Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 31

Episode Date: April 23, 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.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is today about something that did happen here and absolutely sucked.

And with me to talk about the Atlanta shooting is Garrison. Hello. Hi, not happy to be here. Yeah, yeah. No, this is not it. We're not talking about a current event. This happened like, what was it, last year? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, in case someone's listening and wondering if there was another one. No, we're specifically talking about... Actually, there have been a couple of shootings in Atlanta since then. Yeah, obviously there have, yes, but we're talking about this specific thing we're talking about is from last year.

And it ties into many of the topics we discuss on the show. Yeah. On March 16, 2021, Robert Aaron Long, a regular at Young's Asian Massage, refused to tip after getting a massage. Xiaojie Tan, the spa's owner, confronted him about the tip. Long simply walked away. He got dressed, went to the bathroom, pulled out his gun, and started shooting, leaving Xiaojie Tan dying on the floor. Driving from spa to spa, Long shot nine people and killed eight. The lone wounded survivor, Alicia Hernandez Ortiz, got on his knees and begged Long not to shoot. Long shot him anyways.

There's a tendency when confronted with true horror to retreat into abstraction, as if the abstract is sheltered from the violence of the storm. I intend, if briefly, to do it myself. But there is no safety there. Only the same violence repeated again and again and again in a thousand ways with a thousand names wearing a thousand faces. Because this is hell and we live in it. So on to the abstract. There's a concept in Marxism called Traeger. It's a German word. It's usually translated as bearer in the sense of an individual capitalist being the bearer of capitalist social relations. They enact this relation by, you know, turning capital into more capital, which is what makes them a capitalist. There is, you know, literally an endless debate over what this actually means.

Most of it is pointless. And the meeting is contestant enough that I'm going to abuse it a bit further and argue that a person can become a bearer of historical forces larger than themselves. Robert Aaron Long was the bearer of a great number of historical forces. He bore the violence of capitalism, of misogyny, of racism, of horophobia, of whiteness, of Christianity itself. And he unleashed it into the world. That's just like the idea of like invoking, right? Drawing on these external ideas into yourself and then becoming them for like a brief period of time. Yeah, I mean, I think it's slightly different in that with bearing, it's not so much that you're briefly invoking them. It's that you're constantly a part of the relation. So the relation defines you and you sort of, you constantly enact it by the things that you do it in doing so you make the relation real.

It's more of like an ever-present thing that is... Yeah, yeah. It's something that just sort of structures how society works, right? Like we're all sort of like enacting the wage relation, right? Every time we like do it, you know, like doing this right now. By doing our jobs, yes. Yeah, we are enacting the wage relation. Okay, got it. Yeah, and, you know, I think a lot of people after the shooting were left asking, you know, why? And, you know, we can name social and historical forces, we can talk about sort of anti-Asian violence and racism and horophobia, but what does it actually mean?

And, you know, what are the forces that long elicited this world? What do they look like? And I think we have a good example of this from right after Long was arrested. Police Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff's Department said this to reporters at a press conference. This is about Long in the shooting. He was pretty much fed up at the end of his rope and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did. He apparently has an issue what he considers a sex addiction and he sees these locations as something that allow him to go to these places and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate. Now, yeah, there was a lot going on in those like two sentences. Also, you know, Cherokee Sheriff's Department.

Yeah, there is so much going on. Right. There's just so many layers to this. Yeah, it's incredible. One of the things that we're going to go more into next episode is that like this is where, what's his name? This is where the guy who just drew a random line on a map that he pulled out of his National Geographic thing who divided Korea in half. This is where he's from. Okay, there's this is yeah, there is a there's a lot of historical violence in this very specific part of Georgia that is all coming together here. And oh yeah, his school is also super racist like there's they had a mascot that was like doing all the racist stuff. Yeah, I'm sure.

Yeah, and you know, before we go any further, it's worth mentioning that like almost immediately after the Honorable Police Captain gave that press conference, a bunch of people on the Internet found out that Baker had posted a like a shirt that said COVID-19 imported virus from China. I remember this. Yeah, yeah. The sheriff was pretty pretty racist himself. Yeah, a part of many, many anti Asian tropes relating to conspiracy theories. Yeah, this is the you know, this is this is classic 2020s like anti Asian rhetoric. It's, you know, it's stuff that's led directly to hundreds of attacks and Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic. And, you know, the race is on slot driven by every sector of American society. Now, people immediately start speculating that J Baker had collaborated with long to cover up the racial like motivation for his violence.

And, okay, I think there's some truth to this. The cops have been collaborating with long in his family in various ways. I'm going to read a part of an article in Vanity Fair written by the journalist made John called how the Atlanta spa shooting the victims, the survivors tell a story of America, which is this is one of the best things that anyone's written about the shooting. So far, I'm going to read a little bit of it because it's oh boy. I rang the bell at the family home. No one answered. Before I could decide what to do, a police cruiser showed up. An officer who introduced himself as Sergeant Clement explained that the neighbors multiple people had called to report suspicious activity. The one good thing about Cherokee County, he told me is that we look out for each other.

It's like how it used to be in the 70s. I asked Clement what specifically the neighbors were worried about. To be honest, he said what they are worried about is they are afraid of revenge. What is the context for the like revenge line? Yeah, it was basically just they were really like they were terrified that like Asian people were going to show up like to this community and take revenge for the shooting. They thought they were like attack like the church or something. Well, no, like like they thought they were like show up to like the family's house and like attack the neighborhood. Yeah.

When is that ever happened? Yeah. Yeah. You know what this demonstrates? A is just the kind of community you're dealing with here. And B also like you just you have very obvious close connection between the cops and like Long's family at this point. Yeah. And in terms of like the covering up the covering up of like the anti-Asian violence part of it, honestly, I don't even know how intentional that would be because I don't think he even recognizes that as racism.

I'm not sure how much the cops recognize that as a super big part since that they are already pretty racist against Asian people. Okay, like I don't even know how much they recognize that as being like a thing that isn't normal. Yeah. But I think also like, I don't know, the the the explicitness to which particularly Baker is being racist like makes me suspect that he that he would have been able to figure it out because he's like like you have to go out of your way to like have a shirt that says like COVID imported from China. Like, yeah, but I don't think that he would consider that racist, right? So it's so racist that but but he can't even consider that he just think it's just like normal, right? That's possible. Yeah, I can see that. So like in terms of like them trying to cover up any kind of anti-Asian stuff leading towards the shooting, they may not see that as like as anything to be covered up because they think that's just normal.

So they're not going to like even focus on it because they're like, yeah, I mean, obviously, right? Yeah, I can buy that. So they're going to throw our down the rabbit hole. That's hard to even like recognize it. I don't know. I'm just I'm just I'm just simple. No, it makes it makes sense consciousness. And I think also the other thing that's going on here that that's, I think the other part of why they wouldn't have recognized it if they didn't is that like, okay, so like like most people see this and they're, you know, they kind of like analytically they kind of throw up their hands. Well, this is anti-Asian violence. They talk about like the stuff that's particular dangers faced by like Asian women and sex workers. And they sort of call it a day. They're now sort of like stops there and like they're right.

Like this is anti-Asian violence. The violence is primarily inflicted on women and it particularly on sex workers or and this is also very important. People who are perceived as sex workers, no matter what they actually do. And yeah, like it's gotten worse since the pandemic, but there's a very, very specific kind of violence that Long is doing here. It is it's not it's related to but not identical to the sort of post COVID stuff. And I think people really like did a disservice to what happened and did a disservice to help people understand it by not actually poking at it because this shooting is at its core and evangelical shooting. Like this is this is this is evangelical violence. This is Christian violence. And this is this is purity culture. And you know, if you want to understand what actually happened here, you have to actually have to go back and you have to understand the Christianity angle because it is critical.

Now East Asia's contact with Christianity in the last 200 years has been broadly speaking extremely bleak. The conclusion of the first opium war in 1842 which Britain forced China to buy opium to cover Britain's trade deficit with the country and then Britain also stole Hong Kong and then allowed. Yeah, it also had the effect of allowing Christian missionaries into the country. And it is genuinely unclear which one of those acts has the highest body counts. The product of the Christian missionaries work was the Taiping Rebellion in which the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ waged a failed war against the ruling Qing dynasty that like even if even if you use like the lower estimates of the body count, that war makes World War One look like a minor border skirmish. It is a just incredibly devastating war. And the product of this is there's famines, there's also just a bunch of floods that happen at the same time and this sends an enormous number of immigrants and refugees fleeing from their homes looking for any way to survive.

And a lot of those people find their way to the US and they get imported by American capitalists to where looking for a new labor force to serve is like a racial buffer between right black workers after the Civil War. And the other thing is like it's really hard to get to the West Coast in the 1800s. Like they don't have a Panama Canal. You have to go over land and it sucks and it's hard. So they need a labor force that they can just get to the West Coast. It is literally easier for people to come from China. And so they do. It is a brutal existence.

Chinese workers are worked to death building the railroads and they, you know, they struggle to carve out a life for themselves. And they do haltingly and sort of leaps and spurts, but they create communities. They build towns and temples and cultures in the beginning of a new society and that's when the white working class decides they want to exterminate them. Because this is this is a great country. Yeah, white workers immediately start blaming Chinese workers for the low wages and they use their workers organizations to ethnically clowns the West. The results of this is a series of massacres that goes on literally for decades stretching like into the night like this. So these things start in like the 1870s and they're still going in like the 19 like in like like the early 1900s. And it's at this point where Christianity gets involved.

I think like most people who are listening to the show have probably heard at least in passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act. There's this sort of like the great triumph of like the dark alliance of racists in the white working class. But what I think is less known about is the Page Act of 1875, which banned, quote, lewd and immoral women from entering the United States. And this is like this is directly targeted at Asian and Chinese women who were seen as a threat to the sort of racial and moral character of like the white Christian American nation because of like they're supposed to like the inherent immorality demonstrated by the popular, excuse me, demonstrated by the popular image of all Chinese women as sex workers. And you know, I think like looking back on this, this is extremely recognizable. This is literally just an anti trafficking panic. Like this whole thing is just like this is like this is like proto, this is like proto Q shit.

You know, and like, like there is there is legitimately like sex trafficking going on. But the existence of like, like the fact that there is sex trafficking gets used as the sort of like political and racial image it gets projected onto just like all Asian women who get portrayed as trafficking victims and you simultaneously be like saved but then also expelled from the US to preserve both there in the US's purity. And, you know, like this image of Asian women is literally never changed. You will find it today. Like to this day, people find people using like the exact same racist projections like consciously or unconsciously to talk about Asian immigrants and like particularly spa workers. It's this like it's this like incredibly toxic mix of like Christian moralism sexism, horophobia and racism. And the racism element is really important because like, okay, well this is going on like prostitution is legal in California. Like, you can just do this like there's no law against it.

Um, you know, it's a you'd think that like, oh, hey, they're, you know, the sort of like Christian panic would just be targeted against brothels like no, it's like very specifically against Asian women and it's, you know, this is because all of the sort of like the Christian fears about sex work is, you know, and their horophobia is and still is today incredibly deeply fused with this sort of like, this is this like incredibly racist like concern over the purity of the race. Uh huh. Yeah. And yeah, you know, this will sound familiar to anyone who's been like paying attention at all to any of the trafficking panics and if the anti trans stuff and if just I mean, interracial dating was only extremely recently allowed at all of like the biggest Christian universities. Yep.

Like, like they have like they, uh, yeah, not a it is it's a it's a thing. It's a. Yeah. And that's like the thing about it. It's it's really it's really close to the surface, right? Even even when they're not explicitly just saying it, like if you look at you spent about two seconds looking, it's like, oh, this is what's going on here, huh? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, so that that that's sort of that's sort of one side of this whole thing, right?

Is you have this sort of like, you have this sort of like Christian like anti trafficking panic that that creates that like, you know, it creates this sort of image of what Asian women are. It has a lot of effects. But the other side of this coin is that there is a just incredible amount of sexual violence that America has inflicted on Asian women, like particularly through its war, successive invasions of the Philippines, China, Korea and Vietnam saw American soldiers committing just. Untold and horrific sexual violence on Asian women. Like to the extent that like the US essentially just inherits Japan's like mass military rape system in Korea and just runs it for itself. Like there's this. No, all of all of those things came home so massively, all the things that were normalized overseas just came right back with all the soldiers came back.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Next year. And this this has a. Like that. I don't know. I think people get the relationship between pop culture depictions and of you know, racist depictions of people in pop culture and the actual culture backwards.

Like they don't help and they spread it, but like, you know, the like me love you long time shit from like Kubrick like that doesn't come out of nowhere. That's not just Kubrick. Like that's that is that's something that was brought home by the American racists and you know, like when they got back and that stuff. Like it's not just that like the stuff's being spread by media. It's that the media is being influenced by the people who did this stuff and then came home. It is the full circle thing. Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, even still now there's such a such a degree of like Asian women being like an object to possess even more so than like like even more so than like regular women, which obviously under under like a lot of like patriarchal stuff in the states and you know, overseas everywhere, you know, women are seen as objects to possess, but specifically there's that is so much heightened for women of color and specifically like Asian women. I mean, you see that idea. I mean, you see that everywhere for like the libertarian Asian girlfriend. Yeah. You like you see this in media all the time that like the Asian wife is something you own. Yeah. And it's it's a it's very extremely pervasive. Yeah.

And I think the reason why is that like this image gets refreshed every time a generation comes home from a war in Asia. And you know, that that's because the US has been fighting wars in Asia, like forever. I mean, basically since like the fighting wars in Asians late 1800s. And, you know, like the violence of each subject generation just sort of refreshes this image of like Asian women as prostitutes bodies are supposed to just be like accessible to white men at all times. But this has a sort of there's a kind of clash that happens here, too, because like on the one hand, you have this sort of like racial and sexual fetishization. And on the other hand, you have Christian horophobia. And this gives you this culture where like Asian women are at once seen as like hyper desirable and hyper available, but are also just like utterly despised for both. And this sort of like racist pathology, this this like this this sexual desire mixed with loathing is at just the absolute core of the Atlanta shooting.

And as if to remind us of its origin, long carries out his massacre on the 53rd anniversary of my life. And we're back. So I think we now have enough context to like go back to Long's initial description of why he carries out the attack, which is to self describe sex addiction and his desire to eliminate temptation. Yeah, because I mean, we cannot overstate the degree to which both the police, the church and the shooter himself framed this not as an anti Asian thing, but as like as a as a as something addressing his sex addiction. That was the angle he talked about it now, there's all of the anti Asian stuff that is like right under the surface, which is like propping up so much of what's going on. But the thing that they were publicly talking about was this so called sex addiction. Yeah, and I think this is, you know, this is a very important angle of this is we should actually talk about what that is. And because and to understand because he just is not like, OK, so like the sex addiction is, I think, like actually sort of a thing.

But that is a hotly debated. Yeah, I don't know. I look, I'm not a psychiatrist. Don't take advice to me. I think it's the slightly more legit of the two things that of the two like fake syndrome things we're going to talk about here. But this is not what's going on with him. And you know what I understand? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. What's going on with this? We need to go back to enemy of the show. Purity culture friend of friend of the pod. Yeah. I'm going to say no, I refuse. I had I had friends in there a couple of times and I was like, I refuse to call this friend of the show. Damn it. Like I can't do it. All right. Joshua Harris just unsubscribed.

So long like by all accounts is extremely religious. He's heavily involved in both this church and his high school like his high school. He goes to public high school, but the public high school has like Christian athletic groups, which is a fun thing that they let you do in public schools. Yeah, it's great. So, you know, to get to get an understanding of like the kind of baptism we're dealing with here, here's a line from the church's bylaws. Quote, we believe that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography or any attempt to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex is sinful and offensive to God. Yep. You know, and all of that's in the Bible. Yeah, they have. You can tell because they cite three passages. Not if we say that.

Well, okay, I know there is there is bestiality stuff. Yeah, bestiality is, yeah. I think incest is in there. Well, sort of. I mean, they, they keep doing it. Parts of the Bible are pro incest, parts of Bible are anti incest. Yeah, it's, yeah. The Bible has a real sticky relationship with the topic of incest. But yes, I'm sure they thoroughly cite all of their passages for. Yeah, that's great.

When they talk about bisexual conduct. Yeah, it's, well, I mean, you know, the one that's great is the attempting to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex, a thing that I. I'm guessing they're citing God created males and females and males and females. He created them. I don't actually think so because they're not, they didn't. Okay, yeah, this is maybe a coward and a fool. I'm just, I'm just, I'm just speculating based on my experience in these, in these types of types of groups. Yeah. So speaking of these types of groups, so Long is like, okay, so Long's church like expels him after the, the shooting.

After he does the murders. Yeah. Okay, it's interesting because like I'm 99% sure they violated their own bylaws because there's no way they could have done their expulsion. Uh, their actual explosion protocol and that amount of time because they would have had to like send people to visit him in jail. See, I think you're overestimating the degree to which churches care about what their bylaws actually say. Well, I mean, it's the, why am I blanking on it? What's the thing? Matt 18.

There's like the thing that churches have that's like their explosion protocol and they like send someone to. Yeah, this is the thing that I ran into. I think you're, I think you're slightly overestimating how much people actually care about that. Yeah. And that gets used to prop up the authority of the leaders and push people towards whatever political gains that the movement has. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. Speaking of getting people to submit to the authority and political against the movement.

Yeah. So we've talked about purity culture on the show. We have. We have. So we're not going to go into an enormous amount of detail about it here. But we should, we should at least describe what it is. So the very, very, very short version is it's like, it's an incredibly patriarchal like. Evangelical Christian religious system in which like sex before marriage is seen as like an incredible sin.

And there's just like focus on like the purity of the wife. And like, like a woman is essentially the property of her husband and the entire goal of her existence is to like bear and raise children. Yes. So it was, it was invented. It was the modern version. It was invented in the 90s. Yeah. Strongly influenced by a book written by someone named Joshua Harris.

