It Could Happen Here - Tear It Up & Fighting Back for Trans Lives

Episode Date: April 15, 2022

We chat with Kat and Ada-Rhodes from Tear It Up to discuss taking the fight for Trans lives into the streets and the struggle to make trans pain visible.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do the thing. Do the thing.

It could happen here. A podcast. And it's sure trying to happen, isn't it? It's doing its best. They're really going for it. You know, that thing by Yeats, Great Beasts, Slouching to be Born, Time of Monsters,

all that good stuff. That's what's going on here with It Could Happen Here. It's a podcast. Garrison. Hi. How are we doing? So we're talking about the still ongoing and probably, well, seemingly never ending, hopefully it'll end eventually. Maybe hold up on that one, Garrison. The escalating war on trans people. Yeah.

The escalating war on trans people. Yeah. And we've brought on some people who have been working to organize against the kind of wave of bills and rhetoric and legislation targeting trans It Up, a newer organization dedicated to specifically fighting against these new bills. Hello! Hey, friends! I'm glad to be here. Yes, thank you so much. We've been talking for a bit because of how these bills have been also a thing for a bit. And we initially met up for Trans Day of Visibility.

I tagged along to go to a protest in Idaho. And then we got on Trans Day of Visibility. We cooked up plans to sit down and have this chat. So it is, it is a little bit late, but Hey, it's, it doesn't, maybe we can have more than one day. Maybe that's a good idea. Well, we've got gay remembrance too. So yeah. Well, hopefully we can have more than two days and one of them not be just sad.

Yeah. It's timely too, because you know, they're still attacking. Oh, did they not stop? Nope. Our visibility did not in fact scare them back into their caves. I think this is why we need a trans day of one free murder. I love this plan. Yeah. Really solve a few problems.

Well, that's a great note to... I mean, look, Caitlyn Jenner already used hers. Jesus Christ. That's going to be my contribution for the day. Wow, this is going to really convince all of the on-the-edge libs who are somehow listening to this. They stumbled upon it trying to find

a recipe. They thought it was tear like a scale, and they were like, I was trying to work my baking scale. What if I stumbled upon... Measure 100 grams of lentils and then arm all your local trans women. I would like to make a very, very trans cooking video

in the style of David Lynch's quinoa video. But that is a deep cut for all of the Lynch heads out there, as Lynch fans call themselves. Anyway, we're talking about all of the lynch heads out there as uh lynch fans call themselves anyway we're talking about all of all of uh all the bills talking about um all of the rhetoric that we've seen been specifically increasing the past like the past week uh as of recording probably past you know maybe a week or two as of time of release for their like they're they're really going for it for trying to get people to do just violence against people who don't look like

how they want them to look and that's basically what they're trying to do and we're going to talk on a variety of topics between we're going to unfortunately discuss the groomer thing, we'll talk about all the bills that have and haven't passed and different ways that we can kind of

stand up against this thing that's really trying to take take a hold um i guess i would like to start by discussing the origin of of tear it up and like how you know what what happened to i mean obviously we we know what happened to cause this to start to cause this thing to be prompted but like yeah what was what was like the specific process of being like okay it's it's all these things are happening let's actually get a group of people together to organize this thing across the country yeah um i guess i can talk about that uh so tear it up actually grew pretty directly out of a previous group called trot in texas which is the trans resistance of

Texas, which started last year during their legislative session. And then really started to grow during the special sessions in response to this constant line of attack and realizing that the techniques and the strategies being employed by a lot of the existing more liberal leaning groups were really focused on like backroom conversations and deals and using like procedure to defeat things instead of actually like mobilizing people against anti-trans state violence.

And from there we started to adopt things like louder more obnoxious protests a lot of stickering flyering posters and then this year I so I originally started Trot but I moved across the country and I was like well shit things are just getting worse everywhere and I have a lot of friends all over the country from living in Portland and New York and Texas and Colorado and now the Midwest and reached out to sort of pull together a bunch of humans that I knew would be willing to fight back and to try and experiment with methods that we can pick up

from our predecessors like act up and bring more attention and mobilize people more towards taking direct action instead of relying on these backroom lobbying groups that i don't think really give a fuck about trans people but love to use attacks on us to raise money yeah yeah i mean there's a number of number of examples we could point to, but I think we could be more productive and just talk about you guys instead. Yeah. So yeah, I really, the transnational thing is really an interesting point, how it's like, I know for Trans Day Visibility, there was organized kind of die-ins and protests all across the country to happen at the same day. Obviously, there was one in Idaho, which I was lucky enough to join in on. And yeah, but there was a lot of them. And I guess, yeah, on the lead up to, as all of these bills are escalating, and then there was the whole wave of organizing against trans people for the so-called de-transition day, which is really unfortunate because there actually would be a great discussion to be had there on people who choose to not continue on with transition, but it's been so used by TERFs

