042: What Did Trans People Ever Do to You? feat. Gillian Branstetter

Gillian Branstetter joins to talk about MAGA's hyper-fixation on transgender people and the movement's warpath against them. We discuss right-wing media's use of trans people as scapegoats, false claims that trans people are radical and violent, and more.

https://patreon.com/PostingThroughIt

Links for Gillian:

• Sign up for her newsletter, The Autonomy

• Follow her on Bluesky and X

Transition Music: "I'm Just Saying" by Dyke Drama

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
We have a big fight over there. We have a fight over open
borders. They still want open borders.
We're having a fight over men and women sports.
If you believe it, you would have thought they would have
learned that it's not a good issue.
And we have a fight in transgender as you know,
transgender for everybody. Welcome back to Posting Through

(00:47):
IT, the podcast. Some people, mostly Mike, are
calling the most trusted name. In news, I'm Jared Holt.
And I'm the aforementioned Mike.I'm going to give a couple shout
outs to our newest Patreon members.
These are at the platinum level.We have somebody using the
screen name Fridge Charcooned, Ithink is how this other one is

(01:10):
said. And Kevin Harris, thanks so
much. I know what Kevin Harris, and if
that's that Kevin Harris, and I haven't spoken to him in a very
long time, I want to say what's up, bro?
How's it going? Thanks so much for your support
on Patreon. Posting through it is supported
by our listeners. We can't thank you all enough.
You can go to our Patreon page, sign up to support us.

(01:34):
The links in the description andwhat you get in return is an
extra episode every week. Last week's was about ice and
had a really fun reading series from writer drinker Jeffrey
Ingersoll. Who wants to kill you?
You may not know who he is, but he wants to kill you.
Yeah, that was a lot of fun despite despite the subject

(01:58):
matter. But on our last Monday episode,
Jared, we talked a little bit about this panic around Antifa
and the criminalization of anti fascism.
And that's still going on. Obviously, it's still one of the
biggest things going in Magalandright now.

(02:18):
Yeah, we can report nothing has meaningfully changed in the last
week since. They don't love anti fascism.
They were unconvinced by our episode.
But we briefly touched on the crossover, the crossover between
anti fascism and transgender people, trans people who have

(02:41):
become this huge scapegoat for MAGA.
And you'll see people on X referto something they call Trantifa,
which is quite literally not a thing.
I mean, it's a, it's a pretty bigoted statement or whatever.
And you'll see people like Andy no Jared say this person is a
member of Trantifa, which on there's so many layers to unpack

(03:04):
there. The the the first one is there
are no members of Antifa, which I think we safely covered with
Chris Mathias last week. But there are also no members of
Trantifa because Trantifa isn't actually a thing.
It's just a made-up kind of mutation in the mind of a bigot.
It is just a complete fabrication and a lazy one at

(03:28):
that too. It's from people like Andy No,
who made his bread and butter scaring your conservative uncles
about Antifa coming to their town square and beheading all
the small business owners. And you know, when trans people
really became punching bags in right wing media.

(03:51):
And he looks at this and it's like trans antifa and then does
this like Power Rangers thing where he just like slams it
together and they form Trantifa.It's so cynical.
I it, it's not creative. I don't it's just so stupid.
But it's dangerous because our political leaders are buying

(04:14):
into it. Right.
That's the biggest concern. I, I have seen some people on
blue sky like ironically being like I'm, I'm, I'm the mayor of
Trantifa or I'm the commander ofTrantifa or whatever.
Cheese of Trantifa. But, you know, I mean, like, I
wouldn't put it past them to start, you know, outlawing
Trantifa as a thing. And I'm not even sure what it

(04:36):
actually means. On our premium episode, we refer
to some graffiti that's on the walls in Portland that is a
little bit spicy that it that that sort of intimates something
about trans women. It's a little dirty.
You can go to our premium episode to find out what that
was. But these are the type of things
that are consuming them and obsessing them.
So today we are going to talk about transgender Americans.

