It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 31

Episode Date: April 23, 2022

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

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there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is today about something that did happen here and absolutely sucked. And with me to talk about the atlanta shooting is garrison hello hi not happy to be here yeah yeah no this is this is not a we're not talking about a current event this happened like what was it last year yeah um so yeah in case someone's listening and wondering if there was another one no no this is specifically talking about actually there have been a couple of shootings in atlanta since then yeah obviously there yes but we're talking like the specific thing we're talking about is is uh is uh from

from last year and it ties into many of the topics we discuss on the show yeah on march 16th 2021 robert aaron long a regular at young's asian massage refused to tip after getting a massage xiao jietan the spa's owner confronted him about the tip long simply walked away he got dressed went to the bathroom, pulled out his gun, and started shooting, leaving Xiaojie Tan dying on the floor. Driving from spa to spa, Long shot nine people and killed eight. The lone wounded survivor, Alicia Hernandez-Ortiz, got on his knees and begged Long not to shoot. Long shot him anyways. There's a tendency when confronted with true horror to retreat into abstraction as if the abstract is shelter from the violence of the storm i intend if briefly to do it

myself but there is no safety there only the same violence repeated again and again and again in a thousand ways with a thousand names wearing a thousand faces, because this is hell, and we live in it. So on to the abstract. There's a concept in Marxism called Traeger. It's a German word. It's usually translated as bearer, in the sense of an individual capitalist being the bearer of capitalist social relations. They enact this relation by turning capital into more capital,

which is what makes them a capitalist. There is, you know, literally endless debate over what this actually means. Most of it is pointless. And the meeting is contested enough that I'm going to abuse it a bit further and argue that a person can become a bearer of historical forces larger than themselves.

Robert Aaron Long was the bearer of a great number of historical forces he bore the violence of capitalism of misogyny of racism of horophobia of whiteness of christianity itself and he unleashed it into the world that's just like the idea of like invoking right drawing on these external ideas into yourself and then becoming them for like a brief period of time yeah i mean i think it's slightly different in that with bearing it's it's not so much that that you're briefly invoking them it's that you're you're constantly a part of the relation so the relation defines you and it it and you you sort of you constantly enact it by the things that you do. And in doing so, you make the relation real. It's more of like an ever-present thing that is...

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

does it actually mean and you know what what are the forces that long unleashed into this world what do they look like and i think i think we have we have a good example of this from right after long was arrested uh police captain jay baker of the cherokee sheriff's department uh said this to reporters at a press conference this is about uh long in the shooting he was pretty much fed up and at the end of his rope and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did he apparently has an issue what he considers a sex addiction and he sees these locations as something that allow him to go to these places and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate now yeah there there was a lot going on in in in in those like two sentences um also

you know cherokee sheriff's department oh yeah there is there is so much going like right there's so many so many so many layers to this yeah it's incredible one of the things that we're gonna go more into next episode is that like this this is where uh uh what's his name this is where the guy who just like drew a random line on a map that he found from like that he pulled out of his like national geographic thing who divided korea in half like this is where he's from okay uh there's this is yeah there is a there is a lot of historical violence in this very specific part of georgia that is all coming together here and oh yeah his school was also super racist like there's they had a mascot that was like doing all the racist stuff yeah i'm sure yeah and you know and before we go any further it's worth mentioning that like almost immediately after uh the the the honorable police captain gave that press conference uh a

bunch of people on the internet found out that baker had posted like a shirt that said uh covid19 imported virus from china i i i remember this yeah yeah the yeah. The sheriff was pretty racist himself. Yeah. And a part of many, many anti-Asian tropes relating to conspiracy theories. Yeah. This is classic 2020s anti-Asian rhetoric. It's stuff that's led directly to hundreds of attacks on Asian Americans since the start of the pandemic. And the racist onslaught driven by every sector of american society now people immediately start speculating that uh jay

baker had collaborated with long to cover up the racial like motivation for his violence and okay i think there's some truth to this uh the cops have been collaborating with long and his family in various ways i'm going to read a part of an article in Vanity Fair written by the journalist Mei Zhong called How the Atlanta Spa Shooting, the Victims, the Survivors, Tell a Story of America. This is one of the best things that anyone's written about the shooting so far. I'm going to read a little bit of it because it's, oh boy. I rang the bell at the family home. No one answered. Before I could decide what to do,

a police cruiser showed up. An officer who introduced himself as Sergeant Clement explained that the neighbors, multiple people, had called to report suspicious activity. The one good thing about Cherokee County, he told me, is that we look out for each other. It's like how it used to be in the 70s i asked clement what specifically the neighbors were worried about to be honest he said what they are worried about is they are afraid of revenge what is the context for the like revenge line yeah i mean it was basically just they were released like they were terrified that like asian people were going to show up like to this community and take revenge for the shooting. They thought they were going to attack the church or something? Well, no. They thought they were going to show up to the

family's house and attack the neighborhood. Ah. When has that ever happened? Yeah. Yeah. You know, and you can like, what this demonstrates, A, is just the kind of

community you're dealing with here and b also like you just you have very obvious close connection between the cops and like long's family at this point yeah and i mean in terms of like the covering up the the covering up of like the anti-gay violence part of it honestly I don't even know how intentional that would be because I don't think he even recognizes that as racism and I'm not sure how much the cops recognize that as a super big part since that they are already pretty

pretty racist I guess against Asian people I don't even know how much they recognize that as being like a thing that isn't normal yeah but I think also like I don't even know how much they recognize that as being like a thing that isn't normal. Yeah, but I think also like, I don't know, the explicitness to which particularly Baker is being racist, like makes me suspect that he would have been able to figure it out because he's like, like, you have to go out of your way to have a shirt that says COVID imported from China. Yeah, but I don't think that he would consider that racist, right? It's so racist, but he can't even consider that.

He just thinks it's just normal, right? That's possible, yeah. I can see that. In terms of them trying to cover up any kind of anti-Asian stuff leading towards the shooting, they may not see that as anything to be covered up, because they think that's just normal. So they're not going to even focus on it, because they're like, yeah, I mean, obviously. Right? We're so far down the rabbit hole that it's hard to even

recognize it. I don't know. I'm just...'m just i'm i'm just simple no it makes it makes sense consciousness and i think also the other thing that's going on here that that's i think the other part of why they wouldn't have recognized it if they didn't is that like okay so like most people see this and they're you know they kind of like analytically they kind of throw up their hands they're like well this is anti-asian violence they talk about like the stuff that particular danger is faced by like asian women and sex workers and they sort of call it a

day their analysis sort of like stops there and like they're right like this is anti-asian violence the violence is primarily inflicted on women and it particularly on sex workers or and i mean this is also very important uh people who are perceived as sex workers no matter what they actually do yep and yeah like it's gotten worse since the pandemic but there's a very very specific kind of violence that long is doing here it is it's not it's related to but not identical to the the sort of post-covid stuff and i think people really like did a disservice to what happened and did a disservice to how many people understand it by not actually poking at it because this shooting is at its core an evangelical shooting like this is this is this is evangelical violence this is christian violence and this is this is

purity culture yes and you know if if you want to understand what actually happened here you have to actually you have to go back and you have to understand the christianity angle because it is critical now east asia's contact with christianity in the last 200 years has been broadly speaking extremely bleak uh the conclusion of the first opium war in 1842 which britain forced china to buy opium to cover britain's trade deficit with the country and then britain also stole hong kong and then allowed yeah it also had the effect of allowing christian missionaries into the country and it is genuinely unclear which one of those acts has the highest body count uh the product of the christian missionaries work was the taiping rebellion in which the self-proclaimed brother of jesus christ waged a failed war against the

ruling qing dynasty that like even if even if you use like the lower estimates of the body count that war makes world war one look like a minor border skirmish it is a just incredibly devastating war and you know the product of this is there's there's famines there's also just a bunch of floods that happen at the same time and this sends an enormous number of immigrants and refugees fleeing from their homes looking for any way to survive and a lot of those people find their way to the u.s and they get imported by american capitalists who are you know looking for a new labor force to serve it's like a racial racial buffer between right black workers after the civil war and the other thing is like it's really hard to get to the west coast in the 1800s

like they don't have a panama canal you have to go over land and it sucks and it's hard so they need a labor force that they can just get to the west coast and it's literally easier for people to come from china and you know and so they do it is a it is a brutal existence chinese workers are worked to death building the railroads and they, and they struggle to carve out a life for themselves. And they do, haltingly in leaps and spurts, but they create communities, they build towns and temples and cultures in the beginning of a new society, and that's when the white working class decides they want to exterminate them. exterminate them because this is a this is a great country uh yeah white workers immediately start blaming chinese workers for the low wages and they use their workers organizations to ethnically cleanse the west the result of this is a series of massacres that goes on literally for decades stretching like into the night like this this this these things start in like the 1870s and they're still going in like the 19 like like in the in like the early 1900s.

And it's at this point where Christianity gets involved. I think most people who are listening to this show have probably heard, at least in passing, of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is the great triumph of the Page Act of 1875, which banned, quote, lewd and immoral women from entering the United States. And this is directly targeted at Asian and Chinese women who were seen as a threat to the sort of racial and moral character of the white Christian American nation because of their supposed inherent immorality demonstrated by the popular excuse me demonstrated by the popular image of all Chinese women as sex workers and you know I think like looking back on this this is extremely recognizable this is literally just an anti-trafficking panic like this whole thing is

just it's like this is this is this is like this is like proto this is like proto Q shit um and you know and like like there is there is legitimately like This is like proto-Q shit. And, you know, there is legitimately sex trafficking going on, but the existence of, like, the fact that there is sex trafficking

gets used as this sort of political and racial image. It gets projected onto just, like, all Asian women who get portrayed as trafficking victims and you simultaneously be, like, saved but then also expelled from the U.S. to both there and the u.s's purity and you know like this image of asian women has literally never changed you will find it today like to this day people find people using like the exact same racist projections like consciously

or unconsciously to talk about asian immigrants and like particularly spa workers it's it's this like it's this like incredibly toxic mix of like christian moralism sexism horophobia and racism and the racism element is really important because like okay well this is going on like prostitution is legal in california like you could just do this like there's there's no law against it um you know and so you'd think that like oh hey they're you know the sort of like christian panic would just be targeted against brothels like no it's like very specifically against asian women and it's you know this is because all of the sort of like the christian fears about sex work is you know and their horophobia is and still is today incredibly deeply fused with this sort of like

that this is this like incredibly racist like concern over the purity of the race uh-huh yeah and yeah you know this this will sound familiar to anyone who's been like paying attention at all to any of the trafficking panics any of the anti-trans stuff any of just i mean interracial dating was only extremely recently allowed at all of like the biggest christian universities yep like like they have like they uh yeah not uh it is it's a it's a thing it's uh yeah it's in this and like the thing about it it's it's really it's it's really close to the surface, right? Even when they're not explicitly just saying it.

Like if you look, you spend about two seconds looking, it's like, oh, this is what's going on here, huh? Yeah. Yeah. uh whole thing right is you have this sort of like you have this sort of like christian like anti-trafficking panic that that creates that like you know it creates this sort of image of what asian women are it has a lot of effects but the other side of this coin is that there is a just incredible amount of sexual violence that america has inflicted on asian women like particularly through its war successive invasions of the Philippines, China, Korea, and Vietnam.

All American soldiers committing just untold and horrific sexual violence on Asian women. Like to, to the extent that like the U S essentially just inherits Japan's like mass military rape system in Korea and just runs it for itself. Like there's this, not all of, all of those things came home so massively all the things that were normalized overseas just came right back when all

the soldiers came back yep yep you know yeah i think i was gonna say next year like the and this this has a like the i don't know i i think people get the relationship between pop culture depictions and racist depictions of people in pop culture and the actual culture backwards. They don't help and they spread it, but the me love you long time shit from Kubrick, that doesn't come out of nowhere. That's not just Kubrick. That's something that was brought home by the American racists. And, you know, like when they got back and that stuff like it's not just that, like the stuff's being spread by media. It's that the media is being influenced by the people who did this stuff and then came home. yeah yeah yeah and i mean even still now there's such a such a degree of like asian women being like an object to possess even more so than right like it's like even more so than like regular women which obviously under under like a lot of like patriarchal stuff in the states and you know overseas everywhere you know women are seen as objects to possess but specifically there's that

is so much heightened for uh women of color and specifically Asian women, that idea. I mean, you see that everywhere for the libertarian Asian girlfriend trope. You see this in media all the time that the Asian wife is something you own. And it's extremely pervasive. own yeah and it's it's a it's very extremely pervasive yeah and i think the reason why is that like this image gets refreshed every time a generation comes home from a war in asia and you know that that's because the u.s has been fighting wars in asia like forever i mean basically since like we've been fighting wars in asia since the late 1800s I mean, basically since like, we've been fighting wars with Asians since the late 1800s. And, you know, like, the violence of each subsequent generation just sort of refreshes this image of like Asian women sexual fetishization and on the other hand you have christian horophobia and this gives you

this culture where like asian women are at once seen as like hyper desirable and hyper available but are also just like utterly despised for both and this sort of like racist pathology this this this like this this sexual desire mixed with loathing is at just the absolute core of of the atlantis shooting and as if to remind us of its origin long carries out his massacre on the 53rd anniversary of my lie and we're back so i i think we now have enough context to like go back to long's initial description of why he carries out the attack which is to self-describe sex addiction and his desire to quote eliminate temptation yeah because i mean we cannot overstate the degree to which both the police uh the church

and the shooter himself framed this not as an anti-asian thing but as like uh as a as a something addressing his sex addiction um that was the angle they talked about it now there's all of the anti-asian stuff that is like right under the surface which is like propping up so much of what's going on but the the thing that they were publicly talking about was this uh so-called sex addiction yeah and and i think this is this is you know the this is this is a very important angle of this is we should actually talk about what that is and because and to understand because he just he's not like okay so like the sex edition is i think like actually sort of a thing but that is a hotly debated yeah i i don't know i look i'm not a psychiatrist don't take advice from me uh i think it's the

slightly more legit of the two things that of the two like fake syndrome things we're going to talk about here. But this is not what's going on with him. And if you want to understand. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. What's going on with this? We need to go back to enemy of the show purity culture.

Friend of friend of friend of the pod. Yeah, I'm going to say no. I refuse. I had I had friends in there a couple of times and i was like i refuse to call this friend of the show damn it like i can't bring myself to do it all right joshua harris just unsubscribed so long like by all accounts is extremely religious he's heavily involved in both his church and his high school like his high school he goes to public high school but his public high he goes to public high school

but his public high school has like christian athletic groups yeah which is a fun thing that they let you do in public schools um yeah it's great uh so you know to get it to get an understanding of like the kind of baptism we're dealing with here uh here's a line from the church's bylaws quote we believe that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex

is sinful and offensive to God. Yep. You know, and all of that's in the Bible. Yeah, they have. You can tell because they cite three passages not if we say that well okay i know there is there is bestiality stuff yeah bestiality is yeah and i think i think incest is in there well sort of i mean they there's doing it stuff there parts the bible are pro-incest parts of bible are anti-incest yeah it's um yeah the bible has a real uh sticky relationship

with the topic of incest um but yes i'm sure they thoroughly cite all of their passages for yeah that's great they talk about uh when they talk about bisexual conduct yeah it's well i mean you know the the one that's great is the attempting to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex, a thing that I... I'm guessing they're citing God created males and females and males and females, he created them. I don't actually think so, because they're not, they didn't... Okay, yeah, this is me being a coward and a fool, I didn't... I'm just speculating based on my experience in these in these uh types of types of groups yeah so so speaking of these types of groups so long is like okay so long's church like expels him after the the the shooting is the murders

yeah but okay is this anything because like i'm i'm 99 sure they violated their own bylaws because there's no way they could have done their expulsion uh their actual expulsion protocol in that amount of time because they would have had to like send people to visit him in jail see i think you're overestimating the degree to which churches care about what their bylaws actually say well i mean it's the why am i blanking on it what's the thing matt matt 18 there's like the thing that churches have that's like their expulsion protocol and they like send someone to this is the thing I've run into

I think you're slightly overestimating how much people actually care about that and how much it's all just a racket used to prop up the authority of the leaders and push people towards whatever political gains that the movement has yeah pretty much yeah speaking of getting people to submit to authority and political gains of the movement so we've talked about purity culture on this show we have like we had dozium um so we're not going to go into an enormous amount of detail about it here the very you should at least describe what it is so the very very very short version is it's like

it's an incredibly patriarchal like evangelical christian religious system in which like sex before marriage is seen as like an incredible sin and there's just like focus on like the purity of the wife and like like a woman is essentially the property of her husband and the entire goal of her existence is to like bear and raise children yeah so it was it was invented it was the modern version it was invented in the 90s, strongly influenced by a book written by someone named Joshua Harris. It was called I Kissed Dating Goodbye. The book promotes a pro-courtship-to-marriage pipeline instead of dating. I think dating will probably encourage you to have sex before marriage, which is, of course, bad.

And under all of this, under the actual – if you start digging into this, all the stuff it talks about in terms of sexual purity is about women are responsible for men's sexual sins. If a man lusts for a woman, that's the woman's fault, not the man's fault. It's because women must be presenting in a way that causes that to happen. So women's bodies and clothes should be designed in a way so that it will not cause men to stumble. And by stumble they mean get horny. And it's something that

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

If you have sex before marriage you are like like unclean it's it's like it's like you're it's like you're chewed up gum like you like you would not pick up someone's like if you found some chewed up gum on the street you wouldn't put it back in your mouth right so that's the idea like if you if if you're not a virgin you are you are like chewed up gum like You are already used. You're spent. So you save for marriage so that only your husband can chew up your gum and then after your marriage you're just stuck there forever, right? It's also like very anti-divorce.

And there's really no difference and like they don't really there's not much discussion around consent. Oddly enough you know that may surprise you based on what i all just said like obviously they don't care about consent um there's like they they view any they view sexual assault just as bad as consensual sex

before marriage they see them as the same thing yeah um it's it's basically this it's the same structures they're both an equal sin. And that is purity culture 101. We could just do an entire episode on purity culture, and we probably will in the future. We could do a series on it. Yeah. Yeah. I think the other important thing about it is that this is basically – in terms of there sort of being – I don't know if you call it a counterculture, but there's sort of being like an evangelical cultural machine. Like it's this.

