December 29, 2023 • 40 mins
We look at the horrific results of the spread of terfs to Mexico before returning to the US to see a transphobic alliance of TERFs and Evangelicals fuse with QAnon to create the current anti-trans movement in America.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Welcome to another rewind episode of vike it Happened Here.
Last year, we did a series of episodes in the
United States War and trans People. Since then, things have
only gotten worse. Even an electoral defeat, transphobic politicians across
the country have only doubled and tripled down on their
attempts to wipe trans people out for good. So today
(00:24):
we're going to revisit part three of that series, called
the Turf International, in which we look at the transnational
network of transphobes who built the modern anti trans movement
and see how they function in both Mexico and the US.
Welcome to Ikeodappen Here, a podcast that this week is
(00:45):
about the war on trans people. I'm your host, Christopher Wong.
If you've been around the left long enough, you've probably
heard people called transclusionary radical feminism, or terfism a colonial ideology. Broadly,
the accusation of colonialism is about the erasure of non
Western genders to fall outside the Christian gender binary. But
(01:07):
urfs are colonial in another sense as well, exported by
white academics to a network of fall feminist and anti
trafficking groups, the ideology has imposed itself on the global
South with devastating and violent consequences. As a product of
this colonial imposition, Mexico has become one of the front
lines in the war against trans people. I spoke to
Emmie Flores and Juliana Neuhauser, two members of the Sexual
(01:30):
and Gender Dissonance Resistance Network, a group of activists aligned
with the Zapatistas who've been documenting and resisting the spread
of turfs in Mexico.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
When the new turf waves started in Mexico several years back,
at the time, I thought thought of it as something
of like a radicalization that went too far, you know,
like kind of like thinking back to like the New Left,
and there was a point during the New Left when
(01:59):
l like suddenly everybody joined a maoist cult and they
were angry for the right reasons, but it just went off.
At some point, I thought that's what was going on
in Mexico. But then it started to come out more
(02:21):
that more and more turf groups were had ties to
political parties and one of the and foreign agents. And
one of the one of the most dramatic cases is
from Teluca, a city near Mexico City. Just recently at
(02:44):
the International Women's date protests, like there were turf groups
that had made a pinata out of the trans flag,
had been burning the trans flag also in this same city.
One of the main turf groups turns out that they're
leader is on government payroll. And if you've seen Roma,
(03:04):
for example, the incident, the political incident that happens in
that movie was based on a real incident from the
seventies and the tactics of that political party, which is
the party that controls the state government of the state
to lucas In basically it hasn't changed and they seem
to have been using these turfs basically as shock troops.
(03:27):
At one point, there were two sit ins outside the
state Congress, one to push for a gender identity a
law and another to push for the legalization of abortion,
which are obviously both important things. The ladder, however, was
controlled by these turf groups, who later mysteriously never seemed
to appear at other protests asking for the legalization of abortion,
(03:52):
but they were there. They ran off the trans encampment.
One of the big incidents was defending the Sanctity women's
bathroom with barbed wire wrapped baseball bats.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Jesus, These groups have deep ties to right wing Mexican
political parties, the police, and the growing Turf International.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
And they seem to be very chummy with the local police.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Their leader gives classes, but its like trainings to build
the state government.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Like you know, you can see live streams of the
quote unquote protests, and it was mostly them like drinking
coffee with the cops, like they were on first name
basis with the cops. While the other camp had like
Translomen that were too scared to go to the bathroom
because they were going to be attacked. And so that's
(04:49):
the starkest group, I think, right the delcatives, which are
It's funny because almost every party has their own their
own group. But yeah, also it's no surprised that pri
is the scariest.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Yeah. We should also say that these groups are affiliates
with Sheila Jeffries' Women's Declaration International. And so this is
also a case of an ideology developed in the first world,
in this case England, which is largely a safe country
where even as fascist an ideology as urfism doesn't or
(05:26):
only very rarely leads to real violence, but it gets
exported to countries that are not safe where it does
turn into real violence. So another affiliate of Sheila Jeffreys
Woman's declaration in Mexico would be LEAs Brujs del Mar,
who is another case of At first they seemed to
(05:50):
be a group that was just they just radicalized a
bit too far. Then photos came out of their leader,
who was on the time one hundred a couple of
years back with Felipe Calderon, an ex president of Mexico
and like by far one of the worst in the
country's history, and not like just.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Oh I saw you walking in the street. She was
at a book signing. It was not a casual encounter.
It was a clear sign of admiration. And it's been
more than confirmed since then that her political ambitions lie
with the PAN, the farthest right mainstream political party in Mexico.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
This political alliance between the Turfs and the right has
benefits for both sides. The Turfs gained funding institutional backing
for their war against trans people. The right gained a
way to attack the vaguely center left Mexican President Andrea's
Manuel Lopez overdoor by blaming him and trans people from
Mexico's horrific wave of femicides while distracting from its actual
(06:58):
sources durn the War on drugs. Mexico's transpopulation, however, gained
a new Western educated threat.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
When I say the radical feminism was a complete import
it's from its very beginning. In the For a long while,
there was like one turf in Mexico and she was
She's called jian Maria Yoyotel. Don't even try to pronounce
her name. I don't think she can even pronounce her
name because she's white as hell and she always dresses
(07:26):
like she's a fucking Rachel dollars hell from Mexico.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Yeah, music irony that the first originary turf in Mexico
is also the Mexican Raciel doll as well, right, because she.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
Went abroad and was like the only Mexican everyone knew.
So even though she's white as hell and has blue eyes,
she started wearing some Coachella motherfucking ass feathers and shit.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Right, yeah, I've seen I've seen these pictures. It's it is,
it is like it is. It is the Mexican ver
of and not even just the beas version. It is
the Mexican version of those people at Cochella who like
wear indigenous headdresses who are just like just like look
look like they're descended from like Hydrik Himbler or something incredible, and.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
Like she's she has like she has like half French,
half Spanish name and she changed it to a half
Maya half Nato name. It's growth. So this this person
has been active since the seventies. Right, she went to
she was present in the first Pride in Mexico and
uh she that was that was also the two year
(08:36):
anniversary of the sixty eight massacre. So Pride was from
the start really leftist here in Mexico, but it also
had these kind of people the who who went to
the UK, friends and the United States. And I think
she was there when uh Is Raymond was like sending
(09:03):
her friends with guns to threatened trans women, right, so
that's she. She was there when the turf Wars were
at at the highest point during the seventies and then
came back and she participated in a lot of history
(09:24):
of Mexican feminism. But the time she came back in
twenty sixteen with that letter with that backing because she
is also close to Jenny's Raymond with the Coalition and
against Trafficking in women who the Coalition against Traffiican, the
(09:45):
Coalition against Traffickan and Women cat w has a lot
of After the turf Wars, they went underground in the
in academia and the universities right because they were no
longer accepted, but they were in the process of building
NGOs that could globally affect policy on UH, specifically sex
(10:09):
work and trans rites. And you can tell that John
Maria saw that that was her only opportunity to resurface
UH and to make her seventies as she saw that
the seventies redven discourse was retro now and so she
became like this UH found founding matriarch for the new
(10:29):
generation of transfos, one of them which is Laura Lequana,
who is part of FEMBA and the GEH. Maria and
Lequana were not faced at all by the accusations of
aligned with the reactionaries because they know their history, they
know where they come from, and they know that this
(10:50):
is how Darkin survived, This is how UH, how Sheila
Jefferies and Jennie Raymond survived. This is where you get
the fucking in. Jean Maria and Brussel mar turned the
whole environment around them into these uh well these serve questions.
