TRASHFUTURE - England’s Other Public Health Crisis feat. Abigail Thorn

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

Abigail Thorn (@PhilosophyTube) joins the gang to discuss coming out as a trans woman in Britain, and to explore the psychological, historical, and political roots of transphobia. But first, a startup that is nearly whimsical in its stupidity! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture We support the London Renters Union, which helps people defeat their slumlords and avoid eviction. If you want to support them as well, you can here: https://londonrentersunion.org/donate Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://bailproject.org/?form=donate *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

We are going to sync up the recording in solidarity with Donald Rumsfeld and the people of Azerbaijan. That's right. That's a joke from before the podcast started. I want to do now, every episode of TF is we look at one sort of, you might say, longstanding Republican member of Congress and identify what is the one country they're super, super, super into. And today, Donald Rumsfeld and Azerbaijan. Surprisingly, it's Thailand. I bet there's a Republican member of Congress who is like fully in hock to the like Myanmar military junta.

And I'm excited to find out who it is. If you know right in, in the meantime, however, I would like to introduce the podcast. It is us, TF. Which podcast is it? Hang on, let me check. This is TF. You're listening to the Romaniacs. Yeah, they're called, oh, fuck what now, I think, but the fuck has an asterisk in it.

Are they allowed to say that? That's why the asterisk handle the full. It might say feck. It might say fook. We don't know. That's right. Well, regardless of what it says now, it's just equal to meet the focus. Regardless of what it says, this is TF.

It is me, Riley. There is also Milo. Hi, it's me, your boy. There is Alice. There is Hussein. And we are also very excited to have, I think, three time returning champion, Abby. It's got to be more. Hello, hello, hello.

It's so nice not to have to do the Matt Berry voice. And I think I speak for all of us when I say it is very fun for us not to live in that turfy thought experiment. You don't understand. You have to miss gender, your friend. It's the only way to disarm the bomb. There have been a few guests who've come on as many times as you, but none who've come on in as many genders as you.

So I think you can take that as much as you can. I am definitely winning. You will take home the special memorial cheese grater. We've got a lot of stuff to talk about today. We have a couple of quick things to do. We have a startup to talk about. And then we are finally going to get to the bottom of what the fuck is with this island and it's many fabulous transphobes who we love so much.

But first, before we get into any of that, I want to issue the official trash future congratulations of February to SoftBank. Them again. Employee of the month yet once again. SoftBank's vision fund has, this is from the FT, launched its best performance since its launch in 2017, even when the group's trading arm racked up losses of 2.7 billion from its insane Nasdaq whale trades. I added insane in the final quarter of 2020.

The Japanese tech and glomerates to vision funds have reported a $13 billion rise in the valuation of their investment holdings during the three months leading to December, boosted primarily by the rise in holdings of Uber and DoorDash and other. All of those valuations are completely accurate and valid, according to what the company actually does and makes. Isn't this also like a couple of months after a large amount of the Saudi money went out of the vision fund and into other stuff, which is very funny to me. It's that they declined to invest in vision fund too, as I understand.

They failed to buy GameStop when it was low. Alice, are you suggesting that they've got some kind of revenge work out board to get back at the Saudis? The head of SoftBank's just like going out and getting jacked and inflating his portfolio to make himself look good because the Saudis have left him? Yeah, just posting on Instagram like, yeah, I'm thriving actually. And meanwhile, on the eighth floor of the Riad Ritz Carlton, MBS is like doom-scrolling. Meanwhile, on the seventh floor of the Riad Ritz Carlton, MBS's family members are still there.

If you really want to get back at the Saudis, you've got to really work out your neck, get a really jacked neck to be like, there's nothing you can do to me now. Anyway, I'm sure this represents the increase in the sort of actual value potential revenue and so on of all of the insane boondoggles into which the vision fund has invested, invested rather invested and not the general frenzy in markets around the all the world to put all the money they can be created at permanent zero interest rates into any asset they can possibly get their hands on. No, no, I'm sure that they didn't just forget the money switch was left on

and now the SoftBank vision fund is profitable. Remember, it's not a bubble, it's more of a kind of air pocket in liquid. And what do you need to survive under water? Air pockets. That's right. How could that be bad? View, there are rumors that view the SoftBank company that makes windows that tell you if it's raining, but also that allow landlords to turn off your windows.

They may be going public via SPAC, another one. Everybody buys shares in that. I'm just not investing advice. This is not investment advice, but we can say that all of us will be investing our entire life savings in the windows that make you know whether it's raining or not and also spy on you. And if you own shares in regular windows, sell them now, because that's fucking useless. That's yesterday's tax advice.

That's pure normal glass. But hey, if we want to talk a little bit more about tomorrow's tech, let's talk startups. Okay. The company is called, I'm not making this up. Okay. Pipe dream. Abby, as the guest, please, your first guess. What does pipe dream do?

Pipe dream supplies, it supplies strap-ons to trans men. That would be more socially useful than what they do. It's a kind of holodeck that AI generates deep faked VR pornography. No, that would be more useful than what they actually do. Who's saying? I don't know. But you know what is a pipe dream? 50% of women on CEO boards.

Am I right? Yeah, that's right. Everyone's a CEO. Also, 50% of women, are we saying 50% of the world's women should be on some kind of a board? I don't know. It's been a long day. Something like, I'll say this, right? I'll say this.

Are you saying that 50% of the world's women shouldn't be on some kind of board? No, I'm saying 100% should be on some kind of board. Only 100%. What I'm going to say is what I say every time we do a startup, I can't figure out which is that it's something to do with phrenology. No. Is it like a pipe that comes into your house that dispenses some kind of item like ice cream or juice? Or actually, oh, you're kidding me.

It's calm, isn't it? It doesn't dispense like a particular object. It dispenses objects generally. So, listeners, I'm quite excited about this startup because I have a theory that all the TF startups are either landlords, surveillance, or financial crimes, or some combination of them. And Riley has assured me that pipe dream is none of those things. Some of the startups, you are missing an important fourth category,

which is useless things that do not work and are over-engineered to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Pipes something into your house. Here's some of the copy. Someday, we'll ship things with teleportation. Oh, fuck. It's like it's a vacuum-sealed tube that you can put parcels in it. It's a sex teleporter from that movie that we reviewed.

Yes, we've finally done it. Getting sucked off by a tube. God, I want these guys. Someday, we'll be able to ship things with teleportation until then, we'll use pipe dream. Pipe dream is a network of underground tubes that offer near-instantaneous delivery of objects to and from homes and businesses. Oh, sorry, I thought I was being shipped stuff, but my Amazon package has been stolen by the Tube Morlocks,

who have built a parallel society down there. The Tube Mafia down there, like, hey, you want to use this tube? This is an Elon Musk ass idea. Well, what they're saying is hyperloop is all well and good for transporting people, but what if it's really not a hyperloop for transporting items? What's wrong with just driving them around? Abby, carbon emissions. There's the stat about carbon emissions, they all say.

And items don't die hideously in all of the ways that a hyperloop will kill its passengers, so this is a good idea. Fine, this is good. So how do you actually pull the packages through the tube? How a hyperloop tends to work is you have a vacuum tube, so a completely sort of empty, you know, drained tube. You put a thing in it. It's like a normal penis.

It's marginally more dangerous than having a garbage disposal in your sink, because you'll just have a tube that goes to vacuum in your house. Yeah, that's right. I'm concerned about how we slow the package down at the other end. Oh, they haven't thought of it yet. This is a very early company. You just get that shit at terminal velocity. Yeah, just everything I order is in bits.

