January 15, 2025 • 39 mins
Mia talks with LA trans artist Precious Child about how she was the target of a series of anti-trans harassment campaigns against her art culminating in Congresswoman Nancy Mace censoring her work.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome Dick it Happen here a podcast increasingly about it
having happened. We have spent a long time on this
show talking about what the second Tump administration is going
to meet for trans people, and you know, go listen
to those episodes. The short version is that it is
going to be very, very bad. We're facing care bans,
we're facing federal funding bands. Things are about to get
(00:27):
unbelievably bleak. But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere.
It is the combination of almost a decades worth of
fighting by the right, And I think we have a
tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as
something abstract right, as a sort of abstract political debate,
(00:48):
or even if it affects us. We tend to treat
the subjects, the immediate subjects of the harassment, as sort
of these distant, famous figures. But the issue with looking
at it this way is that the harassment, the hatred,
the violence is happening to real people with real names
and faces, who live lives exactly like yours. The difference
between you sitting in your house right now and someone
(01:10):
whose face is on TV is about the difference between
whether a few right wing journalists cover who you are.
So today we're going to be talking to someone who
has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range
of the sort of emergent far right campaign against trans people,
who have seen basically the entire campaign against trans people
(01:33):
evolve specifically in the far right's harassment against them. And
that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out
of La Welcome to the show. I wish it was
under better circumstances.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Thank you, Thank you for having mema. Glad to be here. Yeah,
and I'm excited to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that my god, this sucks, but.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Well, you know, it's our lives. What can we do?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
What will we do? Wow? Yes?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
That that that's the question for the end of the
episode is what are we going to do about all
of this shit? But let's go back to sort of
the beginning. Can you can you sort of talk about
your first encounter with I guess at that point, what
was a not especially mainstream part of the religious right
back in night around twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, So I've been I've been making music as a
Precious Child for almost a decade and it was my
very first album that I put out, one called Trapped,
that had this track on it titled Phantom, and that
was an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals,
you know, it wasn't a song per se, it was
(02:46):
experimental and I put on a music video with it
and it was pretty It's pretty creepy and there's flashing lights.
You know, if you think of movies from the eighties
like hal Raiser, it's kind of like that, you know,
like kind of gritive of some type of greater supernatural horror.
And the far right at that time, the far right,
(03:09):
vintage twenty eighteen, they found it and started reporting it
on mess and tagging their friends and saying to report this,
report this. And this was on Instagram and Facebook and
on YouTube as well. And that video, like, as I said,
you know, it's creepy, but it's there's nothing political in it,
(03:30):
and there's a little bit of like of blood, but
there's no gory. But they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic.
That's what they said, This is satanic. And that was
my first brush with the right.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, and that's really interesting to me that it's specifically
the satanic angle that they're taking, because it's like it's
like in this early enough phase that they're still sort
of developing their reasons to be angry. They haven't quite
like a tastasized transphobias like they're driving things, so they're
kind of they're reaching back into this kind of satanic
(04:08):
panic era, like the weird nineties and two thousand stuff
that like when when I was growing up, the town
that I grew up with super religious, and like, you know,
we had to have lists of like if you were
inviting like a friend in high school to a party
whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party
and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about
(04:28):
which is it's like that kind of thing, which I
don't know, it feels like almost quaint now, even even
as this stuff's escalated.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
But yeah, it was, as I said, it was a
moral panic. And their point was that that I was
a moral for making art like this, and it was
this is the same thing that's happening today. I'm a
moral for the art that I make. And it's not
just my art, but it's me. It's me. Yeah, And
(04:56):
and I think that's perhaps what has changed as well.
Like before they were saying that this is a satanic
evil person because they're making this art, and now they're
saying this is a satanic evil person making satanic evil art.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, And I think part of the focus on art here, right,
is this kind of mirrored reflection of the sort of
I mean of the original Nazis, Right, Like one of
their big things was just like cracked down on quote
unquote degenerate art, and they had like these like quote
unquote degenerate art festivals of just like Jewish artists and
people whose art they didn't like it. It was, you know,
(05:30):
like what a thing that was like a significant factor
in their rise. And I think there's this sort of
mirror of it here, but I don't know, starting in
a weirder place in some ways, like starting more out
of this very very weird like Christian moral panic shit.
That's I guess if you want to look at how
(05:52):
this you know, plays out, like that's kind of where
it is in like twenty eighteen, right, this is the
first bathroom bill is in past twenty eighteen years Carolina.
But there's you know, there's a huge backlash to it
and that's something that's i think very different than now
where like all of this city trendshit is happening, everyone's
just kind of going eh, So, do you want to
talk about the second time he became tarketed the far right?
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah? I mean, realistically, like this has been pretty constant
throughout my life as a public artist. And there was
another there was another track on that album that was
also targeted. One call it titled My Little Problem Violet Door,
that has some more provocative imagery than the track Phantom,
(06:38):
has some nudity, and that was the collaboration between myself
and a artist who is trans themselves Kid out of Brazil,
and that has again some body horror in it. There's
commentary about gender norms and plastic surgery and identity, but
(06:59):
it wasn't explicitly political. Again, it was kind of a
surreal body horror video. And that was brigade reported not
in twenty eighteen, but in twenty nineteen and actually taken
down from YouTube and then reinstated. And that video is
notable because as a result of what's going on today,
(07:20):
YouTube took that down despite it being up for five
years without a problem that you know, I'd had tens
of thousands of views and now it's gone, So that
was the second time.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, that one I think is interesting to in the
sense of like that one's like a lot more it's
more overtly trans and it's also I think the more
trands you are, the more the more like very obviously
trans it is. And this is I guess something that's
very common among trans artists is kind of like art
(07:56):
that's an exploration of sort of body horror it you know,
I mean, I'm not going to project onto it. I
don't know if this is ucifically are doing, but like,
you know, there's a lot of it that's body horror
as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria, and like it's
this way of sort of thinking about the things that
are happening to your body, things that have been done
to your body, and the things that you're doing back
(08:17):
to it.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I didn't really think too
much about the concepts in that direction when I made
it or when and I okay didn't either at that time. However,
the truth is, for much of my young life, I
felt out of body and I wanted my flesh to
match my personal vision of myself and my identity, and
(08:42):
that was something I struggled with for quite a long time.
When I was young, I didn't have access to the
information and communities that are out there now that support
trans people. Yeah, and I have had some gender confirming
procedures done, not as many as I think I would
have when I was younger. I did feel existential discordance.
(09:07):
And I don't know if that's a word, but if
it's not, I'm going to coin it because pretty sure
I didn't. I didn't feel feel in concordance with my flesh,
and so, you know, I came to experiment what the
boundaries were of of my fleshy identity, in my existence
in my art. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
And I think there's something about the way that your
art works and the way that a lot of quratis
are where there's you know, and this isn't to say
that all Corota's like this, but there's definitely like an
edge to it. There's stuff going on. There's body horror
things happening. There's like eighties aesthetic stuff, and I think
it conflicts with this kind of weird concaid everything is
like happy and cozy, sort of kitch aesthetic thing. That
(09:51):
a lot of like this kind of fascism is really into.
They use the kind of a kind of aesthetic sensibility
as as a weapon to go after stuff that they oppose.
