The Dispatch Podcast - When the Left Became an Online Mob | Interview: Brianna Wu

Episode Date: March 10, 2025

Former Democratic organizer Brianna Wu joins Adaam James Levin-Areddy for a conversation about her journey from leftist activism to clashing with leftists about antisemitism and the recklessness of transgender politics. Wu opens up on the challenges that come with standing up to one’s own tribe, the importance of defending liberal values, and how to think responsibly—and compassionately—about sex and gender. The Agenda: —How Gamergate changed everything —The (de)evolution of progressive politics —October 7 and Jewish mothers —Can normie liberalism bridge the partisan divide? —Transgender healthcare vs. transgender politics Show Notes: —The Pros and Cons of 'Queer' (w/ Jamie Kirchick) —Jesse Singal for The Dispatch: How The American Media Distorted the Transgender Debate The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including members-only newsletters, bonus podcast episodes, and regular livestreams—click here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Details and tickets at festivalofauthors.ca. Save when you fuel up for your next road trip. Get up to 7 cents per liter in value every time you fill up at Petro Canada. That's 3 cents per liter in instant savings plus 20% more points when you link an eligible RBC card to your Petro points. Find out more at RBC.com slash Petro-Dash Canada. Conditions apply. I'm here with Rihanna Wu, and this is, was originally supposed to be nearly an uncertain

things episodes, my show where we talk to people who are in the epistemic ambiguity of the current moment, but since Jamie Weinstein could not host the dispatch podcast on this Monday, I also decided to share this with our dispatchers in case you're interested. I might have grown tired of me because we just released the episode of my interview with Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL. But if you are interested in more conversations, then stick along.

Brianna, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much. I'm sorry I stepped on your interview. I don't think I gave you a proper introduction. How do you want to be introduced to a former democratic operative? Expert in the epistemic horror of the moment. That works for me. I'm changing my Twitter title as soon as I get out of here.

No, I'm an executive director of Rebellion Pact, Democratic fundraiser, lovable gal about town, as I like to say. And I know that you've been doing a lot of work with the free press recently as well. Yes, love them. It's always a great time. Can you give our listeners a quick background of how you found yourself in politics? Sure. You know, it's so interesting. But 10 years ago, there was something called Gamer Game. I was an independent video game developer working on my own game studio. I just wanted to tell stories where women got to be the hero. Back in 2014, there just were fewer women protagonists.

So I hired as many cool women game developers as I could find. And, you know, we shipped a game that I thought was a really breakthrough piece of design. You know, it was fully animated. Women were the main characters, beautiful hair, rich stories. storytelling, all of that. And, you know, we won a bunch of awards as that game was shipping. GamerGate was, you know, happening to the game industry. Gamergate was a back, it was the way we argue and learn today with personal destruction and going after women. It really was a cultural flashball. Like Gamergate was the moment that American politics changed forever. It really was this toxic version of politics where we could no longer talk to each other that permeates everything today. So many of the key people from GamerGate, me, Steve Bannon, Melanie Giannopoulos, Candice Owens, Lauren Southern. I mean, just go through the list.

A lot of the major media figures today got our start there. Explain it to people who really probably only have heard it as, oh, those kids are arguing online. What were the stakes, how it played into the questions of media ethics? What were the fault lines at that moment? Well, there was a sense that, like, the feminists are coming to change the video game industry. And look, in retrospect, they were right. Oh, 100% give them credit for that. You know, the truth is this progressive idea of how to approach inclusion,

it did end up corrupting the game industry and a whole lot of other things. What is amazing to me, you know, 10, 11 years later is to look back at GamerGate and to understand in many ways progressives are the villains now. You know, we're the ones sending rape threats and death threats. It's just a J.K. realm. So, very disturbing. So before we even move forward to when this got you more engaged in politics broadly, this sounds interesting.

You're rushing through this moment because for you, I think this is something that you was, first, I'm sure, painful. But second, something that you've processed a million, bajillion times in your head. But I think it's not that trivial to a lot of people who only know you from afar and only heard the shadows of these arguments. It's interesting that you've already processed the idea that, to some extent, the anxiety that gamers had that led them to rebel so violently against,

quote unquote, the feminization of the video game industry is something that to some extent you now agree, even though obviously you disagree with the way it was expressed and the violent undertones or not even undertone, the overt tones that it took at the moment. So can you explain what were the things that caused that kind of anxiety at the time that where you disagreed with them with the arguments, not with, obviously the violence and the death threats and the the cruelty and then what changed your mind about this well leo alexander wrote a really famous piece for kataku called gamers don't have to be your audience and she was noting the explosion of more casual games like um you know a star d valley

or you know mobile games candy crush and all of that and she was really saying like look game developers don't have to focus on this traditional audience very male very into hardcore games And, you know, the game industry can change. And I remember thinking at the time, like, well, that's just, that's stupid. That's ridiculous, you know. And the truth is that there has, I think gamers were correct to understand that some of this ideology was, I want to say dangerous because it's not dangerous if a game developer makes candy crush. But there was an effort to change their culture. Let me just give you one really good example.

