There Are No Girls on the Internet - DISINFORMED: Republicans are leaning into transphobia

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

Next week, we’ll hear from Emily Gorcenski, an activist who uses her data science background to fight Nazis (seriously!)This work isn’t easy and Emily faces transphobic attacks on her identity as a trans woman.This, unfortunately, isn’t an isolated thing.Just this week, Rand Paul and insurrection enthusiast Marjorie Taylor Green both attacked trans people to score ideological points.In this preview of our conversation, Emily explains how this is used as a deliberate strategy to cause harm to trans folks. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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844-844-I-Hart. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going? On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale, being able to fail in front of the entire world. Like, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game. This morning, the internet lost its mind. And nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, and every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. And we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves, their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear.

Listen to Sports Slice on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Sliced Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. You're listening to Disinformed, a mini-season. from there are no girls on the internet. I'm Bridget Todd. I am so excited about next week's guest that I couldn't wait until Tuesday for you to hear some of what she has to say.

Emily Grosensky is an activist who uses her data science background to fight Nazis. Yep, you heard that right. After being pepper sprayed by a well-known white supremacist at the deadly Unite the Right Valley in Charlottesville in 2017, Emily built First Visual, a resource that documents and tracks

the court proceedings of Nazis and white supremacists. This work has not been without significant personal risk for Emily. She even relocated out of the United States to Germany just to get some space. And when the white supremacist that Emily tracks try to attack her, they often do so using transphobic attacks on her identity as a trans woman. Unfortunately, weaponizing trans identity is not isolated. And just this week, there was a flood of irresponsible public transphobia from our elected officials. During the Senate hearing for Dr. Rachel Levine,

the first transgender person to be nominated for a Senate-confirmed position in the federal government, Ray and Paul asked her a series of completely offensive, deeply trans-mobic questions that pushed harmful misrepresentations obviously meant to attack her identity as a trans woman. And after Rep. Marie Newman, whose daughter is trans, hung a trans flag outside of her office and advocated for the Equality Act, insurrection supporter Marjorie Taylor Green, whose offices across the hall, went out of her way to cruelly antagonize her for supporting her kid. To make matters worse, when Newman posted a video of her putting up the trans flag,

she says Facebook took it down and labeled it as, quote, hate speech, while leaving Marjorie Taylor Green's transphobic nonsense up. Now, I'm being purposely vague here because I don't want to spend too much time talking about the specifics of their antics, because that's exactly what they want. These people are scammers who use trans people's actual lives as stunts for attention and escrow ideological points instead of actually doing their job and governing. From fearmongering about bathrooms and trans kids on sports teams, these kinds of stunts prevent trans people from just being able to safely live their lives.

Now, in our interview, Emily says this is an intentional strategy to cause harm. Here's a preview of our conversation. You're already dealing with so much, and it's like one more thing that you don't need. One more thing to take you out of your work or one more thing to take up your energy or your capacity, which we already know is scarce. That's part of the plan, right? This is a weaponized sort of war of attrition, right, that they do this. Because if they get you spending your energy on all of these little things,

ultimately, if you needed to swallow it, you could to get the job done. You would just swallow it to get the job done. But you want to fight it, right? And so they're trying to distract you. They're trying to steal your energy fighting these pointless battles. And they're not pointless battles, but they're not the main point of battle, right? So it's like death by a thousand paper cuts with all of this stuff. And yeah, I don't know.

It just seems like that's part of this like fascist strategy is to just keep you constantly occupied so that you can never get ahead because they know that if you had a moment peace, right? Imagine what we could all do given that. Like the stuff that I'm accomplishing now, having moved to Germany,

having gotten some space between, you know, the trauma and the noise and all of that, and like the healing that I've done, Like, I'm doing the best work of my life right now because that's the power that I have. And I got that power by having to fight all, like, by surviving all of these fights for so long, you know, as somebody that's mixed race, as somebody that's transgender, as somebody that's queer, right? It's just a constant battle. Well, surviving that has given me the tools to excel. But at the same time, like, sometimes I wish I could just be kind of normal and just like exist like everyone else.

and just have a normal life, right? And not everyone gets to make it through all of that noise. And they, you know, that's the point. That's how they keep us down. Yeah. I even see it in, you know, I feel that a lot of the online conversation around issues impacting the trans community, people, like bad actors and shitheads have dominated,

especially online, dominated those conversations. And so every conversation is like, trans people in sports, bathrooms. And it's like, if we, if folks did not have to constantly, you know, contend with these very loud people who essentially, in my opinion, have been able to really own the conversation online, like, could we actually have a productive conversation that moves us forward? But I feel like we can't because we're still the people who want to be flooding every

conversation with like a bunch of nonsense. They have dominated the online space, I feel. Yeah, and it's all culture world stuff, right? Like, this whole thing now, it's about trans kids in sports, right? There's no problems with trans kids in sports. All of these things that they're talking about, there's no statistics whatsoever that suggests that this is a problem in any way, shape, or form.

