Trans Lives Before the Moral Panic with Eli Erlick

In this episode, we speak with Eli Erlick, celebrated author, trans activist, and educator based out of New York City, who recently published the groundbreaking new book Before Gender: Lost Stories from Trans History, 1850-1950.

In a time of moral panic when trans people are being turned into political scapegoats, with hundreds of new bills restricting their rights and visibility, Erlick’s book is a powerful reminder that trans people have always been here. Drawing on court files, newspapers, and other primary sources, Erlick uncovers the lives of trans kids, workers, activists, and athletes who lived long before words like “transgender” existed.

We talk with Eli about why reclaiming erased history matters now; why there is no such thing as the “first” trans person; how language shapes who is allowed to exist; early gender-affirming care and activism; Magnus Hirschfeld’s legacy; and how trans athletes, youth, and public life became today’s battleground in the culture war.

As Erlick writes, “History has always been a malleable tool used for political ends.” This episode is about restoring the past that reactionaries are trying to erase, and using history as a tool for truth, understanding, and future liberation.

You can learn all about Eli, order her book, and check out her tour dates on her website elierlick.com.

Episode Transcript

(00:08):
It's time for you and me to stand up for ourselves.
Welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where we make a mess out of neat
little narratives. Today we're talking about lost
stories from transgender historyand the anti trans moral panic
that erases them. I'm your host Lola Michaels,
joined by the venerable Ezra Saeed.
Hi, Lola. Hi, everybody.

(00:29):
And our distinguished Cam Cruz. Hey everybody.
And today we have a very respected special guest as well,
Eli Erlich. Eli is a celebrated author,
trans activist and educator based out of New York City who
recently published the groundbreaking new book Before
Gender Lost Stories from Trans History 1850 to 1950.

(00:50):
You can learn all about her, order her book and check out her
tour dates on her website, eliehrlich.com.
Eli, thanks for coming. We're so excited to have you of.
Course, thanks for having me. And a reminder to our listeners
that you can find all our episodes on Spotify, Apple
Podcast, and our website unwashedun-ruly.com.
We also pop up on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, and X.

(01:12):
Please follow us and don't forget to rate and review the
show. Right now we're living through
an intense campaign against trans and non binary people who
are vilified, legislated against, blamed for economic
ills, and targeted by harmful policies.

(01:32):
Trans identity has become a political scapegoat.
In 2025 alone, over 100 anti trans bills have passed across
the US, from bathroom bans to executive orders prohibiting
trans athletes from sports. In the middle of all this, Eli
Ehrlich's new book, Before Gender Lost Stories from Trans
History, is something of a revelation.
It's a reminder that trans liveshave always been part of the

(01:54):
human story. Their existence is not new.
What we're witnessing is a hysterical drive to keep them
oppressed. Eli's book is based on extensive
research from primary sources, court records, and newspapers.
It uncovers the untold stories of 30 trans people who lived
between 1850 and 1950, long before words like gender

(02:16):
identity or transgender even existed.
These are stories of kids, activists, workers, and
athletes. People who fell in love, who
accessed gender affirming care, who organized, built community,
and sparked uprisings decades before Stonewall.
These trans chronicles can help us make sense of a past that's
been deliberately erased and help counter the backlash we're

(02:39):
living through today. Thank you again for being here,
Eli. I just want to start a little
bit at the beginning. I know that you started your
research a while back, but there's a quote in the
introduction to the book by our bigot imperialist in chief,
Donald Trump that kind of situates where we're at in

(03:00):
presenting trans identity as an invention or a kind of social
contagion. So Trump in 2023 says about
trans children, quote, nobody's ever heard of this, what's
happening today. It was all when the radical left
invented it just a few years ago.
And I think behind this statement is a political agenda

(03:21):
to attack trans, non binary and intersex kids, deny them medical
care, slash funding for criticalservices and remove them from
public life altogether. Can you talk a little bit about
what motivated you to write yourbook and why you think it's so
critical in today's ultra reactionary political climate?

(03:42):
So I wrote this book because I wanted to find a way that not
only told entertaining stories about trans history, but finding
out how to actually locate stories and histories that can
make a difference that really disrupt what we've been told
about trans people, including within our own community.
Now, while there was a lot of research done for this book,

(04:05):
it's not academic. It's meant for anyone to read
and enjoy. And starting with the Trump
quote really gets down to the core reason why I wrote this
book, because trans people obviously aren't new.
We've been around for a while and there's amazing stories
about our community out there. When Trump in another speech

(04:26):
claimed that trans kids were invented in 2015, I, I mean, I
was really frustrated because I was a trans kid in 2003 and I'm
like 80% sure I existed then. So it just really set me off on
this search for our lost histories and finding these

(04:46):
known unknowns. So yeah, one of the things that
you introduced at the beginning of the book is about language.
The word gender didn't come intocommon usage until around 1955.
Transgender and trans as terminology didn't come into
common usage until the 1990s. And So what you get is this
awful argument against trans people.

(05:08):
Like, well if the words didn't exist then these people didn't
exist. And of course, language and
terms change over time, even if the meaning behind them doesn't.
You know, I think that this is just basically another way of
them selling the idea that therehave always been 2 genders and
only two genders. Why do you think the discussion
on language is important to yourthesis that trans identities are

(05:29):
not a modern phenomenon? And also at some point can you
talk about how you define trans in the book?
Well, that's a great question because that's been one of the
like central contentions among scholars of trans history and
also the right and general denying trans existence before,
I mean, the 1950s and 1990s, or in Trump's case, 2015.

(05:53):
So this has been a big argument among trans people ourselves.
Like could we call people from the past before the word trans,
existent trans? And in this book, I'm arguing,
yes, of course we can. And in academia, we always we're
always told we're supposed to have this big intervention with
our books. And so unfortunately, I was kind

(06:15):
of pitching hold into that for mine, but I, I proposed this
idea called the Cleopatra problem.
And all this is saying is that we know that Cleopatra was a
woman 2000 years ago. Nobody's questioning that.
And I don't think we should be. But at the same time, like
Egyptians had different gender roles, different terminology,

(06:36):
different, different expressionsof gender than we do today.
And in fact, the word woman wasn't invented for over 1000
years after Cleopatra's death. So how do we know that she was a
woman? And without going into the like,
biological essentialism trenches, we don't really.
But we know because she embodiesthis social category that seems

(07:00):
to persist throughout time, and trans people do too.
We are transcending these binauristic roles that are
placed in Western among other cultures that aren't necessarily
factual or the actual lived experience of people we may now
call trans. And so I really wanted to dive

(07:22):
into this as a sort of solution to this problem that we've spent
the past like 100 years or so arguing over whether we can call
XY or Z trans, transgender, or even, for that matter,
homosexual or Latina. All of these terms have
arguments over their temporality.
And I think that this is too much of A focus and it's being

(07:46):
weaponized against us in this very clear and I want to say a
sinister way that is just completely unnecessary.
What do you mean by the word woman wasn't invented for 1000
years? You're referring to the English
word woman, right? Yes.
So different languages of coursehave different terms for gender.

