It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 27

Episode Date: March 26, 2022

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

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. or whenever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives.

I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead,

now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hey, everyone. This is Garrison Davis from It Could Happen Here. For this week of episodes, the team has put together a special group of episodes

all focused on the broad topic of the escalating war on trans people. For this week of episodes, the team has put together a special group of episodes, all focused on the broad topic of the escalating war on trans people. We'll cover historical background, the international TERF movement, and all the new anti-trans legislation trying to be made into law here in the United States. We won't have time to cover everything. It's only five episodes, but we tried to cram more stuff in, and we don't want to make the episodes all two or three hours. So I'm sure we'll cover all these topics more in the future, but we tried to create five episodes here that kind of cover a lot of our bases.

Also, we've tried not to make the episodes super depressing, because, yeah, it's five episodes based on a kind of upsetting topic. So we tried to keep them more information-based and throwing in some jokes here and there, you know. But it is still not a fun, fun topic. So keep that in mind. But we've tried to space things out and not make them too long and not too depressing.

So without further ado, here is episode one of the War on Trans People. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and in the case of this week, getting very angry at people doing really shitty things to a specific subset of the population. All right, Garrison. Wait, isn't that every week?

Well, no, sometimes we talk about other stuff like 3D printed guns guns but that ties in garrison take it from here i'm done for the week yes so welcome to could happen here we're talking about well one of the big it could happens here is it could happen here yeah in in relation to the ongoing uh war on queer people in general um and how yeah that sure seems to be like it's happening so here here right now but but before we get to the actual right now points i still i do want to do a little bit of background on how it's kind of gotten to this point in the past few decades and the the various like precursors to the current moment that has seemed to be really focused on trans people specifically.

But for a long time, a lot of the focus was on protecting, quote unquote, the sanctity of marriage, which was one of the big table cult podcast uh to assist us in this uh horrible endeavor greetings hi and i'm sorry hi yes we are we are gays who grew up in that universe so hello yes as as as was i as was probably a few other people on this on this call um yeah we we all we all have varying experiences uh growing up in the evangelical movement As was I, as was probably a few other people on this call. Yeah. Yeah. We all have varying experiences growing up in the evangelical movement. While also realizing, huh, maybe we are not straight and or cis children. So, yeah.

But we're going to be talking about the escalating war on gay marriage and how that kind of moves over to trans people at a certain point. And specifically talking about kind of the combination of religion and politics, because this is something I've discussed before on my two-part Focus on the Family episode. And this really is going to tie into a lot of that stuff. It's a lot of the same people, but I would love for everyone else to kind of fill in the gaps where I have stuff missing because I definitely have a good point on the Family Research Council

kind of side of things. And I would love for people to fill in the gaps on the other kind of stuff. But yeah, we're going to start off by talking about Family Research Council

and that whole kind of side of things because, I mean, they really- Oh, hey, Josh Duggar. How's it going? Oh, yes. Josh Duggar is coming up. Don't of things. Oh, hey, Josh Duggar. How's it going? Oh, yes. Josh Duggar is coming up. Don't you worry.

Both research and families, so this seems unproblematic. I'm going to just mute things from now on, and yeah, you guys continue. In terms of all of the save the children rhetoric, yes, Josh Duggar will be coming up. So, yeah. But I do want to actually open up with a quote from Mike Rosebush, who was the vice president of Focus on the Family from 1995 to 2004. And then a few years ago, he came out as gay and as a so-called affirming Christian who loves Jesus and endorses rights for gay people.

He left Slash Got Fired from Focus on the Family. Is he side A or side B? Is he in favor of the celibacy model or is he chill with marriage? He seems to be excited about fucking. Oh, okay. So he's side B. We like side Bs. It is definitely the better side.

But I want to start off with a quote by him just to kind of set the stage for how this type of thing kind of really got started for combining the evangelical kind of biblical worldview with political

organizing. So anyway, I'm going to read a quote here. Dobson, even more so than Focus on the Family, and that's James Dobson, by the way. Dobson, even more so than Focus on the Family, as an organization, strongly encouraged all evangelicals to support and express their values in the public arena. As background, before about 1970, evangelicals often confined themselves within their own, like own cloistered communities. Political involvement was viewed as a secular enterprise and suspect at best, and this changed during the Dobson era.

He and others encouraged evangelicals to learn and apply the biblical worldview. The evangelical person was coached in applying the apologetics debate method in publicly sharing the biblical worldview. Voting in every local and national election became seen as a Christian's duty. So at Focus, I learned that the evangelical leaders like Dr. Dobson considered the Republican Party to be the political machine best equipped to endorse a biblical worldview. In delighted harmony, Republican Party strategists salivated to win elections by securing the evangelical vote. Thus, a mutual agreement was formed. The plan became that evangelical leaders would introduce a hot-button issue onto ballots at every local and state election.

Evangelical ministers would provide voting guides on how to influence evangelicals to vote for the only correct Christian choice. In turn, the elected Republican candidate... I remember those. Oh yeah, oh yeah. In turn, the elected Republican candidate would champion the corresponding biblical worldview, and this strategy worked. And what was the most reliable hot button to place on the local and state

voting ballots, something that would ensure evangelicals in mass to show up to vote? Yep, anti-gay rights bills. Gay rights were viewed by evangelicals as a to show up to vote. Yep, anti-gay rights bills. Gay rights were viewed by evangelicals as a threat to the biblical family and society in general. So yeah, that's kind of how I wanted to open up in terms of kind of the shift in like the 70s and 80s

and especially in the 90s from kind of evangelicals being pretty divorced from like political mainstream action to them becoming a crucial part of the republican machine and this kind of circle that completes itself at this at this like at this point afterwards because yeah this combined with a whole bunch of save the children rhetoric and like saving the family like like the unit of the family as a sacred thing to protect it's really like that that idea really carries over now into into the trans

stuff uh because obviously they kind of lost a lot of the stuff they wanted to do on gay marriage after a long a long fight you know decades and decades but it's still the same core idea at the heart of it yeah i just want to put an evergreen footnote on all of that and say thanks and fuck you to Phyllis Schlafly for getting us down that road. Yes. Yeah. That was like blame can definitely be passed around. Yeah, like originates there. Like I mean, like

before all of that, like the evangelical church was not even united on the idea of abortion being bad. Like we have come so far to merging these these universes in this really fucked up little marriage that they got going on no and and you can't you cannot divorce the ideas of like the the escalating war against abortion and then also like with the save the children, protect the family idea, right?

These are the same issues. These do go together in terms of people making this fake version of the family that they are swearing to protect, whether that be from gay people or that be from women's bodily autonomy or women's rights or feminism. All of it is in the same package.

It's like that meme of two pictures and Pam's like, these are the same picture. It's the same exact rhetoric and it's just reskinned slightly for whatever topic of the day. The other big thing I want to mention before I get into Family Research Council is the 2004 book Marriage Under Fire

by Dr. James Dobson, which was definitely one of the other key points in escalating the idea of the culture war and that type of more almost tactical like more like almost like tactical rhetoric it's all yeah it's it's it was definitely it was definitely a turning point i remember was this around the same time when fireproof came out oh i think so yeah it had to have been close yeah fireproof and all that came out between like 2004 and 2006 2007 so that was all around the same 2004 and 2006, 2007.

So that was all around the same time period because they were losing, like you said earlier, they were losing the battle against gay rights. Yeah, I guess that was around the time Queer Eye was coming out. That was when they were starting to get nervous that maybe they could not stop this particular forward slide. But yeah, on the back cover of their... Robert, did you have something to say? No, I was just thinking back to that period of time when it seemed

positive progress in that regard seemed inevitable and unstoppable. That was nice. I think the note on martial language as used for this is really important here. This is a battle. it is under fire like

that's yeah that is something that was definitely employed on the fullest on that point i'm just going to read a little bit of the back cover of a marriage under fire here we go in this succinct analysis of the issue dr james dobson presents a compelling case against the legalization of marriage between homosexuals and the dire ramifications our nation could face. Same-sex marriage will destroy the fundamental principles of marriage, parenthood, and gender. Families will be increasingly unstable as their definition expands to incorporate multiple moms or dads, in quotation marks. multiple moms or dads in quotation marks. Legalization of gay marriages will lead to polygamy and other alternatives to one man, one woman unions.

The divorce rate will be higher, making our children less safe. Marriage under fire provides the foundations of a battle plan for the preservation of traditional values in our nation. Our response could not be clearer. The wellbeing of the family and thus our nation hangs in the nation. Our response could not be clearer. The well-being of the family and thus our nation hangs in the balance. Now's the time to speak out in defense of marriage

and the American family. So yeah, it is particularly the battle plan, right? You know, one thing I really loved during this time was the like, libertarian Christian response to this kind of conversation where they're just like, or we could just,

you know, not have marriage be tied to the state at all. You know? Oh yeah. Yeah. That was great. I do remember that. This is the,

like, this is the backup plan for like, okay. If like, if marriage, you know, gay marriage goes forward, then we can just like do that.

If we want to, you know, just like completely eliminate. No, absolutely. Yeah. I, I absolutely remember that, that type of rhetoric even even yeah even around like 2013 when like the supreme court cases were going forward they were like really set on like this is like you know last resort we have to make sure that make sure that it like like like church marriage is just

completely separate which even that that still is the case in like in like a lot of places like churches is still in a lot of states like reserve the right to uh not marry people um and you can only you can do it through the courts but not through the church there's also the subtext in that that i think should be unpacked which is that the multiple moms and dads kind of image that's given is not a signal of like the non-traditional family being bad but more of a um there was this myth that was pushed really hard in the conversion therapy circuit that like if you didn't have a good father figure you were gonna be gay yeah you know if you didn't have a good relationship with your mom you're gonna be gay so like having this as like this these coded statements in there are giving the clue of like we're trying to stop the cycle we're trying to not create more gay kids yeah um and

that's why this is important yeah i was reading a lot um earlier today from the heritage foundation because i remember them being a key part of... I'm so sorry. They definitely are the other big part of this. It was so bad. And their whole thing was like, you have to have a mother and a father. Otherwise, everything is terrible. And then you get gay kids. And that also

goes into the whole other theory that was like, well, which I think Robertson either made up or repeated was was like well people who are gay were abused as children yeah that is that is definitely and then of course all these all these evangelicals are also all like beating their kids yeah it's like well which kid first were you abusing your child because they were gay or because yeah i mean i was and i am but i don't think they're actually related yeah exactly they're related in the sense that you being gay

is is the is is the well i mean one of the triggers for the parents but it's not the causal relationship runs the opposite direction right exactly anyway um are going to take a break and hear from all of our lovely sponsors who don't support child abuse, probably. Well, I mean, unless it's unless it's. Which which does, you know, does run that island off the coast of Indonesia where you can hunt children for sport. But we prefer not to see that as I don't think you you're allowed to say that, Robert. I think you have to bleep that. No, no. Garrison, we're not going to bleep an ad. That's what sponsors this show is

child hunting island. Yeah, you cannot say that. Is it designed to just make more gay kids? Well, it's designed to make happier billionaires. Oh, okay. Yeah, there's nothing Elon Musk loves

more than hunting children on a private island reserve off the coast of Indonesia. And like Elon Musk, you too can hunt children if you buy... Anyway, here's the answer. Yes, we are back.

And now we're going to move on to probably the most unfun portion of the show today. FRC, the Family Research Council, I'm going actually talk about like what they are and what they did and how they're kind of important in the evolution of rhetoric and various other stuff so yeah family research council emerged from a 1980 white house conference on families that james dobson kind of co-led with the president of the United States. So that's fun. Yeah, so he met and prayed with a group of like eight Christian leaders at a Washington DC hotel,

ultimately leading to the creation of the Family Research Council under the direction of Gerald Regener. That's how I'm going to say it. That's how I'm going to say his name because he doesn't reserve respect, so I'm not going to google it and it became a division of Focus on the Family in like the late 80s under Gary Boyer and the reason there's a whole bunch of like complicated like

tax stuff because Focus on the Family can't get too political because then it'll like sacrifice their tax exempt status so there's a whole bunch of really shady stuff happening in between Family Research Council and Focus on the Family proper. They're not doing any lobbying. Yeah, in terms of who runs what

and what crossover there is with the leadership, they're basically the same organization, but they are legally separate and kind of have different operating strategies. But they really are like... Which, to be fair lots of orgs do this this is not unusual no it's not unusual but like it's important to know like they basically are like like they are they are very linked like they are like like sibling organizations

so yeah this is uh this is uh the uh gary boyer the guy who took over in the late 80s of what was also the under was the under secretary of education and a domestic policy advisor to President Reagan. So again, already fully tied into the Republican machine. So Boyer brought in several anti-LGBT researchers who pumped out defamatory material about queer people. Robert Knight was a longtime conservative writer and journalist and a major propagandist against LGBTQ rights. He served as the FRC's Director of Cultural Affairs in the 90s up until the early 2000s.

While working there, he wrote, along with some Focus on the Family editors, a 1999 booklet called The Homosexual Behavior and pedophilia this is a very common thread in all their stuff is that gay people were abused as kids and gay people

therefore are like wired to also abuse kids it's part of this cycle that they co-opted a whole bunch of research on it that they misrepresented that all of the researchers who did the actual stuff was like, no, you're totally wrong. It's a spousal bingo right here. Yeah, it's it's there's there's I talk I talk about this a little a little bit more in depth in the focus of the family episodes for bastards in terms of like the actual research they used.

Um, but yeah, it is, uh, one of the, uh, remarkable claims inside the 1999 booklet was, uh, was the, uh, assertion that quote, one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the prophets of a new sexual order. So that's, uh, that's great. I heard that as prophets with an F I T S. That is, yeah. Not prophets, P-H-E-T. P-H, yes, P-H. This is just libertarianism. Basically, yeah. Basically, yes.

Yes, for some reason, you cannot find this pamphlet on the FRC website today. I wonder why. Shocked. Yeah. So Boyer left the group in 1999, and then FRC had two presidents emerge, and one of them kind of resulted

in becoming the most powerful religious right lobbying group in the country with tons of policy researchers and writers, and a lot of a lot of like email like email lists and like physical mailing lists was a big part of their political organizing i know eve and kieran we have talked before about uh the effective power of the rights uh mailing lists in terms of getting political change yeah um kenneth connors was a florida attorney and a leader in the pro-life movement. He served as president in the early 2000s. During his tenure, FRC's agenda focused mostly on abortion and then also traditional marriage. Other stuff was religious liberty, which means Christian supremacy, not actual religious liberty.

christian supremacy not actual religious liberty um and then like uh like uh protecting parents rights right protecting like parental choice um which we'll talk we'll talk more about in the future like how do they define traditional marriage is this involving like dowries and land transfers and treaties i i believe they just i believe they want one man and then one woman and uh the woman doesn't really need to actually want it, but as long as the man wants it, then it's fine. And are they like the Catholics, where they believe it has to be for the purposes of procreation? I mean, they're part of the mainstream evangelicals,

so there's definitely the courtship idea. So yeah, they are for that, but it's i don't know it's it is it's a very like patriarchal thing um and it depends i'm playing dumb here but like because these are these are like important distinctions that need it depends on congregation to congregation right like like the kind of the stuff that i grew up with wasn't super focused on tons of on having tons of kids, actually. In fact, they kind of preferred just keeping it capped off at two kids

because the more kids you had, the less loyal you were to the church because you had to focus more on your kids, actually. So it does really depend on congregation to congregation. I think Family Research Council tried to keep themselves open to lots of interpretations so lots of people could like glom onto their stuff so they didn't get like super specific around like the role of child rearing and that kind of thing it's important to note around this time or a little before it was when pope john paul's theology of the body was coming out which is this tome um that's basically getting into like why you know the death penalty would be bad and

why abortion is bad and there's all this like sanctity of the body and the body existing and then like the sanctity of sex as for the purposes of procreation pleasure that was definitely a key point in the in the atmosphere at this time that was definitely a key point is that sex is just for making kids like that is definitely like a point is that sex is just for making kids like that is definitely like a big a big part of it which like they don't actually really believe but they say right because like if you look at all of like the all of the extra like the people like all like these leaders like are not like faithful to their wives by any chance they're not an accidental side effect kids are the point, yeah. But I think it is like,

it is interesting, like the amount of stuff that's around like parental choice and like parent rights, which will come up over the course of the next episodes of the series. I'm right now writing episodes

about the current like book bannings going across the country. And a lot of that is tied to like, say, the idea of like parents' rights over their children.

Like they decide what their children gets to read. So it's all this kind of stuff. I've never heard of that before in my life. over their children. They decide what their children gets to read. We don't know anything about that. I've never heard of that before in my life. That's definitely not also tied up with a bunch of the stuff happening in Florida right now. That's definitely

not the rhetoric. It's definitely not related to Mike Ferris at all. Yeah, I mean, really, this is sort of what we're getting at is that the modern anti-trend stuff is they're just playing all of the sort of greatest hits of the anti-gay stuff, like the bathroom stuff. And the CRT stuff. Yeah, it's all the same shit.

Don't worry, I'm planning to tie this up in a nice little bow. Sorry for jumping ahead. Sorry for getting ahead of you. Just give me like 15 minutes and I'll do it. So, yeah, up next, we're talking starting in 2003 they changed leaders again and this is where they really kind of evolved into their current form with a tony perkins who became president oh yeah that guy of the uh family family research council prior prior to that he served two terms as a louisiana state representative

um in the 90s and even even even when he was president of a family research council he served two two years as state representative he's uh also a former police officer um and a television news reporter so overall just sounds like a quite quite the dude um yeah he he authored a whole bunch of you know like all these guys writing tons of like Christian books that get published by like weird Christian publishers. He also served as the senior pastor of a church in Maryland called the Hope Christian Church. And he was

a leader of an effort by white and black religious right preachers to work together against LGBT equality, specifically like in like the east coast and the South. So there's a lot of cross-organizing between historically black churches. Of course, not all of them, but Perkins really tried to reach out on that front

to get that coalition going, which was kind of unique at the time. So yeah, a big part of FRC's strategy is to pound home the false claim that queer people are more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual people. This is, yeah, this is not scientifically true. You can look up, like, stats and you can look up, you can look up, like, the American Psychology Association has done a lot of research on this topic because it was such a big point in the early 2000s that people had to like talk about it yeah so like it's like one of these things that like was a myth you know ambiently as a scare tactic and a slippery slope fallacy but i think there's also it has its roots

in a particular misunderstanding of romans too which is the passage that most people point to as their anti-gay rhetoric and yeah the the context of that is like most like centrist and liberal like biblical scholars will agree that that passage was more about the pedophilia that was happening in the roman empire and speaking out against that yeah um and not specifically against like consulting adults even this is even yeah even like the old even even in the old testament a lot of new people going into like the actual translations of stuff and like even like leviticus um it is definitely pointing towards it being about specifically like fathers not abusing their like, like, you know, like prepubescent like sons who are like more like androgynous. Like it is specifically targeting like this type of idea.

It's not it's not against like gay men who are like adults. Yeah, there's there's this theological conversation on the right that was happening that kind of was like trying to account for that historical context and was like it's both clearly it's both because they go together right and obviously like we have to find a way to justify demonizing gay people in order to protect the sanctity of marriage

so we have to like save the children in multiple ways and save the children yeah so Perkins has continued to defend the kind of gay men as pedophiles idea. He had a televised debate on MSNBC in 2010 about this.

So yeah, that is like 12 years ago at this point. But still, 2010 feels much more recent than stuff, you know, talking about the late 90s. Yeah, debating with the Southern Poverty Law Center on the issue of gay rights i remember that now yeah yeah so some other anti-lgbt kind of propagandists at uh at frc includes uh peter sprigg who joined in 2001 um he authored the brochure called

top 10 myths about homosexuality which was pretty popular around the time. Such claims inside the book include that like ex-gay therapy or conversion therapy works, sexual orientation can be changed, LGBTQ people are mentally ill because being LGBTQ makes you ill, and that the sexual abuse of boys by adult men is more common than consensual sex between adult men, which is obviously not true. That is quite... I have questions. That is quite the... So many questions.

That is quite the stat. And like Spriggs' sources are a mixture of like junk science issued by groups that support conversion therapy and also legitimate science coded out of context or cherry-picked, which is a long-used tactic by anti-gay kind of groups to bolster their claims and their general rhetoric, right? If you mix in a hint of truth,

it can make all of your outrageous stuff seem more legible. We knew that from the screwtape letters. Yeah. No, like, one of... Yeah. Sorry.

One of his better... One of his better books. I actually enjoy the Screwtape Letters. I think it's clever. It's pretty fucking funny. It's good. Also, like,

just like an Easter egg for those who know what we're talking about. Like, he was extremely kinky. Carry on. Anyway, one of the main researchers they kind of misused research for

was Judith Stacey, who has, like, since issued lots of public statements condemning what Family Research Council advocates for and has endlessly requested that anti-gay groups stop misrepresenting her work. Yeah. So we're going to jump forward to 2008 because this is, of course, the election of Obama has really kind of frightened a lot of people. This is when Dobson sent out that letter detailing what a post-Obama future could be, in which he included gay marriage as a part of the dystopian nightmare he was imagining. This is the future that gay people want. Yeah. And interesting a just an

interesting thing on sprig here he was uh he was um he was on msmdc again which i mean maybe we should stop maybe we should stop inviting these people onto news channels but anyway um spring works spring responded to a question about allowing non-american same-sex partners of american citizens to immigrate into the States by saying, I would prefer that we export homosexuals from the United States rather than import them. And saying, I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior. And then when asked, so should we outlaw gay behavior? Spriggs said, yes. So yeah, it's like, it's a very much a clear kind of mask off thing is they just don't, they just don't want it around at all.

