It Could Happen Here - Pride Month Special: How Biden Abandoned the Trans Community

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Mia talks with trans policy expert Corinne Green about Biden's regulatory rollback of Obama era protections for trans healthcare and how institutional capture of queer orgs has led to disaster in the South. @gaynarcan https://www.latransadvocates.org/ https://www.transincomeproject.org/ https://blog.openpolicy.forum/ https://www.transjusticefundingproject.org/grantees/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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. 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. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. 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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast being recorded something like 19 hours into bargaining with management's thus at the peak of maximal derangements.

And also about an hour after former President Donald John Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records for his election time payoff of Stormy Daniels. We can only hope that this will bring voting rights to the long-suffering felons of florida and realizing that that kind of sounds like a joke it's actually not uh it is in fact really messed up that you can just disenfranchise an entire class of people and maybe the law hurting someone famous will do something good now that's all the time we have to talk about trump right now uh you know if you want if you want to hear more about that you can go to literally everyone who's ever done any media related thing ever however comma we now have to talk about the other candidate in the 2024 election joe biden which means this is all the fun you're getting for this episode it is now time for you to suffer and with me to talk about suffering and specifically the suffering

of my well i was gonna say my people like it's like one of my people's question mark. I don't know. Identity is complicated. Sometimes you're more than one thing at a time. Is Corinne Green, who's part of a Southern Transfem collective launching a very long list of projects that you will be hearing about very shortly. She also used to be work on policy for the Equality Federation and for the Transgender Law Center. Yeah, Corinne, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. And yeah, I'm excited to get the opportunity to kind of talk about maybe what is behind some of the press releases and the HRC list of accomplishments that gets posted at me all the time

when I complain about lack of action on trans policy. You know, I really should have looked this up beforehand, but I once, one of my friends dragged me in college to a queer movie screening that I went to because I hadn't eaten all day and they had food. They ended up being this this really great little kind of I think it's like an indie movie thing that's about this group of queers robbing, stealing a blood diamond from the from the HRC. Great movie. 10 out of 10. I wish I remember what it was called. In the movement at the time,

we all joked that HRC stood for Hillary Rodham Clinton rather than the White campaign because of how in the tank they were. Yeah. So as the listener may have guessed, we need to talk about Joe Biden's, quite frankly, really terrible record on trans rights. And to do that, we need to talk a little bit about where the power of the president comes from.

Because, you know, the sort of traditional liberal wonk theories of the president tend to either focus on like the discursive effects of what the president says or like the president's ability to like negotiate with Congress to get bills passed. But this largely is not where the president's power comes from. The president's power comes from, I guess, three things, two of which are very similar. One is, you know,

I mean, just literally the command of the military, right? The president since, uh, since Barack Obama, although Bush was doing similar things, has claimed the legal authority to kill any man,

woman, or child. The moment they leave us or regardless of their citizenship status, uh, this is, this is the legal foundation of the drone program, and it is still in place to this day. The second one, I'm talking a lot

about Obama here because Obama weirdly established a lot of these kind of legal frameworks, but the second one has to do with their ability to control the nation's intelligence services. One of the things that Obama did was personally coordinate the multi-agency crackdown on Occupy. intelligence services you know i mean one of the things that obama did was like personally coordinate the the mess like multi-agency crackdown on occupy and then the third thing

and this is where really most of the power is is through the unbelievably massive federal bureaucracy so like i do kind of get a sense of this and anytime you hear the words the department of kind of get a sense of this and anytime you hear the words the department of that is the thing the president has the ability to do shit with that that is that is a very simplified version of it but yeah you know when you're dealing with an office whose power is largely bureaucratic it means that if you want to figure out what they're actually doing you have to dig really deep into the depths of the american bureaucracy so okay let's let's let's do that and yeah first i i want i want to ask you about ppaca 1557 which is a part of the the affordable care act otherwise is it still better known as obamacare do the kids remember obamacare yeah

they reclaimed it i think think. The Libs took it back. I've been having this realization that people don't remember Obama era stuff, which is why I'm saying, I started saying Ferguson to people and they had no idea what I was talking about. And I was like, oh no, we've entered the disaster era. So yeah, can you talk about what that is and what it sort of says about what the Biden administration isn't isn't doing? Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, it's part of the Affordable Care Act. And so Section 1557 is the regulatory implementation of the non-discrimination parts of the Affordable Care Act. Back in the day when we were fighting to prevent trump from uh from rolling back some 1557

protections we actually our comms people came up with a much sexier name than section 1557 but it never took off with any of the policy people and so i don't even remember what i'm supposed to be calling it right now so yeah you ever hear people say section 1557 what they're referencing is the basically the non-discrimination part of the Affordable Care Act. And so the Affordable Care Act, as people have probably noticed by now, touches practically all of the U.S. health care system and has extended, especially through Medicaid expansion, federal dollars into health care even more than they had been previously with the supplements for insurance, through Medicaid expansion and those kinds of things. And so there's actually a lot of control that the Department of Health or Health and Human Services and associated other parts of bureaucracy like Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services,

those kinds of things, have over implementation. And so one of the ways that this works is when legislators write a law, they don't go into all the details. They just pass a law, right? And so most times, especially at the federal level, after a law is passed, the relevant agencies that are going to be dealing with that part of the law work on and issue rules or regulations. You might hear them called either thing, but they mean the same thing, right? So it's basically the additional agency policies and procedures that they issue through the formal process governed by the Administrative Procedures Act. Very exciting.