(08:06):
Most languages actually had morethan two terms.
And Egyptian gender roles 2000 years ago were also very
different. So how we are describing women
today is going to be different than it was then, but I don't
think there's any problem with calling Cleopatra a woman too.
So you make this point about howtoday, you know, transgender is

(08:27):
a category that people identify with, but people in the past,
historical figures, don't get the option to decide what we
call them. So can you explain a little bit
about some of the criteria that you go through in your book?
So for this book, I set up the most explicit, clear cut cases
that I could find of trans people who also tell us

(08:49):
something more about trans history that we don't get from
well publicized or well known cases.
So I chose some kind of frankly overly prescriptive qualifiers
for these different individuals and this man.
Like people who were assigned male at birth were declaring
themself a woman. Or in a couple cases the

(09:11):
individual said I am neither a man nor a woman verbatim, which
is very cool for over 100 years ago.
And I also decided to not include intersex people who of
course today can absolutely be trans, but this was a conscious
decision because this book is ultimately A rebuttal to all of
the arguments and historical arguments that are being made by

(09:34):
the right. They are saying there's only one
category of trans person that who's worthy of surgery, which
are intersex people. And they don't get to decide
because they're usually infants or children.
So the only surgery trans surgeries they support are the
non consensual ones. And so I did end up leaving out

(09:55):
intersex stories, which I found quite a few of.
And I do tendentially include a couple intersex people in the
book and a chapter on the runner.
Stefan Bakar. One of his teammates was also an
intersex trans man. So Danya Kovac, and he's been
written about a bit before in the book The other Olympians by

(10:16):
my friend like waters. Another great book.
I know I'm pure to prevent my own, but his is really great
too. So this history between intersex
and trans people is obviously very intertwined.
It's not a binary. But I still chose to leave out
full narratives of intersex people because I'm making a
point here that non intersex trans people were respected,

(10:38):
they accessed medicine, they were able to advocate for
themselves, and for the most part they were able to live long
and happy lives. Yeah, that was one thing I found
so fascinating about the book isthat a lot of the stories were
very uplifting and showed a level of acceptance that is kind
of shocking in today's world. And then there's also a lot of

(11:01):
stories about trans people who had to make up narratives to
avoid legal punishment or to avoid violence and had to invent
justifications for self protection or for survival.
Some had to say that they were adifferent gender because their
parents treated them that way orclaimed that they had to work
and that was the only way they could gain work.

(11:23):
And so I found it interesting that you mentioned how sometimes
these motivations have been usedby other historians to undermine
their legitimacy. So I was wondering if you could
explain how you took into account all the factors that
might motivate someone to transition during this time
period because of circumstances and the historical context of

(11:46):
the time, like how it influencedthe motivating factors for
transitioning. OK.
So there's two very different questions there.
I'm good at making confusing questions.
Oh no, I pile them on. I love to talk about these
people. I mean, to write this book, you
have to get a little obsessed with each figure and find some
joy in their respective stories.So for the your first question,

(12:10):
I was really surprised by how positive the reception was in
media of some of these individuals.
And of course, obviously very racialized, very gendered like
media love white trans boys. They thought they were brave.
They called them courageous. And I think that's great.
Nothing wrong with that. Now, I wish I could show the
same respect to the trans peopleof color and trans woman who

(12:33):
were in there, who certainly gota lot, a lot less act in terms
of their genders. Some of them did, some of them
didn't. Some were very mixed.
So I was very surprised and alsovery eager to learn these
stories of acceptance and support that were happening in
the 1860s. For example, one of the cases,

(12:56):
Ray Leonard was of a trans man who had the support of his
family in around 1863 for his transition when he was thirteen
years old. I think that's fantastic.
You don't hear about those stories.
It I mean, transness doesn't have to be suffering and it
didn't ever have to be suffering.

(13:16):
Now for your second question, I was very interested in unpacking
why we are so eager to erase trans people from history and
also why this erasure happens. That's a that's a lot of what
this book is about, like these various forms of erasure, of
self erasure, of accidental erasure, and of some malicious

(13:38):
erasure while we're at it. So historians are often very
cautious about presentism. They're cautious about applying
these retroactive labels. And I wouldn't even say that
trans is a retroactive label anymore than woman is.
Again, we're getting back to Cleopatra problem here.
There's been words for transgender for centuries now.

(13:58):
They had words like Ionism like 150 years ago after Chevalier
Dion, who was a French cross dressing possibly trans spy.
While writing this book, I foundquite a few cases that had been
listed maybe in lesbian archives.
It's like a little snippet of history, like a sentence or two.

(14:19):
And I became curious, like, whatare these people actually saying
about themselves? How are they identifying?
And there's some authors out there who are very eager to
misgender trans people to a really almost impressive point
in some cases. There were a few cases that I

(14:40):
briefly discussed in this book of trans men actually shooting
people who are misgendering them, and historians are still
misgendering them. Emilio Robles is one of those
cases who's being harassed by a couple men in the, I believe,
1930s in Mexico. They're misgendering him.
They're calling him a woman, andhe shoots them.

(15:03):
And there have been multiple books and articles written in
the past 10 years calling him a woman.
It's so ridiculous he changed his legal documentation like he
lived almost his entire life as a man talking like 60 years.
Really incredible. Like bending over backwards to
misgender someone. But it's because of this context

(15:23):
that he transitioned 100 years ago now that people don't think
we could call him trans. It's also ridiculous because he
died in 1989 and just really fitthis kind of stereotypical
narrative of trans people. Now, there's also these excuses
that trans people often gave as to why they transitioned.
I had quite a few of those cases, especially among those

(15:47):
caught up in courts. You would often see trans people
saying, oh, I was just raised this way, or especially for
young white trans men, oh, I just wanted to find work, so I
threw on some men's clothes. That would be understandable.
There were plenty of cases like that where this person was
clearly SIS and they wanted a job.
It was hard to get work as a woman then.
But there are other cases where they made this claim and then

(16:11):
said they would detransition andthen immediately went back to
living full time as a man. And there's at least three
stories in this book like that where they're saying, oh, sorry,
I just wanted a job. And I promise I'll wear dresses
from now on. And two days later, you see them
romping throughout the streets, noted by a journalist, like

(16:32):
wearing a suit and making out with two women at once.
You have no idea how many women were throwing themselves at
trans men during that time, especially after they got
notoriety from these court casesouting them.
Really incredible. I was so surprised by like how
much punani all these trans men were getting.

(16:53):
And it really is incredible. You would not believe how many
truffles and sex scandals these boys went through.
I was really amazed with how many of them like had multiple
engagements at the same time andjust how beloved they were.
Also, like a lot of the people you talk about in the book were

(17:14):
married way before legalized gaymarriage, so that was another
surprising part for me. Absolutely.
And that was something I was really excited about too.
In Carl Crawford Story, I was able to uncover what's now the
earliest known court record allowing a trans man to change
his legal sex. And I'm sure there were earlier

(17:37):
ones, but the fact he did this in Tennessee in about 19 O1
really amazing. It certainly didn't hurt that
his cousin married the judge's daughter, but the fact he was
able to do that, get it on record, and now that record's
preserved, it's incredible. Speaking of records, Sally Tom

(17:57):
is another one that's stands outto me because as I was reading
it, a number of things going through my mind.
One was the context in which it happened.
I thought it was interesting that it was during the
reconstruction in the period right after the Civil War, and
that for all its contradictions,the Friedman's Bureau.
I was wondering if you knew why the Friedman's Bureau agreed to

(18:18):
do that? So you're talking about the case
of Sally Tom, who was a trans woman that had her gender
legally recognized by the Friedman's Bureau in around
1869. So Sally Tom was a newly freed
enslaved person during Reconstruction who just happened

(18:38):
to almost coincidentally be out of court case where she was just
a witness in the case, nothing major.
But the judge at the Friedman's Bureau picked up that she was
wearing mixed genders of clothing.
She was at the time sometimes wearing skirts and loose
blouses. She was sometimes wearing like
masculine sailors hats. It was a mix.

