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February 2, 2023 39 mins

Mia, James, and Gare discuss the increasing power of American gender bureaucrats and the danger they pose to trans people.

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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome. Did it could happen? Here? A podcast that's being
done for the first time and not the second time
because we had bike problems. We did not just record
a very funny intro that is now completely lost. Yeah,
you'll you'll you'll never hear it. You'll you'll never you
never know what great fun we had. The joy was
in the creation. They're not none in this sharing Yeah, process,

(00:28):
not an event structure, etcetera, etcetera. So I'm I'm Mia,
I'm a I'm gonna doing this episode. Also Garrison, this here,
hello Hi, and also James, Hi, I'm recording. So we're
good now. Yet the good news is stunning Lee, as
as as as much as it seems we are now
more prepared to record this episode when we're last time.

(00:51):
So yeah, well what are we? What are we? What
are we talking about? We we were? We are talking
about the age of the genter bureaucrat. So as as
people are probably aware, there is a raft of anti
trans bill sweeping through state legislatures um. The latest of
these bills to pass as a time of recording is
the bill in Utah which is banned miners from getting
gender affirming care like hormone therapy, hormone blockers, and any

(01:14):
kind of gender affirming surgery for anyone who's not already
receiving them. Does Does the Utah one also banned like
therapy like talk therapy. No, but they're there, so on
the one hand, doesn't band talk therapy. On the other hand,
there's a provision in there that I think might also
suggest that people do conversion therapy. So that's great. Um

(01:35):
it fucking sucks. Ass uh yeah, kid, kids are going
to die because of this bill. The people who are
writing and signing these bills know that kids are going
to die. We know this because Utah's Governor, Spencer Cox,
who is the guy who signed the bill, vetoed an
earlier ban on trans athletes participating in school sports, specifically
signing the risk of suicide. So she knows this is

(01:55):
going to kill kids. He signs this anyways, and we
are now living in what I call the age of
the gender beercrat um. We're gonna spend We're gonna have
another episode later on where we spend a lot of
time going through all of the individual bills and the
stuff Trump has been saying about this. Because Jesus Christ
pretty pretty pretty grim stuff that they're I mean, on

(02:17):
the one hand, making making trains people out to be
the boogeyman who did not work in their favor greatly
in the midterms. But it seems like they're not trying
to They're not trying to change their their tactics here.
They are still going all in based on Trump's speech
from a few days ago of of of using the
using the transgender menace as the as the greatest threats

(02:39):
to America and the and the and the nuclear family.
So we'll see how that goes for them, like electorally,
but it's pretty bad rhetoric to see flying around. I
think they it does really well with the people who
who allowed and like like you often see this in
like primaries, right, like people pushed to the limits of
their party, because that plays well with the most politicized people.

(02:59):
And for sure, if you're going to a Trump rally
like three years after he got kicked out, yeah you
are also bigot. Yeah. But before we do that, I
I want to, before we actually really do a NEPs
on this, I want to take a look at the
sort of bureaucratic grounding for this entire thing. And to
do that we need to look at gender bureaucrats and

(03:19):
the American gender bureaucracy. So I'm going to cite my
sources a bit and say that I stole this from
a incredibly unlikely source, which is the Bowist review of
Shrek to what wait stop, never speak those words again.
This is the Mallist review of Strek two. Is is

(03:40):
one of the three great sort of text of American maoism.
There's this one, there's Torgeable Attractive People's War the Florida Everglades,
and then there's that time the the RCP got into
a fight with the PSL. They're both trying to grab
each other's signs. Amazing, amazing stuff. But unfortunately, you know,
having having come up with the term gender bureaucrat, which
is incredibly useful their maoists, so that they're constitutionally and

(04:03):
politically just unable to understand what a bureaucrat is. So
I have now stolen this term and I'm using it
for other purposes. Reappropriate. No, it's stealing their mauists us.
It's never wrong to steal from maoists. Okay, fine, So
all right, it's getting back sort of more serious stuff

(04:24):
to understand what this is. I want to talk about
sort of the term assigned gender at birth. Um, this
used to be a like, I used to be fairly
common kind of in in in circles to like refer
to people as like a MAB or a FABS, like
a side mail at birth or assigned female at birth.
And it's a it kind of sucks as the term.
It's been replaced by other stuff. But I think there's

