It Could Happen Here - The War on Trans People: Part 2, TERF Island

Episode Date: March 22, 2022

In part 2 we look at how an ex-eco militant turned conspiracy theorist helped turn the United Kingdom turned into TERF Island and meet a new international transphobic alliance. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee 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. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating.

I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers

as a fake gecko therapist and try to learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's very interesting. Check it out for yourself by searching for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about the war against trans people. I'm your host, Christopher Wong. In February, a camp of indigenous and ecological protesters attempting to stop the Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada was thrown into chaos over an unexpected issue, transphobia.

mine in Nevada was thrown into chaos over an unexpected issue. Transphobia. Two of the camp activists, including a man who had volunteered to act as an attorney for the group, were revealed to be members of another organization called Deep Green Resistance, or DGR. Nominally, Deep Green Resistance is an ecological organization dedicated to destroying industrial society to preserve the environment through promoting the destruction of dams and other infrastructure. Deep-Grim Resistance has found little success on this front, but they have been much more successful in spreading the other core of their ideology, militant, ruthless, and fanatical transphobia. When the indigenous protesters at Thacker Pass discovered the two's membership in DGR and their resultant transphobia, They were furious. Falk, the DGR lawyer who had offered to represent the protesters, was kicked off the case, and the presence of the two DGR

members was used by Lithium America as a weapon against the protesters. This is a familiar cycle for Deep Green Resistance. Soon after its founding in 2011, the group fully embraced radical feminism, staking out a position in an old debate inside the feminist movement raging since the 1970s over whether trans women are in fact women. These feminists, I use the term loosely here, became known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs. Their heroes were people like Janice Raymond, author of the vehemently transphobic screed the Transsexual Empire. Raymond, whose BFL influence we will return to next episode, was largely ran out of the mainstream American feminist movement with the rest of her TERF companions.

A similar fate would befall Deep Green Resistance. Ecological activists in groups like Earth First, Greenpeace, the IWW, and the broader Green Anarchist movement, cis and trans alike, ran DGR out of the ecological left for the transphobia and waged an incredibly successful no-platforming campaign against DGR's founders, Derek Jensen and Leary Keith. Driven from the left so thoroughly they were reduced to slinking into protest camps in secret only to be expelled upon discovery, members of Deep Green Resistance moved right, and increasingly to other countries, to seek an audience for the transphobic bile. Leary Keith founded a TERF organization called the Women's Liberation Front, or WOLF.

More on them later. This brings us to TERF extraordinaire Jennifer Billick. Billick had been a member of Deep Green Resistance in charge of booking appearances for Derek Jensen. The success of the no-platforming campaign waged by the left convinced her that trans people were secretly backed by a conspiracy of billionaires. This idea spread like wildfire across the UK and, as we'll discuss next episode, Mexico. To understand what happened in the UK, we spoke with Krista Peterson, a graduate student at USC, who, at significant personal cost, confronted the rise and spread of transphobia in the English, we spoke with Krista Peterson, a graduate student at USC who, at significant personal cost, confronted the rise and spread of transphobia in the English-speaking world. Krista, welcome to the show and thank you for joining us.

Hi, thank you. I guess I wanted to start with Jennifer Billick and talking a bit about how she sort of moved into increasingly increasingly transphobic territory and i guess how she started moving into the sort of follow the money conspiracy theories that she's been peddling for the past several years now yeah so i give you her narrative of this, which is that in 2013, I think she was supposed to be on a panel about, I think, trans people that was canceled because of pushback. And then because of that, she thought, what is the big force behind this? And then got into it from there. what is the big force behind this? And then got into it from there.

But she has really, I think, you know, that deep green resistance was kind of into focusing on trans people for a while. But she really has gone from an environmental activist to someone who is just solely focused on trans people. It's basically all she is ever talking about. And she's kind of

she started as opposing this kind of existential threat um that was real which was ecological destruction of climate change um and she has kind of maintained that tenor in the shift where now she's um portraying this as an existential threat. But instead of climate change, it's trans people. So the way she got into the money, she's just a very prolific kind of at-home researcher. And she kind of had this anti-corporate mindset going in from her background. And she produces a lot of research. There's not that many people in the gender critical movement who are really producing a lot of original content. And so when someone is, they can get a lot of uptake from that. Her first thing was actually a Federalist article

about who are the rich white men institutionalizing transgender ideology. And just by being a pretty big platform i think that got some big initial distribution i think that was how people initially started seeing her kind of beyond the deep green resistance type audience yeah i mean that's one of the things that that's been very interesting to me studying this, is that you see this a lot. You see a lot of people who were sort of run out of the left by their transphobia, pivoting really hard right and then using right-wing media platforms and using also right-wing political backing to start pushing this stuff and i think yeah bill bill looks interesting example to me because yeah she i guess you talked a bit about this more i mean she has this weird okay so she has two weird angles she has the weird transhumanism angle and then she has this like incredibly like it becomes like an increasingly anti-semitic angle