Let's have it all right. Riley's pepper grinder came today and he is, unfortunately, died. Just ricochets on the ceiling and just embeds itself in your eye. Yeah, that's right. It's like grains, pepper all over your house. Well, this technology has existed for a long time, though, just on small, because they do this in supermarkets. They take the cash out of the till, they put it in a thing,

and it goes in the vacuum tube. I always thought those were great. Yeah, that's cool. Like, that works on that small of a scale, but they're suggesting that it's somehow carbon-efficient to build a network of tubes over the entire world. Well, they say that Pipe Dream is capable of 200 plus MPH speeds, and that's a theoretical time of 10 minutes from San Francisco to Palo Alto.

Wow. The only two places in the world. The only places that were right. Yeah. What I also think is very funny is that this is the only local shipping solution that is vulnerable to an Operation Ivy Bell style sabotage. I have tapped into the Pipe Dream, and now I'm getting everyone's Amazon packages of sex dildos.

Yeah, yeah. It's like tapping an oil well. It's just fine kitchen goods have just spurred it into my house, and it's crashing through the roof. Really? Welcome back to Well There's Your Problem, a podcast about engineering disasters with slides, with tubes. Hearing about this, I'm just feeling like the Unabomber was born in the wrong generation.

He could have had so much fun with this. It would have been more of a unorail gun. Yeah. This is such a like a Watcher's Futurama once-ass idea. That's right. Like, hey, some of us have watched it twice. Yeah. So basically, they say hyperlogistics is the ability to instantaneously receive good.

Hyperlogistics. Yeah. Delivered to you no matter where you are within seconds. Hyperlogistics by an underground tubing system will be used to deliver goods and tools to relieve the need to purchase and store items only needed on occasion. So you can buy something, use it, then put it back into the tube system. Oh, it's another. It's the fourth thing from our Venn diagram of finding ways to make you rent stuff you would

otherwise own. Well, there are five things then. There's making you rent stuff you'd otherwise own, which is, I guess, kind of a subcategory landlord. That's just landlords, that's just landlords for your stuff. I guess so, yeah. But I guess the fourth category truly is just a child drew something in crayon and you're putting it on the fridge.

Yeah, whimsy. This company is across the street from the smart box guys from a couple of episodes ago, and they all hate each other. That's right. They're furious at each other. So hyperlogistics by an underground tubing system will be used to deliver goods and tools to relieve the need to purchase and store items only needed on occasion. And after the items have been used, they can be returned via the pipeline to the sender.

From the tube we emerge and onto the tube we shall return. So you need two tubes, you need the going out and the coming back tube. I will say this though, it is very fun to just say items, like because they can't specify what they're actually going to fit in these tubes. It's so great to be like, man, do you like to receive items? You're going to have to get all your packages in cylindrical boxes. Yeah, a lot more stuff's going to be cylindrical. That's why they were developing the round pizza box.

Yeah, exactly. Synergy. It's all coming together. It all made sense. So a little more on this. They say that they're proposing a funding model similar to how the US government built the American sewage system, which is like, I believe that was... It's full of shit.

Just fuck you ceiling shit. Just firing into Palo Alto at $2,000. Well, I mean, if you've ever been to Palo Alto, that's kind of the vibe there. So fuck the unibomber, the prank capacity is a bit alone. So basically, as I understand it, the federal funding tends for like sewage tended to be funded by like grants to local governments. So I don't know. I don't know much about this.

I welcome being corrected if I'm wrong. I don't... I think they just sort of assuming that they're going to get... Do not correct us. No, correct me. That's fine. I assume that they're just going to get like... Like they think they're just going to get funded by like the government to make tubes

that go from everywhere to everywhere. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's the same thing as Hyperloop. So sure. Why not? So how do you get the energy to generate the vacuum? It's magic. No, I don't have to worry about it.

Yeah. No, no. You can see here that the two bronze from the office enable intelligence on the one side of the square, onto the square, through here to the CIA. We have to stop you guys from watching JFK because every time you watch JFK, you get JFK madness for two full weeks after this. And Nate has just left picking the references to it out of the podcast before us. Anyway, finally though, I can jump into this thing and I can become the philosophy tube.

That's true. So they have recorded two imports, both from China on the sort of US import records, which I've checked. They have two orders. Oh, I thought you meant in the tube. I was like, they've already done it? China got tube from China? Wow.

The silk tube. They appear to have ordered two consignments, one from Ningpo and one from Shanghai. 13 and 50 containers, respectively, of glass water bottles. Sorry, this is a fucking Soviet anecdote. This isn't a real thing that's happened. This is like, this is going to end with a bizarre joke. Why glass water bottles? I think glass seems like the first thing I would fire through the vacuum.

That's right. Well, they say basically, they say, what if Walmart had developed the internet? And they're saying they're trying to develop this partnership with the government. By basically being like Amazon shouldn't be allowed to develop the system of tubes that goes from everywhere to everywhere. But there's a reason why they haven't, though. They're doing something that works. It's a terrible idea.

But he's saying what if Walmart, which was like the biggest retailer when the internet was around, developed the internet to facilitate its transactions. And again, what they've mistaken is that it's much easier to run, let's say, cables to server farms rather than run either object size tubes from everywhere to a central sorting facility or what it appears to be from everywhere to everywhere else. That's cool. So there's like infinite tubes coming into your house that go to like every other house in the world.

It's like a giant pipe organ everywhere. It's going to be so difficult to get the cornering down. I'm sure they've thought of that. 200 miles an hour just, I don't know, like sending like a loaf of freshly baked bread to my mother. I mean, look, the most obvious thing that seems to have been overlooked by these guys is just the fact that digging that far into the earth might not necessarily be a good thing. All things considered. Sending them directly through the earth's core.

Awakening the Balrog that he worried about. I mean, yes, yeah, absolutely. But like, you know, you'd end up like having like, you know, you'd end up just having a lot like having to dig a lot of pipes all the time and it just feels like this is like a lot of pipe, even more than Milo. And like Elon Musk's boring company, like the Hyperloop, at least he had a fig leaf for this, which was like he was going to make tunnel boring machines work better by making them epic. They don't even have this, right?

They're just like, no, we're going to dig a tunnel from everywhere to everywhere. They're using normal baking instead of epic baking. They say physical objects take an insane amount of time to be, quote, downloaded to or uploaded from a user of a physical interface. You wouldn't want to just say delivered, you stupid bastard. Because this guy's called Garrett and he's from Silicon Valley, that's why. With pipe dream, the time it takes to send or receive something will feel almost instant because it will be destroyed.

Pipe dream, we made up a passive packages and driving modules that will push the packages through underground tunnels at speeds of 250 miles per hour. The packages will self direct. So that's good that they're going to self direct. I was worried about how they would direct themselves and propel themselves from the tube to the surface. Someday there will be a pipe dream node in every home and business. However, there are network effects needed to make that happen.

So for phase one, we could say that there are some network effects that need to happen. Building a network of tubes that are vacuum sealed and span the entire earth. Well, Milo, don't be ridiculous. Come on. They understand they have to start small. They want to dig a new subway system in San Francisco and put a pipe dream node in every neighborhood.

In every neighborhood. So it's going to be like the early days of the telephone. Go down to the items pump. Yeah. Yeah. They're basically trying to do like a no man sky situation. A big box that contains kind of just all the ambient items TM that you can get. Very fun.

They say just finishing this up. Eventually there will be a node in every home and business similar to how gigabit internet meant people stored less files in local storage. Again, I think not similar to that because it won't work. Yeah. All the key difference between those two ideas is that idea makes sense. This idea makes no sense. That idea relied on largely existing infrastructure like telephone lines.