(11:12):
The only two issues that we talk about nowadays in
Mexican feminism are are precedent and trans people. It's kind
of gross Jesus.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
And that like remember, like there's only a handful of
states that have legalized abortion. There's femicides happening all the time,
and but we're we continue to debate these two issues
over and over and over again like a feedback group,
and like, as trans people, we don't have any choice
(11:48):
because we're the targets of this right and it's not
it's not an academic debate. Last fall, there was some
tar who had taken over a public park to set
up their separatist space and there was a disabled CIS
woman and her trans girlfriend who are denied entergy at
(12:11):
the park and threatened with tasers. And so when they're
taking over these public spaces and using violence to defend them,
because the next week there was a protest over this
and there they taste a trans man and it's like
this is like a public park, like of course we
(12:35):
have to defend ourselves.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women for kat w an
International Anti Sex worker group, which provided a refuge for
white TERFs driven from mainstream feminism in their home countries,
has been a major source of terf influence in Latin America.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
The reason there is so much important of this ideology
towards radical feminists in Mexico, it's that they needed something
to say and something to do and something to fill
the void in organizing and in NGOs. And the people
who stepped up were Jenny's Raymond's cat W Right, the
(13:25):
Collition against Affian and Women who since the nineties spent
ah a decade and a half building contacts in the
Indie un in the oas in several international organisms to
extend their influence across the whole content and specifically in
(13:46):
Latin America. And you can see this affecting stuff like
stuff like Venezuela where they broke up sex worker unions
two to with the the right and in Mexico. The
founding leader of the Mexican branch of cat W, Teresa Ujoa,
(14:07):
used to be a UN employee, specifically it's drug and
crime segment and before she was like a radical feminist,
she used to conduct drug raids in Japa's and Yeah
and after that she became the founding member of w
(14:27):
Latin American and the Caribbean. And with Jennie Raymond, they
you can see them go together to the nineteen ninety
five Beijing Conference on Women and they influenced, like they
were a big part of why gender is not recognized
as a social construct by the UN. They allied with
(14:48):
the Holy See, with the representative from the Vatican in
the UN, got together with a couple of radical feminists
and pushed back against gender being recognized as a social
construct nineteen ninety five. So that's the level of influence
these groups had in Mexico. These groups, which morphed into
(15:09):
the cap W supported the Warren Rocks from the get go.
They were very in some of the biggest events inaugurating
the Warren Drugs. They were present right there. Because if
you're fighting drug trafficking, it's very easy to just sleep
(15:30):
the word human right there. Right, No politician is gonna
say no. They all fucking love to say, yeah, I'm
hardened on human trafficking. And the way that showed itself
was just targeting trans sex workers and migrant sex workers
and with that and that feeding the agenda of Jennie's
(15:51):
Raymond perfectly. Sila Jeffries gotta basically survived the whole two
thousands on writing garbage for reports for the UN. Most
of her published works during the two thousands and early
twenty tens is stuff paid for Cadolu and they in
(16:16):
twenty sixteen they started pushing for more and more anti
trans legislation worldwide because they could see the writing on
the world right. They were behind the Women's Declaration. The
Shila Jeffers is not okay. She is part of Cadoli.
She's I think Cadouble Australia. She has her own other
(16:37):
collectic called Space International, which is behind Foster Sesta by
the way in the US, where she allied with a
couple of conservative sheriffs to write that legislation. So we
could go on and on. How like people that read
our trans issues think are gone and forgotten by history. Right,
(16:59):
The authors of these horrible books that haunt us to
this day are still active, and not just in the US.
They're active in Mexico, in the UK, in France, in
South Africa, in Korea. Korea is huge in I think
I would say Korea is has as big a problem
as Mexico and the UK. We just don't talk to
(17:23):
them as much and we can't realize that. But if
you check them the languages that have signed the Shila
Jeffers Declaration against Trands People, which is as specifically generocidal declaration,
it doesn't stop at the legislation. It wants to exterminate
us outright. Yeah, and most of them, you are going
to see a lot of Brazilian flags, a lot of
(17:44):
Mexican flags, a lot of Korean flags, even more than
United States flags. And if you track the USA flags,
it's mostly like weird randos that have yoga classes and shit.
It's not relevant politicians. But if you track the other countries,
you're going to find some of the biggest collectives in
their own countries. You're gonna find or just spooks, right,
(18:07):
You're gonna find a lot of people who have really
weird careers that spend a lot of time in Italy
and Uganda. It's it's a never ending ribbit whole of
of of spooks, of conservatives, of has been feminists that
have regranted it as NGOs to get money from those
(18:30):
groups and directed towards breaking up trans rights, towards affecting
sex workers, towards breaking unions, breaking student movements. It's a
global movement that is birthed by conservative thought, but getting
more and more reactionary and more and more organized as
time goes by.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
That international transphobic movement has increasingly found purchase in the US.
I spoke to Lee Leaville and Kai Shiver's, two members
of Health Liberation Now with intimate experience with the turf
movement who spent years particulously documenting its rise. So my
first question is, can y'all explain what Wolf actually is?
(19:12):
And I guess subsequent to that, what their relationship to
hands across the aisle is.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Yeah, so Wolf is They're a transphobic feminist group with
at this point extensive ties to right wing organizations. They've
worked with Family Policy Alliance here Atage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, Concerned,
Wouin for America, Family Research Culture, among others.
Speaker 5 (19:43):
But they.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
They got their start and they started back in twenty
thirteen around when they're founded by Lear Keith, who also
was one of the leaders of Deep Green Resistance, and
she basically got like kind of run out of anarchists
and environmentalist groups and then kind of like went over
(20:06):
to established like turf communities to try and recruit there.
So they sort of like started out trying to like
recruit from these like older turf and transphobic lesbian communities.
And then after Trump got elected and you know, the
conservative Christians on the far right became more mobilized and
(20:27):
more empowered. They kind of like rebranded themselves and were like, oh,
let's form alliances with these right wing groups, and they
kind of like traded their sort of like like crunchy
lesbian feminists like like image for like Kara Danski, who
like you know, is a straight, fairly feminine looking woman
(20:49):
who used to work for the CLU and like a Democrat,
and like you know, she's way more presentable to like
a conservative audience. You know, by working with the right,
then they have access to like money and power and
they can get easier for the.