A game came out last year called Stellar Blake. Look, I am into men. I am not the target audience for games with extremely sexualized women protagonists. This is not a game for people like me. But, you know, this is a game heroin design that only could have been made 10 years ago. And it's just been kind of decided to be put on the wayside. That game sold like crazy last year. There's clearly a massive audience for it, even though, like, the game developer,

I've kind of gone like, oh, no, this is bad. We don't want to do this. So there's like a distance between the political goals of a lot of game developers and what the audience itself is asking for. The backlash from gamers was a sort of gatekeeping sense of don't touch my toys. Don't take away the thing that I care about and turn it into preachy. Don't try to educate me. I think that for a lot of that crowd, that created a sense of rejection.

of what they started seeing as authoritarianism, right? This is when a lot of people who may not have been as political were captured by the sense of the left is coming for my toys and they're trying to control my life and control my mind. And this is why you get figures like Steve Bannon and Miloiannopoulos starting to get popular attention. They literally, there's a quote from Steve Bannon before Trump got elected in 2016 where he says,

look, you bring these young men into the right through GamerGate or whatever, you radicalize them, you start turning them into the issues, and then you bring them into Trump. And that's exactly how Trump won in 2016. It wasn't just Gamergate, there's a whole host of, hey, they're trying to take away your culture. This is actually remarkably similar to what the right is doing right now with trans women in sports, where it's like, hey, these trans women, they're trying to take away culture, better look at this, and then it just causes everything to catch on fire. So let me just tell a really quick story on this. You know, when I was growing up in Mississippi, I had an internship in an office. This was Trent Lott's office. I remember we were looking at some polling that came in one time. And one of the top questions there was the Democrats are trying to take away our culture.

That was one of the things that they were thinking about running the campaign tested through the roof, sky high, crazy. So when you make people feel like their culture is under attack, they will rally behind the flag and they will do something. something about it. That is what, like, this works two ways. Like, A, the young men of GamerGate were far too concerned about the number of women in games being hired going from 5% to 7%. That's just the silly thing to be upset about. At the same time, you know, there was a culture that was changing with all of these progressive politics that were coming in there. I got into GamerGate because I thought women were not being treated fairly with how we, were being hired and what the process was for women to have a fair shape to get venture capital

to start game studios. There is structural discrimination there that is a real issue. I didn't sign up to usher in some fringe progressive censorship over everything that is said and done. And that unfortunately is a lot of the direction that the industry has gone in the last decade. And I think it's really unfortunate looking back on this that I played such a part in ushering in a culture I don't agree with. It's the problem of having this polarized cultural discourse where it becomes if you want to support getting more women into gaming, then you also have to buy into this entire package of critical theory and completely reimagining the mind of young men. Yes.

Or you are against the, you know, the tyranny over the minds of men, which means that you also are against seeing any progress for women or you completely bind to entirely hidebound troglodyte views about gender roles and politics. Exactly. It's all or nothing thinking and Gamergate was very much the start of them. And, you know, it's worth saying like your original question, how we got on this digression here is Brianna, like how did you get into politics? So after this, I ran for Congress. I didn't win, but I did really well. And from there, I learned like the bread and butter, fundraising skills, lobbying skills, compliance skills. I learned how to be a pretty good Democratic opera, which is what I've done for the last decade. And what I've seen in the progressive sphere, I had a really, really, really hard break with them on October 7th after that.

Because I had been seeing this movement that was cancerous and immature. and destructive, and I'd seen it hurt project after project after project in the Democratic Party. I'd seen it lose this elections up close, and I'd had, like, my severe reservations about it. It's not that I don't agree with the progressive idea, like universal health care would be a good policy goal to move towards. It's this belief cluster that goes along with it, that it's like, oh, if you believe we should have universal health care, then you've got to. to, like, believe in this reverse hierarchy of oppression where a black disabled trans woman who's an amputee gets to speak and a white guy is at the bottom and has to shut up all the time

and is secretly evil? No, that's not American. That's not democracy. Like, we're moving towards something where we're all equal. And what I found is the distance between what progressivism was fighting for in the policy arena and the outcome of what we were doing in the party was so distanced that I just could not be involved with it any. Before October 7th, where do you see signs of that, if at all, during your

process with the party? Oh, my God. Left and right. My really first regret with the progressive movement was with the women's march. And you know, they had a bunch of anti-Semites on the board there, you know, talking, basically kicking Jewish women.

I mean, just our story, I think, most notably. Yes. Yes, 100 percent. Absolutely disgusting. And, you know, I want to just be honest. I saw this at the time, and I was like, yeah, this is kind of a, I don't know that much about Palestine and Israel. I will just shut up because women's rights are important and abortions on the ballot. Let me just go forward. But I remember looking at this and going, holy shit, this is just flat out an anti-Semitic.

This is worse than anything I saw in Mississippi growing up. What the hell? And I started thinking through, like, all the really uncomfortable conversations I'd had with people about Israel and Jews and how there really is this permeating belief in progressive circles that Jews run the world, which is just crazy. So, like, there were signs, and I just went right over. These were impressions that you were getting earlier. Like, when we're talking about the heyday of the Women's March, we were talking about, what, 2017, 2018? 100% but before that during gamer game A lot of the feminist figures

would put things like about Palestine in their comments and yeah again I just Palestine is not something I really thought about before October 7th it just didn't impact my life it's a part of the world that's been on fire my whole life and I just tuned it out

actually like I was aware of the second into Fada when the peace talks broke up under Bill Clinton I just honestly didn't know that much amount So, you know, there's this cancer of anti-Semitism that is growing in the progressive movement that I just, it's getting louder and bigger and worse and seeing it hurt more things.