This involves an infrastructure that does not and cannot exist. Well, I think also like they're kind of forgetting that, you know, a sex dildo to a pepper grinder to whatever else you may order online. Made a pepper grinder is a sex dildo if you're brave enough. Yeah, fine. Also, you have to get your sex dildos in front of the whole town because you've got to go down the road to the item pump. But you've got to make the pussy sneeze.

But what's different here? What if I ordered a dildo and I got a pepper grinder? I'd be a bit awkward. Yeah, you'd have to. You just get one of those dildos with the tubes in them, but you like fill it with pepper. You just put it back in. You're just like jerking off this cock full of pepper.

Yeah, because the thing is, right, actually, a pepper grinder you could use as a dildo, but you can't use a dildo as a pepper grinder. Anyway, the best you could do is sort of use it as a pestle and mortar. Okay. Get the ones with the cum tubes. This is going nowhere fast. What I want to say here, right? Start up.

With the internet that works because all that information is rendered down into things that are like one another, but and easily transmissible. Yeah, physical items are not like that. And you can't just be like, well, we have our item storage here, and we have a bunch of uniform servers that contain, I don't know, things with dimension, volume, mass, area, perimeter, all these other kinds of dimensions that information doesn't have. Now, what is the perimeter of this sex dildo?

Indeed. So anyway, they say they have basically made this comparison. And when I found them, they were just some random website, and I didn't want to talk about them. I now am talking about them because they've been admitted to some kind of a tech accelerator and are actually being funded at an early stage to try and do this ironic thing. That one really putting the accelerationism into accelerator. That's right.

So that was the pipe dream. Thank you to Garrett Scott for inventing this made up garbage. He hasn't invented anything. He's taken one of those old pneumatic tube systems and was like, yeah, what if we just did that, but again, and tech. Thank you to Garrett Scott for engaging in a childish flight of fancy. Yeah, thank you for this drawing, Garrett. It's very good.

We're going to put it on the fridge. Yeah, just start up fridge. So I want to move on a little bit. Last summer, a couple setting off a smoke bomb to reveal their baby's gender, invited, ignited rather, a wildfire in Southern California, which burned for over 22,000 acres. Yeah, that was their baby's gender. Another gender reveal party in 2020 started a wildfire in Florida.

Another one in California caused a wildfire that forced 21,000 people to evacuate. Let's see. Another gender reveal party using tannerite set dry brush on fire in, I believe, Arizona. It's very funny to me once they get to using stuff like tannerite, just like it's like gun guys doing gender reveal parties. And then in Iowa, a family accidentally built something that was classified as a later classified as a pipe bomb 200 miles an hour. Our baby's gender is the unibomber.

Yeah. And unfortunately killed the baby's grandmother. Another gender reveal party that will replace the old. Another gender reveal party later that year caused a plane crash when a pilot intending to drop 350 gallons of pink water stalled the plane and then the plane crashed. The pilot was unharmed and no one else was injured. But the plane did crash. Oh, Nigel Farage, our gender reveal.

Yeah, I'm very excited for like, yeah, what's the next like gender reveal prank gone wrong? Or it's like, yeah, we accidentally set an IED on this like on the A5 to just say we had a boy. Well, yeah, that was the original plan was they were going to get into the Senate chamber and they were going to reveal the gender of all of the riotous babies. That's right. So now you're suggesting to me that Lee Harvey Oswald in an attempt to reveal his gender. Abby, I have a question for you. In your coming out video, what do you think the total collateral damage was?

I think the total collateral damage remains to be seen. But if the view counts anything to go by, it could go into the millions. So are we saying that your your agenda reveal with its million possibly millions of views is responsible for a very small amount of carbon emission? Yes, I've only been able to fire my gender reveal down some kind of tube towards people. I wouldn't have had to resort to making a video. Yeah, that's right. Well, I certainly crashed my plane while watching Abby's gender reveal.

So you pipe dream, why will you not? How many more lives must be lost before you can finally make a safer gender reveal? If only you'd set that video in some dry brush. Why do people make those do those gender reveal parties? That happened. That's a real recent thing, it seems. Why do they only do them next to piles of kindling in deserts and with petrol? We're here at the kindling fireworks circular bomb factory gun range.

And of course, home for the criminally disturbed time set up some bomb. It's a CIA op. This is one of those things that there's like a very like English small sea conservative deep down inside me that really resents this kind of thing because it's so obviously American. And then people here start doing it. And I'm like, don't be a fucking simp for the Americans. Come on, get your own stupid idiot thing. Don't don't copy the idiot thing is transphobia.

I wonder if they'll start marrying and as like we'll have gender reveal parties specifically as trans backlash say, well, we've burned down this whole forest to announce your gender. So you'd better not bloody change it now. We've invested, we have paid so much in damages. I'm still paying back my previous gender icon. I'm sorry. Are you truly free if you are in hawk to the bank for your gender? So anyway, also, you mentioned in your and your coming out video that trans people in the UK

do not have equal rights. Now, I have looked into this document, the Magna Carta does beg to differ. But please, if you could elaborate, I have been owned with facts and logic. I mean, if the Magna Carta says it, it must be true. No, I mean, it's a very interesting thing. And it's not often talked about the moment, the actual morning that I came out as trans, I lost some of my rights.

So I now can't get married or adopt children without permission from the government. I have to get a gender recognition certificate or at least not in the way that you or can. Alice accepted, obviously. Oh, I have to get permission from the government, but that's for entirely different reasons. And also, I mean, for instance, Milo, if you were worried about going bald, which you're not, but if you ever did and you were going to happen, baby, that's all right, ladies, if you're listening to this, then you could go to your doctor and you could get finasteride,

which is a testosterone blocker from your GP to stop me going bald. If I want finasteride for the side effects, i.e. transition, then I have to go and see a psychiatrist. I have to answer a bunch of irrelevant questions about my childhood and how I masturbate. They will fully ask you about jerking off. Yeah, the psychiatrist did ask me that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you just don't have to do that to get the exact same medicine that you can just get

like that. So it's very, it's very jarring to suddenly lose a bunch of your rights. It's very weird. But I said as much in a tweet, but like, it is a tough crowd at the gender clinic. They asked me if I did anal, which is so fucking funny to me. And they didn't even laugh when I said, you got to buy me dinner first. They probably heard it a lot, I guess. The guy's just like pulling his trousers back up.

What? You're not serious about getting this certificate, Ms. Colville Kelly. We've spoken about this gender recognition certificate, right? And that's quite challenging to get. And the question is, right, if you want to, how come you need to have a set and legally recognized gender to adopt a child? Well, normally, right, what happens in a sane country is you have this process called self ID, right?

Where like, if you want to change the gender that's on your birth certificate, like you sign an affidavit, you sign a thing saying, yeah, no, I'm not doing this for fraudulent purposes, whatever those might be. And then you just do it, right? In the UK, what you have to do is you have to get a gender recognition certificate, which requires you to prove to the satisfaction of a panel. And I'll ask you to bear in mind that you're paying for the privilege that you are not involved, that you're not like doing this for some sort of nefarious purposes,

and that you are a genuine bona fide transsexual. And I'd like to add to that as well, that cis people, you can self ID your gender. So again, using Milo in his example, because he's sitting here, Milo, if you wanted to get married, you would need to take some ID with you. And your passport, your passport says M for male on it. So they're going to go, right, then that's Mr. Milo Edwards and miss whoever the lucky lady is. You can self ID. It could be the girl, the girl reading this.