(18:59):
And so the judge told her, well,I'll let you be a man or a
woman, but you have to pick one which they would be very
offensive, but at the time was incredibly progressive.
And this definitely ties back into to black history and what
the Friedmans Bureau was trying to do.
So I would, I had no sense of what the Friedman's Bureau was

(19:21):
before writing this book, honestly.
Like we don't teach it in schools anymore because it's
largely considered it a a failure of US political history.
Reconstruction was a failure period.
And what this was trying to do was it was a new government
branch overseen federally that would provide Black people some

(19:43):
autonomous decision making over their own communities.
Part of it, I mean, how we writeabout it in the book is very
mixed. Like, part of it was really
great. It kept Black people out of
prison and encouraged education.It funneled funds from the
federal government to Black communities.
And then at the same time, it tried to force many Black people

(20:05):
into underpaid, low Willow wage work.
It tried to. Assimilate black people into
this culture that didn't want them in it instead of trying to
change the culture itself. And it ultimately was used to
prevent potential rebellion fromblack communities that were

(20:26):
never given their 40 acres. So it provided a lot of good and
also a lot of bad, was a very complicated, a very complicated
system. And part of that were the
courts. And this is where Sally Tom
found herself. And this judge, just by her
presence, allowed her to exist as a woman.
When I first read this article, which came out about 20 years

(20:50):
later by an observer who turned journalist, I wasn't sure if it
was real. There's a lot of questionable
journalism at the time, and I try to view everything with a
lens of doubt. But I actually found her
obituary in the Georgia State Archives, and everything
matched. It showed that she was living as
a woman during that time. It had the same name, and it

(21:13):
matched her description. And then I realized, wow, she
was actually just living her life in this Black neighborhood
in rural Georgia called Hazard Hill, and she had largely been
left alone and respected by the communities.
You mentioned the Friedman's Bureau reconstruction not being
taught at all. I mean, in so far as it's

(21:34):
taught, it's in some ways what taught as worse than even a
failure. It's taught as as a period of,
to use the old terminology that they used to use for it, a
period of Negro domination when basically the South was
supposedly punished and all thishorrible things were imposed on
the South after the Civil War. And it was really the only

(21:56):
period in U.S. history where there was this real endeavor of
interracial democracy in the South.
And I'm just thinking a parallelcase to this.
As I was reading it, I couldn't help but think of this other
case again that you couldn't imagine happened in Tennessee in
1869. An older black man, formerly
enslaved, he is attacked by two white men.

(22:17):
He shoots and kills them, goes to court, argue self-defense and
wins, is acquitted by an whole white jury as an act of
self-defense for shooting 2 white men who were trying to
attack him. That was that was
Reconstruction. With all its flaws.
I have to imagine that part of the Sally Tom story was the fact
that there was this very unique period in American history that

(22:39):
was happening in the South at that time.
Absolutely. And I think if she went to a
white court, she probably would have been arrested by at the
time they were trying to keep. I mean, we could look at this a
few different ways. They were trying to keep black
people out of prison, which is actually amazing for the US
federal government. But this also meant they were
trying to keep them in the laborforce and potentially force them

(23:02):
into unjust working conditions. And Sally Tom actually ended up
working for a former Confederatemajor in a housekeeping
position. So you see how this supposed
punishment is actually just a recycling of slavery in many
ways. Since you're talking a little
bit about race and class, I'm curious about how it played out

(23:27):
in some of the rest of the stories that you cover in the
book. Like you speak about the young
brothers in the 1930s in Englandwho were supported by their
family and community for their entire lives, and a lot of white
trans children who had access toto medicine before black trans
children in that period between 1850 and 1950.

(23:48):
What kind of patterns of acceptance did you see depending
on class or gender? And I was kind of curious also
if you think the size of the community or the cultural
traditions played a role in the likelihood that they would be
accepted. I have to say yes to all of the
above. It was very racialized, very
classed, and at the same time innon western communities there

(24:13):
was a level of support that we might not see in the US.
So going back to the first part of your question, young white
trans boys were by far the most celebrated individuals.
Now, there were a few a few people in there who were people
of color and were trans women orwere trans women of color who
were also very celebrated, not by media but by their

(24:36):
communities. In the chapter on Georgia Black,
the community members who reallyloved her actually chased
reporters out of town because oftheir salacious reporting on her
gender identity. Some refused to believe that she
was a trans woman when she was outed around the year 1950.
And others said, I don't care. She she fed me food, she took me

(25:01):
and she worked at the church I'mat.
She was so beloved that they were willing to support her no
matter what. And the cherry on top is that
this is in Sanford, FL, which was an infamously segregated
town that once chased out JackieRobinson.
So it's all very complicated andthere's no definite pattern, but

(25:24):
we can easily observe that the young white trans boys were
supported to such a higher degree that it becomes very
notable in here. I mean, the story that you're
talking about with Mark and David Farrow, like they are
called courageous and brave by the Daily Mirror, the same
newspaper today that runs, I mean, daily attack ads on trans

(25:49):
people and has been really fundamental and undermining our
basic rights. So it's complicated because of
how things have changed now and also the sort of
conceptualization or lack thereof, of trans people.
I do think a lot of this has to do with the supposed novelty.

(26:11):
During this period, especially the 1890s to 1930s, there was a
lot of support for young white trans boys that I found in
papers. They didn't have words for what
they were. The term just now very
problematic, but the term sex change used to be a signifier of
trans identity, but they didn't have that word at the time.

(26:33):
They had almost nothing. And because of this, because
they weren't trained to demonizetrans people, they were actually
kind of supportive. I mean, Mark and David Farrow
were represented as a triumph over nature, and rightly so.
They were. I mean, there were trans teenage

(26:53):
brothers who were able to accesssurgery and hormones in the late
1930s. So it's really incredible and
changes our entire understandingof the history of trans.
Youth. I thought that was interesting
how they weren't poisoned by today's moral panic in the same
way. So the novelty of it kind of

(27:14):
propelled them to be more accepting or interested in it as
like, oh, there's this variationthat there's this diverse.
Yeah, it seemed like there was like a sense of curiosity in
some of the news articles and things like that.
Exactly. And I wouldn't say it's great to
be treated as a medical curiosity as someone who has
been before, but at the same time, that's a hell of a lot

(27:35):
better than what newspapers are putting out today.
It's interesting to see how the moral panic developed over time,
too. That was something I was keen to
track in this book because therewere actually other moments that
this sort of social contagion panic emerged.
And here I'm thinking about the story of Willie Ray, who was

(28:00):
accused of reading too many dimenovels.
And that's what turned him transwas his old Westerns.
He wanted to be a cowboy. Now, of course, he spent almost
his entire life living openly asa man, but they had to come up
with some sort of excuse. But this was largely dropped and
people actually respected his gender identity starting in the

(28:20):
19 aughts or so. There was also another
interesting case of Gerda von Zobel tits in 1912 Germany who
interviewed with a German newspaper about her gender
identity. And this, this paper was pretty
progressive and very supportive,but they slipped this paragraph

(28:41):
in there that I found really telling.
And during this time there was alot of concern about this
supposed explosion of transgender people in Berlin.
Now this newspaper could have said it was some sort of moral
decay, which became the rhetoricstarting in 1933.
Of course, by instead they said this is actually just the result

(29:04):
of more visibility and more understanding.
There were social hubs opening up of trans people where they
can meet each other and actuallyform communities.
And this is the reason why therewere more trans people around,
because they could actually exist openly for basically the
first time in Germany's history.And I think that particular

(29:25):
article is really incredible forits treatment of Gerda in 1912,
because this is in some ways more supportive than the Daily
Mirror is today. Yeah.
We talked a little bit about howclass kind of factors into
acceptance and the ability to transition.
And you talked a little bit about how Gerda got something

(29:46):
called Transvestitenstein, whichwas a legal document that
recognized that she, you know, was a she.
So can you talk a little bit about a Transvestitenstein?
I know I'm butchering this, but what it what it that?
Was pretty good actually what itwas.
I was like, impressed. And yeah, what what is, what
were the benefits, like the social benefits of having one at
the time? So the transvestitenstein

(30:08):
allowed carriers to dress how they wanted.
Basically it was a legal pass. Police weren't supposed to
address them if they were carrying one.
They sometimes did anyway. I mean, since when do cops ever
follow the laws? But they definitely help some
trans people escape danger and escape harm by legal

(30:29):
authorities. So the Transvestite and Shine,
which sometimes called transvestite pass, but might
better be better translated as transgender pass.
They emerged in the early 1900s with the help of notable
sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who really was at the center

(30:49):
Berlin's work and study of transpeople.
And as a doctor, he would sign off on trans people's need to
address how they wanted and these passes help them express
themselves. Now Gerda was one of the first
people to get this pass, and like you were saying, this is
entirely class based. She was from German nobility,

(31:11):
which is also the reason Nazis didn't persecute her because
they were aligned with her family, with the people that
would ultimately benefit from fascist regimes were the
wealthy. Now she herself, she came from a
large family. She wasn't super rich, but she
was wealthy enough to get away with a lot of let's call them
shenanigans. At one point she almost had her

(31:34):
past taken away because she kepton getting arrested for wearing
shorts that were too short. Apparently she nearly caused her
she. Was really abusing that past.
I know, yeah. Talk about passing privilege.
She apparently once almost caused a riot in Berlin around
around 1913 because of how shorther shorts were.

