It Could Happen Here - The Gender Bureaucracy And Trans Extermination

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

Mia, James, and Gare discuss the increasing power of American gender bureaucrats and the danger they pose to trans people.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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that's being done for the first time and not the second time because we had bike problems.

We did not just record a very funny intro that is now completely lost in time. Yeah, you'll never hear it. You'll never know what great fun we had. The joy was in the creation though, not in the sharing. Yeah. Process, not an event. Structure, et cetera, et cetera. Yep, yep. So I'm Mia.

I'm doing this episode. Also, Garrison is here. Hello. Hi. And also James. Hi. I'm recording, so we're good now. Yeah.

The good news is, stunningly, as much as it seems, we are now more prepared to record this episode than we were last time. So what are we talking about? We are talking about the age of the gender bureaucrat. So as people are probably aware, there is a raft of anti-trans bills sweeping through state legislatures. through state legislatures. The latest of these bills to pass as of time of recording is the bill in Utah, which has banned minors from getting gender-affirming care like hormone therapy, hormone blockers, and any kind of gender-affirming surgery for anyone who's not already receiving them.

Does the Utah one also ban like therapy, like talk therapy? No, but so on the one hand, it doesn't ban talk therapy. On the other hand, there's a provision in there that I think might also suggest that people do conversion therapy. So that's great. It fucking sucks ass. Yeah, kids are going to die because of this bill. The people who are writing and signing these bills know that kids are going to die. We know this because Utah's governor, Spencer Cox, who is the guy who signed the bill, vetoed an earlier ban on trans athletes participating in school sports, specifically citing the risk of suicide. So he knows this is going to kill kids.

He signs this anyways. And we are now living in what I call the age of the gender bureaucrat. We're going to spend – we're going to have another episode later on where we spend a lot of time going through all of the individual bills and the stuff Trump's been saying about this because Jesus Christ. Pretty, pretty, pretty grim stuff that they're – I mean, on the one hand, making trans people out to be the boogeyman did not work in their favor greatly in the midterms. But it seems like they're not trying to change're not trying to change their uh their tactics here they are still going all in based on trump's speech from a few days ago of of using the using the transgender menace as the as the greatest threat to america and the and the and the nuclear family so we'll see how that goes for them like electorally but it's pretty bad rhetoric to see

flying around yeah i think they um it does really well with the people who who are loud and like like you you often see this in like uh primaries right like people push to the limits of their party because that plays well with the most politicized people and for sure if you're going to a trump rally what like three years after he got kicked out yeah you are also a bigot yeah yeah but before we do that i i want to before we actually like really do an episode on this i i want to take a look at the sort of bureaucratic grounding for this entire thing and to do that we need to look at gender bureaucrats the american gender bureaucracy so i'm going to cite my sources a bit and say that i stole this from an incredibly unlikely source which is the Maoist review of Shrek 2

Wait, stop Wait, stop Never speak those words again The Maoist review of Shrek 2 is one of the three great sort of texts of American Maoism. There's this one there's Torjom Retracted People's War

the Florida Everglades and then there's that time the RCP got into a fight with the the psl they were both trying to grab each other's signs amazing amazing stuff but unfortunately you know having having come up with the term gender bureaucrat which is incredibly useful uh they're maoist so they're constitutionally okay and politically just in unable to understand what a bureaucrat is so i have now stolen this term and i'm using it for other purposes reappropriate no it's stealing they're malice it's never wrong to steal from malice okay fine so all right all right getting back sort of to some more serious stuff to understand what this is i want to talk about sort of the term assigned gender at birth um this used to be a like it used to be fairly common kind of in in in circles to

like refer to people as like amab or afabs like assigned male at birth or assigned female at birth and it's a it kind of sucks as a term it's been replaced by other stuff but i i think there's something important here which is i want to go back and look at the assigned part and i want to i want to look at the specifically the part about the gender being assigned because i think there's something that gets lost in sort of popular discussions of this which is that when people think about like the term like the assignment of gender right they think about it as something that's created socially right they think about it as you know people being like pressured to perform one kind of gender or another by the people around them, sort of by their families, by just like people walking down the street.