(04:59):
More specifically, we're going to talk about how our trans
brothers and sisters became the ultimate scapegoat for MAGA.
Like any fascist or authoritarian movement, MAGA has
scapegoats. People that Magus leaders from
Trump to various online propagandists depict as being

(05:19):
part of a sinister out group that's coming for them.
This, of course, includes black people at times, immigrants from
Latin America, feminists, leftists, Muslims, Arabs in some
corners, Jews, too, even though there are prominent Jews in in
Trump's orbit. There's a lot of people.
There's a lot of people. They.
Yeah. Yeah, that's like a boast of

(05:40):
America. But perhaps no group faces a
more concentrated dehumanizationthan trans people.
In a traditional legislative sense, meaning not just hateful
rhetoric, this started a long time ago.
In 2017 Trump announced a ban ontrans people in the military and

(06:02):
from 2018 to 2020 the GOP systemically rolled back Obama
era protections for trans students that enabled them to do
things like use the bathroom that aligns with their gender
identity. In 2020 they removed non
discrimination protections for trans people that were installed

(06:23):
under the Affordable Care Act, meaning their healthcare access
was compromised. But Mega 2 has gotten worse, if
that's possible. There's an executive order that
mandates that the federal government treat gender as an
immutable binary based on, quote, biological sex.
Another executive order that protects children from chemical

(06:45):
and surgical mutilation. Another executive order bans
transgender individuals from military service.
Another executive order cease tokeep men out of women's sports.
A legal push to prevent trans people from choosing their own
sex barkers on passports. So all of that's happening at
the federal level and it's also happening across the nation in

(07:07):
state governments removing civilrights protections for people.
In Iowa, banning gender affirming care for minors.
There's a website calledtranslegislation.com that
has tracked 998 anti trans billsacross 49 states. 122 of those

(07:28):
bills have passed. And the panic is kind of hard to
understand. Maybe if you're if you're not a
huge bigot because trans people make up a very small percentage
of the population and the night the the number takes up slightly
for teenagers, which may be a factor in why these people are

(07:49):
getting obsessed with it. Also, trans people have become
more visible in film and TV withtrans actors like Laverne Cox,
Hunter Schaeffer, MJ Rodriguez and Elliot Page.
Laverne Cox, who also was in a movie that was adapted for one
of my plays. Oh, cool, yeah.

(08:10):
Publishers are selling memoirs by trans authors, and the
publication them reported in 2022 that porn involving trans
people, women in particular, became the third most popular
category in the USI don't know how that was exactly
categorized, but it's very visible there.
And so you can safely guess a lot of MAGA bigots who say

(08:31):
things out of one mouth are alsothat in the other.
And we've had some of the peoplethat we cover on this show have
had like kind of scandals with their base for, for kind of, I
don't know, whatever having, youknow, associated being
associated with porn involving trans people like Nick Fuentes
and Alex Jones. But it's influencers like Nick

(08:53):
Fuentes, like Alex Jones and, you know, Libs of TikTok.
There's too many to name that have led the charge in
dehumanizing trans people. Almost every mega influencer
these days take shots at trans people, but some have taken a
starring role at the front of the pack.
Matt Walsh, a contributor at theDaily Wire, certainly won.

(09:16):
He put a 2022 film out called What Is a Woman?
Which has kind of become, you know, the centerpiece, the sort
of, you know, crown jewel to these people in their efforts to
scare America about trans people.
The mayor of DC was testifying before Congress this week.