Is for more oftly political reasons. They can do this
kind of like hey, look at this disgusting thing, et cetera,
et cetera kind of attack on queer art as a
result of this kind of like fascist kitch aesthetic thing
(10:13):
that's kind of like this this you know, this sort
of like cultural norm in our society. And I think
I have I haven't one worked out the political inplication
of this, but I think there's this kind of connection
between their their weaponization of like revulsion and their weaponization
of this reaction to like anything that's kind of like
horror e that they kind of like use as a
political attack.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, you know, I think gender is horrifying period. Yeah,
not just for queer people, but also for CIS people.
Like I'm gonna defend CIS people here for a second.
So SIS people struggle with gender dysphoria. I think maybe
I would say every bit as much as trans people,
but they sure fucking struggle with it. Yeah. For instance,
(10:58):
an example I will give is face. Lots of people
that were assigned male at birth, they fret and earned
worry over their facial hair. Is it too much? Is
it too little? Then people that are signed female at birth,
you know, if they have facial hair, you know, they
thread over it. You know, well, people see it. Do
I have to bleach it? Do I have to pluck it?
(11:19):
People fret over like they're freaking jaw lines like you know,
if you search online like masculine jawline, how do I
get There's a huge community out there of assigned male
at birth sys men that are trying to get more
defined jaw lines because they feel that their genetics are
presenting them as a non optimal male quote unquote, And
(11:40):
of course, same thing for quote unquote females, like do
I have the female feminine body? Is it curvy enough
in the right ways? Is my waist slim enough? You know?
Is am I just brick shaped? And then all the
industries around that, and that, I think is is horrifying.
And everyone goes through that and struggles with it, and
very few people are lucky enough to embody the ideals
(12:04):
of gender that we thrust upon ourselves. And to me,
that is a tragedy.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, and I think that sort of like fear and
that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to
like perform a gender at a certain way. Well, okay,
I'm not going to say perform, because the Butler scholars
are going to get extremely mad at me.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
But the.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Way in which you're forced to sort of live up
to these standards that are sort of nonsense. I think
it gets to this thing where you know, you could
either sort of like muddle through it and try to
ignore the distance as much as you can. You can
attempt to fight it, or you can get extremely bad
and everyone else is trying to do something about it.
And I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Unfortunately, we need to go to ads, which is another
thing that drives a whole bunch of this. Luckily, these
are audio ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards.
But you know, who knows people are wizards. They'll find
a way to you.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
By mabeline.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
And we are back. I mean, I guess the Watch
to Stay Highway Patrol does forder dorms on people.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Oh, they sure do. May I give another example of
of hideous gender and ORMs yeah. So you listener, you're
hearing me, right, and you're hearing my voice. And this
is another thing that all people fret about. It's not
trust trans people. Lots of a fabs, I know, I'm
just gonna say a fab and amap Okay, lots of
(13:41):
a fabs, I know. You know, they have pretty darned
deep voices naturally, and they I've talked with them privately
and they say that they worry about how husky their
voice is when they just relax. And then same thing
for amaps. They talk about worrying if their voice is
squeaky and thinner. Talk like frecking wrestler from w WE,
(14:02):
you know, like people people like that. People struggle with
that too. Just so yeah, just something as simple as
our appearance and our voice. You know, we're just torturing ourselves.
And ultimately, I gotta say, Niah, you know, I'm I'm
a trans woman. However, ultimately I'm a gender abolitionist because
this shit sucks.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, it's it's not it's not great. It's not a
good time for any way in fault. Yeah, speaking of
bad times, this is even an ad pivot. I just
do this now, which really bad. I do it to
people by daily life. They're like, why are you anpivoting me?
And I'm like, oh God, but yeah, I guess God,
this and the sort of racialization aspect, and I don't
(14:47):
know the aspect of zones of gender performance. God damn.
I keep saying performance that I literally mean that you
were performing it, as in you were acting and not
the butler thing of your before we get to make
it real. Please don't yell at me in the comments
I had. I had the guy who wrote a writer
(15:07):
on the Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about
that on Twitter. What Times Apparentoid. It's really okay. Sorry,
I about to rail this enough, partially because this next
part is really depressing. But so a while back on
this show, my my co host Garrison, who is I
(15:27):
don't know, probably having an absolutely terrible time at the
Consumer Electronics Show right now, covered a specific far right
panic that became known as the we Spat contract for Sea.
Do you want to talk about how the right stuck
you into that shit? Because Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah. So you know, in twenty eighteen, as I said,
I put out this album and then I put out another,
and I star I was touring the country and Canada
and stuff and doing shows pretty much constantly. And then
twenty happened and I became involved in the George Floyd
uprise and the Black Lives Matter marches and protesting, and
(16:05):
so I began to live stream those protests and marches
with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was
going on on the streets to people watching, because a
lot of people, you know, regardless of their politics, did
not understand what the issues were. And the thing is,
in LA there were a lot of continual police murders
(16:28):
even through the riots. And by police murders, I mean
the cops shooting on our black people in the back
as they were running away, or executions, you know, shooting
them in the car, that type of thing. And so
I was explaining that to the viewers, like, this is
why people are in the streets, this is a specific issue,
these are the laws surrounding it, and why these actions
(16:50):
by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal.
And so I was doing that and I became pretty
darn visible and popular, like I was maybe one of
the top five best known activist or racial justice voices,
and I was targeted by a right wing activist who
(17:13):
was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium,
specifically because I was visible, because I was trans, and
so she went for me and posted and said that
I was a transgender individual who was in the women's
spa of we Spa and I was sexually harassing people,
(17:34):
and that went viral on social media. It was covered
on Fox News for a week. I was getting constant
death threats, and you know, I was dogs. It was
pretty durable, especially because I was not that person in
the spa and I was only best picked up because
I was picked up for my visibility. My response to
(17:57):
that was I didn't immediately say yeah, I was me,
It wasn't me, leave me alone, Leave me alone. I
didn't do that because I knew that if I said that,
then they would just pick and attack some other transperson. Yeah,
and you know, I know that like the shit that
the that the right wing machine and acts, if it
(18:19):
happens to one of us, it can happen tral that's end,
it likely will.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yeah, And I mean I think the thing that it
reminds me the most. Something we've also covered on the
This is one of the problems with talking about this.
It's like doing this for so long that like there's
very few things that I could say that I can't
be Like, I've said this on the show before, but
we spent a lot of time, petically, Garrison spend a
lot of time covering the way that every time there's
a mass shooter, the right immediately just like picks a
(18:43):
random transperson and goes it was this person. Yeah, and
this reminds me a lot of the same thing, although
this is a more targeted, like we've invented a fake
controversy about a trans person, and then we're going to
like also just pick a random famous trand well not
even famous, but like a random trans person that we
know about and don't like.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
It's my understanding that this twenty twenty one, we spaw
a controversy that I was targeted for became something of
a right wing playbook. Yep. It was after that that
they started saying, oh, this and that person's trans, and
before that they didn't have a real moral panic around
trans people unless you look all the way back to
(19:24):
the North Carolina South Carolina bathroom man.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, I mean, I think I think there's an interesting
intermediary thing too, where so my friend Vicky ashterwhile who
depending on when this episode comes out, you'll you'll be
hearing from either right before this episode or right after.