I know this is going to be like just a bombshell episode. Terrible stuff is coming. Don't worry. You got to hold on. It's going to get really bad. I'm giving you the foundation to make sure you can get maximally angry along with me um and so they create the rest of the uh implementation uh of of the laws that congress passes right and so in this particular case for section 1557 it deals specifically with non-discrimination so it deals deals with race, sex, gender, sexual orientation,

any inequality you would typically find in federal non-discrimination laws actually in 1557. And so it's obviously been kind of going back and forth as a political football between the Obama administration and then the Trump administration. And then I don't even know if I'm going to give Biden credit for treating it as a football. And so there's this regulatory process that has been going forward and been rolled back and going forward and been rolled back.

And then simultaneously, there are several, I don't know the current number, but several court cases over 1557 from various eras. I think there's still at least one case ongoing from the Obama era, 1557 reg. There's some ongoing from the Trump reg. And then obviously folks might have seen in the news that states like mine, Louisiana, that have a governor and attorney general super focused on raising their own profile, have already filed suit against the recently issued Biden-era Section 1557 regulation. And so there is a lot of fighting around trans people specifically. Go figure. We've been hot right now for the last four years or so. It's

not been a super exciting time. And it has actually impacted, if you know how to read the policy tea leaves, it has actually impacted what we have gotten out of the Biden administration in terms of actual trans policy. And I've been doing trans policy for a very long time, started at the state level in Louisiana. You can't get paid to do queer policy in Louisiana. So I moved out to Oakland to work for Transgender Law Center for a while. And that was actually where I created the Joint Protect Trans Health Campaign. It was actually the first ever coordinated collaboration

between the National Center for Transgender Equality and Transgender Law Center. They had never formally worked together on something before. But for trans policy folks, section 50 and most of the country, frankly, obviously, healthcare is like the thing, right? It's always been really terrible in this country, no matter kind of what. And so taking care of people's, what should be a right to access healthcare has been really, really important. I've kind of

considered it since 2017, the most important trans policy issue to work on. And so this is definitely kind of to the sense that you are a nerd like me and you have, you know, headline regulatory actions that you're looking out for and hoping to influence and doing things around. This is kind of the premier regulatory action, in my opinion, in the trans policy space. I'm trying to, what it should ideally do is safeguard and guarantee trans people's access to health care, including gender affirming care. It does not, if you actually read the 558 page final rule but if you just read like the press releases and the quotes that the the head of human rights campaign give you might have a different

understanding currently and that's what i'm hoping we can kind of get into today yeah and unfortunately before we get into that we have to do one of the other things that is required of trans people which is promoting capitalism if you want to have a job. So here are some ads. We're going to end up with like some campaign ad from a Louisiana rep or something. Oh, they don't even have a super jury that they've been flexing muscle and they don't need to. They're fine. They have a super jar that they've been flexing muscle on.

They don't need to. They're fine. 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. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post 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. Hey, I'm Jack Peace 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. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community

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Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back with some tea. So yeah, let's talk about what has been happening and what was actually in the rules that no one who's not a bureaucrat or a policy activist has actually read. Yeah, so I think a little more background will help you get just as angry as I need you to be, which is, you know, so the

administration is large. There are a lot of people that work in the executive branch and a lot of them have, especially with this administration, where a lot of folks actually did come kind of directly from the Obama administration, they have relationships with issue advocacy organizations. So most of the nationals, the queer national organizations, advocacy nonprofits, have relationships with executive branch folks. And so when an executive branch agency like HHS is working on a regulation that involves queer and trans people. The way it worked in the Obama administration, there was actually very close collaboration between, for example, the National Center for Transgender Equality and the administration in the writing issuance of the

first Obama-era 1557 protective regulation. And so before the election and then during transition, the Biden administration was obviously in contact back and forth with all kinds of issue advocacy groups, not just the queer movement, but everybody. And they made commitments to the queer movement that, you know, would be a fairly smooth transition to working with them like we had worked with the Obama administration. If you think back a little while, that was before the kind of current fascist de window from before the last four years of hell or three years of hell however you want to time it when uh they decided to to come after trans people so hard this was back in the kind of halcyon days i don't even know if people remember this right now but like it used to be a thing where democratic uh like presidential candidates would attack each