And this is all true, but there's also something else going on here. That's something else going on here is we need to ask ourself when we talk about someone's gender being assigned, who is it being assigned by? Because this is an actual specific person, right? The person who actually assigns your gender is a doctor or sometimes a nurse or a midwife. And this person is the first gender bureaucrat. And they're the first gender bureaucrat because they are the person who sits down and puts down what your gender is on a form. Now, okay, you may be asking yourself right mia why should anyone care that your gender is now on a piece of paper well because and also maybe like they're they're also

mainly at least you know in like a in like a medical scientific sense it's mainly like oh what parts do you have um and then using those parts as a carryover for gender, as that's been modeled after ever since we stopped dressing boys and girls and dresses in all the same clothing when they're young. Yeah, and we'll get into sort of like how this has sort of changed over time. But, okay, to understand why this actually matters, I think we need to talk about what bureaucracy actually is, because this is a thing that used to be fairly common to talk about on the left,

and then people have stopped doing over the past maybe like half decade. The anthropologist David Graeber wrote extensively about bureaucracy throughout his career. Probably his most famous book is one of his later works called Bullshit Jobs, but I want to go back to an earlier thing that he wrote called The Utopia of Rules. I'm going to read a little bit of one of the first sections of it. Bureaucratic knowledge is all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real-life existence and reducing everything to preconceived mechanical or statistical formula. Whether it's a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is's a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is always a matter of simplification. Typically, it's not very

different from the boss who walks into the kitchen to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong. In either case, it is a matter of applying very simple pre-existing templates to complex and often ambiguous situations. The result often leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the impression that they are dealing with people who have, for some arbitrary reason, decided to put on a set of glasses that only allows them to see 2% of what's in front of them. So we can see some of the core aspects of bureaucracy here, right?

Bureaucracy inherently is an act of simplification because of literally the technical systems of what a bureaucracy is, aspects of bureaucracy here right bureaucracy inherently is an act of simplification um because because of sort of the tech like literally the technical systems of what a bureaucracy is and because of how it how it stores information how it moves information around it can only see the world in incredibly sort of simplified terms yeah it has to like abstract these things and make assumptions based off those abstractions in order to have any types of functionality yeah yeah so so great graber graber later says that like this, you know, okay, on the one hand, like the sort of simplification and model making

that goes on in a bureaucracy can be really, really frustrating when you have to interact with it. But on the other hand, you know, so the reduction of the complex to the simple, it's not just, you know, a thing that's inherently evil in and of itself. It's the basis of all thought. Because, you know, a thing that's inherently evil in and of itself. It's the basis of all thought. Because, you know, like, we actually can't, like, in and of ourselves, process the world by immediately holding in our minds all of the information at one time, right? The way we understand the world is implications of models.

Yeah. It's pattern recognition, recreating recursive thought loops that give us the very concept of meaning and like that's how we know what words are yeah and that's where Jordan Peterson wow so true you know you can look it's also possible to take a lot of data and make nonsense out of it and this is

a field called economics marketing yeah but yeah you know okay so this is also the basis of all social theory right like all like social theory is about taking a bunch of incredibly complicated like and messy relationships and just statistical stuff and just the noise of people doing doing things in everyday lives and trying to establish sort of like ways of understanding them and you know this in some sense is a kind of violence, right? It's a violence of simplification.

But on the other hand, you know, the violence you're doing to reality here bears more resemblance to sort of like Bakunin's creative destruction, right? You're, you know, you're imposing a kind of violence on reality, you know, in simplifying and destroying a bunch of aspects of it so you can understand just like one part of it at a time. But, you know, this is a useful thing, right? right it's how we think it like we literally couldn't do anything without it but as graver puts it the problem of right the problems arise at the moment that violence is no longer metaphorical here let me turn from imaginary cops to real ones jim cooper

a former lapd officer turned sociologist has observed that the overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or otherwise brutalized by police turn out to be innocent of any crime. Cops don't beat up burglars, he writes. The reason, he explained, is simple. The one thing most guaranteed to provoke a violent reaction from police is a challenge to their right to, as he puts it, define the situation. Yep. That is to say. Yeah, that perfectly describes any physical interaction with police. Absolutely.