Speaker 5 (21:03):
Get on the media.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Like Kidansky is no longer with Wolf, but like she
was with them for years and still has relations like
like good relations with them, and she's been on the
Tucker Carlson Show like many times. So I think one
of the important pieces when it comes to understanding like
how this relationship with the rights started. So in late
(21:28):
twenty sixteen, Wolf put forward their filing against the US
Department of Justice and US Department of Education, right, and
they were going up against aspects of like trying to
reform Title NIND to include gender identity, you know, to
protect folks who need to be able to use the like.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Women's restroom or locker room or whatever.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Right, And this is the case that they ended up
getting some of that ADA funding for. So it's like
one of the first official seeds I guess of the
direct collaboration ended up happening. Those a lot of that
stuff did eventually end up getting leaked, and then they
started doing some more official collaborations just a few months
later when they were working with like Family Policy Alliance
(22:16):
to file amicus briefs against Gavin Grimm again on a
bathroom case. Yeah, they took something like I think it
was like fifteen thousand dollars from the Alliance depending Freedom,
which is one of the main like right wing groups
like like trying to pass all these like anti TRAMS bills,
like going after pediatric transition and trans girls and in
them and sports. So they took that money and then yeah,
(22:37):
then later like I think, like the whole working with
Family Policy Alliance, I believe was the first time they
like publicly allied with with the White Ring group.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
I think, so that happened in January of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, and then they've just sort of like, yeah, like
they also were involved with like the amicus brief against
was it Amy Stephens another Supreme Court case. I can't remember,
it wouldn't surprise me. And like members of both have
appeared on like Heritage Foundation panels. They helped like release
a parent resource guide and an anti transparent resource guide
(23:10):
that was also sponsored by like Heritage Foundation, Family Policy Alliance.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
This this this is very similar to almost exactly what
you see in Mexico, with just sort of slightly less
physical violence, which yeah, it's it's a lot of you know.
And the other thing is that these are to a
large extent exactly the same organizations. And that was one
of the other things I want to talk about was
the influence of Sheila Jeffries and the Women's Declaration, which
has been all over this whole movement.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Yeah. The one thing to point out, so like you know,
the Women's Declaration International is in this in the US
is led by Kardanski who doo she like basically like left.
She worked at Wolf for a long time and still
has lots of connections with them, is on good terms
with them, but she like left and now is like
working with Women's Declaration International of the US branch. So
(24:01):
and also she winds up having kind of like a
foot in both worlds at the same time too, So
like she'll like the US chapter of Women's Declaration International
previously like Women's Team in Rights campaign before they had
to rebrand, they would.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
But if if you if you read this, yeah.
Speaker 5 (24:27):
Yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
So what what ends up happening is that Karen Danski
will either like have the chapter sponsor particular events or
she herself will become actively involved in the formation of
the events, right, which we saw happen with women pick
(24:51):
at d C last year where they were parking themselves
outside of that was like it was a that was
that was a whole big thing. Oh god, it was
a purchase that happened on International Women's Day to protest
the Equality Act. Yeah, NBC, it's not like it's people's
(25:12):
first time dealing with the Equality Act either.
Speaker 5 (25:15):
I mean, like so.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Prior prior to that point which and this starts to
go into the like hands across the Aisle Coalition because
they were actively involved in opposing the Equality Act as well.
So to kind of roll back a little bit the
hands across the Aisle Coalition.
Speaker 5 (25:40):
This was something that started.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Developing in early twenty seventeen, you know, not that long
after Wolfe started building the more direct relationships with the Right,
and so that the people of this coalition would have
like you would have members of the Right itself, and
in the pro sets of that, towards the beginning of
(26:03):
twenty nineteen, in May, they filed this joint letter to
the House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi to oppose things
like the Equality Act, and they did so alongside with
Natasha Chart representing wolf Concerned Women for America, American College
(26:26):
of Pediatricians, Family Research Council, you know, a whole bunch
of really just awful names, and they're, oh, yeah, the
adyf was involved on that one too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
It's really the rose gallery of all of the people
who were anti gay marriage until still are but have
downplayed it. And yeah, all the people who let the
anti gay marriage campaigns, all of the sort of weird
right wing pseudo medical bodies. The next thing what it
(27:00):
to ask about is what's been happening in the last
couple of years with the fusion, Because you already have
your your alliance between the Turfs and the evangelicals, but
in the last couple of years we've seen a I
don't know if if full scale is the right term
to use for, but we've seen a merger of this
(27:20):
with Save the Children Eqanon stuff. I'm wondering if you
can talk about that.
Speaker 5 (27:25):
That's okay.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
So that's an interesting one because, like I've I've been
digging into the timeline of this stuff extensively. It's like
I've got hundreds hundreds of listings, trying to figure out
where different pieces are coming from and trying to understand.
Speaker 5 (27:43):
Like the phases.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Right, so you've got like the formation, the solidification, and
then the escalation, and we're kind of in the escalation
stage right now. But so one of the things that
I started to notice is that elements of this crossover,
like the cross pollination that was happening, actually pre dated
(28:09):
certain key events that we now know are affiliated with QAnon. Right,
So if we think about the actual development of QAnon itself,
so You've got the pizza Gate thing that was happening
in like October twenty sixteen. I believe that was, you know,
(28:31):
right before Trump was getting elected, and you know, kicking
up some stuff about like you know, Hillary Clinton's emails
and stuff like that to go up against her election
campaign and opposition to Trump, and then you know, folding
in the harassment towards Comet Ping Pong to the point
where like Edgar Madison Wells shows up at Comet Ping
(28:54):
Pong in December of twenty sixteen with an AR fifteen
style rifle and starts, you know, firing off as shots
and stuff like that.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
Right, And so eventually.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Most people know the timeline of the q and on
drops happening around like October twenty seventeen. Like if you
look up the original like the first known que drops,
I believe that was like October twenty eight, twenty seventeen,
on four Chan. But the thing is that if you
look at references to save the Children or Save our
(29:32):
Children on like Twitter, the hashtags, and you're also looking
for transphobia related stuff, you can actually start to see
that crossover happening before the original que drops happened, Right, Yeah,
I found tweets that were connecting trans inclusion education in
schools to pedophilia and using the save the Children hashtag
(29:54):
in August of twenty seventeen, the que drops hadn't started yet,
so this is something this pattern continues to happen, right
There were also multiple tweets or Facebook posts or whatever
that would start to use things like save the Children,
save our Children, wake Up America, and stuff like that
(30:16):
before you would have the big scale takeover by QAnon
when things were starting to get really popular, because the
save the Children thing really went viral in the summer
of twenty twenty, but you could still see elements of
it before that point repeatedly. So another early instance of
(30:41):
using both save the Children and wake Up America hashtags
started happening on April I believe that is of twenty nineteen.
And bear in mind, wake up America is a hashtag
that's not only used by QAnon proponents in relation to
(31:01):
the whole like acceleration as I'm trying to, you know,
deep state stuff, but also like Aaron Brewer, one of
the people that was involved in some of the clinic
protests harassments, was using that. No, it wasn't just it
was wasn't just Brewer, it was like both Brewer it was.
