It Could Happen Here - The Trans Genocide: A Seige And A Counter Attack

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

Mia and James talk about the recent anti-trans legislation and rules in Missouri, Montana, Kansas, and Nebraska and how you can stop themSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the transgenocide because it keeps happening and so we keep having to do episodes about it because it just gets worse uh yeah i'm mia wong with me is james i'm here yeah i'm excited to hear more about uh what people are doing to trans people in uh different parts of this country yeah the answer is not good so nice things okay at about 5 a.m this morning i was watching a video from last year, and they had this line about how there's been 100 anti-trans bills in 2022 alone,

and like, oh boy, that is a quaint figure from a more civilized age. We are three months into 2020, and there's been 500 anti-trans bills across the country. That was a Freudian slip. We are three years into 2020 my friend oh god yeah three three months 23 that one which i guess it won't work out like this but technically speaking if this pace continues we're on track for what yeah we're on track for i think 2000 this year which would be great. Ace. Yeah, it's good.

We'll be rebooting Manzanar by November. Now, most of these bills, as we've talked about before, are going to fail, but a lot of them haven't. And the other sort of aspect of this that I think has been less reported on, but is also extremely important, is that, okay, so if you want to do anti-trans bullshit, you have like three options, basically. okay so if you want to do anti-trans bullshit you have like three options basically you have you try to get a bill through the legislature you have the governor doing a mandate or something and then you have the attorney general doing some bullshit and our our first story from the

front lines of the worst shit that's happening is from Missouri, where Missouri's Attorney General Andrew Bailey has issued a, quote, emergency rule that claims that because gender-affirming care is, quote, experimental, it's already banned by state law. Which is nonsense. But, it

gets worse? I don't know if it's worth, like, addressing this shit head-on because it's so clearly bullshit, but, like, we have more than a century of people yeah receiving gender affirming care and transitioning it's it's like people people television is more experimental than gender affirming care yeah like this stuff like airplanes are more experimental this stuff predates the nazis like it's like it's old right yeah it definitely predates passenger flight yeah like so okay i mean that this is like a standard turf argument though is that it's like oh it's experimental it's like no it's not okay so these rules are oh boy okay uh here's from so

i think it was st louis yeah the city government of state lewis put out a thing about it that was basically like this is bullshit. They said, quote, the Attorney General's Emergency Regulations Institute extreme restrictions that require one medically documented gender dysphoria for three years to at least 15 consecutive therapy sessions over 18 months. And three, that all mental health conditions are treated and resolved prior to gaining access to gender affirming care. There's also this section that is. I'm just going to read it. I don't have any words. I don't have any analysis for this.

to a patient who is a minor to ensure that the patient has received a comprehensive screening at least annually for social media addiction or compulsion and has not for at least six months prior to beginning of any intervention suffered from social media addiction or compulsion so

wow yeah now so the good news is that this rule is supposed to go into effect like before this episode was recorded uh it was there instantly there are a bunch of lawsuits it's been blocked by a judge until may 15th yay so hopefully the judge will be like this is obviously illegal uh not holding out hope for that uh this is probably the worst law on the books anywhere in the country right now. Maybe, well, I'll show you the other really bad one, but we'll see. But, okay, so the notable thing about this law is that this is not just a ban for minors.

This is for everyone. And, you know, there's lots of atrocious stuff in here, right? Like, if you have autism, for example, and there's a different thing about screening for autism if you have autism you cannot transition jesus and you know even you know the other part of this right even if you're like a 99 year old on your fucking deathbed you can't transition unless you fulfill all of these bullshit requirements there's this like there's a social media compulsion thing which is this sort of bizarre like social contagion bullshit these people have been spreading for a long time yeah especially given like where the fuck do we think their trans panic comes from it's because they logged on to facebook and your racist

uncle joey had posted something about like how twitter is transing his niece's gender yeah and you know and this is like all of this stuff is very like we're getting into we're getting into the part of this where it's just sort of like they're like copying and pasting turf rants into like laws yeah um the the mental health care thing is like just awful you know for example if you have depression one of the reasons you might have depression if you're trans is because you have dysphoria yeah so you're caught in this loop where if you try to get care for the depression you can't get like treatment for the dysphoria but if you get treatment for the dysphoria you can't get it for the depressions right yeah you're totally alienated from getting care and like i'm sure living in a fucking state which