other for not having for not being radical enough on trans healthcare. That was a thing that happened on the debate stage in 2019. It feels like seven lifetimes ago now. Yeah. And keep in mind that Biden, every six months he tweets that he has our back or whatever. And then he's also called us the civil rights issue of our time. So, you know, there are some opportunities to question that and see if he stacks up. And my personal and professional opinion, this is what I do, is that he absolutely doesn't, right? And so one of the things that you would really, really want out of a Section 1557 regulation in a context where states have been passing trans health care bans, is that you would want a Section 1557 regulation that deals with preventing trans discrimination in health care. You would want that to strongly and efficiently preempt state bans against trans care as violating a federal rule against non-discrimination. against trans care as violating a federal rule against non-discrimination. And because these things are, you have to follow the Administrative Procedures Act when you're issuing regulations

as a federal agency. And most states actually have the same, a similar kind of process. And so you kind of have to, the agencies have to show how they got to the final rule. So they issue a draft rule, invite comment. There's a comment period that you might have seen organizations asking you to submit comments for before. And then they're actually required to read and respond to all those comments. And so if you actually pull up the 1557 final rule, it's actually one of, it sounds like even wonkier than, for example, looking at a bill, but because of the Administrative Procedures Act and the way they have to respond to comments, there's actually a lot more kind of conversational prose, or not conversational,

but, you know, regular ass prose and not terrifying legal language in this stuff that is them directly addressing comments people, organizations have made and explaining their reasoning. And so one of the things that I think is most kind of emblematic of how we've been failed and thrown under the bus is because of this process where they have to kind of show you how the sausage is made, you can look up in this regulation and see that, and for some initial context, we were promised this would come out year one, and then we were promised this would come out year one and then we were promised it would come out year two and then year three and then i have actually heard that they were trying to push it past the election god and we kind of forced their hand on it so you can tell that they initially wrote the first draft of this regulation to kill healthcare bans, to federally preempt healthcare bans.

There's actually, I did a Twitter thread on this about how one sentence that existed in the draft version of the 1557 rule, that one sentence alone could take down, I think the one I used for an example was Arkansas's trans healthcare ban, or Missouri's actually, potentially. Because what that sentence did is it laid out very, very clearly that a determination that

trans health care is never helpful or useful and can never be provided does not meet the bar for considered medical reasoning, right? And so states just can't do it. And that's fantastic because that is functionally what these healthcare bans do, right? And many of them, I think the one I used as an example, even actually have include in the non-effective text, kind of the whereas preamble section of their bans, they can't help themselves. They go into all this flowery language about how trans care is never good and it's always harmful and all this stuff right and garbage and this sentence spoke directly to those trans health care bans and it made a firm commitment to address them as a whole as they were happening, at the federal government to state level. And if you

read the final rule, you will get to see them strike that sentence out and read their reasoning for striking that out. And so you actually had this language that was very clear and very strong written relatively early on in his term term when at the time there were only a handful of trans healthcare bans that had passed. Right. And so it didn't my, and so now I'm just offering conjecture, informed conjecture, conjecture informed by reading policy tea leaves, but it is my suspicion that at that time, because there weren't that many trans health care bans to preempt, they were more than willing to maintain, you know, to fulfill their commitment to us and to issue the kind of regulation that we had we had talked about. But as time went on and the fascist dehumanization campaign started and ramped up and healthcare bans rapidly spread throughout the country. I've been doing this for a decade and I've never seen anything like this

in any area of policy before. All of a sudden, if you're holding a card that nukes healthcare, state healthcare bans, when you wrote it, that card was only going to nuke a few, two or three trans healthcare bans, right? And if you're the federal government, you know, you can expect two steamrolls in just a handful of states like that. But then later on, at this point, I forget the exact number, but it's something like 20, 20 to 23 states have have healthcare bans implemented. And now there, if you're holding a card that nukes healthcare bans, you don't really get to pick and choose which healthcare bans you're going to nuke.

You have to commit to nuke all of them if you play that card. And that just was not something that they seemed willing to do when it was going to make the waves that it would make with 20 to 23 or whatever states being preempted and required to make sure that trans people have healthcare access. And keep in mind that during this period, not just did more states pass these healthcare bans, but the kind of national discussion and focus on trans people deteriorated horrifically, right? And so not only were the stakes higher in terms of the kind of policy confidence and in projecting your politics, but also there was just.