(31:54):
She was pretty out about her gender identity, so props to her
for that, honestly. Like, if you're going to have
that privilege, definitely use it.
And it seems like she did exercise it.
One of the things that your bookdoes really well is it subverts
these ideas at 1st. And I think when Americans think
about the first queer resistancemovement, a lot of people think

(32:15):
about Stonewall. Maybe some other people think
about the Black Cat Tavern protest or the Compton cafeteria
riot. But the OK, now I'm really now
I'm really going to have troublepronouncing this one.
Rashfash Wenger riots. You can.
Ralphings murder. Yeah.
So this was a riot that Girder Vonzo Boltis was involved in in

(32:36):
the year 1930 where they had an incident with the police and
they fought back. And like you were saying, she
really exercised her class privilege by fighting back and
being involved in, I think, a newspaper, also a queer
newspaper. So yeah, it was a really, really
cool to hear these stories that really changed my picture of the
first, like the picture of resistance and how it has

(32:57):
existed in other places too. Absolutely.
And this was, I mean, Gerda's story was really monumental
because of her involvement in the community and lack of
information on her. I mean, a lot of this, a lot of
the primary sources that I'm working with are just newly
digitized. Nobody's looked over them
before. They're not coming from queer

(33:17):
archives. So it's really not it's not
picked over. And some of these items we are
just getting. So the newspaper or magazine
that you mentioned is De Freundin, which was largely
lesbian and trans oriented magazine from a well known queer
publishing group in Berlin, particularly during the Weimar

(33:39):
era. And she knew a lot of people,
the paper, she was friends with them, and she even had a little
article describing her experiences as a trans woman in
the 19 teens, which is really fantastic.
So she was deeply involved despite like, the lack of
English language writing on her.And I do think one of the most

(34:01):
monumental findings in this bookis the Ralphing Swerter riots,
which have only had about a paragraph written about them in
English in the last 90 years. Wow, that's really cool.
Yeah, I I was almost surprised at the amount of reporting on
them versus the amount of consequent writing.
And I mean, it's pretty obvious why this happened.

(34:23):
It was 1930, and the newspapers that were writing about this
riot were largely shut down in 1933.
Everyone forgot about, I mean, every, like, so much
information. The Weimar era was just
destroyed. And so Long story short of this
riot, 300 queer people from the gay organization League for

(34:44):
Human Rights and including GERDA, and then 150 police
officers and 150 of their guestsat these Police Sports
Association meeting. They were dining at the same
large restaurant. And the chief of police who was
part of the association accused the restaurant of unfairly

(35:05):
discriminating against them and giving favoritism to the gays
because we know how much they bought the gays in 1930.
Completely ridiculous. So he he kept on, he kept on
escalating and he started drinking out of the beer tap in
the hall that was previously reserved by the gay rights

(35:27):
organization. And then he starts throwing
plates at them. He's insulting them, he's
hurling slurs, he's making fun of them.
You you can read all about it inthe book because it just keeps
on escalating into a full scale riot in which thankfully the
queer people actually kind of take charge and beat the hell
out of these cops. Nobody got arrested because the
cops absolutely instigated all of it.

(35:49):
Although when they filed chargesagainst the police, of course
the police investigate and nothing happens.
But we do have this amazing history of queer people in 1930
being the shit out of police officers, which is always a
great thing, yeah. And guys, just so you know,
there's a lot of details in the book.
It's very cinematic. It's it's very satisfying.

(36:10):
Really good. Yeah, it's great.
So this chief of police who really instigated all of it
erman Sander, he ends up joiningthe Nazis and committing
atrocities in Ukraine. And so it just adds another
layer of satisfaction to it. Not only were these cops, they
were Nazi cops, and it's always OK to punch a Nazi.
So I would say it's a win for all of us to read this chapter.

(36:33):
Yeah, by the early 1930s, beforeHitler took over, it was pretty
indistinguishable between the police and the SA.
And I mean, many of these peoplejoined the SA and we're already
like signed up Nazi party members.
They would patrol the streets together.
In the between 1930 and 33 they were indistinguishable.
To basically go attack the police was to attack the SA.

(36:54):
Yeah, good thing we don't have anything like that today, no.
Not at all. I'm kind of curious about this
period though, because Magnus Hirschfeld really just had such
trailblazing work and the Institute for Sexual Sciences in
Berlin, where there were medicalconsultations and counseling and
gender affirming surgeries and all this research on sex and

(37:17):
gender and sexuality and allowing people to explore their
identities. All of these archives were
destroyed and that by the Nazis,as you mentioned.
How did you get access to any ofthose?
How were you able to access thatinformation?
So not going too much into the weeds, there was a lot of
information permanently destroyed from the Manglas

(37:38):
Ursfeld Institute and his personal collections.
But actually not all of it was. What the Nazis got their hands
on was largely burned. If you see pictures of Nazis
burning papers, it probably is actually from the institute.
But at the same time, there werecopies of other institutions
too, of some of the information there were.

(37:59):
Again, it's these unknown knownsand known unknowns.
We know that there's a lot of medical records we'll never be
able to get back. Greta von Zoboltich's records
are permanently gone. We will never, we like, have
photos of them being burned. We'll never see them, but at the
same time, copies of the magazine she contributed to
Defreinden, some of those were saved, some of them were sent

(38:21):
outside of the country and rescued by people in
Czechoslovakia, in the UK and even in the USI.
Actually was just in Berlin 2 weeks ago researching some of
these periodicals from the time and reading trans narratives
that have been shared before. I think there's a lot that we do

(38:41):
have access to that people don'trealize.
The Bank of Hirschfeld Society in Berlin today actually has
been working on restoring its collections.
And every year we'll get a few books back that are stamped with
the original Institute for Sexual Sciences.
Well, their personal stamp, likebook collection stamp that might

(39:02):
have been lent out or borrowed by other institutions.
So there's still some of this information left, and sometimes
it feels like we're picking up scraps, but other times there
are amazing gems in there, like Greta von Zobo Tzu's story.
There's been a more recent effort to recover some of these
materials, which is part of the reason why some of these stories

(39:23):
haven't been seen before. Just in the past couple years,
there's been an immense digitization effort of many of
the periodicals and newspapers from the day that have
misinformation from, say, the Ralph and Sweater riots or Fred
Magnus Hirschfeld's letters to colleagues in the US.
So there's a lot more out there that we haven't found yet and

(39:48):
that we know might still be out there.
And there's a lot that we'll never find.
So there's more than we think there is, but there's still this
like huge gaping hole in what wehave access to.
One of the things I really appreciated about the book was
particular reading about Germany, which kind of stands
out within the European context because, well, I knew about the

(40:10):
institute, Magnus Hirschfeld's institute, but he didn't know
the extent of work that had beendone, that you had done, pulling
out the research and the storiesabout trans people in Germany at
that time and the level of acceptance and so on.
And I had read about where it applied to the question of gay
rights, but not directly in relation to trans.
As I was reading this, I kept wondering about is how much what

(40:31):
made Germany stand out from the other European countries.
German culture, if you were to go back to the mid 1800s, is not
particularly. It's actually very conservative
and it's very backward looking and it's, this is the birth
place of, well, German romanticism.
This is not historically a placeknown for its sort of
forward-looking and more, shall we say, libertine culture.
But the one thing that made the set Germany apart between the

(40:54):
late 1800s to up until the 1930swas really the existence of this
massive, the SPD, the Social Democratic Workers Party, and a
massive leftist, Marxist and working class movement there
that very early on took on the question of gay rights.
And at least said questions of sexuality, whatever your