is trying with surgical precision to force you to to pick which way you want to be suffering it's not like great for your mental health to be like being a trans person in missouri would be pretty hard given that the state is using all its powers to stop you getting any yeah and you know i mean everything that's about this is like the the therapy requirements the the the the 15 therapy things over 18 months is just effectively a ban because do you know how fucking hard it is to get an appointment with a gender therapist like it is so like there are

we are talking about something where there are optimistically dozens of these people for an entire state it is fucked it is so bad even in states where it's legal, right, this is sort of the grim joke

of, like, the anti-trans canard, like, it's too easy for kids to get gender-affirming care, and they're giving out hormones like candy. It's like, no. No, it's really, even in states where it's legal to get gender-affirming care, it's hard as fuck, takes forever, and is expensive. And, you know, given how few therapists there are are and how hard it is to

clear those requirements the missouri rule is just effectively a ban on gender affirming care for everyone now it's been stayed for now but this is really bad people are fleeing the state um we're going to talk more about trans refugees later but you know basically every state that has passed one of these laws has refugees already i know i personally know multiple people who fled multiple states yeah um it's really fucking bad uh it's also you know i mean like it it is genuinely important to make sure these people get supported make sure people have a way out it's also not a solution because there's just going to be new trans kids born into these states so yeah yeah we can't fix it by the existing trans people leaving and like

obviously those people have their friends and their family and their community there like we don't fix it by them going somewhere completely different yeah so now we're gonna move to the next state where shit's happening that this one i don't know the the stuff that's happening in kansas is also like okay relative to the amount of media attention it's gotten this is the worst thing that's happening uh in absolute terms it's unbelievably bad okay so there's a bill in k Kansas that people are calling a bathroom bill. And they're calling it that because bathroom bill is a terminology that they have. This is not a bathroom bill. We need to be very clear about this.

This is way, way, way, way fucking worse than a bathroom bill. So this is a bill that what it does is in the eyes of the state, it legally assigns you a gender by defining male and female in all state in all state laws as and I'm going to let the legislature take it from here. Women are those who, quote, biologically whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce over. And men are those, quote, whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilizeva and men are those quote whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female which I yeah hey radfams I hope you're fucking happy

now you've gotten the state to legally define your gender as based on your reproductive capacity yeah we've done a speed run of the fucking what's the thing where they all wear the bonnets? Yeah. Yeah.

And here's a- And it just intersects. People cannot exist in Kansas. Yeah, you're fucked. It's worse. Okay, so here's KSNT, which is a news outlet in Kansas. In addition to restrooms, the legislation would define words like woman, man, mother, and father in areas like athletics, prisons,

or other detention facilities, domestic violence centers, rape crisis centers, locker rooms, and quote, other areas where biology, safety, or privacy are implicated that could result in separate accommodations. Jesus Christ. Yeah. So, uh, supposedly this is going to be on a case by case basis, but you know, like this is going to lead to trans women being put in Ben's prisons where

they will be raped and almost certain, like almost certainly will be raped quite possibly will be killed because that happens all the time. I, you know, this is, I mean like kicking trans women out of domestic violence centers and rape crisis centers when, you know, and this is going to happen.

And, you know, similar like bullshit's going to happen to trans men and also to non-binary people who all of whom are abused and assaulted at rates that are fucking indescribable. I mean, there is also the bathroom bill shit, like the worst version of bathroom bill shit we've ever seen. I mean, there is also the bathroom bill shit, like the worst version of bathroom bill shit we've ever seen. And, you know, but but also so this is not the only one of these bills that we'll talk about the other one in Montana in a little bit. But because the Kansas Republicans are somehow even more cretinous than their colleagues in Montana, they have written the bill in such a way that in the words of Pink News, quote, in such a way that in the words of pink news, quote definitions outlined in the bill also state that a female, a female is a person who produces over, in other words, eggs meeting CIS women who are infertile and are unable to produce eggs could

be barred from spaces under the legislation's legal terms. Likewise, CIS men, I guess. Yeah, it's, it's, yeah.