I had another version of this where she wrote a
book called In Defensive Looting. It came out in twenty
twenty and just for like three months became all the
(19:52):
rest we really two months like became the like the
giant figure with which everyone who didn't like the uprising
was just like taking it out, so like like sitting
in Congress, people were like denouncing this book that you wrote.
Every base Remdia outlet like specifically had their editorial people
going like, this book is evil, Vicky's evil. And I
(20:12):
think that was also like this moment of deep connection
between the backlash of the uprisings and the anti trans
uprisings because the people who you know, are trying to
maintain a white supremacist gender system like intimately themselves, even
if they don't understand it on a theoretical level, understand
that they're that these things are preserving the same systems
(20:33):
of violence, and so they picked us as sort of
like the wedge point to to break this thing apart.
And I think with Vicky, they hadn't really figured out
how to do it, and I think it was like
specifically your case, the the we spa, like with you
being put in as the figure of the we spase,
this is where they like actually really figured out how
(20:53):
to do the whole thing. And yeah, there's just something
really bleak about both how effective it was and the
fact that it's like these are just people I don't know,
Like this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of
like astract figures. It's just like, yeah, people I'm having
conversations with are how.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
They did this just I don't know. I wish I
had more and elsis but but yeah, I think that
trends people like to to Greater America, to most to
a lot of America, I'll say, are a.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
Sensational you know people people imagine chicks with dicks and
dudes with dudes without dicks, and so I think that's
really exciting for a lot of people, you know, for
better or for worse.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
I think for for worse. But yeah, I think that's
just like people and their bodies, right, Like you know,
I guess some people walk around think all the time
about other people's crotches. Uh, I'm not going to say
that's a bad thing. Crush the first of your scene,
you know.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
But on the other hand, right, there's this there's this
aspect of which, like you know, there's a seris socialism,
but then there's also the experience of being a trans
person is like I too am trying to find a
way to not pay rent. Like that's like I don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, so back to back to we SPA. Yeah, that
was a pretty terrible experience for me. And I'm not
going to lie about it now. I I'm glad that
I stood up for for myself. I'm glad I stood
up for trans people that I didn't pass the buck.
It was also really difficult and traumatic, and I didn't
(22:34):
appreciate the death threats. I didn't appreciate and docs and
you know, people have come after me my my whole life,
like I present I think just naturally physically, like I
present as being gender queer, like I've been pretty like
fearing like looking femme my entire life. That had nothing
to do with my internal identity. I've been weird my
(22:57):
entire life. I've perpetually been curious and provocative and interested
in things that were provocative, and so I've been harassed
my whole life. However, until we SPA and to experience
the strangers by the hundreds saying that they're gonna hunt
me down and fucking shoot me. Yeah, I never know
if someone will recognize me when I'm out and be like, hey, buddy,
(23:21):
I know you.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, And it's one of these things where like the
more of a target on you, the more likely it
is to happen. And even people who don't have targets
on them, like I know people you know who've never
experienced anything like this that have still just like had
attacks on them, and it's fucking terrifying. It is an
absolutely terrible way to have to live in, a terrible
sort of thing to have to experience, especially is it's
(23:45):
just being intensifying.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
So yeah, that was That was twenty to twenty one,
and that changed me. That experience of being targeted and
just picked on out of the freaking blue. That changed
me as an artist. And at the same time it
also firmly established me as a sort of celebrity. And
I want to speak to that because there's different tiers
(24:07):
of celebrity, you know. At that yes, at the at
the top because the tier that's known as I get
a Christmas card from Tom Cruise every year, and that's
an actual thing, and that's the A list. And you
know you're on the A list because Tom Cruise since
(24:27):
your Christmas card. And at the bottom is me, who's
been in mass media many times now but has none
of the benefits.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
You know, I make very little money as an artist,
and I don't have an entourage. I can tour and
I play play some shows and you know, some of
them are sold out. I'm playing the show in LA
that's sold out, But I'm not playing large venues. No.
I maybe play like, you know, three hundred five hundred
capacity tops, and most place I play are like small clubs,
(24:59):
like one hundred and fifty years. So yeah, and so
I don't I don't have the protection that most celebrities
inherently have. I don't have book deals, I don't have
movie deals. I don't even have an AGA. I don't
even have a record label. Yeah. So I'm the freaking
D tier. I'm the D tier, and they're coming after me.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, And it's I mean, and that's the thing about
the sort of like this status of like niche d
tier internet micro celebrity is like I don't like, I
feel like I got the best possible version of it,
where like I got a job that pays slightly I
think I might have hit. No, I'm still I'm still
below the median salary of assists man in the U,
but I'm approaching it, getting closer every year, every union fight,
(25:48):
we approach median.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Sis man salaries.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
But like, yeah, the situation I got is effectively the
equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right, Like this is
about the best you could possibly hope for if you're
a transperson you get famous, Like yeah, I mean like
I get that threats too, right, Like nothing anywhere near
the scale that you get, And mostly what happens is
like I mean, like single digit numbers of trans people
(26:13):
in the US have the kind of protection that actual
celebrity gives you and everyone else. Celebrity is just another
It's just a giant target painted on you. And yes,
you have none of the benefits and all of the
sort of Hey, here is one hundred and fifty million
people who absolutely hate you and who've been primed and
targeted like specifically at you.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah, it's something that I wonder about, like, why why
would they do something like this? Why would Fox News
we talk about me? Why would the founder of the
Proud Boys, Gavin mckinnis that old video about me. Bad
Boys is a terrorist group if you don't now listener
to ever recognized as a terrorist group by Canada. Not here,
(26:56):
because like, we're just cool with that shit here, white
supremacist terrorist group. So why me? Why why would a
congress person come after me? And my own hypothesis is
that they punched down because they secretly believe that they
(27:17):
themselves are weak and attacking me, attacking people like me,
is a fight that they can win. And my view
is that it's not a fight that they can win
because they've already lost. They're trying to get power in small,
small ways and false ways, in my opinion, and they're
(27:38):
trying to get money. First of all, they want money,
you know, they want their views, they want their donations,
and that's the entire top of the pyramid for them
and for me though, I'm a fucking artist, and power
is something that I've always been developing because I've sought
to know myself. I've sought to understand who I am
(28:00):
and why and that extends to myself as a queer person,
to come to understand myself who I am as a
queer person. That's not something they'll ever have. So I've
already fucking won. And same with all the other queer
people that are under attack, all your other dcer queer
celebrities out there, we fucking won hopefully well.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
And I think part of this is also like the
reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to
stop the tide from coming in. And they saw how
far in the tide had already come, and now they're
trying to like dam off the tide and you know,
like probably it's not going to work. But the only
(28:45):
way that it can is if everyone just like sits
here does nothing and let's to just keep building and
building and building more walls. It's it's something that is
within our power to resist. We just have to actually
do it, right. You have to actually organize, you to
talk to the people around you, you have to go
get them to do things to resist this. And if
we do, yeah, we like the things that we've already won,
(29:07):
the things that we are going to win are going
to stick. But if not, like things are going to
get really really bad really quickly. And yeah, and speaking
of things getting very bad, very quickly, Carris some more
ats before we get back to things getting wars. We
(29:32):
are back. Yeah, you've been specifically targeted by a city
in US Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who is the person who
actually I don't know if we talked about the bathroom
stuff here yet, but she's the sort of person behind
an attempt to get trans people to not be able
to use the bathroom Capitol Hill. She's become a leading
(29:52):
anti trans figure in Congress. Literally every single thing that
she tweets about is about trans women and how they
to be put in men's jails, which is just an
incredibly cynical ploy to make a bunch of people get
horribly raped and killed, which is one of the predominant
things that happens when we get put in ben's prisons.
