We Can Do Hard Things with Glennon Doyle - Who Invented Gender? Amanda with ALOK

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Who invented gender? Who decided the rules, wrote the script, and convinced us it was all just…nature? Amanda traces the wild history of how gender became a system we call “natural,” “biological,” and “just the way it is.” Then ALOK joins to help us see the game we’ve been playing without even knowing it—and imagine what becomes possible when we stop mistaking the rules for reality. Together, they discuss the history we’ve forgotten, the freedom we’ve been denied, and the beauty, weirdness, and possibility waiting for us outside the boxes. - Why pink was once for boys—and what that reveals about the “natural” rules of gender - How property, inheritance, religion, science, and power helped construct the gender binary - Why attacks on trans people are a threat to everyone’s freedom - The difference between fitting into the world and freely inventing your life - Why ALOK says we don’t need more great thinkers—we need great lovers For more ALOK on We Can Do Hard Things:  74. ALOK: What makes us beautiful? What makes us free? 75. ALOK: How do we interrupt trauma? How do we heal? 293. The One Question to Finally Let Go of Control with ALOK  About ALOK: ALOK is an internationally acclaimed poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor whose work has captivated audiences in over 40 countries. You can catch them live on their EAT PRAY LEAVE world comedy tour.  Follow We Can Do Hard Things on:  Instagram — ⁠https://www.instagram.com/wecandohardthings⁠

Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things. This is Amanda with another episode where we dive deep into a thing. Who invented gender, not biological sex, not chromosomes, not body parts, gender. When did societies take biological differences and build entire systems of expectation, hierarchy, identity, work, family, morality, on top of them. Gender. The rules, the expectations, the script. That pink is for girls. That women are by nature, nurturers, and caregivers. That men are hunters, providers, not caregivers. That there are only those two ways for a complex kaleidoscope of eight billion people to move through the world. Many would probably

answer, no one invented it. That's just natural, human nature. Not sure why, maybe biology or the way the universe was set up, but it's always been this way, inevitable. Except almost none of that is actually true. What we understand as natural, biological, just the way it is, is actually custom invention rules, rules that far from being natural or inevitable have changed dramatically across eras. But the kicker is that folks of each era believed that the order in effect for them wasn't a temporary rule at all. It was just human nature, the way it has always been. In every timeline, people have been following the rules without even seeing the game, which is really the worst kind of game, the one you don't even know you're playing.

Today, we are going to do our best to make the rulemaking clear. so that we can see the game, so that we can decide how we want to play. Take the example of colors. Walk into any baby store, you don't need a single sign. You already know which aisle is for whom. Pink for girls, blue for boys. It's natural, gravitational. Girls just naturally gravitate to pink, boys to blue. Why pick a fight or make an ugly stink over something so trivial? Let the kids like what they like. Just the way it is. Probably always has been. Except, That's not the way it has always been. In fact, what used to be understood as natural and inevitable was the exact opposite. For hundreds of years prior to the 1800s, the pink blue color signifiers

were non-existent. Most infants, for most of all time, regardless of sex, were dressed exactly the same. All babies in simple white dresses. It was functional, practical. White was the easiest to bleach and wash and pass down to future children. Dresses had hams that could be let down as the child grew. Children, regardless of biology, wore these dresses until they were six or seven years old. And for those lucky-duckies with enough wealth to dress their children in the frivolity of actual colors, guess what was the self-evident natural just the way it is color rule? Pink was, obviously, for boys. And blue was for girls. As a 1918 article from the Earnshaw's Infants Department explained, quote, the generally accepted rule is pink for boys and blue for

girls. The reason is that pink being a more decided and stronger color is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl, end quote. There you have it. Pink, a version of red, was associated with strength, war, and therefore masculinity. Blue, which was linked to the Virgin Mary ascribing to her for reasons that make steam rise from my raging head, the state of being delicate. Therefore, naturally, blue for girls. And at the risk of subjecting you to color-blocked whiplash, Rut-Roe, several decades later, we have a new development. Thanks to the rise of mass-produced clothing and the irresistibility of profiting off of gender-specific fashion in the mid-19th century, clothing manufacturers and retail.

tailors aimed to double their profit by promulgating a new social standard, assigning strict colors to gender, thereby preventing parents from recycling gender-neutral clothes among siblings, regardless of gender. And when mass-produced gender-specific clothing was introduced and enforced, uh-oh, we've switched again. Now we are 100% sure it is self-evident that blue belongs to boys and pink to girls. This switcheroo was expedited by the media friends. surrounding the purchase by American millionaires Henry and Arabella Huntington of an incredibly famous 18th century painting from Europe. At $728,000, it was the highest price ever paid for a painting and was widely publicized throughout America. The painting titled Portrait of a Young Gentleman

depicted an aristocratic boy dressed in a blue suit and became known as the boy in blue. The Huntington's also acquired a 1700s painting called Pinky of a young girl in a pink dress and hat. The two paintings, which were highlighted extensively throughout America, suggested that, contrary to prior belief and historical reality, well-bred boys must have always worn blue and respectable girls always pink. By the 1940s, with manufacturers and department stores drunk on the profits made possible by the sale of gender-specific clothing to a new generation, settling into respectable middle-class domestic tranquility, the colors were settled. It was biological. Blue for boys, pink for girls.

