. And interesting.

And just an interesting thing on Spring here, he was on MSNBC again, which I mean, maybe we should stop. Maybe we should stop inviting these people onto news channels. But anyway, Spring responded to a question about allowing non-American sex partners of American citizens to immigrate into the States by saying, I would prefer that we export homosexuals from the United States rather than import them and saying I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior. And then when asked, so should we outlaw gay behavior, Spring said, yes.

So yeah, it's like it's a very much a clear kind of mask off thing is they just don't they just don't want it around at all. And an idea I'm going to tie this kind of more towards towards the end of the series with the trans stuff is like the idea of queerness as like a contagion. These people having to like the brutality is justified in their own heads because they it's like this idea that queerness can spread and it can infect children. So you have to you have to contain it and any action taken against it is justified because it's like you're containing a virus.

And it's like this is really what kind of makes them feel so justified and righteous in every action they do. So yeah, including out including outlaw and gay gay people could have, you know, exporting them from the United States, you know, a blatantly fascist idea. So yeah, FRC also worked unsuccessfully to continue the don't ask, don't tell policy. This was up until like 2010. So that was that was a bit definitely another thing that they tried to focus on. But the slide, you know, the progressive side actually was happening around that time.

It is, you know, something interesting about that. Yeah. Earlier today. Yeah. So I was again, looking at Heritage Foundation because that was the Heritage Foundation was like my big kind of go to when I was growing up in the nineties and 2000s and doing speech and debate and apologetics camp and all that shit. And I was like, well, what was their take on don't ask, don't tell.

And they in the early nineties were very, very against it. Yeah. In 93, they had like this paper published and they were very against it because they were like, well, then you won't, then you'll still have gay people in the military. Yeah. Absolutely. In the military. Yes.

They're like, they will, they will be like, it'll be bad for the unit cohesion. There will be sexual abuse as if that wasn't already happening. There will be like all of these terrible things happening in the military that couldn't possibly happen. Couldn't possibly be happening otherwise. And then we'll like weaken combat effectiveness is the line that family research council used. Yeah.

Yeah. So there was definitely a shift in like the nineties where a lot of these evangelical groups were against don't ask, don't tell, because yeah, it's still allowed gay people and just so they didn't say anything. But then as they saw progress happening, they're like, okay, this is better than nothing. Like this is better than them being openly gay. So they kind of switched gears towards like 2010, which is, you know, they're just like grasping at anything they can.

I think it's time for another break and then we will kind of finish this off with some other not fun information. But yeah, let's let's let's do let's let's do let's let's do an ad. Let's let's see. Let's see what our lovely sponsors at past to say. Well, his big thing is trying to get volunteers together to raid child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. Like a counter raid.

Yeah, yeah, you can you can volunteer to go fight in Ukraine or you can volunteer to help take down child hunting island so that you can run it, you know, it would be fun to have all of like the food delivery services have their own like private militias that take you to the world we're moving towards garrison. I mean, the post office already does. So why not? Exactly. Why not the companies?

Yeah. Yeah. Arm everybody. Everything should be a military. That's the whatever podcast. This is definitely the solution here. Here we're back and we are still talking about my favorite topic, which is the family research council.

During the 2012 election cycle, they donated about 200, $208,000 to 80 federal Republican candidates, saying that they're using the money to strategically be used to support pro family candidates and pro family issues and elections and ballot incentives across the country. Yeah, so this is just, you know, in terms of, you know, keep the keep the pro family angle in mind. You know, this is they continuously were always donating money to 2012 was the highest one on on record.

And I think I don't think they've even matched that since then it was it was pretty high because that was that was Obama's second term. So they were definitely like trying to really, really organize right because this this is like right before 2013, the Supreme Court was gonna be ruling on gay marriage as well. So of course, which didn't get finalized to 2015, but they were starting to hear cases. We're gonna let's go and I'm gonna kind of briefly go back to to James Dobson here. Just a reference of people are if people did not listen to the behind the bastards once.

He's an evangelical Christian author and self-proclaimed psychologist who if you if you don't know who James Dobson is, please preserve your innocence and just quit. Like just go enjoy it. Don't know log off now forever log off now. Just don't know. God, I do. I do love the idea of a self-proclaimed psychologist. That's that's that's the energy I want to bring in 2022 child psychologist.

Yeah, just like I know what kids need. They need to be on hunting Island. You know, and and this guy doesn't even believe in like a child's about like, no, he doesn't have a child development. But also you do know that I'm getting a PhD in Paris psychology, right? I know Garrison. We're paying for it. This podcast is going to have the highest rate of doctors of any podcast on the Internet

other than the one that our friend Kava does. Anyway, I will be happy to be invited back on to Kava's podcast as a doctor in Paris psychology. I think I'll be able to offer some really unique insights. Okay. Anyway, Dobson founded Focus of Family in 1977, which is unfortunate because he couldn't just watch Star Wars, but instead he does. He doesn't hate fun.

We knew he hates fun. That is a key part of this ideology. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, he was he's a founding he's a founding member of several ITL, GBT, hate groups, family research council being one of them. Also a lot. He is a founder of Alliance Defending Freedom. So yeah, yeah, he got he got he got two under his belt.

The organization, which is now based in Arizona, became a very powerful kind of fundraising behemoth dedicated to fighting so-called marriage, like marriage equality for queer people and trans inclusive non-discrimination protections. And with a big part of the thing that they were fighting for was enshrining a quote, right to discriminate against LGBTQ people in state law. So just, you know, all the time around like, you know, what if a baker is forced to bake a cake for, you know, all of this nonsense is what is redoxing. That's a case.

That's an ADF case. Yeah. So that is so like that that that is that that is Dobson, he he started that kind of thing. Yeah. So I'm going to I'm going to now have a little fun though, because we're going to jump ahead a little bit just to kind of get the rhetoric kind of nailed down on what on what kind of house stuff we're going to start shifting towards the trans stuff at this point.

But 2015, after after the Supreme Court ruling for nationwide kind of marriage equality, Dobson has had this had this beautiful, beautiful quote. I had this black cloud over me on June 26th when that decision was handed down and I was contemplating this foreboding, this black cloud, it hit me like a ton of bricks. The decision was not really about gay marriage. It's not. It's about everything else. It's about the entire culture war.

It's about it's about control of the public schools and it's about what's happening in universities. It's about the economy and it's about what businesses and it's about the military and it's about medicine. It's about everything. We lost the entire culture war without one decision. The gay marriage thing was just a part of it, but it's going to touch every dimension. So I really like to call foreshadowing.

I wish that was true, but in terms of yes, in terms of kind of how this gets expanded to like businesses, schools, universities, medicine, I just love the histrionics that they start kind of focusing on in terms of like, well, we lost this culture war. I guess we got to move on to the next one, which is the even more freakish thing, which is oh, kids wanting to, kids realizing that maybe they have a different views on gender. So that's the next kind of like rotating target that they move towards. So yeah, earlier that year, Dobson laid bare his fundamental confusion on what it means to be LGBT.

He claimed on his radio show that being bisexual meant that you have orgies, which I mean not I mean, well, okay, so we wish, yeah, yes, everything so much more complicated. Yes. He also blamed in 2012, he also blamed the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre on queer people because the nation turned turned their back on God and allowed it allowed judgments to fall on us. Which is why I say that's happened. That's one of the interesting splits in the right between the people who think it's fake

and the people who thought it was queer people's fault. Yes. Yeah, it's because of the great decadence. Yeah, they've all come back together now, but it was a real real split. And one of one of the other great things about Dobson is so after my behind the bastards episodes on Dobson, like literally like the day after it dropped, I found this extra little disturbing nugget of info about him in an old blog post titled Is My Child Becoming Homosexual? Dobson recommends things that a father can do to help his child fix homosexual symptoms.

Fix. Sorry. Including taking your child into the shower with you to compare penises. Wait, what? Yeah, it is. Not good. Well, I will quote from the blog. The boy's father has to do his part.

He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough and tumble games with his son in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn how to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in the peg hole. What? He can even take his son into the shower with him, where a boy could not help notice that dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.

Oh my God. You know what this reminds me of? So that is a quote by Dr. James Dobson, psychologist. Wow. Oh my God. Anyway, I'm sure there's nothing, nothing at all to, just, just, hey, Jimmy Dobs, how's your son? How's he doing?

Yeah. How's that going? Are you talking? Nothing at all to kind of interrogate there. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that I really love, and by love, I mean, don't love, is that like the only gay people who exist are gay boys.

Yeah. Lesbians and bi people don't exist at all. Well, yeah. This is a really interesting thing is because it's about why would, it's about if it happens to a woman, it's like, oh, well, they're a woman anyway, they're already not as good as men. I guess it kind of makes sense that they would do that. If it happens to a guy, you're like, why, obviously, like, why would you do that?

You're part of the patriarchy. Why would you, like you're supposed to exert power over women? What is wrong with you for not wanting that? Like, there's a whole bunch of other like patriarchal stuff going on and like why they focus on that. Also because they undeniably find lesbians attractive, like they can't help but find it hot. So they definitely focus it more on gay men because they find that more gross because

it is like a defiant to patriarchy in like a different way. You, butt stuff. Yeah. And of course, butt stuff. Yeah. And I think also, this is the same reason why trans misogyny becomes such a huge sort of driver of anti-transmovement because, you know, I mean, you see this a lot also with we see this with non-Christian like transphobes too, but like the ultimate sin you can commit

if you are a person is like, yeah, the ultimate sin you can commit against sort of the family is having someone who like being born and being seen as a man and then, you know, becoming a woman, a woman. And that's like, that's, you know, that's, that's, that's what trans misogyny is, right? It's about, it's, it's the specific kind of of trans sexist trans sexism that you get when you do that, when you specifically like, you know, in these people's eyes, it's like you give up being a man and become a woman. And these, they go ballistic over this because it's, you know, like it's, it's, it's, it's

rejection of patriarchal power and they, you know, and they have to do all of this sort of like incredible pathologizing to explain why this would happen and ignore it just like this person was always a woman. That's, you know, the reality of the time. And also you're, it's like, it's, it's a condemnation of your misogyny and your misogynistic behavior to like go join, you know, the victims of our hate. So like it has all of these, these layers here. Yeah, and it's going to, we're going to get like right, right into trans stuff now.

Cause yeah. And in 2015, Supreme Court ruling, making the same-sex marriage legal throughout the United States, which sent LGBT, anti-LGBT, you know, hate groups into a furious reaction. Family, family research council was no exception and it started working in tandem with other groups to support so-called kind of religious liberty, you know, laws which allowed people who object to same sex, just same sex like couples and just, you know, queerness in general to, to, to deny goods and services to same sex couples and just, you know, queer people in general.

It is, it is very like nonspecific. So yeah, also in 2015, family research council faced its own set of scandals, referring to a friend of the pod, Josh Duggar, who was executive, who was the executive director of the family research council action political arm of the organization was obviously revealed that he had molested several- Save the babies to your hard drive. Several children. And yeah, had a lot of, had a lot of children on his hard drives.

Sorry. So much that like, even like the FBI was kind of surprised at how much he had, like when, when, when the FBI is surprised on how much child porn you have, you're like quite, quite the bad guy. The FBI sees some shit. Yeah. You are, you are quite the bad guy. When you, when you surprise them.

Have you, have you read his, his appeal case? I have not, I've not read his appeal. It's basically making it out to be like, there was this other guy who had access to that computer. It was his name, Josh Duggar. No, it's just like, he's just like, somebody else probably did it. It wasn't me. Yeah.

So he resigned from family research council after posting a brief message on his website saying that he resigned after a conservative. Yeah. Concerning, concerning events were made public. I think he resigned from family research council because of the Ashley Madison account. Yes. Well, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. He, he resigned listing, uh, listed listing concerning events as the recent. He started to. Ashley Madison accounts got hacked and leaked and it was revealed that he had one. His email was also on there. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

I feel like that's what like kicked it off, but that was around the time. That was, he didn't get, yeah. His sister's case got released to the press. It is, it is frustrating how, yeah, definitely the Ashley Madison thing was seen as more of a moral failing than, uh, molesting children, um, and having tons of child porn. That was definitely like within like the church and within, within the kind of the whole like, like church, like network, the Ashley Madison thing was seen as much more of a kind of like a, a egregious sin.

Well, because that's infidelity and that's just like, that destroys the entire, you know, nuclear family. Whereas molesting your siblings is just boys doing boys stuff. See, I, I grew up a boy and I never, I never did that. I kind of, I'm not sure what boys never did that either. So anyway, uh, back to any real boys right in and let us know, please, we all need to know this. Back to, back to Perkins, um, so Perkins was elected, uh, head chair of the US commission

on international religious freedom, um, in 2019 to 2020, which was a, an independent bipartisan federal government entity established by US Congress to monitor, analyze and report on threats to religious freedom. So who sponsored that fucking bill? That's a good question. Uh, over the course of this time, he, he continued to work at the family research council as well, um, including the annual family research council sponsored, uh, values voter summit in 2019.

I've been to those, which featured president Trump as a speaker, um, as well as health and human services secretary Alex Azar. So yeah, this was, uh, the, the first time a sitting health and human services secretary was addressed, like a, gave an address at, at the gathering, um, at the, at, so also at the 2019 VVS, the values voter summit, uh, they featured an anti-trans panel that illustrated the anti-LGBTQ rights shift to kind of a storytelling as a way to further marginalize trans peoples and like the battle against a foreign care. Watch J.K. Rowling get invited to CPAC next year.

Oh God. The, uh, the panel hosted like a multiple kind of anti-trans activists, um, uh, Lynn Meagher was there, um, uh, two of Meagher's children at NFI is trans and they no longer speak to her. Um, Andre Van Mool, the, uh, the co-chairman anti-LGBT hate group of the American College of Pediatricians, a committee on adolescent sexuality used to cite, used like pseudoscientific claims telling the audience that, uh, that, uh, that dissidents from gender dysphoria is the norm calling, they use this weird problematic study that left like that left trans kids

together with non-trans kids to study this idea of gender identity. It's a whole bunch of like the same, like, you know how like they, like early 2000s, they were, they were misusing like research to say like, oh, look how all of these gay people are all, also all pedophiles. Also they have sex with kids more often than adults. Like what? No, it's, it's the same, it's this, it's the same type of thing. Um, they also made the false claim that, uh, the majority of trans kids are also like a

diagnosed with autism, um, which makes it easier for them to be recruited into being transgender because they can be tricked because they're autistic. This is, you can collect them all. This is like the, the, the, the then diagram of autism caused by vaccines is causing trans kids. Oh God. Yeah. Also, also the idea that like trans affirming care causes more dysphoria, which causes more

suicide as opposed to the scientific reasoning that affirming care causes less dysphoria, which causes less suicide, um, you know, a whole, a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of nonsense stuff. Um, you can't expect a group that will not acknowledge the fact that having access to birth control as a way to prevent abortions would acknowledge any of this is real either. Yeah. No. I mean, the panel also featured a Kathy Grace Duncan from, uh, from the Portland, Oregon

based Portland to fellowship, which states that it would offer us a freedom to people from homosexuality, um, Duncan claims that she de-transitioned and it's proof that transitioning is always wrong because that she de-transitioned, that means it's proof for everybody that everyone should. Yes. Cause trans people are a monolith. Yeah. We're talking more about, we're going to be talking more about, um, the sort of how,

how people who do transition get weaponized against trans people. And again, I also, I also need to point out, like just immediately that like most people who do transition, de-transition, because they are under immense social pressure too, because society is enormously transphobic. And then there are a small number of people who do, who do treat de-transition because it's not for them and good for them. But yeah, they get a very, very small minority of those people basically get used as weapons by people who don't care about them.

Other people get gender reforming surgeries and change their minds about it later. There's this whole movement of, you know, women who are getting their breast implants removed. What's the difference? It's the same picture. Transphobia. Yeah. Yeah.

Same picture. Same picture. Another really fun, another fun thing I do at least once a year is I go on to the Focus on the Family and Family Research Council websites and look at, look at, look at their entire like queer section. And that's really interesting. Cause like, like pre-2015, all of them are around like gay people and like, is, is my kid gay?

What to do? What to do if my kid's gay? Is my, it's my kid showing gay symptoms, like all stuff. And then post-2015. Like the gender issue, you know, the cult of people trying to get your kid to become trans. Is my kid trans? Why is my kid dressing up in girls clothes?

It's like, it's, it's such, it's such an immediate shift. How to know if your kid is taxing trans shit. All of this homosexual like fear stuff to immediately being scared about like the agenda identity kind of movement and like the cult of transgenderism. Yeah. It is, it is, it is such a stark, stark change. Heritage Foundation website is the same. I looked up when they added their gender page and it was in 2017.

Yeah. Exactly. That was when they started going after trans things before that. The only thing was like, Oh, well, it's actually okay that there's a pay gap between men and women. And in 2017, they were like trans. No, yeah. From 2015 to 2018, you see a massive explosion in all of these, in all of these like stuff

about trans and like trans science, whether it be like the, whether it be like the answers and genesis, whether it be focused on the family, whether it be kind of the heritage foundation, all of this stuff. You can watch, watch an immediate shift in the type of stuff that they, they start talking about. I will just say, I am a little glad they're doing that. Not for reasons you think, but because this means that they're, they're kids growing up like we grew up who know that this is an option now, where it's like.

That is true. We didn't know that it was an option until we got out. Yeah. It is. Yeah. I mean, yeah, but you can, you can see the kind of the switch and stuff. There's a, in the, in a family research council pamphlet written by Peter Sprigg called how to respond to the LGBTQ movement published in 2018, there's people with gender dysphoria

or transgender identities are more likely than the general population to engage in high risk behaviors, which may contribute to psychological disorders or both higher suicide exist among those who have already received gender resuscitation surgery, which exists in suicidal tendencies resulted in an underlying pathology, right, did the same people write the script of you for you? But yeah, whole bunch of stuff around like Tom Perkins, Peter Sprigg, if you just look at all of this stuff, it's, um, this is such a, such an explosion, uh, Tony Perkins wrote a pamphlet called I have a girl brain, but a boy body, um, for, uh, for, uh, for a Virginia

kindergarteners, uh, like, uh, transgender story thing that he was doing around 2019 thing for years, LGBTQ activists wanted to keep the goal of luring children into sexual confusion under wraps. But now that they've hoodwinked a lot of the country on their agenda, these extremists no longer have to hide. In fact, they're increasingly bold and even boastful about their real intentions of recruiting kids. So in terms of like, yeah, it's, it is, it is an infection, it's a contagion that they're

trying to like infect or recruit children. And again, all of that kind of rhetoric is in a post, like in a, in a, in a, in a pamphlet call, you know, about, about trans being, about being trans thing, I have a girl brain but in a boy body. It's like the fact that this rhetoric is happening is going to convince kids that they fall prey to it. Like it's this whole, it's this whole thing that is such a, such a marked kind of change. You can read, you know, the other titles include stuff like the regressive cult of transgender

terrorism, all this kind of stuff, talking about our country understands that Scientology is a cult. But we don't seem to understand as how the much, how much the trans, how much the transgender movement mirrors cults like Scientology, it's, it's all of, it's all of the same, it's all of the same stuff. And if the transgender cult is a cult, it's the best cult I've been in yet. Right. Like I, I feel like we need to leave any time and nobody will, nobody will give me shit.

I can, I can stop doing my weekly injections whenever I want to. And it's, you won't, you won't lose your friends. No, no, I will not. So anyway, that was putting testosterone on at any point. That was kind of the bulk of the stuff I had gathered around specifically talking about kind of family, family research, research council and how, you know, the change happened around 2018, 2017, 2016 from all of the stuff around, you know, protecting marriage equality, protecting, you know, the sanctity of marriage to changing, it's like, it's the same save

the children rhetoric, but now shifted over to gender issues. I mean, they're just moving the overshadowing window because they can't win on the gay issue anymore. So they've just got a, like a key pushing in that direction. But it's the same organizing forces. It's the same organizations. It's the same mailing lists. It's the same pamphlets.

It's the same writers, right? It's all the people who wrote all the same stuff, just moving it over to trans things. So I just wanted to kind of lay this groundwork for us, when we talk about kind of the ongoing legislative fight against trans people in these next few episodes, I just wanted to kind of lay this out for an example of talking about, yeah, it is really just, you know, there was all these fears around, you know, gay people in the change rooms, gay people in the bathrooms just gets shifted over to trans people and change rooms, trans people in the bathrooms.

It's just this, it's just moving, it's just like this turning of the clock that just shifts it over to the transgender o'clock time, I don't know what I was going with that metaphor. It's easier to like, to pull parental rights stuff is on the rise in the, in this community as a talking point. And so it's easier to pull that in with trans issues than it is with gay issues. Yes. Well, I think that we are running out of time.

But even Karen, where can people find you online? Our podcast is the kitchen table cult. You can find it at kitchen table cult.com. Our handle on Twitter is kitchen cult pod. I'm at blue pup boy on Twitter. And I'm at Eve underscore etchanger. I would also recommend like, if you want to have a like, you know, trans authors take on the transition, the novel detransition baby is out there.

It exists is again, one person's take, it's not a monolithic thing, but it's a, it's a good novel. And then if you want to learn more about the effects of the deconversion therapy universe, Gary Conley's book boy erased is fucking great. Yep. Agreed. I just want to thank you both for coming on to talk about again, one of one of the most fun topics.