This is what they're pushing as like their mass movement for youth, especially in the 90s and 2000s. We have stuff like purity rings, which is like when you're a teen, you'll get these objects or jewelry, which are like almost like magical items you put on to show that I am going to keep myself pure. And by doing this action, it's symbolizing that and therefore internalizing it. There's also purity balls, which is not what you'll... So when you use the word purity ball, certain things will come to mind, right? Unfortunately, they're not as fun as what is what you are thinking um a purity ball is just like a formal dance event you know like a ball that you put on um which is meant to it's a it's a meant to usually it's a like fathers take their

daughters there and then their daughters swear to make a virginity pledge um to protect their purity of mind body and spirit um so that they will not then infect you know boys uh and cause them to stumble and commit the sin of lust which again is an incredibly weird thing to do at a ball like yeah yes it's so weird well also yeah it's yeah most most yeah it's i we i think i think we've got into enough about yeah about this specific sort of thing i think the the the last thing i will walk in there there's one more thing that we're gonna talk about a bit at length but i so before that i i do want to point out that joshua harris who like is is in a lot of ways responsible like single-handedly responsible for an enormous amount of this. She is Japanese.

And yeah, fucking thanks for that one, buddy. Great job. Good shit, man. Like also good job. In 2019, he announced that he and his wife were divorcing. Yeah. So, you know, and now and now no longer considers himself like the type of christian he was before i'm unclear what his actual spiritual beliefs are at the moment

he did he did try to distance himself from his uh from yeah from what i've read like it's unclear that he knows so oh he he knows i he he definitely knows i can i can i can i can uh guarantee that he's he seems to be running he doesn't do grift now it sucks uh they always get new grifts but yeah actually when we will yeah we will get into the new grift industry in a second um but yeah one of the other things that's that's a big part of this is a like a deep and abiding hatred of porn like to the extent all of this is yeah i mean like as you said like in the list of bylaws watching porn again is the same as sexual assault yeah like this is a huge it's morally the same level of sin yeah and and like you know i mean and you can read that both ways as how seriously they take watching porn and how

not seriously i take sexual assault because it does go it does go both ways yeah um and this this thing the fact that this is this is like considered a sin is the apotheosis like well the apotheosis to this is is porn addiction which again like not really real dubious existence this is this is this is even more dubious and sexist than uh sex addiction like there's no there this is this is like this is just fake um but there's an entire culture that's that's like developed around stopping men from seeing porn these like there's like these incredibly elaborate accountability setups where like there's like apps you install on your stuff like there's ways to alter your ip address to block certain sites yeah robert aaron long the shooter like he he uses a flip phone instead of a

smartphone because uh he thinks having a phone will like lead into temptation um now long yeah and the product of this there's like there's like this entire industry that is built up around uh quote-unquote treating the porn addiction yeah um and it's it's all bullshit. But Long had spent – had twice been in one of these facilities called Hope Quest. Now, Hope Quest is an affiliate of her old friends at Focus and the family. But that's not actually the part I want to talk about because what's more interesting about Hope Quest is that it's founded by Roy A. Blankenship, a former ex-gay who left both Hope Quest and the ex-gay community to live with his husband. ex-gay who left both hope quest and the ex-gay community to live with his husband now what now this what uh what uh what what uh what a funny pattern we keep finding oh yeah yeah now i think my dear listeners if you were if you were not as as cursed as as as we are as we are yes and you don't know what an ex-gay is um ex-gays were there were this movement of

like evangelical gays who claimed that like this is the thing that starts in like the 90s 2000s uh they claimed that like they'd gone to conversion therapy and it made them not gay and it works yeah yeah and and this and you know and impartial part of partial what's going on here is they claim that it's that like they they did it voluntarily because like involuntarily doing conversion therapy had gotten to a point where it was like bad pr wise because Jesus Christ, you were like torturing children and they're still torturing children. But,

but this time they're like, no, it's voluntary. This is like a big, this is the rights, big cultural campaign against the gay rights movement in the nineties and two thousands. And,

uh, like I, I would say this, like it's, it's not exactly the same thing as the way they use detangitioners, but like, there's a lot of, it's very similar.

And of course, obviously that we now have the xx gay movement yeah yeah and and you know and and two two like so okay so like the the xk movement falls apart at in in like the late 2000s early 2010s because like it doesn't work like they're still gay all the leaders were initially gay said they were x gay and then kept having gay sex because that rules yeah um yeah and they all kind of realized maybe we should stop doing this thing that keeps killing kids yeah and blake and blake and ship to his credit like he'd been a big person doing this and then he was just like like one of his friends

like commit suicide and he's like oh shit and so like he stops and he like he denounces conversion therapy and he's now pro queer so many of the Focus on the Family people who were involved in Love One Out, all of these ex-gay programs, so many of them then renounced it, accepted their gayness, and then moved to Portland fucking Oregon. So many of them did this.

There are exceptions to this, though. This is what's interesting about this. So while he was sort of figuring this out, Blankenship had founded hope quest right and so he leaves with the people who are running it now like our ex-gays who they're like the only ex-gays left who didn't renounce it and who like still claim to be ex i mean they they've taken their stuff about how like homosexuality should be like dealt with by same by having by marrying a woman and just not acting on it or whatever like they they took that stuff out of their bios but they apparently

they still believe it like like they've never these people have never publicly come out against it and you know but what essentially happened was that like enough of enough of the ex-gays like the thing collapsed enough that like they had to find a new they had to find a new thing to do and the new thing that they found to do was they went and they went into the porn addiction uh treatment industry yeah yeah and i mean also if you want more background on like the ex-gay thing you can listen to my two-parter on focus on the family and james dobson for behind the bastards also for our week on the war on trans people, we discussed some of the same stuff for the first episode, which is the evangelical gay marriage thing. So we do have some produced, scripted stuff on these topics if you want more background on them.

Yeah, unfortunately, this is a story where every single thread you've ever done suddenly is coming together in one moment of horrific violence this is where long like winds up for his like treatment for like porn and sex addiction addictions which i cannot emphasize enough this is literally what he's talking about is literally that he watches porn like like that that's what porn and sex addiction like means and because none of this is, the treatments like don't work because again, it's all fake. I do. And also say, uh, hope quest is, uh, operates out of Georgia. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, so, so, so he, he, so he goes into treatment twice and he's, he has, he says it like Maverick, which is just like recovery center. Um, it doesn't work. And he goes home and his parents kick him which is this recovery center. It doesn't work. And he goes home and his parents kick him out of his house for watching porn. And I think this is something that is important to understand, which is that the people inside of this world really deeply believe this stuff.

And watching porn has real social consequences for them, and this has a profound effect on how these people think. I'm going to read a quote from a Washington Post article. Bayless, who was Long's roommate at Maverick Recovery, a sober living facility in Roswell, Georgia, in 2019 and 2020, in the months between his stays at HopeQuest, said Long felt his very salvation was at stake, as he told his roommate that he was, quote, living in sin and not walking in the light. He was walking in darkness. So this is how these people see this stuff, right? This is literally about whether you're immortal soul.

Yeah, this is about whether you go to heaven or hell. They're talking about something extremely existential. This all seems very silly to people who are not inside it, because it is. It is absurd. But for the people involved in it, it is the totality of the universe. It is so big. It's the biggest thing it's so important because you're you're determining what your what you will what your conscious being will exist for for thousands

and thousands of years like like this is what they actually believe so it's super important like it's it is it is worth killing for because it's that's that's how important this is like like i think i think there's a incentive, it is more important than life or death, because you dying, like, okay, you die once, you go to heaven. Your physical death doesn't matter. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Your spiritual death is so much more important. Yeah, and this,

you know, and we've talked about this, like, there's those things, there's the social consequences, you can get kicked out of your house, you can get kicked out of your church. If you keep doing this, like, these churches will kick you out. And this makes the ideology at work here incredibly powerful

and provides a mixture of this really incredible self-hatred for falling into sin and giving in to temptation. And it also creates a hatred of the temptation itself. And this brings us all the way up to the shooting. Purity culture,

purity culture is the key that unlocks, you know, the meeting of longs words. We can understand the explanation that the police gave, which again, like he apparently has an issue, what he considers a sex addiction and sees these locations as something that allows him to go to these places.

And it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate, you know, and there there there was a uh at the memorial for for the shooting last year um sex worker organizer kylan jong said this they hate us so they can hate themselves less and i think that's that's a really great Yeah. That is a really good analysis, yes. Yeah, it's a perfect calculation of what's happening here. But this is the part of the story where the media just violently and spectacularly fucks up to an act. They dropped the purity ball, you might say. Yeah, I mean, it's really horrible they're like what they've essentially done is enact 200 years of racist violence against people who had

either literally just survived a mass shooting or who are literally dead and the way they do this the press reads long talking about sex addiction addiction and they immediately assume that the women in these massage parlors have been having sex with them and they start there's like this whole hunt that they do to like search for evidence that massage workers were doing like full-service sex work based off of again the words of a literal racist mass murderer and their own racist preconception that like all asian women especially spa workers are also sex workers yep and like you know on the one hand yeah it's true that this stuff is fueled by horophobia and also like morally who gives a shit what they were doing, but the immediate problem

here is that by doing this witch hunt, you are sicking the police on the survivors. Yep, you're putting survivors in immense legal and physical danger. Yeah, and we will talk about this more next episode, but, like, these women have already seen more police violence and police

raids than all of the journalists writing about this combined have seen in their entire lives. And if any of these people had bothered to spend five seconds thinking about what purity culture is, they would have realized it long is from a fanatically puritanical culture. A culture where, for

example, a massage given by a woman where the man is like almost entirely naked is something that would absolutely have been considered a sexual service and like you know and if you think about this again

for like five seconds right when he's talking about removing temptation he he already thinks of all of these women as sex workers because that's what he thinks a massage is. He thinks – that's how he thinks about massages. Yeah, it is – women are the – women do this and they cause men to sin, right?

It has nothing to do with what's going on with the man. It is specifically what the woman's doing. Yeah, well, and even then, it doesn't actually i think the the important distinction here is that it does not matter when long talks about how this is a place that was giving him temptation and also like like he was giving him temptation and he was like he was going there for his sex addiction like it doesn't actually matter to him whether or not any of these women have ever like no exchange money for sex at all it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't need to be sexual at all absolutely not no yeah because

these people are fucking like just engulfed in like so totally engulfed in this incredibly like violent and racist and misogynist and horophobic ideology that it just sort of you know like that that's just how they think and i i think this is where we're going to return one final time this episode to race because there there's a mistake that people make thinking about this analytically that prevents them from understanding both what's happening in atlanta and how sort of capitalist and racist violence happens everywhere which is that like okay so right when this happened um like, when the press conference dropped, there were a lot of people, like, I think Glenn Greenwald did this, like, Lee Fang, like, there was a whole crew of people who were like, this isn't about Asian racism at all, this is about him, like, hating sex workers. And, okay, it is true that human labor has been transformed into a commodity that can be bought and sold at will.

Now, on a more theoretical level, you will see sort of incredibly theory-brained people who will talk about how – in Marx's critique of political economy, all labor is abstract and interchangeable. Each unit of labor time is equivalent, identical, and exchangeable. But here in the massage parlor, this is a deadly simplification. This labor, the labor that is going on here is Asian. It is indelibly stamped with race and ethnicity and nationality and hundreds of years of violence and perception. Ruma S. Pacha, an assistant professor at the Institute of Women's Studies at the University of Georgia wrote a piece last year called White Supremacy in the Wellness Industry, or Why It Matters That This Happened at a Spa. And I'm going to read a passage from it because it's very good. Massage spas, also called salons or parlors, like the one where these crimes took place, are part of a broader industrial complex that capitalizes on the racist belief that Asian people, and Asian women in particular,

possess magical, spiritual, and sexual healing abilities. These attitudes belong to an entrenched Orientalist infrastructure in the United States that connects yoga, meditation, and massage to tourism, pleasure, and escape, signaled by the exotic tropical flower

in the photo above. There's a photo of a flower at a parlor. Yeah. And this labor, the labor of the massage that's happening here, it depends almost entirely on a very specific performance of a specific kind of Asian femininity. a specific kind of asian femininity and you know when this sort of gendered racialized violence when this gender and racialized labor comes into contact with long and all of the sort of historical forces that he's bearing he murders the workers and yeah i think yeah this is the part of the story of the atlantic shooting that i think if people know about

the atlantic shooting at all like this is the part they know about right they know the story of robert aaron long but there are other stories here stories that are stories that in large part are just not about the us at all um there are the stories of the victims the survivors and the absolute hell that brought them into the massage parlor in the first place on that horrific night. And those are the stories that we're going to tell in part two. Yeah. Well, that does it for us today. I do want to say, I know Chris was planning these for the anniversary of the shooting, but they proved to be quite the daunting task

to put together, so it had to get pushed back for a while. But big thanks to you for doing the work to read through all of the horrible things that you had to. Oh boy, the other thing I'll say about this, if you think this is bad, wait till part two,

which is even more wide-spanning and has horrific and disturbing violence in a way that will, I don't know, reduce media tiers multiple times and, yeah, will leave you in existential dread of the condition of this world. And I guess, again, there is ways to combat it, right? Because a lot of these things are problems with viewpoint and ideas in terms of how we view sex, how we view women, how we view race. And there are things that when you see, you can interrogate in people. Especially if you're a Christian, if you're going to church, these are things to watch out for and you can push back on because it's and doing so can maybe save people's lives

because these ideas have a death count yeah and I think there's another part of this too which is that the reason we talk about purity culture stuff so much the reason we talk about the mobilizations of the evangelical right so much is that they keep producing these movements that you know that that put that put our lives in danger and the only way that we can stop this and this is a thing that we can do is you have to actually destroy their movement right

you have you have to you have to actually break their power you have to you know you you have to actually destroy their movement right you have you have to you have to actually break their power you have to you know you you have to find various ways to break the power break the power of these churches and you have to find ways to break the power of their political movements and that is not an easy task but if if we want to live in a world well i mean just point blank if if we want to live in a world and not in four degrees Fahrenheit unlivable death scape, we have to deal with these people. Because they are the source of

almost every right-wing movement that we're facing, and they have to be crushed before they do this again. Yeah, and they're going to try. Yeah, because the biggest thing would would say is like reaching out to people who you know are in this or if you if you go to church i think it's your duty as a christian to push back on these things yeah because i'm i'm not gonna bash anyone specifically for whatever religion they have. I understand why people have this.

I can see how they work. I was raised in something very similar. But you can still push back on the type of rhetoric that leads to these things and the type of objectification and racism that necessitates violence and gets people to be okay with violence. And pushing back against Christian apocalyptic worldviews and the idea of your actions will determine the spiritual quality of your soul and where it's going to reside for all of eternity.

All these things are ideas that are pretty pretty like innately dangerous um and there's ways to do religion that don't have that yeah but i think i think that is a good enough place to leave it for today. Because I know part two, we're going to have some more widespread problems. Yeah. All right. Well, this has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us in the social media places at Happen Here Pod. You can also flee into the woods.

Flee into the woods. But before you flee into the woods, subscribe to the pod and leave a 5 star review bye bye everybody see you tomorrow welcome I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and 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 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. Yep. It's It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and some other stuff occasionally. I'm Robert Evans. Welcome to the show.

and some other stuff occasionally. I'm Robert Evans. Welcome to the show. Today, our guests, fresh off their new hit movie by Paramount, Garrison Davis. What? Yeah, what? What? I'm doing like a thing.

Chris, Garrison's lost the thread. Why don't you pick it up? I also have lost the thread thread so here's a new one this has been very confusing for part 2 of an episode it's just absolutely baffling you want things to not be confusing you have somebody else introduce your podcast

that's just the way it goes noted yeah so welcome to part 2 of the atlanta shooting um we are back with actually less atlanta this time but more shooting oh good sorry this is a very absurd it really is we've had ourselves in. Dear God. Just a normal day at work.

Take it away, Chris. You got this. You got this. We believe in you. There's a tendency, I think, among Asian American writers where when we get confronted

with what are considered quote-unquote asian american stories uh there's almost inevitably an autobiographical pivot that happens like at some point in the piece um may jong the the author of the vanity fair piece i mentioned last episode that's been a major source for both these episodes uh doesn't her piece so do i mean like dozens and dozens and dozens of asian american writers who are you know much more accomplished and talented than i am and like i get it i i don't blame them for it i think it's a powerful way to anchor a story and to understand a story and i also think that it's why we miss like half of the story that we when we talk about things because you know the the the the audio

autobiographical focus has this tendency to narrow the scope into looking at just sort of the u.s and this story and the story of asian americans in general isn't just a story about sort of a minority in the u.s or about american imperialism it's about asia itself and here especially it's about china and korea to a lesser extent japan and you know the the histories of these places have as much to do with why the people who died in atlanta were in those rooms on that day as christian purity culture does and you know by by actually looking at this we get to introduce another key player in this horror show who only sort of appear tangentially in part one which is capitalism because capitalism is about to show up and make just all of this

monumentally worse yeah it's kind of like steven seagal in that way. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I think much more active than Steven Seagal, but similar levels of that. Well, yeah, he can barely move. Yeah. Capitalism, unfortunately, moves at an incredibly relentless pace. Yeah, capitalism's knees are in incredible shape. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And this brings us back to Atlanta itself.

Tao Youfang died a hero. brings us back to Atlanta itself. Tao Youfeng died a hero. In the final moments of her life, as shots rang across Yang's Asian massage, she motioned for Marcus Leon, still half-naked on the massage table, to stay still and

wait for her to walk in front of him before he dived behind the massage table. By covering Leon's movement as she opened the door, she sacrificed her life to save the life of a man she'd met just minutes before. Her reward, in typical American fashion, was a bullet in the head. It took six days for her family in China to realize that she'd been killed. By village custom, the remains of an unmarried woman who left the village could not re-enter it to be buried.

