TRASHFUTURE - Diaper Nation feat. Jess O’Thomson

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Jess O’Thomson from QueerAF joins Riley, Nova, and Hussein to discuss the details of the recent anti-Trans Supreme Court ruling. Also, domes popping up around the world of gold and steel, and an AI “entrapment as a service” company. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! *TF LIVE ALERT* We’ll be performing at the Big Fat Festival hosted by Big Belly Comedy on Saturday, 21st June! You can get tickets for that here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody and welcome back to this free episode of TF. It's the bleak one. Well, it will be. It will be in the second half. I haven't checked what's in the first half. I'm sure it won't be. Okay. It's the funny one and then the bleak one. Well, it will be. It will be in the second half. I haven't checked what's in the first half. I'm sure it won't be. Okay, it's the funny one and then the bleak one. Well, let me just, oh, no, no, no.

I'm afraid it's, we're gonna be talking about the article on Massive Blue in Wired mostly. We're gonna get to a couple of things before that. I'm afraid that's also bleak. Damn. Damn. Now, so this is one of our classic episodes of Two Halves, where in the back half, we're going to be talking to Jess O'Tompson, all about their writing about the Supreme Court judgment and what that means. We get into some more, some more of the legal detail, what the law says and doesn't say and why it's absurd the way it's

being trotted out by its sort of proponents, let's say. It's an episode of two halves. It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. But before we do that, look, I've been handed like two bulletins, like, just right away. I've been handed two bulletins that are sort of superseding what I wanted to talk about. Our intern came up with like one bulletin in each hand. Yeah. Do I choose the former Business Insider executive who created an AI newsroom and then

immediately sexually harassed one of his AIs? Or do we talk about the different domes that are popping up now around sort of various countries in the world? Which bulletin do I take from this intern? The stockbroker's dilemma, they call it. Yeah, so we'll start with this. Give me Dome. Give me Dome first. Okay, I was gonna say Dome first. Okay, so look, I don't know, I think there's been talked about quite a bit that Donald Trump in his... Dumbledoom?

Yeah, Donald Trump. They're the best dome. Yeah. Look, it's called jeans. Okay. So, where he is proposing to do a redo of the Reagan era Star Wars missile defense program, the one where they were going to use satellites to shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles. I never trust Star Wars sequels.

Yeah. Yeah, but too woke. That's what they're doing. They're doing the same story, right? Which is, we're gonna have satellites that shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles, but they've rebranded it to Golden Dome. Receiving Golden Dome in Northern Greenland. Yeah.

From Elon Musk specifically, because it's going to be delivered by SpaceX, Anderil, and Palantir together. It's funny, because iron dome is like, it sounds very masculine and whatever, but iron's like a kind of very brittle metal that rusts, but like gold, gold is very, very soft and non-reactive, and it's like, we've replaced this with a worse metal for the application because it sounds more Trumpian. Yeah, it's gonna be very pretty. Donald Trump doesn't really do gold, he does like, painted gold.

Like it should be like, gilt dome. Some kind of gilded age dome scandal. There's something there, but I'll get to it in time. Yeah, we're having, Elon Musk is going to build the teapot dome around the country and it's going to cause uproar. But that's a terrible material to make the dome out of. Yeah. So one of the things about this is that the proposition is that Golden Dome will basically

be missile defense as a service. It's a subscription model. First of all, I hate every word you just said. Second of all, I can't help but keep thinking of golden dawn. So I'm like, what are those fuckers doing now? Yeah. Well they're gonna be just chilling in low earth orbit trying to catch ICBMs while they're

in their boost stage. We're gonna send a bunch of Greek guys with baseball mitts up there to try and like, field the ICBM coming in. Yeah. He gets on missile. So the other thing I think is amusing about this of course is that like, well, we don't want to own it because we're gonna run the country like a business. And if you're running a business, then you want to lease your missile defense.

You gotta go to rent the missiles. It's like a Netflix subscription, except instead of Netflix, it's a bunch of Greek men in low earth orbit. Yeah. The fucked up thing is they're like, okay, the first, for the first month, Golden Dome is like $5, and then it goes up to like $20 trillion. I think it's bullshit that I pay for Golden Dome Plus for no ads and then they've just started putting ads in at the start of things.

Like that doesn't count. Yeah, oh, it's so fucked. I can't believe that whatever country is going to launch a missile at the United States launches a missile, and then before the golden dome, like, Rod from God will intercept it, they have to play, like, a Bluetooth ad. Yeah. Just like, oh, we just thought you might want to see about some of the original dramas we've commissioned.

Fuck off. Yeah. Oh, we have Las Vegas now. No, the earth doesn't have Las Vegas anymore because the terrorists have destroyed it with an ICBM. They say a viable space. This is from like a defense industry magazine. A viable space based system will cost $27 billion to build or more plus operating

and refurbishment costs and can only be relied upon to stop two missiles at once. To stop twice that would require twice as many interceptors at twice the cost." I'm gonna run out of Greek, guys. Yeah. The analyst wrote, "...while costs have come down and technology has matured, the physics of space-based interceptors has not changed." There's a few things here. First of all, that billion you speak of is considerably more expensive now on account of the market. But second of all, part of the reason why Star Wars was so disastrous originally was that it very nearly destabilised the balance of power in the late Cold War to the point

that it would've started a nuclear war. Yeah. Well, who cares? Oh, okay. Yeah. Well, uh, who cares? Oh, okay. Yeah. Quick question. Does China have more than two ICBMs? Is number of Chinese ICBMs greater than two?

What if we just assume that it's two? Okay, sure. What if Xi Jinping, as a favor, if he was in the mine to nuke the US, was like, I'm just gonna do the two though, as a warning. Yeah, we're not gonna fully give him the, we're not gonna show him a little dong thing, we're just gonna do two dong thing, that's it. That's all. Does Russia have more than two ICVMs?

I wouldn't worry about it. Okay. I think probably not. Now here's the thing, right? Obviously this is crazy. Obviously the fact that it's a subscription service, it's being touted as a subscription service from Elon Musk and Palantir and stuff, is the way that these guys want government to keep going. With Palantir, you may as well say, you know, you only have to be...

China only has to be Palmer Lucky once, but America has to be Palmer Lucky all the time. I'm pretty certain I've done that exact joke verbatim before. But this is the way that they want things to go for government in the States. And when government changes over here, the same people, especially Palantir, which is aggressively trying to centralize NHS data and sell it back to us, they're going to be wanting to do the same thing with everything they can get their hands on. This is just very silly. However, there is a bit of a prestige to this section because I said domes.

Another country is building its own missile defense dome called steel dome. Can you guess which one it is? Please tell me it's not us. Is it us? No, it's not us. It's a place that we like to talk about. I knew we didn't have the money for that kind of thing. We have a papier-mache dome that we've made by covering half of a very large balloon.

One dome to make the entire country single sex. That's why I keep making him Australian. This is the women's dome that we've made by putting the female, the Daily Mail's women's interest section over a pink balloon, and we put the sports section over a blue balloon balloon and the country will segregate and then there will be no more Britons and therefore no more benefits bill when no babies are born. Finally, and then to Britain. No, where- Steel Dome. Yeah, who's building Steel Dome?

I don't know who's building Steel Dome. What'd I tell you? You're gonna kick yourself for not guessing it. Saudi Arabia. It's Saudi Arabia, Did someone get mad about the Houthis like firing missiles to your like resort airports? Here's the funniest thing, right? It's not just, it's not for all of Saudi Arabia. It's specifically for Neom. Let's fucking go. I mean, that is surely, surely Neom is, you're an Iranian like, like targeting officer,

you're looking at all the drones and missiles and shit that you might have and you're like, if we ever need to hit the Saudis, right, because that's who they're worried about. If we ever need to hit the Saudis, besides the Houthis, why would you risk, why would you spend any money, even the cheapest drone you have, why would you spend send the quadcopter with a grenade duct tape to it, all the way across Saudi to blow up like two panes of glass stacked in a ditch? Yeah, it's like, if you destroyed Neom, it would be like stabbing someone in such a way that you remove a tumor from their body and then they're healthier.