Our favorite people near and dear to near and dear to all of our hearts with featuring friends, friends of the pod, James Dobson and his urge to take his kids in the shower with them to compare penises and our good friend, uh, Josh Duggar, um, save the babies to your heart. Save, save the children. Oh, not like that. Not like that. All right.

That's the, that's the episode. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, alphabet boys. As the FBI sometimes you get to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of alphabet boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his heart was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to alphabet boys on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

You must be the civilian mercenaries, ether and serious. I'm ether and big guy is serious. I'm logo. I'm here to seek your services for a mission. I heart radio presents Intraquest, an adventure podcast. Oh no, we appear to have reached an impasse cornered between two buildings. Logo wasn't the door to the building behind you. Try the handle.

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It's the only way. Come to the intro. Listen to Intraquest on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. From the executive producer of Children's Hospital, Wet Hot American Summer and Murderville comes Brewster High. Up until now, Brewster High seemed like just a normal high school. But all that changed when Brady Brewster, our star Frisbee player disappeared.

Brady didn't come in again today. He's been missing for weeks. Your assignment is to write an article for the school newspaper about Brady's disappearance. There are a lot of strange things going on around here, and it seems like everybody has a secret. Everybody in this town bets on Frisbee games. What is going on with you, Hyde? It's not like you could get a boner in Mrs. Bankley's class.

Who likes minds? The truth is, I don't feel comfortable dancing in public. I came for the truth about Brady. It's all going in my 10 part newspaper expose, Brewster High, The Ultimate Mystery. You've got the reader's attention, now reel them in. Welcome to Brewster High on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the war against trans people.

I'm your host, Christopher Wong. In February, a camp of indigenous and ecological protesters attempting to stop the Thacker past lithium mine in Nevada was thrown into chaos over an unexpected issue, transphobia. Two of the camp activists, including a man who had volunteered to act as an attorney for the group, were revealed to be members of another organization called Deep Green Resistance, or DGR. Nominally, Deep Green Resistance is an ecological organization dedicated to destroying industrial society to preserve the environment through promoting the destruction of dams and other

infrastructure. Deep Green Resistance has found little success on this front, but they have been much more successful in spreading the other core of their ideology – militant, ruthless, and fanatical transphobia. When the indigenous protesters at Thacker past discovered the two's membership in DGR and their resultant transphobia, they were furious. Falk, the DGR lawyer who had offered to represent the protesters, was kicked off the case, and the presence of the two DGR members was used by Lithium America as a weapon against the

protesters. This is a familiar cycle for Deep Green Resistance. Soon after its founding in 2011, the group fully embraced radical feminism, staking out a position in an old debate inside the feminist movement raging since the 1970s over whether trans women are in fact women. These feminists – I use the term loosely here – became known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs. Their heroes were people like Janice Raymond, author of the vehemently transphobic screed

the transsexual empire. Raymond, whose baiiful influence we will return to next episode, was largely ran out of the mainstream American feminist movement with the rest of the TERF companions. A similar fate would befall Deep Green Resistance. Ecological activists in groups like Earth First, Greenpeace, the IWW, and the broader Green Anarchist movement – cis and trans alike – ran DGR out of the ecological left for their transphobia and waged an incredibly successful, no-platforming campaign against DGR's founders, Derek Jensen and Leary Keith.

Driven from the left, so thoroughly they were reduced to slinking into protest camps in secret only to be expelled upon discovery. Members of Deep Green Resistance moved right, and increasingly to other countries, to seek an audience for their transphobic bile. Leary Keith founded a TERF organization called the Women's Liberation Front, or WOLF. More on them later. This brings us to TERF extraordinaire, Jennifer Billick. Billick had been a member of Deep Green Resistance in charge of booking appearances for Derek

Jensen. The success of the no-platforming campaign waged by the left convinced her that transpeople were secretly backed by a conspiracy of billionaires. This idea spread like wildfire across the UK, and as we'll discuss next episode, Mexico. To understand what happened in the UK, we spoke with Krista Peterson, a graduate student at USC, who at significant personal cost, confronted the rise and spread of transphobia in the English-speaking world. Krista, welcome to the show, and thank you for joining us.

Hi, thank you. I guess I wanted to start with Jennifer Billick and talking a bit about how she sort of moved into increasingly transphobic territory and I guess how she started moving into the sort of follow-the-money conspiracy theories that she's been peddling for the past several years now. Yeah, so I give you her narrative of this, which is that in 2013, I think she was supposed to be on a panel about, I think, transpeople that was cancelled because of pushback, and then because of that, she thought, what is the big force behind this, and then got into

it from there, but she has really, I think you know that deep green resistance was kind of into focusing on transpeople for a while, but she really has gone from an environmental activist to someone who is just solely focused on transpeople, and it's basically all she is ever talking about. And she's kind of, she started as opposing this kind of existential threat that was real, which was ecological destruction of climate change, and she has kind of maintained that tenor in the shift where now she's portraying this as an existential threat, but instead of climate change, it's transpeople.

So the way she got into the money, which is just a very prolific kind of at-home researcher, and she kind of had this anti-corporate mindset going in from her background, and she produces a lot of research. There's not that many people in the gender-critical movement who are really producing a lot of original content, and so when someone is, there's really, they can get a lot of uptake from that. Her first thing was actually a federalist article about who are the rich white men institutionalizing transgender ideology, and just by being a pretty big platform, I think that got some

big initial distribution. I think that was how people initially started seeing her kind of beyond the deep green resistance type audience. Yeah, that's one of the things that's been very interesting to be studying this, is that you see this a lot. You see a lot of people who were sort of run out of the left by their transphobia, like pivoting really hard right, and then using right-wing media platforms, and using sort of also right-wing political backing to start pushing this stuff.

I think, yeah, Bill looks an interesting example to me because, yeah, she, I guess you talked a bit about this more, I mean, she has this weird, okay, so she has two weird angles. She has the weird transhumanism angle, and then she has this like incredibly, it becomes like an increasingly anti-Semitic angle. Yeah, so where she, so she's following the money is the original thing. Where she follows the money, too, is trans rights are a conspiracy to usher in transhumanism. So her thing is, she often says, transgender is an ad campaign for transhumanism, so quote, to get people comfortable with actual merging with machines, slash AI, there must be a complete

dissociation from biological reality. So you see this a lot with conspiracy theories, I think, where you have this kind of like metaphorical goal, right, where it's all about getting people to dissociate from their bodies. It's like not very clear what that looks like on an actual causal level. But that's the big goal, right, and they need a big goal. There's kind of this mysterious part of this like supposed conspiracy that is trans rights, which is like, what is this for, right, they, lots of people now are accepting that there

is like this big dark money push behind it, which raises the question, why, what, what is this doing? Yeah. And the answers are kind of kooky, right, and so this one has caught on more than I would have expected. Yeah. It's really weird. It's like.

They kind of walk into it slowly, right, they start off and it's, I think there's something weird with trans rights, and they have, it's very common for them to think that their opponents don't really believe their beliefs, something is up, and for some reason, all these people are supported trans rights when they know it's bad, that you need, you need something to go in there to explain why. And this is a narrative that fits with Billick's worldview, you know, you can see how someone with her background would get here. It's kind of unusual for all these ladies from the UK now to believe that trans people

are transhuman conspiracy, but they needed something to go there as the goal. So they picked it up. Yeah. So I'm going to get into mom's net a little bit because mom's that's a really weird, like specifically UK thing that I don't know if there's like, there's not really an American equivalent to it. Like, I guess it's like, it's like, it's like, what if you took the worst parts of Facebook and next door, I guess.

Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about like what mom's net is and how this stuff sort of sort of seeping into it? Yeah. And this is part of this bigger question, which is like, why in the UK has taken off so much in the way it has? A big part of that story is mom's net, which is a website from mom's to ask kind of parenting questions.

And it's really widely used, I think, especially among this kind of like white upper middle class educated population, a lot of people are on mom's and it's kind of a trusted website for a lot of familial type things, like advice about what to do when your kid has lice, things like that. And mom's net has become just like the main infection point, I think, in the gender critical movement in the UK. With why it happens more generally, you have to look at it as kind of part of this global resurgence and fascism around the same time period.

It's like the mid 2010s on like the most obvious instances of that have the kind of traditional fascist targets and ideals, but I think what's essential is this kind of logic that you really see in the gender critical movement also, which is you have this kind of background climate of anxiety and fear, then you get this narrative that minorities are rising up against you, you've lost something, your identity used to give you a special status, and now they're taking it from you and you have to fight back, and they've kind of switched out like what the big identity is, who the minorities are, what the special status is with this more feminist thing, but it really does have that kind of internal logic in the

same way. And I think you just had this kind of moment globally where you had the kind of background of this emotional state that was ripe for fascism in a lot of ways, and then this ideology was just infectious in that way, and then in Moms Night it was able to catch, and it really provided it with this place where it could really grow into this kind of unusual demographic group or a kind of fascist movement. Yeah, I think there's an interesting, I think there's another interesting thing to me about it is like, I don't know, I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of, yeah, why specifically

the UK and why the US doesn't have this, and I mean, I guess one explanation for it partly is like the US is so much more religious than the UK is, and a lot of these people sort of would have been evangelicals in the US, but yeah, I think the Moms Night angle is interesting to me in that it really seems like because there's so few people publishing anything that's even remotely tangible, like a very, very small number of actors were able to very quickly radicalize people, and I think, I don't know, and I think it's interesting that like people like Jesse Sengal, like I think wind up being much more influential in the UK than they are in the US even though they're getting sort of published in these

US publications because there's sort of, I don't know, I guess there's this like hunger for it on Moms Night, like for anything that sort of supports this worldview in a way that there's kind of wasn't in the US. I think part of why, like the why UK question, there's some part of it that's just kind of by chance Moms Night existed was a place where it could really take off, but I think also to some extent like you are related to, I think kind of part of the relevant group in the US is I think a little more inoculated against this stuff, I mean that it doesn't really have the same initial appeal among women who would like to construe themselves

as feminists because many Americans see anti-trans stuff and immediately connect it to like the religious right. Yeah. So it doesn't, you don't really get the initial way into it where, you know, you come across this thing presenting trans people as encroaching on your space and taking something from you and for us we see that and it's like, oh yeah, bathroom bill laws really just had this a few years ago and it was this right-wing religious thing, we know what this is, the UK has kind of had a more prominent turf activism for a little while and that Julie Bindle, it's

kind of long been a thing there, but it wasn't really catching in the same way. It is now really caught. Yeah, I guess, I mean, one of the other things that I was talking, I had an interesting conversation that sadly didn't wind up getting recorded, but what I was talking with some Mexican feminists, like trans feminists about this and one of the things they were saying was the way, like talking about the way like intersectionality is a framework and the fact that there was an incredibly strong black feminist current in the US insulated like the main line of American feminism from this stuff in a way that didn't really happen in the UK because

the black feminist movement there is just not as strong and not as sort of mainstream and that has this knock on effect, I guess, where like you get, you know, without an intersectionality framework, it's easier to have this sort of like totalizing like identity of like the woman as like a thing that's just one object that you can like pin down to biological barkers instead of having to sort of like look at all of the different actual like relations that are going on. Yeah, so my read on them is that most of them are not really, were not preexisting feminists. They were not people who are very interested in women's rights and then kind of took this

turn. My pressure is that there are largely people who really started identifying as feminists once that could be a guys to kind of take things out on trans people. And I think I'll probably why it was able to get so big on mom's net, so eventually the women's rights for my mom's net, which is just one of the subboards in addition to all the childcare stuff just became almost all anti trans stuff. And so that is partially this stuff was popular. But I also I think that, you know, normal mainstream feminist stuff wasn't as popular

and they weren't getting a lot of engagement on normal important feminist issues. Instead, this was what their user base was really going for. It's really striking. I think how there's exceptions. But in general, the big gender critical people talk very, very little about all feminist issues. It's like, yeah, this is the thing they care about all the time. Yeah, that's definitely a pattern with terfs.

Like, yeah, once once once you're a turf, like this is the only thing you care about. Like, you don't you don't do, yeah, I mean, it's like one of one of the we'll talk more about this in the next episode. But one of the sort of big like flagship things in in like with the UK and Ireland was like a bunch of the terfs getting extremely mad at the at these and at the at the pro like at the the pro-abortion activists in in Ireland because they weren't being terfs. And so the the terfs were like, no, no, no, we're going to like try to sabotage this act, the actual feminist movement trying to get access to abortions because we're terfs

and they're not. Yeah, they could be really vindictive against women who they say are like selling out women's rights by focusing on anything other than the tiny percent of the population that is trans is the one issue you're allowed to focus on. And if you say like, no, please, please leave us alone. We're focusing on something else that really do not take the bomb. I guess the other thing I wanted to ask about was existing. The other thing that happened in the UK that only really started happening in the U.S.

like pretty recently and even then was kind of like it was an event in like a way that I don't know how much it was in the UK is the extent to which like people like J.K. Rowling and like the sort of mainstream of British famous people and like British journalists and stuff like that like like start started rallying around this stuff. Yeah, this is it's been wild for me seeing I like don't think super highly of the American media but seeing how much worse the British media is really while they just have been publishing stuff. Things like the Times of London have been the worst with more conservative outlets, especially

bad. But even, you know, the Guardian has been some BBC and some these things are just kind of like demonstrably false coverage of trans rights stuff that just gives a lot of credence to this transphobic movement. It's kind of this like near blackout of in serious consideration of what trans people are experiencing and what their actual position on this stuff is. It's just really grim, I think part of it is maybe that mom's not did have this reach to a lot of people who are like professionals.

Their audience is pretty professional and it was this kind of trusted website where this got normalized a lot. The last thing I wanted to talk about before we go to break is do you want to talk about Kathleen Stock and that whole thing a little bit? Yes. Okay. Also, we should talk about we should connect Billick to. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So that is, there was, you know, moms that started, I think the initial narrative was kind of trans people are being really unreasonable, they're really demanding, they're infringing on our status. This thing that was more localized about this group that was easy to cast as unreasonable and they were able to take kind of a victim stance relative to them and then it just kind of kept escalating, right, it just kind of shifted to more and more of this kind of content

and then eventually there really was a great appetite, this kind of anti-trans content and it just got increasingly conspiratorial, I think. So people at this point, I think almost everyone in the gender critical movement thinks that there's dark money behind trans rights. They think it's like some kind of astroturf movement for who knows what. Lots of them will say the goal is like selling, you know, hormones and surgery to people. What? Like yes.

Yeah. It's funding, you know, a global conspiracy, I think it's like pretty expensive and it's like the most plausible way to get an audience, this kind of thing. But Jennifer Billick is one of relatively few people doing this kind of deep research and so it's just kind of the kind of thing they were looking for and they have pretty minimal bullshit filters about what they're willing to see and it's just pretty rare that they will see a source that seems to be on their side and be like, no, there's something wrong with us.

So she increasingly got banned and a lot of people hear her stuff secondhand, I think. They're not directly meeting her but people are repeating her and so much of her stuff now is part of the, just the background of this movement. Like there's this woman, Martine Rothblatt, who is a kind of random rich woman who was, she was involved in kind of early trans rights activism and kind of moved on and got interested in transhumanism stuff instead, she's like kind of a strange lady and she is interested in transhumanism stuff and rich and is not the architect of the trans rights movement. But now they just all think that this person has his central role and when you see them

talking about her it is Jennifer Billick's influence and they just don't have, they just don't have any defenses against kind of increasingly radicalized stuff. And when I started looking into Jennifer and I started seeing her get, you know, when you see people talking about a conspiracy of people like George Soros, Jennifer Pritzker, Rothblatt is also Jewish, there was a red flag and in conspiracy spaces it just kind of tends towards anti-Semitism if you're not on the lookout for and if you're not defending against it and Billick's not and she has gotten increasingly into anti-Semitic side of things up to the point where she was boosting Heath Woods, who is just an oxy, his content that was largely

inspired by her work about the Jews behind the transgender movement and just taking kind of going from this kind of non-explicit anti-Semitic conspiracy theory where you have this group of people who happen to be largely filled with Jewish people kind of orchestrating this global conspiracy to explicitly naming the Jew and saying, no, this is a Jewish movement and yet and she just like followed it all the way. And there was some, when I started making a big deal about this, you know, there was some pushback from the gender critical movement, but largely they think I'm like a bad faith actor, right, I'm the enemy, so they're not going to take anything, I say really seriously,

but also it was really struck by how some of them were arguing with me about this Keith Woods video that was, you know, about how this was a Jewish plot and why the Jewish religion would inspire you to do something like this and they say, no, this is an anti-Semitic. There's nothing, you know, it's just, it's very interesting, it's about Judaism because they already believed all the background stuff, right, they thought that there was in fact this conspiracy that's populated by people who happen to be Jewish and so then when you take the explicit step, it's, they're like, well, yeah, there's an interesting question, right, why are all these people Jewish?

Yeah, they're just going all the way, right, it's not real fast. And yeah, I should say in general, the movement is like, just really not have good defenses against this kind of stuff at all, and yeah, this kind of conspiratorial stuff will take you there if you don't have defenses against it, it's just a very old road that goes in exactly that direction and is ready for you if you start getting into this stuff and aren't watching out for it. Yeah, all right, so let's talk about Kathleen Stock, philosophies, horror, child. Oh, no, yeah, so I think not just Kathleen, but you have one of the things that is noteworthy

about the movement, I think, is you have these unusual prominence of academics, one of them being Kathleen Stock, maybe the most prominent being Kathleen Stock, but also like Rosa Freeman and Selena Todd, and you have this kind of academic face of it. And it's very interesting, I think, how that works, and that these people are in generally not doing kind of substantive research on anything related to this. Instead, what I see is, you know, stuff starts out in the community, it's like on Momsnet, it's on Twitter, and then Kathleen Stock picks it up, right, she is getting her stuff kind of from Momsnet and stuff, and then she's legitimizing it, right?

It's like, oh, this is what these fancy professors think, and then centrally their role is claiming that there are all these serious issues on the basis of their academic status and saying that trans people aren't willing to discuss it, you know, trans people are shutting down the debate, they're being silenced, and it gives it this legitimacy that the movement I think really capitalizes on. Yeah, which I think with Stock in particular, you know, part of what's happening is like the anti-trans people kind of like moves between different conservative panics, and so like the modern one, they're on the save the children panic, but when Stock was sort of like getting

big, and you can see this with the end of her career arc, which we'll get to in a second, but she was big on the whole sort of conservative college free speech crisis, I guess, sort of cancer culture also, but yeah, she was really big on the whole like, yeah, the conservatives are being silenced, I think she was kind of doing the liberal centrist thing, but she was, yeah, she was doing all these censorship claims and then turning around and just actually censoring people. Yeah, I gave a talk at Sussex, Kelly's University, that I believe she tried to have canceled. Yeah.

Come on. It was just kind of interesting because I, initially this talk was kind of scheduled as a protest at the same time as one of her, as a talk she was going to give on a related topic, and then she canceled her talk. So I thought she might come to mind, right, like Freda Bay, like ask me questions, and I was like, okay, but of course she didn't, right, because instead, she really tried to just get it shut down, and I think this is, yeah, it's one kind of the cancel culture thing is kind of one element, but I think it's really central in a lot of their stuff

and that the, kind of in the background of other stuff is like, you know, somehow the consensus has been controlled and like, it's the result of like the truth not being heard and people not considering all these important things that they need to consider, kind of from care for trans youth to, you know, trans women being able to use the bathroom, kind of across all this, they're writing this narrative that the truth has been silenced and, you know, trans people are being unreasonable and have shut it down, I think that is a pretty foundational, the overall narrative they've built. Yeah, and you see this as like, this is one of the ways they try to, I guess, rest the

mantle of authority back from literally every actual medical group who all agree that you should actually let kids transition and you should let adults transition and that this is in fact good and like, a thing that medically is, is like, I mean, like I said, yeah, this is a huge deal, right, so like, Kathleen Sough is a philosopher, right, and so she started off, her first thing was like, something is afoot in academic philosophy, you know, academic philosophers aren't debating whether trans women are women in the way that they should. And this idea that the debates being silenced in philosophy, you know, like, doesn't have really important consequences, I think.

The idea that like all mainstream research on trans healthcare, like what is in the good interest, the best interests of trans kids, being able to delegitimize that is really serious. Yeah. Right, that just has these tremendous consequences, and I think they've been able to be pretty effective on that too. Yeah, and that's been really scary in a lot of ways because you see like the arguments of these people pioneered and the sort of the techniques and the groups that they're

part of like wind up being core parts of the anti-trans push in both the UK and the US. And yeah, that's extremely scary. It's really scary. I mean, it's just awful, right, these are children, and for them to become the focus of this kind of hate movement is just horrifying is just often the, you know, the history of healthcare for gender nonconforming kids is really grim, and they are just pushing to kind of go back there. And it's just ghastly, it's really horrifying to see.

Yeah, I guess I think that's a that's a good point. We can have this is probably the second ad break, but yeah, do you know what else is horrifying ads? And we're back. One of the scariest parts, I think, of what was happening in the UK was the extent to which I mean, not just mainstream, British media gets involved in this, but I mean, literally the BBC, which is which is the, you know, this is this is the state media organization, right, starts to just push unbelievably transphobic articles out as just regular contents.

I think I think the most famous one is, yeah, in in October 2021, the BBC publishes this article that's called we're being pressured into sex by some trans women that is just in just just an absolutely appalling display of transphobia. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that and this article was framed around the question, is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women? Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners, and so the overarching perspective in the piece that you get is that this is a significant problem among lesbians.