(30:13):
And she specifically came after years, you want to talk
about how that happened and the latest sort of a
congress woman tweets and a fucking social media company does
their bidding.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, so, right at the end of twenty twenty four,
I think it was on December twenty eighth, I was
docked by a right wing control nazi that has doxed
multiple friends of mine, the activist friends, artist friends, and
(30:46):
they pointed out in a tweet how my art was
on YouTube, specifically my music videos were on YouTube calling
for violence and how I was an evil trans person,
and they added like at symbol YouTube and said that
these videos are in violation of your terms of service?
(31:08):
Why are they still up? And Nancy May saw that
because if you look at her Twitter, it's all just
just stocks and trans people and perpetual like rage bait
about the queer menace, the trans menace, and so she
saw that, retweeted and said, YouTube, this squarly violates your
(31:28):
terms of service. Why haven't you done anything? And then
immediately following that, my videos were taken down, the ones
that were mentioned in these tweets. And as I said before,
some one of these videos, what was that of my
little problem that's been up for seven years?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, for a long time.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah. And YouTube terms of service they're very clear, and
I do my best to stay within YouTube terms of
service so my work doesn't get taken down. And they
state that stuff like violence, minimal nudity that is allowed
within the context of art, within the context of music videos,
(32:14):
and so my videos, you know, they weren't designed to
This is from the terms of service. They weren't designed
to sexually titillate or gratify. That's exactly what it says
in the in the terms. Now they weren't recreations of
real life violence, and they weren't real life violence, but
they were still they were still removed at the behest
(32:36):
at the easy click press of Nancy Mace.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, And I think there's there's a couple of things
going on here, one of which is, you know, so
we've seen this with Facebook in the last I guess
when this comes out, it'll be like a week ago.
But you know, Facebook has in stated policies that allow
you to basically stay slurs against queer people. Allowed you
to call core people mental illnesses and stuff like that
that's very specifically you can only do to queer people.
(33:02):
You can't do it to anyone else. And I think
there's this sort of trend here of I don't know
with Facebook. I wouldn't say that it's like compliance with
the sort of new Trump regime, because like this is
just your Facebook is right, like they did hing the genocide,
like the genocide into Gray too. That was also a
Facebook thing. So they've always just been evil and they
(33:23):
have been sort of looking for the excuse that they
need to like drop the hammer on us. But I
think YouTube, to some extent to what we're seeing right
now is this kind of like mask coming off moment
where people are realizing that with Trump and power, they
can just drop the hammer on a queer artist because specifically,
like on a trans artist, because now they have this
(33:44):
sort of like backing to do this stuff, and the
right has you know, realized that they can feel like YouTube,
take this video down and they'll do it. And that's
a really terrifying precedence in a lot of ways. And
also it's very you know, I was like, yeah, obviously,
because a point of a hypocrisy does nothing. But like,
I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of
(34:08):
censorship than a member of the government says that something
should be taken down and it's taken down.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
It's like, it's really sound. You know. It makes me
kind of afraid, honestly, because you know, before I was
a victim of a moral panic, and now my work
is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare, So you know,
(34:33):
what's what's going to happen next? For what Well, we
see just made invisible and unseen. And I know that
in this country, I have freedom of speech, but that's
that's really bullshit. We all know that, Like, I'm not
going to reach many people if I stand on a
street corner at the park and yell at people. What
matters nowadays is the freedom of reach that these social
(34:53):
media platforms control, that are themselves controlled now by the
by the Republican Party. And what happens when our freedom
of reach is annihilated and then suddenly trans people are
actually invisible. We're very close to that. I think Fancy
proved that.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first
step for how you destroy a people. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Art, art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak,
and I know that's why she came after my art.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen.
And then like the next tweet is again a sitting
member of the US government saying that trans women should
be put in Ben's prisons, and it's like, okay, one
of these is considered violence by sort of the media machine,
and one of them isn't.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, does she even actually do work for the people
of South Carolina? Like I saw. All she does is
just like start shit with trans people, like she says,
another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer, And she says,
the a knockoff product of a bootleg Trump, That's what
she is. And she's not even good at her fucking politics.
(36:07):
Like she's tried to get this bathroom band for disallowing
trans people to use a bathroom at the US Capitol,
and her own freaking party kicked the bill out of
the out of the bylaws for this year, so she
couldn't even get that. And yeah, so I guess she
thinks you can get a get a win by harassing me,
(36:28):
harassing my art. Yeah, try to get people to come
after me.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
You know, these people are not as powerful as they
want you to believe, right, A lot of their stuff
just fails. But they will only fail if people are
willing to resist and people are willing to stop them.
And that's the thing that's needed in this moment. Is
organization is you know, like is organization, It is action,
It is it is now. It is now the time
(36:54):
to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being like,
should I be organizing a U? Should I be like
setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations. It's like, yeah,
it's time, It's time to go, because otherwise, you know,
and I think this is something that like every trans
person now understands intimately, and I think most people don't.
Which is that right now it's us, But you know,
(37:19):
in two years, assuming we're all still alive, there's a
very good chance that it's going to be you like
showing up on this show because a fucking congress person
is deliberately interviewing to destroy your life. And I would
rather we had stopped this before it got to any
of us. But they're going to come for you too
unless we stop them. Thank you so much for coming
(37:39):
on the show. And where can people find you and
find your art? And yeah, support you?
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yeah, thanks for having me. May I really like talking
with you. It's been very good and Listaris. You can
find my work on Spotify. You can also check out
my website at precious Child dot and please sign up
for my mailing list there as well. That is the
best and best direct way for me to stay in
(38:07):
touch with my friends and fans. I'm most a precious
child on Instagram, on TikTok, i am the last precious child.
I also will be doing live shows this spring and
summer in the US, and so follow me on my
website and on social media to stay up to date
on that and come say hi in person.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Hell yeah, we will have links to all of that
in the description, So yeah, go check it out and
resist the creep of fascism.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
That's one thing I want to add about I said
earlier about personal power and how I have to develop
plan personal power by getting sick down myself. I want
to toil you trans people out there, you queer people
and your allies. That first thing is getting to know yourself,
and then next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws,
(39:01):
Fuck these fucking lall makers. Good to know each other
and strengthen our bonds with each other, because those are
bigger than any type of oppressive laws they may put
upon us. And it's only by the strength that we
develop with each other, within each other that we will persevere.
(39:23):
It could happen.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia. Dot
com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. We can now find
sources for it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions.
Thanks for listening.
Call Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome Dick it Happen here a podcast increasingly about it
having happened. We have spent a long time on this
show talking about what the second Tump administration is going
to meet for trans people, and you know, go listen
to those episodes. The short version is that it is
going to be very, very bad. We're facing care bans,
we're facing federal funding bands. Things are about to get
(00:27):
unbelievably bleak. But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere.