And did I say pink for girls? I obviously mean pink for grown women, too. It is, after all, the core of their very nature. We are now in World War II America. Here's the slightly awkward thing. After teaching women for many lifetimes that her natural, God-ordained role was in the home and admonishing her that debasing herself to study or work outside the home would desecrate her femininity and literally destroy her reproductive organs, oopsie daisy, we have to call an audible. We are now engaged in a world war, which extremely inconveniently means the men need to go fight and therefore the women need to go to work to operate factories, make planes, keep the towns and businesses running. And the women damn well did. More than six and a half million American women entered the

workforce as new workers during World War II, including an unprecedented one in four married women. They worked heavy industry, factories, shipyards, and manufactured weaponry with shockingly negligible reports of destroyed reproductive organs. The nation encouraged Rosie the Riveter to don her denim blue because it needed women's public labor for its own stability. For a few extraordinary years, the country watched women successfully perform jobs that human nature itself dictated them unsuited to perform. But yikes, now the men are back from war. They need their jobs back, their dinner on the table, their domestic peace, and definitely need their prior family power and financial dynamics restored. They also need to advance themselves. They also need to advance themselves

financially and educationally on the GI Bill to attain levels never before available. So all the rosies must revert to the level they previously occupied, taking off their blue button-ups and overalls and factory uniforms and military gear and go home. Encouraging middle-class white women, even married ones no less, out of the house to work, had been a dangerous gamble because it ran afoul of hundreds of years of conditioning about middle-class women's respectability and natural biology capacity and inevitable gender order. It was only allowed because the urgency of the war era for the nation's stability. Now it was equally urgent for the nation's return to a stable domestic order that women

forget that weird aberration and revert to the previous agreement on their inevitable place. And let us be very clear that what we are talking about here is respectable middle-class white women femininity and nature. The absurdity being that it was only middle-class white women painted as too delicate for intellectual and physical labor, while poor women and women of color had been tolling in fields and later factories unceasingly for centuries. Post-World War II, this middle-class white femininity reboot, was not just about the tranquility and order of the individual home. This gender role reset was a matter of tranquility and order of the home from. We are now in the depths of the Cold War.

The primary strategy for national defense is literally domestic containment. And key to containing communism was containing the gender ideology that had inconveniently become complicated by the World War II National Security enlistment of Rosie. The family was a microcosm of the state and with a post-war bestselling book declaring the working woman as hastening the end of civilization, sound familiar, maintaining that gendered order was a woman's civic duty. So it was that respectable white femininity needed an urgent and intense re-indocrination. Just as national security activated Rosie, it now required a happy, contented, traditional, and apparently very pink housewife. Enter First Lady Mamie Eisenhower,

wife of President Ike Eisenhower, who had been the mastermind of D-Day and the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during World War II. Mamie was here to show us what love of country and femininity looked like now, and it looked unequivocally pink. Mamie remade the White House residence in pink. She wore pink, proselytized pink, quipping, quote, Ike runs the country, I turn the pork chops. She was known as the mother of pink and her signature color, Mamie Pink, or First Lady Pink, swept the nation. Hollywood produced films with anthems such as Think Pink, literally urging American women to banish blue and black and embrace pink, and with it her natural blushing nature. Hollywood produced an onslaught of movies portraying ambitious women who were miserable until they found their fulfilled calling

in femininity and homemaking. The message was clear. Those rosy days were a weird anomaly. A woman's inherent homebound nature is nature itself. And that nature, much like gender-specific children's clothes, is available for purchase. Suddenly, we had pink face cream, pink menstrual pads, pink lipstick marketed as confidence boosters, and pink kitchen appliances promising fulfillment of her inherent purpose. Now, admittedly, the story of the color binary is relatively inconsequential, almost silly. It's the low-hangingest fruit. Yes. But that fruit hangs within an orchard of the lived realities we experience as natural, biological,

inevitable, perhaps scientifically supported, perhaps divinely ordained, all of which are actually crafted, decided, marketed, enforced. They are the rules of a game we don't even know we're playing. Digging our teeth in this fruit is important because when we get a taste, we start to develop an appetite for what else is growing here. When we see, for example, that a few hundred years ago, high heels, lace, wigs, makeup, perfume, and of course pink, were the natural and inevitable identifiers of wealthy men, which was then stripped from them and passed off as suddenly naturally belonging to women. It invites us to push deeper into the project. Since that is true, then what else is it, perhaps much more important than Lacer Heels, that once belonged to women and was stripped away from them and given to men? Is anything actually natural?

Who decides? And if gender roles are in fact as a natural, scientific, and divinely ordained as they are justified to be, then why do those roles change so damn much? Why does every culture in that its version of gender is the one that's always existed. People who today seek to criminalize and oppress trans and non-binary people often profess to be defending the natural, biological, God-given order of the world against its newfangled, woke invention of gender fluidity, diversity, and transness. They stand on the side of the natural facts and against the newfangled fiction. The biological divine order of things versus the woke gender ideology corrupting our very nature and threatening civilization itself. But those people either don't know or are very much counting on us not knowing history.

History is clear that gender diversity has existed forever. An existential panic over so-called newfangled radical gender ideology has existed for as long as those very panickers have falsely denied the existence of gender diversity. The reality is that history is filled with people who don't fit neatly into the gender binary of man and woman. Many cultures recognize more than two genders. They had social roles for people who lived outside conventional expectations. of men and women. These people were accepted not as aberrations of, but as part of nature, part of reality. One of the oldest civilizations we know, the Samarians of ancient Mesopotamia, had their goddess Inana, later known as Ishtar, who was associated not only with love and war, but also with transformation. Ancient hymns describe Anana as someone who could, quote,

turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man. Ancient texts describe members of an anna's priesthood, whose appearance, social roles, and gender expression did not fit ordinary expectations of men and women. This goddess and her priesthood, and the texts surrounding them, demonstrate that ancient societies knew the human experience was more complicated than two uniform boxes of man and woman.

In ancient Rome, the galley, priests of the goddess Sibili, wore typically feminine clothing, long hair, adopted feminine names, and many underwent ritual castration. The Bougainese people of Indonesia recognize five genders and three sexes living harmoniously, including what we would today understand as trans men and trans women, as well as the Bisu, often spiritual leaders, who, with our Western categorization, we would understand as intersex. Intersex is the term for the biological reality that between one and two percent of us across the globe, the same percentage as redheads, are born with sex chromosomes, hormones, and genitals for male and female bodies. And aside here to say that if any of us are

within that one-ish percent of people born intersex, we likely have no idea. Intersex babies are generally subjected to irreversible surgeries on their internal sex organs or genitalia shortly after birth to force their bodies to conform to typical male or or, quote, normal binary standards. The Bougainese people do not do this. They let natural biological reality do its thing. In India, the Hidras, whom we would read as trans or intersex, historically occupied, recognized social roles and respected positions in royal courts. Many performing blessings at birth, weddings, and religious ceremonies. And these societies are not anomalies. Long before American annexation of Hawaii, the people there celebrated and honored the Mahu as teachers,

healers, caretakers, and keepers of cultural traditions. The Ties, the Katui, the Samoans embrace, the Fa Afafina, the Afafina, the Afanah, the Afanahu, and the Dina indigenous Americans, the nathohi, translated as one who is transformed. The point is, it is historical fiction to claim that gender diversity, the existence of humans outside the male, female, gender, binary are new. Indeed, you would have to be profoundly asleep to documented facts to accept that only two natural categories, male and female, existed throughout history. So how did we get to the fiction of the male-female binary if reality defied it?