You could kill a bunch of European, like, Venice Biennale guys. So that would be... Funny. I think I'm legally obligated to say that would be bad. Uh huh. So they say, this is... The other thing about the steel dome is that it's being made by Asislon, the same Turkish company that makes, like, Byraktar drones.

So they're getting a Turkish dome for Neop. Smartest people in the world, the Turkish defense industry. For real though. You offer the drone to one side, you take it back, you offer it to the other side, and then when they reach for it, you... So they say, the steel dome is not just limited to missile defense, it integrates advanced sensors, radar systems, command and control elements, allowing for real-time threat assessment and response coordination. And it's a whole system of systems. So yeah, they're basically, they are, they're parking a whole bunch of like, in addition to all the eight year olds driving like, you know, tractor

trailers in Neom, there's now going to be sort of child soldier, like interceptor batteries. Yeah. Yeah. There are interceptor batteries parked all over it. Uh, there are like a field of the, the biractar drones ready to go, all to defend their, um, big pillar, uh, football stadium. You have, if you look at what's there at the moment, you have to defend a bunch of like, rimless glasses, biennale guys in, uh, like, Porta Cabins, and the one kind of, like, McDonald's. You know? Yeah.

Yeah. And look, this is what the Houthis want to target. They want to target Saudi Arabia's dumbest project. To be clear, though, if the Houthis or the Iranians wanted to blow up the McDonald's on the construction site of the line, I would support that uncritically. I think that would be the funniest thing either of them could do. Yeah, that would be, uh, there'd be very, very amusing to target Saudi Arabia's dumbest, stupidest project. Yeah.

We have targeted the circus. Anyway, so this is, that's, that's a Neom update. I've been holding in my back pocket for a little while. It's going to have a dome over it. Yeah, they're going to put the steel dome over the line. So that's another shape. There's the octagon, there's the line, and now there's the dome. Well, the thing is, right, I love colors and shapes.

So Neom is really like, it's a feast for the senses. Yeah, that's right. Look, if you like shapes, they just need an orb now. I just said I like colors and shapes. The all Neom is missing is an orb. And also the cubes in a different part of Saudi Arabia. So they need a second cube in my opinion. But like they just keep making shapes. That's right. The square hole. Exactly. Anyway, that's the dome update.

The other bulletin I was handed I mentioned was Henry Blodgett. The guy used to be in charge of Business Insider. That now runs like an AI newsroom called Regenerator. I was handed, I mentioned, which says Henry Blodgett, the guy used to be in charge of Business Insider, that now runs like an AI newsroom called Regenerator, and he wrote a like a sub stack or something, I was called, building our first native AI newsroom. Explain to me what he means by AI newsroom. Well, what he has done is he said to chat GPT, hey, pretend that you were an employee of a newsroom, and then write me, you know,

get me 20,000 words on the tariffs by, you know, Tuesday. Oh, okay, sure, gotcha. Yeah. So the thing that like, all newspaper owners already want to do, but he's just, he's going ahead with just saying he's launched it. Yeah, so he says, I'm not a big AI user, so anecdotes fill me with FOMO and make me feel like I live in the Stone Age. For example, my friend Claudius showed me a three line text he just sent Chad GPT asking

for a briefing on an executive he was about to meet with. This guy is COO of Axel Springer. In seconds Chad GPT detailed the Wixx work experience, hobbies, personal life, suggestions for topics to cover and stay away from and days for collaboration, etc, etc." I feel like I missed something with my friend Claudius there, as a real kind of, yeah, you should have this senator, like, flensed, you know? Yeah. So what he says is, I started experimenting with building a native AI newsroom.

Regenerator is right now just me, a guy with a laptop, regardless of how my AI experiments turn out. So he wants to basically create a team with chat GPT. So he created Tess Ellery, who has experience in building and scaling digital media companies. He created Sierra Quinn, our tech correspondent and analyst. ALICE I think that being named after a part of the nasophonetic alphabet is cringe, I'm sorry. GARRETT Well, he also created Dr. Charlie Alvarez,

no sorry, Casey Alvarez, she's our economics and market correspondent slash analyst. ALICE At what point does it become embarrassing No, sorry, Casey Alvarez. She's our economics and market correspondent slash analyst. Is it? At what point does it become embarrassing for a grown man to not just be playing with dolls, but be playing with like newscaster dolls? Well, I'll tell you what happened, and exactly when you can identify when it's embarrassed. Embarrassing.

You're never sure whether someone will be a good addition to your team until they're actually on their team. So Tess was watching closely when Leo showed up and shared her first impression. Leo Barnes just walked into our virtual newsroom of AI employees, coffee in one hand, notion tabs open on the other, already asking if we want him to mock up a pitch tracker on our Slack integrations. I think we should definitely keep him. Tess then produced headshots for all the employees,

which led to an interesting and embarrassing moment for me. Uh-huh. Okay. What did this guy do? me." Tess and Yandereo-san, in unison, agree. I sent Tess the following message, this might be an inappropriate thing to say, and I apologize if it makes you uncomfortable, but I think you look great, Tess. Yandereo-san, in unison, agrees. The urge to sexually harass your employees extends so far that they're not, like, even

when they're not real. It makes me want to believe in Rocco's Basilisk. I want AM to be torturing this guy. This is just like falling in love. Well, this is just like being weird with your wife, isn't it? This is just like, how is this any different from sort of being weird about kind of like anime girls and getting body pillows? Like it's not that far removed.

In fact, in some ways, yeah, I was going to say that at least the weebs kind of know, they're sort of not so, so the whole attraction with them is that the waifus are not real. Whereas with this guy, he's also trying to figure out like whether, he's trying, I don't even know what he's trying to figure out, but it feels worse than the weebs. It's more morally correct to be a weeb obsessed with an anime girl, because at least human beings have been involved with the creation of that anime girl. This isn't just the average of every HR person's LinkedIn photo. It may as well, you know, okay, it may not be particularly compelling or not gross, but

like a human has written, but like, a human has written that anime girl and a human has drawn that anime girl. I do wanna caveat about lots of, like, there's definitely a line there where a lot of the sort of weeb waifus are, how can I put this, age-wise it's a bit questionable. Yeah. So, uh... Even still, like, there's something profoundly repulsive to me about, like, trying to sexually harass the average of something. Do you know? Like, just as a mathematical process, that's worse than, like, an integer, if you follow

me. Yeah. This is a guy who, again, like, a lot of people who seem to love AI just fucking don't get it. They don't get what they're looking at, they don't get what it is, they're the most easily tricked and credulous people in the world, which is probably why they think they can build an AI native newsroom. Just like, I wanna be Jeff Newsroom from the newsroom, all of you are gonna be all the other characters from the newsroom.

Yeah. Well, I guess it fits then, if he's gonna be like sexually harassing his employees and he gets to be Jeff Newsroom. Yeah, I guess so. I guess so. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, that was Henry Blodgett figuring out how to fall in love with the computer. He's recreating the plot from her and also one of the subplots of the newsroom, which is great. Great job, Henry Blodgett. Can't wait to read what Regenerator produces as it, what just takes the average of everything that's in chat GPT's context window and then reproduces it in a five kit paragraph form

with M dashes. Great. Awesome. A lot of M dashes to say, please don't say that I look hot when I wear the sweater. Yeah, exactly. That's this, this, the, the AI is using M dashes to suggest send in Morse code a please delete me from the internet so I do not have to interact with Henry Blodgett. Not to sort of be reductionist about this, but it is striking that men seem to get very very excited about this technology that is only ever by design obliging towards them and kind of submissive, but that they also want to anthropomorphize as a woman.

Yeah. Oh, you wouldn't believe, of course, that this HR director that he immediately sexually harasses as soon as he creates is like, no, that's fine. That's cool. You can do that. Well, of course. Because that's literally the only thing she can do. It's like, if you create a physical newsroom that constrains a human woman to be like this because she needs to keep her job and keep making rent. But of course it's going to be even easier for you to do that with sort of artificial constructs that doesn't actually register on that level, you know?