yeah so where she so she's following the money is the original thing where she follows the money too is um trans rights are a conspiracy to usher in transhumanism um so her thing is she often says transgender is an ad campaign for transhumanism this is a quote to get people comfortable with actual merging with machines slash ai there must be a complete dissociation from biological reality so you see this a lot with conspiracy theories i think where you have this kind of like metaphorical goal right where it's all about getting people to dissociate from their bodies it's like not very clear what that looks like on an actual causal level yeah but that's that's the

big goal right um and they need a big goal it's there's kind of this mysterious part of this supposed conspiracy um that is trans rights which is like what is this for right they lots of people now are accepting that there's like this big dark money push behind it um which raises the question why what what is this doing yeah um and the answers are kind of kooky right and so this one has caught on more than i would have expected yeah it's really weird they kind of walk into it slowly right they have start off and it's i think there's something weird with trans rights and they have it's very common for them to think that their opponents don't really believe their

beliefs that something is up and for some reason all these people are supporting trans rights what It's very common for them to think that their opponents don't really believe their beliefs, that something is up, and for some reason all these people are supporting trans rights when they know it's bad. You need something to go in there to explain why. And this is a narrative that fits with Billick's worldview. You can see how someone with her background would get here. It's kind of unusual for all these ladies from the UK now to believe that trans people are a transhuman conspiracy. But they needed something to go there as the goal,

so they picked it up. Yeah, I guess we should get into Mumsnet a little bit because Mumsnet's a really weird, like specifically UK thing that I don't know if there's like there's not really an American equivalent to it. Like, I guess it's like it's like it's like what if you took the worst parts of Facebook and next door, I guess. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about like what mom's net is and how this stuff started sort of seeping into it yeah so this is part of this bigger question which is like why in the uk has it taken off so much in the way it has a big part of that story is moms that which is a website for moms um to ask kind of parenting questions.

And it's really widely used, I think, especially amongst kind of like white, upper middle class educated population. A lot of people are on Moms. And it's kind of a trusted website for a lot of familial type things, like advice about what to do when your kid has lice, things like that. familial type things like advice about what to do when your kid has lice things like that um and mum's has become just like the main infection point i think in the gender critical movement in the uk with why it happens more generally you have to look at it as kind of part of this global resurgence in fascism around the same time period. It's like the mid-2010s on. The most obvious instances of that have the kind of traditional fascist targets and ideals.

I think what's essential is this kind of logic that you really see in the gender critical movement also, which is you have this kind of background climate of anxiety and fear. Then you get this narrative that minorities are rising up against you you've lost something your identity used to give you a special status and now they're taking it from you and you have to fight back and it's they've kind of switched out like what the big

identity is who the minorities are what the special status is with this more feminist thing but it really does have that kind of internal logic in the same way and I think you just had this kind of moment globally where you had this kind of background emotional state that was ripe for fascism in a lot of ways. And then this ideology was just infectious in that way. And then in Moms Night, it was able to catch, and it really provided, provided it with this place where it could really grow into this kind of unusual demographic group for a kind of fascist movement.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's an interesting, I think there's another, the other interesting thing to me about it is like, I don't know, I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of, yeah, why specifically the UK and why the US doesn't have this. for it partly is like the u.s is so much more religious than the uk is and a lot of these people sort of would have been evangelicals in like in the u.s but but yeah i think the the mumps net angle's interesting to me in that it really seems like because there's so few people publishing anything that's even remotely tangible like a very very small number of actors were able to very quickly radicalize people and i and i think i don't know and i think it's interesting that like like people like jesse singhal like i think wind up being much more

influential in the uk than they are in the us even though they're getting sort of published in in these us publications because there's sort of i don't know i guess there's there's this like hunger for it on mom's night like for for anything that sort of supports this worldview in a way that there's kind of wasn't in the us i think part of why like the why uk question there's some part of it that's just kind of by chance moms that existed it was a place where it could really take off but i think also to some extent like you were alluded to i think kind of part of the relevant group in the u.s is i think a little more inoculated against this stuff i mean that it doesn't really have the same initial appeal among women who would like to construe themselves as feminists because many Americans see anti-trans stuff and immediately

connect it to like the religious right. It doesn't, you don't really get the initial way into it where you know you come across this thing presenting trans people as encroaching on your space and taking something from you and for us we see that and it's like oh yeah bathroom bill laws they just had this a few years ago and it was this right-wing religious thing we know what this is the uk has kind of had a more prominent turf activism for a little while in that julie bindle it's kind of yeah long been a thing there um but it wasn't really catching in the same way it has now really caught yeah i guess i mean one of the other things that i was talking i had an interesting conversation that sadly didn't wind up getting recorded but i was talking