It was called I Kissed a Dating Goodbye. The book promotes a pro courtship to marriage pipeline instead of dating. Dating dating will probably encourage you to have sex before marriage, which is of course bad. And under, under all of this, under like the actual, like, you know, if you, if you, if you start digging into this, all the stuff it talks about in terms of like sexual purity is about, you know, women are responsible for men's sexual like sins, right? If a man lusts for a woman, that's the woman's fault, not the man's fault, right? It's because the women must be presenting in a way that causes that to happen, right? So women's, women's bodies and clothes should be designed in a way so that it will not cause men to stumble. And by stumble, they mean get horny.

And, you know, it's something that, you know, your, your body's both this thing that should be pure, but also you should be ashamed of it, right? Because it causes this sin. Women can't really have any sexual desire on their own. Women aren't going to really enjoy sex. It's specifically for men and it's for procreation. It's an intense value tied to your idea of like virginity and virginity extending out to like personal purity and spiritual purity. Like if you have sex before marriage, you are like, like unclean. It's like, it's like your, it's like your chewed up gum.

Like you, like you would not pick up someone's, like if you found some chewed up gum on the street, you wouldn't put it back in your mouth, right? So that's the idea. Like if you, if you're not a virgin, you are, you are like chewed up gum. Like you are already used, you're spent. So you have, so you save, save for marriage so that only your husband can chew up your gum. And then after marriage, you're just stuck there forever, right? It's also like very, very, very anti-divorce. And there's really no difference. And like there's, they don't really, there's not much discussion around consent. Oddly enough, you know, as, you know, that may surprise you based on what I all just said.

Like obviously they don't care about consent. There is like, they, they view any, they view sexual assault just as bad as consensual sex before marriage. They see them as the same thing. It's, it's basically the, it's the same structures. They're both in equal sin. And I mean, that is, that is Purity Culture 101. We could, we could just do an entire episode on Purity Culture and we probably will. We could do a series on it.

Like, yeah, like, yeah. Yeah. And I think the other important thing about it is like, this is basically like, in terms of their sort of being like, like, I don't know if you call it a counterculture, but there's sort of being like an evangelical cultural machine. Like it's this, like this is, this is what they're pushing as like, as like their mass movement for, for youth, especially, especially in the 90s and 2000s. We have, we have stuff like Purity Rings, which is like, you know, when, when you're a teen, you'll get these like objects or jewelry, which are like, like almost like magical items you put on to like show that I am going to keep myself pure.

And by doing this, by doing this action, it's symbolizing that and therefore internalizing it. There's also Purity Balls, which is not what you'll. So when, when you use the word purity ball, certain things will come to mind, right? Unfortunately, they're not as fun as what, as what you are thinking. A Purity Ball is just like a formal dance event, you know, like a ball that you put on, which is meant to, it's a, it's a meant to, usually it's like fathers take their daughters there and then their daughters swear to make a virginity pledge to protect their purity of mind, body and spirit, so that they will not then infect, you know, boys and cause them to stumble and commit the sin of lust. Which, again, is an incredibly weird thing to do at a ball.

Like, yes, it's so weird. Well, also, yeah, it's most, most, yeah, it's, I, we, I think, I think we've gone into enough about, about this specific sort of thing. I think the, the, the, the last thing I will walk in, there, there, there is one more thing that we're going to talk about a bit at length. But I, so before that, I do want to point out that Joshua Harris, who like is, is in a lot of ways responsible, like single-handedly responsible for an enormous amount of this. She is Japanese. And yeah, fucking thanks for that one, buddy. Great job. Good shit, man. He also, good job.

In 2019, he announced that he and his wife were divorcing. Yeah. So, you know. And now, and now no longer considers himself like the type of Christian he was before. I'm unclear what his actual spiritual beliefs are at the moment. He did, he did try to distance himself from his, From, yeah, from what I've read, like it's unclear that he knows, so. Oh, he knows. He, he definitely knows. I can, I can, I can, I can guarantee that.

He seems to be running, he has a new grift now. It sucks. They always get new grifts, but. Yeah, we will, yeah, we will get into the new grift industry in a second. But yeah, one of the other things that's, that's a big part of this is like a deep and abiding hatred of porn. Like, to the extent. Oh, yeah. All of this is, yeah. Like, as you said, and like in the list of bylaws, watching porn, again, is the same as sexual assault. Yeah, like this isn't a huge sin.

It's morally the same level of sin. And, and like, you know, I mean, and you can read that both ways as how seriously they take watching porn and how not seriously they take sexual assault because. It does go, it does go both ways. Yeah. And this, this thing, the fact that this is, this is like considered a sin is the apotheosis. Like, well, the apotheosis of this is, is porn addiction, which again, like, not really real. Dubious, dubious existence. This is even more dubious than sex addiction. Like, there's no, this is, this is like, this is fake. But there's an entire culture that's, that's like developed around stopping men from seeing porn.

These like, there's like these incredibly elaborate accountability setups where like, there's like apps you install on your stuff. Like. There's ways to alter your IP address to block certain sites. Yeah. Robert Aaron Long, the shooter, like he, he uses a flip phone instead of a smartphone because he thinks having a phone will like lead into temptation. Now, Long, yeah. And the product of this, there's like, there's like this entire industry that is built up around quote unquote treating the porn addiction. Yeah. And it's, it's all bullshit. But Long had spent, had twice been in one of these facilities called Hope Quest.

Now, Hope Quest is an affiliate of her old friends that focus in the family. But that's not actually the part I want to talk about because what's more interesting about Hope Quest is that it's founded by Roy A. Blankenship, a former ex gay who left both Hope Quest and the ex gay community to live with his husband. Now. Now this, what a, what a, what a, what a funny pattern we keep finding ourselves here. Yeah. Now, I think my dear listeners, if you were, if you were not as, as cursed as, as, as, as we are. As we are.

And you don't know what an ex gay is. Ex gays were, there were this movement of like evangelical gays who claimed that like, this is the thing that starts in like the 90s and 2000s. They, they claimed that like they'd gone to conversion therapy and it made them not gain more. And it works. Yeah, yeah. And this, and you know, and in part, part of what's going on here is they claim that it's that like they, they did it voluntarily because like, involuntarily doing conversion therapy had gotten to a point where it was like bad PR wise because Jesus Christ, you were like torturing children. But, but this time they're like, no, it's voluntary. This is like their big, this is the rights, big cultural campaign against the gay rights movement in 90s and 2000s.

And like, I would say this, like it's, it's not exactly the same thing as the way they use the transitioners. But like, there's a lot of. It's very similar. And of course, obviously that we now have the ex ex gay movement. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and to, to like, so like the ex gay movement falls apart in, in like the late 2000s and early 2000s and 10s because like, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. Like there's all the leaders were all the leaders were initially gay. He said they were ex gay and then kept having gay sex because that rules.

Yeah. Yeah. And they all kind of realized maybe we should stop doing this thing that keeps killing kids. Yeah. And Blakenship to his credit, like he'd been a big person doing this. And then he was just like, like one of his friends, like commit suicide and he's like, oh, shit. And so like, he stops and he like, he's now this conversion therapy and he's now pro queer. So many of the focus on the family people who were involved in like Love One Out, all of these ex gay programs.

So many of them then renounced it, accepted their, their gayness and then moved to Portland, fucking Oregon. Yeah. So many of them did this. Now there are except this though. Like this, this is what's interesting about this. So, okay. So, so while he was sort of figuring this out, Blakenship had founded HopeQuest, right? And so he leaves with the people who are running it now, like our ex gays who they're like the only ex gays left who didn't renounce it.

And who like still claim to be ex. I mean, they've taken their stuff about how like homosexuality should be like dealt with by same by having by marrying a woman and just not acting on it or whatever. Like they took that stuff out of their bios, but they apparently they still believe it. Like, like they've never, these people have never publicly come out against it. And, you know, what essentially happened was that like enough of enough of the ex gays, like the thing collapsed enough that like they had to find a new, they had to find a new thing to do. And the new thing that they found to do was they went into the porn addiction treatment industry. Yeah. And also if you want more background on like the ex gay thing, you can listen to my two parter on Focus on the Family and James Dobson for Behind the Bastards.

Also for our week on the war on trans people, we discussed some of the same stuff for the first episode, which is the evangelical gay marriage like thing that. So yeah, we have we do have we do have some like produced scripted stuff on these topics if you want more background on them. Yeah, unfortunately, this is this is a story where there's like every single thread you've ever done suddenly is coming together in one moment of horrific violence. This is where it long like winds up for his like treatment for like porn and sex addiction addictions, which I cannot emphasize enough. This is literally what he's talking about is literally that he watches porn. Like like that, that's what porn and sex addiction like means. And because none of this is real, the treatments like don't work. Because again, it's all fake.

I do and also say hope quest is operates out of Georgia. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, so so so he so he goes in the treatment twice and he says it like Maverick, which is just like recovery center. And doesn't work and he goes home and his parents kick him out of his house for watching porn. And, you know, I think this is something that like is important to understand, which is that the people inside of this world really deeply believe this stuff.

Right. And like watching porn has real social consequences for them and it has, you know, and this this has this has a profound effect on how these people think. I'm going to read a quote from a Washington Post article. So this is how these people like see this stuff. Right. Like this is this is literally about whether you're very intense. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. This is about whether you go to heaven or hell. They're talking about like something extremely existential. Like it is. And this all seems very silly to people who are not inside it because it is. It is. It is absurd. But if the people involved in it, it is like the totality of the universe.

Like it is. It is so big. It's like the biggest thing. It's so important because you're you're determining what you're what you will what your conscious being will exist for for thousands and thousands of years. Like this is what they actually believe. So it's super important. Like it is it is worth killing for because that's that's how important this is. Like it like I think I think there's an extent to which it is more important than life or death because you dying like you die once you go to heaven.

Your physical death doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Your spiritual death is so much more important. Yeah. And and this, you know, and you know, we talked about this like it's there's those things there's there's the social consequences. You can get kicked out of your house. You can get out of your church. If you keep doing this, like like these churches will kick you out.

And this, you know, this makes the ideology at work here incredibly powerful and provides a mixture of this like this, this really incredible self hatred for like falling into sin and giving him to temptation. And it also creates a hatred of the temptation itself. And this brings us all the way up to the shooting. The purity culture, purity culture is the key that unlocks, you know, the meaning of longs words. We can understand the explanation that the police gave, which again, like he apparently has an issue. What do you consider as a sex addiction and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate. You know, and there was a at the memorial for the shooting last year. Sex worker organizer Kylin Zhang said this.

They hate us so they can hate themselves less. And I think that's that's a really great. Yeah, that is a really good analysis. Yes. Yeah, it's a perfect calculation of like what's happening here. But this is the part of the story with immediate just violently and spectacularly fucks up to an act. They dropped the purity ball, you might say. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's really horrible. They're like what they've essentially done is enact 200 years of racist violence against people who would either literally just survived a mass shooting or who are literally dead.

And the way they do this is the press reads long talking about sex addiction addiction and they immediately assume that the women in these massage parlors have been having sex with them. And they start there's like this whole hunt that they do to like search for evidence that massage workers were doing like full service sex work based off of again, the words of a literal racist mass murderer and their own racist preconception that like all Asian women, especially spa workers are also sex workers. Yep. And like, you know, on the one hand, yeah, it's true that this stuff is fueled by horophobia and also like morally who gives a shit what they were doing. But the immediate problem here is that by doing this witch hunt, you are sickening the police on the survivors. Yep, you're putting you're putting survivors in immense legal and physical danger. Yeah, and we will talk about this more next episode.

But like, these women have already seen more police violence and police raids than all of the journalists writing about this combined have seen in their entire lives. And if any of these people had bothered to spend five seconds thinking about what purity culture is, they would have realized that long is from a fanatically puritanical culture, a culture where, for example, a massage given by a woman where the man is like almost entirely naked is something that would absolutely have been considered a sexual service. And like, you know, if you think about this again for like five seconds, right? When he's talking about removing temptation, he already thinks of all of these women as sex workers. Yes. And that's what he thinks a massage is he thinks like that's that's that's how he thinks about massages. It's yeah, it is it women are the like women do this and they cause men to sin right it's not it's nothing to do with what's going on with the man it is specifically what the woman's doing.

Yeah, well and even then like it doesn't actually like I think I think that the important distinction here is that it does not matter when long talks about how this is a place that was giving him temptation and also like, he was giving him temptation and he was like he was going there for his sex addiction. Like it doesn't actually matter to him whether or not any of these women have ever like no exchange money for sex at all. It doesn't it doesn't it doesn't need to be sexual at all. Absolutely not. No. Yeah, because these people are fucking like just engulfed in like so totally engulfed in this incredibly like violent and racist and misogynist or orophobic ideology that it just sort of you know like that that's just how they think.

And I think that this is where we're going to return one final time this episode to race because there's a mistake that people make thinking about this analytically that prevents them from understanding both what's happening in Atlanta and how sort of capitalist and racist violence happens everywhere, which is that like OK so right when this happened. Like when the press conference dropped you got there are a lot of people like I think Glenn Greenwald did this like Lee Fang like there was a whole crew of people who were like this isn't about Asian racism at all. This is about him like hating sex workers. And OK, it is true that human labor has been transformed into a commodity that can be bought and sold at will. Now, on a more theoretical level, right. You will see sort of incredibly theory brain people who will talk about how, you know, in March's critique of political economy, right, all labor is abstract interchangeable. Each unit of labor time is equivalent identical and exchangeable.

But here in the massage parlor, this is a deadly simplification. This labor, the labor that is going on here is Asian. It is indelibly stamped with race and ethnicity and nationality and hundreds of years of violence and perception. Um, Ruma Espacha, a assistant professor at the Institute of Women's Studies at the University of Georgia wrote a piece last year called White Supremacy in the Wellness Industry, or why it matters that that this happened at a spa. And I'm going to read a passage from it because it's very good. Massage spas, also called salons or parlors, like the one where these crimes took place, are part of a broader industrial complex that capitalizes on the racist belief that Asian people, and Asian women in particular, possess magical, spiritual, and sexual healing abilities. These attitudes belong to an entrenched Orientalist infrastructure in the United States that connects yoga, meditation, and massage to tourism, pleasure, and escape, signaled by the exotic tropical flower in the photo above, and there's a photo of a flower at a parlor. Yeah.

You know, and this labor, the labor of the massage that's happening here is, it depends almost entirely on a very specific performance of a specific kind of Asian femininity. And, you know, when this sort of gendered and racialized violence, when this gendered and racialized labor comes into contact with long and all of the sort of historical forces that he's bearing, he murders the workers. And, yeah, I think, yeah, this is the part of the story of the Atlantic shooting that I think if people know about the Atlantic shooting at all, like this is the part they know about, right? They know the story of Robert Aaron Long. But there are other stories here, stories that are, stories that in large part are just not about the US at all. There are the stories of the victims, the survivors, and the absolute hell that brought them into the massage parlor in the first place on the horrific night. And those are the stories that we're going to tell in part two. Yeah.

Well, that does it for us today. I do want to say, I know Chris was planning these for the anniversary of the shooting, but they proved to be quite the daunting task to put together, so had to get pushed back for a while. So, but big thanks to you for doing the work to read through all of the horrible things. Yeah, and oh boy, if in like the other thing I say about this, like, if you think this is bad, wait till part two, which is even more wide spanning and has a horrific and disturbing violence in a way that will, I don't know, reduced media tears multiple times. And yeah, we'll leave you an existential dread of the condition of this world. Yeah, and I guess, again, there is, there is ways to combat it, right, because all of these, a lot of these things are, you know, problems with like viewpoint and ideas in terms of how we view sex, how we view women, how we view race. And there are things that when you see you can interrogate in people, especially if you're, especially if you're a Christian, if you're, if you're going to church, these are things to watch out for and you can push back on. Because it's and doing so can maybe save people's lives because these ideas have a death count.

Yeah, and I think, I think there's another part of this too, which is that, you know, I mean, the reason we talk about purity culture stuff so much. The reason we talk about the mobilizations of the evangelical right so much is that they keep producing these movements that, you know, that put that put our lives in danger. And the only way that we can stop this, and this is a thing that we can do is you have to actually destroy their movement. Right, you have to you have to actually break their power, you have to, you know, you have to find various ways to break the power, break the power of these churches. And you have to find ways to break the power of their political movements. And that is not an easy task. But if we want to live in a world, well, I mean, just quite blank, if we want to live in a world and not in, you know, like four degrees Fahrenheit, like unlivable death scape, like we have to deal with these people. Because they are the source of almost every right wing movement that that we're facing and they have to be crushed before they do this again.

Yeah, and they're going to try. I mean, there's a bit. Yeah, the biggest thing would say is like, reaching out to people who you know are in this or if you if you go to church. I think it's your duty as a Christian to push back on these things. Because I'm not going to bash anyone specifically for whatever religion they have. I understand why people have this. I can see how they work. You know, I was raised in something very similar. But you can you can still push back on the type of rhetoric that leads to these things and the type of like objectification and racism that necessitates violence and gets people to be okay with violence. And pushing back against like Christian apocalyptic worldviews and like the idea that your actions will determine your, you know, how the spiritual quality of your soul and where it's going to reside for all of eternity.

Right. All these things are ideas that are pretty, pretty like innately dangerous. And there's ways to do religion that don't have that. Yeah. I think I think that is a good enough place to leave it for today. Because I know part two, we're going to have some more, more fire, white, white widespread problems. Yeah. All right. Well, this is the naked app in here. You can find us in the social media places that happened here, Podge.

You can also flee into the woods. Flee into the woods. But before you flee into the woods, subscribe to the pod and leave a five star review. Bye. Bye. Bye, everybody. See you tomorrow. Yep. It's, it could happen here. A podcast about things falling apart and some other stuff occasionally. I'm Robert Evans.

Welcome to the show. Today, our guests fresh off their new hit movie by Paramount, Garrison Davis. What? And, and yeah, what, what? I'm doing like a, like a thing. Chris, Garrison, Garrison's lost the thread. Why don't you pick it up? I also have lost the thread.