Yeah, subscribe to the top level of the TF Patreon to be Milo's wife. To subscribe to the top level of the TF Patreon to be Milo's top. People moaning about the $10 tier aren't serious about being my wife. So if you went down to the registry office, you could self ID, you can use your passport as ID. Even though my passport says F for female, my passport isn't good enough because I'm trans. So if I want to get married and have it say miss Abigail Thorn, on the thing rather than Mr. Abigail Thorn,

then I need to get a gender recognition certificate, because my ID isn't as good as yours anymore. You also need to get like one of those black passports, because I hear that those are like way cooler and like more legit. Yeah, even that's not good enough. I have the new passport and it says F for female, but I can't use it the way that you all can. As I understand it, it was not ever thus, right?

Because we had like various consultations on self ID. I think in the last five years we've had nine consultations. It's interesting, it seems like to come down on the side of allowing transgender people equal rights to let themselves ID like to do everywhere else, is construed as an unacceptable attack on free speech and shutting down debate, which has to go on forever. The funny thing is, the results of those consultations have always been, every single time it's been tried, overwhelmingly in favor,

and not just from like trans people writing in. All of the sort of like institutional stakeholders, I guess, and whether that's like women's rights groups or LGBT groups, or any number of like law reform societies, things like that. It's always been overwhelmingly in favor, and yet every time mysteriously, the government, whether that's the Scottish government, who are actually in some ways worse about this, or the UK government, they've just been like,

ah, yes, that's very interesting. Get back to us in six months when we run this exact same consultation again. Sorry, more debate needed. You'll like this. Well, this is the funny thing. When I finally got my grubby little pause on hormones for the first time, and I finally got approved for those, and I finally got my referral for the surgery and everything else,

I spoke to the psychiatrist at the gender clinic up here in Glasgow, and I said, right, do I need to go about getting a gender recognition certificate now? And this guy said, I probably wouldn't bother, because it's quite expensive and it's quite onerous, and they're doing a consultation. Any second now will have self ID. So, you know, don't even don't stress about it. Just just wait like six months, and you'll be able to do it yourself.

You're right there Riley, that it wasn't ever thus, and you'll like the story because it involves a divorced guy and some big divorced energy. There was a trans woman years ago, Alice, you might need to tell me the decade, may have been 70s, April Ashley, who was married to... Might have been 60s. Might have been 60s.

She was married to this guy who was either like a lord or a viscount or something, and anyway, their marriage didn't last. She was a trans model and they got divorced. And she demanded some money from him as a result of the divorce settlement, and he came up with this genius defense in court where he said, my wife is legally a man. My wife. And therefore, we have not been married.

I cannot owe my ex-wife money if she was never my wife, because at that time, of course, gay marriage was not recognized. And the judge... Everyone's a trans ally until we have to pay alimony. The judge agreed with him and said, your wife, in quotes, is legally a man, and therefore not just your marriage, but every trans person's marriage in Britain was annulled overnight like that.

And suddenly, self-id was gone, whereas previously, it had been there. It was 1971, by the way. I have to say, I'm very surprised by that purely because of how regressive British attitudes at the time were even to straightforward homosexuality, that that was kind of a sort of like... That's supposed to advance homosexuality. You know what I mean? I'm surprised at a country which I don't need to read something new.

Yeah, that's right. That a country that only made homosexuality legal very recently was not doing something to clamp down on trans people getting married before that. That really surprises me just as a... Well, for the longest time, people thought that we were the same as gay people. I mean, for the longest time, some people still do. Some people will still look at me and say, that's just a gay man. And I have to tell you, that is very much not the case.

Oh, you're a gay woman. That's right. So I think let's go through this a little bit more. I want to ask you a little bit more about your coming out in two ways as well. Coming out in this country and coming out with the effect of the internet as well and having to exist in these spaces. Well, yeah. What would you like to know?

I can tell you as much as you like. So, Alice, this is something that you raised that I think you were interested in asking, which I have in front of me on the notes, which is one of the things about your sort of coming out story is that it was very closely stage managed. With some fantastic stage assistants as well from you and pretty much every other YouTuber and podcaster on both sides of the Atlantic. It's been an open secret for a long, long time. Yeah, crucially, I'd like emphasis on the secret and open secret,

because as much as we might have slipped up on streams and stuff, we were doing that for a damn near a year. Yeah, and that was just you. I mean, you guys weren't the first to know. But yes, it was kept secret for a long time. That was for a few reasons, really. Partly personally, I wanted to kind of take some time to enjoy it and get used to it before I jumped into this position of public responsibility and attention.

It was partly for artistic reasons. I mean, I remember when I realized I was trans, I experienced it very much as a fair complete. It's something that was already done. It wasn't like making a choice. It was realizing that it was a choice was already made. So I kind of wanted to present it like that in the coming out video, as if like, this isn't something that is going to happen.

This has already happened. And the question is, how do we respond to it and enjoy it? And partly it was stage managed to make it easier for cis people to understand. I knew that, I mean, transitioning at any time is difficult, but transitioning in the public eye. The emotional labor of making your transition and your gender legible to cis people. Yeah, well, I mean, you'll recall that it was simultaneous on all platforms across Patreon, Twitter, Tumblr, everything I have all switched.

I had a coming out photo shoot ready to go. I mean, it's a little bit like joining the royal family, to be honest, because... It's an endorsement for gender. There you go, absolutely. I mean, I had interviews set up in the press ready to go, ready to print as soon as it happened. And it was a little bit like joining the royal family, because to me, I'm just doing it for love,

and it's because this is what makes me happy. But I knew there would be this like big fucking deal for everyone else. And I kind of had to take a step back when I realized I was trans and go, okay, if I was managing somebody else's PR team, and they were going to come out as trans, how would I do this in a way that helps their audience? So that was kind of why it had to be a secret, and why I'm so grateful to all of you for keeping that secret for such a long time.

Well, one of the things that I was thinking about was, there's this really sort of night and day deference, right? Between you having to manage this over the course of months, and the clumsiness, right? In which tufts, and I'm doing big air quotes here, come out, right? Like, they can absolutely get on the wine, and like a bunch of tweets at 1am, and then just be like, yeah, no, fuck you.

I think that's actually like- And then Riley's law kicks in, and they never post normal again. That's right. Again, it's unfair, complete, because once you discover you're a tuft, there's no going back. It's too delicious being a tuft. Like, you get that one taste, it's like heroin. Yeah, it's the forbidden fruit.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I think there is also, you know, quite a bit of... There tends to be that once you come out as a tuft, you sort of then are celebrated by the sort of same section of the sort of media and politics that look at all this massive public opinion. And first, for context, another opinion poll came out in Scotland today, where I think 44% of women and 40% of men were in favour of like,

robust, pro-trans reforms to gender recognition. And then another like, what, like, plurality- 26, 27%. People just didn't... We're like, yeah, do what you want. Don't care. Another 26, 27% of no preference, don't mind. Another 10% of don't know.

Yeah. And so you were left with like, about 16% in social? What I'm getting at is that the... If you like the mainstream media, so to speak, and especially the Times, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Spectator and others, they are, and especially like our political class as well, largely the voice of that 16%. And when you get on the wine and like a bunch of tweets at 1 a.m.,

they will then, Harold, you're coming out as a turf is brave, effectively. Yeah, so it's very, very, very sad because I remember when I was a little kid, I used to practice reading by reading my mom's copy of The Times. And in November of 2020, The Times referred to trans people as an epidemic. And I remember, God, I used to read this paper as a child, and now they're calling me a disease. It was very sad. Children sacrificed to appease trans lobby was Janice Turner's headline.