And an idea I'm going to tie this kind of more towards towards the end of the series with the trans stuff is like the idea of queerness as like a contagion of these people having to like, the brutality is justified in their own heads because they, it's like this idea that queerness can spread and it can infect children. So you have to contain it and any action taken against it is justified because it's like you're containing a virus. And it's like, this is really what kind of makes them feel so justified and righteous in every action they do. So yeah, including outlawing gay people, including exporting them from the United States, a blatantly fascist idea. So, yeah.

FRC also worked unsuccessfully to continue the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. This was up until 2010. So that was definitely another thing they tried to focus on. But the progressive slide actually was happening around that time. So that was definitely another thing they tried to focus on. But the progressive slide actually was happening around that time. Karen discovered something interesting about that earlier today. Oh, yeah. So I was, again, looking up Heritage Foundation because Heritage Foundation was my big go-to when I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s and doing speech and debate and apologetics camp and all that shit and um i was like well what

was their take on don't ask don't tell and they in the early 90s were very very against it yeah in 93 they had like this paper published and they were very against it because they were like, well, then you won't, then you'll still have gay people in the military. Yeah, absolutely. In the military. Yes. They're like, they will, there will be like, it'll be bad for the unit cohesion. There will be sexual abuse as if that wasn't already happening. There will be like all of these terrible things happening

in the military that couldn't possibly happen couldn't possibly be happening otherwise it will like weaken combat effectiveness is the line that uh family research council used yeah yeah yeah so there was definitely a shift in like the 90s where a lot of these evangelical groups were against don't ask don't tell because yeah it still allowed gay people in just that they didn't say anything. But then as they saw progress happening, they're like, okay, this is better than nothing? This is better than them being openly

gay? So they kind of switched gears towards 2010. They're just grasping at anything they can. I think it's time for another break and then we will kind of finish this up with some other not fun information but yeah let's let's let's do let's let's do let's let's do an ad let's let's see let's see what our lovely sponsors at has to say well his big thing is trying to get

volunteers together to raid child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. Like a counter raid. Yeah, yeah. You can volunteer to go fight in Ukraine or you can volunteer to help take down this child hunting island so that can run it. You know? It would be fun to have all of the food delivery services

have their own private militias that take each other out. That's the world we're moving towards, Garrison. I mean, the post office already does, so why not the Eastern companies? Yeah, arm everybody. Everything should be a military. That's the, whatever podcast this is. Definitely the solution here.

And we're back, and we are still talking about my favorite topic, which is the Family Research Council. During the 2012 election cycle, they donated about $208,000 to 80 federal Republican candidates, saying that they're using the money to strategically be used to support

pro-family candidates and pro-family issues in elections and ballot incentives across the country. Yeah, so this is just, you know, in terms of, you know, keep the pro-family angle in mind. You know, they continuously were always donating money. 2012 was the highest one on record. And I don't think they've even matched that since then.

It was pretty high because that was Obama's second term. So they were definitely trying to really organize. Because this was right before 2013 when the Supreme Court was going to be ruling on gay marriage as well. So, of course, it didn't get finalized until 2015, but they were starting to hear cases.

I'm going to kind of briefly go back to James Dobson here. James Dobson. Reference if people do not listen to the Behind the Bastards ones. He's an evangelical Christian author and self-proclaimed psychologist. If you don't know who James Dobson is,

please preserve your innocence and just quit. Like, just go. Enjoy it. Don't know. Log off now forever. Log off now. Just don't know. God, I do love the idea

of a self-proclaimed psychologist. That's that's that's the energy I want to bring to 2022. Child psychologist. Yeah. Just like I know what kids need. They need to be on hunting island, you know, and this guy doesn't even believe in like child development. Like, no, he doesn't.

He doesn't. But also, you do know that I'm getting a Ph.D. inychology right i know garrison we're paying for it yes this podcast is going to have the highest rate of doctors uh of any podcast on the internet other than the one that our friend kava does anyway um i i will be happy to be invited back onto kava's podcast as a doctor in parapsychology i think I'll be able to offer some really unique insights. Okay. Anyway, Dobson founded Focus the Family in

1977, which is unfortunate because he could have just watched Star Wars, but instead he did this. He doesn't hate fun. We knew he hates fun. That is a key part of his ideology. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, he's a founding member of several anti-LGBT hate groups, Family Research Council being one of them.

Also, he is a founder of Alliance Defending Freedom. Fuck ADS. Yeah, he got two under his belt. The organization, which is now based in arizona became a very powerful kind of fundraising behemoth um dedicated to fighting so-called marriage uh like marriage equality for for queer people and trans-inclusive non-discrimination protections um and with a big part of the thing that they were fighting for was uh enshrining a quote right to discriminate against LGBTQ people in state laws.

Which is all the time around what if a baker is forced to bake a cake for all of this nonsense is what is with Dobson. That's an ADF case. That is Dobson. He started that kind of thing. Yeah, so

I'm going to now have a little fun though because we're going to jump ahead a little bit just that kind of thing. Yeah, so I'm going to now have a little fun, though, because we're going to jump ahead a little bit just to kind of get the rhetoric kind of nailed down on what kind of house stuff. We're going to start shifting towards the trans stuff at this point. But 2015, after the Supreme Court ruling for nationwide kind of marriage equality Dobson has had this

beautiful, beautiful quote I had this black cloud over me on June 26th when that decision was handed down and I was contemplating this foreboding this black cloud, it hit me like a ton of bricks the decision was not really about gay marriage it's not, it's about everything else

it's about the entire culture war it's about control of the public schools. It's about everything else. It's about the entire culture war. It's about control of the public schools. And it's about what's happening in universities. It's about the economy. And it's about what business is. And it's about the military. And it's about medicine.

It's about everything. We lost the entire culture war without one decision. The gay marriage thing was just a part of it. But it's going to touch every dimension. So I wish that was true um but in terms of yes in terms of kind of how this gets expanded to like businesses schools universities medicine i just love the histrionics that they start kind of focusing on in terms of like well we lost this culture war i guess we got to move on to the next one, which is, you know, the even more freakish thing,

which is, oh, kids wanting to, kids realizing that maybe they have different views on gender. So that's the next kind of like rotating target that they move towards. So, yeah. Earlier that year, Dobson laid bare his fundamental confusion on what it means

to be lgbt um he claimed on his radio show that being bisexual meant that you have orgies which i mean not i mean well okay so we wish yeah um yes i want to live in that world complicated yes um he also blamed uh in 2012 he also blamed the 2012 uh sandy hook massacre on queer people because i forgot about that our nation the nation turned turned their back on god um it allowed it allowed judgments to fall on us which is why i said yeah that's that's one of the interesting splits in the right between the people who think it's fake and people who thought it was queer people's fault. Yes. Yeah. It's because of the queer decadence. Yeah. They've all come back together now. But it was it was a real it was a real split. And one of one of the other great things about Dobson is so after my behind the bastards episodes on Dobson, like literally like the day after it dropped, I found this extra little disturbing nugget of info about him um in

an old blog post titled is my child becoming homosexual uh dobson recommends us dobson recommends things that a father can do to help his child fix homosexual symptoms fix sorry including taking your child into the shower with you to compare penises. Wait, what? Yeah, it is. Not good. Your child? I will quote from the blog. The boy's father has to do his part.

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

What? Only bigger. help notice that dad has a fetus just like his only only finger oh my god you know what this reminds me of so that is a quote by Dr. James Dobson psychologist oh my god anyway

I'm sure there's nothing nothing at all to Hey, Jimmy Dabs, how's your son? How's he doing? How's that going? Are you talking? Nothing at all to kind of interrogate there. Yeah.

The other thing that I really love and by love I mean don't love is that like the only gay people who exist are gay boys yeah they really lesbians and bi people don't exist at all like it's yeah this isn't a really interesting thing it's because it's about why would uh it's about if it happens to a woman it's like oh well they're a anyway. They're already not as good as men. I guess it kind of makes sense that

they would do that. If it happens to a guy, you're like, why would you do that? You're part of the patriarchy. Why would you, like, you're supposed to exert power over women. What is wrong with you for not wanting that? Like, there's a whole bunch of other

patriarchal stuff going on and why they focus on that. Also because they undeniably find lesbians attractive. wanting that like there's a whole bunch of other like patriarchal stuff going on and like why they focus on that also because they undeniably find lesbians attractive like they can't like they can't help but find it hot so they definitely focus it more on gay men because they find that more gross because it is like a defiance of patriarchy in like a different way you but stuff yeah and of course but yeah um yeah well and i think also this is the same reason why transmisogyny becomes such a huge sort of driver of the anti-trans movement because you know i mean you see this a lot also with we see this with non-christian

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

and they you know and they they have to do all of this sort of like incredible pathologizing to explain why this would happen and ignore just like this person was always a woman that's you know the reality of what's happening it's a condemnation of your misogyny and your misogynistic behavior to like go join you know the victims of our hate

so like it has all of these layers here yeah and it's gonna we're gonna get like right into trans stuff now. In 2015, Supreme Court ruling making same-sex marriage legal throughout the United States, which sent anti-LGBT hate groups into a furious reaction. Family Research Council was no exception, and it started working in tandem with other groups to support so-called religious liberty. and it started working in tandem with other groups to support so-called kind of religious liberty, you know, laws which allowed people who object to same-sex,

to same-sex like couples and just, you know, queerness in general to deny goods and services to same-sex couples and just, you know, queer people in general. It is very like non-specific. So, yeah. Also in 2015, Family Research Council faced its own set of scandals, referring to a friend of the pod, Josh Duggar, who was executive director of the Family Research Council action political arm of the organization. It was obviously revealed that he had molested several… Saved the babies to your hard drive.

Several children and, yeah, had aed the babies to your hard drive. Several children, and yeah, had a lot of children on his hard drives. Sorry. So much that even the FBI was kind of surprised at how much he had. When the FBI is surprised on how much child porn you have, you're quite the bad guy.

The FBI sees some shit. Yeah, you are quite the bad guy. When you surprise them. Have you read his appeal case? I have not read his appeal. It's basically making it out to be like, there was this other guy who had access to

that computer. Was his name Josh Duggar? No, it was his evil twin. No, he's just like, somebody else probably did it. It wasn't me. Yeah, so he resigned from Family Research Council after posting a brief message

on his website saying that he resigned after concerning events were made public. I think he resigned from Family Research Council because of the Ashley Madison account. Yes. He resigned listing concerning events as the recent.

He just got to. Ashley Madison accounts got hacked and leaked, and it was revealed that he had one. His email was also on there, yes. Yeah, yeah. I feel like that's what kicked it off, but that was around the time. That was.

He didn't get. Yeah. His sister's case got released to the press it is it is frustrating how yeah definitely the ashley madison thing was seen as more of a moral failing than uh molesting children um and having tons of child porn that was definitely like within like the church and within within the kind of the whole like like church like network it the ashley madison thing was seen as much more of an egregious sin. Well, because that's infidelity.

That destroys the entire nuclear family. Whereas molesting your siblings is just boys doing boy stuff. See, I grew up a boy and I never did that. I'm not sure what boy stuff is. I never did that either. Anyway. Could any real boys write in and let us know? Please, we all need to know this.

Back to Perkins. Perkins was elected head chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2019 to 2020, which was an independent bipartisan federal government entity established by U.S. Congress to monitor, analyze, and report on threats to religious freedom. Who sponsored that fucking bill? That's a good question. good question uh over the course of this time he he continued to work at the family research council as well um including the annual family research council sponsored uh values voter summit in 2019 i've been to those which featured president trump as a speaker um as well as health and human

services secretary alex azar so yeah this was uh was the first time a sitting Health and Human Services Secretary gave an address at the gathering. So also at the 2019 VVS, the Values Voter Summit, they featured an anti-trans panel that illustrated the anti-LGBTQ rights shift

to kind of storytelling as a way to further marginalize trans peoples and the battle against affirming care. Watch J.K. Rowling get invited to CPAC next year. Oh god. The panel hosted like a multiple kind of anti-trans activists.

Lynn Mager was there. Two of Mager's children identify as trans and they no longer speak to her. Andre Van Moll, the co-chair of an anti-LGBT hate group, the American College of Pediatricians Committee on Adolescent Sexuality

used pseudo-scientific claims telling the audience that dissidence from gender dysphoria is the norm. They used this weird problematic study that left trans kids together with non-trans kids to study this idea of gender identity it's a whole bunch of like the same like you know how like they like in the early 2000s they were they were misusing like research to say

like oh look how all of these gay people are all also all pedophiles also they have sex with kids more often than adults like what no it's it's the same it's this it's the same type of thing um they also made the false claim that uh the majority of trans kids are also like diagnosed with autism um which makes it easier for them to be recruited into being transgender because they can be tricked because they're autistic this is you can collect them all this is like the the then diagram of autism caused by vaccines is causing trans kids. Oh, God. Also the idea that trans-affirming care causes more dysphoria, which causes more suicide, as opposed to the scientific reasoning that affirming

care causes less dysphoria, which causes less suicide. You know, a whole bunch of nonsense stuff. You can't expect a group that will not acknowledge the fact that having access to birth control as a way to

prevent abortions would acknowledge any of this is real either. Yeah, no. I mean, the panel also featured Kathy Grace Duncan from the Portland, Oregon-based Portland Fellowship, which states that it offers freedom to people from homosexuality.

Duncan claims that she detransitioned and is proof that transitioning is always wrong because that she detransitioned. That means it's proof for everybody that everyone should. Yes, because trans people are a monolith. We're going to be talking more about the sort of

how people who detrans transition get weaponized against trans people and again i also i also need to point out like just just immediately that like most people who do transition detransition because they are under immense social pressure too because society is enormously transphobic and then there are a small number of people who do who do treat detransition because it's not for them and good for them but yeah they get a very very small minority of those people basically get used as weapons by people who don't care about them other people get gender affirming surgeries and change their minds about it later you there's this whole movement of you know women who are getting their breast implants removed what's the

difference it's the same picture yeah same picture same picture another really fun another fun thing I do at least once a year is I go onto the Focus on the Family and Family Research Council websites and look at look at their entire like queer section and it's really interesting because like pre-2015 all of them are around like

gay people and like is my kid gay what to do with my kids gay is my kid showing gay symptoms like all stuff and then is is my kid gay what to do what to do if my kid's gay is my it's my kid showing gay symptoms like all stuff and then post 2015 it's all like the gender issue you know the cult of people trying to get your kid to become trans is my kid trans why is my kid dressing up in girls clothes it's like it's it's such it's such an immediate shift how to know if your kid is sex intrinsic all of this homosexual homosexual fear stuff to immediately being scared about the gender identity kind of

movement and the cult of transgenderism. Yeah, it is such a stark change. Heritage Foundation website is the same. I looked up when they added their gender page and it was in 2017. Yeah, exactly. That was when they started

going after trans things. Before that, the only thing was like, oh, well, it's actually okay that there's a pay gap between men and women. And in 2017, they were like trans. From 2015 to 2018, you see a massive explosion in all of these stuff about trans and trans science, whether it be like the answers in

genesis whether it be focused on the family whether it be because the heritage foundation all of this stuff you can watch an immediate shift in the type of stuff that they they start talking about i will just say i am a little glad they're doing that not for reasons you think but because this means that there are kids growing up like we grew up who know that this is an option now. Whereas like. That is true. We didn't know that it was an option until we got out. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, that's true. But you can see the kind of the switch in stuff. There's a in the in a family research council pamphlet written by Peter Sprigg called How to Respond to the LGBTQ Movement, published in 2018, says people with gender dysphoria or transgender identities are more likely than the general population to engage in high-risk behaviors which may contribute to psychological disorders or both. High-risk suicide exists among those who have already received gender reassignment surgery, which exists suicidal tendencies resulted in an underlying pathology. Wait, did the same people write the script of Euphoria? But yeah, a whole bunch of stuff around Tom Perkins, Peter Sprigg.

If you just look at all of this stuff, this is such an explosion. called I Have a Girl Brain But a Boy Body for a Virginia kindergartner's transgender story thing that he was doing around 2019. For years, LGBTQ activists wanted to keep the goal of luring children into sexual confusion under wraps. But now that they've hoodwinked a lot of the country on their agenda,

these extremists no longer have to hide. In fact, they're increasingly bold and even boastful about their real intentions of recruiting kids so in terms of like yeah it's it is in it is an infection it's a contagion that they're trying to like infect or recruit children um and again all of that kind of rhetoric is in a post like in a in like a in a pamphlet a call you, about being trans, saying I have a girl brain but not a boy body. It's like the fact that this rhetoric is happening is going to convince kids that they fall prey to it. Like it's this whole

thing that is such a marked kind of change. You can read, you know, the other titles include stuff like the regressive cult of transgenderism, all this kind of stuff Talking about our country understands that Scientology Is a cult but we don't seem to understand

How much the transgender Movement mirrors cults Like Scientology It's all of the same stuff If the transgender cult is a cult It's the best cult I've been in yet Right I feel like we need to add that to the timeline of our podcast.

I can leave anytime and nobody will give me shit. I can stop doing my weekly injections whenever I want to. And you won't lose your friends. Amazing. No, I will not. You can stop putting testosterone on at any point. That was kind of the bulk of the stuff I had gathered around specifically talking about kind of

Family Research Council and how the change happened around 2018, 2017, 2016 from all of the stuff around protecting marriage equality, protecting the sanctity of marriage to changing. It's like it's the same save the children rhetoric, but now

shifted over to gender issues. I mean, they're just moving the Overshin window because they can't win on the gay issue anymore. So they've just got to keep pushing in that direction. But it's the same organizing forces. It's the same organizations. It's the same mailing lists. It's the same pamphlets. It's the same writers, right?

It's all the people who wrote all the same stuff just moving it over to trans things. So I just wanted to kind of lay this groundwork for us when we talk about kind of the ongoing legislative fight against trans people in these next few episodes. I just wanted to kind of lay this out for an example of talking about, yeah, it is really just, you know, there was all these fears around, you know, gay people in the change rooms, gay people in the bathrooms just gets shifted over to trans people in change rooms trans people in the bathrooms it's just this it's the just moving it's just this like this turning of the clock that just shifts it over to the transgender o'clock time i don't i don't know where i was going with that metaphor but it's easier to like to pull parental rights stuff is on the rise in the in this community as a talking point and so it's easier to pull that in with trans issues than it is with gay issues.

Yes. Well, I think that we are running out of time, but even Kieran, where can people find you online? Our podcast is the Kitchentable Cult. You can find it at KitchentableCult.com Our handle on Twitter is KitchentableCultPod

I'm at BluePupBoy on Twitter. pod i'm at blue pup boy on twitter and i'm at eve underscore ettinger um i would also recommend like if you want to have a like you know trans authors take on detransition the novel detransition baby is out there it exists it is again one person's take it's not a monolithic thing but it's a it's a good novel um and then if you want to learn more about the effects of the deconversion therapy universe um gary conley's book boy erased is fucking great yep agreed um i just i just want to thank you uh both for coming on to talk about again again, one of one of the most fun topics. Our favorite people.

Near and dear to near and dear to all of our hearts with featuring friends of the pod, James Dobson and his urge to take his kids in the shower with them to compare penises and our good friend, Josh Duggar. Save the babies to your hard drive. Save the children. Not like that. Not like that. Not like that. All right. That's the episode. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora. dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of

Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Duda Podcast Network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. 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. You look like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck.

You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise.

Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the war against trans people. I'm your host, Christopher Wong. In February, a camp of indigenous and ecological protesters attempting to stop the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada had volunteered to act as an attorney for the group, were revealed to be members of another organization called Deep Green Resistance, or DGR. Nominally, Deep Green Resistance is an ecological organization dedicated to destroying industrial society to preserve the environment through promoting the destruction of dams and other infrastructure. Deep Green Resistance has found little success on this front, but they have been

much more successful in spreading the other core of their ideology, militant, ruthless, and fanatical transphobia. When the indigenous protesters at Thacker Pass discovered the two's membership in DGR and their resultant transphobia, they were furious. Falk, the DGR lawyer who had offered to represent the protesters, was kicked off the case, and the presence of the two DGR members was used by Lithium America as a weapon against the protesters. This is a familiar cycle for Deep Green Resistance. Soon after its founding in 2011, the group fully embraced radical feminism, staking out a position in an old debate inside

the feminist movement raging since the 1970s over whether trans women are in fact women. These feminists, I use the term loosely here, became known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs. Their heroes were people like Janice Raymond, author of the vehemently transphobic screed The Transsexual Empire. Raymond, whose BFL influence we will return to next episode, was largely ran out of the mainstream American feminist movement with the rest of her TERF companions. A similar fate would befall Deep Green Resistance. ran DGR out of the ecological left for the transphobia, and waged an incredibly successful no-platforming campaign against DGR's founders, Derek Jensen and Leary Keith. Driven from the left so thoroughly they were reduced to slinking into protest camps in secret only to be expelled

upon discovery, members of Deep Green Resistance moved right, and increasingly to other countries, to seek an audience for the transphobic bile. Leary Keith founded a TERF organization called the Women's Liberation Front, or WOLF. More on them later. This brings us to TERF extraordinaire Jennifer Billick. Billick had been a member of Deep Green Resistance in charge of booking appearances for Derek Jensen. The success of the no-platforming campaign waged by the left convinced her that trans people were secretly backed by a conspiracy of billionaires. This idea spread like wildfire across the UK and, as we'll discuss next episode, Mexico. To understand what happened in the UK, we spoke with Krista Peterson, a graduate student at USC,

who, at significant personal cost, confronted the rise and spread of transphobia in the English-speaking world. Krista, welcome to the show and thank you for joining us. Hi, thank you. I guess I wanted to start with Jennifer Billick and talking a bit about how she sort of moved into increasingly transphobic territory and I guess how she started moving into the sort of follow the money conspiracy theories that she's been peddling for the past several years now yeah so i give you her narrative of this um which is that in 2013 i think she was supposed to be on a panel about trans people that was

cancelled because of pushback and then because of that she thought what is the big force behind this and then got into it from there but she has really I think you know that Deep Green Resistance

was kind of into um focusing on trans people for a while um but she really has gone from an environmental activist to someone who's just solely focused on trans people it's basically all she is ever talking about um and she's kind of she started as opposing this kind of existential threat that was real, which was ecological destruction of climate change. And she has kind of maintained that tenor in the shift where now she's portraying this as an existential threat. But instead of climate change, it's trans people. So the way she got into the money, she's just a very prolific kind of at-home researcher. And she kind of had this anti-corporate mindset going in from her background.