So here's new one. This has been very confusing for a part two of an episode. It's just absolutely baffling. Look, you want things to not be confusing. You have somebody else introduce your podcast. That's just the way it goes. Noted. Yeah.

So welcome to part two of the Atlanta shooting. We are back with actually less Atlanta this time, but more shooting. Oh, good. Sorry. This is a very absurd. It really is. We've had ourselves it. Dear God.

Just a normal day at work. Take it away, Chris. You got this. You got this. We believe in you. There's, there's a tendency. I think among Asian American writers where when we get confronted with what are, you know, considered quote unquote Asian American

stories, there's almost inevitably an autobiographical pivot that happens like at some point in the piece. Mei Zhong, the author of the Vanity Fair piece I mentioned last episode, that's been a major source for both these episodes, doesn't her piece. So do I mean, like dozens and dozens and dozens of Asian American writers who are, you know, much more accomplished and talented than I am.

And like, I get it. I don't blame them for it. I think it's a powerful way to anchor a story and to understand a story. And I also think that it's why we miss like half of the story that we, when we talk about things, because, you know, the, the, the autobiographical focus has this tendency to narrow the scope into looking at just sort of the US.

And this story and the story of Asian Americans in general isn't just a story about sort of a minority in the US or about American imperialism. It's about Asia itself. And here especially it's about China and Korea to less extent Japan. And, you know, the histories of these places have as much to do with why the people who died in Atlanta were in those rooms on that day as Christian purity culture does.

And, you know, by, by, by actually looking at this week, we got to introduce another key player in this horror show who only sort of appear tangentially in part one, which is capitalism because capitalism is about to show up and make just all of this monumentally worse. Yeah, it's kind of like Steven Seagal in that way. Yeah. I think more, much more active than Steven Seagal, but

Well, yeah, he can barely move. Yeah. Capitalism unfortunately moves at an incredibly relentless pace. Yeah. Capitalism's knees are in incredible shape. Yeah. So, and this, this, this brings us back to Atlanta itself. Now you'll fang die to hero.

In the final moments of her life, a shot's rang across Young's Asian massage. She motioned from Marcus Leon, still half naked on the massage table to stay still and wait for her to walk in front of him before he dived behind the massage table. By covering Leon's movement as she opened the door, she sacrificed her life to save the life of a man she'd met just minutes before her reward in typical American fashion

was a bullet in the head. It took six days for her family in China to realize that she'd been killed by village custom. The remains of an unmarried woman who left the village could not re enter it to be buried. Her body thus lay unclaimed in a morgue for 19 days before she was buried in the land of her killer at a funerals attended entirely by strangers.

Marcus Leon, the man Da Yongfeng sacrificed her life to save, was forced to return to work at FedEx just three days after surviving the massacre. The sound of the packages he dropped on his delivery runs sounded like gunshots. He quit soon after. There is no justice in this world, only an unending parade of horror, the details of which are somehow

each worse than the last. And it is... Yeah, this is I think what I wanted to sort of talk about in this episode, which is that like it's not just that there was a shooting, it's that each element of why everyone is there is its own successive horror story.

And the conditions that produced this horror are not you know, they're not just the conditions that produce Robert Aaron Long, they're not just the conditions that produced the shooter. They are the conditions that produced Da Yongfeng, who spent almost her entire life as a migrant worker supporting a family whose most pressing concern was attempting to marry her off. And I think it's worth tracing out these conditions

and how they developed because a 12 year old girl drops out of middle school to work at a factory 250 miles away and that eventually is gunned down by an American racist is not how the future of Asia was supposed to go. Like, you know, I don't have much love for Mao. Yeah, I would imagine not. Yeah, it's like I don't have much love for Mao,

but I don't think if you showed Mao this, he would be like, oh my god, this is the future that I wanted for my people like this. Things have gone very badly wrong, and I think to understand how we got to this hell, we need to go back to another hell, which is the beginning of the Korean war. And, you know, we've talked about the effects that the Korean war had on Korean women in the last

episode, but I think there's a few other things that are worth emphasizing here, one of which is that the absolute devastation that the war wrought on North and South Korea is incalculable. I mean, the effects of this are still felt to this day. It was a utterly devastating war. But it also has sort of more subtle effects on the sort of politics and economics of the region

because one of the very important things about this war is that the U.S. is fighting in East Asia. And this means that the U.S. is going to leave an enormous army in South Korea, which has its own military and sort of political and economic consequences. And, you know, those troops are still there to this day, like technically fighting a war which has never formally ended. And, you know, we'll come

back a bit to this later, but this has enormous implication for the entire region. I've talked on bastards before about, like, you know, about so many effects this has, but, you know, Korea and later Vietnam are a major, like the war is the U.S. fights there, are a major factor behind the industrialization of Japan, which sees, you know, enormous U.S. investment as part of this

attempt to, like, shorten American supply lines by exporting their military industrial complex to East Asia. You know, we talked about the Japanese think of this, but South Korea is likewise industrialized by American capital for, you know, pretty much the same reason. You know, and this goes on to the extent that, like, Korean troops, like, fight on the side of the U.S. in Vietnam.

And, you know, in South Korea's production base proves a sort of a pivotal military asset for the U.S. war machine in the East. Now, the thing I think, and I think that part of it, like, is understood decently well, because, you know, if you, if you, if you, if you, like, know literally anything about this region, you've seen the effects of this stuff, but the part of it I think is less

understood is that in China this, the war has a similar effect, which is that communist leadership fights this war, right? And it immediately becomes clear to them that there is a looming possibility they're going to have to fight the U.S. again. And if they're going to have to fight the U.S. again, they need an actual sort of modern industrial base to fight a war against the

U.S. And this, you know, this leads to sort of militarization, industrialization, and you get a look at two very different kinds of state-led developments, which I'm going to call state-led development corruption and state-led development socialism question mark, which sort of, which sort of play out in China and Korea. And, you know, I think it's, it's, it's

worth actually talking about this, because both of these systems are essentially going to collapse. And when they do, they are going to send an enormous number of people, both in China and Korea, you know, spreading, spreading across the world seeking, like, any kind of economic salvation. And a lot of the people who are killed in Atlanta are in Atlanta

because of these, because of these crises. Yeah, so, so the first of these is the chaebol system in Korea, which is sort of informally established by the dictator, Park Jung-hee, is like the core of his plan for economic development. And it generates a, a number of extremely powerful family-owned mega conglomerates with intimate ties to the state and these sort of various

political factions. And these conglomerates, which control just vast sections of the Korean economy, I mean, like, like to this day, Samsung, which is the, the largest, the remaining chaebols, like, I think, I think they, they're, they're total percentage of the GDP of Korea is like 17% or something. It's like, it's, it's absolutely absurd. Wow. Jesus. Yeah, like, and, and, and, and

like, and the thing that's, you know, it's sort of, it's amazing about this is that, like, the chaebols are much weaker than they used to be for reasons that we will get to in a bit. And, you know, when, when they're founded, when they're sort of at the height of their powers, they have, you know, they're, they're, they're established with three goals. There's an

attempt to develop the economy. You know, there's an attempt to sort of the fuel, there's an attempt to sort of fuel the American and South Korean war machines. And the third thing I'm trying to do is to make a lot of people in the government and their allies indescribably rich. And it works sort of amazingly, which is a weird thing to say about a development regime

started by military dictatorship, but they have, they have an enormous amount of mill of American capital military aid and like they, they do successfully develop, they kill an enormous number of people in the process, but you know, it on, on the other side, you have Chinese daylight developments. And this is also about economic development and fueling the military.

But you know, the goal here is to create an economic base for socialism. And this does not work. There, there, there's a number of sort of complicated reasons for this. The simplest one is that China just doesn't get the kind of investment technology transfers South Korea gets until like way later. But the other really important element of this for this story

is about the urban world divide. And this is another thing I've talked about bastards like on I've talked about ambassadors a bit, but I think it's worth going into the details a little bit because otherwise, a lot of the stuff that's going to happen. That is, you know, the, the, the part of the story that is directly sending 12 year olds off to a factory in Shenzhen, like

don't make any sense without it. So to make a very complicated and shifting set of economic programs, like as simple as possible, Chinese industrial policy dream, what's sort of called the socialist period is about extracting grain from the countryside and fueling and funneling it into urban industrial developments. And you know, to get it to get it like understanding of

what we're talking about here. So the CCP is essentially deliberately under developing the countryside in favor of developing cities. And this is this is explicit state policy from 1953 to 1985, 80% of the Chinese population is doing agricultural labor. But agriculture receives less than 10% of state investments over the same period. So they are like really, really, really

incredibly not funneling any resources back into, into rural areas. Yeah, I mean, is there a degree to that? Is there a degree of that that is maybe related to like I know in the USSR, a lot of the early left wing resistance to the Soviet regime came from rural areas. Is it anything to do with that? Like is it kind of a desire to avoid developing these

places that are less controllable? No, and this is the sort of interesting thing about China is that I mean, okay, so the CCP originally has an urban base, but they managed to get their entire urban base killed. So this is this is the cause of like, like this is this is one of the reasons for the sign of Soviet split. Like this is basically like Stalin and Trotsky are bickering

and their bickering gets like a million Chinese communists killed. And that means that you know this this is this is where the sort of rise of Mao comes in because Mao is Mao's a peasant organizer. And once the entire rural party is dead, it's like, well, okay, so now we have a peasant base and they have they actually have a really have like a basically unprecedented level of

sort of buy in from the countryside. But the problem is that the party just isn't interested in in rural development because the thing that they want is they want to be able to develop military power and they want to be able to develop like heavy industry. And those aren't things that they think you can do in the countryside. And so their strategy is just to just I mean, just literally

it's just pure grain extraction from the countryside and then using that to fuel industrial development, which they're doing for I mean, largely ideological reasons, but it also does have to do with the fact that China like like people people talk a lot about how like, you know, the communist revolution in Russia happens and like the least developed country in

Europe. And it's like, yeah, but like Russia had like several times more industrial capacity in Russian revolution than China does after the war. So this is a country that is like a complete economic backwater. And so, you know, this is this is part of what they're doing, though it doesn't it doesn't work. And you know, I should mention that there's one other thing that they're doing

here, which is that so they're based in the peasantry is fairly solid. But the other thing they have to use this grain budget for is to buy off this like incredibly militant working class that they've inherited. Because these people are on strike like constantly. And this is this is this is a really serious problem for the CCP. And so they they you know,

they have all these welfare programs, they have all of this sort of these resources that they're paying they're putting into buying off this class. And the result of this is you have just incredible rural poverty because like one of the things that happens here is I guess I guess you call the benefits, but things like housing, education, like medical care, this stuff is all distributed

like through your work and through your household registration. And so, you know, if you're someone who has a job in the countryside, you're you the resources that you're getting are also from the countryside and that means that you have just these like awful underfunded services your benefits are terrible and even if you can somehow get a job in the city, which is really

hard because China also has these like really intense internal like immigration restrictions. So like if you're like in another province that you're not supposed to be like you will get deported back to your home province. There's all these really tight controls. And this means that like if you're in a rural area like your livelihood is tied to your family

unit in a way that's like not happening anywhere near as intensely in the cities. And when I say your livelihood is tied to your family unit, what I mean is that like other than this like brief like token attempt they make to socialize like housework reproductive labor in the Great Leap Forward. Men in the state are just like entirely dependent

on uncompensated housework and production by women, which well, yeah, it's not just a China thing. Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's like, okay, it's like, oh, hey, this sounds like your modern system. And like, yes, this is true. But on the other hand, the socialists like ideologically are claiming to be better than this. So I'm holding them through their own standards

and I'm just like D on this because this is fair. Like, yeah, I mean, like, I think this is really one of like, you know, okay, so they failed to end capitalism. But like, I think if you look at like, what is the other great failure of the Chinese Revolution? It's that they never dealt with the patriarchy. And this means that like, you know, when Mao is saying stuff about like women hold up half the sky,

like what he actually means is that like women's labor is holding up like 70% of the budget and they're getting like 20% of the pay. And this, this is extremely important for reasons that we will get to in a second because it turns out if your entire economy is based on patriarchy, really bad things start happening in terms of your gender politics, which is a thing that has never,

has literally never happened in any other regime and we should not at all take any lessons from this about how our own economy works. It's great. It's completely fine. The other thing that we need to talk about is the CCP's just utter full scale war against its urban workers. And this is not the kind of like abstract class war

that you hear leftist talking about all the time. That's, you know, about like wages and unionization and so forth. Like this is an actual war that is resolved by the, by just the PLA, the Chinese army just butchering the Chinese working class. And this comes to a head in the Cultural Revolution and, you know, I have a whole rant about the

Cultural Revolution that I will do sometime. That's not now. But the short version of it is that one of the things that happens in the Cultural Revolution is that the CCP crushes these sort of rebel worker factions and they kill a million people. Like from, from, from, from the Well, that is a lot of people.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's really, it's really like comparing it like to the scale of like the great anti-communist purges. Like this is, I think it, I think it's actually more, I think it's like 1.1 million people. I think it's more people than, than Suharto killed. It's like.

Well, there you go. See, there's some left-right unity. Yeah. Well, I mean, Mao, Mao, Mao undisputed greatest anti-communist has the highest number of communism kills. Well, I don't know. Let's, let's, I mean, Joseph Stalin's in that running. That's true.

You've got to, you've got to, you've got a couple of Titans battling it out here. Yeah. It's, it's a, it's a difficult choice. But yeah. I mean, like they are like, like the CCP is literally fighting a war against, against a certain workers. And like this is, even by like the mid-70s, there,

there are moments where the army is sending like tens of thousands of workers, since thousands of troops, like into cities to break up strike waves. And this is, this is an enormous problem for the CCP. You know, okay. Like it's a enormous problem for them politically because it turns out that being a communist party and then the thing that you're doing all of the time is sending soldiers

to shoot workers is really bad for your political system ideologically. Well, okay. That's your opinion. Yeah. It doesn't go great for them. And the other problem they have is, you know, this, this creates this like, this incredible militarization

of society and this leads to stagnation and there's all this corruption that's happening. But the other problem is like, okay, so if you're like a cadre, like planner, right? And there's all these people on strike. You need to not be on strike because you need them to produce stuff for your like central planning production schedules.

And so all of these like cadre planners start being like, okay, these workers keep going on strike. Like where, where can we get labor that won't do this? And they start looking at the countryside and they start going like beard stroke. Can we send this over here? And meanwhile, like the actual rural, like rural lights are fed up with just being treated like shit.

And they start de-collectivizing their farms because well, okay, there's a lot of reasons why they're doing this. But they essentially start forming these things that become called a town and village enterprises, which are these like, the simple explanation of it is that they basically start for forming capitalist companies and trying to make money. But the ownership structures are a bit different because

they're like, you know, it'll be like a village, right? And like the village like technically, collectively owns this like company that makes tires or something, right? And this is where you start getting markets coming back to China. And the CCP looks at this and goes like, yeah, sure, this is fine. This won't stop our communism thing because we're having

budget shortfalls right now. And if we let someone else do this work, we don't have to pay for it. And these, so these town and village enterprises are called TVEs. Like mostly what they're doing is they're like selling parts and stuff to like these giant state-owned enterprises, which are, you know, your state-owned enterprises are

things that are building like bikes and like tractors and refrigerators. So they're like, you know, they're selling them like wheels or like refrigerator parts. And this is, this is the thing that becomes the core of the Chinese economy, particularly in Dao Feng's home province of Guangdong because Guangdong is a really unique, well, okay, really unique province.

I guess is the thing you can say about literally every province, but Guangdong is particularly unique in this period because it's right next to Hong Kong. And this means that, I mean, there's always been sort of like capital kind of through really shady black markets and like people passing each other like notes under dinner tables and extra like all of the weird like diplomacy stuff that like Kissinger and Dixon get up to is happening

through these like weird back channels that a lot of which are running through Hong Kong. There's a lot of stuff that's been sort of running through there. And when this stuff starts to happen, Guangdong gets these special economic zones. And this becomes sort of the prototype for China's like eventual sort of capital-centric like export

development model. Guangdong is like they're literally, they're taking like foreign capital from Hong Kong and they're using it to produce good for the market. And this is the world that Danyong Feng and Xiaojie Tan grow up in. It's a world where on the one hand there's enormous economic growth, but on the other hand like all of the

safety nets that Chinese socialism have put in place are just like being completely destroyed and everyone is once again dependent on wages to survive. And it's also an incredibly deeply patriarchal world, you know, and we've seen this already right with Danyong Feng's village just like refusing to bury her body because she's not married. And you know, this is something that's only gotten worse

as the sort of as the 80s where on you get into their foreign period, you have simultaneously you have the one child policy, which is this incredibly draconian state enforced destruction of bodily autonomy. And it also serves this really horrific role in devaluing girls because girls are seen as having less economic value than boys. And so you get all these things where like you get these

you get targeted like gender targeted abortions. There are these master realizations that happen. And yeah, it's just enormous patriarchal engine. And it sucks. And there's also there's a return to Confucianism as well because like this is one of the things is like the most infuriating about this because like, like 80% of like what the original Chinese Revolution was about was like, hey,

Confucianism sucks. Like this incredible like reactionary patriarchal ideology is in fact bad. And then like 40 years in they're like, hold on, wait, what if we bring this shit back? And it is it is it is extremely bad. And you know, and it serves as a sort of like like this pacifying patriarchal ideology that they're using to sort of

hold the family unit together because the family unit are like so a lot of the firms in this period are just like owned by families, right? And you know, you there's there's a lot of similarities here between if you look at your like, you know, you're sort of like right wing, like culturally Christian, like small business owner families, and you look at this and it's like, huh, we've we've we've redeveloped the wheel

here. We have once again created the patriarchal death engine. Yay. Woo. It's it's great. It's yeah. And this this is basically this is the world that Da Yongfeng like grows up in and this is the period where

the the old urban working class is just hammered to pieces at the state and capital to just gorge itself as well for benefits and the new Chinese working class is born. And this migrant working class. It's Vanguard are these women who are given two imperatives by their families and these these these imperatives are given, I mean, literally Da Yongfeng, like Da Yongfeng directly.