They are experiencing sexual pressure from trans women. The kind of reporting strategy that the reporter used was, you know, just soliciting this one kind of particular narrative from lesbians who said that they had had these kind of experiences with trans women. The people who are quoted in the article who aren't anonymous are gender critical people like Rose of Dawn, Debbie Hayden, and then there's these anonymous women who we don't know who they are, but it's not, they didn't go and approach, you know, normal mainstream lesbian activists or lesbian organizations to see like what they were experiencing in

the community, right? There's kind of no perspective just from any kind of mainstream lesbian organizations at all. That was one of the things that sort of was haunting about this, like this journalist is working on this for eight, I think it was like years she's been trying to find this, and like she was specifically trying to find these people, like people who like had experienced a specific thing and like no normal, like she couldn't find normal people because it's not a thing.

And so she, after like many, many years she was able to find like a couple of examples, like a few examples and mostly from, yeah, just open transphobes. And the article is just like so conceptually sloppy that it doesn't distinguish, you know, theoretical discourse about whether, you know, it's transphobic to just say out of hand, you never date a trans woman, it doesn't distinguish this from sexual abuse. Yeah. And it takes for granted that they're just saying in kind of an abstract theoretical context that some of these like just saying that you won't ever sleep with a trans woman,

saying that that is transphobic is itself treated as akin to pressuring someone into sex, right? Like that. Yeah. Journalism that doesn't distinguish between just a conversation about sexual issues and sexual abuse is just disastrous. There's just nothing serious about this piece and it's just kind of throughout it. Yeah.

Like one of the other things about this is, so they found like a survey, right? Because the journalists went looking for a survey about like what percentage of lesbians have like encountered this and encountered this pressure. And the only thing they could find was, well, okay, the only thing they could find that would like support their actual claim was this poll from this group called Get Out the L, which is just like a group that whose entire purpose is just being anti-trans people and trying to get rid of them. Yeah.

And it was just like, it was like a Twitter poll, right? So it was like, they're publishing as statistical evidence for their claim, a Twitter poll from a turf group and trying to like claim this is serious journalism. And it's just, yeah, I mean, so literally on the page of the statistic they cite in this report, the report approvingly cites Janice Raymond saying, quote, all transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact. And so like, are we talking about metaphors here or are we talking about sexual abuse? Yeah.

It's just sick, right? So one of the people who was interviewed in this was Lily Cade, who was an adult performer. And again, throughout this, just a trans woman saying that the way someone is treating her in a sexual context is transphobic is itself treated as sexually abusive. So Lily Cade, you know, she refused to, I think initially she refused to be in a scene with a trans woman, but then later on also refused to shoot a trans woman at all when she was working as a producer. So they kind of get a quote from Lily, you know, saying something about women being pressured

into sex by trans women, and it turns out that Lily Cade was pushed out of the adult industry because she's like a serial rapist, right? So this is their source on whether this is a problem for a cis woman is herself a cis woman who is a serial rapist, right? And they're using this person to portray trans women as the victimizers. And it's just so grim. Yeah, just much for this, just sort of like haunting, like one of the other things that came out was like part of the story is they said that like no prominent trans women would

speak with them for the story. And then a prominent trans woman was like, no, you guys interviewed me and that didn't include it in the article. Yeah, so this was one of the people who Lily Cade had had a conflict with was Chelsea Poe, another woman in Porn who had asked if Lily, if she could work for Lily's company, and Lily said no, because she was trans. So they talked, Chelsea was like, is a reasonably prominent person. And they interviewed her, didn't include her in the article.

She says that she told them that Lily had this predatory past. They also didn't say anything about that. So we have a situation where we have this person who is this woman, who the author has been told is a serial sexual predator being presented as kind of an authority on women's sexual victimization supposedly by trans women when she is the victimizer and not only is she a serial sexual predator, but she's like specifically attacked people in bathrooms. Yeah. Which is like the famous fear mongering transphobic thing, right, is that trans people are going

to attack you in the bathroom and abuse your source has attacked people in bathrooms. And there's just very little interest like how women are actually victimized and by who? Yeah. And I think like that's a nice disturbing part of it. This isn't just like a negligent reporting thing here. This is just malice. Like if you are told anything, it's not like it was hard to find out that someone tells you that someone else is an abuser, right?

It's like, okay, maybe you're a journalist, maybe you're going to be like, oh, I should check this out. Lily Cage assaulted so many people and raped so many people that just scrolling through Twitter. I found multiple people who have been abused by her like this was this was not something that was like, like she admitted publicly, this is not something that was like hard to find, right? Yes.

To be clear, she, yeah, I just want to underline that, which is that Lily Cage after these accusations really got going, she did like publicly admit she did not deny accusations and then she retired from porn. Yeah. And, you know, and this is something like the BBC does this, they do this weird back tracking of this article comes out and everyone gets extremely mad at them. But they, they, they refuse to release the, like the tape of the interview they had did with Chelsea Poe, which, you know, would have proved that Chelsea Poe did in fact tell them

that Lily Cage was a rapist and they published the story anyways. And there's, there's so much of this stuff was like, yeah, like the way they backtrack about it, the way that also like, so the two places where this thing, the story ran was the BBC in Britain and they syndicated it out to Brazil and a few other places that were like, that are incredibly transphobic. And it ran like, yeah, and this stuff like right in Brazil, like ran as a bunch of mainstream news headlines, like where like news stories and in the major newspapers like ran this. And it was, I don't know, like there's, there's, there's this extent to which, yeah, like

you're watching British state media decide that they actively just want to go to war on trans people and they literally just do not care that like they are, you know, publishing little rapists. And then Yeah, I just, just the BBC's policy, you know, is when we interview those responsible for antisocial behavior or crime, it may cause distress to victims and we should contact victims and advise them of our plans, you know, when a viewing criminals care must be taken to minimize potential distress, this may cause to victims of the crime.

They didn't see Lily as this applying to her, right? This is a cis woman who they have been told is a sexual predator. You can find this information, I found it pretty quickly. All of these victims talking about it, her acknowledging it, and they didn't identify this cis woman as a predator with victims who would be like very plausibly upset by seeing their rapists treated as an authority on sexual abuse, right? And this is kind of pervasive, I think, in the gender critical movement, right where if any of you are out there, I'm sure you're thinking women can't be rapists, rape requires

a penis, which is in the UK, it's kind of, you know, most women consider this a pretty reactionary way to define rape, where it has to be penetration with a penis. And this isn't reflective of, you know, how women experience sexual assault, that it's just kind of totally other category. And most countries, women consider it quite important that you don't kind of treat this as this like categorically different offense. But the gender critical movement really pushes this perspective where it is literally impossible for women to commit rape, you know, and this is, they think that when they, a brief period

where they thought that they had identified like that every rape that was recorded as committed by a woman was trans women, because they thought that it required a penis, and they thought that that was the only way that it was possible. You can actually be convicted of it if you were like aiding and abetting. They thought that they had all of these, and they just have this overall perspective where it is literally impossible for, you know, to say, a woman meaning a cis woman to commit a sexual offense. And in doing this, they create cover for cis women predators, like Lily K. It creates

this context where their victimization just disappears. People can't even acknowledge it. Yeah. It's awful. And yeah, and like I think like the extent to which this whole movement is built on violence and is built. And there are so many people that the gender critical people work with who are abusers. There are, you know, and I want to come back to like the last piece of the Lily K. thing,

which is that after this article came out, the BBC initially basically didn't do anything, right? Even after the rape out, like, yeah. And then Lily K. published one of, like, one of the most transphobic things I've ever encountered in my life, like a just this, it gets called a manifesto. Like I don't. It was like a manifesto. It was terrifying.

Yeah. Like she's explicitly like, like, like names specific trans women that she once lynched. Like there's a bunch of stuff about there's people she wants raped. She wants like she wants all trans people to die. There's a bunch of there's like weirdly racist stuff. There's like it's just it's it's it's it is a document that calls for genocide. And the part where it's calling for genocide probably isn't like line for line the most disturbing part of it because the individual threats are like so graphic.

And I was terrified when I read this. I was the person who, you know, initially dug up the sexual abuse allegations. And when I did it, I knew it would kind of throw a wrench into her life. I thought that they hadn't, you know, they were there. They were visible. You could find them. But when it had happened, she had not really been a in the mainstream eye. And so I knew if this got uptake, it would make it bigger.

And I went ahead and then this woman is posting this terrifying manifest. It read like she's shooting someone now. It was just so it was just terrifying. It was like something to be written, you know, immediately before someone goes to shoot someone. It was all and she's tweeting it and tagging the BBC in it. Yeah, and like that that finally like one of the most disturbing things I've ever read in my life, like that was finally the thing with BBC was like, maybe we should do something about this.

It was just so, so little, right? This is they took her out of the article. They added an update that says we have updated this article published last week to remove a contribution from one individual in light of comments she's published on a blog post in recent days, which we have been able to verify. We acknowledge that an admission of inappropriate behavior by the same contributor should have been included in the original article. And so this is, you know, there's kind of erased her, right?

So they didn't acknowledge that they had included this person in the article who just published this genocidal rant, right? So one of their sources is the person who is advocating for killing trans people. That is important, right? That is pertinent to this narrative they're pushing. And they also are not saying, you know, they should have, we acknowledged that an admission of inappropriate behavior should have been included in the original article. It really changes the overall narrative of the article, right?

If you acknowledge the cis woman is a serial predator, right? The overall picture is like cis women are at risk from trans women, and it's a reality check, right? To hear, you know, in fact, this woman who we're presenting as like victimized is one of the women who was preying on people and she's not a trans woman. And it's just, they just, you know, even after this responded in a way that protected the narrative of the piece, right? They weren't going to let in anything that acknowledged this, the people they're finding

with this position are transphobic. This person was very, and it just says, they've removed the contribution in light of comments she has published. What kind of comments? What are they about? It's serious, right? It's serious to not acknowledge that one of their sources is a violent transphobe. This is how I found out that she was alive also, them saying that they had been able

to verify it. Before that, I'd been like, she's not very online in a lot of cases. So I was really worried, I didn't know how long it was going to be before, you know, there was confirmation that like, in fact, the like, Kate had not just shot someone and herself. Yeah. It was just really, it's a manifesto, it's terrifying, I don't know, it's just awful. Yeah.

I think, you know, one of the things that's happening here is you get to see, there's a couple of like, there's a couple, there's like layers at which the stuff operates. So you have, you know, you have your BBC running to legitimization, right? But then you have the stuff beneath it, which is just appropriately genocidal. And I think, you know, in some sense, like with the Lily Kade, like, if you're going to be a turf, Lily Kade kind of blew it, right? I was like, you can't like, okay, like you can be really, really transphobic in a lot of, in a lot of ways, but like, you know, actively calling people to get lynched is

a thing that like, even like, transphobes are normally like, wait, what, why are you? Yeah, they didn't like this. Yeah, yeah. But I don't think like the mainstream turf movement is not in a place where you can do stuff like that. But in some ways, I think, you know, the stuff that's more moderate is more dangerous. The last thing I want to talk about is a document called the Decoration on Women's Sex-Based Rights, which was put together by a bunch of turf activists, fairly prominently featuring

Arch Australian turf Sheila Jeffries. But yeah, can you talk a bit about like what this is and... Yeah, so this is a document that basically all of the gender-critical organizations and the people have signed, and it is extreme, right? It calls for trans women to be banned from all women's spaces, including toilets, which you know, if women can't go to the bathroom, they can't participate in society, right? It's just like a basic need people to have to exist in public, and that it bans all, it asked to ban all internationally recommended health care for trans children.

It asked to legally protect deliberate misgendering, which would allow you to be just treated with such hostility like at work, just in public. This is just kind of a direct assault on trans people's ability to exist with dignity in society and just live normal lives. A lot of gender-critical people will say or portray themselves as only opposing advances for trans rights, not wanting trans rights to be rolled back, but what this document calls for is basically every right trans people have to exist in their genders, in particular, trans women, especially target trans women, to just take it all back and leave them with

basically nothing. Yeah, yeah. They have this whole thing about basically like they want to erase the concept of gender identity from law, which is the thing that does is it eliminates all trans people from... It eliminates trans people as a thing that the law recognizes exists and thinks should have protections. It is the legal genocide of trans people, that's what it is. Yeah.

Yeah, so they've basically all signed this. This is not at all a French document, it positions itself as the demands kind of of this movement and it's extreme. The organization's spokeswoman is Cara Dansky, who uses almost all of her public appearances. She has a number of times been on Tucker Carlson. She boosts Jennifer Billick all the time. She I think is her biggest supporter and was formerly the chair of WOLF, which is Lear Keith's organization.

Yeah, the Women's Liberation Front is what WOLF stands for. It is a cool name for an org that sucks and they should give it back. Does it work better? Yeah, so this is, I mean generally you'll see the American turfs kind of in this more radical direction, also especially explicitly collaborating with the right and here they've made this document that just reports to and everyone has signed it kind of direct the overall agenda to one that just leaves trans people with just no protections at all. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, the reason I think this is in a lot of ways like more

dangerous and a lily cave thing is again, it's in this like, it's not actually in legalese because none of these people are lawyers and so how did an actual law, I mean, okay, I shouldn't be asking how did an actual lawyer produce this because I've met lawyers and they're, they're not, they are not as smart and above board as they portray themselves to be. But yeah, like this stuff isn't making legal arguments. Like one of the things that they've like, I guess the whole sort of gender critical like turf movement is invented is like this, this concept of sex based rights, which is

not a thing like, yeah, like, they all think that there's like rights that you have because of your sex. And no, this doesn't exist, they completely made this up, they keep on like, referring to it as if it's like a concept that exists in the law, like none of this stuff, like in terms of legalese, it's like, it's nothing, it's a jumble of words. Yeah, I know you really see as the movements go, they really have really robust movement discipline and kind of taking up these new terms and then saying them all the time as though it's a thing everyone's familiar with one of them is always like women's sex based

rights, women's sex based rights, like what people's rights aren't based on their sex. Yeah, kind of like a whole thing we're doing with feminism, you know, was like, you don't have special rights based on being a man, and it turns out that like, supposedly a lot of we've thought that you have special rights for if you're a woman to exclude whoever you want to exclude, I guess, it's just goofy. Yeah, but I think like it's weird, but it's like, it's also, it has this function, which is that the sort of like, and like, okay, so like, I don't, my guess is that most of the people who have signed this document have not read it, because, you know, but, but you

know, like, I think what the thing that it does is it gives them this, this legitimization, it gives their goal of exterminating trans people, this sort of legal jargon apparatus they can hide behind if like, oh, it's actually from the UN, and we're basing it on international law and that and the organization used to have this fancy name, which was the women human rights campaign. And they have now dropped that possibly for legal reasons, but it sounds good, right? Yeah, yeah. The website's polished and it seems like a real thing and the, you know, they really

try to take this phrase to and using it just kind of sneak everything in, right? So they'll ask people questions like, well, what about women sex-based rights? These are the things I've never heard about before in my life and, but people just get on board and they don't really know what's happening and they've, another thing they do is they always portray like bathrooms as sex-segregated spaces and every bathroom I've ever been in says women on the door, it doesn't seem like female bathroom, but I feel like this is based on sex, not gender. Just making these assertions and they have a lot of assertions.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good place to wrap up, I guess. They have a lot of assertions. Yeah. Yeah. I guess we have just underwriting again what a serious kind of attack on trans people's rights this is, right? And this is calling for things that would make it very hard for trans people to exist.

And it's really scary to watch this, I think, and watch it kind of progress across this movement and be boosted. It's awful. Yeah, and next episode we are going to take a much deeper dive into some of the people who signed this document and we are going to see what happens when this kind of bloodless but genocidal legalistic rhetoric makes it into the hands of people who are not afraid to do physical violence. It is worse, it is going to go worse than you're probably imagining.

Just to underline this, we said earlier that Jennifer Billick's stuff is just widely now accepted within this movement and her stuff is portraying trans people and trans rights as this existential and media threat. She portrays, often says that doctors are butchering children, right, they're making children into slaves. It's stuff that, if it was true, would call for kind of an extreme level of resistance and that's kind of what this stuff functions to do, right? If you are accusing people of these really extreme offenses and of hurting and threatening

all of these people, what that motivates is extreme responses and violent responses and Billick herself is sometimes engaged in violent rhetoric but I think many of us who have been following this movement are just kind of waiting, afraid because that's just where it looks like it's going in the US and the UK too, it's kind of hard to... It's just so scary and they're mapping out where the gender clinics are and it's scary because where rhetoric like this goes is to a violent place and it's hard to see it letting up right now. Yeah, that is the subject of tomorrow's episode in which a bunch of people will start attacking

gender clinics and a bunch of trans people are going to get violently assaulted by TERFs who are directly affiliated with Sheila Jeffries and our followers are Jennifer Billick. So... Graham. Yeah. Oh, Krista, thank you for coming on and doing this. Thank you. Yeah, this has been Naked Happen Here.

You can find us at Happen Here Pod on Twitter and Instagram. We are also... There is other stuff that we do at the Cool Zone and yeah, go fight for the rights of trans people before they cease to exist. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

Because the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad-ass way.

And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. You must be the civilian mercenaries, Ether and Sirius. I'm Ether and Big Guy is Sirius. I'm Logo.

I'm here to seek your services for a mission. iHeartRadio presents IntreQuest, an adventure podcast. Three adventurers face a dark force on their quest to return home. From the executive producer of Children's Hospital, Wet Hot American Summer, and Murderville comes Brewster High. Up until now, Brewster High seemed like just a normal high school. But all that changed when Brady Brewster, our star Frisbee player, disappeared. Brady didn't come in again today.

He's been missing for weeks. Your assignment is to write an article for the school newspaper about Brady's disappearance. There are a lot of strange things going on around here, and it seems like everybody has a secret. Everybody in this town bets on Frisbee games. What is going on with you, Hyde? It's not like you to get a boner in Mrs. Bankley's class. Who likes mimes?

The truth is, I don't feel comfortable dancing in public. I came for the truth about Brady. It's all going in my 10-part newspaper expose, Brewster High, The Ultimate Mystery. You've got the reader's attention, now reel him in. Listen to Brewster High on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Ika Dappin' Here, a podcast that this week is about the war on trans people. I'm your host, Christopher Wong.

If you've been around the left long enough, you've probably heard people call trans-exclusionary radical feminism, or turfism, a colonial ideology. Broadly, the accusation of colonialism is about the erasure of non-western genders that fall outside the Christian gender binary. But turfs are colonial in another sense as well, exported by white academics through a network of fall feminist and anti-trafficking groups. The ideology has imposed itself on the global south with devastating and violent consequences. As a product of this colonial imposition, Mexico has become one of the front lines in

the war against trans people. I spoke to Emmy Flores and Julianne and Newhauser, two members of the Sexual and Gender Dissidence Resistance Network, a group of activists aligned with the Zapatistas who have been documenting and resisting the spread of turfs in Mexico. Then the new turf wave started in Mexico several years back. At the time, I thought of it as something of a radicalization that went too far, thinking back to the new left. There was a point during the new left when suddenly everybody joined a Maoist cult and

they were angry for the right reasons, but it just went off at some point. I thought that's what was going on in Mexico, but then it started to come out more and more. Turf groups had ties to political parties and foreign agents. One of the most dramatic cases is from Toluca, a city near Mexico City. Just recently at the International Women's Day protests, there were turf groups that had made a pinata out of the trans flag, had been burning the trans flag. Also in this same city, one of the main turf groups turns out that their leader is on government payroll.

If you've seen Roma, for example, the political incident that happens in that movie is based on a real incident from the 70s and the tactics of that political party, which is the party that controls the state government of the state Toluca is in, basically it hasn't changed. They seem to have been using these turfs basically as shock troops. At one point, there were two sit-ins outside the state Congress, one to push for a gender identity law and another to push for legalization of abortion, which are obviously both important things. The latter, however, was controlled by these turf groups, who later mysteriously never seems

to appear at other protests asking for the legalization of abortion, but they were there and they ran off the trans encampment. One of the big incidents was defending the sanctity of the women's bathroom with barbed wire, wrapped baseball bats. Jesus, these groups have deep ties to right-wing Mexican political parties, the police and the growing turf international. And they seem to be very chummy with the local police. Yes. Their leader gives classes, but it gives trainings to the state government, it's not subtle.

You can see live streams of their quote unquote protests and it was mostly them drinking coffee with the cops. They were on firstly invasions with the cops while the other camp had trans women that were too scared to go to the bathroom because they were going to be attacked. And so that's the starkest group I think, right? The Toluca Turfs, which are, it's funny because almost every party has their own group, but it's no surprise that PRI is the scariest. We should also say that these groups are affiliates with Gila Jeffery's Women's Declaration International. And so this is also a case of an ideology developed in the first world, in this case England, which is largely a safe country where even as fascist an ideology as Turfism doesn't

or only very rarely leads to real violence, but it gets exported to countries that are not safe where it does turn into real violence. So another affiliate of Gila Jeffery's Women's Declaration in Mexico would be Las Brujas Del Mar, who is another case of at first they seemed to be a group that was just, they just radicalized a bit too far. Then photos came out of their leader who was on the time 100 a couple years back with Felipe Calderón, an ex-president of Mexico and like by far one of the worst in the country's history. And not like just, oh, I saw you walking in the street, she was at a book signing.

