It Could Happen Here - Ohio's War On Trans People, Pt. 2: From WPATH to the Legislature

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

In part 2 of our interview with Ky and Lee, we discuss how anti-trans groups campaigned to influence medical organizations like WPATH and drew in vulnerable people along the way.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. podcast. AT&T, connecting changes everything. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a

little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CallZone Media Welcome to It Could Happen Here. This is is me along back with part two of my interview with kyan lee from health liberation now about the long origins of anti-trans legislation and policy in ohio let's get right into it okay so the the next thing i wanted to sort of ask about is so this is a very very long running i guess sort of strategy and campaign of sort of right wing or right wing and turf do you transition like groups advocating

for uh trans health careans. And I wanted to talk about some of the older campaigns that happened, and I wanted to talk about specifically some of the campaigns to influence WPATH. Right. We should start by explaining to people what WPATH is,

because I think unless you're trans, you probably don't know, you've probably never heard of WPATH. It's like World Professional Association for Trans Health Care, I believe, is what it is. I'm trying to double check that. Yeah, yeah. World Professional Association for Transgender Health,

formerly known as the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Alliance. They publish the standards of care that is usually used to help inform gender-affirming care for trans people, and they have done various versions of this over the course of decades. We are currently on version 8. of administering trans healthcare has involved a lot of gatekeeping and psychological assessments or requiring people to do a real life test which is like making someone live as the gender they're transitioning to for like a year

before they can actually access medical transition so I guess like social transition but it's like a test to prove whether you're a quote unquote real trans person or not yeah things have gotten like somewhat better over time, but there's still a lot of medical professionals, especially therapists in WPATH,

who still want to require some form of gatekeeping, who basically still don't trust trans people to know who we are and what we need. And they're like, okay, but we need to make sure they get therapy. We need to make sure we do all the the psych tests what if they regret it and so yeah so i used to be a detransition radical feminist back in the day um and i used to know uh i mean i i knew max and kitty i was involved in that particular group for about six and a half, seven years.

And I used to have a blog called Crash Chaos Cats, where I wrote about detransitioning and kind of got more turfy over time. But pretty early into my blog, about three months or so in, this gender therapist who worked for the San Francisco Department of Health left a comment on my blog and was like, I'm interested in talking to detransitioned people because I think there are two... Well, she left a comment that she was interested in talking to detransitioned people and talking to me.

And then we started emailing back and forth and she opened up pretty quickly and said, there are too many F2Ms in San Francisco. There's too many F2Ms in the San Francisco Bay Area. There are too many, quote-unquote, female people transitioning. Which is nuts! I know. It's like, oh no! It's like, oh wow! It couldn't possibly be that people are just coming to one of the most trans-friendly areas in the country to transition

because they think they'll have an easier time there. No, there's got to be too many people. I mean, I think somewhere early in the conversation, she brought up YouTube influencing people towards transitioning. She thought there was pressure to transition in the trans community. So anyway, she had all this stuff, something about like, oh, people are treating the social problem as a medical problem. And I immediately you know, immediately

kind of turned around and started talking with this other detrans radical feminist that I knew, Devorah Zahav, and we started scheming like, okay, this like gender therapist who works for the San Francisco Department of Health, like thinks there's too many people transitioning. How do we exploit this? Like, how can we use this as an opportunity to cut down on the number of people transitioning? It wasn't just that connection to the Department of Health. It was also the WPATH. Well, we found out about that.

