May 13, 2025 • 59 mins
Mia talks with writer and author Victoria Zeller about her new book One of the Boys and the politics of masculinity, being trans, and football.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call Zon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to youap and here a podcast and I forgot
to write an introduction for I'm your host, Miya Wong,
and we are well, okay, we're not taking a break
from the horrors, because this is also still a podcast
about the horrors and what you can do about it.
But you know, I am a transgender. One of the
ways that we have been like depersonified via transgender is
(00:26):
through a you know, a massive attack on trans like
trans women in sports, and this has led to you know,
like the acceleration of like the broad scale attack on
all of us being able to exist as people. And
with me to talk about this is someone who has
written a book that is about this and also kind
of not about this in a lot of ways, and
(00:46):
that is Victoria Zeller, who is a writer author, writes
about the Buffalo Bills for our friends over at Defector
sometimes and is the author of a new book What
are the Boys Out Today? When you're listening to this,
wow crazy, While yeah it is, it has SYNCD up
like this completely on purpose. We were one hundred percent
planning this from the beginning.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, I'm excited to have you on so you would
think that the question that your book One of the
Boys asks is what if a transchool played football? But
the actual and more important question to ask is what
if a poster could write fiction? And the answer is
that it fucking rips?
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Thank you?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Is this this book rules? I? Jenni Wily. I think
this is the best written group chats I've ever read
in a book. It rips it so good.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
I am very passionate about group chats, you know. I
mean like posting is writing Hello audience. If you don't
know me, my name is Victoria. I'm online. You may
know my Twitter or blue Sky accounts at dirtbag Queer.
I'm like largely posting about football when football is in season.
I kind of just post about random shit these days.
(01:54):
But yeah, I've allegedly written a book. The weird thing
about writing book is that I feel like I've just
totally blacked out actually writing it. And I'm like, that's crazy.
Who did that? Couldn't be me? But yeah, in terms
of like how I would like very quickly pitch one
of the boys, high school senior named Grace comes back
to her high school football team. She quit over the
(02:17):
summer because she came out as trans because her teammates
want to make a push for a state title and
it's like trans coming of age, Friday night Lights handshake meme.
But also when I was like big picture thinking about
what I wanted to do with this, I wanted to
tell kind of a like traditional high school sports story,
but through an outsider lens. Like if you think about
(02:39):
the average like high school football story, you think like, well,
what we're gonna do is we're gonna win state, we're
gonna get the scholarship, and we're gonna get the girl.
And I wanted to sort of like deconstruct those three
things by making the protagonist trans and making the protagonist
a kicker instead of like a linebacker or a quarterback
or whatever. And that is who I am.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Yeah, and this this book rips. That sounds like a
fun thing going on where it basically has like the
football iceberg, where like you can come into us knowing
zero ball and you will get stuff out of it.
And you can come into this where I am knowing
like a some ball and you will guess some out
of this. And then like the unhinged people who have
like sixteen different pff tabs like pinned their bookmarks will
be like, holy shit, the world building.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, yeah, that was it is. It is hard writing
fiction about sports if you're writing young adult fiction, you know,
which is what one of the boys is. Don't be
weird about that. If you're an adult, teenage girls are like, oh,
you don't have to hate the things they like. You
can like call down a little bit. Uh, But yeah,
(03:44):
writing about football for an audience of like teenagers is
like fascinating because you have to assume that the audience
knows very little and you have to figure out how
much you want to give them so that they get
it without like overwhelming them, which is like really just
not at all what I wanted to do. But also yeah,
if you're a sicko like me, you can be like, ooh,
(04:07):
I'm really into what this offense is doing or I
am really into this like on side kick play design.
So I tried to like do I tried to do
a little bit of both. And also, again, this is
a transcoming of age story, so yeah, it's also dealing
with you know, the horrors. So yep, ball plus horrors
(04:28):
is what we're working with here.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, so I think, okay, we're going to get more
into the politics of this in a second. But first
I want to ask one ball question since I have
now I have now introduced my audience to the fact
that I talk about football by managing to get a
rant about de Sean Watson on here for like ten minutes,
the Sean Watson trade. But okay, my one ball question
for this was how happy did it make you when
you figure out a way to write a football team
(04:52):
that does not use the forward pass? Oh man, it's.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Without without spoiling what happens at the end of the
act one turn, circumstances occur so that this high school
football team has to move a player who is who
is not a quarterback two quarterback, at which point passing
just goes away and we are just running the ball, baby,
we are. We are pounding the rock.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
It's so sick.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
It is kind of sort of like loosely, what I
based this on was the year that the University of
Kentucky football team, like all like every single quarterback got
hurt and they were like, Okay, Lynn Bowden, you are
our best wide receiver. We're just gonna put you a
quarterback and you know, we're just gonna see what happens
(05:43):
and that's like that was the fun of writing fictional
football is that I can make my fictional football team
do whatever I want and I don't want to ever
see conservative trickery that is the forward pass, get it
out of here. Yeah, it's is.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
One of the things that you're writing is that you
are very much just like an old school like traditionalist
football pound of the rock, like none of this, like
none of none of this is like an RPO bullshit
person which is which is also I don't know, it's
just very funny that you have like you have like
the football personality of like an extremely cranky, like seventy
(06:20):
five year old like coach from like the seventies. Yep.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
And I'm a trans woman, yeah rules, which like again
I tried down to do too much of it in
this book. Like part of the reason that I made
my main character a kicker, which we will also talk
about other reasons later, but part of the reason is
that kicking is this sort of like own separate salad
off thing. So I really only have to like get
the audience to understand kicking and what happens when Grace
(06:47):
is on the field. I don't have to get into
like what a football team that like never passes the ball,
like is doing on a technical level. We don't have
to do all that. I give you just enough that
if you are a sick oh you're like, yeah, baby.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Rules, this is the sickest offense of all time.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
But but also yeah, but also like you know, trying
to u trying to help the queer kiddos understand that
like running the ball is the official football position of
the working class, of the politariat.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
You know, Okay, we're gonna get more into the class
ynamics of football a second. But the place I kind
of want to start in terms of, like you know,
talking about the parts of this at art just ball
is so in a lot of ways, this is a
book about scriptlessness, which is something that I think, I
don't know, like we've been seeing a sort of resurgence
(07:48):
of trends or not resurchens, but I kind of like
surgeons emergence. There we go, there we go, there we go. Yeah,
of trans literature, and I think this is a very
interesting angle to take on it. And it's you know,
when I say scriplessness, it's about the ways in which
trans women in particular don't have you know, sort of
examples and paths to like follow. Right, there's not like
(08:09):
a you're supposed to go from A to B two C.
This is like what you're doing with your life and
you have to just figure it out because suddenly you're
you and you just you just have to you know,
there's no rails, there's no guide, You just have to
do it. I think the Sapatista line about it is
that the road is made by walking. Can you talk
about how like having to just figure the shit out
(08:30):
influence the way that you write Grace and the way
that you sort of write this book.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Yeah, So this is something that Grace struggles with a lot.
I mean, like specific to her, it's because she's a
trans woman who's playing football, something that if an openly
trans woman has ever openly played, like American football, there
is not a lot of documentation of that online. So
like Grace, she is like walking a path that has
(08:57):
like never existed before. But I think, like more broadly
and more like thematically, there is that like Grace is
also frequently I call her stupid and I don't think
that she's stupid, but calm up. But Grace struggles a
lot to like express herself. I would say, and like,
(09:17):
I wanted her to like challenge what a reader might
expect from a trans girl in young adult fiction. Specifically,
we're like I think she's like frequently kind of like grading,
or at least I find her grading. She is not
traditionally feminine. I don't think she's unfeminine, but she like
struggles a lot with like feeling okay enough to like
(09:39):
express that about herself. Yeah, and like, I feel like
a lot of stories about trans kids have this view
of being a like younger transperson of like, well, it
was always easy for me, and I took to femininity
like a fish in water, and like this was like
natural to me. I wanted to write a character for
(09:59):
whom it is not necessarily natural for Grace to be
this person, and I wanted her past and the way
she is now to sort of like challenge a like
cist reader specifically, but also in terms of scriptlousness in
a more like macro way. There's not a lot of
(10:21):
hya contemporary fiction about transgirl characters like at all. There
is now, thankfully, a good amount of trans male representation
in the genre, but there are a few authors who
are out here writing transferm contemporary but like not a
lot so like figuring out like where I wanted to
(10:43):
like slot in to this like genre that is kind
of like struggling to be born, you know, not a
lot of transferm like seventeen year old protagonists who are
like going to like parties and beer and worrying about
whether or not they want to go to college, which
(11:04):
is all is all stuff I wanted to like touch here.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, And I think there's a bunch of levels of
this stuff sort of operates on and I think it's
very like I don't know, like a lot of being trands.
And I say it, at least for me, I don't know,
like maybe maybe this was different other people. Was just
like having no idea what the fuck you're doing and
just you know, waking up one day and realizing like shit, wait,
(11:30):
what the fuck do you mean I'm doing this? And
it's like, you know, I got think about this, Like
doing this job was like wait, what the fuck I'm
a trans podcaster? Like what like I can't even do
my makeup? Well, Like, what the fuck are we doing here?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Yep?
Speaker 2 (11:47):
I think that like an never think that I've talked
about to talk about this a lot on the show. Is,
but it's also just like how kind of like normal
the trans girls who just like suddenly something blows up
and they're like Internet famers or whatever the fuck are that.
They're just like some kid until like, yeah, you know,
(12:08):
there's just like an explosion and everyone is suddenly interested
in every intimate detail of your life and is trying
to deconstruct it in order to destroy you.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Yeah, Grace is. Again I don't really want to like
spoil act act three stuff here, but later on in
the story, Grace achieves some amount of like Internet notoriety
for what she's doing. And yeah, Grace is like an
extremely typical kid. She has like typical kid problems. But
(12:35):
then this like microscope gets put on her and she's
she is sort of like forced to like become this
like different thing that like if she wants to be
that thing someday, it's not now.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
I think in a lot of ways, my book is
about how we ask teenagers to like do too much
and be too much. But like, especially trans kids, when
you transition at any age, you are building the plane
of your personality while you are flying it baby, yep,
And like that's so much pressure to put on anyone,
(13:10):
but like especially anyone who is a kid, is just
like there's a lot of pressure, and I wanted to
I wanted to like juxtapose the parts of Grace's experience
that like a like sis boy or girl could read
and be like, yep, I also don't know where I
want to go to college. But also like sort of
like show like well because she is like this, she
(13:35):
is facing this like unreal level of scrutiny that is
like not normal, deeply unnatural and like fucked up and
like unfair.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, speaking of unfair, we have to go to ads.
We come back. That's one of my better pivots. I'm
proud of that one. We come back for you to
talk about masculinity. We are back. So One of the
(14:14):
Boys is weirdly the second football involved book about a
trans woman that I've read in the last year, And
I think it's fascinating because in the like pure archetypal
sense from like structuralless anthropology, it is like a pure
structural inversion of Alison Greeves is how to Fly, because
(14:35):
how to Fly is this is also a good book.