And I think indirectly to Xiao Zhitan. Okay, so like with Da Yongfeng, we like we literally have the quotes of this, right? Like she is told by her family, get married and find a job. And Xiao Zhitan gets married off at 20, but a middle school Da Yongfeng like drops out of school and just goes to work in a factory in Shenzhen. And this like these are the women who built modern China.

Like these these are literally these are the people who turn Shenzhen from a tiny rural town into a world-class manufacturing hub that is literally larger than any city in North America. And I mean this happens in the span of like a couple of decades and they get jacked shit for it. Like the wages they are working for like Da Yongfeng's brother is working on rubber plantations.

He's making five dollars a month. And you know in Da Yongfeng's case, like the other thing she's dealing with is literally these constant demands for a family to get married. And Feng just refuses. They try to do it as a young adult. She just goes no. And they try to try to get like when she's like 38,

they like they bring her back to her village and are like pick a husband. She just goes no. She just like they keep showing your guys. She's just like no. And you know what she does instead is charter her own path by managing to secure a visa to the U.S. where this is so Da Yongfeng's like is American worker

for ages and eventually I think like 2016 she moves to the U.S. to support her family again from afar. There's only there's one more piece of macroeconomics that we need to talk about before we can follow Da Yongfeng to the massage parlor and this one is going to get like everyone else to the scene. This massacre. So when we last left our Korean corruption shavles

business business was booming and in the early 90s business is like even more booming. It is this is this is the best I've ever done economically and the reason it's the best I've ever done economically is because is by is in large part because of the thing that I am just perpetually cursed by when I do research for the show which is the Plaza Accords. I've talked about this before but I will once again do a

brief summary of this which is that so in the 1980s as people probably are aware the U.S. manufacturing economy is dying and this is a real problem for Reagan because everyone's like Reagan. Why does the economy suck and his solution to this is just basically at gunpoint forcing Japan and West Germany to like let the U.S. devalue its currency relative to the end of the

Deutsche Mark and it's like OK this is a this is a boring technocratic thing but the thing it actually does is if if your currency is weaker than another currency it's easier for you to like sell them to have an export economy and sell them stuff and this sets off just like an incredibly catastrophic change of events where the U.S. manufacturing actually comes back because you know hey

oh hey look the dollars dollars weaker now we can produce shit again but it just you know it it it combines with this like structural weakness Japan's economy Japan's economy is implodes and Japan goes OK fuck it how do we keep the economy going without my manufacturing sector and their solution is invest in other countries and do real estate speculation and you know OK so obviously nothing bad ever happens happens when you do

real estate speculation and the Japanese economy was completely fine until it collapsed like five years later but this this is a series of effects one of them is that the Korean shables you know those companies that are doing like literally the best business have ever done the reason they're doing this is because of Japanese credit and the fact that like the there's more complicated currency bullshit going on but

basically like the value the value of the Korean currency was pegged to the dollar and so when the dollar's value decreased the one also decreased and so you know this this this gives Korea like a big manufacturing competitive manufacturing edge but then you know Japan goes under and they start to lose credit and then the U.S. in 1995 does the reverse Plaza Accords where they just reverse the

thing that they did before and so now the dollar is incredibly strong again every other currency is really weak relative to it and this just like this just obliterates like every economy in East Asia like they all just implode Thailand goes under and mostly countries like have never recovered like Thailand declared like the I mean South Korea kind of does but it's basically the only one all the

rest of the economies are just obliterated and you know this is the Asian economic crisis and you know saddle with like enormous debts declining profits like these shables starts collapsing left and right and South Korea just is just on the edge of bankruptcy and right on cue the IMF shows up and makes everything worse because yeah it's great it's the IMF they yeah they they they do

normal IMF stuff and they you know they impose a bunch of austerity measures and this just this annihilates the Korean middle class like it's just it just gets obliterated this is this is just his death now and it also it has you know it has a lot of effects but one of the other ones is the Korean labor movements is really severely damaged by just all the economic devastation that's

happening around them and the product of this is just a sort of rural poverty drives Da Yong Fong and Chow Chiton from their villages the economic collapse drives Hyun Jung Kim Grant who's one of the other people who died in this shooting from Korea to the US and this is something that this is there's there's something about the US here well okay there's something

about the US is that its economy is incredibly strong and the dollar is incredibly strong and even people who come to the US for other reasons that two of the women who end up here like are here basically because they married someone and but even that you know they did like there's a couple people like they marry someone and they

they break up and divorce them but they stay in the US they stay in the US because like the median American income is like three times the median American income in China and that's like now and so you know and the combination of that and the strength of the American the American dollar sort of it brings it brings the brave the desperate

and just the love struck to our shores um now if you remember LCS Hernandez Ortiz who's who's the man that a long like shot while he was on his knees begging for his life um Hernandez Ortiz was in that mall because he was wiring money home to his family in Guatemala and you know we could do another entire story here about

Guatemala and the other fruit company and these the US back who's in genocides but I think the thing about this story is that every atrocity is tied to every other atrocity you know and it creates this web of death that we sort of you know we we euphemistically call it capitalism or society or reality and the survivors

of this are just flung from meat grinder to meat grinder desperately looking for a new life a new country and you know they get there and the country just buries them instead now Yongfeng was also you know constantly sending money home to her family when she arrives in the US she when she's supporting like ten

members of her family off of a salary that is like I mean like she's supporting ten members of her family off of the salary that you get from massage work right yeah I think this like again I think something like people don't understand about the US is that like yeah American wages are low but the

dollar is so strong that even like like really like small amounts of money that you can send like small amounts of money in dollars you can send back home have this enormous economic impact and there is there is an enormous like an absolutely enormous sort of network of immigrants in the US who are here

basically to work and to send her abitances back home and this is I mean this is like this is an enormous part of just how the economy the Philippines works because of yep yeah a bunch of the just incredibly fucked up stuff that the Marcos is did um yeah and you know for Asian women in particular

once they get here they're often drawn to spot work because and there's a lot of reasons we'll get into in a second but these spas these spas are in some sense just like a microcosm of the US like the pay is good and the people doing the work often like prefer it to other jobs that are accessible to

immigrants well okay they're accessible to immigrants with their levels of political and economic capital and social connections which is usually really not that large but the problem is you know as as with everything in the US it's also often dangerous like that the particular kind of sort of

exposure and performance of femininity that you need to do this leaves these workers incredibly vulnerable to stalkers and you know they face sort of constant like racial massages abuse on butterfly which is a Toronto based sex worker group released a report that said that half of all

massage parlor workers reported some kind of threat to their safety at work Jesus yeah it's it's workplace is both incredibly dangerous and then you know and what we're saying like threat to their workplace that doesn't that's not even like that's not even counting the police and if you've read anything

about this you'll read people saying things like massage parlors face constant police raids and this is true but if anything it understates how bad it actually is because like Asian massage parlors are subjected to two different kinds of police raids that just happen constantly I'm going to read a thing

from Buzzfeed yeah it's great it's it's really fun from 2016 to 2020 94% of people arrested for unauthorized practice of a profession for any job requiring a license in New York but we're Asian and 96% were women according to data from the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services and our

prostitution is a misdemeanor defense unauthorized practice of a profession which is the charge that covers unlicensed massage along with roles like veterinary medicine and engineering is a felony that carries higher penalty including up to four years of jail time now I'm no expert but that sure does sound like

racism and misogyny yep it's like yeah there's an argument to me mate like if you're if your moonlighting is a bridge engineer and you're not qualified yes sure maybe that's a felony but really just calling me out on on the pod just right right in the now garrison we agreed not to talk about all of those people

who died when that bridge collapsed that you built in Florida on that university campus nothing of value was lost no it was Florida like that's why that's why the DA is not coming after you yeah US government not pressing charges it's Florida mm-hmm so okay yeah back to the back to the racism it's like okay so

you have these raids that are like literally only like targeted against Asian massage workers and then on top and you know so that's type one and the second type of raid is that the other thing that happens at these places constantly are these anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking grades and I'm

putting both of those in enormous quotations have these heavy quotation yeah you know I this is okay I'm gonna go on a side tangent rant here which is that like okay so like every single person who does reporting on this and I don't know if this is like a journalistic standards thing but like even the good

reporting on this they like almost always have like a section that says I oh the the the Georgia like Georgia is like resources on sex trafficking says that I salon Asian salons are a place where there's a bunch of sex trafficking and it's like mm-hmm really like this this is what you're putting in your article

about a bunch of people getting murdered by a racist dude like this is the thing that you're gonna put in here and you know and like this this is sort of like all of that stuff I talked about like last episodes about Robert Aaron Long like all of the objectification and the racism and the horophobia and that like

mixture of like desire and loathing like the cops have this like also the journalists who are writing about this have this stuff and the people who don't are sort of like picking up on the on the sort of like Abby and racism and so you get all this coverage that's just focused on like trying to figure out if

there was sex work going on here and you know and like as I said last episode like this is really dangerous because exposing people, exposing these sites to police investigation means you get more of these stings and you know like we mentioned at the beginning that Da Yong Fong like no one she knew showed up to

her funeral and the reason that no one she knew showed up to her funeral is that no one wanted to be at a place where there could potentially be cops they wouldn't be deported. Right. How could anyone who knew her come to her funeral because that would be well and her brother wanted to come but

the like travel to the US was expensive enough that he was just like yeah we can't do this and you know and like and I that these anti-trafficking anti-prostitution raids are so common that two of the Atlanta victims have been arrested as part of raids like before this and even though both of them

are innocent, Soong Chung Park was convicted of criminal trespassing anyways again which is like one of the most insane things I've ever heard of my life because she was arrested at the place where she worked and they convicted her of criminal trespassing because this entire system is made up of just like

robbery and long levels of racism but they have it they have a legal outlet to do it so they don't have to just go murder people and and sometimes they still do murder people. Oh yeah definitely yeah I mean we talked about very generous with that sometimes Garrison. Yeah I mean there there's a

really horrific story of there was there was a attorney sex worker who the NYPD like repeatedly attempted to force her at gunpoint to have sex with them and she refused and they so and you know because because she refused the NYPD kept doing raids on her and eventually she died because she jumped out of

window trying to escape one of the raids because these people are just literal monsters yeah yeah and you know Soong Chung Park like she's convicted of criminal trespassing and she gets you know the sort of particular American humiliation of being forced to wear an ankle monitor that you have to pay for

around your house while being under house arrest and I've I've talked about this with the journalists but again like there this is an entire system full of Robert Aaron Long's it's the judges it's the prosecutors it's the social workers it's the journalists it's the cops and this is this is an incredible level of

systemic state violence that makes these already tenuous migrant worker communities even more vulnerable because you know if someone's harassing them they can't call the cops because if the cops show up it's like oh hey it's good this is this is even worse than the harassment and that's I think where I want to

want to end here today on with things that can actually be concretely done about this to help spot workers and sex workers there's two proposals that spot sex workers have been backing one of which is just ending the licensing licensing requirement for massages because it's it's literally only ever

used to target Asian massage workers yep that seems that seems like a good call yeah it's definitely not the law but oh yeah yeah yeah getting rid of it clarify there yeah yeah I mean it's you know like this is my this is my like my most libertarian position is just being against like a lot of these licensing

things because what's what's next to license to make your own toaster if it's if it's a thing that people just do all the time and in fact cannot be stopped from doing under any circumstances then it shouldn't require a license to do like flying a plane like flying exact garrison like flying a plane like

performing surgery you know like being a police officer just make everybody everything all licenses sorry I've lost the thread it's okay I mean well I think that the actual threat here though is that like you know okay so like yeah on the one hand in theory it is good to have licenses that that you know like

have a way to tell who knows how to do something and who doesn't right yeah but the thing is that's not what the state does yeah massage yeah yeah it's massage and like and the thing that the state actually does even with licenses like and they do this with driver's licenses like even even with driver's licenses which is

the thing that like yeah like people should know how to drive before you put them behind like the the the four-wheel death machine like what do they do with it it's like oh they used to go after a documented immigrants because the state is just incredibly racist and that this is the thing that's happening with these

licenses is yeah they just they just do racism with it well it's it's why you can't have like the common sense law would be like okay well we're gonna have sex workers so there should be some sort of system to make sure that people are getting tested for things and that basic you know certain safety procedures

that at least people know what safety procedures are being you know used at the place or whatever but what it always boils down to is this is an excuse for police to fuck with vulnerable people yeah the thing that this brings us to is the second proposal which is just decriminalizing sex work like don't

prosecute people for this don't send the cops after them just don't do it like it only ever causes violence against people who are already the most marginalized people doesn't actually help against either yeah it makes spending against trafficking actually harder people feel not able to talk about

things when they see stuff that's questionable it's it's I'm sure we can do more content content I'm sure we can do more stuff about sex work in the future but yeah it really should be a not a crime yeah and I think this is something like you know it's it it reminds me a lot of like of the anti

trans stuff where it's like okay so you you should care about the stuff because you should care about trans people you should also care about the stuff because it affects people who are not trans and this this is a this is a thing where these massage workers are like most of them are not sex workers and it doesn't

matter at all and it's the splash over effects are hitting them too and yeah the the consequence of that is eight people are dead yep yep go hope your local sex worker organizations and go hope you help your local spa workers associations like get rid of this licensing stuff and fight for

decriminalization because this this this kind of shit doesn't have to happen and we can this is something that we actually can concretely do and win that will make it an enormous number of people whose lives are incredibly precarious enormously better yep okay so we have already seen it before our eyes

that you can do you can do things that involve safety where the police are just useless we we have seen we we have seen we have seen Zach wait is his name Zach yeah Zach is his name yeah yeah but look we have we have yeah it's nice he rules we have seen bodega Zach out with like out do the entire police force

even after literally the guy called them to turn himself in and bodega Zach still got there before they did one of the entire police department himself in and left his wallet and gun at the scene yeah and again this is this is this is a ten billion dollar police force the thing that the thing

that they mostly do is harass homeless people and sex workers for the love of God we don't need them we could like literally one man could do their job for them I yeah get get rid of them yeah that sounds nice okay well there we go we did it happy episode everybody it's an introduction good for you we did it

yeah I love that what what show is this this is this is it could happen here a show that is also currently in the middle of about seventeen thousand personnel disasters but it's fine yeah I am I am Christopher Wong and with me is garrison hello hi good morning or afternoon or evening depending on when

you're listening and also Sophie hello hi so we are we're here to talk about something that is I guess technically over but was extremely weird and did a lot of harm and that is the very weird stuff that Texas general general Jesus hopefully not Texas governor Greg Abbott who is the general of Texas Greg Abbott

you're kind of not wrong but I don't like that he wishes he wishes he was the general of Texas I mean I feel like that's me one of those things was like that that's when we know the coup started is when he himself the general takes over Texas uh-huh so Greg Abbott is extremely mad and he's actually mad because Biden

finally decided to end one of like the absolute worst Trump era border policies just called title 42 and it's time for you to use like nominally in anti-pandemic measures like the the CDC that's so I don't know why it took me like five seconds to remember the name of the CDC the Central Defense Agency yeah yeah

that one yeah so it's normally supposed to be a thing where it's like okay you can you you cut off migrants from coming into the country because there's a risk of a pandemic now okay if you have lived the last two years you know but the U.S. just literally does not give a single shit about the pandemic at all like

yeah yeah this whole thing really has just been a justification to just boot out and just prevent every like asylum seeker and refugee and immigrant from getting into the country and you know and you can tell this because uh the title 42 when it was originally invoked didn't cover people who were like

driving trucks across the border like it didn't cover economic activity of course not yeah so it's just a way for the U.S. to like not have asylum seekers and Biden let this go for like another fucking year while he was in office uh-huh and so you like like late last month he like he finally got rid of it

and you know this means that like immigrants and refugees now once again have their legal right under both American and international law to petition for asylum which again the U.S. doesn't give a shit about because you know U.S. doesn't care about laws unless they do bad things but this finally

happens and Greg Abbott who is once again we must remind everyone that Greg Abbott is is running for election in November he sure is he's just just literally running through the entire right wing like every single right wing scare we can possibly think of and don't worry Chris don't work

Chris Beto will get him I believe it I believe in Beto this time it's gonna lose by like 30 points landslide yeah okay so the thing that could stop him from this is Greg Abbott decides to do like two PR stunts and one of them is he's taking buses of of immigrants asylum seekers just

busing to the DC and I want to talk about this for a little like a second because like this is really shitty and that shouldn't be legal yeah be allowed to really traffic you're trafficking people across the country for a political stunt that's like that shouldn't be allowed yeah and like I think like

everyone's ago this is like it is but like the thing with American political sense is that real people get hurt constantly yeah and we're gonna come back to that theme more in a second as we talk about the second stunt that he did which was so essentially what Abbott did is there are an enormous number of

trucks that cross the US-Mexican border into Texas like every day right I mean there's like there are individual bridges that are moving 60 60 70 billion dollars of just produce like every day and so that produce when it when it comes into the US it goes to a bunch of checks by the border patrol and

stuff and there's all these checks and this is this whole thing but I Abbott went on this incredibly bizarre rant about well I mean it's not bizarre I guess if you're right when we went on this rant about like the cartels and there's immigrants we need to stop them and so he very scary yeah yeah it's

really weird okay so he's doing all these weird fair mongering and he's like okay we need to stop these people from getting across the border so we're gonna inspect all of these trucks which again like they're already being inspected by the feds yeah this is this is you know this is where like the horrible ice

budget is going right so he does this and he calls in a bunch of just like the border patrol to just literally do all of the same checks again and this has an enormous economic impact I'm gonna read a quote from the American Statesman the delays have resulted in a 60% drop in commercial traffic at the

border according to U.S. customs and border protections the agency said the delays are a direct result of quote additional and unnecessary inspections being conducted at Abbott's request I do like that the same people who were shooting moms in Portland in 2020 are now inspecting produce at the Texas

yeah it's it's pretty well I mean I think I think there's an important thing to note here right it's like okay so why why are these the people who are like doing both these things the answer is it like those organizations like that the thing that they're designed to do is to protect the interests of