And then October 7th happened. And oh, Jesus. Like, there's a woman who I went to a conference in a city, major city, I don't want to name her here. Feminist, a feminist comment. And we're up there talking about sexual violence on stage and the importance of standing up. And this is a professor. This is someone that I really liked.

I considered a friend. I talked to him on the phone all the time. And after October 7th, I'm looking at her Twitter and she's talking about how there's no rape and this is actually an act of resistance. And I just lose my shit and I call her up and I'm like, do you not remember how we met? How can you be minimizing this? Like, I thought we were against sexual violence. When do we start giving a thumbs up to, like,

rape is a legitimate tactic of a struggle? How dare you say this? And then she starts getting into the really anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Like, it didn't really happen. The Jews are lying about it. It's an idea of plot. It's like, I'm just looking at this bizarre. thing that I could not have even imagined

happening in front of me. And it's like all this evil that I've just been looking past. Like I can't dance past today. It's right there on my friend's face. And this is why I realized I really needed to sit down and start reading about the history of Israel Palestine. Like something was really, really wrong here that I needed to understand. And the more I educated myself, just I came to a point where I had to have a complete break with progressivist.

It's just not a force for good. It's interesting, too. No, you don't come at it as not a Jew, not a latent Jew, even, like many progressives who might be of, come from a Jewish family. You have some Jewish background. You don't have a Jewish background. I'm Presbyteria. I mean, I'm adopted.

My mom couldn't be Jewish. But, yeah, it's like, it's just not my stuff, right? I grew up in the church. Right. And I don't think that's a, that's, I think the surprising thing about your evolution on this particular topic, because I don't think that. many people who don't have any kind of affinity to or some sort of Jewish background, experience that moment as a breaking point because for a lot of people, the Palestinian-Israeli

conflict is a topic that they feel uncomfortable, either uncomfortable to have an opinion on or they default to their, you know, natural positions about power relations. And especially when you are embedded in democratic progressive politics where there are certain notions of power are definitive of one side's morality, right? If you are the powerful player, if you are coded as

the powerholder, you are dynamic, you are ipso facto the oppressor. And it is the only people that I've, or for the most part, the people that I've seen to have broken out of that mold post October 7th war Jews,

which to me, I have to confess always irked me a little bit from from from Jews who were supposedly paying attention to the Palestinian story and turn a blind eye to that uh you called it a cancer i'll just call it like this pathology on the left and then suddenly paid attention on October 7th from from Jewish friends for somebody who's not Jewish does not did not particularly have any affinity to this story, to that part of the world to have gone through this process is intriguing. Why do you think this was such a break for you? Well, it's not like, I mean, I marched if Black Lives Matter, right?

Like, that mattered to me. I mean, this, I grew up in Mississippi. Like, I've seen, I mean, I've seen, like, anti-Semitism up close. Yeah, I remember when a Jewish person moved into our neighborhood growing up and hearing all my relatives mocking when I was growing up on Thanksgiving. I didn't even know what a Jew was. I'm saying you're listening to it. I'm like, this is the same way they talk about black people. It just was like the most evil thing I'd ever heard in my life. So, I mean, it's not like I don't feel solidarity. I mean, I'm a trans woman and I feel like I understand oppression. I think in some

point, like we have a responsibility to look out for each other. I think what really got me about this conflict is the stakes, in my view, are insanely high. This is not just about Palestine. Because if you really, really start understanding these forces, like this is, just looking at it from 30,000 feet. I think the big conflict in the world right now is the West and democracy versus everything else. And the West and democracy is under attack by strong men. And it's also under attack by Islamism. And I think if you were looking at, you know, this theocratic political project that is, you know, led to 9-11 and led to ISIS and destabilized the Middle East is why, you know, there are rockets firing into Israel non-stop. You've got to understand this political project

is also currently destabilizing Australia, is destabilizing the U.K. And I think it is, as we saw from the post-October 7th protests, I think it's destabilizing the United States. I think that that was a non-trivial factor in Trump getting elected. So it's not, like, it is personal for me. Like, I care about my Jewish friends and neighbors, but I also understand I've got skin in this game. Democracy is what gave me my civil rights as a trans woman, and that is fundamentally under attack here. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute.

This September, lease a 26 XE90 plug-in hybrid from $599 bi-weekly at 3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to Explorevolvo.com. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style. It's quick intuitive and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into

built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch. for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So that's interesting. I think there's actually a very dispatchian line about holding the ideal of a liberal democracy and the liberal world order

at the top of your priorities and recognizing that it is being, that is coming under attack. Why was it clear to you that the threat to liberal democracy comes in one direction? Because if Israel is this military superpower who has currently a very right-wing government with a very, you could say, I don't want to say intolerant, but the bellicose agenda, how is that not also a source of threat to the stable liberal world order to be aligned with this kind of government? Well, so, boy, I don't want to sum up all the history since 1948 quickly. But I think all of this has been made way too complicated. And respectfully, I think Jews really overcomplicate this story.