That was the clinic protest that involved both partners Peltical
(31:23):
kr PEC, which Brewer was a member like one of
the founders of at the time and one of the
leaders of and uh Joey Bright's like can't I get
a witness, Like they teamed up to stage a bunch
of clinic protests and they used wake up of Like
wake of America was one of the slogans that they
used in one of the hashtags.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
There to make to make to make sure we're getting this. Uh,
these are protests against clinics that offered gender firming care.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah that mm hmm yeah that
that happened that one. So yeah, the wake Up America
one was in so like City, New York City and LA.
Speaker 5 (32:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
And they also, I mean, speaking of pastakes, they also
have used the slogan pull back the Curtain, which has
also been used by uh like anti choice activists. Yeah,
like that was I remember, like like finding like they
use pull back the curtain a lot to be like
what they mean is like they're like expose the evil
(32:25):
gender industry. But like there's other this like.
Speaker 5 (32:30):
Anti abortion group. I'm blinking on which one off the
top of my head.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
But they also use that pull back the curtain to
go after planned parenthood, Yeah, which I think is like problem,
like that doesn't I'm for a direct connection, but it
seems like that's too much of a coincidence in a
lot of One of the one of the things that
I really want to stress about this called like what
I call tanon thing, is that like the seeds for this,
(32:59):
the cross pollinase that we are seeing happening between the
gender critical movement, Pizzagate, and QAnon, like these were already
in place before QAnon formally developed as its own phenomenon.
Speaker 5 (33:12):
This keeps happening.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
It's you can't really like figure out where one particular
type of rhetoric is necessarily coming from in terms of
its source, because it just keeps going back and forth repeatedly.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
People are acting like.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
They're coming up with a lot of the same ideas
together because in the end, in the end, they are
of the same roots. They are in fundamental agreement with
each other, whether they're calling themselves different names.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
I think that's that's worries me in a lot of ways.
Partly because you know, I mean, this has always been
something where if you look at the rhetoric that these
people are spreading, it's like it's explicitly the extermination is
like it's it's you know, like they they're they're strochiatric terrorists,
like in search of a like a quote unquote low
(34:07):
wolf and in a lot of you know, and in
the seventies, I think they were. There's there's a lot
more explicit violence that these people are doing directly, and
now they're kind of like they're they're they're trying to
find people who will do their already work for them,
and there are places where they found them already. We've
seen this in Mexico and in the US. The people
who they seem to be recruiting are people who are
(34:30):
extremely dangerous. I mean, we've we've seen QAnon people have
killed enormous numbers of people. You know, We've there's a
long history of abortion clinic bombings and people getting asassinated
from that. I mean, I think, you know, one of
the connections that I've been sort of like looking at
is the extent to which this stuff is connected to
the Atlanta shooting. Because if you if you look at
(34:52):
the stuff. The Atlanta shooter believes it's you know, like
he's in this like in the same sort of Christian
patriarchal pje and his thing is specifically about sex workers.
But hey, look if you look at uh yeah, not
particularly Asian sex workers. And you know, if if you
if you look at the anti trafficking groups and you
look at the Christian AI trafficking groups and you look
at the vent diagram with them and the turfs, it's like,
(35:14):
oh and that particular and yeah, there's there's this kind
of vice closing in on trans people where on the
one hand you have these people attempting to employ the
violence of the state, and on the other hand you
have this sort of strochiatric terrorism where they're attempting to
(35:38):
incite violence by sort of individuals. And then also, I mean,
I think I think there's you know, there's there's sort
of two forms of this.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Right.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
There's the explicit people who are explicitly like quote unquote
political right, you have your sort of like ideological street fascist.
You have like you know, you have your people with
baseball bass covered in barred wire. But then you also
have the stuff that's been fueling antiation violence where it's
not necessarily like you know, there is this is an
(36:05):
organization that like haze Asian people, it's we will just
sort of passively increase the rhetoric until the level of
violence increases.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah. Yeah, it kind of got like you've got the
street bashed and then you've got the intellectual fash. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Well, and and I think but I think also there's
there's another like if it was just those people, I
think it'd be less bad. But but there's also just
the way in which just random people who are encountering
this become very quickly radicalized and it becomes part of
sort of I mean and stretch Trobic violence has always
been part of the sort of background violence the same
way that anti black and so it's I mean, you know, okay,
(36:39):
the level of anti black violence is much higher, but
like the level of violence against black trans people in particular,
and the level of antiation violence we've been seeing that
has just sort of be it's just a part of
the background violence of American society, and that the levels
of those things, the more this rhetoric gets circulated and
the more this activism happens, that background level of violence increases,
(37:03):
and that to me is also terrifying because it means
like it's not just sort of like fascisty you can track,
it's just someone on the street.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, they're just sort of like trying to
like like associate like well, I mean a lot of
the e like yeah, like people like like I feel
like in Aaron alex Ara and the Gender Mapper and
Joey Brighten stuff like that, like they're they're hardcore like eliminationists,
Like they're like they're say over and over the compinal compromise.
(37:33):
And I would also especially like anti fascist networks to
pay more attention to it because you know that solidarity
with trans paople is just as important as solidarity with
like a racial and ethnic minorities when it comes to
combating fast right, especially since like there are a number
of us that are in multiple categories, So like let's
(37:57):
all work together and try to like you know, be
proactive about combating the threat.
Speaker 5 (38:02):
Right. So, my my tnon.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Collections, I guess like I only have two reports on
it so far because getting into the full detail is
just it is a lengthy project and I keep getting
distracted by the conversion therapy.
Speaker 5 (38:26):
There's so much stuff to research.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
And there's more like two people and yeah, anyway, so
else in terms of finding the like the original kind
of like broader views of TNN, both like what it
is in terms of like the one oh one kind
of stuff, and also like the timeline of where it
(38:50):
came from, you can find it on Health Liberation noow
dot com. We have a little tap there that has
like analysis and then if you go down to key issues,
you can find a TNON tag there, right, and it'll
have that stuff in there.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
This has been a thing that throughout this entire series,
which is that most of the information on this stuff
has been compiled by a very small number of trans people,
and that cannot stay the states of this because there
are just not enough trans people and they are extremely overworked. Yeah,
and if that's a project that you can take up,
(39:26):
please do that.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yes, please, yes, please hands on deck, all, hands on
the back.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, because the seriousness of this is such that if
you want there to be trans people living in a
way that does not actively destroy them, you have to
act now.
Speaker 5 (39:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Basically, yeah, this has been it could happen here a
product of cool zone media. Suppress your local turfs before
it's too late. Goodbye. What Happen Here is a production
of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
All Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Welcome to another rewind episode of vike it Happened Here.
Last year, we did a series of episodes in the
United States War and trans People. Since then, things have
only gotten worse. Even an electoral defeat, transphobic politicians across
the country have only doubled and tripled down on their
attempts to wipe trans people out for good. So today
(00:24):
we're going to revisit part three of that series, called
the Turf International, in which we look at the transnational
network of transphobes who built the modern anti trans movement
and see how they function in both Mexico and the US.