Well, to understand that, we have to go way, way back. Thousands of years ago, before we had nation states or kingdoms or organized religion or science or philosophy, on which to reverse engineer and inscribe our social constructs, we lived outside those systems altogether as hunter-gatherers. Small bands of people, no governments, people raised children, people hunted, people gathered. Just as an aside here to say that although many archaeologists assumed that men hunted and women gathered, archaeologists have made discoveries complicating that narrative, including women buried with hunting tools and other evidence that women hunted large game.

But the point is, for 95% of human history, we lived as transitory hunter gatherers. Yet about 12,000 years ago, something changed. Humans stopped moving so much. We started farming, settling, building villages, domesticating animals, growing crops. And as a result of all of that, most importantly, we started accumulating things. Land, livestock, stored grains, wealth. For the first time, many people weren't simply surviving season to season. They were created, property. And once you have property, suddenly you have a new problem. Who gets it when you're gone? That question, who gets it when I'm gone? Change the world. Now lineage matters. Marriage matters. Whose children are these matters? Society suddenly has a huge stake in our personal familial business.

Genius historian Gerda Lerner found that this was one of the greatest turning points in the history of patriarchy. As wealth accumulated, societies increasingly regulated women's reproductive lives because inheritance depended on knowing whose children belong to whom. Agriculture, private property, and the rise of states fundamentally transformed gender relations because now the government is interested. And the government needs categories. Categories make taxes easier, inheritance easier, marriage easier, military service easier. Neat boxes work well for the organization of nation states. Neat boxes do not work well for the reality of human beings. At first, these boxes aren't asking whether women are naturally nurturing or whether men are naturally ambitious. They're asking practical questions, who owns property, whose child counts as an heir, who inherits when someone dies,

who controls a marriage. Gender is becoming something governments administer, not just families, states. And the law begins to spend an extraordinary amount of time deciding who belongs in which category. Why? Because reality keeps refusing to cooperate. For example, medieval Islamic jurists wrote pages and pages of laws to determine how the legal system of the day applied to a recognized group of people who were born with bodies that didn't fit neatly into male or female categories, what today we would generally describe as intersex people. They wrestled mightily with how inheritance law, marriage law, and religious obligations should apply to these people. The medieval jurists were not pretending these people didn't exist or arguing that they should not exist. They were

adapting their legal codes in light of the natural reality of their existence. August is National Dog Poop Month. Yes, this is a real thing. It's supposed to educate pet parents on how to get a visual indicator of your pup's overall digestive and physical health. And honestly, if any pet food brand understands that level of devotion, it's Ali. Seamus has been loving his Ollie meals. They're made. with fresh human-grade ingredients that are gently cooked and designed to support energy, skin health, and yes, digestion that leads to celebration. This summer, treat your pup to better food and perfect poops.

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invested in organizing families, therefore organizing gender, and therefore gender is not merely personal. It is very much political. Governments love categories. And just ask the medieval jurists. Categories as complex and messy as humans actually are make a government's job harder. Two boxes makes a government's job a lot easier. But no society ever explains itself this way. No society ever comes out says, this is how our society happens to work. Whether for practicality, greed, bigotry, or efficiency, here's how we've decided to do things. They don't say, here's how our society will work. They say, this is how nature intended the world to work. Almost every major civilization developed stories explaining why the world was ordered the way it was. In China, Confucian

traditions emphasized complementary roles within family and society. In Christian, in Europe, Eve's story became intertwined with ideas about women's obedience and male's authority. These traditions differed enormously from one another, but they shared something important. They didn't simply tell people how to live. They explained why the social order reflected something larger than human choice. Nature, the cosmos, God. And once a social rule becomes sacred, it becomes much harder to recognize that it is, in fact, a social rule. Then comes another shift. Around the 4th century BC, along comes a philosopher whose influence on Western thought is almost impossible to overstate. Aristotle. Aristotle wasn't simply

describing the world around him. He was trying to explain why the world worked the way it did. He looked at the deeply hierarchical society he lived in and concluded that hierarchy itself was part of nature. He observed that some people were naturally suited to rule, others naturally suited to be ruled. Men were naturally more rational and active. Women were more emotional and passive. He concluded and taught in his biological writings that women were in fact incomplete and defective versions of men. His authority reigned for nearly 2,000 years. The reason Aristotle matters so much is that he did that ultimate cultural trickery loop. He took what was in fact cultural custom and transformed it into nature. That move from social practice to natural law is one of the

oldest, most powerful moves in history. Because once something is declared natural, questioning it no longer feels like questioning society. It feels like questioning reality itself. And after Aristotle, the new religion of science was there to carry the torch and perpetuate the loop. This was in fact not science. but the transformation of customs into biological destiny, with each new so-called scientific discovery reinforcing the same preordained socially constructed conclusion. For example, Charles Darwin's peer, Herbert Spencer, philosopher and pioneer of social Darwinism, taught that women possessed a limited store of biological energy. If too much of it went into thinking, there would be insufficient supply for reproducing. So, education. So, education.

educating women would lead to their infertility and therefore national collapse. By the 1870s, Harvard physician Dr. Edward Clark advanced Spencer's argument, publishing in his best-selling book, Sex in Education, that girls studying would misappropriate vital, quote, energy from the uterus to the brain, producing monstrous brains and puny uteruses, end quote. French physician Paul Broca ostensibly proved the inferior intellectual capacity of women by weighing brains, cataloging that the smaller female skull demonstrated lesser intellect, completely ignoring the reality that brain and skull size was proportionate to overall body size in men and women, not to mention the fact that brain size does not actually affect intelligence or IQ scores, but I digress. And absurdly, this so-called scientific reasoning was not limited to the human species.

