The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Complex Story of Being Trans in Africa, and Derek DelGaudio on Deception

Episode Date: March 30, 2021

Our producer talks with the South African scholar Dr. B Camminga, whose essay “Disregard and Danger” deconstructs the viewpoints of so-called TERFs—trans-exclusionary radical feminists—through an African-feminist lens. And we speak with Derek DelGaudio, whose magic special on Hulu is “In & Of Itself.” DelGaudio says that he’s never liked tricking people, and he credits his brief stint as a “bust-out dealer”—a professional card dealer who cheats the players on behalf of the house—with changing his perspective on the power of deception. DelGaudio compares the claims of a rigged election that preceded the actual election to his work as a crooked dealer: he made his legitimate deals look shady in order to camouflage the bad ones. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Pretty presciently, back in 2012, Joe Biden said that trans rights would be the civil rights battle of our time. And on his first day in office as president, Biden rolled back some of the Trump administration's orders on trans rights. But civil rights don't just happen by executive order. they're argued in the court of public opinion, in popular culture on television series and talk shows, and they take sometimes a very long time to play out.

Producer Gophane and Putubuele has a story about that part of the struggle. The story starts in March of 2017 with an interview that the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was giving. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is probably the most famous African voice in the U.S. alongside Trevor Noah and Lupida Njongo. She's a hugely acclaimed novelist, but also at the time, my generations kind of go-to public feminist. I mean, now I get sent every book that has anything to do with gender, but I don't feel that I'm the authority on feminism. She had given this viral TED Talk that was featured on the song by Beyonce. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.

We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man. Feminist, a person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes. So it's 2017 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and British journalist Kathy Newman from Channel 4 News are seated on these. red armchairs, there's a wood table with a purple orchid plant growing up between them. Then the interviewer asks this question. Staying with this issue of feminism, femininity, does it matter how you've arrived at being a

woman? I mean, for example, if you're a trans woman who grew up identifying as a man, who grew up enjoying the privileges of being a man, does that take away from becoming a woman? Are you any less of a real woman? So when people talk about, you know, are trans women women? My feeling is trans women are trans women. I think if you've been, if you've lived in the world as a man, with the privileges that the world accords to men, and then sort of change, switch gender,

it's difficult for me to accept that then we can equate your experience with the experience of a woman who has lived from the beginning in the world as a woman and who has not been accorded those privileges that men are. I don't think it's a good thing to talk about women's issues being exactly the same as the issues of trans women. Do you remember this happening when this controversy was happening back in 2017? Yeah.

Well, I mean, I crossed the African continent. Like social media blew up, but it just didn't ring true for many people's experience of being trans on the African continent. This is Dr. B. Kaminga. they are a South African scholar, Caminga, who's trans and their community disagreed intensely with Aditya's take. Do we need to put out statements? Does this mean that we give her more traction? Dr. Caminga started writing an essay, an article in a scholarly journal that basically says, okay, let's break down Adichie's statements. I came across that essay recently after Adichie came out in support of J.K.

who has made numerous transphobic comments. Scrolling through Black Twitter, as I do, there were Black Africans, Black Europeans, and Black Americans all positively retweeting and recommending this essay by Kaminga, who's a White South African. I approached Kaminga wanting to learn what had resonated so much. The essay basically takes one African lens to very universal questions. What is a fairer? feminist and who is a woman? And it has to do with TERFs. T-E-R-F. What does the term turf mean and like

explain that to me in the context of what we're talking about? It means trans-exclusionary radical feminist. And it is a way to name a kind of feminist belief and practice for a particular group of people who believe that at their most like mundane or at the most like simplest level that trans women are not women and at its most extreme and violent level that trans women are somehow violent interlopers and are using their ability to transition to infiltrate cis women spaces and they present a danger to those spaces. So what like how how do you then in the paper, like, respond to that?

Well, I think in the way in which Adichie frames her argument, she makes three fundamental assumptions. The one was this idea that people just switch gender, which is like a very antiquated understanding of what it means to be trans. And it's kind of embedded in that language of one day a person might be this and another day a person might be that as though it is that simple. But also that that's a kind of a to be linear. journey. The word switching is, it's kind of, it's problematic, but it's also a little bit aggressive. It undermines the kind of authenticity of a person's gender identity by suggesting that it's clothing in a closet that we can just pick one day or the next and be in the world.