We try to educate the public about it. I think you go, well, in 1948, and then we had the Suez Christ and then the first Intifada and then the Six-Day War and the Second Intifada, and you want to go into each conflict really, like, in a complicated way. This is actually super simple. We like her granularity. Well, I guess I think it's hard to follow it. Like, I think there's a reason I couldn't follow it going up.

This is really simple. In 1948, the British over-promised the land to two people. There was a conflict. The Jews won. And the Muslims who had kicked the Jews out of every single country for centuries really got really angry about that. And in the, what is it, 76 years, they've started six wars and six major conflicts. Israel has, in my view, started zero of them.

And Israel has won every single. one of those defending themselves. There is a anti-Semitic political project to destroy Israel and slaughter the Jews there. And Israel is trying to survive. And I really genuinely think it's that simple. So tell me about the, if you're comfortable, about the responses that you got for taking this, for staking this position after October 7th. Oh my God. It's been like setting every friendship in my life on fire. Personal friendships? Personal friendships. Personal friendships. Relations. I've, I did the math on it. I've lost over $100,000 of contracts. Like, it's, it's really, really been a major factor in my life. Now I've gone and got another work, but there are a lot of people in the Democratic Party that are really, really pissed at me for taking this position. So, you know, it's, it's hard. But, you know, I also think, like, something about my personality is I'm going to say what I think. And I just am not going to. to sit here and be silent while there's this project that's very obviously anti-Semitic

that wants to target the rights I need to survive. Like, it's just insane. So the idea of a complete break with a friendship, and that's why I've said like a personal friendship, as opposed to say a colleague who you're only united on for the, for the sake of a temporary expedient political alliance. And then suddenly when you realize that your ideologies break too far apart, you know that the friendship cannot sustain itself. But if it's a personal friendship, if it's somebody that you've actually had in your life, can you tell me about how does this play out?

How does your opinion about some moral issue create a rift in a real true bond? I'm going to tell you, there is a Syrian, half-Syrian girl that was really good friends with. Another trans woman, I really, really cared about this woman. Like, I really genuinely cared about her, talked to her every day, genuinely considered his friend. And I tried as hard as I could every single time it would turn to Israel to go, hold on, let's just not talk about this. You've got your point of view on this. I've got mine. Let's just form our friendship on all this rich ocean of stuff.

We deeply agree. I tried so hard to do that. And just for whatever reason, she is. so deranged about this Israel issue and thinks every single Jew is a killer and just is frankly an anti-Semite and it just got to the point where that friendship could not go on. That really, really hurt me. And I've got probably 20 or 30 stories exactly like it. It's, for whatever reason, I don't understand it. There is a derangement and a set of double stamps. that apply to Jews, that don't apply to anyone else. And I just, I think there's a lot of evidence for this. If you look at what's going on with college campuses right now,

you've got these lunatics running around, clearly intimidating Jewish students. If anyone was doing this to a black student or a woman or a trans student, they'd be thrown out like that. And just for whatever reason, these people get arrested, and the NYPD just sets them loose. I don't know why Jews don't count, But for whatever reason to a lot of Americans, they don't.

And it's just not acceptable to me. I asked this to Jonathan Greenblatt in my talk with him. And I think this is just an inevitable question to grapple with. But you talk about Jews being targeted. And I think that the targeters would argue that they are only looking to exclude Zionists, right? that the identity that they are tackling is not really, it's not the ethnicity, it's not the religion. It is a political view that they are fighting against.

And why should they not exclude a political grouping, a view that they consider detrimental, even genocidal in their minds? Well, first of all, the alternative to Zionism is a second Holocaust. Let's just be clear about that. If Israel doesn't exist at this point, Boy, is it, nine million Jews there and probably the two million non-Jews? They're just dead, right? Ethnically cleansed, they're gone.

So if you're not a Zionist, you're in favor of a second Holocaust, in my view. So that's the first thing. Secondly, do you think I haven't seen this dance before? Like, I grew up in the 90s. I knew that when people couldn't say the N-word, they just moved over to saying Doug instead. Like, this is, it's obviously coded language. Like, when I look at my Twitter DMs, and I get death threats, it's always Zionists like you don't deserve to live.

That's how they dehumanize. Like, it's, it's clearly a political project that's based in anti-Semitism. And I think it's just laughable to try to separate these things. And yet, you'll have people who self-identify as Jews who lock hands, lock arms with these protesters, with these rioters, and would even share the sort of vehemence in fighting against the Zionist oppressor, including the individual people carrying a Israel flag on campus, right? And they will consider, I am a Jew and I have a right to stand up to Israel and the servants of this oppressive regime. I don't want to psychoanalyze the entire Jewish people, but I would like to make some observations because I've made a lot of,

of friends that are Jewish since October 7. And, you know, let me just back up for a second here. When I came out as a trans woman, my mom disowned like that. It is a pain that is still with me 20 years later. And what I have discovered with a live Jewish people is like your moms are a little inappropriate and they're a little nosy and they ask too many questions. But they're very well mean. And what I've seen from my position is because you've got these communities that are so tightly knit, there's a good deal of trauma that I think a lot of Jews are dealing with from growing up with a community that kind of doesn't give you space where you kind of see the worst of it all the time. And I think there's a desire to distance yourself from that that is

manifested in some really unhealthy politics in my view. So I think it's partially minority. stress and I think I don't know. I think there's some people for whatever reason they see the beauty of this community and just need to define themselves as not it and I think it's just frankly sad.