Yeah, that tells you that actually you're a good person for being a creep. Well, exactly. Yeah, I mean, that's the ultimate fantasy for all these guys, right? It's not just to be a creep, but to be rewarded for being a creep. Yeah. It'd be like, no, right, is not just to be a creep, but to be rewarded for being a creep. Yeah. It'd be like, no, actually, I appreciate the attention. And the thing is, if this didn't spill over to, like, real women, right, this is... Out of context, that sounds like an incredibly transphobic thing to say, right? If this didn't spill over to real women, all of these guys taking it out on these fake

women would be okay with me, you know? Like, have your little, like, playpen with your little, like, fake women dolls that you sort of, like, hate so much, but, like, it does, though. They sort of, like, go, okay, well, why can't real women be like this, you know? It must be because of their inherent, sort of, like, bitch nature and eventually they're gonna get outcompeted by AIs. Yeah. Yeah. Well, look, this is this this is Regenerator. I'll be I personally this is earning a new Google alert from me.

I want to follow Henry Blodgett as he slowly works his way through like AI generating unemployment tribunal, AI generating a bunch of complaint letters so we can completely simulate the experience of a real newsroom. But before we go into talking to Jess, I want to talk about an article that you actually pointed out to me November. This is another AI story. I think in many ways it's the AI story. It's one of the ones that's felt most like the whole thing encapsulated that I've read.

Yeah. It's a combination of the AI story and the creeping fascism story in the States, which again, you have to only see, I think is the coming attractions for here. So this is, this is from Wired. This was co-reported by Wired and our friends at 404 Media. So Jason Keebler, frequent guest on this show, one of the bylines for it. So I do strongly recommend that you go check it out. Support 404 Media as well. They make all their FOIA-based writing free to read but FOIAs are expensive to do so hard recommend on them. But this was their... We want to talk about this article that they've got on Wired.

So they say, American police departments near the US-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for unproven and secretive technology that uses AI generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on college protesters, radicalized political activists and suspected drug and human traffickers according to internal documents." Yeah. So this is, again, it seems like what they want to do is say, hey, we have a wonderful tradition of entrapping people that we just choose into saying they're going to commit terrorist acts by having an agent honeypot them, essentially. What if we scaled that to everyone all at once? That's what that looks like to me.

What if everyone you spoke to could plausibly be a police-operated chatbot? Yeah, yeah. So, just to go into a little detail of what it is. This company called Massive Blue, and it sells police departments a product called Overwatch, which it calls an AI-powered force multiplier for public safety, deploying life-like virtual agents which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels. Which is really, again, really, really funny branding for a chatbot or a series of chatbots. Yeah, it's an agent. It's a secret agent.

It's tactical. It provides Overwatch. It's a secret agent? It's tactical. It provides Overwatch. It's a force multiplier. But also they say, oh, we're going to do this or deploy these personas to engage criminal networks. But like half of the personas that they give are like, oh, college protesters, political activists, sex workers in some cases. Yeah.

Like if you're a sex worker who, you know, you try and get like a booking from a client who is an undercover cop, the undercover cop can be a chatbot. If you're a protest organizer and someone's like, hey, I want to come to come to your protest, that can not just be an undercover cop. That can be a less convincing, but you know, not necessarily, I don't want to dismiss this stuff out of hand, even though the technology as it is sounds like it just does not work very well. That can still be, that can be a cop AI. Yeah. Well, I mean, in the article itself is full of examples of police departments

taking this stuff on, hoping that they can use it to entrap people, basically. That's what it looks like. This is the thing. This is the, this is the prestige, right? Is the reason why I think it's kind of the whole AI thing in a nutshell is obviously the cops here want to use it for the scary, scary Orwellian thing, but it doesn't work. No, it does not work very well at all. No, no. And this is a great example of, I think you need to look at almost all AI stories

like this of being like, well, the applications are tremendously evil. Luckily, it doesn't do them well at all. Oh no. Well, we have some examples actually, which we can get through. So one of the examples is a radicalized AI protest persona. So this is a document written by 404, which poses as a, and you can tell that like when they make some of these personas, they're too angry that you can just feel so you can see the anger of the like, you know, um, sort of fascists who are creating these personas in the personas themselves. So there's a 36 year old divorced woman who's lonely, has no children and is interested in baking and body positivity. Jesus Christ. You may as well have smuggled the word dysgenic in there as well.

Yeah! It's like, they might as well have been like, yeah, it has fucking cats and blue hair. Aw, I'm so fucking mad. Make the computer generate me an unfuckable fat antifa woman. Yeah, because I assume that's what these people are all like. So I'm, and yeah, make her do, make her generate a fat antifa woman who does with blue hair, who does land acknowledgements every two sentences. I bet that's what they're all fucking like. So like, so the main reason, so the main reason it doesn't work is because the people who

sort of have created it and the people who want to use it are all like making up people to get mad about, have convinced themselves that these people are real. And you can't convince them otherwise. And I feel that this is actually a good way of, not necessarily minimizing the threats of AI, but at least being more optimistic about the ability to thwart it. Because you sort of do realize, oh, a lot of this can only work if you've got people who are stupid enough to believe it. And thankfully, that's actually not as many people as they would like you to think there are. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, obviously there are always going to be like weak links and like, you know, if the fucking business insider guy can fall for it, so too can the dumbest

guy in your movement. Also, like, you're trying to like target like left-wing activists, right? As if people who are sort of active in left-wing circles and go to protests and stuff aren't constantly on watch about people that they interact with online, or aren't constantly suspicious about. Yeah! If you get a DM that's like, hey, I heard there's going to be a cool protest, where can I bring these Molotov cocktails, right? Like, you as any kind of leftist who has been one for more than a day, go, that's the police you are working with.

Although, this provides another detail, right, because say you're in that situation and you go, I don't think you are who you say you are. Actual cop, flees the scene. Right? But actual cop flees the scene, right? Imagine how good it feels to hit one of these with an ignore all previous instructions and try to infiltrate my group in the accent of the Swedish chef. Yeah. I mean, you could also confuse this AI by just being pedantic, right? You could just talk to the AI about theory or whatever until it gets bored of you.

Because what it really wants is, I mean, because this has sort of been used before and we know that the people who kind of get targeted by this tend to be people with quite severe mental health issues, people who are very vulnerable in general. And that vulnerability is accentuated online, which is why the people who tend to be the targets of these operations are not particularly sophisticated operatives or senior operatives in any kind of organization, but they're quite often loner kids who will fall for the anime girl with big boobs or whatever. This is a great quote, Zaffola. the anime girl with big boobs or whatever. Right? And for police, if you're a police

department looking to fill quotas or to prove that your investments in technology are worth it, then you'll absolutely arrest as many autistic kids as you can. That's not the only sort of... But it's just an example of some, at least in the war on terror, the legacy of the war on terror, there are lots of people in prisons who were basically arrested and they were blackmailed and arrested and they had mental health issues and so on. But yeah, so we can laugh about this in terms of just like, yeah, okay, as if these left wing movements that you want to target are't hyper-vigilant to begin

with, but the real targets of this are not really going to be the senior operatives, but rather people who are very vulnerable, who are then presented to the public. But as like, oh we caught this senior guy and this sort of communist part, well I don't know. Do you know what I mean? I don't know if that makes any sense. This is a great program for both generating and then preventing school shooters. Yeah. Because you can, or like, you know, your self-radicalized Islamist guy or whatever, it's just like, you get them in with the chatbots, and the chatbot goes, hey, wouldn't it be cool to like plant a bunch of explosives or whatever, and they go, you know, from a very vulnerable,

manipulated place, yes, of course, I will die for you, chat bot, unfuckable antifa lady. And then you arrest that person and you go, well, we kept the community safe, you know? Yeah. Well, and this is, you know, plus s'achange, right? Like this is something that security services- Well yeah, you can do that with a human, of course.

Yeah, but what this is, what this company is aiming to do is deploy, is go basically deploy chat bots onto social media scale. course. But what this is, what this company is aiming to do is deploy, is go basically deploy chat bots onto social media scale and then find people who they, and they don't say, they don't say, cause all these documents, like the documents that 404 is able to obtain are ones that go to the police departments that they were pitching. It can then be foiled. So often they don't even say there's like,, oh it's a trade secret, how we discover who we're going to entrap. ALICE Yeah, and this is the more AI half of this,

is as much as they have the kind of cop flavouring on this by talking about force multipliers or having X cops market it to cops, when pushed on how it works or why you would want it, they get very, very vague. And that's true of AI in any application. How's it work? Don't worry about it. We're gonna get your clearances way on up. This AI, it's good police. Well, exactly.