(09:38):
And I think it was Nancy Mace was like, well, why should we
trust you when you can't even say what a woman is?
It's just a stupid, like, punchline they have.
You've got people like Andy No, who's openly gay.
You've got Tim Poole, the late Charlie Kirk.
Riley Gaines is another person people might have seen a former

(10:00):
collegiate swimmer who didn't she get like a third place or
something. It's it's not like she wouldn't.
Seem like the greatest swimmer of all time?
No. But Maggie assumes that she is,
and then the only reason she wasn't the greatest swimmer of
all time is somehow because of trans people.
Yeah, yeah, this, this woman would have been Katie Ledecky
getting gold medals if it weren't for, you know, those

(10:24):
darn trans swimmers. And of course, Chaya Raichik AKA
lives with TikTok, who built an entire brand around trying to
shock and outrage people that follow her with videos of trans
people. And then there are people who,
in my opinion, had no business doing any of this stuff.

(10:46):
They had their own lives and stuff like that, but made
decided to go all in on on transphobia.
You got your JK Rowling, Graham Lenihan, who is the creator of
the IT Crowd. A quick story about Graham and
he got really upset with me one time.
He I I guess at one point he wasa fan of my work on the radical

(11:08):
right, and then I compared him to a Sargon of a cod the like
dead brain YouTube, who British YouTube, who for the longest
time before his identity was known, used a an avatar of a of
a little. I guess like ancient mask of
some kind would be like yes, immigration will be the downfall

(11:31):
of western culture and and grants got got got pretty
offended that I compared him to this guy, but once again, as in
many points in my career validated.
Yeah, these are among, you know,a whole host of people who

(11:53):
people once identified as I guess, or, or thought of as like
liberals, right? They, they thought of them as
being kind of, you know, in the liberal sphere of things.
And then all of a sudden they just got obsessed with trans
people. And then it, you know, changed
people's perception of them. Then there's also the, you know,
the the kind of Barry Weiss crowd, Jesse Singal, who's made

(12:14):
basically his entire career writing about trans people.
And, you know, Elon Musk, of course, who was beloved by
liberals early in his life and is basically, you don't
depending on whose narrative youwant to buy.
There's so many, the story is sobig about Elon, but may have may
have actually bought X just because he was so mad online

(12:35):
about trans things. Yeah, it's kind of hard to
process mentally. Well, the consequences of this
onslaught has been to try to make trans people seem scary to
the public. I remember when I started my
career, the line of attack on trans people was that they were
confused, mentally ill people. This was used by, you know, the

(12:59):
religious right, evangelical activist in particular, to prop
up arguments about why the government shouldn't recognize
trans people or support them. And that's a pretty gross,
condescending argument, no doubt.
But it, it was kind of coded in this like Sheen or this sort of

(13:23):
disingenuous pretense of, of just being, you know, concerned
about mental health and, and, and wanting to do right in a
mental health setting or whatever.
They definitely really care about mental health on the
right. Med beds, you know.
He said, that's right, Med beds for the for, for the Patreon
listeners will know about Med beds.

(13:44):
But since the return of the decade, things have gotten, you
know, taking a more sinister turn.
Today, trans people are discussing right wing media's a
violent threat to public safety.This is especially clear after
Charlie Kirk was murdered by Tyler Robinson or we believe by
Tyler Robinson. Actually, we you know he still
has to go to trial when right wing press and social media

(14:07):
media influencers race to claim that trans people somehow
deserve the blame for this crime.
Yeah. So influencers like Andy Noe,
who we talked about on the episode, the last one a little
bit, have spent recent years trying to portray transgender
people not as mentally ill as the GOP might have done in

(14:29):
previous years, but as a extremist threat.
They use the same kind of language to talk about trans
people that we might use on thispodcast to talk about white
supremacist mass shooters and that sort of thing.
I don't think those are really the same.
It really picked up in a major way after the 2023 shooting at

(14:51):
the Covenant School in Nashville, TN.
A former student at the religious private school killed
6 people during their attack, including three students who
were just nine years old. It's complete horror.
As more information about the shooting start to come out, it
began to seem like the attacker had expressed an interest in
transitioning their gender. In fairness, adjusting to be