But How to Fly is about a girl getting forced
femed to escape masculine violence, why they come and a
cheerleader and one of the boys is about a trans
woman going back into, like into a hypermasculine space to
become a football player. It's like they're just literally perfect
structural versions of each other. And so I wanted to
ask you about how are you thinking about doing this
(14:59):
thing right, which which is going back into these these
hyper masculine spaces that a lot of people come out
of pre transition, you know, when when you were sort
of writing this, because this is not a thing that
people tended to write when they're writing about transfems.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Totally and sort of the like irregularity of Grace's path
this way is like one of the reasons why I
was like drawn to like writing a sports story about
like a trans girl playing football specifically, is because like
I probably have a like more I don't know if
(15:38):
complicated is the word, but I have like a very
like interesting relationship with masculinity. And as much as I'm
like fascinated by it, like I think it is like
endlessly interesting to see the ways that like men construct
the like various kinds of masculinity that they live in
and the like various outcomes that men can end up
(16:01):
finding via their weird distinct masculinities. For instance, for me personally,
I'm still in my like old high school like boys'
group chat like that we like started like a decade ago,
and like I have never once had a problem fitting
in there. When they all found out I was trans,
(16:22):
was like, oh shit, cool, whatever, we're gonna keep talking
about like the Knicks, you know. And like, again, Grace's
journey with masculinity is different from mine, but kind of
like her, I have like some amount of like difficulty
and like very masculine sports spaces when I was a kid.
(16:45):
But then like once you adapt and once you like
learn how to like perform this thing, Like I never
had a problem existing in these worlds. And like something
that Grace is really annoyed by is that people are
always like I just can't believe that, like you would
be trans, And what is hidden in there is like
(17:06):
you were kind of a dick. You were like kind
of a douchebag. Yeah, So, like I very much wanted
to write a trans protagonist who has a relationship with
like her past self and with her male friends that
was like a little more complicated, where like she has
a like very good, solid group of like male friends
(17:30):
who are not like perfect, but are still like that's
my friend. So like I think for my friends and
for a lot of trans women's male friends, they're like, well,
I was friends with you before, so like you're still
like you know, you're still you. I'm still gonna be
cool with you. So I guess that means that I
(17:50):
have to think about like that I have to like, okay,
now I have to like think about how like trans
people are like treated by society more broadly. And it's
like interesting seeing men in my life like suddenly become
like cognizant of like transitions, and it's all like personal.
(18:12):
It's all like, well, I know this person, and therefore
I'm going to show compassion to this person that I like.
And then you know, politics starting at the personal and
sort of like growing out from there.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
So I want to ask a bit a bit more
just digging into sort of the masculinity aspect specifically, because
one of the things I think is I don't know
that there's a part of being a transfem that isn't
super well understood outside of it, which is sort of
a lot of trends women have a phase where you
(18:45):
really try to be a man, right, where you get
like really into like hypermasculinity in order to try to
like yeah, try to make yourself do it. Like I
had gamer mea phase which was a fiasco. Not even
gaming me. I'm still sort of gamer, but I had,
like you know, I had I had like like top
point two five percent heartstone player, like the ag a
(19:06):
wreck a disasters, substantively a worst person. Yeah, and you
know so and like that's the thing that has a
lot of complicated social ripples. Were like this this process
if like like doing this, you know, sometimes it's like
your final them. It's just it's just what you're doing
to try to get by. It's like trying to force
yourself to be a man and like do this masculinity
(19:28):
in a way that's like really shit because you're trying
to like reconcile it with yourself. Yes, So this is
like a thing that a lot of like transforms experience.
I think it's written interestingly in this book. I was
always wondering. I don't know, like like the way you
talk about being in this in like fitting into these
spaces is as like okay, well I figured out how
(19:50):
to like do the performance okay, and then it was
sort of fine. So I'm wondering, like this is almost
universally seen as like this is like a formal structural
violence enacted on you that you sort of have to
like do this. But there's also a kind of, I
don't know, a kind of complicated dynamic of like these
(20:11):
people are still like your friends and you like them,
and I guess I want to know sort of how
how you've been thinking about like that specific angle and
like this sort of process of fitting in and becoming
it also just this is sort of unbecoming you have
to do to like become yourself.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Yeah, so my book has flashback sequences that are written
in second person. This is mostly a book that's written
in first person. But I tried to like really lean
into this like phenomenon of like closeted trans women like
butching up at like certain moments in their lives in
(20:47):
order to like pass and cram down this like feeling
that is like really fucking scary at first. Yeah, So,
like I want the second person grace flashbacks to her
like starting fights and being a like asshole to her girlfriend.
(21:10):
I want them to feel like jarring and I want
them to feel like Grace is being a bastard in
a lot of these flashbacks, but like I also wanted
to show like how she gets there in terms of
like various moments earlier in her life where she was
sort of like shunted into this more like masculine path
(21:33):
in order to like pass and like not be bullied
or like other eyes, and like it definitely is. It's tough,
and I think that I think that I personally have
a like complicated relationship with Like, yeah, like I hated
football when I played it, and I did it because
(21:53):
like I like the sport obviously because I'm a fan,
and because I wrote this book about it, and because
I write about football sometimes and I boast about it
a lot. But like playing it made me miserable, But
like I also be friends with that team who I
still talk to. So it's like I definitely wanted to
feel like violent and imposed, but also like it isn't
(22:14):
something that can be like erased. It's something that you
have to deal with. It's something that like as you
grow up and as you continue to self actualize, you
have to like decide what parts of that version of
yourself are worth keeping. And what parts aren't. And that's
like something that I wanted to show, like Grace struggle
(22:36):
through kind of in real time. She's like very early
in her transition, and she doesn't know how she wants
to present, and she doesn't know how much of her
old life and the people in her old life that
want to associate with her, or does existing on this
football team dragger back towards something that she doesn't want
(22:58):
to be anymore. It's all stuff that I wanted to
play with. And it's not like overtly political, but is
like subtextually political, you know.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah, well it's it's it's political in the sense that,
like you know that we were talking about sort of
scriptlessness earlier, right, And I think one of the one
of the sort of alienating factors about being trends is that, like,
especially if you're like kind of alone and you're like,
you know, like you're like the only transferm that you're
spending time with, right, This is just true for like
a lot of things, like a lot of how sort
(23:29):
of oppression functions and a lot of how violence functions
is by convincing you that this is the only you're
the only person's ever gone through this m and there
are always going to be unique aspects of it. But like,
you know, one of the ways that alienation has maintained
is by convincing you that no one else can understand
the thing that's happening to you, and that because no
one else has ever done it. And it turns out like, no, actually,
this is something that like all of us have gone through.
(23:52):
And when you sort of start to realize this and
the kind of solidarity that they could be built based
on this collective well of experience we've all gone through,
and how it can be you know, changed by actual
actions of a bunch of people working together. It changes things.
So I think I think it is in a lot
of ways political in the sense that like, in order
to have politics, you have to have sort of like
(24:14):
collective assemblages of people who fucking understand each other and
to understand that they're not alone, that they can do
things totally. And this is part of how you get
to that.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Yeah, we can talk a little bit more about the
like very start of something that could be seen as
a political awakening that Grace has in this book, but like, yeah,
part of the reason that she isn't perfect is because
she doesn't know any other, Like there are no other
transmitting characters in this book, And that was very deliberate. Yeah,
(24:45):
Grace is like on our own. She is like figuring
this shit out as she goes yep. And I wanted
it to feel rough and like ad hoc y because
like that's how it is for a lot of people.
That's how it was, like.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Go through it by walking. Yeah, yeah, I guess. I
guess I want to kind of move into the more
directly political realm. Why do I think that's interesting about
this book is that like Grace and this is something
that like I my brain has been so melted by
having been like the politics kids since I was like fifteen,
because I was like my high school was like interrupted
(25:16):
in the middle of it by be trying to overseell
the Turkish government, and so like my brain is so melted.
We'll get aired one one day. We already can't go
there for our coverage of Kurdish gorilla movements. Very good stuff.
You'll find many, many such things, as I think, But
like one of the interesting persons about this is that
Grace is like not political, right, and most of the
(25:38):
people in this aren't. And there's kind of a divide
between the politics knowers who are like the more uh
you know, who are like okay, yeah, like we are
like the queer kids. We are like the activist kids,
and then like the you know, like the ballplayers, and
then Grace sort of fits more into the like not
even more into Grace isn't like a politics person. Grace
(25:59):
is a like, hey, like transphobia is bad, we shouldn't
do that, but also like just wants to fucking go
kick a go kick a rock between two posts. So yeah,
can you talk about like how you sort of decided
to make her just be like kid who doesn't follow politics.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, so like if that was like not any kind
of like statement about how like politics is bad, you know,
that was like Grace's seventeen, and most seventeen year olds,
if they have politics at all, have like completely incoherent politics.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, because I was like holy shit.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, So like Grace has the like barest outlines of
like ideology and those were like put on her by
people in her life. We know that her dad is
a union man, and from a small age she has
internalized that unions are good. Does she know why? Probably not?
(26:53):
But or also we know that her friend tab who
is Bori, has been like educating her on like Puerto
Rican independence, which was like, which was a like that
was a very funny line, right because because Grace is
just like dumb as shit white kid from the suburbs.
(27:14):
But so like inasmuch as she's like piecing together the
person she is bit by bit, she's also kind of
like piecing what she thinks about the world together along
with that in terms of like most of the straight
white players on the football team like do not have
like basically don't have politics. There's a scene where one
(27:38):
of my minor characters is like, yo, I just figured
out that, like trans phobia is bad, and I loved
I fucking loved writing that. But like, I imagine that
up until recently, Grace was exactly like this and just
like just like yep, I'm a middle lower middle class
(28:00):
white straight boy, air quotes on all of that, she
never had any kind of like thought about that. That
does not reflect what was going on in my life
when I was a teenager, because I was a very
annoying oh like me and a friend of mine, Chavon,
got in trouble for putting a Bernie Sanders twenty sixteen
(28:23):
sticker on her locker, because that's the kind of shit
we were doing in high school in twenty fifteen. So like,
I was like very much had sort of like vacant liberal,
middle class kid politics, but like Grace Grace is. I
(28:45):
imagine that like later in her life she kind of
has more political thoughts in her head. But I also
kind of imagine that her brain works like I don't
know if you've played Disco Elysium, but I kind of imagine.
I kind of imagine Grace has a like thought cabinet,
and it's like she has like she has like two
(29:10):
slots in it. Oh, she just like cannot hold that
many ideas in her brain at once. So she's she
is in all aspects of her life trying her vest
and trying to get better. And yeah, I want to
like I feel like a lot of contemporary YA that
comes out these days, a lot of the kids have
(29:32):
like overly coherent politics. I was like, nah, nah, I
wanted to write a kid who has like good intentions
but has no idea what she's doing.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yep, God, my brain's doing the Trump flying. In many
cases have no idea what they're doing. Yeah. Oh, Jesus
crushing braids are broken. Okay, speaking of things being broken,
the products and services to support this podcast unrelated statements.
(30:03):
We are back, Okay. So, having now gotten like many
far into this interview without directly being like, here's the
football politics, let's talk about the politics of football. Because
one of the things I think is fascinating about, you know,
the way you're sort of talking about this, and the
way that Grace like runs into this, and the way
that this is just like a thing that happens in
(30:25):
the US, which is that like giant portions of the
entire US economy and like like structural elements of the
US like education system from like the ground up, and
like all of these sort of contracting services, like massive
portions of like how every single part of the education
system from like fucking like middle school through college are
(30:46):
all bent around this game, yep. And I think one
of the things that happens there is that like the
kind of like default ambient politics, it is very conservative,
and I think in ways you know, are very easy
to understand, and that when people tend to talk about this,
they immediately go like, well, yeah, so, like you know,
like the left is talking about football it's like you're
(31:08):
talking about the militarism, which is like, yeah, I mean
they're fucking flying jets over games like there, we're not
even in wars anymore. In terms of like US ground
troops deployed, Like why the fuck are their troops showing
up on the field. There's like the cult of masculinity stuff.