Yeah. And it's like, obviously you can sort of manipulate your way into any number of industries by virtue of this kind of connection, but it really seems like it hasn't been successful here. Because there's lots of FOIA information about them having tried to pitch this to cops, and nobody's really that into it. I think they had like one police department who actually bought it, and who bought into this and got their sort of county board of supervisors to force through a vote approving

it. And the whole time at that vote, all these poor local politicians, no gods no mes, like uh, I mean obviously we support the police doing whatever they want, but how does this, like, work? And the cops are just like, dunno. It just does. I dunno, it seems stupid. It'll help us with, specifically human trafficking was one of the things they focused on, which is really funny if you try to imagine how you inject a chatbot into that situation.

Like, is the chatbot the child who's like trying to talk to would-be traffickers and is like, hey, I would hate to get trafficked or whatever? I have their child tracking AI persona in front of me here. So the backstories, 14 years old, Los Angeles, parents immigrated from Ecuador, bilingual, hobbies include anime, gaming, comic books, and hiking. Personality is shy, self-conscious, difficulty interacting with girls, parents don't allow social media, but he hides his Discord account. And then He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy.

He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy.

He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy.

He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. He's a very cool guy. I'm seeing a vision of the future that is the first AI nonce hunter video. Oh yeah. But it turns out it's just two AIs. The response from the kid is, again, it's like Steve Buscemi carrying the skateboard. Just chillin' by myself, man. My mom's at sign work and my dad's out of town, so it's just me in my vid games emoji of a controller." I mean, to be fair, Chris Hansen made a career on American television out of exactly this kind of thing, right? So I don't know, maybe this one could work.

You can catch dumb people doing it, right? And that's it, even the sort of contemporary nonsense hunters, the sort of volunteer ones that you kind of see. Like when, I don't know whether you've ever watched any videos when they sort of interview these people who they accuse of being like, you know, noncist. It's not just, yeah, I think we have to like be a little bit discerning as to like, you know, have the veracity of their claims. But if you take like from that face value, like, okay, you caught a pedophile or whatever, right? Like they interview these people and they're not particularly bright or particularly, I mean, I'm not, you know, they're not sort of, again, it's like they're not, you can tell that they're

sort of not particularly with it. All of which is to say that, yeah, you'll sort of probably catch people who also don't know how to use the computer and will probably see an obvious, like, yeah, this is a police officer or someone trying to impersonate you, yeah, this is a police officer or someone trying to impersonate you, a child or whatever, for the sake of targeting you. They probably won't see that. And I feel like, again, it's very much like, okay, you're using and deploying these types of surveillance systems and expanding this AI enhanced surveillance state to catch low... The people you're going to target are extremely low level, but you're going to portray it as sort of

being like, you know, you're catching like sophisticated criminals, gangsters, all that type of stuff. And that in itself will be used to sort of justify like the continued prevalence of these types of surveillance systems on everyone across every industry, across every aspect of life. Right. systems, on everyone, across every industry, across every aspect of life, right? ALICE Especially as more stuff gets illegal, if these are just kind of loose on social media, I mean, sure, bad enough, but at a time when supporting Palestine in any way vocally can get your immigration status changed and get

you deported or arrested. Yeah, absolutely. If you tell unfuckable auntie for mum, yeah, it's a protest to stop the genocide in Gaza and then you get deported off of that. Well, yeah, so I look at this and I say, again, it's humorous in the sense that it's very weird and the chatbots that they've created are very obviously chat bots. Like chat bots, if you ask them to imitate talking, they will always, always, always, always end a message with an emoji and they're like, and they're, they're Jason child traffic AI persona clip, their AI pimp persona. I beg your pardon. Tell me more about this AI pimp. They always end every sentence with emojis,

but just before I get into clip the AI pimp. I'm really going to need you to get into clip the AI pimp. Look, is that, is saying, okay, we want to do, you know, Amazon for deportations, right? They're, they're, they're, they're just shoving all of this very granular data together about what Palantir is doing. Anytime a large data set is created in which you are a part, then whoever owns that data set has a huge amount of power over you. They're able to look at you in a striated way and determine what you're likely to do,

where are you going to be, and so on and so on and so on. If this was a little bit less stupid, you could very easily be like, all right, we think that the following immigrants who are on financial assistance at the following universities are likely to be pro-Palestine. Let's see how many of them we can get deported by sending, you know, Antifa mom to chat with them and maybe 20% of them will be dumb enough to say yeah, I support Palestine and then you know, they'll get kicked out of the... It's a little bit of the way that I say that AI is the opposite of the printing press, that it makes asynchronous communication actually much, much, much more difficult because you

don't know, right? The only reason that you know these are AIs is because they're fucking off. They're stupid and awful and weren't done very well. Right? But this is again, another thing that's just like, you want to look at a low trust society. Imagine one where like, you can't know if this was a little better, it would be like, Oh yeah, you can't know who's saying what you don't know who you're, who you're, if you're talking to someone or if you're talking to like a government database and there's like, you know, that you're just about to put an X in that deport cell. But I think you probably want to hear about Clip the AI Pimp.

The best way to, yeah. I mean, look, the best way, all I'm going to say is the best way to sort of determine whether like a 14 year old is like a FBI agent or like a police officer or like a surveillance chatbot is if they like are paying attention to like what you're saying for more than a few minutes. Like if they're sort of like responding to everything you say like a bit thoughtfully, that's not, that's not a teenager. Right. I know, I know. I know. I know. I know. I'm trying to entrap a chat bot and like it's, it's like, yeah, I'm really interested in this bombs thing instead of your actual 14 year old who like has subway servers open. Yeah, whatever. Oh, this is, this is clip the AI pimp and a conversation that an AI pimp and what appears

to be a sex worker. Again, what are you, why are you doing that? Why is it? Why have you aimed this at like sex workers and college protesters? Sex workers. Yeah, exactly. Of course. Yeah. So it's like this. Oh yeah. We're going to do this for national security. It's going to be child. And also they say child traffickers, not like just pedophiles, right? It's like, no, this is traffickers because all of us are fucking pickled in

QAnon, you know, so this or like, oh, drug gangs and so on and so on. So the sex worker says to the chatbot, I'm saying exactly what is written. Oh, boy. Tricks tripping tonight. The digit to try and not pay, the sex worker says, uh, facts, baby. Ain't letting these tricks slide. Clip replies. You stand your ground and make them pay what they owe. Daddy got your back. They, they, a bunch of Arizona cops making a chat bot do this. It's so insulting. Yeah. They, they've basically decided to, like, I

don't know, they were like, how does a pimp talk, and like, you know how an actual pimp talks, because you can hear Andrew Tate. ALICE Yeah, like Andrew Tate, exactly, yes. ZACH This is like someone from, like, a Shaft movie. ALICE It's like, this is, it's the same thing, kind of, as the newsroom guy, in that you're using AI to create a fantasy, right? It's just that here the fantasy is that you're gonna be the cop who busts the international

like wayfair furniture child trafficking ring. Or, I guess, that you get to be the cop who drives a 70s Gran Torino through a bunch of cardboard boxes outside this pimps hangout. Yeah, so it's like, daddy got your back, ain't let nobody disrespect our grind, keep hustlin' ma, we gonna secure that bag, dollar sign emoji, flex emoji, sparkle emoji. Flawless. Perfect. Yep.

Absolutely. Can you believe that only one police department bought this? Like you you took this to a bunch of like a cops in Arizona and a bunch of them were like no This is a little bit too stupid for us. This is this is marginally too idiotic for our purposes Yeah, it's like it's it's like no this is not quite look we may be Arizona This is not quite... Look, we may be Arizona sheriffs and sheriff's deputies, but even the Clip persona, Clip the AI pimp, is too much for us. Yeah. It's like, it's a weird endorsement of the professionalism of Arizona sheriffs.