Where do you see the sort of center and I don't just mean political center between right and left they mean a core of political energy to defend the sort of liberal

values you represented them, the liberal world, the democratic world. Because it's clearly not going to be the political moment on the right. The current government has made it very clear that protecting the liberal world is not in its priorities. Do you think so? Do you really believe them? I mean, how would you...

This is interesting. If, okay, do you think that there is potential for the current Trump administration to be a defender of the liberal world, a stalwart to defender. I can tell you, I have talked to more people in this administration than I have any democratic administration. They are very eager for relationships of people on the other side in my experience. And don't get me wrong, it's not that I disagree with Trump. I worked against him for a reason. I recognize he is a threat to democracy. But I do think that there's a

mirror issue with extremism on both sides. And I think that now that the problem on the left is so apparent and the problem on the right is so apparent, I actually think there's a lot of overlap with people in the middle in our ability to talk to each other. Yeah, Richard Hanania is someone I consider a friend. We don't vote the same way. We don't see the world the same way. But there is a commitment to democracy that he has, that the fringe left just simply does not. So I actually think there is a really rich opportunity now for the reasonable people in the middle to talk to each other and move us forward if we can just get past this culture war nonsense that isn't getting anyone the policy they want.

But if I read both some of the actions coming out from the Trump administration as well, and that's vis-a-Ukraine, prosecuting enemies while pardoning friends. Everything is sending signals of a more transactional, a more a more thuggish, mafioso approach to politics, which does not seem to primarily or at all prioritize a liberal world. Trump is terrible. I mean, I have fully agree. What I'm saying is Trump may be their president. but he does not represent every single Republican.

And I think that there are a lot of opportunities right now for Democrats to work with Republicans. Does that make sense to you? I mean, I hope so. I think so I don't know if you know the history of the dispatch, but the dispatch was bounded from disaffected right-wing pundits and Republicans and primarily from the perspective of preserving their view of conservatism,

which is really conserving the American mission of classical liberalism and liberal democracy, seeing that as the constitutional commitment to the constitution and to the American world order, the Pax Americana of post-war, a post-co-war liberalism. So what I'm saying is that if you talk to my colleagues, you will hear a lot of despair. So, in fact, you are probably the person that I hear the most sense of optimism and potential for new alliances around these shared values. I don't know. I try to watch. I don't have any talent for prognestication.

But it is just interesting for me to hear the most optimistic view of our current state coming from somebody who is a, from the left, and second, who has been under grueling, relentless attack from her own crowd. Yeah, and the right for years. And from the right, right, that's after surviving, after surviving a decade of attacks from the right, turning a page to be to enjoy the hatred of your own community. Don't you think that there's a rich constituency in America that's just tired of all this culture war bullshit? Because I can show you polls all day long that show this is true.

What is it? The tired, the exhausted majority. Yeah. I want to cling to that. I mean, on my optimistic days, I tell myself that the power of the American constituency to redefine itself and oscillate. And even the back and forth between Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump shows, I guess a vitality of an electorate. For better or worse, and on my darker days, I think that it will be difficult. It will be difficult.

And in fact, because the terms of the argument in the culture keep getting more and more aggressive and violent. And it becomes, I think, more difficult for people to maintain their quietude and their healthy reticence from politics. and they are dragged into having stronger, harsher, more violent opinions because they keep thinking that the other side is coming for them. And sometimes the other side is coming for them. At some point, we're going to have to put down a gun.

I mean, that's just the truth of it. At some point, one of us is going to have to put down a gun and try to talk to the other side and we're going to have to have more tools in our toolbox than just violence and destroying the other side. Like, that's just the truth. And I can tell you, like, I've been on the front line of this culture

war in a way very few people have. It does not get us anywhere. There's no public policy I can point to the Gamergate accomplished. Like, it's just it's the way democracy works and I understand this

so clearly now in a way I didn't a decade ago. You're not pushing for some utopian future. You're trying to put together coalition of people where you can just agree on something that makes it better. and then you take that step and you assess and you do another.

There's so clearly what America means right now. Like I'm old enough to remember where goddamn country worked and it just keeps getting worse and worse with this hyper-partisanship. And I just, I have to believe that the fever is going to break. There's also the cyclical effect of

the view that you're describing, which I would consider, again, very conservative or at least dispatchian in understanding the value of sluggishness, of the government plotting and not rushing towards remaking the people in a more perfect form. And I think that instinct seems to be either forgotten or at least wearing out on people.