I was just going to go into that. Eventually, first we found out she was working for the Department of Public Health and then we found out that she was in WPATH and she actually was talking to the president of WPATH. So she made it like you know talking to the president of w path and that she like so she made it clear that like she wanted to use um the stories of detransition people to try to get more clinicians to be take a more cautious approach and she also wanted to try to develop

psych assessments that could supposedly like weed out you know who the real trans people were who was going to benefit from transitioning and who who was supposed to go on to regret transitioning and detransition. Now, the thing is, we didn't actually believe that you could tell the difference between someone who would end up state-transition or detransition because we were TERFs, right? We thought everyone could be saved by radical feminism. And we had a bunch of people in our group who thought that they were, quote unquote, true transsexuals, who thought they fit the criteria of someone who would have a successful transition, you know, until they decided they actually were suffering from internalized misogyny or some other kind of rad femme explanation for gender dysphoria. the thing is like devora also lived in the san francisco bay area so she actually ended up like meeting up with this gender therapist uh his name was julie graham and was like pretty open with her with her anti-trans views i mean she wasn't like completely open with her like intentions like oh i'm gonna use this person to try to like work towards ending all transition but she was she

did tell um you know graham that she didn't think anyone really benefited from it and she told her that you know she said she knew people who had been true transsexuals who had detransitioned and said lots of really awful things about trans women being fetishists and just like all this very

anti-trans stuff but then oh but I think we don't have to agree on everything I think we can work together and like this gender therapist fell for it like somehow like divorcing all this very anti-trans stuff like making it clear that she was opposed to transition saying like really nasty trans misogynistic shit like none of that was like objectionable enough for Graham not to like continue to like work with her to continue to be like hey do you want to talk to these clinicians about what it is to do transition and you know eventually

what happened like that eventually this relationship with this gender therapist eventually led to a presentation at the first us path conference by carrie callahan who's like she's a kind of an odd figure because she never actually identified as like a radical feminist, but she spent like years hanging out with like detransitioned radical feminists. And she's, she's detransitioned, but she's kind of more of like a weird liberal who believes in more gatekeeping, but she's kind of handy. Like we, like, like she did this presentation at us path and she showed some videos of uh detrans turfs including myself like i made one i made a short video

and max robinson also made one of those videos and um carrie stella was the third person and carrie stella she did like she was another detrans Tumblr TERF who did this survey that still gets, like, it was a survey monkey survey. It gets cited by, like, anti-trans researchers about detransition. Anyways, so there were

three of us who made these short videos. Both me and Max Robinson, by that point, had gone, like, we had hooked up with these weird TERFs who were Dianic witches and taken part in these kind of weird neo-pagan

ex-trans reclaiming femaleness rituals we had been through this kind of religious neo-pagan conversion practice rituals which of course that wasn't something that the US religious neo-pagan conversion practice rituals. Which, of course, that wasn't something that the US people,

those are the people, USPath knew that, but we hid that. I talked about how I thought I had transitioned due to internalized misogyny and trauma and all that. So I was spreading a more watered-down turf ideology to the folks over at USPATH. This is kind of an intentional strategy, if you think about it. Because I want to point out something

from the emails about how that presentation was made and then given, where Carrie Callahan noted that her slides were quote unquote decidedly unradical she was trying to talk to therapists as a therapist um what that basically meant was she was taking away a lot of the um more objectionable elements the things that would identify folks like kai and her previously scrambled state as a turf and being completely opposed to transition and stuff like that and then putting on you know kind of suiting them up right like you know getting getting them in

their in their nice clothes um and then presenting them to a professional audience who is then able to take that information and sort of absorb it into their general thinking and then how that's going to play out in terms of their changes or implementations of care in the long term yeah and that's something that like i there's something that's pretty common with like a detrans uh like anti-trans activists across the spectrum like a lot of people like chloe cold there's a lot of the sort of like just hardline right-wingers who didn't talk about stuff like like some of these people detransition because like the thing that they're saying now is that you transition because they got a vision from god right and they don't start with that because

i think right i mean i i think i think there should be more skepticism of people who are like i got a vision from the christian god or like the abrahamic god that told me to transition i think there should be more skepticism of that but that's not something that like i don't know if you if you walk into like w path and you tell them i was given a vision from god they're going to be like what WPath and you tell them I was given a vision from God they're going to be like what whereas this kind of stuff right like you know but the WPath people like and this is something that's kind of complicated about this because I think there's I think there's a lot of people who see WPath as one of the sort of like as one of the organizations that's there to protect trans people