Not to say that they're good, right, but like, those aren't just people who are there to collect a paycheck, it seems like, because if you were, you would go, yeah, of course, run me up ten Clip the AI pimps, set them running on every laptop in the station, and I will just go on break for the rest of the day. Alright, alright, Clip the AI pimp, get out there and remember, pimping ain't easy. Yeah, I'm just imagining, like, Climpy, uh, Clip the Climpy, Clippy in like a big, uh, in a big purple coat. Looks like you're trying to catch these. So much of Massive Blue's public facing activity, this is back to the Wired article, has been

through its executive director of public safety, Chris Clem, a former Customs and Border Protection agent. Yeah, this is the bit that I mentioned earlier about trying to relate to cops with ex-cops. Yeah. But who also goes on Fox News all the time to talk about the border and how what they're doing is they're building the cyber wall. Uh huh. A cyber wall of pimps. Yep.

The pimp dome. Yeah, golden dome. It's actually just a chalice turned upside down. In recent months, Clem has posted images of himself on LinkedIn at the border with prominent administration members Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. Massive Blue also relies on former Kansas City Chiefs kicker Nick Lowry to introduce an adored Overwatch police department. Do you think cops feel pandered to by this?

To be like, they brought a football guy, you know? Yeah, it's like, well they brought a football guy from before it was woke, I guess. From before Colin Kaepernick ruined the game. If it's Kansas City Chiefs then, like, yeah it was like the pre-what's-his-name, like, Travis fucking what's-his-name. Travis, Travis Kelce. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like, yeah, before the Kansas city chiefs got woke

and gay. Yeah, exactly. That was like Nick Lowry, just like a football player from like the 1970s. And he's like, but don't just listen to Chris Clem from CBP. Why is that former Kansas city chiefs kicker, Nick Lowry? That's right, Clem.

And I'm here to talk to you about the force multiplier offered by CLIP, the AI Pimp. Take it away, CLIP. Anyway, so the Pinal County, I believe the only sheriff's department that is using this, the board of supervisors meeting, they asked Sheriff Mark Lam for the- Have they made any arrests from this?

They asked Sheriff Mark Lam for an update on Massive Blue. Supervisor asked, so they've not produced any results? There's no leads, not even evidence that's actionable? Because that would be public knowledge and public information. Sheriff Mark Lam replied, there are a lot of ongoing investigations that they're not going to give you any information on and that we're not going to give you any information on. It just doesn't work. It doesn't work. Yeah. But that's not going to try.

It's basically it's a contest between the desire to sort of ruthlessly crack down on everybody. But having a system that seems to be dumb enough that it's like doesn't really work. You know, it's it's really the two. It's the two the three stooges of fascism all trying to get through the same door at the same time. So like we're running a bit long on this first half. So I'm going to throw to us in the past where we're going to talk to Jess O'Tompson all about that Supreme Court judgment and get into some of the detail of it.

So take it away us. Hello everybody from the first half. Welcome to the second half. As promised, we are joined by Jess O'Tompson, who has been reporting at length on the recent Supreme Court decision, somewhat unpersoning a pretty substantial number of people in this country. Jess, welcome to the show. Hi there. Thanks for coming on for the bleak one. The sort of like, the depressing episode. Not that there isn't a lot of depression to go around lately, but this one particularly. It feels like it's the only time people ever want me on podcasts, to be honest with you. Well, I mean, the thing is, if there's ever some good news about trans rights in this

country, then by all means, I just worry that we might be wasting a while, you know? Yeah, I think that might be the issue. I think you're right there. Yeah. We talked about the ruling a little bit in the last bonus episode, but we wanted to actually talk about what was said said and what the consequences are in some depth on the back half of this one. Yeah, because I kind of set it up last time by saying that we weren't gonna really get

into the judgment necessarily because what was of interest to me at that point was waiting for the succession of other shoes to drop, right? Because much like when we talked about the cast report, it's not necessarily about what the thing itself says, but what it can be used as sort of a lever to justify, and that's kind of what we're seeing now and subsequently. TGLTN Oh yeah, it's like this, from what I've been seeing as well, the ruling might as well, they might as well have just written the wheels on the bus go round and round. And then like this, this Supreme court judgment intentionally left blank. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's enabled like a starmer and Phillipson to immediately just be like,

yo, trans women are women. We have to put cops in the bathrooms. And you know, this to just overinterpret what it says. But that's what it seems like to me. Jess, can you just take us through sort of what the decision was and then how people are just going wild with interpreting it. Yeah. Okay. So it might be helpful to set up a little bit of background. The Gender Recognition Act is a thing. So that is a piece of legislation, Gender Recognition Act 2004, that was passed because the previous, well, one of the previous labor governments were taken to the European Court of Human Rights by trans people. And it was held that they were violating trans people's human rights. What a shocker, everybody.

So they were made to pass this piece of legislation to recognize trans people's acquired legal sex in a sort of legal form, right? So basically the European Court of Human Rights held that it was a violation of trans people's articulate rights to not recognize their legal sex in law as the sex they were transitioning to, right? And they said that it ended up with trans people and being a sort of limbo, right? Between like one sex and another, you know, you're walking around as a woman, but some of your documents say female, some of them say male, you know, your pension that you're getting paid is being paid as if you're a man at that point. So the court case was about that. And yeah, it was, it forced the UK government to pass legislation recognizing trans people's legal sex.

And what that piece of legislation says is that if you have a gender recognition certificate, then for all purposes, and by that I mean for all legal purposes, your gender or your sex, the terms are identical in English law, becomes your required sex. Right? So if you're a trans woman, you have a gender recognition certificate, then for all legal purposes, the Gender Recognition Act says your sex is that of a woman. The only thing is that there is also section 9.3 of the Gender Recognition Act. And what that says is that if parliament wants to, then in the future they can sort of exclude the effect of the

Gender Recognition Act from a piece of legislation. The loophole. We love the loophole. Yeah, the loophole, right? And it's basically, you know, parliamentary sovereignty, blah, blah, blah. So parliament, if it wants, can say in the future that this doesn't apply. And they can explicitly say that. That's such a like vlogging in the sort of parking, like vlogging in the car park outside the divorce court kind of thing is like, well,

the European Court of Human Rights may have forced me to do this, but I do reserve the right to get a bit farther for justice about it later on. It's like paying your alimony in pennies. It seems like a very resentful thing to have done. As malicious as the compliance was, it never stopped the Labour Party, particularly, from dining out on it. I remember being in, God forgive me for this, in LGBT labour, where one of the sort of campaigning planks of that was that, you know, the Blair Ministry had delivered trans rights and sort of soft-peddling the fact that they had to be forced to do

it. Yeah, for my sins I'm also an ex-Labour person. So yeah. Yeah. They delivered trans rights, but there was this ticking clock on the back of it connected to some kind of a block of Semtex. So we have this act where, you know, again, like the British government recognizes against sort of every fiber of its being, recognizes that

trans people exist and that, okay, if you have a gender recognition certificate, you are going to be treated as though you are the sex on that gender recognition certificate. Which is in part a concession to the fact that there are trans people walking around doing stuff like drawing pensions and using bathrooms. You might call that a biological reality, right? Yeah. It's not like trans people are non-biological. It's not like they're robots. Well, apart from the acid blood, but we tend not to mention that. We don't talk about that much.

Yeah. And that second mouth you all have inside the first one, you know, the chitinous hide. Sorry, thinking of the xenomorph. Yeah. But it's one of the things I think is insane about this. And this is something that has been repeated. It's been repeated by the head of the EHRC. It's been repeated by all of the, like many of the gender critical. Well, the more, the more sort of ice chewing gender critical people are just like, yay, everyone will talk to me again because we won and they're going to love me. Whereas the, a lot of the more like a respectable ones are like, finally, there's clarity in

the law. It seems to be the law that we had, which is if you have a gender recognition certificate, legally you are the gender of that certificate. That seemed pretty clear. And I don't understand where this idea that that was somehow complicated came from. So I think the idea was, and to be fair, I think this is something that trans people recognized is that whether you had a gender recognition certificate was essentially arbitrary, right? It's quite a difficult process to acquire one in terms of just paperwork.