It is the combination of almost a decades worth of
fighting by the right, And I think we have a
tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as
something abstract right, as a sort of abstract political debate,
(00:48):
or even if it affects us. We tend to treat
the subjects, the immediate subjects of the harassment, as sort
of these distant, famous figures. But the issue with looking
at it this way is that the harassment, the hatred,
the violence is happening to real people with real names
and faces, who live lives exactly like yours. The difference
between you sitting in your house right now and someone
(01:10):
whose face is on TV is about the difference between
whether a few right wing journalists cover who you are.
So today we're going to be talking to someone who
has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range
of the sort of emergent far right campaign against trans people,
who have seen basically the entire campaign against trans people
(01:33):
evolve specifically in the far right's harassment against them. And
that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out
of La Welcome to the show. I wish it was
under better circumstances.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Thank you, Thank you for having mema. Glad to be here. Yeah,
and I'm excited to talk to you.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that my god, this sucks, but.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Well, you know, it's our lives. What can we do?
Speaker 2 (02:02):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (02:03):
What will we do? Wow? Yes?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
That that that's the question for the end of the
episode is what are we going to do about all
of this shit? But let's go back to sort of
the beginning. Can you can you sort of talk about
your first encounter with I guess at that point, what
was a not especially mainstream part of the religious right
back in night around twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
Yeah, So I've been I've been making music as a
Precious Child for almost a decade and it was my
very first album that I put out, one called Trapped,
that had this track on it titled Phantom, and that
was an instrumental track with just some kind of whispery vocals,
you know, it wasn't a song per se, it was
(02:46):
experimental and I put on a music video with it
and it was pretty It's pretty creepy and there's flashing lights.
You know, if you think of movies from the eighties
like hal Raiser, it's kind of like that, you know,
like kind of gritive of some type of greater supernatural horror.
And the far right at that time, the far right,
(03:09):
vintage twenty eighteen, they found it and started reporting it
on mess and tagging their friends and saying to report this,
report this. And this was on Instagram and Facebook and
on YouTube as well. And that video, like, as I said,
you know, it's creepy, but it's there's nothing political in it,
(03:30):
and there's a little bit of like of blood, but
there's no gory. But they found it unsettling and explicitly satanic.
That's what they said, This is satanic. And that was
my first brush with the right.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Yeah, and that's really interesting to me that it's specifically
the satanic angle that they're taking, because it's like it's
like in this early enough phase that they're still sort
of developing their reasons to be angry. They haven't quite
like a tastasized transphobias like they're driving things, so they're
kind of they're reaching back into this kind of satanic
(04:08):
panic era, like the weird nineties and two thousand stuff
that like when when I was growing up, the town
that I grew up with super religious, and like, you know,
we had to have lists of like if you were
inviting like a friend in high school to a party
whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party
and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about
(04:28):
which is it's like that kind of thing, which I
don't know, it feels like almost quaint now, even even
as this stuff's escalated.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
But yeah, it was, as I said, it was a
moral panic. And their point was that that I was
a moral for making art like this, and it was
this is the same thing that's happening today. I'm a
moral for the art that I make. And it's not
just my art, but it's me. It's me. Yeah, And
(04:56):
and I think that's perhaps what has changed as well.
Like before they were saying that this is a satanic
evil person because they're making this art, and now they're
saying this is a satanic evil person making satanic evil art.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, And I think part of the focus on art here, right,
is this kind of mirrored reflection of the sort of
I mean of the original Nazis, Right, Like one of
their big things was just like cracked down on quote
unquote degenerate art, and they had like these like quote
unquote degenerate art festivals of just like Jewish artists and
people whose art they didn't like it. It was, you know,
(05:30):
like what a thing that was like a significant factor
in their rise. And I think there's this sort of
mirror of it here, but I don't know, starting in
a weirder place in some ways, like starting more out
of this very very weird like Christian moral panic shit.
That's I guess if you want to look at how
(05:52):
this you know, plays out, like that's kind of where
it is in like twenty eighteen, right, this is the
first bathroom bill is in past twenty eighteen years Carolina.
But there's you know, there's a huge backlash to it
and that's something that's i think very different than now
where like all of this city trendshit is happening, everyone's
just kind of going eh, So, do you want to
talk about the second time he became tarketed the far right?
Speaker 1 (06:17):
Yeah? I mean, realistically, like this has been pretty constant
throughout my life as a public artist. And there was
another there was another track on that album that was
also targeted. One call it titled My Little Problem Violet Door,
that has some more provocative imagery than the track Phantom,
(06:38):
has some nudity, and that was the collaboration between myself
and a artist who is trans themselves Kid out of Brazil,
and that has again some body horror in it. There's
commentary about gender norms and plastic surgery and identity, but
(06:59):
it wasn't explicitly political. Again, it was kind of a
surreal body horror video. And that was brigade reported not
in twenty eighteen, but in twenty nineteen and actually taken
down from YouTube and then reinstated. And that video is
notable because as a result of what's going on today,
(07:20):
YouTube took that down despite it being up for five
years without a problem that you know, I'd had tens
of thousands of views and now it's gone, So that
was the second time.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, that one I think is interesting to in the
sense of like that one's like a lot more it's
more overtly trans and it's also I think the more
trands you are, the more the more like very obviously
trans it is. And this is I guess something that's
very common among trans artists is kind of like art
(07:56):
that's an exploration of sort of body horror it you know,
I mean, I'm not going to project onto it. I
don't know if this is ucifically are doing, but like,
you know, there's a lot of it that's body horror
as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria, and like it's
this way of sort of thinking about the things that
are happening to your body, things that have been done
to your body, and the things that you're doing back
(08:17):
to it.
Speaker 1 (08:18):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I didn't really think too
much about the concepts in that direction when I made
it or when and I okay didn't either at that time. However,
the truth is, for much of my young life, I
felt out of body and I wanted my flesh to
match my personal vision of myself and my identity, and
(08:42):
that was something I struggled with for quite a long time.
When I was young, I didn't have access to the
information and communities that are out there now that support
trans people. Yeah, and I have had some gender confirming
procedures done, not as many as I think I would
have when I was younger. I did feel existential discordance.
(09:07):
And I don't know if that's a word, but if
it's not, I'm going to coin it because pretty sure
I didn't. I didn't feel feel in concordance with my flesh,
and so, you know, I came to experiment what the
boundaries were of of my fleshy identity, in my existence
in my art. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
And I think there's something about the way that your
art works and the way that a lot of quratis
are where there's you know, and this isn't to say
that all Corota's like this, but there's definitely like an
edge to it. There's stuff going on. There's body horror
things happening. There's like eighties aesthetic stuff, and I think
it conflicts with this kind of weird concaid everything is
like happy and cozy, sort of kitch aesthetic thing. That
(09:51):
a lot of like this kind of fascism is really into.
They use the kind of a kind of aesthetic sensibility
as as a weapon to go after stuff that they oppose.
Is for more oftly political reasons. They can do this
kind of like hey, look at this disgusting thing, et cetera,
et cetera kind of attack on queer art as a
result of this kind of like fascist kitch aesthetic thing
(10:13):
that's kind of like this this you know, this sort
of like cultural norm in our society. And I think
I have I haven't one worked out the political inplication
of this, but I think there's this kind of connection
between their their weaponization of like revulsion and their weaponization
of this reaction to like anything that's kind of like
horror e that they kind of like use as a
political attack.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Yeah, you know, I think gender is horrifying period. Yeah,
not just for queer people, but also for CIS people.