and that are sort of allies in this sort allies in this battle against anti-trans stuff. And it's true to a certain extent, but they're also, like, this is an organization composed of a bunch of cis doctors, right? Who can be influenced and manipulated and... There's

trans members as well. There's a few, but... Less power. Well But it also seems like the trans people who do end up in a high position at WPATH also tend to be end up believing in gatekeeping and restrictions that kind of internalize

the general mindset. So it's kind of like they're tokens. It's kind of handy for cis medical professionals who want to control trans people to have some trans people as figureheads expressing those views. Because they'll be like, oh, well, look,

this person's saying it, and they're trans. So, like, yeah. I mean, yeah, at the same like, at the first US path, I mean, just to kind of show how far things still need to come, you know, the same, like, at the first USPath, I mean, just to kind of show how far things still need to come, you know, the same USPath where Carrie did her detransition presentation,

Ken Zucker was there, and he got protested. I mean, like, there was a protest against him, and they did, I believe they ended up, like, canceling at least, like, one of his presentations. But yeah, so Ken Zucker, kind of this notorious conversion therapist who focused primarily on trans youth. He had this clinic in Canada. Going after both trans youth and gender non-conforming youth. They tried to prevent kids from growing up trans,

but they also tried to make non-conforming youth more gender conforming as well. With the justification, the justification oh well it's easier to change the individual than to like make society less bigoted yeah yeah but yeah but he was the type of um like he was one of the medical professionals that was like you know helping to create like the standards of care for for trans youth for decades and it took a lot of work to, to change that. And like, yeah, he was still given a platform by WPATH in like 2017.

That's not that long ago. Yeah. And that's, I don't know. It's, this is one of these things where like the, the, the,

the history of of cis doctors treating trans people is really really bleak in ways that don't get talked about and the reason like one of the reasons they don't get talked about from people who know about it is that like it's fucking bad like it's a lot it's it's a lot of people getting raped it's like a lot of like i mean and like when we talk about sort of like gatekeeping for health care like that was the like one of the original things was like you know one of the things that would happen very very commonly was you know it's like okay like if you if you want to get health care like you have to let me rape you like that that's the thing that happened all the fucking time and this is and that that's not something that's you know extremely long ago right and you can you can look at like modern w path and be like

well it's obviously like yes it has come a long way from that shit but simultaneously yeah like i don't know that's that's something that you know like there are living people who fucking experience that, right? And, you know, and when you look at why these kinds of, like, detrans campaigns, why these sort of detrans anti-trans activists have been so successful in targeting this, it's like, well, you know, it's, I think it's a kind of similar thing to like oh wow i wonder why like the third kkk was successful in the south and it's like hmm hmm maybe there are things happening i mean that that that is slightly unfair as being a bit unfair to them but you know there's there's still a lot of these sentiments that there's still a lot of sort of like transphobic sentiments that are just kind of like buried beneath the surface and's still a lot of sort of like transphobic sentiments that are just

kind of like buried beneath the surface and i think a lot of what we've been seeing over the past you know like like eight ish years what is time hold on is that god okay i've broken my own rule about not trying to do math life on air people don't figure out that i can't do subtract but you know that's that's a lot of what's been happening for the last like eight years is that people figured out that there's still a lot of sort of lingering anti-trans sentiment and they figured out where you can target it in ways that are extremely effective we need to go to ads we back in a second with less capitalism. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together.

You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking

off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

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

separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, like, yeah. I mean, I feel like, like in terms of like medical professionals who want to gatekeep or what, like they gatekeep, they've been using detransition and transition regret as an excuse for controlling people for basically since the beginning of trans healthcare.