There's you know, I mean, like there's been some engagement
now with the racial politics of it with Kaepernick. People
(31:28):
realize like, holy shit, wait, there's been like stuff happening
here for ages, and you know, when you get sort
of the masculinity politics. But there's I think a lot
of stuff here that we don't talk about on the
left in terms of like the class dynamics of this
and the way that football I'm just like functions in
a lot of very very weird ways in terms of
(31:50):
like sucking together this weird pool of a bunch of
like non white working class kids and like, I don't know,
fucking see, if I knew ball, I could I could
pull an example off the top of my head of
like some some quarterback prospect you'd spent these family had
spent like two million dollars on like personal trainers for him.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Absolutely. Yeah, I grew up sort of like middle lower
middle class and like playing football specifically, and I grew
up playing mostly like soccer and baseball, a little bit
of basketball, but I sort of like I sort of
ended up playing football when I was like a teenager
because I was large, and that's how that works, yep.
(32:31):
And like in terms of like connecting with people who
weren't white and of my exact class status or higher
like football, so it happened. Man, like most of my
earliest friendships with black kids with Hispanic kids was like
all through football, and like it is a like very
(32:53):
interesting sort of like class and racial melting pot at
least at like I went to a like pretty big
suburban middle and high school, but like lots of lots
of very different kinds of people ended up at my school,
and lots of very different kinds of people ended up
playing football, And like you're gonna get a more diverse
(33:18):
slice of that student population on a football team than
you will on the fucking yearbook committee or in like
school band, class government, whatever. All of that came very
naturally to me in terms of writing this book, where
like I've ended up with a book that's like quite diverse.
(33:40):
But I didn't really do that on purpose. I just
kind of like, who are the kinds of kids who
end up playing football? And it's like everyone you have
like Poorish kids like Grace, and then you have like
Ritish kids like Ahmed or Dre in my book, who
like I very much wanted to like show that, like
maybe one of the reasons that Grace is going to
(34:01):
end up having a more coherent politics is because, like
she has friends of different backgrounds that she might not
if she had not ended up playing this this like
fucked up, evil, violent game. To be clear, Yeah, I mean,
I think any football fan who is honest with themselves
and has his politics that are not evil has a
(34:23):
very complicated relationship to the game for a like variety
of reasons. Because it like chews up people's brains and
there's that, but there's also like implied conservative politics. There's
also a big factor here is that high school football,
even at a public school like mine, the religion is
(34:43):
all over it, baby, like all over it.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, that's a huge part of it.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Jason Kirk of The Shutdown Full Cast is working on
a book about the history of Christianity and Talls Football
called it Church in State. I'm very fucking excited for
that book.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Hell yeah, yeah, that sounds awesome.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
But it's just like really interesting political space because of
how diverse it is and because of how like homogeneous
a lot of the like religion and politics.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Of it are, I guess if that makes sense. Yeah,
And it's sounds so weird because like, you know, so
like I don't know, I refuse to watch college football,
Like I draw the line there, like I'm not doing this.
I'm not doing this. They can't make me watch like
fucking Colorado's State or whatever the fuck. But like one
of the things that you get in the NFL too,
is it's like, on the one hand, like you have
(35:35):
all of this really really conservative shit right, like every
fucking everything is God. Like every single time someone holds
a thing in front of a player there there's like
at least three lines of like all of this is
possible because of God, and like someone's like it's like
that the only place you see people regularly saying Christ
(35:56):
is King where they're not also like holding an ar
to like a non white person's head, you know. So
so that there's all of this like really really conservative
religious shit. But then also there's like a union, yes
that everyone's in and it's like a large like I mean,
it's not that powerful. And there's there's weirdness there too,
(36:17):
because you get to see all of the really interesting
dynamics of unions that you don't really get outside of
kind of like I mean, like I guess like SAG
kind of has this, but it's this union in this
place where one the owners have like an unbelievable amount
of control, like a hideous amount of power, and they
can turn through people really quickly. They have you know,
(36:39):
these are some of the richest people in the world.
And then also secondly there's there's this like marketization force
that's happening where you know, you get to see in
miniature the way that capitalism has like moved to to
sort of deal with with unions, to deal with sort
of the class movements of the twentieth century, which is
that like they're also trying to turn all of these
(37:01):
kids like into entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
M I think in the NFL, I think it's more
coherent because there is a players association, not a union.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
A players association, although also also shout out shoutouts the
PA for backing are for backing a unionization attempt here,
Thanks for that. I don't know if it mattered, but
that's a lot to me.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Yeah. Also, like sports players, unions are fascinating because these
are people who are part of a union who are
like at least some of them millionaires. So it's yep,
a very interesting sort of like class dynamic happening there.
But like call it like the college game right now
is just charn Oldhouse. I mean, like it is better
(37:47):
now that players are being paid like unambiguous good that
players can profit off of their name, image and likeness.
But again it makes like I remember, like I'm not
on Twitter much anymore, but like in the like early
Elon days, you started getting Twitter ads and these were
sixteen and seventeen year old high school football players.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
The post is like huddle highlights and like a like
quick recruiting profile of like hey, class of twenty twenty
seven defensive back wide receiver out of Palo Alto, and
just like blasting that onto like Twitter timelines everywhere, just
like please God, somebody see my Like, somebody see these
(38:31):
fucking huddle highlights. The feudalism stage of high school and
college ball has like ended, and now we are in
the no regulations baby, just like completely unfettered capitalism stage.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Can we explain like just how like very briefly, people
who do not know any football, like what name, image, likenesses,
and how this is different from like a system that
would be normal, which is you pay the players.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Yeah, so for like seventy years, the precedent with college
football in the United States of America is that all
these players are amateurs and they cannot be compensated in
any way. They cannot profit off of their name, image likeness,
so that means that they can't like sell autographs. The
school isn't going to sell jerseys that have their name
on them. You are meant to make exactly zero dollars
(39:22):
from your time as a amateur college athlete. And this
was the ironclad system for like seventy years, and then
it kind of got like destroyed overnight. Yeah, when the
NCAA finally legalizes players profiting off of their name, image,
and likeness, so that means that they could sign like
(39:42):
endorsement deals. And when this was first made a thing
in twenty twenty one, it mostly manifested in like the
coldest Crawford for the Nebraska football team is filming a
ad for a local air conditioning company because his name
is Coldest And it was sort of like very like
(40:03):
quaint and cute at first, but then nil collectives got going,
which are these I don't even know how to how
to like God described nil collective is these are like
investment groups that operate independently of universities that pool resources
and then pay players for like extremely scant public appearances
(40:28):
so that they can say that they're just profiting off
of name, image and likeness, but in reality they exist
as a way to pay college football players without paying
them via schools. Now there is the house settlement happening
right now, which colleges will soon be able to probably
maybe God who knows, will soon be able to directly
(40:48):
pay college athletes a certain amount of money. Lord knows
where that's going. Like this stuff is all changing at
like lightnings at like yeah, so like we have just
have gone from like nobody gets paid for anything to
like we are in fucking like gilded age robber bear
and shit where like yeah, because none of this shit
(41:10):
is regulated, schools or an aisle collectives will go back
on agreements and everything's negotiated every year. They're like like
it's it's a fucking mess. Yeah in the college game
right now. So I mean all of that makes the
like NFL having a kind of shitty union look a
lot better.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Yeah, well, I just kind of thinking about the kind
of like this is my way of kind of bringing
it back to transgender but like one of the things
that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of
I mean just like what I do, right, and but
also just like the way that capitalism has been moving
in the lass like few decades is it's increasingly about
(41:53):
you know because like okay, so, like capitalism's fundamental base
has always been like you sell your labor, h right,
but now it's it's it's been increasing shows for me
into like you're selling like the image of yourself. You're
selling your identity, you're selling like yeah, you know, you're
selling your personality. You're selling as much of like and
this is this is what name image likeness is.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
It's like, we're not gonna pay you for like your labor,
which is like you playing football. We're gonna pay you
for like this nebulous image of yourself. So you get
all these people who like are are you know, you're
forced to turn all of yourself into an object for consumption,
and like I think that's the thing with like fucking
I don't know, That's what I'm doing on this show
right to a large extent, like I am like the
(42:32):
Asian transgender and like, yeah, obviously, like all of this
is like research, but it's also you know, this is
what like brand and identity is, and this has had
these like seismic impacts on the entire global economy. Like
I talked about this in an episode on when I talked
about Temu, but like Tamu is literally the product of
this happening with Chinese farmers. We're like Chinese farmers were
doing this like farm social media thing, and so almost
(42:53):
like holy shit, what if we like become these things
where they were selling food but they're also just selling
that like the identity brand of like themselves as farmers,
and Timbu was like, well a PDD, which is the
Chinese company, was like, what if we just brought all
of these things together in one spot so you could
just do directed like consumer sales through it. And now
that's like the entire fucking economy is just this morass
of like selling every single part of yourself and I
(43:17):
don't know, like I'm wondering how much of yourself did
you have to do you have to like leave in
a book like this, and how much of it can
you like kind of like keep away from the market.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Oh boy, so.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
You're good.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah, Oh gosh, everything is uh, everything is personal brands.
Speaker 4 (43:42):
Now.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
You know, there's a lot of pressure as an author
to to use all your social media is in a
very particular way. You're supposed to You're you're supposed to
make your cute little canva graphics, uh, and like talking
about your character and engage with like prompt posts on
(44:05):
Instagram and you know whatever social media du jore And like,
my personal experience is a little irregular because I do
have some amount of like sports, Twitter, niche micro celebrity posting,
so like I'm not out here making promotional tiktoks for
(44:30):
one of the boys. That was like something that was
very important to me. Was like, oh, I'm not going
to be doing that, thank god. Fuck that shit. Yeah.
And the way that authors have to promote themselves and
turn themselves into brands is like a whole other can
of worms.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
That like sucks.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
So like, Thankfully, I think I've managed to avoid the
most alienating like forms of that. But I did have
a few not too long ago, very confidently state that
this book was loosely based on my life story, which
was news to me. I was, like, word, I didn't
(45:12):
know that. So, like, I think, especially if you write
fiction as a person of any marginalized identity, if you're
if you're black, if you're gay, if you're trans, whatever,
people are going to assume that you're writing like auto fiction.