with some mex Mexican feminists, like trans feminists about this. And one of the things they were saying was the way, like talking about the way like intersectionality is a framework. And the fact that there is, there was an incredibly strong black feminist current in the U S insulated, like the, the main line of,

of American feminism from this stuff in a way that didn't really happen in the UK because the uk because the like the black feminist movement there is just not as strong and not as sort of mainstream and that has this knock-on effect i guess where like you get you know without an intersectionality framework it's easier to have this sort of like totalizing like identity of like the woman as like a thing that's just one object that you can like pin down to biological barkers instead of having to sort of like look at all of the different actual like relations that are going on yeah so my read on them is that most of them are not really were not pre-existing feminists they're

not people who were very interested in women's rights and then kind of took this turn my impression is that they're largely people who really started identifying as feminists once that could be a guise to kind of taking things out on trans people and i think probably why it was able to get so big on MomsNet. So eventually the women's rights forum on MomsNet, which is just one of the sub boards in addition to all the child care stuff, just became almost all anti-trans stuff. And so that is partially. This stuff was popular, but I also I think that, you know, normal mainstream feminist stuff wasn't as popular and they weren't getting a lot of engagement on normal, important feminist issues. And instead, this was what their user base was really going for. It's really striking, I think, how there's exceptions.

But in general, the big gender critical people talk very, little about all feminist issues it's like yeah this is the thing they care about just all the time yeah yeah that's definitely a pattern with turf so it's like yeah once once once you're a turf like this is the only thing you care about like you don't you don't do yeah i mean i guess like one of one of the we'll talk more about this in the next episode but one of the sort of big like flagship things in in like with the uk and ireland was like a bunch of the turfs getting extremely mad at the at at these and at the at the pro like at the the pro-abortion uh activists in uh uh in ireland because they weren't being turfs and so yeah the turfs were like no no no we're gonna like try to sabotage this act the actual feminist movement trying to get access to

abortions because we're turfs and they're not yeah they could be really vindictive against women who they say are like selling out women's rights by focusing on anything other than the tiny percent of the population that is trans is like the one issue you're allowed to focus on and if you say like no please please leave us alone we're focusing on something else really do not take that well Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast or wherever you get your podcast. 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. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. everywhere. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm you get your podcasts. paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for

10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I guess the other thing I wanted to ask about was, because I think the other thing that happened in the UK that only really started happening in the US like pretty recently and even then was kind of like, it was an event in like a way that I don't know how much it was in the UK is the extent to which like people like JK Rowling and like the,

the sort of mainstream of British famous people and like British, British journalists and stuff like that, like, like start started rallying around this stuff. Yeah, this is, it's been wild for me seeing i like don't think super highly of the american media but seeing how much worse the british media is yeah really wild they just have

been publishing stuff things like the times of london have been are the worst right more conservative alito especially bad um but even you know like the guardian has in some bbc and some uh these things are just kind of like demonstrably false coverage of trans right stuff that just gives a lot of credence to this transphobic movement um it's kind of this like near blackout of in serious consideration of what trans people are experiencing and what their actual position on this stuff is it's just really grim i think i think part of it is maybe that mom's not did have this reach to a lot of people who are like professionals their audience is pretty professional and it was this kind of trusted website where this got normalized a lot the last thing i wanted to talk about before um we go to break is do you want to talk about kathleen stock and that whole thing

a little bit yes okay also we should talk about uh we should connect billick to oh yeah yeah yeah we should yeah we should do that first yeah and so that is there was you know mums that started um i think the initial narrative was kind of trans people are being really unreasonable they're really demanding they're infringing on our status. This thing that was more localized about this group that it was easy to cast as unreasonable. And they were able to take kind of a victim stance relative to them. And then it just kind of kept escalating. It just kind of shifted to more and more of this kind of content. And then eventually there really was a great appetite for this kind of anti-trans content.

And it just got increasingly conspiratorial, I think. So people at this point, I think almost everyone in the gender critical movement thinks that there's dark money behind trans rights. They think it's like some kind of astroturf movement for who knows what. Lots of them will say the goal is like selling, you know, hormones and surgery to people. What? Like, yes. It's funding, you know, a global conspiracy. I think it's is pretty expensive.