It was not a casual encounter, it was a clear sign of admiration and it's been more than confirmed since then that her political ambitions lie with the PAN, the farthest right mainstream political party in Mexico. This political alliance between the Turfs and the right has benefits for both sides. The Turfs gained funding and institutional backing for their war against trans people. The right gained a way to attack the vaguely center left Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador by blaming him and trans people for Mexico's horrific wave of femicides while distracting from its actual sources, NAFTA and the war on drugs. Mexico's trans population,

however, gained a new Western educated threat. When I say the radical feminism was a complete import, from its very beginning, for a long while there was like one Turf in Mexico and she was, she's called Jean-Marie Alliotul, don't even try to pronounce her name, I don't think she can even pronounce her name because she's white as hell and she always dresses like, she's a fucking Rachel Dolezal from Mexico. The music irony that the first originally Turf in Mexico is also the Mexican Rachel Dolezal. Right, because she went abroad and was like the only Mexican everyone knew.

So even though she's white as hell and has blue eyes, she started wearing some Coachella motherfucking ass feathers and shit, right? Yeah, I've seen these pictures. It is the Mexican version of, and not even just the Mexican version of the people at Coachella who wear indigenous headdresses who just look like they're descended from like, Hydric Hemler or something is incredible. She has like half French, half Spanish name and she changed it to a half Maya, half Alliotul name. It's gross.

So this person has been active since the 70s, right? She went to, she was present in the first Pride in Mexico and that was also the two-year anniversary of the 68 massacre. So Pride was from the start really leftist here in Mexico, but it also had these kind of people who went to the UK, France and the United States. And I think she was there when Janice Raymond was like sending her friends with guns to threaten trans women, right? So that's, she was there when the terroirs were at the highest point during the 70s and

then came back and she participated in a lot of history of Mexican feminism. But she came back in 2016 with that letter, with that backing because she is also close to Janice Raymond with the coalition against trafficking in women who, the coalition against trafficking, the coalition against trafficking in women, CATW, has a lot of, after the terroirs, they went underground in the, in academia and the universities, right? Because they were no longer accepted. But they were in the process of building NGOs that could globally affect policy on specifically sex work and trans rights.

And you can tell that Jan Maria saw that that was her only opportunity to resurface and to make her 70s as, she saw that 70s rat-fan discourse was retro now. And so she became like this founding matrix for the new generation of trans folks. One of them, which is Laura Lecuana, who is part of FEMBA and Jan Maria and Lecuana were not faced at all by the accusations of laying with the reactionaries because they know their history. They know where they come from and they know that this is how dorking survived. This is how Sheila Jeffries and Janis Raymond survived.

This is where you get the fucking money. And Laura Lecuana, Jan Maria, and Brujas del Mar turned the whole environment around them into these, well, these tough questions. The only two issues that we talk about nowadays in Mexican feminism are precedent and trans people. It's kind of gross, Jesus. And remember, there's only a handful of states that have legalized abortion. There's femicides happening all the time, but we continue to debate these two issues

over and over and over again, like a feedback group. And as trans people, we don't have any choice because we're the targets of this, and it's not, it's not an academic debate. Last fall, there was some tarfs who had taken over a public park to set up their separate space, and there was a disabled cis woman and her trans girlfriend who were denied entry to the park and threatened with tasers. And so when they're taking over these public spaces and using violence to defend them because the next week there was a protest over this, and they taste a trans man, and like this

is like a public park, like of course we have to defend ourselves. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, or CATW, an international anti-sex worker group, which provided a refuge for white terfs driven from mainstream feminism in their home countries, has been a major source of turf influence in Latin America. The reason there is so much importing of this ideology towards radical feminists in Mexico is that they needed something to say and something to do and something to feel the void in organizing NGOs, and the people who stepped up were Janice Raymond, CATW, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, who since the 90s spent a decade and a half building

contacts in the UN, in the OAS, in several international organisms to extend their influence across the whole continent, specifically in Latin America. And you can see this affecting stuff like Venezuela, where they broke up sex worker unions with the OAS, and in Mexico, the founding leader of the Mexican branch of CATW, Teresa Ulloa, used to be a UN employee, specifically its drug and crime segment, and before she was like a radical feminist, she used to conduct drug raids in Chiapas, and after that she became the founding member of CATW Latin America and the Caribbean, and with Janice Raymond, you can see them go together to the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, and they

influenced, like, they were a big part of why gender is not recognized as a social construct by the UN. They allied with the Holy See, with the representative from the Vatican in the UN, got together with a couple of radical feminists and pushed back against gender being recognized as a social construct in 1995. So that's the level of influence these groups had. In Mexico, these groups, which morphed into the CATW, supported the war on drugs from the get go.

They were very, in some of the biggest events inaugurating the war on drugs, they were present right there, because if you're fighting drug trafficking, it's very easy to just sleep the word human right there, right? No politician's gonna say no, they all fucking love to say, yeah, I'm hardened on human trafficking, and the way that showed itself was just targeting trans sex workers and migrant sex workers. And with that, and that feeding the agenda of Janice Raymond perfectly, Sheila Jeffries basically survived the whole 2000s on writing garbage for reports for the UN. Most of her published works during the 2000s and early 2010s is stuff paid for CATW.

And they, in 2016, they started pushing for more and more anti-trans legislation worldwide because they could see the writing on the wall, right? They were behind the women's declaration, Sheila Jeffries is not, she is part of CATW, she's, I think, CATW Australia, she has her own other collective called Space International, which is behind FOSTA CESTA, by the way, in the US, where she allied with a couple of conservative sheriffs to write that legislation. So we could go on and on on how people that read about trans issues think are forgotten by history, right?

The authors of these horrible books that haunt us to this day are still active, and not just in the US, they're active in Mexico, in the UK, in France, in South Africa, in Korea. Korea is huge, and I think I would say Korea has as big a problem as Mexico and the UK. We just don't talk to them as much, and we can't realize that. But if you check the languages that have signed the Sheila Jeffries Declaration against trans people, which is a specifically genocidal declaration, it doesn't stop at legislation, it wants to exterminate us outright. And most of them, you are going to see a lot of Brazilian flags, a lot of Mexican flags,

a lot of Korean flags, even more than United States flags. And if you track the USA flags, it's mostly weird randos that have yoga classes and shit. It's not relevant politicians. But if you track the other countries, you're going to find some of the biggest collectives in their own countries, you're going to find, or just spooks, right? You're going to find a lot of people who have really weird careers that spend a lot of time in Italy and Uganda. It's a never-ending rabbit hole of spooks, of conservatives, of has-been feminists that

have rebranded as NGOs to get money from those groups and direct it towards breaking up trans rights, towards affecting sex workers, towards breaking unions, breaking student movements. It's a global movement that is birthed by conservative thought, but getting more and more reactionary and more and more organized as time goes by. That international transphobic movement has increasingly found purchase in the US. I spoke to Lee Leeville and Kai Shevers, two members of Health Liberation Now with intimate experience with the TERF movement, who spent years particularly documenting its rise. My first question is, can you all explain what Wolf actually is, and I guess subsequent

to that, what the relationship to hands across the aisle is? Yeah, so Wolf is their transphobic feminist group with, at this point, extensive ties to right-wing organizations. They've worked with Family Policy Alliance, Heritage Foundation, Alliance Appending Freedom, Concerned Good for America, Family Research Cultural, among others. But they got their start back in 2013, around when they were founded by Lear Keith, who also was one of the leaders of deep pre-resistance, and she basically got run out of anarchist and environmentalist groups and then went over to established TERF communities to try

and recruit there. So they started out trying to recruit from these older TERF and transphobic lesbian communities, and then after Trump got elected, and the conservative Christians on the far right became more mobilized and more empowered, they rebranded themselves and were like, oh, that's more alliances with these right-wing groups, and traded their crunchy lesbian feminist image for Kara Dansky, who is a straight, fairly feminine-looking woman who used to work for the CLU and a Democrat, and she's way more presentable to a conservative audience. By working with the right, then they have access to money and power, and it's easier

for them to get on the media. Kara Dansky is no longer with Wolf, but she was with them for years and still has good relations with them, and she's been on the Tucker Carlson show many times. So I think one of the important pieces when it comes to understanding how this relationship with the right started. So in late 2016, Wolf put forward their filing against the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education, and they were going up against aspects of trying to reform Title IX to include gender identity, to protect folks who need to be able to use the women's

restroom or locker room or whatever, and this is the case that they ended up getting some of that ADF funding for. So it's like one of the first official seeds, I guess, of the direct collaboration that ended up happening, and a lot of that stuff did eventually end up getting leaked, and then they started doing some more official collaborations just a few months later when they were working with Family Policy Alliance to file amicus briefs against Gavin Grimm, again, on a bathroom case. I think it was like $15,000 from the Alliance Depending Freedom, which is one of the main

right-wing groups, trying to pass all these anti-trans bills, like going after a pediatric transition and trans girls in women's sports. So they took that money, and then later, I think the whole working with Family Policy Alliance, I believe, was the first time they publicly allied with the right-wing group. I think so. That happened in January of 2017. Yeah, and then they're just more involved with the amicus brief against, was it Amy Stephens?

Another Supreme Court case? I can't remember. Yeah. It wouldn't surprise me. And members of Wolf have appeared on Heritage Foundation panels. They helped release a parent resource guide, an anti-transparent resource guide that was also sponsored by Heritage Foundation Family Policy Alliance. This is very similar to...

Almost exactly what you see in Mexico with just sort of slightly less physical violence, which yeah, it's a lot of... And the other thing is that these are, to a large extent, exactly the same organizations. And that was one of the other things I want to talk about was the influence of Sheila Jeffries and the Women's Declaration, which has been all over this whole movement. Yeah. Yeah. The one thing to point out, so like the Women's Declaration International is in this, in

the U.S., is led by Kara Dansky, who basically left, she worked at Wolf for a long time and still has lots of connections with them, is on good terms with them, but she left and now is working with Women's Declaration International of the U.S. branch. And also she winds up having kind of like a foot in both worlds at the same time too. So like she'll, like the U.S. chapter of Women's Declaration International previously, like Women's Human Rights Campaign, before they had to rebrand, they would like... Possibly for legal reasons. Yeah.

Yeah. They're very cagey, but if you read the stuff, it's... Yeah. Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So what ends up happening is that Kara Dansky will either like have the chapter sponsor particular events, or she herself will become actively involved in the formation of the events, right?

Which we saw happen with Women Picket DC last year, where they were parking themselves outside of... Well, that was a whole big thing, oh God. It was a protest that happened on International Women's Day to protest the Equality Act. Yeah. It's not like it's people's first time dealing with the Equality Act either. I mean, like, so prior to that point, which then this starts to go into the, like, hands across the aisle coalition because they were actively involved in opposing the Equality

Act as well. So to kind of roll back a little bit, the hands across the aisle coalition, this was something that started developing in early 2017, you know, not that long after Wolf started building the more direct relationships with the right. And so that the people of this coalition would have members of the right itself. And in the process of that, towards the beginning of 2019 in May, they filed this joint letter to the House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi to oppose things like the Equality Act. And they did so alongside with Natasha Chart representing Wolf, Concerned Women for America,

American College of Pediatricians, Family Research Council, you know, a whole bunch of really just awful names in there. Oh yeah, the ADF was involved in that one too. Yeah. Yeah. It's really the rose gallery of all of the people who were anti-gay marriage until... Oh, still are, but have downplayed it. And yeah, all the people who led the anti-gay marriage campaigns, all of the sort of weird

right-wing pseudo-medical bodies. The next thing I wanted to ask about is what's been happening in the last couple of years with the fusion? Because I mean, so you already have your alliance between the TERFs and the evangelicals. But in the last couple of years, we've seen a, I don't know if full scale is the right term to use for it, but we've seen a merger of this with Save the Children in QAnon stuff. I was wondering if you could talk about that. That's okay.

So that's an interesting one because like I've been digging into the timeline of this stuff extensively. It's like, I've got hundreds, hundreds of listings trying to figure out where different cases are coming from and trying to understand like the phases, right? So you've got like the formation, the solidification and then the escalation and we're kind of in the escalation stage right now. So one of the things that I started to notice is that elements of this crossover, like the cross-pollination that was happening, actually predated certain key events that we now know

are affiliated with QAnon, right? So if we think about the actual development of QAnon itself, so you've got the pizza gate thing that was happening in like October 2016, I believe that was right before Trump was getting elected and kicking out some stuff about like Hillary Clinton's emails and stuff like that to go up against her election campaign in opposition to Trump and then folding in the harassment towards Comet Ping Pong to the point where like Edgar Madison Wells shows up at Comet Ping Pong in December of 2016 with an AR-15 style rifle and starts firing off his shots and stuff like that, right?

And so eventually, most people know that the timeline of the QAnon drops happening around like October 2017, like if you look up the original, like the first known QDrops, I believe that was like October 28, 2017 on 4chan, but the thing is that if you look at references to save the children or save our children on like Twitter, the hashtags, and you're also looking for transphobia related stuff, you can actually start to see that crossover happening before the original QDrops happened, right? Yeah, I found tweets that were connecting trans inclusion education in schools to pedophilia and using the save the children hashtag in August of 2017.

The QDrops hadn't started yet, and this pattern continues to happen, right? There were also multiple tweets or Facebook posts or whatever that would start to use things like save the children, save our children, wake up America and stuff like that before you would have the big scale takeover by QAnon when things were starting to get really popular because the save the children thing really went viral in the summer of 2020, but you could still see elements of it before that point repeatedly. So another early instance of using both save the children and wake up America hashtags started happening on April, I believe that is of 2019 and bear in mind, wake up America

is a hashtag that's not only used by QAnon proponents in relation to the whole like acceleration as I'm trying to get deep state stuff, but also like Aaron Brewer, one of the people that was involved in some of the clinic protest harassment was using that hashtag later. No, it wasn't just Brewer, it was like both Brewer, that was the clinic protest that involved both partners for health care, PEC, which Brewer was like one of the founders of at the time and one of the leaders of, and Joey Bright's like can I get a witness like they teamed up to stage a bunch of clinic protests and they used wake up America was one of the slogans that they use and one of the hashtags to make sure we're getting this.

These are protests against clinics that offer gender affirming care. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, that happened that one. So yeah, the wake up America one was in Salt Lake City, New York City and L.A. Yeah, and they also I mean, speaking of hashtags, they also have used the slogan pull back the curtain, which has also been used by like anti-choice activists. Yeah, that was I remember like finding like they use pull back the curtain a lot to be like what they mean is like they're like expose the evil gender industry, but like this other this like anti abortion group I'm linking on which one up the top of my head, but they

also use that pull back the curtain to go after Planned Parenthood, which I think is like that doesn't I'm far direct connection, but it seems like that's too much of a coincidence in a lot of ways. One of the one of the things that I really want to stress about this holds like what I call T and on thing is that like the seeds for this the cross pollination that we are seeing happening between the gender critical movement, pizza gate and QAnon like these were already in place before QAnon formally developed as its own phenomenon. This keeps happening.

It's you can't really like figure out where one particular type of rhetoric is necessarily coming from in terms of its source because it just keeps going back and forth repeatedly. People are acting like they're coming up with a lot of the same ideas together because in the end, in the end, they are of the same roots. They are in fundamental agreement with each other, whether they're calling themselves different names. I think that's that's worrying to me in a lot of ways partly because you know, I mean this has always been something where if you look at the rhetoric that these people are

spreading, it's like it's explicitly exterminationist like it's you know, they're they're they're stoichiatic terrorists like in search of a like a quote unquote lone wolf and in a lot of you know, in the 70s, I think they were there's there's a lot more explicit violence that these people are doing directly. Now they're kind of like they're they're they're trying to find people who will do their dirty work for them and there are places where they found them already. We've seen this in Mexico and in the US, the people who they seem to be recruiting are people who are extremely dangerous.

I mean, we've we've seen QAnon people have killed enormous numbers of people. You know, we've there's a long history of abortion clinic bombings and people getting assassinated for that. I mean, I think, you know, one of the connections that I've been sort of like looking at is the extent to which this stuff is connected to the Atlanta shooting, because if you if you look at the stuff the Atlanta shooter believes it's, you know, like he's in this like in the same sort of Christian patriarchal project, and his thing is specifically about sex workers.

But hey, look, if you look at, uh, yeah, I'm not particularly Asian sex workers. And, you know, if you if you look at the anti trafficking groups, you look at the Christian anti trafficking groups, and you look at the Venn diagram with them and the terfs, it's like, oh, yeah, and people are involved. Yeah. Both. Yeah.

And is big in that particular world. Yeah. And yeah, there's there's this kind of vice closing in on trans people where on the one hand you have these people attempting to employ the violence of the state. And on the other hand, you have this sort of stoichiatic terrorism where they're attempting to incite violence by sort of individuals. And then also, I mean, I think I think there's, you know, there's sort of two forms of this right?

There's the people who are explicitly like, quote unquote, political, right? You have your sort of like ideological street fascist. You have like, you know, you have your people with baseball bats covered in barbed wire. But then you also have the stuff that's been fueling anti-Asian violence where it's not necessarily like, you know, there is a this is an organization that like hates Asian people. It's we will just sort of passively increase the rhetoric and tell the level of violence increases. And yeah, kind of got like, you've got the street fashion, then you've got the intellectual

fashion. Yeah. Well, and then I think, but I think also there's there's another like, if it was just those people, I think it'd be less bad, but there's also just the way in which just random people who are encountering this become very quickly radicalized and it becomes part of sort of I mean, and transphobic violence has always been part of the sort of background violence in the same way that anti-black and I mean, you know, the level of anti-black violence is much higher, but like the level of violence against black trans people in particular and

the level of anti-Asian violence we've been seeing that has just sort of because it's just a part of the background violence of American society. And that the levels of those things, the more this rhetoric gets circulated, the more this activism happens, that background level of violence increases. And that to me is also terrifying because it means like, it's not just sort of like fascist so you can track, it's just someone on the street. Yeah. Yeah.

And they're just sort of like trying to like, like, yeah, associate like, well, I mean, a lot of the extreme, like, yeah, like people like, like, Felix and Aaron, Alex, Sarah and the gender mapper and Joey Brighton stuff like that, like they're, they're hardcore, like eliminationist, like they're like, they're over and over, that could be no compromise. And I would also especially like anti-fascist networks to pay more attention to it because you know, that solidarity with trans people is just as important as solidarity with like racial and ethnic minorities when it comes to combating facts, right? Especially since like, there are a number of us that are in multiple categories.

So like, let's all work together and try to like, you know, be proactive about combating the threat, right? So my, my TNN, um, collections, I guess, like, I only have two reports on it so far because getting into the full detail is just, it is a lengthy project and I keep getting distracted by, by the conversion therapy stuff. There's just like, there's so much stuff to research and there's like, I'm more like two people and, and yeah. Anyway, so, so in terms of finding the, like the original kind of like broader views of

TNN, both like what it is in terms of like the 101 kind of stuff and also like the timeline of where it came from, you can find it on health liberation now.com. We have a little tab there that has like analysis and then if you go down to key issues, you can find a TNN tag there, right? And it'll have that stuff in there. This has been a thing that throughout this entire series, which is that most of the information on this stuff has been compiled by a very small number of trans people and that cannot stay the state of this because there are just not enough trans people and they are extremely

overworked. Yeah. And if, if that's a project that you can take up, please do that. Yes, please, yes, please, now hands on back, all hands on back. Yeah, because the seriousness of this is such that if you want there to be trans people living in a way that does not actively destroy them, you have to act now. Yeah, basically. Yeah.

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Well, that actually does tie in to what we're talking about today. It ties into what you were reading. Oh, Jesus, dear God. When I logged into this call an hour late, Garrison was studiously reading a book by d*** with the screen centered on the cover. We got to bleep this out and have it be the new thing that's bleeped out. I agree with that, actually. Yes.

Really? Good call. That way we can just do a whole series of jokes where we just like pill people on fascist esotericism. What a fun joke that would be. Welcome to the show where we talk about things that could happen. But just talking about the onslaught of bills that have been introduced the past few months that attacking kind of trans rights and queer people in general.

Yeah. So we've heard about gay marriage. We've heard about TERFs a lot, the past few episodes, and now we're going to be kind of focusing on, yeah, like I said, the current legislation that's happened specifically within the past six months that have been targeting LGBTQ people in schools, particularly. A lot of it's been targeted towards minors, teens, adolescents, and restricting their visibility and what's allowed to be said and mentioned in schools. So we're going to kind of actually talk about books first because a lot of this stuff is

kind of tied into the critical race theory kind of like organizing that the right was doing in 2021. So yeah, the American Library Association says that between September and December of 2021 alone, they received more than 330 reports of book challenges, which is the most in over two decades in terms of people trying to restrict what books are allowed to be in schools. Boy, I experienced a book challenge lately. Tell you what, trying to read through the new James Patterson book. Do either of you know who James Patterson is?

No, vaguely. This was a bad idea on my back. Please continue, Garrison. I was busy reading the before you logged on. I have a different interest in books. You know, actually very similar books, very similar in the Pelican brief. Basically identical. I have no idea how much of that's going to get bleeped, but it's going to be funny.

So yeah, a Tennessee school's removal of a Moz, the Holocaust graphic biography became kind of the most famous example of this trend a few months ago. The book was allegedly banned due to due to nudity and because of curse words. But this is kind of, you know, it was they they claimed it had nothing to do with actual political content. It was just because of the the inappropriate children, which is a little a little dubious since it's all, you know, starring mice. Yeah.