Like, or like if you have like fucking had an accident or you know like yeah you know and it's bullshit like it pointing out the logical errors it doesn't really work because that's not really the point is it like like their point is not to be like logically sound it's to be cruel yeah but but but i i think there is something very important about this which is that this this is a very very firm example of how the struggle for trans rights and sort of you know like trans bodily autonomy is intimately connected for the struggle with abortion rights because if you if you look at what's happened here right republican lawmakers are literally defining women by their by their capacity to produce children for them yeah so you know this is this is not like the these are two very very interconnected struggles and the same people have the same absolutely dog

shit like horrific patriarchal politics in both of them so okay so we're gonna we're gonna leave can't uh nebraska okay so we've we've had two really grim stories in a row we're gonna have one that's slightly less grim which is nebraska so okay there has been a bill to ban gender affirmative care for minors but it is being staved off basically single-handedly by the genuinely heroic efforts of state senators megan hunt and michella cavendale who have been filibustering literally every bill that goes to the state senate to stop it from happening which fucking rips yeah and like you know and okay so basically the thing is like we will we will filibuster literally every single bill until they stop trying to patch this ban through and

you know this is the okay so like there was there was a thing that happened in the early 2010s where in the in the u.s like the big u.s senate right they changed the rules about filibustering so you don't actually have to stand there and talk for eight hours because they're fucking cowards and enormous pieces of shit uh in that is not true in nebraska if you want to filibuster a bill you have to fucking stand up there and talk for eight hours and they have been doing this for months yeah and it's it's it's holding um that you know basically so the way filibuster works right is you can't like in the senate and then also in the state senate you can't stop someone from talking unless they like during debate you can't stop someone talking unless you get a two-thirds vote of the body for a motion of cloture and so they've just been forcing him to do it for every single bill they don't have the votes in some of the bills yeah it you know and the reason i think this is

this is happening you know the reason that they've been doing this and not sort of just like like doing bullshit like most of the democrats well partially it's because there's a senate and partially because senator hunt hunt has a 12 year old trans son yeah which yeah has given her you know a sort of urgency that's absent from democrats in other states yeah it's not theoretical for her yeah and i mean like this is one of the things that sucks about this right it's like it it should not fall on you know like literally the trend like the the rights of the children of an entire state are falling on like one mom and the few other democrats who decided to take a stand with her and that's fucked that is nonsense like it's yeah it's great that she's doing it, but like, yeah, yeah. This is, yeah, this is horrible.

Yeah. Um, do you know what else is horrible? Uh, is it the products and services that support our podcast? Uh, by FTC regulations. I don't think I can legally say that,

but no, no, we do. We don't know. It's not, not that. Yeah. Welcome.

I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. And we're back. Okay, so now we're going to get to, to i think the most famous story or most most well known story of an anti-trans fight that's been happening recently and that is montana

so montana has passed a bill that bans gender affirming care from binaries and also opposes legal sanctions anyone who does it governor greg giafanti like has a non-binary son who's a he they and he like gave a speech it was like dad fucking don't sign these bills and his dad signed them anyways yeah uh one of the co-sponsors of this bill on the floor of of of the montana house said she'd rather her children die than transition and then out of it yeah she had to give a press conference later saying she didn't actually mean that but like no that's literally what she said on the floor of the fucking house so these people are ghouls

and monsters they are the dogs of the sort of the Republican Freedom Caucus which is their like absolutely deranged like Matt Gaetz fucking weirdos in Congress who are if you remember that republican freedom caucus which is their like absolutely deranged like matt gates fucking weirdos in congress who were if you remember that giant fight over the speaker of the house like that was those freaks likes the yeah um these people are like their local sort of like dogs