This is one of the things I like about Grayley, because this is something that I noticed when I was in academia, is it is very, very easy to tell who, like when you're reading a social theorist talking about stuff, like who has been tear gassed before and who hasn't? It's like, who has been tear gassed before and who hasn't yeah i'm always reminded when we talk about like academics who have a real fucking life of that picture of edward saeed throwing stones yeah yeah single most based academic thing anyone has done yeah and like graber graber i think i think it's been tear gas on five continents or

something like that like he's he's he's, he's gotten around. He's, he's done a lot of stuff. Yeah. It is, it is always nice whenever the, you can, whenever these types of theorists who like, you know, they often will philosophize about like the nature of power and the nature of the state. And sometimes it can get a little bit wishy-washy and it's nice when there's people who do that and also know like the material like

the material reality of like power yeah and and how that transfers on yeah like how how how like the how like the philosophy of power transfers over to street politics is always uh always an interesting difference to to to compare compare various theory to in 2020 i was teaching a world history course and obviously it's remote because of the pandemic right um so like we would just log in in the morning like fully aware that i had seen and been tear gassed with some of my students the night before and then just discussed like how the state has a monopoly on violence people would be like yeah well that fucking lines up looks like you've got a massive bruise again yeah it was very instructive and everyone

should do it in their history classes yeah okay so i'm gonna keep reading uh from this quote because there's a couple more things i want i want to get out of this cool so okay so he you know he's talking about how like you you get a violent reaction from challenging their right to define the situation that is to say no this isn't a possible crime situation. This is a citizen who pays your salary walking his dog situation, so shove off, let alone the invariably disastrous, wait, why are you handcuffing that guy? He didn't do anything. So true. It's talking back above all that inspires beatdowns and means challenging whatever administrative rubric, an orderly, a disorderly crowd, a properly or improperly

registered vehicle, has been applied by the officer's discretionary judgment. The police truncheon is precisely the point where the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force come together. It only makes sense, then, that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost on attacks on those who insist on alternative schemas or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts Jean Piaget's famous definition of mature intelligence as the ability to coordinate between multiple perspectives or possible perspectives, one can see here precisely how bureaucratic power at the moment

it turns to violence becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity yeah it's it is this weird like childlike sense that is a that is an interesting combination of thoughts that's a fantastic grabe of passage i love it it's just i like literally reading this book book is one of the things that really sort of committed me to anarchism because it's a book that actually takes violence seriously while talking about bureaucracy, which is something that really doesn't – I don't know. It's a good critique, and we kind of have lost it over the years i feel like we've gotten into arguments about this sort of thing when discussing the usefulness of like uh fuko's um theories about power and like how power functions you've definitely brought up this passage before talking about how the extent of that is always is always measured by where the truncheon is hitting uh yeah on like the actual street level yeah but you know okay graber isn't writing about gender here really right he's he's mostly writing about sort of direct police violence although i mean it is worth noting that like all the stuff that he's writing is informed by sort of like

like uh by actually specifically by by actual critical race theory and by sort of like uh like feminist standpoints theory stuff yeah um but you know okay if if you if you look back at this right and you look back at sort of the you know the the the the point at which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schemes and the monopoly on force come together or specifically the parts that are about right like the the way you get a violent reaction is by being something that being something that a bureaucrat thinks you're not. Yeah, that is it's challenging their their version of reality. It's challenging the validity of their perception of reality.

Yeah. And, you know, if you think about this for about five seconds, if you're a trans person, that's not good because someone, a bureaucrat has already assigned you a gender at birth. And if you're not that gender, things are going to get really bad really quickly. Well, do you know what bureaucracies are actually worthwhile and things that you should definitely consider greatly is all of the bureaucracies that support the products and services that,

that fund this podcast. 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. 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. 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, peliculas, 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 week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me 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.

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them

to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Check out betteroff it. Violence. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So, you know, if you are, for example, intersex, the point at which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and its monopoly on coercive force comes together is on the operating table of the hospital where you're born. You know, first, a doctor assigns you a fucking gender, which is never intersex, by the way. The doctor just decides whether you're male or female and then you know puts that gender on your birth certificate um it's technically possible in some places to get it changed to intersex later in life but when i