Yeah. But the majority of challenged books have been kind of those focused on LGBTQ characters or themes. Back in November, nearly two dozen people a day were dying from COVID-19 in South Carolina. Thank God that got better. Thank God we'd knocked that shit out. But rather than try to handle the public health crisis, Governor Henry McMaster seemed more interested in pressuring the state's Department of Education to crack down on queer themed

books. He directed the Department of Education and the State Board of Education to create quote statewide standards and directives to prevent pornography and other obscene content from entering our state's public schools and libraries of the governor said in a letter to the superintendent of education inside the letter, it was specifically targeted towards a Maya Kobe's book, Gender Queer A Memoir, which is a gender queer graphic novel kind of detailing what it's what it's like to be gender queer. It's definitely popular among kind of the adult like a young adult kind of age range.

And it's a good resource for kind of gender bending type stuff. And it has faced a large amount of the a large amount of the onslaught and like the bashing of queer books have been focused on this specific book. It's an autobiographical book based on the Bay Area non-binary writer and illustrator. It's been challenged. It started being challenged at one of South Carolina's nearly 500 schools and then got banned from all of them just because people were mad at about it at one school. It was being recommended for those in the 10th grade or higher to learn about kind of queer

issues. And it is now become one of the most banned books of this past year. It's been removed from schools in Virginia, New Jersey, Florida, North and South Carolina, Texas, and a large amount of other states in the south. Speaking of Texas, the gender queer graphic novel was just one part of a massive kind of horrifying purge led by Texas Republican state representative Matt Cross. He led an effort to pressure and force schools and libraries to remove books based on a list of undesirable reads that he compiled himself.

The list is a 16 page spreadsheet with over 850 books cataloged on Cross's 850 strong list of titles that he won't span from Texas libraries, 62% of them concern LGBTQ issues. It's kind of clear that what he did to make this list is just like googling the words like queer and LGBTQ and gay and trans like with book and just found a list of books that have it like mentioned somewhere. So like a lot of the so many books are just like completely banned that aren't even really like, yeah, like the list is nearly 1000 books like long. So like he was just like Google searching to like add as many books as he could.

Yeah, it's not actually about the content beyond the fact that the content acknowledges the existence of queer people. Yeah, that's to the extent that he knows about the content, that's it like you can't be reading all these books. No, because he like one of the more interesting trends that you can find on this list is that it challenges and tries to ban books that teach students like their legal rights like not even counting books about like reproductive rights or rights as like LGBTQ people. It also it includes in this list like titles like the legal Atlas of the United States

teen legal rights. Oh, yeah, kids to know about their legal rights. Yeah, equal rights. We the students, Supreme Court cases for and about students. Yeah. I mean, this is my my support for LGBTQ people is is warring here with my belief that children should not know their rights because they're they're they're they're getting too uppity as it is.

We got a we got a crack. Look, could we crack down on kids in a way that isn't bigoted? That's all I'm asking. Nope. No, absolutely no way possible. We got to slow them down. No, no, kids, you must know your rights. And the very important thing here is that if you keep we in your locker, the school can

just search it. So don't put it in your locker. If you put it in your car, they it's way harder for them to search it. Even if the car is on school premises in the principal's car. Store guns that wait. Okay. Sorry. Let's um, yeah, I'm not sure if you can find that in the legal Atlas of the United States.

But to be fair, Texas kids can't read that book either now. So who knows, who knows what it says? Yeah. So two Virginia school board members kind of called for a sexual books quote unquote sexual books to be burned at a meeting last year. And a lot of these like a lot of the rhetoric around like book book burnings and book bannings was specifically tied to the kind of the effort to harass and gain support in school boards. We saw us last year with like proud boys and extremists and just like other like random

people who got their brains kind of warped by propaganda kind of leading these like incendiary charges against against school board members. Some you know, school board members got fired like threatened with arrest just for allowing books that mentioned the existence of being queer. It was it was a it was quite a quite a problem that is now influencing this current legislative cycle in almost every case quote unquote like concerned parents have swarmed school board meetings and flooded kind of mailboxes with outrage over what they call pornography being distributed to their children.

You know people will will plaster signs with you know scenes from the gender queer graphic novel that is like what they they they deem as being like porn like pornographic when it just depicts like how how like adults and young adults behave accurately just like you can find it any like fucking like Batman comic like it's not like it's it's like it's like not it's it's it's it's both in line with other comic books and also like it's obviously dealing with like issues around being queer as like that's the whole point of it. So but yeah just blasting this blasting like queerness as innately pornographic is you know a big a big part of this type of propaganda push it's it's it's pretty upsetting because

I mean a lot of these adults and like quote unquote parents you know who knows if they're actually parents you know it even goes and stuff to being like you know they're accusing librarians and teachers of being pedophiles for having this for the having these type of materials in Wyoming prosecutors considered charging library staff with stocking books about sexuality including like literary classics under like the sex ed banner like sex is a funny word and this book is gay but can see I considered charging library staff like with crimes for for stocking these books which are like very typical sex ed books. It's incredible because when I was in a Texas public school I read all of the Wheel of Time

books from my school library and those are horny in a much much more unhealthy way than any of the books that you keep talking about could possibly be described as well you get that you get this fun thing where it's like they're basically running the clock back on the turf arc like if you remember we were talking about Turf in Mexico it was okay so the the arc that they did was they were anti-porn people but then they lost the anti-porn wars so they they became anti-trafficking people and then when sort of Turfism came back they went from anti-trafficking back to being Turfs and it's like this is literally they're doing this whole thing in reverse right they're starting position is that they're anti-trans

and they're just going back to like the anti-porn stuff but like bringing in like bringing in an anti-trafficking angle and it's it's great it's extremely fun yeah this is I would describe this as fun this is what I consider a fun time yeah well I know what you consider a fun time here okay you you do notice my my carefully placed carefully placed books on on my yes yeah I'm extremely aware of that garrison garrison is reading books that will get them canceled by like five specific people if we talk about them too much on this show that is always the fear of this that's always the fear of Twitter is being canceled by five people my favorite thing about doing a podcast for an audience of millions garrison is telling

a joke that is it that is precisely for you and me and then making that like several minutes of content sorry in Oklahoma bill was introduced to the state Senate that would prohibit school libraries from keeping books that that focus on sexual activity sexual identity or gender identity you know we're gonna use the word gender identity a lot that kind of just refers to anything that even I mean like it refers to even mentions of being cisgender right because if you bring up the concept of cisgender that infers that there is an alternative to that so it's so like even if anything even mentions being cis that means that there must be something other so that already falls into the gender identity kind of framework

so it's just like anything that suggests that you are that you that there is like gender identity is not something you are innately born with and are forever is is it gonna be is gonna be is is banned and is seen as pornographic what I'm seeing or is like grooming children or whatever kind of words that they use and like all of this rhetoric is is much worse for LGBTQ authors who are black or people of color there's books like all boys aren't blue by writer George M. Johnson whose whose book led one white school board member to call the police on her own district's librarian for keeping it in stock it's the the the central York school district in Pennsylvania banned an extensive list of books last year that

was almost entirely written by authors of color this is all the stuff's been happening like concurrently with the anti-critical race theory like organizing and protests which again obviously isn't about actual critical race theory just about the suggestion that maybe racism is something that is not just an individual problem but is maybe kind of built into our entire culture and system of like governance and education so it's it's not actual critical critical race theory it's that but I think everyone listening to this kind of already already knows that Texas governor Greg Abbott which is gonna be just who's gonna be a recurring character on this episode kind of it has taken this whole you know calling

the police on librarians thing much further kind of a demanding that the state's education agency quote investigate any criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography a move that kind of librarians in the state fear could make them targets of criminal complaints for again the stocking books about sex ed or you know stocking books that not even not even not even not even but like sex ed just just like books that mention an alternative to the heteronormative like you are the gender that you are signed at birth like idea like anything other than that is now could get them in trouble so anything that doesn't kind of fall under the Christian supremacist like worldview of sexuality and

gender it's it's not great there's a it's so yeah all boys aren't blue the book written by by George M. Johnson has been similar to the gender queer graphic novel is one of the most banned books of last year targeted for removal in at least 15 states it's a lot of the organizing of these efforts kind of start online there's like telegram channels Facebook groups and they carry over into like school board protests and then eventually they you know maybe some school board members will will will catch on to this and start advocating for it then you know the state governor does you know the city city council made like all of this thing is this is his whole cycle of organizing that's really picked up alongside

the anti CRT stuff many many parents have seen like Google docs or spreadsheets like the 16 page one made by Matt Krause of contentious titles posted on Facebook by local chapters of organizations such as mom's for liberty so people will make these giant giant spreadsheets talking about books that they don't like and then they'll get shared around on Facebook groups telegram channels from their librarians say that parents will ask their schools if these books are available inside libraries and then we'll start rallying and organizing to get them banned from being available in any kind of public public government setting whether that be school libraries whether that be like public libraries whether that be like

online access all this type of stuff so yeah it's it's I don't know it's organizing against these types of things is never the easiest thing because a lot of times they these people get really get get really dedicated onto this because it is such a it's it's it's the whole save the children kind of idea which gave QAnon such strength and QAnon's kind of taking a dip down this stuff was taking a rise up it's kind of it's passing over the same type of organizing principles online as as mentioned before the governor of South Carolina asked the state superintendent of education but also its law enforcement division who investigate the presence of quote obscene and pornographic materials from its public schools you know

citing the gender and queer graphic graphic novel as an example you've seen you've seen mayor was in different in different cities withhold funding from county libraries saying that he will not release money to these county library systems until books with lgbtq themes are removed it's it's pretty grim and so far efforts to bring criminal charges against librarians and educators have largely faltered as is as law enforcement officials in like Florida and Wyoming and other states for this type of things been attempted have you know found really no basis for criminal investigations but still it's like the same thing for like even even if this process gets started it's about building like fear that it could happen

to you it's about you know this fear that someone's always watching and someone's always wanting to report you and it's the thing that like happened with Texas and abortion it's like trying to have like the bounty hunter idea be like parents are trying to find examples of this to report it so then it's like this like proactive kind of surveillance of anything that doesn't fall into the Christian supremacist idea of gender and sexuality it's you know the now of course that's like a specific interpretation of Christianity I'm not not saying all Christianity is like that but it is the one of it's them in the south it is like the one of them bigger strains of that type of of that type of kind of religious and politic synthesis let's let's

see so courts have generally taken the position that libraries should not remove these books from circulation but sometimes due to pressure via like loss of funding or depending on how like the gut how much how much like who is in charge of each state's the kind of education system a lot of a lot of these books have been banned and have half been pulled from many school libraries and many public libraries even if it doesn't like go all the way to being like you know court mandated all of it sometimes it doesn't it doesn't even need to get that far so yeah because like even if it doesn't get to the court librarians kind of librarians have said that just the threat of having to defend against charges and having to defend against like accusations

of pedophilia and grooming and all this kind of nonsense is enough to get many educators to censor themselves by just not talking these books to begin with to avoid that whole kind of debacle because even just the public spectacle of an accusation can be enough to like ruin someone's life inside like a small like in like a small community right it's it's it's if you know parents if you know kids and this is like part of your social group it's part of like wherever you're like situated in in your community if this type of thing starts up it can really be devastating to someone's personal life and obviously this is very ironic because all these same people who are trying to get these books banned are also crying and screaming about like censorship and

cancel culture while literally advocating the burning of comic books and even like fucking like advocating the burning of know your rights books so it's it's like yes they will cry and scream about cancel culture but they will do all of this stuff as well it's not it's not there is no ideological consistency there's they're not they're not trying to that's not that's that's not part of the point it's because it's not even hypocrisy in their own eyes because all of this is for the greater good it's it's about protecting the innocence of children right if you'll notice that a lot of these bills and efforts try to not explicitly attack books for being gay or queer instead they will label them as pornographic or obscene um now obviously many

books that conservatives will defend have just as graphic depictions of intimacy or a tonic like or um in or anatomy um but usually heterosexual in nature and alongside other kind of values that the right wants to push um you know even like the fucking bible is more graphic than the gender queer graphic novel um but when conservatives say pornography what they just mean is a is any display of queerness right anything outside the mold of the fundamentalist christian supremacist worldview that they're fighting for just like when they say ban critical race theory they don't they don't actually mean that what they mean is ban any discussion on racism that kind of disrupts white comfort it's it's it's it's they they have their own framework to view this and they can

justify it within their own framework so you know it should not surprise anyone that many of these queer book bannings are being organized alongside bans on books focusing on race and racism um matt cross's 16 page spreadsheet uh was was was made to accompany house bill 3979 the so-called anti-crt bill that bans teaching of any materials that could mean quote an individual should feel discomfort guilt anguish or any other psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex so just banning teaching of things that could make a theoretical person kind of uncomfortable uh which is seems like a great way to view education uh yeah let's just skip over the parts that are uncomfortable and that'll make a great society wow mm-hmm so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm

gonna quote from a uh a great article by uh samantha ridell in them.com quote small wonder then that much of the current fervor can be traced back to the conservative group no left turn founded in 2020 to ban books about racial inequality from classrooms uh by alina fischbein and alina fischbein believes that antifa children quote quote quote antifa children are going to assault her kids for being white um the the organization no left turn rocketed to prominence in the anti-education right wing after fischbein was interviewed by tucker carlson on fox news um a tile which similarly lifted like-minded boats such as moms for liberty no left turns website directs parents to a laundry list of books that they claim are used to quote indoctrinate kids

into a dangerous ideology including a robust selection on quote comprehensive sexual education here the pornography lie is laid bare with over 40 books whose only kind of through line is that they deal with lgbtq themes uh the picture book i am jazz uh kate borne steens my gender workbook and the yi novel two boys kissing also included as margaret atwoods the hand the handmaiden's tale uh no left turn indiscriminately targets all these titles because they simply feature queer people having lives or in the case of like margaret atwood having their lives be ended so after all ideas ideas like that might influence kids to think that they could be different right any and for conservative parents there's no greater order than the thought of not being able to control

their children or the idea that their kids might not be straight it should come as no surprise that the grassroots campaigns quote unquote grassroots campaigns like a no left turn are in reality linked to influential conservative donors and packs like the catto institute and the former federal society pardon kato yes kato yes like the kato isn't it's named after kato kaylan the guy who lived behind oj's house is that true no it's like what i should have just let that i should have just god damn that should have been gears was one line you're just gonna like slightly constantly expand my like red string it's like my red string board and set my head feel like what yeah oh yeah kato institute named after kato kaylan the guy who oj surfer bro buddy but

it should come as no surprise that the grassroots quote unquote grassroots campaigns like no left turn are in reality linked to influential conservative donors and packs like the kato institute and former federalist society vice president lenard leo but then again lies don't matter to the reactionary base that republicans are hoping to rally to the front of this culture war what matters to them is controlling the information that children have access to to obsessively keep them safe and innocent but in truth because they think that if kids don't know but all gbtq identities they won't form one it's conversion therapy by ignorance end quote but that's an idea i'm gonna kind of come back through come back to you a few times throughout

the course of this episode is the idea of conversion therapy by ignorance uh which really does kind of i think have a introduce a really good like mental framework to understand why these things are happening because they think if they can keep kids from learning about these things then they won't become gay or trans it is it's like trying to isolate them so that so that their reality tunnel is so small so that they won't hopefully will never like break out of it now obviously if kids feel if kids start having feelings that break that tunnel if they don't know that there's an alternative to that that really kind of leads to things like depression and suicide which is why that's so high among among queer kids in that region because it's like there's it's like they're

fundamentally breaking realities so it's that's hard to cope with um we're just gonna it's gonna do what's gonna do kind of one more segment quickly before before we have an ad break it is uh it's it's interesting we have like a lot of the parents that have been rallying for this uh have some interesting track records themselves if you can even you know go back to um uh to the family research council with josh dugger having to save the children idea while you know himself being a child molester or help lily kade like serial boys yeah yeah so um uh in a uh secondingly ironic case uh a missouri parent named ryan udderback was charged in december with multiple counts of child molestation and uh giving and distributing pornography to minors including

a child as young as four um on upon his arrest udderback was heavily involved in the book banning advocacy including protests against the books uh all boys aren't blue and uh and other sex ed books um he he said he he he gave a quote before he got arrested and when he was still doing like the book banning advocacy quote only i have the intimate understanding of what is an isn't appropriate for my children uh which is quite quite the quite the sentence to say on someone who is now arrested for a child molestation so yeah that's not yeah that's uh that sucks but yeah so like it's it's the idea that a racing a racing documentation of queer lives and making it so that so that people their kids only are exposed to a very kind of isolated worldview

will make it easier to control um and if they don't hear about something maybe they'll just you know live their life as a regular straight child and that's that's their hope now obviously that doesn't that doesn't really happen in practice but that's kind of what they're working towards and that's why this save the children thing is so important to them because they really do think that they can save the kids children they like they they do think that they can keep keep keep them from this stuff so i i think there's one other reason that they're doing that specifically they focus on books too and specifically the the pornographic attack which is that the these kind of like incredible hard right evangelicals are not the entire republican base and so there are

people who they have to convent like they have to fully radicalize into into the extermination of queer people and specifically the extermination trans people and the like the easiest way to do that is just by constantly associating anything queer with pedophilia and with uh specifically pedophilia and specifically grooming and you know these kind of campaigns it's like they have dual effect they have the the effect on the one hand of the actual material harm to children and they're you know preventing them from having any access to anything that shows them that they could be queer and then simultaneously it has this effect of of creating this association inside of conservatives that allows you to push for even more genocidal stuff that without this they might not have been

able to swallow yeah well speaking of genocidal actions i'm sure that one of our sponsors have contributed to at least one attempt at genocide oh i mean we we are actually entirely sponsored this week by the former indonesian dictator suharto so you know big big thank yous to him uh pancasila forever uh and yeah here's some ads ah we're back uh don't don't don't google what suharno did in uh in west papua hey hey hey hey suharto and suharno different guys totally different guys yeah i'm i am very clear on this and that's why you should not google what suharno did in in papua because dear god but we will put his patreon in the description yeah we will be backing his patreon heavily look at the show notes for that

hi welcome back we're gonna we're gonna segue into other types of legislation now but still kind of focusing on the whole parents' rights to decide what scientific and medical knowledge children can have access to in terms of like the conversion therapy by ignorance category so we're going to talk about the don't say gay bill so florida's house and senate just passed the so-called don't say gay bill that bantz mentioned of anything other than the strict heteronormativity and the u r the gender assigned at birth kind of idea um for at least most of elementary school it's banned and possibly farther reaching than that um with teachers also opening themselves up to lawsuits if they fail to comply it's formerly known as the parental rights in

education bill and the text of the legislation states that quote classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through third grade or in any manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards so it it is it is very intentionally vague for how far reaching this can be for how much they will determine what and what isn't appropriate for grades uh for and up who knows uh yeah so it's not just it's not just limited to early grades classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity could be prohibited or at least taken to court at all grade levels uh depending on what the parents find unacceptable right it is

it's it's based on what the parents want to want to happen to to to the kids that are under their care so it's it's specifically following kind of the the framework that yeah you can you can report something if you don't like it so it's it's it's very much pandering to like a reactionary conservative yeah all the stuff that conservatives said was a nightmare about like the stasi in east germany and the kgb they're like but what if we just decentralized that you know and and let anyone who's a bigot uh report and ruin the lives of people around them for a variety of bullshit reasons it's it's good yeah it's uh and i mean just like other states and like in texas the enforcement of it is not initially done by the government but is open to a concern of fanatical

public saying that parents may bring action against the school district to obtain a declaratory judgment um and a court may award damages and attorney's fees if it finds the school violated the measure so there's like a financial incentives for parents for this um the bill will come into effect on the first of july with all school districts um uh required to update their policies by elise to june 2023 there was uh there was also a proposed amendment that would have required schools and educators to report if they knew or suspected a child was lgbtq to their parents within six weeks of learning that um so within six weeks of learning if they're not cis or straight they would have to be reported to the parents um but that that part was withdrawn before the bill

reached the house but in terms of like this is the type of thing that this look that like the legislators are thinking of when it became increasingly apparent that the bill was going to be passed no matter what uh uh uh democrat chevron jones the first openly gay florida state senator tried to amend the bill to narrow the language to say that in classroom instruction should not be intended to change a student's sexual orientation or gender identity and specifically not marginalized queer people and instead just limit the bill to h appropriate sex ed and that amendment obviously failed um with denis backley the bill's main sponsor saying that it would significantly gut the bill's intent so it's it's it's it's specifically to

suppress knowledge of being queer that is that is the whole that's the whole point of the bill um you know mean the the governor claims that the bill addresses quote sexual stuff and quote telling kids that they may be able to pick genders and all that uh saying that again like that has nothing to do like this is nothing to do with sex at all with literally nothing at like nothing yeah it's but you know they still like the pornographic obscene kind of category because like it's right it's the same thing like if you show gay people kissing that is sexual if you show straight people kissing that isn't right it's it's being queer is innately more obscene it is it is it is it is so much more of an issue

you'd want to sentence governor also said like how many parents want their kindergartners to have transgenderism or something injected into their school discussion um but that's so that's type of stuff he says at like press conferences and stuff so yeah it is it is very clear that the bill is targeted specifically towards gay people um and being trans or being queer being non cis non straight that whole that that that whole category um uh the governor's press secretary called it the anti grooming bill um you know reviving the type of like you know letter like that lgbt attacks they have had for years suggesting that you know being gay means that you are a pedophile or being trans means that you're a pedophile yeah it ties in with this thing you'll