Welcome to Ikeodappen Here, a podcast that this week is
(00:45):
about the war on trans people. I'm your host, Christopher Wong.
If you've been around the left long enough, you've probably
heard people called transclusionary radical feminism, or terfism a colonial ideology. Broadly,
the accusation of colonialism is about the erasure of non
Western genders to fall outside the Christian gender binary. But
(01:07):
urfs are colonial in another sense as well, exported by
white academics to a network of fall feminist and anti
trafficking groups, the ideology has imposed itself on the global
South with devastating and violent consequences. As a product of
this colonial imposition, Mexico has become one of the front
lines in the war against trans people. I spoke to
Emmie Flores and Juliana Neuhauser, two members of the Sexual
(01:30):
and Gender Dissonance Resistance Network, a group of activists aligned
with the Zapatistas who've been documenting and resisting the spread
of turfs in Mexico.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
When the new turf waves started in Mexico several years back,
at the time, I thought thought of it as something
of like a radicalization that went too far, you know,
like kind of like thinking back to like the New Left,
and there was a point during the New Left when
(01:59):
l like suddenly everybody joined a maoist cult and they
were angry for the right reasons, but it just went off.
At some point, I thought that's what was going on
in Mexico. But then it started to come out more
(02:21):
that more and more turf groups were had ties to
political parties and one of the and foreign agents. And
one of the one of the most dramatic cases is
from Teluca, a city near Mexico City. Just recently at
(02:44):
the International Women's date protests, like there were turf groups
that had made a pinata out of the trans flag,
had been burning the trans flag also in this same city.
One of the main turf groups turns out that they're
leader is on government payroll. And if you've seen Roma,
(03:04):
for example, the incident, the political incident that happens in
that movie was based on a real incident from the
seventies and the tactics of that political party, which is
the party that controls the state government of the state
to lucas In basically it hasn't changed and they seem
to have been using these turfs basically as shock troops.
(03:27):
At one point, there were two sit ins outside the
state Congress, one to push for a gender identity a
law and another to push for the legalization of abortion,
which are obviously both important things. The ladder, however, was
controlled by these turf groups, who later mysteriously never seemed
to appear at other protests asking for the legalization of abortion,
(03:52):
but they were there. They ran off the trans encampment.
One of the big incidents was defending the Sanctity women's
bathroom with barbed wire wrapped baseball bats.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
Jesus, These groups have deep ties to right wing Mexican
political parties, the police, and the growing Turf International.
Speaker 4 (04:10):
And they seem to be very chummy with the local police.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
Their leader gives classes, but its like trainings to build
the state government.
Speaker 4 (04:26):
Like you know, you can see live streams of the
quote unquote protests, and it was mostly them like drinking
coffee with the cops, like they were on first name
basis with the cops. While the other camp had like
Translomen that were too scared to go to the bathroom
because they were going to be attacked. And so that's
(04:49):
the starkest group, I think, right the delcatives, which are
It's funny because almost every party has their own their
own group. But yeah, also it's no surprised that pri
is the scariest.
Speaker 3 (05:03):
Yeah. We should also say that these groups are affiliates
with Sheila Jeffries' Women's Declaration International. And so this is
also a case of an ideology developed in the first world,
in this case England, which is largely a safe country
where even as fascist an ideology as urfism doesn't or
(05:26):
only very rarely leads to real violence, but it gets
exported to countries that are not safe where it does
turn into real violence. So another affiliate of Sheila Jeffreys
Woman's declaration in Mexico would be LEAs Brujs del Mar,
who is another case of At first they seemed to
(05:50):
be a group that was just they just radicalized a
bit too far. Then photos came out of their leader,
who was on the time one hundred a couple of
years back with Felipe Calderon, an ex president of Mexico
and like by far one of the worst in the
country's history, and not like just.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Oh I saw you walking in the street. She was
at a book signing. It was not a casual encounter.
It was a clear sign of admiration. And it's been
more than confirmed since then that her political ambitions lie
with the PAN, the farthest right mainstream political party in Mexico.
Speaker 2 (06:37):
This political alliance between the Turfs and the right has
benefits for both sides. The Turfs gained funding institutional backing
for their war against trans people. The right gained a
way to attack the vaguely center left Mexican President Andrea's
Manuel Lopez overdoor by blaming him and trans people from
Mexico's horrific wave of femicides while distracting from its actual
(06:58):
sources durn the War on drugs. Mexico's transpopulation, however, gained
a new Western educated threat.
Speaker 4 (07:05):
When I say the radical feminism was a complete import
it's from its very beginning. In the For a long while,
there was like one turf in Mexico and she was
She's called jian Maria Yoyotel. Don't even try to pronounce
her name. I don't think she can even pronounce her
name because she's white as hell and she always dresses
(07:26):
like she's a fucking Rachel dollars hell from Mexico.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Yeah, music irony that the first originary turf in Mexico
is also the Mexican Raciel doll as well, right, because she.
Speaker 4 (07:39):
Went abroad and was like the only Mexican everyone knew.
So even though she's white as hell and has blue eyes,
she started wearing some Coachella motherfucking ass feathers and shit.
Speaker 2 (07:51):
Right, yeah, I've seen I've seen these pictures. It's it is,
it is like it is. It is the Mexican ver
of and not even just the beas version. It is
the Mexican version of those people at Cochella who like
wear indigenous headdresses who are just like just like look
look like they're descended from like Hydrik Himbler or something incredible, and.
Speaker 4 (08:15):
Like she's she has like she has like half French,
half Spanish name and she changed it to a half
Maya half Nato name. It's growth. So this this person
has been active since the seventies. Right, she went to
she was present in the first Pride in Mexico and
uh she that was that was also the two year
(08:36):
anniversary of the sixty eight massacre. So Pride was from
the start really leftist here in Mexico, but it also
had these kind of people the who who went to
the UK, friends and the United States. And I think
she was there when uh Is Raymond was like sending
(09:03):
her friends with guns to threatened trans women, right, so
that's she. She was there when the turf Wars were
at at the highest point during the seventies and then
came back and she participated in a lot of history
(09:24):
of Mexican feminism. But the time she came back in
twenty sixteen with that letter with that backing because she
is also close to Jenny's Raymond with the Coalition and
against Trafficking in women who the Coalition against Traffiican, the
(09:45):
Coalition against Traffickan and Women cat w has a lot
of After the turf Wars, they went underground in the
in academia and the universities right because they were no
longer accepted, but they were in the process of building
NGOs that could globally affect policy on UH, specifically sex
(10:09):
work and trans rites. And you can tell that John
Maria saw that that was her only opportunity to resurface
UH and to make her seventies as she saw that
the seventies redven discourse was retro now and so she
became like this UH found founding matriarch for the new
(10:29):
generation of transfos, one of them which is Laura Lequana,
who is part of FEMBA and the GEH. Maria and
Lequana were not faced at all by the accusations of
aligned with the reactionaries because they know their history, they
know where they come from, and they know that this
(10:50):
is how Darkin survived, This is how UH, how Sheila
Jefferies and Jennie Raymond survived. This is where you get
the fucking in. Jean Maria and Brussel mar turned the
whole environment around them into these uh well these serve questions.