Because I think a lot of people react to women's
(45:33):
fiction this way, because I think a lot of people
subconsciously have a hard time believing that like women have
interior lives and can like imagine things, you know, Like,
I think a lot of people assume that authors are
always writing about themselves and writing about the people in
their lives, and uh, I mean, I'm writing about experiences
(45:57):
that I have had similar ones too, but like naw dog,
that is not how this works.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
There's a really great I say about this by a
friend of mine named Rosemary Hoe, who's absolutely brilliant writer,
who wrote about the she's's writing about Zady Smith, and
one of the things that she talks about is like
the way that people just assume that Zadi that like
Zadie Smith's politics are just like didactically coming out of
the mouth of a character, and like, well, no, that's
(46:24):
not how this shit works, Like yeah it is.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Uh it's frustrating, and I think like a lot of
authors have their own experiences with this, so uh yeah, yeah,
I mean I like, you have to turn yourself into
some kind of brand. That's why I'm going on podcasts,
you know. So that's all, uh, you know, that's fun,
(46:48):
but uh, I'm trying not to like, you know, completely
give myself over to the fucking torment nexus, you know.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
And there's like, I don't know, the this is also
just like this is a way you can just completely
lose your mind. I don't know if I've ever actually
talked about this on the show. Weirdly, one of the
people whose career trajectory is the most similar to Minus
is Asian American writer named Lesley Yang, who was like
this guy who got brought in to write about like
I think it was Columbine. It's like some mass shooting
that was like a Korean kid did and his friends
(47:19):
were like, hey, you're Asian right about this, Oh God,
and he you know, for a bit he was like
he was like duh, Like he was like he was
like the guy who was like the big like Asian American,
like this is like the literary thinker. He was like
interviewing Aaron Schwartz. He was doing like profiles of a
bunch of like interesting people, and then he just became
this like incredibly boring, bog standard reactionary and he became
(47:42):
one of these A very common kind of person who
you experience on the right is like someone who's experienced
who's like understanding of race comes from like watching sports
where they're like there are black players in basketball and
there's a bunch of them, and because of that, this
means that like actually black people like overrepresented and like
as a class, they're like privilege or whatever the fuck
(48:03):
because there's just like a bunch of black basketball players
and I don't know, I think it's like there's like
a really interesting intersection here of like the way that
people understand politics as just like politics are just like
the thing that I see on my screen when I'm
watching football, and how we have to sort of like
just deal with that shit and deal with the sort
(48:25):
of micro identity formation that is real but also isn't
like a depiction of what the world is.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
M m.
Speaker 4 (48:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
So one of the interesting things in this book is
that like the right wing media, like right wing football media,
kind of isn't in it that much really, which I
think is fascinating And I wonder part of how much
of this is just that, like this was kind of
a book that was a real action being written before,
like Aaron Rodgers was going up Pat McAfee show in
front of like half a million people every single day
(49:06):
and like screaming about trans people.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
M hm. So this book has excerpts of like articles
and outside media and like social media, et cetera. Originally
it had like a lot more. I had to cut
a lot in order to make this book like legible
as a book. This book is already like pushing the
edges of what you could really communicate in ya in
(49:30):
terms of like I have a lot of characters, I
have a lot of shit going on, So like part
of it is just that, like I had to like
you know, trim et cetera. But like, originally it had
a lot more of that stuff, and there were like
interstitial snippets from a fictional sort of like football podcaster
guy who is like Pat McAfee and all of the
(49:54):
like barstool former athlete podcasters, Yeah, in a blender, and
he like he was this like really pathetic former like
special team or linebacker who just like keeps reliving the
fucking glory days. Yeah. Eventually I just had to like
(50:14):
refocus and like, yeah, yeah, bring that conflict closer to
home with like school administration's kind of shitty, and like
there are plenty of dudes on the football team who
also suck. So I kind of like left it in
via some like shitty tweets that you see, or you
(50:36):
get a lot of it, like indirectly you can imagine
what is happening on the fucking Pat McAfee show.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
Oh my fucking god.
Speaker 3 (50:43):
Yeah, But like also part of it is what you
said that the weird timeline of publishing means that I
started writing this book in February twenty twenty one, wrote
the majority in twenty twenty two, and edit it in
twenty three and twenty four, and like kind of this
like very very organized anti trans reaction was not as
(51:04):
prevalent in twenty twenty one at all like I kind
of had to like track it as it started to
like really like form up a drill time. This is
not the world that I thought I was gonna write
my stupid little football book. Yeah, and like have it
emerge into a lot of people are say that this
book is very timely, and I'm like, dog, this is
(51:26):
a Biden administration sept for him through.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
So one final ball question on behalf of my beloved
and a curse Seattle Seahawks. Okay, so think about Sam Darnold,
who's now our quarterback after they traded my beloved Gito
Smith for a fucking third round pick.
Speaker 3 (51:41):
Brother.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Okay, so, like, is the thing that's going to happen
this season not just by week five? Ave Lucas goes
down for the twelve million time whatever child they drag
out of a kindergarten to try to block the deal,
one hundred gets liquified in ten milli seconds to Sam
Darnold just like start seeing the ghosts of men who
haven't been born yet, Like, isn't this exactly?
Speaker 4 (51:58):
Is?
Speaker 2 (51:58):
It's just what's gonna fuck happen? Why did they build
this team like this?
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Can I attempt to give you a small amount of
Seattle Seahawks optimism. I thought they were gonna.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Would have lived in games last season. They should have,
so we lost to the Flat Giants.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
So I really like some of what the Seahawks did.
They drafted a lot of players that I really like.
It's true they they finally took a interior offensive line
player in the first round. Congratulations, Uh yay. Gray's Abel
(52:37):
is a good player. He's also a maga as shit,
which is what you want on your offensive line. No,
that's what you want on your offense. It's true, it's true.
But also like, god fucking damn it. So you got
Gray's Abel. You got Jalen Milroe, who Jalen Milroe isn't
good at football right now, but a sports media friend
(52:59):
named Derek klass And put it that he's He's the
kind of player you want to bet on and then
be wrong about, just just because he's fun, because he's
a like legit, actual like special athlete, special with the
ball in his hand. He's cool. I really like Jaylen Milroe.
But you also drafted later on. You took Tory Horden
(53:21):
and Ricky White, who are two of my favorite sort
of like small school wide receivers in the draft. You
took Damien Martinez, who is a running back who I
think could end up being a lot better than someone
who's drafted in the seventh round would indicate. And also
you took a full back. You took Robbie Oates. That's great.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
His name is a.
Speaker 2 (53:40):
Robbie Oates a great name, great name, old name, old
name team.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
He is a He's like the squarest football player I've
ever seen. Love love Robbie Oates. However, the Sam Darnold
situation is tough. It's tough. I have a hard time
seeing it happen.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Like he would literally if you had put it behind
last year Seahawks offensive line, he literally would have died
by about week eight, like you just like straight up
would have died on the field. Oh god.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
Yeah, And like it's a bit better this year because
you have friends able, but you still have Abe Lucas.
You know, you still have a We'll.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Have Abe Lucas for three weeks and then we won't
have Abe Lucas and then yeah.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
And also like Sam Darnold is in like the perfect
spot for him, and now he's going to be throwing
the ball too. I mean, you know, you got Cooper Cup,
you got you know, for four weeks, got JSN, but
you also have Marcus valdezk is he gonna is he
gonna get load bearing snaps?
Speaker 2 (54:48):
Like?
Speaker 3 (54:48):
Is that really? Is that really what you want?
Speaker 2 (54:51):
My cope last year was that was that JSN Metcalf
and Lockett was the most underrated receiver trio in the league. Yep.
And this year it's like, all right, we get six games,
a Cooper Cup and then we get fifth rounders.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
Yeah. God, it's it's tough out here. Yeah. I don't
expect Sam Darnold to work here, just like straight up,
Like I have been a Sam Donald truther for years.
But it is the classic thing of like I think
Sam Donald's better than most people think, and then a
lot of people are like one hundred thirty million dollars
(55:29):
Sam Donald, and it's like what hold on, hold on,
hold on, hold on, hold on. I didn't think he
was that good. I didn't think he was traded Gino
Smith good. No, oh god, So that's unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (55:43):
Yeah, so this this that this has been the football
section of this of this podcast. Yeah, so Victoria, do
you have anything else that you want to say before
we head out, and where should people buy your book from?
Speaker 3 (55:54):
Non Amazon? That's like really all I have to say
about that. Yeah, one of the boys, my name is
Victor Coria Zeller, and you just buy that from bookshop,
buy it from your local indie. You can buy it
from Barnes and Noble, because we don't hate them as
much as we hate Amazon. But like I would say,
buy it from your local indie bookstore is like ideal
(56:15):
for me. I make the same amount of money wherever
you buy it, so it doesn't matter. But if you
want to sign copy, you can also order it from
my home bookstore, So there's that. Hell. Yeah, but yeah,
my website is a Victoria dot monster and all my
links are there.
Speaker 2 (56:32):
Yeah. Okay, I realized I had an actual final question
that I wanted to ask it I forgot to do
before this the fucking we started the intro, so I apologize.
So the odds here are much much higher than they
are in most places that there's going to be some
queer kids who fucking play ball to some extent listening
to it, and I wanted to I'm throwing something from
your book at you, which is, I know, what would
(56:54):
you say to the what did you say it to
the kiddos who are going through it?
Speaker 3 (56:58):
This is so mean. Okay, Okay, I'm gonna be real
with you right now. Guys, do what's best for you. Yeah,
fight if you have it in you to fight, But like,
you got to be a kid first and foremost, and
like trans kids, queer kids deserve the chance to be
(57:21):
fucking kids. They deserve the chance to make mistakes and
listen to music too loudly in their friends' shitty car,
and they deserve to play sports if that's what they
want to do. I think in a lot of ways,
my book is about how we ask teenagers to be
(57:43):
braver than they should be, and I think that's bullshit.
So I'm not gonna put it on. You have as
much fun as you can, like ball if you can,
but do what makes you happy and what feels safe
to you. Is like really, all I've got, Like, you know,
just have fun while you're able to as a child
(58:05):
is like yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:06):
No, And it's like, yeah, it's not if you are
like a little ass kid. A I'm so sorry for
how much I swear on the show. Be like, it
is not up to you right now to save the world.
That is the job of fucking everyone else who listens
to the show like you. If you want there to
be more queer athletes, if you want trans kids be
able to be kids, that shit's on you. Yeah, all
of the rest of you who listen to the show,
(58:28):
If you are also like the fucking one bazillion trans
people listen to the show, this is like a bit
less on you than it is on fucking everyone else.
But yeah, but the best time do I started organizing
was like five years ago. The second best time is
right now, and the best time after that is tomorrow.
So go fucking build a world where trans kids can
be kids and fall out.
Speaker 3 (58:47):
Let kids like me hoop, let them hoop, let them
hit dingers, let them ball. Oh yeah, my people need rings.
My people need titles, They need trophies, they need championships.
Speaker 1 (59:06):
It could Happen 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.
Speaker 2 (59:17):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (59:19):
You can now find sources for It could Happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening,
Call Zon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome to youap and here a podcast and I forgot
to write an introduction for I'm your host, Miya Wong,
and we are well, okay, we're not taking a break
from the horrors, because this is also still a podcast
about the horrors and what you can do about it.
But you know, I am a transgender. One of the
ways that we have been like depersonified via transgender is
(00:26):
through a you know, a massive attack on trans like
trans women in sports, and this has led to you know,
like the acceleration of like the broad scale attack on
all of us being able to exist as people. And
with me to talk about this is someone who has
written a book that is about this and also kind
of not about this in a lot of ways, and
(00:46):
that is Victoria Zeller, who is a writer author, writes
about the Buffalo Bills for our friends over at Defector
sometimes and is the author of a new book What
are the Boys Out Today? When you're listening to this,
wow crazy, While yeah it is, it has SYNCD up
like this completely on purpose. We were one hundred percent
planning this from the beginning.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Hello, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yeah, I'm excited to have you on so you would
think that the question that your book One of the
Boys asks is what if a transchool played football? But
the actual and more important question to ask is what
if a poster could write fiction? And the answer is
that it fucking rips?