see in like the far right the libertarian right where people who have like kill your local pedophile bumper stickers and stuff because you can't argue with like yeah pedophiles are are the worst that's horrible but you don't actually mean people who molest children you mean people who live in a way that you consider obscene which you are equating with pedophilias that you can justify murdering those people eventually yep uh yeah yeah and when and when confronted with actual pedophiles they literally don't do shit well they are off like andy know for a great example has regularly hung out around a specific i think amos lee is his name pedophile yeah the longest serving republican speaker of the house was a pedophile on a massive scale didn't it didn't his haster d-hast du haas

that's what that um that's what that what's that german band this would have been a decent joke if i remembered their name right away rom romstein yeah well i fucked it up okay so anyway please please continue so yeah but like the don't say gay bill tries even less than some of the like schoolbook bands to hide behind the defense of prohibiting pornography like it just says the quiet part out loud you know saying that this bill is grounded in the belief we're gonna say the loud part out loud yeah but yeah i mean like the bill is just grounded in the belief that lgbtq people simply by existing are a threat to like children and must be completely erased like that's that's the whole that's the whole idea following several hours of debate ahead of the vote in the senate

of a bill sponsor uh alana garcia claimed that quote gay is not a permanent thing and lgbtq is not a permanent thing so yeah it's the type of like conversion therapy by ignorance thing a lot of these people have advocated for conversion therapy to be legalized in the past or really legalized in the past so yeah they just they just don't want gay people to be around because they find the mickey so it's it's not it's not just florida though right the the fears with like hyper focusing on you know just just that just don't say gay bill in florida kind of like you know it it ignores a lot of the other stuff that's happening across the entire country if you did when you're just focusing on one state because there are like 15 similar bills moving through

state legislators that restrict how textbooks and curriculums are allowed to teach lgbtq topics and even like who could be hired as teachers and what are what are like what's allowed to be said when it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation all like stuff's happening all across the country um a house bill in tennessee would ban textbook and instructional materials that promote normalized support or address lesbian gay bisexual or transgender lifestyles quote unquote um in in k312 schools so also also high school um in uh in uh in kansas there's a bill that seeks to amend the state's obscenity laws to make using classroom materials depicting homosexuality a class b misdemeanor uh legislators in indiana are working to bar educators from

discussing any content about sexual orientation quote transgenderism or gender identity without permission from parents uh in oklahoma there's a senate bill that would ban public schools from plowing anyone who quote promotes positions in the classroom or any or any function of the public school that is in opposition to the closely held religious beliefs of students so that's that's interesting framing there yeah and again we need to be very clear about this when like when these people say deeply how religious beliefs they mean fundamentalist christianity yes they're there these people are very specifically attempting to turn these states into a christian ethno state and this is the shit that they used to do it and it's yeah it's it's it's grim we can look at like

a recent report from the trevor project um which is a an lgbtq suicide prevention and crisis intervention group and they did a recent report finding that lgbtq youth who learn about lgbtq people or lgbtq issues in the school have a uh 23 lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the past year so just like the the knowledge that there is an alternative is like is life changing for people right the ability to to realize that there are other reality tunnels is can save people's lives like it is yeah i mean i like i i watched this happen like my my public school like i was in a public school but i was in public school on a really conservative area the only time anyone even mentioned being gay was screaming about gay marriage and like we fucking

saw some shit like a lot of extremely bad things happen to the queer kids there including me like it yep like this this this stuff kills people it self hurts people it is i think that's that's something that people in like more blue states don't quite understand is how how absolute this type of thing is like living in these communities how how narrow your version of reality is like how how everything you're exposed to is so hyper focused that even knowledge of an alternative can be so mind-blowing that it really is important to have at least this to be knowledgeable because yeah a lot of people who you know a lot of people may not have access to the internet in the same way it's like a lot of these groups especially like especially like christian groups specifically

have like like you know services that you can buy to like suppress websites on your wi-fi routers is that only you're only available to access like certain websites like like oh like it is a whole effort to restrict the reality that kids are exposed to to kind of railroad them into this hyper specific kind of heteronormative idea of existence so yeah any type of thing that breaks these kids out of out of these reality tunnels can be can be life-changing which is why they're trying to ban all these books at libraries because yeah even if you even if you block websites even if you restrict internet access even if you restrict what can be taught in schools you know there's the fear of what if a kid goes to a library and finds a book about being gay then oh wow that

could that would you know undo all of the effort that undo the thousands of dollars we spend on blocking internet access to two websites so like that's why they're talking about like libraries and stuff is because yeah if they find out about this stuff anywhere then they're gonna be in trouble like that's it's a whole point of like isolating people isolating what they view as possible so yeah uh we're not gonna talk about some uh we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna talk money money money money uh the other thing that the don't say gay bill has highlighted is the extent to which big businesses and corporate america is financially funding many of these recent efforts to hack away at queer rights uh this has kind of been like a back and forth thing though especially

if you look back at the past few years under the trump era let's take the 2016 uh north carolina bathroom bill for example um arguably the opening act for the current onslaught of socially conservative legislation targeting trans people uh remember this was like right after the supreme court ruling on gay marriage so this is when the needle starts to shift towards trans people this is the bill that said that you have to use the bathroom assigned at matching the gender you were signed at burglary for certificate all this kind of stuff um putting again unspoken bigotry unspoken stuff you know you could be you know arrested or harassed for doing this previously but it's like putting this type of idea into concrete law right this is once once progress starts there is this

like back peddling so they you know they put they put that they put what was once like unspoken bigotry and just like obvious bigotry into actual written law um it's it's like make making it concrete so during the 2016 bathroom bill kind of whole thing in north carolina um we saw corporations trying to stay conscious of culture shifts attempting to stay on like the sympathetic side of the rising generations who would you know become their future employees and cuss and customers trying to appeal to them and keeping that in mind so in the aftermath of the passage of the bathroom bill also companies like paypal adidas uh dutch bank um all rescinded plans to invest in the state doisha banks wild too like oh i mean if there's if there's evil going on doisha bank is providing

money to make it yeah it's it's it's it's stunning like how bad you have to be that doisha bank is like no i would like like every every person who's like i don't think they've pulled out of russia yet like no like doisha bank like i was i was i was before like i i knew someone who worked there who two of his co-workers like started like doing audits of their accounts and both of them wound up dead in their hotel rooms non extradition countries yeah that scans yeah like even so okay so yeah doisha bank initially said they weren't gonna pull out of russia but like two days ago as we record this started pulling out so okay but they pulled out of north carolina they pulled out of north carolina jesus christ um big big big uh i mean you know there's a degree to which

it's probably just like that raytheon energy where it's like raytheon we're great with trans people if you're making missiles then you're fine exactly yeah i mean big musical artists like bruce springstein pearl jam and uh former uh former rem member ringo star kezzel the concert's there did you call ringo star a member of rem garrison the end the ncda announced it with uh not his championship tournament okay okay okay garrison if you'd live through the nineties you would never make fun of michael stipe again and the national basketball association pulled its all-star game from charlotte of almost 70 companies joy did a lawsuit against the bill um and you know money talks the pressure worked the state repealed the law in 2017 uh the same year abroad a coalition of business

leaders in texas blocked a similar bill pushed by the ostentially conservative then republican lieutenant governor dan patrick um and we've seen the same type of thing happen in georgia the past few years um with uh with actions like corporate boycotts many large employers pushing back on the succession of socially conservative bills including like racist voting restrictions six-week abortion bans and quote religious freedom bills that would give businesses protection to refuse customers or hire employees that are queer um a prominent in that resistance was disney which cast a long shadow over georgia's economy uh via its uh filming of marvel movies inside atlanta yeah so yeah across many states big corporate brands were quick to condemn obviously

bigoted political moves um prominent tennessee employers like uh nissan del amazon and vander built universities sent a sent a letter last year opposing a suite of bills targeting lgbtq rights and similarly a group of texas businesses business leaders declared opposition to governor greg abbott's recent directive to investigate parents and others who provide transition treatment for uh for transgender youth but after trump got out of office and particularly during this recent round of attacks on queer rights companies have not relieved by backing up their words with any equivalent actions uh after tennessee uh last year passed all the bills that targeted lgbtq rights including measures restricting uh classroom discussion um barring trans girls from any high

school sports and its and its own version of like the bathroom bill it faced nothing like the north carolina boycotts there was there was there was just nothing because this is when biden was president now um so whether it be the anti-crt stuff voting restrictions or stripping away lgbtq rights the past year under joe biden companies have not really bothered to push back on the socially conservative bills over taking many states it's it's they don't it's it's easier to push back about it's easier to push back on something when you know when you have a big bad in office i guess uh well and i think also it's it's the companies can see which way the wind is blowing right yeah like it's the same the same thing with grifters when you want when you watch people like when you

watch stream ratios like suddenly starting to flip their political positions when you when you watch the live streamers in particular do this when you watch them starting to flip that that's how you can tell which way the wind is blowing and this is really fucking scary because you know the way the wind is blowing right now that that these corporations are are you know drifting towards is just you know and refusing to oppose is just this exterminationism yeah i mean yeah thankfully disney got you know shouted to like we're gonna talk about it yeah okay we're getting into that yeah so uh creators of the hit movie song of the south um was uh notable that in their refusal to criticize the bill as it moved through the legislator under um the kind of recent stuff inside

florida specifically so but this was part of an overall pattern like the the corporate response was was much more muted to the go to the don't say gay bill um in florida compared to other stuff across across the country even um and this shouldn't really surprise anybody uh many of the uh republican backers of the bill in florida are actually bankrolled by the very same businesses that have done performative virtue signally boycotts and protests under the trump era uh disney and disney world in orlando is one of the state's biggest employers and an enormous economic force inside florida and uh when disney silence was met with pushback bob chapec the ceo tried to kind of do damage control at first like internally within the company and then for outside press um last

monday i think on which was the seventh um in a in a uh in a memo to disney staff uh chapec argued that the company can do more to promote tolerance quote through the inspiring content we produce and the welcoming culture we create and the diverse community of organizations we support um which is funny if you know anything about the history of disney um also saying that the messages in their movies are more powerful than any lobbying effort which is uh wow yeah yeah that's a good line which is also you know great coming from the company most famous for queer coding almost all of their fillings so sure sure bob um two days later um at a shareholder meeting a chapec was a little more open and told uh told shareholders that the company had privately opposed

the bill um and while trying to explain why the silence or in the recent legislative efforts to attack lgbt lgbtq people he said that we chose not to take a public position on the bill because we felt like we could be more effective working behind the scenes engaging directly with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle but it uh it uh later came out that chapec had only reached out to florida governor ronda sent us just that morning after the bill it already it already passed yeah we need that cat from saga that just yells lies um yes lying cat my favorite um definitely appreciate lying cat lying uh yeah so of course none of this satisfied anybody um and there's been increasing pushback from both

within the disney company and outside um a pixar sent a letter to chapec criticizing his wishy washy stance on the on the on the don't say gay bill and even goes on even goes on to goes on to criticize the corporation for capitalizing on pride through like a through rainbow mickey merchandising and stuff uh saying quote it feels terrible to be part of a company that makes money from pride march when it when it chooses to step back in times of our greatest need and when our rights are at risk uh says the pixar letter so yeah uh after after a few days after the shareholder meeting chapec said uh third time's the charm and tried again to save face announcing the company would immediately begin supporting efforts to combat similar legislation in other

states and would pause all political donations in the state pending a review of the company's political uh giving um conceding that the company fails to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and all that is well and good if you ignore the fact that in the past two years alone uh disney has given uh 300 000 to politicians in florida who voted for the don't say gay bill um disney entities donated at least four thousand dollars in the 2022 reelection campaigns for the bill's chief sponsors a state representative joe harding and state sponsor denis backsley um and disney entities also donated fifty thousand dollars to political action committee tied to the governor ronda santas in 2021 so just last year so yeah that's uh that's a lot of money yeah and i think

i think it's worth like noting for people who like are somewhat younger which is that like there's a whole thing where corporations pretend that they like queer people now and this is a thing that has existed for maybe a decade and the other several hundred years of capitalism are them like ruthlessly crushing queer people of all kinds so yeah this is this is their normal state queer capitalism is like not a thing it's a thing that exists solely to sell you sweatshirts it's not a thing get that rainbow mickey merchandise yeah they they want to they they are actively okay with funny people who want to kill you so so yeah as i as i was writing this um last week tonight the show with uh jonathan oliver uh came out with a a small piece that was covering similar ground uh

to to to my writing that also included some uh nice nice nice background on uh disney sponsored politician and lead sponsor of the don't say gay bill that denis baxley um so yeah apparently uh baxley has said that uh quote uh abortion is causing europeans to be replaced by immigrants disney's going back to its nazi roots great nice little white replacement lie um in 2020 he worked on bills to repeal protections for queer workers and worked to re legalize gay conversion therapy um and in 2018 at some kind of fundraising event he said that quote i know some districts where there's a big infestation of homosexuals that are pushing their agenda infestation under the screen and then trying to get more people hired like them and set up gay adoptions and all this stuff

it's a continual fight for the values that we hold dear oh boy so brought to you brought to you by disney wow and yeah take take ha ha infestation huh yeah it's uh yeah take take take note of the use of the word infestation there um that kind of ties into my whole my whole like uh viewing you know queerness as a contagion kind of idea well which i mean all viewing the enemy as a contagion is also older than just viewing queer people as a contagion because it's exactly how hitler talked about the jews and you know it goes we can look at like some of the things the turks would say about armenians it's this idea of you know you there's no there's no middle ground with a virus and if you turn people into a virus then you don't have to consider a middle ground

yep um so before we go and break i'm gonna i'm gonna do one more i'm gonna do a quote from an article in the atlantic um titled want to understand the red state onslaught look at florida um it's a it's a it's a decent article kind of going through the financial stuff that isney has kind of backed um but yeah quote why have so many companies backed away from these fights the fights against the queer legislation some corporate lobbyists i spoke with said that one reason is that they believe the public opposition is counterproductive because more republican elected officials in the donald trump era find it politically valuable to be seen as fighting big companies businesses also frequently complain that the widening gulf between the parties

leaves them in a lose lose position of alienating an important block of potential customers whatever they come down on policy debates um activists though point out that businesses often try to have both ways by rhetorically identifying with causes such as inclusion and diversity without taking any tangible steps to defend them another factor probably looms larger than any of these considerations however much they want to publicly align with the values of younger customers and consumers and workers big companies want to only want want to go only so far in fighting these proposals because they still mostly prefer republicans in control state governments to deliver the low tax like regulation policies that they favor state republicans have

in turn have grown more overt about threatening those beliefs when business leaders raise objections to the cultural war components of their agenda when american airlines criticized the restrictive voting bill in texas past last year lieutenant governor patrick openly threatened to kill other legislation the company had cared about so yeah like obviously companies want republicans to be in charge because it will make it easier to run their big giant corporate businesses that basically are as powerful sort of as a lot of other like government entities uh so yeah they're gonna spend 50 50 000 supporting ron de santis they're gonna spend 300 000 in the past the past two years we're supporting all these republican candidates that voted for for the don't say gay

bill because that makes them more profit in the long run and that's you know if you're if you're running a business that's what they want so yep that is uh i'm gonna we're gonna take another ad break and then we will we will come back to talk about uh texas and and bathroom bills and health care and all of the other kind of stuff that's happened in recent weeks hot yeah hello we are back sorry i was i was taking some time to listen to my favorite uh ringo star rem album in the break in in between reading books by it's a really good combo of media how how dare you not the not properly appreciating michael stip the the voice of several generations michael stipern stipener michael stip yeah so he was uh i mean yeah i i i i really like the black

keys so anyway um i'm gonna make more bad music jokes or i could continue my script yeah please continue we don't have to talk about all of the wonderful contributions your generation is made to music like uh like uh you too with uh hit yeah like you too fame zoomer band you too with hit hit man uh george harrison mm-hmm yep you're gonna make a lot of people happy garrison a lot of people real happy at least 31 states have introduced bills that would ban trans athletes from competing in sports that correspond to their gender identities um arkansas minnesota sypii tennessee have already signed such bills into law at the start of this year uh new restrictions were put into place for in for in texas uh to also restrict um uh what k through 12 school sports people can

be on now making them specifically match uh they're sex listed on their birth certificate at or near time of birth um and even when there are states who don't just have blanket bans there's other horrifying things happening uh like in the beginning of last february it came out that the utah republicans uh are making uh have proposed a commission to analyze the bodies of trans kids that would uh determine student athlete eligibility on a case-by-case basis with having the authority to establish a baseline range for fiscal characteristics affected by puberty uh banning schools school school athletes who do not fall within these established limits from participating in gendered sports um also a non fun a fun side side bit about the bill is that in their uh efforts

to analyze the bodies of trans kids uh the bill would also amend or the commission immune from any lawsuit with respect to all acts done and actions taken in good faith in carrying out their purposes um yeah and this this is something that i think is is really common specifically with transphobia which is that like all of the rhetoric about transphobia is about sort of like like a huge amount of it's about molestation huge about amount amount of it's about pedophilia and then i mean specifically with the molestation part it's like yeah okay so we're gonna have this council right we're gonna have we're gonna have this fucking commission these people are gonna they're they're going to just like they're gonna molest these kids right but like this this is just

something that happens to trans people constantly like the tsa like constantly it's just an enormous engine for just like like sexually abusing every single trans person who goes into an airport yeah i've definitely had not fun experiences at the airport the past few times like this is the thing it's it's like it's it's they they impose as a sanction on trans people the things that they claim trans people are doing yes and it's it is and it's also interesting you'll find how many of these kind of bill sponsors politicians eventually have it come out that like they watch a lot of like trans pornography and stuff it's like it's it's all it's all fake like all like everything like everything they say they don't actually mean it's all about the culture war it's all about

all the fucking like save the children stuff it's all in opposite that they can get elected into politics right well we'll talk about this but like that with like the with the texas thing how all of the big new texas stuff happened like days before the primary election because they were being challenged by by by other politicians that were farther to the right of them so it's all like a political ploy but the problem is is that at certain points because of how long the culture war kind of ideas been going there's people who you know sincerely bought into the idea of the of the culture war now themselves running for office so like it is like they do actually genuinely believe the things now it is it is like it is like a full circle thing

of things that were just you know just to get votes initially like things that weren't really believed sincerely just just to hold votes but now people who were brought up in that whole political idea are starting to run for office who do actually believe those in those things sincerely so now it's it's leading leading to a whole new kind of onslaught of rights because these people have just escalated and accelerated the whole culture war idea yeah well and the other thing is like they've linked up with people who like people whose politics is the church or people whose politics have specifically been about eliminating trans people for like half a century right like there's there's the linkages that are being formed between people who have sort of like

you know between these militantly anti-trans organizations in between sort of these people who buy into this like either who are either who are cynically deploying the sort of the the sort of christian supremacist rhetoric or the people who are just actual like christian fascists right like these people like these people join together to the point where it doesn't it doesn't really matter why they're doing it like at a certain point it's like the reason why specifically they're doing it becomes immaterial and you're just sort of left with the things that they are doing yeah it's i mean and there's just been so much of it the past the past year specifically like yeah over like overall more than 100 bills uh designed to restrict the rights of transgender

of transgender people have been introduced in at least 33 states in just in just in 2021 which is like it's become a record-breaking year for any kind of anti-trans legislation it's just it has accelerated to such a extreme degree and now continuing in the 2022 legislative cycle last spring in in in in um uh arkansas the state legislator banned gender of her main care for minors including you know puberty blockers hrt all the stuff you know and house bill 1570 prevents trans people from receiving hormone therapy puberty blockers similar treatments um it was called the save adolescents from experimentation act um you know referring to medical treatment as experimentation um and shortly after the bill was was was signed into

law um the the doctors who run the largest or who ran the largest provider of of hormone therapy in the state uh reported an increase in suicide attempts in their patients during like just that same month um it was it was the first of its kind to bill signed into law and it was it was initially vetoed by the governor but then that veto was overturned by the state legislator so and that kind of similar laws have been have been happening in states ever since then we're now going to talk about texas um because that's one of the one of the biggest one of the biggest kind of things in this whole fight is the stuff around texas so texas officials have begun investigating parents of transgender um adolescents for possible child abuse according to a lawsuit

filed on uh a few a few weeks ago after governor greg abbott directed uh the the child protective services agency in texas to handle certain medical treatments including puberty blockers and hrt as possible crimes the directive from governor abbott was following a non-binding opinion by texas attorney general ken paxton um saying that parents who provide their transgender teenagers with doctor prescribed uh a care could be investigated for child abuse so the moves by both abbott and paxton which are two uh republican uh incumbents came just days before the primary election um in which each of them faced significant challenges from farther right opponents um so they've both they they've faced criticism from not being staunch staunchly anti trans enough

in the past like in the months prior to this and they did this to hopefully you know gain support from the more radical uh more radical voters in texas that's like that is that is undoubtedly a big a big a big part of why this happened at the time that it did they did the same thing uh both uh paxton well less recent paxton but uh abbott did basically the same thing with like masks yeah in the last year or two or it's like yeah you know i mean it's great because the people are just they will literally kill thousands of people in order to just hold on to their power and it's um yeah among to be the first people investigated uh for child abuse was actually an employee by the state's protective services agency um who had a 16 year old transgender