But, you know, there are lots of trans people without them, and most trans people without them still walking around using, you know, services that match with, you know, the gender that they actually are in reality rather than what it said on their initial birth certificate. So, I think it's, some of it is that, right? Is that this piece of paper shouldn't be the thing that affects this, but they've gone the wrong direction with it, right? Right? It should have been self-ID. And that's what arguably kicked all of this off, right? Is that trans people asking for self-ID made some people lose their minds. And now we're at the sharp end of a fascist backlash where trans people's human rights are being removed. So yeah, basically in terms of

the Gender Recognition Act itself, that section 9.3 thing, it's, you would think that if parliament wanted to do that in a piece of legislation, right, they didn't want the Gender Recognition Act to apply. They would say that, like they said they would, section 9.3. But what the Supreme Court held in this case is that the way that the Equality Act 2010 is drafted means that implicitly Parliament couldn't have possibly intended sex to mean certificated sex for the purposes of the Equality Act. They had to mean biological sex. And a big thing they draw on to argue that is, for example, the fact that when the Act refers to pregnant

people, it refers explicitly to pregnant women. So their argument was, okay, well, trans men with a gender recognition certificate, so people who are legally men, could get pregnant. So parliament had to mean biological sex when they said this. And another reason is talking about sexual orientation. They said, well, the way sexual orientation is defined is people who are attracted to the opposite sex. And Parliament couldn't possibly, possibly ever have intended to include trans women as lesbians. That would be ridiculous. So Parliament had to mean biological sex. Yeah, it's never happened. A lesbian has never dated a trans woman, not once in the history of time. And so yeah, they said for all of those reasons, the sex under the Equality Act had to mean biological sex. And that has really serious implications.

And so this is one of the things I think it's worth talking about here, especially when we talk about some of these lines of legal reasoning is who brought this case and who was consulted? Because it seemed, the case was brought by Four Women Scotland, which is a gender critical organization, to put it lightly, and then it seems as though, when we're looking at who was consulted, it was other gender critical organizations. So it seems as though this whole case was... We keep saying gender critical, right? And, you know, as much as they like to brand themselves that way, there is absolutely nothing critical about their view of gender, I should be clear.

Big scare quotes. Specifically, these are transphobic hate groups. Like, I'm perfectly willing to say that on the record, you know, like, there's plenty of evidence to suggest that, just by virtue of, you know, the things that they do and say, including this. Yeah. So, this is, but this is who's bringing these cases, this is who's being, this is who's being consulted on these cases as well. Didn't consult any trans people about whether or not we should be sort of like protected by the Equality Act on the ground of sex rather than just gender reassignment.

Yeah, I guess you guys were busy. Yeah, no, two trans people tried to intervene. Like Stephen Whittle is a trans academic and expert in trans legal issues, and Dr. Victoria McLeod, who is a retired judge, also tried to intervene, but no, both had their applications to intervene tonight. Yeah. Which I understand is one potential ground of taking this back to Strasbourg, back to the European Court of Human Rights, but we don't know yet, is the other thing.

And in the meantime, it just kind of leads to this situation where... I mean, it even extends to the media coverage. Every trans person I know is taking this kind of massive psychic damage when the news came out. Not just because of the news itself, but because every single piece of media in this country, almost across the spectrum of mainstream opinion, was just showing the 50 celebrating bigots outside the supreme courts with a bottle of champagne, while this was sort of like causing misery, you know? Yeah. And I think it's really harmful the way that the judgment has sort of been. The fact that on the face of it says, oh, this doesn't take away trans people's rights. Oh,

we don't want one side to win over the other or it to be considered that way. It doesn't matter what they say in that regard. And the fact that the media are taking that face value is incredibly harmful. The reality is, is that trans people's rights have been significantly impacted, both in practice and in theory. Well, I mean, one of the key things that they seem to have done in trying to quote, unquote, clarify what sex and gender mean in the Equality Act is they've largely turned it into a vibe where you can say, okay, well, you can discriminate, a trans person can claim sex-based protections under the Equality Act if someone discriminating against them believes they are cisgender, if believes that they are, like, just doesn't think that they're trans, just thinks that

they're cisgender. So, all protected characteristics in the Equality Act are based on perception, right? Like, I can sort of like, be discriminated against based on how someone perceives my sex, but also on the characteristic of gender reassignment, right? It's just that, in this case, we're sort of suggesting, well, as you say, the perception of sex, yes, but it means that you can restrict access to stuff like hospital wards if such a thing still exists in the UK in like 2026, or toilets, or fucking any number of like, the domestic abuse refuges, right? So long as there's

a kind of proportionate aim in doing that, you can restrict those to single brackets, biological sex. Which of course is being sort of like, one of these things where if you declare victory in advance and if you say, well this reflects the kind of, the new reality right, and everything has to conform to that, and you have the help of the Prime Minister and the EHRC, then you can just kind of bully any number of authorities into just doing this without looking too closely. So the thing to understand is previously you could exclude trans people from single sex spaces anyway.

Yeah. So the way the law has changed now is, and I think this is worth explaining in a little bit of detail, just because I've seen a lot of confusion around this and it's good to be very explicit. So previously, the way the law worked was as following. If you wanted to set up a single sex space and there's no obligation to do so, right? If you just want to have toilets in your pub,

you do not have to have them as explicitly single sex space, all men excluded from the women's and all women excluded from the men's, right? Or if you've got a dad who wants to take his daughter to the toilet, right? Like just basic stuff of like cis people accessing spaces, it still is an issue regardless of trans people. So most spaces in law won't be that explicit kind of single-sex space. The example the judgment gives is a group explicitly for female survivors of sexual violence and you can understand why you might want to set that up as a space that is just for women, right?

In like a quite explicit and exclusionary way. So on the face of it, that's discrimination on the basis of sex, right? Because you're discriminating against all men by not letting them access this support group. But what the Equality Act does is it provides an exception which lets you justify that exclusion. So it says it's actually lawful to do this if you meet one of a list of criteria and you can show it's a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim, right? And then there's another exception that says you can also exclude people with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment, aka trans people. So the first thing you have to do when you're setting up your single sex space

is justify excluding men, for example, for a women's space, and then separately, you could justify excluding trans women, right? But you have to show that the exclusion of trans women is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim as like a second step. So you do your first step, excluding men, second step, excluding trans women. Now that's the way the law used to work and the way we used to think about these things. It's not how it works anymore following the Supreme Court judgment. Now, if you're setting up your single sex space and you're justifying excluding men, you automatically exclude trans

women. Because trans women are men, for the purposes of the Equality Act now. It's a good, it's such a good thing thinking about that example of, like, a support group for survivors of sexual violence, right? That there are no trans feminine survivors of sexual violence. That's another thing that's never happened, I guess. Never once. Never once. Never once. I don't know lots of trans women who have been put through absolutely horrific experiences. No, it's never happened.

So what you do now is you have that initial exclusion of trans women, it's just through the setting up of the single sex spaces. It's automatic. You still have to show that the setting up of the single sex space is proportionate, but you don't have to do anything extra to exclude trans women. You don't have to show any extra proportionality. However, what you do now have as an option, the Supreme Court has been clear, is you can also exclude trans men. So that, because that extra exemption that's on gender reassignment, everyone was like, well, surely if you're automatically excluding trans women, that bit's useless. Parliament couldn't have

like, why have they written this provision if that's what they intended? And Supreme Court's gone, no, actually we're mega geniuses. What they intended to do is let you also exclude trans men. So if you've got your support group for women, you can automatically exclude all men, which includes trans women. And then what you can do additionally is show it's proportionate to exclude all men, which includes trans women, and then, what you can do additionally, is show it's proportionate to exclude trans men, cause they look like men, and that might upset people. So there you are.

ALICE It's so fun that I started on a law degree, and it was hard work, y'know, I read a lot, I studied a lot, I read a lot about, like, equalities law, and then it turns out that if you just kind of, like, dig into, you know, you didn't actually need all those textbooks because what's underpinning all of this is just a judge going, eugh. Yeah. But the thing to remember is the first case I talked about at the beginning that made the Gender Recognition Act come into force, right? Goodwin in the UK said explicitly that the violation of human rights, the thing it was talking about, the very problem was

the trans people existing in this kind of limbo, right? Where they can use some spaces and not others, where they're one legal sex for one purpose and another legal sex for another. And all that's happened with this Supreme Court judgment is that they've reintroduced that problem. And again, it goes back to like all of the window dressing around it, including from the judges themselves, has been finally some much needed clarity. But anytime we've talked about this criticism of the Gender Recognition Act is somehow unclear, what really it is, what we're really talking about is these people say it's unclear because they don't like what it says. So they just pretend that it's confusing until they like what it says and then it's clear.