American capital and you know so the interests of American capital are we need to move capital across the we need to move goods across the border and we need to just like absolutely obliterate like a bunch of teenagers who don't like us that is pretty much their bit I mean yeah I know we've talked in the

past about U.S. like customs and border and border protections and the weird the weird like agencies and weird kind of almost malicious that they operate and how they get deployed into certain areas if they're you know X X miles away from the border they would be worth talking about more in depth in

the future because I know Robert's done some historical background on them yeah bastards but I think yeah that is something I would I would be down to talk more about yeah I think they are a very bizarre agency yeah they're very weird they're also really not like in this story they're basically just

sitting there being mad because it's taking longer to get that is a lot of what they do yeah and and you know cuz and again like these these actual these inspections are being run by like state troopers okay okay and you know because because Abbott has more direct control over yeah yeah cuz yeah

Abbott is right power for them and this means that like it's okay so you have your truck right your truck has a bunch of produce in it you're moving it across the border um this usually takes about two hours of you know being like sitting there in a truck while your stop your everyone's cargo gets

inspected and stuff which I will say the truckers don't even get paid for that when they're yeah two hours yeah and and and you know what would make difference between 10 and 30 hours because I intentionally on purpose was like okay we're just we're gonna put 6000 like people total to do this

whole thing and so you know hundreds of millions of dollars of produce like onions and tomatoes and avocados are just sitting in these trucks rotting in the Texas heat yep I mean hopefully the trucks are refrigerated but still well the trucks are refrigerated but like the people in them I'm sure the

cabins are not yeah I'm sure it gets well you know I do have some family who were truckers and some of the cabins can't be nice but still that's sitting for 30 hours without getting paid because you only get paid when you are moving which is not a great way to you know run our entire

economy yep I'm gonna read a quote I'm gonna read a section from the paragraph of the Texas Tribune Felix a 60 year old Mexican trucker who is transporting tomatoes onions and avocados waited about 13 hours in line at the bridge he has to be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution and targeted inspections from

CPB officials hearing of the delays at the border he packed water and food for a few days but other truckers didn't come as prepared and were sitting in still traffic without anything to eat or drink Felix said he was told by a CPB official that the agency would be putting portable bathrooms along the bridge for

the gridlock truckers but he never saw them once Felix made it to the state cheaper inspection point around 9pm they didn't even peer into his truck which have been sealed since Mexican authorities inspected it about 600 miles away in the state of Sinaloa there's no possibility of bringing illegal immigrants

in the merchandise or in the cabin he said referencing one of Abbott's explanations for the inspections I can't bring any illegal immigrants here for money because I know inspectors are going to discover them it's not a thing here I don't know what the politicians ideas are I don't know what they're talking about so that seems not

good yeah it's really bad and like again this whole thing is nonsense like there's nothing I didn't even think I didn't even think about having to you know use the bathroom for 30 hours yeah the thing with this is like the backups are 8 miles long so like

if you want to go to the bathroom you have to walk for like miles depending on where you are in this backup and you know this is having like these just enormous horrifying these enormous horrifying knock on effects because you know it's not just the

truckers who are being affected by this there's a bunch of workers whose job it is you know to process these goods right take them out of trucks put them onto American trucks to like sort through the vegetables and figure out like which ones are good and which ones are not and again like just enormous amounts of just

produce that is like fresh and good to eat is just being intentionally destroyed because it's being forced to sit at the border for this long there's a bunch of these people whose whose job it like who are contract workers whose job it is to like go through this stuff and they're all getting fired because there's no work for them to do

um there's all of these people who like their their jobs or they run bodegos or they run like like they run restaurants did they run a bunch of stuff on the border for these truckers and they also don't have any work and those people have to on a day by day like it's like it I think it's like $1,500

per day to rent a terminal in in like God yeah and they're making nothing and it it's it's it's horrifying there's all there's just enormous economic devastation that that that's been sort of like you know that that that's been happening

because of this and well you know you know what else reminds me of economic devastation ah the fact that the fact that our paychecks are solely reliant

on the products and services that support this podcast it's true uh yeah we'll talk about the problems they're having in a second after this break yep one second wow that was uh that was a fast second

that just that flew right by time's not real destroy the clocks the scientists are the police all right what's next what is a second if you press fast forward if you press the if you press the 32nd button four times yes yeah you gotta be real speedy

now this is having other problems because as we talked about at the show literally ad nauseam our supply chains are really bad and it turns out that does seem to be a recurring character on the pod is that supply chains uh not the most stable thing we've invented yeah and especially with

especially with with with fruit and vegetables walk I mean we'll be getting some of the other supply chains that are like fucked because of this but like vegetables in particular like the the the way that we do them they're they're designed to be in motion for like a very specific amount of time so that when

they show up to you they're right yeah yeah yeah you know you add a few hours on to that it everything falls apart and this like I'm not sure if it happens because I'm not in Texas but there was there were a bunch of articles they were talking about like yeah like avocados in Texas are going to cost five more dollars like it like a single avocados price

is going to increase by like five dollars over the weekend because like because it was just the enormous amount of produce that's that's being destroyed here and there's there's there's a lot of other stuff going on here because American and Mexican supply chains are enormously integrated from now I mean they've always been

integrated to some extent but like yeah particularly post NAFTA there's a lot of like auto supply chains in particular that are that are tied to plants in Mexico and you actually this occasionally has like interesting effects like Mexico's has a lot of auto strikes and you get like you'll get these things where like

people will like tuck messages into like auto parts and like send them to the US people will open these messages from like a worker in Mexico to yeah you need this and it's cool that there's lots of there's interesting stuff there but this also means that like yeah so if those parts

aren't moving across the border those just in time production schedules are even more omega screwed and they've been already and so yeah there's been a lot of sort of economic stuff that's been happening here and you know the other people who are getting

just completely screwed by this are the Mexican truckers and so yeah so this starts on April 6th on Monday April 11th the truckers are just like fuck this and they start just completely blockading the

the largest border crossing between it's on this giant bridge they started they literally just blockade the bridge and like prevent any goods from getting in and this has an enormous impact because again it was going like yeah production was down by

60% but that still means that 40% of the goods are getting through and by the 11th it's just nothing I do hope the one good thing that can come out of the whole Canada COVID isn't real protests

that people have learned that blocking off supply chains is a really effective way to do protests because you can stop the import of thousands and millions and billions of dollars of trade pretty easily actually and it would be cool if more people realize hey obviously

the COVID stuff that we're talking about and the whole overthrowing the government part to install a right wing dictator that part's obviously bad but some of their tactics were actually pretty interesting now we're going to get more into that like later

I will say the thing with the US is that I think there's been a lot of focus on the American left on ports because there's a lot of reasons for that but yeah you can use the border crossings too the Mexican truckers blockade was really effective this has been a thing where

it's kind of hard to get information from I saw a few papers talking about cartel people attacking the blockade and lighting trucks on fire to try to force goods to go through again which it's possible I don't know

but this once the border is completely blockaded this completely changes the entire political situation because now Abbott's been running this thing sort of as a political stunt and as this game he's playing with he's trying to play a game with Biden

and he's like okay well you got to do something about the border whatever he's been challenging Biden over immigration bullshit but there's a third party involved and that third party is the Mexican truckers and now

Abbott's in a confrontation with the people that he needs to make the entire Texan economy run and this starts going very badly for him and the other thing that starts going very badly for him is that it turns out if you shut down cross-border trade

you really really piss off the bourgeoisie turns out that'll happen if you ain't careful it's really interesting and I think I should mention like stress this they're pissed off on both sides of the border and obviously you could talk about

the extent to which they're they're the same class but like capitalists on both sides of the border start exerting their political pressure because they're losing enormous amounts of money off of this that's what they do yeah you take away their ability to do capitalism

as capitalists they're going to be mad yeah which again you'd think you would think that Abbott would like get this but it seems to have not occurred to him that he was going to piss off like either that or he thinks he didn't care enough and thought it wouldn't matter but like

no it turns out one of the things that happens yeah it's amazing I think this is sort of a symptom of people lose right-wing politicians losing sight of what their actual base is because

this is all supposed to be campaign trail feeding the anti-immigrant base but you are a politician in the US your actual constituency is the capitalists and like you have an actual job and that's to make the economy keep going

and keep the people in power to have all the power like you're not just like that's one interesting thing that Trump was kind of one of the first big indicators for which is like a politician now is just the endless cycle of campaigning and they don't actually have a job it's just always

campaigning and they're just always campaigning and they're like oh I guess I should do my actual job that I was elected for or I could just do more rallies and that seems like it would be less work I think what Trump was like there was always a set to which the bureaucracy kept

functioning and you know like Trump got the tax cut right and like he didn't really start getting in trouble with them until he started doing the anti-China stuff which was sort of a disaster because there was a lot of people who turned out like need those trade connections to make money and you saw like it was a very weird thing

even some of his like domestic like small business base started to get really mad at him because he's putting all these sanctions up and it's like oh hey look all these sanctions mean that all these people who are reliant on Chinese supply chains have to pay this stuff and Abbott has like done this

in microcosm and these people like they start going to the press I'm going to read a quote from Bloomberg some retailers particularly those in the grocery industry have experienced supply chain delays resulting from the extended wait times along the Texas-Mexico border

John McCord the executive director of Texas Retailers Association wrote an email so like you know these are like the Texas Retail Association is like this is like the most Republican solidly institution in the country and you can

watch them over time like these people are getting really mad like one of I was like like one of Abbott's like I forget the exact title like one of Abbott's like secretaries like

the secretary of one of the like economic bureaus was like yeah man all the cows are going to cost five more dollars and you know this really hits me hard because everyone knows this about me I care a lot about retail

retail is like one of my big core personality traits and you know who else wants you to care about retail oh my goodness is it the Washington State Patrol that is right Sophie it's the Washington State Patrol our good friends

so here is some here's some messages about how you can improve your retail decisions okay I can't find this George Bush quote that I was going to use a bit so instead of that we will return to this and

you know one thing I think we should also mention is if you ran into this on Twitter you will see a lot of videos of people like Democrats like standing at the border and pointing at the trucks and going this is Abbott

attempting to like make inflation to get worse by sabotaging the economy cringe and like cringe moments yeah like okay like I cannot rule out

that this was like a part of what he wanted to do but that's not really why he's doing this like this this is like mostly I saw people talking about like oh this is like the the trucker's blockage in Chile and I'm like no no it's not

at all like yeah like yes Chile has a bunch of had a bunch of right wing anti-communist truckers unions that tried to shut down the government but like that's not what's happening here this is the state and Abbott trying to do this is like an immigration PR thing like this isn't like he's not

actually he's not actually trying to destroy the government because the the only way you can get stuff like that is if like is if the capitalist class is like genuinely afraid that they're about to get like like wiped out by communists and it turns out that

Biden is not about to immunize the entire U.S. I don't think that's actually a looming threat at the moment no so yeah it's like no it's like it's not it's not really about that like it's it's it's mostly about this sort of this sort of like border game

that the commies are coming for your avocados well I mean this is sort of this is the interesting thing here because it's like you have this really weird scenario where like it's it's it's the right-wing governor like shutting down the flow of commodities and like the liberals are like we must restore the flow of commodities

and like the bush was here like we must restore the flow of commodities and like even the cartels of some extent are like come on like we all we all need the border open ah it really it really does just showcase the entire bit

yeah you know but I mean like we've been talking a lot about the human cost of this and the reason this stuff works is because American politics is literally just a machine that turns human suffering into stories and then turns those stories into percentage points at the polls and

that's Abbott's entire wait am I getting him confused with no Greg Abbott's the governor I momentarily got him confused with the UK guy Tony Abbott who is also bad in very similar ways yeah but I think I think we're allowed

to have two bad Abbott's yeah I thought there's one in Australia too but well you might be right the bad Abbott's are multiplying someone has got to get on this we need to deal with the Anglosphere before they produce a fourth one and we get the four horsemen to the apocalypse

that would be funny if we just have four Abbott's bringing the apocalypse but I think the thing that's important to understand about like about Abbott is like everything that Abbott does is just about inflicting suffering on people and trying to use that to do polls like he has genuine right wing beliefs but like

the timing of everything that he does yeah that's what all his that's what all his anti trans stuff is is that he could beat his primary challenger who was trying to campaign a little bit further to the right than Abbott was yeah and this is the thing where like politicians are

allowed to play games with real people's lives like that's their job right that's how you get elected but they're allowed to do this up until the exact moment at which those real people are the bourgeoisie and the moment and this is the thing that Abbott is learning is that you can do these kind of stunts

all you want like you can shoot every trans kid you can like you can ban every school from saying the word race but you can't fuck with the bourgeoisie and

this is the problem that he has by like the middle of last week like the ruling class is turning on him the truckers are blockading the bridges are preventing all travel and Abbott is like basically scrambling to find a way out

and the thing that he does to do this is he like he goes to a bunch of Mexican governors who are like the governors of border states and his governors had like sent him letters being like hey like what are you doing like we need we need our economies to function

can you actually do this and you know so he starts doing these negotiations with him where he's like well okay if you guys like inspect all of these trucks or whatever before and you ensure that there's no immigrants and then or whatever before they get here like we'll reopen

the borders and you know so they do this and I think there's a couple interesting things about this one is that most of these I think there's one guy who's from the PRI but like almost all of these governors are from the PAN which is Mexico's like far right wing party

and like these guys these guys are also like hard right like war on drug hardliners who hate immigrants and this has been another big part of how the sort of border regime works which is that like yeah on the one hand you have Abbott and you have like Texas so you have just the US government like projecting its power

like into Mexico which is you know another big part of what this is but the other part of it has been the US essentially outsourcing its border regime and border policy just in like to Mexico and so you get a lot of there's been a lot in the last especially during Trump administration

I mean it goes back much further than that but like in the last like five years there's been a lot of really egregious examples of just like border patrol shit but by the Mexican police because A it turns out there's also a bunch of people in Mexico who fucking hate Central American refugees and B

the police are the police literally everywhere and this also for example this is how a lot of the border regime stuff works in Europe Frontaxle, European border like thing basically just

negotiates with like literally every border state I guess in Africa to like ensure that refugees coming up to North Africa like don't ever get to Europe and like this is they made deals with

Gaddafi they made deals with the people who came after Gaddafi yeah there's the border system is horrible and this is sort of the border system like working as intended now the other thing that we should mention is that like

okay so they're stopping and like supposedly searching all of these trucks and they find literally nothing the entire time because like there's you know there's never anything there these press conferences they were like well yeah of course there is nothing it's because the cartels were tipped off

of the raid because we did press conferences about it and that's why they didn't we announced the thing that we were going to do so it gave them a chance to outsmart us wow whoa yeah um so that's

been fun the last thing I want to talk about yeah this is part of what we were talking about earlier which is that like yeah this is the second time this year that we've seen right wingers like block off a border for political reasons and I think there's a few interesting things here um one is that this is the kind of stuff that from like

basically from the start of Occupy and even before then until like the Bernie campaign this was like the core of like what Marxist were thinking about in the US and also anarchist to some extent like if you go and read anything from that period like it's all about logistics and counter logistics and how you can like disrupt them and whether or not we should try to take control

of logistics and you know and I think you see here like like attacking logistics is a very powerful political tool but it's a tool that has like limited um like it it has limited utility for the right

because you know the right depends on the backing of capitalists for the politics to work they they really really need buy-in from capitalists and those capitalists need cross-border trade and you know and the other thing like they also need they also need market workers to make their money and if you cut that stuff off your political base starts to collapse

and the second part of it that's interesting is you get to see how powerful this is as a weapon for you know like the working class because of just like how instantaneously add it back down when the

trucking blockade starts because this this is all over um last Friday I think the what date is that that was good Friday I mean the 15th the goodest Friday

yeah the 15th Abbott was like oh it's all over we secured the border everything's fine sure buddy okay but you know like that's the thing like you can see like yeah

you got to see a rare moment of like Mexican workers and also like the sort of international capitalists working on the same side and you got to see how fast they just like clobbered their politicians because yeah like yeah like the state is the state is a powerful force but it turns out it's it's class politics all the way

down and and I think I don't know between this in Canada I think there's a couple of interesting things one is which okay yeah you're like if you're on at the left like already automatically you're gonna be fighting the capital just always mad at you

that's less of a concern you will face more suppression immediately obviously this is how the game is played yeah you'll face more suppression immediately but it's also like that's not like your base turning on you like that problem doesn't stem from capitalists not making money

the problem you have with your base turning on you is about being able to provision supplies to people and I think this is you know you know more about this than I do but I will finish this sentence and then stop talking which is that like like yeah if you look at Canada it was like part of the reason their occupations

failed was that like yeah like just like a bunch of ordinary people got really really mad at them because their cities were being locked down yeah they started impacting not just the economic drivers but the people who live in those areas regularly and need them to operate

and that gave politicians enough of an incentive to be like see it's actually hurting real people it's not just hurting the economy but it's hurting you know your grandma who could be living in like Ottawa or something right so when you use these tactics it's about balancing the propaganda

of like not severely impacting the people who actually live in these places very much but targeting the economics policies and the you know the corporate elite or whatever kind of framing you want to use because as soon as you start

doing tactics that just hurt you know regular people that is such an immediate like propaganda L as the kids would say because yeah you're just giving them the tools to easily fight you back and yes they're going to try to invent tools

to stop you no matter what like they're going to they're going to try to do something via propaganda lens but there's some propaganda is way easier and much harder than others so I think a big part of these types of things when you're starting to

like block off you know routes to cities block off supply chains as you need to be cognizant of making sure that the people who you're like immediately next to kind of thinks that you're also cool because that can give you so much more legs I mean we saw this in the red house in Portland

there was a there was a lot of effort to make the immediate neighbors not hate the occupation there to stop the family from being evicted and there was a lot of debate around like how much graffiti should be allowed in the surrounding area because you know you don't want to

piss off the neighbors too much this can obviously stem in bad directions in terms of like there was then self-appointed security guards like beating up and shooting people with paintballs who were doing graffiti which is obviously like not not how you do good anarchism

but then there was other stuff being like no we should just trash this area anyway it's all in the process of being gentrified which means it is but you're like yes I understand that emotional impulse and you may be right in a lot of senses like like more like more correct morally but to play

the propaganda game to actually stop a black family from being evicted maybe we can actually look at this at a more tactical level yeah and and I think that there's a lot of examples of things we can learn from strikes that do is very efficiently like one of the one of the reasons the the Wildcats in the Wildcat Teacher Strikes West Virginia in