Speaker 3 (01:22):
Thank you?
Speaker 2 (01:23):
Is this this book rules? I? Jenni Wily. I think
this is the best written group chats I've ever read
in a book. It rips it so good.
Speaker 3 (01:32):
I am very passionate about group chats, you know. I
mean like posting is writing Hello audience. If you don't
know me, my name is Victoria. I'm online. You may
know my Twitter or blue Sky accounts at dirtbag Queer.
I'm like largely posting about football when football is in season.
I kind of just post about random shit these days.
(01:54):
But yeah, I've allegedly written a book. The weird thing
about writing book is that I feel like I've just
totally blacked out actually writing it. And I'm like, that's crazy.
Who did that? Couldn't be me? But yeah, in terms
of like how I would like very quickly pitch one
of the boys, high school senior named Grace comes back
to her high school football team. She quit over the
(02:17):
summer because she came out as trans because her teammates
want to make a push for a state title and
it's like trans coming of age, Friday night Lights handshake meme.
But also when I was like big picture thinking about
what I wanted to do with this, I wanted to
tell kind of a like traditional high school sports story,
but through an outsider lens. Like if you think about
(02:39):
the average like high school football story, you think like, well,
what we're gonna do is we're gonna win state, we're
gonna get the scholarship, and we're gonna get the girl.
And I wanted to sort of like deconstruct those three
things by making the protagonist trans and making the protagonist
a kicker instead of like a linebacker or a quarterback
or whatever. And that is who I am.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Yeah, and this this book rips. That sounds like a
fun thing going on where it basically has like the
football iceberg, where like you can come into us knowing
zero ball and you will get stuff out of it.
And you can come into this where I am knowing
like a some ball and you will guess some out
of this. And then like the unhinged people who have
like sixteen different pff tabs like pinned their bookmarks will
be like, holy shit, the world building.
Speaker 3 (03:22):
Yeah, yeah, that was it is. It is hard writing
fiction about sports if you're writing young adult fiction, you know,
which is what one of the boys is. Don't be
weird about that. If you're an adult, teenage girls are like, oh,
you don't have to hate the things they like. You
can like call down a little bit. Uh, But yeah,
(03:44):
writing about football for an audience of like teenagers is
like fascinating because you have to assume that the audience
knows very little and you have to figure out how
much you want to give them so that they get
it without like overwhelming them, which is like really just
not at all what I wanted to do. But also yeah,
if you're a sicko like me, you can be like, ooh,
(04:07):
I'm really into what this offense is doing or I
am really into this like on side kick play design.
So I tried to like do I tried to do
a little bit of both. And also, again, this is
a transcoming of age story, so yeah, it's also dealing
with you know, the horrors. So yep, ball plus horrors
(04:28):
is what we're working with here.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Yeah, so I think, okay, we're going to get more
into the politics of this in a second. But first
I want to ask one ball question since I have
now I have now introduced my audience to the fact
that I talk about football by managing to get a
rant about de Sean Watson on here for like ten minutes,
the Sean Watson trade. But okay, my one ball question
for this was how happy did it make you when
you figure out a way to write a football team
(04:52):
that does not use the forward pass? Oh man, it's.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
Without without spoiling what happens at the end of the
act one turn, circumstances occur so that this high school
football team has to move a player who is who
is not a quarterback two quarterback, at which point passing
just goes away and we are just running the ball, baby,
we are. We are pounding the rock.
Speaker 2 (05:21):
It's so sick.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
It is kind of sort of like loosely, what I
based this on was the year that the University of
Kentucky football team, like all like every single quarterback got
hurt and they were like, Okay, Lynn Bowden, you are
our best wide receiver. We're just gonna put you a
quarterback and you know, we're just gonna see what happens
(05:43):
and that's like that was the fun of writing fictional
football is that I can make my fictional football team
do whatever I want and I don't want to ever
see conservative trickery that is the forward pass, get it
out of here. Yeah, it's is.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
One of the things that you're writing is that you
are very much just like an old school like traditionalist
football pound of the rock, like none of this, like
none of none of this is like an RPO bullshit
person which is which is also I don't know, it's
just very funny that you have like you have like
the football personality of like an extremely cranky, like seventy
(06:20):
five year old like coach from like the seventies. Yep.
Speaker 3 (06:23):
And I'm a trans woman, yeah rules, which like again
I tried down to do too much of it in
this book. Like part of the reason that I made
my main character a kicker, which we will also talk
about other reasons later, but part of the reason is
that kicking is this sort of like own separate salad
off thing. So I really only have to like get
the audience to understand kicking and what happens when Grace
(06:47):
is on the field. I don't have to get into
like what a football team that like never passes the ball,
like is doing on a technical level. We don't have
to do all that. I give you just enough that
if you are a sick oh you're like, yeah, baby.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Rules, this is the sickest offense of all time.
Speaker 3 (07:06):
But but also yeah, but also like you know, trying
to u trying to help the queer kiddos understand that
like running the ball is the official football position of
the working class, of the politariat.
Speaker 2 (07:26):
You know, Okay, we're gonna get more into the class
ynamics of football a second. But the place I kind
of want to start in terms of, like you know,
talking about the parts of this at art just ball
is so in a lot of ways, this is a
book about scriptlessness, which is something that I think, I
don't know, like we've been seeing a sort of resurgence
(07:48):
of trends or not resurchens, but I kind of like
surgeons emergence. There we go, there we go, there we go. Yeah,
of trans literature, and I think this is a very
interesting angle to take on it. And it's you know,
when I say scriplessness, it's about the ways in which
trans women in particular don't have you know, sort of
examples and paths to like follow. Right, there's not like
(08:09):
a you're supposed to go from A to B two C.
This is like what you're doing with your life and
you have to just figure it out because suddenly you're
you and you just you just have to you know,
there's no rails, there's no guide, You just have to
do it. I think the Sapatista line about it is
that the road is made by walking. Can you talk
about how like having to just figure the shit out
(08:30):
influence the way that you write Grace and the way
that you sort of write this book.
Speaker 3 (08:34):
Yeah, So this is something that Grace struggles with a lot.
I mean, like specific to her, it's because she's a
trans woman who's playing football, something that if an openly
trans woman has ever openly played, like American football, there
is not a lot of documentation of that online. So
like Grace, she is like walking a path that has
(08:57):
like never existed before. But I think, like more broadly
and more like thematically, there is that like Grace is
also frequently I call her stupid and I don't think
that she's stupid, but calm up. But Grace struggles a
lot to like express herself. I would say, and like,
(09:17):
I wanted her to like challenge what a reader might
expect from a trans girl in young adult fiction. Specifically,
we're like I think she's like frequently kind of like grading,
or at least I find her grading. She is not
traditionally feminine. I don't think she's unfeminine, but she like
struggles a lot with like feeling okay enough to like
(09:39):
express that about herself. Yeah, and like, I feel like
a lot of stories about trans kids have this view
of being a like younger transperson of like, well, it
was always easy for me, and I took to femininity
like a fish in water, and like this was like
natural to me. I wanted to write a character for
(09:59):
whom it is not necessarily natural for Grace to be
this person, and I wanted her past and the way
she is now to sort of like challenge a like
cist reader specifically, but also in terms of scriptlousness in
a more like macro way. There's not a lot of
(10:21):
hya contemporary fiction about transgirl characters like at all. There
is now, thankfully, a good amount of trans male representation
in the genre, but there are a few authors who
are out here writing transferm contemporary but like not a
lot so like figuring out like where I wanted to
(10:43):
like slot in to this like genre that is kind
of like struggling to be born, you know, not a
lot of transferm like seventeen year old protagonists who are
like going to like parties and beer and worrying about
whether or not they want to go to college, which
(11:04):
is all is all stuff I wanted to like touch here.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, And I think there's a bunch of levels of
this stuff sort of operates on and I think it's
very like I don't know, like a lot of being trands.
And I say it, at least for me, I don't know,
like maybe maybe this was different other people. Was just
like having no idea what the fuck you're doing and
just you know, waking up one day and realizing like shit, wait,
(11:30):
what the fuck do you mean I'm doing this? And
it's like, you know, I got think about this, Like
doing this job was like wait, what the fuck I'm
a trans podcaster? Like what like I can't even do
my makeup? Well, Like, what the fuck are we doing here?
Speaker 3 (11:45):
Yep?
Speaker 2 (11:47):
I think that like an never think that I've talked
about to talk about this a lot on the show. Is,
but it's also just like how kind of like normal
the trans girls who just like suddenly something blows up
and they're like Internet famers or whatever the fuck are that.
They're just like some kid until like, yeah, you know,
(12:08):
there's just like an explosion and everyone is suddenly interested
in every intimate detail of your life and is trying
to deconstruct it in order to destroy you.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Yeah, Grace is. Again I don't really want to like
spoil act act three stuff here, but later on in
the story, Grace achieves some amount of like Internet notoriety
for what she's doing. And yeah, Grace is like an
extremely typical kid. She has like typical kid problems. But
(12:35):
then this like microscope gets put on her and she's
she is sort of like forced to like become this
like different thing that like if she wants to be
that thing someday, it's not now.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:50):
I think in a lot of ways, my book is
about how we ask teenagers to like do too much
and be too much. But like, especially trans kids, when
you transition at any age, you are building the plane
of your personality while you are flying it baby, yep,
And like that's so much pressure to put on anyone,
(13:10):
but like especially anyone who is a kid, is just
like there's a lot of pressure, and I wanted to
I wanted to like juxtapose the parts of Grace's experience
that like a like sis boy or girl could read
and be like, yep, I also don't know where I
want to go to college. But also like sort of
like show like well because she is like this, she
(13:35):
is facing this like unreal level of scrutiny that is
like not normal, deeply unnatural and like fucked up and
like unfair.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
Yeah, speaking of unfair, we have to go to ads.
We come back. That's one of my better pivots. I'm
proud of that one. We come back for you to
talk about masculinity. We are back. So One of the
(14:14):
Boys is weirdly the second football involved book about a
trans woman that I've read in the last year, And
I think it's fascinating because in the like pure archetypal
sense from like structuralless anthropology, it is like a pure
structural inversion of Alison Greeves is how to Fly, because
(14:35):
how to Fly is this is also a good book.
But How to Fly is about a girl getting forced
femed to escape masculine violence, why they come and a
cheerleader and one of the boys is about a trans
woman going back into, like into a hypermasculine space to
become a football player. It's like they're just literally perfect
structural versions of each other. And so I wanted to
ask you about how are you thinking about doing this
(14:59):
thing right, which which is going back into these these
hyper masculine spaces that a lot of people come out
of pre transition, you know, when when you were sort
of writing this, because this is not a thing that
people tended to write when they're writing about transfems.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Totally and sort of the like irregularity of Grace's path
this way is like one of the reasons why I
was like drawn to like writing a sports story about
like a trans girl playing football specifically, is because like
I probably have a like more I don't know if
(15:38):
complicated is the word, but I have like a very
like interesting relationship with masculinity. And as much as I'm
like fascinated by it, like I think it is like
endlessly interesting to see the ways that like men construct
the like various kinds of masculinity that they live in
and the like various outcomes that men can end up
(16:01):
finding via their weird distinct masculinities. For instance, for me personally,
I'm still in my like old high school like boys'
group chat like that we like started like a decade ago,
and like I have never once had a problem fitting
in there. When they all found out I was trans,
(16:22):
was like, oh shit, cool, whatever, we're gonna keep talking
about like the Knicks, you know. And like, again, Grace's
journey with masculinity is different from mine, but kind of
like her, I have like some amount of like difficulty
and like very masculine sports spaces when I was a kid.