Victorian science applied its gender fantasy on the poor animal kingdom as well. Male birds were bold and adventurous. Females, coy and nurturing. Lions were symbols of masculine dominance. Bees were the epitome of self-sacrificing motherhood. In this way, gender ideals were not just promoted by philosophy, religion, and polite society, but proven by Victorian science as the natural biological order. But here's something else that was happening at exactly the same time. While scientists were trying to prove that there were clearly two distinct kinds of human beings and ordering them into tiny gender boxes, they kept encountering people who complicated that picture. People born with bodies that didn't fit typical male or

female anatomy, people whose gender expression didn't match cultural expectations, people who are attracted to the, quote, wrong sex. Reality kept refusing to cooperate. One of the founders of modern sexology was a German physician named Mangus Hirschfeld. Hershfeld was doing something very different for many of his contemporaries. Instead of insisting, contrary to reality, that everyone fit neatly into two categories. He spent decades documenting the astonishing diversity of human experience. He described what he called, quote, sexual intermediaries. People whose lives didn't fit the rigid categories Victorian society had inherited. Today, that umbrella would include people we might understand as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and many others.

Hershfeld wasn't using today's language. Those words didn't exist yet. But his cultural insight was remarkably modern and remarkably ancient, that human, sexual, and gender diversity is far more complicated than our artificial categories. In 1919, he founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. It became one of the first places in the world where people could study sexuality and gender scientifically without assuming difference was pathological. Researchers gathered case histories, medical records, photographs, personal testimonies to understand human diversity. But this knowledge, this documented reality of the human experience was dangerous to those

who wished to deny it and who wanted to build a world based on the fiction of an ideal superior model. In 1933, the Nazis' destroyed the Institute for Sexual Science. Students and stormtroopers looted the institute. They burned the archives in the streets. Many of the most famous images we have of Nazi book burnings are in fact photographs of Hershfeld's life's work, the record of queer, trans, and gender diverse reality going up in flames. Those images are haunting and familiar in this moment in which book banning in America has risen to record highs, far exceeding previous rates

of censorship, with 40% of those erased books representing the experiences of LGBTQAI folks and people of color. The Nazis burning, the moms for liberty banning, is not just about the destruction of books and knowledge. It's about reality itself becoming dangerous. reality that complicates certainty, reality that challenges fictional categories, reality that proves human beings have always been more complex than many worldviews can withstand. The inability to withstand reality is also why colonizers sought to eradicate the realities they discovered when they seized colonized land and peoples, attempting to erase the knowledge, history, customs, and reality that the colonized people had lived for centuries.

When the British colonized India and discovered the Hidra, the third sex long understood, accepted, and revered in South Asia, they couldn't allow that reality to stand. In 1871, the British enacted the Criminal Tribes Act, specifically targeting hedras, placing them under government surveillance and effectively criminalizing them. Think about what that means. a community that had existed for centuries, didn't suddenly disappear. The law simply decided it didn't and shouldn't exist. And colonialism wasn't only changing gender. It was changing families. Remember how societies got interested in gender when property and therefore inheritance became a

thing? For most of us, we understand that, regrettably, it has just always been that property passed from father to son, impoverishing daughters intergenerational. It's unfair. It's unfair. but just the way it was, naturally. But that wasn't universal. Among the Iroquois Confederacy, dissent and clan membership traditionally passed through the mother's line. Women selected and could remove male chiefs. Land use was deeply connected to matrilineal clans. Among the Aachen of West Africa, inheritance passed through a man's sisters and their children rather than his own son. Among the nairs of Kerala, India, instead of inheritance passing from father to son, it passed from mother to daughter or maternal uncle to his sister's children.

Likewise, the Minankabau of Indonesia passed ancestral land from mothers to daughters. These were sophisticated systems of governance, inheritance, and family organization that had existed for centuries. And every time European colonizers encountered these systems, they sought to destroy and replace them with a legal system built around the patriarchal model in their own image. Colonial courts recognized male household heads as the legal owners of property, even where women had traditionally held authority over land or lineage. In many parts of the world, women didn't lose power because their own societies suddenly changed their minds. They lost power

because colonial governments stopped recognizing the systems that had given women authority in the first place. Hundreds of conceptions of family became one model. Enormous human diversity was tortured into two tiny categories. Colonizers didn't just conquer land. They defied reality to standardize humanity. And like the Nazis burning the Institute in Berlin, sought to make historical reality disappear. But the thing about reality is that it doesn't disappear. The power of empires, regimes, religious juggernauts, imperial ideology, and shameless profiteering, they can and do stomp viciously

on reality and nature, but they can never snuff it out. Reality and nature has its way. So like rascally little eaves, we have picked from the tree of knowledge. And having disposed of the rule that nature, biology, and history dictates only men and women and only into tortured inevitable boxes of how it has always been. Let's move on to the deeper stakes of the game. What are we being sold as natural now that is actually just marketing? What are the marketers actually selling? Who is suffering and erased when we buy what's available as natural?

And what within our own nature do we never get to experience as a result? What beauty, breadth, and possibility for ourselves and our world have we sacrificed on this altar of fraudulent inevitability? To plumb these questions, I am so honored to be joined today by a Loque Vade Menin, with whom we have reveled on this show before. Alok is an internationally acclaimed poet, comedian, public speaker, and actor whose work has captivated audiences in over 40 countries. You can catch them live on their eat, pray, leave world comedy tour, which I am a giddy to see in D.C. on September 3rd. They are the subject of

the acclaimed Alex Hedison directed Doc Ushort Alok and the award-winning author of Beyond the Gender binary, femme in public, and your wound, my garden. Alok, thank you for sharing your time and yourself with us today. It is an honor. I know you are every night doing your show, and so it is a big deal that you're making time. There's no place I'd rather be than here. Thanks for having you.

In this moment of unrelenting extremist attacks on trans and non-binary people, so many of the conversations that are happening right now revolve around the costs and dangers of existing as a trans or non-binary person. And that is deeply important work. But I would like to ground our conversation differently. It seems to me that especially in a time of such danger, trans and non-binary people have located the luckiest gift, which is living for something more important than safety.