Yeah, the echo is on trans lobby as well. Well, that shouldn't be allowed. Because the... I'm all in favor of trans rights, but yeah, you're sacrificing a children. Sacrificing the children. How did they bring this in? What kind of gender and incremency are you doing down there at the trans headquarters? So firing them down a big pneumatic tube.

Okay, now I'm back on board. You didn't say it was for invention. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's very sad because the idea that there's a trans lobby coming for your kids is literally a Nazi conspiracy theory. I mean, this is why the Nazis burned the library of Magnus Hirschfeld. So it's very alarming to see people saying that. In fact, I mean, we can cut this out if it gets a little bit too dark.

But I remember a few months into my transition, I went to see my brother and his family, and I hadn't seen them since the pandemic started. And it was about time for my baby niece to be getting out of nursery. And I was walking to the nursery with my brother. And I suddenly realized, and I said to him, I can't go to the school gates with you to pick up your daughter. Because if people see you at the school gates with a trans woman,

I know what they will say. Because I know what they say about us in the papers. And I don't know if someone's going to say something to you, or if they're going to wait till I go, and they're going to say something to my niece's teacher or to her. And I said, I've got to go. I've got to go home. And I couldn't be there to hold my niece.

And my brother had to say to her, that Auntie Abby loves you and she wants to see you. But she can't pick you up outside of school because somebody might write something in the papers about it. And that is what the papers in this country have done, is they've made a little girl feel like her auntie doesn't love her. So that is why my coming out had to be so staged managed. Because I know what this country is like.

And I know what women like me and Alice have ahead of us. And it's that this v-transphobia in the UK, as we said, created by these entities. It is not natural. It was not in the air. It's not that there's something in the water. It was, it is literally a political project by actually existing entities, right?

This is something I've always found very bizarre about it. I mean, there's lots of like really bad political tendencies in Britain that are found by the press, but a lot of them make more sense than others. Like, okay, smacking the racism button. Like, yeah, it's pretty easy to sell the British public on racism. I get that. The turf shit is some of the most delusional stuff.

Because they try and frame transgender rights as this, like, well, try selling that on the doorstep in Bolshevik or whatever. And it's like, try selling turfism. Like, these people, like, at worst, they just don't care. They're not interested. Like, they certainly don't like turfs because turfs are exactly the kind of people they fucking hate. They're like rich white liberals who spend all their time

like drinking Chardonnay and talking bollocks about toilets or whatever. Like, they appeal to these people zero. The obsession with toilets. It just goes on and on. We have a theory about this, which is very much like, this has only been so effective because what the turfs have really done is root has done, like they've done a very good job linking it to child abuse

and linking it to the general kind of tendency. This could never have happened without the kind of hysteria that we had. In the late 90s and early 90s, of like fucking burning down pediatricians' houses and stuff. Or gay men becoming teachers. Remember that? Who's saying? Carry on.

Yeah. Well, like there's like child abuse, like, yeah, like kind of like child abuse hysteria, pedophilia hysteria. I know that like on 10K, like when we had Merit on, like she had met and like Merit is an American, but like she has, like she's lived in the UK and has had some experience.

And she made this point about like, well, it's only in the UK, but like you have like all these documentaries about, like in all these like experts on like, you know, like, PR, like pedophilia in like the 80s and 90s. And of course, like this hysteria is like sort of built. And what I think the like the kind of very notable tasks have done, because I didn't like, you know, I don't know if you guys had seen, but like a mutual of some of us had like stuck up for like trans people.

And all like a lot of the people that like had thought that he was on their side, had suddenly like turned on him. And it was like a very interesting way of like looking at, well, how does this sort of begin? So it begins with being told that, oh, you know, you don't care about women, you're a misogynist, but then as like time goes on, he gets accused of like being a pedophile. He gets accused of like wanting women like to be abused in changing rooms.

There's suddenly this like fixation on athletics and like bodybuilding, which I always found very weird. Some one of them was just like, I don't want men in our prisons, which is just like just such a bizarre sentence to me. Some was prison was a wonderful, safe place to be. You'd go to prison for a laugh, you'd take children there to prison, but now they've ruined these prisons, putting the trans women in there. You can't-

Well, I have, I have, I have an insidious, I have an insidious little detail, which is from the latest set of parliamentary hearings about self-identification. Happened this week, where a woman said very plainly that like, if someone has unspent convictions against women, then they should have their gender recognition certificate revoked, because that's incompatible with being a woman. And that's verbatim. Because no woman has ever committed a crime against women,

but I think you're absolutely right who's saying that there is, there is, they have very effectively weaponized the language of safeguarding for children, but it's a particular kind of cisnormative safeguarding, because this comes in the context of the decision in Bellevue Tavistock, which has, the result of which has been that trans children under 16 now require a court order to get puberty blockers. And that, that High Court decision has been internationally condemned by human rights groups, by lawyers, and by doctors actually.

So this comes in the context of actual children actually being denied life-saving medical care, but they have very effectively weaponized this language of child safeguarding. And you know what, and the other places it's been, it's been weaponized as well is the first place that jumped to my mind anyway, was Rotherham and grooming gangs and stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I think we can also talk about Savile, we can talk about Jimmy Savile,

we can talk about Peter Sarkliff. We can allegedly talk about Prince Andrew. Yeah, like so much of this, I think, is this really reflected anxiety over genuine, unarguable male violence, right? Like, I was, I watched the Netflix documentary on Peter Sarkliff, and I was struck to see Julie Bindle there, having like made her name, writing these, writing these articles about how, yeah, there was in fact a serial killer, and it wasn't women's fault, and he wasn't like in any way just for targetting women.

And like, you kind of see the line there of how that like, you take these very real, you know, sources of hurt and terror, and you just veer off of them. Mail them to the wrong address. It's that what seems to happen is that the... Put them in the wrong pneumatic tube. The violence is taken out of the social relationship of patriarchy and put onto the chromosome. Yes.

Yeah, like, fucking Jimmy Savile, right? Never felt any need to address as a woman, right? Peter Sarkliff never had any need to like, who were like, well, actually, I identify as a woman, so it's fine for me to murder you. Like, you didn't need to do that because he was enabled by the same sort of, like, structural misogyny that was like, that they're now perpetuating. Less than 2% of rapes in England and Wales result in charges. And that's not because rapists are self-ideeing as women.

No, people get very mad at me when I say this, but rape is legal in the United Kingdom. And it's not because it's like... This is not legal advice. Yeah, no, as you're returning, I have to say that no, legally it is not. But in a practical sense, right, if hardly anyone is arrested for it, and then of the people who are arrested, hardly anyone is charged, and then of the people who are charged, hardly any of them go to trial, and then of the ones who go to trial, hardly any of them are convicted,

and then of the ones who are convicted, hardly any of them get a custodial sentence, then when you're talking about that minority of a minority of a minority of a minority, how can you then say that this is a law that is like, effective, that is actually on the books, as opposed to just being something that exists to like, scoop up a handful of people by chance? And I mean, I think what I'd like to sort of emphasize here as well, right, is that the transphobia in the UK is so pervasive and sort of difficult to escape, that even when you're on the side of trans rights, you always find yourself talking in the sense of, well, no, there is not, this is not, there's not a danger here.

There is not, these are not sort of dangerous people, this is not an invasion, you are not being replaced, you're sort of, it's very difficult to get out of the framing that is, again, that represents this very small minority of people. Yeah, it's so tempting to get in there and sort of try to refute these things and try to fact check, and we make fun of liberals for doing this about everything else, but it's an immensely like, seductive impulse to be like, well, no, this simply isn't true, you're lying and I'm gonna prove that you're lying, but the thing that I point out is that for a lot of these people, they know damn well that they're not telling the truth, and it's convenient for them to do that.