(41:14):
personal prejudices are, have tobe scrutinized in a scientific
manner like everything else. And so, for example, one of the
things that, like Magnus Hirschfield, there was this
petition in the late 19th century that he had put forward
in support of building his institution.
And I ran into a speech by one of the leaders of the SPD,

(41:34):
August Babel, who himself was fairly stodgy.
But he talks about how this thing called paragraph 175 in
the German Penal Code, which wasused to go after what they
called sexual deviance. And he ends his speech by saying
we have before us a printed petition signed by me
personally, among others, and bya number of colleagues from
other parties, and further by people from literary and

(41:56):
academic circles, by jurists of the most illustrious standings,
by psychologists, pathologists, and by experts of the highest
rank in the field. The petition advocated the
revision of the Penal Code to repeal the relevant provisions
of paragraph 175. And this was in the late 1800s.
It's just a very interesting aspect of why Germany stood out

(42:16):
at that time as opposed to otherEuropean countries.
Yeah, some people would think itwould be France, but Germany was
way ahead. I.
Was thinking exactly the same thing I was.
You would think on the face of it, it would be France, but it
wasn't. Yeah.
It was, I mean, it was the dynamics that were also a bit
different to France certainly had was known for a libertine
lifestyle. But during this interwar period

(42:37):
it was a bit reversed. I mean, there was this
polarization happening in WeimarGermany that created these
opportunities for people from social categories usually
excluded from public life to work together.
And I mean, it was a very interesting study in solidarity.

(42:58):
During that time. There was a strong communist,
Marxist and socialist movement that was actually aligning
itself with the burgeoning gay and trans movements, along with
anti sterilization and pro Jewish movements.
It was, it was really incredible.

(43:19):
Now also it wasn't all cheery. There was a lot of infighting.
There was a lot of anti-gay and anti trans rhetoric.
The Socialist Party and actuallya lot of gay rights campaigners
at the time really skewered gay members of a Nazi party and like
kind of homophobic ways, which is funny to see and very
contentious. So it's it's complicated, but I

(43:41):
also think it does show how solidarity through these
intersections, through these transversals, through these
connections between race, class and gender that we are able to
actually observe a fairly progressive society 100 years
ago that was doing well for a few years.
Yeah, and you're right, they would throw out that homophobic

(44:03):
convective against their opponents and particularly the
Nazis. But I always think about it like
even within that context, what they were actually pushing in
terms of policy and changes. I don't want to pretend that
stuff away, but when you sort oflook at it as a whole, it was a
very different environment than what comes certainly, obviously
what comes afterwards. But even what you look at today
in much of the world, and in thecase of the Social Democratic

(44:25):
Party, the question of paragraph175, gay rights and so on, it
goes back even to the late 19th century.
It's really quite extraordinary.Yeah, campaigning in Western
countries to remove these so-called sodomy laws was, I
mean, it was really lacking. And the fact they did that in
the 1890s in Germany is very impressive.

(44:46):
I want to go back to this idea about kind of breaking down the
misconception around the idea ofa first.
You know, we often hear these stories about, oh, this is the
first trans person to get surgery or this is the first
trans person to do XYZ. And was there any case while
you're researching that like really, really surprised you

(45:07):
that challenge your own conception maybe of the first
known time in history? There were quite a few of those
cases, and I had laid all of them in the introduction.
I think that Mark and David Pharaoh's transition in the
1930s was really interesting to me because it it opened up new
questions for me. It made me ask when and where

(45:29):
were these hormones and surgeries being distributed
from? Who was performing them?
How do they get access? And I think their case is also
important to me in an evolving way too, because after
publishing this book, I actuallyfound an earlier one from the
story of this young trans man named Alan Caldwell, who

(45:50):
obtained surgery up in Manchester, not too far from
their home in London in 1937, a couple years earlier than them.
And the fact he was 16, completely supported by his
family and community, showed a lot of parallels with Mark and
David Farrow. But the fact that we can keep on

(46:11):
pushing back further and furtherhas me excited because of this
being an indicator that we can look even further back.
And in the book I mentioned there's someone off cases also
in Weimar Germany about young trans people, largely trans men,
interestingly, who were able to obtain surgery and hormones as

(46:34):
teenagers and in one case even aminor.
At the same time. I'm curious to what point these
were done on a systematic level.I was in England last month
trying to do some of this research, but still much of it
was just went undocumented. And then where it was done
10/20, sometimes 30 years prior in Berlin, while that

(46:55):
information is now completely gone and destroyed forever.
So we have to rely instead of onmedical records there on
personal narratives which are frankly very unreliable.
And in the case of the UK, many of the records just weren't
kept. One of the archives they visited
in the UK last month was their Sex Hormone Committee, which was

(47:17):
tasked with synthesizing estradiol and testosterone for
the first time in the UK on a mass scale.
They had to keep it secret, and it was actually only
declassified in the 1980s. So we have these large, large
spans of trans history that are only accessible to us through

(47:38):
second or third hand means or only accessible to us that kids
after the fact. Yeah, and I think this touches
on trans people needing gender firming care for a very, very
long time. You also have a whole section on
athletes and again, poking into this idea that trans athletes
are something new. And you talk about trans

(47:59):
athletes going back 120 years and some of whom had their
genders respected. When did things start getting
really dangerous for trans athletes?
I'm not trying to say it was all, you know, rainbows, but why
do you think that it's such a big part of the culture war
today? Frankly, the panic over trans
athletes is poll testing. A few years ago, the Heritage

(48:23):
Foundation conducted a research poll of some of their members to
find out what outraged them the most.
And trans women in sports, that was way up there, of course,
along with trans minors accessing care.
So this is, I mean, it's a very artificial moral panic that can
actually be traced back to a very concrete moment, which is

(48:47):
interesting and fun in a way because most can't.
But it's very clearly being pushed because it's such a not
only because it's such a popularidea, but the fact that it's
popular idea makes it a popular idea.
It's very tautological. They realize that this is
something like an anger people and potentially when
conservative some points with the public.

(49:08):
And so they have really latched on to it now more than ever.
But this also isn't the first time this has happened in the
1930s. They're at 1:00, the point where
so many trans men in the sports,particularly coming from Eastern
Europe, that mothers were withholding their daughters from
playing sports because they werefearful that it would turn them

(49:28):
into men. There were about 7 cases who
became internationally famous inAI want to say two or three-year
period from 193435 until 1937. And I got to talk about that a
little bit and in the book and Stephen Bakar's chapter, but
there are also other panics thatdeveloped during Hitler's regime

(49:51):
that he was sending men disguised as women into the
Olympics. And also in the 60s when the
Cold War was happening, they were worried that Russian
athletes were doping and they were pretending to be women,
etcetera, etcetera. This actually did happen a
couple times. It wasn't all trans people.
But at the same time, like sex testing is obviously very cruel

(50:12):
and invasive and just unnecessary.
For sure, these institutions like the Heritage Foundation,
they, they're always looking forthese hot button issues to
mobilize the base to vote. And I'm, as I say, I'm old
enough to remember gay marriage being used as that in the
earlier early 2000s. And then at some point around
20/15/2016 is when I became veryconscious of it.

(50:35):
It became trans athletes and it became the bathroom question.
Those two things they sent, theyseem to go together and and it's
just, it was like, wait, what crisis?
What are you talking about? Why is this?
Why is this an issue? What, what, what is happening?
And it's utterly cynical and it's it destroys people's lives.
I guess my curiosity is why is it polling high?