Can you talk about the gifts and beauty and freedom of living? of living as yourself. What a beautiful way to put it. You're right. I think that there's this narrative structure that there's a relentless crusade against trans and non-binary rights. I want us to edit that.

Yes, and. It's a relentless crusade against creative self-expression, against wonder. It's a war against whimsy, for sure. And that casts a shadow on all of us. because it's a theft of imagination. The idea is that there are pre-formatted Bridgerton era rules and restrictions that you have to comply with,

not that a life is your creative act, not that living is your ministry, not that every day can be sculpted with the same quiet intensity as a painter. And what my transness has afforded me is the ability to, give birth to myself, to fashion a life where I wear what makes me feel beautiful, me, not other people, where I love who I love unabashedly, where I have reclaimed the means of my own pleasure from other people's projections. And that often is missing in the ways that we speak about trans and non-binary life, where our only worthiness is approximate to our injury and not our imagination. And I would say actually that the reason we're being so thoroughly punished and hazed,

which is what I see it as is an act of hazing, it has an echo beyond just the victim. It's a way of saying, if you don't comply, this is going to happen to you next. It's a humiliation ritual that's about compliance for the entire population, not just for help. The reason we are being hazed is because of our magnificence, our expansiveness, our imagination. It's because in so many ways, our detractors see our power, integrity, and strength more than our so-called supporters. Wow. The detractors, the attackers target trans and non-binary people precisely, because of that power. That is historic reality of everyone who has been targeted. It is not because the marginalization or the minority status. It is because of the power of what those people

represent. Which is one of the most sinister qualities of patriarchy is that it plants within us a perpetual self-doubt as the people who aggress us are undoubtedly aware of our power. And I see patriarchy as one of the largest psychological manipulation devices historically, because it has us belief that we are weak, when in fact we are so strong that the goal has been our total elimination. Why would you want to eliminate an entire class of people, deny them access to education, to space? It's because you see in them something that is so massive and full of potential that it could

change the world. Do we see ourselves as such? And that's what I see transphobia is, is the lack of self-belief. It's not actually about antagonism or violence or oppression of the other. It's the lack of self-belief. It's the tell of a theft of magic in yourself. It's the defense of enclosure. Oh, look, this cage is really cute.

Let me decorate it. Not freedom. And if you believed that you were worth freedom, which is not selecting pre-selected options, but improvising your own life, then you would see transatlose. as just another energy in the world, trying its best to figure out who it is, just like you. You know, I've been thinking about all of this in like a co-centric circle removed from the way

you just framed it, you know, the way Lila Watson, if you've come to help me, you're wasting your time, if you've come because your liberation is tied to mine, then let us work together because of the kind of factual reality that so many of the means of controlling trans folk are extensions of the literal means of controlling ciswomen, you know, the way that the three article rule, they were scared of women leaving the house, wearing pants, and adventuring and working. And so you'd be imprisoned if you didn't wear three articles of clothing that matched the role you were signed at birth. And then that began to be used against trans people. So it's like I've been following the kind of legal frameworks.

And that seems just so self-evident to me that it feels obvious that like don't protect trans people because you have some distinct do-goating in you. But that that is an extension of protecting yourself that we are all connected not only cosmically but in this struggle. And what you just said, though, about the political necessity, the strategic necessity of having those who wish to join this struggle understand the power of transness. The joy, the power, the magic is so vital, precisely because the other side does. How do you think that we get folks to not empathize and sympathize and have, you know, solidarity, but have awe and gratitude and appreciation of the power. I worry sometimes there's that irksome thing, the pendulum, and it does its thing swinging.

And I don't want to swing in a direction that fetishizes transness as this freedom practice because there are many trans people who are not committed to being free. And there are many cis people who are. I think what I've moved away in my practice is away from even saying cis people get in support of trans people. And it's more people love you. And I find the vocabulary of love so much bigger and more permission granting than political solidarity. Because political solidarity is rooted in the vocabulary of the eugenicist, the sexologist, where the architect, of gender and race. So I'm sure as you've discussed in this podcast, right, all these categories that we inherit as natural, like woman and man, have histories that were defined by a lot of

like dudebroths who were so insecure and hated themselves so much that they had to contain and categorize the world as a way to create the myth of their supremacy. And then we inherit these categories saying, I am without learning the histories of those words when each one of those words has a terrain. And so I think that there's work to be done here about saying, we need to speak a new language. And this language that cis and trans isn't accurate because there are many cis women who don't give birth. There are many cis women who are not interested in having children. There are many cis women who are lesbians and completely outside of the ways that heteronormitivity works. And there are many trans people who are deeply committed to gender

vinerism, many trans people who have very traditional Victorian ideas of gender. The project ahead is not cis trans. I think the project is actually something more expansive. It's soul. It's soul first kind of love that says, okay, your body's interesting, cool, but who are you? It's moving beyond the paradigm because the way that these concepts were architected was a worldview that saw our body as our worth and as our true self. And what anyone who has ever been a body on Earth knows is that is not true. That in fact, when people see our bodies, they're actually not seeing us. They often stop there. And the deeper truth is like, what are the galaxies you have inside of you? What are the memories and the histories and the emotions? And

and the stories and the contradictions and ambivalences and the things you still hate about in you, that's where this work begins, because then it's not about political solidarity of this community to this community. It's souls being souls first. And the reason I believe in a soul first kind of approach is because we're really good at the feminist rebuttal, indicting patriarchy, saying what's wrong, diagnosing what's wrong, but in some ways that creates our own micro-nationalisms and myco-patriarchies, because it's not challenging the logic of tyranny. And to challenge the logic of tyranny, we need a logic of mercy and a logic of empathy, which patriarchy would see as an illogic. Empathy is not logical, but we advance, yes, it is. Because if we want to live, we have to learn

how to love. And so a lot of what I'm trying to move away from my work now is like, loving myself was how I saw the power of transness and how I saw my own complexity and how I saw my own complexity. and how I began to love other people. So when I worked on really routing my affirmation, not through what society thinks about me, but what I think of me, I unlocked this belief that everyone is this weirdo. Everyone is a misfit.