And I think if you make that effort, if you're trying to convince them, and I do draw a distinction, I think you can try and convince like third party observers, right? But like, if you're trying to talk to that person and say, no, come on, this isn't accurate, and this isn't some epidemic of rapists and waiting, just queuing up outside your bathroom, they're laughing at you for it, and not unreasonably, because you're taking them at face value, and you're insisting that they don't see any absurdity in what they're saying, but they absolutely do. Alice, I believe you are setting me up for a certain long passage. It's almost like I'm some kind of professional podcaster, isn't it?

So there's a famous passage from Sartre about anti-Semitism specifically, but from which we can draw, I think, a general conclusion about, sort of, if you like, mass prejudice in this way, right? So he says, never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous and open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who has obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have a right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons,

they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert. And if you press them too closely, they abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. And the fact that a lot of the framing about the discussion of trans rights in the UK is so disingenuous. It means that we end up advocating and fighting for things that are really not good enough. So the most that we have managed to ring from some politicians is an acknowledgement that may be the waiting times for the gender identity clinics are a little bit long.

And some politicians have positioned themselves as wonderful heroes by saying, we must pledge to reduce the waiting times for gender identity clinics. But that's not good enough, because we need to close every single one of them and get healthcare the same way everyone else bloody does. Yeah, we've I've mentioned this before and in passing, but like I cannot stress enough how fucking much non-shit the gender identity clinic system is. It is like, but it's simultaneously very stupid, very slow, and yet also like humiliatingly intrusive. Like they will ask you to do things and say things that for no real reason other than to prove

your own commitment to allowing yourself to be humiliated. And like that that is like technically right that technically the real life experience thing is not a thing anymore. It's not something that the NHS does. But what it certainly used to be and in practice, I've certainly found it to be. But the idea is that like if you go to a gender clinic, if you finally get that that referral, and you've been by this point on a waiting list for anything up to five years, and you finally see a specialist, the first thing they'll say to you is, how long have you been dressing as a woman? How long have you like how long since you've changed

your name on your ID? How long have you been out to all of your friends and family? And that used to and in practice kind of still does start a little clock, right? And you couldn't get prescribed hormones until you had been out in real life experience being a woman, but without the benefit of any of that sort of medical support for at least a year. It used to be longer, it used to be two years. And also, if you really want the hot take, gender identity clinics is how we get care about because we don't have much control over our own transitions. There are non-binary people in this country who report having to pretend to be more binary than they are, because they have to jump through the hoops that the gender identity clinic presents.

Yeah, there you go. And they have to act up. I mean, I was just chatting to a friend yesterday who said, oh, when I went to my appointment at the GIC, I had to, you know, pretend I couldn't say the word penis because that's what the doctor expects to see. So that's how we get situations like Kira Bells, because we're not allowed to control our own bodies. Yeah, it's like, they're very interested in a lot of intrusive details, but they won't actually support you through any of them. You're still left to handle this stuff on your own. And it's always this sort of grinding thing in the back of my head when we talk about like, every time Libs do the thing where we have the 2012 Olympics about how great the NHS is, right?

And I'm not saying this as we have to privatize the NHS. You know better than that. But it takes a lot of gall to be like, oh, this is the best health system in the world, having been exposed to the way that it does trans healthcare, which is to say that it just kind of doesn't. And again, that goes back to what we were saying earlier, right, which is trans people for a variety of reasons that are, again, connected to historical prejudice that are connected to ingrained sort of homophobia that saw this as within its purview. And that also sort of comes in, that also has its roots in, that is difficult to solve because of a relatively recent full court press media campaign that sort of suggests just disingenuously and

frequently like without proof or with sort of shaky misrepresented statistics and so on and so on, that this is somehow a bad thing and that at best, it's a bad thing we have to learn to live with, right? And this is because of that. This is, if you want to think like, oh, media studies is ridiculous, you shouldn't care about it. This is a media studies problem in no small part. And a philosophical one. I think something I'm interested in is transphobia as a kind of constructed deliberate ignorance. And I can give you an interesting example of this involving public toilets since we live in England. We do love a toilet. We do love a public toilet. We love to worry about toilets and where people shit. So when public women's toilets were first built

in Camden in the 19th century, there was a lot of sexist backlash because people said, well, why do women women don't need to be shit and women not be shitting, women should be in the home. Do you do shit in there? Well, they said they shouldn't be out shopping. But then women came back and said, you know what, women be shopping. And sometimes when women be shopping, we need to be shitting as well. So we need public toilets. And there was a lot of sexist backlash. So when turf say women's spaces are hardwander and need to be defended, they are right. But what they miss is the fact that when those public toilets were constructed, only upper class white cis able bodied women were allowed to use them. If you were black,

not coming in. If you are on your way to work in a factory, not coming in. If you're visibly a sex worker, not coming in. So when turf say that women are oppressed only on the basis of their sex, they miss the fact that for the majority of us, majority of women on earth, that simply isn't true. But they pretend to be deliberately ignorant of this. And they perform an ignorance of this, I think, kind of in a way to avoid talking about race and class. Absolutely. And like this, this, this ties into my sort of, why do all of these people sound like they're talking about the great replacement? Why are all turfs one step away from talking about George Soros?

I've been accused of working with George and Big Pharma to sterilize white mothers. Yeah. We support you nonetheless. I do do some stuff that's pretty out there. You go really in on your video. It's the same anxiety though. It's like realizing that you are a privileged minority and your response to that being, not only am I not a minority at all, I'm just normal. And in fact, I'm speaking for a silent majority here. But on top of that, right, I'm not just, I'm not just that, but I'm, like, anything that suggests that my position, that how I got here, like, isn't hard one by me personally. Right. Like, it's not like, I think, to a certain extent, transphobia is like a

disease of mediocrity, right? Like it comes from realizing that like, oh, kind of anybody could write guardian columns about how my husband who is a gaming YouTuber doesn't know how to use a book or maybe the wizard books are actually just okay. My enormously successful series of novels became so less out of my own ability and more sort of just by chance. Anything like that just really sort of gets in your head. I for one, cannot imagine why a bunch of wealthy upper middle class white women who write columns in the Guardian wouldn't want to have a discussion about race or class. It's not, it is not for me to speculate, but one of the things- And to be fully, fully intersectional, like one of the

reasons why they get so into women's sports is, well, look at who's winning women's sports. And it was so funny to me watching all of these sort of former British Olympians come out against cast of Semenya, right? As this sort of foreign invasive president. Who is a cis woman? But like one of them, I don't remember her name, but she came 16th, right? And she was like, no, this is a threat to our sport. I'm like, you weren't, what exactly were you being threatened with coming 15th? But I think that's also important to talk about, right? Like it's that tourism isn't simply a sort of white women thing either. I mean, one of the biggest proponents of this whole thing from the beginning in the times is Rod Little.

Like this is, I think the important thing, and this is, I spoke with a friend and ultimate multi-time guest of the show, Juliet Jux, while sort of preparing for this as well. And, you know, we were talking about how like, you can't just see feminism gone awry. What she sort of wants to emphasize, right, is that a lot of these sort of the second wave feminists and stuff, right, were sort of victims of male violence in the 1970s. And so they were like, we don't want anything man related here or that we see as man related. And what Juliet sort of talked about with me and what I sort of thought made a good amount of sense was that you have to see Turfery as a form of displaced patriarchy.