(50:56):
What is it that's driving it? And I I don't know that I have
the answer, but I was curious ifyou do.
Well, I don't think there is a simple answer.
What I like to think is that people aren't born with
ideologies. They don't have a natural
tendency to see trans people as monstrous, abhorrent or

(51:16):
undesirable. But this is so intensely placed
on them through media, through repetition, through these speech
acts that we're subjected to every day, that they are deeply
ingrained in the public's consciousness.
And part of this comes through, I mean people being taught that

(51:37):
there are inherent biological differences between man and
woman and anyone assigned male or female at birth.
And this isn't necessarily true,of course, but we're taught it
from such a young age that it becomes an objective truth in
many people's minds. Now, the Heritage Foundation has
found a way to really tap into this rhetoric, and they have set

(52:00):
the playing field in terms of the rhetoric that, say, Fox News
hosts use. They use it to claim a sort of
moral and scientific superiorityover liberals, progressives and
leftists because they want to, well, their term is keep men out

(52:20):
of women's sports, which is absolutely not happening and
actually forcing many men, many trans men into women's sports.
I mean, it's a frustrating case because like, the facts don't
matter whatsoever. Like most studies show that
trans women who've been on hormones for long enough are
like equally skilled if not lessskilled than their peers who are

(52:42):
assess women. And then also keeping trans men
with like normal T levels off ofmen's teams is just really
absurd. It kind of shows that this isn't
actually about fairness, this isabout just harassing trans
people and something that I do really like to highlight
especially in this book. Or all of the trans men who are

(53:03):
like kicking ass in men's sports.
Also Stefan Bakar played sports after he transitioned with men
and his friends hadn't yet Kovacdid too and these cases are just
overlooked because they disprovetheir point.
There's a quality of a three card Monte with all this because
one of the ways they portrayed, particularly in relation to
women's sports, is this is to protect women's sports.

(53:26):
And we all know how much the Heritage Foundation cares about
women and women's rights. The level of absurdity that it
goes to is just absurd. The same thing with the bathroom
hysteria too, because so much ofthe sex segregated toilets which
appeared at the turn of the 20thcentury was about Victorian
prudishness and this kind of social anxiety and reaction to

(53:49):
women joining the labor force. And the separate facilities were
supposed to, you know, protect women's modesty.
And they did the same thing withaccess to restrooms during the
Jim Crow period. That whole idea of the separate
facilities for black people was because, you know, then you
they'll be black men will be closer to white women and can

(54:11):
prey on them or whatever. So these kind of social
anxieties that actually like setpolicy by the bigots were always
based on these systemic structural terms of oppression
that we see in society and the deep entrenched models against
women's sexuality, against gay people and against black people.

(54:33):
Well, I think part of why this gets so complicated is because
these gender roles are baked so deeply into the capitalist
culture. One of the things that I found
interesting too is there's so much associated with, for
example, Middle Eastern society as though it's a hotbed of
social reaction and social backwardness.
And when you look at the actual history of it, it's a lot more

(54:54):
fluid when it comes to gender and gender identity and gender
roles. And you speak to that in the
book. And when you look at the actual
laws that were passed throughoutmuch of the Middle East, the
anti sodomy laws that were passed, they were only became
laws once the British occupied these regions.
It was actually the British who forced through those laws.

(55:16):
Now, some of them still exist tothis day after the British have
left, but these were all Britishconcoctions.
It's not to deny that we're certain social mores and certain
social norms, but these are these tend to be very pliable,
especially in depending on region and class.
But in terms of like a strict law that applies to all, blind
to these distinctions, that was the doing of the also civilized

(55:38):
British coming into these regions.
Colonial. Yeah, under the under the
colonial era, much like you see happening in large parts of
Africa today, like Uganda being the product of mainly white
American and European Christian missionaries who can't quite
stone this the so-called sexual deviance in the United States.
So they go to Africa to implement the laws.

(56:00):
To do that exactly, a lot of theconservatism in non western and
also rural communities comes from, I mean comes from
reactionary backlash. It comes from white supremacy,
it comes from colonialism. I mean, very famously, there's
many different gender identitiesamong Native American cultures,

(56:21):
or at least social roles we could call gender identities.
And these were heavily policed by Western European colonizers.
I don't think it gets talked about just how many different
social and gender roles are in West Asia.
Also, there is, I mean dozens and dozens throughout the

(56:41):
different regions and this almost never gets discussed
because there's this sort of idea of barrenness in the
ideological landscape of the region.
I was very excited to find and learn about Masood Al Emiratli's
story and before a gender too, who was an Iraqi person we met

(57:02):
called mustargeal, which is a gender social role in
traditional Iraqi, especially southern Iraqi culture that's
sort of analogous to trans man in ours.
And his story is again, one of support.
He was accepted by his community.
He was fairly out about his assigned sex at birth.

(57:24):
And he received so much support that his talent for singing
actually received a record deal from a British label of all
places that was of course run byby another Iraqi man.
So it really complicates this sort of relationship that we see
between at least the relationship that's put before

(57:46):
us and like media and common discourse about about West Asia,
like being reactionary, conservative or hating queer and
trans people, when this is so clearly and obviously the result
of colonialism that we should know this.
But God, we know it's never going to be taught in school.
So we have to bring it up again and again.

(58:07):
I'm sure you know this, but boosters I do a literal
translation with mean masculine like one of the most famous
medieval, probably the most famous medieval poet from their
region, what's now Iraq, is guy named Abu Nawaz, whose most
famous poetry was all about lovefor young men and wine.
That was at a time when I don't believe there's any poets in

(58:29):
Europe at that time writing such.
I mean, Liberace even wishes he could have done that.
So in the book you do talk aboutthese kind of what might be
considered like third gender or separate identity in particular
culture. So Mustajil and the 2 spirit,
this kind of pan indigenous termby native and First Nations to

(58:50):
describe someone with like masculine and feminine
identities. We also know about like the
Hijra people and in South Asia we're kind of considered like a
third gender assigned male at birth but live as feminine lady
boys In Thailand. Was thinking of the Moshe in
Mexico. It's kind of 1/3 gender with
very important cultural positions.

(59:11):
And I think in like old rabbinical Jewish tradition,
there's also six genders. Did you find any other instances
of this in your in your researchor was it just a question of
space that you couldn't include them?
So there are so many of these cases.
And actually part of the reason I didn't include them is because

(59:32):
many of these stories are already written.
How did in full? There's entire books on people
we might now call to spirit and there are really incredible vast
amounts of literature focused onthese different categories that
often get overlooked now. There were four different

(59:54):
individuals who adopted non western social roles.
We might call them gender identities who fit into other
social categories outside of male and female, or at least
outside of their sex assigned atbirth.
Maxim Selopoli, who was a Klamath person we might call

(01:00:14):
trans feminine now. Actually invented her own
pronoun in the Klamath language,which is extremely cool.
And so when an ethnographer camein to document the Klamath
language, they actually documented her pronoun.
And I find this funny because it's just like a pronoun Maxim

(01:00:35):
say loply uses to refer to herself and there's no other
definition. I mean, so many of these
individuals are very creative with their gender.
Some of them clearly fit into preexisting roles, others seem
to come up with their own genderidentities.
There's also Okiyo, who's just known by her singular name, who

(01:00:57):
did publicly identify with a category of Dan show which comes
from the Japanese characters, unfortunately of male
prostitute. But together they form something
like trans woman. And she was with a group of
other Dan show and directly worked with many of them
actually went on to take hormones and identify with the
term transgender in later years.But she also very clearly

(01:01:21):
embodied this social role, whichwasn't solely around gender
identity. It was also wound up in sex work
and love for men in dressing femininely.
And so I think it's always very complicated to call these
individuals trans unless they identified with it at a
different time. I'm a big believer in Maria

(01:01:42):
Lugonis is the coloniality of gender.
There's another reading for you all.
It's a bit dense, but absolutelyworth it.
We shouldn't need to use these historical categories from non
western vultures to justify western trans people today.
The reason I do include them along with obviously like
transness not just being a western thing which is another

(01:02:04):
myth that often pops up, is thatthese stories reveal why we are
lacking in some of this information.
In Okeo's case, her original records in Osaka were bombed
during unnecessary fire bombingsof Osaka in World War 2 that

(01:02:26):
almost all historians agreed were just the result of US
cruelty and imperialism, not an actual necessity to end the war.
In Masood Al Damarati's case, wecan actually trace the specific
bombs dropped by the US and Britain on archives that would
have contained his records. We can also see how US

(01:02:47):
destabilization in Iraq led to the fire bombing of the central
Iraqi archives that held his records too.
Like there are pictures of the archives burning that contained
his information in them, which is deeply frustrating.
There's actually a mass digitization effort going on
right now with the surviving records that hopefully will

(01:03:08):
reveal more about his life as they move forward in the
project. But what these really show is
how diverse gender identity was in these non western and in some
cases Western cultures. This is not entirely unrelated
to the burnings of the Institutefor Sexual Science, which

(01:03:28):
contained Gerda von Zoboltz's record and also records of trans
people from Brazil to Japan thatMagnus Hershfeld collected.
So all of these attacks stemmingfrom white supremacy were deeply
intertwined with one another. One of the things I would think
that the usefulness of the non western narratives is it also

(01:03:50):
just captures the universal Nessof the human experience.
That this is not unique to western society and how it's
experienced in western society is not the norm in every
society. And to be absolutely fair about
it, there's much to learn from others and to also not emulate
from others. So I absolutely agree.

