It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: The War on Trans People: Part 3, The TERF International

Episode Date: December 29, 2023

We look at the horrific results of the spread of terfs to Mexico before returning to the US to see a transphobic alliance of TERFs and Evangelicals fuse with QAnon to create the current anti-trans movement in America.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was,

should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners,

for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. CallZone Media. everything. Welcome to another Rewind episode of It Could Happen Here. Last year, we did a series of episodes on the United States' war on trans people. Since then, things have only gotten worse.

Even in electoral defeat, transphobic politicians across the country have only doubled and tripled down on their attempts to wipe trans people out for good. So today, we're going to revisit part three of that series, called The TERF International, in which we look at the transnational network of transphobes who built the modern anti-trans movement and see how they function in both Mexico Mexico and the U.S. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that this week is about the war on trans people. I'm your host, Christopher Wong. If you've been around the left long enough, you've probably heard people call trans-exclusionary radical feminism, or TERFism, a colonial ideology. Broadly, the accusation of colonialism is about the

erasure of non-Western genders that fall outside the Christian gender binary. But TERFs are colonial in another sense as well. Exported by white academics through a network of fall feminists and anti-trafficking groups, the ideology has imposed itself on the global South with devastating and violent consequences. As a product of this colonial imposition, Mexico has become one of the front lines in the war against trans people. I spoke to Emi Flores and Julianne Neuhauser, two members of the Sexual and Gender Dissidence Resistance Network, a group of activists aligned with the Zapatistas

who've been documenting and resisting the spread of TERFs in Mexico. When the new TERF wave started in Mexico several years back, at the time, I thought of it as something that, like a radicalization that went too far. You know, like kind of like thinking back to like the new left

and there was a point during the new left when like suddenly everybody joined a Maoist cult, and they were angry for the right reasons, but it just went off at some point. I thought that's what was going on in Mexico. going on in Mexico. But then, slowly, it started to come out more that more and more TERF groups had ties to political parties.

And foreign agents. And foreign agents. And one of the most dramatic cases is from Toluca, a city near Mexico City. Just recently, at the International Women's Day protests, there were turf groups that had made a piñata out of the trans flag,

had been burning the trans flag. Also in this same city, one of the main turf groups turns out that their leader is on government payroll and if you've seen roma for example the incident the political incident that happens in that movie is based on a real incident from the 70s and the tactics of that political party which is the party that controls the state government of the state tolu is in, basically it hasn't changed. And they seem to have been using these TERFs basically as shock troops. At one point, there were two sit-ins outside the state Congress,

one to push for a gender identity law and another to push for legalization of abortion, which are obviously both important things. The latter, however, was controlled by these TERF groups, who later mysteriously never seems to appear at other protests asking for the legalization of abortion. But they were there, and they ran off the trans encampment. One of the big incidents was defending the sanctity of the women's bathroom with barbed wire wrapped baseball bats. Jesus. These groups have deep ties to right-wing Mexican political parties, the police, and the growing Turf International.

And they seem to be very chummy with the local police. Yes. Funny that, huh? Their leader gives classes, gives trainings to the state government. It's not subtle. You can see live streams of their quote-unquote protests, and it was

mostly them drinking coffee with the cops. They were on first-name basis with the cops, while the other camp had trans women that were too scared to go to the bathroom because they were going to be attacked. And so that's the starkest group, I think, right?

The Toluca Turfs, which are... It's funny because almost every party has their own group, but it's no surprise that PRI is the scariest. We should also say that these groups are affiliates with Sheila Jeffries' Women's Declaration International. And so this

is also a case of an ideology developed in the first world, in this case England, which is largely a safe country, where even as fascist an ideology as turfism doesn't, or only very rarely leads to real violence. And, but it gets exported to countries that are not safe, where it does turn into real violence. So another affiliate of Sheila Jeffrey's Women's Declaration in Mexico would be Las