And she produces a lot of research. There's not that many people in the gender critical movement who are really producing a lot of original content. And so when someone is, there's really, they can get a lot of uptake from that. Her first thing was actually a Federalist article about who are the rich white men institutionalizing transgender ideology. And just by being a pretty big platform, I think that got some big initial distribution. I think that was how people initially started seeing her kind of beyond the deep green resistance type audience. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that's been very interesting to be studying this is that you see this a lot. You see a lot of people who were sort of run out of the left by their transphobia like pivoting really hard right and then using right-wing media platforms and using sort of also right-wing

political backing to start pushing this stuff and i think yeah bill bill looks interesting example to me because yeah she i guess you talked a bit about this more. I mean, she has this weird, okay, so she has two weird angles. She has the weird transhumanism angle, and then she has this, like, incredibly, like, what becomes like an increasingly anti-Semitic angle. Yeah, so where she, so she's following the money is the original thing where she follows the money too, is trans rights are a conspiracy to usher in transhumanism. So her thing is,

she often says transgender is an ad campaign for transhumanism. This is a quote to get people comfortable with actual merging with machines slash AI. There must be a complete dissociation from biological reality. So you see this a lot with conspiracy theories, I think, where you have this kind of like metaphorical goal, right, where it's all about getting people to dissociate from their bodies. It's like not very clear what that looks like on an actual causal level. Yeah. But that's that's the big goal, right?

And they need a big goal. There's kind of this mysterious part of this supposed conspiracy that is trans rights, which is like, what is this for? Lots of people now are accepting that there is this big dark money push behind it, which raises the question, why? What is this doing? Yeah. And the answers are kind of kooky, right?

So this one has caught on more than I would have expected. Yeah. It's really weird. It's so weird. They kind of walk into it slowly, right? They start off and they think there's something weird with trans rights. It's very common for them to think that their opponents don't really believe their beliefs. That something is up and for some reason all these people are supporting trans rights when they know it's bad

and said that you need you need something to go in there to explain why and this is a narrative that fits with billick's worldview you know you can see how someone with her background would get here it's kind of unusual for all these ladies from the uk now to believe that trans people are trans human conspiracy but they needed something to go there as the goal so they picked it up yeah i guess i guess we should get into mom's net a little bit because most that's a really weird like specifically uk thing that i don't know if there's like there's not really an american equivalent to it like i guess it's like it's like it's like what if you took the worst parts of facebook and next door i guess yeah can you talk a little bit about like what mumsnet is and how this stuff started sort of seeping into it yeah so this is part of this bigger

question which is like why in the uk has it taken off so much in the way it has uh a big part of that story is moms that um which is a website for moms um to ask kind of parenting questions um and it's really widely used i think especially among this kind of like white, upper middle class educated population. A lot of people are on Mumsat. And it's kind of a trusted website for a lot of familial type things, like advice about what to do when your kid has lice, things like that. And Mumsat has become just like the main infection point, I think, in the gender critical movement in the UK. With why it happens more generally, you have to look at it as kind of part of this global resurgence in fascism around the same time period. It's like the mid 2010s on, you know, like the most obvious instances of that have the kind of traditional fascist targets and

ideals. I think what's essential is this kind of logic that you really see in the gender critical movement also, which is you have this kind of background climate of anxiety and fear. Then you get this narrative that minorities are rising up against you. You've lost something. Your identity used to give you a special status and now they're taking it from you and you have to fight back and it's they've kind of switched out like what the big identity is who the minorities are what the special status is with this more feminist thing but it really does have that kind of internal logic in the same way um and i think you just had this kind of moment globally where you had this kind of background emotional state that was ripe for fascism

in a lot of ways and then this ideology was just infectious in that way and then in mom's night it was able to catch um and it really provided provided it with this place where really grow uh into this kind of unusual demographic group for a kind of fascist movement yeah i mean i think there's there's an interesting i think there's another the other interesting thing to me about it is like i don't know i've been thinking about this a lot in terms of, yeah, why specifically the UK and why the US doesn't have this? And I mean, I mean, you know, I guess one explanation for it partly is like the US is so much more religious than the UK is. And a lot of these people sort of would have been evangelicals in like in the US. lot of these people sort of would have been evangelicals in like in the u.s but but yeah i think the the mumps net angle's interesting to me in that it really seems like because there's so

few people publishing anything that's even remotely tangible like a very very small number of actors were able to very quickly radicalize people and i and think, I don't know, I think it's interesting that like, like people like Jesse Singal, like I think wind up being much more influential in the UK than they are in the US, even though they're getting sort of published in these US publications, because there's sort of, I don't know, I's there's this like hunger for it on mom's night like for for anything that sort of supports his worldview in a way that there's kind of wasn't in the u.s i think part of why like the why uk question there's some part of it that's just kind of by chance mom's net existed it was a place where it could really take off but i think also to some extent like you were alluded to i think kind of part of the relevant group in the u.s is i think a little more inoculated against this stuff i mean that it doesn't really have the same initial appeal among women who would like to construe themselves as feminists because many many americans see

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

but it wasn't really catching in the same way. It has now really caught. Yeah, I guess, I mean, one of the other things that I was talking, I had an interesting conversation that sadly didn't wind up getting recorded, but I was talking with some Mexican feminists, like trans feminists about this.

And one of the things they were saying was the way, like talking about the way, like intersectionality is a framework and the fact that there is an incredibly strong Black feminist current in the US insulated the main line of American feminism from

this stuff in a way that didn't really happen in the UK because the Black feminist movement there is just not as strong and not as sort of mainstream and that has has this knock on effect, I guess, where like you get, you know, without an intersectionality framework, it's easier to have this sort of like totalizing like identity of like the woman as like a thing that's just one object that you can like pin down to biological barkers instead of having to sort of like look at all of the different actual like relations that are going on yeah so my read on them is that most of them are not really were not pre-existing feminists they're not people who are very interested in women's rights and then kind of took this turn my

pressure is that there are largely people who really started identifying as feminists once that could be a guise to kind of take things out on trans people. And I think probably why it was able to get so big on MomsNet. So eventually the women's rights form on MomsNet, which is just one of the sub boards

in addition to all the childcare stuff, just became almost all anti-trans stuff. And so that is partially, this stuff was popular. But also, I think that normal mainstream feminist stuff wasn't as popular. And they weren't getting a lot of engagement on normal, important feminist issues. And instead, this was what their user base was really going for it's really striking i think how there's exceptions um but in general the big gender critical people talk very very little about all feminist issues it's like yeah this is the thing they care about just all the time yeah yeah that's definitely a pattern with turf so it's like yeah once once once you're a turf like this is the only thing they care about all the time. Yeah, that's definitely a pattern with TERFs.

It's like, yeah, once you're a TERF, this is the only thing you care about. You don't do... I mean, I guess one of the... We'll talk more about this in the next episode, but one of the sort of big flagship things with the UK and Ireland was a bunch of the the turfs getting extremely mad

at the at at these and at the at the pro like at the the pro-abortion uh activists in uh uh in ireland because they weren't being turfs and so the other the turfs were like no no no we're gonna like try to sabotage this act the actual feminist movement trying to get access to abortions because we're TERFs and they're not yeah they could be really vindictive against women who they say are like selling out women's rights by focusing on anything other than the tiny percent of the population that is trans is the one issue you're allowed to focus on. And if you say like, no, please, please leave us alone. We're focusing on something else.

Really do not take that well. I guess the other thing I wanted to ask about was because i think the other thing that happened in the uk that only really started happening in the us like pretty recently and even then was kind of like it was an event in like a way that i don't know how much it was in the uk is the the extent to which like people like jk rowling and like the the sort of mainstream of british famous people and like british british journalists and stuff like that like like start started rallying around this stuff yeah this is it's been wild for me seeing i like don't think super highly of the american media but seeing how much worse the

british media is yeah really wild they just have been publishing stuff things like the times of london have been are the worst right more conservative outlets especially bad uh but even you know like the guardian has been some bbc and some uh these things are just kind of like demonstrably false coverage of trans right stuff that just gives a lot of credence to this transphobic movement kind of this like near

blackout of serious consideration of what trans people are experiencing and what their actual position on this stuff is it's just really grim i think i think part of it is maybe that moms that did have this reach to a lot of people who are like professionals their audience is pretty professional and it was this kind of trusted website where this got normalized a lot the last thing i wanted to talk about before um

we go to break is do you want to talk about kathleen's stock and that whole thing a little bit yes okay also we should talk about uh we should connect billick to oh yeah yeah yeah we should yeah we should do that first yeah and so that so that is, there was, you know, MUMSA started, I think the initial narrative was kind of trans people are being really unreasonable. They're really demanding. They're infringing on our status. This thing that was more localized about this group that it was easy to cast as unreasonable. And they were able to take kind of a victim stance

relative to them, and then it just kind of kept escalating, right? It just kind of shifted to more and more of this kind of content, and then eventually there, you know, there really was a great appetite for this kind of anti-trans content, and it just got increasingly conspiratorial i think so people at this point i think almost everyone in the gender critical movement thinks that there's dark money behind trans rights they think it's like some kind of astroturf movement for who knows what lots of them will say the goal is like selling, you know, hormones and surgery to people. I wish. What?

Like, yeah. Yeah. It's funding, you know, a global conspiracy. I think it's like pretty expensive. I don't think it's like the most plausible way to get an audience

for this kind of thing. But Jennifer Billick is one of relatively few people doing this kind of deep research and so it's just the kind of thing they were looking for and they have

pretty minimal bullshit filters about what they're willing to see um it's just pretty rare that they will see a source that seems to be on their side and be like no there's something wrong with this um so she increasingly got fans and a lot of people hear her stuff secondhand i think they're not directly meeting her but people are repeating her and so much of her stuff now is part of the just the background of this movement like there's this woman martine rothblatt um who's a just kind of a random rich woman um who was she was involved in kind of early trans rights activism

and kind of moved on and got interested in transhumanism stuff instead she's like kind of a strange lady and she is interested in transhumanism stuff and rich and is not the architect of the trans rights movement yeah but now know, they just all think that this person has this central role. And when you see them talking about her, it is Jennifer Billings' influence. And they just don't have, they just don't have any defenses against kind of increasingly radicalized stuff and when i started kind of looking into jennifer and i started seeing her get you know when you see people talking about a conspiracy of people like george soros jennifer pritzker rothblatt is also jewish

Pritzker, both Jewish. Rothblatt is also Jewish. There's a red flag and in conspiracy spaces, it just kind of tends towards anti-Semitism if you're not on the lookout for it and if you're not defending against it. And Billick's not and she

has gotten increasingly into the anti-Semitic side of things up to the point where she was boosting has gotten increasingly into the anti-Semitic side of things, up to the point where she was boosting Keith Woods, who is just a Nazi, his content that was largely inspired by her work about the Jews behind the transgender movement. And just taking, kind of going from

this kind of non-explicit anti-semitic conspiracy theory where you have this group of people who happen to be largely filled with jewish people kind of orchestrating this global conspiracy to explicitly naming the Jew and saying no this is a Jewish movement um and yeah and she just like followed it all the way um and there was some when I started making a big deal about this you know there was some pushback from the gender critical movement um but largely they think I'm like a bad faith actor right I'm the enemy it's they're not gonna take anything I say really seriously um but also I was really struck by how some of them were arguing with me about this Keith Woods video that was you know about how this was a Jewish plot and why the Jewish religion would inspire you to do

something like this. I mean, there's a, no, this is an antisemitic. There's nothing, you know, it's just,

it's very interesting. It's about Judaism because they already believed all the background stuff, right? They thought that there was in fact, this conspiracy that's populated by people who happen to be Jewish. And so then when you take the explicit step, it's, they're like, well, yeah, there's an interesting question, right?

Why are all these people Jewish? And they just go in all the way. Gets Nazi real fast. And yeah, I just, in general, the movement is like, does really not have good defenses against this kind of stuff at all. And yeah, this kind of conspiratorial stuff will take you there if you don't have defenses against it it's just a very old road that goes in exactly that direction and is ready for you if you start getting into this stuff and aren't watching out for it

yeah all right so let's let's let's let's talk about kathleen stock philosophy's horror child. Oh, no. So, I mean, not just Kathleen, but you have one of the things that is noteworthy about the movement, I think, is you have this unusual prominence of academics. One of them being Kathleen Stock, maybe the most prominent now, being Kathleen Stock. But also like Rosa Freeman and Selena Todd. And you have this kind of academic face of it. And it's very interesting, I think, how that works. And that these people are in generally not doing kind of substantive research on anything related to this.

kind of substantive research on anything related to this. Instead, what I see is, you know, stuff starts out in the community. It's like on Mumsnet, it's on Twitter, and then Kathleen Stock picks it up, right? She is getting her stuff kind of from Mumsnet and stuff, and then she's legitimizing it, right? It's like, oh oh this is what these fancy professors think and then centrally their role is claiming that there are all these serious issues

you know on the basis of their academic status um and saying that trans people aren't willing to discuss it you know trans people are shutting down debate they're being silenced and it gives it this legitimacy that the movement i think really capitalizes on yeah which i think with stock in particular so you know the the they're but part part of what's happening is like the the anti-trans movement kind of like moves between different conservative panics and so like like the modern one they're on the same the children panic but when stock was sort of like getting big and you can see this with the sort of the end of her career arc uh which we'll get to in a second but she was big on the whole sort of like like conservative uh callous cancel like college free speech crisis like can i guess sort of cancel

culture also but yeah she was really big on the whole like yeah the conservatives are being silenced or like i don't even start it's like i think she was kind of doing the like liberal centrist thing but but she was yeah she's she was doing all these censorship claims and then turning around and just actually censoring people. And it was, yeah. I gave a talk at Sussex, Kelly sucks university that I believe she tried to have canceled. Come on. It was just kind of interesting,

right? Cause I initially, this talk was kind of scheduled as a protest at the same time as one of her as a talk she was going to give on a related topic um and then she canceled her talk so i thought she might come to mine right like free debate like ask me questions and i was like okay uh but of course she didn't right because instead seemingly tried to just get it shut down and i think this is yeah it's one kind of the cancel culture thing is kind of one element but i think it's really central in a lot of their stuff um and that the kind of in the background

of other stuff is like you know somehow the consensus has been controlled and like it's the result of like the truth not being heard and people not considering all these important things that they need to consider kind of from care for trans youth to you know trans women being able to use the bathroom it's kind of across all this they're running this narrative that the truth has been silenced and you know trans people are being unreasonable and have shut it down i think that is a pretty foundational the overall narrative they've built yeah and it and you see this as like this is one of the ways they try to is like this is one of the ways they try to i guess rest the mantle of authority back from literally every actual medical group who all agree that you should actually let kids transition and

you should let adults transition and that this is in fact good and like a thing that medically is is like i mean like i said yeah i mean this is yeah this is a huge deal right so like kathleen sock is a philosopher right and so she started off her first thing was like something is afoot in academic philosophy you know academic philosophers aren't debating whether trans women are women in the way that they should and this idea that the debates being silenced in philosophy you know it like doesn't have really important consequences i think the idea that like all mainstream research on trans health care and what is in the good and the best interests of trans kids being able to delegitimize that is really serious yeah right that just has these tremendous consequences i think they've been able to be pretty effective on that too yeah and that's been really scary in a lot of ways because you you see like the

arguments of these people pioneered and the sort of the techniques and the the groups that they're a part of like wind up being core parts of of the anti-trans push in both the uk and the us and yeah that's extremely scary it's really scary i mean it's just it's just awful right these are these are children and for them to become the focus of this kind of hate movement is just horrifying and it's just awful and the you know the history of health care for gender non-conforming kids is really grim yeah and it's and like they are just pushing to kind of go back there and it's just ghastly it's really horrifying to see yeah i guess i think that's it that's a good point we can okay this is probably this would probably be the second ad break but yeah

do you know what else is horrifying? Ads and we're back one of the scariest parts I think of what was happening in the UK was the extent to which, I mean, not just mainstream British media gets involved in this, but I mean, literally the BBC, which is the, you know, this is the state media organization, right? to just push unbelievably transphobic articles out as just regular contents. Um, I think,

I think the, probably the most famous one is, yeah. Uh, in, in October of 2021, the BBC publishes this article that's called we're being pressured into sex by some trans women that is just an

just just an absolutely appalling uh display of transphobia um yeah can you talk a little bit about that and yeah yeah so the this article was framed around the question is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners um and so the the overarching perspective in the piece that you get is that this is a significant problem among lesbians they are experiencing sexual pressure from trans women um the kind of reporting strategy that the reporter used was you know just soliciting this one kind of particular narrative from lesbians who said that they had had these kind of experiences with trans women.

The people who are quoted in the article who aren't anonymous are gender critical people. They're like Rose of Dawn, Debbie Hayden. And then there's these anonymous women who we don't know who they are. But it's not, they didn't go and approach, you know, normal, like mainstream lesbian activists or lesbian organizations to see like what they were experiencing in years and like like she was specifically trying to find this people these people like people who like had experienced a specific thing and like no normal but she couldn't find normal people because it's not a thing and so she she it after like many many years she was able to find like a couple of examples like a few examples and mostly from yeah just open transphobes and the article is just like so conceptually sloppy that it doesn't

distinguish you know theoretical discourse about whether you know it's transphobic to just say out of hand you never date a trans woman it doesn't distinguish this from sexual abuse yeah it just kind of takes for granted that they're just saying in kind of an abstract theoretical context um that some of these like just saying that you won't ever sleep with a trans woman saying that that is transphobic is itself treated as akin to pressuring someone into sex, right? Like that. Yeah. Journalism that doesn't distinguish between just a conversation about sexual issues and sexual abuse is just disastrous. There's just nothing serious about this piece. And it's just kind of throughout it.

It's just. Yeah. Like one of the other things about this is, so they found like a survey, right? Because the journalist went looking for a survey about like, what percentage of lesbians have like encountered this pressure? And the only thing they could find was, well, okay. The only thing they could find that would like support their actual claim

was this poll from this group called uh get out the l which is just like a group that whose entire purpose is just being anti-trans people and trying to get rid of them yeah and it was just it was just like it was like a twitter poll right it was it was like they they're they're publishing as as statistical evidence for their claim a twitter poll from a from a turf group and trying to like claim this is serious journalism and it's just yeah i mean so literally on the page of the statistic they cite in this report um the report approvingly cites janice raymond saying all transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact

and so like are we talking about metaphors here or are we talking about sexual abuse yeah it's just sick right and so one of the people who was interviewed in this um was lily cade yeah who was an adult performer uh and again throughout this just a trans woman saying that the way someone is treating her in a sexual context is transphobic is itself treated as sexually abusive um so lily cade you know she refused to i think initially she refused to, I think initially she refused to be in a scene with a trans woman, but then later on also refused to shoot a trans woman at all when she was working as a producer. So they kind of get a quote from Lily saying something about women being pressured into sex by trans women. something about women being pressured into sex by trans women. And it turns out that Lily Cade was pushed out of the adult industry because she's a serial rapist.

So this is their source on whether there's this problem for a cis woman is herself a cis woman who is a serial rapist. And they're using this person to portray trans women as the victimizers and it's just so grim yeah just most of it is just sort of like haunting like one of the other things that came out was like part of the story is they said that like no prominent trans women would speak with them for the story and then a prominent trans like, no, you guys interviewed me and then didn't include it in the article. Yeah. So this was one of the people who Lily Cade had had a conflict with was Chelsea Poe.

Another woman in porn who had asked if Lily, if she could work for Lily's company. And Lily said no, because she was trans. So they talked. Chelsea is a reasonably prominent person. And they interviewed her, didn't include her in the article. She says that she told them that Lily had this predatory past. They also didn't say anything about that. predatory past they also didn't say anything about that and so we have a situation where we have this person who is this this woman who the author

has been told is a serial sexual predator being presented as kind of an authority on women's sexual victimization supposedly by trans women when she is the victimizer yeah and not only is she a serial sexual predator uh but she's like specifically attacked people in bathrooms yeah which is like the famous fear-mongering transphobic thing right is that trans people are going to attack you in the bathroom and it'd be this your source has attacked people in bathrooms and there's just very little interest like how women are actually victimized and by who yeah and i think like that that's a means to disturbing part is like this isn't just like a negligence

of reporting thing here this is just malice like if if you are told anything is like it's not it's not like it was hard to like find out that that you know if okay so someone someone tells you that someone else is is is an abuser right it's like okay like maybe you're a journalist maybe you're gonna be like oh i should check this out like lily cage assaulted so many people and like raped so many people that like just scrolling through Twitter. I found multiple people who had been abused by her. Like this was,

this was not something that was like, like she, she admitted it publicly. This is not something that was like hard to find. Right. And to be clear, she, yeah,

I just want to underline that, which is that Lily K after these accusations really got going she did like publicly admit she did not deny yeah accusations and then she retired from porn yeah and and you know and there's something like the bbc does this they do this weird backtracking if this article comes out and everyone gets extremely mad at them but they they they refuse to release the like the tape of the interview they had to with chelsea poe which you know would have proved that chelsea poe did in fact tell them that lily kade was a rapist and they published the story anyways and there's there's

so much of this stuff was like yeah like the the they the the way they backtrack about it the way that also like so the two places where this thing the story ran was uh the bbc in britain and they syndicated it out to brazil and a few other places that were like that are incredibly transphobic and it ran like yeah and this stuff like right in brazil like ran as a bunch of mainstream news headlines like where like news stories and in the major newspapers like ran this and it was i don't know like there's there's there's this extent to which yeah like you're watching british state media decide that they actively just want to go to war on trans people and they literally just do not care that like they are you know publishing little rapists and then yeah i just just the bbc's policy you know is when we

interview those responsible for antisocial behavior or crime it may just cause distress to victims and we should contact victims and advise them of our plans you know when a viewing criminals care must be taken to minimize potential distress this may cause to victims of the crime and this they they didn't see lily as this applying to her right this is a cis woman who they have been told is a sexual predator you can find this information i found it pretty quickly all of these victims talking about it her acknowledging it and they didn't identify this cis woman as a predator with victims who would be like very plausibly upset by seeing their rapist treated as an authority on sexual abuse right and this is kind of pervasive i think in the gender critical movement right where

if any of you are out there i'm sure you're thinking women can't be rapists rape requires a penis which is in the uk it's kind of a you know most women consider this a pretty reactionary way to define rape where it has to be penetration with a penis and this isn't reflective of you know know, how women experience sexual assault, that it's just kind of totally other category. And most countries, feminists consider it quite important that you don't kind of treat this as this like categorically different offense. offense um but the gender criminal really pushes this perspective where it is literally impossible for women to to commit rape you know and this is they think that when they this is a brief period where they thought that they had um identified like that every rape that was recorded as committed by a woman was trans woman

because they thought that it required a penis and they thought that that was like the only way that this was possible and you can actually be convicted of it if you were like aiding and abetting i think they thought that they had all these and they just have this overall perspective where it is literally impossible for you know know, they say a woman meaning for a cis woman to commit a sexual offense. And in doing this, they create cover for cis women predators.