(15:14):
some critical information suggesting that was true.
Right wing media had a field daywith this, portraying the school
shooting as a transgender attackon Christians.
It's worth noting that an investigative report about the
shooting was published earlier this year, and the police didn't
agree with that conclusion, instead understanding the
shooter as somebody who struggled with mental illness

(15:35):
and plan their attack with the goal of making themselves
famous. Actually looked at the these
narratives at my prior employer for a piece they spiked over
concerns that I'll just say theyspiked it and I completely
disagreed with the rationale there.
There's a story there, but probably for another day I'll

(15:57):
try to summarize kind of what I found.
So basically the short of it is that posts that associate
transgender people and queer people with mass shootings and
terror attacks became enormouslypopular after that 2023 shooting
at the Covenant School. These narratives existed before,

(16:18):
to be clear, but they really took off online in a major way
after that. It's all over the right wing
Internet now, and you can prettymuch count on somebody to blame,
quote UN, quote gender ideology for any deadly attack that makes
the news, whether it's true or not.
And it's usually not. To make matters worse, the

(16:40):
people who promote this defamatory nonsense are running
the country right now, and the Republican establishment seems
to be fully on board with using this narrative to rob our trans
brothers and sisters of their rights and their respect and
their safety. The Heritage Foundation, as part
of Project 2025, proposed a new category called Transgender

(17:02):
Ideology inspired Violent Extremism TIVE.
They call this gender ideology and they want to police trans
people like they're ISIS. This has received some fresh
attention since Charlie Kirk waskilled because the Heritage
Foundation started pushing for this again As we record this
episode, this idea is not confirmed to be how the federal

(17:25):
government is approaching transgender issues, but I'm not
sure it would surprise anyone ifthe Trump administration started
exploring this possibility more closely.
People who claim transgender people are increasingly
responsible for violent attacks are fudging the numbers in a way
that I as a professional researcher find intellectually

(17:46):
insulting. For example, to support this
transgender ideology inspired violent extremism thing that
they're pushing for, the Heritage Foundation has put out
claims that 50% of quote major non gang school shootings since
2015 UN quote have involved a transgender shooter or a trans

(18:11):
related motive. The publication Wired looked
into this and surprise, the numbers didn't seem to gel.
The Heritage Foundation to calculate those stats only
counted 8 school shootings. So this 50% number they have is

(18:32):
4 out of eight. And Mike, would you say, you
know, just taking a guess, have there been more or less than
eight major school shootings in the last 10 years?
I, I am going to go with more. That's just my, my gut, largely
because my, my idea of the day is I wake up in the morning and

(18:56):
I have my, my yogurt muffin and,and my grapefruit juice and my
black coffee. And then by like 11:00, there's
something on CNN where a bunch of children are just running out
of a school and, and, and there's a there's a breaking
news banner. So here's a stat I have more
confidence in. The Gun Violence Archive lists 5

(19:18):
mass shootings by transgender ornon binary people since 2013.
That is less than .1% of the mass shootings that that
organization has counted in thatperiod.
So Simply put, this is just not a thing.
In fact, trans people categorically are way more

(19:41):
likely to be killed by gun violence than to be responsible
for it. Well, that's not stopping these
guys fully. I mean, Trump has floated the
idea of taking guns away from people who the government thinks
might be transgender. Destroying the progress trans
people have made in the last decade is a clear priority of

(20:01):
today's Republican Party. And the tone feels as vicious as
I personally can remember. I want to point out it's so
vicious that I that I, I believeJared, the National Rifle Rifle
Association. Kind of stepped in to defend
trans people, you know, obliquely.
They didn't. They they just started in a sort
of passive way when when a comment was made about taking

(20:23):
transgender people's guns away. Never thought I would see the
day. Hate and lies about trans people
have been pivotal talking pointsin recent GOP campaigns.
You can look back on the last few election cycles in this
country and see that it is at the forefront of their

(20:43):
communication strategy. And hate for queer people has
been an animating force in far right organizing around issues
like. As we discussed a couple weeks
ago with Kelly Jensen book bands.
This era of MAGA has given rise to people like lives of TikTok
as major stars whose entire bit is hate for queer people.