(16:45):
But then like once you adapt and once you like
learn how to like perform this thing, Like I never
had a problem existing in these worlds. And like something
that Grace is really annoyed by is that people are
always like I just can't believe that, like you would
be trans, And what is hidden in there is like
(17:06):
you were kind of a dick. You were like kind
of a douchebag. Yeah, So, like I very much wanted
to write a trans protagonist who has a relationship with
like her past self and with her male friends that
was like a little more complicated, where like she has
a like very good, solid group of like male friends
(17:30):
who are not like perfect, but are still like that's
my friend. So like I think for my friends and
for a lot of trans women's male friends, they're like, well,
I was friends with you before, so like you're still
like you know, you're still you. I'm still gonna be
cool with you. So I guess that means that I
(17:50):
have to think about like that I have to like, okay,
now I have to like think about how like trans
people are like treated by society more broadly. And it's
like interesting seeing men in my life like suddenly become
like cognizant of like transitions, and it's all like personal.
(18:12):
It's all like, well, I know this person, and therefore
I'm going to show compassion to this person that I like.
And then you know, politics starting at the personal and
sort of like growing out from there.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
So I want to ask a bit a bit more
just digging into sort of the masculinity aspect specifically, because
one of the things I think is I don't know
that there's a part of being a transfem that isn't
super well understood outside of it, which is sort of
a lot of trends women have a phase where you
(18:45):
really try to be a man, right, where you get
like really into like hypermasculinity in order to try to
like yeah, try to make yourself do it. Like I
had gamer mea phase which was a fiasco. Not even
gaming me. I'm still sort of gamer, but I had,
like you know, I had I had like like top
point two five percent heartstone player, like the ag a
(19:06):
wreck a disasters, substantively a worst person. Yeah, and you
know so and like that's the thing that has a
lot of complicated social ripples. Were like this this process
if like like doing this, you know, sometimes it's like
your final them. It's just it's just what you're doing
to try to get by. It's like trying to force
yourself to be a man and like do this masculinity
(19:28):
in a way that's like really shit because you're trying
to like reconcile it with yourself. Yes, So this is
like a thing that a lot of like transforms experience.
I think it's written interestingly in this book. I was
always wondering. I don't know, like like the way you
talk about being in this in like fitting into these
spaces is as like okay, well I figured out how
(19:50):
to like do the performance okay, and then it was
sort of fine. So I'm wondering, like this is almost
universally seen as like this is like a formal structural
violence enacted on you that you sort of have to
like do this. But there's also a kind of, I
don't know, a kind of complicated dynamic of like these
(20:11):
people are still like your friends and you like them,
and I guess I want to know sort of how
how you've been thinking about like that specific angle and
like this sort of process of fitting in and becoming
it also just this is sort of unbecoming you have
to do to like become yourself.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Yeah, so my book has flashback sequences that are written
in second person. This is mostly a book that's written
in first person. But I tried to like really lean
into this like phenomenon of like closeted trans women like
butching up at like certain moments in their lives in
(20:47):
order to like pass and cram down this like feeling
that is like really fucking scary at first. Yeah, So,
like I want the second person grace flashbacks to her
like starting fights and being a like asshole to her girlfriend.
(21:10):
I want them to feel like jarring and I want
them to feel like Grace is being a bastard in
a lot of these flashbacks, but like I also wanted
to show like how she gets there in terms of
like various moments earlier in her life where she was
sort of like shunted into this more like masculine path
(21:33):
in order to like pass and like not be bullied
or like other eyes, and like it definitely is. It's tough,
and I think that I think that I personally have
a like complicated relationship with Like, yeah, like I hated
football when I played it, and I did it because
(21:53):
like I like the sport obviously because I'm a fan,
and because I wrote this book about it, and because
I write about football sometimes and I boast about it
a lot. But like playing it made me miserable, But
like I also be friends with that team who I
still talk to. So it's like I definitely wanted to
feel like violent and imposed, but also like it isn't
(22:14):
something that can be like erased. It's something that you
have to deal with. It's something that like as you
grow up and as you continue to self actualize, you
have to like decide what parts of that version of
yourself are worth keeping. And what parts aren't. And that's
like something that I wanted to show, like Grace struggle
(22:36):
through kind of in real time. She's like very early
in her transition, and she doesn't know how she wants
to present, and she doesn't know how much of her
old life and the people in her old life that
want to associate with her, or does existing on this
football team dragger back towards something that she doesn't want
(22:58):
to be anymore. It's all stuff that I wanted to
play with. And it's not like overtly political, but is
like subtextually political, you know.
Speaker 2 (23:08):
Yeah, well it's it's it's political in the sense that,
like you know that we were talking about sort of
scriptlessness earlier, right, And I think one of the one
of the sort of alienating factors about being trends is that, like,
especially if you're like kind of alone and you're like,
you know, like you're like the only transferm that you're
spending time with, right, This is just true for like
a lot of things, like a lot of how sort
(23:29):
of oppression functions and a lot of how violence functions
is by convincing you that this is the only you're
the only person's ever gone through this m and there
are always going to be unique aspects of it. But like,
you know, one of the ways that alienation has maintained
is by convincing you that no one else can understand
the thing that's happening to you, and that because no
one else has ever done it. And it turns out like, no, actually,
this is something that like all of us have gone through.
(23:52):
And when you sort of start to realize this and
the kind of solidarity that they could be built based
on this collective well of experience we've all gone through,
and how it can be you know, changed by actual
actions of a bunch of people working together. It changes things.
So I think I think it is in a lot
of ways political in the sense that like, in order
to have politics, you have to have sort of like
(24:14):
collective assemblages of people who fucking understand each other and
to understand that they're not alone, that they can do
things totally. And this is part of how you get
to that.
Speaker 3 (24:22):
Yeah, we can talk a little bit more about the
like very start of something that could be seen as
a political awakening that Grace has in this book, but like, yeah,
part of the reason that she isn't perfect is because
she doesn't know any other, Like there are no other
transmitting characters in this book, And that was very deliberate. Yeah,
(24:45):
Grace is like on our own. She is like figuring
this shit out as she goes yep. And I wanted
it to feel rough and like ad hoc y because
like that's how it is for a lot of people.
That's how it was, like.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Go through it by walking. Yeah, yeah, I guess. I
guess I want to kind of move into the more
directly political realm. Why do I think that's interesting about
this book is that like Grace and this is something
that like I my brain has been so melted by
having been like the politics kids since I was like fifteen,
because I was like my high school was like interrupted
(25:16):
in the middle of it by be trying to overseell
the Turkish government, and so like my brain is so melted.
We'll get aired one one day. We already can't go
there for our coverage of Kurdish gorilla movements. Very good stuff.
You'll find many, many such things, as I think, But
like one of the interesting persons about this is that
Grace is like not political, right, and most of the
(25:38):
people in this aren't. And there's kind of a divide
between the politics knowers who are like the more uh
you know, who are like okay, yeah, like we are
like the queer kids. We are like the activist kids,
and then like the you know, like the ballplayers, and
then Grace sort of fits more into the like not
even more into Grace isn't like a politics person. Grace
(25:59):
is a like, hey, like transphobia is bad, we shouldn't
do that, but also like just wants to fucking go
kick a go kick a rock between two posts. So yeah,
can you talk about like how you sort of decided
to make her just be like kid who doesn't follow politics.
Speaker 3 (26:14):
Yeah, so like if that was like not any kind
of like statement about how like politics is bad, you know,
that was like Grace's seventeen, and most seventeen year olds,
if they have politics at all, have like completely incoherent politics.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, because I was like holy shit.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
Yeah, So like Grace has the like barest outlines of
like ideology and those were like put on her by
people in her life. We know that her dad is
a union man, and from a small age she has
internalized that unions are good. Does she know why? Probably not?
(26:53):
But or also we know that her friend tab who
is Bori, has been like educating her on like Puerto
Rican independence, which was like, which was a like that
was a very funny line, right because because Grace is
just like dumb as shit white kid from the suburbs.
(27:14):
But so like inasmuch as she's like piecing together the
person she is bit by bit, she's also kind of
like piecing what she thinks about the world together along
with that in terms of like most of the straight
white players on the football team like do not have
like basically don't have politics. There's a scene where one
(27:38):
of my minor characters is like, yo, I just figured
out that, like trans phobia is bad, and I loved
I fucking loved writing that. But like, I imagine that
up until recently, Grace was exactly like this and just
like just like yep, I'm a middle lower middle class
(28:00):
white straight boy, air quotes on all of that, she
never had any kind of like thought about that. That
does not reflect what was going on in my life
when I was a teenager, because I was a very
annoying oh like me and a friend of mine, Chavon,
got in trouble for putting a Bernie Sanders twenty sixteen
(28:23):
sticker on her locker, because that's the kind of shit
we were doing in high school in twenty fifteen. So like,
I was like very much had sort of like vacant liberal,
middle class kid politics, but like Grace Grace is. I
(28:45):
imagine that like later in her life she kind of
has more political thoughts in her head. But I also
kind of imagine that her brain works like I don't
know if you've played Disco Elysium, but I kind of imagine.
I kind of imagine Grace has a like thought cabinet,
and it's like she has like she has like two
(29:10):
slots in it. Oh, she just like cannot hold that
many ideas in her brain at once. So she's she
is in all aspects of her life trying her vest
and trying to get better. And yeah, I want to
like I feel like a lot of contemporary YA that
comes out these days, a lot of the kids have
(29:32):
like overly coherent politics. I was like, nah, nah, I
wanted to write a kid who has like good intentions
but has no idea what she's doing.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
Yep, God, my brain's doing the Trump flying. In many
cases have no idea what they're doing. Yeah. Oh, Jesus
crushing braids are broken. Okay, speaking of things being broken,
the products and services to support this podcast unrelated statements.
(30:03):
We are back, Okay. So, having now gotten like many
far into this interview without directly being like, here's the
football politics, let's talk about the politics of football. Because
one of the things I think is fascinating about, you know,
the way you're sort of talking about this, and the
way that Grace like runs into this, and the way
that this is just like a thing that happens in
(30:25):
the US, which is that like giant portions of the
entire US economy and like like structural elements of the
US like education system from like the ground up, and
like all of these sort of contracting services, like massive
portions of like how every single part of the education
system from like fucking like middle school through college are
(30:46):
all bent around this game, yep. And I think one
of the things that happens there is that like the
kind of like default ambient politics, it is very conservative,
and I think in ways you know, are very easy
to understand, and that when people tend to talk about this,
they immediately go like, well, yeah, so, like you know,
like the left is talking about football it's like you're
(31:08):
talking about the militarism, which is like, yeah, I mean
they're fucking flying jets over games like there, we're not
even in wars anymore. In terms of like US ground
troops deployed, Like why the fuck are their troops showing
up on the field. There's like the cult of masculinity stuff.