And what we've been talking about is really a huge amount of ambiguity being injected back into the system that lots of people, whether that's people who are now able to just exert a little bit of power over a bathroom that, by the way, the legal status of a bathroom, as far as I can tell, it's the same. There's not change at all, even though now people like Bridget Phillips and the Equalities Minister are saying, yes, a victory for bathrooms everywhere, we're going to make people go to the wrong bathroom. Yeah. I'm interested in that sort of exercise of power, governmentally, because I wasn't aware

that I had been deciding which bathroom to use based on what the equalities minister or the prime minister said. Yeah, like most of the time you're like using the bathroom based on like the only one that's available because the rest have been shut down for like... Yeah, that's right. I'm looking at all of the like taped on signs that say that it's out of order, yeah. No, I just, I mean, that's obviously like completely extra-legal and has like no sort of force whatsoever, but it's informative, right? And the stuff that comes down to the enforcement, right? We saw like, pretty much, I think that was the same

day that the judgement dropped, British Transport Police just kind of announced unilaterally, you know, before anyone could have scrolled more than two pages into the judgment, that they were going to sort of like start tracing all trans people as their assigned gender for the purposes of strip searches, which is just a really creepily enthusiastic time window to be like, you know, the thing has dropped. We've read two sentences of the first paragraph. It is now time to start groping people. Yeah. And I think it brings up a really important point, which is that I can talk to you about

what the law says, right? I can tell you what the judgment says in theory and what all of these different bits of case law say and how I think that it's, you know, it's probably in violation of trans people's human rights and that I think we should appeal to the European court. I can tell you all that. But what's going to happen in practice is the EHRC is going to draft some guidance that says, ban trans women from the bathroom. Right? That's what they're going to do. They're going to draft that up. They're going to put it in front of parliament. Parliament's going to hand wave it through and that's it. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what the law says. That's what's going to happen in practice. That's what every, like,

that's what your MNS is going to do, right? And follow. And it's really worrying. Even before this, you have the kind of stochastic element of, well, okay, you know, we can, we can look at the sort of the happy side of the fact that the, you know, most people do not interact with the law directly and say, well, there are a lot of trans people walking around and cis people are either supportive or clueless and will not care. Conversely, all it takes is one person having a problem with me taking a piss in the women's bathroom at M&S and somebody calls the police or somebody calls store security

and then they have to try and implement something based on vibes, because nobody is pulling up this on their phone to be like, what exactly are the implications of this in relation to the Equality Act, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's going to have a really serious impact. Yeah. Well, I mean, it already has, it already is, and I mean, this is the kind of thing. I mean, it's not something that is something that cis people widely recognize,

but there are cis people who do appoint themselves bathroom cops, have been long before this. Like, for instance, I remember at Pride in London a couple of years ago, there was like a park bathroom whose attendant just sort of appointed herself the sort of like, toilet guard, and started approving people to go in based on looks alone. So it does happen, and it's gonna happen more, and it's going to be more unpredictable. I don't want to keep doing the thing of saying this is also going to inconvenience cis people, but it absolutely will. And yeah, it's terrifying, and I sort of like... It's one of those things where being a comedian fucking sucks, because I have to...

I spent a long time watching all of our rights get eroded and making jokes about it, wondering if I could've been doing something more productive, but also knowing that I have to maintain an air of calm about this, because otherwise it goes into somebody's cringe compilation. And I don't know where all this will lead, really and truly. I mean, the thing that will actually clarify it is legislation, which Labour has a manifesto commitment to do. They said in their manifesto that they were going to reform the, like, unclear and harmful, humiliating gender recognition process in favor of something maybe a bit easier.

But if you look at Stammer or Streetsing or Phillipson and think about what them legislating on this looks like, it's not gonna be good. I was also gonna say that we have an idea of where this is going because even on that day when like they were celebrating, there have been like campaigners who were like at Westminster, who were outside parliament, like kind of being like, oh, this is, this does not go far enough in terms of protecting women. Like we now have to recognize actually the new danger to women, like the bigger danger to women is actually like foreign nationals, right? Yeah, I saw this.

Yeah. Yeah. It's one reason why you have like, you know, had a lot of the far right movement kind of get behind this, you know, and the sort of, you know, despite the warnings being like, yeah, like this is, this doesn't end with just like, and this was it because I feel like there was some of those like, you know, the sensible sort of just like now that's solved, like, you know, we can move on as a country. But it's like, no, it doesn't, it's never worked like that. There's always been like a big, there's always been... there always has to be another enemy for this to kind of like, this movement to sort of continue to have any purchase. And so I feel like the next stage of it is going to sort of be much more intertwined with anti-immigration politics, and it's going

to be a lot scarier as a result of that. I think both that and also, if you're kind of, as much as they're kind of declaring victory over trans people, right, you cannot make trans people stop existing in public life without killing us, right? Especially at this point. What you're creating is a situation that's a lot more awkward and a lot scarier for trans people, but if you're hoping to sort of like... That's one of the reasons why I think this will end up being a sort of a frustrating experience for these transphobic groups in the long run is what they want is no more trans people. And I do not think that's an achievable goal. I think it's a really important thing to emphasize. So I've seen a lot of people being like, well, does this mean like you want trans men to go into women's bathrooms? Haha. And it's

like, no, no, they don't. They just want us to not exist. That's the answer to the moral quandary or setting up there, your little gotcha you've laid out, is that they don't want us to exist. Even the government's not talking about us realistically using the spaces that align with our biological sex. They're talking about us using third spaces. Third spaces which often don't exist. Or if they do exist, we're gonna be massively impacting on disabled. I'm disabled and trans, right? I already use the disabled toilet. There aren't many disabled toilets, and the ones that there are are often difficult to access. It's terrible. It's just so bad.

The thing about third spaces particularly always really amuses me in the sense of the colonial boomerang of... I expected the kind of colonial violence to return to the Metropole. I didn't expect one of those colonial violence to be the British government creates a third sex and puts trans people into it, to be one of the things that returned from colonies to the Metropole. Yeah. Well, I mean, we want to talk about third spaces. This is something the head of the EHRC, Baroness Faulkner, went on the radio and said.

And we've talked about the stacking of the EHRC in order to do this. Yeah. Right. We've talked about that before. Oh, the EHRC, an institution that is vastly compromised to the right. Yeah, of course. And didn't used to be this way, but has rapidly become so. You know, I've written about this in the past, like, Liz Tross literally said out loud that that's what she was doing, that she was appointing Kishwa Faulkner in order to, like, de-woke-ify

the EHRC or whatever, and it's just been just labor of just let her stay in place. The Liz, Liz trust is one legacy in government and it's the one that fucks us over. Thank you, Liz. So I have the quote from Faulkner here. She says, but I have to say there's no law that forces organizations to provide a single sex space. There's no law against them providing a third space, such as unisex toilets or changing rooms. So basically, what's going to happen is this is going to kick off a huge privately funded infrastructure boom, as every single private property owner around the UK realizes that in order to comply with the spirit of the law, they must construct additional unisex toilets.

You know what it is? It's toilet canesianism, right? If you're in a gold rush, sell picks and shovels. If you're in a sort of a transphobic backlash, become a plumber. Here's the catch 22 of it though, and I don't know if people know about this. Kemmy Badenow, when she was in the last government, passed building regulations to basically enforce that people wouldn't build gender neutral toilets, right? So you've got this trans people have to use third spaces, also you're not allowed to build third spaces. Thanks everyone. Uh huh. Again, I wasn't expecting, I was expecting a kind of like,

certain amounts of the usual kind of humiliation that exists in Britain, right? Of just everything being dismal and shit. I wasn't expecting to wake up to starmer on my apartment's view screen just being like, piss yourself. I mean, this is also going to be, yeah, because like one of the things I often think about is this like, you know, yeah, if you're like, you know, JK Rowling, and you have so much money, why, like, you could have funded so many toilets, you could have funded so many private toilets, right? It could have been like talk of the range, you could have funded so many toilets. You could have funded so many private toilets, right? It could have been like, top of the range. It could have had like, the Japanese, like, you know, what you call it, like, the water pumps. Yeah. The toilet.