there's two other absolutely terrifying bills that are about to become law there's hb 359 which is a ban on kids attending drag shows which like that bill has gotten less bad than it was which is it's now a ban on kids attending adult entertainment but you know i guess it gets to decide what adult entertainment is etc etc right yeah and that bill has passed both the house and senate is waiting for reconciliation uh there is the even worse SB 458, which is basically the bill from Kansas, except I'm just going to read some of it. Female means a member of the human species

who under normal development has produced XX chromosomes and produces or would produce relatively large immobile gametes or eggs during her life cycle and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around those production of gametes. An individual who would otherwise fall within this

definition but for a biological or genetic condition is female. So this is straight TERF shit, right? This is the straight up like a woman is an adult human female thing that like these people walk around saying thinking is like a normal thing to say. Yeah, and thinking that

specifically the chromosomality thing, we know has been bullshit for a very long time. Yeah, I mean, it's nonsense. These people don't understand biology. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, and we can like, the example is this woman called Maria Jose Martinez Patino, who was a hurdler who won a number of events

and then lost her medals because she failed a chromosomality test and fucking ruined her life. Right. Lost her fiance, lost her job, lost all her competitions and was able to successfully sue with the help of like leading experts in the field to prove that like, I think she had like mosaic,

she exhibited mosaicism like XXY and that like, this is in fact a normal fucking variation in in a human species and like this was in the 80s and we're still doing this shit yep her papers are really good by the way she's a professor of philosophy now oh cool yeah yeah she's uh yeah she's great i've spoken to her a few times but yeah rare rare w yeah but like these people are doing... They are... This bill legally writes trans people out of existence. And it is, again, another one of these

gender-pericard things where the state is legally defining what gender you are. But also, again, they have to do all this bullshit because... These people are slightly... I don't know if smarter is the thing like these guys these people are like slightly i don't know if smarter is the right word but they're they're slight they're slightly more engaged in

turf shit so they have a more convoluted like yeah biological misconception of what a woman is which they can't define because it's not a thing like yeah it's a social construct yeah because they can't society yeah and put in mind of south africa constantly chasing the fucking definition of what race was and like trying to define uh like multi-racial kids into one box or another box yeah it's you know it doesn't work but the problem is this bill is going to be signed by the governor like next week probably possibly this week like in the next couple of weeks is going to be signed um so that's really fucking bad so the part of the story that i think is the most well-known is montana republicans crusade against montana house rep zoe zephyr zoe zephyr is trans she is

a rep for a part of missoula which is is a college town home to the University of Montana. We talked about this a bit when Zoe won her seat, but before we really get into what's been happening to Zoe, I want to talk a bit about Missoula and a bit about the geography of transmigration because the way the media talks about this is that trans refugees and transmigration is something that started with these anti-trans bills. And that's not true. This is – all of this stuff, all of the sort of fleeing, all of the refugee stuff predates Tennessee.

It predates Missouri. It's always been happening. Yeah. always been happening yeah you know because and the the actual process of this is that you know for for generations and generations the wretched of the earth get fed to the wolves and then the wolves spit them out of their homes and their communities and they fled they fled to places like portland and philadelphia and atlanta and chicago places where people like us had clawed out in existence in a world that wants us dead, where we continuously survive off the shit end of urban labor markets. And this is something that has happened beneath the notice or even the contempt of bourgeois

society, but it's been going on for longer than we've had the words that we use today to describe it. And, you know, Missoula is one of those places where you can go when your family kicks you out. And, you know, and that's not the only way people end up here, right? Like there's a lot of people who, you know, you know, have better stories, right? They go to college, they discover themselves. There are people who go here because it's where they've chosen to make new lives. And, you know, sometimes there's also just people who are from Missoula who just realize they're trans. they're trans yeah and you know it's this mix of sort of trans refugees trans migrants and the local trans community that you know all fuse together and becomes a sort of beautiful community