There's you know, I mean, like there's been some engagement
now with the racial politics of it with Kaepernick. People
(31:28):
realize like, holy shit, wait, there's been like stuff happening
here for ages, and you know, when you get sort
of the masculinity politics. But there's I think a lot
of stuff here that we don't talk about on the
left in terms of like the class dynamics of this
and the way that football I'm just like functions in
a lot of very very weird ways in terms of
(31:50):
like sucking together this weird pool of a bunch of
like non white working class kids and like, I don't know,
fucking see, if I knew ball, I could I could
pull an example off the top of my head of
like some some quarterback prospect you'd spent these family had
spent like two million dollars on like personal trainers for him.
Speaker 3 (32:10):
Absolutely. Yeah, I grew up sort of like middle lower
middle class and like playing football specifically, and I grew
up playing mostly like soccer and baseball, a little bit
of basketball, but I sort of like I sort of
ended up playing football when I was like a teenager
because I was large, and that's how that works, yep.
(32:31):
And like in terms of like connecting with people who
weren't white and of my exact class status or higher
like football, so it happened. Man, like most of my
earliest friendships with black kids with Hispanic kids was like
all through football, and like it is a like very
(32:53):
interesting sort of like class and racial melting pot at
least at like I went to a like pretty big
suburban middle and high school, but like lots of lots
of very different kinds of people ended up at my school,
and lots of very different kinds of people ended up
playing football, And like you're gonna get a more diverse
(33:18):
slice of that student population on a football team than
you will on the fucking yearbook committee or in like
school band, class government, whatever. All of that came very
naturally to me in terms of writing this book, where
like I've ended up with a book that's like quite diverse.
(33:40):
But I didn't really do that on purpose. I just
kind of like, who are the kinds of kids who
end up playing football? And it's like everyone you have
like Poorish kids like Grace, and then you have like
Ritish kids like Ahmed or Dre in my book, who
like I very much wanted to like show that, like
maybe one of the reasons that Grace is going to
(34:01):
end up having a more coherent politics is because, like
she has friends of different backgrounds that she might not
if she had not ended up playing this this like
fucked up, evil, violent game. To be clear, Yeah, I mean,
I think any football fan who is honest with themselves
and has his politics that are not evil has a
(34:23):
very complicated relationship to the game for a like variety
of reasons. Because it like chews up people's brains and
there's that, but there's also like implied conservative politics. There's
also a big factor here is that high school football,
even at a public school like mine, the religion is
(34:43):
all over it, baby, like all over it.
Speaker 2 (34:46):
Yeah, that's a huge part of it.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
Jason Kirk of The Shutdown Full Cast is working on
a book about the history of Christianity and Talls Football
called it Church in State. I'm very fucking excited for
that book.
Speaker 2 (35:02):
Hell yeah, yeah, that sounds awesome.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
But it's just like really interesting political space because of
how diverse it is and because of how like homogeneous
a lot of the like religion and politics.
Speaker 2 (35:14):
Of it are, I guess if that makes sense. Yeah,
And it's sounds so weird because like, you know, so
like I don't know, I refuse to watch college football,
Like I draw the line there, like I'm not doing this.
I'm not doing this. They can't make me watch like
fucking Colorado's State or whatever the fuck. But like one
of the things that you get in the NFL too,
is it's like, on the one hand, like you have
(35:35):
all of this really really conservative shit right, like every
fucking everything is God. Like every single time someone holds
a thing in front of a player there there's like
at least three lines of like all of this is
possible because of God, and like someone's like it's like
that the only place you see people regularly saying Christ
(35:56):
is King where they're not also like holding an ar
to like a non white person's head, you know. So
so that there's all of this like really really conservative
religious shit. But then also there's like a union, yes
that everyone's in and it's like a large like I mean,
it's not that powerful. And there's there's weirdness there too,
(36:17):
because you get to see all of the really interesting
dynamics of unions that you don't really get outside of
kind of like I mean, like I guess like SAG
kind of has this, but it's this union in this
place where one the owners have like an unbelievable amount
of control, like a hideous amount of power, and they
can turn through people really quickly. They have you know,
(36:39):
these are some of the richest people in the world.
And then also secondly there's there's this like marketization force
that's happening where you know, you get to see in
miniature the way that capitalism has like moved to to
sort of deal with with unions, to deal with sort
of the class movements of the twentieth century, which is
that like they're also trying to turn all of these
(37:01):
kids like into entrepreneurs.
Speaker 3 (37:03):
M I think in the NFL, I think it's more
coherent because there is a players association, not a union.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
A players association, although also also shout out shoutouts the
PA for backing are for backing a unionization attempt here,
Thanks for that. I don't know if it mattered, but
that's a lot to me.
Speaker 3 (37:22):
Yeah. Also, like sports players, unions are fascinating because these
are people who are part of a union who are
like at least some of them millionaires. So it's yep,
a very interesting sort of like class dynamic happening there.
But like call it like the college game right now
is just charn Oldhouse. I mean, like it is better
(37:47):
now that players are being paid like unambiguous good that
players can profit off of their name, image and likeness.
But again it makes like I remember, like I'm not
on Twitter much anymore, but like in the like early
Elon days, you started getting Twitter ads and these were
sixteen and seventeen year old high school football players.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:09):
The post is like huddle highlights and like a like
quick recruiting profile of like hey, class of twenty twenty
seven defensive back wide receiver out of Palo Alto, and
just like blasting that onto like Twitter timelines everywhere, just
like please God, somebody see my Like, somebody see these
(38:31):
fucking huddle highlights. The feudalism stage of high school and
college ball has like ended, and now we are in
the no regulations baby, just like completely unfettered capitalism stage.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Can we explain like just how like very briefly, people
who do not know any football, like what name, image, likenesses,
and how this is different from like a system that
would be normal, which is you pay the players.
Speaker 3 (38:57):
Yeah, so for like seventy years, the precedent with college
football in the United States of America is that all
these players are amateurs and they cannot be compensated in
any way. They cannot profit off of their name, image likeness,
so that means that they can't like sell autographs. The
school isn't going to sell jerseys that have their name
on them. You are meant to make exactly zero dollars
(39:22):
from your time as a amateur college athlete. And this
was the ironclad system for like seventy years, and then
it kind of got like destroyed overnight. Yeah, when the
NCAA finally legalizes players profiting off of their name, image,
and likeness, so that means that they could sign like
(39:42):
endorsement deals. And when this was first made a thing
in twenty twenty one, it mostly manifested in like the
coldest Crawford for the Nebraska football team is filming a
ad for a local air conditioning company because his name
is Coldest And it was sort of like very like
(40:03):
quaint and cute at first, but then nil collectives got going,
which are these I don't even know how to how
to like God described nil collective is these are like
investment groups that operate independently of universities that pool resources
and then pay players for like extremely scant public appearances
(40:28):
so that they can say that they're just profiting off
of name, image and likeness, but in reality they exist
as a way to pay college football players without paying
them via schools. Now there is the house settlement happening
right now, which colleges will soon be able to probably
maybe God who knows, will soon be able to directly
(40:48):
pay college athletes a certain amount of money. Lord knows
where that's going. Like this stuff is all changing at
like lightnings at like yeah, so like we have just
have gone from like nobody gets paid for anything to
like we are in fucking like gilded age robber bear
and shit where like yeah, because none of this shit
(41:10):
is regulated, schools or an aisle collectives will go back
on agreements and everything's negotiated every year. They're like like
it's it's a fucking mess. Yeah in the college game
right now. So I mean all of that makes the
like NFL having a kind of shitty union look a
lot better.
Speaker 2 (41:30):
Yeah, well, I just kind of thinking about the kind
of like this is my way of kind of bringing
it back to transgender but like one of the things
that I've been thinking about a lot in terms of
I mean just like what I do, right, and but
also just like the way that capitalism has been moving
in the lass like few decades is it's increasingly about
(41:53):
you know because like okay, so, like capitalism's fundamental base
has always been like you sell your labor, h right,
but now it's it's it's been increasing shows for me
into like you're selling like the image of yourself. You're
selling your identity, you're selling like yeah, you know, you're
selling your personality. You're selling as much of like and
this is this is what name image likeness is.
Speaker 3 (42:10):
Right.
Speaker 2 (42:11):
It's like, we're not gonna pay you for like your labor,
which is like you playing football. We're gonna pay you
for like this nebulous image of yourself. So you get
all these people who like are are you know, you're
forced to turn all of yourself into an object for consumption,
and like I think that's the thing with like fucking
I don't know, That's what I'm doing on this show
right to a large extent, like I am like the
(42:32):
Asian transgender and like, yeah, obviously, like all of this
is like research, but it's also you know, this is
what like brand and identity is, and this has had
these like seismic impacts on the entire global economy. Like
I talked about this in an episode on when I talked
about Temu, but like Tamu is literally the product of
this happening with Chinese farmers. We're like Chinese farmers were
doing this like farm social media thing, and so almost
(42:53):
like holy shit, what if we like become these things
where they were selling food but they're also just selling
that like the identity brand of like themselves as farmers,
and Timbu was like, well a PDD, which is the
Chinese company, was like, what if we just brought all
of these things together in one spot so you could
just do directed like consumer sales through it. And now
that's like the entire fucking economy is just this morass
of like selling every single part of yourself and I
(43:17):
don't know, like I'm wondering how much of yourself did
you have to do you have to like leave in
a book like this, and how much of it can
you like kind of like keep away from the market.
Speaker 3 (43:28):
Oh boy, so.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
You're good.
Speaker 3 (43:34):
Yeah, Oh gosh, everything is uh, everything is personal brands.
Speaker 4 (43:42):
Now.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
You know, there's a lot of pressure as an author
to to use all your social media is in a
very particular way. You're supposed to You're you're supposed to
make your cute little canva graphics, uh, and like talking
about your character and engage with like prompt posts on
(44:05):
Instagram and you know whatever social media du jore And like,
my personal experience is a little irregular because I do
have some amount of like sports, Twitter, niche micro celebrity posting,
so like I'm not out here making promotional tiktoks for
(44:30):
one of the boys. That was like something that was
very important to me. Was like, oh, I'm not going
to be doing that, thank god. Fuck that shit. Yeah.
And the way that authors have to promote themselves and
turn themselves into brands is like a whole other can
of worms.
Speaker 2 (44:48):
That like sucks.
Speaker 3 (44:49):
So like, Thankfully, I think I've managed to avoid the
most alienating like forms of that. But I did have
a few not too long ago, very confidently state that
this book was loosely based on my life story, which
was news to me. I was, like, word, I didn't
(45:12):
know that. So, like, I think, especially if you write
fiction as a person of any marginalized identity, if you're
if you're black, if you're gay, if you're trans, whatever,
people are going to assume that you're writing like auto fiction.
Because I think a lot of people react to women's
(45:33):
fiction this way, because I think a lot of people
subconsciously have a hard time believing that like women have
interior lives and can like imagine things, you know, Like,
I think a lot of people assume that authors are
always writing about themselves and writing about the people in
their lives, and uh, I mean, I'm writing about experiences
(45:57):
that I have had similar ones too, but like naw dog,
that is not how this works.
Speaker 2 (46:03):
There's a really great I say about this by a
friend of mine named Rosemary Hoe, who's absolutely brilliant writer,
who wrote about the she's's writing about Zady Smith, and
one of the things that she talks about is like
the way that people just assume that Zadi that like
Zadie Smith's politics are just like didactically coming out of
the mouth of a character, and like, well, no, that's
(46:24):
not how this shit works, Like yeah it is.