If a bunch of trans girls were out there winning every sports championship for, you know, in high school women's sports and college women's sports, even I would say, like, you know, maybe we need to revisit this, right? But that's not happening. There's none. There's none. There are no trans women dominating collegiate athletics. There are no trans women dominating high school athletics.

There are no trans women dominating the Olympic, you know, women's competition. There are some trans women who are successful in those competitions. But we do not see a wave of, you know, cis men trying to pretend that they're trans women. so they can get in a gold medal. We don't see that. We don't see trans women, trans girls joining these teams to dominate them. This is a completely fabricated issue.

And the reason it has been fabricated is in order to create this polarization so that the right can stay relevant by creating this cultural division. And trans people have been historically used as scapegoats. As just, you know, we are just one sort of identity that has been used, used as scapegoats. You know, three, four years ago, this was all about bathroom bills. Okay, well, there was no evidence of any trans women ever sexually assaulting anyone in the bathroom or any men trying, you know, cisgender men, trying to pretend that they

are trans women to assault women in bathrooms. There were plenty of cases of cisgender men going into women's bathrooms when a cisgender woman who was like a butch lesbian went in the... there and then beat her up. So the actual threat of men, men, again, men on women violence and women's bathrooms was the opposite of this problem, right? The thing that they were saying was going to happen was the thing that they were doing. All of this is culture war stuff. All of this is designed to keep inflated this polarized version of politics and to rally people to, you know, the right knows that it is a losing cause,

but they create these fake issues to mobilize people. And it works because we're left here holding the bag because we have to be outraged and we have to fight it because if we don't fight it, it's a catastrophe. If we do fight it, it becomes this polarization vector. And then all of these talking heads, you know, on social media and in the New York Times op-ed and on cable news, they're all sitting here going,

hmm, is America so polarized? Like, is it really both sides that are bad? And like, fuck you, buddy. You're not affected. Like, you're not going to get beat up if you go to try to take a leak in the bathroom at a courthouse or a school, right? This is not an issue of people becoming polarized.

This is an issue of people who have always had a right defending against lies that are being used to try to remove that right in order to further a different political agenda. Like, we're not a, you know, we're not a football, right? We're people. And then us fighting to retain whatever little dignity we are granted somehow becomes like a both sides issue. Fuck that.

It's so insulting. And I think people forget that these are people that, yeah, where people, it's like, you're not, I guess I hate when I see people talking about other human beings as if it's some sort of ideological exercise or something, you know, not someone's actual life. It's very frustrating. People shouldn't have to go through this. Trans people are valid and trans people belong. And we shouldn't stand for their identities and lives being used for chief political stunts. Emily's work is so incredible and she's so cool. I was almost kind of nervous to talk to her.

Tune in to Disinformed from There Are No Girls on the Internet this Tuesday to hear our entire conversation. You won't want to miss it. If you enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? We'd love to hear from you at hello at tangoity.com. Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet. It's a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.

Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Life is full of hurdles. So how do you keep going?

On Hurtle with Emily Abadi, we're talking with the most inspiring women in sports and wellness from professional athletes, coaches, and Olympic champions about the challenges that shape them and the mindset that keeps them moving forward. At our level, at this scale,

being able to fail in front of the entire world, I can do anything. I can do anything. Listen to Hurtle with Emily Abadi on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHart Women's Sports. Last night, a blown call changed a game.

This morning, the internet lost its mind, and nobody's telling you exactly what happened. That's where Sports Slice comes in. I'm Timbo, in every episode, we're cutting through the noise, breaking down the biggest moments in sports and giving you the real story behind the headline. and we're going straight to the source, the athletes themselves.

Their locker room stories, their reactions in the moment, and the stuff nobody gets to hear. Listen to SportsSlice on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. And for more, follow Timbo Slicalife Life 12 in the TikTok podcast network on TikTok. I'm Michelle McPhee, and I've been unraveling the strangest criminal alliance

I've ever reported on, a Mormon polygamist and an Armenian businessman. multi-million dollar house, Ferraris and Lamborghinis, private jets, a billion dollar fraud. But how long can this alliance last? Tell me what you know.

Is somebody coming after me? Listen to Kingdom of Fraud on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.