(04:46):
something important here, which is I want to go back
and look at the assigned part, and I want to
I want to look at the scifically the part about
the gender being assigned, because I think there's something that
gets lost in sort of popular discussions of this, which
is that when when people think about like the term
like the assignment of gender, right, they think about it
as something that's created socially. Right. They think about it

(05:06):
as you know, people being like pressured to perform one
kind of gender or another by the people around them,
sort of by their families, by just like people walking
down the street. And this is all true, but there's
also something else going on here. And that's something else
going on here is we need to ask ourselves when
we talk about someone's gender being assigned who is it
being assigned by? Because this is an actual specific person, right,

(05:31):
the person who actually assigns your gender is a doctor
or sometimes a nurse or a midwife. And this person
is the first gender bureaucrat. They're the first gender breacrat
because they are the person who sits down and puts
down what your gender is on a form. Now, Okay,
you may be asking yourself, right, Mia, why should anyone

(05:52):
care that your gender is now on a piece of paper? Well,
because it also maybe like they're they're also mainly, at
least now in like a like a medical scientific sense,
it's mainly like, oh, what parts do you have? Um,
and then using those parts as as a carryover for
gender as it's been modeled after ever since we stopped

(06:14):
dressing boys and girls and dresses and all the same clothing. Yeah,
and and well we'll get into sort of like how
this has sort of changed over time. But okay, so
to understand why this actually matters, I think what we
need to talk about what bureaucracy actually is, because this
is a thing that used to be fairly common talk
about on the left, and then people have stopped doing
over the past maybe like half decade. The anthropologist David

(06:37):
Graeber wrote extensively about bureaucracy throughout his career. Probably his
most famous book is one of his later worst, called
Bullshit Jobs. But I want to go back to an
earlier thing that he wrote, called The Utopia of Rules.
I'm gonna'm gonna I'm gonna read a little bit of
one of the first sections of it. Bureaucratic knowledge is
all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring

(06:59):
all the dutialties of real life existence and reducing everything
to preconceive mechanical or statistical formula. Whether it's a matter
of forms, rural statistics, or questionnaires, it is always a
matter of simplification. Typically, it's not very different from the
boss who walks into the kitchen to make an arbitrary
snap pocition as to what went wrong. In either case,

(07:20):
it is a matter of applying very simple, pre existing
templates to complex and often ambiguous situations. The result often
leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the
impression that they are dealing with people who have, for
some arbitrary reason, decided to put on a set of
glasses that only allows them to see two percent of
what's in front of them. So, you know, we we

(07:41):
can see some of the the core aspects of bureaucracy here, right.
Bureaucracy inherently is an act of simplification. Um because of
sort of the tech like literally the technical systems of
what a bureaucracy is, and because of how it how
it stores information, how it moves information around, it can
only see the world in incredibly sort of simplified terms. Yeah,
it has to like abstract these things and make assumptions

(08:03):
based off those abstractions in order to have any type
of functionality. Yeah, so so great. Greb later says that
like this, you know, Okay, on the one hand, like
the sort of simplification and model making that goes on
into bureaucracy can be really really frustrating when you have
to interact with it. But on the other hand, you know,
so the reduction of the complex to the simple, it's

(08:23):
not just you know, a thing that's inherently evil in
its in and of itself. It's the basis of all
thoughts because you know, like we we we actually can't
and like in and our ourselves process the world by
immediately holding in our minds all of the information at
one time. Right, the way we understand the world is
simplfications and models. Yeah, and we we it's pattern recognition,

(08:44):
recreating recursive spot loops that give us the very concept
of meaning. And like that's how we know what words are. Yeah,
and so true. You know, you can you can, you
can look it's it's also possible to take a lot
of data and make sense out of it. And this
is this is this is a field called economics marketing. Yeah,

(09:08):
but yeah, you know, okay, so it's it's this is
also the basis of all social theory, right, Like, like
social theory is about taking a bunch of incredibly complicated
like in messy relationships and just statistical stuff and just
the noise of people doing doing things in everyday lives
and trying to establish sort of like ways of understanding them.
And you know, this in some sense is a kind
of violence, right, It's it's a violence of simplification. But