I mean, that gender therapist, Julie Graham, she went looking for us. She went looking for detrans people to use. She's like, like okay this is how i'm gonna like cut down on the number of people transitioning i'm gonna find some like detransitioned women and then use their experiences and you know that's what she tried to do and like and i see this happening with other like clinicians too like kind of going back to ohio scott lebowitz who runs he's a therapist who runs uh the thrive clinic uh in ohio and he's another one who has used like detransition to justify like more psych assessments and i mean he was actually

one of the therapists featured in um one of the new York Times articles that a lot of trans people got mad at. The one by Emily Bazelon. What is it like? I forget what it's called. The Battle for Gender Therapy. Yes, The Battle for Gender Therapy. Where he's kind of cast as this poor, moderate clinician who's caught between the religious right

that wants to ban all trans healthcare and these wacky trans activists who just want to let everyone transition it's like he's just trying to find this nuanced approach and make sure that like teenagers don't transition and regret it and you know yeah you know he was like i mean like he was trying to stop the healthcare bans in ohio by pointing out like, oh, look, you know, we're, we do comprehensive care, you know, most, most youth don't go on to medically transition. Like, like Carrie Callahan was also one of the, you know, she and her testimony and in

some op-ed pieces that she wrote, she was like praising his approach, calling it cautious, cautious, you know, people who want want to restrict care, implement more gatekeeping, will use detransition stories to justify that. And then, of course, the religious right, who wants to completely wipe out all transition healthcare, will also use detransition stories as well. They'll have their set of detransition people that they bring out, like Chloe Cole, to testify for the bans.

Yeah, Leibowitz was also one of the co-leads for the adolescent chapter in the Standards of Care 8 from WPATH. This was also partially reported on in the Bazelon piece, since they were given exclusive access to the draft before the actual final product was officially published. And so this particular chapter, especially compared to most of the other ones, it was basically a dumpster fire. It was a massive rollback in terms of accurate information.

And part of this was actually captured by a white paper that was written by Kelly Winters, a trans woman. She's got a PhD and everything like that. She's been paying attention to this stuff for a really long time, has been working in aspects of WPATH and trying to, like, you know, kind of help reshape some of the transphobia that's been happening. Yeah, I mean, she's been fighting back against, like, how trans people are pathologized and, you know,

against paternalistic health care for a very long time now. Yeah, so she ended up writing a white paper about version 8 with a significant section focusing on the adolescent chapter and some of the weird, like, pseudoscience laundering that ended up happening because that chapter not only did it include like you know lip service to things like quote-unquote rapid onset gender dysphoria which is a this is a bunk pseudo diagnosis that was invented by lisa litman after surveying a bunch of anti-transparents but then within that chapter you also see the the laundering of specific studies that are focused on predominantly detransitioned women, predominantly gender critical or radical feminists. These two papers were Littman 2021, which surveyed a lot of

the kind of the old detrans turf groups that we had been connected with right around 2017 or so. So this was before the ROGD paper was published in 2018. But then there was also, let's see, there's the Vanderbush study, which I believe that was published in like, what, 20... I don't remember what year that was published in. The Vanderbush, who is basically post-trans, half of a gender critical detransition project. And it had a very similar kind of recruitment

strategy, sometimes an overlapping recruitment pool, but the difference is that this happened after the ROGD paper dropped. ROGD, that's Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, which is this thing made up to be like, all the kids are suddenly transitioning. It's like, no, this is... Yeah, but that's rapid onset gender dysphoria, which is just things made up to be like, all the kids are suddenly transitioning. It's like, no, this is, yeah, but that's what that acronym is. Yep. When that paper dropped, a shift in some of the narratives from people who

are coming out as detransitioned was also starting to be observed. More people were starting to call themselves as having experienced rogd this is where the peak resilience project came from um and so as a result like this vandenbosch study was also pulling in aspects of that kind of narrative as well right and you know this none of this actually makes sense these are wildly biased sample pools it's not going to be generalizable to basically any population. It's only focused on a very particular subset of people who end up detransitioning and then develop