say it's technically possible i i i there might even more people who've done it the first person who we know ever changed their gender to intersex did it in 2017 so yeah i'm sure there were like yeah i mean pre-bureaucracy indigenous societies i know that oh yes oh absolutely yeah but this is this yeah this is yeah i mean like yeah like and and this is like the the way that like we treat intersex people also has gotten worse yes yeah yeah yeah like yeah and we're gonna get into this but too but it's like it's like you know this is a very like it's a very obvious thing where there's clearly more than two genders and how how society reacts to that i think says you know a it's it's an enormous sort of like it's something that enormously impact intersex people right like you know you have like an incredible amount of violence that is inflicted onto them and then secondly the the the the way intersex people is dealt with it's something that reveals a lot about how the society is going to look at gender and how society is

going to look at the enforcement of gender i think on the point of how in a lot of ways the treatment of intersex people has gotten has gotten worse in the past like a few hundred years i feel like as the bureaucracy grows yeah the amount of violence that is necessary to maintain it also grows yeah and the the bigger any any small thing threatens the validity of the entire bureaucracy so they have to come down hard on anything that that is that is uh like deviant from that because yeah they need to maintain the validity of the system that they have built i think that's definitely an aspect yeah and the other thing that's really really bad is that you know we're going to talk about this more a bit later but like

the the actual capacity of the bureaucracy to enforce this stuff has increased so dramatically, even in the past 50 years. It is like, like the U.S. is a, if someone, someone living in 1890, right? The modern U.S. is an incomprehensibly bureaucratic society. It is like,

like it, even like the, even like the, yeah, like, you know, like, like,

like, yeah, like even like the, the, the most sort of like totalitarian Stalin is bureaucrat, like looks at the U.S. and is like even like the the the most sort of like totalitarian stalinist bureaucrat like looks at the u.s and is like what the fuck guys you guys are taking bureaucracy too far like even just like the surveillance capacity is oh he definitely would like he would have loved

that well to to be to be fair to be fair the east germans did really well with what they had but i think it's really so i think also just in terms of how surveillance impacts the way you're able to do gender when you're yeah well and this is the thing getting targeted advertisements for stuff based on your internet searches they're like that that's one side of it and there's other sides of it in terms of like you know people people seeking to make uh like different gender presentations illegal how the how that type of surveillance will eventually lead into pretty pretty uh draconian well and i think i i i think in a lot of ways like the violence that is done to intersex kids is sort of it's one of the sort of origin points of this right um i i do actually

want i want to sort of get into what what this is a little bit um since the 1960s and again there's i'm saying this like this stuff is kind of recent right um doctors have started commonly performing non-consensual surgery on intersex kids to force them to conform to a gender um here's from a 2013 report from the united nations special rapporteur on torture that's cited by human rights watch children who are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to irreversible sex assignment, involuntary sterilization, involuntary genital normalization surgery performed without their informed consent

or that of the parents in an attempt, quote, in an attempt to fix their sex, leaving them with permanent irreversible infertility and causing severe mental suffering. And this is fucking horrible. It happens all the time. And all of the people who write these fucking laws that are like giving someone gender-affirming care

is like mutilating them, specifically carve out sections so that doctors can keep fucking doing this to intersex kids. And it's horrible. It's really interesting how like, so often the sports field is a terrain where this kind of gets hashed out or like this brutality happens for the first time.

Like the sports governing authorities have been fucking brutalizing intersex athletes for 50 years now. And every time it's because, yeah, and they'll they'll put forth an argument and then lose in court most of the time because they'll they'll seek to advance like a very narrow definition of gender based on chromosomality or something or testosterone levels or something and then demonstrably this binary doesn't exist right like and then they'll lose

and they'll respond to losing by fucking destroying that person. Yeah, there are plenty of cases people can find in history of that happening, and yeah, it's fucked up. Yeah, and I think the more I've been thinking about this, the more I think that the sort of like, that a lot of what TERFism is, is this kind of like, it's attempting to take the bureaucratic categories as literal truth but that doesn't work it doesn't it doesn't actually work on a sort of either on a scientific

level or on a sort of more philosophical level because again what what what what that sort of bureaucratic assignment is is there is a radical simplification of reality that destroys it destroys reality itself in order to create a sort of like an m or an f on a page and when you when you try to go back into the real world that shit doesn't work it only works when you can enforce it with violence toughs do be loving to enforce gender with violence yeah and you know i mean and this is this entire thing is sort of this this is the basis of the sort of of the of the american gender bureaucracy right it's inherently violent it's it's not just sort of a procedure for recording what your gender is it is it always sort of has been and is increasingly more so now becoming a system