Her body thus lay unclaimed in a morgue for 19 days before she was buried in the land of her killer at a funeral attended entirely by strangers. Marcus Leon, the man Da Yongfeng sacrificed her life to save, was forced to return to work at FedEx just three days after surviving the massacre. The sound of the packages

he dropped on his delivery run sounded like gunshots. He quit soon after. There is no justice in this world only an unending parade of horror the details of which are somehow each worse than the last and it is

yeah this is I think what I wanted to sort of what I wanted to talk about in this episode which is that like it's not just that there was a shooting it's that each element of why everyone is there is a its own successive horror story and the conditions that like produce this horror are not you know they're not just the conditions that produce robber darren long horror are not just the conditions that produce Robert Aaron Long. They're not just the conditions that produce the shooter. They are the conditions that produce Dao Youfeng, who spent almost her entire life as a migrant worker supporting a family whose most pressing concern was attempting to marry her off.

and how they develop because uh a 12 year old girl drops out of middle school to work at a factory 250 miles away and that eventually is gunned down by an american racist is not how the future of asia was supposed to go like you know i i i don't have much love i would imagine not yeah it's like i don't have much love for mal but i don't think if you showed mal this he would be like oh my god this is the future that I wanted for my people like this things have gone very badly wrong and I think to understand how we got to this hell we need to go back to another

hell which is the beginning of the Korean War and you know we've talked about the effects that the Korean War had on Korean women in the last episode but I think there's a few other things that are worth emphasizing here one of which is that the absolute devastation that the war wrought on north and south korea is incalculable i mean the effects of this are still felt to this day it was a utterly devastating war um but it it also has sort of more subtle effects on the sort of politics and economics of the region because one of the very important things about this war is that the U.S. is fighting in East Asia.

asia and this means that the u.s is going to leave an enormous army in south korea which has its own military and sort of political and economic consequences and you know those troops are still there to this day like technically fighting a war which has never formally ended and you know we'll come back a bit to this later, but this has enormous implication for the entire region. I've talked on Bastards before about so many effects this has, but Korea and later Vietnam are a major, like the war is the US fights there, are a major factor behind the industrialization of Japan, which sees enormous US investment as part of this attempt to shorten American supply lines by exporting their military industrial complex to East Asia. We've talked about the Japanese angle of this, but South Korea is likewise industrialized by American capital for pretty much the same reason. And this goes on to the extent that Korean troops fight on the side of the US in Vietnam. And South Korea's production base proves a pivotal military asset for the US war machine of the u.s in vietnam and you know so in south korea's production base proves a sort of a pivotal military asset for the u.s war machine in the east

now the thing i think and i think i think that part of it like is understood decently well because you know if you if you if you like know literally anything about this region you've you've seen the effects of this stuff but the part of it i think is less understood is that in china this the war has a similar effect which is that communist leadership fights this war right and it immediately becomes clear to them that there is a looming possibility they're gonna have to fight the u.s again and if they're gonna have to fight the u.s again they need an actual sort of modern industrial base to fight a war against the U.S. And this, you know, this leads to sort of militarization, industrialization. And you get a look at two very different kinds of state led developments, which I'm going to call state led development, corruption and state led state led development, socialism, question mark. and state-led development socialism? Which sort of play out in China and Korea.

And I think it's worth actually talking about this because both of these systems are essentially going to collapse. And when they do, they are going to send an enormous number of people, both in China and Korea,a you know spreading it spreading across the world seeking like any kind of sort of economic salvation and a lot of the people who are killed in atlanta are in atlanta because of these because of these crises yeah so so the the first of these is the chaebol system in korea which is sort of informally established by the dictator Park Chung-hee as like the core of his plan for economic development. And it generates a number of extremely powerful family-owned mega conglomerates with intimate ties to the state and these sort of various political factions. And these conglomerates, which control just vast sections of the Korean economy, like mean like like like to this day samsung which

is the the largest the remaining tables like i i think i think they they're that their total percentage of the gdp of korea is like 17 or something it's like it's it's absolutely absurd wow jesus yeah like and and like and the thing is you know it's sort of it's amazing about this is that like the the tables are much weaker than they used to be for reasons that we will get to in a bit. When they're founded and they're at the height of their powers, they're established with three goals. There's an attempt to develop the economy. regals um there's an attempt to develop the economy uh you know there's an attempt to sort of the fuel there's an attempt to sort of fuel the american and south korea war machines and the third thing they're trying to do is to make a lot of people in the government their allies

indescribably rich and uh it works sort of amazingly which is a weird thing to say about a development regime started by military dictatorship, but they have an enormous amount of American capital military aid, and they do successfully develop. They kill an enormous number of people in the process, but they do it. On the other side,

you have Chinese state-led development and this is also about economic development and fueling the military but you know the goal here is to create an economic base for socialism and this does not work um there there's a number of sort of complicated reasons for this the the simplest one is that china just doesn't get the kind of investment technology transfer South Korea gets until like way later. But the other really important element of this for this story is about the urban world divide. And this is another thing I've talked about bastards like on I've talked about on bastards a bit, but I think it's worth going into the details a little bit because otherwise a lot of the stuff that's going to happen that is you know the the the the part of the story that is directly sending 12 year olds off to a factory in shenzhen like don't make any sense without it so to make a very complicated

and shifting set of economic programs like as simple as possible, Chinese industrial policy during what's sort of called the socialist period is about extracting grain from the countryside and fueling and funneling it into urban industrial developments. And to get an understanding of what we're talking about here. So the CCP is essentially deliberately underdeveloping the countryside in favor of developing cities and this is explicit state policy from 1953 to 1985 80% of the Chinese population is doing agricultural labor but agriculture receives less than

10% of state investments over the same period so they are like really really really incredibly not funneling any resources back into into rural areas yeah i mean is there a degree to that is there a degree of that that is maybe related to like i know in the ussr a lot of the early left-wing resistance to the soviet regime came from rural areas um is it anything to do with that like is it kind of a desire to to avoid developing these places that are less controllable no and this is the sort of

interesting thing about china is that i mean okay so the the ccp originally has an urban base but they managed to get their entire urban base killed so okay well yeah that'll that'll yeah yeah it's yeah and this is this this is the cause of like like this this is this is one of the reasons for the sino-soviet split like this is basically like stalin and trotsky are bickering and their bickering gets like a million chinese communists killed and that means that you know this this is this is where the sort of rise of comes in because mao is uh mao's a peasant organizer and once the entire rural party is dead it's like well okay so now we have a peasant base and they have they actually have a really they have like a basically unprecedented level of sort of buy-in from the countryside but the problem is that the party just isn't

interested in in rural development because the thing that they want is they want to be able to develop military power and they want to be able to develop like heavy industry. And those aren't things that they think you can do in the countryside. And so their strategy is just to just, I mean, just literally, it's just pure grain extraction from the countryside and then using that to fuel industrial development, which they're doing for, mean largely ideological reasons but it also does have to do with the fact that china like like people people talk a lot about how like you know the communist revolution in russia happens in like the least developed country in europe and it's like yeah but like russia had like several times more industrial capacity during russian revolution than china does after the war so this is a country that is like

a complete economic backwater. And so, you know, this is part of what they're doing. Although it doesn't work. And you know, I should mention, there's one other thing that they're doing here, which is that so their base in the peasantry

is fairly solid, but the other thing they have to use this grain budget for is to buy off this like incredibly militant working class that they've inherited. Because these people are on strike like constantly. And this is this is this is a really serious problem for the CCP. And so they you know, they have all these welfare programs, they have all of these resources that they're putting into buying off this class. And the result of this is you have just incredible rural poverty. Because one of the things that happens here is, I guess you call them benefits, but things like housing, education, medical care, this stuff is all distributed through your work and through your household registration. this stuff is all distributed like through your work and through your household registration. And so, you know, if,

if, if you're someone who has a job in the countryside, you're, you, the resources that you're getting are, are also from the countryside. And that means that you have just these like awful underfunded services. Your benefits are terrible.

And even if you can somehow get a job in the city, which is really hard because China also has these like really intense internal, like immigration restrictions. So like if, if you're like in another province that you're not supposed to be like you you will get deported back to your home province there's all these really tight controls and this means that like if you're in a rural area like your livelihood is tied to your family unit in a way that's like not happening anywhere near as intensely in the cities.

And, and when I say your livelihood is tied to your family unit, uh, what I mean is that like, other than this, like brief, like token attempt, they made to socialize like housework,

reproductive labor in the greatly forward, uh, men and the state are just like entirely dependent on uncompensated housework and production by women which well yeah it's not just a china thing yeah i mean yeah it's like okay yeah it's like oh hey this sounds like a modern system i'm like yes this is true um but on the other hand the socialists like ideologically are claiming to be better than this so i'm holding them through their own standards giving them just like a d on this because this is fair like yeah i mean like i think this is really one of like you know okay so they failed to end capitalism but like i think if you

look at like what is the other great failure of the chinese revolution it's that they never dealt with the patriarchy and this means that like you know when mao is saying stuff about like women hold up half the sky like what he actually means is that like women's labor is holding up like 70 of the budget and they're getting like 20 of the pay and this this is extremely important for reasons that we will get to in a second because it turns out if your entire economy is based on patriarchy uh really bad things start happening in terms of your gender politics which uh is a thing that has never has literally never happened in any other regime and we should not at all take

any lessons from this about how our own economy works it's great it's completely fine. The other thing that we need to talk about is the CCP's just utter full-scale war against its urban workers. And this is not the kind of abstract class war that you hear leftists talking about all the time. That's about wages, unionization, and so forth. This is an actual war that is resolved by the PL just the pla the chinese army just butchering the chinese working class and this comes to a head in the cultural revolution and you know i i have i have a whole rant about the cultural revolution that i will do sometime that's not now but the short version of it is that one of the things that happens in the cultural revolution is that the ccp crushes these sort of rebel worker factions and they kill a

million people like from from from that is a lot of people yeah yeah i mean it's like it's really it's really like it comparing it like to the scale of like the great anti-communist purges like this is i i think it i think it's actually more i think it's a 1.1 million people i think it's more people than than suharto killed it's like well there you go see there's some left right unity yeah well i mean about mount mount mount undisputed greatest anti-communist has the highest number of communism kills well i don't know let's let's i mean joseph stalin's in that running that's true you've got you've got a, you've got a couple of Titans battling it out here. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a difficult, it's, it's, it's difficult choice, but yeah, I mean, like

they are like, like the CCP is literally fighting a war against, against the servant workers. And like, this is even by like the mid seventies, there are, there are moments where the army is sending like tens of thousands of work of since a thousand of troops, like into cities to break up strike waves. And this is, this is an enormous problem for CCP, you know? Okay.

Like it's an enormous problem for them politically because it turns out that being a communist party. And then the thing that you're doing all of the time is sending soldiers to shoot workers is really bad for your political system. Ideologically. Well, okay. that's your opinion yeah it doesn't go great for them and and the the other problem they have is uh you know this this creates this like this incredible militarization of society and this leads to stagnation and there's all this corruption that's happening but the other problem is like

okay so if you're like a cadre like planner right and there's all these people on strike uh you need to not be on strike because you need them to produce stuff for your like central planning production schedules and so all these like cadre planners start being like okay these workers keep going on strike like where where can we get labor that won't do this and they start looking at the countryside and they start going like beard stroke can we send this over here and meanwhile like the actual world like ruralites are fed up with just being treated like shit and they start de-collectivizing their farms because well okay there's a lot of reasons why they're doing this but they essentially start forming these things that become called a town and village enterprises

which are these like the simplest explanation of it is that they basically start forming capitalist companies and trying to make money but the ownership structures are a bit different because they're like you know it'll be like a village right and like the village like technically collectively owns this like company that makes tires or something. And this is where you start getting markets coming back to China. And the CCP looks at this and goes, yeah, sure, this is fine. This won't stop our communism thing because we're having budget shortfalls right now. And if we let someone else do this work, we don't have to pay for it.

And so these town and village enterprises which are called tvs like mostly what they're doing is they're like selling parts and stuff to like these giant state-owned enterprises which are you know your state-owned enterprises are things that are building like bikes and like tractors and refrigerators so they're like you know they're selling them like wheels or like refrigerator parts and this is this is the thing that becomes the core of the chinese economy particularly in daioh feng's home province of guandong because guandong is a really unique well okay really unique province i guess is the thing you can say about literally every province but guandong is particularly unique in this period because it's right next to hong kong and this means that i mean there's always been sort of like capital kind of through really shady

black markets and like people passing each other like notes under dinner tables and extra like all of the weird like diplomacy stuff that like uh like kissinger and nixon get up to is happening through these like weird back channels that a lot of which are running through hong kong that there's a lot of stuff that's been sort of running through there and when this stuff starts to happen um you uh guendong gets these special economic zones and this becomes sort of the the prototype for china's like eventual sort of capitalist centric like export development model um guandong is like they're literally they're they're they're they're taking like foreign capital from hong kong and

they're using it to produce good for the market and this is the world that dano yong feng and xiao zhetan grow up in um it it's a world where on the one hand there's enormous economic growth but on the other hand like all of the safety nets that chinese socialism have put in place are just like being completely destroyed and everyone is once again dependent on wages to survive and it's also an incredibly deeply patriarchal world you know and we've seen this already right with diane fong's village just like refusing to bury her body because she's not married and you know this is this is something that's only gotten worse as the sort of as the 80s where you get into the reform period you have simultaneously you have the one child policy which is this incredibly draconian state enforced destruction of bodily autonomy and it also serves this really horrific role in devaluing girls because girls are seen as having less economic

value than boys and so you get all these things where like you get these you get targeted like gender targeted abortions they're these mass sterilizations that happen. And yeah, it's this just enormous patriarchal engine and it sucks. And there's also, there's a return to Confucianism as well. Because like, this is one of the things that's like the most infuriating about this,

because like, like 80% of like what the original Chinese revolution was about was like, Hey, Confucianism sucks. This incredible reactionary patriarchal ideology is in fact bad. And then 40 years in, they're like, hold on, wait, what if we bring this shit back? And it is extremely bad. and it is it is it is extremely bad and you know and it serves as a sort of like like this pacifying patriarchal ideology that they're using to sort of hold the family unit together because the family unit are like so a lot of the the firms in this period are they're just like owned by families right and you know you you there's a lot of sort of similarities here between if you look at your like you know you're sort of like right wing like

culturally christian like small business owner families and you look at this and it's like huh we've we've redeveloped the wheel here we have once again created the patriarchal death engine yay it's it's great it's it's it's great it's yeah and this this is basically this is the world that Da Yongfeng like grows up in and

this is the period where the old urban working class is just hammered to pieces so that the state and capital could just gorge itself as welfare benefits and the new Chinese working class is just hammered to pieces so that the state and capital can just gorge itself on its welfare benefits. And the new Chinese working class is born. And this migrant working class, its vanguard are these women who are given two imperatives by their families. And these imperatives are given, I mean, literally to Da Yongfeng, like Da Youfeng, like directly, i i think indirectly to um xiao zhetan

okay so like with dao yufeng we like we literally have the quotes of this right like she she is told by her family get married and find a job and xiao zhetan gets married off at 20 but a a middle school da yong feng like drops out of school and just goes to work in a factory in shenzhen and this like these are the women who built modern china like these are these are literally these are the people who turn shenzhen from a tiny rural town into a world-class manufacturing hub that is literally larger than any city in north america and i mean this happens in the span of like a couple of decades and they get jack shit for it like the wages they are working for like dao fang's brother

is working on rubber plantation he's making five dollars a month and you know in dao fang's case like the other thing she's dealing with is literally these constant demands for her family to get married and Fong just refuses they try to do it as a young adult she just goes no and they try to try to get like when she's like 38 they bring her back to her village and are like pick a husband and she just goes no

and she's just like they keep showing your guys she's just like no and you know what she does instead is charter her own path by managing to secure a visa to the u.s where yeah this this is so daniel fong's like is a migrant worker for ages and eventually i think like 2016 she moves to the u.s to support her family again from afar there's there's only there's one more piece of macroeconomics i mean you talk about before we can follow da young fong to the massage parlor and

this one is going to get like everyone else to the scene of this massacre so when we last left our uh korean corruption tables uh business business was booming and in the early 90s, business is even more booming. This is the best I've ever done economically. The reason it's the best I've ever done economically is because in large part because of the thing

that I am just perpetually cursed by when I do research for this show, which is the Plaza Accords. I've talked about this before, but I will once again do a brief summary of this, which is the plaza accords um i've talked about this before but i will once again do a brief summary of this which is that so in the 1980s as people probably are aware the u.s the u.s manufacturing economy is dying and this is a real problem for reagan because everyone's like reagan why does the economy suck and his solution to this is just basically at gunpoint forcing japan and west germany to like let the u.s devalue its currency relative to the yen and the Deutsche Mark.

And it's like, okay, this is a boring technocratic thing. But the thing it actually does is if your currency is weaker than another currency, it's easier for you to like sell them to have an export economy and sell them stuff. sell them to have an export economy and sell them stuff and this sets off just like an incredibly catastrophic chain of events where the u.s manufacturing actually comes back because you know hey oh hey look the dollars the dollars weaker now we can produce shit again but it just you know it it it combines with this like structural weakness japan's economy japan's economy just implodes and japan goes okay fuck it how do we keep the economy going without a manufacturing sector and their solution is invest in other countries and do real estate speculation and you know okay so obviously nothing bad ever happens

happens when you do real estate speculation and the japanese economy was completely fine until it collapsed like five years later um but this this has a series of effects uh one of them is that the korean shables you know those those companies that are doing like literally the best business i've ever done the reason they're doing this is because of japanese credit and the fact that like the the there's more complicated currency bullshit going on but basically like the value the value of the korean currency was pegged to the dollar and so when the dollar's value decreased uh the one also decreased and so you know this this this gives korea like a big manufacturing competitive manufacturing edge but then you know japan goes under and they start to lose credit and then the

u.s in 1995 does the reverse plaza accords where they just reverse the thing that they did before and so now the dollar is incredibly strong again uh every other currency is really weak well due to it and this just like this just obliterates like every economy in east asia like they all just implode thailand goes under and most of these countries like have never recovered. Like Thailand in particular, like the, I mean, South Korea kind of does, but it's basically the only one. All the rest of the economies are just obliterated. And, you know, this is the Asian economic crisis. And, you know, saddled with like enormous debts and declining profits, like these tables start just collapsing left and right.

And South Korea just is just on the edge of bankruptcy and right on cue the imf shows up and makes everything worse because yeah it's great it's the imf they yeah they they they do they do normal imf stuff and they you know they impose a bunch of austerity measures and this just this annihilates the korean middle class like it's just it just gets obliterated this is this this annihilates the Korean middle class. Like it's just, it just gets obliterated. This is, this is just as death knell. And it also, it has, you know, it has a lot of effects. But one of the other ones is the Korean labor movements is really severely damaged by just all the economic devastation that's happening around them. And the product of this is just as sort of rural poverty drives Da Yongong fong and chao chiton from their villages

the economic collapse drives hyun jung kim grant who's one of the other people who died in in this shooting from korea to the u.s and this is something that this is there's there's something about the u.s here well okay there's something about the u.s is that its economy is incredibly strong and the dollar is incredibly strong and even people who come to the u.s for other reasons two of the women who wind up here like are here basically because they married someone and but even that you know like there's a couple people like they marry someone then they they break up divorces them but they stay in the US. They stay in the US because like the median American income is like three times the median American income in China. And that's like now. And so, you know, and the combination of that and the strength of the American the American dollar sort of it brings.

It brings the brave, the desperate and just the love struck to our shores um now if you remember lcs hernandez ortiz who's who's the man that uh long like shot while he was on his knees begging for his life um hernandez ortiz was in that mall because he was wiring money home to his family in guatemala and you know we could do another entire story here about guatemala and the united fruit company and these the u.s backhoos and genocides but i think the thing about this story is that every atrocity is tied to every other atrocity. You know, and it creates this web of death that we sort of, you know, we euphemistically call it capitalism or society or reality. And the survivors of this are just flung from meat grinder to meat grinder, desperately looking for a new life in a new country.