some kind of political belief connected to it. And then it's being used as legitimate data as part of standards of care that is supposed to be like yeah yeah it's just it's ridiculous it's absolutely ridiculous it is ridiculous but i don't feel like like i feel like the medical professionals who want more gatekeeping like they just need some detransition

people to justify it they don't really care if like the people ended up detransitioning because they found God or radical feminism or our old group, a lot of the detrans, and I think I already mentioned this before, a lot of us talked about how we had the same kind of dysphoria that any other trans person had. And we're still fighting it off. That was a thing, too. Most of the people I knew still had gender dysphoria. And we're just finding, quote unquote unquote alternative ways to cope with it. And it's just like, I don't, I mean, a lot of people were trying to like talk themselves out of like transitioning again. So I don't think the issue here is like, oh, transition didn't work for these people. It's more like they internalized the idea that no one said transition.

But again, like people don't, it's like people don't yeah, they only care about using detransition in order to reduce the number of trans people or prevent transition. They don't care about transition or detransition that results from transphobia, either internalizing

it, internalizing an anti-trans ideology, or not being able to access transition because of living in a transphobic society, coming from a transphobic family, having to go into the closet to find a job, that kind of stuff.

It's never about preventing due transition that results from transphobia. It's just about finding an excuse to control us and our access to health care there's this perverse incentive structure here too because you know these doctors are trying to find you know they're trying to find something that gives them more ability to do gatekeeping so it's it's in it's in their interest to in order to in order to preserve and increase their own power

to find this kind of stuff which means that they're not actually doing their job they're going out and trying to find ways to like they're trying to find you know whatever whatever like absolutely dog shit studies or like just stuff that like probably should be considered medical malpractice like they don't really care because again it's it's it's just this like loop because that's the thing that they need so they'll find whatever like crank pseudoscientist is like cranking this stuff out and they'll use it yeah i mean and also i mean i also feel like this is one of the reasons why there aren't more resources for people who

end up de-transitioning too because they want to be able to use it as a scare story, right? Because like really I mean like okay, I detransitioned and like it was hard because there weren't as much like resources and support out there and I mean a lot of the supports I did find were crappy because they were coming from TERFs but it's like, it's really just kind of

like transitioning again in a lot of ways so it's like well if you can create resources to make transitioning easier, you could definitely create a lot of similar. So it's like, well, if you can create resources to make transitioning easier, you could definitely create a lot of similar resources to make detransitioning easier, but that's not there. And I feel like one of the reasons that is not there is because

if it's easy for someone to detransition, get what they need to have a good life and just move on, then it's harder to use those stories. You'll have less people who you can indoctrinate into these anti-trans ideologies and then use them as part of the anti-trans movement. But also, if it's not scary anymore,

if you just show, okay, this is just an issue of making sure people get the supports they need so they can just get on with their lives. You just treat it as a practical problem that needs to be solved instead of using it to feed a trans panic like yeah it's just like the the there's actually like less reasons for gatekeeping i mean i feel like like creating like basically you're kind of like creating a safety net for in case like you know in case something unexpected or negative happens so you're like okay well if you transition and things you end up changing your mind or things don't work out the way you think you they would here's all

these supports you can turn to so like i feel like that's kind of a better long-term thing to work for is like okay like make sure there are supports for people no matter how their transition turns out like if then including you Including detransitioning, or if people face health complications, make sure that there's supports in place for that. Don't use that as an excuse for gatekeeping. Yeah, that's unfortunately one that I know all too well the consequences of.