2017 worked was that the striking teachers in West Virginia were very very careful about making sure that they did things like you know like making making sure that kids got like the meals that the school would have been yeah yeah like providing like you know like

this is why this is why mutual aid is extremely important because it lets you it lets you provision services not just when they collapse because of like you know oh hey the government's doing weird stuff or like there's a plague it lets you it lets you shut down

logistics lines yourself and still have community support and still be able to provide people to think to provide people things that they need and this is like you know if you carry this all the way to like the macro macro level it's like yeah okay so like why did the Russian Revolution not work and you know like why did the Paris Commune

fail and it's like well yeah it's because instead of like giving peasants things they went into the countryside and shot them into attempting to get those things and it's like yeah like you have to whatever the thing that you're doing is in in in your sort of like base

area right whatever you're like you're doing a strike you're shutting down a bridge you're like you know you're blocking a border you're shutting down a port right you have to make sure you're constantly expanding and building out support outside outside of that outside of that action and making sure

you're you're able to provision the people who are affected by it and if you don't do this you end up like Abbott and it's like yeah you know he Abbott had like the entire power of the American state behind him and he was able to keep this up for like less than two weeks yeah

before he had to just pull out so yeah we can do this better and for things that are good and in ways that don't hurt people or at least hurt people significantly less or you know don't not hurt the wrong people instead try to try to hurt the right people just like an incredible

lack of like thinking that's my that's my summary is better like yeah and I think also like again like Abbott's politics like is entirely about like infracting cruelty on people right and ours

like shouldn't be and shouldn't yep it should not be and the fact that we actually care about people makes our politics more effective in theory in theory they should and anytime we may take a misstep from that I think is of is a big loss

yeah there's one more strike thing that I just remembered that I was going to talk about which is so it's also trains a lot there's a type of strike whose name I'm forgetting because I'm a hack and a fraud where like the people will just like take over a train and they'll run it

but they just won't take fares that is incredibly based that's like level one of it and then level two of the strike is instead of just we're on strike but we're running the series and not taking any money we now control this train and that has happened on several occasions

well you heard it here first take over your local train it could happen here we can do it anarchism can make the trains run on time oh I am not sure about that Chris

punk time is an unstoppable force here's the thing right like punk time like you don't have the punks running the trains you have the nerds running the trains you have the people who should spend all of their time playing train simulator running the trains

and the trains will run great it's just alright that is completely fair where can people find you and or the show on the internet you can find me at itmechr3 on twitter

if you want to do that for some reason you can find us at happen here pod on twitter and instagram there's also the cool zone cool zone media we have a new podcast that is coming Sophie do you want to do it we actually got two new ones for you

coming soon we have a ghost church by jamie loftis episode one is out april 25th and then we have cool people who did cool stuff hosted by margaret killjoy trailer is out

next week and episode one may 2nd check both of them out so many pods in the pipe as we say that is the technical term pods in the pipe these are genuinely legitimately

very good shows and you should listen to them and I'm really excited so yay alright well thank you for listening and go take over a train greetings listeners in the podcast verse this is it could happen here

the podcast about things falling apart and sometimes how we can put stuff back together I'm garrison davis our resident gender mass in the past few weeks we've been talking a lot here on the show about the escalating war

on trans people and queer folks in general there's been a wave of bills making any gender affirming healthcare a felony for people under the age of 18 which forcibly detransitions teenagers in multiple states and we've had a lot of banning trans people

from participating in sports and trying to ban books and discussion in schools about just the existence of queer people at all but today we're not really going to be talking about that we've talked about that plenty for the past few weeks it's good to have a little bit of a break but we'll still be

talking about stuff around trans people because with all the discussion around gender affirming healthcare I thought it would be a good idea to put something together talking about what HRT or hormone replacement therapy actually is since it's the most common form of trans healthcare

and since many states are trying to or already have criminalized it perhaps I can use the pod to point people towards alternative means of receiving care in the vein of the putting stuff back together side of the show

now I want to clarify up front that we're not giving anyone medical advice obviously I'm just making observations and talking about things as they exist and talking about things that many trans people have been doing for a long time and that includes DIY HRT

my doctorate program is in parapsychology not medical science so just keep that in mind first I will quickly clarify what HRT or hormone replacement therapy actually is for specifically non cisgender individuals

because HRT as a term is also used for cis women to describe similar but different treatment so HRT as a form of gender affirming treatment is when someone receives sex hormone medication that produces a number of

desired secondary sex characteristics there are two broad types of hormone therapy that one would receive depending on what direction you want to go in gender wise there's feminizing hormones and masculinizing hormones

feminizing hormones produce more typically feminine traits big shocker there it usually consists of a form of estrogen usually called estradiol there's different types of estradiol and also it can include anti-androgens aka

testosterone blockers masculinization therapy consists of taking testosterone or androgens and then also less commonly anti-estrogens but usually just taking testosterone will suffice now

I'm no expert in hormones despite my weekly e-shot but lucky enough I was able to sit down with an actual expert on hormones and talk over Zoom so what follows is segments from our conversation I guess first do you want to introduce yourself

sure I am the Reverend Dr. Victoria Luna Beegrieve I am an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy my primary clinical focus is on gender affirming hormone therapy other kind of advocacy work in queer healthcare

and I do a lot of other stuff on the side pedagogy, ludic instructional design game design just anything that strikes my fancy really fun stuff within kind of our coverage of trans stuff the past few weeks and months

it's been mostly on like the bills and like the politics side of things I've definitely had some people like reach out and be like okay but how why transgender, why hormones why are hormones actually important could you actually explain

with all of these states banning hormones I would like to kind of explain why it's such a big deal and how much these things actually are life-saving medication for so many people yeah so why hormones

I love it because it's a question that as like a species we have been we have known the answer to for like 5,000 years it's very funny but hormones are a big part of this requires

to like acknowledge something that is very wrong in like the medical literature there's a lot of elements of healthcare that are coordinated between like male and female and there's a kind of obviously is a little so there's a level

I mean like from from people's I know when trans people talk about interacting with the medical system it's always like oh yes we're going to be doing this bullshit yes of course but it even goes to like a really deep level like if you're in the hospital and you get a CBC count

there's a male profile and a female profile of what your hematocrit should be on like what the level of red blood cells are and the general understanding in like the health industry that there's a biological anatomical difference between them and for the longest time certainly in this country

trans women would have would be compared against the male profiles but it's nonsense it's actually should be thought of in form of hormone dominance because the vast majority of medical differences are not anatomical they are hormonal and that right there

should give the game away a little bit which is really funny which is why I kind of hate the term biological woman whenever people start using that because that's not really how biology works right yeah I mean the joke is my nesting partner my fiance

wishes that she could be a robot and then if she were to do that and upload her brain into an immortal robot body she would no longer be a biological woman but she would still be a woman it's just cybernetic I hate that it's like organic organic just means it has carbon in it like give me a break

yes so hormones what's what's the deal do they because I know all of people will be like well all of these trans people sure do seem sad I want that's how how can we make things better

does this thing actually work oh well so it's somewhat multifactorial I have a friend who does cell imaging and her like working theory which I'm a little dubious of is it like the brains of trans people have receptors for hormones that the body

doesn't make and we should think of being transgender as having like a form of hypogonadism there's a lot of different trains of thought there in terms of the different theories of why trans people exist and how it's like you know girls brain boys body blah blah blah blah blah

which all if you dig deep enough goes back to eugenics so it's all fucking nonsense I've always not liked that model I've always found it to be a little bit uncomfortable because I take hormones because I want to and I don't think it's because my brain

is like secretly looking for girl receptors or something I totally agree like it also requires a certain like extremely binary understanding of gender which I also do not describe to so it's a very like odd thought but putting aside all of that

if you just wanted to look at the like why people want hormones because when a person who wants hormones gets the hormones they want their suicidality goes down their anxiety depression goes down gender dysphoria if we wanted to you know

talk about the problems with that essentially like goes away and they get they start to get treated like the way they want to be treated in society so from the if you want to look at it not from like the causes but from the results giving gender affirming

hormone therapy to a person who is requesting gender affirming hormone therapy has a 99% success rate the rate of regret from starting hormones is 1% or less which is unbelievable in the healthcare

field like like having a child like biologically giving birth has a 7% regret rate like the idea of any therapy having that high of a rate of preventing death anxiety depression

bullying like all of the different effects being that successful should be like a miracle it should be looked at as the thing we in healthcare are like should do absolutely ethically and it is so much more complicated

than that so like hormones from the results obviously make sense it aligns your body's shape and like fat deposits in the way that you feel the way your emotions it all goes back to the way that hormones work on your body

and there's like the old saying that like a cis person would never want to try gender reforming hormone therapy so like if you have the in big if you want to try it you should be allowed to try it I mean like you're kind of a good example right care like yeah

I mean I don't sitting yeah if you're sitting around a bar with a bunch of like cis guys and you're like hey who wants some estrogen they would all like shrink away from it like no absolutely because yeah it's definitely a thing like I'm not the most dysphoric person but I'm like

sure I'll take estrogen that sounds fun that's like it's like that sounds like a thing that I could enjoy watching my body change and I'm you know it's it's I'm happy that we're moving more towards that and not having to deal with oh I'm so dysphoric I want

to die which is obviously a big thing for a lot of people I'm not minimizing that right but also a lot of trans people who've had more kind of complicated feelings on gender whether they're like genderqueer non-binary having the past made it more difficult to get gender firming care because they don't fit

into those specific like male female boxes as easily mm-hmm and what you're talking about is really something that's relatively recent the idea of gender euphoria like the idea that people want to take hormones because it gives them joy

to like dress or act or feel a certain way and that I mean health care is all about at least up until well the reality of health care is that it is all about finding problems to solve and not really looking at like your life just

better in general yeah exactly so you know I know plenty of people who started hormones of any type just because they felt it would make them happier and they were correct and that gender euphoria is just as good of a reason to take it as the dysphoria the problem ends up in

how the medical industry treats it because dysphoria quote-unquote is something there's a long oh my gosh I could go into the whole history of that if you wanted but I'm sure we could talk about the DSM 4 and DSM 5 for a long time oh it's so frustrating I spend I spend a two-hour session in my queer health care class

specifically just dunking on the DSM 5 definition of gender dysphoria but the real problem is like this focus on this negative quality and how that actually damages a lot of the conversations around gender affirming hormone therapy

and trans people in general like instead of seeing it as like this manifestation of people like truly taking control of their lives to become authentic in like the truest way like you have never met a more truly well a self

made man than a trans man who gets hormones like it's I mean it's and it's still something we're even we're not quite at the gender utopia I mean obviously because of all of the anti-trans stuff but even I'm like just purely

the medical side like even for informed consent I still needed to get diagnosed with gender dysphoria at the informed consent clinic in order to get hormones which is in part like an insurance thing and you know it has all of these all of these bullshit reasons

but that is that is something we're still we're still definitely dealing with oh my goodness yeah and the the better informed care clinics are the ones that they realize it's just like an effort in box ticking so they're just like yep sounds good you came here to this clinic and you asked about hormones sounds like gender dysphoria to me

like your insurance whatever we got to say yes eventually we'll go into like hormone blockers as well but I want to talk about there's a lot of this this there's a lot of rhetoric that's been we're growing for a long long time about the extremely damaging irreversible

effects of hormone replacement therapy and how they're gonna permanently alter your biology if you give these to children and there's five year olds taking testosterone and it's gonna like you're like oh really that sounds very scary

so that's something I would like to discuss it's like because a lot of people when we talk about hormones they think of it as this like big extremely life-altering thing that has like these you know irreversible effects on your you know your bones are gonna get weak

and tripled and never and never get big again and all of all of this very scary stuff what's up with that I think a lot of it goes back to that biological essentialism because hormones even for the people who give them are considered partially

like reversible because the majority of the things that happen one take a long ass time like you will know whether or not this is a good idea for the majority of people well before the physical manifestations occur

and considering like one of the biggest problems we have with certain formulations like in the once a week or once every other week injectable version of estrogen by the time you get to right before your next dose your estrogen is so low you're feeling it and it's starting to like reverse some of those

so like if you're feeling it after two weeks how irreversible could it be and some of it depends on like a timing because if we're talking about a person who has say already gone through a testosterone mediated puberty

then some of the things are just not going to be affected you can't change like bone size height or anything like that there's some interesting things about like hip like flexation and pivoting I have seen more of that recently yeah actually yeah and even like

shoe size can change because of the way the ligaments work on hormones but like the bones aren't going to change once they're done growing but that's sort of where the puberty blockers come in that we can we'll talk about later but for the majority of people if you are going through if you have gone through

a puberty that you did not want you can take hormones to go through puberty you do want and get the effects that you do want and some of the elements sure like you know growing breasts or gynecomastia as we would call it an assist man which is another

whole nonsense is not irreversible like you can have them removed if you decided that you needed to like detransition which is a whole another story but even then it takes like five years to see their final breast size

like if you if you're on hormones for five years and you're worried about the irreversible quote unquote effects like what are we doing here I mean and even I've heard from a lot of my elder trans friends that whenever they go off hormones sometimes their breasts just kind of go away

because they're not massive to begin with like if it's generally generally you don't get the massive massive honkers so I know I know we're trying but a lot of

that was one of the big things that informed consent thing was like you know a lot of these changes are reversible except for breasts these aren't permanent change be careful and all my trans friends are like a little bit but your nipples won't shrink

your nipples will definitely be bigger and that won't change but a lot of like the size actually does fluctuate and I can even tell that on like depending on if I like misados or something being like oh yeah there is a lot of a lot of fluctuation even like on like you know like temperature

and stuff how cold it is will determine how how how how my chest looks it is it is a it's pretty fun I mean I am I just like the biohacking thing in general it is like the cyberpunk in me but yeah I guess

I guess we could talk about hormone blockers as well because this is the other kind of thing you hear a lot about when conservatives are very scared about trans people the idea of hormone blockers like making people infertile or making permanent changes

to children's health or something blah blah blah blah that's the thing that is like really really frustrating for me specifically because puberty blockers the gonadotropin the GNRH

antagonist and agonist which have been around for like long time like ever for I want to say it was like a hundred years but I might be misquoting something that I'm half remembering but they've been around for like a really long time to the point where we have generics and in the in the

pharmaceutical industry that means that it's been like decades at the very least something that had rigorous testing that has an indication with the FDA for precocious puberty which just means a person who is usually cis who for whatever reason has puberty

at a very young age with some of the some of the specific cases that I've seen that I've looked into involve giving puberty blockers like a three or four year old because their body is trying to undergo puberty so even the idea of like oh well I don't know this 12 year old being

on a puberty blocker for three years that sounds very dangerous when we have a person over here who was on it for 15 years with no ill effects like no long lasting ill effects the idea of anybody describing it as like experimental

is absolutely a historic outside of the realm of reality. Yeah it's basic anti-intellectualism because yeah we've been giving cis children hormone blockers for a long time for early onset puberty and turns out they

work and they're pretty safe so maybe we should give those to trans kids too if they want them seems like something we could at least try and see if it improves mental health it's not even a matter that we have to try we've been doing it for like almost 10 years

it was first I think it was like 2013 there's a there's a TED talk I use in my class of a physician who like pioneered the use of puberty blockers in trans kids and showed that any trans kid who got puberty blockers allowed to undergo the puberty that they desired

at an appropriate age which is actually like 14-15 at the same time as their peers but even if they had to wait till 18 the psychological effects of having an appropriate puberty are essentially nullified they are otherwise psychologically

and physically like identical to their cisgender peers so it's like we have actual evidence that it is extremely beneficial and extremely worthwhile and like the one kind of long-term side effect is you might be up

to an inch shorter than you otherwise be which is a wildly like problematic like study that was done because like we don't have time machines to know whether or not that worked like what would your control group be and it's just wild it's very bothersome to me because a lot

of the gender affirming hormone therapy the evidence is all over the place for a variety of political reasons and historical reasons but for hormone blockers or for puberty blockers specifically the evidence is like really solid

really strong and this is a question I actually have because I'm actually unfamiliar with this specific thing but yeah if you give like hormone blockers to like a kid who's 10 they still kind of like grow

at the same rate as a lot of their peers and that is just it's specifically like the secondary sex characteristic changes that get put on pause but there's just so much yeah there's just so much fear

around the whole even just the hormone blocker thing right when we're getting you know just like prescribing hormone blockers being like a felony offense in multiple states now you're like it's just an extreme degree of anti-intellectualism

just like purposeful ignorance and just extreme hatred and bigotry and it is I mean yeah I'm kind of speaking to the choir here

but but that's the trick and even like the puberty blocker thing like you were saying your body will still make human growth hormone you will still grow but the modulation of that with say testosterone which would increase the overall growth

just doesn't there and people say make a lot of you know talk a lot about the idea of bone mineral density because you don't have testosterone or estrogen which are both necessary one or the other necessary for your bone mineral

density to not have easily fractured bones but like you don't even have that until you go through puberty you're just like preventing one puberty the endogenous puberty and then providing the hormones for an exogenous puberty they're fine like they have the hormones they need

their bones are happy so yeah I would like to talk about I guess kind of access to hormones and in like the different models of I mean obviously we're not giving up medical advice but like

access to hormones and the different ways that people can go about that now through doctors through informed consent and all of that jazz yeah so the informed consent model is a much more recent option

and it's not available everywhere I have a friend in Texas we had to find a clinic that was like two hours away to get her hormones but here where I live we actually have two informed consent clinics so it's pretty convenient but it varies wildly by region and the informed care clinics are great