(01:04:11):
I don't think you have to go to non western society to defend
trans rights and western society, but there is a certain
beauty in the universality of the human experience that the
West is not as unique as it likes to think it is.
You mentioned Iraq, I remember an article around 2004 on Iraq
and on the massive rise of anti-gay violence in Iraq under

(01:04:35):
the American occupation and in the wake of the American
conquest. And it was just like wholesale
slaughter of I can't remember how many people, but hundreds
and possibly thousands. And I remember someone at the
time arguing with me and saying,what was it better under Saddam
Hussein? And in a certain sense, as
absurd as it might sound, yes, You know, if you were political,

(01:04:56):
if you were a political activistwho in any way challenged Saddam
Hussein, it wasn't better because whether you were gay,
trans or not, he was going to crush you.
But if you were just going aboutliving your life, yeah, it was
actually better before the Americans barged in and
destroyed that whole society. And it's just again, in
microcosm what these Western imperials have done in so much

(01:05:17):
of the world and including, as you pointed out, destroy
archives that are useful not only to Iraqi society but are
part of human heritage. Absolutely.
Both in and outside of Iraq. I feel like more people should
be reading Russia there these days.
I mean, like we can talk about it's the same thing every time,
like the US or some Western Power comes and destabilizes the

(01:05:38):
country, reactionary nationalismcomes and there's this huge
backlash against other communities and they're forced
to rebuild over the following decades or hundreds of years.
And well, the cycle repeats and hopefully we won't be seeing too
much anymore. I do think that like, Donald
Trump is too incompetent to start a war that ends like, ends

(01:06:01):
how the a lot of the invasion set up by neoliberals have gone,
at least. But we'll see.
Maybe I'm being too hopeful here.
Yeah, he may be incompetent, buthe surrounds himself by people
who are driven and I fear may know more what to do than he
does. But we will see.
So bringing it forward to the future, Eli, I'm going to quote

(01:06:22):
you to you basically. And this is something that you
say in the conclusion to your book that I really, really
liked. You say, quote, our
understanding of the world is regulated by those who seek to
maintain their power rather thandismantle it.
History has always been a malleable tool used for
political ends. Only when we establish A
widespread desire to teach the histories of the oppressed can

(01:06:43):
we finally access the broader breadth of our human past and
fight for a fair future. And I think that was kind of
connected to what we were just speaking about.
But you also make the point throughout the book that
supporting trans people is insufficient when we live in a
capitalist society that's based on race and class oppression.
And this feels very aligned witha Marxist perspective that the

(01:07:04):
struggles of the oppressed go hand in hand and that it will
take a fundamental social and economic transformation to
change the institutions that arethe source of this bigotry.
Could you talk a little bit about this and kind of what you
see as a connection to fighting for freedom for trans people and
the oppressed? As I'm sure all your listeners
know, all of these forms of oppression and subjugation are

(01:07:27):
connected. And I'm approaching history, I
mean pushing history from a Fukodian perspective but also a
Marxist perspective I am interested in.
I mean for those nerds out there, I'm interested in joining
this post structural list and non Marxist with materialist
ideas and questioning how V is connections between different

(01:07:53):
ideologies. Different communities will
ultimately help us uplift one another.
And I try to do this throughout the book with discussing these
connections between race and gender, class and gender.
I mean, the entire worker section discusses how the ruling
class is monopoly over work and subjugating trans people

(01:08:15):
further, and developing class consciousness is the only way to
really overcome this major hurdle in trans people's
freedoms. So it's about it's about making
these intersections more comprehendible and
understandable. It's about understanding that
the histories that were taught are ultimately subjective and

(01:08:40):
not the result of some sort of grand idea of history by instead
the textbook manufacturer. What's acceptable to say or
celebrate or promote in some way?
There were some lines and stories in this book that some

(01:09:01):
readers weren't too sure about. I mean, in Okeo's case, I was
going a little hard on the US there.
Like they, Okeo and her friends also started a riot in 1948
against the police. But then we have to ask, why
were the police so hell bent on arresting these dozens of Dan

(01:09:23):
show that night? And the fact is, it was to
impress the new US administration of Japan.
And so really connecting these these different interests that
are at play here was necessary and something that I hope that
will help people think about when reading the book.
I I mean, I like to describe myself as an obnoxious Fucodia

(01:09:45):
and history is constructed. It's not something that we can
objectively see while at the same time trying to can try to
string along some sort of truth or theory from it.
But ultimately we are limited byour distance and our ways of
knowledge. So it's going to be difficult
moving forward when knowledge and education is so

(01:10:08):
fundamentally under attack by the political right.
But at the same time, we are seeing this insurrection of
subjugated knowledges come out from the woodwork.
And I mean everything from like personal blogs to scenes to oral
histories of groups that whose names couldn't even be mentioned

(01:10:29):
on Public TV until the past 20 years.
So there's a lot of work to do, but I am also hopeful that the
explosion of personal media is going to actually do some good
for our society too. Just to jump off that, I mean,
if you look at today's politicalclimate, it's obviously
incredibly reactionary and anti immigrant, anti black, anti
trans. One of the things I know Cam,

(01:10:52):
Lola and I were talking about, if you go back a few years, was
when the Democratic Party and its acolytes were posturing as
friends of trans people. Eli, Eli, grasp her pearls for
all of our listeners. Hashtag loved ones.
Exactly, exactly. And well, I mean, you remember
the flags and the corporations for Pride month changing their

(01:11:15):
little low, their logos. I remember all the Democratic
Party politicians and I always read it as they're trying to do
to the trans movement what they have more or less succeeded
doing with the gay rights movement, which is turned
something that was associated with a certain degree of
radicalness, a certain degree. You used to think of things like
Stonewall and rebellion and the Vietnam War and and the Black

(01:11:36):
Panthers. And so that would sort of the
heyday of the gay rights movement at least in the 1960s
years to now a very respectable middle class movement.
And there was an element of trying to do that with the trans
movement. I just remember us talking about
at the time was nobody is talking about the brutal
violence faced on a daily basis by mainly black trans youth on

(01:12:00):
the streets of this country because they don't fit that
narrative. They're not part of that whole.
Respectability or. White, respectable middle class
picture of that picture or narrative or outlook.
Yeah. And of course, once it became
politically inconvenient, it wasdropped like a hot potato and
left to the tender mercies of the Trumpites.
I mean, this is what the Democratic Party always does.

(01:12:22):
And it's it's obscene. And it's there's an element of
it history repeating itself. I remember more than a decade
ago being in the Bay Area when Pride wanted to have as its
honorary chair Chelsea Manning. Chelsea Manning was still in
prison under the Obama administration for her
revelations and the role she played in revealing all these
crimes of US imperialism, particularly in Iraq.