I assume I assume those lanyards run horrible polls all the time. Right. And saw that we were losing points in terms of how the public view strength people, because there's a lot of money being poured into this, and just made the horrible, unethical, immoral calculations that Democrats make and decided that trans people weren't worth it. And so you can see them cross that, strike that part out of the final 1557 rule. And it no longer contains any language, even approaching that, that is written to address states as a whole. And it is mostly what is in there at this point is the same thing that they've been telling us to do for the last over a decade, which is individual trans people who just happen to encounter discrimination in healthcare. You just submit an OCR complaint, an HHS OCR complaint. OCR stands for Office of Civil Rights. So you would think an Office of Civil Rights could maybe be proactive

and notice that a state that has banned trans healthcare and in some places even criminalized it might be ready for some enforcement, some broad enforcement. And yet they have maintained in this final rule that they expect individual trans people to file individual OCR complaints every time and that they will address each one on a case-by-case basis. They reiterate this at least a dozen times. It is one of the most offensive parts of all this, right? Because that's the only thing that hhs has ever told us about this yeah which is just nuts like that's not an actual systemic way of addressing this can you imagine if they had done this with like literally any other kind of civil rights issue like you know

okay we we get we we get we get a state ban on gay marriage and the department is like yeah you have to submit a complaint to us individually like that's yeah absolutely nuts or even if like states were banned insulin or something you know right like any other any other facet of health care just nobody would take that you know everyone would expect yes the federal government will come in to make sure that people in louisiana can still access insulin um yeah And instead you have this just, you know, I mean, a complete abrogation of any, like not just any responsibility, but I mean, any attempt to actually like not even like any attempt to do anything to stop any of these bands that are, you know,

going to kill a like not insignificant number of people like me. Yeah. And, and one of the things i i'd like to point out is one of the benefits of you know the federal government having to follow the administrative procedures act is they have to talk about the previous rules in this space and so you also get really i was going to say funny but they're not funny they're they're deeply depressing paragraphs uh about how their final rule is worse than Obama's final rule, right? And they have to explain it. And one of the things I'll reference here is that Obama's final rule, I believe, involved directing the Office of Civil Rights to conduct a disparate

impact analysis on marginalized populations to determine if there were discriminatory outcomes in healthcare access, kind of, even as a closed system, so they can look in from the outside and be like, oh, okay, all the trans people in the state can't access X, Y, Z. So whether that, whether there is a discriminatory, you know, law or not, there is a disparate impact on this population. that means we need to take enforcement action and uh you get to read the biden uh hhs right about how they're not going to do that actually no no don't please do please do not do any analysis to see how trans people are being oppressed this would look really bad for us yeah speaking speaking of looking bad for us uh you know you know what won't look bad it's if you buy these products and services from this ad that hopefully isn't i don't know i feel like we're kind of running we've run through the cycle of the terrible ads

so i feel like we're about we're we're on the precipice of there being another bunch of ads they put on the show without telling us that we can complain about. But for now, these ones. 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. 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. Hey, I'm Jack Peace 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. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.

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And we are back. Yeah, and I think this is something that... I don't know. I think most people do not know this. I think most people do not understand that not only is the Biden administration not being proactive, it's like they're actively rolling back protections and they're actively rolling back things that the agency used to do under Obama, which was, you know, in most other respects. I don't, I don't know, again, I don't really, like, can I expect the people who listen to the show to remember the obama administration now i don't know i mean i was one of the people who came of aged off my parents health care plan uh kind of exactly right before um kind of the primary uh ppaca productions kicked in right And so I had a several month period where they could still deny you health insurance using your being trans as a preexisting condition as a justification.

And so that actually did happen to me. I applied for health insurance and they sent me a letter that said, you have your trans, that's a preexisting condition. We're not going to sell you health insurance. And so I still actually did several months later, know those protections kicked in and the obama administration actually did do some kind of proactive work to to make sure that those were spread around the country like it's not nowhere never has been as good and thorough as it should be but it worked

for me here because then when i applied again i was not denied for being trans so yeah and i mean i think that's the kind of general thing i want to say about that too is like you know there were things where like on these kinds of issues where the obama administration was a lot better broadly if you look at the rest of their policy it was like significantly further right in the biden administration like obama obama tried to tried to like put a grand bargain together to destroy Medicare and Social Security. He tried to do that, and he was stomped by the Republicans. I need to give people a sense of how far right Obama was, even compared to Biden.

And yet, the regs are getting worse, which is nuts. On our issues, he was fairly fairly good right yeah and one thing one thing that i think contributes to people not i you know i can't blame folks for not understanding this is happening because the queer advocacy orgs are not talking about things this way right and i and i think possibly one of the most illustrative uh things i can point out is when the first title IX NPRM drops. So NPRM stands for Notice of Proposed Rulemaking. So if I drop that again, it's a screw up on my part.