(09:32):
on the other hand, you know, the violence are during
to reality here bears more resemble to sort of like
Bacunian's creative destruction. Right, You're you know, you're imposing a
kind of violence on reality, you know, in in simplifying
and destroying a bunch of aspects of it so you
can understand just like one part of it at a time.
But you know this, this is a useful thing, right,
It's how we think, like we we literally couldn't do
anything without it. But as Graver puts it, the problem

(09:55):
of right the problems arise at the moment that violence
is no longer better oracle here, let me turn from
imaginary cops to real ones. Jim Cooper, a former l
A p D officer turned sociologist, has observed at the
overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or
otherwise brutalized by police turned out to be innocent of
any crime. Cops don't beat up burglars, he writes. The reason,

(10:18):
he explained, is simple. The one thing most guaranteed to
provoke a violent reaction from police is a challenge to
their right to as he puts it, defined the situation.
That is to say, yeah, that that that perfectly describes
any any physical interaction with police like this is one
of the things I like about Greater because I mean,
this is this is something that I noticed and I

(10:39):
was in academia. Is it is very very easy to
tell who, like when you're reading a theorist social theorist
talking about stuff like who has been to your gas
before it? Who hasn't. Yeah, I'm always reminded when we
talk about like academics who have a real life of
that picture of Edwards said throwing stones. Yeah, most based

(11:01):
academic thing anyone his death and like graver, graver, I
think I think it's been ture gas on five continents
or something like that, Like he's gotten around, He's used
on a lot of stuff. Yeah, it is. It is
always nice whenever you can whenever these types of theorists
who like, you know, they often will philosophize about like
the nature of power, in the nature of the state,

(11:22):
and sometimes it can get a little bit wishy washy,
and it's nice when there's people who do that. Also,
you know, like the material like the material reality of
like power and how that yeah like how how how
like the how like the philosophy of power transfers over
to street politics is always always an interesting difference to
to compare compare various theory too. In I was teaching

(11:47):
a world history course and obviously it's remote because of
a pandemic. Right, Um, so, like we would just log
in in the morning and like fully aware that I
had seen and been tear gassed with some of my
students a night before. I've just discussed like how the
state has a monopoly on violence. People are gonna Yeah,
all the fucking lines up. It's like you've got a
massive bruise again. Yeah, it was. It was very instructive

(12:10):
and everyone should do it in their history classes. Yeah, okay,
So I'm gonna keep reading from this quote because there's
a couple more things I want. I want to get
out of this. So okay, So you know he's talking
about how, like you, you get a violent reaction from
challenging their right to define the situation. That is to say, no,
this isn't a possible crime situation. This is a citizen
who pays your salary of walking his dog situation. So

(12:32):
shove off. Let alone the invariably disastrous. Wait, why are
you handcuffing that guy? He didn't do anything. It's talking
back above all that inspires beat downs and means challenging
whatever administrative rubric and orderly a disorderly crowd, a properly
or improperly registered vehicle has been applied by the officers
discretionary judgments. The police truncheon is precisely the point where

(12:57):
the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and
it's monopoly on coercive force come together. It only makes
sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost
on a tacks on those who insist on alternative schemas
or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts John
Page's famous definition of mature intelligence is the ability to

(13:20):
coordinate between multiple perspectives or multiple or possible perspectives, one
can see here precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment
it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity. Yeah,
it's it is this weird, like childlike sense that is
a that is an interesting combination of thoughts. That's a

(13:42):
fantastic I love it. I like literally read reading this
book is like one of the things that really sort
of like committed me to anarchism because you know, like
it's it's a it's a book that actually takes violence seriously,
and while talking about bureaucracy with something that really doesn't.
I don't know. It's a good critique, and we kind

(14:03):
of have lost it over the years. I feel like
we've gotten into arguments about this sort of thing when
discussing the usefulness of like a Fuco's theories of power
and like and like how power functions. You've definitely brought
up this passage before talking about how the extent of
that is always is always measured by where the truncheon
is hitting on, like the actual street level. Yeah, but