And that's a true experience of what it's like to be trans. The second thing that she alluded to was that all people who are trans women always live in the world as men. So they are never acknowledged as children as girls and then raised as women when they express themselves. I mean, I think many people might think about the African continent that way in that very like backward barbaric kind of understanding where it just would seem impossible that any family would acknowledge and love their trans daughter and raise a child that says, I am a girl as a girl. And then the last thing she does is that when she talks about this. idea of switching and male privilege, she discounts the fact that these people are women,

that they are misgendered as children, and that we live on a continent with very few rights for trans people, and that male privilege and patriarchy are prized possessions, and that any a person who's assigned male who expresses femininity will experience generally quite time. harsh and brutal backlash to that expression of self. To frame that as somehow a privileged position is to overlook the ways in which a person might have to survive being consistently misgendered. Tell me kind of like what you set out to do when you were writing this. One of the things I really want to bring across is that trans exclusionary feminism is a

particularly global northern idea. it is a minority position that is being taken up in the media and being treated as a very mainstream position. It's being treated as the fundamental facet of feminism. And it is not the fundamental facet of feminism and that there are many strands of feminism. And in the global South, this doesn't seem to have much traction. And I really wanted to, as a white trans scholar,

elevate the voices of particularly black trans women who had written. I mean, the one hashtag I note in the article is Chimamanda killed me. And you'd think using a hashtag like that would gain some notice or traction, but it just didn't. And I think that's because black trans women from the global South are often maligned and sidelined in the kind of global conversation about trans rights. So how does whiteness and your whiteness like connect to this, right?

Because I think I noticed as I was talking to people about doing this interview, I was talking to a friend and they're like, oh, you're, oh, you're speaking to a white South African. Like, how is that? You know, like. Yeah, I mean, that carries a reputation. Yes. Yeah. So how do you think about that? So when you, like, when you approach me to do this, I had like a moment of, I don't want to, I don't want to, like, I'm a white person.

I don't want to do this. And I understood myself in this paper using, as far as we know, I'm the first person on the African continent, trans person on the African continent to get their PhD. So I recognize there's like a very deep sense of privilege in who I am based on whiteness, based on masculinity. based on historical power and privilege that has allowed me to enter the institution. And I hoped in writing this paper to kind of elevate the voices of these trans women who have really been my guides and my touchstones to become who I am. Yeah, I see you citing everywhere. Yeah, I want to make it clear that, like, some of this is my thinking,

but a lot of it is this like really difficult work that these people are doing and it's just not getting the acknowledgement that it should have gotten. You kind of, you explain this idea that in the West we like imagine there's like a trans experience and that that it just kind of is across the globe. So I think like as much, you know, as much with the idea that there's like a global womanhood. There's this idea that there's a global kind of trans experience and that is you recognize that you are a trans man or a trans woman and then you move from point A to point B and often that includes medicalization, so access to affirming

healthcare. So there is this kind of idea of a very linear movement and it always includes a a kind of medicalization. On the African continent, medicalization just really isn't an option in most countries. So the ways in which trans existence is imagined often, and that doesn't include this kind of medical imaginary. So then how does transness work outside of that? A handful of the people who are in my book, transgender refugees, they talk about coming to South Africa because they knew there were trans rights here, leaving all their clothes behind, these are people who identifies trans women

and coming with a bag of dresses. And their idea of South Africa was that they would finally just be able to wear their dresses. And that was what trans womanhood meant for them. And so it's like, you know, one brings one's dress. Like I bring all my dresses to South Africa and like me being a woman, here, being a trans woman here, is like fully fulfilled and in the ability for me to actually just

like present and wear my dresses. Like that medicalization isn't necessarily a part of it. That doesn't like make something missing. No, no, not at all. And I think it's this kind of, it makes me, it gives me, it makes me like a little bit sad in one space and a little bit really happy in another because it speaks to this kind of very beautiful, um, utopic. I idea of what gender could mean. You know, many, across the continent, many trans women have beards. And that's either because it's to maintain a sense of safety because they are living in societies where they're not accepted and having to pass as men sometimes.

And for some trans women, it is just a part of who they are. A lot of people got to know Chima Manda Gosea Dice through this TED Talk. Like that's how a lot of us were introduced to her. So that is how to create a single story. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. The single story, the idea of it's dangerous to have one story of, of, of, of, about, anything, really, and what it is to be Africa, and I feel like is maybe at the heart of her explanation of it. I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person

without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this. It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. And so you bring that back in the paper and kind of bring this idea of like, are you, Adichie, creating a single story here? Tell me, tell me what you're getting at. I'm, I mean, I can ask a better question. No, it's fine. I'm willing to answer.

I just, you know, it's, I. It's not meant to be. This isn't the question. is it meant to be a confrontational one? Or like, you know, like, you know, not at all. It's just like, you know, when you suddenly have this rising sense of guilt because you really respect this person. I respect her writing.

I respect, as, like, many of the people who respond in this paper do. She has done so much for the ways in which we understand feminism and for the kind of freedom of writing. I mean, even Aquaki Amizi, who tweeted this paper, and that's when the traction started, It comes out of Adichie's kind of writing school. And it's like, yeah, so it's just hard to answer because I feel like a naughty kid when I wrote this. Yeah.