Brujas del Mar, who is another case of, at first, they seemed to be a group that was just, they just radicalized a bit too far. Then photos came out of their leader leader who was on the Time 100 a couple years back with Felipe Calderon an ex-president of Mexico and by far one of the worst in the country's history and not like just oh I saw you walking in the street

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

trans population, however, gained a new Western educated threat. And she was... She's called Janmaria Yoyotl. Don't even try to pronounce her name. I don't think she can even pronounce her name because she's white as hell. And she always dresses like... She's a fucking Rachel Dolezal from Mexico. Yeah. The amazing irony that the first originary

TERF in Mexico is also the Mexican Rachel Dolezal. Right, because she went abroad and was the only Mexican everyone knew. So even though she's white as hell and has blue eyes, she started wearing some Coachella motherfucking ass feathers

and shit, right? Yeah, I've seen these pictures. It is like... It is the Mexican version of... And not even just the mexican version it is the mexican version of those people like coachella who like wear indigenous headdresses who are just like just like look look like they're descended from like

hydric hemler or something it's incredible and like she's she has like uh she has like half french half spanish name and she changed it to a half Maya, half Navajo name. It's gross. So this person has been active since the 70s, right? She was present in the first Pride in Mexico. And that was also the two-year anniversary of the 68 massacre. So Pride was, from the start really leftist here in Mexico but it also had these kind of people the who who went to

the UK France and the United States and I think she was there when Janice Raymond was sending her friends with guns to threaten trans women, right? So she was there when the turf wars were at the highest point during the 70s. And then came back and she participated in a lot of history of Mexican feminism but she came back in 2016 with that letter with that backing because

she is also close to Janice Raymond with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women who the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women who the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women CATW has a lot of after the turf wars

they went underground in academia and the universities because they were no longer accepted but they were in the process of building NGOs that could globally affect policy on specifically sex work and trans rights. And you can tell that Jean-Marie saw that that was her only opportunity to resurface

and to make her 70s ass... She saw that 70s rat fem discourse was retro now and so she became like this founding matriarch for the new generation of trans folks one of them which is

Laura Lecuana who is part of FEMBA and Jean Maria and Lecuana were not faced at all by the accusations of laying with the reactionaries because they know their history they know where they come from and they know that this is how Dworkin survived this is how how Sheila Jeffries and Janice Raymond survived this is where you get the fucking money.

And Laura Decona, Jan Maria, and Brujas del Mar turned the whole environment around them into these well, these turf questions. The only two issues that we talk about nowadays in Mexican feminism are precedent and trans people.

It's kind of gross. Jesus. And, like, remember, there's only a handful of states that have legalized abortion. There's femicides happening all the time. But we're...

We continue to debate these two issues over and over and over again like a feedback group and like as trans people we don't have any choice because we're the targets of this right and it's not it's not an academic debate last fall um there was some tarps who had taken over a public park to set up their separatist space. And there was a disabled cis woman and her trans girlfriend who were denied entry to the park

and threatened with tasers. And so when they're taking over these public spaces and using violence to defend them, because the next week there was a protest over this, and they tased a trans man. Jesus. And it's like, this is a public park. Of course we have to defend ourselves. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture musica, peliculas and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the

game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries.

Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, or CATW, an international anti-sex worker group, which provided a refuge for white TERFs driven from mainstream feminism in their home countries,

has been a major source of TERF influence in Latin America. The reason there is so much importance of this ideology towards radical feminists in Mexico is that they needed something to say and something to do and something to fill the void in organizing and in NGOs. And the people who stepped up were Janice Raymond's KW, the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women,

who, since the 90s, spent a decade and a half building contacts in the UN, in the OAS, in several international organisms to extend their influence across the whole continent, specifically in Latin America. And you can see this affecting stuff like Venezuela, where they broke up sex worker unions with the OAS, right?