(11:12):
The only two issues that we talk about nowadays in
Mexican feminism are are precedent and trans people. It's kind
of gross Jesus.
Speaker 3 (11:25):
And that like remember, like there's only a handful of
states that have legalized abortion. There's femicides happening all the time,
and but we're we continue to debate these two issues
over and over and over again like a feedback group,
and like, as trans people, we don't have any choice
(11:48):
because we're the targets of this right and it's not
it's not an academic debate. Last fall, there was some
tar who had taken over a public park to set
up their separatist space and there was a disabled CIS
woman and her trans girlfriend who are denied entergy at
(12:11):
the park and threatened with tasers. And so when they're
taking over these public spaces and using violence to defend them,
because the next week there was a protest over this
and there they taste a trans man and it's like
this is like a public park, like of course we
(12:35):
have to defend ourselves.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women for kat w an
International Anti Sex worker group, which provided a refuge for
white TERFs driven from mainstream feminism in their home countries,
has been a major source of terf influence in Latin America.
Speaker 4 (13:02):
The reason there is so much important of this ideology
towards radical feminists in Mexico, it's that they needed something
to say and something to do and something to fill
the void in organizing and in NGOs. And the people
who stepped up were Jenny's Raymond's cat W Right, the
(13:25):
Collition against Affian and Women who since the nineties spent
ah a decade and a half building contacts in the
Indie un in the oas in several international organisms to
extend their influence across the whole content and specifically in
(13:46):
Latin America. And you can see this affecting stuff like
stuff like Venezuela where they broke up sex worker unions
two to with the the right and in Mexico. The
founding leader of the Mexican branch of cat W, Teresa Ujoa,
(14:07):
used to be a UN employee, specifically it's drug and
crime segment and before she was like a radical feminist,
she used to conduct drug raids in Japa's and Yeah
and after that she became the founding member of w
(14:27):
Latin American and the Caribbean. And with Jennie Raymond, they
you can see them go together to the nineteen ninety
five Beijing Conference on Women and they influenced, like they
were a big part of why gender is not recognized
as a social construct by the UN. They allied with
(14:48):
the Holy See, with the representative from the Vatican in
the UN, got together with a couple of radical feminists
and pushed back against gender being recognized as a social
construct nineteen ninety five. So that's the level of influence
these groups had in Mexico. These groups, which morphed into
(15:09):
the cap W supported the Warren Rocks from the get go.
They were very in some of the biggest events inaugurating
the Warren Drugs. They were present right there. Because if
you're fighting drug trafficking, it's very easy to just sleep
(15:30):
the word human right there. Right, No politician is gonna
say no. They all fucking love to say, yeah, I'm
hardened on human trafficking. And the way that showed itself
was just targeting trans sex workers and migrant sex workers
and with that and that feeding the agenda of Jennie's
(15:51):
Raymond perfectly. Sila Jeffries gotta basically survived the whole two
thousands on writing garbage for reports for the UN. Most
of her published works during the two thousands and early
twenty tens is stuff paid for Cadolu and they in
(16:16):
twenty sixteen they started pushing for more and more anti
trans legislation worldwide because they could see the writing on
the world right. They were behind the Women's Declaration. The
Shila Jeffers is not okay. She is part of Cadoli.
She's I think Cadouble Australia. She has her own other
(16:37):
collectic called Space International, which is behind Foster Sesta by
the way in the US, where she allied with a
couple of conservative sheriffs to write that legislation. So we
could go on and on. How like people that read
our trans issues think are gone and forgotten by history. Right,
(16:59):
The authors of these horrible books that haunt us to
this day are still active, and not just in the US.
They're active in Mexico, in the UK, in France, in
South Africa, in Korea. Korea is huge in I think
I would say Korea is has as big a problem
as Mexico and the UK. We just don't talk to
(17:23):
them as much and we can't realize that. But if
you check them the languages that have signed the Shila
Jeffers Declaration against Trands People, which is as specifically generocidal declaration,
it doesn't stop at the legislation. It wants to exterminate
us outright. Yeah, and most of them, you are going
to see a lot of Brazilian flags, a lot of
(17:44):
Mexican flags, a lot of Korean flags, even more than
United States flags. And if you track the USA flags,
it's mostly like weird randos that have yoga classes and shit.
It's not relevant politicians. But if you track the other countries,
you're going to find some of the biggest collectives in
their own countries. You're gonna find or just spooks, right,
(18:07):
You're gonna find a lot of people who have really
weird careers that spend a lot of time in Italy
and Uganda. It's it's a never ending ribbit whole of
of of spooks, of conservatives, of has been feminists that
have regranted it as NGOs to get money from those
(18:30):
groups and directed towards breaking up trans rights, towards affecting
sex workers, towards breaking unions, breaking student movements. It's a
global movement that is birthed by conservative thought, but getting
more and more reactionary and more and more organized as
time goes by.
Speaker 2 (18:50):
That international transphobic movement has increasingly found purchase in the US.
I spoke to Lee Leaville and Kai Shiver's, two members
of Health Liberation Now with intimate experience with the turf
movement who spent years particulously documenting its rise. So my
first question is, can y'all explain what Wolf actually is?
(19:12):
And I guess subsequent to that, what their relationship to
hands across the aisle is.
Speaker 1 (19:19):
Yeah, so Wolf is They're a transphobic feminist group with
at this point extensive ties to right wing organizations. They've
worked with Family Policy Alliance here Atage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom, Concerned,
Wouin for America, Family Research Culture, among others.
Speaker 5 (19:43):
But they.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
They got their start and they started back in twenty
thirteen around when they're founded by Lear Keith, who also
was one of the leaders of Deep Green Resistance, and
she basically got like kind of run out of anarchists
and environmentalist groups and then kind of like went over
(20:06):
to established like turf communities to try and recruit there.
So they sort of like started out trying to like
recruit from these like older turf and transphobic lesbian communities.
And then after Trump got elected and you know, the
conservative Christians on the far right became more mobilized and
(20:27):
more empowered. They kind of like rebranded themselves and were like, oh,
let's form alliances with these right wing groups, and they
kind of like traded their sort of like like crunchy
lesbian feminists like like image for like Kara Danski, who
like you know, is a straight, fairly feminine looking woman
(20:49):
who used to work for the CLU and like a Democrat,
and like you know, she's way more presentable to like
a conservative audience. You know, by working with the right,
then they have access to like money and power and
they can get easier for the.
Speaker 5 (21:03):
Get on the media.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Like Kidansky is no longer with Wolf, but like she
was with them for years and still has relations like
like good relations with them, and she's been on the
Tucker Carlson Show like many times. So I think one
of the important pieces when it comes to understanding like
how this relationship with the rights started. So in late
(21:28):
twenty sixteen, Wolf put forward their filing against the US
Department of Justice and US Department of Education, right, and
they were going up against aspects of like trying to
reform Title NIND to include gender identity, you know, to
protect folks who need to be able to use the like.