I kind of am taking her narrative of a single story, attempting to take it back to her and ask the question about where, if we understand trans woman as not to be a woman, then we can only end up in one narrative. and if we actually listen to to trans women and what they're saying, and we listen to actually cis women who are defending this position and saying you've got it wrong, you have several other voices that are telling you completely different stories to this narrative of male privilege, switching, and always being seen as men. Because I do believe her when she says, you know,

she supports LGBT rights, she certainly has done a lot to support LGBT people. But all of us can be on the wrong side of the narrative at some point. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah. That's producer Gophane Mputtubuele. And he was speaking with Dr. B. Caminga.

You can find Caminga's paper called Disregard and Danger at New Yorkerradio.org. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Derek, what do you do for a living? Okay, yeah, you just, just going to start with that. Let's see. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Michael Schillman recently talked to the performer Derek Delgado, and their conversation got off to a funny start.

I make things. I make things, and I try to use that. the skills that I have to hopefully reveal more than I conceal, but I don't really I don't really have a simple

answer for that question. Now, to clarify, you could call Derek Delgado a magician, and you wouldn't be wrong. He's performed illusions with cards all over the world. His stage show, in and of itself, was directed for television by the great Frank Oz, and it's playing on Hulu.

But in the long line of illusionists, people like Ricky Jay and Penn and Teller, Derek Delgado is not content to be just a magician. I have a complicated relationship with that word. I have a background in magic and sleight of hand and illusions, but the context that's created around that word or with that word It makes it difficult for me to pursue the type of work that I'm interested in pursuing, which is usually in some way or another about truth.

It's sort of interesting that someone who's so fascinated with the truth chose a deceptive practice. So I've been grappling with that for some time of what that means. how to use these skills that I've learned in a way that's in service of truth rather than deception. Deception is the theme of Delgado's new book, Amoral Man. Amoral Man is a memoir, and it describes a period when he took a break from performing and used his card skills to be a bust out dealer, a dealer who cheats the players to benefit the house. So I was I was hired to be a bust out dealer in a private poker game in Beverly Hills when I was around 25 years old. And by this point you had already learned a lot of these skills, right?

Yeah, I had a lot of, well, not all of the skills. Yeah, I had acquired many of the skills I needed. I never dealt a professional game of cards in my life. but I had the technical prowess as a sleight of hand artist to achieve the maneuvers that were required to do the things in the game. It was just a matter of did I have the mental ability or lack of whatever morals or ethics are required to do these things. And just to be clear, this was not a casino.

know, like what, can you just tell, like, describe what this setup was at this place? Sure. So imagine a house in Beverly Hills behind a wall, a tall wall with green vines growing on it. And this is that kind of house that those Hollywood celebrity tour vans drive by. And they, you know, they say Brad Pitt lives in that house. You know, this is one of those houses. and inside they would host what are essentially parties. And in one of those rooms was a gaming table, generally a poker table.

This house also included a professional chef who could make whatever you wanted and a bar with a bartender and a few cocktail waitresses. It was just a nice place to go play a game of poker. At least that's what it looked like. none of the rest of the staff had any idea that you were a bust out dealer, right? Correct. Everyone else was basically an unwitting participant, or unknowing participant. And they were hired just to be part of a party that was going on that happened to have a poker game in the back.

Yeah. And the whole point of this operation was you. Yeah. It all centered around my ability to direct. and alter the narrative of the game because it was never a game. It just looked like one. And just to get a sense of like the money that was involved, how much money were these players being cheated out of every night

and how much were you making from that? It was a $10,000 buy-in. And so at any given time there was, you know, as little as 30 or 40,000 on the table up to 150,000 at any given time. Did you struggle with the morality of what you were doing to these players? It's, I found it very easy to tell yourself whatever story you need to justify your actions. And the people who came into this house and played in these games, they were legitimately, they weren't great.

I saw, you know, a lot of people doing drugs and guys, you know, cheating on their wives. And I was able to look at them and think they were the villains in the story. And I was too wrapped up in the journey of it. I hadn't been successful at anything else. This is kind of the only thing I was good at. And here's a place where I'm finally valued and the things that I can do are, literally valued financially and I'm treated well. And so it really in a sense seemed like maybe this is all I'm good for is this. And so I didn't, I knew it was wrong, but I didn't realize

what I had become or what I was becoming. So can you maybe show me over Zoom even, like an example of these skills that you had learned? Sure. I'll show you something very specific. One of the techniques which varied in how I used it was known as a bottom deal. So if I were to have some cards on the bottom of the deck that I wanted to be able to deal, I have to somehow take those cards from the bottom and have them look like they're coming off the top. It has to look like what it's supposed to look like, which is your... you're just dealing a card.