it means you come in they say this is what's going to happen do you still want to do it you say yes they take some blood they run some tests you come back in two weeks and they go here you go they work really well depending on the clinic I guess but the more traditional

standard model would be going to your PCP or whoever and saying that you want to do this which makes most of them very concerned because most physicians and nurses they don't get taught anything about trans people or caring for trans people

or gender affirming hormone therapy in their school so they have nothing to fall back on so that makes them very nervous to do it and then if you look at I really want to tell you about the guideline stuff at some point here because it is

spoiled as to why that would be a concern but another part of it is also the insurance of America's original sin in our healthcare dystopia if you will the insurances historically have required and part of this is also

from antiquated guidelines that has been somewhat like just grandfathered into excuse the term this idea of like well you have to go to a therapist you have to go to a psychologist and they have to say that you have gender dysphoria that's why it's in the DSM and then after you do that some places require you to

socially transition before getting hormones or anything which can be extremely problematic for some individuals that just increases visibility and bullying and such in a way that it may drive people it sort of was intentionally required back in the day

to drive people to not want hormones anymore and it's all of these gatekeeping steps and it's even worse if you wanted to get a surgery later on where you have to have been on hormones for a certain length of time you have to have two different

generally like cisgender healthcare practitioners who don't necessarily understand like the full everything that's going on write you letters before the most insurances up until recently wouldn't even cover it so it's just gatekeeping step after gatekeeping step because even the big

guidelines which is WPATH which is about to put out there so gate guidelines there's a guidelines out of San Francisco and the endocrine society has guidelines from 2017 that are written but all of those are made by cisgender people

usually with the intent to gatekeep this care because it either they're uncomfortable with it because they're unfamiliar with it they have some kind of ideological reason to be against it or whatever there's a survey that I often quote to my students in class

that they surveyed a whole bunch of trans individuals trying to get care from their physicians and it was nearly a quarter of them said that they avoided healthcare because of discrimination and half of them reported having to teach

their healthcare practitioner how to care for them which is wild? like imagine going to the hospital with like heart failure and having to like talk your physician through how to care for you can you live for two years with heart failure first before we get you treatment

oh my gosh oh my gosh could you imagine if we treated other things this way I'd be like well are you sure that you have diabetes are you sure that you're like we can't treat your diabetes you're too fat your BMI is too high so we can't give you

the insulin like give me a break what is happening seems like basically what you're saying is that we got a good system we got to figure out absolutely no notes 100% perfect in every way

well that does it for us today it can happen here well specifically if I could it's really interesting from like the healthcare perspective because from the practitioner perspective because there's essentially two kinds of treatment

there's guideline based medicine and evidence based medicine and a lot of schools like my school teaches a lot of guideline based medicine which is for something like hypertension or diabetes is put out by like large organizations with a ton of evidence it is actually like pretty reasonable but that means

that if you're going along with what they say that means that you believe that they read those studies correctly and that their interpretation is in no way compromised by like sources of their income say and that those guidelines

actually match your patient so it's a lot of assumptions that you're making which can be extremely problematic and evidence based is where you dive into the literature and you figure it out yourself which is very time consuming and requires an awful lot of like professional like you know criticism in a way

but when you look at it for trans care for gender affirming hormone therapy those guidelines are unbelievably compromised to give you an example a hotly contested issue in feminizing therapy is the use of micronized progesterone

in feminizing care it's kind of like all over the place there's a long history of it of this controversy in the upcoming WPATH SOC8 guidelines that I had like a preliminary copy to provide notes on

there's a single statement that just says that there's a controversy that exists and you should not use micronized progesterone in trans feminine care and they list a study okay if you pull up that study the title of it is

progesterone is important for transgender women's therapy applying evidence for the benefits of progesterone in cis women and it is like a pretty long document that concludes that it is like an ethical imperative to offer it

so the idea that the people who are writing the WPATH guidelines read this article read this like meta-analysis and went yeah I don't really agree with any of that I'm just gonna say no is just so infuriating again that seems like we got a good system going here

100% no notes on that note I want to discuss some of the things that aren't talked about as much as like anti-antigens progesterone, spiro and what all kind of those do and how they can kind of supplement a regular estradiol prescription

regimen that sounds fancy sure generally speaking if you're maybe you give a baseline for folks who are unaware the way that we do feminizing therapy is we offer estradiol which is a

bio-equivalent version of E2 because there's like three different versions of estrogen and an anti-androgen because testosterone tends to be somewhat of an overriding hormone the presence of testosterone will override the effects of estrogen to a certain extent depending on doses and stuff like that which is

for the transmasculine individuals we just give testosterone it just does the job you don't need to block the estrogen so there's a lot of history in just those hormones as well that we could talk about like conjugated estrogens versus

estradiol and all the different other stuff but for the anti-androgens that we give historically in this country we give spironelectone which is a mineral corticoid it's a potassium sparing diuretic and it's just really good at higher levels we usually use it in like cardio

issues like it can be used for like hypertension some other things and I believe it makes you pee a lot yes that is what I've heard so it's a diuretic meaning that it makes you urinate an awful lot and it's a potassium sparing because it prevents your body from eliminating potassium

so no more eating bananas well so that's the thing that I think is really really wild because you're using these high levels of it it is preventing your production your endogenous production of testosterone and making you pee

all of the time which spoilers estradiol also makes you pee more often so like that's a real fun combination but then physicians if they don't know what the heck they're doing they might say something like well you can't eat any bananas and like historically the people who are

on feminizing therapy are healthy enough that their body just accommodates for it and if you have hyperkalemia which is like too much potassium you're going to know like your muscles are going to ache and there's going to be a lot of like telltale side effects usually it's only a problem if you are

like only consuming a like salt alternative that has potassium instead of sodium okay okay not super common not super common or if you have some other reason why your body is like holding on to potassium

so it's not usually an issue it doesn't and spironolactone isn't sufficient for everyone there's plenty of people who have like refractory testosterone after some time and there's some other options there's kind of a weird controversy about it that is sort of heralded by the San Francisco guidelines

I mentioned earlier that spironolactone leads to okay wait I want to make sure I get the wording right it's leads to premature fusing of the breast bud and overall smaller breast size which the document that they cite

for that is a real weird retrospective study from like a bunch of years ago on the rate of trans women getting breast augmentation and it found that the vast majority of trans women who were on spironolactone got breast augmentation but the problem is

like of their sample group of like two three hundred people almost all of them were on spironolactone like there's like a sampling error it's very silly and also even like that premature fusing of the breast bud

I have never been able to find anything that suggests that that's a thing or even like a way to explain what that statement even means but the San Francisco guidelines to go back to my guideline thing actually says has some like

maybe don't use spironolactone even though it's something we've been using since literally like the fifties or sixties for this purpose in other countries you'll use what's called cyprotorone which is a synthetic progesterone but it's not actually approved in the states because it has a

there is actually some evidence that it causes increase in certain specific cancers but it's like a pretty limited overall risk like it's not like going outside increases your risk of cancer it's not like a huge deal but it was enough that they don't it's not approved in the states but in a lot of other countries

you might get cyprotorone there's a lot of you know controversy around that too for those reasons here the other option that we usually see is finasteride which is a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor that essentially is preventing testosterone from being turned into

dihydrotestosterone which we use normally for to prevent quote-unquote male pattern baldness and in higher doses for prostate cancer because it's real good at because it like reverses some of the feedback loops

just reducing testosterone production so it's just fine like it that one has very limited side effects but it might not have as substantial of a reduction of testosterone that spironolactone does

and then the kind of third one that we really we don't see very often but there's a lot of interesting evidence about it's called bicollutamide it's also a prostate cancer medication it actually blocks all of the receptors of testosterone in your body while not reducing the production of it

so you'll see a person who has like you know they have like 700, their testosterone comes back as like 700, 600, whatever but they're entirely feminized because none of it has anywhere to work but the problem with that is bicollutamide being an anti-cancer med

primarily is ridiculously expensive I think it's like 50 bucks a dose or something like that that's what we have here it's so great I will say and for my gender queers out there or anyone else

you can also just take estrogen without any without any blockers and you still get results as I can as I can confirm and for a subset of the population just taking estrogen at sufficient dosages will also reduce your levels of testosterone

like it's it is pretty cool how much you can just change things up and your body's like oh we're doing this now okay got it great I have all these mechanisms it's wonderful and with that

that wraps up part one of our little two part series of episodes talking about hormone replacement therapy tomorrow I'll talk more about access to gender affirming treatment and touch on DIY HRT special thanks to Dr. Victoria Luna for chatting with me about gender affirming

hormonal treatment you'll get to hear more of my discussion with her tomorrow as well including a brief tangent about the Scythian Priestesses which I was very excited to talk about but that does it for us today you can follow this show at happen to hear pod

and coolzonemedia on Twitter and Instagram and you can look at my late night gender tweets at Hungry Bowtie on twitter.com so see you all on the other side welcome back to it could happen here

the podcast about things falling apart and sometimes how we can put things back together I'm Garrison Davis aspiring Rebus and this is part two of my little two part series talking about trans hormone replacement therapy last episode we discussed what HRT is

its various benefits as gender affirming treatment and the informed consent model of receiving hormones before we continue on with my discussion with Dr. Grieve I would like to talk a bit more about informed consent so the informed consent option can be great for many

many people as it attempts to bypass some of the red tape around receiving gender affirming healthcare for informed consent all you got to do is set up an appointment, sign the forms maybe get some blood work done and then pick up your hormones

you don't need to live as trans for like two years or have letters from therapists it is just up to you so it is really convenient if you can get that option via telemedicine appointments so you can just sit at home holding your little

Ikea shark and then get your hormones which does sound very very nice Planned Parenthood offers informed consent trans healthcare in many states and in the show notes I will link a google map of the informed consent clinics from across the country depending on your insurance

you can get hormones for little to no extra cost this way it can be really convenient the biggest asterisk for informed consent is that since it is based on informed consent it often is just for humans age 18 and older

or sometimes teens a few years younger but only if their parents or guardians sign the forms obviously this is not ideal for a 16 year old with transphobic parents who would really be helped by receiving like hormone blockers or something

another potential drawback is that the clinics can sometimes have quite the wait list I started off with the informed consent model because it was the easiest but by the time I needed more blood work done and my prescription refilled setting up more appointments that Planned

Parenthood became kind of a nightmare I was continuously having appointments being cancelled on me last minute and just getting pushed back months and months into the future eventually I just resorted to getting hormones through my regular doctor instead of just continuing on with informed consent

this is obviously a regional issue I don't know what it's like in Florida for example but the COVID-19 pandemic has stressed a lot of the medical infrastructure here in the states and scheduling some appointments in these clinics can be still quite challenging and

as you know a big theme of this show is that maybe we shouldn't assume the structures that hold up our society are concrete permanent fixtures the term the crumbles that we use to describe the slow deterioration of the systems that we rely on

was initially coined in reference to our medical system by a friend of the show who works in the medical field listen to the first five episodes of the daily show talking about climate change for more on that but a part of the criminal's idea is trying to learn how to become

less reliant on the systems that we take for granted right trying to solve for the fallacy of misplaced concreteness before it's too late on that note back to my discussion with Dr. Victoria Luna Breton Grieve assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh

School of Pharmacy for places that are getting you know all of these anti-transbills criminalizing all of this stuff for minors and then you know eventually maybe even you know my big fear is that you know first off they're going to criminalize it for minors

and they're going to say the brain's not fully developed until you're 25 and they're going to criminalize until you're 25 and they're just going to criminalize it for everyone after that so for all of these places that are making access to health care so much harder what is one to do like if there's these

kids and then even adults who are like just find it so much harder to get stuff like I know there's the informed clinics but there's like a few in Texas but I don't even know what they can even offer anymore right like it's really unclear yeah well I'll tell you some of that fear

is already becoming reality here in Pennsylvania just two days ago HB, I think it was HB 972 passed by the house in Dunn and Harrisburg that prevents, it's a ban on trans people playing sports up through the college

level not just high school and grade school it's all the way up through you know secondary education and even though our governor like has vowed to veto it like who even knows what's going to happen but they're already taking

aim at this higher level kind of thing and there's a lot of press for that but my goodness there's a long and storied history of DIY hormone therapy and it's easier for the trans feminine individuals because

testosterone is actually a schedule to controlled substance I think it's schedule 2 or schedule 3 it might be a 3 I'll write a little thing about it and I'll say it in the episode and it's such a funny reason too because it's just you can use it

to dope for endurance based like cycling and running because it will increase your red blood cell count and so it's a controlled substance because people can use it to dope for sports so that's a little bit harder to get a hold

of in like a meaningful way but there are a lot of different allegedly there are a lot of different places online that you can acquire estrogen or estradiol relatively easily. Now I'm going to actually pause the discussion with me and Dr. Grieve

to talk a little bit about DIY HRT or for those anti-acronym people out there do it yourself hormone replacement therapy again I'm not a medical doctor unless you have a problem regarding parapsychology I cannot offer you any expertise

but I can talk about DIY HRT as it's existed for trans people for the past two decades because an unfortunate truth is although it's gotten much easier to get gender-affirming care and hormones the past few years even in states that aren't facing this way

of anti-trans healthcare bills the medical establishment hasn't been the most trans friendly place in general a recent Center for American Progress Report found that nearly half of transgender people and 68% of transgender people of color

reported having experienced mistreatment at the hands of a medical provider including refusal of care and verbal or physical abuse just in the year before the survey which took place in June of 2020 so this is still very much an ongoing issue

one in two trans people reported that their access to gender-affirming healthcare was curtailed significantly during the pandemic and nearly one in two transgender adults have had insurance providers deny them coverage for gender-affirming care and very often

doctors don't even know how to properly treat transgender patients and often it's up to the patients to educate the doctors on trans healthcare issues the Center for American Progress Survey from last year found that one in three trans people report having to teach their doctors

about trans people to get them appropriate care and 15% reported having been asked invasive or unnecessary questions about being trans which were not related to the reasons for them visiting the doctor the report cited a 2018 brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation

that found that more than half of medical school curriculums lack information about unique health issues the LGBTQ community faces and doesn't cover treatment beyond HIV prevention and care so obviously that leaves a lot to be desired for people wanting to receive

transgender health care between medical mistreatment insurance complications and doctor ignorance many trans folks have taken it upon themselves to get the drugs necessary for hormone replacement therapy because the alternative is often just having to face not being able to receive the health care

that in many cases makes it possible to live the Center for American Progress Survey found that 28% of trans folks report having postponed or not gotten medical care for fear of discrimination taking your endocrinology

and hormone treatment into your own hands has a lengthy history and used to be much more common in the days before informed consent in a survey of trans people in Washington DC circa 2000 over half of the respondents said that they

had used non-prescribed hormones also known as DIY HRT so information on how to go about DIYing your HRT spread via online forums and websites in the early 2000s and after some trial and error

the information is kind of consolidated into a few main information hubs that being the DIY HRT Wiki HRT.cafe and DIYHRT.github.io now obviously when you're getting into taking drugs from online sources

you need to be extremely careful and cautious with the chemicals you're putting into your body including in trying to only acquire drugs from trustworthy sources doing drug testing if you can and doing your own blood testing before and after to keep an eye on your testosterone and estrogen levels

it is possible to order blood tests via online and send it through a lab that you have to ship your blood to but often it's just easier to do it by going through the medical system now one massive caveat with DIY HRT is although it's more straightforward

to acquire estradiol and anti-androgens like Spiro from online sources getting testosterone for masculinization therapy is much more tricky because in most places it's a restricted drug here in the states it is a schedule 3 substance so technically buying it without a prescription

would be a felony so for this reason most DIY HRT stuff focuses on feminizing hormones since that is less legally complicated now obviously steroids exist so it is possible to get them but I will not be giving out

guides on how to do that here on the pod but you can look into it if you so desire for feminizing hormones the main way of going about it requires obtaining bioidentical estradiol it can come in a few forms pills which are not difficult to acquire

and assuming you get the dose right it's pretty easy because it's just a process of dissolving the little pill tablets under your tongue and that's kind of it dosage is its own thing which you can figure out if you do reading but the actual taking of it is pretty straight forward

transdermal estrogen or transdermal estradiol is kind of the new hot thing usually this has you taking weekly estradiol patches which you just switch out every week or you can also do daily gels that you just rub on your body

although unfortunately for dosing gels it can be more tricky if you go DIY because it's hard to know what concentration just the gel is if you're just rubbing a salve on yourself if it's not already pre-packaged but the patches are pretty good and lastly the classic method is

injectable estradiol at various concentrations in the form of some oil solution this can usually be the cheapest option if you can figure out how to buy estradiol and needles and syringes can be bought at any pharmacy just over the counter in most countries

without a prescription for feminizing hormones some people also take anti-androgens a.k.a. testosterone blockers like spiralactone which can be acquired online and are almost always taken orally in the form of a pill now when getting these drugs online

there are two main categories of purchase there's pharmaceutical grade and home brewed pharmaceutical grade refers to HRT produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies that are licensed and subject to regulation they should be of the same quality as those found in your local pharmacy

and they can be ordered without a prescription from websites based in countries that allow for the legal exportation of certain medications these will almost always carry less inherent risk versus receiving and taking home brewed hormones which leads us to the second version

that you can buy which is home brewed this refers to HRT produced by individuals by sourcing raw estradiol or whatever other chemical you're taking in the form of a powder and then compounding the medication themselves they do not synthesize or correct from scratch these hormones

but they do use the powdered versions of them and they get them from sources from drug manufacturing companies to synthesize it into their own estradiol or whatever other drug you're taking you know in the anti-androgen list there's too many too many to name

now while this concept does sound scary and it can obviously go wrong if someone's not synthesizing it correctly there are a couple well respected members of the community that have been known to produce high quality and safe HRT medications but before anyone decides to take drugs

that you get on the internet please please please please do lots of reading beforehand on dosage effects side effects and be very cautious with your drug sourcing right you should know who you're buying it from you don't want to just buy whatever sketchy website you should make sure

that what you're doing is other people are backing up on this decision make sure that you can cross reference information here because there's a lot of information out there online and not all of it is good information obviously but really try to cross reference information on any drug sources

on hormone dosage on any possible drug interactions if you're taking multiple drugs or you already have prescriptions now I should note that supply chain issues that affect the medical system can even extend out to DIY HRT there's no true escape there's no true other

one of the main pharmaceutical grade online sites to source HRT from is currently out of estradiol pills so there is no true escape sometimes but to learn more about DIY HRT you should check out

diyhrt.github.io or HRT.cafe and the diytrans.wiki and keep in mind not everything you read on those sources is necessarily good advice or up to date with the current information on how these drugs work recently I was reading

a guide I found via one of those sites on how to homebrew my own estrogen by buying the powdered version of it and synthesizing it myself to level up my alchemy stat and I found the guide I was reading contained quite a bit

of outdated misinformation about progesterone so don't take everything you read as gospel but those resources are at least a good place to start anyway now back to the interview the problem that you might run into with DIYing it is you might not be able to

get the bioequivalent estradiol in some form you might have to settle for conjugated estrogens or even something like an ethanol estradiol which is like hormonal birth control which because they are synthetics they actually have a much

rougher time on your body and that's where a lot of the side effects quote unquote come from all of the worry about blood clots and things from taking estrogens comes from conjugated estrogens ethanol estradiol

the actual study that a lot of that is citing goes all the way back and it was studying the rate of clotting in cisgender women taking hormonal birth control and it's like this is the wrong population with the wrong medication

that seems like not a great scientific study right what do we do it might be great to talk about for the rate of clotting for trans women or people who want to take estrogens it doesn't really help so much

and what I think is also pretty wild I mentioned the progesterone thing earlier a lot of that controversy comes from the fact that the original studies on whether or not it could be beneficial were done with medroxy progesterone asynthetic progesterone

that has a really nasty side effect profile in a lot of different ways and now that we have micronized progesterone where the evidence suggests that not only is it safe it actually makes estrogens safer and now they're like no we can't give that that's just crazy talk I will say