and the gender critical movement that it's now just like, it's just another day for more transphobia, which is really unfortunate. But we had that happening at the same time as all of these bills. And then we're like, okay, so what was kind of the stuff

that prompted all of the die-ins and how are you like talking with people in all the different states to kind of organize this thing together, but still also separately for each location? One of the points that I'd like to come back to, we're going to talk a little bit more about the details of some of the specific legislation that has passed successfully into law and some of the other legislation that has not been able to pass into law. And, you know, we're drawing a contrast between ourselves and some of, Tear It Up is drawing a contrast between itself and some of these more, you know, institutionalist liberal

organizations. Not because they can't succeed in their stated goals sometimes, right? Like the ACLU will sue on some of these things. Sure. As a result of those lawsuits may be something worth celebrating. What's happening in Texas right now is a great example of that. But that said, right, so like, we can acknowledge that these more institutionalized tactics can lead to, you know, like, it's a better outcome that these laws do not succeed, obviously. But there's the impacts of this legislation and the discussion around this legislation

is so much bigger and so much more profound than any of these individual laws, specifically looking at them in terms of their material impact on people's lives, which are already abysmally fucking awful. But the place that Teared up is looking to kind of champion is the kind of hell-raising that like enables us to empower each other that enables us to be visible in a way that shows people on the ground all across the country that like, that we are not just a minority to be destroyed and ignored,

that we're going to fight for ourselves. We're going to fight for each other. We're going to fight for our kids. We're going to fight for our families and we're going to fight for our rights and we're going to do it loud and as ugly as we need to, in order to make sure that trans pain is visible. Yeah. And building on that, when we look at the start of last month, March,

or I guess late February, I think Texas was really kind of the flashpoint in a lot of the country on this, where we had a lot of these bills sort of boiling um i believe there were around 70 active at that point um we're now down to like the high 60s so that's better but um that was really where stuff started to boil over on this and we looked around and saw that the fight needed to focus on trans survival more than just the bills and the bills are important to defeat because they're things trying to exterminate

us there's things that are trying to take families apart to take away the things that are helping people stay alive and to remove trans people from accessing public life. And that's going to really ruin a lot of humans, but we need to not just look at that individual fight. And remember, we're fighting for survival and we're fighting for each other. And trans people as a community, we've always had to kind of rely on each other via various means be it like Susan's place or like go back to like transvestite even and like these systems that weren't necessarily always and these forms of communication that weren't always focused on um necessarily legal wins in the more traditional sense and more just like forming community even if those communities weren't necessarily great in the case of like uh transvestite and like some of those much more um

respectable leaning groups could you chat a little talk a little bit about what transvestite and susan's place work because i'm gonna guess a lot of people listening are not going to be super familiar with that history i kind of am only casually heard anything about it. Yeah. So I'm a bit of a queer history nerd and you can learn a lot about this. Actually. I have, can I plug my podcast?

What we would like to do is provide people with an ability to learn more about this kind of stuff. So yeah, please. Yeah. So I'm part of the totally trans podcast network. You can find us on Twitter at like totally trans pod um but we talk a lot about trans and queer history through the lens of like looking at it through pop culture and reading stuff into like

the little mermaid and things um so we go in a lot about virginia prince and transvestite in there because i'm kind of obsessed with this human from the 1960s who is like the first Twitter trans girl um she was very problematic super racist and classist and her argument was um she led to a lot of 20th century confusion by saying uh that there's like heterosexual transvestites which are what we would now just call like trans lesbians. And then like the homosexual transsexual, which is now what we would call straight trans folks. And that the homosexual transsexuals are bad and should be shunned, but the heterosexual transvestite should maintain all of her previous privileges. And she put out this magazine called transvestia she famously also got in trouble for sending nudes in the mail to another trans girl across the country wow um yeah

fascinating historical figure who kind of i mean ahead of the curve historically in terms of sending nudes that's that's groundbreaking groundbreaking with stuff but um transvestia though uh did have this big cultural impact on sort of being an early trans zine shortly after it we started to see drag which um was much more focused on like the homosexual transsexual and uh more like sexually liberated takes through like the 70s and then then later, my favorite scene, like gender trash from hell, which was out of Toronto in like the 90s, and was very confrontational about trans rights. So we sort of exist in this larger history, where we're looking at how trans community has survived, and formed and learning from things like star,

which was the street transvestite action revolutionaries out of New York with Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, as well as act up and HIV activism. And we're trying to take what we can learn from our ancestors and apply it to our current survival and play with it a little bit and update some of their tactics because I don't think traditional non-violent protests the way it existed in the past gets attention anymore. I think we need to figure out ways to be louder about it. And I'm a,