Like, okay. It creates this context where their victimization just disappears. People can't even acknowledge it. It's awful. And yeah it's awful and yeah and like i think like the the extent to which this whole movement is is is built on violence and is built and there are so many people that the that the general critical people work with who are abusers there are you know and i don't know like i want to come back to like the last piece

of the lily cade thing which is that after this article came out the bbc initially basically didn't do anything right even after the the rape out the the yes yeah and then lily cade published one of like one of the most transphobic things i've ever encountered in my life like a a just this it gets called a manifesto like i don't it was like a manifesto it was terrifying yeah like she she's she she's explicitly like like like name specific trans women that she wants lynched like there's a bunch of stuff about there's people she wants raped uh she wants like she wants all trans people to die uh there's there's a bunch of there's like weirdly racist

stuff there's like i mean it's it's just it's it's it's it is a document that calls for genocide and the part where it's calling for genocide probably isn't like line for line the most disturbing part of it because the individual threats are like so graphic and i was terrified when i read this i i was the person who you know initially dug up the sexual abuse allegations and when i did it i knew it would kind of it would throw a wrench into her life i thought that they hadn't you know they were there they were visible you could find them but when it had happened she had not really been a in the mainstream eye and so i knew if this got uptake it would make it bigger and go ahead and then you know this woman is posting this terrifying manifesto it read like yeah it was like is she

shooting someone now it was just so it was just terrifying it was like something to be written you know immediately before someone goes to shoot someone it was all and then she's tweeting it and tagging the BBC

in it yeah and like that that finally like one of the most disturbing things i've ever read in my life like that was finally the thing with bbc was like uh maybe we should do something about this it was just so so little right this is they took her out of the article um they added an update that says, we have updated this article published last week to remove a contribution from one individual in light of comments she's published on a blog post in recent days, which we have been able to verify.

We acknowledge that an admission of inappropriate behavior by the same contributor should have been included in the original article. And so this is, you know, they just kind of erased her right so they didn't acknowledge that they had included this person in the article who just published this genocidal rant right so one of their sources is the person who is advocating for killing trans people that is important right that is pertinent to this narrative they're pushing and they also are not saying you know they should have we acknowledged that an admission of inappropriate behavior should have been included in the original article it really changes the

overall narrative of the article right if you acknowledge this cis woman is a serial predator yeah right the overall picture is like cis women are at risk from trans women and it's a reality check right to hear no in fact this woman who we're presenting as like victimized is one of the women who's preying on people and she's not a trans woman. And it's just. They just, you know, even after this responded in a way that protected the narrative of the piece. Right. They weren't going to let in anything that acknowledged this. The people they're finding with this position are transphobic. This person was very,

and it just says, they've removed the contribution in light of comments she has published. What kind of comments? What are they about? It's serious, right? It's serious to not acknowledge that one of their sources is a violent transphobe. Yeah. This is how I found out that she was alive.

Also, them saying that they had been able to verify it. Before that, I had been like, she's not very online in a lot of cases. So I was really worried. I didn't know how long it was going to be before there was confirmation that, in fact, Lily-Kate had not just shot someone and herself. Yeah. It was just really... This manifesto is terrifying. I don't know.

It's just awful yeah and i think you know one of the things that that's happening here is you you get to see there's a couple of like there's a couple there's like layers at which this stuff operates so you have you know you have your bbc running delegitimization right but then you have the stuff beneath it which is just apparently genocidal and i think you know in some sense like with lily cade like if you're gonna be a turf lily cade kind of blew it right because like you can't like okay like you you can be really really transphobic in a lot of in a lot of ways but like you know actively calling people to get lynched is a thing that like even like transphobes are normally like,

wait, why are you- Yeah, they didn't like this. Yeah, yeah. But I don't think the mainstream turf movement is not in a place where you can do stuff like that. But in some ways, I think the stuff that's more moderate is more dangerous. ways i think you know the the stuff that's more moderate is more dangerous last thing i want to talk about is a a document called the declaration on women's sex-based rights which was was put together by a bunch of turf activists uh fairly prominently featuring uh arch australian turf sheila jeffries but yeah can you can you talk a bit about what this is? Yeah, so this is a document that basically all of the gender-critical organizations,

image and people, have signed. And it is extreme. It calls for trans women to be banned from all women's spaces, including toilets. If women can't go to the bathroom, they can't participate in society, right? It's just like a basic need people to have to exist in public. And that it bans all, it has to ban all internationally recommended healthcare for trans children. It has to legally protect deliberate misgendering um which would you know allow you to be just treated with such hostility like at work just in public this is a just kind of a

threat to salt and trans people's ability to exist with dignity and society and just live normal lives and you know a lot of gender critical people will say will portray themselves you know as only opposing advances for trans rights you know as not wanting trans rights to be rolled back but what this document calls for is like basically every right trans people have to exist in their genders in particular trans women especially trans trans women um to just take it all back right and leave them with basically nothing yeah yeah like this is like they have this whole thing about like basically like they want to erase the concept of gender identity from law, which is the thing that does is it eliminates all trans people

from, like it eliminates trans people as a thing that the law recognizes exists and thinks should have protections. It's like, it is you know, like it is the legal genocide of trans people, like that's what it is.

It's, yeah. Yeah, and so they've's that's that's what it is it's yeah yeah and so they've basically all signed this you know it is a yeah it's this is not at all a french document it positions itself as like you know the demands kind of of this movement and it's extreme um the organization's spokeswoman is Kara Dansky who uses almost all of her public appearances she has a number of times been on Tucker Carlson and she boosts Jennifer Billick all the time she I think is her biggest supporter um and was formerly the chair of wolf which is lear keith's organization um so she is the women's liberation front is what wolf stands for it is a cool name for an org that sucks and they should give it back to someone better yeah so this is, I mean, in general, you'll see the American TERFs kind of in this more radical direction, also, especially explicitly collaborating with the right.

Here, they've made this document that just purports to, and everyone has signed it, kind of direct the overall agenda to one that just leaves trans people with just no protections at all. Yeah, and I think

it's, you know, the reason I think this is in a lot of ways more dangerous than the LilyCade thing is, again, it's in this, like, it's not actually in legalese because none of these people are lawyers and so yes oh so how did an actual law i mean okay i shouldn't be asking how did an actual lawyer produce this because i've met lawyers and they're they're not they are not as smart and above board as they portray themselves to be but yeah like this stuff isn't making legal arguments like one of the things that they they've like i guess the

whole sort of gender critical like turf movement is invented is like this this concept of sex-based rights which is not a thing like yeah like they all think that there's like rights that you have because of your sex and like no this doesn't exist they completely made this up they keep on like referring to it as if it's like a concept that exists in the law like it's none of this stuff like in terms of legalese it's like it's nothing it's it's it's it's a jumble of words yeah no you really see as the movements go they really have really robust movement discipline and kind of taking up these new terms and then saying them all the time as though it's a thing

everyone's familiar with one of them is always like women's sex-based rights women's sex-based rights like what people's rights aren't based on their sex yeah it doesn't exist kind of like a whole thing we were doing with feminism you know it was like you don't have special rights based on being a man and now it turns out that like supposedly all along we've thought that you have special rights for if you're a woman to exclude whoever you want to exclude i guess it's yeah it's just goofy yeah but but i think like it's weird but it's like it's also it it has this function which is that it the the sort of like and like okay so like i i don't my my guess is that most of the people who have signed this document have not read it because you know but

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

And they really try to take this phrase to and using it just kind of sneak everything in right so they'll ask people questions like well what about women's sex-based rights these are a thing i've never heard about before in my life and but people just get on board and they don't really know yeah what's happening and they've another thing they do is they always portray like bathrooms as sex segregated spaces and every bathroom i've ever been in says women on the door it doesn't seem like female bathroom but they're like this is like sex based on sex not gender just making these assertions and they have a lot of assertions yeah yeah i think i think that's a good place to wrap up i guess they have a lot of assertions yeah yeah um

i guess we're just underwriting again what a serious kind of attack on trans people's rights this is right and this is calling for things that would make it very hard for trans people to exist and it's really scary to watch this i think and watch it kind of progress across this movement and be boosted it's awful yeah and next episode we are going to take a much deeper dive into some of the people who signed this document and we are going to see what happens when this kind of bloodless but genocidal legalistic rhetoric makes it into the hands of people who are not afraid to do physical violence and it is worse it is going to go worse than you're probably imagining just to underline this we said earlier that jennifer billick's stuff is you know just widely now accepted and within this

movement and her stuff is portraying trans people and trans rights as this existential and media threat. Yeah. Right. She portrays, she often says that doctors are like butchering children, right? They're making children into slaves. It's stuff that, if it was true, would call for kind of an extreme level of resistance.

And that's kind of what this stuff functions to do right if you are accusing people of these really extreme offenses and of hurting and threatening all of these people what that motivates is extreme responses and violent responses and billick herself is sometimes engaged in violent rhetoric um but i think many of us who've been following this movement are just kind of waiting afraid because that's just where it looks like it's going in the u.s and the uk too yeah kind of like hard to it's just so scary right and like you know they're mapping out where the gender clinics are yeah and it's it so scary. And like, you know, they're mapping out where the gender clinics are. And it's scary because where rhetoric like this goes is to a violent place.

And it's hard to see it letting up right now. Yeah. And yeah, that is the subject of tomorrow's episode, which, yeah, in which a bunch of people will start attacking gender clinics and a bunch of trans people are going to get violently assaulted by TERFs who are directly affiliated with Sheila Jeffries and are followers of Jennifer Billick so great yeah Krista thank you for coming on and doing this thank you yeah this has been it could happen here uh you can find us at happen here pod on twitter and instagram uh we are also there is other stuff that we do at the cool zone and yeah go go fight for the rights of trans people before they cease to Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 the 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. podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. 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. Looked like a little angel. I mean, he looks so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out

loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 of a radicalization that went too far. You know, 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, but then slowly it started to come out more

that more and more TERF groups had ties to political parties. 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 pinata out of the trans flag, had been burning the trans flag. Also in this same city,

one of the main turf groups turns out that their leader is on government payroll. And if you've seen Roma, for example, the political incident that happens in that movie is based on a real incident from the 70s. And the tactics of that political party which is the party that controls the state government of the state toluca is in basically it

hasn't changed and they seem to have been using these turfs basically as shock troops at one point there were two sit-ins outside the state congress one to push for a gender identity law and another to push for legalization of abortion which are obviously both important things the latter however was controlled by these turf groups who later mysteriously never seems to appear at other protests asking for the legalization of abortion but 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. Yeah, you can see live streams of their quote-unquote protests, and it was mostly them, like, drinking coffee with the cops.

Like, they were on first-name basis with the cops, while the other camp had, like, 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 Turfsfs which are yeah it's funny because almost every party has their own their own group but yeah also it's no surprise that pri is the scariest yeah we should also say that these groups are affiliates with sheila jeffrey's women's declaration international um 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 terfism doesn't,

or only very rarely leads to real violence. But it gets exported to countries that are not safe, where it does turn into real violence 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, 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. It's been more than confirmed since then that

her political ambitions lie with the PAN. The farthest right mainstream political party in Mexico. This political alliance between the 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. When I say that radical feminism was a complete import, from its very beginning, for a long while there was like one turf in Mexico and she was she's called Gian Maria y'all you too don't even try to pronounce her name I don't think she can even pronounce her name because she's white as hell and she always dresses like she's a fucking Rachel Dolezal from Mexico the 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?

I've seen these pictures. It's, it is, it is like, it is, it is the Mexican version of, and not even just the Mexican version. It is the Mexican version of those people at Coachella who like wear indigenous headdresses

or just like, just like look, look like they're descended from like Heidrick Himmler or something. It's incredible. She has like half French, half Spanish name and she changed it to

half Maya, half Nahuatl name. It's gross. This person has been active since the 70s. She went to... She was present in the first Pride in Mexico. That was also the two-year anniversary of the 1968 massacre. So Pride was, from the start, really leftist here in Mexico. But it also had this kind of people who went to the UK, France, and the United States. who went to the UK, France, and the United States.

And I think she was there when Janice Raymond was, like, sending her friends with guns to threaten trans women, right? So 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, KW,

has a lot of... After the tough wars, they went underground in academia and the universities, right? Because they were no longer accepted. But they were in the process of building NGOs that could globally affect policy on specifically sex work and trans rights. And you can tell that Jean-Marie

saw that that was her only opportunity to resurface Specifically sex work and trans rights. And you can tell that. That Jean Maria. Saw that that was her only opportunity. To resurface. And to make her 70s ass. She saw that 70s. Rat femme 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-Marie and Lecuana were not faced at all by the accusations of laying with 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 TERF 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 loop. And as trans people we don't have any choice because we're the targets of this. And it's not an academic debate. Last fall

there was some TERFs 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 there they um they tased a trans man j Jesus. And it's like, this is like a public park. Like, of course we have to defend ourselves. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, or CATW, an international anti-sex worker group, which provided a refuge for white TERFs

driven from mainstream feminism in their home countries, has been a major source of TERF influence in Latin America. The reason there is so much importance of this ideology towards radical feminists in Mexico, it's 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 right the the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women who since the 90s spent a decade and a half building contacts in the in the UN in the OAS in several international

organisms to extend their influence across the whole continent specifically 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, it's drug and crime segment. And before she was like a radical feminist,

she used to conduct drug raids in Chiapas. And after that, she became the founding member conduct drug raids in Chiapas. And yeah, and after that, she became the founding member of WLATAM and the Caribbean. And with Janice Raymond, you can see them go together to

the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women. And they influenced, like, they were a big part of why gender is not recognized as a social construct by the UN they allied with the holy sea with the 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 1995. So that's the level of influence these groups had.

In Mexico, these groups which morphed into the CATW supported the war on drugs from the get-go. They were very... In some of the biggest events

inaugurating the war on drugs they were present right there because if you're fighting drug trafficking it's very easy to just sleep the word human right there no politician is going to 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 with that, that fit in the agenda of Janice Raymond perfectly. Sheila Jeffries basically survived the whole 2000s on writing garbage for reports

for the UN. Most of her published works during the 2000s and early 2010s is stuff paid for 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. 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 gonna find or just spooks right you're gonna find a lot of people who have really weird careers that spend a lot of time in italy and uganda it's it's it's a never-ending uh rabbit hole spooks, of conservatives, of has-been feminists that have re-branded as NGOs to get money from those groups and direct it towards breaking up trans rights, towards affecting sex workers, towards breaking unions, breaking student movements. 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 meticulously documenting its rise. So my first question is, can you all explain what WOLF actually is?

And I guess subsequent to that, what the relationship to Hands Across the Aisle is? Um, yeah, so Wolf is, um, they're a transphobic feminist group, um, with at this point extensive ties to right-wing organizations. Um, they've worked with Family Policy Alliance, Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, Concerned Women for America, family research, cultural among others. But they, they got their start. They started back in 2013 around when they were founded by the, Keith, who also was one of the leaders of deep green resistance. And she basically got like kind of run out of anarchist and environmentalist groups and then kind of like went over to established like turf communities,

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, 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 like image for like kira 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 relations, 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 IX 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. so it's like one of the first official seeds i guess of the the direct collaboration that ended up happening those 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 um when they were working with like family policy alliance um to file amicus briefs against uh gavin grimm again on a bathroom case yeah 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 uh groups like past like trying to pass all these like anti-trans bills like going after pediatric transition and trans girls and in women's sports so they took that money and then yeah and then later like i think like um the whole working with family policy alliance i believe was the first time they like publicly allied publicly allied 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 were involved with, like, the Amicus Brief against, was it Amy Steffens? 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. Another Supreme Court case? I can't remember. It wouldn't surprise me. Members of Wolf have appeared on Heritage Foundation panels. They helped release a parent resource guide, an anti-transparent resource guide that was also sponsored by Heritage Foundation, Family Policy Alliance. This is very similar to almost exactly what you see in

Mexico, with just slightly less physical violence. The other thing is that these are to a large extent exactly the same organizations and that was one of the other things i want to talk about was the influence of sheila jeffries and the women's declaration which has been all over like this whole movement yeah the one thing to point out, the Women's Declaration International is in this, in the US, is led by Kara Dansky.

She basically left, she worked at Wolf for a long time and still has lots of connections with them, is on good terms with them, but she left and now is working with Women's Declaration International, the US branch. And also, she winds up having a foot in both worlds at the same time Declaration International of the U.S. branch. So that's a no-brainer.

She winds up having a foot in both worlds at the same time too. The U.S. chapter of Women's Declaration International previously, Women's Human Rights Campaign, before they had to rebrand, they would like this. Possibly for legal reasons.

Yeah. Very cagey, 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 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, the equality act. Yeah. It's not like it's people's first time dealing with the equality act either. I mean, like, so prior, prior to that point, which then this starts to go into the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, because they were actively involved in opposing the Equality Act as well. So to kind of roll back a little bit, the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, this was something that started developing in early 2017, you know, not that long after Wolf started building the more direct relationships with the right.

And so that the people of this coalition would have like you would have members of the right itself. 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, it's really the Rose Gallery of all of the people who were anti-gay marriage until, still are, but have downplayed it. 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 the next thing i wanted to ask about is what's been happening in the last couple of years with

the fusion because i mean so you already have your your alliance between 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 QAnon stuff. I was wondering if you could talk about that. 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, 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 started to notice is that elements of this crossover, like the cross pollination that was happening, actually predated certain key events that we now know are affiliated with QAnon, right? So if we think about the actual development of QAnon itself, so you've got the Pizzagate thing that was happening in 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 welsh shows up at comet ping pong in uh 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 um most people know that the timeline of the q anon drops happening around like 2017. If you look up the first known Q drops, I believe that was October 28th, 2017 on 4chan. look at references to save the children or save our children on like Twitter, the hashtags, and you're also looking for transphobia related stuff.

You can actually start to see that crossover happening before the original Q drops happen. Right. Yeah. I found, 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, 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 of 2019. And bear in mind, Wake Up America is a hashtag that's not only used by QAnon proponents in relation to the whole like acceleration as I'm trying to, 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. No, it wasn't just Brewer. It was like both Brewer. That was the clinic protest that involved both Partners for Ethical Care, PEC, which Brewer was one of the founders of at the time and one of the leaders of. And Joey Bright's like like can i get a witness like they teamed up to stage a bunch of uh clinic protests and they used wake up like wake up

america was one of the slogans that they used and one of the hashtags these are um to to make this to make to make sure we're getting this uh 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 expose the evil gender industry but like this other this like um anti-abortion group i'm blanking on which one uh off 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 a 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 one of the things that i really want to stress about this whole like what i call t and on thing is that like the seeds for this the cross-pollination that we are seeing happening between the gender critical movement pizzagate and q anon like these were already in place before q anon formally developed as its own phenomenon. This keeps happening. You can't really 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, I think that's worrying to me in a lot of ways, partly because, you know, I mean, this has always been something where if you look at the rhetoric that these people are spreading, it's like it's explicitly exterminationist. Like it's, you know, like they're, they're, they're stochastic terrorists, like in search of a, like a quote unquote lone wolf. And in a lot of, you know, in the seventies, I think they were 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 QAnon people have killed enormous numbers of people. You know, 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 atlantis shooting because if you if you look at the stuff the atlantis 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 you if you look at the anti-trafficking groups, you look at the Christian anti-trafficking groups, and you look at the Venn diagram with them and the TERFs, it's like, oh.

Oh, yeah. Some of the same people are involved in both. Yeah. And that's why this agreement is big in that particular world. Yeah. 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 i think there's you know there's sort of two forms of this right there's the people who are explicitly like quote-unquote political right you have 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, 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-black violence is much higher, but like the, the level of violence against black trans people in particular, and the level of anti-Asian violence we've been seeing that has just sort of, it's just a part of the background violence of American society, and that,

the levels of those things, the more this rhetoric gets circulated 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 fascists who you can track, it's just someone

on the street. Yeah. They're just trying to associate... A lot of the extreme... People like Bielek and Aaron, Alexera and the Gender Mapper and Joey Bright and stuff like that, they're hardcore

eliminationists. They're like, over and over, there can could be no compromise and i would also especially like anti-fascist networks to pay more attention to it because you know that solidarity with trans people is just as important as solidarity with like racial and ethnic minorities when it comes to combating fash right 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 the conversion therapy stuff. There's so much stuff to research and we're like two people.