(14:26):
you know, okay, Graber isn't writing about gender here really, right,
He's he's mostly writing about sort of direct police violence.
Although I mean it is worth noting that like all
of the stuff that he's writing is informed by sort
of like like by by actually specifically by by actual
critical race theory and by sort of like uh like
feminder standpoints theory stuff. Um, but you know, okay, if

(14:48):
if if you, if you, if you look back at
this right and you look back at sort of you know,
the point at which the state's bureaucratic impetue imperative for
imposing simple administrative ski seams and the monopoly and force
come together, or specifically the parts that are about right, Like,
the way you get a violent reaction is by being
something that being something that a bereacrat thinks you're not. Yeah,

(15:12):
that is it's challenging their their version of reality. It's
the challenge. It's challenging the validity of their perception of reality. Yeah.
And you know, and if you think about this about
five seconds, if you're a transperson, that's not good because someone,
a bureaucrat, has already assigned you a gender at birth

(15:33):
and if you're not that gender, things are going to
get really bad really quickly. Well, do you know what
bureaucracies are actually worthwhile and things that you should definitely
consider greatly is all of the breaucracies that support the
products and services that that fund this podcast. Well, I

(15:59):
hope you enjoy your your your your five new bars
of gold. Thank you for supporting the show. Um, we
are back. Uh, let's talk about gender and the bureaucracy
that seeks to contain it violence. So you know, if
if if you are, for example, intersects the point at
which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema

(16:21):
and it's monopoly on course, if force comes together is
on the operating table of the hospital where you're born. Um,
you know, first you a doctor assigns you a fucking gender,
which is never intersects by the way. The doctor just
decides whether you're male or female, and then you know,
puts that gender und your birth certificate. Um, it's technically
possible in some places to get it changed to intersect

(16:42):
later in life. But when I say it's technically possible,
I there might even more people who have done it.
The first person who we know ever change their gender
to intersect did it in So yeah, I'm sure there
were I mean, pre bureauqucy indigenous societies. I know that, yes, yeah,
but this is this is yeah, this is yeah. I

(17:02):
mean like yeah, like and and this is like the
way that like we treat intersext people also has gotten worse.
Like yeah, and we're gonna get into this, but it's
like it's like, you know, this is a very like
it's a very obvious thing where there's clearly more than
two genders. And how how society reacts to that, I

(17:23):
think says you know, A it's it's an enormous sort
of like it's something enormously impact intersect people, right, like
you know, you have like an incredible amount of violence
that has flicted onto them. And then secondly, the way
intersext people is dealt with, it's something that reveals a
lot about how this society is going to look at

(17:44):
gender and how society is going to look at the
enforcement of gender. I think on the point of how
it's in a lot of ways, the treatment of intertext
people has gotten has gotten worse in the past like
a few years. I feel like as the bureaucracy grows,
the amount of violence that is necessary to maintain it
also grows, and the bigger any any small thing threatens

(18:08):
the validity of the entire bureaucracy. So they have to
come down hard on anything that that is that is
like deviant from that because they need to maintain the
validity of the system that they have built. I think
that's definitely an aspect. And the other thing that's really
really bad is that, you know, we're going to talk
about bore this more a bit later, but like the

(18:28):
actual capacity of the bureaucracy to enforce this stuff has
increased so dramatically even in the last fifty years. It
is like like the the u S is a if
to someone to someone living in eight nine, right, the
modern US is an incomprehensibly bureaucratic society. It is like
like it may even like the even like the like

(18:49):
you know, like like some people like yeah, like even
like the most sort of like totalitarian style and is
bureaucrat like looks at the u s and it's like,
what the funk guys, you guys are taking taking bureaucracy
too far? Like the surveillance capacities definitely would like you
would have loved that well, to to be to be fair,
to be fair, the East Germans did really well with
what they had, but I think it's really so. I

(19:11):
think also just in terms of how surveillance impacts the
way you're able to do gender when you're well and
when you're getting targeted advertisements for stuff based on your
Internet searches, they're like that that that's one side of it,
and there's other sides of it in terms of like,
you know, people people seeking to make like different gender
presentations illegal, how the how how that type of surveillance