Yeah, and I think also the other thing that's going on is is there's just like all of these groups see both trans people and people who do transitions as just not like like they're you know it they're they're they're violating the the content categorical imperative in the sense that they're not treating people as actual humans are treating them as objects or tools yes and once you do when you do that right like everything suddenly you know like who cares what happens to these people afterwards because you don't think of them as people you think of them as just a thing that you're using to do another thing. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

The unfortunate thing is that this can also happen within the community as well when they are trying to advocate for certain kinds of things. People will end up using each other as tools in order to meet their own personal goals. Speaking of goals, make it your goal to buy these products and services. Oh, no. Hey, guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more.

with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?

Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged

look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people.

I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his

mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, you look so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami.

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So let's go back a little bit to about like 2019. Some of the bills are starting to go out.

We had the test balloon bill that was looking for people that wanted to advocate for better healthcare outcomes for trans and detrans people, right? During that timeframe, I had been starting to go off of my hormones. I started going off of them a few months prior to that point and in that time frame i started experiencing certain types of what seemed like progressive vision loss right my my brain i sometimes have a tendency to to panic i guess um especially when it comes to things like health anxiety, my brain started to make the internal connection, did going off of my hormones cause my vision to change, right? And unfortunately, as I started to talk about this online and the likes, I was getting a lot of encouragement from other folks,

usually like, you know, gender critical, anti-transparents, that kind of thing, that yes, absolutely. My, like the hormones were causing me to have vision loss. Right. And it was really impacting my ability to function in my daily life. Right. But another part of me at the same time as all of this was starting to feel like I was starting to feel aspects of regret and anger, which made me want to do something. This is a very common narrative, right? It made me want to do something so that other people would not end up in the situation that I was in. And so I answered this call, probably not the best of decisions that I could have made for myself, but I decided to go ahead and do so. Answered Carrie Calhoun's call. Yes myself, but I decided to go ahead and do so.

Answered Carrie Calhoun's call. Yes, yes. I decided to go ahead and say, yes, I will connect in with this. I would like to be a part of it. I had to apparently apologize for talking to the wrong clinician in public first. Jesus. You had to apologize for talking to Jack Turbin because he was too affirming and she was mad that you would speak to him because he's too willing to respect trans kids yes yes because he prescribed puberty blockers i was talking to the wrong clinician and therefore this was not allowed but anyway so eventually um the actual actual organizing committee starts with four people. So it was predominantly the four of us that ended up being

the actual formal board at any point in the early stages, right? And so we started to draft a lot of this stuff, but like over, I was starting to wonder about two things, right? Like after some exchanges with other board members about who it is that we should be predominantly outreaching, should it be clinicians or should it be people that are actually impacted, people who have gone through gender-affirming care, regardless of how they identify themselves currently, like, what is our main priority? The other board member at the time wanted to focus more on the clinician route. I did not. My focus was on if we are going to be doing a quote unquote patient advocacy organization, we should be focusing on the people that we are supposed to be connected to. Right. Like those are who we are. We are supposed to be connected to, right?

Like, those are who we are. Why would we want to put more power into the hands of the clinicians that supposedly harmed people? It doesn't make any sense, right? over time um the trajectory of this organization at that point was going to start advocating for more restrictions or full-out bans later on in the future possibly even partnering up with some of the um some of the more right-wing groups i believe i actually um i i think i I worried about them becoming like the gender care equivalent to Wolf, which was unfortunately pretty accurate, I would say, in terms of my concern. president about five months after I had joined on, um, because I could not see any, I could not see any recourse within the group for, for changing directions. Um, I couldn't be party to them hurting other people, even if I felt hurt at the time. And so I ended up taking a step back um my vision was still having problems um but you know what ended up making that a lot easier actually it's funny this is not something that was recommended to me by anybody that i had been talking to um about this stuff who had been more exposed to anti-trans um rhetoric like i i talked to blind people

yeah i i ended up talking to blind people um i connected with folks from the national federation for the blind um it was a group that was recommended to me by somebody i knew from a um from a past job that i had because she was the daughter of somebody who went blind later in life due to a genetic condition. And he was a member of the NFB, right? He was part of the Federation. And so that was her recommendation to me. I hadn't reached out at the time.