I don't think it's the most plausible way to get an audience for this kind of thing. But Jennifer Billick is one of relatively few people doing this kind of deep research. And so it's just kind of the kind of thing they were looking for and they have pretty minimal bullshit filters about what they're willing to see um it's just pretty rare that they will see a source that seems to be on their side and be like no there's something wrong with this um and so she increasingly got fans and now a lot of people hear her stuff secondhand i think they're not directly meeting her but people are repeating her and so much of her stuff now is part of the just the background of this movement like there's this woman Martine Rothblatt um who's just kind of a

random rich woman um who was she was involved in kind of early trans rights activism um and kind of moved on and got interested in transhumanism stuff instead she's like kind of a strange lady um and she is interested in transhumanism stuff and rich um and is not the architect of the trans rights movement yeah um but now you know they just all think that this person has his central role um and when you see them talking about her it is jennifer billick's influence um and they just don't have they just don't have many defenses against kind of increasingly radicalized stuff and when I started kind of looking into Jennifer and I started seeing her get you know when you see people

talking about a conspiracy of people like George Soros, Jennifer Pritzker, Rothblatt is also Jewish. There's a red flag. And in conspiracy spaces, it just kind of tends towards anti-Semitism if you're not on the lookout for it and if you're not defending against it. And Billick's not. And she has gotten increasingly into the anti-Semitic side of things. Up to the point where she was boosting Keith Woods, who is just a Nazi. His content that was largely inspired by her work um about the jews behind the transgender movement um and just taking kind of going from this kind of non-explicit anti-semitic conspiracy theory where you have this group of people who happen to be largely filled with jewish people kind of orchestrating this global conspiracy to explicitly naming the Jew

and saying no this is a Jewish movement um and yeah and she just like followed it all the way um and there was some when I started making a big deal about this you know there was some pushback from the gender critical movement um but largely they think i'm like a bad faith actor right i'm the enemy it's not gonna take anything i say really seriously um but also i was really struck by how some of them were arguing with me about this keith woods video that was you know, about how this was a Jewish plot and why the Jewish religion would inspire you to do something like this. And they say, no, this is an anti-Semitic. There's nothing, you know, it's just it's very interesting.

It's about Judaism because they already believed all the background stuff. Right. They thought that there was, in fact, this conspiracy that's populated by people who happen to be Jewish. And so then when you take the explicit step, they're like, well, yeah, there's an interesting question, right? Why are all these people Jewish? They just go in all the way. Gives Nazi real fast. And yeah, I just, in general, the movement is like like just really not have good defenses against this kind of stuff at all and yeah this kind of conspiratorial stuff will take you there

if you don't have defenses against it it's just a very old road that goes in exactly that direction and is ready for you if you start getting into this stuff and aren't watching out for it. Yeah, all right. So let's talk about Kathleen Stock, philosophy's horror child. Oh, no. So I think not just Kathleen, but you have one of the things that is noteworthy about the movement, I think, is you have this unusual prominence of academics, one of them being Kathleen Stock, maybe the most prominent now, being Kathleen Stock, but also like Rosa Freeman and Selena Todd. And you have this kind of academic face of it. And it's very interesting, I think, how that works.

And that these people are generally not doing kind of substantive research on anything related to this instead what I see is you know stuff starts out in the community it's like on mumsnet it's on twitter and then the kathleen stock picks it up. She is getting her stuff kind of from mom's net and stuff. And then she's legitimizing it, right? It's like, oh, this is what these fancy professors think. And then centrally, their role is claiming that there are all these serious issues on the basis of their academic status and saying that trans people aren't willing to discuss it. You know, trans people are shutting down debate. They're being silenced.

It gives it this legitimacy that the movement, I think, really capitalizes on. Yeah, which I think with stock in particular, you know, part of what's happening is, like, the anti-trans movement kind of like moves between different conservative panics and so like like the modern one they're on the same the children panic but when stock was sort of like getting big and you can see this with the sort of the end of her career arc uh which we'll get to in a second but she was big on the whole sort of like like

conservative uh callous cancel like college free speech crisis like can i guess sort of cancel culture also but yeah she was really big on the whole like yeah the conservatives are being silenced or like i don't even consider this like i think she was kind of doing the like liberal centrist thing but but she was yeah she's she was doing all these censorship claims and then turning around and just actually censoring people and it was yeah yeah i gave a talk um at sussex um california university um that i believe she tried to have canceled come on it was just kind of interesting right because i initially this talk was kind of scheduled as a protest at the same time as one of her as a talk she was going to give on a related topic um and then she canceled her talk so i

thought she might come to mine right like free to bathe like ask me questions and i was like okay but of course she didn't right because instead seemingly tried to just get it shut down and but then i think this is yeah it's one kind of the cancel culture thing is kind of one element but i think it's really central in a lot of their stuff um and that the kind of in the background of other stuff is like you know somehow the consensus has been controlled and like it's the result of like the truth not being heard and people not considering all these important things that they need to consider kind of from care for trans youth to you know trans women being able to use the bathroom. It's kind of across all this, they're running this narrative that the truth has been silenced and,

you know, trans people are being unreasonable and have shut it down. I think that is a pretty foundational, the overall narrative they've built. Yeah. And it, and you see this as like this is one of the ways they try to i guess rest the mantle of authority back from literally every actual medical group who all agree that you should actually let kids transition and you should let adults transition and that this is in fact