(19:33):
will eventually lead into pretty pretty druycon Ian well and
and I think I think in a lot of ways,
like the violence that has done to intersects kids is
sort of it's is one of the sort of origin
points of this. Right Um. I I do actually want
I want to sort of get into what what this
is a little bit um since the nice in sixties

(19:53):
and again that what I'm saying this like this stuff
is kind of recent, right um, doctors have started commonly
performing non consensual surgery and intersex kids to force them
to conform to a gender. Um, here's so much two
thousand and thirteen report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur
on Torture that's sited by Human Rights Watch. Children who
are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to

(20:16):
irreversible sex assignments, involuntary sterilization, involuntary genital normalization, surgery performed
without their informed consent or that of the parents in
an attempt quote, in an attempt to fix their sex,
leaving them with permanent, permanent, irreversible infertility and causing severe
mental suffering. And this is fucking horrible. It happens, it's

(20:40):
all the time, and on all of the people who
write these fucking laws that are like giving giving someone
gender affirming care is like mutilating them. Specifically carve out
sections so that doctors can keep sucking doing this intersex kids,
and it's horrible. It's really interesting how like, um, so
often the sports field is a terrain where they kind
of gets hashed out or like this brutality happens for

(21:03):
the first time, Like the sports governing authorities have been
fucking brutalizing intersect athletes for fifty years now, and every
time it's because yeah, they'll and they'll they'll put forth
an argument and then lose in court most of the
time because they'll they'll seek to advance like a very
narrow definition of gender based on chromosomeality or something or

(21:26):
testosterone levels or something, and then demonstrably this binary doesn't exist, right,
and then they'll lose, and they'll respond to losing by
fucking destroying that person. Yeah, it's there are plenty of
cases people can confined in history of that happening, and yeah,
it's sucked out. And I think the more I've been
thinking about this, the more I think that the sort

(21:47):
of like that a lot of what turfism is is
this kind of like it's it's attempting to take the
bureaucratic categories as literal truth but that doesn't work. It
doesn't It doesn't actually work on a sort of on
a scientific level or on a sort of more philosophical level,
because again, what what what what that sort of bureaucratic
assignment is is there is a radical simplification of reality

(22:09):
that destroys it destroys reality itself in order to create
a sort of like an m or and on a page.
And when you when you try to go back into
the real world that it doesn't work. It only works
when you can enforce it with violence. Test do be
loving to enforce gender with violence? Yeah? And you know,
I mean this is this entire thing is sort of

(22:30):
this this is the basis of the sort of of
the of the American gender bureaucracy. Right. It's inherently violent.
It's it's not just sort of a procedure for recording
what your gender is. It is it always sort of
has been, and is increasingly more so now becoming a
system that imposes it imposes a gender on you. Um,
you know, and there's also a lot of ways that

(22:52):
this bureacracy you gets imposed on you that are you know,
less extreme. You know, if if if we go back
to the question of like, who are us signed a
gender for? Right? You're signed a gender for the state,
And you know, almost everything in your life depends on
these bureaucratic documents, because that's how the state understands you
as a person by by these bureacract documents, like specifically
birth certificates, like driver's licenses, social Security cards, and sports

(23:16):
ination papers. Yeah, I mean, like here here, here's the
American Bar Association talking about birth certificates. They are so
common that we might even overlook their significance. In the
United States, birth certificates serve as a proof of an
individual's age, citizenship status, and identity. They are necessary to
obtain social security, apply for a passport, in roll in schools,

(23:37):
get a driver's license, gain employment, or apply for other benefits.
Humanitarian Desmond too to describe the birth certificate as quote
a small paper, but it actually establishes who you are
and gives access to the rights and privileges and the
obligations of citizenship, you know, And I think that doesmen
too two as being enormously optimistic about sort of what

(23:58):
it means to be seen by the state here, because
the other thing that it does is it exposes you
to the state's violence in a way where you know
it now the state like this is this is the
mechanism with you which it now knows who you are,
so it is not having one like yeah, it's when
the soft sids try to not have birthtificates for their children,

(24:19):
gets real violent and this and this is the thing.
And one of one of the things hear about this
is that like, you know, okay, you used to be
able to, like get away with not having birth certificates, right,
like a lot of a lot of Americans used not
to used to like not. But one of one of
the things that happens over the course of World War
two is there's this enormous expansion in the state's bureaucratic capacity.