Everyone is strange, and everyone is cosplay as something normal because they want to be loved. and they think that the only way that they can be loved is by playing pretend. I felt that way too. So what if I learned to love people when they disobey, when they're mischievous, when they don't follow the rules, when they make decisions that people will be like, are you sure you're okay? I'm going to do a wellness check.

But really, actually, I'm like, cool, you're figuring out who you are. And that involves a lot of spontaneous combustion and a lot of experimentation and a lot of going rogue and a lot of miscalls and a lot of, I guess this is just a long-winded way to saying, we got to love humans again because I see what patriarchy is, is an insecurity that humans are broken, that humans are wrong, that humans are sinful, that humans are dirty. And a lot of that's with like sedimented religious orthodoxy. And I'm offering a pro-life, ironically, vision of the world that says,

I love humans so much because we don't make sense and we're deeply weird and inconsistent and we don't know and we make decisions out of heartbreak and grief and grief and pain. And then subsequently we're like, no, it was my rational decision. And we stay in relationships too long. We've got to learn to love those things. And then the politics just makes sense because you're like, that's my neighbor on earth. Of course, what's happening to my neighbor on earth impacts me because they're my family. And what patriarchy has is a malnourished idea of family. That's about hereditary property. It's not actually about community.

It's about an enclosure of saying mine. That's the history of marriage law, owning women. That's the history of the family, owning property. I don't believe in that. My family is my entire species and my entire kin in the world. And I was excited to speak to you because I was just on tour in Ireland. And I felt this so deeply. It was my first time going into the heartland.

Yeah, you've done Dublin for years, but you were like all over the place. I was in limerick. I was in court. And I just felt so moved by the land and so moved by the way that Irish people were some of the most hospitable. Those crowds, there was like mammies for trans rights. They came with these shirts and they wrote me a love letter. And that was the political solidarity. It was something ancient.

of like, oh, I know you and I don't need to meet you to know you, I know you, human. And I felt so loved by that. And there are ancient technologies of community that have survived patriarchy and that has survived colonialism. And part of this conversation is like learning those methodologies, methodologies from the earth. I've never been someone who is willing to spend 20 minutes on makeup. That's exactly why I've been reaching for Jones Road beauty. Their miracle bomb has completely changed my routine. I can use it as a blush, a bronzer, a highlighter, even a lip tint. I'm basically using

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When I hear you talk about your connection with Ireland, it is a really, I feel like, beautiful through line to all of, you know, the ancient cultures and the pre, quote, unquote, pagan rituals and the land. and then the history of colonization, and then the way that Catholicism reigned, and then yet still, the heart of what it means that the fire and free in me sees and honors the fire and free in you. They just can't no matter what they do stamp that out. Never. No matter how many languages they've criminalized speaking, right? Notice the languages that they try to eradicate. And notice in those languages is intimacy with the earth and one another. So part of like this work of transness for me, it began selfishly. I'll be honest.

It began, oh, no, I'm being oppressed. That sucks. And it began with my struggle. But then I learned if I don't learn every struggle, I'm never going to be free. I know that now. Transness is the tip of the iceberg of a larger thing. How do we have a society where hatred is fathomable? Like that's the root.

And we have a society where hatred exists because people have lost their way. There's a real exile from the soul. And we're love drunk in these intoxicating narratives that think that we can cheat death. That's what patriarchy was trying to do is to create demigods out of men, which is now hurt men. because their only utility in society is in risking their lives and damaging their bodies to prove their worthiness in society. Yikes. And so the antidote to patriarchy is not just condemning men or condemning the gender binary. That's important. But it's also like loving men, loving masculinity more than they love themselves under patriarchy. And that stewardship,

It's a stewardship of love. It's like an Olympic flame that we have to keep alive. And I worry that that's when the ultimate loss is, is when we've lost that commitment to one another. And that's what I've been seeing in the past few years is the internal divisions and the spite and the derision and the like cis women against trans women and the like, oh, who's got it worse and the ranking of oppressions. I'm like, this is where we're so losing. the plot, we're so losing the plot and we're doing the work for them. It's kind of a macrocosm of the way that we were defined in opposition to each other to begin with. You know, like even the man means not woman, woman means not man, literally the term non-binary, you are defined on your basis

of not conforming to the fiction of the binary based on the binary. You are not that. And And then in our political world right now, it's so much easier to understand ourselves in opposition to what we are not. I am not MAGA. I am not right wing. And it is much harder for me to understand what I am for. I think it's in some ways a project of the harder route, which is doing the work of figuring out what you're for rather than the, lazy route of what you're against, which I am just as guilty of as the next person. It's really hard. It's intoxicating. The us them thinking is intoxicating. I mean, kudos to the binary. It's a

really cute way to create the artifice of community. Like, what's happening right now is people are desperate for belonging and they find belonging through a scapegoat. What scapegoating is, is belonging ritual of if we all hate this person, then we're a community. That's not true community. True community is much more enmeshed. It's much more interlocked. It's rooted in mutual aid and interdependence, not in hatred. And so what I understand the rise of right-wing populism, and I see turfdom and trans-exclusionary feminism as part of that is a genuine desire for kinship. And that's where I work from.

So rather than seeing it just as a hate extremist movement, which it is, but it's a hate extremist movement that within it has a confession of pain and fear and a desire for a community to endure that fear through, I can identify with that. When I think about being alive, I'm like, this is so hard. This is true. How am I supposed to do this? I feel haunted by the specter of all of the grief and all of the devastation and all of my horrible decisions.

And I don't want to be responsible for my own life. I hate having to be like, oh, I'm unhappy. How is that the result of my choices? Are you kidding me? It is so much easier to outsource all of that to some demigod, to some politician, to some idea. And that's what a lot of this is, is a lot of people need to believe in white supremacy and patriarchy because those ideas are easier to believe in than people.

Believing in people is hard because people disappoint you. Mythologies endure centuries. Our human, fragile lives don't. And the problem with our movements is that we are not taking on the roots of the stories and the mythologies and the supremacies. We are rebranding our own supremacies. our own exclusions and our own borders. And I get that.

But I think that like, unless we carmically and cosmologically commit ourselves to doing hard things and interrupting patterns, we're going to be stuck in the same cycle over and over again. And I think the only way forward to win is to look at the face of the people who are opposition and to say we are actually fighting the same thing. and we actually want the same thing.