(21:06):
Groomer was popularized as a slur, a false claim that queer
people are systemically, you know, grooming children for
sexual abuse and so on. I mean, it's just, it's, it
feels inescapable in a lot of senses.

(21:27):
Yeah, I just want to just quickly say one thing to our
audience before we bring on Jillian, who you're going to
really like. Somebody I'm a big fan of, which
is if you think in the back of your head like this is a sad
situation, but it doesn't reallyhave anything to do with me.
What I would say to you is this is really the tip of the spear,

(21:47):
whatever cliche you want to throw at it.
This if you were concerned aboutthe the fascist movement that is
growing in this country, trans people are are first in line and
they have been under the gun really since going back to the
start of Trump's rise. So with all that said, let's get

(22:07):
to our interview with Jillian Branstetter.

(22:28):
We're excited to have Gillian Branstetter joining us on
posting through it today. Gillian is a communication
strategist at the ACLU. She has worked Women's Law
Center, National Center for Transgender Equality.
She's experienced spokesperson, media strategist, and has
written for all kinds of media outlets like CNNMSNBC, New York

(22:50):
Times, and on and on. But Julia wanted us to stress
that she's appearing here in a personal capacity today, not as
a spokesperson for the ACLU. But Julian Rocks, so welcome
Julia. Thank you so much, Jared and
Mike. Great to be with you.
Thank you for coming. A lot has happened around trans

(23:11):
issues, as we introed on this podcast already, but could you
give us an idea of just what hashappened, just in terms of
legislation really since Trump took power a second time?
What what? What is legislation that has
been proposed? What has been passed?
What is a change for trans people in a literal sense?

(23:33):
Over the last five years at the state level, folks may know that
we've been targeted by literallyover 2000 pieces of legislation
that have been introduced and strictly or broadly attacking
LGBT rights, but very principally focused on the
rights of transgender people andtransgender young people
especially. So across the country.
Trans people have been losing access to the healthcare they

(23:56):
rely on. They've been losing their
freedom to be themselves in public spaces.
Schools have been made less safefor them.
It's been less safe for them to be out at work by virtue of laws
that are criminalizing their healthcare, that are
criminalizing water stream they use, that are censoring their
speech. So when Donald Trump was elected

(24:17):
and then inaugurated, it was randomly clear that he was going
to do his damnedest to take a lot of that national.
A lot of this was, of course, also laid out in Project 2025 by
the Heritage Foundation and others.
So it wasn't a surprise when, onhis first day back in office, he
signed a number of executive orders targeting our rights, the

(24:37):
first of which can seem really abstract.
It is nominally declaring that there are only two genders in
the United States, that these genders are immutable, meaning
they cannot be changed, and thatthey are assigned at conception.
Which is, of course, a phrasing tipping off that's being written

(24:57):
by the very same people who havebanned abortion and and want to
enforce fetal personhood laws, control pregnant people's
well-being as well. But as abstract, it's sort of
like almost like philosophical as the question of what is
gender and how many are there can seem.
The end result of that was basically eroding protections
that trans people and organizershave fought for at the federal

(25:21):
level, ranging from workplace protections for federal workers
to what gender markers go onto our identity documents, to
really broad and sweeping measures like our ability to
access healthcare without discrimination.
Our rights are non discrimination laws, our rights
under the equal protection clause, the US Constitution, our
ability to report harassment at our workplaces.

(25:44):
And over the ensuing weeks, the implementation of that order led
to just that. Probably the most alarming to me
has been the effort to defund medical providers to offer
gender affirming care. So it's a little different than
the Hyde Amendment, which folks may know, which prohibits
federal funding for abortion services.