(24:39):
And there's an expansion the state's bureacratic capacity because it
has to you know, it has to go to war.
But simultaneously this and this is something that didn't have
to happen but did, is that you get the army
and you get employers starting to ask people's birthtificates. But
if people don't have them, because like I don't know,
I was, why why the fund do I need a
record of me being born? Right? Like this is this
this is only this is an every thing you need.
It's only a thing that's state needs. Yeah, it's interesting

(25:03):
to look at, Like I was thinking about how this
is also where the kind of front line of colonialism happens,
like the enforcement of a binary gender on indigenous people.
Like you can look at specific individuals um osh tissues.
One of them, they were a crow person in the
cronation who like for for the United States as a
scout what's what's called bad ay and then was like

(25:25):
in later life kind of forced to conform to a
binary gender with which they didn't identify and they hadn't
lived that way and because they had to, having being
assigned identity papers to live on a reservation, you have
to take one of the fucking boxes. Yeah, and you know,
and the thing about those sucking boxes, right is you know,
even like to this day, there are a lot of

(25:47):
states where you can't change your gender, like on on
you can't change what doesn't the card. You just can't.
And you know, if they've assigned you a gender that's
not your gender, then well tough luck. They have they
have an up, they have a monopoly and a legitimate
use of force. And you don't you know there's other
stage where you need a fucking court order saying that
you've had surgery in order to get the fucking you know,

(26:09):
in order to change your bureaucratic person. And again the
reason for this is and I kind of emphasize this enough,
fuck you. That is that. That is that, that is
the reason for this. Um, yeah, I want to I
want to go back also to you know, look to
to look a bit more about sort of bureaucratic effects. Um,
I'm gonna read from a n triple epiece about transguy

(26:29):
in the UK and the fifties. From the start, the
sensensialized press coverage or ferguson this transition focused on some
surprisingly quote tition elements. Quote change of sex puts them
in a different employment category with a raisin salary, reported
one newspaper, underscoring the fact that being reclassified as male
in the eyes of his employer the British government tied

(26:50):
into a complex network of gendered economic and labor discrimination.
In fact, not only did his pay change, but his
whole job category changed, even though he was doing exactly
the same work under the same conditions. This was because
women workers were simply were not simply paid less, but
also kept in feminized job grades in the Civil Service,
despite the government's claims that service was a meritocracy. A question,

(27:14):
a question raised in Parliament by an MP who had
heard about Ferguson, demanded to know what form and number
of proofs other than a mirror announcement by the subject
they miss endered them a couple of times. All right,
it is required before a female quote like like civil Survey,

(27:34):
is permitted to obtain a higher salary in a different
employment category owing to a change in sex. By gaining
a quote official change, Jonathan Ferguson suddenly transformed himself, suddenly
suddenly transformed into chief Experimental Officer with a male breadwinner
salary large enough to support a family, rather than a
woman's lower wage that was expected to be supplements mental

(27:56):
to a family's earnings. For obvious reasons, noted the Treasury,
we should not have to say anything which would have
led to a request for the mail pay rate to
be applied from his data's entry to the Civil Service.
In other words, the Treasury wanted to ensure for that
Ferguson did not try to claim back wages in Turf
Island always been very normal, um, and there's I would

(28:18):
read a little bit more of this um. Conversely, a
different civil servant, this time a trans woman who was
working in the Admiral p Department and transitioning around the
same time, was advised it was in her quote interest
to delay official recognition of the change until at least
January nineteen sixty assuming full equal pay in the civil
services introduced by nineteen sixty one, Her employers wrote that

(28:41):
it was in her quote own interest in their opinion,
to continue wearing men's clothing for the time being in
order to avoid her significant reduction in pay. That's it's
funny because like I it's not funny. It's sucked up
and it's not stupid, isn't it. But uh, like I
knew trans people in Britain who would have grown up
around this time who like socially transitioned after retirement. Yeah,

(29:06):
or at least like openly to you know, we went
like BFF or anything. But it's absolutely fucking insane that
like that this argument was deployed. Yeah, and you know,
you can you can see what's sort of going on here,
which is that like, you know, it's more it's more
explicitly obvious and here that it is in a lot
of other cases. But your status in the gender bureaucracy