(01:12:45):
And the main opposition to having Chelsea Manning as an
honorary chair or grand Marshall, sorry, as an RA Grand
Marshall for the parade was coming from the Democrats and it
was coming from liberals because, you know, Chase Bank
wouldn't like this, Apple wouldn't like this.
The corporations, the police whoMarch who lead the parade now
wouldn't like this. And remember going to these
organizing meetings and all these veterans of Stonewall were

(01:13:08):
getting up and just bemoaning the fact what has become of
this. And it's it was the doing of the
of our movement and it's the doing of the Democratic Party.
And, and there it was again withbeing attempted with the trans
movement. And when it didn't work, throw
into the dogs. It happens every time and we see
these cycles and different movements with similar
characteristics. There's been a bunch of

(01:13:30):
different theories of social movement cycles and
unfortunately, there is a a tendency towards respectability
and assimilation that happens from the top down.
I'm I'm always very interested in these questions.
My dissertation was on dissertation respectability
politics and how the trans movement internally struggles

(01:13:51):
with itself to work within or outside or abolishing different
systems. And we are at a different point,
really an interesting turning point right now where trans
people aren't being offered respectability by the Democrats
in the same way that we were five years ago.
I mean, I always say never trusta politician.

(01:14:13):
They're they're professional liars.
There's no reason to. And anyone who gets fooled by
them probably shouldn't be too foundational to any social
movement. But ultimately there's this
pattern of uplifting the people who are going to do the least
for released people. I was very influenced by Dean

(01:14:33):
Spade's book Normal Life, one ofmy all time favorite texts that
helped me understand this tendency in that mostly in the
context of the gay rights movement at the time it was
originally published in I believe 2011.
But he also starts to go into this future of trans community
organizing and how it might end up in the same pattern.

(01:14:56):
It's, it's going to be difficultto break out of it, but I
actually think that the crackdowns on migrants and SNAP
and Medicaid are going to reallymotivate a lot of trans people
who would otherwise be aligning themselves with Democrats, with
the left, with people who are actually going to fight for

(01:15:18):
universal health care or abolishing prisons.
And this is going to be a fundamentally different time
than in the past decades in the trans movement.
It's always going to be difficult because the people who
are calling for us to be assimilated into the Democratic
Party are going to get the most press time.
They're going to take all the air out of the room.

(01:15:38):
But I do think with new forms ofmedia and new forms of outreach
and organizing, there's some hope that we'll be able to break
out of this cycle. And when Republicans are running
everything, trans people won't have a horror structure to cling
to when they are targeting us more explicitly even than they
are now. I am curious by different

(01:15:59):
theories and ideas of organizingcan look like Dean Spade calls
it critical trans politics. Or questioning why we want what
we want, asking what different systems we might want to be part
of or dismantle or fundamentallychange or overhaul, and asking
why exactly our movements operate in the ways that they do

(01:16:23):
sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is.
It's really just fundamentally questioning everything about our
social movements and why certainnonprofits, organizations, and
demands get uplifted while others get shut down.
In the case of trans people, I mean, like universal Healthcare
is so obvious as a central argument for movement, but at

(01:16:45):
the same time, people are reallyfixated on things like bathroom
access and representation government when our
representatives don't really do much and they can't really do do
much. It's very frustrating to see the
ways that trans liberalism has increasingly impacted the
movement since it's become more mainstream.

(01:17:07):
I mean, DN calls this mainstreaming.
It's, it happens in every movement, or at least every mass
movement. And at the same time, I do think
there's a turning point now where people are realizing the
government is not working in ourfavor.
It won't be working in our favorand never has.
And we need to find alternative structures like mutual aid and

(01:17:29):
fair distribution of resources to really actually fundamentally
change things in our society. Yeah, I think there's always a
question of how identity politics and visibility politics
kind of is part of that same graveyard of the Democratic
Party. But I think part of what I
always see as a way forward is really looking at the

(01:17:49):
institution that prop up capitalism that are also
responsible for the oppression of trans people, of women, of
gay people. And I think of the bourgeois
family and not the family as like your own personal family,
but the family as an institutionand what role it plays
economically and socially in society.
So economically in terms of maintenance and the passing down

(01:18:10):
a private property, raising the next generation of workers.
I think about the family ideologically as instilling very
conservative gender norms and social ideology for conforming
to what are the codes of morality in society and stuff
like that. And so fundamentally, I think it
kind of goes back to, and this is part old school Marxism for
me, but like looking back at theinstitution of the family and

(01:18:34):
having that real understanding of how it serves as a prop of
capitalism and that everything kind of flows from that in terms
of enforcing these gender norms and the hysteria and everything.
And so you really have to tacklethat.
And that's that's a much bigger task, I think.
Absolutely. I mean, the norms instilled by
society always need to be questioned and we train people

(01:18:56):
not to question them. I can't recommend Sophie Lewis
and Emy O'briens work enough. They are two of the most
accessible fund to read authors who are writing about family
abolition these days, and they have, they have excellent work.
Sophie Lewis's new book Enemy Feminisms also details this deep

(01:19:20):
connection between empty trans and racist feminism and family
structures, which I don't think anyone has done in quite the
same way. So it's, I mean, it's a lot of
questioning that'll need to be done and I'm excited to see more
people doing it. And lastly, I wanted to look at
some of the reviews about this book.
And again, I encourage all of our our listeners to pick up a

(01:19:42):
copy of this book and we'll include your website in the show
notes. It was really hard to find bad
reviews about your book. I was expecting, you know, with
Eli, expecting some, some major hate since you've dealt with
death threats basically every day of your entire life since
you were an activist at what, 15or something.
Yeah. But I just want to read some of

(01:20:03):
the really good ones that were nice for me to look at on
Goodreads quote. One of the best nonfiction books
I've ever read. Meticulously researched and
compellingly written. Another one quote.
I feel lucky to be some of the first to read what will one day
be a classic for generations of queer history seekers.
Get it? While it's not burned that that
one was good, another one quote lots of new information.

(01:20:25):
To me it was quite uplifting butalso baffling to read that to an
extent society was way more accepting of trans people than
today. I did find one bad review.
It was only one. It was on Amazon of course, but
I thought it was really really funny so just wanted to end with
this one. The title of the review is Bad
Faith Feminism. I think you know where this is

(01:20:46):
going, quote. It's hard to reconcile misogyny
with conversations about gender,at least with conversations
about gender that are in good faith.
Supporting trans folks does not have to come at the expense of
CIS women. What What was the date on that
review? I feel like I've seen that one
before. I don't know, but I'm like, did
you even read the book clearly? What the hell?

(01:21:06):
Oh, 'cause I 'cause I'm pretty sure that one was like,
published the day the book was released and they clearly hadn't
read the book. Yeah, it's Eli's against turfs.
Let's Yeah. It's just the same sentence
regurgitated every few weeks over and over again.
Oh yeah, they tried to review bomb the book but I think they
they got caught. Oh wow.

(01:21:27):
So what is your what is your greatest wish for the book at
this point? I want to see a review of the
book by Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson calling it gender
ideology and then burning it up with a blowtorch.
Yeah, that's that's a beautiful dream.
Aim high. Yeah, absolutely.
But the book is actually being used now at the Supreme Court to

(01:21:50):
defend trans athletes, which is really nice to see.
That's. Amazing.
That's very. Good.
Ultimately, I just, I just hope it can help people and help
people feel seen and also help people express themselves.
Well, I have to say I really enjoyed reading it.
Anytime I'm digging into trans history, I'm kind of bracing

(01:22:12):
myself for pain and so that things are going to be really
dark. And there was so many uplifting
and funny moments. I love that you chose to write
it in such a humanizing way where you really get to know
these characters. And like I said, there's so much
great detail in the book. There's a shoplifting machine,
Trans men beats up other men guys, there's good details.
Check out the book, It's awesome.
It's a really fun and uplifting read.

(01:22:34):
You will almost definitely find out and learn something you
didn't know before by reading this book.
It's absolutely worth a read. And fuck Jeff Bezos, but do
review it on Amazon and Goodreads.
No purchase necessary. But we don't love anybody who

(01:22:55):
doesn't love us. Thanks for listening to Unwashed
and Unruly and thank you to Eli for joining us.
And please read her book links in the show notes.
Please follow us also on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or
wherever you find us. And make sure to also rate and
review and check out our website, unwashedun-ruly.com.