that imposes that imposes a gender on you um you know and there's also a lot of ways that this bureaucracy gets imposed on you that are, you know, less extreme. You know, if we go back to the question of, like, who are you assigned a gender for, right? You're assigned a gender for the state. And, you know, almost everything in your life depends on these bureaucratic documents because that's how the state understands you as a person. By these bureaucratic documents, like specifically birth certificates, but also things like driver's licenses, social security cards. Passports, immigration papers. Yeah, I mean, like here's the American Bar Association

talking about birth certificates. They are so common that we might even overlook their significance. In the United States, birth certificates serve as a proof of an individual's age, citizenship status, and identity. They are necessary to obtain social security, apply for a passport, enroll in schools, get a driver's license, citizenship status, and identity. They are necessary to obtain social security,

apply for a passport, enroll in schools, get a driver's license, gain employment, or apply for other benefits. Humanitarian Desmond Tutu described the birth certificate as, quote, a small paper, but it actually establishes who you are and gives access to the rights and privileges and the obligations of citizenship. You know, i think it does when chuchu is being enormously optimistic about sort of what it means to be seen by the state here because the other thing that it does is it exposes you to the state's violence in a way where you know it now the state like this is this is a mechanism through which it now knows who you are right so does not having one like yeah yeah it's when the sovsids try to not have

birth certificates for their children uh yeah it gets real violent and this and this is the thing one of the things i hear about this is that like you know okay you used to be able to like get away with not having birth certificates right like a lot of a lot of americans used to not to used to like not but one of one of the things that happens over the course of world war ii is there's this enormous expansion in the state's bureaucratic capacity and there's an expansion in the state's bureaucratic capacity because it has to you know it has to go to war but simultaneously this and this is something that didn't have to happen but did is that you get the army and you get employers starting to ask people's birth certificates but people don't have them because like i don't know i was

why the fuck do i need a record of me being born right like this is this is only this is not everything you need it's only a thing the state needs yeah it's interesting to look at like i was just thinking about how this is also where the kind of front line of colonialism happens yeah like the the enforcement of a binary gender on indigenous people like you can look at specific individuals um osh tish is one of them they were a crow person from the crow nation who like fought for the united states as a scout um was what's called a bad day and then was like in later life kind of forced to conform to a binary gender with which they didn't identify in the they hadn't lived that way and because they had to having been assigned identity papers to live on a reservation you have to tick one of the fucking boxes yeah and you know and the thing about those

fucking boxes right is you know even like to this day there are a lot of states where you can't change your gender like on on you can't change what it says in the fucking card you just can't and you know if they've assigned you a gender that's not your gender, then, well, tough luck. They have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and you don't. You know, and there's other states where you need a fucking court order saying that you've had surgery in order to get the fucking, like, you know, in order to change your bureaucratic person. And, again, the reason for this is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, fuck you. That again the reason for this is and i cannot emphasize this enough fuck you that is that that is that that is the reason for this um yeah i i want to i want to go back also to you know look to look a bit more about sort of bureaucratic effects um i'm going to read from an ieee piece about a trans guy in the uk in the 50s from the start the sensationalized

press coverage of fergus Ferguson's transition focused on some surprisingly quotidian elements. Quote, chains of sex puts him in a different employment category with a raise in salary, reported one newspaper, underscoring the fact that being reclassified as male in the eyes of his employer, the British government tied into a complex network of gendered economic and labor discrimination. In fact, not only did his pay change, but his whole job category changed, even though he was doing exactly the same work under the same conditions. This was because women workers were not simply paid less, but also kept in feminized job grades in the civil service,

despite the government's claims that service was a meritocracy. A question raised in parliament by an np who had heard about ferguson demanded to know what form and number of proofs other than a mere announcement by the subject uh they misgendered them a couple times uh it is required before a a female quote like sick like civil servant is permitted to obtain a higher salary in a different employment category owing to a change in sex. By gaining a, quote, official change,