And in Mexico, the founding leader of the Mexican branch of CATW Teresa Ulloa used to be a UN employee specifically its drug and crime segment and before she was like a radical feminist, she used to

conduct drug raids in Chiapas and yeah, and after that she became the founding member member of cat w latin america and the caribbean and with janice raymond they they you can see them go together to uh the 1995 uh beijing conference on women and they influenced like they were a big part of why gender is not recognized as a social construct by the UN. They allied with the Holy See, with the representative from the Vatican in the UN, got together with a couple of radical feminists,

and pushed back against gender being recognized as a social construct. In 1995. So, that's the level of influence these groups had. In Mexico, these groups, which morphed into the Cat W, supported the war on drugs from the get-go. They were very... In some of the biggest events inaugurating the war on drugs, they were present right there, because

if you're fighting drug trafficking, it's very easy to just sleep the word human right there, right? No politician is gonna say no. They all fucking love to say, yeah, I'm hard on human trafficking. And the way that

showed itself was just targeting trans sex workers and migrant sex workers. And that fit in the agenda of Janice Raymond perfectly. Sheila Jeffries basically survived the whole 2000s on writing garbage for reports for the UN. for the UN. Most of her published works during the 2000s and early 2010s is stuff paid for cat value.

And they in 2016 they started pushing for more and more anti-trans legislation worldwide because they could see the writing on the wall, right? They were behind the women's declaration

that Sheila Jeffries is not... Okay, she is part of KW. She's, I think, KW Australia. She has her own other collective called Space International, which is behind FOSTA-SESTA, by the way, in the US. Where she allied

with a couple of conservative sheriffs to write that legislation. So we could go on and on on how people that read about trans issues think are gone and forgotten by history, right? The authors of these horrible books that haunt us to this day, are still active. And not just in the US. They're active in Mexico, in the UK, in France, in South Africa, in Korea. Korea is huge.

I think I would say Korea has as big a problem as Mexico and the UK. We just don't talk to them as much and we can't realize that. But if you check the languages that have signed the Sheila Jeffries Declaration against trans people, which is a specifically genocidal declaration, it doesn't stop at legislation. It wants to exterminate us outright.

And most of them, you are going to see a lot of Brazilian flags, a lot of Mexican flags, a lot of Korean flags, even more than United States flags. And if you track the USA flags, it's mostly like weird randos that have yoga classes and shit. It's not relevant politicians. But if you track the other countries,

you're going to find some of the biggest collectives in their own countries. You're going to find... Or the biggest collectives in their own countries. You're going to find or just spooks, right? You're going to find a lot of people who have really weird careers that spend a lot of time in Italy and Uganda. It's a never-ending rabbit hole of

spooks, of conservatives, of has-been feminists that have re-branded as ngos to get money from those groups and directed towards breaking up trans rights towards affecting sex workers towards breaking unions breaking student movements it's a global movement that is birthed by conservative thought, but getting more and more reactionary and more and more organized as time goes by. That international transphobic movement has increasingly found purchase in the US. I spoke to Lee Leaville and Kai Shevers, two members of Health Liberation Now

with intimate experience with the TERF movement, who spent years particularly documenting its rise so my first question is can y'all explain what wolf actually is and i guess subsequent to that uh what the relationship to hands across the aisle is um yeah so Wolf is, they're a transphobic feminist group with, at this point, extensive ties to right-wing organizations. They've worked with Family Policy Alliance, Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, Concerned Women for America, Family Research Cultural, among others. But they got their start um they started back in 2013 um around when um they were founded by leah keith who also was one of the leaders of deep green resistance and she basically got like um kind of run out of anarchist and environmentalist groups and then kind of

like went over to uh established like turf communities to try and recruit there so i sort of like started out trying to like recruit from these like older turf and transphobic lesbian communities and then after trump got elected and um you know, the conservative Christians on the far right became more mobilized and more empowered, they kind of like rebranded themselves and were like, oh, let's form alliances with these right wing groups. And they kind of like traded their sort of like, like crunchy lesbian feminist, like, like image for like Kara Dansky, be in feminist like like image for like Kara Dansky who like you know is a straight fairly feminine looking woman who used to work for the ACLU and then like a democrat and like you know she's way more presentable to like a conservative audience you know by working with the right then they have access to like money and power and they can it's easier for them to get on the media like like kira dansky