Like I'm gonna defend CIS people here for a second.
So SIS people struggle with gender dysphoria. I think maybe
I would say every bit as much as trans people,
but they sure fucking struggle with it. Yeah. For instance,
(10:58):
an example I will give is face. Lots of people
that were assigned male at birth, they fret and earned
worry over their facial hair. Is it too much? Is
it too little? Then people that are signed female at birth,
you know, if they have facial hair, you know, they
thread over it. You know, well, people see it. Do
I have to bleach it? Do I have to pluck it?
(11:19):
People fret over like they're freaking jaw lines like you know,
if you search online like masculine jawline, how do I
get There's a huge community out there of assigned male
at birth sys men that are trying to get more
defined jaw lines because they feel that their genetics are
presenting them as a non optimal male quote unquote, And
(11:40):
of course, same thing for quote unquote females, like do
I have the female feminine body? Is it curvy enough
in the right ways? Is my waist slim enough? You know?
Is am I just brick shaped? And then all the
industries around that, and that, I think is is horrifying.
And everyone goes through that and struggles with it, and
very few people are lucky enough to embody the ideals
(12:04):
of gender that we thrust upon ourselves. And to me,
that is a tragedy.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, and I think that sort of like fear and
that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to
like perform a gender at a certain way. Well, okay,
I'm not going to say perform, because the Butler scholars
are going to get extremely mad at me.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
But the.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Way in which you're forced to sort of live up
to these standards that are sort of nonsense. I think
it gets to this thing where you know, you could
either sort of like muddle through it and try to
ignore the distance as much as you can. You can
attempt to fight it, or you can get extremely bad
and everyone else is trying to do something about it.
And I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option.
Speaker 1 (12:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Unfortunately, we need to go to ads, which is another
thing that drives a whole bunch of this. Luckily, these
are audio ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards.
But you know, who knows people are wizards. They'll find
a way to you.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
By mabeline.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
And we are back. I mean, I guess the Watch
to Stay Highway Patrol does forder dorms on people.
Speaker 1 (13:19):
Oh, they sure do. May I give another example of
of hideous gender and ORMs yeah. So you listener, you're
hearing me, right, and you're hearing my voice. And this
is another thing that all people fret about. It's not
trust trans people. Lots of a fabs, I know, I'm
just gonna say a fab and amap Okay, lots of
(13:41):
a fabs, I know. You know, they have pretty darned
deep voices naturally, and they I've talked with them privately
and they say that they worry about how husky their
voice is when they just relax. And then same thing
for amaps. They talk about worrying if their voice is
squeaky and thinner. Talk like frecking wrestler from w WE,
(14:02):
you know, like people people like that. People struggle with
that too. Just so yeah, just something as simple as
our appearance and our voice. You know, we're just torturing ourselves.
And ultimately, I gotta say, Niah, you know, I'm I'm
a trans woman. However, ultimately I'm a gender abolitionist because
this shit sucks.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Yeah, it's it's not it's not great. It's not a
good time for any way in fault. Yeah, speaking of
bad times, this is even an ad pivot. I just
do this now, which really bad. I do it to
people by daily life. They're like, why are you anpivoting me?
And I'm like, oh God, but yeah, I guess God,
this and the sort of racialization aspect, and I don't
(14:47):
know the aspect of zones of gender performance. God damn.
I keep saying performance that I literally mean that you
were performing it, as in you were acting and not
the butler thing of your before we get to make
it real. Please don't yell at me in the comments
I had. I had the guy who wrote a writer
(15:07):
on the Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about
that on Twitter. What Times Apparentoid. It's really okay. Sorry,
I about to rail this enough, partially because this next
part is really depressing. But so a while back on
this show, my my co host Garrison, who is I
(15:27):
don't know, probably having an absolutely terrible time at the
Consumer Electronics Show right now, covered a specific far right
panic that became known as the we Spat contract for Sea.
Do you want to talk about how the right stuck
you into that shit? Because Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1 (15:42):
Yeah. So you know, in twenty eighteen, as I said,
I put out this album and then I put out another,
and I star I was touring the country and Canada
and stuff and doing shows pretty much constantly. And then
twenty happened and I became involved in the George Floyd
uprise and the Black Lives Matter marches and protesting, and
(16:05):
so I began to live stream those protests and marches
with the specific intent of contextualizing what the heck was
going on on the streets to people watching, because a
lot of people, you know, regardless of their politics, did
not understand what the issues were. And the thing is,
in LA there were a lot of continual police murders
(16:28):
even through the riots. And by police murders, I mean
the cops shooting on our black people in the back
as they were running away, or executions, you know, shooting
them in the car, that type of thing. And so
I was explaining that to the viewers, like, this is
why people are in the streets, this is a specific issue,
these are the laws surrounding it, and why these actions
(16:50):
by the police are not just horrifying, they're also illegal.
And so I was doing that and I became pretty
darn visible and popular, like I was maybe one of
the top five best known activist or racial justice voices,
and I was targeted by a right wing activist who
(17:13):
was known for blocking the vaccination clinics at Dodger Stadium,
specifically because I was visible, because I was trans, and
so she went for me and posted and said that
I was a transgender individual who was in the women's
spa of we Spa and I was sexually harassing people,
(17:34):
and that went viral on social media. It was covered
on Fox News for a week. I was getting constant
death threats, and you know, I was dogs. It was
pretty durable, especially because I was not that person in
the spa and I was only best picked up because
I was picked up for my visibility. My response to
(17:57):
that was I didn't immediately say yeah, I was me,
It wasn't me, leave me alone, Leave me alone. I
didn't do that because I knew that if I said that,
then they would just pick and attack some other transperson. Yeah,
and you know, I know that like the shit that
the that the right wing machine and acts, if it
(18:19):
happens to one of us, it can happen tral that's end,
it likely will.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Yeah, And I mean I think the thing that it
reminds me the most. Something we've also covered on the
This is one of the problems with talking about this.
It's like doing this for so long that like there's
very few things that I could say that I can't
be Like, I've said this on the show before, but
we spent a lot of time, petically, Garrison spend a
lot of time covering the way that every time there's
a mass shooter, the right immediately just like picks a
(18:43):
random transperson and goes it was this person. Yeah, and
this reminds me a lot of the same thing, although
this is a more targeted, like we've invented a fake
controversy about a trans person, and then we're going to
like also just pick a random famous trand well not
even famous, but like a random trans person that we
know about and don't like.
Speaker 1 (19:02):
It's my understanding that this twenty twenty one, we spaw
a controversy that I was targeted for became something of
a right wing playbook. Yep. It was after that that
they started saying, oh, this and that person's trans, and
before that they didn't have a real moral panic around
trans people unless you look all the way back to
(19:24):
the North Carolina South Carolina bathroom man.
Speaker 2 (19:28):
Yeah, I mean, I think I think there's an interesting
intermediary thing too, where so my friend Vicky ashterwhile who
depending on when this episode comes out, you'll you'll be
hearing from either right before this episode or right after.
I had another version of this where she wrote a
book called In Defensive Looting. It came out in twenty
twenty and just for like three months became all the
(19:52):
rest we really two months like became the like the
giant figure with which everyone who didn't like the uprising
was just like taking it out, so like like sitting
in Congress, people were like denouncing this book that you wrote.