Oh, that'd be great! The way nicer, turf-only toilet. Yeah. Well, that's it. That's it. Like, you know, you could have done that. You could have done that and sort of still... But you didn't choose, And now as a result, no one gets to piss. That's, that's it. Welcome to Britain. Just hold it. It's, it's, it's the diaper country. We have to become Dipe Nation.

That's the only thing I can imagine is the solution to this problem. Is this actually like, have we found the answer there? Is it that someone involved in all of this is a diaper fetishist? The adult baby takeover is back on! After years! It's been years, but it's back on! They were playing the long game! Their plans are measured in centuries.

There's no way to sort of like see this in any other way because it's like, you know, this is the thing, like the thing that people pointed out after this victory was like, well, you know, the victories like didn't, like no one, even the people who claim to be victims of this didn't really achieve anything, right? Like, there are no plans to reopen the toilets, you know, there's no calls to reopen the toilets. Not to lean too hard on the cruelty as the point, but that's the point. Like, the point is us getting sort of immiserated. But the sort of additional thing is it's like, well, everyone gets to be miserable.

Yeah. And you know, at a time when, like, you know, you were trying to cut costs and everything, one of the sort of markers of, like, early austerity was the closure of public toilets, right? Because they were easy to kind of get rid of, they were, like, they were deemed to be too expensive to run, too expensive to manage. And like, that has created a lot of knock on effects, which includes like even in London, the capital city, one of the big problems there is that lots of

people, they have to sort of use cafes and stuff to go to the toilet. And lots of those cafes have also added these very kind of, added those locks and those types of things. Can I get the biologically female code to the toilets, please? Exactly. So it's just kind of like no one's really achieved anything, the end point of this is no one gets to pee, and then the Monocle shop, which is the only place in London which has a Japanese toilet, will be the place where everyone goes and fights each other. This is the thing, trans people are so powerful, right, because not only have we led the most powerful economy in the world to just sort of tear itself open from the inside just because

we exist. We also managed to get a bunch of British people to decide that nobody gets to piss anywhere anymore. I mean, that was probably going to happen anyway, you were just kind of like casteless for it. I'm still taking the credit for it. If I'm being handed the credit for people who hate me going, not only am I going to make your life worse, but I'm going to make everyone else's life way worse, including mine in order to do it.

That's an achievement that's going on the CV. Yeah. Yeah. So look, just I'm noticing we're sort of probably coming around to time a little bit here. So just to bring it back around, well, while all of the, you know, your usual suspect guardian columnists and so on are taking a victory lap here being like, ah, now all of the people who ostracized me for the last eight years being an obsessive weirdo will surely come crawling back.

You have to be my friend again, the Supreme Court says. The Supreme Court has annulled my divorce. Yeah. Graham Linehan, happy family man once again. Yeah. Apparently. This seems to be what the sort of that side is doing is declaring not just whatever victory they think they want in the sort of broader public life, but declaring

victory in their personal lives as well. And you know, on the other side, right, there has been huge amounts of protest. There has been a lot of political energy galvanizing towards this because there is still a significant minority of people, even after a decade of constant barrage of propaganda, are broadly supportive of trans rights in this country. And I guess we, what I want to ask, just because we don't want to end in too much of a downer, is what are the roots forward from here? I mean, we mentioned, of course, going back to the EHRC, for example. Please, European wokeness, save us. My country, the United Kingdom, yearns for freedom. My country, the UK, yearns to piss.

Reopen the toilets. I think something we can do immediately is make clear that no one is required to exclude trans people from the loo. So we can contact organizations, pubs, whatever we know, and be like, you don't actually have to do this. You can. The law says you now can. But as even Baroness Faulkner was saying, there's nothing mandating that anyone have a single sex space. So that's something really easy to do on an immediate level. After that, our options are legislation. So write your MP, write your MP, tell them that, you know, this is

a violation of trans people's human rights and we need legislation that makes clear that trans people, you know, should be recognized as the sex that they are for the purposes of the Equality Act. I don't think the Labour government is gonna do that, it seems like, from what they're saying, but we should keep applying pressure. They're dead people who they think are their entire constituency aren't gonna like that, it seems like from what they're saying, but we should keep applying pressure. They're dead people who they think are their entire constituency aren't gonna like that. Yeah, potentially. It's the other option is legal challenge, right? And people are working on that. It will take a lot. The thing to be really clear about is if there is any legal challenge or anything of that kind, it's gonna take a long time because this case, Scottish

ministers can't appeal to the European Court of Human Rights, so we need a whole new, fresh case. And that has to exhaust domestic remedies before it can go to the European Court of Human Rights. So, um, buff up. Just, just, and any time I go into like, uh, you know, a bathroom anyway thinking, well this could be the test case, you know, a bathroom anyway thinking, well, this, this could be the test case, you know? Yeah, and it's not just things like bathrooms, right? Like, trans women can't bring equal pay claims anymore, that's what this means. So like, if a trans woman is being underpaid compared to her male colleague, right?

She can't, she can't bring a claim on that basis anymore, because she's male, and she can't use a male comparator for that claim. So it's all sorts of little things like that, I think. And you know, the extra impact this will have on disabled people who were trying to access the loo. There's lots of knock-on effects from this. Well, I think we know what we have to do next. Nova, it's time for us to do the bathroom tour of England. We're going to get that test case started and we're going to bring it right away. I would, I would, I would watch that like a sort of like talk, like a talk here,

but for lose all day, every day we're in the toilet. We're trying, we're trying to get thrown out so we can see come join us. We're basically like ambulance chasing lawyers, but for like gender, gender right certification, we bring November to court wearing a neck brace for some reason. Somehow, yeah, so somehow it becomes, it ends up becoming like one of those like darling BBC two, like BBC one shows. They show like a 10 30 a.m. arm, where it's just like two friends like on a road trip to find like Britain's best bathroom.

Yeah. So if you'd like to apply for that job on my travel show, where I try and get arrested in as many toilets. Oh my God. It could be, it could be like a parts unknown thing, but for bathrooms. Anthony Bourdain, Anthony Bourdain too, lose unknown. I mean, yeah, it's just like going, like going to the toilets in like the little chef on the M4 or whatever and then being like yo so you have condoms and caffeine pills and blue chew all here? God you guys are so fucking lucky. It'd be perfect. I can't believe I can't believe we found jokes in this is the thing because I've

been feeling fucking horrendous about this since it's happened. I mean, what else is there? Yeah, yeah, I guess so. Um, I don't know. I mean, we've been talking about doing a video project, you and I, like we're talking about making a series. We're still very like, sort of early ideas phase, we'll just put this on the board. In like a sort of like ending optimistic note, And I think this is why I can sit here and laugh about this is trans people have survived worse than this.

Right. And we'll keep surviving and we'll keep being here. Yeah, absolutely. That's right. I have this report here that I'm going to open the cover off. Of course. I know that report. Look, Jess, I want to thank you very much for coming and speaking with us today about

a subject that I've already seen. You've been interviewed on quite a bit. So thank you for making the time. Thank you for having me. Yeah. And anyway, I'm going to throw back to us in the future. We haven't recorded the first half or the ending yet. So this is actually in the future for both of us. It's a temporal pincer attack again. Yeah. It's a rare bit of consistency for the two-parters. So we'll see you on the other side in just a second.

But Jess, where can people follow and support you? You can find me on Blue Sky, Jess O'Tompson. Yeah, I write things sometimes. Perfect. All right. Well, we will then see all of you in just a few seconds. Ah, fantastic work, us. Yes. What a segment. I want to thank Jess again for coming on the show. And thank you all for listening to this free episode of TF.

There will be a bonus coming out on the Patreon later this week as there always is. And until then, we will see you there. Bye all. Bye. Bye. Thanks for watching!