And in fact, the energy is increasingly towards wanting to speed up government, letting, you know, move fast and break things. Well, that may work well for Windows, but I don't think it's going to work here. I do want to, I think we're taking a turn that really brings us to something I would love to talk about right now, if that's okay. Because I think this feeds really well into this, which is, you know, I'm not just known as someone very dissatisfied with their policy post-October 7th. I've really become someone who's synonymous with being a critic of our current. an approach to trans rights. And I think this really ties into the thing that we're talking about here, because the dispatch being kind of an old school looking for those conservative values,

I want to tell you a story about what's gone wrong with trans rights and why the trans people that are coming out today are so different than I. So when I transitioned over 20 years ago, We had a document called the Standards of Kids, it was written in 1998, and there was a really, really, really long list of stuff I had to go through to transition from mail to fee. It involved months and months and months of therapy. It involved getting letters. It involved going to an endocrinogist, getting buy-in, have tests done, getting second letters written before I could start getting surgery. I had to go out and actually hold a job to show that I could thrive in my social role and make friends and not just sit on the internet all day long. And, you know, there was this this guide pen that we went through. And it said, look, you're in pain right now.

If you go do this thing, we can evaluate you and see if you're ready to go to the next step. And it created a generation of trans women that, like, I think I've done pretty, well for myself. I've been married to a man monogamously for 17 years. I'm from Congress. I own the house I'm recording in. Got some lovely Porsches. Like, I've had a good life. It really set me up for success. This comes into the conservative argument because that document, the standards of care, was at its core, a conservative document. It was thinking through this and going really slowly with people. And there has been a progressive political project to take that document and tear it to shreds in the name of instant access to all of these medications, which I want

to be clear, will change your body for your entire life and make you dependent on external hormones. I could take you to Planned Parenthood literally right now and get you on antigenes that would destroy your testosterone and your testes today. And you would be going down that path because every part of that has been destroyed. And I feel so strongly that this progressive political project in the name of love and acceptance of everyone, it has caused us to embrace a series of extreme medical procedures on people where there is zero, zero, zero evidence. It's the way it did me. And I think until we can have a real reckoning with all of this, my fear is these nutjombs that are lying about the science are going to make the health care

for people like me not tenable if we stay on this course. Not tenable because it is leading to a backlash from the right that is now trying to claw away, not just back to your view, but 50 years behind. And in fact... 100%. But not just that. Like the science is giving very poor results nowadays. Because when you get people that are not transsexuals the way that I was, like I responded very, very well to these treatments because I'm the textbook. I'm the thing in the medical textbook. They're not. And they're going out and they're getting on all these extreme hormones and they're having extreme surgeries like vaginoplasti, which is, you know, you don't have your penis after that. You know, it's an extreme surgery, and it's not serving someone. When you're saying they're not like you in the sense in the... They don't meet the clinical criteria. The phenomenologically, they are not, they are not, you would say that they are not trans, that they are...

No, they're not trans. If you go through their case history, they don't meet the DSM standards in the same way. They've got comorbidities. Autism is something we are not even talking about. There's a massive explosion in trans people with autism. I would estimate it's about a third of this now. It was not that way 20 years ago. They transitioned for different reasons.

They don't experience gender dysphoria in the same way. And maybe transition helps them. Maybe it does. I can't say, but I can't say it doesn't because we don't have any science on any of this. It's so understood. Your view is that this explosion is a form of cultural contagion, right? 100% is lowered standards where you've got everyone from people with pedestrians. gender nonconformity to confuse bored teenage girls to fetishistic cross-dressers

are telling themselves if they just go on hormones it's going to fix all their problems and it doesn't this is extreme health care by any definition it should really only be held for the people that meet a very high set of clinical criteria and we've substituted like this is what really upsets me is the standards of care, the document that outlines our health care has moved from science and things that we know with a reasonable level of certainty to applying all these crazy social theories. Like, are you aware that with no evidence whatsoever, they are telling people that if they want to have genital nullification, meaning having no genitals or endocrine system at all, that they will go facilitate that medically? There's no social.

study you can point to saying this is a good idea. When I grew up, like the people that wanted to be eunuchs, that was a fetish. And it's just been rolled into trans health care is absolute insanity. How do you explain that the the gates being flung open this way? How do I explain the gates being flung open? I think that I think that the activism project has hijacked the health care. So, you know, there's an organization called W Pound. the World Professional Transgender Health Organization has been ideologically captured by the fringe left. Go on Twitter, like look up who the staff are at WPath

and go follow their Twitter. They're communists, they're anti-Semites, they're just nuts. They're absolutely crazy. And they are fundamentally not interested in science, the same way that other medical health care providers are. So I think until we go and, really put the science first I think trans health care

is going to keep getting weaker and weaker and I think people that do not benefit from these procedures are going to get called up and this is one of the issues that well until October 7th probably would get you the most grief

to say the least on social media and in general public discourse. I mean, I guess the fair, the kindest way of thinking about this is probably for a lot of people. This is a very intimate, sensitive issue that raises

strong emotions. But then it also creates an environment of heightened emotions, anger, and hyperbole that gets thrown at anybody who stakes a position like yours. Where are

the adults who are who want to say, you know, we want to help people in need, but helping people requires discernment. And it requires a more careful, qualitative evaluation of people's conditions and what could help and figuring out what would help each individual under their conditions. It would not help to just, you know, bring down the lock from the medicine cabinet and say, like, have a free for all, right? And it would be obvious with any kind of other treatment, let alone things that require

surgery that are essentially irreversible and would define your life from here on. If you're asking where the adults are the adults? We are the adults. They don't exist. I'm just being flat out. Who are the stakeholders here? You've got HRC ideologically captured. They're pushing for the trans fringe, all this non-binary stuff, which we have no evidence for, 100% on board with it.