And, you know know they get there and the country just buries them instead da yong fong was also you know constantly sending money home to her family when she arrives in the u.s she's supporting like 10 members of her family off of a salary that is like i mean like she's supporting members of her family off of the salary that you get from massage work right yeah i i think this is like like again i think something that people don't understand about the u.s is that like yeah american wages are low but the dollar is so strong that even like like really like small amounts of money that you can send like small amounts of money in dollars you can send back home have

this enormous economic impact and there is there is an enormous like an absolutely enormous sort of network of immigrants in the u.s who are here basically to work and to send remittances back home and this is i mean this is like this is an enormous part of just how the economy of the philippines works because of yep yeah a bunch of the just incredibly fucked up stuff that the marcos's did um yeah and you know for for asian women in particular once they get here they're often drawn to spa work because i mean there's a lot of reasons we'll get into in a second but these spas these spas are in some sense just like a microcosm of the US.

Like the pay is good and the people doing the work often like prefer it to other jobs that are accessible to immigrants. Well, okay. They're accessible to immigrants with their levels of political and economic capital and social connections, which is usually really not that large. But the problem is, you know, as with everything in the u.s it's also often dangerous like the particular kind of sort of exposure and performance of femininity that you need to do this leaves these workers incredibly vulnerable to stalkers and you know they face sort of constant like racial misogynist abuse um butterfly which is a toronto-based sex worker group released a report that said that half

of all massage parlor workers reported some kind of threat to their safety at work jesus yeah it's it's workplace is both incredibly dangerous and then you know and when we're saying like threat to their workplace that doesn't that's not even like that's not even counting the police and if you've read anything about this you'll read people saying things like massage parlors face constant police raids and this is true but if anything it understates how bad it actually is because like asian massage parlors are subjected to two different kinds of police raids that just happen constantly um i'm gonna read a thing from buzzfeed yeah it's great it's it's really fun uh from 2016 2020, 94% of people arrested for unauthorized practice of a profession for any job requiring a license in New York were Asian, and 96% were women, according to data from the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services. and where prostitution is a misdemeanor defense unauthorized practice of a profession which is the charge that covers unlicensed massage along with roles like veterinary medicine and engineering

is a felony that carries higher penalty including up to four years of jail time now i'm i'm no expert but that sure does sound like racism and misogyny yep well it's like yeah there's an argument to be made like if you're If you're moonlighting as a bridge engineer and you're not qualified, yeah, sure, maybe that's a felony. Robert, you're really just calling me out on the pod, just right in the... Now, Garrison, we've agreed not to talk about all of those people who died when that bridge collapsed that you built in Florida on that university campus.

Nothing of value was lost. No, it was Florida. That's why the DA is not coming after you. Yeah. U.S. government not pressing charges. It's Florida. Mm-hmm. So, okay.

Back to the racism and misogyny. Back to racism and misogyny. It's like, okay, so you have these raids that are like literally only like targeted against Asian massage workers. And then on top, so that's type one. And the second type of raid is that the other thing that happens at these places constantly are these anti-prostitution and anti-trafficking raids. And I'm putting both of those in enormous quotations heavy heavy quotation yeah you know i this is okay i'm gonna go on a side tangent rant here which is that like okay so like every single person who does reporting on this and i don't know

if this is like a journalistic standards thing but like even the good reporting on this they like almost always have like a section that says uh oh the the the georgia like georgia's like resources on sex trafficking says that uh uh salon asian salons are a place where there's a bunch of sex trafficking and it's like really like this this this is what you're putting in your article about a bunch of people getting murdered by a racist dude like this is the thing that that you're gonna put in here and you know and like this is sort of like all of that stuff that i talked about like last episode about robert aaron long like all of the objectification and the racism and the horophobia and that like mixture of like desire and loathing like the cops have this but like also the journalists who are writing

about this have this stuff and even the people who don't are sort of like picking up on the sort of like avian racism so you get all this coverage that's just focused on like trying to figure out if there was sex work going on here and you know and like i talked about last episode like this is really dangerous because exposing people exposing these sites to police investigation means you get more of these stings and you know like we we mentioned at the beginning that uh uh dao yung feng like no none no one she knew showed up to her funeral and the reason that no one she knew showed up to her funeral is that the reason that no one she knew showed up to her funeral is that no one wanted to be at a place where there could potentially be cops. So they wouldn't be deported.

Right. Yeah. How could anyone who knew her come to her funeral? Because that would be. Yeah. Well, and her, her brother wanted to come,

but the, the like travel to the U S was, was expensive enough that he was just like yeah we can't do this and you know and like and i that these these anti-trafficking anti-prostitution raids are so common that two of the atlanta victims have been arrested as part of raids like before this and even though both of them are innocent, uh, Soon Chung Park was convicted of criminal trespassing anyways,

again, which is like one of the most insane things I've ever heard in my life because she was arrested at the place where she worked and they convicted her of criminal trespassing because this entire system is made up of just like robber and long levels of of racism but they have it they have a legal outlet to do it so they don't have to just go murder people and and sometimes they still do murder people yeah definitely yeah um i mean we talked about very generous with that sometimes garrison yeah i mean there there's a really horrific story of uh there was there was a a chinese sex worker who the nypd like repeatedly attempted to force her at gunpoint to have sex

with them and she refused and they so and you know because because she refused uh the nypd kept doing raids on her and eventually she died because she jumped out a window trying to escape one of the raids. Oh, God. Because these people are just literal monsters. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, Soon-Chung Park, like, she's convicted of criminal trespassing

and she gets, you know, the sort of particular American humiliation of being forced to wear an ankle monitor that you have to pay for around your house while being under house arrest. And... of being forced to wear an ankle monitor that you have to pay for around your house while being under house arrest. And I've talked about this with the journalists, but again, like there, this is an entire system full of Robert Aaron Longs. It's the judges, it's the prosecutors, it's the social workers, it's the journalists, it's the cops. the judges it's the prosecutors it's the social workers it's the journalists it's the cops and this is this is an incredible level of systemic state violence that makes these already

tenuous migrant worker communities even more vulnerable because you know if someone's harassing them they can't call the cops because if the cops show up it's like oh hey it's good this is this is even worse than the harassment and that's i think think, where I want to end here today on with things that can actually be concretely done about this to help spa workers and sex workers. There's two proposals that spa and sex worker groups have been backing, one of which is just ending the licensing requirement for massages because it's literally only ever used to target Asian massage workers.

Yeah, that seems like a good call. it's definitely not the law but oh yeah yeah yeah getting rid of it getting rid of it yeah clarify there yeah yeah i mean it's you know like this this is my this is my like my most libertarian position is just being against like a lot of these licensing things because what's what's next a license to make toast in your own toaster if it's a thing that people just do all the time uh and in fact cannot be stopped from doing under any circumstances then it shouldn't require a license to do like flying a plane like flying exact garrison like flying a plane like performing surgery you know um like being a police officer just make everybody everything all licenses

sorry i've lost the thread it's okay i mean well i i think that the actual thread here though is that like you know okay so like yeah on the one hand in theory it is good to have licenses that you know like have have a way to tell who knows how to do something and who doesn't right yeah but the thing is that's not what the state does yeah massage yeah yeah it's massage and like and the thing the state actually does even with licenses like and they do they do this with driver's licenses like even even with driver's licenses which is the thing that like yeah like people should know how to drive before you put them behind like the the the four-wheel death machine like what what do they do with it it's like oh they use it to go after undocumented immigrants because the state is just incredibly racist and that this is the thing that's happening

with these licenses is yeah they just they just do racism with it well it's it's why you can't have like the common sense law would be like oh okay well we're gonna have sex workers so there should be some sort of system to make sure that people are getting tested for things and that basic you know certain safety procedures or that at least people know what safety procedures are being you know used at the place or whatever um but what it always boils down to is uh this is an excuse for police to fuck with vulnerable people yeah the thing that this brings us to is the second proposal which is just decriminalizing sex work like don't prosecute people for this don't send the cops after them just don't do it

like it it it it it only ever causes violence against people who are already the most marginalized people in a given society. It doesn't actually help against trafficking either. In fact, it makes fighting against trafficking actually harder because people feel not able to talk about things when they see stuff that's questionable.

I'm sure we can do more content. I'm sure we can do more content content um i'm sure we can do more stuff about sex work in the future um but yeah it really should be uh not a crime yeah and and i think this is something like you know it's it it reminds me a lot of like of of the anti-trans stuff where it's like okay so you you should care about the stuff because you should care about trans people you should also care about this stuff because it affects people who are not trans this is a thing where these massage workers are like

most of them are not sex workers and it doesn't matter at all and it's the splash over effects are hitting them too and yeah the consequence of that is eight people are dead yep yeah go help your local sex worker organizations and go hope you help your local spa workers associations like get rid

of this licensing stuff and fight for decriminalization because this this this kind of shit doesn't have to happen and we can this is something that we actually can concretely do and win that will make an enormous number of people whose lives are incredibly precarious enormously better yep okay so we have already seen before our eyes that uh you can do you can do things that involve safety where the police are just useless. We have seen Zach. Wait, is his name Zach? Yeah, Zach is his name.

Yeah, yeah. But look, we have. He seems nice. He rules. We have seen Bodega Zach outdo the entire police force, even after literally the guy called them to turn himself in. And Bodega zach still got there before they did one man beat the entire new york police department turned himself in and left his wallet and gun at the scene like you know and again this is this is this is this is a

10 billion dollar police force the thing that the thing that they mostly do is harass homeless people and sex workers for the love of god we don't need them we could like literally one man could do their job for them uh yeah get get rid of them yeah that sounds nice okay well there we go we did it happy episode everybody Well, there we go. We did it. Happy episode, everybody. Yay. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.

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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. It's an introduction. Good for you. We did it. I love that. What show is this? This is It Could Happen Here, a show that is also currently in the middle of about 17,000 personnel disasters, but it's fine.

Yeah, I am Christopher wong and with me is garrison hello hi good morning or afternoon or evening depending on when you're listening and also sophie hello hi so we are we're here to talk about something that is i guess technically over but was extremely weird and did a lot of harm. And that is the very weird stuff that Texas General General Jesus, hopefully not Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who the general of Texas, Greg Abbott. I mean, like, you're kind of not wrong, but I don't like that. He wishes. He wishes he was the general of Texas.

I mean, I feel like that's going to be one of those things where it's like, that's when we know the coup started is when he just, like, promotes himself the general and takes over Texas. Uh-huh. So, Greg Abbott is extremely mad and he's extremely mad because Biden finally decided to end one of, like, the absolute worst Trump-era border policies, which is called Title 42. And it's, mad because Biden finally decided to end one of like the absolute worst Trump era border policies, just called Title 42.

And it's so tough for you to use like nominally an anti pandemic measures like the CDC. That's so I don't know why it took me like five seconds to remember the name of the CDC, the Central Defense Agency. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That one. Yeah. So it's normally supposed to be a thing where it's like, okay, you can, you,

you cut off migrants from coming into the country because there's a risk of a pandemic now. Okay. If, if, if you have lived the last two years, you know, but the U S just literally does not give a single shit about the

pandemic at all. Like it's not even pretending. Yeah. Yeah. And so this, this whole thing really has just been a justification to just boot out and just prevent every like asylum seeker and refugee and immigrant from getting into the country and you know and you can tell this because uh the the title 42 when it was originally invoked didn't cover people who

were like driving trucks across the border like it didn't cover economic activity of course not yeah so it's it's just a way for the u.s to like not have asylum seekers and biden let this go for like another fucking year while he was in office uh-huh and so you like like like late last month he like he finally got rid of it and you know i this means that uh like immigrants and refugees now once again have their legal right under both american and international law to petition for asylum which again the u.s doesn't give a shit about because you know u.s doesn't care about laws unless they do bad things but this finally happens and greg abbott who is once again we must remind everyone that greg abbott is is running for election in november and it's is he's it's

just literally running through the entire right wing like every single right wing scare we could possibly think of and don't worry chris don't worry chris beto will get him i i believe it i i believe in beto this time oh it's gonna lose by like 30 points landslide you know well okay so the thing that could stop him from this is Greg Abbott decides to do like two PR stunts. And one of them is he's taking buses of, of immigrants and asylum seekers and just busing them to DC. And I want to talk about this for a little,

like a second, because like, this is really shitty. And that shouldn't be legal. That shouldn't be allowed to basically traffic. You're trafficking people across the country for a political stunt. That's like, that, that shouldn't be allowed to basically traffic you're trafficking people across the country for a political stunt that's like that that shouldn't be allowed yeah and like i think like everyone's like oh this is political like it is but like the thing with american political

stunts is that real people get hurt constantly yeah and we're gonna come back to that theme more in a second as we talk about the second stunt that he did which was so essentially what abbott did is there are an enormous number of trucks that cross the the u.s mexican border into texas like every day right i mean there's like there are individual bridges that are moving 60 60 to 70 billion dollars of just produce like every day and so that produce when it when it comes into the u.s it goes through a bunch of checks by the border patrol and stuff and there's all these checks and this is this whole thing but uh abbott went on this incredibly bizarre rant about well i mean it's not bizarre i guess if you're right when we went on this rant about like the cartels and

there's immigrants we need to stop them and so he very scary yeah yeah it's really weird okay so he's doing all this weird fear-mongering and he's like okay we need to stop these people from getting across the border so we're gonna inspect all of these trucks which again like they're already being inspected by the feds like this is this is this is you know this is where like the horrible ice budget is going right so he he does this, and he calls in a bunch of just like the border patrol to just literally do all of the same checks again. And this has an enormous economic impact. I'm going to read a quote from the American Statesman. commercial traffic at the border according to um us customs and border protections the agency said the delays are a direct result of quote additional and unnecessary inspections being conducted at abbott's request i i do like that the same people who were shooting moms in portland in 2020 are now inspecting produce at the texas yeah it's it's pretty well i mean i think i think

there's an important thing to note here right it's like okay so why why are these the people who are like doing both these things the answer is that like the those organizations like the thing that they're designed to do is to protect the interest of american capital and you know so the interest of american capital are we need to move capital across the we need to move goods across the border, and we need to just absolutely obliterate a bunch of teenagers who don't like us. That is pretty much their bit. I mean, yeah, I know we've talked in the past

about U.S. Customs and Border Protections and the weird agencies and weird kind of almost militias that they operate and how they get deployed into certain areas if they're X miles away from the border. It would be worth talking about more in depth in the future because I know Robert's done some historical background on them

for Bastards. But I think that is something I would be down to talk more about. They are a very bizarre agency. They're very weird. they're also really not like in this story they're basically just sitting there being mad because it's taking longer to get that is a lot of what they do yeah and and you know because it's because again like these these actual these inspections are being run by like state troopers okay okay and you know because

because abbott has more direct control over state yeah yeah because yeah abbott has direct power over them and this means that like okay so you have your truck right your truck has a bunch of produce in it you're moving it across the border um this usually takes about two hours of you know being like sitting there in a truck while your stuff your everyone's cargo gets inspected and stuff which i will say the truckers don't even get paid for that when they're waiting two hours yeah and and and you know what would make that worse oh yeah now it takes between 10 and 30 hours because i intentionally on purpose was like okay we're just we're gonna put 6 000 like people total to do this whole thing and so you know hundreds of millions of dollars of produce like things like onions and tomatoes and avocados are just sitting in these trucks rotting.

In the Texas heat. Yep. I mean, hopefully the trucks are refrigerated, but still. Well, the trucks are refrigerated, but like the people in them. I'm sure the cabins are not. Yeah, I'm sure it gets mighty. Well, you know, I do have some family who were truckers and some of the cabins can be nice. But still, that's sitting for 30 hours without getting paid because you only get paid when you are moving, which is not a great way to, you know, run our entire economy.

Yeah, I'm going to read a quote. I'm going to read a section from the paragraph of the Texas Tribune. Felix, a 60 year old Mexican trucker who was transporting tomatoes, onions and avocados, waited about 13 hours in line at the bridge. He has to be identified only by his first name for fear of retribution and targeted inspections from CPB officials. Hearing of the delays at the border, he packed water and food for a few days. But other truckers didn't come as prepared and were sitting in standstill traffic without anything to eat or drink. Felix said he was told by a CPB official that the agency would be putting portable bathrooms along the bridge for the gridlock truckers, but he never saw them. Once Felix made it to the state trooper's inspection point around 9 p.m., he said they didn't

even peer into his truck, which had been sealed since Mexican authorities inspected it about 600 miles away in the state of Sinaloa. There's no possibility of bringing illegal immigrants in the merchandise or in the cabin, he said, referencing one of Abbott's explanations for the inspections. I can't bring any illegal immigrants here for money because I know inspectors are going to discover them. It's not a thing here. I don't know what the politicians' ideas are. I don't know what they're talking about.

So that seems not good. That seems pretty bad. It's really bad. And again, this whole thing is nonsense. I didn't even think about having to you know use the bathroom for 30 hours yeah and like do you think the thing with this is like this the backups are eight miles long so like if you want to go to the bathroom you have to walk for like miles depending depending on where you are in this backup and you know this is having like these just enormous

horrifying like this is like these enormous horrifying knock-on effects um because you know it's not just the truckers who are being affected by this there's a bunch of workers whose job it is you know just to process these goods right to take them out of trucks put them onto american trucks to like sort through the vegetables and figure out which ones are good and which ones are not. And again, just enormous amounts of produce that is fresh and good to eat is just being intentionally destroyed because it's being forced to sit at the border for this long. There's a bunch of these people who are contract workers, whose job it is to go through this stuff. And they're all getting fired because there's no work for them to do.

is to like go through this stuff and they're all getting fired because there's no work for them to do um there's all of these people who like their their jobs or they run bodegos or they run like like they run restaurants did they run a bunch of stuff on the board for these truckers and they also don't have any work and those people have to on a day by date like it's like it i think it's like 1500 per day to rent a terminal in like they're making nothing and it's horrifying there's all this enormous economic devastation that's been sort of like

that's been happening because of this and well you know you know what else reminds me of economic devastation? Ah. Oh, Gare. The fact that our paychecks are solely reliant on the products and services that support this podcast.

It's true. Yeah, we'll talk about the problems they're having in a second after this break. Yep, one second. Wow, that was a fast second. We'll talk about the problems they're having in a second after this break. Yep. One second. Wow. That was a fast second. Wow. That flew right by.

Time is not real. Destroy the clocks. The scientists are the police. All right. What's next? It is a second if you press fast forward. If you press the 30 second button four times. Yes.