My brain was too focused in doing this weird, we gotta save people kind of bullshit direction but eventually after I'm like taking a step back from all of this stuff I decided to go ahead and

pursue that suggestion from this random person in my life not from anybody I had been connected to in terms of organizing and when I went there, the only thing that I ever got was acceptance. There was no questioning. Nobody asked what happened. Nobody asked any sort of details about my personal views.

I didn't have to express any forms of like, you know, sorrow or regret or anything like that. A lot of it was focused on, okay, these are the issues that you're currently dealing with. Here are some of the things that you can work on to make your life easier. Here are some supports that you can find within your states. If you need to do things like, you know know get certain kinds of mobility training using a white cane and the likes if you need to learn how to use braille all of that fun stuff here here's even like specific doctors that you could try to go to who can like really assess what's going on with your vision because before that point I did not have access to specialists

I was living in like you know rural Maine there There was nothing there. I would have had to travel over three hours to go to Boston for me to be able to see a specialist. Instead, they were able to point me to people who had specializations in retinal conditions. And so when I went there you know they they did their usual tests they ruled out um some things that were known to run in my family actually but they did ultimately decide that like my retinas are not processing light correctly and that it's actually likely genetic um so unrelated to hormone use completely unrelated to hormone usage. Completely unrelated to hormone usage. In fact, as I was going through that process and I started to reflect on what my vision was like

before I even took hormones, let alone stopping it, certain symptoms were actually there just at a much lower degree since like at least my teens i already had uh difficulties with my night vision um i had difficulties with uh color contrast sometimes um my light sensitivity wasn't nearly as bad usually it was only with migraines but um over time like you know that started to to break out more where like even just like you know there being too much sunlight was painful for me but like some of this stuff it definitely predated when i started my transition but because i wasn't really given

space to actually unpack any of this stuff i didn didn't really have the ability to make those connections. Instead, what happened was, you know, I joined in on this organizing board. I connected in with three other people that were looking to advocate in very particular directions. And like my story was not something that was meant to get support my story was something that was meant to scare people yeah i was also nominated as the spokesperson which meant i would have had the responsibility to do things like, you know, respond to the press or give sound quotes or whatever, right?

I gave certain kinds of descriptions over to a, like a Democratic candidate that we had been scheduled to meet with, Ryan Starzik at the time down in Arizona, and, you know, give the whole spiel, right? You know, a visible trans person with a story that for a lot of people who, like, most people are very connected to their senses, whether that's hearing, vision, touch, or whatever, they can't conceptualize a life without them. And so it terrifies them, right? And so it terrifies them, right? But that doesn't actually help the person be able to get to a point where this is a livable life. It's even a freeing life. There are certain things that I can do

that other people can't do. I can navigate inside the apartment without having the lights on because I know where everything is mapped out of my head and I can rely on touch. I can pour myself a glass of water and not have to worry about it spilling because I can feel where it like goes up. But that's not really something that like we're not even allowed to think about. We're not even allowed to think about like, okay,

so if this thing happens to you and there's documented evidence of it, not like something that's completely imagined, like my brain decided it was, here's what we can do to help. That's the kind of things that people really need to be able to access, right? You know, if something happens to you, these are the things that you can do

to be able to work through this and live a more comfortable life in the way that you are happy with. But I don't really see any of that happening to be perfectly frank well no like i'm also thinking back about that like the standards of care a because like you know there's this you know um inclusion of aspects of regret and detransition and stuff like that into things like the adolescent chapter but you know what they don't include a chapter and detransition and stuff like that into things like the adolescent chapter. But you know what they don't include? A chapter for

detransition support. Yeah. No, because they're not serious about that. Again, they just want to use it as a scare story and a justification for controlling people or putting them through a bunch of assessments or something like that. Again, I very much believe that there's a connection between