Every base Remdia outlet like specifically had their editorial people
going like, this book is evil, Vicky's evil. And I
(20:12):
think that was also like this moment of deep connection
between the backlash of the uprisings and the anti trans
uprisings because the people who you know, are trying to
maintain a white supremacist gender system like intimately themselves, even
if they don't understand it on a theoretical level, understand
that they're that these things are preserving the same systems
(20:33):
of violence, and so they picked us as sort of
like the wedge point to to break this thing apart.
And I think with Vicky, they hadn't really figured out
how to do it, and I think it was like
specifically your case, the the we spa, like with you
being put in as the figure of the we spase,
this is where they like actually really figured out how
(20:53):
to do the whole thing. And yeah, there's just something
really bleak about both how effective it was and the
fact that it's like these are just people I don't know,
Like this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of
like astract figures. It's just like, yeah, people I'm having
conversations with are how.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
They did this just I don't know. I wish I
had more and elsis but but yeah, I think that
trends people like to to Greater America, to most to
a lot of America, I'll say, are a.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
Sensational you know people people imagine chicks with dicks and
dudes with dudes without dicks, and so I think that's
really exciting for a lot of people, you know, for
better or for worse.
Speaker 1 (21:40):
I think for for worse. But yeah, I think that's
just like people and their bodies, right, Like you know,
I guess some people walk around think all the time
about other people's crotches. Uh, I'm not going to say
that's a bad thing. Crush the first of your scene,
you know.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
But on the other hand, right, there's this there's this
aspect of which, like you know, there's a seris socialism,
but then there's also the experience of being a trans
person is like I too am trying to find a
way to not pay rent. Like that's like I don't know.
Speaker 1 (22:14):
Yeah, so back to back to we SPA. Yeah, that
was a pretty terrible experience for me. And I'm not
going to lie about it now. I I'm glad that
I stood up for for myself. I'm glad I stood
up for trans people that I didn't pass the buck.
It was also really difficult and traumatic, and I didn't
(22:34):
appreciate the death threats. I didn't appreciate and docs and
you know, people have come after me my my whole life,
like I present I think just naturally physically, like I
present as being gender queer, like I've been pretty like
fearing like looking femme my entire life. That had nothing
to do with my internal identity. I've been weird my
(22:57):
entire life. I've perpetually been curious and provocative and interested
in things that were provocative, and so I've been harassed
my whole life. However, until we SPA and to experience
the strangers by the hundreds saying that they're gonna hunt
me down and fucking shoot me. Yeah, I never know
if someone will recognize me when I'm out and be like, hey, buddy,
(23:21):
I know you.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah, And it's one of these things where like the
more of a target on you, the more likely it
is to happen. And even people who don't have targets
on them, like I know people you know who've never
experienced anything like this that have still just like had
attacks on them, and it's fucking terrifying. It is an
absolutely terrible way to have to live in, a terrible
sort of thing to have to experience, especially is it's
(23:45):
just being intensifying.
Speaker 1 (23:47):
So yeah, that was That was twenty to twenty one,
and that changed me. That experience of being targeted and
just picked on out of the freaking blue. That changed
me as an artist. And at the same time it
also firmly established me as a sort of celebrity. And
I want to speak to that because there's different tiers
(24:07):
of celebrity, you know. At that yes, at the at
the top because the tier that's known as I get
a Christmas card from Tom Cruise every year, and that's
an actual thing, and that's the A list. And you
know you're on the A list because Tom Cruise since
(24:27):
your Christmas card. And at the bottom is me, who's
been in mass media many times now but has none
of the benefits.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
You know, I make very little money as an artist,
and I don't have an entourage. I can tour and
I play play some shows and you know, some of
them are sold out. I'm playing the show in LA
that's sold out, But I'm not playing large venues. No.
I maybe play like, you know, three hundred five hundred
capacity tops, and most place I play are like small clubs,
(24:59):
like one hundred and fifty years. So yeah, and so
I don't I don't have the protection that most celebrities
inherently have. I don't have book deals, I don't have
movie deals. I don't even have an AGA. I don't
even have a record label. Yeah. So I'm the freaking
D tier. I'm the D tier, and they're coming after me.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
Yeah, And it's I mean, and that's the thing about
the sort of like this status of like niche d
tier internet micro celebrity is like I don't like, I
feel like I got the best possible version of it,
where like I got a job that pays slightly I
think I might have hit. No, I'm still I'm still
below the median salary of assists man in the U,
but I'm approaching it, getting closer every year, every union fight,
(25:48):
we approach median.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Sis man salaries.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
But like, yeah, the situation I got is effectively the
equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right, Like this is
about the best you could possibly hope for if you're
a transperson you get famous, Like yeah, I mean like
I get that threats too, right, Like nothing anywhere near
the scale that you get, And mostly what happens is
like I mean, like single digit numbers of trans people
(26:13):
in the US have the kind of protection that actual
celebrity gives you and everyone else. Celebrity is just another
It's just a giant target painted on you. And yes,
you have none of the benefits and all of the
sort of Hey, here is one hundred and fifty million
people who absolutely hate you and who've been primed and
targeted like specifically at you.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
Yeah, it's something that I wonder about, like, why why
would they do something like this? Why would Fox News
we talk about me? Why would the founder of the
Proud Boys, Gavin mckinnis that old video about me. Bad
Boys is a terrorist group if you don't now listener
to ever recognized as a terrorist group by Canada. Not here,
(26:56):
because like, we're just cool with that shit here, white
supremacist terrorist group. So why me? Why why would a
congress person come after me? And my own hypothesis is
that they punched down because they secretly believe that they
(27:17):
themselves are weak and attacking me, attacking people like me,
is a fight that they can win. And my view
is that it's not a fight that they can win
because they've already lost. They're trying to get power in small,
small ways and false ways, in my opinion, and they're
(27:38):
trying to get money. First of all, they want money,
you know, they want their views, they want their donations,
and that's the entire top of the pyramid for them
and for me though, I'm a fucking artist, and power
is something that I've always been developing because I've sought
to know myself. I've sought to understand who I am
(28:00):
and why and that extends to myself as a queer person,
to come to understand myself who I am as a
queer person. That's not something they'll ever have. So I've
already fucking won. And same with all the other queer
people that are under attack, all your other dcer queer
celebrities out there, we fucking won hopefully well.
Speaker 2 (28:24):
And I think part of this is also like the
reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to
stop the tide from coming in. And they saw how
far in the tide had already come, and now they're
trying to like dam off the tide and you know,
like probably it's not going to work. But the only
(28:45):
way that it can is if everyone just like sits
here does nothing and let's to just keep building and
building and building more walls. It's it's something that is
within our power to resist. We just have to actually
do it, right. You have to actually organize, you to
talk to the people around you, you have to go
get them to do things to resist this. And if
we do, yeah, we like the things that we've already won,
(29:07):
the things that we are going to win are going
to stick. But if not, like things are going to
get really really bad really quickly. And yeah, and speaking
of things getting very bad, very quickly, Carris some more
ats before we get back to things getting wars. We
(29:32):
are back. Yeah, you've been specifically targeted by a city
in US Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who is the person who
actually I don't know if we talked about the bathroom
stuff here yet, but she's the sort of person behind
an attempt to get trans people to not be able
to use the bathroom Capitol Hill. She's become a leading
(29:52):
anti trans figure in Congress. Literally every single thing that
she tweets about is about trans women and how they
to be put in men's jails, which is just an
incredibly cynical ploy to make a bunch of people get
horribly raped and killed, which is one of the predominant
things that happens when we get put in ben's prisons.