Speaker 3 (46:27):
Uh it's frustrating, and I think like a lot of
authors have their own experiences with this, so uh yeah, yeah,
I mean I like, you have to turn yourself into
some kind of brand. That's why I'm going on podcasts,
you know. So that's all, uh, you know, that's fun,
(46:48):
but uh, I'm trying not to like, you know, completely
give myself over to the fucking torment nexus, you know.
Speaker 2 (46:58):
And there's like, I don't know, the this is also
just like this is a way you can just completely
lose your mind. I don't know if I've ever actually
talked about this on the show. Weirdly, one of the
people whose career trajectory is the most similar to Minus
is Asian American writer named Lesley Yang, who was like
this guy who got brought in to write about like
I think it was Columbine. It's like some mass shooting
that was like a Korean kid did and his friends
(47:19):
were like, hey, you're Asian right about this, Oh God,
and he you know, for a bit he was like
he was like duh, Like he was like he was
like the guy who was like the big like Asian American,
like this is like the literary thinker. He was like
interviewing Aaron Schwartz. He was doing like profiles of a
bunch of like interesting people, and then he just became
this like incredibly boring, bog standard reactionary and he became
(47:42):
one of these A very common kind of person who
you experience on the right is like someone who's experienced
who's like understanding of race comes from like watching sports
where they're like there are black players in basketball and
there's a bunch of them, and because of that, this
means that like actually black people like overrepresented and like
as a class, they're like privilege or whatever the fuck
(48:03):
because there's just like a bunch of black basketball players
and I don't know, I think it's like there's like
a really interesting intersection here of like the way that
people understand politics as just like politics are just like
the thing that I see on my screen when I'm
watching football, and how we have to sort of like
just deal with that shit and deal with the sort
(48:25):
of micro identity formation that is real but also isn't
like a depiction of what the world is.
Speaker 1 (48:32):
M m.
Speaker 4 (48:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:44):
So one of the interesting things in this book is
that like the right wing media, like right wing football media,
kind of isn't in it that much really, which I
think is fascinating And I wonder part of how much
of this is just that, like this was kind of
a book that was a real action being written before,
like Aaron Rodgers was going up Pat McAfee show in
front of like half a million people every single day
(49:06):
and like screaming about trans people.
Speaker 3 (49:08):
M hm. So this book has excerpts of like articles
and outside media and like social media, et cetera. Originally
it had like a lot more. I had to cut
a lot in order to make this book like legible
as a book. This book is already like pushing the
edges of what you could really communicate in ya in
(49:30):
terms of like I have a lot of characters, I
have a lot of shit going on, So like part
of it is just that, like I had to like
you know, trim et cetera. But like, originally it had
a lot more of that stuff, and there were like
interstitial snippets from a fictional sort of like football podcaster
guy who is like Pat McAfee and all of the
(49:54):
like barstool former athlete podcasters, Yeah, in a blender, and
he like he was this like really pathetic former like
special team or linebacker who just like keeps reliving the
fucking glory days. Yeah. Eventually I just had to like
(50:14):
refocus and like, yeah, yeah, bring that conflict closer to
home with like school administration's kind of shitty, and like
there are plenty of dudes on the football team who
also suck. So I kind of like left it in
via some like shitty tweets that you see, or you
(50:36):
get a lot of it, like indirectly you can imagine
what is happening on the fucking Pat McAfee show.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
Oh my fucking god.
Speaker 3 (50:43):
Yeah, But like also part of it is what you
said that the weird timeline of publishing means that I
started writing this book in February twenty twenty one, wrote
the majority in twenty twenty two, and edit it in
twenty three and twenty four, and like kind of this
like very very organized anti trans reaction was not as
(51:04):
prevalent in twenty twenty one at all like I kind
of had to like track it as it started to
like really like form up a drill time. This is
not the world that I thought I was gonna write
my stupid little football book. Yeah, and like have it
emerge into a lot of people are say that this
book is very timely, and I'm like, dog, this is
(51:26):
a Biden administration sept for him through.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
So one final ball question on behalf of my beloved
and a curse Seattle Seahawks. Okay, so think about Sam Darnold,
who's now our quarterback after they traded my beloved Gito
Smith for a fucking third round pick.
Speaker 3 (51:41):
Brother.
Speaker 2 (51:42):
Okay, so, like, is the thing that's going to happen
this season not just by week five? Ave Lucas goes
down for the twelve million time whatever child they drag
out of a kindergarten to try to block the deal,
one hundred gets liquified in ten milli seconds to Sam
Darnold just like start seeing the ghosts of men who
haven't been born yet, Like, isn't this exactly?
Speaker 4 (51:58):
Is?
Speaker 2 (51:58):
It's just what's gonna fuck happen? Why did they build
this team like this?
Speaker 3 (52:03):
Can I attempt to give you a small amount of
Seattle Seahawks optimism. I thought they were gonna.
Speaker 2 (52:11):
Would have lived in games last season. They should have,
so we lost to the Flat Giants.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
So I really like some of what the Seahawks did.
They drafted a lot of players that I really like.
It's true they they finally took a interior offensive line
player in the first round. Congratulations, Uh yay. Gray's Abel
(52:37):
is a good player. He's also a maga as shit,
which is what you want on your offensive line. No,
that's what you want on your offense. It's true, it's true.
But also like, god fucking damn it. So you got
Gray's Abel. You got Jalen Milroe, who Jalen Milroe isn't
good at football right now, but a sports media friend
(52:59):
named Derek klass And put it that he's He's the
kind of player you want to bet on and then
be wrong about, just just because he's fun, because he's
a like legit, actual like special athlete, special with the
ball in his hand. He's cool. I really like Jaylen Milroe.
But you also drafted later on. You took Tory Horden
(53:21):
and Ricky White, who are two of my favorite sort
of like small school wide receivers in the draft. You
took Damien Martinez, who is a running back who I
think could end up being a lot better than someone
who's drafted in the seventh round would indicate. And also
you took a full back. You took Robbie Oates. That's great.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
His name is a.
Speaker 2 (53:40):
Robbie Oates a great name, great name, old name, old
name team.
Speaker 3 (53:45):
He is a He's like the squarest football player I've
ever seen. Love love Robbie Oates. However, the Sam Darnold
situation is tough. It's tough. I have a hard time
seeing it happen.
Speaker 2 (54:06):
Like he would literally if you had put it behind
last year Seahawks offensive line, he literally would have died
by about week eight, like you just like straight up
would have died on the field. Oh god.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
Yeah, And like it's a bit better this year because
you have friends able, but you still have Abe Lucas.
You know, you still have a We'll.
Speaker 2 (54:24):
Have Abe Lucas for three weeks and then we won't
have Abe Lucas and then yeah.
Speaker 3 (54:30):
And also like Sam Darnold is in like the perfect
spot for him, and now he's going to be throwing
the ball too. I mean, you know, you got Cooper Cup,
you got you know, for four weeks, got JSN, but
you also have Marcus valdezk is he gonna is he
gonna get load bearing snaps?
Speaker 2 (54:48):
Like?
Speaker 3 (54:48):
Is that really? Is that really what you want?
Speaker 2 (54:51):
My cope last year was that was that JSN Metcalf
and Lockett was the most underrated receiver trio in the league. Yep.
And this year it's like, all right, we get six games,
a Cooper Cup and then we get fifth rounders.
Speaker 3 (55:07):
Yeah. God, it's it's tough out here. Yeah. I don't
expect Sam Darnold to work here, just like straight up,
Like I have been a Sam Donald truther for years.
But it is the classic thing of like I think
Sam Donald's better than most people think, and then a
lot of people are like one hundred thirty million dollars
(55:29):
Sam Donald, and it's like what hold on, hold on,
hold on, hold on, hold on. I didn't think he
was that good. I didn't think he was traded Gino
Smith good. No, oh god, So that's unfortunate.
Speaker 2 (55:43):
Yeah, so this this that this has been the football
section of this of this podcast. Yeah, so Victoria, do
you have anything else that you want to say before
we head out, and where should people buy your book from?
Speaker 3 (55:54):
Non Amazon? That's like really all I have to say
about that. Yeah, one of the boys, my name is
Victor Coria Zeller, and you just buy that from bookshop,
buy it from your local indie. You can buy it
from Barnes and Noble, because we don't hate them as
much as we hate Amazon. But like I would say,
buy it from your local indie bookstore is like ideal
(56:15):
for me. I make the same amount of money wherever
you buy it, so it doesn't matter. But if you
want to sign copy, you can also order it from
my home bookstore, So there's that. Hell. Yeah, but yeah,
my website is a Victoria dot monster and all my
links are there.
Speaker 2 (56:32):
Yeah. Okay, I realized I had an actual final question
that I wanted to ask it I forgot to do
before this the fucking we started the intro, so I apologize.
So the odds here are much much higher than they
are in most places that there's going to be some
queer kids who fucking play ball to some extent listening
to it, and I wanted to I'm throwing something from
your book at you, which is, I know, what would
(56:54):
you say to the what did you say it to
the kiddos who are going through it?
Speaker 3 (56:58):
This is so mean. Okay, Okay, I'm gonna be real
with you right now. Guys, do what's best for you. Yeah,
fight if you have it in you to fight, But like,
you got to be a kid first and foremost, and
like trans kids, queer kids deserve the chance to be
(57:21):
fucking kids. They deserve the chance to make mistakes and
listen to music too loudly in their friends' shitty car,
and they deserve to play sports if that's what they
want to do. I think in a lot of ways,
my book is about how we ask teenagers to be
(57:43):
braver than they should be, and I think that's bullshit.
So I'm not gonna put it on. You have as
much fun as you can, like ball if you can,
but do what makes you happy and what feels safe
to you. Is like really, all I've got, Like, you know,
just have fun while you're able to as a child
(58:05):
is like yeah.
Speaker 2 (58:06):
No, And it's like, yeah, it's not if you are
like a little ass kid. A I'm so sorry for
how much I swear on the show. Be like, it
is not up to you right now to save the world.
That is the job of fucking everyone else who listens
to the show like you. If you want there to
be more queer athletes, if you want trans kids be
able to be kids, that shit's on you. Yeah, all
of the rest of you who listen to the show,
(58:28):
If you are also like the fucking one bazillion trans
people listen to the show, this is like a bit
less on you than it is on fucking everyone else.
But yeah, but the best time do I started organizing
was like five years ago. The second best time is
right now, and the best time after that is tomorrow.
So go fucking build a world where trans kids can
be kids and fall out.
Speaker 3 (58:47):
Let kids like me hoop, let them hoop, let them
hit dingers, let them ball. Oh yeah, my people need rings.
My people need titles, They need trophies, they need championships.
Speaker 1 (59:06):
It could Happen 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.
Speaker 2 (59:17):
You listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (59:19):
You 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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Law & Order: Criminal Justice System - Season 1 & Season 2
Season Two Out Now! Law & Order: Criminal Justice System tells the real stories behind the landmark cases that have shaped how the most dangerous and influential criminals in America are prosecuted. In its second season, the series tackles the threat of terrorism in the United States. From the rise of extremist political groups in the 60s to domestic lone wolves in the modern day, we explore how organizations like the FBI and Joint Terrorism Take Force have evolved to fight back against a multitude of terrorist threats.