(29:28):
is a key element of how you're able to extract
resources from the state. And you know, sometimes that's literally
just an explicit pay gap, like it was based on
institutional sexism. But you know, I think I think the
second case in a lot of ways more revealing. Right,
the state and its gender bureaucracy is very explicitly saying

(29:48):
conform to what the jet the bureaucracy says your gender
is and you it'll you'll get paid more, and if
you don't, you'll get paid less. And if you look
at this more abstractly, right, in order to interface with
the state in order struct well for benefits, in order
to pay your fucking taxes, in order to drive, in
order to buy alcohol, apparently now in order to buy
the stupid cleaning bottles you of of compressed air but

(30:10):
you have to use to to clean out your computer keyboards. Uh,
in order to buy alcohol, in order to get on
an airplane, you have to conform to the state's bureaucratic
view of you. And if you don't, you can't do it.
And and you know this, this brings up the question
what right does the state have to assign my gender?
And you know, the state will spit out a variety

(30:30):
of sort of like pseudo medical and pseudo political explanations,
but the answer is that the state has no right
to tell you what your gender is except force. And
you know, the the the extent to which the state
has actually been able to sort of do this kind
of stuff has changed over time. But we we've talked
about this a bit. But what like, you know, over

(30:52):
the course of sort of over the course of sort
of of the twentieth century, and you know, we can
also look at things like, uh, we can look at
the War on Terror, we can look at the liberalism
and David Graber's Iron Law of liberalism, which the Iron
law of liberalism states that any market reform, any government
initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces,

(31:14):
will have the ultimate effect of increasing a total number
of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total
number of bureaucrats, the government employees, which I always love.
But you know, like we we we've we've seen the
sort of consequences of this playing out over the course
of of you know, the last about a century. Right,
if you go back to the age nineties, it was
possible for basically private citizens to have just full on

(31:36):
wars with each other in parts of the US, and
that the government would just be like, sure, okay, whatever,
Like the people mining bird ship off of the coast
of California are shooting each other with cannons again, like whatever, Right,
Like it's it's not really until the twentieth century. And
really even in like the last fifty seventy years has

(31:58):
been a last expansion of this that like the state
actually has full territorial control over everywhere that it claims
to have control of. Right, we were like we we
are just now getting to a place where the police
can actually you know, like have like militarily hold the
entire country at one time. And even then they can
only do it as long as people sort of cooperate
with them. Um, but you know this, this is really

(32:23):
bad if you're a person who doesn't who who who
the bureaucracy has deemed to be something else or and
this is another you know, another sort of angle on this, right, Like,
if you're someone who does not have documentation, the state
very very quickly will just attempt to destroy you because
you know, oh hey, you don't you don't know the
right papers. This means the government can fucking arrest you
and kick you out of the country. Yeah, and you

(32:46):
know this is fucking horrible. Um, there's a lot of stuff, Like,
there's a lot of other angles you can look at
this from, right. I mean, like at some point we
probably will do an episode about like the process of
getting medical care and all of of people who you
have to convince that you are your gender. But yeah,
that that's another episode in tirely what I want to
get at here is that state bureacratic power is being

(33:08):
used by by just increasingly politicized gender bureaucrats not only
to force people to comply with their sort of state
mandated gender when they deal with the state, but also
to force them to inhabit that gender in their private lives,
which is constitutes nothing less than a form of full
scale genders hotel terrianism. Um. We talked about that fucking
Utah bill, which you know again prohibits miners from getting

(33:30):
gender affirming surgery people blockers are hormone treatment. That that
is a bill that forces people to live in their
state mandated gender In Florida, gender bureaucrats are allowed to
physically inspect athletes they suspect of being trans, which is
to say, not conforming to fucking state bureaucratic gender controls.
It's children, right, like, yeah, children, Like they are allowed

(33:53):
to molest your child because they think that because there
they think they're trans. The other aspect of this is,
obviously there is something we've talked about before that's something
that you're starting to see with these bills is they're
trying to make the bills UH age number go as
high as possible. Yes, there's bills for people, there's bills