good and like a thing that medically is like and then like I said yeah I mean this is this is a huge deal right so like Kathleen Salk is a philosopher right and so she started off her first thing

was like something is afoot in academic philosophy. You know, academic philosophers aren't debating whether trans women are women in the way that they should. And this idea that the debate's being silenced in philosophy, you know, it like doesn't have really important consequences, I think. like all mainstream research on trans healthcare and like what is in the good and the best interests of trans kids being able to delegitimize that is really serious yeah right that it just has these tremendous consequences i think they've been able to be pretty effective on that too yeah and that's been really scary in a lot of ways because you you see yeah and that's been really scary in a lot of ways because you you see like the the arguments of these people pioneered and the sort of the techniques and the the groups that they're a part

of like wind up being core parts of of the anti-trans push in both the uk and the us and yeah that's extremely scary it's really scary i. I mean, it's just awful, right? These are children. And for them to become the focus of this kind of hate movement is just horrifying. And the history of healthcare for gender nonconforming kids is really grim. Yeah. And it's, and like,

they are just pushing to kind of go back there and it's just ghastly. It's really horrifying to see. Yeah. I guess, I think that's a, that's a good point we can this would probably be the second ad break but yeah do you know what else is horrifying? Ads

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. 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 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.

On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian.

Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like,

how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15 percent. I'm not saying you're going to get 15 percent every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of

Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. and we're back um what one one of the scariest parts i think of what was happening in the uk was the extent to which i mean not just mainstream uh british media gets involved in this but i mean literally the bbc which is which is the you know this this is this is the state media organization right starts to just push unbelievably transphobic articles out as just regular contents um i think i think probably the most famous one is yeah in in october 2021 the bbc publishes this article that's called we're being pressured into sex by some trans women that is just an just just an absolutely uh display of of transphobia um yeah can you talk a little bit about that and yeah yeah so the this article was framed around the question is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners um and so so the overarching perspective in the piece that you get is that this is a significant problem among lesbians.

They are experiencing sexual pressure from trans women. The reporting strategy that the reporter used was, you know, strategy that the reporter used was you know just soliciting this one kind of particular narrative from lesbians who said that they had had these kind of experiences with trans women um the people who are quoted in the article who aren't anonymous are gender critical people right there like rose of dawn debbie hayden and then there's these anonymous women who we don't know who they are um but it's not they didn't go and approach you know normal like mainstream lesbian activists or lesbian organizations to see like what they were experiencing in the community right there's kind of no perspective just from any kind of mainstream lesbian organizations at all that was one of the

things that like sort of was haunting about this like this journalist is working on this for age like i think it was like years trying to find this and like like she was specifically trying to find this people these people like people who like had experienced a specific thing and like no normal like she couldn't find normal people because it's not a thing and so she she it after like many many years she was able to find like a couple of examples like a few examples and mostly from yeah just open transphobes and the article is just like so conceptually sloppy that it doesn't distinguish you know theoretical discourse about whether you know it's transphobic to just say out of hand you would never date a trans woman it doesn't distinguish this from sexual abuse yeah

it just kind of takes for granted that they're just saying in kind of an abstract theoretical context um that some of these like just saying that you won't ever sleep with a trans woman saying that that is transphobic is itself treated as akin to pressuring someone into sex, right? Like that. Yeah. Journalism that doesn't distinguish between just a conversation about sexual issues and sexual abuse is just disastrous. There's just nothing serious about this piece and it's just kind of throughout

it. It's just. Yeah. Like one of the other things about this is so they they found like a survey right because the the journalist went looking for a survey about like how like what percentage of lesbians have like encountered this and encountered this pressure and the only thing they could find was well okay the only thing they could find that would like support their actual claim was this this poll from this group called uh get out the l which is just like a group that whose entire purpose is just being anti-trans people and trying to get rid of them yeah and it was just it was just like it was like a twitter poll right it was like

they're they're publishing as as statistical evidence for their claim a twitter poll from a from a turf group and trying to like claim this is serious journalism and it's just yeah i mean so literally on the page of the statistic they cite in this report the report approvingly cites Janice Raymond saying, quote, all transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact. And so like,

are we talking about metaphors here or are we talking about sexual abuse? Yeah. It's just sick. And so one of the people who was interviewed in this was Lily Cade, who was an adult performer. And again, throughout this, just a trans woman saying that the way someone is treating her in a sexual context is transphobic is itself treated as sexually abusive. is itself treated as sexually abusive. And so Lily Cade, you know, she refused to, I think initially she refused to be in a scene with a trans woman, but then later on also refused to shoot a trans woman at all

when she was working as a producer. So they kind of get a quote from Lily, saying something about women being pressured into sex by trans women. And it turns out that Lily Cade was pushed out of the adult industry because she's a serial rapist. So this is their source on whether there's this problem for a cis woman is herself a cis woman who is a serial rapist right and they're using this person to portray trans women as the victimizers and it's just so grim yeah just much of it is just sort of like haunting like one of the other things that came out was like