I don't mean to use the jargon. But so that's when they issue their first draft of a regulation and invite comment and a comment period follows. follows, right? So the Title IX in PRM that they released around trans students' access to sports programs and education, if you read it, the language of the actual draft policy, not the press releases people put out about it, it's functionally states' rights for athlete bans, right? It gives the states rights to come up with a justification that involves fairness and safety and then they will have deference to to pursue or whatever which is not dissimilar to some of the ways they've they've done uh 50 57 as well yeah and like to make it make it explicitly clear what they're saying is that if you as a state can

come up with a good enough reason you are allowed to discriminate against trans people and prevent them doing sports. Which is, again, it is overt discrimination based on gender, which you should not be able to do legally. However, comma, the absolute cowardly shits at the Biden administration were like, no, you can actually do this. Go ahead to have fun. Fascist dehumanization works. And so if you remember back to that time, all of the national queer organizations put out these glowing press releases. So I'm on the policy side, right? I'm not on the comp side. I read and analyze the policy. I tell them what it means. And then it's unfortunately out of my hands at that point. Right. And the national queer organizations have been messaging basically all of these things as great wins, moving things forward, Biden, truly the first trans president. We love him,

stuff like that. Right. And so they did that for that title nine in PRM. Uh, and then several days later, the representative Zoe Zep zephyr uh a trans woman representative state representative from montana organized uh the out trans state trans and non-binary state legislators from around the country uh to release an open letter which you know condemned the the title nine in prm for being dog shit yeah and so that's that's i think maybe the the one and only kind of uh crack in the in the facade that has gotten through over the past couple years is when you know this thing came out after the policy people said this is how did this happen what the hell and then the comms came out and they were great

glowing you know he loves trans people and and then you know the state trans electives actually said no this this fucking sucks actually right yeah but that has not really happened for anything else because they're you know most of the people who do what i do they're you know specialized in each and there aren't many jobs for it and you i, I could speak at length about how you don't get to speak your mind if you want to continue to stay with kind of movement employment in this sector. And so in terms of publicly being able to speak about how we're being thrown under the bus currently, there are not many folks with the expertise who are free to

do that. i mean i remember like i'm not a policy person right like i have i have you know part i'm partially this is an analytical thing right like i i bailed out of going to law school because i had to read that i had to read the clean air act and i was like i will literally die if i have to do this for a living but you know i i remember when when the sort of Title IX stuff came out and when, and I remember trying to talk about it. I remember, like, the pushback that I got for being like, wait, this sucks was enormous. It was this, like, incredible sort of broad front PR campaign from, I mean, just so many different, like, and not even just, you know, it had filtered down to the point where, where like it wasn't just like these orgs it was like just like like the random people on twitter who's supposed to follow policy stuff were falling in line it was like everyone was coming in and it was just this like absolutely terrifying like kind of closing because most people don't actually read policy that's the thing policy reporters don't right yeah and so many such cases and so so most people who report on policy uh or or kind of are

follow policy do tend to kind of stick in the realm of those press releases and initial initial articles based on press releases and so if there is not kind of sincerity and truthfulness on the part of the orgs that are the trusted, you know, speakers in this space, then this stuff gets successfully laundered. on one hand is an intentional move to prevent and stymie actual grassroots organizing around sincere and real and pressing trans needs because if you're trying to get a lot of people fired up about trans health care is like on fire and half the like half the trans kids in the country don't have we have to like this is act up shit time right right? But if everybody that, you know, is on your email list, if most of them have seen HRC and NCT and all these places put out these glowing press releases, people are like, you're crazy. Things are fine.

Joe's moving things forward. We're good. And then also I think they have kind of backed themselves into a corner in terms of how a lot of libs have backed themselves into a corner at this point how a lot of libs have had backed themselves into a corner at this point right they they know that trump is worse on on policy even if biden has done barely anything trump is obviously worse for trans people and so they're they're allowing electoral weirdness to control actual kind of policy comms in a way that i find really really uh frustrating

and i think is is not doing trans people especially in the south it's not treating them with the respect that they deserve from their the organizations that claim to represent them yeah and this is a thing that okay this is this is going to sound like a weird sidebar but i promise if you if you follow this train of logic all the way this is something you actually this is a debate you get a lot more clearly in latin american social movements where because because their social movements are significantly stronger than the social movements in the u.s right they are their own sort of coherent like political basis you get this question like a labor movement yeah yeah well i mean like you know this is the thing about the labor movement like you know if you look at for

example uh bolivia which has very very strong social movements or like has traditionally had very strong labor movements and a lot of social movements in the last 20 30 years right i mean like their labor movement throws dynamite at bosses right like you know so like they they have they have a very strong movement and but one of the questions of these movements, and this is something that has just torn apart the MAS, they're sort of like supposedly movement political party is this question of to what extent should you integrate your social movement with the state? This is a long-running debate in a bunch of social movements. Various movements have picked different directions. Some of them have become very enfolded in the state. Some of them have resisted it.

And there are benefits and problems with both. But one of the big issues with trying to sort of incorporate yourself into the state is that the state isn't just a kind of neutral body. It's not just that you're working with the state. The state is also working with you and it will attempt to and its political parties will attempt to seize control of your organization and turn your organization into just a sort of into you know into basically a pr outlet for whatever thing it's doing and this becomes a real problem when your you know your your party is trying to screw you. Yeah, I mean, this came to a head in 2012 where there was a huge fight in Bolivia over a plan by the MAS to build a highway

through a bunch of indigenous land. And this basically split the base of the party, right? Because the MAS had been sort of an indigenous socialist movement and it got split between the people who supported building this road and the people who didn't. And so, like, Eva Morelis has riot police stormed the offices of one of the Indigenous federations and, like, replaces them, like, replaces their leadership with guys who are loyal to him who will push this thing through, right?