Anyway, so... I also have a life and and yeah anyway so 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 healthliberationnow.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 yeah and if if that's a project that you can take up please do that um yes please yeah hands on deck all hands on back yeah because the the

seriousness of this is such that if you want there to be trans people living in a way that does not actively destroy them you have to act now yeah basically yeah this has been it could happen here a product of cool zone media suppress local TERFs before it's too late. Goodbye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters, to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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, 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. 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 Gonzalez.

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. Gonzales 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. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud,

but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know what I love is decadent Western sexual mores.

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

I agree with that, actually, yes. Really? Good call. That way we can just do a whole series of jokes where we just like pill people on fascist esotericism. What a fun joke that would be welcome to it could happen here the show where we talk about things that could happen um about just talking about the onslaught of uh of uh bills that have been introduced the past

few months that attacking kind of trans rights and queer people in general yeah so we've we've we've heard about gay marriage we've heard about turfs a lot the past the past few episodes and now we're going to be kind of focusing on the yeah like i said the the kind of current legislation that's happened specifically within the past six months um that have been targeting kind of LGBTQ people in schools particularly. And a lot of it's been targeted towards minors, teens, adolescents, and restricting the visibility and kind of what's allowed to be said and mentioned in schools. So we're going to kind of actually talk about books first, because a lot of this stuff is kind of tied into the critical race theory kind of like organizing that the right was doing in 2021. between September and December of 2021 alone, they received more than 330 reports of book

challenges, which is the most in over two decades in terms of people trying to restrict what books are allowed to be in schools. Boy, I experienced a book challenge lately. Tell you what, trying to read through the new James Patterson book. Do either of you know who James Patterson is? No, vaguely. This was a bad idea on my part. Please continue, Garrison. I was busy reading the *** before you logged on. I have a different interest in books.

You know, actually very similar books. Very similar. *** and The Pelican Brief, basically identical. I have no idea how much of that's going to get bleeped but it's going to be funny um so yeah a tennessee school's removal of a maz the holocaust graphic biography became kind of the most famous example of this trend a few months ago um the book was allegedly banned due to due to nudity and because of curse words. But this is kind of, you know, they claimed it had nothing to do with actual political content.

It was just because of the inappropriate images for children, which is a little dubious since it's all, you know, starring mice. Yeah. Yeah. mice. Yeah. Yeah. But the majority of challenged books have been kind of those focused on LGBTQ characters or themes. Back in November, nearly two dozen people a day were dying from COVID-19 in South Carolina. Thank God that got better. Thank God we'd knocked that shit out. But rather than try to handle the public health crisis, Governor Henry McMaster seemed more interested in pressuring the state's Department of Education to crack down on queer themed books. He directed the Department of Education and the State Board of Education to

create, quote, statewide standards and directives to prevent pornography and other obscene content from entering our state's public schools and libraries, the governor said in a letter to the superintendent of education. Inside the letter, it was specifically targeted towards Maya Kobe's book, Gender Queer, a memoir, which is a genderqueer graphic novel kind of detailing what it's like to be genderqueer. It's definitely popular among the adult, young adult age range, and is

a good resource for gender-bending type stuff. And it has faced a large amount of the onslaught and the bashing of queer books have been focused on this specific book. It's an autobiographical book

based on the Bay Area non-binary writer and illustrator. It's an autobiographical book based on the Bay Area non-binary writer and illustrator. It's been challenged. It started being challenged at one of South Carolina's nearly 500 schools and then got banned from all of them just because people were mad at about it at one school. It was being recommended for those in the 10th grade or higher to learn about kind of queer issues. And it is now become one of the most banned books of this past year. It's been removed from schools in Virginia, New Jersey, Florida, North and South Carolina, Texas, and a large amount of other states in the South. Speaking of Texas, the genderqueer graphic novel was just one part of a massive, kind of horrifying purge led by Texas Republican State Representative Matt Krause. He led an effort to pressure and force schools and libraries to remove books based on a list of undesirable reads that he compiled himself.

he compiled himself. The list is a 16-page spreadsheet with over 850 books catalogued. On Krause's 850 strong list of titles that he once banned from Texas libraries, 62% of them concern LGBTQ issues.

It's kind of clear that what he did to make this... What he did to make this list is just like googling the words like queer and lgbtq and gay and trans like with book and just found a list of books that have it like mentioned somewhere so like a lot of the so many books are just like completely abandoned aren't even really like yeah like the the list is nearly 1000 books like long so like he was just like google searching to like add as many books to this list as he could possibly find.

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

Yeah. Equal rights. We the students. Supreme Court cases for and about students. Yeah. I mean, this is, my support for LGBTQ people

is warring here with my belief that children should not know their rights because they're getting too uppity as it is. We gotta crack. Look, could we crack down on kids in a way that isn't bigoted?

That's all I'm asking for. Nope. Nope. Absolutely impossible. We got to slow them down. No, no. Kids, you must know your rights. And the very important thing here

is that if you keep weed in your locker, the school can just search it. So don't put it in your locker. If you put it in your car, it's way harder for them to search it even if the car is in the principal's car store guns that wait okay sorry let's um let's yeah i'm not sure if you can find that in the legal ads list of the united states but to be fair texas kids can't read that book either now so who knows who knows what it says yeah so so two Virginia School Board members kind of called for sexual books, quote unquote sexual books, to be burned at a meeting last year.

And a lot of these, like a lot of the rhetoric around like book burnings and book bannings was specifically tied to the kind of the effort to harass and gain support in school boards. harass and gain support in school boards. We saw this last year with like Proud Boys and extremists and just like other like random people who got their brains kind of warped by propaganda, kind of leading these like incendiary charges against school board members. Some, you know, school board members got fired, like threatened with arrest

just for allowing books that mentioned the existence of being queer. It was quite a problem that is now influencing this current legislative cycle. In almost every case, quote-unquote, like, concerned parents have swarmed school board meetings and flooded kind of mailboxes with outrage over what they call pornography being distributed to their children. pornography um being distributed to their children uh you know people will will plaster signs with you know scenes from the genderqueer graphic novel that is like what they they they deem as being like porno like pornographic um when it just depicts like how how like adults

and young adults behave accurately just like you can find in any like fucking like batman comic like it's not like it's it's like it's like not it's it's it's it's both in line with other comic books and also like it's obviously dealing with like issues around being queer as like that's the whole point of it so but yeah just blasting this blasting like queerness as innately pornographic is you know a big a big part of this type of propaganda push. It's, it's, it's pretty upsetting because I mean, a lot of these adults and like quote unquote parents, you know, who knows if they're actually parents, you know, it even goes and stuff to being like, you know, they're accusing librarians and teachers of being pedophiles for having this for having these type of materials in Wyoming. Prosecutors considered charging library staff with stalking books about sexuality, including like literary classics under like the sex ed banner, like sex is a funny word and this book is gay. But yeah, considered charging library staff like with crimes for for stalking these books, which are like very typical sex ed books.

It's it's incredible because when I was in a Texas public school, I read all of the Wheel of Time books from my school library. And those are horny in a much, much more unhealthy way than any of the books that you're talking about could possibly be described as. Well, you get that you get this fun thing where it's like they're basically running the clock back on the TERF arc. Like if you remember when we were talking about the TERFs in Mexico, it was – okay, so the arc that they did was they were anti-porn people, but then they lost the anti-porn wars. So they became anti-trafficking people. And then when sort of TERFism came back, they went from anti-trafficking back to being TERFs.

And it's like this is literally – they're doing this whole thing in reverse right they're starting position is that they're anti-trans and they're just going back to like the anti-porn stuff but like bringing in like bringing in an anti-trafficking angle and it's it's great it's extremely fun yeah this is i would describe this as fun this is what i consider a fun time yeah well i know what you consider a fun time. Yeah. Well, I know what you consider a fun time, Garrison. Okay. You do notice my carefully placed books on my bookshelf. I'm extremely aware of that, Garrison.

Garrison is reading books that will get them canceled by like five specific people. By five people? If we talk about them too much on this show. That is always the fear of Twitter. It's being canceled by five people. My favorite thing about doing a podcast for an audience of millions, Garrison, is telling a joke that is precisely for you and me. And then making that like several minutes of content. Sorry. Anoma bill was introduced

to the state senate that would prohibit school libraries from uh keeping books that focus on sexual activity sexual identity or gender identity um you know we're gonna use the word gender identity a lot that kind of just refers to anything that even i mean like it refers to even mentions of being cisgender right because if you bring up the concept of cisgender that infers that there is an alternative to that so it's so like even any if anything even mentions being cis that means that there must be something other so that already falls into the gender identity kind of framework so it's just like anything that suggests that you are that you that there is like gender identity is not something you are innately born with and are forever is banned and is seen as pornographic or obscene or as grooming children or whatever kind of words that they use.

And all of this rhetoric is much worse forq authors who are black or people of color there's books like all boys aren't blue by writer george m johnson whose whose book led one white school board member to call the police on uh her own district's librarian for keeping it in stock it's uh the the central york school district in pennsy in Pennsylvania banned an extensive list of books last year that was almost entirely written by authors of color. critical race theory. It's just about the suggestion that maybe racism is something that is not just an individual problem, but is maybe kind of built into our entire culture and

system of governance and education. So it's not actual critical race theory. It's that. But I think everyone listening to this kind of already knows that. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who's going to be a recurring character on this episode, kind of has taken this whole, you know, calling the police on librarians thing much further, kind of demanding that the state's education agency, quote, investigate any criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of pornography, a move that kind of librarians in the state fear could make them targets of

criminal complaints for, again, stalking books about sex ed or, you know, stalking books that not even about like sex ed, just like books that mention an alternative to the heteronormative, like you are the gender that you are signed at birth, like idea, like anything other than that is now could get them in trouble. So anything that doesn't kind of fall under the Christian supremacist worldview of sexuality and gender. It's not great. It's, so,

yeah, All Boys Aren't Blue, the book written by George M. Johnson, has been similar to the genderqueer graphic novel. It's one of the most banned books of last year, targeted for removal in at least 15 states um it's a lot of the organizing of these efforts kind of start online there's like telegram channels facebook groups and they carry over into like school board protests and then eventually like you know maybe some school board members will

will catch on to this and start advocating for it then you know the state governor does you know the city city council. All of this thing is this whole cycle of organizing that's really picked up alongside the anti-CRT stuff. Many parents have seen Google Docs or spreadsheets, like the 16-page one made by Matt Krause, of contentious titles posted on Facebook by local chapters of organizations such as Mamas for Liberty. So people will make these giant spread streets talking about books that they don't like, and then it'll get shared around on Facebook groups, Telegram channels.

From there, librarians say that parents will ask their schools if these books are available inside libraries, and then we'll start rallying and organizing to get them banned from being available in any kind of public public government setting whether that be school libraries whether it be like public libraries whether that be like online access all this type

of stuff so yeah it's uh it's i don't know it's organizing against these types of things is never the easiest thing um because a lot of times they these people get really get really dedicated onto this because it is such a it's it's it's the whole save the children kind of idea which gave QAnon such

strength and QAnon is kind of taking a dip down this stuff is taking a rise up it's kind of it a dip down. This stuff is taking a rise up. It's kind of passing over the same type of organizing principles online. As mentioned before, the governor of South Carolina asked the state superintendent of education, but also its law enforcement division, to investigate the presence of, quote, obscene and pornographic materials from its public schools. Citing the gendered queer graphic novel as an example. You've seen mayors in different cities withhold funding from county libraries,

saying that he will not release money to these county library systems until books with LGBTQ themes are removed. It's pretty grim. So far, efforts to bring criminal charges against librarians and educators have largely faltered, as law enforcement officials in Florida and Wyoming and other states where this type of thing has been attempted have found really no basis for criminal investigations. uh but still it's like the same thing for like even even if this process gets started it's about building like fear that it could happen to you it's about you know this fear that someone's always watching and someone's always wanting to report you um and it's the thing that like happened with texas and abortion it's like trying to have like the bounty hunter idea be like parents are trying to find examples of this to report it. So then it's like this like proactive kind of surveillance of anything that doesn't fall into the Christian supremacist idea of gender and sexuality. It's, you know, now, of course, that's like a specific interpretation of Christianity. I'm not saying all Christianity is like that, but it is one of the bigger strains of that type of kind of religious and politic synthesis.

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

and grooming and all this kind of nonsense is enough to get many educators to censor themselves by just not stocking these books to begin with to avoid that whole kind of debacle. Because even just the public spectacle of an accusation can be enough to ruin someone's life inside a small community, right? It's if you know parents, if you know kids, and this is part of your social group, it's part of wherever you're situated in your community. If this type of thing starts up,

it can really be devastating to someone's personal life. And obviously, this is very ironic because all these same people who are trying to get these books banned are also crying and scream about like censorship and cancel culture while literally advocating the burning of comic books. And even like fucking like advocating the burning of know your rights books. So it's like, yes,

they will cry and scream about cancel culture, but they will do all of this stuff as well. It's not, it's like, yes, they will cry and scream about cancel culture, but they will do all of this stuff as well. There is no ideological consistency. They're not trying to. That's not part of the point. Because it's not even hypocrisy in their own eyes, because all of this is for the greater good. It's about protecting the innocence of children. You'll notice that a lot of these bills and efforts try to not explicitly attack books for being gay or queer. Instead, they will label them as pornographic or obscene.

Obviously, many books that conservatives will defend have just as graphic depictions of intimacy or anatomy, but usually heterosexual in nature, and alongside other kind of values that the right wants to push. You know, even like the

fucking Bible is more graphic than the genderqueer graphic novel. But when conservatives say pornography, what they just mean is any display of queerness, right? Anything outside the mold of the fundamentalist Christian supremacist worldview that they're fighting for.

Just like when they say ban critical race theory, they don't actually mean that. What they mean is ban any discussion on racism that kind of disrupts white comfort. They have their own framework to view this, and they can justify it within their own framework.

So, you know, it should not surprise anyone that many of these queer book bannings are being organized alongside bans on books focusing on race and racism. Matt Cross's 16-page spreadsheet was made to accompany House Bill 3979, the so-called anti-CRT bill that bans teaching of any materials, that could mean, quote, an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex. So just banning teaching of things

that could make a theoretical person kind of uncomfortable, which seems like a great way to view education. Yeah, let's just skip over the parts that are uncomfortable, and that'll make a great society. Wow. So I'm going to quote from a great article by Samantha Rydell in them.com. Quote,

Small wonder, then, that much of the current fervor can be traced back to the conservative group No Left Turn, founded in 2020 to ban books about racial inequality from classrooms by Alina Fischbein. And Alina Fischbein believes that Antifa children, quote, quote, Antifa children are going to assault her kids for being white. The organization No Left Turn rocketed to prominence in the anti-education right wing after Fischbein was interviewed by Tucker Carlson on Fox News. A title which similarly lifted like minded boats such as Moms for Liberty. No Left Turn's website directs parents to a laundry list of books that they claim are used to, quote,

indoctrinate kids into a dangerous ideology, including a robust selection on, quote, comprehensive sexual education. Here, the pornography lie is laid bare with over 40 books whose only kind of through line is that they deal with LGBTQ themes. The picture book, I Am Jazz, Kate Bornstein's my gender workbook and the ya novel two boys kissing also included as margaret

atwood's the hand the handmaid's tale uh no left turn indiscriminately targets all these titles because they simply feature queer people having lives or in the case of like margaret atwood having their lives be ended. So after all, ideas like that might influence kids to think that they could be different, right? And for conservative parents, there's no greater horror than the thought of not being able to control their children, or the idea that their kids might not be straight. It should come as no surprise that the grassroots campaigns, quote unquote grassroots campaigns, like a no left turn, are in reality linked to influential conservative donors and PACs like the Cato Institute and the former Federalist Society. Pardon?

Cato. Yes. Cato. Yes. Like the Cato Institute. It's named after Cato Kaelin, the guy who lived behind OJ's house. Is that true? No, it's me.

I was like, what? I should have just let that... I should have just... God damn it. That should have been Garrison's one line. He was going to slightly expand my red string inside... My red string bored inside my head. You're like, what? Oh yeah, the Kato Institute named after Kato Kaelin, the guy

who... OJ's surfer bro buddy. But it should come as no surprise that the grassroots quote unquote grassroots campaigns like No Left Turn are in reality linked to influential conservative donors and PACs like the Cato Institute and former Federalist Society Vice President Leonard Leo. But then again, lies don't matter to the reactionary base that Republicans are hoping to rally to the front of this culture war. What matters to them is controlling the information that children have access to, to ostensibly keep them safe and innocent. But in truth, because they think that if kids don't know about LGBTQ identities, they won't form one. It's conversion therapy by ignorance. End quote. But that's an idea I'm going to kind of come back to a few times

throughout the course of this episode, is the idea of conversion therapy by ignorance, which really does kind of, I think, introduce a really good mental framework to understand why these things are happening. Because they think if they can keep kids from learning about these things, then they won't become gay or trans. It is like trying to isolate them

so that their reality tunnel is so small so that they won't, hopefully will never like break out of it. Now, obviously, if kids feel, if kids start having feelings that break that channel, if they don't know that there's an alternative to that,

that really kind of leads to things like depression and suicide which is why it's so high among queer kids in that region because it's like they're fundamentally breaking reality so that's hard to cope with we're just going to do

kind of one more segment quickly before we have an ad break it's interesting we have like a lot of the parents that have been rallying for this have some interesting track records themselves. We can even go back to the Family Research Council

with Josh Duggar having the Save the Children idea while himself being a child molester. Or help Lily Cade. Serial rapist. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in a sickeningly ironic case, a Missouri parent

named Ryan Utterback was charged in December with multiple counts of child molestation and giving and distributing pornography to minors including a child as young as four. Upon his arrest Utterback was heavily involved in the book banning advocacy including protests against the books uh all boys aren't blue and uh and other

sex ed books um he he said he he gave a quote before he got arrested and when he was still doing like the book banning advocacy quote only i have the intimate understanding of what is and isn't appropriate for my children uh which is quite quite the quite sentence to say on someone who is now arrested for child molestation so yeah that's not yeah that's uh that sucks but yeah so like it's it's the idea that erasing erasing documentation of queer lives and making it so that so that people their kids only are exposed to a very kind of isolated worldview will make it easier to control um and if they don't hear about something maybe they'll just you know live their life as a regular straight child and that's that's their hope now obviously that doesn't that doesn't really happen in practice but that's kind of what they're working towards that's why the save the

children thing is so important to them because they really do think that they can save the children they like they they do think that they can keep keep them from this stuff so i i think there's one other reason that they're doing that specifically they focus on books too and specifically the the pornographic attack which is that the the these kind of like incredible hard right evangelicals are not the entire republican base and so like there are people who they have to convince like they have to fully radicalize into like into the extermination of queer people and specifically the extermination of trans people and the like the easiest way to do that is just by constantly associating anything queer with pedophilia and with specifically pedophilia and specifically grooming.

And these kind of campaigns, it's like they have dual effect. They have the effect on the one hand of the actual material harm to children and they're preventing them from having any access to anything that shows them that they could be queer and then simultaneously it has this effect of of creating this association inside of conservatives that allows you to push for even more genocidal stuff that without this they might not have been able to swallow yeah well speaking of genocidal actions i'm sure that one of our sponsors have contributed to at least one attempt to genocide. Oh, I mean, we are actually entirely sponsored this week by the former Indonesian dictator Suharto. So, you know, big, big thank yous to him. Pankasila forever.

And yeah, here's some ads. Ah, we're back. Don't Google what Sukarno did in West Papua. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Suharto and Sukarno, different guys. Totally different guys. Yeah, I am very clear on this, and that's why you should not Google what Sukarno did in Papua,

because dear God. But we will put his Patreon in the description. Yeah, we will be backing his Patreon heavily. Look at the show notes for that. Hi, welcome back. We're going to segue into other types of legislation now, but still kind of focusing on the whole parents' rights to decide what scientific and medical knowledge children can have access to in terms of the conversion therapy by ignorance category. So we're going to talk about the Don't Say Gay Bill.

So Florida's House and Senate just passed the so-called Don't Say Gay Bill that Vance mentioned of anything other than the strict heteronormativity and the you are the gender assigned at birth kind of idea. For at least most elementary school, it's banned, and possibly farther reaching than that, with teachers also opening themselves up to lawsuits if they fail to comply. It's formally known as the Parental Rights in Education Bill, and the text of the legislation states that, quote, bill and the text of the legislation states that quote classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through

third grade or in any manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards so it it is it is very intentionally vague for how far-reaching this can be for how much they will determine what and what isn't appropriate for grades 4 and up. Who knows? Yeah, but it's not just limited to early grades. identity could be prohibited or at least taken to court at all grade levels uh depending on what the parents find unacceptable right it is it's it's based on what the parents want to want to happen to to to the kids that are under their care so it's it's specifically following kind of the the framework that yeah you can you can report something if you don't like it.

So it's very much pandering to like a reactionary conservative. Yeah, all this stuff that conservatives said was a nightmare about like the Stasi in East Germany and the KGB. They're like, but what if we just decentralized that, you know, and and let anyone who's a bigot report and ruin the lives of people around them for a variety of bullshit reasons. It's good. Yeah, it's just like other states, like in Texas,

the enforcement of it is not initially done by the government, but is open to a concerned fanatical public, saying that parents may bring action against a school district to obtain a declaratory judgment, and a court may award damages and attorney's fees if it finds the school violated the measure. So there's like financial incentives for parents for this. The bill will come into effect on the 1st of July,

with all school districts required to update their policies by at least June 2023, there was also a proposed amendment that would have required schools and educators to report if they knew or suspected a child was LGBTQ to their parents within six weeks of learning that. So within six weeks of learning, if they're not cis or straight, they would have to be reported to the parents. But that that part was withdrawn before the bill reached the House. But in terms of like this is the type of thing that this that like the legislators are thinking of. When it became increasingly apparent that the bill was going to be passed, no matter what, a Democrat, Chevron Jones, the first openly gay Florida state senator, Democrat Chevron Jones, the first openly gay Florida state senator, tried to amend the bill to narrow the language to say that in-classroom instruction should not be intended to change a student's sexual orientation or gender identity, and specifically not marginalize queer people, and instead just limit the bill to age-appropriate sex ed. And that amendment obviously failed, with Dennis Backley, the bill's main sponsor, saying that it would significantly gut the bill's intent. So it's specifically to suppress knowledge of being queer.