that we've been you know has finally like stepped out of the shadows in the last like 10 years and you know and this is why it's not enormously surprising that bazula sent zoe's effort to helena to represent them because this is you know again like this is why it's not enormously surprising that Missoula sent Zoe Zephyr to Haleta to represent them because this is, you know, again, like this is one of these places that like collects people from all over Montana and, you know, from all over like Eastern Washington too. Some of these people go to Seattle, some of these people go to Portland, but yeah, there have always been these massive networks of migration that just, you know, no one ever, no one researches, no one talks about, no one even, it's hard to even know they exist unless you know the people who like have been moved along them. The product of this now is that Zoe Zephyr is trans, is in the, you know, on the floor of the house debating with Republican legislatures this bill to ban healthcare for trans youth. And she says, quote, if you vote yes on this

bill and yes on these amendments, I hope the next time there's an invocation when you bow your hands in prayer, you see the blood on your hands, which I really wish, because the media talks about the blood on your hands being constant, and I wish they read the whole quote because it fucking rips. Like, it's great.

Yeah, I think you need to, like, there's no fucking point in bourgeois civility with this stuff, is there? Yeah, I know. And this has been one of the things that's been happening, right? It's like, the Republicans, their backlash to this has been a sort of like, oh, you're not being civil thing, right? oh you're not being civil thing right and like in uh uh like senator hunt in uh uh nebraska was like literally didn't actually literally say fuck you but you know like said like yeah like no i'm not gonna i'm not gonna like show up to like your like your dinner parties or whatever like like you don't don't say hi to me in the halls like you know my fucking kid like and you know what you're doing to them that's the way to approach

it right like like the person being upset with the person trying to legislate your little trans son out of existence yeah it's like fuck these people they're not gonna do this shit okay so there's a couple of theories as to why what happened next happened next um there's been a lot of speculation that it's been like oh this is like a gambit byit by the Freedom Caucus to like turn Zoe Zephyr into like the face of the Montana Democratic Party so they can win a Senate race. It's like, I actually don't buy that. I think very specifically the when you close your hands to pray, you see the blood on your hands thing.

I think they got really fucking pissed off and then they just kept escalating. So after that happens, theana republicans formally censor her and they prevent her from speaking on the floor until she apologizes and it's always like no fuck you i got much doesn't actually say fuck you but she's like no i'm not gonna apologize right yeah um there are there are a bunch of like pretty large protests like in helena that are like you know that are like pro- trans protests and protests to like, let Zoe speak. And they arrest seven of the protesters.

I, one of the people they arrest was, I think a woman on crutches who like couldn't clear the area fast enough. Yeah. She was on crutches. Yeah. Yeah. It's like,

I've seen that go down before people in chairs and all kinds of shit. And then, and then the, the, so there's like, there's, there's like... I've seen that go down before, people in chairs and all kinds of shit. And then... So there's, like, there's protests in the gallery, right? And the Montana Republicans start doing this whole thing about how this is the Democratic January 6th.

And, like, they were storming the capitol, the capitol was in his seat. They tried to do that in Tennessee as well. Like, it's so pathetic. Like, it's so asinine. Yeah, and the other thing I want to mention about this,ennessee as well like it's so pathetic like it's so asinine yeah and the other thing i want to mention about this right is like okay like the montana freedom caucus people and all like the censors and the fucking press releases are just constantly misgendering zoe it is it's really fucking ugly uh yeah and you know so after these protests the house like banishes her from the floor and

kicks her out of her offices and so she shows up like to work from a bench outside the chambers where like legally they can't kick her out of but then like i mean this is an ongoing saga right like this morning she showed up and there were like three really old white women sitting on the bench. The Speaker of the House's mum. Oh, the Speaker of the House's mum. Jesus Christ. Yeah, like this fucking big Montana tough guy had to call his mum to fight his battles for him. Like just insanely puerile, asinine nonsense. But it's unfortunately has very real consequences.