And, you know, I mean, the reason I'm talking about, like, this is the kind of social movement stuff I studied in college, right? And it's like, and now in the US, we are, like, kind of starting to get to the point where we have real social movements, right? And we've seen sort of like BLM, and you know, we sort of have something that is a queer movement, and we're running into exactly the same thing. Where, yeah, like if you, you know, this is something you can talk about more specifically in the US, but it's like, yeah, like these orgs are on, are in the middle of this sort of state capture process. And this is having really, really dogshit effects on queer people because when these organizations become sort of media arms or become sort of political arms of these party apparatuses, they're not representing you. They're representing the party.

And I think that one of the easiest places to kind of see the dynamic that you and i are talking about in current u.s politics is in the discourse around palestinian liberation right yeah if you try to talk with anybody about palestinian liberation you get beset upon on all sides by people saying well do you want trump to win you think trump's gonna be better this like electoral project takes precedence over, you know, politics guided by core values so quickly and so overwhelmingly. Yeah. And I mean, and it's, it's accelerated to a point. I mean, this is something I remember in during the Trump years, we would, we would joke about this, about sort of the spinelessness of liberalism. Like it used to be a joke that like like if the democratic president did a genocide, people would go, oh, well,

you still have to support him because the other guy's Trump. And now it's literally happening. Yeah. You know, I mean, well, so I actually started working at nationals. I took the job at Transjurisdict Law Center right after Trump took office. And so my, you know, after Trump took office. And so my, you know, it was very easy for me to, especially as someone who, you know, had never worked at large advocacy nonprofits before, because go figure there's no money in doing trans work in the South. It was scrappy and under-resourced as fuck. I got to delude myself, I think, because, you know, Trump is such a uniquely dangerous force that a lot of people alongside me in the movement were, had the same, shared the values with me because I could see them being equally strident and vocal on kind of all the bad things that were happening. And then, you know, it's almost, it's a tired joke at this point, but, you know, Biden took over and the kids were still in cages and everybody else shut up and I looked around and I'm like wait I'm still I still care

what the hell where'd y'all go like I want to yell about that for a second because like so I kind of like this was like my sort of well I mean I guess my technical origin story there's a slight longer thing than this but like my me being a person that anyone listened to was a product of being involved in Occupy Ice

and like you know going out and finding like, you know, I mean the sort of horror of that, like you can fucking hear people yelling from the inside of these buildings that they're being fucking held in. And now, you know, Biden,

like, well, we'll, we'll, we'll do a longer thing about this at some point, but like Biden is, you know, that,

that fucking bill that they were trying to pass, like absolutely unbelievably fascist one saying that the president has the right to close the border she's trying to just fucking do it anyways yeah and they're still doing comms hits about it making them they think it makes them look good no it's it's like it's they're they're doing just pure evil like again like literally without like james and his friends there would be pile like there still are corpses floating up in the fucking rivers on the border but there would be fucking like there would be stacked like mounds of corpses of people who fucking starved or died like if literally james and his friends weren't down there on the border right now that and you know and yeah like it's the thing you're talking about

it's like you like i remember all these people in the streets for this i was like i was there i was fucking helping to organize this stuff and then like you watch them walk away yeah it's terrible and and i i want to make clear that you know you're talking about kind of the pressure that a a party in power can uh can apply and the way in which these organizations can be captured, especially just due to how nonprofit funding is a whole clusterfuck and how it works here in the US. But I, so I actually, a White House staffer called my executive director within an hour of my boss forwarding the White House, an analysis of mine that I'd written for a state

without reading it herself at all. And in this analysis, I included a dismal assessment of the likelihood that the federal government would use its power to prevent implementation of this law. This was a health care ban, a novel health care ban that a state wanted a quick turnaround on. And so my boss, direct boss, forwarded it to the White House who had asked for analysis on it without reading it at all. And within an hour of my boss forwarding it to the White House, the White House had called our executive director to complain about me. And I got written up for it. That is the fastest turnaround on anything trans that anybody has gotten out of this White House. And it was getting me disciplined for an analysis that was not for them, not being super impressed with their,

with their trans policy. And I, and I have heard, I have, you know, a lot of colleagues in the movement, uh, folks, I, I trust completely on trans policy. Um, and I know for a fact that I am not the only person that has had a situation like that occur. And so they are applying pressure and even in the most direct ways to the advocacy organizations. So it is happening. Yeah, and I think the thing I wanted to close on was talking a bit about the consequences of this because what happens when – and this is part of – going back to me talking about Bolivia, this is part of how even Morales got overthrown in the coup was that because the social movements – a lot of these social movements have been weakened to the point where they no longer had – they'd become policy organs of the state and not actual, like, fighting movements that could, like, effectively resist. You know, that could do a thing. Like, for example, like, you know, if you look at the original coup against Hugo Chavez, right? Like, the social movements were so strong