child on march 1st the aclu of texas and uh lambda lambda legal great great name uh went to state court in austin to try to stop this inquiry into this family who again who who worked for who worked for the child protective services agency um the employee who was not named in the court filing works on reviews of reports of abuse and neglect she was based on administrative leave a few weeks ago um according to the filing the friday after a governor abbott made the initial kind of letter um she uh she was visited by the investigator from the agency um who was also seeking medical records related to her child uh the the family of the child identified in court documents only as mary doe has uh has refused to voluntarily turn over records and is taking the case to court

according to the lawsuit the state investigator told parents that the only allegation against them was that their transgender daughter uh may have been provided with gender affirming health care and was currently transitioning and that was that was the claims that was that was the basis for the claims of of of of child abuse it's uh so like initially it wasn't clear if abbott's order would survive kind of judicial scrutiny because the order does not any the order doesn't change any texas law um it's just it's just an opinion piece and several county attorneys and district attorneys of dallas and houston have publicly condemned abbots and pakistan's directives um clarifying that they would not prosecute families for child abuse under the new definition and they

would not irrationally um and unjustifiably interfere with medical decisions um the mayor of austin announced that uh austin should be considered a safe place a sanctuary for transgender children and their families and that they would not be enforcing the governor's mandate so it's quite a time to be alive to have sanctuary cities for being trans yep and of course all of these things whether that be from like the da's or the mayor that doesn't stop child protective services from not investigating you like that doesn't like that doesn't like they can still investigate and harass you they can still send agents to your door they can still try to seize medical records right they can still investigate claims even if even if the dga won't prosecute there's still that

massive like looming threat of and like that like terror like holding over you know people's heads um you know it's it's it's a it is like a mass it's a massive scare tactic right it is it is to terrorize people right but they'll be too scared to transition because they don't want their family to get in trouble it's it's pretty grim it's pretty it's pretty it's pretty evil um um so on the uh for the for the aclu and the lambda legal court filing uh they they're they're seeking to block the request for medical records from the employees case and more broadly kind of challenge the legitimacy of the entire investigation and the power that the government has to change this definition of child abuse it's uh because it's it's it's it's also important

important to mention that the mandatory ask the the mandatory reporting aspect of the bill uh which was well not not bill of the of the legal opinion that was really emphasized in governor abbott's directive um abbott described in his letter that the order would mean that all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children including doctors nurses therapists and even school teachers would be required to report to state authorities um if if if they believe that there is a minor who is trans or could be receiving any kind of gender affirming treatment um and if they don't report this they could themselves face criminal penalties so the whole the whole mandatory reporting aspects and other like insanely insanely bad thing

that you know we could talk about it for a long time this episode is getting long enough so we're just going to continue through and we can we can ponder at how at how bad that is um one parent of a transgender a teenager in houston said that the family's health clinic a legacy community health has suspended all refills and new prescriptions for transgender youth in light of abbott's uh new order so it's it's happening like yeah it's there it's the stuff has happened the stuff has started it's it's already scaring people into not doing stuff like it's it's that's doing what it was yet designed to do yeah yeah and and i and i know we keep making this episode longer but like it is worth mentioning that like it actually like having someone even temporarily like being off of the

hormones that they've been taking for for hrt like that fucking sucks yeah it's like it has really bad negative effects i mean yeah like people will be surprised how fast hormones start working and how fast going off of them they stop working like it is it is it is pretty it is pretty surprising and like i didn't want to get tons into like the science of being trans in this because that's that's not the focus of this week we're talking about the legislation and the onslaught of queer rights of people trying to hurt them but like you know it's it's obvious that like there is not many cases at all where there's being you know like general surgery done on minors like if that does that does not happen yeah it can happen for like medic like that can

happen for medically necessary reasons like if there's like accidents and stuff but like that doesn't happen for gender affirming care what happens is you get on you you you go on puberty blockers which are already prescribed to cisgender kids all the time if they have early onset puberty they have no lasting side effects they're completely safe and in some cases depending on the kids therapist and their doctors they may be prescribed hrt or they'll be prescribed that a bit later but that is that even still that is that is really the only things that happen um and what they're really trying to suppress is both both of like those things but also like the ability for like therapists to even talk about gender with kids like if kids are having problems with like with

gender dysphoria they don't feel comfortable to even have to not even be able to talk to that to talk talk about those feelings with therapists is like part is part of the goal because that can be considered gender affirming care um i think that there's one other thing we really should mention which is that uh so there there is one kind like what that is a few but there's there's a very important kind of like quote on quote like gender surgery that is done on children which is the stuff that's under intersex kids and yes i mean it also yeah they like also like circumcisions are already like yeah yeah yeah but i mean like with with specific with intersex kids this stuff matters because all of these bills that you're talking about where it's like oh you

can't uh have gender affirming surgery you can't have like surgery on kids like every single one of these bills like they all have they all specifically have carve out carve outs to allow doctors to fuck up uh the the genitals of intersex kids yep yeah it that that's it's all carved out there so yeah well let's see we are we are near the last we are we're near near near the last little stretch here um on march 11th a texas state court uh halted the new department of family protective services policy of investigating the parents of transgender children um district uh district judge amy uh mentioned uh concluded on uh concluded the hearing on the requested statewide injunction by saying quote the governor's directive was given the effect of new law or new

agency rule despite there being no new legislation regulation or even agency policy texas governor greg abbott and department of family protective services commissioner baby masters of their actions violate the separation of powers by impermissibly approaching into the legislative domain um judge mentioned also granted a temporary restraining order blocking the state from investigating uh the family that that that prompted this lawsuit from happening the from the from the person who already worked at the department of family protective services um texas attorney general ken paxton um appealed this decision uh well first of all he he appealed the restraining order and lost that appeal um and and the the aslu is trying to make this temporary restraining order

against the state permanent and extend to all parents of all transgender kids in texas and there's there's going to be a whole trial scheduled for this topic on july 11 2022 so this is going to this is going to get this is going to happen like we're we will figure out what is going to happen with this later on this year um and after the judge is ruling uh halting the investigations due to lack of legal binding uh attorney general ken paxton filed an appeal for for for the ruling so and that's so so that's that's going to get appealed um and he he tweeted out that the quote democrat judges order permitting child abuse is frozen much needed investigations will proceed as they should the fight will continue up to the supreme court i'm ready for it um but

it's unclear how much legal backing this actually has so we don't know if if the if the if the protective services actually has permission to keep investigating or not it is kind of unclear paxton says they can this this this uh state judge says they can't and that's kind of legally up in the air right now so we don't totally know but there's going to be a whole trial on the topic in july um kind of one of the last things i want to mention is uh this this Idaho bill that was passed by the house of representatives that would that would criminalize gender affirming medical procedures including puberty blocker sorry including puberty blockers and hrt for any kind of trans transgender youth and it was also reported that the bill would make it a felony

punishable by life imprisonment to anyone who helps a kid travel across state lines to get gender affirming health care uh but this actually maybe isn't actually true like this actually probably wasn't part of that bill um the bill just amends current laws regarding female genital mutilation of course carving out a specific section to allow the mutilation of intersex kids um yep but uh but yeah it added a section also criminalizing gender affirming care but the section of the bill making it a felony to travel out of state only refers to the general mutilation section um it doesn't refer to the gender affirming care section and it's unclear if that was an oversight um or if the limitation was intentional who knows um but it it still did

attempt to criminalize gender affirming care within the state the bill was i believe i think earlier this morning as of time time of recording the bill was not passed by the senate um so that's good uh they said this the the senate said that it was too vague in scope and it was unclear how it was going to be enforced so that bill was halted and it did not did not continue um yeah but you know that's yeah there is a lot of the reason why all stuff is kind of started is that like there has been so much progress happening in queer rights in the past like 10 years right um so now because of progress is more visible what was once like obvious but like low-key bigotry is trying to be put into law right there's there's there used to be so many

medical hoops to jump through to get any type of gender affirming treatment but now almost every like legit medical organization recognizes the importance of gender affirming care so that plus the visibility and the cultural acceptance of queerness is making some you know mostly good old white christian conservative populations a little bit uncomfortable right there's there's this increasing fear that what if your kid thinks they're trans well what if what if they become an unholy degenerate what if and what if there are people trying to make that happen on purpose right all of the brutality all of like all of the brutality in these bills the kind of the not like the the total nonchalance at the possibility of you know kids killing themselves

because of this bill and because of all these little legislations like all of like the transphobia negatively contributing to mental health all of that brutality is is justified in the minds of these anti-trans like people because it's to save the it's to save their kids from experiencing that in the first place right it's the idea that queerness is an infection that it can spread from person to person it's like it's a it's like a contagion if you hear about it you could yourself become gay so if they don't hear about it then that's not going to be a possibility so all all of the brutality is like it's it's it's it's both the point but it's also justified because this thing is seen as such like an it's seen as such an ontological threat to their whole idea of like

the world so yeah that's uh and it's i mean it's it's not going to stop right every you know you know 2021 we saw a massive increase in legislation on this topic 2022 we're seeing an even bigger increase in legislation on this topic and you know attempts to physically oppose it you know is our can can kind of be done i mean like you can you can see all there was some some successful counter protests to the whole school board thing you can also like you can sneak queer books into libraries like you can just put you can just put them in there um you can request queer books in your library systems um you can you know attend school board meetings and again it's sure the the institution of the institution of schooling is problematic

in a lot of ways but it's we shouldn't make it worse for queer kids so maybe it still is worth actually focusing on and there is there's a lot like you know you can like in the case of the ACLU suit there is legal challenges being taken up against all of these things we'll see how that goes the there's always been a there's always been a shaky record of the legal you know of like the the court's ability to protect these rights but every once in a while it does happen like with like with gay marriage um the last thing i'll mention with like specifically with like HRT being made illegal in a lot of these places at least like prescribed via doctor um i will kind of talk about i will mention um DIY HRT as a thing that that is the thing that exists you can go to

DIYHRT.github.io to get information on this it's been it requires a lot of like research but you can find like you can get HR you can get like estrogen and stuff from like like made by the companies that that supply pharmacies you can buy that legally um testosterone's a little bit more iffy because that is i think uh that is like a schedule two or schedule three drug um but estrogen is much more available um to buy legally online to just make sure you get it from a good place and make sure that you you know know how it affects you and all that stuff like do lots of reading but that is a possibility so i will probably plan an episode on DIY HRT in the near future just like it's like a whole episode on the topic but i just wanted to kind of mention that it's one of

the last things to being like yeah if they're restricting all these stuff we should probably you know learn to provide it ourselves because there's no guarantee that the governments or any kind of even like pharmacies will be able to do that forever right like it's it's good to have alternative methods of figuring out how to get the drugs that make you feel nice um so yeah that was uh that is my episode on the on the legislation that has been happening in the past in the past really like six months um yeah that's fun yeah and by the time this is up there might there might be new stuff that has happened oh most certainly yeah that's good that's my you know when all the stuff gets very depressing i just like listening to my favorite Wayne Cohen song by pink floyd and

it really just really does wow garrison call me down and make me feel much better wow well i'm gonna go listen to the new uh double album that a hundred gex did with billy joe uh i do i do love me some 100 gex yeah the gex joe concert it's even i hear that that elton john's gonna get in too and they're gonna they're gonna do that would be quite the show honestly that would be that would be a fascinating experience that would be a very gay it would be an amazing mix of like horny women in their 60s and horny 17 year olds what an incredible thing that would that is what would happen well yeah that is uh there are plenty of organizations that are you know fighting against this stuff in texas um i could list them but honestly if you if you're not there it's it's

it's if you mean you should you should look into what's happening in your area learn what legislations being passed in your area learn what your you know state representatives are doing and look into helping people get diy hrt that's really that's really i mean like yeah if there's a way that body builders can get testosterone there's a way that you can get testosterone for trans guys if estrogen is much easier to get um so look into that don't don't don't be stupid um but yeah that is uh uh that's that is that is that is my piece yeah enjoy find violence and find the correct application of the two that allows people to stay alive yeah yeah and uh yeah and uh listen to listen to music that makes you happy that is that is that is all you can do all you can uh all you all you can do

yeah is find your favorite u2 album uh featuring roger waters all right during the summer of 2020 some americans suspected that the fbi had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right i'm trevor erenson and i'm hosting a new podcast series alphabet boys as the fbi sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy each season will take you inside an undercover investigation in the first season of alphabet boys we're revealing how the fbi spied on protesters in denver at the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse was like a lot of guns he's a shark and not in the good badass way

and nasty sharks he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven listen to alphabet boys on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast you must be the civilian mercenaries ether and serious i'm ether and big guy serious i'm logo i'm here to seek your services for a mission i heart radio presents intro quest an adventure podcast run hurry up dead end oh no we appear to have reached an impasse cornered between two buildings logo wasn't the door to the building behind you try the handle uh there you're going it's locked serious break get away what three adventurers face a dark force on their quest to return home winds approaching gale

force speed sandstorm imminent the storm coming we have to keep going it's the only way to the intro listen to intro quest on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts from the executive producer of children's hospital wet hot american summer and murderville comes bruster high up until now bruster high seemed like just a normal high school but all that changed when brady bruster our star frisbee player disappeared brady didn't come in again today he's been missing for weeks your assignment is to write an article for the school newspaper about brady's disappearance there are a lot of strange things going on around here and it seems like everybody has a secret everybody in this town bets on frisbee games what is going

on with you hide it's not like you to get a boner and mrs bankley's class who likes minds the truth is i don't feel comfortable dancing in public i came for the truth about brady it's all going in my ten-part newspaper expose bruster high the ultimate mystery you've got the reader's attention now reel them in listen to bruster high on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast oh boy welcome to america the podcast wait is that is that what we're calling it now i don't think that's true we just had like two episodes on international terms that we are going to we're trying to be a little beyond america i i fucked it up i fucked it up well that's the podcast goodbye everybody see usually at this point you say garrison take over all right

well let's uh let's get into this what are we talking about today who are we where are we what is life where it could happen here where is god final episode of the war on trans people which means when this episode when this episode is done that means the war will be over we did it everybody and whatever gods once were if long abandoned this place we did get pretty good news about the governor of utah kind of surprising me here uh yeah that just hit that's nice there's the there's that i mean luckily some of some of the bills that we've talked about actually have been shot down at this point yes the sconce and bill got shot you got got kind of in surprisingly and in very very recently like yeah past few days yeah um there was a looks like there's

still going to be injunctions on any investigations in texas until the case gets put up yeah that's still very much in the air yeah it's it's it's still in the courts but it's like it's it's trying it at least it's kind of paused right now and it's going to get settled at some point in either the lawsuit or in the higher courts so we'll see yeah we'll see how that develops but for right now things seem to things seem to be paused and some states are not are not fully passing it i know there was um a a walkout by disney employees today yeah about uh over the don't say gay bill and we're gonna see if that's gonna get signed um so yeah still still up in the air but we're gonna be talking about something a little bit different we're gonna do some we're gonna do some time travel

oh boy that's that's what i had to say was oh boy yeah so we're going to go back to another time in which there was a for a very brief period a uh massive expansion in the knowledge about and sort of both knowledge about and appearance of and safety of trans people and then it all cashed off we came crashing down oh good and to help us with that is robert heavens my boss hi everybody how are we doing garrison how are we doing oh i'm doing actually fine yeah i'm just i'm just waiting for you to do your job and not pass over all right so the important thing to understand is that like the kind of very concept of not just gay rights but like our our modern attitudes towards like what it means to be uh homosexual and trans all have their origins in

germany in the not not just in the post-war period but really the last couple of decades of the the kaiser and the weimar republic like that is where kind of the modern western attitudes towards what it like is to be homosexual really get formed because obviously like gay people have existed for forever there's quite a bit of documentation but if you look at like for example you know two spirit folks within some indigenous american cultures that's a very different attitude towards um like what like trans people i suppose compared to the western idea of gender identity yeah yeah so this is like there like western quote unquote you know whatever yeah there's the actual thing that's going on and like the the individual sexuality and then there's kind of the the public

concept of what it is um and and that is really forming in probably the seminal moment that kind of starts this progress is in august 29th 1867 when a lawyer named carol heinrich orix goes before the sixth congress of german jurists in munich to urge them to repeal laws forbidding sex between men so again there is still a kaiser and like this this is before germany is actually uh fully a nation right because 1870 is when that happens so germany doesn't even really exist at this point there's a series of like kings kind of being welded together slowly into a german state and there is a lawyer getting up in front of like the council of different german jurists to urge and end to the laws that make it illegal for for men to have sex with each other now one

thing that's important to note is that obviously there are lesbians in this period of time as again there have been throughout all of history that's not really a legal problem right they do not face really legal repression and and i mean not to say that like there's not repression and things that they're dealing with but it's not the same as as it is for like men who want to be in relationships with men that's it's in fact a lot easier for women to be kind of like and this is not just germany to be built to like kind of say like well you know we're friends and we live together right yeah like we're aunties and we live together like we're gal gal pals yeah that that because in part because men just like i think a lot of like the men in this period just assume it's impossible

like that women would do that or the other side of it is like femininity is always presentiary it's always like it's you as soon as a beauty symbol so it makes more sense for women to find other women attractive because that's what beauty is is when is performative femininity so like that's like way more obvious and it doesn't make sense for but and it makes less sense for men to find other men attractive and that's way more taboo because of the way that messes with like patriarchy um so yeah there could be a like gender studies and sexuality studies you know have a lot of theorizing for how this is developed but yeah this this idea you can even see in like victorian era and like renaissance era of yeah women who who live together and are very

good friends very very close friends i hope people don't feel like i'm trying to like flatten the history of like the concept of being a lesbian in the west no no to to that at all or trying to for that matter flatten like homosexuality between men but i am kind of making the point and i i i am not the the person who is kind of initially made this point the scholarly work that i'm kind of basing my research on this on largely right now and we're going to do an episode of behind the bastards that gets in to more of this i think in the near future but it's a book called gay berlin by robert beachy um and in in the book one of the things that beachy argues is that even though obviously same-sex love is as old as the existence of quite a bit older actually than the existence

of human beings um the public discourse around it and like the the political attempt to win rights for gay people starts in germany in the late 1800s and it starts in this conference in 1867 um and and the the guy who does this orix is a number one is a gay man um and he had he had been open kind of to his relatives he had started in the period before he gets up in front of all these lawyers to be open with like his family members that he was homosexual um but he had never like he was not publicly out and so on the same day that he appeals for a change in the legal code to make homosexuality legal in the german states is the day he comes out publicly as a gay man like he does both of these things at the same time and i want to read a quote from a

new york yeah it's quite a moment what a what a move yeah holy shit um i want to read a quote from a new yorker article that's covering all of this and that's based again on the book gay berlin quote he faced an audience of more than 500 distinguished legal figures and as he walked to the lectern he felt a pang of fear there was still time to keep silent he later remembered telling himself then there will be an end to all your heart pounding but orix who had earlier disclosed his same sex desires and letters to relatives did not stop he told the assembly that people with a sexual nature opposed to common custom were being persecuted for impulses that nature mysteriously governing and creating had implanted in them pandemonium erupted and orix

was forced to cut short his remarks still he had an effect a few liberal minded colleagues accepted his notion of an innate gay identity and a bavarian official privately confessed to similar yearnings in a pamphlet titled gladius furan's or raging sword orix wrote i am proud that i found the strength to thrust the first lance into the flank of the hydro it feels like that's sometimes funny incredibly based wow what if if there's a heaven i hope this dude made it there because wow absolute yeah unbelievable yeah so no but like what it like like yeah the astonished like the astounding bravery that that takes yeah um wow essentially the first gay activist in a modern western political context um and it's interesting like uh within kind of the uh the next couple

of years things start to happen very quickly uh two years later in 1869 uh an austrian an austrian writer i know right named carol curt benny um who is kind of fighting sodomy laws and and sodomy laws are laws that make everything that's not like missionary position sex elite they're obviously targeted towards towards gay men primarily um so carol curt benny create like he's the guy who invents the term homosexuality like like two years after this is part of his like fight against uh these anti sodomy laws um the 1880s a berlin police commissioner makes the decision to stop prosecuting gay bars um and in fact not only does he stop doing this but he starts leading tours of the gay districts in berlin just to like show off like look at how tolerant berlin is it's kind of

don't right that's a weird wow yeah what a weird picture to put in your head at least even like yeah yeah this fucking cop being like why are we arresting these people let's show this off yeah wow that is that is boggling yeah so uh in 1896 the very first gay magazine starts publishing in germany in berlin really do you want to know what it's called yeah of course of course i do the german name is der eigen uh and that means the self-owning like that's great yeah it's pretty it's pretty fucking cool um so the very next year 1897 one of the primary heroes of the early gay rights struggle physician magnus hershfeld uh starts the scientific humanitarian committee which is the first organized gay rights group in western history at least

yeah um so by the start of the 20th century a lot of stuff is in place right and i i think i'm even have been a little bit guilty of this in the past of kind of focusing so much on weimar germany um and all of the stuff that happens around gay rights there and how progressive it was this is building in germany again we don't consider the kaiser reich as a particularly progressive but all of this is happening under the kaiser's and it there's there's so many things that are happening in the 1890s and the start of the 1900s that directly mirror things that are happening in the united states in the 1980s in fact right as the century turns um you start getting an advocate one of the first gay rights advocates in gay literature uses the phrase coins

the phrase staying silent is death to like talk about the importance of gay literature and talk yeah wow which is essentially the same slogan that gay rights activists picked during yates it's the same stuff we're talking about right now with all of it with all of like the with all like the book bannings taking you know but doing a massive sweep sweep of that the past the past few years yeah this is 1900 like basically that this is starting to have a flat circle um so yeah and there's you know there's even there's a lot of um activists start to complain and start to try to complain both within like their own magazines and within like more public magazines about things like negative depictions of gay people in popular novels um there start to be

the first arguments about whether or not it's morally right to out people who are gay but who are attached to anti-gay organizations because that starts happening in this period of time absolutely yeah um it's it's fucking wild how old all of this is nothing new under the sun yeah no but like this is also like the first time it happened in these types of countries in these societies yeah yeah yeah but like it is that it is so yes times a flat circle but this is also like the first time it's happened and it's just kind of been re-happening ever since then it's important to note i didn't i didn't covers when we start talking about orix well there's a lot of people who get angry and obviously orix is not successful in repealing the anti-homosexuality

laws um when he makes his speech in addition to the people who are like yelling at him to sit down there are like german deputies yelling no no no let him continue let him continue like he needs to be allowed to talk um so even like in this period of time there are non-gay people at a fairly high level in german politics who are like vocal allies and starting to become vocal allies you know yeah um yeah it's it's it's pretty fascinating so um obviously world war one happens um doesn't go great for germany uh but you know we we get after that the weimar republic and the weimar republic is kind of the traditional era in which we talk a lot about you know gay rights starting to really move forward in significant ways and uh so there's a lot of um even kind of into the early