is no longer with wolf but like she was with them for years and still has relation like like good relations with them and she's been on the tucker carlson show like many times so i i think one of the important pieces when it comes to understanding like how this relationship with the right started. So in, in late 2016, Wolf put forward their filing against the U S department of justice and U S department of education. Right. And they were going up against aspects of like trying to reform title nine to include gender identity, you know, to protect folks who need to be able to use their, like, women's restroom or locker room or whatever, right?

And this is the case that they ended up getting some of that ADF funding for. So it's like one of the first official seeds, I guess, of the direct collaboration that ended up happening. A lot of that stuff did eventually end up getting leaked. And then they started doing some more official collaborations just a few months later when they were working with like Family Policy Alliance to file amicus briefs against Gavin Grimm, again, on a bathroom case. They took something like, I think it was like fifteen thousand dollars from the alliance defending freedom which is one of the main like right-wing groups like past like trying to pass all these like anti-trans bills like going after a pediatric transition and

trans girls and in women's sports so they took that money and then yeah and later like i think like um the whole working with family policy alliance i believe was the first time they like publicly allied with with the white ring group i think so that happened in january of 2017 yeah and then they've just sort of like yeah like they also uh were involved with like the amicus brief against was it amy steffens um another supreme court case i can't remember yeah it wouldn't surprise me and like members of wolf have appeared on like heritage foundation panels they helped like release a parent resource guide an anti-transparent resource guide that was also sponsored by like heritage foundation family policy alliance this this is

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

so like, you know, the Women's Declaration International is in this in the u.s is led by kara dansky who you know she like basically like left she worked at wolf for a long time and still has you know lots of connections with them is on good terms with them but she like left and now is like working with women declaration international of the u.s branch so and also like she winds up having kind of like a foot in both worlds at the same time too so like she'll like the the u.s chapter of women's declaration international previously like women's human rights campaign before they had to rebrand um they would possibly for legal reasons

yeah yeah they're like kg but it look if you if you read the stuff it's yeah yeah yeah exactly exactly um so what what ends up happening is that kara dansky will either like have the the chapter sponsor particular events or she herself will become actively involved in the formation of the events right which we saw happen with um women picket dc last year where they were parking themselves outside of that was like it was a well that was that was a whole big thing oh god it was a protest that happened on international Women's Day to protest the Equality Act. Yeah. In D.C.

It's not like it's people's first time dealing with the Equality Act either. prior to that point which and this starts to to go into the um like hands across the aisle coalition because they were um actively involved in opposing the equality act as well so to to kind of roll back a little bit um the the hands across the aisle coalition this was something that started developing in early 2017, you know, not that long after Wolf started building the more direct relationships with the right. And so that the people of this coalition would have like, you would have members of the right itself. And in the process of that, towards the beginning of 2019 in May, they filed this joint letter to the House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to oppose things like the Equality Act. And they did so

alongside with Natasha Chart, representing Wolf concerned women for america american college of pediatricians family research council you know a whole bunch of really just awful names in there oh yeah the adf was involved in that one too yeah this is the it's really the rose gallery of all of the people who were anti-gay marriage until still are but have downplayed it and yeah all people who led the anti-gay marriage campaigns all of the sort of weird right-wing pseudo-medical bodies. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley

into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Thank you. what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again,

the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love.

Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The next thing I wanted to ask about is what's been happening in the last couple of years with the fusion. Because you already have your alliance between the the turfs and the evangelicals but in the last couple of years we've seen a i don't know if a full scale is the right term to use for it but we've seen a merger of this with save the children and q anon stuff i was wondering if you could talk about that yeah that's okay so that's an interesting one because like i've

i've been digging into the timeline of this stuff extensively it's like i've got hundreds hundreds of listings trying to figure out where different pieces are coming from and trying to understand like the the phases right so you've got like the the formation the solidification and then the escalation and we're kind of in the escalation stage right now but so one of the things that i i started to notice is that elements of this crossover like the cross-pollination that was happening, actually predated certain key events that we now know are affiliated with QAnon, right? So if we think about the actual, like, development of QAnon itself, so you've got the Pizzagate thing that was happening in like October 2016, I believe that was, you know, right before Trump was getting elected and, you know, kicking up some stuff about like,

you know, Hillary Clinton's emails and stuff like that to go up against her election campaign in opposition to Trump and then, you know, folding in the harassment towards Comet Ping Pong to the point where like Edgar Madison Wells shows up at Comet Ping Pong in December of 2016 with an AR-15 style rifle and starts, you know, firing off his shots and stuff like that. Right. And so eventually, most people know that the timeline of the QAnon drops happening around like October 2017.

Like if you look up the first known Q drops, I believe that was like October 28th, 2017 on 4chan. But the thing is that if you look at references to save the children or save our children on Twitter, the hashtags, I found tweets that were connecting trans inclusion education in schools to pedophilia and using the save the children hashtag in August of 2017, the Q drops hadn't started yet. So, and this is something, this pattern continues to happen, right? There were also multiple, um, you know, tweets or Facebook posts or whatever that would start to use things like save the children, save our children, wake up America and stuff like that before you would have the big scale takeover by QAnon when things were starting to get really

popular because the save the children thing really went viral in the summer of 2020. But you could still see elements of it before that point, repeatedly. So another early instance of using both Save the Children and Wake Up America hashtags started happening on April, I believe that is a 2019 and bear in mind, wake up America, um, is a hashtag that's not only used by QAnon proponents, um, in relation to the whole like acceleration as I'm trying to, you know, deep state stuff. But also like Aaron Brewer, one of the people that was involved in some of the clinic protest harassments

was using that hashtag later. No, it wasn't just Brewer. It was like both Brewer. It was, that was the clinic protest that involved both Partners for Ethical Care, PEC, which Brewer was a member, like one of the founders of at the time and one of the leaders of.

And Joey Bright's like can I get a witness like they teamed up to stage a bunch of clinic protests and they used wake up wake up America was one of the slogans that they used and one of the hashtags to make sure we're getting this these are protests against

clinics that offer gender affirming care yes yeah yeah yeah yeah that um yeah that that happened uh that one so yeah the wake up america one was in um salt lake city new york city and la yeah And they also, I mean, speaking of, of, um, hashtags, they also have used the, the slogan pull back the curtain, um, which has also been used by, uh, like anti-choice activists. Yeah. Like that was, I remember like, like finding, like, they use pull back the curtain a lot to be like, they, what they mean is like, they're like, ah, expose the evil gender industry. But like this other this like

um anti-abortion group i'm blanking on which one uh at the top of my head but they also use that um pull back the curtain to go after planned parenthood yeah oh boy which i think is like problem like that doesn't i haven't found a direct connection but it seems like that's too much of a coincidence in a lot of ways. One of the things that I really want to stress about this whole, like, what I call TN on thing is that, like, the seeds for this, the cross pollination that we are seeing happening between the gender critical movement, Pizzagate and QAnon, like these were already in place before QAnon formally developed as its own phenomenon. This keeps happening. It's, you can't really like figure out where one particular type of rhetoric is necessarily coming from in terms of its source because it just keeps going back and forth repeatedly people are acting like they're coming up with a lot of the same ideas together because in the end in the end

they are of the same roots they are in fundamental agreement with each other whether they're calling themselves different names i think that's that's worrying to me in a lot of ways partly because you know i mean this has always been something where if you look at the rhetoric that these people are spreading it's like it's explicitly exterminationist like it's it's you know like they they're they're stoichiatic terrorists like in search of a like a quote-unquote lone wolf and in a lot of you know and in in the 70s i think they were there's there's a lot more explicit violence that these people are doing directly now they're kind of like they're they're they're trying to