Where trauma from cis men is passed on to trans women, often via cis women. And that that's a kind of political whiteness. Yes, I think that's, I mean, I'm reluctant to say, oh, it's because people are traumatized and they act out. She's talking about that. She's talking about rooting this in history, I think. Not saying all Turfs were at some point traumatized, but rather like the philosophical roots of this in the 1970s were in this, in this sort of, in this sort of shifting uncertain area. Oh, yeah. And like, that's one of the things that like gets me too, right, is this sort of deployment of this backwards, right? And I'm thinking once again about the Sircliffe documentary, right? And I get very, very upset about the extent to which

an entire era of British feminism has sort of largely been hijacked by, by transphobes now, because like, you can't look as a trans woman at these, at these sort of, at this footage of like the earliest reclaim the night marches, say, right? What that should be is you should be thinking, you should be allowed to be thinking, oh, yes, these are my sisters, right? These are sort of comrades in arms. We share a struggle here. But you end up thinking, having been taught very effectively by the media is, I wonder how many of these women are currently posting at me right now. And to be fair, trans women have been not only involved, but actually organizing women's rights and gay women's rights for a long time. So there were, I think it was 1973,

a trans woman called Beth Elliott, organized a national lesbian conference in the United States. And she was attacked on stage by turfs, 70s turfs, which you'll like now, but the haircuts were worse if you can imagine it. We've been doing this dance for 50 years. And, and this is again, what one of the things that Juliet sort of took pains to make clear to me as well was in the 1970s, as now, this was a minority opinion. Yes, it was. This is not a majority opinion. What this is, is it is a reactionary opinion that is propped up by a reactionary political and media sphere. Effectively. You know what's funny is, as much as they like to lay claim to radical feminism, you know, who was surprisingly and

very explicitly trans positive was, was Andrea Dworkin, who is like oft, oft cited as like this absolute, like the apex of manhating radical feminism, right? And, you know, like I will say this, like if, if Andrea Dworkin had a hatred of men, she came by it honestly. And like as such was driven to this kind of much more logically consistent position, which is that like, if, if gender is like this war that's going on, this war of oppression, it kind of behooves you to welcome defectors to your side. The gender clinic is now just like a bridge and there's people in trench coats. It's like shoving people across. Literally, she, she, she genuinely saw this as like, oh, we have to provide a pathway to transition

out of, out of this sort of awful thing, masculinity, right? And, and we have to provide that as an emergency medical service because of course there are going to be refugees from it. Well, even, even before she was making that very simplistic and I think, I don't know, I'm slightly insulted by that. But, but yeah, but even before she was making that kind of, that kind of analogy, there were black feminists way before that. Like you had the Khmeri River Collective in the 60s and 70s and Audre Lorde and Kimberly Crenshaw being like, yeah, trans women absolutely part of this. Like, why, why would you only focus on sex when there's also race and class and other things to be talking about as well? And so, yeah, even before the,

even before some of the white radical feminists were doing it, I mean, it was, we were already there, we were already part of it. But Abby, have you considered how this will play on the doorstep in Bassett law? So the people who say that, I say, have you considered how being a trans verb will play on the doorstep of a trans person in those places? Because we're there. We are everywhere. And that's Bassett's law, Tuesday night, so yeah. So she's the only trans detective on the force.

We support her in being trans, but not in being a cop. My favorite cop drama of the 1980s, bathroom rider. You don't have to yell. You don't have to yell, Michelle. I'm all around you. Driving a bathroom. Just the bones from the show bones, examining a pelvis and being like, I know it looks male to me bones. Bones, but like turf bones. See, there are, I have a few more things here. I want to talk a little bit as well.

Lightning round. I'm missing words, right? Hands on buskers. So this is right. This is from academic Allison Phipps, who's a professor of gender studies at the University of Sussex. And this is where I sort of grabbed that phrase political whiteness, where she says ultimately trans misogyny in the UK is focused on violence against white cis women and lasers in on the male body as a source of privilege. There's a lot of straight white privileged cis women involved and whiteness has everything to do with it. Whiteness and class privilege. She goes on to say, it is Carolyn Bryant was Emmett Till's accuser all over again.

Trans exclusionary feminism is grounded in fear and in some cases a hatred of the other and a deep need for protection. Yeah. I mean, I, again, I'm reluctant to say that all like turfs have been traumatized. I think that some, some turf area, I think is kind of Miss Andrew, like the hatred of men that is being sent to the wrong address. Again, down the wrong pneumatic tube. We've already covered the kind of whiteness in the class space, but you're right to bring up. There is this incredibly intense focus on the penis. This like Zardos. The penis is evil. Like it's a so much focus on that. Zardos did draw a lot of attention to the penis.

But there is this like intense focus on it. The homophobia. Also, like it's not only a fear of, of, of men and masculinity, but there's a, there's a deep hatred and spite towards both gay men and like effeminate men, which is like very, very interesting when you see how much of this stuff is like recycled from the 80s with like the serial numbers filed off. It essentially like, it's like someone, you could, if you, if you look closely, you can see that the words McMartin preschool have been just removed from this building. Yeah. It is the panic at the potential loss of a, like we said, privileged minority position.

Effectively, the panic at the idea that this might happen. And this I think was why Phipps draws the, the Emmett Till parallel, right? Which is, you know, and, and why this also comes in as the, the hatred of the other as well. And Britain is nothing else if incredible at making hatred of the other a standard, a standard, a sort of default position. Yeah. But before you can hate the other, you need to decide on what grounds will you demarcate that other? Because I am not an other to women. I am a woman and feminist causes are my causes. Women's rights are my rights. So before you can hate the other,

you need to have a way of pointing them out. And the way that TERFs do that is with, is with this kind of Zardo's penis obsession. Yeah. It's fucking chromosomes. Well, it's, it's got, yeah. Well, it's like dicks and therefore like dicks devoid of any context. And they, they view them as somehow like uniquely threatening or that they must, or that they are always masculine. They're like the Romans. Yeah. Yeah. They, they really are.

They have a nice threatening dick on this chariot. Yeah. Like I think that one of them, one of the most abiding and valuable contributions that my illustrious colleague Natalie has made to the public discourse is highlighting that sometimes penises are feminine. There is, there is gildick. Like it behaves differently. It's, if you take it out of context, it's not the same. It's nothing like the dicks you know. I'll be honest. A lot of people in PE changing room said that about my dick, but I'm not sure it was in such an affirming way. But there is this, this, and it reminds me of Kierkegaard's madman,

which is a fantastic bit of philosophy that I love. I put some Kierkegaard in the notes too. I know. It's almost like I'm queuing you up. But Kierkegaard has this, has this story about a lunatic who escapes from an asylum and he thinks himself, well, I've got to blend in with the locals because otherwise they'll realize I'm mad and they'll send me back. So he resolves to only say things that are true. So he goes up to people and says, the world is round.

The world is round, the world is round. And everyone he sees, he says, the world is round, the world is round. That's all he says because it's true. And of course, they instantly realize that he's mad and they drag him back. And Kierkegaard's point is that it's not just about saying things that are true. It's about saying things in the right context. So there are people who will say, penis, you've got a penis. They'll point out that I've got one and Alice has got one and we do.

Like there's three dicks sitting around this table. For now, Mr. Chopper. For now, Mr. Chopper, put it in the pneumatic tube and send it back. And then join me in the dick tube. But there's three dicks sitting around this table right now, but one of them is very, very different. That's the real. Exactly.

So it's about the context in which you say it. But again, we come back to this idea that turfitude is this enforced ignorance and it's this absolute refusal to know about things like context or change. Yeah. Which is also why it's so funny, right? Like why they do so many cell phones. It's why they insist on, we can always tell or like telling a trans man that like he'll always be a man.