W-Path, gone. Like, their emails have been leaked through these lawsuits. I encourage people to go read it. It is an organization that is interested in politics and not science, in my view. Like, seriously, go read it and make your own assessment. That's mine. You know, they're individual health care providers that are good, but you don't have Democratic politicians. that can just flat out say this.

Seth Moulden did that in my state, faced a very steep price. So, like, this is the truth here, is we don't have adults running this ship for trans health care now. I think the reason this is so hard for me to get my head around, even though I've been paying attention to it as an outsider. This is a topic that I've never waited into because it's not my bailiwick.

But it blows my mind. that something that, you know, I can understand how people take an issue like Israel-Gaza war and turn that into their own proxy narrative. They're playing their video game through the stories of Israeli and Palestinians. And each player in America can pick their own heroes, their own players, and project whatever narratives they want without having to actually study history, without having to really developed the complicated moral and political historical savvy required to really have a discussion about this topic. Why would they, when they can just a cosplay as as freedom fighters, wear kaffia's

and march on the streets? But with the transgender, I would say transsexual, not transgender, the police per se. Yes. Oh, sorry, transsexual. Fair point. And actually, I want you to to clarify this distinction, but by thinking is that with transsexuals, we are talking about people that you meet in your real life. This is not a story that is playing out on your Twitter feeds alone. This is something that can affect people that you know. And especially if this is with a growing social contingent, this is theoretically something that you see more and more of. And you have to navigate whether this person that you saw yesterday should actually go through a life-altering procedure tomorrow. And this is something.

that how could how could you be blaze about this how could you be just well i i i guess just like just go for it like if you have i don't understand it feels like you would have like just a being human seeing other humans put making these like difficult decisions you would have to apply more weight in thinking about this than what seems to be the case with the supposed gate but it's been the progressive political project let me give you a really concrete example that maybe can help you do this. So Buck Angel is a good friend of him. And if you talk to Buck Angel, it's just clear he should be a dude. He's just got male energy. He's obnoxious in the best way men can be. He's just got dude energy. It was obviously a good call for him to go on testosterone.

But it's also just true that we don't know that much scientifically about female to male transsexuals as opposed to people like me. Like, you can go into, you know, 4,000 years ago. You can see my predecessors, like, in Rome. Like, we're just a phenomenon that's been all through human history. Women that want to be men is a much newer phenomenon.

We weren't studying this in the 60s. And now it's just been this explosion of them. You know, like, you can go back 10 years ago where it was like one person in seven, was a female to male transsexual. Today, those ratios are flipped. Like, it's absolutely terrified, like, how fast this is exploded. So we, the problem is a health care process that was interested in getting those natal women, the right kind of health care would go, well, let's talk about this. If you want to go on testosterone like Buck Angel did, we can talk about that. Like,

we will work with that. But we need to be honest with you. We don't. know that much about the phenomenon compared to male-to-female transsexuals, and the surgeries that we have are not as good, and there's a lot of weird complications you need to be aware of, like you can be in your 20s and incontinent, and your organs may fuse together, and you may have sepsis and die. Like, an honest health care system would give those patients that information. instead what happened is this progressive political project happens where it goes well men and women are equal right so therefore these two phenomena has got to be the same thing so if this study is true for the male to females i'm sure it's fine for the female to males and so they extrapolated out this is crazy because the history of feminist criticism of the the medical establishment was that the that that that that women's health care never got the same kind of attention that male health care does,

and many studies only apply to men and therefore put women's health at risk. This is a very smart and longstanding criticism. That's really true. I can't believe I've never thought about that. You're done on, yes. Like, how is it flipped? This is, this is mind-boggling. What, hasn't flipped, has it?

I mean, it's health care for natal women. Okay, yes. I mean, but politically, you, this is, so, Are you basically saying this is the internalized patriarchy of the left? I'm saying that there is a politics first approach to the science, right? If we were honest, we would tell those natal girls, if they want to have be boys, we could say, this may work, this may not work for you, we don't really know, we don't really have a criteria to determine who's going to really respond to this.

And instead, we just said, these things are the same. Another one is this non-binary political project. We have no evidence, no evidence, no evidence, no evidence, that putting these non-binary people that in no way qualify for transsexuality, they fundamentally do not meet the diagnosis, there's no study out there that would justify putting them on testosterone or estrogen. But this happens every day to not adults, but children, because we know. do not honestly labels. So how do we,

we hear this term a lot by non-binary, but what I spoke with James Kirchick several times and he is entirely dismissive of the entire category of non-binary as as a false concept.

But what do you, what do you understand even as non-binary? What is this category? So I think it's clearly something. Like there, it goes, beyond pedestrian gender nonconformity for some of them. For many of them is just pedestrian gender nonconformity. But this, again, is where if we were treating this seriously, we would

be commissioning studies. We would be developing a protocol for it. When it's a pedestrian gender nonconformity, you would say just like an effeminate guy. Yeah, a feminine guy, a girl likes to play with Legos, the engineers, all that kind of stuff. Right. So a tomboy girl, that would be pedestrian gender and uncomfortly, right? In my view, like, look, when I transition, I adhere fairly closely to a typical gender stereotype. I like men, cook dinner from my husband, love putting on makeup, all that kind of stuff, right? Like, that's just my vibe. Like, I am comfortable with that stuff.