Right, which it totally does over Zoom. It just looks like you're dealing, but I know that you have that Asa's fades on top there. Right. That's actually, as you find over the years, you don't try to make your bottoms look like your tops. That's kind of impossible. What you do is you try to get your tops

to look more like your bottoms. In other words, you make the real deals look more dishonest and match the dishonest deals so you can't tell the difference. the way that these deals, these false deals are simulated, or the way that these shuffles are simulations of shuffles, that extrapolates out to everything. That to create a convincing illusion, for instance, there was in the house, there was a sports memorabilia there, which was signed and autographed, but it was all fake. Really?

Yeah, they fake, they, you know, they didn't, yeah, they, you don't want to spend money on real sports memorabilia that was signed, but they wanted to give the illusion that this was a house where people liked gaming and they liked sports and they liked... This was totally the matrix that you were in. That, yeah, that is it. And that, but that's what life is. It's like everything that's around me has been made by a person, really. And so what was the intent of that person?

And why was this thing made and what was its intention? Do you, are you constantly on the lookout for, you know, reality not being what you perceive it to be? I'm at least mindful of the fact that it might not be, that all of this might not be what I think it is, that every truth that I'm living, I'm aware there might be some illusion or complete illusion involved with whatever my perception. is of that truth. And watching people really believe in fiction as though it's truth is, you can't, you can't shake that. They really believe it. The way that you and I believe that we're talking right now, they believe it with that much conviction. Well, we are, in fact, talking right now. We are, but it doesn't have to be. For instance, you could hire an actor or a voiceover actor

to recite everything I've said so far and play that for people instead of playing what we've actually recorded right now. That's one way to do it. So people would be listening to this conversation and they would think that they were listening to Michael and Derek, but they would actually be listening to me talking to an actor playing you saying all the things that you said to me during this interview. Yeah, I mean that... Yeah, I mean that...

Everything they've heard will be true for them. will be true for them, including my voice and who I am as a person, until you reveal to them that it's not. Okay, so we actually did do that. Our producer, Alex Barron, went back and recorded everything that Derek had said to me up until this point. So you've been hearing Alex, this is Derek. And when you reveal to them, it will change everything. It will re-contextualize everything they've just heard and everything.

moving forward. And it's that uncertainty of knowing what's real and what's not. That's interesting to me. Tadda. And then one night you had an epiphany. Can you say what happened? Yeah, I had, there was a regular player that I had seen a few times before. And it's very common for players to tip the dealers.

And they usually do that by giving them a poker chip. And one night, this particular player, we had just beaten him for all of the money that he had. So he had no poker chips left. But he stood up and he reached into his pocket and he pulled out a $5 bill, appeared to be the last money he had on him. And he gave it to me. And he's here you go, dealer. I wish it was more.

And in that moment, I recognized the absence of humanity in what I was doing. And for some reason, that dollar bill, as opposed to a poker, It's one step closer to what we would call real, you know, and everything was a facsimile and, you know, it was all a simulation of what was happening in that space. But this was a real object entering at a real moment of this guy who just lost everything. And I realized this is not, it's not just about what I'm doing. And I need to, I need to really evaluate if this is the life I want for myself. I guess, is there is, is, how do, how do you? walking through the world knowing that this kind of deception is possible? How do you, you know,

do you have any advice from people who are just kind of exasperated by the idea of objective truth being gone somehow? For me, it kind of, it just shows the fragility of our state, of our, how you can convince anyone of really anything if you set your mind to it. There are people doing to us on Facebook and social media what the people in the house that I worked in were doing to those poker players. All deception is the same in this regard. It's creating strategic ambiguity between what's true and what's false. It's not about making your false seem more true through truth. It's about you can't tell the difference between either. And if you can't tell the difference, it doesn't matter. It's not a question of, does it live?

like it's coming off the top or the bottom. It just, they all look the same. So this is like Donald Trump saying over and over again, you know, the election is rigged, before the election happened. So that once a, you know, once a normal election happens, no one can tell anymore. That's exactly right. It's all based on, I don't give a shit about making my lies seem like truths. If I can just make your truth seem like lies, then I've created a playing field that I now

control and that's how he wins. So how did you actually leave the job? Did you tell them you were quitting? I told, no, I didn't tell him I was quitting. I just, I just left and hoped there would be no repercussions. Bad ass. I don't know about that, but. They walk away from the explosion without looking.

back. Derek Delgado's special in and of itself is on Hulu, and his memoir is called A Moral Man. He spoke with staff writer Michael Schulman. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for listening this week. Hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Avi, and

Carillo, Riannon Corby, Calli Leah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Monkfei Chen, and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.