(34:14):
proposing twenty five not so, it's trying to trying to
police and control the bodily autonomy of of complete adults,
which obviously is not not a new thing for the GOP,
specifically especially in the wake of the Roe v. Wade
overturning um. But another aspect of like this, this this

(34:35):
goes beyond just people who are younger than the age
of nineteen. This this this they're going to try to
keep raising this as much as as much as possible.
And this is where the types of surveillance that I
was talking about before it's gonna become a problem because
if you're if you're googling how to do d I
y h R T and get stuff shipped in from Brazil. Uh,
don't think that the surveillance stuff is not gonna not

(34:57):
gonna impact your ability to do that. They had also
polices like the gender presentation of SIS people, specifically CIS woman.
I think like the people who are getting physically inspected
because of these laws are just girls who are good
at fucking sport. Like there's CIS girls that just they
might be like like taller or stronger or and like

(35:18):
it's some anyone has the power to just be like,
oh you're not you're not a girly enough girl. Uh
that's so fucking now you get to go to the
pervert room and get expected. You know, like in Texas.
Right the law right now is that if the state,
if the state thinks you're fucking child is not sufficiently
close to the gender, they can fucking take your child
from you and force them to be whatever fucking gender

(35:39):
the state wants them to be. Right, and you know,
any other period in history, if you walk into a
room and tell a bunch of people the state is
going to decide your fucking gender. Everyone would lose their
goddamn minds. This would be like this, This is a
this is a like unfathomable like even in sort of
like the depth of the sort of totalitarian like nightmarr
or states, this is like an unfathomable level of sort

(36:02):
of state bureaucratic like in position onto people's lives. And yeah,
you know it's the fucking us right, we have, we
have We are the most bureacratic society humanity has ever produced.
Nobody thinks that's the most bureacratic society has ever produced.
And you know we are right now every day seeing
the points at which bureaucracy meets violence. The last thing

(36:31):
I have to say is that you know, like this, this,
this is the future of gender. The future of gender
is government bureaucrats, whether they're cops, politicians, doctor's shop, protective service,
as a school board, administrators forcing you to be a
gendor that they're not. But fundamentally, they have no fucking
right to do this, right. What they have is power,
and their graspmant power is still right now tenuous. So

(36:52):
you know it is possible to stop them from going
any further than this. It is possible to beat back
the power of the state, and it is possible you
have a world that's not this. And we know it's
possible to have world is off this because it wasn't
like this like fifty years ago. So yeah, fuck him,
and that's that's. That's that that that's that's that's gender bureaucrats.

(37:13):
People should read David Gray. But learning about intersectionality for
a fucking second. Another another another great resource to learn
about how you can like mix up gender stuff. There's
this new video game out right now which has a
pretty intense character creation selection you can It's called let

(37:34):
me See, It's called Hogwarts Legacy. Is that no I
thought you were going with side called but it has
it has It has a lot of different customizations that
you can do for your gender presentation and and and
your body parts. I've been refusing could do this on Twitter,
but I need, I need, I need to take fucking

(37:55):
one minute talk about the dumbest argument anyone has ever made,
which is that I have to buy this game in
order support developers, which think about this five seconds, right, Okay,
if you have to buy this game to support the developers,
don't you have to buy every other game to support
their developers? In fact, are are you not morally obligated
to buy every single product on Earth? Because if you
don't buy every single product that's ever been made, you

(38:16):
those those will not be deployed. It's bullshit here. This
is such a weird like capitalism of a poison development
thinking you're obligated to consume lots of people on I
have been holding my tongue on Twitter about this from
monks now watching people watching people. Maybe the argument I
have to buy something to sport developers, which again buy

(38:38):
a different game, support those developers, buy fucking go on strike.
Fucking I don't know if you want, if you want
to want to support the develophy give you money to
someone who is in a fucking video game developer. Well
I'm glad. I'm glad. Glad we could have that that
special bonding movement over the very inclusive gender settings inside

(39:02):
this new hit video game. So that's that's pretty cool.
I feel get an ad from them soon, but I hope, so,
I hope. So the worst Twitter day of my life
is the day we get the fucking ad gold presented
by Hogwarts. It could happen Here as a production of

(39:24):
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
for It could happen here, updated monthly at cool zone
Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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