I'm personally a devout pacifist. Other people aren't, and that's a okay. Um, I'm a good Quaker girl, but, um, we need to be seen. We need our lives to be seen and we need our value as humans to be seen so that we can love ourselves and each other enough to survive this horrible shit. That's going to continue happening to us over the next couple of years. Yeah. I, I, I want to piggyback on that with one thought that you're talking about this sort of, like, this history of trans people drawing together to take care of each other. And, you know, I'm just thinking about how today Marjorie Taylor Greene releases a video

that amongst a bunch of other just like terrifying, awful, and occasionally super funny and it's incredible stupidity things that she's claiming in this video are that like trans people are basically like the, you know, the barbarian hordes that have come to destroy Western civilization. And she's, you know, she says with a straight face,

like, you know, the, the late rome and modern america are very similar yes um both of us rely heavily on varangian mercenaries in order to maintain the sanctity of our borders i always wanted to be a wizard but i guess i'm a barbarian but i i bring that up because there is this impression of trans power that like trans people uh that is a result of our increased visibility, you know,

like what the media called 2014, the transgender tipping point because suddenly people were like, Oh, I guess Laverne Cox gets to exist. But like, with this increased visibility is this impression that we have this like incredible magical cosmic powers to seduce your people and ruin your civilization or whatever and like actually like when i so i i came out in 2004 i'm 35 and like i never imagined a world where we could even get health care covered when i was like i was like a kid organizing with camp trans out in the woods of michigan and like i knew people who got orchiectomies in barns. I, every single

trans woman I knew, everything that they knew about how to like get hormones and like manage their own transition and like endocrine system, they learned from message boards. It was the only collective knowledge and existence that was like accessible to people because if you went to your doctor unless you lived in san francisco or new york and were particularly well connected the response you were going to get is i don't know are you a demon right yeah no absolutely that's the one thing i found it um really insightful talking to the older trans people that i know because i'm like you know i'm a gen z gender queer person on hormones and it's very different because when i've been talking to the

my my transgender uh friends who are older it's like yeah all of these bills are just are a reaction to the increased visibility and increased well-being of trans people right it's putting it's putting things that used to be kind of just like unspoken or like obvious bigotry, it's putting, now that that's actually progressing, it's now putting that old bigotry into actual law because they're like, oh no, we don't want things to progress further. So it's a purposeful sliding back.

So it's just like, for a lot of people who are older, it doesn't even seem that new. It's just seemed to be, it's resurfacing the things that were used to be normalized are now becoming, you know, are becoming more obviously bigoted, but they're putting that bigotry into actual law. And that's the, yeah, that's the kind of interesting point is because there's a whole bunch of people who believe that like the transgenderisms and the gender ideology is like a point of power it's like because it's affiliated with the left um and the left is seen as like the power it's it's then like it therefore you're

actually punching up on it which is of course entirely backwards like that none of that if you have any political analysis you'll know like oh that's not how anything works but yeah these people in in their minds they think they're actually pushing up against like the like the powerful forces of transgenderism yeah you're like no we're just like punks who are poor who are trying to who are trying to get our home on injections like leave us alone i can't remember if it was like tom cotton or matt gates yeah yeah yeah one of one of those guys one of the like pentagon guys right being like uh yelling at him because you know our military is being destroyed because somebody took a class about like respecting someone's pronouns and the guy's response is like we can obliterate any

target on the entire planet with no effort like what the fuck are you talking about uh-huh there's there's that great there's that horrible great tweet about the person that runs that um 4chan trans account who's who is who is like this this trans person who's like a war criminal because they sell weapons it was yeah it was a wonderful tweet from a few days ago. I mean, famously, a lot of companies in the arms industry like Raytheon have a great reputation for hiring trans people because all Raytheon cares about is you can code a missile guidance chip. That's all that matters to Raytheon. They're very woke. to watch these people really justify their transphobia as a form of fighting against the system

because they've somehow affiliated being trans with the Democratic Party. Therefore, it's affiliated with the establishment. Therefore, it's actually this force of power, which none of that's true, but that propaganda is shown to be very effective. The people seem really convinced by that. It's a story that's easy to glom onto.

And as long as we have a story that we can glom onto, then it doesn't matter what's true or not. All of the stories are what's actually true. So yeah, that is an intriguing point in terms of how stuff has changed from transphobia 10 years ago versus transphobia now. That's resurfacing some things that used to be they used to just take shape in a slightly different form yeah well and so cat's experiences in 2004 if you fast forward a decade because i'm a little younger than cat i'm not a lot younger than Kat. Around like 2014, 2015, when I was trying to get on hormones,

we also had like RLE. Do kiddos these days know what that was? No. So it was real life experience. Which is basically having to socially transition and come out and do all of this under the care of a therapist and a physician for between six months and a couple of years before they'll allow you to access hormones. Okay. And that was kind of like the stepping stone between the previous experiments

where it was just like DIY or nothing. Yeah. Or impossible gatekeeping. And then now where there's like more informed consent models. The informed consent model, which is what I do now. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of these laws are just kind of reiterating that weight that comes from a really like flawed place.

Like that weight didn't in any way benefit anyone it's really it's just torturing people and trying to kind of like um like beat the tranny out of you uh make you go to the mall presenting as a woman while you feel incredibly awkward and get yelled at by some guy for like trying to buy shoes and he's like yeah right yeah like if if you're a nine-year-old who is experiencing precocious puberty it is completely acceptable and no one is going to question whether or not um you know prescribing puberty blockers to just make make like to make it so that you can experience puberty at what feels like a more appropriate developmental age. Cis people, politicians, the right wing,

generally people agree that that is an acceptable practice, but to use that same practice in order to help a trans child not die, that is a sin against God and leading to the decline of Western civilization. We wish. Whatever people are like, yeah, like trans people are leading in this degeneracy that's going to bring down

Western civilization. You're like, oh, wow, that sure does sound cool. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters,

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network. Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For me, hormones worked so quickly. And having to live through a year of trying to present in specific ways while not on hormones sounds like complete hell.

Because I was very surprised at how fast even like mindset things changed um how it is like they're very like hormones are very useful and very interesting and how they and how they affect changes and being forced to i guess as the the term now is like boy moding or girl moding this is this is this is this is what the zoomer the zoomer kids call whenever they have to like almost like code switch gender. Having to like present in the way that you want to without these systems of hormones for a while to even be allowed to have hormones. As me, a Zoomer now, sounds like horrible. It's literally dangerous.

It's actually an incredibly dangerous thing to put people, like, experience to put people into. And I think that, like, that kind of gatekeeping, you start looking at it through a more intersectional lens and, like, who is it hurting the most? It's hurting people who don't have a shit targets of violence if they're more obviously visible and red is trans yep well and it really artificially diminished the number of trans people and just gender variance in general um something that's been really interesting to watch is someone who kind of went into the pandemic as like a trans elder doing a lot of community work is uh the core in trans as a thing and how much yeah you we give everyone an opportunity to like explore themselves and be introspective for a year and how many people are like fuck I'm a girl um or like I'm no gender or I'm every gender and all of these incredibly beautiful forms of exploration that couldn't have happened if they had to go through that and like their normal social situations. If you just gave them an excuse to like do their own thing for six months.

And yeah, RLE was a good way to keep people from being able to explore. And it's just one way that trans people's bodily autonomy is attacked. And that's what a lot of these bills come down to as well, is it's the same thing as like anti-abortion or anti-birth control stuff. It's all just about reducing people's bodily autonomy. I mean, yeah, because like if I had to quote unquote live as a girl for a year, I would have just never gotten hormones because I don't want to live as a girl.

Like that's not what I want to even do. And yeah, having all of that gatekeeping, which is part of what they're trying to do because as much as they hate people who find more comfort inside the more typical gender roles, they also really don't like the people who enjoy being more like overt gender freaks um and like like outside of that it's like so of course they're going to try to clamp down on any anything it's worth noting too just the like there's there are a few different camps um in in in the sort of right-wing response to trans people um one of the things that i've uh learned over the years kind of looking at, looking at

what the alt-right is up to, um, you know, what I originally, I really like thought of the whole Republican party, the whole right wing is like a single cohesive ideological unit. You know, it seemed like they were just able to like get everyone on the same page and then go at something. And if you look closely, you realize actually it's this huge ever evolving coalition of people who mostly hate each other. And if you're clever, you can break people off and disrupt things. There's different movements, different thoughts inside of the way that people are approaching

this. And you have a lot of politicians who, they probably never met a trans person. They certainly probably don't have any gay friends. They're just some random suburbanite motherfuckers who know that sacrificing trans kids on the altar of political convenience will score them points with a radicalized base of bigots. So those people are just cynically hurting trans people because it will score them some pretend points that will lead to real structural power yes but there is also the evangelical community and a huge amount of the the deepest and scariest fervor against trans people comes out of the evangelical community i was raised vaguely evangelical as as was i yeah yeah and like when i came out i was definitely told i was going to

hell like if you look at the you look at the where this a lot of the incredibly incredibly like eliminationist rhetoric is coming from and that's coming from the evangelical community who are like it's not just that i think that from a policy perspective this is like we need to like retool how we're doing trans health care or something because if people wanted to have conversations about how to make the best possible systems like we want to have that conversation we can we can agree to we can disagree about policy but their policy is literally trans people are an army of demons who have come to win souls for satan and i'm like i'm just trying to refill my prescription like leave me the fuck alone And it also creates this really interesting

looping effect of politicians who get into anti-trans and, like, all of this kind of, like, anti-gay stuff to specifically win elections, right? We even saw this with, like, Greg Abbott doing his, like, letters about investigating parents of trans kids, specifically around

his primary election. So people definitely do, are still very much getting into this specifically to win elections because they know it's a point that riles up the base. But then you also have people, because that's been going on for so long, you have people who are maybe not necessarily super evangelical, but who grew up around this kind of culture of politicians needing to say these things, who are now, again, even if politicians didn't really fully agree with it, they needed to do it to get support. But you have people who grew up around that and went into politics around that,

who now just do that sincerely because it was what they were exposed to previously. Now we have people like that who are trying to run for office for the first time, who are just that extreme. I think that's even a bit of what the Marjorie Taylor Greene thing is, is like someone who was exposed to extremist stuff online who is now running for office herself and is completely sincere about all the stuff she's doing. Like she is a true believer in the way that some other people like Matt Gaetz may not even be a true believer. He might just be doing it because it's popular. But you also have the people who are just like fully, fully doing it because it's popular but you also have the people who are just like fully fully believe it because it's it's it's influenced culture long enough

that it's now a full loop of sincerity well and then specifically the perception of trans people within the religious right specifically has actually shifted so much in the last decade i guess now i'm trying to think how old I am. Because I was a student at Baylor University. Oh, okay. Yeah. Okay, cool, cool. I have some family who used to work at Baylor.

Oh, boy. I spent a lot of time in and around there. Yeah. My top part of the world. Yeah, sick them for all of the world. Yeah. Sikkim for all of the queer ass Baylor bears out there. But I became a student in 2010 and I graduated 2014. And being queer was against the rules the whole time I was there. Yeah.

Despite me, we came out and started a student group my freshman year. But I had to face this really weird decision because in high school I had a lot of gender stuff going on a lot of sexuality stuff going on and I described myself as like a queerosexual because I'm like I'm still figuring it out sometimes I'm a girl sometimes I'm a boy I don't know I'll sort this out in my 20s and then I go to college where I thought I'd sort it out and And I was faced with this thing of like, you can either be out as queer and, but you have to like present as like a cis gay man, or you can transition,

which will be totally acceptable within this culture, but you have to go deep stealth and you'll just show up next year as a girl and everyone will be fine with that. And we'll all pretend it didn't happen and that you've always been a girl. And that was like the standard in a lot of the, Baylor's very upper crust religious, right? Like very privileged group of people,

but was you just kind of go away and we can just for a few months and we just pretend this is how it always was. And now it's much more, inquisitional is the wrong word, but it's like hunting trans people down in a much more aggressive way where they can't just kind of be like, well, God doesn't make trash. Instead, they're like, oh, God condemns you to hell just very directly. And it's getting worse. And that's why Tear It Up is really important that we like start now instead of like next fall.

Absolutely. Because it's going to be horrible next fall. And the spring after that could be. 2024 is going to be real grim. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter. Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Presented by iHeart and Sonora.

An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. To bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I would love to talk more about like Tear It Up and how you approach organizing and what you're kind of hoping to both expand into and the various actions that you have done in the past few weeks. So the first tear it up action officially was,

um, the three 13 rally in Austin, Texas. That was the trans kids cry for help rally. Um, where we had a bunch of people on the steps of the governor's mansion, um, speaking and getting loud.

And, um, we had a few hundred people show up and that really mobilized a lot of folks in Texas that I know got activated from that and are still going. But while I was running and organizing that with Trot, and I actually flew down to Texas from Nebraska to do that, the various humans I'd reached out to, and I was just like, I don't have time to explain directions right now. We need to organize a die-in by the end of the month. Here's what I have. I just kind of threw it at them and they all ran with it. And

I think that's the way that we need to approach this right now, because we need to build this big machine, because they've been building the machine against us for years. And to build a machine that can rival that, we kind of need to be much more decentralized and much more agile about how we grow and how we do these actions. Kat, you were one of the first humans I reached out to and I was like, yes, I would like to make a big trouble. What was that like from your side of things? Yeah. So I keep thinking about this from the perspective of kind of my own political motivation. So I've done various kinds of like lefty, whatever, organizing for most of my adult life and um in the last like last i guess february and february or whatever um i think like probably a lot of people especially a lot of trans people i had like a a couple week period of just like totally depressed doom scrolling and then the invasion of ukraine was happening and it's just like everything was bad all the time um it still

feels still feels like everything's bad all the time. But I have stuff to do. Thanks to Iterodes over here. So like I said, I grew up, I was a child of the 90s. I grew up in a world that I knew was utterly hostile to my existence. I knew that trans people were like, that to be trans was something deeply shameful and a secret that I either needed to die with, or that if I came like, that to be trans was something deeply shameful and a secret that I either needed to die with, or that if I came out, it would like ruin the life of all of my family.

Until I eventually, you know, I managed to not die all the way until 18, came out, and then found a bunch of incredible queer people and have been alive since then. But I was shaped by that experience, by the experience of needing to survive, knowing that I had this secret all, you know, I knew in kindergarten, I like just knew with total certainty. And I also knew that it was evil and bad and that I should be ashamed. And there is a whole couple, there's like generation, there's like a whole generation of kids right now growing up who have, you know, come out who have been born since 2014 and come out as tiny, tiny children. Holy smokes. That is kind of mind blowing. Isn't that insane? Right. So there's like a whole, and then nevermind like kids who weren't born

before that, but who are in high school now who are coming out and like they have existed in a world where pop culture and the sort of mass culture, more generally speaking, has like there are trans people on TV and they're not just serial killers or the murder victims in an SVU story. There's legitimate representation. There is, you know, you have like the, you have people in national government and in state government explicitly defending trans people. Like they have been enculturated to this idea that they have some semblance of rights and that civilization, that the civilization they live in doesn't want to smite them out of existence. that the civilization they live in doesn't want to smite them out of existence. And those kids are watching this conversation shift. And I don't know what that's like, but I can tell you that I've been motivated by anger to do a lot of things.

And I don't know that I've ever been quite as furious in my life as I have been the last couple of months. And so being drawn towards Tear It Up, to me, is this opportunity to like, you know, I love the Trevor Project. I'm really glad that they exist. I'm really glad that they do the work that they do. You know, like there's all these different orgs who are putting out positive messaging, but it's all pretty milquetoast.

You know, it's like trans people are cool. Maybe we should give all the we should give all the tender queers a baseball bat maybe that would be a more useful space for like they're fucking trying to kill you hey 13 year old they are coming for you this world is unsafe and i need you to know that you have somewhere to run to that there are adults in the world who will keep you safe who will show up for you who are going to go and raise a bunch of hell make a bunch of noise do a graffiti put up some posters go and you know get ourselves in trouble on the steps of the capitals all across the country so that those kids in high school right now who are feeling like the

entire fucking universe is dissolving around them into a bottomless sea of fear and hatred that like there's other people out there if you're in idaho if you're if you were a kid who's growing up in northern idaho like there's other people out there yeah you just have to get free and we're specifically so our first actions we specifically targeted these states that tend to be ignored by sort of like the mainstream liberal media. I'm trying to say that without sounding like a wackadoodle, but I'm here, so it's fine. We're fully past that point. Great. Cool.

I have to like be professorial or some shit. I don't know. We opened this show with a joke about Caitlyn Jenner. Caitlyn's so funny. That's true. We're fine. It is true that that happened. Oh, I know.

But yeah, the mainstream liberal media doesn't give a fuck about Iowa or Idaho. And frankly, since I've lived all over the country and been involved in queer activism for over a decade, I have friends all over. I have friends all over and a lot of the more higher up folks in established orgs on the coasts and in big cities look at what happens in like Iowa and Idaho and Texas and Florida. And they're like, oh, no, this is a sign of what's to come and not this affects a quarter of the country. It's already happening. Yeah, it's happened. Yeah, it's not. It could happen here. It's happened already. And

we fight for these kids desperately because their lives are at risk in so many ways right now. They're legally imperiled. The things that were giving them hope for life are being taken away. And a lot of these laws most affect the kids that have supportive families. But we need to fight for the kids that don't,, and make sure that they know that like, we see you in Iowa and we're going to go do something melodramatic and cover ourselves in fake blood and lay on the steps of the Capitol in the, in the state that you live in. So you can see that like your feelings are being externalized and hopefully that'll move you to knowing that like other people are going through this too. And hopefully other people will see what's happening and it'll move them to action

to protect those kids. And it'll give you a space to start building community and building connections for other trans people and other people in your area who want to help keep you alive. Exactly. And that's really the next step in Tear It Up is this next month, I want to have us focus a bit more on a little community building and community events, which has always been a big part of my strategy with previous organizing is big loud protests followed by a pizza party. Or we did a great picnic in Austin after the legislative sessions last year, where we had a bunch of people show up and made a lot of good connections. We had a lot of the little trans kiddos there.

And some photos that were taken there were then used as like the headline, like the cover photos for like all these articles about the kids being attacked. Yeah. Yeah, I think that we pulled off our sort of first coordinated national set of actions. The model that we're looking at is groups like ACT UP. So more of a sort of decentralized national network of folks who are all working together to be sort of power amplifiers to like share resources, share tools, make sure that, you know, everyone has what they need and has backup in case anything gets out of hand, wherever they're, whatever state they're in, whatever city they're in. And that coalition

building or like the community building part is such a, is such an incredibly important factor. Like I, so I was coordinating, I was working on the event to have happen in Boise. And, you know, one of the major things that I, that I ran into reaching out to all these different organizations is like, I mean, they've been at war for a long time and they have like, there are literally militia groups hunting anyone who shows up at a BLM rally in Boise. When I talked to, you know, some of the like executive directors

of like LGBTQ oriented nonprofits in Boise, they were like, hey, I'm really, it's really cool that you're doing this, but we cannot send our kids. We can't participate in this because we don't know you and we don't know what's going to happen.

And this is like this, you need to understand that this scene is like not safe. Totally fair. Yeah, so totally fair. And so I think a big part of this next step is deepening those connections, you know, showing people that like we will show up. We are accountable. We are looking to be partners for long-term action, for long-term struggle.

be partners for long-term action for long-term struggle and one of the things that is really cool about tear it up that i didn't expect because i am old so my networking has always been phone trees um and literally just like calling people out and being like you call these three people um and getting people out for actions uh for Tear It Up, we have these amazing humans at building like online communities on Discord, which makes me feel simultaneously like 20,000 years old and also like the kids, they're all right. They know how to do the trouble. And we're trying to not just build through this traditional coalition building that I've been doing for a long time and making all these connections, but trying to build not just like a physical community, but an online community to stitch these physical communities together. see what's happening in Austin but you can't always like physically make it there so it's good to know that like these are my humans and they're fighting for me and I can be in the loop and get involved um and our long-term strategy with that is to connect people like um the Trevor Project

we I love a lot of the humans they're actually and like Trans Lifeline in these groups because they um and all these other like national groups that raise a lot of money humans there actually, and like trans lifeline in these groups. Cause they, um, and all these other like national groups that raise a lot of money, but they're actually not allowed to raise a lot of trouble because of like their tax status and all these things is like, uh, the HRC like can't do a trouble because it'll look bad for them. And they care about those sorts of things, but we can connect those people with these young activists that want to like go stir up shit and cause trouble and need to like let out that scream. And even if we can't defeat the laws in the moment, letting out that scream is a communal good. It lets people feel seen and it lets people know I need help right now and shouting and crying and a gnashing of teeth and rending of hair and clothes is objectively good. Actually, we need

people to come together and we need people to see our suffering and we need people to be moved to loving each other and helping each other. And that's, um, how that's how we'll survive. Right. if we achieve nothing beyond catharsis then we've achieved something yeah um i loved your point about the online community component of things because i feel like so much of trans focused online community is like uh you know do i look okay in this outfit or like hey we're all fans of the same like anime or something right like they're all fans of the same anime or something. There's these very specific projects.

And I don't feel like there's a lot of spaces that are like, hey, this is the war room. Not that we can't talk about bullshit, but the entire focus of this space is to connect as many trans people as possible so we can amplify our power together um and you know begin to even remotely approximate the boogeyman that fucking marjorie taylor green imagines us to be right yeah um well and we need to become like the transsexual menace which is um another protest group that I love from the 90s where they created this iconography around like, oh, we are the transsexual menace.

And then it's a bunch of like very nice people. Yes, like very like normal looking folks. Yeah. But I think we need to reclaim that and take it in another direction. And we need to not be menacing in a like, we need to be a good menace we need to be a bit of an anti-hero for the trans community and we need to do fucking trouble and we need to cause problems for people and frankly i think um too many politicians get to go to bed at night not listening to people call them motherfuckers on a megaphone and too many people get to have a nice lunch at their favorite

restaurant without that being disrupted and having uh things shouted at them i think we need to become the menace that we need to be to survive in this moment i concur with this project and yes uh i i concur with this and um enjoy enjoy enjoy participating in things that lead to those outcomes. Because they want us dead anyway. That is what they're doing. That's what they're complacent with. I think it is also an important thing to note that in terms of good news, not all of these bills are passing. On this show, we've talked a lot about the bills that have passed. We have like not all of these bills are passing like on this

show we've talked a lot about the bills that have passed we have talked about all the stuff that has been going on but there is not not not all not all of them are going through and that is an important thing to talk about it doesn't mean the fight's over because they're gonna try again um yeah but that is the other thing i think is worth is. And states from Florida to Idaho to Washington, Utah, Virginia, there is stuff that is getting blocked or at least not going through. And there's a lesson that needs to be learned from how the right operates in this, because what they did for years was oppose equal rights, wide-ranging and powerful machine to push this stuff through learning from their failures grabbing more power getting better at messaging and like that it ultimately the same attitude needs to be had like when when one of these laws gets struck down it's not a sign that the fight's been won it's a sign um to keep pushing like it's this kind of thing where you have to you have to pay attention to the way they built this over the

course of really 30 or 40 years um because it has to be done something a counter a counterweight a machine capable of applying equal pressure in the opposite direction has to be built and it has to be built very quickly. Well, nine out of the nine out of 10 of these bills die. So nearly 270, I think it's 264 is the actual count of how many anti-trans bills have been proposed in the last two years since the last election. And only 27 have become law. So they're really just playing a numbers game, right? They're just forcing it through. And they're not going to stop. And we, in Texas, it was so hard last year. Because I remember the last day of the legislative session.

We were all there until midnight and cheered so hard when it was done. And we're like, this bill can't come back. And then we faced special session followed by special sessions followed by special session where they're like we are pushing through this trans legislation and the war is not gonna stop we we we're maybe gonna we're gonna win a lot of battles we're gonna win a lot of battles. We're going to win the majority of battles, but they're not playing it to win those individual fights. They're playing to eventually exterminate us. And they're really gaining a lot of ground and we're way behind on building

our machine to fight it. And this is all happening in the context of, you know, a, a very, very explicit mask off movements to essentially destroy American democracy and replace it with Christian fascism, right? And we are the scapegoat, we are the enemy that they are currently identifying for elimination, right? So like, it's, you know, for them, they're like, I can score some points if I encourage this trans kid to kill themselves, right? And for us, it's like an existential threat that we may be watching the United States descend into, you know, an irreversible chasm of authoritarianism and violence. And, you know, that's going to be bad for trans people too. Yeah.

Yeah. Very, I love, very understated. How can, how can, if people are interested in Tear It Up and what they're doing, how can people find out more info online about how to keep up with stuff and, um, and what, what y'all do. So I think, uh, the, the best place to, I guess, get little updates, um, is the Twitter, which is at tear itaritup.org. And yes, good. And then if you come and get involved and you can get invited to our Discord, we're trying to grow that out a little slowly and stick with folks that we know

are getting involved in the fight while we sort of build the initial foundation of this. But that's the place to find us right now twitter instagram as well we're also teared up uh teared up org on instagram and we technically have a facebook page but who the fuck uses facebook i mean actually so our facebook we won't be posting a lot of stuff but a lot of our events will go through facebook because in a lot of the midwest and the, a lot of people still use Facebook, which is probably bad.

Turns out that's not helping, I think. Not a good look. But those are the places. Go find us. And then come get involved. We're going to be doing a lot more. We've sort of been on a break for a week because we did a shit ton of events last month

all at once and kind of needed a week off but starting next week we're going to be posting a lot and organizing and pulling together some community and social events and some more protests even if you don't want to join the organization specifically if you're a cis ally who's

listening to this and you're like this sucks I hate it I'd like to do something we're going to have things like, you know, postering resources and stickers and all kinds of stuff that you can grab and like, just go paint the town. Let it be known that trans people won't be erased, that we are fighting back. We're a very pro-graffiti organization. please bully your local politicians and uh sticker every service surface you can uh get get some paint pens i think i think i'll do an upcoming episode on how to make uh or how to do wheat pasting oh yeah as a as a fun as as some fun uh uh content for you for you fans of

content out there uh But yes, follow the Tear It Up account on the Twitters. That's how I've been mostly keeping up with it, besides just asking people, because I know who they are. But the Twitter is definitely a good resource.

Any other thoughts or notes that you would like to add before we wrap up here? Can I say fuck Greg Abbott? Can we all just say fuck Greg Abbott? Fuck Greg Abbott. Fuck that motherfucker. Also, fuck Kay Ivey.

Also, yeah, fuck lots of governors. Fuck a lot of the governors. Most of them. I think the vast majority of governors should go fuck themselves and I'll see them in hell yeah

that's a good idea plug your history podcast because queer history sounds like a great thing that people should learn more about well so it's the totally trans podcast network we might also come up that people should learn more about? Yeah. Well, so it's the Totally Trans Podcast Network. We might also come up as Totally Trans Searching for the Trans Canon.

We were originally just the one show where we talked about pop culture and history. It was me and writer Henry Jardina. And now we have a slate of shows that we do all on the same feed. One that talks about comics, one that talks about history that I love that the playwright Katie Coleman does called our sacred history.

And then we have, we just started the newest season of totally trans searching for the trans canon, where we're talking about finding lessons from history and queer culture and pop culture. Love it. Yeah. All right.

Yeah. Buy some paint pens. Show up to actions if you can. And learn to make some trouble. Yeah. Also, megaphones are only $40 from Harbor Freight. Just saying. You can get really loud, really cheap. And it's generally legal to shout at40 from Harbor Freight. Just saying. You can get really loud really cheap.

And it's generally legal to shout at people from outside their homes. Although not always. That can get you in some trouble. But not bad trouble necessarily. Check your local sound ordinances. And bring a volume meter. And really just amplify yourself just to that level. And learn how to edit audio.

So you can really just dial it in. Find a good lawyer and consult with them first. Yes. Also, personally, I would like to say force femme all anti-trans politicians who say that you can be peer pressured into transitioning. I am personally trying to force femme Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.

It hasn't worked yet, but he's very insistent. It will work eventually. I do feel like the right way to pursue that is just by deregulation and then poisoning the water supply. Well, that doesn't fit us today. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Lord of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.