I too want community. I too want belonging. I too want safety. But the way that I get those things and the way that we get those things is not through war, by the way. It's actually through like building public housing. We've got to start there.

I think we actually want the same thing. What I think is interesting is that like humans are 99.9% genetically similar. And yet we are so fluid on like difference. And I also think politically, that's the same. We actually, by and large, want the exact same thing. And then a billionaire class has come into power and is like, ooh, let me fuel these internal schisms and antagonisms to make people believe that they're one another's enemies. We have so much more in common than we have a part at every single level.

And where is our language of the comments? And that's why I've been saying that, like, I feel like we is actually the most political pronoun because I'm always looking at an opportunity to reframe things, not as just things that affect me, but things that impact us. I've been thinking about how the way forward is also going back. I mean, I think that stay with me here because I'm thinking a lot about your beloved Anne or Vichy, who was a revolutionary queer activist. I heard you say about her, my aunt knew who I was before I did and prepared my family for me,

that you didn't know you were possible until you knew her. And I'm thinking about, you know, thousands of years of history, which history to me at its best, most powerful is just intergenerational community. You know, when you can look back and see that these struggles, these fights, these, wonderings have been happening for ever before you and that you have these ancestors in struggle, that it isn't a personal problem that you're facing. It feels like the attempt to separate people from a people's history is an attempt to separate from intergenerational community, an attempt to these struggles you have must be personal problems, not a structural cycle that has been happening and every generation over and over and you get to pick up the baton a little

earlier because you understand from your community. It's a separation from wisdom and strategy. The depression is by design. Yes. It's not your moral failing. It's not you being broken. Like the reason you feel sad and the reason you feel scared is by design. And that's why people believe in conspiracy, by the way, because there's an awareness now of there are sinister forces in this world. And people are waking up to the fact of like, wait, there are people who are acting really untoward ways. But that energy gets harnessed in the wrong directions. But that's where the history that you're teaching people is so important because we know their names. We know the names of the eugenesis, the American eugenesis, who are on the front lines of creating

this mythology that men are like this and women are like this. We have access to their book. We know the institutions they created. We notice how they're behind organizations like Focus on the Family. We know how they created entire schemas that blamed dysfunctional marriages on women not being feminine enough. We know that they would punish, they would see it as basis for a lobotomy if women didn't enjoy being held captive. We know all of this. And when you learn it, it's like a Matrix X-esque moment where you're like, oh, this thing. thing that I've always felt has a history. And it's, it's precedent unlocking. And I feel so

lucky that I had her. And I'm so grateful for you bringing her out. She's always on my mind. Because I am what happens not just when a trans kid is loved, but I'm what happens when a kid is loved. And what being a child that's loved is, is not gaslighting them that the world is peachy and sweet and angelic. And if you just work hard, you'll get, I had someone who demystified the world and said, the world is tough and brutal and people will cheat you and mistreat you, but you are beautiful, worth power, and you can speak back. And that's what love is, is giving people permission to dissent. That's not the kind of love that most family formations are formed on, but Orvishi loved it when I argued with her.

and that's the sacred kind of love. I just really feel lucky and indebted to her, especially when I think about my own relationship to my own nibbling now, who is around the same age I was, when she was the age I was, and the ability to continue that cycle of like, how do I be that reservoir where I can give them the same knowledge and expertise? It feels really special,

and it feels special what you're doing with this, with these history lessons, I think that the sharing of history is an ancient. And I was watching The Odyssey and, you know. Oh, I haven't seen it yet. And what I left with was FOMO because storytellers used to be loved in our culture. Yeah. It wasn't about the ring word. It was about oration.

And you would go and you would learn the structure and the cadence of the poem. And then you would come and improvise like jazz and you would build a story. people would come to a bard and that is community. Yeah. Whatever simulation of it that these techno oligarchs are trying to do, that's a departure from the fundamental wisdom of, I want to hear someone tell a story and come together and learn history. Since one was like learning not fun and cool,

I mean, that's what it was about. It's like we're going to tell these ancient myths to teach you lessons and ethics and philosophy. And that's our Friday night entertainment. And we're so far from that. So I agree that the sharing of history is permission granting, but also just like a divine pleasure and ancestral tradition. Yes. And it's a way to understand. It's so absurd that we would think that we would be born.

And in our individual lifetimes, we would learn what we need to know. When there's thousands of years of wisdom before us that we would just be like, well, let's just start on day one. and hope we get it. I mean, it's just insanity. And so when I think about Orvishishi was the embodiment of what it means to be a complex and revolutionary Indian, that means something different than what, quote unquote, being Indian in whatever moment you happen to be born means. You know, we are born in particular moments and assume that the ones we're in are inevitable. And they could be wholly different from the thousands of years that preceded it. And so it's this like reclaiming of the lessons learned from the past, which is, I think, very much connected to why we live in

unprecedented high watermark for a book banning, why critical race theory is illegal in classrooms. It's because people discovered and worked so hard to learn and document these structures that are dangerous in the hands of people who would pick up the baton at that instead of wasting 30 years of their lives and discovering it on their own. We need proof of concept. Yes. A lot of times people tell me that what I'm saying is naive, is idyllic, is unfathomable. and that's a confession that people don't know history because actually the status quo is naive, ridiculous, and unfathomable.

Everything that we think of now as like reality, for example, women being able to have a bank account. At one point in history, what people would read you with such incredulity, like, what are you saying? That's heretical. But it happened. impossible things happen every single moment on earth.

And when we learn history, we learn that impossible and possible are not true. Yes. They're just foot soldiers that people use to cordon off possibility. So what history gives me is an awareness that there were freer times. There were freer times in the past, which means that there can be freer times in the future. What the proof of concept of history shows me is that, that the conservative political commentators who are women were calling me a disgusting cross-dresser for wearing a dress while wearing tants, a hundred years ago would have been called a disgusting

cross-dresser for wearing pants. They would have been seen as a third sex for believing that women had the right to vote, that it's the same cyclical thing. And I suppose that's why I believe that we could and might win because I am a student of history. I've seen attempted eradicate fail. And I've seen people act in ways that are profoundly dignified when the conditions don't reward them for doing so. And I've seen people come together in calamity and clarify what community actually looks like. And I feel like those are my ancestors, not just my blood kin, but people who act in the 1950s, who in the 1950s or the 1900s or the 1850s or the 1850s or 70s, those 1700s, people probably looked at them like, you're crazy.