Speaker 5 (21:50):
Women's restroom or locker room or whatever.
Speaker 1 (21:53):
Right, And this is the case that they ended up
getting some of that ADA funding for. So it's like
one of the first official seeds I guess of the
direct collaboration ended up happening. Those a lot of that
stuff did eventually end up getting leaked, and then they
started doing some more official collaborations just a few months
later when they were working with like Family Policy Alliance
(22:16):
to file amicus briefs against Gavin Grimm again on a
bathroom case. Yeah, they took something like I think it
was like fifteen thousand dollars from the Alliance depending Freedom,
which is one of the main like right wing groups
like like trying to pass all these like anti TRAMS bills,
like going after pediatric transition and trans girls and in
them and sports. So they took that money and then yeah,
(22:37):
then later like I think, like the whole working with
Family Policy Alliance, I believe was the first time they
like publicly allied with with the White Ring group.
Speaker 5 (22:45):
I think, so that happened in January of twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, and then they've just sort of like, yeah, like
they also were involved with like the amicus brief against
was it Amy Stephens another Supreme Court case. I can't remember,
it wouldn't surprise me. And like members of both have
appeared on like Heritage Foundation panels. They helped like release
a parent resource guide and an anti transparent resource guide
(23:10):
that was also sponsored by like Heritage Foundation, Family Policy Alliance.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
This this this is very similar to almost exactly what
you see in Mexico, with just sort of slightly less
physical violence, which yeah, it's it's a lot of you know.
And the other thing is that these are to a
large extent exactly the same organizations. And that was one
of the other things I want to talk about was
the influence of Sheila Jeffries and the Women's Declaration, which
has been all over this whole movement.
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Yeah. The one thing to point out, so like you know,
the Women's Declaration International is in this in the US
is led by Kardanski who doo she like basically like left.
She worked at Wolf for a long time and still
has lots of connections with them, is on good terms
with them, but she like left and now is like
working with Women's Declaration International of the US branch. So
(24:01):
and also she winds up having kind of like a
foot in both worlds at the same time too, So
like she'll like the US chapter of Women's Declaration International
previously like Women's Team in Rights campaign before they had
to rebrand, they would.
Speaker 2 (24:23):
But if if you if you read this, yeah.
Speaker 5 (24:27):
Yeah, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
So what what ends up happening is that Karen Danski
will either like have the chapter sponsor particular events or
she herself will become actively involved in the formation of
the events, right, which we saw happen with women pick
(24:51):
at d C last year where they were parking themselves
outside of that was like it was a that was
that was a whole big thing. Oh god, it was
a purchase that happened on International Women's Day to protest
the Equality Act. Yeah, NBC, it's not like it's people's
(25:12):
first time dealing with the Equality Act either.
Speaker 5 (25:15):
I mean, like so.
Speaker 1 (25:19):
Prior prior to that point which and this starts to
go into the like hands across the Aisle Coalition because
they were actively involved in opposing the Equality Act as well.
So to kind of roll back a little bit the
hands across the Aisle Coalition.
Speaker 5 (25:40):
This was something that started.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Developing in early twenty seventeen, you know, not that long
after Wolfe started building the more direct relationships with the Right,
and so that the people of this coalition would have
like you would have members of the Right itself, and
in the pro sets of that, towards the beginning of
(26:03):
twenty nineteen, in May, they filed this joint letter to
the House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi to oppose things
like the Equality Act, and they did so alongside with
Natasha Chart representing wolf Concerned Women for America, American College
(26:26):
of Pediatricians, Family Research Council, you know, a whole bunch
of really just awful names, and they're, oh, yeah, the
adyf was involved on that one too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
It's really the rose gallery of all of the people
who were anti gay marriage until still are but have
downplayed it. And yeah, all the people who let the
anti gay marriage campaigns, all of the sort of weird
right wing pseudo medical bodies. The next thing what it
(27:00):
to ask about is what's been happening in the last
couple of years with the fusion, Because you already have
your your alliance between the Turfs and the evangelicals, but
in the last couple of years we've seen a I
don't know if if full scale is the right term
to use for, but we've seen a merger of this
(27:20):
with Save the Children Eqanon stuff. I'm wondering if you
can talk about that.
Speaker 5 (27:25):
That's okay.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
So that's an interesting one because, like I've I've been
digging into the timeline of this stuff extensively. It's like
I've got hundreds hundreds of listings, trying to figure out
where different pieces are coming from and trying to understand.
Speaker 5 (27:43):
Like the phases.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Right, so you've got like the formation, the solidification, and
then the escalation, and we're kind of in the escalation
stage right now. But so one of the things that
I started to notice is that elements of this crossover,
like the cross pollination that was happening, actually pre dated
(28:09):
certain key events that we now know are affiliated with QAnon. Right,
So if we think about the actual development of QAnon itself,
so You've got the pizza Gate thing that was happening
in like October twenty sixteen. I believe that was, you know,
(28:31):
right before Trump was getting elected, and you know, kicking
up some stuff about like you know, Hillary Clinton's emails
and stuff like that to go up against her election
campaign and opposition to Trump, and then you know, folding
in the harassment towards Comet Ping Pong to the point
where like Edgar Madison Wells shows up at Comet Ping
(28:54):
Pong in December of twenty sixteen with an AR fifteen
style rifle and starts, you know, firing off as shots
and stuff like that.
Speaker 5 (29:01):
Right, And so eventually.
Speaker 1 (29:07):
Most people know the timeline of the q and on
drops happening around like October twenty seventeen. Like if you
look up the original like the first known que drops,
I believe that was like October twenty eight, twenty seventeen,
on four Chan. But the thing is that if you
look at references to save the Children or Save our
(29:32):
Children on like Twitter, the hashtags, and you're also looking
for transphobia related stuff, you can actually start to see
that crossover happening before the original que drops happened, Right, Yeah,
I found tweets that were connecting trans inclusion education in
schools to pedophilia and using the save the Children hashtag
(29:54):
in August of twenty seventeen, the que drops hadn't started yet,
so this is something this pattern continues to happen, right
There were also multiple tweets or Facebook posts or whatever
that would start to use things like save the Children,
save our Children, wake Up America, and stuff like that
(30:16):
before you would have the big scale takeover by QAnon
when things were starting to get really popular, because the
save the Children thing really went viral in the summer
of twenty twenty, but you could still see elements of
it before that point repeatedly. So another early instance of
(30:41):
using both save the Children and wake Up America hashtags
started happening on April I believe that is of twenty nineteen.
And bear in mind, wake up America is a hashtag
that's not only used by QAnon proponents in relation to
(31:01):
the whole like acceleration as I'm trying to, you know,
deep state stuff, but also like Aaron Brewer, one of
the people that was involved in some of the clinic
protests harassments, was using that. No, it wasn't just it
was wasn't just Brewer, it was like both Brewer it was.