1930s some pretty interesting things that are happening in german society in like the mainstream elements of it there's a film called magin in uniform in 1931 which is the first like positive portrayal of lesbians in western cinema okay um like 31 is like again we're talking like right before uh uh the nazis kind of kind of come around um and yeah there's these like this this this police commissioner that we chatted about earlier i think is one of the people who's most interesting to me we're gonna get to herschfeld a bit in in a little bit but this this guy is named leopold von mirsheit hussein um i'm not gonna get that right uh but he's a big part of when we talk about gay berlin particularly during the weimar years even though he's like during what while the the kaiser's

in he's why gay berlin really happens in a lot of ways um and it's in part because like he decides to stop cracking down on on gay people um and like he's not gay although his boss is which is part of like what makes it easier um for him to do this and there's like a lot of debate about why he does this because he's not like a gay rights activist some people say that it's because um he's worried that like gay people will become politically radicalized by the reds and so if you stop cracking down on them they won't go communist like there's a lot of like debate about like why he does this um he's also there's a number of things that he like he takes a lot of data on on gay people in berlin and he does this on everybody he's a big data guy so

it's not particularly uh um harmful in his era but it some of the stuff that he gathers will be used by the nazis later um which is kind of a broader thing about like the wisdom of not letting the government get access to this like he has he founds a department of homosexuals in 1885 that like lists the people that they know are gay and and again like this is all so it's really a complicated thing that's that's happening here because he's not he's not this like thoroughly sympathetic figure he's doing a lot of stuff that's that's weird and that will later have negative outcomes but he's also by ending police persecution of gay people um at least in an organized way really allowing gay culture to to blossom um in berlin uh and it's it's it's yeah i'm gonna read another

quote from that new yorker article here for whatever reason mierscheid holsenheim took a fairly benevolent attitude towards berlin's same-sex bars and dance halls at least in the better healed parts of the city he was on cordial terms with many regulars and none other than august strindberg testified to in his autobiographical novel the cloister which evokes a same-sex costume ball at the cafe national and this is in 1898 the police inspector and his guests had seated themselves at a table in the center of one end of the room close to which all the couples had to pass the inspector called them by their christian names and summoned some of the most interesting among them to his table so he's kind of like going on safari like among the the

gay people in berlin like there's a lot of weird it's it's weird in a lot of way um but he's also one of the things he does is he provides police help to gay people who are being blackmailed and like threatened with outing um and he'll even like counsel them on how to handle it like he provides like counselors and stuff and he does this in part because like he's worried about um them committing suicide because they're being blackmailed which is like a real problem in germany and a bunch of other places um yeah and this guy like why this police commissioner winds up killing himself kind of in the early 1900s i think because he wound up getting found to be taken bribes from some millionaire who gets in a lot of legal trouble for raping somebody so again

he is a sketchy dude but he's also like because he's he's got this weird almost like voyeuristic fascination with gay people um and some legitimate because there are legitimate humanitarian concerns he's really worried about people committing suicide as a result of blackmail so he's one of these figures i we don't talk about enough in history where it's like the overall outcome of this guy's work is pretty positive but he does it for this like really confusing mix of reasons he's just a very strange figure in history well i think it's interesting looking at him like like comparing him to like if you look at like what the us is doing in the 50s right where there's this whole thing about like gay people are getting are going to get are getting blackmailed and you know

the the us the entire us security state loses its mind and becomes convinced that like these people are all going to become soviet agents and you know and instead of like doing counseling that there's their the thing that they do is they they do the lavender scare and they start purging every gay person they can find from the entire u.s government and it's like you know it's it's interesting that like yeah this is this is a guy in like late 1800s early 1900s bur like like literally ruled by a monarch berlin and his policies are enormously better than like anything you're gonna see for like half a century he's he is way more woke on on this than like any new york police officer for a century today up up to the present day in a lot of ways yeah

so let's talk about magnus hershfeld a bit um hershfeld is very influenced by olrich the guy we started the story with his first like publication on the matter is called sappho and socrates in 1896 which is again it's a story of a gay man who gets coerced into marriage so this like uh and who commits suicide as a result so there's like a big with both um you know this police commissioner with hershfeld with a lot of people who are becoming activists in this period a big part of why is for one reason or another the suicide rate among gay people um which is a huge problem today for for trans people in particular and this is what it's interesting like that that utah governor you know made the announcement today that like

he's vetoing this trans sports ban in utah and he specifically cites like the suicide rate among trans people is so like high and it he could not morally conscience doing anything that would like make these kids feel othered and likely to commit suicide well i mean okay let's let's let's let's not go that far he was he was willing he was willing to do the commissions he just wasn't willing to do a full ban yeah i'm just saying the the justification he gives for what he's doing is like um that is is the the rate of of suicide attempts among trans people um not to like whitewash that guy or utah like again we've been doing this whole weeks episodes but it's interesting that you get um again it's just kind of like the the issue for a long time has been

that when you like other people and make it dangerous for them to be who they are openly they will kill themselves um a lot of them will and that's that's a thing that is even by very problematic people in germany in the 1890s folks recognize that like this is a huge issue um so yeah uh hershfeld um starts this first organization this like gay rights organization um and he also is doing like a huge amount of of research um he is fall again he's following in oryx footsteps because he too believes that that homosexuality is congenital right it's something you're born with as opposed to like a choice people make because of of deviance or whatever which is still the big fight that we're having to this day and he's also like it's hard to there's a lot that like

you can criticize about hershfeld scientifically and a lot of the research he does among other things there's like difficulty with like control groups and actually like being uh the kind of scientific sort of detachment that is necessary to study there's like critiques of his of his research that are valid but one of the he's he's really like it's wild how far ahead of the curve he is because one of the things that hershfeld introduces is the idea that sexuality is a spectrum um where there's what he calls sexual intermediaries between male and female um he doesn't believe that like those are even particularly useful terms that sexuality kind of like it it again that it's a spectrum which is this thing that we are just now really starting to have

good wider kind of range in conversations about today um and hershfeld is very much like kind of utopian and his belief that if you can scientifically study and understand where homosexual like what homosexuality is and that it is an innate characteristic that people will stop being bigoted against gay folks right like his his belief is that science will end prejudice um just because the german people are so scientific and like they'll have to accept this if i can just like prove it with enough rigor which is heartbreaking um heartbreaking that he was very very wrong um and yeah there's a number of things that are like really worth kind of within sort of the because he's not he's kind of come down now as this sort of um like saint like hero of the gay

rights movement for good reason but that does tend to flatten the fact that within his his day and within kind of the gay culture in berlin in particular there were a lot of people who were frustrated with him for a lot of reasons um there were a lot of uh so there's this there's this split in gay culture in this period of time between um gay men who are seen as more effeminate and what are called the masculinists um and the masculinists they are not all or even mostly nazis but all of the gay nazis are what you'd call masculinists right who are like i'm not having like like i am so manly that the only person i can have sex with is a man right like that i'm flattening even that quite a bit but like you have guys like um Ernst Rome who is the head of the brown

shirts and is is a is a gay nazi and is like that's that's a significant not an insignificant chunk of the nazis they all get murdered in the night of long knives and it is interesting that that Rome was outed by anti-fascists yeah he sure was like two years before he was murdered and it was it was it was he was specifically outed to so division within the nazi party yes and that does like also just play it you know you're you're you're talking about like you know people having debate over whether it's okay to out somebody um if they you know are part of bad organizations right that was something we mentioned previously and yeah just like interesting historical tidbit yeah and it's it's um so uh again a monk like one of the things that the the masculinists

are doing is like a lot of them are married to women and they're they're actually fine with this because again they think that like well you still need to like procreate and have like not it's not even all just about being having like a beard or whatever you want to call it some of it is just like this attitude that you have a responsibility to make more germans for the fatherland but like then when it comes to it's kind of like the greeks there were not wildly dissimilar concepts and a lot of the masculinists ideologically are wrapped up in the work of max sterner um and in fact like the self-owners that first gay magazine is big as a reference to sterner yeah that that that was i was like oh that sounds like sterner's egoism yeah yes yeah

there's a lot of that going we we again i want to at some point provide a lot more detail on this because it's it's all fascinating um but there there are these big sort of like this big split and there's he gets a lot of shit from the masculinists for because he also studies lesbians heavily like there's a decent chunk of the gay male population in berlin who's against the research in the medical practice he's doing to help trans people who is against his research on lesbians because they're like well this is this is the fight right like we're the ones who are being legally cracked down on or whatever like um so there's a bunch of like different cleavages and fractures kind of within the community at this time and hershfeld is not universally beloved there are people

kind of within the gay community who have a lot of issues with him um and i just think it's important to note that because we often do again kind of flatten things because the nazis flatten things right because these were all it was all the same to them um and and we often flatten them in a different way to where like yeah you've got this guy and he's the he's the hero of the of the of gay berlin and he's this like thoroughly positive no there were a lot of people who hated him for like all these different reasons because this was uh these like all people had a million different kind of fractures and ideologies sort of running within um what what someone who was not well looking in from the outside would have just called gay berlin you know um and yeah uh obviously this all

falls apart uh or is is cracked down horribly when the nazis come to power um hershfeld is doing a lot of some of i mean all of the very earliest research on like what it is to be transgender and he is uh performing surgery on like gender operations on on trans people for the very first time um and and that gets all kind of destroyed in in may of 1933 uh which is about three months after hitler becomes reich's chancellor uh nazi sack hershfeld institute for sexual science they burn its library um they go after a lot of of of his of the people he had been working with and on are killed others have to flee um hershfeld is thankfully out of the country on tour when the nazis rise to power and just you know doesn't come back um yeah he sees he watches his institute

get burned and all of his his research get burned in a newsreel in paris uh and he dies the next year um yeah so that's the that's the the the the broad details of kind of the story of this early period um of of the birth of kind of like a lot of our our legal fights uh around you know gay rights and like the birth of kind of western gay identity like this is where it comes from and and uh yeah um there's a lot that's important in understanding this and this is one of the points that gets made in gay berlin we often see the weimar years as this kind of inevitable march towards fascism and the reality is that there was 50 something years of uh of incredibly progressive movements on on gender and sexuality um and you know even outside of gay

rights just in terms of like attitudes towards democracy and attitudes towards the nature of like the state that were very progressive and very powerful and very popular um and they do get you know it's important to understand both that like the naziism was not inevitable the regressivism and the violence and the the the like that kind of flattening of human life under the fascists was not an inevitable progression for germany um but it's equally important to understand that like a tremendous so much progress had been made in german culture by the period of time when the nazis rise and it does get wiped out you know it does not recover right away it's still recovering now it's still now yeah exactly um and in fact one of the groups

of people when when the allies liberate the concentration camps we don't free imprisoned gay people they go back to prison because what they were doing was still seen as criminal if you have the uh is the pink triangle you don't just get out because the nazis because you were in a concentration camp with these other people because the allies to a large extent are like well that was it was okay for them to punish those people anyway that's the story now another interesting thing is on like kind of on the same note is that if you look through all old um uh german war photography from world war two you will actually see a higher than average rate of uh men cross dressing inside photos now there's always cross-dressing during war is not uncommon especially

during like performances yeah for like theater and stuff um because there's not as much women around but specifically uh comparing like the documentation of the nazis and all of all the german soldiers there was like yeah absolutely higher than average amount of of people comfortable cross dressing despite you know being a soldier for the nazis yeah it is it is like an yeah it is an interesting thing in terms of how how some of those kind of more advanced views and sexuality still carried over um at least like in terms of like gender presentation among you know even even if you're among this genocidal group who's imprisoning gay people by the hundreds of thousands um yeah it's it just it just it just it just it just like kept happening yeah it also sort of points to just like

how bad everywhere else was also oh yeah like it's yeah it's a rough world for Berlin just got so progressive that even when suppressed there was enough like stuff there that things could kind of there was there was still there was still a bit there's still a bit of some remnants um and I mean and it's still it got it didn't get horribly obliterated and and we're still recovering now in terms of our views and medical knowledge on like gender and you know social contracts um sexuality you know all all this kind of stuff um but yeah the the german law code that made homosexuality illegal um again after it was briefly more okay than it had been uh doesn't get repealed until 1994 yeah I mean a lot of a lot of sodomy laws did not get repealed until the 90s and a

lot of cases they're actually still around yeah just don't enforce them like a lot of this a lot of flaws that are actually just still just hanging out texas had anti sodomy laws on the book until a 2003 supreme court case yeah and invalidated all sodomy laws right that's that's why there's some they're still on the books but they but they're not valid yeah prosecute people um yeah uh uh yeah Magnus Hirschfeld was pretty based though so was fucking orix some pretty based this really interesting stuff and then that's why we wanted to talk about this is to kind of show the historical background and show like there's precedent for all of the same stuff happening before um and you know there's ways people fought fought against it back then who

didn't necessarily succeed yeah but also did have a lot of progression and a lot of like views socially on these types of topics you know you just need to make sure that you're also very very aware of the rise of fascism and being able to counter that as well because they can just do so much damage in such a short amount of time despite you know 50 years of progress yeah yeah and I think I think understanding the fragility of everything that exists that I don't know I mean there's this is you know one of one of the sort of American mythoses right is that like the moral arc of the universe bends towards progress and then everything's getting better and that's not true nope it's not and like every everything good that you see in this world is there because people

fought for it it was fought for yeah and and if they lose it all goes away yeah yeah it we we absolutely could go back it's like you have that I mean he backpedaled but you have that republican uh legislator who was like um making comments about how he didn't think uh the state should be forced to honor interracial marriages yeah um and it's like yeah there's people who want to go back on all of that stuff and they could do it it doesn't even and it doesn't matter I like when people criticize kind of like some of the the attitudes we have the fear we have towards this especially on on the subreddit I've seen people be like well look these are not popular laws and it's like it doesn't matter they weren't yeah absolutely they weren't as popular they weren't

like necessarily all that popular in in in Germany you know when some like a lot of the thing not specifically even talking about what was done to gay people but a lot of the things that were done by the Nazis were not necessarily popular it it doesn't matter what matters is power yeah this like plays into how like what shit's worth focusing on on electoralism and being like yeah these laws obviously aren't being uh pushed as far in blue states because there's not enough electoral power there but that doesn't mean that we can flip Texas blue if we will it into being like there's so many other cultural factors that are keeping red states red and yes of course voting suppression all of those things gerrymandering all these things are contributing factors but the overall

political bent of those states right now seems to be pretty firm because there's so many people invested in maintaining that power so when we complain about kind of how electoralism is not often a super reliable solution to securing these things over the long stretches of time it's more kind of talking about that because even though we have you know Democrats and power in the executive branch and they you know make statements about trying to secure things they make they make some gestures the follow-through on those things is always so minimum and so bare um and there's it's like it's it's a thing how like Trump was able to do so much um and now we have Biden so less willing to use executive power this is the same thing that like oh like with with Obama

and the Supreme Court when the Senate would refuse to put through any any candidates Obama technically had the power could because the Senate refused to do to do their job um there is a very strong argument that Obama could just put someone into the Supreme Court uh because of the failure of what the Senate was doing it was specifically doing a thing that meant because they were not doing the job at all that he can't get he can't get fully put through and we so we could have we that could have happened and Obama just didn't uh because you know you want to play you want to be the good guy like you want to be the person who follows the rules but the other side doesn't care about that they are not playing a genuine game they're not following the rules they're

doing whatever they can to win so this this isn't about being plugged into lefty twitter I get I get almost none of my takes from lefty twitter I get them from like reading reading stuff and thinking about how electoralism affects all of these issues and where to focus like my attention because no matter what I say or what I do that's not going to affect whether Texas is blue or red yeah and there's this I think like one of the things that is uh an argument against Obama you know intervening in that way is like well that would have created precedent that would have like further centralized executive power and could have been used by their only the senate refused to do their job yeah but you know I mean look at what we got look at the supreme court

that we have which now has a six to three bent conservatively no there was just another fucking shadow ruling today that was um about um uh gerrymandering and god I was uh was it Wisconsin um one sec I'll look it up but yeah like you're getting like we're we're already living through that scenario um yeah yeah like like in this I mean it's just in terms of centralization of power like Obama claimed the legal authority to kill any man woman or child regardless of their citizenship as the as a u.s citizen without trial the moment they left the United States um like that that is that is the that is the authority that he claimed like when you know in order to in order to run the drone assassination program and it's yeah so like at that point like

yeah okay we we literally have a person who can go I'm going to press a button and kill you like oh no we might centralize my part like it's just I mean it's it's not even a centralization because it was specifically within the context of the senate not doing their job um and it kind of just all plays into like it seems like democrats are more politically successful when they're losing like it seems like they want the other side to be in power because that's when they actually do things politically then when they have power they're just so scared to use it that they don't even do anything to really help people that much well and and I mean this is the other thing is that like yeah the democrats like like most of like their actual constitution like

they have they have two constituencies right they have like you know they have the people they're passing tax breaks for and then they have a bunch of lot they have a bunch of consultants and the consultants like the thing that they care about is campaign donations right because that's how they get paid yeah and yeah hey guess what happens when uh you're in power oh people don't give you any people don't give you much money like this is this is this is a problem the program ran into in the 80s they they get more power when they're they get more money when they're not in power yeah because then they're trying to organize to get in power but then once they're in there it's like oh wow you're not really using the same power capabilities

that the other side does when they're in charge and they're all willing to play dirty politically and we and for some reason the democrats are not well because i mean they don't like that's something like they don't actually care about any of this stuff right this stuff is useful for them in terms of fundraising right but it's like yep yeah i don't know like they they don't like if every trans person in the united states was killed right the democrats would be sad for a little bit and then they wouldn't move on like it's not that's that's not a thing that if you're in a hard blue state we know it's more important than actually voting for support of like this kind of stuff is actually just giving trans people money like that is going to have much more of a positive

political effect it's just give trans people money whenever you see a go fund me for a trans person donate to that instead that's going to have a much more uh lasting effect than voting if you're in you know new york or if you're in oregon right because like that those states are they're they're gonna be blue that's always gonna happen um but other states like uh like i texas oklahoma tennessee uh alabama like these are gonna be red states like there's and as much as we would be nice if yeah if democratic senators and and people in the house were in there instead and yeah these trans people probably wouldn't be happening as much um but that's not gonna happen so if that's not gonna happen we should focus on other ways to do that politically and yeah sure fixing

jury gerrymandering will be great but i don't think you need me to tell you that no anyway we should probably that's probably more or less a sod that is a sod i will i will i will plug next week if similar similar on a similar train for for kind of talking about queerness and fascism which yeah we are we are planning a two a two parter which is a pretty gonna be extensive deep dive into explaining the curious case of nazi cat boys and garrison says garrison says we as if any of the rest of us had any choice in this garrison garrison forced this on us through violence yes but yes we will be talking about this which kind of touches on some similar topics in terms of like gender and sexuality and how it intersects with politics and how there can be you know seemingly

country contradictory claims that you know game nazis and all that kind of stuff so similar similar train will be kind of discussing that and how that works um but yeah this is uh end of trans week honestly at this point as we're ending as we're ending it i'm a kind of more optimistic than i at what than i then i was when we started trans week um in terms of like watching kind of how some some of these bills have played out how some of them were not we're not fully carried through um there is protests and stuff being organized i know for march i believe it's march 31st which is a trans day of visibility there's gonna be protests in a lot of conservative states um i know there's gonna be let me let me actually let me check because i know there's

there's gonna be there's gonna be multiple multiple things happening and i will i'm gonna be trying to get i'm gonna try to be in Idaho next next week for that uh because there's gonna be a protest in Boise which i think Boise Boise Idaho that's the place but there's gonna be yeah there's gonna be events in Austin uh Tallahassee Montgomery um so yeah i will look up tear it up dot org for event for info on all of the events at different at different at in different states for for trans day of visibility march march 31st and yeah uh uh be gay do crime yeah throw bricks at transphobes yeah all that stuff hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe

it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website cool zone media dot com or check us out on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated in monthly at cool zone media dot com slash sources thanks for listening do you love movies will i have the podcast for you hey there this is mike d from movie mikes movie podcast your go-to source for all things movies each episode explores a different movie topic plus spoiler free reviews on the latest streaming and movies in theaters you'll also get interviews with actors and directors to take a look behind the scenes of your favorite movies listen to new episodes of movie mikes movie

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