nonsenine nonsense uh but it's unfortunately has very real consequences yeah and like you know so she was like at like a lot she was like like had her like tablet like on a lunch counter taking meetings from like like standing at that counter yeah i it's it's been a whole thing also i think earlier today someone someone tried to swat her girlfriend yeah who's the journalist aaron reed uh so that's bad uh this whole thing's been getting like an unbelievable amount of media attention and you know in a very very short period of time zoe zephyr goes from someone who i know about because i'm trans and like all trans people are like four hops away from each other there's something i probably shouldn't say but like it's true yeah you kind of get forced into it there aren't that many of us and a lot of us are extremely online so like you know like i'm like two hops away from this person right like

from multiple angles with her right yeah i met her like very briefly on a stream she's you know like she's a good person she i don't know she's just like this is one of the things that i think like i've met a couple of the or a few of the like very famous like trans people who sort of come under the gun and they're just normal fucking people like just normal trans people and this bullshit happens to them yeah it's so like bullshit that like like i know a number of trans ladies who are bike racers right and like they like it must be pretty clear that if you win a fucking race if you win a big race like you know what's coming for you you know fucking bright part news is gonna have you on there the next day. And the same for her, right?

She likely would have been aware that the moment she tried to defend her right to fucking exist, all the very worst people around the country would be baying for blood. But she's very brave. She did it anyway. She should. Fuck them. They shouldn't be able to silence her. Yeah.

Okay, we should take an ad break yeah one more time and then yeah we'll come back and say something funny this bit more welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. 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. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, your podcast. to protecting and celebrating our stories. Blacklit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks

while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers

and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking.

It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Okay, we're back. Okay, so in the middle of all of this, Zoe went home to, I think there was like a recess or something because legislatures work like two days a year. Rich people hours.

Yeah, it's bullshit. Yeah, they have like a break for fucking horse racing and you have to do polo or whatever. Yeah, but so she went home to Missoula and there was a, just like a massive march. There was this rally that turned into like this basically like a 24 hour long party uh people my famous story for this there's some people who okay so they brought beer they had got from rowing a boat out to a derailed train ah yes uniting the two media narratives of 2023 yeah yeah i mean it's great and like you know i mean i i think in in these sort of moments right you you can see the new world there

right you can you can see a world where you know we no longer live in fear this you can see this world where we're where we're free to create joy and meaning and art and our lives you know can be a celebration of the beauty that's in and around us but that world the world that generations and generations of trans people have fought and died to sort of claw out of the dirt the world tried to bury us in that world will die unless we fight for it and that fight cannot be left to individual state representatives there's not enough of them eventually they will lose and and this is this is the other story of montana right as as much as you know as much as what's

been going on in montana is a story about a trans woman defying like all of the sort of organized power for state like all of those bills passed and there is not enough power to if we keep trying to fight them in legislatures and we keep trying to only fight them in in the legislatures and in court we're going to lose but okay i i probably shouldn't say this before i i know we've locked in the title but the the projected title of this is is the trans is the trans genocide siege, and a counterattack. And I promised a counterattack. So now I'm going to fucking give it to you.

You didn't want like brief notes on the siege. You could have gone full Maoist on the title. We did that with the other one. And I realized after the last episode we did on this that I could have just called it counterattack and that would have been better. So I've saved it for this moment. I'm glad that you get to use it so okay what one of the things that's become incredibly apparent in the last in the last few years is that as as much as there is

sort of passive transphobia in society transphobia is not a sort of nebulous idea that just like floats freely around the world. It is brought into this world by men. And, you know, we know the foundational story of how these men and women gained power, right? They cut a deal with capital to reconstitute the Republican Party in the 80s. But, you know, this is both their weakness and their strength, right? It's their strength because this gives them an enormous amount of resources to pull on. It gives them the institutional backing of an entire political party. But its weakness is that it means that capital and the transphobes are bound together. And this means that when you

scratch a capitalist, a transphobe bleeds. Now, the other things that we know are, A, there is power in logistics, logistics and b there are companies profiting from genocide fedex for example fedex's headquarters are in tennessee tennessee has passed a bunch of tendencies like the state where this shit all fucking started right with the original bathroom bills with their drag bills with their aunt you know they've also passed uh bans on minors getting gender affirming care there are are other states where you can look at the largest sort of companies in the States, like Missouri is probably like Panera, Montana is Schneider Electric, Kentucky is probably KFC.