That is the whole point of the bill. The governor claims that the bill addresses, quote, sexual stuff and, quote, telling kids that they may be able to pick genders and all that. kids that they may be able to pick genders and all that saying that that has nothing to do this has nothing to do with sex at all literally nothing but nothing

they still view it like the pornographic obscene kind of category it's the same thing if you show gay people kissing that is sexual if you show straight people kissing that isn sexual if you show straight people kissing that isn't right it's being queer is innately more obscene

it is so much more of an issue Ron DeSantis governor also said like how many parents want their kindergartners to have transgenderism or something injected into their school discussion so that's the type of stuff he says at like press conferences and stuff so yeah it is it is very clear that the bill is targeted

specifically towards gay people um and being trans or being queer being non-cis non-straight that whole that that whole category um the governor's press secretary called it the anti-grooming bill um you know reviving the type of like you know rhetoric that lgbt attacks have had for years suggesting that you know being gay means that you are a pedophile or being trans means that you're a pedophile yeah it ties in with this thing you'll see in like the far right the libertarian right where people who have like kill your local pedophile bumper stickers and stuff because you can't argue with like yeah yeah, pedophiles are are the worst. That's horrible.

But you don't actually mean people who molest children. You mean people who live in a way that you consider obscene, which you are equating with pedophilia so that you can justify murdering those people eventually. Yep. Yeah. And when and when confronted with actual pedophiles, they literally don't do shit. Well, they are like Andy Ngo, for a great example, has regularly hung out around a specific I think Amos Lee is his name. Pedophile longest serving Republican speaker of the House was a pedophile on a massive scale.

Didn't it? Didn't his haster de hast do hast. That's what that that's what that what's that German band? This would have been a decent joke if I remember their name right away. Rammstein. Yeah. Well, I fucked it up. OK, so anyway, please, please continue. So, yeah, but like the don't say gay bill tries even less than some of the like school

book bands to hide behind the defense of prohibiting pornography. Like it just says the quiet part out loud, you know, saying that this bill is grounded in the belief. We're not going to say the loud part out loud yeah yeah i mean like the the bill's just grounded in the belief that lgbtq people simply by existing are a threat to like children and must be completely erased like that's that's the whole that's the whole idea following several hours of debate ahead of the vote in the senate of a bill sponsor, Alana Garcia, claimed that, quote, gay is not a permanent thing and LGBTQ is not a permanent thing. So, yeah, it's the type of like conversion therapy by ignorance thing. A lot of these people have advocated for conversion therapy to be legalized in the past or re-legalized in the past.

So, yeah, they just they just don't want gay people to be around because they find the mickey so it's it's not it's not just florida though right the the fears with like hyper focusing on you know just just just don't say gay bill in florida kind of like you know it it ignores a lot of the other stuff that's happening across the entire country if you're just focusing on one state. There are like 15 similar bills moving through state legislators that restrict how textbooks and curriculums are allowed to teach LGBTQ topics. And even like who can be hired as teachers and what's allowed to be said when it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation. Stuff's happening all across the country. Stuff is happening all across the country. A House bill in Tennessee would ban textbook and instructional materials that promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender lifestyles, quote unquote, in K-12 schools, so also high school. In Kansas, there's a bill that seeks to amend the state's obscenity laws to make using classroom materials depicting homosexuality a Class B misdemeanor. Legislators in Indiana are working to bar educators from discussing any content about sexual orientation, quote, transgenderism, or gender identity without permission from parents.

gender identity without permission from parents. In Oklahoma, there's a Senate bill that would ban public schools from employing anyone who quote, promotes positions in the classroom or any or any function of the public school that is in opposition to the closely held religious beliefs of students. So that's that's interesting framing there. Yeah. And again, we need to be very clear about this when like when these people say deeply hard religious beliefs, they mean fundamentalist Christianity. These people are very specifically attempting to turn the state into a Christian ethnostate, and this is the shit, which is an LGBTQ suicide prevention and crisis intervention group. And they did a recent report finding that LGBTQ youth who learn about LGBTQ people or LGBTQ issues in the school have a 23% lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the past year.

So just the knowledge that there is an alternative is like life-changing for people, right? The ability to realize that there are other reality tunnels can save people's lives. It is...

I watched this happen. My public school... I was in a public school, but I was in public school in a really conservative area the only time anyone even mentioned being gay was screaming about gay marriage and like we fucking saw some shit like a lot of extremely bad things happened to the queer kids there including me like it yep like this this stuff kills people it's of hurts people it is i think that's something brutal that people in in more blue states don't quite understand, is how absolute this type of thing is. Living in these communities, how narrow your version of reality is, how everything you're exposed to is so hyper-focused that even knowledge of an alternative can be so mind-blowing that it really is important to have at least this to be knowledgeable

because yeah a lot of people who you know a lot of people may not have access to the internet in the same way it's like a lot of these groups especially like especially like Christian groups specifically have like like you know services that you can buy to like suppress websites on your Wi-Fi routers so that only you're only available to access

like certain websites. It is a whole effort to restrict the reality that kids are exposed to to kind of railroad them into this hyper-specific kind of heteronormative idea of existence. So yeah, any type of thing that breaks these kids out of

these reality tunnels can be life-changing, which is why they're trying to ban all these books at libraries. Because yeah, even if you block websites, even if you restrict internet access, even if you restrict what can be taught in schools, there's the fear of what if a kid goes to a library and finds a book about being gay? Then, oh, wow, that would undo all of the effort, undo the thousands of dollars we spend on blocking internet access to

websites. So that's why they're talking about libraries and stuff. Because yeah, if they find out about this stuff anywhere, then they're going to be in trouble. It's the whole point of isolating people and isolating what they view as possible. So, yeah.

We're not going to talk about some... We're going to talk money, money, money, money. The other thing that the Don't Say Gay bill has highlighted is the extent to which big businesses and corporate America is financially funding many of these recent efforts to hack away at queer rights. This has kind of been like a back and forth thing, though, especially if you look back at the past few years under the Trump era. Let's take the 2016 North Carolina bathroom bill, for example, arguably the opening act for the current onslaught of socially conservative legislation targeting trans people. Remember, this was like right after the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. So this is when the needle starts to shift towards trans people. starts to shift towards trans people.

This is the bill that said that you have to use the bathroom assigned at matching the gender you were assigned at, birth certificate, all this kind of stuff. Putting, again, unspoken bigotry, unspoken stuff. You know, you could be arrested or harassed for doing this previously, but it's like putting this type of idea into

concrete law, right? Once progress starts, there's this like backpedaling so they you know they put they put that they put what was once like unspoken bigotry and just like obvious bigotry into actual written law um it's like make making it concrete so during the 2016 bathroom bill kind of whole thing in north carolina um we saw corporations trying to stay conscious of culture shifts, attempting to stay on the sympathetic side of the rising generations who would become their future employees and customers, trying to appeal to them and keeping that in mind.

So in the aftermath of the passage of the Baskin-Bell, multiple companies like PayPal, Adidas, Deutsche Bank, all rescinded plans to invest in the state deutsche bank's wild too like oh i mean if there's if there's evil going on deutsche bank is providing money to make it yeah it's it's it's it's stunning like how bad you have to be that deutsche bank is like no i would like like every every person who's like i don't think they've pulled out of russia yet like no like deutsche bank like i've pulled out of Russia yet. Like, no, like Deutsche Bank. Like, I've heard before. Like, I knew someone who worked there who two of his co-workers, like, started, like, doing audits of their accounts.

And both of them wound up dead in their hotel rooms, non-extradition countries. Yeah, that scans. Yeah. Like, even so. Okay. So, yeah, Deutsche Bank initially said they weren't going to pull out of Russia. But, like, two days ago, as we record this, started pulling out. Okay. But they pulled out of North Carolina.

They pulled out of North Carolina? Jesus Christ. Big, big, big. You know, there's a degree to which it's probably just like that Raytheon energy where it's like, Raytheon, we're great with trans people. Exactly. If you're making missiles, then you're fine. Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, big musical artists like Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, and a former REM member, Ringo Starr, canceled concerts there. Did you call Ringo Starr a member of REM, Garrison? The NCAA announced that it would not host championship tournaments. Okay. Okay. Okay.

If you'd lived through the 90s, you would never make fun of Michael Stipe again. And the National Basketball Association pulled its all-star game from Charlotte. Almost 70 companies joined in a lawsuit against the bill. And, you know, money talks, the pressure worked, the state repealed the law in 2017. The same year, a broad coalition of business leaders in Texas blocked a similar bill pushed by the staunchly conservative then Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. And we've seen the same type of thing happen in Georgia the past few years, with actions like corporate boycotts, many large employers pushing back on the succession of socially conservative bills, including racist voting restrictions, six-week abortion bans, and, quote, religious freedom bills that would give businesses protection to refuse customers or hire employees that are queer.

refuse customers or hire employees that are queer um prominent in that resistance was a disney which cast a long shadow over georgia's economy uh via its uh filming of marvel movies inside atlanta yeah so yeah across many states big corporate brands were quick to condemn obviously bigoted political moves um prominent tennessee employers like Nissan, Dell, Amazon, and Vanderbilt University sent a letter last year opposing a suite of bills targeting LGBTQ rights. And similarly, a group of Texas business leaders declared opposition to Governor Greg Abbott's recent directive to investigate parents and others who provide transition treatment for transgender youth. But after Trump got out of office, and particularly during this recent round of attacks on queer rights, companies have not really been backing up their words with any equivalent actions.

After Tennessee last year passed all the bills that targeted LGBTQ rights, Last year passed all the bills that targeted LGBTQ rights, including measures restricting classroom discussion, barring trans girls from any high school sports, and its own version of the bathroom bill. It faced nothing like the North Carolina boycotts. There was just nothing because this is when Biden was president now um so whether it be the anti-crt stuff voting restrictions or stripping away lgbtq rights the past year under joe biden companies have not really bothered to push back on the socially conservative bills overtaking many states it's it's they don't it's it's easier to push back but it's easier to push back on something when you know when you have a big bad in office i guess uh well and i think I think also it's the companies can see

which way the wind is blowing, right? Yeah. Like it's the same thing with grifters. When you watch people, like when you watch streamers, it's just like suddenly starting to flip their political positions. When you watch the live streamers in particular do this, when you watch them starting to flip, that's how you can tell which way the wind is blowing.

And this is really fucking scary because, you know, the way the wind is blowing right now that that these corporations are are you know drifting towards is just you know and refusing to oppose is just this exterminationism yeah i mean yeah thankfully disney got you know shouted to like we're gonna talk about it yeah okay we're getting into that. So, creators of the hit movie Song of the South was notable in their refusal to criticize the bill as it moved through the legislator under the kind of recent stuff inside Florida specifically.

But this was part of an overall pattern. The corporate response was much more muted to the go to the don't say gay bill um in florida compared to other stuff across across the country even um and this shouldn't really surprise anybody uh many of the uh republican backers of the bill in florida are actually bankrolled by the very same businesses that have done performative virtue signaling boycotts and protests under the Trump era. Disney and Disney World in Orlando is one of the state's biggest employers and an enormous economic force

inside Florida. When Disney Silence was met with pushback, Bob Chapek, the CEO, tried to kind of do damage control at first internally within the company and then for outside press. Last

Monday, I think, which was the 7th, in a memo to Disney staff, Chapek argued that the company can do more to promote tolerance quote, through the inspiring content

we produce and the welcoming culture we create and the diverse community of organizations we support. Which is funny if you know anything about the history of Disney. Also saying that the messages in their movies are more powerful than any lobbying effort, which is... Oh, wow.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good line. Which is also, you know, great. Coming from the company most famous for queer coding almost all of their villains. So sure, sure, Bob. Two days later at a shareholder meeting, Chaythack was a little more open and told shareholders that the company had privately opposed the bill. And while trying to explain why the silence and the recent legislative efforts to attack LGBTQ people,

he said that we chose not to take a public position on the bill because we felt like we could be more effective working behind the scenes, engaging directly with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. But it later came out that Chapek had only reached out to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just that morning after the bill had already passed. Yeah, we need that cat from Saga that just yells lies. Yes, lying cat, my favorite.

Definitely appreciate lying cat. Lying. Yeah, so of course course none of this satisfied anybody um and there's been increasing pushback from both within the disney company and outside um a pixar sent a letter to chapek criticizing his wishy-washy stance on the on the on the don't say gay bill and even goes on even goes on to goes on to criticize the corporation for capitalizing on pride through like a through Rainbow Mickey merchandising and stuff

saying quote it feels terrible to be part of a company that makes money from pride merch when it chooses to step back in times of our greatest need and when our rights are at risk says the Pixar letter so yeah after a few

days after the shareholder meeting, JPEG said a third time's the charm and tried again to save face, announcing the company would immediately begin supporting efforts to combat similar legislation in other states and would pause all political donations in the state pending a review

of the company's political giving, conceding that the company failed to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights. And all that is well and good if you ignore the fact that in the past two years alone, Disney has given $300,000 to politicians in Florida who voted for the Don't Say Gay bill. Disney entities donated at least $4,000 in the 2022 re-election campaigns for the bill's chief sponsors, state representative Joe Harding and state sponsor Dennis Baxley. And Disney entities also donated $50,000 to a political action committee tied to the governor, Ron DeSantis, in 2021, so just last year. So yeah, that's a lot of money yeah and i think it's worth like noting for people who like are somewhat younger which is that like there's a whole thing where

corporations pretend that they like queer people now and this is a thing that has existed for maybe a decade and the other several hundred years of capitalism are them like ruthlessly crushing queer people of all kinds. So, yeah, this is this is their normal state. Queer capitalism is like not a thing. It's a thing that exists solely to sell you sweatshirts. It's not a thing. Get that rainbow Mickey merchandise. Yeah, they they want to.

They are actively OK with funding people who want to kill you. So as I was writing this last week tonight, the show with Jonathan Oliver came out with a small piece that was covering similar ground to my writing that also included some nice background on Disney-sponsored politician and lead sponsor of they don't say gay bill that dennis baxley um so yeah apparently uh baxley has said that uh quote uh abortion is causing europeans to be replaced by immigrants disney's going back to its nazi roots right nice little white replacement lie um in 2020 he worked on bills to repeal protections for queer workers and worked to re-legalize gay conversion therapy. And in 2018, at some kind of fundraising event, he said that quote, I know some districts where there's a big infestation of homosexuals that are pushing their agenda under the screen and then trying to get more people

hired like them and set up gay adoptions and all this stuff. It's a continual fight for the values that we hold dear. Oh, boy. So brought to you, brought to you by Disney. Wow. And yeah, take it. Infestation, huh? Yeah, it's a yeah.

Take take take note of the use of the word infestation there. That kind of ties into my whole my whole like viewing, you know, queerness as a contagion kind of idea. Well, which I mean, viewing the enemy as a contagion is also older than just viewing queer people as a contagion, because it's exactly how Hitler talked about the Jews. And, you know, it goes, we can look at like some of the things the Turks would say about Armenians. It's this idea of, you know, there's no there's no middle ground with a virus. And if you turn people into a virus, then you don't have to consider a middle ground. Yep. So before we go on break, I'm going to do one more. I'm going to do a quote from an article in The Atlantic

titled, Want to Understand the Red State Onslaught? Look at Florida. It's a decent article kind of going through the financial stuff that Disney has kind of backed. But yeah, quote, why have so many companies backed away from these fights, the fights against the legislation? Some corporate lobbyists I spoke with said that one reason is that they believe the public opposition is counterproductive because more Republican elected officials in the Donald Trump era find it politically valuable to be seen as fighting big companies. Businesses also frequently complain that the widening gulf between the parties leaves them in a lose-lose position of alienating an important block of potential customers wherever they come down on policy debates. Activists, though, point out that businesses often try to have it both ways by rhetorically identifying with causes such as inclusion and diversity without taking any tangible steps to defend them.

Another factor probably looms larger than any of these considerations. However much they want to publicly align with the values of younger customers and consumers and workers, big companies want to go only so far in fighting these proposals because they still mostly prefer Republicans in control of state governments to deliver the low tax, light regulation policies that they favor. State Republicans have, in turn, have grown more overt about threatening those beliefs when business leaders raise objections to the culture war components of their agenda. When American Airlines criticized the restrictive voting bill in Texas passed last year, Lieutenant Governor Patrick openly threatened to kill other legislation the company had cared about.

So yeah, obviously companies want Republicans to be in charge because it will make it easier to run their big giant corporate businesses that basically are as powerful as a lot of other like government entities uh so yeah they're gonna spend fifty fifty thousand dollars supporting ron desantis they're gonna spend three hundred thousand dollars in the past the past two years we're supporting all these Republican candidates that voted for the Don't Say Gay bill because that makes them more profit in the long run. And that's, you know, if you're running a business, that's what they want. So, yep, that is, we're going to take another ad break and then we will come back to talk about Texas and bathroom bills and care and all of the other kind of stuff that's happened in recent weeks. Hot.

Yeah. Hello, we are back. Sorry, I was taking some time to listen to my favorite Ringo Starr R.E.M. album in the break. In between reading books by d***. It's a really good combo of a media how how dare you not the not properly appreciating michael stipe the the voice of several generations michael stiper michael stipe yeah so he was uh i mean yeah i, I really like the Black Keys. So anyway, I'm going to make more bad music jokes or I could continue my script.

Yeah, please continue. We don't have to talk about all of the wonderful contributions your generation has made to music. Like U2 with Hit, like U2. Famous Zoomer band U2. With hit hit man George Harrison. Yep. Gonna make a lot of people happy, Garrison. A lot of people real happy. At least 31 states have introduced bills

that would ban trans athletes from competing in sports that correspond to their gender identities. Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee have already signed such bills into law. At the start of this year year new restrictions were put into place in Texas to also restrict what K-12 school sports

people can be on now making them specifically match their sex listed on their birth certificate at or near time of birth and even when there are states who don't just have blanket bans, there's other horrifying things happening. Like in the beginning of last February,

it came out that the Utah Republicans are making, have proposed a commission to analyze the bodies of trans kids that would determine student-athlete eligibility on a case-by-case basis with having the authority to establish a baseline range for physical characteristics affected by puberty, banning school athletes who do not fall within these established limits from participating in gendered sports.

Also, a fun side bit about the bill is that in their efforts to analyze the bodies of trans kids, uh, the bill would also remember the commission immune from any lawsuit with respect to all acts done and actions taken in good faith in carrying out their purposes. Um, yeah.

And this, this is something that I think is, is really common specifically with transphobia, which is that like all of the rhetoric about transphobia is about sort of like like a huge amount of it's about molestation here's about amount amount of it's about pedophilia and then i mean specifically with the molestation part it's like yeah okay so we're gonna have this council right we're gonna have we're gonna have this fucking commission these people are gonna they're they're going to just like they're going to molest these kids right but like this this is

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

they don't actually mean. It's all about the culture war. It's all about all the fucking, like, Save the Children stuff. It's all an op so that they can get elected into politics, right? We'll talk about this with, like, the Texas thing. How all of the big new Texas stuff happened, like, days before the primary election

because they were being challenged by other politicians that were farther to the right of them. So it's all like a political ploy, but the problem is that at certain points because of how long the culture war kind of idea has been going, there's people who

sincerely bought into the idea of the culture war now themselves running for office. So it is like they do actually genuinely office. So like, it is like, they do actually genuinely believe the things now. It is, it is like a, it is like a full circle thing of things that were just,

you know, just to get votes initially, like things that weren't really believed sincerely, just, just to hold votes. But now people who were brought up in that whole political idea are, are starting to run for office who do actually believe those in those things sincerely so now it's it's leading leading to a whole new kind of onslaught of rights because

these people have just escalated and accelerated the whole culture war idea yeah well and the other thing is like they've linked up with people who like people whose politics is the church or people whose politics have specifically been about eliminating trans people for like half a century right like there's there's the the linkages that are being formed between people who have sort of like you know between these like militantly anti-trans organizations in between sort of these people who buy into this like uh either who are very who either who are cynically deploying the sort of the sort of christian supremacist rhetoric or the people who are just actual like christian fascists right like these people like these people are joining together to the point where it doesn't it doesn't really matter why they're doing it okay at a certain point there's that like the reason why specifically they're doing it becomes immaterial and you're just sort of left with the things that they are doing yeah it's i mean and there's just been so much of it the past

the past year specifically like yeah over like overall more than 100 bills uh designed to restrict the rights of transgender of transgender people have been introduced in at least 33 states in just in just in 2021, which is like, it's become a record-breaking year for any kind of anti-trans legislation. It's just, it has accelerated to such an extreme degree and now continuing in the 2022 legislative cycle. Last spring in Arkansas,

the state legislator banned gender-affirming care for minors, including, you know, puberty blockers, HRT, all this stuff. You know, House Bill 1570 prevents trans people from receiving hormone therapy, puberty blockers, similar treatments.

It was called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act, you know, referring to medical treatment as experimentation. And shortly after the bill was signed into law, the doctors who ran the largest provider of hormone therapy in the state reported an increase in suicide attempts in their patients during just that same month. It was the first of its kind bill signed into law, and it was initially vetoed by the governor, but then that veto was overturned by the state legislator. And similar laws have been happening in states ever since then. have been happening in states ever since then.