(30:13):
And she specifically came after years, you want to talk
about how that happened and the latest sort of a
congress woman tweets and a fucking social media company does
their bidding.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
Yeah, so, right at the end of twenty twenty four,
I think it was on December twenty eighth, I was
docked by a right wing control nazi that has doxed
multiple friends of mine, the activist friends, artist friends, and
(30:46):
they pointed out in a tweet how my art was
on YouTube, specifically my music videos were on YouTube calling
for violence and how I was an evil trans person,
and they added like at symbol YouTube and said that
these videos are in violation of your terms of service?
(31:08):
Why are they still up? And Nancy May saw that
because if you look at her Twitter, it's all just
just stocks and trans people and perpetual like rage bait
about the queer menace, the trans menace, and so she
saw that, retweeted and said, YouTube, this squarly violates your
(31:28):
terms of service. Why haven't you done anything? And then
immediately following that, my videos were taken down, the ones
that were mentioned in these tweets. And as I said before,
some one of these videos, what was that of my
little problem that's been up for seven years?
Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, for a long time.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
Yeah. And YouTube terms of service they're very clear, and
I do my best to stay within YouTube terms of
service so my work doesn't get taken down. And they
state that stuff like violence, minimal nudity that is allowed
within the context of art, within the context of music videos,
(32:14):
and so my videos, you know, they weren't designed to
This is from the terms of service. They weren't designed
to sexually titillate or gratify. That's exactly what it says
in the in the terms. Now they weren't recreations of
real life violence, and they weren't real life violence, but
they were still they were still removed at the behest
(32:36):
at the easy click press of Nancy Mace.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Yeah, And I think there's there's a couple of things
going on here, one of which is, you know, so
we've seen this with Facebook in the last I guess
when this comes out, it'll be like a week ago.
But you know, Facebook has in stated policies that allow
you to basically stay slurs against queer people. Allowed you
to call core people mental illnesses and stuff like that
that's very specifically you can only do to queer people.
(33:02):
You can't do it to anyone else. And I think
there's this sort of trend here of I don't know
with Facebook. I wouldn't say that it's like compliance with
the sort of new Trump regime, because like this is
just your Facebook is right, like they did hing the genocide,
like the genocide into Gray too. That was also a
Facebook thing. So they've always just been evil and they
(33:23):
have been sort of looking for the excuse that they
need to like drop the hammer on us. But I
think YouTube, to some extent to what we're seeing right
now is this kind of like mask coming off moment
where people are realizing that with Trump and power, they
can just drop the hammer on a queer artist because specifically,
like on a trans artist, because now they have this
(33:44):
sort of like backing to do this stuff, and the
right has you know, realized that they can feel like YouTube,
take this video down and they'll do it. And that's
a really terrifying precedence in a lot of ways. And
also it's very you know, I was like, yeah, obviously,
because a point of a hypocrisy does nothing. But like,
I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of
(34:08):
censorship than a member of the government says that something
should be taken down and it's taken down.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
It's like, it's really sound. You know. It makes me
kind of afraid, honestly, because you know, before I was
a victim of a moral panic, and now my work
is effectively being disappeared with little fanfare, So you know,
(34:33):
what's what's going to happen next? For what Well, we
see just made invisible and unseen. And I know that
in this country, I have freedom of speech, but that's
that's really bullshit. We all know that, Like, I'm not
going to reach many people if I stand on a
street corner at the park and yell at people. What
matters nowadays is the freedom of reach that these social
(34:53):
media platforms control, that are themselves controlled now by the
by the Republican Party. And what happens when our freedom
of reach is annihilated and then suddenly trans people are
actually invisible. We're very close to that. I think Fancy
proved that.
Speaker 2 (35:13):
Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first
step for how you destroy a people. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:19):
Art, art is perhaps the loudest way a person can speak,
and I know that's why she came after my art.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen.
And then like the next tweet is again a sitting
member of the US government saying that trans women should
be put in Ben's prisons, and it's like, okay, one
of these is considered violence by sort of the media machine,
and one of them isn't.
Speaker 1 (35:45):
Yeah, does she even actually do work for the people
of South Carolina? Like I saw. All she does is
just like start shit with trans people, like she says,
another lousy politician trying to be an entertainer, And she says,
the a knockoff product of a bootleg Trump, That's what
she is. And she's not even good at her fucking politics.
(36:07):
Like she's tried to get this bathroom band for disallowing
trans people to use a bathroom at the US Capitol,
and her own freaking party kicked the bill out of
the out of the bylaws for this year, so she
couldn't even get that. And yeah, so I guess she
thinks you can get a get a win by harassing me,
(36:28):
harassing my art. Yeah, try to get people to come
after me.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
You know, these people are not as powerful as they
want you to believe, right, A lot of their stuff
just fails. But they will only fail if people are
willing to resist and people are willing to stop them.
And that's the thing that's needed in this moment. Is
organization is you know, like is organization, It is action,
It is it is now. It is now the time
(36:54):
to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being like,
should I be organizing a U? Should I be like
setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations. It's like, yeah,
it's time, It's time to go, because otherwise, you know,
and I think this is something that like every trans
person now understands intimately, and I think most people don't.
Which is that right now it's us, But you know,
(37:19):
in two years, assuming we're all still alive, there's a
very good chance that it's going to be you like
showing up on this show because a fucking congress person
is deliberately interviewing to destroy your life. And I would
rather we had stopped this before it got to any
of us. But they're going to come for you too
unless we stop them. Thank you so much for coming
(37:39):
on the show. And where can people find you and
find your art? And yeah, support you?
Speaker 1 (37:45):
Yeah, thanks for having me. May I really like talking
with you. It's been very good and Listaris. You can
find my work on Spotify. You can also check out
my website at precious Child dot and please sign up
for my mailing list there as well. That is the
best and best direct way for me to stay in
(38:07):
touch with my friends and fans. I'm most a precious
child on Instagram, on TikTok, i am the last precious child.
I also will be doing live shows this spring and
summer in the US, and so follow me on my
website and on social media to stay up to date
on that and come say hi in person.
Speaker 2 (38:29):
Hell yeah, we will have links to all of that
in the description, So yeah, go check it out and
resist the creep of fascism.
Speaker 1 (38:41):
That's one thing I want to add about I said
earlier about personal power and how I have to develop
plan personal power by getting sick down myself. I want
to toil you trans people out there, you queer people
and your allies. That first thing is getting to know yourself,
and then next thing is like, fuck these fucking laws,
(39:01):
Fuck these fucking lall makers. Good to know each other
and strengthen our bonds with each other, because those are
bigger than any type of oppressive laws they may put
upon us. And it's only by the strength that we
develop with each other, within each other that we will persevere.
(39:23):
It could happen.
Speaker 3 (39:24):
Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more
podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia. Dot
com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. We can now find
sources for it could happen here, listed directly in episode descriptions.
Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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