And those companies are weaknesses. So what am I talking about here? I'm not talking about a boycott because this is the US. Nobody fucking knows how to do a boycott. Like when Americans try to do a boycott, they buy like 16 pallets of bud light and shoot it with a bazooka right like this is this a boycott it is not what what i'm talking about here is something a lot more serious you know we we've we've seen this sort of

sorry let me rephrase this we've sort of the sort of echoes of what this kind of campaign could look like with the SOPCOP city protests with, you know, you have protests outside the offices of banks and outside of corporations that are backing that are backing COP city. But I'm talking, you know, that and that at the most mild is something that we should be doing right these companies that are profiting from genocide the companies that are you know funded by the fucking tax exemptions that are given out by these states the companies that are you know giving money to these people political campaigns but i'm talking about more than that i'm talking about blockades this is you know very specifically fedex is quite possible possibly the best example of a company that you can that you can just target right talking about blockades we're talking about supply, like disrupting their supply chains. I'm talking about, very specifically,

a campaign to put the trans sword through the arteries of capital and make the bastards bleed. I'm talking about a counterattack. Now, the advantage of this strategy, of picking corporations, targeting them, and not just necessarily protesting outside of their offices without doing that but specifically actually making them fucking bleed actually disrupting their ability to function as a company right the advantage of this strategy which is

developed in sort of broad strokes with my dear friend vicky osterweil is that what one of the big one of the big problems we have in this whole fight is this sort of weird is this geographic mismatch right right you know the majority of people in the US and also the majority of people in most of the states where this is happening right don't support this shit but it doesn't matter because you know the districts are gerrymandered to fuck

and you know but it means that like there's a lot of people who like me for example like I live in Illinois right like the you know under normal circumstances the best I can do is help my friends in Missouri get out and try to help, like, you know, do banks, the financial institutions that are funding this shit, we can hit them everywhere. Because states have borders, but capital doesn't. And that means that, you know, if you are specifically, you want to target the legislature of Kentucky, you can go after fucking KFC, right? You can go after their banks.

You can go after anyone who funds them. We can hit them on multiple fronts here, right? We can hit them with protests. But these companies also, they rely on our labor, right? A lot of these places are either sort of fast food chains or logistics networks. And that's a place where trans people are overrepresented because trans people are overrepresented in the service sector. Again, because it's easier to get jobs there institutional transphobia locks you out of better jobs they also rely on public infrastructure they rely on you know streets being open right they rely on an entire logistics network to make sure that not only are they

extracting the labor of people that they are like you know the the sort of like theoretical term for this is realization right they have to actually be able to sell. They have to be able to assemble the product. They have to be able to sell it. And you can stop those things, right? I mean, KFC and sometimes it's also kind of hard because there's franchise shit going on. But that's not true with FedEx. Like every FedEx office is FedEx.

And, you know, these are companies that, maybe we can't fucking drive them underground. Right. But we can make them bleed and we can make it, we can make it painful enough to be complicit in this genocide that these people that, you know, these people get fucking axed. Right.

We can, we can, we can make them bleed. We can go. And you know, another, another thing that, you know,

people can do right. Is it's not that, you know, if, if, if, if you have like a spare afternoon on a weekend right it's not that hard to figure out the like the specific business

interests of the legislatures who are voting for this stuff you can just do this all these people are unbelievably corrupt they have land deals that they're doing and so you know open records laws and let you see who donates to all those people as well yeah yeah and Yeah. And there are websites that you can just Google who gives donations to people. And yeah, it's like donations trackers. And you can just plug in their name and it will show you everyone who donates to them. Yeah. And so we have learned through sort of the experience of the past few years, right, that these people cannot be swayed by logic. They cannot be swayed by logic they cannot be swayed by they can't be swayed by logic they cannot be swayed by science they cannot be swayed

by you know they cannot be swayed by emotional appeals they do not give a shit about trans people they would literally rather have their kids die than be trans but again the one thing they do care about is capital. And if you, if you, if you, if you, if you make capital bleed, these people will bleed too.

And that will actually fucking hurt them. And that will give you the leverage you need to let, to let these people make a choice, right? It's either us or the world of capital burns. It could happen here as 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

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