But they were just true. It makes your loneliness have a precedent. Yes. Because I think that right now, there's a feeling we all have that like something's not right or why am I not happy or I've done the things. I've checked off the boxes. I have the kids. I have the marriage.

I have the job. I have the whatever. But something feels anxious or unstead. steady. And the reason that is is because this was not what we were meant to be doing. Like what we were meant to be doing is spending our days having big conversations with other people. It's like cross-cultural exchange. It's like eating together. It's like learning how the land loves us back. It's like herbs and shit. It's not what we were meant to be doing. And then when we when we read societies in the world that did that, so I don't know. I mean, I'm feeling like

actually, it's like a really weird experience of like wanting to hold both how calamitous and vile things are. While also the luxury of my job is I get to do this ancient practice of being a bard, and I get to be in rooms with complete strangers, and I get to love and be loved, and that gives me so much hope. And I feel actually a groundswell of people who don't need political education because they have heart education and who aren't looking for the next takedown or hot take, but are actually looking for like the next warm embrace. And I feel that critical mass growing of people really want to actually build community. I did some quick math the other day. If dinner takes you about 45 minutes, let's say to plan, prep, cook, and clean up,

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Okay, can I talk about Wayfair for a second? The biggest thing I didn't expect when we updated our outdoor space was how much it would change our actual routine. So before the backyard was kind of a special occasion area. We'd clean it up if people were coming over, but otherwise kind of mostly went unused. Now it's where we drink coffee in the morning, eat dinner. I feel like we built an extension of the house without actually having to do any construction. So my favorite find was the two-piece modern industrial acacia wood outdoor conversation set. It has that clean, modern look, but it also is incredibly comfortable, which is important because you actually want to spend time out there. I highly recommend it. Patio season is here, and these deals won't last.

Head to Wayfair.com slash outdoor right now to get your outdoor space ready for way less. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R dot com. Wayfair, every style, every home. I think you're right. I think the calamity, it's kind of like in recovery circles where you're like, congratulations, you've rock-bottomed. It's like we're almost at the great-uncle moment. where everyone's just like, fuck it, this isn't working.

There is a deep discontent simmering. And I think that's when people are maybe more open, open to seeing things and open to seeing things a new way. I was thinking about you and how I would, with all of your many, many talents and media in terms of how you approach things. And I think I view you as a scam artist. You are an artist that makes visible the scams that we take as self-evident. The scam of gender, the scam of you have to be, you know, crawling on your knees through the world's penitent before you will have any reward.

I wondered if you could take us through, not gender, because that's one of the least interesting things about you. But what are some other scams that you have found that people might be open to receiving in some sense? I think that there's a narrative in our culture that the things that are most precious to us that we feel most insecure about are just things that we think. like no one else feels this way. I actually think it's the things that we think that are most particular bespoke in us that are actually the most universal. It's the ways that we have failed and betrayed ourselves, made mistakes, gotten it wrong. Those are the connective tissues that actually bring us back together when we name them.

So there's a scam that tells us that when you name your truth, everything's going to fall apart. But what the scam is is that the status quo is everything falling apart. and it's only through the naming of the truth, can we sew it back together? So a lot of times, you know, people live lives. Like I think about all the lives people have lived with the secrets that they've never named. And I feel so deep sadness for those people. Because there's something really precious about being able to say the secret out loud and no longer it becoming a secret. And the scam is that you've got to go to your grave with them.

It's not true. I think another scam is this idea that wonder and imagination are immature, when in fact I think wonder and imagination and creativity are maturity, keeping them is what's mature. Because what adulthood is another scam is that you're supposed to just become cynical and call that maturity. That's not maturity, that's cynicism. The most mature people in society are people who can think outside of a box.

Are people who can be asked what's your gender and give a painting. Are people who are doing a third path, a different thing. That doesn't make sense. And I think we need a collective reckoning with how we've defined intelligence as a brain thing and not a heart thing. I'm bored by people saying, where's the next generation of great thinkers? Great thinkers got us in this mess. I want great lovers. Where's the next generation of the biggest hearts in America?

And I want that to be our leadership. I think leadership is not like your ability to like give a hot take or like deconstruct. Like a lot of people can do that. Leadership is the ability to like sow the world back. I've been thinking a lot about what I'm calling love speech. Why is there a framework for hate speech in our culture, but not for love speech? Huh? So we know bad words, but we don't know good words.

And what love speech for me is like it's about. sowing back the world together is about saying the way that we resist polarization is not by rebranding polarization, but actually rebuilding us a common ground. And so I guess I love this idea of the scam artists. I never thought about that. Thank you. Maybe I'll just change my bios right now. You're so right. But I guess it's because the most thing, the most elope thing about me is that I've always felt, and I see this in you too, that when I learn something, I want to tell the entire world. So it's like when I was a kid staying up late watching Nova documentaries about black holes,

all I wanted to do was to go and talk to the other kids to be like, do you realize that we're a speck of dust in the scheme of the universe? I've never been interested in gatekeeping anything. That doesn't make fun to me. I want to share everything with everyone because when I feel like that I've been scammed, I'm not like, whammed, I'm like, cool, what else do I not know?

Yeah. I can't wait to unlearn even more. It's a dropping keys. everywhere you go. Just like, free yourself, free yourself. Well, Alok, you are my favorite scam artist. I am so excited to be seeing you September 3rd in D.C. if y'all, I'm sure it's sold out. But if not, you're listening to this and you might be able to snag one of the last tickets to that show, grab them. We will see you there. If not, go check. out a loke site and get your tickets for where they're coming near you. Thank you for doing the

work you do, being so beautiful, so free, and giving us a vision of how we can be free too. Thank you. We are proud to say that We Can Do Hard Things is an independent production brought to you by us, Treat Media. Treat Media makes art for humans who want to stay human. And you can follow us at We Can Do Hard Things on Instagram.