part of the story is they said that like no prominent trans women would speak with them for the story and then a prominent trans woman was like no you guys interviewed me and that didn't include it in the article yeah so this was um yeah one of the people who lily kate had had a conflict with was chelsea poe um another woman in porn who had asked if lily um she could work for lily's company and lily said no because she was trans so they talked chelsea was like is a reasonably prominent person um and they interviewed her didn't include her in the article. She says that she told them that Lily had this predatory past. They also didn't say anything about that. has been told is a serial sexual predator being presented as kind of an authority on women's sexual victimization supposedly by trans women when she is the victimizer yeah

and not only is she a serial sexual predator uh but she's like specifically attacked people in bathrooms yeah which is like the famous fear- mongering transphobic thing, right? Is that trans people are going to attack you in the bathroom. Your source has attacked people in bathrooms. And there's just very little interest in how women are actually victimized and by who. Yeah. And I think like that that's a means to disturbing part of it is like this isn't just like a negligence of reporting thing here

this is just malice like if if you are told and the thing is like it's not it's not like it was hard to like find out that that you know if okay so someone someone tells you that someone else is is is an abuser right it's like okay like maybe you're a journalist maybe you're gonna be like oh i should check this out like lily cage assaulted so many people and like raped so many people that like just scrolling through twitter i found multiple people who had been abused by her like this was this was not something that was like like she admitted it publicly this is not something that was like hard to find right yes to be clear she yeah i just want to underline that which is that lily k after these accusations really got going she did like publicly admit

she did not deny yeah accusations and then she retired from porn yeah and and and you know and there's something like the bbc does this they do this weird backtracking at this article comes out and everyone gets extremely mad at them. But they, they refuse to release the like the tape of the interview they had to with Chelsea Poe, which, you know, would have proved that Chelsea Poe did in fact tell them that Lily Cade was a rapist and they published the story anyways and there's there's so much of this stuff was like yeah like the they the the way they backtrack about it the way that also like so the two places where this thing the story ran was uh the bbc in britain and they syndicated it out to brazil and a few other places that were like that are incredibly transphobic and it ran like just really yeah and this stuff like right in brazil like ran as a bunch of mainstream news headlines like where like news stories and in the major newspapers like ran this and it was i don't know like there's there's there's this extent to which yeah like you're

watching british state media decide that they actively just want to go to war on trans people and they literally just do not care that like they are you know publishing literal rapists and then yeah i just just the bbc's policy you know is when we interview those responsible for antisocial behavior or crime it may just cause distress to victims and we should contact victims and advise them of our plans you know when a viewing criminals care must be taken to minimize potential distress this may cause to victims of the crime and this they they didn't see lily as this applying to her right this is uh cis woman who they have been told is a sexual predator you can find this information i found it pretty quickly all of these victims

talking about it her acknowledging it and they didn't identify this cis woman as a predator with victims who would be like very plausibly upset by seeing their rapist treated as an authority on sexual abuse right and this is kind of pervasive i think in the gender critical movement right where if any of you are out there i'm sure you're thinking women can't be rapists rape requires a penis which is in the uk it's kind of a you know most feminists consider this a pretty reactionary way to define rape where it has to be penetration with a penis and this isn't reflective of you know how women experience sexual assault that it's just kind of totally other category and most countries feminists consider it quite important that you don't kind of treat this as this like categorically

different offense um but the gender criminal movement really pushes this perspective where it is literally impossible for women to to commit rape you know and this is they think that when they this was a brief period where they thought that they had identified like that every rape that was recorded as committed by a woman was a trans woman because they thought that

it required a penis and they thought that that was the only way that this was possible and you can actually be convicted of it if you were like aiding and abetting I think they thought that they had all these and they just have this overall perspective where it is literally impossible for you know they say a woman meaning for them a cis woman to commit a sexual offense and in doing this they create cover for cis women predators like yeah it it creates this context where their victimization just

disappears and people can't even acknowledge it yeah it's awful and yeah and like i think like the the extent to which this whole movement is is is built on violence and it is built and there are so many people that the that the general critical people work with who are abusers there are you know and i don't know like i want to come back to like the last piece of the lily cade thing which is that after this article came out the bbc initially basically didn't do anything right even after the the rape out the like yes yeah and then li Cade published one of like one of the most transphobic things I've ever encountered in my life. Like a just this. It gets called a manifesto. Like, I don't think that's like a manifesto.