That was the clinic protest that involved both partners Peltical
(31:23):
kr PEC, which Brewer was a member like one of
the founders of at the time and one of the
leaders of and uh Joey Bright's like can't I get
a witness, Like they teamed up to stage a bunch
of clinic protests and they used wake up of Like
wake of America was one of the slogans that they
used in one of the hashtags.
Speaker 2 (31:40):
There to make to make to make sure we're getting this. Uh,
these are protests against clinics that offered gender firming care.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah that mm hmm yeah that
that happened that one. So yeah, the wake Up America
one was in so like City, New York City and LA.
Speaker 5 (32:04):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (32:04):
And they also, I mean, speaking of pastakes, they also
have used the slogan pull back the Curtain, which has
also been used by uh like anti choice activists. Yeah,
like that was I remember, like like finding like they
use pull back the curtain a lot to be like
what they mean is like they're like expose the evil
(32:25):
gender industry. But like there's other this like.
Speaker 5 (32:30):
Anti abortion group. I'm blinking on which one off the
top of my head.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
But they also use that pull back the curtain to
go after planned parenthood, Yeah, which I think is like problem,
like that doesn't I'm for a direct connection, but it
seems like that's too much of a coincidence in a
lot of One of the one of the things that
I really want to stress about this called like what
I call tanon thing, is that like the seeds for this,
(32:59):
the cross pollinase that we are seeing happening between the
gender critical movement, Pizzagate, and QAnon, like these were already
in place before QAnon formally developed as its own phenomenon.
Speaker 5 (33:12):
This keeps happening.
Speaker 1 (33:14):
It's you can't really like figure out where one particular
type of rhetoric is necessarily coming from in terms of
its source, because it just keeps going back and forth repeatedly.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
People are acting like.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
They're coming up with a lot of the same ideas
together because in the end, in the end, they are
of the same roots. They are in fundamental agreement with
each other, whether they're calling themselves different names.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
I think that's that's worries me in a lot of ways.
Partly because you know, I mean, this has always been
something where if you look at the rhetoric that these
people are spreading, it's like it's explicitly the extermination is
like it's it's you know, like they they're they're strochiatric terrorists,
like in search of a like a quote unquote low
(34:07):
wolf and in a lot of you know, and in
the seventies, I think they were. There's there's a lot
more explicit violence that these people are doing directly, and
now they're kind of like they're they're they're trying to
find people who will do their already work for them,
and there are places where they found them already. We've
seen this in Mexico and in the US. The people
who they seem to be recruiting are people who are
(34:30):
extremely dangerous. I mean, we've we've seen QAnon people have
killed enormous numbers of people. You know, We've there's a
long history of abortion clinic bombings and people getting asassinated
from that. I mean, I think, you know, one of
the connections that I've been sort of like looking at
is the extent to which this stuff is connected to
the Atlanta shooting. Because if you if you look at
(34:52):
the stuff. The Atlanta shooter believes it's you know, like
he's in this like in the same sort of Christian
patriarchal pje and his thing is specifically about sex workers.
But hey, look if you look at uh yeah, not
particularly Asian sex workers. And you know, if if you
if you look at the anti trafficking groups and you
look at the Christian AI trafficking groups and you look
at the vent diagram with them and the turfs, it's like,
(35:14):
oh and that particular and yeah, there's there's this kind
of vice closing in on trans people where on the
one hand you have these people attempting to employ the
violence of the state, and on the other hand you
have this sort of strochiatric terrorism where they're attempting to
(35:38):
incite violence by sort of individuals. And then also, I mean,
I think I think there's you know, there's there's sort
of two forms of this.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Right.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
There's the explicit people who are explicitly like quote unquote
political right, you have your sort of like ideological street fascist.
You have like you know, you have your people with
baseball bass covered in barred wire. But then you also
have the stuff that's been fueling antiation violence where it's
not necessarily like you know, there is this is an
(36:05):
organization that like haze Asian people, it's we will just
sort of passively increase the rhetoric until the level of
violence increases.
Speaker 1 (36:13):
Yeah. Yeah, it kind of got like you've got the
street bashed and then you've got the intellectual fash. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
Well, and and I think but I think also there's
there's another like if it was just those people, I
think it'd be less bad. But but there's also just
the way in which just random people who are encountering
this become very quickly radicalized and it becomes part of
sort of I mean and stretch Trobic violence has always
been part of the sort of background violence the same
way that anti black and so it's I mean, you know, okay,
(36:39):
the level of anti black violence is much higher, but
like the level of violence against black trans people in particular,
and the level of antiation violence we've been seeing that
has just sort of be it's just a part of
the background violence of American society, and that the levels
of those things, the more this rhetoric gets circulated and
the more this activism happens, that background level of violence increases,
(37:03):
and that to me is also terrifying because it means
like it's not just sort of like fascisty you can track,
it's just someone on the street.
Speaker 1 (37:11):
Yeah, yeah, Yeah, they're just sort of like trying to
like like associate like well, I mean a lot of
the e like yeah, like people like like I feel
like in Aaron alex Ara and the Gender Mapper and
Joey Brighten stuff like that, like they're they're hardcore like eliminationists,
Like they're like they're say over and over the compinal compromise.
(37:33):
And I would also especially like anti fascist networks to
pay more attention to it because you know that solidarity
with trans paople is just as important as solidarity with
like a racial and ethnic minorities when it comes to
combating fast right, especially since like there are a number
of us that are in multiple categories, So like let's
(37:57):
all work together and try to like you know, be
proactive about combating the threat.
Speaker 5 (38:02):
Right. So, my my tnon.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
Collections, I guess like I only have two reports on
it so far because getting into the full detail is
just it is a lengthy project and I keep getting
distracted by the conversion therapy.
Speaker 5 (38:26):
There's so much stuff to research.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
And there's more like two people and yeah, anyway, so
else in terms of finding the like the original kind
of like broader views of TNN, both like what it
is in terms of like the one oh one kind
of stuff, and also like the timeline of where it
(38:50):
came from, you can find it on Health Liberation noow
dot com. We have a little tap there that has
like analysis and then if you go down to key issues,
you can find a TNON tag there, right, and it'll
have that stuff in there.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
This has been a thing that throughout this entire series,
which is that most of the information on this stuff
has been compiled by a very small number of trans people,
and that cannot stay the states of this because there
are just not enough trans people and they are extremely overworked. Yeah,
and if that's a project that you can take up,
(39:26):
please do that.
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yes, please, yes, please hands on deck, all, hands on
the back.
Speaker 2 (39:33):
Yeah, because the seriousness of this is such that if
you want there to be trans people living in a
way that does not actively destroy them, you have to
act now.
Speaker 5 (39:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Basically, yeah, this has been it could happen here a
product of cool zone media. Suppress your local turfs before
it's too late. Goodbye. What Happen Here is a production
of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It could happen here, updated monthly at
coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
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