We're now going to talk about Texas because that's one of the biggest kind of things in this whole fight is the stuff around Texas. So Texas officials have begun investigating parents of transgender adolescents for possible child abuse according to a lawsuit filed a few weeks ago after Governor Greg Abbott directed the Child Protective Services Agency in Texas to handle certain medical treatments,

including puberty blockers and HRT, as possible crimes. The directive from Governor Abbott was following a non-binding opinion by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, saying that parents who provide their transgender teenagers with doctor-prescribed care could be investigated for child abuse. So the moves by both Abbott and Paxton, which are two Republican incumbents, came just days before the primary

election, in which each of them faced significant challenges from farther right opponents. So they've both faced criticism from not being staunchly anti-trans enough in the past, like in the months prior to this.

And they did this to hopefully gain support from the more radical voters in Texas. That's like that is that is undoubtedly a big, a big, a big part of why this happened at the time that it did. They did the same thing. Both Paxton. Well, let's just say Paxton.

But Abbott did basically the same thing with like masks. Yeah. In the last year or two where it's like yeah you know i mean it's great because these people are just they will literally kill thousands of people in order to just hold on to their power and it's um among to be the first people investigated uh for child abuse was actually an employee by the state's protective services agency who had a 16 yearyear-old transgender child. On March 1st, the ACLU of Texas and Lambda Legal, great, great name,

went to state court in Austin to try to stop this inquiry into this family, who, again, who worked for the Child Protective Services Agency. The employee, who was not named in the court filing, works on reviews of reports of abuse and neglect. She was placed on administrative leave a few weeks ago, according to the filing. The Friday after Governor Abbott made the initial kind of letter,

she was visited by an investigator from the agency who was also seeking medical records related to her child. The family of the child identified in court documents only as Mary Doe has refused to voluntarily turn over records and is taking the case to court. According to the lawsuit, the state investigator told parents that the only allegation against them was that their transgender daughter may have been provided with gender affirming health care and was currently transitioning and that was that was the claims that was that was the basis for the claims of of of of child abuse it's uh so like initially it wasn't clear if abbott's order would survive kind of judicial scrutiny because the order does not any the order doesn't change any

texas law um it's just it's just an opinion piece and several county attorneys and district attorneys of dallas and houston have publicly condemned abbott's and paxton's directives clarifying that they would not prosecute families for child abuse under the new definition and they would not irrationally and unjustifiably interfere with medical decisions. The mayor of Austin announced that Austin should be considered a safe place, a sanctuary for transgender children and their families, and that they would not be enforcing the governor's mandate.

So it's quite a time to be alive, to have sanctuary cities for being trans. Yep. And of course, all of these things, whether it be from the DAs or the mayor, that doesn't stop Child Protective Services from not investigating you. They can still investigate and harass you. They can still send agents to your door. They can still try to seize

medical records. They can still investigate claims, even if the DA won't prosecute. There's still that massive looming threat of terror holding over people's heads. prosecute there's still that massive like looming threat of and like that like terror like holding over you know uh people's heads um you know it's it's it's a it is like a mass it's a massive scare tactic right it is it is to terrorize people like but they'll be too scared to transition because

they don't want their family to get in trouble it's it's pretty grim it's pretty it's pretty grim. It's pretty evil. So for the ACLU and the Lambda legal court filing, they're seeking to block the request for medical records from the employee's case and more broadly kind of challenge the legitimacy of the entire investigation and the power that the government has to change this definition of child abuse. It's because it's also important to mention that the mandatory reporting aspect of the

bill, which was, well, not bill, of the legal opinion that was really emphasized in Governor Abbott's directive. Abbott described in his letter that the order would mean that all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children, including doctors, nurses, therapists, and even school teachers, would be required to report to state authorities if they believe that there is a minor who is trans or could be receiving any kind of gender-affirming treatment. And if they don't report this, they could themselves face criminal penalties. And if they don't report this, they could themselves face criminal penalties. So the whole mandatory reporting aspect is another insanely bad thing that we could talk about for a long time. But this episode is getting long enough, so we're just going to continue through and we can ponder at how bad that is.

One parent of a transgender teenager in Houston said that the family's health clinic, Legacy Community Health, had suspended all refills and new prescriptions for transgender youth in light of Abbott's new order. So it's happening. Like, yeah, the stuff has happened. The stuff has started. It's already scaring people into not doing stuff.

Like, it's... It's doing what it was designed to do. Yeah and and i and i know we keep making this episode longer but like it is worth mentioning that like it actually like having someone even temporarily like being off of the hormones that they've been taking for for hrt like that fucking sucks yeah it's like it has really bad negative effects i mean yeah like people will be surprised how fast hormones start working and how fast going off of them they stop working like it is it is it is pretty it is pretty surprising and like i didn't want to get tons into like the science of being trans in this because that's because that's not the focus of this week we're talking about the legislation and the onslaught of queer rights of

people trying to hurt them. It's obvious that there is not many cases at all where there's being genital surgery done on minors. That does not happen. It can happen for medically necessary reasons. If there's accidents and stuff

but that doesn't happen for gender affirming care. What happens is you get on you go on puberty blockers which are already prescribed to cisgender kids all the time um if they have early onset puberty they have no lasting side effects they're completely safe um and in some cases depending on the kid's therapist and their doctors they may be prescribed hrt or they'll be prescribed that a bit later but that is that even still that is that even still, that is, that is really the only things that happen.

And what they're really trying to suppress is both, both of like those things, but also like the ability for like therapists to even talk about gender with kids. Like if kids are having problems with like, with gender dysphoria, they don't feel comfortable to even have to not even be able to talk to that, to talk, talk about those feelings with therapists is like part is part of the goal because that can be considered

gender affirming care. I think that there's one other thing we really should mention which is that there is one kind well there's a few but there's a very important kind of like quote on quote like gender surgery that is done on children which is the stuff that's done to

intersex kids. Also like circumcisions are already done on children which is the stuff that's done to intersex kids and yes i mean intersex kids yeah they like also like circumcisions are already like yeah yeah yeah but i mean with with specific with intersex kids this stuff matters because all of these bills that you're talking about where it's like oh you can't uh have gender affirming surgery you can't have like surgery on kids like every single one of these bills like they all have they all specifically have carve outs to allow doctors to fuck up uh the generals of intersex kids yeah yeah it that that's it's all carved out there so yeah well let's see we we are we are near the last we are we're near near the last little stretch here um on march 11th a texas state court uh halted the new department of family protective

services policy of investigating the parents of transgender children. District District Judge Amy Mencham concluded on concluded the hearing on the requested statewide injunction by saying, quote, the governor's directive was given the effect of new law or new agency rule, despite there being no new legislation, regulation, or even agency policy. Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Department of Family Protective Services Commissioner Jamie Masters, their actions violate the separation of powers by impermissibly approaching into the legislative domain. Judge Mensham also granted a temporary restraining order, blocking the state from investigating the family that prompted this lawsuit from happening, from the person who already worked at the Department of Family Protective Services.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed this decision. Well, first of all, he appealed the restraining order and lost that appeal. First of all, he he appealed the restraining order and lost that appeal. And and the the ACLU is trying to make this temporary restraining order against the state permanent and extends to all parents of all transgender kids in Texas. And there's going to be a whole trial scheduled for this topic on July 11th, 2022. So this is going to this is going to get this is going to happen. Like we're we will figure out what is going to happen with this later on this year. And after the judge's ruling halting the investigations due to lack of legal binding, Attorney General Ken Paxton filed an appeal for the ruling.

So that's going to get appealed. And he tweeted out that the, quote, Democrat judge's order permitting child abuse is frozen. Much needed investigations will proceed as they should. The fight will continue up to the Supreme Court. I'm ready for it. But it's unclear how much legal backing this actually has. So we don't know if the protective services actually has permission to keep investigating or not. It is kind of unclear. Paxton says that they can. This state judge says

they can't, and that's kind of legally up in the air right now. So we don't totally know, but there's going to be a whole trial on the topic in July. Kind of one of the last things I want to mention is this Idaho bill that was passed by the House of Representatives that would criminalize gender-affirming medical procedures, including puberty blockers and HRT for any kind of transgender youth. And it was also reported that the bill would make it a felony punishable by life imprisonment to anyone who helps a kid travel across state lines to get

gender affirming health care uh but this actually maybe isn't actually true like this actually probably wasn't part of that bill um the bill just amends current laws regarding female genital mutilation of course uh carving out a specific section to allow the mutilation of intersex kids um yep but uh but yeah it added a section also criminalizing gender affirming care um but the section of the bill making it a felony to travel out of state only refers to the general mutilation section um it doesn't refer to the gender affirming care section and it's unclear if that was an oversight or if the limitation was intentional. Who knows? But it still did attempt to criminalize gender affirming care within the state.

The bill was, I think, earlier this morning, as of time of recording, the bill was not passed by the Senate. So that's good. The Senate said that it was too vague in scope and it was unclear how it was going to be enforced. So that bill was halted and it did not did not continue. Yeah. But, you know, that's. Yeah, there is a lot of the reason why all this stuff is kind of started is that there has been so much progress happening in queer rights in the past like 10 years. Right.

Like there has been so much progress happening in queer rights in the past like 10 years, right? So now because progress is more visible, what was once like obvious but like low-key bigotry is trying to be put into law, right? There used to be so many medical hoops to jump through to get any type of gender-affirming treatment. But now almost every like legit medical organization recognizes the importance of gender-affirming care. legit medical organization recognizes the importance of gender affirming care. So that, plus the visibility and the cultural acceptance of queerness, is making some, you know, mostly good old white Christian conservative populations a little bit uncomfortable, right? There's this increasing fear that what if your kid thinks they're trans? What if they become an unholy degenerate? And what if there are people trying to make that happen on purpose?

All of the brutality in these bills, the total nonchalance at the possibility of kids killing themselves because of this bill and because of all these legislations, all of the transphobia negatively contributing to mental health,

all of that brutality is justified in the minds of these anti-trans people because it's to save their kids from experiencing that in the first place, right? It's the idea that queerness is an infection, that it can spread from person to person. It's like a contagion. If you hear about it, you could yourself become gay. So if they don't hear about it, then that's not going to be a possibility. So all of the brutality is like it's both the point, but it's also justified because this thing is seen as such like it's seen as such an ontological threat to their whole idea of like the world. going to stop right every you know 2021 we saw a massive increase in legislation on this topic 2022 we're seeing an even bigger increase in legislation on this topic and you know attempts to physically oppose it you know is our can can kind of be done i mean like you can you can see

all there was some some successful counter protests to the whole school board thing you can also like you can sneak queer books into board thing you can also like you can sneak queer books into libraries so you can just put you can just put them in there um you can request queer books in your library systems um you can you know attend school board meetings and again it's sure the the institution of the institution of schooling is problematic um in a lot of ways but it's we shouldn't make worse for queer kids, so maybe it still is worth actually focusing on. And there's a lot that you can, like in the case of the

ACLU suit, there is legal challenges being taken up against all of these things. We'll see how that goes. There's always been a shaky record of the legal, you know, of the court's ability to protect these rights. But every once in a while it does

happen, like with gay marriage. The last thing I'll mention specifically with like HRT being made illegal in a lot of these places, at least like prescribed via a doctor, I will kind of talk about, I will mention DIY HRT as a thing. That

is a thing that exists. You can go to diyhrt.github.io to get information on this it's been it requires a lot of like research but you can find like you can get hr you can get like estrogen and stuff from like like made by the companies that supply pharmacies you can buy that legally um testosterone is a little bit more iffy because that is, I think, a Schedule 2 or Schedule 3 drug. But estrogen is much more available to buy legally online.

Just make sure you get it from a good place and make sure that you know how it affects you and all that stuff. Do lots of reading, but that is a possibility. So I will probably plan an episode on DIY HRT in the near future just like a whole episode on the topic but i just wanted to kind of mention that as one of the last things of being

like yeah if they're restricting all these stuff we should probably you know learn to provide it ourselves because there's no guarantee that the governments or any kind of even like pharmacies will be able to do that forever right like it's it's good to have alternative methods of figuring out how to get the drugs that make you feel nice. So, yeah. That is my episode on the legislation that has been happening in the past really like six months.

Yeah, that's fun. Yeah, and by the time this is up, there might be new stuff that has happened. Oh, most certainly. Yeah. That's good. That's why, you know, when all this stuff gets very depressing,

I just like listening to my favorite Wayne Cohen song by Pink Floyd, and it really just really does calm me down and make me feel much better. Wow. Well, I'm going to go listen to the new double album that 100 Gex did with Billy Joel. I do. I do love me some 100 Gex. Yeah, the Gex Joel concert. It's even I hear that that Elton John's going to get into and they're going to they're going to do. That would be quite the show. Honestly. That would be a fascinating experience. That would be a very gay, very trans show.

It would be an amazing mix of horny women in their 60s and horny 17-year-olds. What an incredible thing that would be. That is what would happen. Well, yeah, there are plenty of organizations that are fighting against this stuff in Texas. I could list them, that is, uh, there are plenty of organizations that are, you know, fighting against this stuff in Texas. Um, I could list them, but honestly, if you, if you, if you're not there, it's, it's, it's iffy.

I mean, you should, you should, you should look into what's happening in your area, learn what legislation's being passed in your area, learn what your, you know, state representatives are doing and look into helping people get DIY HRT. That's really, that's really that's really i mean like yeah if there's a way that bodybuilders can get testosterone there's a way that you can get testosterone for trans guys if um estrogen is much easier to get um so look into that don't don't be stupid um but yeah that is uh that's that is that is that is my piece yep all right enjoy find violence,

and find the correct application of the two that allows people to stay alive. Yeah. Yeah, and listen to music that makes you happy. That is all you can do.

All you can do is find your favorite U2 album uh featuring roger waters all right goodbye welcome i'm daniel thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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, 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. 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. Gonzales 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 iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone.

But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud,

but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're gonna get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. oh boy welcome to america the podcast wait is that is that what we're calling it now i don't think that's true we just had like two episodes on international turf so i think we are going

we're trying to be a little beyond america i i it up. I fucked it up. Well, that's the podcast. Goodbye, everybody. See, usually at this point you say, Garrison, take over. All right, well, let's get into this. What are we talking about today?

Who are we? Where are we? What is life? It could happen here. Where is God? Final episode of the war on trans people, which means when this episode

is done, that means the war will be over which means when this episode when this episode is done that means the war will be over we did it everybody and whatever gods once were have long abandoned this place we did get pretty good news about the governor of utah kind of surprising me here uh yeah that just hit that's nice there's the there's that i mean luckily looks some of some of the bills that we've talked about actually have been shot down at this point. The Wisconsin bill got shot down. Kind of surprisingly and very, very recently.

Past few days, yeah. Looks like there's still going to be injunctions on any investigations in Texas until the case gets put up to higher courts. Yeah, that's still very much in the air yeah it's it's still in the courts but it's like it's it's trying at least it's kind of paused right now and it's going to get settled at some point in uh either the lawsuit or in higher courts so we'll see yeah we'll see how that develops but for right now things seem to be things seem to be paused

and some states are not are not fully passing it i know there was um a uh a walkout by disney employees today yeah about uh over the don't say gay bill and we're gonna see if that's gonna get signed um so yeah still still up in the air but we're gonna be talking about something a little bit different we're gonna do some we're gonna do some time travel oh boy that's that's what i had to say was oh boy yeah so we're going to go back to another time in which there was a for a very brief period a uh massive expansion in the knowledge about and sort of but both knowledge about and appearance of and safety of trans people and then it all catastrophically came

crashing down oh good and to help us with that is robert evans my boss hi everybody how are we doing garrison how are we doing oh i'm doing actually fine yeah i'm just i'm just waiting for you to do your job and not pass over all right So the important thing to understand is that the kind of very concept of not just gay rights, but our modern attitudes towards what it means to be homosexual and trans all have their origins in Germany, not just in the post-war period, but really the last couple of decades of the Kaiser and the Weimar Republic. Like that is where kind of the modern Western attitudes towards what it like is to be homosexual really get formed. Because obviously like gay people have existed for forever. There's quite a bit of documentation. But if you look at like, for example, two-spirit folks within some indigenous American cultures, that's a very different attitude towards

like trans people, I suppose. Compared to the Western idea of gender identity. Yeah, so this is like- Or like Western, quote unquote, you know, whatever. Yeah, there's the actual thing that's going on in like the individual sexuality. And then there's kind of the public concept of what it is. And that is really forming in – probably the seminal moment that kind of starts this progress is in August 29th, 1867 when a lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs goes before the 6th Congress of German Jurists in Munich to urge them to repeal laws forbidding

sex between men. So again, there is still a Kaiser. This is before Germany is actually fully a nation, right? Because 1870 is when that happens. So Germany doesn't even really exist at this point. There's a series of kings kind of being welded together slowly into a German state. there's a series of like kings kind of being welded together slowly into a german state and there is a lawyer getting up in front of like the council of different german jurists to urge an end to the laws that make it illegal for for men to have sex with each other now one thing that's important to note is that obviously there are lesbians in this period of time as again there have been throughout all of history that's not really a legal problem right they do not face really legal repression and and i mean not to say that like there's not really a legal problem right they do not face really legal repression and and

i mean not to say that like there's not repression and things that they're dealing with but it's not the same as as it is for like men who want to be in relationships with men that's it's in fact a lot easier for women to be kind of like and this is not just germany to be built to like kind of say like well you know we're friends and we live together, right? Like we're aunties and we live together. Like we're- Gal pals. Yeah, that, in part because men just like, I think a lot of like the men in this period

just assume it's impossible, like that women would do that. Or the other side of it is like, femininity is always presentuary. It's always like, it's viewed as soon as a beauty symbol. So it makes more sense for women to find other women attractive because that's what beauty is, is is when is performative femininity so like

that's like way more obvious and it doesn't make sense for but and it makes less sense for men to find other men attractive and that's way more taboo because of the way that messes with like patriarchy um so yeah there could be a like gender studies and sexuality studies you know have a lot of theorizing for how this has developed. But yeah, this idea you can even see in, like, Victorian era and, like, Renaissance era of, yeah, women who live together and are very good friends. Very close friends. I hope people don't feel like I'm trying to, like, flatten the history of, like, the concept of being a lesbian in the West to that at all, or trying to, for that matter, flatten like homosexuality between men. But I am kind of making the point, and I am not the person

who kind of initially made this point, the scholarly work that I'm kind of basing my research on this on largely right now. And we're going to do an episode of Behind the Bastards that gets in to more of this, I think, in the near future. But it's a book called Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy. And in the book, one of the things that Beachy argues is that even though obviously same-sex love is as old as the existence of – quite a bit older actually than the existence of human beings, the public discourse around it and like the political attempt to win rights for gay people starts in Germany in the late 1800s and it starts in this conference in 1867. And the guy who does this, Ulrichs, is a – number one, is a gay man. And he had been open kind of to his relatives.

He had started in the period before he gets up in front of all these lawyers to be open with like his family members that he was homosexual. But he had never – like he was not publicly out. And so on the same day that he appeals for a change in the legal code to make homosexuality legal in the German states is the day he comes out publicly as a gay man. Like he does both of these things at the same time. And I want to read a quote from a New Yorker. Yeah, it's quite a moment. What a move. Yeah.

Holy shit. I want to read a quote from a New Yorker article that's covering all of this and it's based again on the book Gay Berlin. Quote, he faced an audience

of more than 500 distinguished legal figures and as he walked to the lectern he felt a pang of fear. There is still time to keep silent, he later remembered telling himself. Then there will be an end to all your heart pounding. But Ulrichs, who had earlier disclosed his same-sex desires in letters to relatives, did not stop. He told the assembly that people with a sexual nature opposed to common custom

were being persecuted for impulses that nature, mysteriously governing and creating, had implanted in them. Pandemonium erupted, and Ulrichs was forced to cut short his remarks. Still, he had an effect. A few liberal-minded colleagues accepted his notion of an innate gay identity, and a Bavarian official privately confessed to similar yearnings. In a pamphlet titled Gladius Furenz, or Raging Sword, Ulrichs wrote, I am proud that I found the strength to thrust the first lance into the flank of the hydra incredibly based wow what if there's a heaven I hope this dude made it there because

wow absolute yeah unbelievable yeah so no but like, like, yeah, the astonished, like, the astounding bravery that that takes. Yeah. Wow. And he's essentially the first gay activist in a modern Western political context. And it's interesting, like, within kind of the next couple of years, things start to happen very quickly. Two years later in 1869, an Austrian writer – I know, right? Named Karl Kurtbenny, who is kind of fighting sodomy laws. And sodomy laws are laws that make everything that's not like missionary position sex illegal. They're obviously targeted towards gay men primarily.

So Karl Kurtbenny create – like he's the guy who invents the term homosexuality. Like two years after this as part of his like fight against these anti-sodomy laws. In the 1880s, a Berlin police commissioner makes the decision to stop prosecuting gay bars. And in fact, not only does he stop doing this, but he starts leading tours of the gay districts in Berlin just to like show off like look at how tolerant Berlin is. It's kind of dope, right?

That's such a weird. Wow. Yeah. What a weird picture to put in your head. At least even like, yeah. Yeah, this fucking cop being like, why are we arresting these people? Let's show this off. Yeah.

Wow. That is that is boggling. Yeah. people let's show this off yeah wow that is that is boggling yeah so uh in 1896 the very first gay magazine starts publishing in germany in berlin really do you want to know what it's called yeah of course why of course i do the german name is der eigen uh and that means the self-owning that's great. Western history, at least. So by the start of the 20th century, a lot of stuff is in place, right? And I think I'm even,

have been a little bit guilty of this in the past of kind of focusing so much on Weimar Germany and all of the stuff that happens around game rights there and how progressive it was. This is building in Germany. Again, we don't consider the Kaiserreich as a particularly progressive, but all of this is happening under the Kaisers.