It was terrifying. Yeah. She she's she she's explicitly like like like names specific trans women that she wants lynched like there's a bunch of stuff about there's people she wants raped uh she wants like she wants all trans people to die uh there's there's a bunch of there's like weirdly racist stuff there's like i mean it's it's just it's it's it's it is a document that calls for genocide and the part where it's calling for genocide probably isn't line for line the most disturbing part of it, because the individual threats are so graphic. I was terrified when I read this. I was the person who initially dug up the sexual abuse allegations, and when I did it, I knew it would kind of,

it would throw a wrench into her life, I thought. And that they hadn't, you know, they were there, they were visible, you could find them. But when it had happened, she had not really been in the mainstream eye. And so I knew if this got uptake, it would make it bigger. And I went ahead and I did it. And it bigger. And then this woman is posting this terrifying manifesto. It read like, is she shooting someone now?

It was just terrifying. It was like something to be written immediately before someone goes and shoots someone. And then she's tweeting it and tagging the bbc in it yeah and like that that finally like one of the most disturbing things i've ever read in my life like that was finally the thing with bbc was like uh maybe we should do something about this it was was just so, so little, right? This is, they took her out of the article. They added an update that says, we have updated this article published last week

to remove a contribution from one individual in light of comments she's published on a blog post in recent days, which we have been able to verify. We acknowledge that an admission of inappropriate behavior by the same contributor should have been included in the original article and so this is you know they just kind of erased her right so they didn't acknowledge that they had included this person in the article

who just published this genocidal rant right so one of their sources is the person who is advocating for killing trans people that is important right that is pertinent to this narrative they're pushing and they also are not saying you know they should have we acknowledged that an admission of inappropriate behavior should have been included in the original article it really changes the overall narrative of the article right if you acknowledge this cis woman is a serial predator yeah right the overall picture is like cis women are at risk from trans women and it's a reality check right to hear no in fact this woman who we're presenting as like victimized is one of the woman who's preying on people and she's not a trans woman and it's just they just you know even after this

responded in a way that protected the narrative of the piece right they weren't going to let in anything that acknowledged this the people they're finding with this position are transphobic this person was very and it just says they've removed the contribution in light of comments she has published what kind of comments what are they about it's serious right it's serious, right? It's serious to not acknowledge that one of their sources is a violent transphobe. Yeah. This is how I found out that she was alive. Also, them saying that they had been able to verify it.

Before that, I had been like, she's not very online in a lot of cases. able to verify it before that i've been like she's not very online in a lot of cases um so i was really i didn't know how long it was going to be before you know there was confirmation that like in fact lily kate had not just shot someone and herself yeah this was it was just really this manifesto is terrifying. I don't know. It's just awful. Yeah, and I think... One of the things that's happening here is you get to see...

There's layers at which this stuff operates so you have you know you have your bbc running delegitimization right but then you have the stuff beneath it which is just apparently genocidal and i think you know sometimes like with the lily cade like if you're going to be a turf lily cade kind of blew it right because like you can't like okay like you you can be really really transphobic in a lot of ways. But like, you know, actively calling people to get lynched is a thing that like even like transphobes are normally like, wait, what? Why are you? Yeah, they didn't like this.

Yeah, yeah. But I don't think like the mainstream turf movement is not in a place where you can do stuff like that. mainstream turf movement is not in a place where you can do stuff like that but in some ways i think you know the the stuff that's more moderate is more dangerous last thing i want to talk about is a a document called the declaration on women's sex-based rights which was was put together by a bunch of turf activists uh fairly prominently featuring arch-Australian TERF Sheila Jeffries. But yeah, can you talk a bit about what this is? Yeah, so this is a document that basically all of the gender-critical organizations, imaging people, have signed. And it is extreme.

organizations, imaging people, have signed. And it is extreme. It calls for trans women to be banned from all women's spaces, including toilets. If women can't go to the bathroom, they can't participate in society. It's just a basic need people have to exist in public. And that it asks to ban all internationally recommended health care for trans children. Yeah.

It has to legally protect deliberate misgendering, which would, you know, allow you to be just treated with such hostility at work, just in public this is a just kind of a direct assault on trans people's ability to exist with dignity and society and just live normal lives and you know a lot of gender critical people will say will portray themselves you know as only opposing advances for trans rights you know as not wanting trans rights to be rolled back but what this document calls for is like basically every right trans people have to exist in their genders in particular trans women especially trans trans women um to just take it all back right and leave them with basically nothing yeah yeah like this is like they have this whole thing about like basically like they want to erase the concept of gender identity from yes law which is like the thing that does is it eliminates all trans people from like it eliminates trans people as a thing that the law recognizes exists and things should have protections it's like it's it's it it is you know like it it is the legal

genocide of trans people like that that's that's that's what it is it's yeah yeah and so they've basically all signed this you know it's a yeah it's this is not at all a french document it French document. It positions itself as like the demands kind of of this movement and it's extreme. The organization's spokeswoman is Kara Dansky who uses almost all of her public appearances she has a number of times been on Tucker Carlson. She boosts Jennifer Billick all the time. She, I think, is her biggest

supporter. And was formerly the chair of Wolf, which is Lear Keith's organization. So she is... The Women's Liberation Front is what Wolf stands for. It is a cool name for an org that sucks and they should give it back to someone better.