I have heard from people with more experience taking hormones than me that progesterone does make you way too horny so just a heads up for side effects hashtag can confirm but

progesterone can have a lot of other really beneficial side effects it can really increase the fat deposition to various places it can help with your mood, it can help with your sleep it actually reduced the period symptoms that I was having because there's surprise estrogen can also have periods

and because your body again knows what it's doing it's going to modulate it through the E1, E2, E3 pathway like throughout the month in a cyclical fashion and you can get bloating and cramps and I had really bad morning sickness like for three days every 28 days for months

until eventually I started micronized progesterone and those symptoms alleviated which makes a kind of sense if you know that progesterone only birth control reduces periods so like there's a lot of precedent it makes a lot of like sense that it would work

God I I need to tell you have you ever heard of the powers method of oh Garrison I am so excited to introduce you to this person

like Dr. Powers is a fascinating grifter in the trans healthcare space because he is a physician who like has made it his duty to make sure that trans people

especially trans women he actually doesn't like really have anything to say about trans men because the therapy is so like easy to do that he has wild postulation as to like better ways to give

hormones and he has things where it's like we don't need anti androgens you just give really high levels of injectable estrogen which like I mean that will probably work because it turns out it could work for some people but yeah but also estrogen is like really safe and so like you can give it

to an unbelievably high level it's not really going to speed things up exactly like it will maybe a little bit but not that much and any of the side effects you might experience which could also come from the the excipients non-active elements of it

like you can be allergic to those if you have a really high dose it could be a real problem but the big thing for him is he pushes that micronized progesterone is not only necessary and good especially for breast size you should also stick the oral capsules in your butt

oh we are we are officially buffing estrogen now yes yes okay well I'm switching back to pills this sounds very exciting well so well oh my gosh so the the idea is his line is

that the oral capsules you only get a tiny fraction of the total progesterone and you get a lot more if you stick it up you get the whole dose if you stick it up your butt which like if you know literally anything about pharmacology is both right and entirely

insane because anything that you take orally there's a bio available like level of it like so oral micronized progesterone has a bio equivalent of I think like 2 or 3% which is why when you take like 100 milligram capsule you get like a certain

blood level if you take it rectally it's like a 12% it's still not the whole thing which is why the the micronized progesterone rectal suppositories are 25 milligrams to give you the same exposure so it's

4 times the systemic absorption which means that if you are buffing a micronized progesterone capsule you are getting 3 to 4 times the dose that you should be getting

and I pulled because I get into fights with people all the time about this I pulled the original FDA filing for micronized progesterone and they suggested that 300 milligrams is basically getting to what like a cisgender person's

own progesterone levels would be meaning that if you're buffing one or two as some of his regimen suggest like you might be essentially overdosing on progesterone for no reason like there's no real reason to do that and it is just

crazy. When I started this call today I did not think we would get just a buffing progesterone I said it is a weird a weirdly large part of my twitter interactions have been fighting people to stop buffing progesterone

unfortunately you just exposed this idea to millions of more people well no I'm saying don't do it you know you know that's not how that works I do know that's not how that works but I mean I tell you

if your friend Robert Evans were here I could pitch a hole behind the bastards on this Dr. Powers guy sounds fascinating he has a subreddit like all good physicians do I love him my doctor has a subreddit

my favorite post other than recently he's been pushing this like miracle hair tonic that he made which is like come on buddy now it's just obvious he calls it tonic yep yep the verb he might even call it an elixir

which is very funny come on come on for my magical exactly it's so funny because one of the components of it I think is finasteride and I'm like yes that is something for male pattern bulbous it will probably work congratulations you just remade Rogaine

but the single post that I feel like perfectly encapsulates this guy's mentality is there's this big post that went around through cisgender centrist spaces

the person I saw was just like excuse me what the fuck where this guy was secretly micro dosing injectable estrogen that he prescribes himself which sounds kind of illegal not going to lie and messed up the dose by a thousand percent

by a times thousand yeah and I can give you the link I know exactly where it is I can give you the link if you wanted to read this it is buck wild I want to describe this like acute dysphoric episode

that he had from one high dose of subcutaneous estrogen a thing that is not physiologically possible and completely insane but he was like but I understand the pain the trans women go through because I

fucked up a dose where I was secretly taking estrogen to make my face look younger so I understand your pain there is so much empathy for the trans women that I am trying to save and it is so frustrating to me

how many people give him like credence give him credit because he has claims like apply progesterone cream to the smaller breast to even them out it's like okay my dude have you ever met like people with breasts one is larger than the other

that's how breasts work and it's like well what's your evidence for that we've got a lot of people who did it and they said it worked okay cool do you have those reports no no no they got burned up in a house fire and it's very sad and I can't give you that data

let's actually say that yes so he worked in a clinic that a friend of mine actually moved to after they got rid of him because he made all these wildly anecdotal claims and whenever anybody challenged and then his house burned out

he didn't deserve his cats because cats are perfect creatures and this man is insane the cats are nothing wrong the cats are nothing wrong cats never do anything wrong cats are perfect magical beings I love yours so much as they keep crossing in front of the screen

as they do they're perfect so whenever anybody challenges him on literally any of his claims he goes well I had all of that data but it burned up in my house and then he like makes it a sob story about how horrible this was

I'm sure it was really bad I'm sure it was really really bad but even his power point presentations that he has that he goes through to really talk about the powers method and make it sound really really good has a fire safety

section specifically so he can garner this sympathy so people will not question his claims and have no evidence behind them and so it's just such a fantastic examine to me it's just so weird

seeing like a space that has historically been denigrated in the evidence you know you had that whole episode on like the Hirschfeld Institute and you know we see all this like anti trans like propaganda and legislation going on right now that there's a lot of like

empty space in the medical record and in the evidence record for what to do in these situations there's a lot of confusion from the guidelines and these other societies like I was talking about and in steps this guy who sees an opportunity

to be like popular powerful individual in this space to give people hope that he can cash in on and since the medications and since the hormone therapy is so safe he doesn't actually hurt that many people

and it is so wild seeing this juxtaposition of individuals being like well this is unsafe experimental nonsense and seeing this guy flagrantly overdosing people on hormones with no ill effects because they're that safe that is

pretty funny yeah it's funny in that like laughing until you're crying kind of way what is a way that people can try to combat all the medical disinformation around HRT specifically

because we see this a lot in the Save the Children rhetoric we see this a lot for just anti trans stuff in general and like yeah just in terms of someone who has to deal with this stuff on a professional level like

when we're just faced with all of this just blatantly just like wrong stuff being treated as absolute fact when you're experienced what's kind of the best ways to go about that in people oh my goodness it kind of depends on the audience

when I'm talking to other health care practitioners I I have historically because I do a lot of like teaching and advocacy in this area to other health care practitioners and holding sessions like volunteering to hold sessions of like

to educate on this and say like these are the kind of regimens that are commonly used in clinics this is why these are things to look out for and to stress the importance of believing the patient and the importance of

you don't want to gatekeep because if if they're not that dangerous but if there is to be a problem you would rather have that patient want to work with you to solve it is like such a big part of it like even just understanding that from that level

that you're not like delivering this kind of like life-saving medication to them as this like lord on high it's this idea that like no you should be working with this person and if you're not familiar with it you need to do your fucking research and like I will give you the resources

for that I will walk you through those resources and that's that's awfully convincing for the majority of health care individuals at any level because I've done I've done talks for students in nursing programs and physical therapy programs all the way up to like actively

practicing physicians nurses and pharmacists and it's basically the same you just you make the argument you show the evidence you give them the evidence and you walk them through like and then and then have a robust question and answer period where they will ask you those questions

and you can explain why they are wrong having that kind of dedicated space that can be really beneficial but not scalable in a way that's necessarily helpful like I've made a positive impact on my city but that doesn't really necessarily help if you yourself

are not a health care practitioner and want to like explain this kind of stuff and I mentioned earlier that on Twitter I've spent a lot of time like arguing that people shouldn't be goofing their progesterone but I've had to stop because it's exhausting every single person like

the same conversations over and over again and there's no good way to like have a central location that just has all that information that anybody is going to believe because of the way the internet works so I guess my answer is I'm not

sure like there's so much misinformation out there and so much of it is so wrong and not in alignment with reality that looking at it at all it falls to pieces and the idea of

the majority of people I guess I could say if a person is coming to you and asking legitimate questions and they don't really know like they're just like parroting stuff that they heard they're much easier to convince because you can show like oh like we have

a long history of doing this like look at you know I tell my students about how like 1952 was first like recognized hormonal mediated transition in the United States like she was like a movie star and

you know I talk about a lot of the history to be like this isn't new this is something like we have been here forever my favorite story do you know about the story about the Scythian priestesses yes I actually do but I would love for you to explain it but I found out about that a few months ago and I was like oh my god

it makes me so happy so to explain very briefly I think it's an old um I think it was like Herodotus it's like an old like Cretian like author that we have information author philosopher whatever historian but they talk about in one of the texts the Scythian priestesses

who essentially distill the poison of woman they call it in one of the texts which I think is such a great term from um pregnant mare urine which interestingly enough we actually still make today conjugated estrogens

the brand name is premarin because it comes from pregnant mare urine like are you serious yeah yeah yeah that's that's literally a thing that we still do today that is hilarious it's beautiful it's so good um and so they were priestesses

they were like people would come to them to seek out their wisdom and they're like this spiritual thing and it was like a bunch of trans women who like got high told stories and probably fucked each other and that sounds like a polycule to me but um the

the Scythians were like a nomadic group of people who would travel all around kind of what is now the Middle East um and yeah it's I mean I do love the idea of trans people having like specific like more esoteric insight almost naturally

because they've had to deal with ideas of ontology and ideas as ontology is just like the nature of being um and so having to deal with that having to deal with like the nature of reality from a much younger age because their whole perception of reality in self is obviously so different because

of their experience of being what is now called trans um so it makes a lot of sense that a lot of these people would have been like basically different forms of shamans mediums or just have like esoteric insight because they've been thinking about these types of like

reality altering topics for so much longer because it's so much more personally affecting to them um but yes what I specifically read about the Scythian priestesses I'm like oh my they're just like doing the thing they're just doing the thing it turns out we've been doing this forever my favorite account is a

one of the reasons they commanded respect of the like masculine leaders that would come to get information was because they were all terrified that they would inflict the poison of women which it does spread by the way it is oh it's highly contagious actually it is it is contagious but the

idea that like there was like some of the respect was from like this fear of being force-femmed is hilarious from like this early BC the primordial fear primordial fear I was gonna say Garrison you mentioning like ontology my original degree was in

psychology and philosophy so like let's go baby we can go deep on some of this stuff oh I'm sure I'm sure we can talk about mysticism and magic and gender for a long long time oh my god there'd be a whole another podcast those are big areas of interest

but I but I super agree with you because I've been thinking about this and I've ended up having conversations with a lot of my peers in pharmacy and in the university because people might not recognize this but pharmacies actually one of the more conservative spaces in healthcare like my my school had a dress

code for the students until two years ago when I fought hard enough to get it removed like it was wild like the code of conduct committee tried to get me tried to prevent me from getting my ears pierced like really yeah it's a wild space for me to exist then

it's extremely conservative extremely traditional like the some like yeah I I got stories that I'd love to tell if you wanted to hear them but the the thing that I think is really interesting is when you look at me in comparison to my my colleagues

who are predominantly like Christian predominantly like traditionalist predominantly capitalist and I roll in as this like anti-capitalist like anarchist trans woman who's poly who's pansexual who's a pagan all the peas and

it's like well once I question gender I started realizing all of culture and society is bullshit and now I can tell you the truth come to me for the truth of reality no it even makes sense in terms of like you know

why did two trans women make the matrix you're like yeah no it's like it is it is the same thing your entire nature and basis of reality was severely questioned so you're trying to trying to understand these feelings and for you know in modern days we have like stuff like simulation

theory we have the matrix and then you know before before then you know it would have been taken out in like spiritualism and religion and you know the different levels of reality on like the whole like mystic side of things as opposed to like the more sci-fi side of things

but yeah it's all the same stuff like you're playing with the same things but yeah it is just a funny a funny trend that once you notice it you'll start seeing it in like different places yeah so we are still

mystics who understand the true reality of the world and will force them you if you don't give us respect I just don't see what the problem is that was my take away from matrix resurrections oh yeah I mean 100% well

is there anything else you would want to add oh my goodness I don't know fight for trans people one of the things that I end up always having to talk to my students about and colleagues and things is what ally

means because I've literally gotten into arguments with people who are like oh yeah it's LGBTQIA because A stands for ally and I'm like oh I will knife you like I've like it doesn't stand for ally it stands for asexual or

or aromantic or agender yes all of all of the other A's yes but it's the it's this thing where people think being an ally is just being like okay with a person existing the kind of like well if it makes you happy

which is like okay motherfucker that's not like that is so belittling of the experience that's not allyship to be an ally you have to leverage your privilege by not being a member of that community to protect people in that community you can be tolerant

but not an ally and that's sort of where the old saying comes from that if that's what being an ally is to you we don't need allies we need accomplices and with the current legislative push against trans people I mean like literally what I do

is like a felony in three states now or almost a felony in three states oh and it's going to be a growing number of states yeah and it's just so unbelievably depressing and there aren't enough I mean there's a lot of trans and non-binary

and every kind of expression you could want people in this country way more than a lot of surveys suspected but we're not enough to necessarily fight this in a way that isn't going to end up with increasing violence I mean

the FBI statistics of random violence against hate crimes specifically has been rising against LGBT people especially trans people in the last couple of years and I'm sure it's only going to get more in the next few years still with all of the

wave of stuff happening the past few months yeah so if you're if you're a cis person and you want to be an ally you got to fight for us and if you're a trans person if you don't have other reasons why you can't maybe arm yourself in some way at this point

if you feel mentally capable it's not a bad idea to learn how to do things it's not a bad idea to get stopped to bleed training not a bad idea to get you know emergency first aid training right all of all of all of the things

absolutely because things are things are happening and they're going to keep happening one might say it could happen here wow I know we really we really pulled this together just pulled it back just just really encapsulated

it so yeah I think that does it for us today do you have do you have any pluggables that you would like to plug sure so if you wanted to talk to me more you can I'm on twitter for now

assuming that Elon Musk doesn't make it entirely unlivable at Vixen Witch but the WS2Vs I don't post a whole app but you can you can find me there you can also just straight up email me if you had questions my like work email for that purpose is just victoria.grieve

at pit.edu I'd be happy to answer any questions that people have and it's a robust university firewall so if I get hate that's fine it won't get through and then outside of like my classes and stuff the only other thing

I wanted to plug because you brought it up I am a frequent guest on a podcast that a friend of mine hosts called School of Movies and we actually did Matrix 2 3 and 4 and I was on those episodes and talked a lot about the trans narrative therein

we also did an episode on Priscilla Queen of the Desert that I'm really proud of because it's great! I was lucky enough to watch Priscilla Queen of the Desert a few months ago with some queer friends of mine with Hugo Weaving in both of those things so it's perfect

it is pretty fun watching Hugo Weave and go from Agent Smith to his character Priscilla Queen of the Desert it's a beautiful metamorphosis it is very good but yeah thank you so much for coming on to talk yeah anytime drugs possibly

and learning how to source your own estrogen from places that are not just a doctor because who knows what other states will start criminalizing getting drugs from a doctor there seems to be a trend of making HRT illegal via the medical system

so this is something definitely to look into because it seems more and more people will face restrictions in this vein so yeah that's kind of a big reason for why I wanted to talk about this today on the pod big extra special thanks to Dr. Victoria Luna Brennan Grieve

for coming on to talk with me about gender affirming hormonal treatment you can check her out or ask her questions on her twitter which can be found at Vixen Witch with two V's for the W in Witch or you can email her queries at victoria.grieve

at pit.edu and that does it for us today everybody you can follow the show at Happen Here pod and CoolZone Media on twitter and instagram and you can look at my late night gender hostile tweets at Hungry Bowtie see you on the other side

hey we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe it could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media for more podcasts from CoolZone Media

visit coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening