It Could Happen Here - The Democrats Turn on Trans People

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Minutes before Biden dropped out of the election, Mia talked with trans policy expert Corinne Green about a series of disturbing anti-trans moves by the Biden administration and Democrats in congress.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls are media. apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast call zone media it could happen here it could happen here the podcast that is about i don't know how everyone hates trans people and how this has become a sort of cross-partisan thing uh i'm your host bia wong we are we have we have been doing oh god

i don't even know what sort of number of d of r and c episodes are going to have come out before this thing before before you hear this episode but we are once again turning away from the republican the the sort of chaos and despair of the republican party to turn towards the chaos and despair of the democratic party yeah we're going to specifically be talking about a series of what I think were kind of high profile fights in trans circles over sort of the administration very publicly starting to write off trans kids. I don't think it got that much news attention because as you may have noticed, it is, you know, a lot of this is by very specifically Biden administration stuff. We are recording this Sunday know, a lot of this is by very specifically Biden administration stuff.

We are recording this Sunday morning, the morning of the 21st. There is a real chance that by the end of the day, Biden is no longer the nominee. So we'll get into that a little bit. But as of right now, he's still the guy and he is fucking us. So yeah, with me to talk about this is Corinne Green,

who we have had on the show before, is a trans policy expert of many organizations and much experience. And yeah, welcome back to the show. Hey, thanks for having me, Mia. Yeah, it's kind of fun to come back on to talk more about this because the timing of when you had me on last time was pretty much just before a month before he went public with this new stuff we're going to talk about. much just before a month before he went public with this new stuff we're going to talk about yeah so the last time we were talking about this it was largely about stuff that was kind of like plausibly deniable for the administration it was a lot of sort of stuff buried in bureaucratic minutiae whether or not any of that stuff even exists anymore given recent supreme court rulings

that have effectively annihilated the administrative state. Who knows? But now, having had the Supreme Court gut their ability to do this sort of non-plausibly, they have full on gone on the record against trans kids. So I guess I want to start there. Can you sort of explain what happened with this New York Times story that kind of kicked this whole saga off? Yeah. So kind of the context is I'm a trans policy analyst it's what i do um there aren't that unfortunately are not that many of us in the country and all those

of us many of us are still employed in the movement organization so they can't talk about this stuff publicly but so he's been putting out the regulations that the biden administration has been putting out are not good regulations for trans people right but it's hard to help people understand that they're transphobic because it's a 500 page regulation and so yeah you know it's it's kind of wonky a little weird and if there is comms like the biden administration and the orgs have been putting out calling him pro-trans and all this stuff there's a big barrier to overcome there with wonky stuff like that but what happened a couple days after the debate, which I'm sure everyone saw, or if you didn't watch it live, you realized in horror that you now had to watch it to understand

what this country is going through. There was some initial reporting around how the WPATH Standards of Care version 8 came out. WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. It was either last year or the year before they updated the Standards of Care 7 to Standards of Care 8. This is a little background, sorry. And at the time, there was discussion among WPATH members, doctors, and kind of policy

people to some degree about whether mentioning kind of rough ages for what time, what age people tend to start certain treatments like period blockers, hormones, that kind of thing. What kind of normal age ranges those things happen in? We know from years and years of advocacy and work and activism is that if somebody writes something like those things down, even if they present it as a kind of loose guideline, or this is where things typically fall, policymakers will write that stuff into law and reg and take what is supposed to give doctors and patients, you know, room to figure out what works best for them and make it a very strict regime and so trans activists did not want ages in the w path sock eight for that reason and in the one and only

instance of pro-trans advocacy that i'm aware of her ever engaging in uh rachel levine and hhs kind of advocated with w path not to include those age ranges in it yeah levine by the way is is like the only deputy health secretary i think yeah she's like the only trans like she's the highest ranked trans uh like you know white house official ever by like an order of magnitude she's like she's like the only trans person like openly trans person possibly in history to ever like get to a position where she has some authority and she's doesn't use it ever except this one time it's a big disappointment to people i was i was her biggest fan in the world because she passed uh she wrote pennsylvania's narcan standing order and i based my law in louisiana legalizing narcan and our subsequent standing

order on hers so i thought it was really cool that trans firms had done this in both places and i really really was a big and then she just crickets nothing it's all this terrible stuff happens so that's the context in which the new york times was uh reporting they somebody had gotten like some bad guys had gotten some of the emails between levine and w path and were like trying to make it into a scandal right and they and the bad guys misrepresented kind of what the the issue and discussion was about right so we discussed what it was but the way that they would present it as oh you know w path was trying to limit treatments to kids being you know old enough of a certain age which is not what they were doing and they were trying to present levine

as trying to get rid of those so that five-year-olds could have surgery or whatever and so you know just very very insincere but um so the media was kind of reporting just on that because they love muckraking. policy at all right they're like they're absolute fucking clowns these people have no idea what the fuck they're talking about and so you know when they're trying to write a story that's about like leaked technical policy documents they have no fucking idea what they're doing and the reporting is gibberish it's like i remember i was trying to understand it and this is a real issue because the only source we had was this document of this New York Times writer who like couldn't like the New York Times writer who like couldn't find the back of their hand with a map. Right. Trying to like write out these emails.

I'm convinced cis people don't even understand that they don't know what they're talking about, because I think they just inherently feel like, oh, I have a gender. Therefore, I know everything about gender. I can do this. Yeah, and it's like, you know, and like, I, I, I, and it's, this is like mostly kind of like fine-ish, but the problem is when you have, you know, when you have cis journalists who don't know anything about trans, like, people at all,

who in a lot of places don't think trans people exist, trying to write these policy things it's they they have nothing and yeah so it wasn't presented super clearly and so other people had questions some justified some based on misunderstanding that misunderstanding some not but anyway there was additional kind of back and forth between the media and the white house. They were asking about it. And in that it, the, the white house at one point told them that they opposed surgery for

transgender youth. And then obviously that is at least publicly, that is a new position for the president who has isn't, has been called not by me, but by other people, 100% pro-trans, super great ally, his entire administration. I disagree with that, but other people have been saying that for a long time. And so that took a lot of people by surprise and was a big kind of kerfuffle. And so that's kind of the jumping off point for where we're going here.

And so that happened, that came out on a Friday in the New York times that the white house, uh, opposed surgery for trans minors and nobody talked to there. Like there were no responses from the orgs. Um, there was no additional reporting, no followup from the white house that Friday, not that Saturday, not that Sunday. Family Equality Council and National LGBTQ Task Force went on all three together, an MSNBC show. The host, I don't remember his name, but he has an MSNBC show, writes for Washington Post, and then also contributes to PBS NewsHour. none of these three people that we pay to advocate for us yeah or this journalist brought up this

very fresh very pertinent very relevant uh new white house position they just talked about like how important it is to vote and how much fun they had at pride parades instead garbage right and so it was very weird to me that these three people who represent lgbtq advocacy organizations would not immediately vocally condemn that kind of anti-trans stance and it also blew my mind that this journalist must be like allergic to scoops or something like why why wouldn't you this like that's your chance right there i mean and i i genuinely think the journalist didn't know because like this stuff didn't break out of like a very small sort of like trans sphere by this point right i mean it's in the new york times you're giving nobody actually like but like like nobody cares about like people people don't care about us like you you would

think that these people would know but like i i genuinely don't even know if this person had any idea what was happening because I, I trust journalists to write about trans people about as much as I trust myself to be able to bench press a car. So, you know. Yeah. So that came and went Sunday evening. No, I, and I was going insane the whole time. Right. going insane the whole time right because for for me as a trans policy analyst you know i have i've been i've noticed and been and called been calling biden's transphobic regs and executive orders and stuff problematic and transphobic since i first noticed it and picked up on it which was you know

two or three years ago now uh and so for for me it was a very kind of complicated feeling of, okay, now at least other people don't have to take my word about the regs. There's something they can look at and see it for themselves. But I was also, you know, completely threw off my sleep schedule. I was bouncing off the walls, going insane, trying to, you know, organize responses. And so the first org actually, I believe, I believe it was HRC issued a statement Monday night and it was a decent statement. I might have critiques of them, whatever. And then the rest of the orgs kind of didn't issue statements until Tuesday evening. And so that Tuesday, also the white house House issued a statement to clarify their position.

And the statement actually made it worse. So what the statement said was that they do oppose surgery for transgender youth. So they reiterated that. And then it went on to say, however, we continue to support gender-aff affirming care for youth, such as mental health care, period. I mean, it wasn't, it was a comment that they said, but they didn't list other things that they supported, right? It's like the only thing they put in the list that they supported was mental health care, which to a policy person, again, you're not sneaking those things past me. If you're talking about trans healthcare

and the only thing that you say that you support is mental healthcare, I'm very worried. I'm very concerned, right? Because if you're pro-trans and you support trans access to healthcare, it is not complicated or hard or controversial for you to say, yeah, you know, I support trans people and their access to healthcare. They should have access to therapy hormones puberty blockers surgery whatever they need like it's not complex there right but they didn't do that and so to me that felt even worse than kind of the initial position because it signaled to me that there's likely um we're likely kind of losing them on not just surgery but some of this other stuff. And so two hours later, that statement was updated, uh, revised, uh, and it took out

saying they support mental health care and was changed to say, we support gender affirming care, like a continuum of care, uh, and use the words continuum of care instead of mental health care now that doesn't that feels like tripling down to me because the problem was that it was very uh overt what you left out and you had the opportunity to go back and fix it and then you continued you just made new words that very overtly leave out the kind of things that we would need reassurance about right um and so that's kind of where things were at at that point uh and yeah we're gonna let's let's leave it there for a second to turn to the people who are funding us talking about this which is the i was gonna say

the noble products and services i cannot promise their was going to say the noble products and services. I cannot promise their nobility at all, but the products and services that support this podcast, here they are. 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. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game if you love hearing

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Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Yeah, and we are back. And there's one other thing I want to mention before we sort of get into where this went, which is part of the fear that was going on is that at the same

time as this is all happening labor has taken power in the uk and the labor government they're fucking okay what what can what what can i say about the about west streeting that won't get me impaled on a cross they're militantly transphobic piece of shit i think it's like their health secretary now yes yeah yeah minister their ministers over there don't forget yeah yeah their ministers came out and said we're gonna ban all children from getting puberty blockers not just on the nhs but also everyone all private health care everyone yeah and this is a this is an absolutely sort of terrifying step it is going to get a lot of kids killed i also want to reiterate yeah already already has there's

a whole scandal over there about like about the number of joe the good law project has you know done the research into like nhs minutes and all this stuff and has thinks that there have been 16 suicides since this yeah and i i also want there's like a sort of debunking thing that's going on that was from data that like the party released that was like, oh, there weren't actually that many suicides. And the thing you have to understand about those numbers is that those numbers don't count people on wait lists.

And the wait lists are not the only place that people die, but they kill a lot of people. So I want to sort of like, yeah, we got to get that sort of context in, which is we're in this position. It's not just streeting, right?

They're all, it's farmer. And then there are a whole lot of very vocally transphobic labor MPs. Yeah. And, and that, you know, that's,

there's a lot of fear that the democratic party can sort of take this even more extreme path than the sort of stuff we've been saying. And also, you know, I'm going to include the standard thing about puberty blockers which is we give these we give puberty blockers to like literal like five-year-old cis children they're fine it's complete like they're completely safe there's no there's no downside apparently puberty blockers only have dangerous terrifying side effects used and they can tell when they're in a trans body and it's this body yeah they only do the bad things in trans bodies we've created the trend specific bioweapon like you know so like this all

of this stuff is safe and it's not only safe it saves lives like the the difference between you know like any trans person can tell you the difference between being on your hormones and being off your hormones is night and day it is the difference between being alive and not being alive like it is the difference between having sort of like a stable like stable interiority and feeling like you don't exist every fucking day so we're not just talking about being on your right hormones but in this case we're also talking about preventing being on the wrong hormones right which can be even more excruciating yeah it's terrible like yeah and so there's there's this real fear that what we're seeing here is a pivot to uk style stuff and one of the things i do in the uk that was specifically worrying about that

language about mental health care is one of the big turf tactics is pushing this thing where we go oh well we're going to have this like you, we're going to give you mental health care. We're going to, like, help you figure out what your gender is. They call it, like, exploratory care. This is conversion therapy. That's what they are talking about. And, you know,

seeing the White House suddenly pivot to this language that is, like, effectively identical to, again, the UK thing where they're like, we're going to give these kids conversion therapy was terrifying. Yeah. And then, so, I think that the space between that Friday

with the New York Times article and then the Tuesday with that clarification, I think the fact that the orgs were so quiet and didn't offer any pushback and didn't organize community to demand better, to demand they retract it. Like, I think that that's what gave them the room to essentially double and triple down in that statement on Tuesday. And so that coincided, unfortunately, with a couple other anti-trans developments in the Democratic Party in a way that I find very

worrying, especially when taken kind of as a constellation, right? So that same week, the Senate Armed Services Committee, so the NDAA is a large military funding bill. It's the National Defense Authorization Act. And the House has been passing versions with lots of transphobic riders in them. And then for the last couple of years, the Senate has been taking those out and passing a clean version. And then ultimately, it's a clean version of the gets enacted. Last year, I was very, very worried that we would lose on that and that it would go through with the riders and the implications here. So the DOD, Department of Defense, funds health care for the VA and TRICARE.

I think there's one other smaller program, kind of similar, that's a different name, but largely VA and TRICARE. So for active service members and their families and veterans, which is, I think I last read, like 10 million people or something. And so if they cut off public funding for trans health care through those programs, a whole lot of people are going to lose it. And we're going to very quickly wind up in a situation like abortion is with the Hyde amendment where no public money can be used on our healthcare. And so that week, at the same time, the Senate armed services committee had their version of the NDAA in

committee. Joe Manchin voted with Republicans to attach attach these transphobic writers to it and then it was everyone in the committee except for three people it was i believe it was warren one other democrat and i think possibly one republican who voted against it but all the other democrats on the voted to pass it out of committee with those transphobic writers which is terrifying yeah and senator kelly has introduced a floor amendment to take those out but whether his amendment even makes it to the floor i don't know and what the vote looks like that like on that i don't know so i'm really worried that the nda will pass with these writers in it and then subsequent spending bills for other departments

will as well and then simultaneously there's the third thing over biden's term there have been over he's had over 200 of his judicial nominees that he's offered up and over his whole term not a single time has a democrat opposed one of his judicial nominees and but that week asaf actually opposed one of his judicial nominees over the fact that she had sent a trans woman to women's prison so specifically a transphobic reason for objecting and so she didn't get nominated and that's the first time that has happened uh over biden's term from what i read and so there are just lots of these signals that kind of back me up in my feeling that the support that you know everyone has been pretending that the democratic party has for trans people i mean i i read their eggs so i know better but it is not, it is an illusion, right?

And when it shatters, it's going to come apart really fast and people are going to be really surprised by it because our organizations have not been kind of educating people along the way. Yeah, we're going to come back and talk more about this. And we're also going to come back very specifically to the trans women in women's prisons thing, because I really, truly do not think since people understand how fucking bad that is. Yeah, we're going to come back to that after these ads. 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. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep

into the world of Latin culture, musica, películas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each Thank you. for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible.

Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better.

Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Yeah, so we're back. Yeah, so I wanted to specifically highlight Chris's thing in the context of of you know, okay, so there's a chance by the time this comes out that Biden is no longer the nominee. Your lips to God's ears.

Yeah. The issue with this is that the strongest possibility for replacing him is Kamala Harris. And you know, I'm going to ask you to explain Kamala Harris's record on trans women in fucking prisons because it is appalling

because I can never escape these shit libs I actually worked at TLC while we were suing the state of California TLC uh yeah transgender law center um TLC we had to to sue the state of California for incarcerated trans people to be able to access health care that they deserved and kamala harris as the ag of the state of california uh defended the the state's position that they did not they did have a right to health care we won she lost but so she is she is not someone that i can ever trust with trans lives, right? Especially because there have been other issues. I think marijuana most recently, where she has tried to kind of trumpet

that she has used her discretion and not prosecuted certain things or whatever, right? And that doesn't help me at all, right? Because it shows you know you have prosecutorial, you have discretion in what cases you take and what you defend and all this stuff. And you used it to prevent trans people from getting health care. Yeah, and I want to also specifically talk about the part about this judge sending a trans woman to a women's prison, which is the thing that you should do. Because this is the kind of thing that has to be opposed at all costs.

Because prison is violent enough for everyone. It is even worse for us. And the fact that Democrats are like, you know, it looks like we're seeing this sort of tide break on this. And especially specifically on this issue where the consequences are so dire it is it is extremely bad yeah and so i kind of had the suspicion that there was a deal struck on the ndaa that democrats and this is solely me speculating right i have no insider information about this speculating that the democrats kind of accepted a deal on the nda that there would be some level of anti-trans writers that they would

accept and and into the enacted law um and that after making that deal the white house felt they could kind of move to the right publicly on trans people because you know it would be in the news from the nda passing that they could start kind of preparing people for that by kind of making it public and kind of moving to the right word there right so that's kind of what i suspect maybe happened i don't know but it is it doesn't bode well for us especially because you know so the the white house's position has already been cited in at least one judicial opinion yep and then was also recently cited yesterday the day before yesterday or not no yeah friday yeah i think it was friday in new hampshire um as justification from governor sununu for signing their surgery ban there and so these things have

immediate consequences even before they show up in executive branch policy and this is why i have been very convinced ever since kind of i read the policy tea leaves and the executive orders and regs and kind of identified that we were dealing with a functionally a hostile executive branch I've been trying I tried as hard as I could to get movement leadership to switch from a kiss ass framework to a take names framework right yeah but but they just they haven't done it so and the community just doesn't but they just they haven't done it so and the community just doesn't it's going to feel like whiplash i think for a lot of folks um who aren't kind of deep into this stuff and don't follow me on twitter um to see me yelling about 500 page regulations but it makes me worried that you know the leadership is not advocating for trans people appropriately.

And I think that if this is demonstrating that they're not, they don't have leverage or they're not willing to bring leverage to bear on whoever the nominee is when it's not Biden, right? Like they're not setting the movement up to have strong footing to hold people accountable to trans equality, kind of on the campaign trail. And that's really scary, looking at labor especially, as kind of a blueprint. Yeah, we're going to be talking about Sean O'Brien's dog shit, weird fascist turn later with some teamsters.

Well, hopefully. We'll see what happens in that episode but yeah uh yeah it's very bad but also it's not we're not in a position yet where this is inevitable right right like it doesn't have to happen and the way that it get this gets stopped from happening is by us organizing and us fighting and us putting pressure on these people to fucking do this because you know and like this this is this has always been the thing like these people unfortunately they do need us right they hate it but you know these like the democratic party needs us yeah we got to see last month during pride month they all show up at pride parades yeah yeah right it's like y'all actually don't belong here um why why are you fuck off

yeah and it's like you know they like they they they they have been successfully sort of like feasting off of the movement that we built for decades now yeah and it is you know if they're gonna fucking if they're gonna fucking eat our corpses it is it is it is it is absolutely time for them to fucking try to defend us and the only way that's going to happen is if we we actually start mobilizing and we start putting pressure on these people to like not fucking back down and write us off for dead but the way that the national organizations have been moving right like the positive press and the praise that they've given to even biden's shittiest actions and inactions on trans people actively stymies community organizing right yeah because

if i have to explain a 500 page regulation to show people that biden is transphobic that and they're just like no but look this hrc statement says it's actually great policy it's a big barrier to overcome yeah or community organizing there right so yeah and you know the the the other sort of issue here right is that the republican party is i mean i don't know if hurling towards even the right word but they are they are very very very close to what is effectively like banning trans people from public life and their eventual goal of wiping us out right yeah and you know if if if there's no actual force to oppose that because all of these sort of national organizations are busy sort of kissing ass instead of actually fighting we are in deep

trouble yeah and i think we and i think we are i think we are in deep trouble. Yeah. And I think we are. I think we are in deep trouble. But like you said, it is not a done deal yet, right? I was actually heartened. I was very, I was terrified. So Zoe Zephyr, the trans representative, state representative from Montana, after the draft bad Title IX regulation came out. She organized an open letter from 14 out of 16 out trans and non-binary state electeds against it. They released it a couple of days after all of the orgs put out their praise word, their praising statements, and they looked really dumb.

So she actually organized another open letter of out trans and non-binary state legislators against this. It wasn't the full compliment because it was over a weekend, really scrambly. But just like the Title IX one, Dana Carome and Sarah McBride did not sign it. Can you explain who that is, by the way, for the audience? Yeah. So Dana Carome is a trans state representative from Virginia. And then Sarah McBride is an out trans legislator from Biden's home state of Delaware. And the McBrides are actually family friends with the Bidens. And Joe Biden actually wrote the foreword to Sarah McBride's memoirs, autobiography, whatever you call it right but she's also a zionist and she is a kind of centrist center

right democrat who you know as i've i've talked to people um my understanding is that she didn't sign on to the title nine letter uh because she has you know rising star in the democratic party aspirations she's probably going to be the first trans congressperson soon. I hate it. And so I was extremely concerned that Sarah McBride, who, you know, because of those ties and because she's probably going to be in Congress soon, is the most kind of politically powerful trans person in the country. I was extremely worried that she was going to join the Biden administration on this. Uh, so I, I posted the shit posted that are for several days. And thankfully,

uh, she, she did, um, condemn it and kind of bullying works. Yeah. Right. Go.

I was, I was seriously concerned about that because, you know, just these, the forces, this anti-trans dehumanization campaign is so powerful and so strong at this point that a lot of people are making the calculation that if they want to advance in politics, they got to mulch us, you know? And I don't think highly, I don't think highly enough of Sarah to have been confident that she wouldn't

do that. Yeah. And I think that's, you know, that's also one of the really hard parts about this is like you, I don't know, as, as, as much as there is sort of intercommunity, solidarity among trans people, you can't even trust your own people when they take power. Right. And, you know, this isn't to say like, this is one of the rare times where like i think there are like there's some legislators who do good stuff like zoe zephyr has been doing great but you have to keep the

pressure on everyone no matter who they are no matter where they come from you have to you have to keep pressuring them because i mean that's my experience as an activist. Yeah. Yeah. If you don't, we're going to get, we're going to get left behind and left to die. Yeah. And so like one of the, one of the ways that this has been so dismaying for me, right, is that trans people don't have any or any national organization that any national organization that advocates for them full-throatedly, principally, in a trans-maximalist kind of unapologetic way, right? It's always all of the orgs,

all the LGBTQ orgs and the trans-Pacific orgs, which is kind of what I'm getting to, all kind of take this very centrist tack, or they have over the last several years with biden they were they were they were all kind of a lot happier to be radical when trump was president but but no longer yeah and my my main issue is even if you are you know a rich dc strategist who leads who runs these movement orgs like you know they are and you believe even you believe that the balance between kind of strident principled advocacy and lobbying blazer tightened up moderated advocacy is way further in the moderated direction than i do even if you believe that you still understand the need for some group with a voice to articulate the trans maximalist position, to articulate the standards by which politicians are going to be measured if they're going to be considered pro-trans. And what we have not seen is the trans-specific

organizations, so specifically National Center center for transgender equality nct and uh transgender legal education defense fund till death they recently merged into advocates for trans equality which is abbreviated a4te don't ask don't ask but like why let the lgbt let let hrc do the centrist bullshit let them put out milk toast statements let them praise politicians who don't fully support us right but we need at least one organization representing trans people to lay out the full case to present kind of our actual policy needs and be the rubric by which everyone else can be measured. And also just for community education. So we know, so the community knows without, you know, people like organizers, people like me trying to overcome these huge, these huge walls to, to get people to understand what's going on can see what's being done to us

know what we deserve in terms of policy and then measure what is actually being done for us against that bar yeah and i think that one of the other frustrating aspects of this is something that you talk about a lot is that the people who do the work in these organizations right you're sort of like you know you're sort of staffers or researchers people on the on the sort of bottom of the pyramid who make all this stuff function they don't get a say in how these you know and how how these fucking orgs put these things out no most of them are radical anarchists and communists like i am right they they really really want to do what we need to be done and And it's just, you know, comes down from on high that that's not what they're doing. And I know that I am not the only trans national org staffer who has been silenced by the White House or the White House reached out directly to my bosses.

I think I mentioned it the last time I was on. Yeah, but I know that's happened to my colleagues, friends at other organizations. And I know that I have a lot of privileges that, that a lot of people don't. Um, so I can kind of get fired or I could not, maybe couldn't afford it anymore. Uh, get fired from my principals. And I don't, you know, uh, I don't, I don't judge, you know, my, my comrades and colleagues who are still kind of doing the best they can, but I'm really, really scared with, with leadership and the way that they have not recognized kind of the situation they've gotten us into. yeah and i think the thing i want to close on is what do you think are effective things that people can do sort of now right and people who aren't in the top of these power structures although if you're for some reason you're the head of one of these orgs and you're listening to this what the fuck are you doing um please do better but yeah what what what what kinds of

things can people do on top of sort of just like community education and yeah yeah so i mean i i think the real thing i mean i've encouraged people to do this on on twitter as well is if you see one of these national organizations fall short of a hundred percent and advocating for if you see them equivocate about, you know, maybe banning surgery isn't that bad because it's not super common, or maybe it's okay not to demand that Biden, you know, explicitly say that he supports, you know, these, these parts of these components of our healthcare before calling him a hundred percent pro-trans on healthcare, you know, that kind of stuff.

If you see them fall short of that you know don't trust them anymore don't donate to them anymore take that money attention time and energy uh and turn it to mutual aid efforts to local organizing efforts to um supporting trans people in red states campaign for southern equality just expanded their their practical support program to be not just a subset of red states that they will help trans youth and families in, but all red states that are facing health care bans and similar anti-trans measures support that fund, right? Go look at, and if you don't know of a local trans group or a state trans group near you doing good work,

you can go to Trans Justice Funding Project's kind of grantee map. They're really low barrier, only grant to trans-led groups. And you can see what those groups are doing and you can hook up with them or donate to them. But I think that the biggest thing is not, I mean, Lord we need money we're all poor as shit yeah but mainly but mostly honestly what i i think we need is we need vocal visible support we need cis people not to remain silent or passive um when they hear or see transphobia or when they hear or see someone uh equivocating

on well maybe you know maybe kids aren't old enough to be know they're trans like if you're that stuff sounds insane to actual trans people right but you know can take cis people right and so if you are a cis ally um being an ally is an action right um and we need that now more than ever as the stakes of the risks of uh being attached to us supporting us grow higher right like we need principled allies to stand with us um and so if you can do that in your daily life you can be a trans advocate in your kind of routine we desperately need that yeah and i think that's a good i know that that that's a good sort of rallying cry it's like all you know and this is this has always substantively been one of the big issues with being trans is that

we are one percent of the population right now right that's probably going to rise in the future but right now our sort of distributed policy sort of distributed impacts on politics, you know, we have an outsized impact on politics, but we're 1% of the population. We can't fight 90%, 99% of the population. Right. Yeah. So we need your help and we need, you know, we need not just sort of milquetoast lip service. We need to actually fight. We need not just sort of milquetoast lip service. We need to actually fight. Yeah. And we need people in your life to know that you are fully pro-trans.

And that means that you kind of learn maybe how to talk about trans healthcare to educate other folks who don't know as much, or you are able to develop and kind of share a personal story about how you learned about trans people and, and became, you know, an ally. Right. So learning how to do that work,

I think is super important. So this, this has been a good happen here. Corinne, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me. Like I said, that timing of the last show,

man, it's very smart. Yeah, we, I have, I have have i have a weird knack for timing this stuff correctly for mostly for worse but you know it's yeah um this has been nicking up here you can find us in the places and yeah go go support the trans people in your life because lord knows they need it yeah and you can follow me yeah so i'm cranky pronouns and i'm at gay narkan on twitter you can find me there for hot trans policy takes that are not moderated by centrist comm staff yeah and don't find me on twitter absolutely not on Twitter. Absolutely not.

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.

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