that even though the army literally did a coup, they got fucking ran out by, like, several million Venezuelans taking to the streets and just like overturning the coup right and that i mean it that happens later like in in like there was you know there there was there was a second round of barricades that went up that got basically no press attention in 2020 you know there's a whole comp i'll talk about that one day and how hilariously after getting bailed out even rallies pulled his people off the barricades because they didn't actually want to overthrow the government they just wanted an election

um so they pulled people off to keep the government intact long enough he's done this in many this is the second time he's done this by the way this happened in the water in the water wars uh in 2006 but i you know but but like in in the initial period of the coup part of the reason this this was able to happen again was because because the capacity of these groups to overturn something like this had been so neutered that they were able to sort of be defeated in the streets. been happening the fucking hellscape that's been happening in in louisiana as in you know partially because of the sort of republicans fascist turn but also because the the resistance to them has been neutered by the fact that they're you know they have to like defend this biden policy shit right and yeah so so one important point to make about the federal uh the need for federal protections is that you know i live in louisiana federal protections, is that, you know, I live in Louisiana.

Federal protections are all I'm ever going to have. Yeah. Right? And so if the federal protections aren't there, and if there's not a federal government willing to enforce them, I'm in big trouble. Like, I would bet every single dollar I have, which is not many,

that my Medicaid will not cover my hormones by the end of the year. And so what I think, and I've highlighted kind of before when it was very clear that Jeff Landry was going to become governor after John Bell, and actually did drug policy for John Bell for a while. And a lot of trans people were kind of quietly in his administration. I think that my friend Tucker, aside from Rachel Levine, was probably the highest ranked state executive branch trans person in history as deputy press secretary for a while. Yeah, I'm not sure. But yeah, trans people busted ass to get John Bell elected. And so we had held off a lot of this this stuff for a long time, not just through having a nominally Democratic governor,

having a nominally democratic governor, but through the organizing in the South that happens on no resources whatsoever is some of the most broad-based and inspiring kind of coalitional organizing that I've ever seen. And I've done work all around the country. And the way that people are able to organize kind of cross issue here is phenomenal. But we are all gerrymandered to shit. We get no money, attention, resources from national groups, often the media. And especially here in Louisiana and in much of the South, like we are not an attractive place for impact litigation because we're in the fifth circuit and all our state courts are shit. And so we really kind of are on our own here in a, all of a sudden Republican super majority legislature with an activist fascist governor and AG. So Jeff, Jeff Blender is very much in the model of a DeSantis

or an Abbott in terms of what he is hoping to do in Louisiana and what he's hoping to get out of it in terms of his own personal profile and ambitions. And there's so much we could talk about in terms of what's going on here, but I want to highlight specifically SB 276, which is the bill you may have seen headlines about. It's the bill that adds Mifepristone and Misopristol to the state's Schedule for Controlled Substances Act. And can you explain what that actually means for people who don't? Yeah, so Mif and Miso are used for a lot of health care in terms of, for example, miscarriage management, inducing labor in a hospital, but they can also be used

for self-managed medication abortion. And so this has not been done anywhere else in the country where leading the charge here, no other state has ever added drugs like this to their controlled substances law. And so what that means is that those drugs are now going to be going through the prescription monitoring program, the PMP, which has a lot more controls and surveillance than non-controlled substances, right? So

the Board of Medicine, the Board of Pharmacy, and I'm trying to do a survey now to figure out which state agencies specifically have automatic inherent access to that PMP database. But it makes it a lot more traceable and trackable, which is really scary for anybody trying to access reproductive and abortion healthcare in a place like Louisiana. And then the other thing it does is it raises the stakes phenomenally for the people doing the kind of, and I'm going to try to speak very carefully here, the people doing the kind of direct practical support work to work with underserved populations to make sure that they can access healthcare services that they need. Right. And it is just a it is a fact of life that, you know, just like in the harm reduction

movement, there are a lot of people on the ground busting ass to get people what they need. And, you know, for a lot of times for abortion funds, it's organizing money and transportation and hotels to get people out of state. Right. Since the Florida abortion ban, we can't send people there anymore anymore we have to send people to illinois which is more expensive and further away and it's it's those people who are at risk the people doing the work like the backbone of the on the ground grassroots practical support mutual aid work that are risking, I think it's, you know, five to 10 years per pill,

if they are, you know, providing that to someone else, it's, it's terrifying. And there's no, we don't know what we're going to do about it yet. I was in a call last night, kind of like, what are we going to do about this? We don't know. Um, cause it's, it's scary. And then jumping back to, to kind of the problem with how nonprofit and advocacy funding works in this country. There are a lot of restrictions that come that are, you know, that organizations who are funded that way have to live with, like, especially I'll speak to the harm reduction world. For example, you'll get a grant at your syringe exchange and they're like, here's $10,000, but you can't spend