Yes. Yeah. That'd be real speedy. Now, this is having other problems because as we talked about at the show, literally ad nauseum, our supply chains are really bad. And it turns out that... Yeah, that does seem to be a recurring character on the pod is that supply chains, not the most stable thing we've invented. Yeah, and especially with fruit and vegetables.

Well, okay, I mean, we'll be getting some of the other supply chains that are like fucked because of this but like fruit and vegetables in particular like the the the the way that we do them they're they're designed to be in motion for like a very specific amount of time so that when they show up to you they're ripe yeah yeah yeah you know you add a few hours onto that everything falls apart and this like i'm not sure if it happens because i'm not in Texas, but there were a bunch of articles that were talking about, like, yeah, like, avocados in Texas are going to cost five more dollars. Like, a single avocado's price is going to increase by, like, five dollars over the weekend because, like, because of just the enormous amount of produce that's being destroyed here. And, you know, there's a lot of other stuff going on here because american and mexican supply chains are enormously integrated from now i mean they've always been integrated

to some extent but like yeah particularly post nafta there's a lot of like auto supply chains in particular that are that are tied to to plants in mexico and you actually this occasionally has like interesting effects like mexico's has a lot of auto strikes and you get like you'll get these things where like people will like tuck messages into like auto parts and like send them to the u.s people will open these messages from like a worker in mexico to yeah you need it it's cool there's lots of there's interesting stuff there but this also means that like yeah so if those parts aren't moving across the border, those just-in-time production schedules are even more omega-screwed than they've been already. And so, yeah, there's been a lot of sort of economic stuff that's been happening here. And, you know, the other people who are getting just completely screwed by this are the Mexican truckers.

Yeah. And so, yeah so this this starts on april 6th um on monday april 11th i the truckers are just like fuck this and they start just completely blockading the the the largest border crossing between like this it's on this giant bridge they started they literally just blockade the bridge and but prevent any goods from from getting in and this this has an enormous impact because again like you know it was going like yeah it was reduction was down by 40 by 60 but that means still means that 40 of the goods are getting through and now is it you know and by by by the 11th it's just nothing um i i do i do hope the one the one good thing that can come out of the whole

canada covid isn't real protest um is that people have learned that uh blocking off supply chains is a really effective way to do protest yeah you can stop the import of thousands and millions and billions of dollars of trade um pretty easily actually and it would be cool if more people realize hey obviously the covid stuff they were talking about and the whole overthrowing the government part um to install a right-wing dictator that part's obviously bad but uh some of their tactics were actually pretty interesting yeah we're gonna get more into that uh like later good yeah i mean i will say like i think that the thing with the U S is that like,

I think there's been a lot of focus on the American left on ports because yeah, there's a lot of reasons for that, but like, yeah, you could use a border crossings too. And the, the,

the, the, the, the, the Mexican truckers blockade was really effective. I mean, okay. So this,

this has been a thing where it's, it's, it's kind of hard to get information from. I saw a few like newspapers about cartel people attacking the blockade and lighting trucks on fire to try to force goods to go through again, which it's possible. I don't know. um but this you know once once there are like once the block like the border is completely blockaded this completely changes like the entire political situation because now like you know abbott's been running this thing sort of as a political stunt and as this game he's playing with you know he's trying to play a game with biden right and he's like okay well

yeah you got to do something about the border or whatever like you know he's been challenging biden over like immigration bullshit but you know now now there's a there's a third party involved and that third party is the mexican truckers and now and now abbas not just in the car it's like abbas in a confrontation with the people that he needs to make the entire texan economy run yep and this starts going very badly for him and the other thing that starts going very badly for him is that i it turns out if you shut down cross-border trade you really really piss off the bourgeoisie turns out turns out that'll happen if you ain't careful yeah yeah it's really interesting and you know and i think i should mention like stress this like they're pissed off on both sides of the border. And like, obviously, you could talk about the extent to which, like, yeah, they're the same class. But like, capitalists on both sides of the border start exerting their political pressure because they're losing enormous amounts of money off of this.

That's what they do. Yeah. You take away their ability to do capitalism as capitalists they're gonna be mad yeah which again you'd think you would think that the abbot would like get this uh huh but he just it seems to have not occurred to him

that he was gonna piss off like either that or he thinks he didn't care enough and thought it wouldn't matter but like no it turns out like you know one of the things that happens yeah it's amazing like he's you know like I think this is you know, one of the things that happens. Yeah, it's amazing. Like he's, you know, like, I think this is this is, you know, I think this is this is sort of a symptom of like. People lose like right wing politicians losing sight of what their actual base is, because like this is all this is all supposed to be like campaign trail feeding the anti-immigrant base. But like, you know, you you are a politician in the u.s your actual

constituency is the capitalists and and like you have an actual job and that's to make the economy keep going and keep the people in power to have all the power uh like you're not just like that's one interesting thing that trump was kind of one of the first big um indicators for which is like a politician now is just the endless cycle of campaigning and they don't actually have a job. It's just always campaigning and they're just always campaigning and they're like oh, I guess I should do my actual

job that I was elected for or I could just do more rallies and that seems like it would be less work. I think with Trump it was like there was always this set to which the bureaucracy kept functioning and you know like Trump got the tax cut, right? Yeah. And like, he didn't really start getting in trouble with them until he started doing the anti-China stuff, which was sort of a disaster because there was a lot of people who turned out like need those trade connections to make money.

And you saw like, it was a very weird thing. you started to see even some of his like like domestic like small business base started to get really mad at him because he's putting all these sanctions up and it's like oh hey look all these sanctions mean that uh all these people who are reliant on chinese supply chains have to pay this stuff and and abbott abbott has like done this in microcosm and like these these people like they start going to the press um i'm going to read a quote from bloomberg uh some retailers particularly those in growth in in the grocery, have experienced supply chain delays resulting from the extended wait times along the Texas-Mexico border. John McCord, the executive director of Texas Retailers Association, wrote in an email. So, like, you know, these are like, like the Texas Retail Association is like, this is like the most republican solidly institution in the country

and and you can watch them over time like these people are getting really mad like one of i i was like like what one of abbott's like i forget the exact title like what one of abbott's like secretaries like they're like the secretary or secretary of one of the economic bureaus was like, yeah, man, Avocados are going to cost five more dollars. And, you know, this really hits me hard because everyone knows this about me. I care a lot about retail. Retail is like one of my big core personality traits. And you know who else wants you to care about retail?

Oh my goodness. Is it the Washington State Patrol? That is right, Sophie. It's the Washington State Patrol. Our good friends. So here is some messages about how you can improve your retail decisions.

I can't find this Georgeorge bush quote that i was going to use as a bit so that's fine instead of that we will return to this and you know one thing i think we should also mention is if you ran into this on twitter um you will see a lot of videos of people like democrats like standing at the border and pointing at the trucks and going uh this is this this is abbott attempting to like make inflation to get worse by sabotaging the economy cringe and like cringe cringe moments yeah like okay like i i i i i cannot rule out that this was like a part of what he wanted to do but that's not really why he's doing this like this this is this is like mostly and i saw people talking about like oh this is like the the truckers blockades in chile and i'm like no no it's not at all like

like yeah yeah yeah like yes chile has a bunch of right had a bunch of right-wing anti-communist truckers unions that tried to shut down the government but like that's not what's happening here this is the state and abbott's trying to do this as like an immigration pr thing like this isn't like he he's not actually he's not actually trying to destroy the government because the the the only way you can get stuff like that is if like is is is if the capitalist class is like genuinely afraid that they're about to get like like wiped out by communists and uh it turns out that i is not about to communize the entire u.s i don't think that's actually a looming threat at the moment no and so yeah it's like no it's like it's not it's not really about that like

it's it's it's mostly about this sort of this sort of like border game that the commies are coming for your avocados. it's the right-wing governor shutting down the flow of commodities, and the liberals are like, we must restore the flow of commodities, and the British are like, we must restore the flow of commodities, and even the cartels of some extent are like, come on. We all need the border open.

It really does just showcase the entire bit. Yeah, but I mean, we've been talking a lot about the human cost of this and the reason this stuff works is because american politics is literally just a machine that turns human suffering into stories and then turns those stories into percentage points at the polls and that's abbott's entire wait am i getting him confused with no greg abbott's the governor i i momentarily got him confused with the UK guy Tony Abbott,

who is also bad in very similar ways. I think we're allowed to have two bad Abbots. Yeah, I thought there was one in Australia too, but... Well, the bad Abbots are multiplying. Someone has got to get on this. We need to deal with the Anglosphere before they produce a fourth one and we get the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

That would be funny if we just have four Abbots bring in the Apocalypse. Yeah, but I think the thing that's important to understand about Abbott is everything that Abbott does is just about inflicting suffering on people and trying to use that to do polls. He has genuine right-wing beliefs, but

the timing of everything that he does is not this shit. That's what all his anti-trans stuff is, is that he could beat his primary challenger, who was trying to campaign a little bit further to the right than Abbott was. Yeah, and this is the thing where

politicians are allowed to play games with real people's lives like that that's their job right that's their entire elected but they're allowed to do this up until the exact moment at which those real people are the bourgeoisie and the moment this is the thing that abbott is learning is that you can do this kind of stunts all you want. Like, you can, you can, like, you can shoot every trans kid. You can, like, I don't know, like, you can, you can ban, like, every school from, like, saying the word race. But you can't fuck with the bourgeoisie. And, you know, this is the problem that he has. This is the problem that he has.

By the middle of last week, the ruling class is turning on him. The truckers are blockading the bridges and preventing all travel. And Abbott is basically scrambling to find a way out. And the thing that he does to do this is he goes to a bunch of Mexican governors who are the governors of border states. And these governors had sent him letters being being like hey like what are you doing like we need we like we we need our economies to function can can you actually do this and you know so he starts doing these negotiations with them where he's like well okay if you guys like inspect all of these trucks or whatever before and you ensure that there's no immigrants in them or whatever before they get here,

like, we'll reopen the borders. And, you know, so they do this. And I think there's a couple interesting things about this. One is that most of these, I think there's one guy who's from the PRI, but, like, almost all of these governors are from the PAN, which is Mexico's, like, far right-wing party. all of these governors are from the pan which is mexico's like far right-wing party and like these guys these guys are also like hard right like war on drug hardliners who hate immigrants and and this this has been another big part of how the sort of border regime works which

is that like yeah on the one hand you have you have abbott you have like texas so you have just the u.s government like projecting its power like into mexico which is you know another big part of what this is but the other part of it is has been the u.s essentially outsourcing its border regime and border policy just in like to mexico and so you get a lot of there's been a lot in the last especially during trump administration uh i mean it goes back much further than that but like in the last like five years have been a lot of really egregious examples of just like border patrol shit but by the mexican police because a it turns out there's also a bunch of people in mexico who fucking hate central american refugees and b uh the police are the police literally everywhere and yeah and this this also for example like this this is how this is how a lot of the border regime stuff works in Europe. Frontex, the European border

thing, basically just negotiates with literally every border state, I guess, in Africa to ensure that refugees coming up to North Africa don't ever get to Europe.

They made deals with Gaddafi, they made deals with the people who came after Gaddafi, refugees coming up to north africa like don't ever get to europe and like this is they make deals with gaddafi they made deals with the people who came after gaddafi um yeah there's the border system is horrible and this is sort of the border system like working as intended now the the other thing that we should mention is that like okay so they're stopping and like supposedly searching all of these trucks and they find literally nothing the entire time because like there's there's you know there's never anything there but you get all these press conferences that were like well yeah of course there was nothing it's because the cartels were tipped off of the raid because we did press conferences about it and that's why they didn't we announced we announced the thing that

we were going to do so it gave them a chance to outsmart us wow whoa yeah um so that that that's been fun um and the last thing i want to talk about yeah this is part of a bit we were talking about earlier which is that like yeah this is the second time this year that we've seen right wingers like block block off a border for political reasons. And I think there's a few interesting things here. One is that this is the kind of stuff that from like, basically from the start of Occupy, and even before then, until like the Bernie campaign, this was like the core of like what Marxists were thinking about in the US and also anarchists to some extent. and read anything from that period like it's all about logistics and counter logistics and how you can like disrupt them and whether or not we should try to take control of logistics and you know and i think you see here like like attacking logistics is a very powerful political tool but it's a tool that has like limited um like it it has limited utility for the right because you know the right depends on the backing of capitalists for the politics to work.

They really, really need buy-in from capitalists. And those capitalists need cross-border trade and, you know, and the other thing like they also need they also need migrant workers to make their money. And if you cut that stuff off, your political base starts to collapse. And the second part of it that's interesting is you get to see how powerful this is as a weapon for the working class. Because of just how instantaneously Abbott backed down when the trucking blockade starts. Because this is all over. Last Friday, I think the... What date is that?

That was... Good Friday. I mean... The 15th. The the 15th the goodest the goodest friday yeah the 15th abbott was like oh oh it's all over uh we secured the border yeah everything's secured the border sure buddy okay yeah but you know and you but like that's the thing like you you can see like yeah you you gotta see you gotta see a rare moment of like mexican workers and also like the sort of international capitalist class working on the same side you gotta see how fast they just like clobbered their politicians because yeah like yeah like the state is the state is a powerful force but it turns out it's it's class politics all the way down and i think i don't know between this and Canada, I think there's a couple of interesting things.

One is which, okay, yeah, you're like, if you're on the left, like already automatically, you're going to be fighting, the capitalist business owners are just always mad at you. So that's less of a concern. You will face more suppression immediately, obviously. This is how the game is played. Yeah, you'll face more suppression immediately. But it's also like that that's not like a your base turning on you like that problem doesn't stem from capitalists not making money

the problem you have with your base turning on you is about being being able to provision supplies to people and i think this is you know garrison you know more about this than i do but i will finish this sentence and then stop talking which is is that like, like, yeah, if you look at Canada, it was like part of the reason their occupations failed was that like, yeah, like just like a bunch of ordinary people got really, really mad at them because their whole their cities were being locked down. just the economic drivers, but the people who live in those areas regularly and need them to operate. And that gave politicians enough of an incentive to be like, see, it's actually hurting real people. It's not just hurting the economy, but it's hurting, you know, your grandma who could be living in like Ottawa or something, right? So when you use these tactics, it's about balancing the propaganda of like not severely impacting the people who actually live in these places very much but but targeting the economics policies and the you know you know the the

corporate elite or whatever kind of framing you want to use because as soon as you start doing tactics that just hurt you know regular people that is such an immediate, like, propaganda L, as the kids would say. Because, yeah, you're just giving them the tools to easily fight you back. And yes, they're going to try to invent tools to stop you no matter what. Like, they're going to try to do something via a propaganda lens. But some propaganda is way easier and uh much harder than others so i think a big part of these types of things when you're starting to like block off you know routes to cities block off supply chains as you need to be cognizant of making sure that the people who you're like immediately next to kind of thinks that you're also cool because that can give you

so much more legs i mean we saw this in the red house in portland there was a there was a lot of effort um to make the immediate neighbors not hate the occupation there to stop the family from being evicted um and there was a lot of debate around like how much graffiti should be allowed in the surrounding area because uh you know you don't want to piss off the neighbors too much. Now, this can obviously stem in bad directions in terms of there was then self-appointed security guards beating up and shooting people with paintballs who were doing graffiti, which is obviously not great

and not how you do good anarchism. But then there was other stuff being like, no, we should just trash this area anyway. It's all in the process of being gentrified, which it is. But you're like're like yes i understand that emotional impulse um and you may be right in a lot of senses like like more like more correct morally but to play the propaganda game to actually stop a black family from being evicted maybe we can actually look at this at a more tactical level yeah and i think that there's a lot of examples things we can learn from strikes

that do this very efficiently like one of the things one of the reasons the the wildcats in west the wildcat teacher strikes west virginia in 2017 worked was that the striking teachers in west virginia were very very careful about making sure that they did things like you know like making making sure that kids got like the meals that the school would have been yeah yeah like providing like like you know like this is why this is why mutual aid is extremely important because it lets you it lets you provision services not just when they collapse because of like you know oh hey the government's doing weird stuff or like there's a plague it lets you do it lets you shut down logistics lines yourself and still have community support and still be able to provide people to think that provide

people things that they need and this is like you know if you carry this all the way to like the macro macro level it's like yeah okay so like why did why did the russian revolution not work and you know like like why did the paris commune fail and it's like well yeah it's because instead of like giving peasants things they went into the countryside and shot them into attempting to get those things and it's like yeah like you have to whatever the thing that you're doing is in in in your sort of like base area right whatever you're like you're doing a strike you're shutting down a bridge you're like you know you're blocking a border you're shutting down a port right you you

have to make sure you're constantly expanding and building out support outside outside of that outside of that action and making sure you're you're able to provision the people who are affected by it and if you don't do this you end up like abbott and it's like yeah you know he abbott had like the entire power of the american state behind him. And he was able to keep this up for like less than two weeks. Yeah. Before he had to just pull out. So yeah, we can do this better.

And for things that are good and in ways that don't hurt people, or at least hurt people significantly less, or, you know, don't not hurt the wrong people. Instead, try to try to hurt the right people. Just like an incredible lack of like thinking

that's my that's my summary is yeah better do you think like yeah and i think also like again like abbott abbott's politics like is entirely about like inflicting cruelty on people right and ours like shouldn't be and shouldn't yep should not be. And the fact that we actually care about people makes our politics more effective. Or I guess I should. In theory, they should. And any time we take a misstep from that, I think, is a big loss. Yeah. There's one more strike thing that I just remembered that I was going to talk about, which is I.

So this also trains a lot. was going to talk about which is i so this also trains a lot there's a type of strikers name i'm forgetting because i'm a hack and a fraud where like the people the people the people will just like take over a train and they'll run it but they just won't take fares that is incredibly big yeah and you know so that's that's that's like level one of it and then level two of the strike is instead of just we're on strike but we're running the service and not taking any money it's we now control this train and that that has happened on several occasions and well yeah you heard that it's cool you heard it here first take over your local train um it could happen here we could we can do it yep anarchism can make the trains run on time oh i i am not sure about that chris punk

punk time is a is an unstoppable force. Okay, but here's the thing. Punk time, like... Okay, so you don't have the punks running the trains. You have the train nerds running the trains. You have the people who spend all of their time playing train simulator running the trains. Okay, that's fair.

And the trains will run great. Alright, that is completely fair. Where can people find you and or the show on the internet? You can find me at itmechr3 on Twitter if you want to do that for some reason. You can

find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram. There's also the Cool Zone. Cool Zone Media. Yeah, we have a new podcast that is coming. Sophie, do you want to plug this podcast? We actually got

two new ones for you coming soon. We have Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus. Episode one is out April 25th. And then we have Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff

hosted by Margaret Kiljoy. Trailer is out next week and episode one is out on May 2nd. Check both of them out. So many, so many pods in the pipe, as we say. That is a technical term. Yeah. Yeah. Pods in the pipe.