Jonathan Ferguson suddenly transformed himself suddenly transformed into chief experimental officer with a male breadwinner salary large enough to support a family rather than a woman's lower wage that was expected to be supplemental to a family's earnings for obvious reasons noted the treasury we should not have to say anything which would have led to a request for the male pay rate to be applied from his

data's entry to the civil service in other words the treasury wanted to ensure that ferguson did not try to claim back wages incredible turf. Turf Island always been very normal. And I will read a little bit more of this. Conversely, a different civil servant, this time a trans woman, who was working in the Admiralty Department and transitioning around the same time, was advised, it was in her, quote,

interest to delay official recognition of the change until at least January 1960, assuming full equal pay in the civil service is introduced by 1961 her employers wrote that it was in their quote own interest in their opinion to continue wearing men's clothing for the time being in order to avoid a significant reduction in pay that is it's funny because like i was not funny it's fucked up and it's been stupid isn't it but uh like i knew trans people in britain who would have grown up around this time who like socially transitioned after retirement yeah or at least like openly to you know we weren't like bffs or

anything but it's absolutely fucking insane that like that this argument was deployed yeah and you know and you can you can see what's sort of going on here which is that like you know it's more it's more explicitly obvious and here than it is in a lot of other cases but your status in the gender bureaucracy is a key element of how you're able to extract resources from the state and you know sometimes that's literally just an explicit pay gap like it was based on institutional sexism but you know i i i think i think the second case is in a lot of ways more revealing right the the state and its gender bureaucracy is very explicitly saying conform to what the jet the bureaucracy says your gender is and you it'll

you'll get paid more and if you don't you'll get paid more. And if you don't, you'll get paid less. And if you look at this more abstractly, right, in order to interface with the state, in order to extract welfare benefits, in order to pay your fucking taxes, in order to drive, in order to buy alcohol, apparently now in order to buy the stupid cleaning bottles of compressed air that you have to use to clean out your computer keyboards in order to buy alcohol, in order to get on an airplane, you have to conform to the state's bureaucratic view of you. And if you don't, you can't do it. And, you know, this brings up the question, what right does the state have to assign my gender? And, you know, the state will spit out

a variety of sort of like pseudo-medical and pseudo-political explanations, but the answer is that the state has no right to tell you what your gender is except force. And, you know, the extent to which the state has actually been able to sort of do this kind of stuff has changed over time. We've talked about this a bit, but like, you know, over the course of sort of the 20th century, and we can also look at things the total number of bureaucrats the government employs, which I always love. But we've seen the sort of consequences of this playing out over the course of the last about a century. you know, the last about a century, right? If you go back to the 1890s, it was possible for basically private citizens to have just full-on wars with each other

in parts of the US, and the government would just be like, sure, okay, whatever. Like, the people mining bird shit off of the coast of California are shooting each other with cannons again, like, whatever, right? Like, it's not really until the 20th century and really even in like

the last 50 60 70 years there's been a massive expansion that's like the state actually has full territorial control over everywhere that it claims to have control of right we're like we are just now getting to a place where the police can actually you know like have like militarily hold the entire country at one time and even then they can only do it as long as people sort of cooperate with them. But, you know, this, this is really bad. If you are a person who does, who, who, who the bureaucracy has deemed to be something else or, and this is another, you know, another sort of angle on this, right?

Like if you're someone who does not have documentation, the state very, very quickly will just attempt to destroy you because, you know, another sort of angle on this, right? Like if you're someone who does not have documentation, the state very, very quickly will just attempt to destroy you because, you know, Oh, Hey, you don't, you don't have the right papers. This means the government can fucking arrest you and kick you out of the

country. Yeah. And you know, this is fucking horrible. Um, I, there's a lot of stuff, like there's a lot of other angles you can look at this from,

right? I mean, like at some point we probably will do an episode about like the process of getting medical care and all of the people who you have to convince that you are your gender. But, you know, that's another episode entirely. just increasingly politicized gender bureaucrats, not only to force people to comply with their sort of state mandated gender when they deal with the state, but also to force them to inhabit that gender in their private lives, which is constitutes nothing less than a form of full scale gender totalitarianism.