There's some natal girls that aren't. And that's okay. Like, like, I understand, like, in the age of Instagram, like, there's got to be a lot of pressure to be perfect. But my point here is not a judgment call on non-binary. I think something is going on. My point is if you truly value those people, you don't funnel them into a cheap political project that just fits into the progressive narrative. You commission studies, you start developing a protocol to identify them at the clinic, you start figuring out what helps them with these feelings. Is it testosterone?

Is it estrogen? Is it treatment for the ones at autism to help them deal with sensory issues? Is it just helping them accept their gender role? I don't know. And neither does any other doctor. And we need to start being honest about that. Would you mind sharing how you knew that you were trans? Oh, my God.

I've never had a second of doubt in my entire life. You know, it's when I was really, really young, I wondered why I had those parts and started asking my parents when they were going to go away. I wanted to play with girls in kindergarten. And, you know, this was Mississippi in the 80s. And, you know, feminine boys get fairly punished for that. You know, I played dress up in my mom's closet and played with their makeup or high heels, all that kind of stuff. And just, you know, it's just what I am.

And, you know, I went into a really deep depression. I was substance addiction, addiction, and life went wildly off course, and I finally got the courage to transition. I was actually the first student to ever transition at the University of Mississippi, which is kind of crazy. How did you come upon that as a path, the transition itself? I mean, I've been thinking about it my whole life. Actually, I can show you. So when I was 12 years old, I was feeling very suicidal. So I knew I was going to die if I didn't figure out what was wrong with me and peddled down to the University of Mississippi library because they checked the libraries in my school.

And this is a book from 1964 called Trit Sexualism and Sexual Assignment. It's basically a psychological breakdown of what we knew about girls like me in the 60s. And I'm reading it and looking at graphic medical photos. of vaginoplasty from that era and kind of horrified me. So that was when I found out what I was. Was there when the

idea finally landed that you were going to do it, was there a lot of hesitation or when it clicked, it clicked? Well, it's, I knew I probably wanted to transition and I went on estrogen and just bam. It's like, my brain had been broken my whole life.

I could think clearly. I had emotions. Just wonderful. It was like going from a black and white TV to full HD surround sound in every aspect of my life. And I just knew it was right for me and went full steam ahead from there

and have never regretted it for a second. Even though my family disowned me and I ended up homeless. It was the right call. And I'm sure I would even assume that without knowing your Twitter feed, but you are concerned about what's happening now from the Trump administration or a general Republican motion

to completely curtail access. I mean, there's some stuff that I think is reasonable there. I mean, there are obviously two sexes, right? And I think anyone that is denying that is just law, right? So I don't necessarily have an issue with that. What Trump is doing goes beyond. It is robbing us of lives of dignity where we can transition and move on with life. You know, he's making it so we cannot use NIH dollars to do any kind of research into transsexual health care outcomes.

So let's say if you are a parent and your child comes to you and says, I'm non-bindyre, please put me on testosterone. there's no research that's going to happen on that with the NIH dollars thanks to Trump, which would probably give us some helpful answers. So it's one of these things where it's, I think parts of it are good because there's clearly a correction that needs to be made. But I would really urge conservatives. Really think about this. For me, I had a health care issue.

I went and got health care and it made my life better. I have paid millions of dollars in taxes throughout my career. I hire people. I am a credit to my community. I participate in our government. I am a good American citizen. That happened because I had a pathway to go have a normal life and move on once I transition. Those are the things that are being taken away by the Trump administration.

So you really have to choose. Do you want a nation of Brianna Woo's? Or do you want a nation of broken progressive activists that can't leave their house? Because if you take away all the options to normalize this, that's what you're going to end up getting. Brianna, you've been so generous with your time. So before letting you go, I have to ask you my kicker question for uncertain things, since this is the double podcast today. what do you say, what would you say is the blind spot on the left and what are the blind spots on the right at this particular moment? I think the blind spot on the left. Do you know what Chesserton's fences?

Oh, yeah. Okay. So just in case your listeners don't know, there's this, it's a Catholic, a theologian came up with this. Basically, it's like a bunch of people go out into a field and they see a fence that's there. They don't know what it's four and they tear it down. And it finds, ends up that that fence is really, really important. I think that the left in our rush for things tends to tear down institutions in the name of progress without asking ourselves if there's value. And I think it's really to our detriment. I think on the right, the really big blind spot that I have is a lack of compassion sometimes. Yeah, I say this is someone that grew up in the right. But I think there's a real sense that you can just tell people.

to ignore a problem and it will go away and this is just not the way the real world works. We need, we need conservatives. We need your pragmatism. We need your thoughtfulness. And we need to keep that core focus on our values moving forward. We need you in the mix for solving these very complicated problems that our nation is facing. So I think we're stronger if we do that together. And I hope you'll do that with this.

Brandon, well, thank you so much. Thanks. You know,