These are genuinely, legitimately very good shows and you should listen to them and I'm really excited so yeah alright well thank you for listening and go take over a train welcome I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and 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 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. or wherever you get your podcasts. Greetings, listeners, in the podcast-verse. This is It Could Happen Here, the podcast about things falling apart, and sometimes how we can put stuff back together. I'm Garrison Davis, our resident gender mess. In the past few weeks, we've been talking a lot here on the show about the escalating war on trans people and queer folks in general.

There's been a wave of bills making any gender-affirming healthcare a felony for people under the age of 18, which forcibly detransitions teenagers in multiple states. And we've had a lot of banning trans people from participating in sports and trying to ban books and discussion in schools about the just the existence of queer people at all. But today, we're not really going to be talking about that. We've talked about that plenty for the past few weeks. It's good to have a little bit of a break. But we'll still be talking about stuff around trans people, because with all the discussion around gender-affirming healthcare, I thought it would be a good idea to put something together talking about what HRT, or hormone replacement therapy,

actually is, since it's the most common form of trans healthcare. And since many states are trying to, or already have criminalized it, perhaps I can use the pod to point people towards alternative means of receiving care, you know, in the vein of the putting stuff back together side of the show. Now, I want to clarify, uh, up front, that we're not giving anyone medical advice, obviously. I'm just making observations and talking about things as they exist, and talking about things that many trans people have been doing for a long time, and that includes DIY HRT. My doctorate program is in parapsychology, not medical science, so just keep that in mind. First, I will quickly clarify what HRT, or hormone replacement therapy, actually is for specifically non-cisgender individuals,

because HRT as a term is also used for cis women to describe similar but different treatment. So HRT, as a form of gender-affirming treatment, is when someone receives sex hormone medication that produces a number of desired secondary sex characteristics. that produces a number of desired secondary sex characteristics. There are two broad types of hormone therapy that one would receive depending on what direction you want to go in, gender-wise. There's feminizing hormones and masculinizing hormones. Feminizing hormones produce more typically feminine traits, right? Big shocker there.

It usually consists of a form of estrogen, usually called estradiol. There's different types of estradiol. And also it can include antiandrogens, aka testosterone blockers. Masculinization therapy consists of taking testosterone or androgens, and then also less commonly anti-estrogens, but usually just taking testosterone will suffice. Now, I'm no expert in hormones, despite my weekly eShot, but lucky enough, I was able to sit down with an actual expert on hormones and talk over Zoom. So what follows is segments from our conversation. I guess first, do you want to introduce yourself? Sure. I am the Reverend Dr. Victoria Luna B. Grieve. I am an assistant professor at the

University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. My primary clinical focus is on gender-affirming hormone therapy, other kind of advocacy work in queer healthcare, and I do a lot of other stuff on the side, pedagogy ludic instructional design game design just anything that strikes my fancy really fun fun stuff in with within kind of our coverage of trans stuff the past few weeks and months it's been mostly on like the bills and like the politics side of things i've definitely had some people like reach out and be like okay but how like why why transgender why hormones like why are hormones actually important like could you actually explain like what like you know with all of these all these states banning hormones let's i would like to kind of explain why it's such a big deal and like how much these

things actually are like life-saving medication for so many people yeah so why hormones i i love it because it's a question that as like a species we've been we have known the answer to for like 5 000 years it's it's very funny but um hormones are okay a big part of this requires to like acknowledge something that is very wrong in, in like the medical literature. There's a lot of elements of healthcare that are coordinated between like male and female. And there's a kind of like, obviously is a little, so there's a lot. I mean, like from like like from people's i know when

trans people talk about interacting with the medical system it's always like oh yes we're going to be doing this bullshit yes of course yeah well but it even goes to like a really deep level like if you're in the hospital and you get a cbc count there's a male profile and a female profile of what your hematocrit should be on like what the level of red blood cells are and and the general understanding in like the health industry is that there's a biological anatomical difference between them and for the longest time certainly in this country trans women would have would be compared against the male profiles yeah but but it's nonsense it's actually should be thought of in form of hormone dominance because the vast majority of medical differences are not anatomical, they are hormonal. And that right there should give the game away a little

bit. Which is really funny, which is why I kind of hate the term biological woman, whenever people start using that, because that's not really how biology works. Right. Yeah. I mean, the joke is my nesting partner my fiance wishes that she could be a robot and then if she were to do that and upload her brain into an immortal robot body she would no longer be a biological woman but she would still be a woman it's just cybernetic um i hate that it's like organic organic just means it has carbon in it like give me a break yes so yeah hormones what's what's what's the deal do they because i know all of people will be like well all of these trans people sure do seem sad i wonder that's how how what how can we make things better does this thing actually work

oh well so it's somewhat multifactorial i i have a friend who does cell imaging and her like working theory, which I'm a little dubious of, is that like the brains of trans people like have receptors for hormones that the body doesn't make. And we should think of being transgender as having like a form of hypogonadism. Yeah, there's a lot of different trains of thought there in terms of the different theories of why trans people exist and how it's like, you know, girl's brain, boy's body, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which all, if you dig deep enough, goes back to eugenics. So it's all fucking nonsense. Yeah, I've always not liked that model. I've always found it to be a little bit uncomfortable because I take hormones because I want to. uncomfortable because i i take hormones because i want to and i don't think it's because my my brain is like secretly looking for girl receptors or something right i like totally agree like it also requires a certain like extremely binary understanding of gender which i also do not

ascribe to so it's a very like odd thought but putting aside all of that, if you just wanted to look at the, like why people want hormones, because when a person who wants hormones gets the hormones they want, their suicidality goes down, their anxiety, depression goes down, gender dysphoria. If we wanted to, you know, talk about the problems with that go essentially like goes away and they get, they start to get treated like the way they want to be treated in society. So if you want to look at it, not from the causes, but from the results, giving gender-affirming hormone therapy to a person who is requesting gender-affirming hormone therapy has a 99% success rate. The rate of regret from starting hormones is 1% or less, which is unbelievable in the healthcare field. Having a child, biologically giving birth, has a 7% regret rate.

The idea of any therapy having that high of a rate of preventing death, anxiety, depression, that high of a rate of preventing death, anxiety, depression, bullying, all of the different effects, being that successful should be a miracle. It should be looked at as the thing we in healthcare should do absolutely ethically. And it is so much more complicated than that. So hormones from the results obviously make sense. It aligns your body's shape and fat deposits and the way that you feel, the way that you relate to your emotions. It all goes back to the way that hormones work on your body. And there's the old saying that a cis person would never want to try gender-reforming hormone therapy so

like if you have the in if you want to try it you should be allowed to try it i mean like you're you're kind of a good example right care like yeah i bet if you were sitting yeah if you're sitting around a bar with a bunch of like cis guys and you were like hey who wants some estrogen they would all like shrink away from it like no absolutely because yeah it's definitely a thing like i'm not the most dysphoric person but i'm like sure i'll take estrogen that sounds fun that's like it's like that that sounds like a thing that i could enjoy watching my body change and i'm you know it's it's i'm happy that we're moving more towards that and not having to deal with uh oh i'm so dysphoric, I want to die,

which is obviously a big thing for a lot of people. I'm not minimizing that. Right. But also a lot of trans people who've had more kind of complicated feelings on gender, whether they're like genderqueer and non-binary, have in the past made it more difficult to get gender affirming care because they don't fit into those specific like male female boxes as easily and and what you're talking about is really something that's relatively recent the

idea of gender euphoria like the idea that people want to take yeah because it gives them joy to like dress or act or feel a certain way and that i mean I mean, healthcare is all about, at least up until, well, the reality of healthcare is that it is all about finding problems to solve and not really looking at like your life just better in general. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I know plenty of people who started hormones of any type just because they felt it would make them happier and they were correct. And that gender euphoria is just as good of a reason to take it as the dysphoria. The problem ends up in how the medical industry treats it because dysphoria, quote unquote, is something as long, oh my gosh, I could go into the whole history of that if you wanted. I'm sure we could talk about the DSM-IV

and DSM-V for a long time. Oh,'s so frustrating i spend i spend a two-hour session in my queer health care class specifically just dunking on the dsm-5 definition of gender dysphoria um but the the the real problem is like this focus on this negative quality and how that actually damages a lot of the conversations around uh gender affirming hormone therapy and trans people in general uh like instead of seeing it as like this manifestation of people like truly taking control of their lives to become authentic in like the truest way like you have never met a more truly well a self-made man than a trans man who gets hormones like it's i mean it's and it's still something we're even we're not quite at the

at the gender utopia i mean obviously because of all of the anti-trans stuff but even like even on like just purely purely the medical side like i even for for informed consent um i still needed to get diagnosed with gender dysphoria at the informed consent clinic in order to get hormones which is in part like an insurance thing and you, you know, it has, has all of these, all of these bullshit reasons. But that is, it is something we're still, we're still definitely dealing with. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And the, the better informed care clinics are the ones that they realize it's just like an effort in box ticking. So they're just like, yep, sounds good. You came here to this clinic and you asked

about hormones. Sounds like gender dysphoria to me like we'll tell your insurance whatever we gotta say yes eventually we'll go into like hormone blockers as well um but i want to talk about there's a lot of this is there's a lot of rhetoric that's been we're growing for a long long time about the the extremely damaging irreversible effects of of hormone replacement therapy um and how they're going to permanently alter your biology if you give these to children and there's five-year-olds taking testosterone and it's gonna like you're like you're like oh really that sounds very scary um so that's something i would like to discuss is like because a lot of people when we talk about hormones they think of this as this like big extremely life-altering thing um that has like these you know irreversible effects on your you know your bones are going to get weak and shriveled and never and never get

big again and all of all of this very scary stuff um what's up with? I think a lot of it goes back to that biological essentialism because hormones, even for the people who give them, are considered partially like reversible because the majority of the things that happen, one, take a long ass time. Like you will know whether or not this is a good idea for the majority of people well before the physical manifestations occur. And considering one of the biggest problems we have with certain formulations, like in the once a week or once every other week injectable version of estrogen, by the time you get to right before your next dose, your estrogen is so low, you're feeling it, and it's starting to reverse some of those. So if you're feeling it and it's starting to like reverse some of those so like if you're feeling it after two weeks how irreversible could it be uh and some of it depends on like eight uh timing because if we're talking about a person who has say already gone through a

testosterone mediated puberty then some of the things are just not going to be affected you can't change like bone size height or anything like that. There, there's some interesting things about like hip, uh, like flexation and, and, and, and pivoting. I have seen more of that recently. Yeah, actually. Yeah. Yeah. And even like shoe size can, can change because of the way the ligaments work on hormones, but like the bones aren't going to change once they're done growing,

but that's sort of where the puberty blockers come in that we can, we'll talk about later. But for the majority of people, if you are going through, if you have gone through a puberty that you did not want, you can take hormones to go through a puberty you do want and get the effects that you do want. And some of the elements, sure, like, you know, growing breasts or gynecomastia, as we would call it in the cis man, which is another whole nonsense, is not irreversible. You can have them removed if you decided that you needed to detransition, which is a whole other story.

But even then, it takes like five years to see their final breast size. it takes like five years to see their final breast size like yeah if you if you're on hormones for five years and you're worried about the irreversible quote-unquote effects like what are we doing here i mean and even i've heard from a lot of my elder trans friends that whenever they go off hormones sometimes their breasts just kind of go away because they're not massive to begin with like if it's generally generally generally you don't get uh the massive massive honkers uh immediately um so we're working on it i know i know we're trying um but a lot of a lot a lot of even the i know that was one of the big things that informed consent thing was like the you know a lot of these changes are reversible except for

breasts these are these are these are these are a permanent change be careful and all my all my trans friends are like a little bit but i mean like your nipples won't shrink like your nipples will definitely be bigger and that that won't change but a lot of like the size actually does fluctuate and i i can even tell that on like depending on if i like miss a dose or something being like oh yeah there is a lot of fluctuation even like on temperature and stuff how cold it is will determine how

my chest looks it's pretty fun I just like the biohacking thing in general it is like the cyberpunk in me but yeah I guess i guess we could talk about um hormone hormone blockers as well because this is the other kind of thing you hear a lot about when conservatives are very scared about trans people the idea of hormone

blockers like making people infertile or making permanent changes to children's health or something, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh my gosh. That's the thing that is like really, really frustrating for me specifically because puberty blockers, the gonadotropin, the GNRH antagonists and agonists, which have been around for like. Long time.

For like ever for, for, I want to say it was like a hundred years, but I might be misquoting something that I'm half remembering, but they've been around for like a really long time to the point where we have generics and in the, in the pharmaceutical industry, that means that it's been like decades at the very least something that had rigorous testing that has an indication with the FDA for precocious puberty, which just means a person who is usually cis, who for whatever reason has puberty at a very young age. Some of the specific cases that I've looked into involve giving puberty blockers to a three or four-year-old because their body is trying to undergo puberty. So even the idea of like, oh, well, I don't know, this 12-year-old being on a puberty blocker for three years, that sounds very dangerous

when we have a person over here who was on it for 15 years with no ill effects, like no long-lasting ill effects. The idea of anybody describing it as experimental is absolutely ahistoric, outside of the realm of reality. Yeah, it's basic anti-intellectualism because, yeah, we've been giving cis children hormone blockers for a long time for early onset puberty

and turns out they work and they're pretty safe, so maybe we should give those to trans kids too if they want them. Seems like something we could at least try and see if it improves mental health. physician who like pioneered the use of puberty blockers in trans kids and showed that any trans kid who got puberty blockers and then was allowed to undergo the puberty that they desired at an appropriate age, which is actually like 14, 15 at the same time as their peers. But even if they had to wait till 18, the psychological effects of having an inappropriate puberty are essentially

nullified. They are otherwise psychologically and physically identical to their cisgender peers. So we have actual evidence that it is extremely beneficial and extremely worthwhile. And the one kind of long-term side effect is you might be up to an inch shorter than you otherwise be, which is a wildly problematic study that was done because we don't have time machines to know whether or not that worked. What would your control group be? And it's just wild. It's very bothersome to me because a lot of the gender-affirming hormone therapy, the evidence is all over the place for a variety of political reasons and historical reasons but

for hormone blockers or for puberty blockers specifically the evidence is like really solid really strong and it's ah this is this is a question i actually have because i'm actually unfamiliar with this specific thing but yeah if you give like um hormone blockers to like a kid who's 10 they they still kind of like grow at the same rate as a lot of as a lot of their uh peers yep and that is a it just it's it's the specifically like the secondary sex characteristic changes that get put on pause um but there's just so much yeah there's just so much fear around the whole even even just the hormone blocker thing right when we're getting you know just like prescribing hormone blockers being like a felony offense in multiple states now you're like that's like it's

it is just an extreme degree of anti anti-intellectualism, just like purposeful ignorance and just extreme hatred and bigotry. And it is, I mean, yeah, I'm kind of speaking to the choir here, but that's the trick. And even like the puberty blocker thing, like you were saying, your body will still make human growth hormone. You will still grow. It's just that the modulation of that with, say you don't have testosterone or estrogen, which are both necessary, one or the other, necessary for your bone mineral density to not have easily fractured bones. But you don't even have that until you go through puberty. If you're just preventing one puberty, the endogenous puberty, and then providing the hormones for

an exogenous puberty, they're fine like they have the hormones they need their bones are happy uh so yeah i mean i'd like to talk about i guess kind of access to hormones and in like the different models of of i mean obviously we're not giving up medical advice uh but like yes access to hormones and the different ways that people can go about that now through doctors, through informed consent, and all of that jazz. Yeah. So the informed consent model is a much more recent option, and it's not available everywhere. I have a friend in Texas. We had to find a clinic that was like two hours away to get her hormones. But here where I live, we actually have two informed consent clinics. So it's pretty convenient,

but it varies wildly by region. And the informed care clinics are great. It means you come in, they say, this is what's going to happen. Do you still want to do it? You say, yes. They take some blood, they run some tests, you come back in two weeks and they go, here you go. Like that's, they work really well, depending on the clinic, I guess. And, but the more traditional quote unquote standard model would be going to your PCP or whoever and saying that you want to do this, which makes most of them very concerned because most physicians, pharmacists, nurses, they don't get taught anything about trans people or caring for trans people or

gender-affirming hormone therapy in their school. So they have nothing to fall back on. So that makes them very nervous to do it. And then if you look at, wow, gosh, I really want to tell you about the guideline stuff at some point here, because it is buck wild, as to why that would be a concern. But another part of it is also the insurance, America's original sin in our healthcare dystopia, if you will. The insurances historically have required, and part of this is also from antiquated guidelines that has been somewhat just grandfathered into, excuse the term, this idea of, well, you have to go to a well, you have to go to

a therapist, you have to go to a psychologist, and they have to say that you have gender dysphoria. That's why it's in the DSM. And then after you do that, some places require you to socially transition before getting hormones or anything, which can be extremely problematic for some individuals that just increases like visibility and bullying and such in a way that it may drive people. It sort of was intentionally required back in the day to drive people to not want hormones anymore. And it's all of these gatekeeping steps. And it's even worse if you wanted to get a surgery later on where you have to have been on hormones for a certain length of time. You have to have two different hormones for a certain length of time. You have to have two different,

generally, cisgender healthcare practitioners who don't necessarily understand the full, everything that's going on, write you letters before the, and most insurances up until recently wouldn't even cover it. So it's just gatekeeping step after gatekeeping step. Because even the big guidelines, which is WPATH, which is about to put out their SOGATE guidelines, there's guidelines out of San Francisco, and the Endocrine Society has guidelines from 2017 that are... But all of those are made by cisgender people, usually with the intent to gatekeep this care, because either they're uncomfortable with it because they're unfamiliar with it, they have some kind of ideological reason to be against it, or whatever else. There's a survey that I often quote to my students in class that they surveyed a whole bunch of trans individuals trying to get care from their physicians, and it was nearly a quarter of them said that they avoided healthcare because of discrimination.