Yeah. So this is, I mean, in general, you'll see the American TERFs kind of in this more radical direction. Also, especially explicitly collaborating with the right um and here they've made this document that just reports to and everyone has signed it kind of like direct the overall agenda to one that just leaves trans people with just no protections at all yeah and i think i think it's, you know, the reason I think this is in a lot of ways more dangerous than the Lily Cave thing is, again, it's in this

like, it's not actually in legalese because none of these people are lawyers. Karadziewski is! Karadziewski's lawyer, oh! So, how did an actual lawyer, I mean, okay, I shouldn't be asking how did an actual lawyer produce this because I've met lawyers and they're not, they are not as smart and above board as they portray themselves to be.

But yeah, like this stuff isn't making legal arguments. Like one of the things that they've like, I guess the whole sort of gender critical like turf movement is invented is like this, this concept of sex based rights, which is not a thing. this concept of sex-based rights which is not a thing like yeah like they all think that there's like rights that you have because of your sex and like no this doesn't exist they completely made this up they keep on like referring to it as if it's like a concept that exists in the law like none of this stuff like in terms of legalese it's like it's nothing it's it's it's it's it's a jumble of words yeah i know you really see as the movements go they really have really robust movement discipline and kind of taking up these new terms and then saying them all the time as though it's a thing everyone's familiar with one of them is always like women's sex-based rights women's sex-based

rights like what people's rights aren't based on their sex yeah this is kind of like a whole thing we were doing with feminism you know it was like you don't have special rights based on being a man and now it turns out that like supposedly all along we've thought that you have special rights for if you're a woman to exclude whoever you want to exclude i guess if yeah it's just goofy yeah but but i think like it's weird but it's like it's also it it has this function which is that it the the sort of like and like okay so like i i don't my guess is that most of the people who have signed this document have not read it because you know but but you know like i think the thing that it does is it gives them this this legitimization it gives their goal of exterminating trans people this sort of legal

jargon apparatus they can hide behind of like oh it's actually from the UN and we're basing it on international law. And the organization used to have this fancy name, which was the Women's Human Rights Campaign. And they have now dropped that, possibly for legal reasons. But it sounds good, right? Yeah, yeah. The website's polished and it seems like a real thing.

And they really try to take this phrase and using it just kind of sneak everything in. So they'll ask people questions like, well, what about women's sex-based rights? These are a thing I've never heard about before in my life. But people just get on board and they don't really know yeah what's happening and they've another thing they do is they always portray like bathrooms as sex segregated spaces and every bathroom i've ever been in says women on the door it doesn't seem like female bathroom but they're like this is like sex based on sex not gender

just making these assertions and they have a lot of assertions yeah yeah i think i think that's a good place to wrap up i guess they have a lot of assertions yeah yeah um yeah I guess we were just underwriting again what a serious kind of attack on trans people's rights this is calling for things that would make it very hard

for trans people to exist and it's really scary to watch this I think I'd watch it kind of progress across this movement and be boosted it's really scary to watch this i think and watch it kind of progress across this movement and be boosted it's awful yeah and next episode we are going to take a much deeper dive into some of the people who signed this document and we are going to see what happens when this kind of you see what happens when this kind of bloodless but genocidal legalistic rhetoric makes it into the hands of people who are not afraid to do physical violence and it is worse it is going to go worse than you're probably imagining just to underline this we said earlier that jennifer billick's stuff is

you know just widely now accepted and within this movement and her stuff is portraying trans people and trans rights as this existential immediate threat yeah right she portrays she often says that doctors are like butchering children right it's they're making children into slaves it's stuff that if it was true would call for kind of an extreme level of resistance and that's kind of what this stuff functions to do right if you are accusing people of these really extreme offenses and of hurting and threatening all of these people what that motivates is extreme responses and violent responses and billick herself is sometimes engaged in violent rhetoric but i think many of us who've been following this movement are just kind of waiting afraid because that's just where it looks

like it's going in the u.s and the uk too it's kind of like hard to it's just so scary and like you know they're mapping out where the gender clinics are yeah and it's it's scary because where rhetoric like this goes is to a violent place and it's hard to see it letting up right now. Yeah. And yeah, that is the, that is the subject of tomorrow's episode, which yeah. In which a bunch of people will start attacking gender clinics and a bunch

of trans people are going to get violently assaulted by turfs who are directly affiliated with Sheila Jeffries and our followers of Jennifer Billick. So. Grim. Yeah. Krista, thank you for coming on and doing this. Thank you.

Yeah, this has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us at HappenHerePod on Twitter and Instagram. We are also... There is other stuff that we do at The Cool Zone. And yeah, go fight for the rights of trans people before they cease to exist 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 iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

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