Things like that. Oh my God. I had somebody within hours reply to me when I did my coming out post. Yeah. Sorry, Abby. You're always going to be a woman. Yeah. There's somebody that you will always be a woman and a pretty feminine one at that.

And I was like, thanks. Damn. Oh, shut up. And I think if we want to say, well, where is this otherness come from? You can combine that with that discussion of ignorance pretty well and say, well, the otherness is on the other side of that wall of intentional ignorance. It's that I've decided that I'm going to be, I'm just going to not know some stuff and everything beyond that wall of information I refuse to take in, that's the other.

And it's sad. It really is sad. And a lot of terfs seem to me to be very, very angry and upset. And they don't recognize that, well, we're not others. Alice and I, we are women. And as I say, feminism is our struggle too. And we have a part to play in it. And we trans women, we've always been here.

We've always been part of it. God actually describing terfism as the refusal to know things has suddenly made me realize why it's such a thing in Britain. Because there's nothing more British than refusing to know things. Absolutely. I've said this on this podcast before. British people fucking hate knowing stuff and they resent people who do. So I think with, I think that's, that's a, that's a love, a little button to put on.

And I think, so Abby, do you have any, any final thoughts before we transition into this episode being over very, very nice. No, I don't think I do, except that if you'd like to refuse to know things, mine is that like, I'm very resistant to, to sort of tie this up in a nice bow. And that's sort of, I'm engaged in a dialectic here, right? The two parts of my nature, trans woman and podcaster are our intention. Alice, dialectic away. I'm afraid Alice, you'll never be a podcaster.

You will always be a woman. You'll always be a YouTuber. No, I like, as, as a podcaster, as someone who does this professionally, I want to put a nice little bow on this segment and be like, well, this was, this was nice. Let's, let's have some closing thoughts and let's move on. I also, as a trans woman, don't want to do that because like, ultimately, like to you, the cis, the cis gender listener,

once you're done listening to this, you can kind of forget about it. But um, Abby and I can't, we're, we're gonna have to keep doing this. Especially if you're British, because you'll be like, fuck, I just learned something quick. Forget it instantly. Yeah. And like the thing is, if you want, if you want like a, a happy ending to this that makes you feel good as a cis ally, you haven't earned one, right? Because all of this shit is still happening.

It's still miserable. And it's, it's going to continue to do that. So yeah, just, just, I invite you to think upon that for a while. I've earned one, but I'm special. Yeah, RIP to you, but I'm different. You're not included in that, the listener. This is sort of worth doubling down on, right? Because it's more than a debate.

The people who want it to be a debate are the ones who want it to be a debate forever and are the ones who can sort of notch a victory up. You know, whenever, um, you know, the, the essentially self ID gets, despite its popularity, um, gets sort of struck down again and again, because that's letting this just stay as an interesting kind of parlor discussion to be carried on in columns. It is exhausting, right? And I don't mean to sort of belabor this point, right?

But like, it really is sort of never ending. And it's, I don't know, it's very, it's very tempting just to, just to be like, oh yeah, good podcast segment, but it doesn't stop there. And you know, I'm not sure what else I can productively say about that. Other than that, like, it's sort of, it's very difficult, right? I knew this was going to be a difficult episode to record going into it, because you're, you're sort of asking me to take off a bit of my armor, right? Where I do this, uh, where I do this for a living, I kind of like,

I process this by being like, yeah, this is actually fine. I'm not mad. I'm actually laughing. And, um, it, not actually the case as it turns out. It's considerably more, more taxing and more draining than that. And it's, it's sort of something that I'm, I'm loath to admit, but it's, it's not an easy thing. And it's not an easy thing because it has been made to be difficult

and more difficult than it needs to be. Though as I said in my coming out video, even when other people make it hard, being trans is a gift. Yeah. Yeah, cool. I think, and I think as with so many things, right? Like with these people, they're not trying to win the debate. Actually their victory is the debate itself.

The debate is what they want to keep going. And it's the same with trans rights and so many other things like, I don't know, like the homeless or whatever, right? It just keeping the debate going is how they win. So in the spirit of not keeping the debate going, uh, and, uh, Fuck debate, fuck learning things, fuck off. And getting, and getting some dinner. I want to say, uh, to our lovely guest, Abby Thorne,

thank you so much for coming and talking to us today. My pleasure. It's always nice to be on TF. Indeed. And to thank you, the listener for listening today. It is always nice to have you listening. And don't forget, uh, we have a, uh, Patreon episode coming out in a couple of days,

five bucks a month. You can subscribe to it. It is going to be with, uh, Shanti Singh about how, uh, billionaires, uh, have a, a strange thing about running for office in California. So, uh, that is going to be quite a bit of fun. And we're really, really looking forward to that. Uh, additionally, uh, don't forget to check out Abby's Patreon. Yes. Yes.

I run a channel called philosophy tube. If you weren't already aware of it, you don't have to sign up to the Patreon. And just come along and watch the show and learn something. My next episode is going to be about sneak preview for you, capital punishment and prison abolition. Indeed. Unless I change it.

I assume those are both good things. Yes. How are they both good things? Capital punishment, good prison abolition, also good. Yeah. Oh, that's the Obama foreign policy. Yeah. Instead of prisons, a guy just shoots it.

That's just, you get in prison if you get shot. Instead of prisons, a pneumatic chew. Yeah. You get delivered a pepper grinder at, sorry, I've ordered a pepper grinder recently. That's why it's on my mind. Got pepper grinders on the brain. It's a really good one.

It's a Pujo Paris 22 centimeter in natural beachwood. Why do you have a car branded fucking? Nate, just fade this out as we go. Just fade it out. Otherwise, uh, don't forget to, uh, check out 10 K posts. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, uh, we have a Patreon, uh, 10 K posts, uh, Patreon is live

as of today. So not only should you listen to our free episode and our Patreon episode with Nate, where he talks about his ongoing war with the QCs. Another aspect, another aspect of British posting and the British psyche that, you know, if you enjoyed this episode, I'm sure it will benefit, you know, that in terms of trying to understand

posting on this island. Um, yeah. And, uh, sign up for the Patreon because we have a lot of plans for some good episodes and stuff. And I believe there's also a Seinfeld podcaster in the house. Yeah. If you would like to learn absolutely fucking nothing, and in fact, learn negative things,

like somehow lose knowledge from your brain, listen to masters of our domain with me and Phoebe. Yeah. Absolutely. Where we allegedly talk about Seinfeld, but not really. I've heard a lot of people express concerns that they don't know anything about Seinfeld. And can I say, buddy, you still won't.

And finally, if you got, we all kind of started, uh, out of other podcasts kind of at once. This is the beginning of the end. We're all like Yoko Onoing ourselves. If you are Canadian or interested in Canada. No, not finally. Fuck you. Well, there's your problem.

Engineering podcast, YouTube slides, Patreon. You rank above us on Patreon, Alex. Now that's the trans lobby at work. That's right. And finally, if you are Canadian or interested in Canadian stuff, me and Dan Beckner have a podcast called The Bottleman. And it is available wherever you find podcasts. We are going to have to learn how to cut this.

Maybe we're going to have to rotate. Who does the plug on each one? I don't know. I think nobody is still listening. Yeah. No, they're all gone. They're all gone. They're all gone. They're busy hitting themselves in the head with a shoe.

Time to say what we really think. Yeah. Oh, what's your favorite slur? Well, mine is, and then play the trend. That's trash. Play the trans feature theme song. Yes. Yeah, that's right.

All right, cool. Our theme song is here. We trans by trans song. That's right. Goodbye. It's going to make you know.