a desire for more gatekeeping and psych assessment control over trans people and not having support for detransition or retransition either, because there's not I feel like there's even less talk or resources for people who end up retransitioning

after detransitioning, because no one's trying to figure out, oh, the idea that detransition could just be one's trying to figure out like oh like the idea that detransition could just be temporary or that a lot of people you know go on to retransition later on or just confirms for them that they really are trans like that's also a thing that you know cis people don't really want to touch it's one of these things where you know like pain is useful to these people but like the actual like people experiencing the pain aren't and you know and that has its own perverse incentive cycle because like yeah if you want to harvest scare stories you don't want people getting actual help and that is a absolutely

terrible incentive structure for making sure people actually get the care and the help that they need. And it absolutely sucks. Just, yeah. Oh, I remember realizing like when I was still a detrans radical feminist, like realizing that a whole lot of like people who wanted to restrict or

eliminate transition, like, like had an investment in my suffering. Because, you know, I was, and I was struggling a lot. Like, I do, it can really be hard to do transition, like, right now because there are, you know, there is a lack of resources and support and understanding. But the thing is, like, I, you know,

I kind of slowly realized over time, it's just like, oh, all these people want to use my story, but they need me to suffer for it to, like, work out work out for them like they don't have any interest in making my life easier like they don't have any interest in like helping me like create a good life and being happy they want me they really do want me to be ruined and miserable forever because they can use like that's more valuable to them like my suffering matters more than my happiness to a lot of these people like you know that was definitely one of those moments where i was like what like one of those things that eventually you know led me to get disillusioned with the whole thing and be like you know what i get myself

involved with but yeah yeah it's just it's it is really like sick and perverse how how anti-trans people like use suffering use both trans and detrans people suffering for their own agenda um it's awful yeah and i think this is something that you know there's this is the sort of it's also there's a broader set of incentives here too which is the sort of the structure of the media market right which is the media that's like the like you know the entire media broadly like you know like if it bleeds it leads right like that's that's that's the that's the actual media model of you know everything from like your like shitty local right-wing tabloid to like the new york times right and the way that this plays out for trans people and for detrans people is that like the thing that

these people that you know the journalists also are looking for is suffering like they don't really care you know like they like none of these people ever report stories that are just like hey like i went to a gender clinic and it was great like nobody's gonna like they don't think anyone's gonna read that like i would read that because you know that's you know that's great but like but like they don't care about that there's there's no sort of sensationalism there the sensationalism is like you know you then this is why you get like the washington post interviewing this like you know like these people who are just like oh like i was i worked at a gender clinic but i was secretly doing evil or like you know or or or you get all of and this is why a lot

of even pro-trans like media coverage is about things like suicide rates and about things like you know like how like how likely you are to die if you don't get the health care that you need like how likely you are to die if you don't get the healthcare that you need because it's it's the same incentive structure it's the thing the thing that's useful to sell to people is suffering and that i don't know what the solution is to that because i mean i don't know i have have media that's not based on profit i guess but like you know decommodify the news but that's one of these things where it's like you know like as long as long as like every single like shitty local newspaper is making all of their money from like crime scare stories they're not going to report they're not going to you're not going to get active reporting about police because they need the police to like give that like feed them all of

these shitty crime stories right and this is the same thing here where it's like you're not going to get actual good reporting about trans people and about people who do transition because nobody actually cares about that because the incentive structure is just suffering and that trickles down through through the health care system and through you know through like the legislative system and it trickles down through social networks and what support networks exist and don't exist and it's a absolutely like if if you were just to like ask someone how do you want a society to be run zero people would answer we want it to be based on the production of suffering and yet we have done this but it doesn't have to be like this to sort of finish the david graberg quote

the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. So let's go build a world that's safe for trans people. This has been It Could Happen Here. You can find more of Lee and Kai's work at healthliberationnow.com. I recommend you go do it. It is great. And go and make the world otherwise. us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for

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I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting.

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