And half of them reported having to teach their healthcare practitioner how to care for them, which is wild. Imagine going to the hospital with heart failure and having to talk your physician through how to care for you. Can you live for two years with heart failure first before we oh my gosh could you imagine if we treated other things this way i'd be like well are you sure that you have diabetes are you sure that you're like well we can't treat your diabetes you're too fat well your bmi is too high so we can't give you the insulin like give me a break like what is happening uh seems like uh it's basically what you're saying is that we got a good system we got it

we got it figured out absolutely no notes uh 100 perfect in every way well that does it for us today it can happen here uh well specifically if i could, it's really interesting from the healthcare perspective, or from the practitioner's perspective, because there's essentially two kinds of treatment. There's guideline-based medicine and evidence-based medicine. And a lot of schools, like my school, teaches a lot of guideline-based medicine, which is for something like hypertension or diabetes is put out by like large organizations with a ton of evidence. It is actually like pretty reasonable, but that means that if you're going along with what they say, that means that you believe that they read those studies correctly

and that their interpretation is in no way compromised by like sources of their income, say, and that those guidelines actually match your patient. So it's a lot of assumptions that you're making, which can be extremely problematic. And evidence-based is where you dive into the literature and you figure it out yourself, which is very time-consuming and requires an awful lot of professional criticism in a way. But when you look at it for trans care, criticism in a way. But when you look at it for trans care, for gender-affirming hormone therapy, those guidelines are unbelievably compromised. To give you an example, a hotly contested issue in feminizing therapy is the use of micronized progesterone in feminizing care. It's kind of like all over the place. There's a long history of it, of this controversy. In the upcoming WPATH SOC 8 guidelines that I had a preliminary copy to provide notes on, there's a single statement that just says that there's a controversy that exists and you should not use micronized progesterone in trans feminine care. And they list a study.

Okay. If you pull up that study, the title of it is progesterone is important for transgender women's therapy, applying evidence for the benefits of progesterone in cis women. And it is like a pretty long document that concludes that it is like an ethical imperative to offer it so the idea that the people who are writing the w path guidelines read this article read this this like meta-analysis and went yeah i don't really agree with any of that i'm just gonna say no is just so infuriating again that seems like we got a good system going here yeah a hundred percent no notes i guess on that note let's i want to discuss some of the some of the things that aren't talked about as much as like um anti-androgens uh progesterone spiro and what all kind of those do and how they can kind of supplement a regular estradiol prescription i guess yeah regimen regimen yes that sounds that

sounds fancy sure sure so uh generally speaking if you're, maybe give a baseline for folks who are unaware, the way that we do feminizing therapy is we offer estradiol, which is a bioequivalent version of E2, because there's like three different versions of estrogen, and an antiandrogen because testosterone tends to be somewhat of an overriding hormone. The presence of testosterone will override the effects of estrogen to a certain extent, depending on doses and stuff like that, which is for the transmasculine individuals, why we just give testosterone. It just does the job. You don't need to block the estrogen. So there's a lot of history in just those hormones as well that we could talk about, like conjugated estrogens versus estradiol and all the different other stuff.

But for the antiandrogens that we give, historically in this country, we give spironolactone, which is a mineral corticoid. It's a potassium-sparing diuretic, and it's just really good at higher levels. We usually use it in cardio issues. It can be used for hypertension and some other things. I believe it makes you pee a lot. Yes. That's what I've heard. So it's a diuretic, meaning that it makes you urinate an awful lot.

And it's a potassium sparing because it prevents your body from eliminating potassium. No more eating bananas. Well, so that's the thing that I think is really, really wild because you're using these high levels of it. It is preventing your endogenous production of testosterone and making you pee all of the time, which, spoilers, estradiol also makes you pee more often. So that's a real fun combination. But then physicians, if they don't know what the heck they're doing, they might say something like, well, you can't eat any bananas. And historically, the people who are on feminizing therapy are healthy enough that their body just accommodates for it. And if you have hyperkalemia,

which is too much potassium, you're going to know. Your muscles are going to ache, and there's going to be a lot of telltale side effects. Usually, it's only a problem if you are only consuming a salt alternative that has potassium instead of sodium. Okay, okay. Not super common. Not super common. Or if you have some other reason why your body is holding on to potassium. So it's not usually an issue. And spironolactone isn't sufficient for everyone. There's plenty of people who have refractory testosterone after some time,

and there are some other options. There's kind of a weird controversy about it that is sort of heralded by the San Francisco guidelines I mentioned earlier, that spironolactone leads to, okay, wait, I want to make sure I get the wording right. It leads to premature fusing of the breast bud and overall smaller breast size, which the document that they cite for that is a real weird retrospective study from like a bunch of years ago on the rate of trans women getting breast augmentation. And it found that the vast majority of trans women who were on spironolactone got breast augmentation. Also get breast augmentation.

Okay. But the problem is like of their sample group of like two, 300 people, almost all of them were on spironolactone. Like there's like a sampling error. Like it's nonsense. It's very silly. And also even like that premature fusing of the breast bud,

I have never been able to find anything that suggests that that's a thing, or even like a way to explain what that statement even means. But the San Francisco guidelines, to go back to my guideline thing, actually says, has some like, maybe don't use spironolactone, even though it's something we've been using since literally like the fifties or sixties for this purpose. In other countries, you'll use what's called cyprotorone, which is a synthetic progesterone, but it's not actually approved in the States because it has a, like, there is actually some evidence that it causes increase in certain specific cancers, but it's like a pretty limited overall risk. Like it's not like

something like, you know, going outside increases your risk of cancer. It's not like a huge deal, but it was enough that they don't, it's not approved in the States, but in a lot of other countries, you'll, you might get cyprotorone, which there's a lot of, you know, controversy around that too, for those reasons. Here, the other option that we usually see is finasteride, which is a five alpha reductase inhibitor that essentially is preventing testosterone from being turned into dihydrotestosterone, which we use normally to prevent, quote unquote, male pattern baldness and in higher doses for prostate cancer. Because it's real good because it reverses some of the feedback loops, just reducing testosterone production. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's just fine.

Like that one has like very limited side effects, but it might not have as substantial of a reduction of testosterone that spironolactone does. And then the kind of third one that we really, we don't see very often, but there's a lot of interesting evidence about is called bicollutamide. It's also a prostate cancer medication. It actually blocks all of the receptors of testosterone in your body while not reducing the production of it. So you'll see a person who has like, you know, they have like 700, their testosterone comes back as like 700, 600, whatever. Yeah.

But they're entirely feminized because none of it has anywhere to work. But the problem with that is bicollutamide being an anti-cancer med primarily is ridiculously expensive. I think it's like 50 bucks a dose or something like that. What a good system we have here. It's so great. have here it's so great uh i will say and and for my gender queers out there or anyone else you can also just take estrogen without any without any blockers um and you still get results as i can uh as i can confirm um and for a subset of the population just taking estrogen at sufficient dosages will also reduce your levels of progesterone or of testosterone. Like it's your body knows what it's doing.

Yep. It is. It is. It is. It is pretty cool how much you can just change things up and your body's like, oh, we're doing this now. Okay. Got it.

Great. I have all these mechanisms. It's wonderful. And with that, that wraps up part one of our little two-part series of episodes talking about hormone replacement therapy. Tomorrow, I'll talk more about access to gender-affirming treatment and touch on DIY HRT. Special thanks to Dr. Victoria Luna Brennan-Greave for chatting with me about gender-affirming hormonal treatment.

You'll get to hear more of my discussion with her tomorrow as well, including a brief tangent about the Scythian priestesses, which I was very, very excited to talk about. But that does it for us today. You can follow the show at HappenToHearPod and CoolZoneMedia on Twitter and Instagram. And you can look at my late-night gender tweets at HungryBowTie on Twitter.com.

So see you all on the other side. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and 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 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.

Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast about things falling apart and sometimes how we can put things back together. I'm Garrison Davis, aspiring Rebus, and this is part two of my little two-part series talking about trans hormone replacement therapy. Last episode, we discussed what HRT is, its various benefits as gender-affirming treatment, and the informed consent model of receiving hormones. Before we continue on with my discussion with Dr. Greve, I would like to talk a bit more about informed consent. So the informed consent option can be great for many, many people as it attempts to bypass some of the red tape around receiving gender affirming healthcare. For its form of consent, all you got to do is set up an appointment, sign the forms, maybe get some blood work done, and then pick up your hormones, right? You don't

need to live as trans for like two years or have letters from therapists. It is just up to you. So it is really convenient if you can get that option. Some places even let you do it via telemedicine appointments. So you can just sit at home holding your little IKEA shark and then get your hormones, which does sound very, very nice. Planned Parenthood offers informed consent trans healthcare in many states. And in the show notes, I will link a Google map of the informed consent clinics from across the country. Depending on your insurance, you can get hormones for little to no extra cost this way. It can be really convenient. The biggest asterisk for informed consent is that since it's

based on, you know, informed consent, it often is just for humans age 18 and older, or sometimes teens a few years younger, but only if their parents or guardians sign the forms. Obviously, this is not ideal for a 16-year-old with transphobic parents who would really be helped by receiving hormone blockers or something, right? Another potential drawback is that the clinics can sometimes have quite the wait list. I started off with the informed consent model because it was the easiest. But by the time I needed more blood work done and my prescription refilled, setting up more appointments at Planned Parenthood became kind of a nightmare. I was continuously having appointments being canceled on me last minute and just getting pushed back months and months into the future.

appointments being canceled on me last minute, and just getting pushed back months and months into the future. Eventually, I just resorted to getting hormones through my regular doctor, instead of just continuing on with informed consent. Now, this is obviously a regional issue, right? I don't know what it's like in Florida, for example. But the COVID-19 pandemic has stressed a lot of the medical infrastructure here in the States, and scheduling some appointments in these clinics can be still quite challenging. And as you know, a big theme of this show is that maybe we shouldn't assume the structures that hold up our society are concrete permanent fixtures. The term the crumbles that we use to describe the slow deterioration of the systems that we rely on was initially coined in reference to our medical system by a friend of the show whoation of the systems that we rely on was initially coined in reference to our medical system by a friend of the show who works in the medical field. Listen to the first

five episodes of The Daily Show talking about climate change for more on that. But a part of the Kreml's idea is trying to learn how to become less reliant on the systems that we take for granted, right? Trying to solve for the fallacy of misplaced concreteness before it's too late. On that note, back to my discussion with Dr. Victoria Luna Brennan-Greave, assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. Four places that are getting, you know, all of these anti-trans bills, criminalizing all of this stuff for minors, and then, you know, eventually maybe even, you know, my big fear is that, you know, first off, they're going to criminalize it for minors and they're going to say the brain's not fully

developed until you're 25 and they're going to criminalize it until you're 25. And then they're just going to criminalize it for everyone after that. So for all of these places that are making access to healthcare so much harder, what, what harder, what is one to do? If there's these kids and then even adults who are like, just find it so much harder to get stuff. I know there's the informed consent clinics, but there's a few in Texas, but I don't even know what they can even offer anymore, right? It's really unclear. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you some of that fear is already becoming reality here in Pennsylvania. Just two days ago, HB, I think it was HB 972 passed by the House down in Harrisburg, that prevents, it's a ban on trans people playing sports up through the college level, not just high school and grade school. It's all the way up through secondary education. And even though our governor has vowed to veto it, who even knows what's going to happen, but

they're already taking aim at this higher level kind of thing. And there's a lot of precedent for that. But my goodness, there's a long and storied history of DIY hormone therapy, and it's easier for the transfeminine individuals because testosterone is actually a Schedule 2 controlled substance. I think it's Schedule 2 or Schedule 3. It might be a 3. I think it's a Schedule 3 steroid. I'll write a little thing about it and I'll say it in the episode. And it's such a funny reason too, because it's just, you can use it to dope for endurance-based cycling and running because it will increase your red blood cell count. That's it. And so it's a controlled substance because people can use it to dope for sports. So that's a little bit harder to get a hold of in a meaningful way. But there are a lot

of different, allegedly, there are a lot of different places online that you can acquire estrogen or estradiol relatively easily. Now I'm going to actually pause the discussion with me and Dr. Grieve to talk a little bit about DIY HRT, or for those anti-acronym people out there, do-it-yourself hormone replacement therapy. Now again, I'm not a medical doctor. Unless you have a problem regarding parapsychology, I cannot offer you any expertise. But I can talk about DIY HRT as it's existed for trans people for the past two decades. Because an unfortunate truth is, although it's gotten much easier to get gender-affirming care and hormones the past few years, even in states that aren't facing this wave of anti-trans healthcare bills, the medical establishment hasn't been the most

trans-friendly place in general. A recent Center for American Progress report found that nearly half of transgender people, and 68% of transgender people of color, reported having experienced mistreatment at the hands of a medical provider, including refusal of care and verbal or physical abuse, just in the year before the survey, which took place in June of 2020. So this is still very much an ongoing issue. One in two trans people reported that their access to gender-affirming healthcare was curtailed significantly during the pandemic, and nearly one in two transgender adults have had insurance providers deny them coverage for

gender-affirming care. And very often, doctors don't even know how to properly treat transgender patients, and often it's up to the patients to educate the doctors on trans healthcare issues. The Center for American Progress survey from last year found that one in three trans people report having to teach their doctors about trans people to get them appropriate care, and 15% reported having been asked invasive or unnecessary questions about being trans, which were not related to the reasons for them visiting the doctor. The report cited a

2018 brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation that found that more than half of medical school curriculums lack information about unique health issues the LGBTQ community faces and doesn't cover treatment beyond HIV prevention and care. So, obviously that leaves a lot to be desired for people wanting to receive transgender health care.

Between medical mistreatment, insurance complications, and doctor ignorance, many trans folks have taken it upon themselves to get the drugs necessary for hormone replacement therapy. Because the alternative is often just having to face not being able to receive the health care that in many cases makes it possible to live. The Center for American Progress survey found that 28% of trans folks report having postponed or not gotten necessary medical care for fear of discrimination. Taking your endocrinology and hormone treatment into your own hands has a lengthy history and used to be much more common in the days before informed consent. In a survey of trans people in Washington,

D.C. circa 2000, over half of the respondents said that they had used non-prescribed hormones, also known as DIY HRT. So information on how to go about DIYing your HRT spread via online forums and websites in the early 2000s. And after some trial and error, the information is kind of consolidated into a few main information hubs, that being the DIY HRT Wiki, HRT.cafe, and DIYHRT.github.io. Now, obviously, when you're getting into taking drugs from online sources, you need to be extremely careful and cautious about what foreign chemicals you're putting into your body, including trying to only acquire drugs from trustworthy sources, doing drug testing if you can, and doing your own blood testing before and after to keep an eye on your testosterone and estrogen levels. It is possible to order blood tests via online and send it through a lab that you have to

ship your blood to, but often it's just easier to do it by going through the medical system. Now, one massive caveat with DIY HRT is although it's more straightforward to acquire estradiol and antiandrogens like Spiro from online sources, getting testosterone for masculinization therapy is much more tricky because in most places it's a restricted drug. Here in the States, it is a Schedule III substance, so technically buying it without a prescription would be a felony. So for this reason, most DIY HRT stuff focuses on feminizing hormones, since that is less legally complicated. Now, obviously, you know, steroids exist, so it is possible to get them, but I will not be giving out guides on how to do that here on the pod.

But, you know, you can look into it if you so desire. For feminizing hormones, the main way of going about it requires obtaining bioidentical estradiol. It can come in a few forms. Pills, which are not difficult to acquire, and assuming you get the dose right, it's pretty easy because it's just a process of dissolving the little pill tablets under your tongue, and that's kind of it. Dosage is its own thing, which you can figure out if you do reading, but the actual taking of it is

pretty straightforward. Transdermal estrogen or transdermal estradiol is kind of the new hot thing. Usually this has you taking weekly estradiol patches, which you just switch out every week. Or you can also do daily gels that you just rub on your body. Although unfortunately for dosing gels, it can be more tricky if you go DIY because it's hard to know what concentration just the gel is if you're just rubbing a salve on yourself if it's not already pre-packaged. But the patches are pretty good. And lastly, the classic method is injectable estradiol at various concentrations in the form of some oil solution. This can usually be the cheapest option if you

can figure out how to buy estradiol, and needles and syringes can be bought at any pharmacy just over the counter in most countries without a prescription. For feminizing hormones, some people also take antiandrogens, aka testosterone blockers like Spiralactone, which can be acquired online and are almost always taken orally in the form of a pill. Now, when getting these drugs online, there are two main categories of purchase. There's pharmaceutical grade and homebrewed. Pharmaceutical grade refers to HRT produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies that are licensed and subject to regulation. They should be of the same quality as those found in your local pharmacy, and they can be ordered without a prescription from websites based in countries

that allow for the legal exportation of certain medications. These will almost always carry less inherent risk versus receiving and taking home-brewed hormones, which leads us to the second version that you can buy, which is home-brewed. This refers to HRT produced by individuals by sourcing raw estradiol or whatever other chemical you're taking in the form of a powder and then compounding the medication themselves. They do not synthesize or create from scratch these hormones, but they do use the powdered versions of them,

and they get them from sources from drug manufacturing companies to synthesize it into their own estradiol or whatever other drug you're taking. You know, in the anti-androgen list, there's too many to name. Now, while this concept does sound scary, and it can obviously go wrong if someone's not synthesizing it correctly, there are a couple well-respected members of the community that have been known to produce high-quality and safe HRT medications. But before anyone decides to take drugs that you get on the internet, please, please, please, please

do lots of reading beforehand on dosage, effects, side effects, and be very cautious with your drug sourcing, right? You should know who you're buying it from. You don't want to just buy from whatever sketchy website. You should make sure that what you're doing is other people are backing up on this decision. Make sure that you can cross-reference information here. Because there's a lot of

information out there online, and not all of it is good information, obviously. But really try to cross-reference information on any drug sources, on hormone dosage, on any possible drug interactions if you're taking multiple drugs, or you already have prescriptions. Now, I should note that supply chain issues that affect the medical system can even extend out to DIY HRT. There's no true escape. There's no true other. One of the main pharmaceutical-grade online sites to source HRT from is currently out of estradiol pills. So there is no true escape sometimes. But to learn more about DIY HRT, you should check out diyhrt.github.io or hrt.cafe and the diytrans.wiki. And keep in mind, not everything you read on those sources is necessarily good advice

or up to date with the current information on how these drugs work. Recently, I was reading a guide I found via one of those sites on how to homebrew my own estrogen by buying the powdered version of it and synthesizing it myself to level up my alchemy stat. And I found the guide I was reading contained quite a bit of outdated misinformation about progesterone. So don't take everything you read as gospel, but those resources are at least a good place to start. Anyway, now back to the interview. The problem that you might run into with DIYing it is you might not be able to get the bioequivalent estradiol in some form. You might have to settle for conjugated estrogens or even something like an ethinyl estradiol,

which is like hormonal birth control, which because they are synthetics, they actually have a much rougher time on your body. And that's where a lot of the side effects, quote unquote, come from. All of the worry about blood clots and things from taking estrogens comes from conjugated estrogens, ethinyl estradiol. I didn't know that. rate of clotting in cisgender women taking hormonal birth control. Birth control. Okay. And it's just like, okay, so this is the wrong population with the wrong medication. Yeah.