any of it on needles. And you're like, that's $10,000, but you can't spend any of it on needles. And you're like, that's my biggest expense. That's what I was going to, you know, and so it's the same kind of thing. The more that this kind of work gets criminalized and pushed to the edge, the fewer resourced organizations are able to work on it, have the money to work on it. But B, just their legal teams, the chilling effects of this stuff are massive. And so it just falls more and more on the backs of kind of the grassroots folks

who have always been making this happen for a community to the extent that they can under the harshest of circumstances. And, you know, it's people like that who are going to have to make some really tough decisions going forward yeah and you know

like the it's never there's never been a good or safe time to do stuff like this but you know as it gets increasingly dangerous and as you know you get the sort of downstream effects of both the sort

of legal like both the sort of legal danger and the sort of like constricting of of movement space by by the sort of question of these ngos things just get more and more dangerous in a time where the people who need to be dangerous is us because otherwise we are going to die. Yeah. Scary time, but yeah, we, we keep us fucking safe and always have and always will.

And it's going to be rough what we're heading into, but you know, I, again, the organizing in the South is I've never seen anything that's made me so proud to be an organizer and an activist as the work that I see in the South. And so if there's anybody who can lead the way on how to respond to these things and how to take care of each other, you know, it's our people. It's these people who have been doing it forever. It's our people. It's these people who have been doing it forever.

Yeah, and I think on that note, if people want to find you and the people you've been working with in the orgs that you're sort of working with now, where can they find that on the internet? Or I guess other places too? Are there other things that are not the internet? At this point, I'm not sure. I really don't know. Yeah, so you can find me on Twitter.

I'm GayNarcan on Twitter. That's me. And then if you are interested in supporting kind of the work that my collective is doing, the probably best place to go for that right now is our first launched project called Trans Income Project. It's transincomeproject.org. And what that is, is a, uh, an organization

that is solely dedicated to doing direct cash transfers to trans sex workers in Louisiana. Um, we just had some of our first listening sessions, um, with folks and yeah, this is gonna be so kick-ass. Um, so yeah, go, go there, um, for, for that direct project. And then I would also encourage folks, um, to take a look at louisiana trans advocates um i used to be president there it's the state trans advocacy organization we're actually the state uh in the south that has had the longest consistent trans presence at the capital um through louisiana trans advocates um and we have no fucking money um so feel free to so maybe toss something over there too if you get inspired. Yeah, and I will say this, given

how fucking zero dollars every trans person has, this is one of the places where your individual dollar will go the furthest because your $10 is like a 300% increase on the total funding of these orcs. Alright, well,

thank you so much for coming on and talking about this. thanks so much for having me yeah and i i guess my final final final message to listeners go fuck them up you can do you could do it too yeah that i agree completely coastline hi everyone it's me james and I just wanted to read you this today. We're going to put it in our episode this week because it's a cause that's important to us, and so we thought it would be something that might be important to you too as well. On the 10th of June 2024, Leonard Peltier, an enrolled member of the Turtle Band of Chippewa of Lakota and Ojibwe ancestry,

and the longest serving political prisoner in the United States, will be appearing before the US Parole Commission for the first time since 2009. He faces staunch opposition from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies due to having allegedly killed two FBI agents in a firefight on the 26th of June 1975, after the agents appeared on reservation land to execute a pretextual warrant. The initial firefight occurred during the, quote, reign of terror on Pine Ridge, in the wake of the occupation of Wounded Knee, a time of extreme violence when federal law enforcement installed a puppet tribal chair and was arming vigilantes who targeted indigenous traditionalists. Everything leading up to these events, as well as subsequent investigation, and Mr. Peltier's extradition, trial, conviction and sentencing were characterized by

gross misconduct on the part of law enforcement, the prosecution and the courts. Mr. Peltier's co-defendants were separately tried and acquitted on grounds of self-defense. Mr. Peltier was railroaded and his case is tainted by discrimination at every level, ranging from the withholding of exculpatory evidence to the torture and coercion of extradition and trial witnesses, and from the refusal of the judge to dismiss an avowedly racist juror to the apologetic gymnastics of the courts affirming his convictions in the face of meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds. of meritorious legal challenges and admitted evidence of outrageous government misdeeds.

Mr. Peltier has been in prison for more than 48 years, and he's almost 80 years old. He suffers from chronic and potentially lethal conditions, for which he receives insufficient and substandard medical care. If you want to take action to hashtag free Leonard Pard peltier you can call the u.s parole commission at 202-346-7000 and if you'd like to find l t i e r or you can follow ndn collective on social media for more ways to support him more information on leonard peltier listen to margaret's podcast on the lakota nation a read in the spirit of the crazy horse by Peter Mathewson. 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.

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. 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. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

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