find people who will do their dirty work for them and there are places where they found them already we've seen this in mexico and in the u.s the people who they seem to be recruiting are people who are extremely dangerous i mean we've seen q anon people have killed enormous numbers of people um you know we've there's a long history of abortion clinic bombings and people getting assassinated for that i mean i think you know one of the connections that i've been sort of like looking at is the extent to which this stuff is connected to the Atlanta shooting. Because if you, if you look at the stuff, the Atlanta shooter believes it's, you know, like he's in this, like in the same sort of Christian patriarchal project and his thing

is specifically about sex workers, but Hey, look, if you look at, uh, yeah, I'm not particularly Asian sex workers. And, you know, if, if, if you, if you look at the but also particularly Asian sex workers and you know if you look at the anti-trafficking groups you look at the Christian anti-trafficking groups and you look at the Venn diagram with them and the TERFs it's like oh yeah people are involved in both and that's why this agreement is big

in that particular world and yeah there's this kind of vice closing in on trans people where on the one hand you have these people attempting to employ the violence of the state. And on the other hand, you have this sort of stochastic terrorism where they're attempting to incite violence by sort of individuals. And then also, I mean, I think there's sort of two forms of this, right? There's the people who are explicitly like, quote unquotequote political right you have you have your sort of like ideological street fascist you have like you know you you have your people with baseball bats covered in

barbed wire but then you also have the stuff that's been fueling anti-asian violence where it's not necessarily like you know there isn't this is an organization that like hates asian people it's we will just sort of passively increase the rhetoric until the level of violence increases yeah yeah kind of got like you've got the street bash and then you've got the intellectual bash yeah well and i think but i think also there's there's another like if it was just those people i think it'd be less bad but but there's also just the way in which just random people who are encountering this become very quickly radicalized, and it becomes part of sort of – I mean, and transphobic violence has always been part of the sort of background violence in the same way that anti-black and – I mean, you know, okay, the level of anti-asian violence we've been seeing that has just sort of because it's just a part of the background violence of american society and that the levels of those things the the more this rhetoric gets circulated

and the more this activism happens that background level of violence increases and that to me is also terrifying because it means like it's not just sort of like fascist who you can track. It's just someone on the street. Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, they're just sort of like trying to like,

like associate like, well, I mean, a lot of the extreme, like, yeah, like people like, like Beelick and Aaron,

Alex, Sarah and the gender mapper and Joey Bryant and stuff like that. Like they're, they're hardcore, like eliminationists. Like they're're like they're say over and over there can be no compromise and i would also especially like anti-fascist networks to pay more attention to it because you know the solidarity with trans people is just as important as solidarity with like racial and ethnic minorities when it comes to combating FASH, right? Especially since like, there are a number of us that are in multiple categories. So

like, let's all work together and try to like, you know, be proactive about combating the threat, right? So my, my TN on collections, I guess, like, i only have two reports on it so far because getting into the full detail is just it is a lengthy project and i keep getting distracted by by the conversion therapy stuff there's just like there's so much stuff to research and there's and we're like two people and and yeah anyway so i also have a life to try to live in terms of finding the like the original kind of like broader views of tianan both like what it is in terms of like the 101 kind of stuff and also like the the timeline of where it came from you can find it on health liberation now.com we have a little tab there

that has like analysis and then if you go down to key issues you can find a tn on tag there right and it'll have that stuff in there this has been a thing that throughout this entire series which is that most of the information on this stuff has been compiled by a very small number of trans people and that cannot stay the state of this because there are just not enough trans people and

they are extremely overworked yeah and if that's a project that you can take up please do that yes please all hands on deck yeah because the seriousness of this is such

that if you want there to be trans people living in a way that does not actively destroy them you have to act now yeah basically this has been it Could Happen Here, a product of Cool Zone Media.

Suppress your local turfs before it's too late. Goodbye. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, and digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami?

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