That seems like not a great scientific study. Right. What do we do? I mean, it might be great to talk about for the rate of clotting for cis. Yeah. Right. But not for trans women or people who want to take estrogen.

Right. It doesn't, it doesn't really help so much. And what I think is also pretty wild, I mentioned the progesterone thing earlier. A lot of that controversy comes from the fact that the original studies on whether or not it could be beneficial were done with medroxyprogesterone, a synthetic progesterone that has a really nasty side effect profile in a lot of different ways. And now that we have micronized progesterone, where the evidence suggested not only is it safe, it actually makes estrogen safer. And now they're like, no, we can't give that. That's just crazy talk. I will say, I have heard from people with more experience taking hormones than me

that progesterone does make you way too horny. So just a heads up for side effects. Hashtag can confirm. But progesterone can have a lot of other really beneficial side effects. It can really increase the fat deposition to various places. It can help with your mood. It can help with your sleep. It actually reduced the period symptoms that I was having because surprise, people on estrogen can also have periods because your body, again, knows what it's doing. It's going to modulate it through the E1, E2, E3 pathway throughout the month in a cyclical fashion. And you can get bloating and cramps. And I had really bad morning sickness for three days, every 28 days for months until eventually I started micronized progesterone and those symptoms alleviated, which makes a kind of

sense if you know that progesterone-only birth control reduces periods. So there's a lot of precedent. It makes a lot of sense that it would work. God i i need to tell you have have you ever heard of the powers method of of no oh garrison i am so excited to introduce you to this person like dr powers is a fascinating grifter in the trans health care space because he is a he's a physician who like has has made it his duty to to to make sure that trans people especially trans women he actually doesn't like really have anything to say about trans men because the the therapy is so like easy to to to do yeah that he has a wild postulation uh as to like better ways to give hormones and he has things where it's like well you don't need anti-androgens you just give really high levels of injectable estrogen which like i mean that'll probably work because it doesn't work

for some people but yeah yeah but but also estrogen is like really safe and so like you can give it to an unbelievably high level it's not really going to speed things up exactly like it will maybe a little bit but not that much and any of the side effects you might experience which could also come from the the excipients the the non-active elements of it like you can be allergic to those if you have a really high dose it could be a real problem. But the big thing for him is he pushes that micronized progesterone is not only necessary and good, especially for breast size. You should also stick the oral capsules in your butt.

Oh, I were, we are, we are officially boofing estrogen now. Yes. Okay. Well I'm, I'm switching back to pills. This sounds very exciting. Well, oh my gosh. So the idea is, his line is that the oral capsules, you only get a tiny fraction of the total progesterone. And you get a lot more if you stick it up. You get the whole dose if you stick it up your butt. a total progesterone and you get a lot more if you stick it up, you get the whole dose if you stick it up your butt, which like, if you know, literally anything about pharmacology is both

right and entirely insane because anything that you take orally, there's a bioavailable like level of it. Like, so oral micronized progesterone has a bioequivalence of, I think like two or 3%, which is why when you take like a 100-milligram capsule, you get like a certain blood level. If you take it rectally, it's like a 12%. It's still not the whole thing, which is why the micronized progesterone rectal suppositories are 25 milligrams to give you the same exposure. So it's four times the systemic absorption, which means that if you are boofing a micronized progesterone capsule, you are getting three to four times the dose that you should be getting. And I pulled, because I get into fights with people all the time about this, I pulled the original FDA filing for

micronized progesterone, and they suggested that 300 milligrams is basically getting to what a cisgender person's maximum progesterone levels would be. Meaning that if you're boofing one or two, as some of his regimens suggest, you might be essentially overdosing on progesterone for no reason like there's no real reason to do that and it is just crazy when when i started this call today i did i did not think we would get to boofing progesterone it is a weird like a a weirdly large part of my twitter interactions have been fighting people to stop boofing progesterone um so i i needed to say it unfortunately you just exposed this idea to millions of more people no well no i'm saying don't do it well and so but you know that you know you know that's not how that works i do know that's

not how that works but i mean i i tell you if uh if if your your friend uh robert evans were here i could pitch a hole behind the bastards on this Dr. Powers guy. He sounds fascinating. He has a subreddit, like all good physicians do. I love when my doctor has a subreddit. And my favorite post, other than recently, he's been pushing this miracle hair tonic that he made, which is like, come on, buddy. Like, no, it's just obvious. He calls it tonic yep yep the verb he might call it he might even call it an elixir which is very funny but come on come on

for my magical hair tonic exactly and it's so funny because one of the components of it i think is finasteride like i i looked at the door and i'm like yes that is something for bald for male pattern baldness it will probably work congratulations you just remade rogaine uh but the the the single post that i feel like perfectly encapsulates this guy's mentality um is there's this big post that went around through like cisgender like kind of like centrist spaces that every trans person i saw was just like excuse me what the fuck where this guy was secretly microdosing injectable estrogen that he prescribed himself which sounds kind of illegal not gonna lie uh and messed up the dose by a thousand percent by a thought by a times thousand wait yeah yeah yeah and um like i can give you the link i i can i know exactly where it is i can give you the link if you wanted to read this it is buck wild but the thing is he

goes on to describe this like acute dysphoric episode that he had from one high dose of subcutaneous estrogen a thing that is not physiologically possible and completely insane. But he was like, but I understand the pain that trans women go through because I fucked up a dose where I was secretly taking estrogen to make my face look younger. So I understand your pain and have so much empathy for the trans women that I am trying to save. have so much empathy for for the trans women's that i am trying to save and it is so frustrating to me how many people give him like credence give him credit um because he he has he has claims like apply progesterone cream to the the smaller breast to even them out it's like okay my dude have you ever met like people with breasts one is larger than the other. That's how breasts work. And it's like, well, what's your evidence for that? Well, I had two people who did it and they said it worked. Okay, cool.

Do you have those reports? No, no, no. They got burned up in a house fire and it's very sad. And I can't give you that data. Did he actually say that? Yes. Oh, why? So he worked in a clinic that a friend of mine actually moved to after they got rid of him because he made all these wildly anecdotal claims.

And then his house burned down, which is actually very sad because his cats died in it. And he didn't deserve his cats because cats are perfect creatures. And this man is insane. The cats are nothing wrong. Cats never do anything wrong. Cats are perfect magical beings uh i love yours so much as they keep crossing in front of the screen as they do they're perfect um but so whenever anybody challenges him on literally any of his claims

he goes well i had all of that data but it burned up in my house. And then he like makes it a sob story about like how like, like horrible this was, which like, I'm sure it was really bad. Like, I'm sure it was like really, really bad, but even his like PowerPoint presentations that he has that he like goes through to like, really like talk about the powers method and make it sound like really, really good has a like fire safety section specifically so he can garner this like sympathy so people will not question his claims that have no evidence behind them.

And so it's just such a fantastic examination. To me, it's just so weird seeing like a space that has historically been denigrated in the evidence. You know, you had that whole episode on like the Hirschfeld Institute and you know we see all this like anti-trans like propaganda and legislation going on right now that there's a lot of like empty space in the medical record and in the evidence record for what to do in these situations there's a lot of confusion from the guidelines in these other societies, like I was talking about. And in steps this guy who sees an opportunity to be a popular, powerful individual in this space, to give people hope that he can cash in on.

And since the medications and since the hormone therapy is so safe, he doesn't actually hurt that many people. And it is so wild seeing this juxtaposition of individuals being like, well, this is unsafe experimental nonsense. And seeing this guy flagrantly overdosing people on hormones with no ill effects because they're that safe. That is pretty funny. Yeah, it's funny in that laughing until you're crying kind of way.

Yes, yes. What is a way that people can try to combat all the medical disinformation around HRT specifically? Because we do this specifically, we see this a lot in the Save the this specifically, we see this a lot in the Save the Children rhetoric, we see this a lot for just anti-trans stuff in general

and like yeah, just in terms of someone who has to deal with this stuff on a professional level like when we're just faced with all of this just blatantly, just like wrong stuff being treated as absolute fact when your experience

what's kind of the best ways to go about that in people oh my goodness um it kind of depends on the audience uh when i'm talking to other other health care practitioners i um i can i i have historically because i do a lot of like teaching and advocacy in this area to other healthcare practitioners, and holding sessions, volunteering to hold sessions to educate on this and say, these are the kind of regimens that are commonly used in clinics. This is why these are things to look out for. And to stress the importance of believing the patient and the importance of you don't want to gatekeep. Because if, which they're not that dangerous, but if there is to be a problem, you would rather have that patient want to work with you to solve it is such a big part of it.

Even just understanding from that level that you're delivering this kind of like life-saving medication to them as this like Lord on high. It's this idea that like, no, you should be working with this person. And if you're not familiar with it, you need to do your fucking research. And I, I will give you the resources for that. I will, I will walk you through those resources. And that's, that's awfully convincing for the majority of healthcare individuals at any level, because I've done talks for students in nursing

programs and physical therapy programs, all the way up to actively practicing physicians, nurses, and pharmacists. And it's basically the same. You make the argument, you show the evidence, you give them the evidence, and you walk them through and then have a robust question and answer period where they will ask you those questions and you can explain why they are wrong. Having that kind of dedicated space can be really beneficial, but not scalable in a way that's necessarily helpful. I've made a positive impact on my city, but that doesn't really necessarily help if you yourself are not a healthcare practitioner and want to explain this kind of stuff. And I mentioned earlier that on Twitter, I've spent a lot of time arguing that people shouldn't be boofing their progesterone, but I've had to stop because it's exhausting. Every single person coming back, it's like the same conversations

over and over again. And there's no good way to have a central location that just has all that information that anybody's going to believe because of the way the internet works. So I guess my answer is, I'm not sure. There's so much misinformation out there, and so much of it is so wrong and not in alignment with reality that looking at it at all, it falls to pieces. And the idea of the majority of people... So I guess I could say, if a person is coming to you and asking legitimate questions and they don't really know, like they're just like parroting stuff that they heard, they're much easier to convince because you can show like, Oh,

like we have a long history of doing this. Like, look at the, you know, I tell my students about how like 1952 was the first like recognized hormonal mediated transition in the United States. Like she was like a movie star. And, and, you know, I talk about a lot of the history to be like, this isn't new. This is something like we have been here forever. My, my favorite story. Do you know about the story about the Scythian priestesses? Yes, I actually do, but I would love for you to explain it, but I,

I found out about that a few months ago and I was like, oh my God, makes me so happy. So to explain very briefly, I think it's an old, I think it was like Herodotus. It's like an old like Grecian like author that we have information, author, philosopher, whatever, historian. But they talk about in one of the texts, the Scythian priestesses who essentially distill the poison of woman, they call it in one of the texts, which I think is such a great term, from pregnant mare urine, which interestingly enough, we actually still make today, conjugated estrogens. The brand name is Premarin because it comes from pregnant mare urine. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's literally a thing that we still do today. That is hilarious.

It's beautiful. It's so good. And so they were priestesses. They were like, you know, people would come to them to seek out their wisdom and their like this like spiritual thing. And it was like a bunch of trans women who like got high, told and probably fucked each other and that sounds like a polycule to me but um like the silly the scythians were like a nomadic uh group of people who would travel all around kind of what is now the middle east um and yeah it's i mean i i do love the idea of trans people having like specific like more esoteric insight almost naturally because they've had to deal with ideas of ontology and ideas.

Ontology is just like the nature of being. And so having to deal with that, having to deal with like the nature of reality from a much younger age because their whole perception of reality and self is obviously so different because of their experience of being what is now called trans um so it makes a lot of sense that a lot of these people would have been like basically different forms of shamans mediums or just have like esoteric insight because they've been thinking about these types of like reality altering topics for so much longer because it's so much more personally affecting to them um but yes when i specifically read about the scythian priestesses i'm like oh my they're just like doing the thing they're just doing the thing it turns out we've been doing this forever my favorite account is a uh one of the reasons they commanded respect of the like masculine leaders that would come to get information was because they were all terrified that they would inflict the poison of women which it does spread by the way it is oh it's highly contagious it is

contagious but the idea that like there was like some of the respect was from like this fear of being force-femmed is hilarious from like this early bc the primordial fear of the primordial fear i was gonna say garrison you mentioning like ontology my original degree was in psychology and philosophy so like let's go baby we can go deep on some of this stuff oh i'm sure i'm sure i'm sure we could talk about uh mysticism and magic and gender for a long long time oh my god that'd be a whole nother podcast those are big areas of interest um but i but i but I super agree with you because I've been thinking about this and I've ended up having conversations with a lot of my peers in pharmacy

and in the university because people might not recognize this, but pharmacy is actually one of the more conservative spaces in healthcare. My school had a dress code for the students until two years ago when I fought hard enough to get it removed. Like it was wild. Um, like the code of conduct committee tried to get me, tried to prevent me from getting my ears pierced. Like it is, yeah, it's a wild space for me to exist in. Um, it's extremely conservative, extremely traditional. Like the, some like, yeah, I, I got stories, uh, that I'd love to tell if you wanted to hear them. But the thing that I think is really interesting is when you look at me in comparison to my colleagues who are predominantly Christian, predominantly traditionalist, predominantly capitalist, and I roll in as this anti-capitalist, anarchist, trans woman who's poly, who's pansexual who's a pagan all the peas and it's like well once i questioned gender i started realizing all of culture and society is bullshit and now i can tell you the truth come to me for the truth of reality no it even makes sense in terms of like you know why why did two trans women make the matrix you're

like yeah no it's like it's it is it is the same thing as your your entire nature and basis of reality was severely questioned so yes so you're trying to trying to understand these feelings and for you know in modern days we have like stuff like simulation theory we have the matrix um and then you know but before before then you know it would have been taken out in like spiritualism and religion and you know the different levels of reality on like the whole like mystic side of things as opposed to like the more sci-fi side of things right um but yeah like it's it's all the same stuff like you're you're you're playing with the same things um but yeah it is it is just a funny a funny trend that once you once you

notice it you'll you'll start seeing it in in like different places yeah so we are still mystics who understand the true reality of the world and will force them you if you don't give us respect i just don't see what the problem i believe that that was my takeaway from Matrix Resurrections. Oh, yeah. I mean, 100%. Well, is there anything else you would want to add? Oh, my goodness. I don't know. Fight for trans people? One of the things that I end up always having to talk to my students about and colleagues and things is what ally means. to my students about and colleagues and things is what ally means because i i've literally gotten into arguments with people who are like oh yeah it's lgbtqia because a stands for ally and i'm

like oh i will knife you like i'm like it doesn't stand for ally it stands for asexual or uh or aromantic or a romantic or a gender yes all of all of all of all of the other a's yes but it's the it's this thing where um people think being an ally is just being like like okay with a person existing the kind of like well if it makes you happy which is like okay motherfucker that's not like that is so belittling of the experience um that's not allyship. To be an ally, you have to leverage your privilege by not being a member of that community to protect people in that community. You can be tolerant, but not an ally. And that's sort of where the old saying comes from that if that's what being an ally is to you, we don't need allies, we need accomplices. And with the current legislative push against trans people,

I mean, like literally what I do is like a felony in three states now or almost a felony in three states. Oh, and it's going to be a growing number of states. Yeah, and it's just so unbelievably depressing. And there aren't enough, I mean, there's a lot of trans and non-binary and every kind of expression you could want people in this country, way more than a lot of surveys suspected. But we're not enough to necessarily fight this in a way that isn't going to end up with increasing violence. The FBI statistics of random violence against hate crimes specifically has been rising against LGBT people, especially trans people in the last couple of years. And I'm sure it's only going to get more in the next few years still with all of the with the wave of stuff happening the past few months.

Yeah. So if you're if you're not if you're a cis person and you want to be an ally, you've got to fight for us. If you're a cis person and you want to be an ally, you've got to fight for us. And if you're a trans person, if you don't have other reasons why you can't, maybe arm yourself in some way at this point. If you feel mentally capable, it's not a bad idea to learn how to do things. It's not a bad idea to get stop-the-bleed training, not a bad idea to get emergency first aid training not a bad idea to get you know emergency first aid training right all of all of all of the things um absolutely because things are things are happening and they're going to keep happening uh one might say it could happen here wow i know we really we really pulled this together just pulled it back. Just really encapsulated it. So yeah, I think that does it for us today.

Do you have any pluggables that you would like to plug? Yeah, sure. So if you wanted to talk to me more, I'm on Twitter for now, assuming that Elon Musk doesn't make it entirely unlivable at Vixen Witch, but the W is two Vs. I don't post a whole lot, but you can find me there. You can also just straight up email me if you had questions. My work email for that purpose is just victoria.grieve at pit.edu. I'd be happy to answer any questions that people have. And it's a robust university firewall. So if I get hate, that's fine. It won't

get through. And then outside of my classes and stuff, the only other thing I wanted to plug, because you brought it up, I am a frequent guest on a podcast that a friend of mine hosts called School of Movies. And we actually did Matrix 2, 3, and 4. Nice. And I was on those episodes and talked a lot about the trans narrative therein. We also did an episode on Priscilla, Queen of the Desert that I'm really proud of. Because it's great.

I was lucky enough to watch Priscilla, Queen of the Desert a few months ago with some queer friends of mine. With Hugo Weaving in both of those things. So it's perfect. It is pretty fun watching Hugo Weaving go from Agent Smith to his character Priscilla Queen of the Desert. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful metamorphosis.

It is very good. Thank you so much for coming on to talk. Yeah, anytime. Thank you for listening to my little two-parter on hormone replacement therapy. If you want to start reading more on the DIY and mutual aid side of things, check out DIYHRT.github.io, HRT.cafe, and DIYTrans.wiki as a jumping off point.

But obviously, don't take everything you read on the internet as gospel. I do think it is worth learning how to make your own drugs, possibly, and learning how to source your own estrogen from places that are not just a doctor. Because who knows what other states will start criminalizing getting drugs from a doctor, right? There seems to be a trend of making HRT illegal via the medical system. So this is something definitely to look into because it seems more and more people will face restrictions in this vein. So yeah, that's kind of a big reason for why I wanted to talk about this today on the pod. A big extra special

thanks to Dr. Victoria Luna Brennan-Greave for coming on to talk with me about gender-affirming hormonal treatment. You can check her out or ask her questions on her Twitter, which can be found at vixenwitch, with two Vs for the W in witch, or you can email her queries at victoria.grieve at pit.edu. And that does it for us today, everybody. You can follow the show at HappenHere Pod and Cool Zone Media on Twitter and Instagram. And you can look at my late night gender hostile tweets at Hungry Bowtie. See you on the other side. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. 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 for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of an anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.