And there's so many things that are happening in the 1890s and the start of the 1900s that directly in gay literature uses the phrase coins the phrase staying silent is death to like talk about the importance of gay literature yeah which is essentially the same slogan that gay rights activists pick during the same stuff we're talking about right now with all of like with all of like the um with with all like the book bannings taking you know doing a massive sweep of that the past the past few years yeah this is 1900 like basically that this is starting to happen it's a flat circle um so yeah and there's you know there's even there's a lot of um activists start to complain and start to try to complain both within like their own magazines and within like more public magazines about things like negative depictions of gay people in popular novels um yeah there

start to be the first arguments about whether or not it's morally right to out people who are gay but who are attached to anti-gay organizations because that starts happening in this period yeah um it's it's fucking wild how old all this this is. Nothing new under the sun. Yeah. No, but this is also like the first time it happened in these types of countries, in these societies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but like it is that it is. So, yes, time is a flat circle, but this is also like the first time it's happened.

And it's just kind of been re-happening ever since then. It's important to note, I didn't, I didn't, covers when we start talking about Ulrichs. Well, there's a lot of people who get angry and obviously Ulrichs is not successful in repealing the anti-homosexuality laws. When he makes his speech, in addition to the people who are like yelling at him to sit down, there are like German deputies yelling, no, no, no, let him continue. Let him continue. Like he needs to be allowed to talk. So even like in this period of time, there are non-gay people at a fairly high level in German politics who are like vocal allies and starting to become vocal allies. You know? Yeah.

It's pretty fascinating. So obviously World War I happens. Doesn't go great for Germany. But, you know, we get after that, the Weimar Republic. And the Weimar Republic is kind of the traditional era in which we talk a lot about, you know, gay rights starting to really move forward in significant ways. And so there's a lot of, even kind of into the early 1930s, some pretty interesting things that are happening in German society in like the mainstream elements of it. There's a film called Mädchen in Uniform in 1931, which is the first like positive portrayal

of lesbians in Western cinema. Okay. Like 31 is like, again, we're talking like right before the Nazis kind of come around. And yeah, there's these like this police commissioner that we chatted about earlier, I think is one of the people who's most interesting to me. We're going to get to

Hirschfeld a bit in a little bit. But this guy is named Leopold von Mierscheidt-Hulsheim. I'm not going to get that right. But he's a big part of when we talk about gay Berlin, particularly during the Weimar years, even though he's like during while the Kaiser's in, talk about gay Berlin, particularly during the Weimar years, even though he's like during while the Kaiser's in, he's why gay Berlin really happens in a lot of ways. And it's in part because like, he decides to stop cracking down on on gay people. And like, he's not gay, although his boss is, which is part of like, what makes it easier for him to do this. And there's like a lot of debate about why he does this. Cause he's not like a gay rights activist. Some people say that it's because he's worried that like gay people will

become politically radicalized by the reds. And so if you stop cracking down on them, they won't go communist. Like there's a lot of like debate about like why he does this. He's also, there's a number of things that he, like he takes a lot of data on, on gay people in Berlin and he does this. He's also – there's a number of things that he – like he takes a lot of data on gay people in Berlin and he does this on everybody. He's a big data guy.

So it's not particularly harmful in his era but some of the stuff that he gathers will be used by the Nazis later, which is kind of a broader thing about like the wisdom of not letting the government get access to this. Like he has – he founds a department of homosexuals in 1885 that like lists the people that they know are gay. And again, like this is all – so it's really a complicated thing that's happening here because he's not this like thoroughly sympathetic figure. He's doing a lot of stuff that's weird and that will later have negative outcomes. figure. He's doing a lot of stuff that's weird and that will later have negative outcomes, but he's also, by ending police persecution of gay people, at least in an organized way, really allowing gay culture to blossom in Berlin. I'm going to read another quote from that New Yorker article here. For whatever reason, Mearscheidt-Holzenheim took a fairly benevolent attitude towards Berlin's same-sex bars and dance halls,

at least in the better-heeled parts of the city. He was on cordial terms with many regulars, and none other than August Strindberg testified in his autobiographical novel The Cloister,

which evokes a same-sex costume ball at the Café National, and this is in 1898. The police inspector and his guests had seated themselves at a table in the center of one end of the room, close to which all the couples had to pass. And this is in 1898. So he's kind of like going on safari, like, among the gay people in Berlin.

Like, there's a lot of weird—it's weird in a lot of way. But he's also—one of the things he does is he provides police help to gay people who are being blackmailed and like threatened with outing um and he'll even like counsel them on how to handle it like he provides like counselors and stuff and he does this in part because like he's worried about um them committing suicide because they're being blackmailed which is like a a real problem in Germany and a bunch of other places. Yeah. And this guy, like why this police commissioner winds up killing himself kind of in the early 1900s, I think, because he wound up getting found to be taken bribes from some millionaire who gets in a lot of legal trouble for raping somebody. So again, he is a sketchy dude, but he's also like, because he's got this weird, almost like voyeuristic fascination with gay people and some legitimate, because there are legitimate humanitarian concerns.

He's really worried about people committing suicide as a result of blackmail. So he's one of these figures we don't talk about enough in history where it's like the overall outcome of this guy's work is pretty positive, but he does it for this like really confusing mix of reasons he's just a very strange figure in history well i think it's interesting looking at him like like comparing him to like if you look at like what the u.s is doing in the 50s right where there's this whole thing about like gay people are getting are going to get are getting blackmailed and the you know the u.s the entire u.s security state loses its mind and becomes convinced that like these people are all going to become soviet agents and you know and instead of like doing counseling that there's there the thing that they do is they they do the lavender scare and they start purging every gay

person they can find from the entire u.s government and it's like you know it's it's it's interesting that like, yeah, this is this is a guy in like late 1800s, early 1900s, like like literally ruled by a monarch Berlin. And his policies are enormously better than like anything you're going to see for like half a century. He's he is way more woke on on on this than like any New York police officer for a century. Today. Up to the present day in a lot of ways. Yeah. So let's talk about Magnus Hirschfeld a bit. Hirschfeld is very influenced by Ulrich, the guy we started the story with.

His first like publication on the matter is called Sappho and Socrates in 1896, which is, again, it's a story of a gay man who gets coerced into marriage. So this like, and who commits suicide as a result. So there's like a big, with both, you know, this police commissioner with Hirschfeld, with a lot of people who are becoming activists in this period, a big part of why is for one reason or another, the suicide rate among gay people, which is a huge problem today for trans people in particular. And this is what, it's interesting, like that Utah governor, you know, made the announcement today that like, he's vetoing this trans sports ban in Utah. And he specifically cites like, the suicide rate among trans people is so like high, and he could

not morally conscience doing anything that would like make these kids feel othered and likelier to commit suicide i mean okay let's let's let's not go that far he he was he was willing he was willing to do the commissions he just wasn't willing to do a full ban yeah i'm just saying the the justification he gives for what he's doing is like um that is is the the rate of suicide attempts among trans people. Not to like whitewash that guy or Utah. Like again, we've been doing this whole week's episodes. But it's interesting that you get – again, it's just kind of like the issue for a long time has been that when you like other people and make it dangerous for them to be who they are openly, they will kill themselves.

A lot of them will. And that's a thing that is, even by very problematic people in Germany in the 1890s, folks recognize that like, this is a huge issue. So yeah, Hirschfeld starts this first organization, this like gay rights organization. And he also is doing like a huge amount of research. He is, again, he's following in Ulrich's footsteps because he too believes that homosexuality is congenital, right? It's something you're born with as opposed to like a choice people make because of deviance or whatever,

which is still the big fight that we're having to this day. And he's also like, it's hard to, there's a lot that like you can criticize about Hirschfeld scientifically. And a lot of the research he does, among other things, there's like difficulty with like control groups and actually like being the kind of scientific sort of detachment that is necessary to study. There's like critiques of his research that are valid. But one of the, he he's really like it's wild how far ahead of the curve he is because one of the things that Hirschfeld introduces is the idea that sexuality is a spectrum um where there's what he calls sexual intermediaries between male and female

um he doesn't believe that like those are even particularly useful terms that sexuality kind of like it it it again that it's spectrum, which is this thing that we are just now really starting to have good, wider kind of range in conversations about today. And Hirschfeld is very much like kind of utopian in his belief that if you can scientifically study and understand what homosexuality is and that it is an innate characteristic that people will stop being bigoted against gay folks right like his belief is that science will end prejudice um just because the german people are so scientific and like they'll have to accept this if i can just like prove it with enough rigor which is heartbreaking yeah um heartbreaking that

he was very, very wrong. And yeah, there's a number of things that are like really worth kind of within sort of the – because he's not – he's kind of come down now as this sort of like saint and within kind of the gay culture in Berlin in particular, there were a lot of people who were frustrated with him for a lot of reasons. There were a lot of – so there's this split in gay culture in this period of time between gay men who are seen as more effeminate and what are called the masculinists. more effeminate and what are called the masculinists. And the masculinists, they are not all or even mostly Nazis, but all of the gay Nazis are what you'd call masculinists, right? Who are like, I'm not having like, like I am so manly that the only person I can have sex with is a man, right? Like I'm flattening even that quite a bit.

But like you have guys like Ernst Röhm, who is the head of the brown shirts and is is a is a gay nazi and is like that's that's a significant not an insignificant chunk of the nazis they all get murdered in the night of long knives and it is interesting that that rome was outed by anti-fascists yeah he sure was like uh two years before he was uh murdered and it was it was it was he was specifically outed to so division within the nazi party yes um and that does like also just playing it you know you're you're talking about like you know people having debate over whether it's okay to out somebody um if they you

know are part of bad organizations right that was something we mentioned previously and yeah just like an interesting historical tidbit yeah and it's it's um so uh again among like one of the things that the the masculinists are doing is like a lot of them are married to women and they're they're actually fine with this because again they think that like well you still need to like procreate and have like not it's not even all just about being having like a beard or whatever you want to call it some of it is just like this attitude that you have a responsibility to make more Germans for the fatherland. But like,

then when it comes to, it's kind of like the Greeks, there were not wildly dissimilar concepts. And a lot of the masculinists ideologically are wrapped up in the work of Max Stirner. And in fact, like the self owners, that first gay magazine is a reference to Stirner.

Yeah. I was like, Oh, that sounds like Sterner's egoism. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There's a lot of that going. And we, again, I want to at some point provide a lot more detail on this because it's all fascinating.

But there are these big sort of like this big split. And there's, he gets a lot of shit from the masculinists for, because he also studies lesbians heavily. Like there's a decent chunk of the gay male population in Berlin who is against the research and the medical practice he's doing to help trans people who is against his research on lesbians. Cause they're like, well, this is, this is the fight, right? Like we're the ones who are being legally cracked down on or whatever. Like, um, so there's a bunch of like different cleavages and fractures kind of within the community at this time.

And Hirschfeld is not universally beloved. There are people kind of within the gay community who have a lot of issues with him. And I just think it's important to note that because we often do, again, kind of flatten things because the Nazis flattened things, right? Because these were all – it was all the same to them. the same to them. And we often flatten them in a different way to where like, yeah, you've got this guy and he's the hero of gay Berlin and he's this like thoroughly positive. No, there were a lot of people who hated him for like all these different reasons because this was – like all people had a million different kind of fractures and ideologies sort of running within what someone who was not – well, looking in from the outside

would have just called gay Berlin. And yeah, obviously, this all falls apart or is cracked down horribly when the Nazis come to power. Hirschfeld is doing a lot of some of – I mean, all of the very earliest research on like what it is to be transgender and he is performing surgery on like gender operations on trans people for the very first time. And that gets all kind of destroyed in May of 1933, which is about three months after Hitler becomes Reich's chancellor. Nazis sack Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science. They burn its library. They go after a lot of the people he had been working with and on are killed. Others have to flee. Hirschfeld is thankfully out of the country on tour when the Nazis rise to power and

just doesn't come back. He watches his institute get burned and all of his his research get burned in a newsreel in paris uh and he dies the next year um yeah so that's the that's the the the the broad details of kind of the story of this early period um of of the birth of kind of like a lot of our legal fights around gay rights and like the birth of kind of Western gay identity. Like this is where it comes from. And there's a lot that's important in understanding this. And this is one of the points that gets made in Gay Berlin. We often see the Weimar years as this kind of inevitable march towards fascism. And the reality is that there was 50 something years of, uh, of incredibly progressive movements on, on gender and sexuality. Um, and, you know, even outside of gay rights, just in terms of like

attitudes towards democracy and attitudes towards the nature of like the state that were very progressive and very powerful and very popular. Um, And they do get, you know, it's important to understand both that like the Nazism was not inevitable, the regressivism and the violence and the, like that kind of flattening of human life under the fascists was not an inevitable progression for Germany. But it's equally important to understand that like a tremendous, so much progress had been made in German culture by the period of time when the Nazis rise. And it does get wiped out. You know, it does not recover right away. It's still recovering now in Germany. It's still now. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, one of the groups of people when the allies liberate the concentration camps, Yeah, exactly. out because the nazis because you were in a concentration camp with these other people because the allies to a large extent are like well that was it was okay for them to punish those

people anyway that's the story now another interesting thing is on like kind of on the same note is that if you look through old um uh german war photography from world war ii you will actually see a higher than average rate of men cross-dressing inside photos. Now, cross-dressing during war is not uncommon, especially during performances for theater and stuff, because there's not as much women around. But specifically, comparing the documentation of the Nazis and all of the German soldiers, documentation of uh the nazis and all of all the german soldiers there was like yeah absolutely higher than average uh amount of of people comfortable cross-dressing despite you know

being a soldier for the nazis yeah um it is it is like an yeah it is an interesting thing in terms of how how some of those kind of more advanced views on sexuality still carried over um at least like in terms of like gender presentation among you know even even if you're among this genocidal group who's imprisoning gay people by the hundreds of thousands um yeah it's it just it just it just it just like kept happening yeah it also sort of points to just like how bad everywhere else was also. Oh yeah. Like it's, yeah,

it's a, it's a rough world for Berlin just got so progressive that even when suppressed, there was enough like stuff there that things could kind of, there was, there was still, there was still a bit, there's still a bit of some remnants.

and I mean, and it's still, it got, it did get horribly obliterated, and we're still recovering now in terms of our views and medical knowledge on gender and social contracts, again, after it was briefly more okay than it had been, doesn't get repealed until 1994. Yeah. I mean a lot of sodomy laws did not get repealed until the 90s. And in a lot of cases, they're actually still around. You just don't enforce them. Like a lot of – there's a lot of flaws that are actually just still just hanging out texas had anti-sodomy laws on the book until uh a 2003 supreme court case uh yeah it invalidated all sodomy laws right that's that's why there's some that are still on the books but they but

they're now invalid yeah prosecute people um yeah uh yeah magnus herschfeld was pretty based though so was fucking olrix some pretty based there's some really interesting stuff and that's why we wanted to talk about this is to kind of show the historical background and show like there's precedent for all of the same stuff happening before uh and you know there's ways people fought against it back then who didn't necessarily succeed um yeah but also did have a lot of progression and a lot of like views socially on these types of topics you know you just need to make sure that you're also very very uh aware of the rise of fascism and being able to counter that as well because they can just do so much damage in such a short amount of time despite you know 50 years of progress yeah yeah and i think i think understanding the fragility of everything

that exists that i don't know i mean there's this is you know one of the sort of american mythosis right is that like the moral arc of the universe bends towards progress and everything's getting better and that's not true nope it's not and like like every everything good that you see in this world is there because people fought for it was fought for yeah and and if they lose it all goes away yeah yeah it we we we absolutely could go back it's like you have that i mean he backpedaled but you have that republican uh legislator who was like um making comments about how he didn't think the state should be forced to honor interracial marriages. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, there's people who want to go back on all of that stuff and they could do it.

It doesn't even and it doesn't matter. I like when people criticize kind of like some of the attitudes we have, the fear we have towards this, especially on the subreddit. I've seen people be like, well, look, these are not popular laws. And it's like, it doesn't matter. They weren't as popular. They weren't like necessarily all that popular in Germany. You know, when some, like a lot of the thing, not specifically even talking about what was done to gay people, but a lot of things that were done by the nazis were not necessarily popular it doesn't matter what matters is power yeah this like plays into how like what is worth focusing on on electoralism and being like yeah these laws obviously aren't being uh pushed as far in blue states because

there's not enough electoral power there but that doesn't mean that we can flip Texas blue if we will it into being. There's so many other cultural factors that are keeping red states red. And yes, of course, voting suppression, all of those things, gerrymandering, all these things are contributing factors. But the overall political bent of those states right now seems to be pretty firm because there's so many people invested in maintaining that power. So when we complain about kind of how electoralism is not often a super reliable solution to securing these things over long stretches of time, it's more kind of talking about that because even though we have, you know, Democrats in power in the executive branch and they, you know, make statements about trying to secure things they make they make

some gestures the follow-through on those things is always so minimum and so bare um and there's it's like it's it's the thing here like trump was able to do so much um and now we have biden so less willing to use executive power this is the the same thing with Obama and the Supreme Court. When the Senate would refuse to put through any candidates, Obama technically had the power. Because the Senate refused to do their job, there is a very strong argument that Obama could have just put someone into the Supreme Court because of the failure of what the Senate was doing. It was specifically doing a thing that meant because they were not doing the job at all, that he can't get fully put through. And that could have happened, and Obama just didn't. Because you want to be the good guy. You want to be the person who follows the rules. But the other side doesn't care about that. They're not playing a genuine game. They're not following the rules. They're doing whatever they can to win. So this isn't about

being plugged into lefty Twitter. I get almost none of my takes from lefty Twitter. I get them from reading stuff and thinking about how electoralism affects all of these issues and where to focus my attention. Because no matter what I say or what I do, that's not going to affect whether Texas is blue or red. Yeah. And there's this i i think like one of the things that is uh an argument against obama you know intervening in that way is like well that would have created precedent that would have like further centralized executive power and could have been used by their only if the senate refused to do their job yeah but you know i mean look at what we got look at the supreme court that we have which now has a six to three bent conservatively no there was just

another fucking shadow ruling today that was um about um uh gerrymandering and god i was wisconsin um one sec i'll look it up but yeah like you're getting like that we're we're already living through that scenario um yeah and it's like like in this i mean in terms of centralization of power like obama claimed the legal authority to kill any man woman or child regardless of their citizenship as as a u.s citizen without trial the moment they left the united states like that that is that is the that is the authority that he claimed like when you know in order claimed in order to run the drone assassination program. And yeah, so at that point, yeah, okay, we literally have a person who can go, I'm going to press a button and kill you.

Like, oh no, we might centralize. It's just – I mean it's not even a centralization because it was specifically within the context of the senate not doing their job um and it kind of just all plays into like it seems like democrats are more politically successful when they're losing like it seems like they want the other side to be in power because that's when they actually do things politically then when they have power they're just so scared to use it that they don't even do anything to really help people that much and i mean this is the other thing is that like yeah the democrats like like most of like their actual constituent like they have they have two constituencies right they have like you know they they they have the people they're passing tax

breaks for and then they have a bunch of they have a bunch of consultants and the consultants like the thing that they care about is campaign donations right because that's how they get paid yeah and yeah hey guess what happens when uh you're in power oh people don't give you any people don't give you much money like this is this is this is a problem that i ran into in the 80s they they get more power when they're they get more money when they're not in power yeah because then they're trying to organize to get in power but then once they're in there it's like oh wow you're not really using the same power capabilities that the other side does when they're in charge. And they're all willing to play dirty politically.

And we, and for some reason, the Democrats are not. Well, because I mean, they don't like this. I think like they don't actually care about any of this stuff, right? This stuff is useful for them in terms of fundraising, right? But it's like, yeah, I don't know. Like they don't like if every trans person in the United States was killed, right? The Democrats would be sad for a little bit and then they wouldn't move on like it's not that's that's not a thing that if you're in a hard blue state we know it's more important than actually voting for support of like this kind of stuff it's actually just giving trans people money

like that is going to have much more of a positive political effect it's just give trans people money whenever you see a gofundme for a trans person donate to that instead that's going to have a much more uh lasting effect than voting if you're in you know new york or if you're in oregon right because like that those states are they're they're going to be blue that's always going to happen um but other states like uh like i texas oklahoma tennessee uh al, Alabama, these are going to be red states. And as much as we would be nice if Democratic senators and people in the House were in there instead, then yeah, these trans bills probably wouldn't be happening as much. But that's not going to happen. So if that's not going to happen, we should focus on other ways to do that politically.

And yeah, sure, fixing gerrymandering will be great, but I don't think you need me to tell you that. No. Anyway, we should probably, that's probably more or less a soad. That is a soad. I will plug next week, on a similar train for kind of talking about

queerness and fascism um which yeah we are we are planning a two a two-parter which is a pretty going to be extensive deep dive into explaining the curious case of nazi cat boys and garrison says garrison says we as if any of the rest of us had any choice in this garrison garrison forced this on us through violence yes but yes we will be talking about this which kind of touches on some similar topics in terms of like gender and sexuality and how it intersects with politics and how there can be you know seemingly contradictory claims of you know gay nazis and all that kind of stuff. So similar train, we'll be kind of discussing that and how that works.

But yeah, this is end of Trans Week. Honestly, at this point, as we're ending it, I'm kind of more optimistic than I was when we started Trans Week in terms of like watching kind of how some of these bills have played out,

how some of them were not fully carried through. There is protests and stuff being organized. I know for March, I believe it's March 31st, which is a Trans Day of Visibility. There's going to be protests in a lot of conservative states. I know there's going to be – let me actually – let me check because I know there's going to be multiple things happening. let me let me actually let me check because i know there's there's going to be there's going to be multiple multiple things happening and i will i'm going to be trying to i'm going to try to be in idaho next next week for that uh because there's going to be a protest in boise which i

think boise boise idaho that's the place but there's going to be yeah there's going to be events in Austin, uh, Tallahassee, Montgomery. Um, so yeah, I will, uh, look up, uh, tear it up.org at four event for, uh,

info on all of the events at different, at different, at, at, in different States for, for trans day of visibility, March, March 31st.

And yeah, uh, uh, be gay, do crime. Yeah, throw bricks at transphobes. Yeah, all that stuff. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, 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. You should probably keep your lights on

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