We talked about that fucking Utah bill, which, you know, again, prohibits minors from getting gender affirming surgery. PB block is a hormone treatment that That is a bill that forces people to live in their state-mandated gender. In Florida, gender bureaucrats are

allowed to physically inspect athletes they suspect of being trans, which is to say not conforming to fucking state bureaucratic gender controls. It's children, right? Yeah, fucking children. They are allowed to molest your child

because they think they're trans the other aspect of this is obviously there this is something we've talked about before it's something that you're starting to see with these bills is they're trying to make the bills uh uh age number go as high as possible yes there's bills proposing 25 now 21 there's bills proposing... I think it was 25 now. 21. There's bills proposing 25. So it's trying to police and control the bodily autonomy of complete adults, which obviously is not a new thing for the GOP specifically,

especially in the wake of the Roe v. Wade overturning. But just another aspect of this goes beyond just people who are younger than the age of 19. They're going to try to keep raising this as much as possible. And this is where the types of surveillance that I was talking about before, it's going to become a problem. Because if you're Googling how to do DIY HRT and get stuff shipped in from Brazil, googling how to do diy hrt and get stuff shipped in from brazil uh don't think that the surveillance stuff's not gonna not gonna uh impact your ability to do that they'd also police is like the gender presentation of cis people specifically cis women i think like the people who are getting physically inspected because of these laws are just girls who are good at fucking sport. Like, they're cis girls, they just might be taller or stronger.

And, like, anyone has the power to just be like, oh, you're not a girly enough girl. So, fucking, now you get to go to the pervert room and get inspected by Matt Gaetz. You know, we've seen this in Texas, right? The law right now is that if the state thinks your fucking child is not sufficiently close to their gender, they can fucking take your child from you and force them to be whatever fucking gender the state wants them to be, right?

And, you know, any other period in history, if you walk into a room and tell a bunch of people the state is going to decide your fucking gender, everyone would lose their goddamn minds. This would be like – this is a, like, unfathomable, like even in sort of like the depths of the sort of totalitarian, like nightmare states, this is like an unfathomable level of sort of state bureaucratic, like imposition onto people's lives. And yet, you know, it's the fucking U S right. We have, we have the, we are the most bureaucratic society humanity has ever produced. Nobody thinks it's the most bureaucratic society has ever produced. And, you know, we are right now every, 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex 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. 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, peliculas, 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 week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me 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. The last thing I have to say is that,

you know, like this is the future of gender. The future of gender is government bureaucrats, whether they're cops, politicians, doctors, child protective services, or school board administrators administrators forcing you to be a gender that they're not but fundamentally they have no fucking right to do this right what they have is power and their grasp on power is still right now tenuous so you know it is possible to stop them from going any further than this it is possible to beat back the power of the state and it is possible to have a world that's not this and we know it's possible to have a world

that's not this because it wasn't fucking like this like 50 years ago so yeah fuck them and that's that's that's that that's that that's gender bureaucrats people should read david graber learn about intersectionality for a fucking second. Another great resource to learn about how you can mix up gender stuff. There's this new video game out right now which has a pretty intense character creation selection. Fucking God. It's called, let me see, it's called Hogwarts Legacy? Is that what it's called?

Oh no, I thought you were going with Cyberpunk. What it's called? Oh, no! I thought you were going with Cyberpunk. What's it called? Oh, no. It has a lot of different customizations that you can do for your gender presentation

and your body parts. So that's pretty cool. I've been refusing to do this on Twitter, but I need to take fucking one minute to talk about the dumbest argument

anyone's ever made, which is that I have to buy this game in order to support the developers, which, think about this for five seconds, right? Okay, if you have to buy this game to support ever made which is that I have to buy this game in order to support the developers which think about this for five seconds right okay if you have to buy this game to support the developers don't you have to buy every other game

to support their developers in fact are you not morally obligated to buy every single product on earth because if you don't buy every single product that's ever been made those people who made those products will not be deployed it's bullshit fuck off this is such a weird like capitalism poisoned

moment here of thinking you're obligated to consume lots of people online I have been holding my tongue on twitter about this for months now watching people watching people make the argument I have to buy something to support the developers which again buy a different game support those developers

buy fucking go on strike I don't know if you want to support the developers someone who isn't a fucking video game developer well I'm glad we could have that special bonding moment over

the very inclusive gender settings inside this new hit video game. So that's pretty cool. Hopefully we get an ad from them soon. I hope so. I hope so. The worst Twitter day of my life is the day we get that fucking ad. Gold presented by Hogwarts. gold presented by Hogwarts. 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.

Listen to Nocturnal 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 Tex Elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google Search, Better Offline is your unvarnished

and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999,

five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.