(26:06):
So if you are a Medicaid patientand you go to a doctor to
receive it or you know, a Planned Parenthood clinic or
wherever to get an abortion, Medicaid will not provide
coverage for that abortion. What they want to do for
transgender people's care, and specifically they targeted the
care of people under the age of 19, is prohibit any provider of

(26:29):
that care to a person under 19 from receiving any federal
funds. So the millions upon I used to
be a healthcare reporter in Central PA, the millions upon
millions of dollars that hospitals rely on for Medicare,
Medicaid, and any number of federal programs, they would be
locked out of that entirely if they work with young trans

(26:50):
people and their families to provide them healthcare.
So it's kind of to scare them. Well, yeah, to lean on them in
the same way that we've seen them do now with the
universities, with corporations,with law firms, basically trying
to make it untenable for them todo anything but comply with the
order and drop these patients. And many of these hospital

(27:11):
networks have So now an additionto the 20 five states which have
criminalized the healthcare for transgender young people at the
state level. You now have, even in the states
where it's still legal, many providers and hospitals refusing
to provide this care, not because it's medically feasible,

(27:32):
because of course it is, not because it's within their best
medical judgment, because of course it is.
This is some patients that may have been working for or with or
with for literally a decade, mayhave known them for most of
their lives that they now have to drop for fear of losing the
funds that allows them to open their doors.
And it's, you know, it's it's kind of a perfect example of how

(27:56):
Trumpism operates in like a realpolitic way, which is making
anyone's solidarity with a marginalized group dangerous to
their own well-being or their own stability and forcing them
into a position to drop them. And that has led to not just
restrictions and access for trans people under 19 and their

(28:16):
families. Because as we've seen with
abortion, when you impose any kind of restriction or any undue
regulation, you are making it harder in every instance to get
that care because the providers who are working with young
people are probably also the same providers who are working
with transgender adults. So suddenly their doctors aren't
returning their calls. Their appointments are getting

(28:38):
canceled. And same with, you know, these,
these large hospital networks that they're like, even if you
have, as we've seen with like Catholic hospitals who have
declared that they don't want toeven host medical care for
transgender people, even if yourdoctor's willing, you're, you
know, you've gotten your letter from your therapist, your

(28:58):
insurance is signed off if the hospital isn't willing to
actually host your surgery appointment, that, you know,
some people receive their hormones through like a small
implant, like a little pellet you get in your arm and they
aren't willing to host the implantation of that, right.
So the network is the network ofaccess to care for transgender

(29:20):
people, which, by the way, has never been great, has always
been a struggle, particularly for transgender people who
experience widespread discrimination and poverty to
begin with. It was always a patchwork.
And it's becoming scarcer just in the nine months since that
order was issued. And that is just one action that

(29:42):
he's taken. I list it as the most sweeping
and most dire because it's the one I think is impacting the
most people. You may recall that, for
example, Hunter Schaefer received her passport back with
AMI gender marker on IT. People online were joking that
it's M for mother it's and this can seem kind of abstract.

(30:06):
I doubt most people have really thought about like the gender
that's listed on their passport.Many people may be surprised to
recall their genders even listedon their passport at all, and in
fact, once. I didn't even remember that
until I saw it a thing. But there's but there's been
more than that too, right? Like they've also others, like
sort of ostensibly superficial attacks that also have a subtext

(30:30):
of of of menace and erasure. Like they remove like T from the
LGBT like thing on on on government websites too, which
is sort of like you're not here.Yes, and erased at Sylvia Rivera
and Marshall B Johnson from the National Park Service and the
Stonewall Monument. And censored really any mention

(30:52):
of transgender people across thefederal government.
So even like State Department travel advisories for queer
travelers, scrubbing an invention of transgender person.
And I think it's important because the back line to that is
that it is a belief that a transgender person simply does
not exist as a transgender person, that our self

(31:15):
determination, our self identification, our autonomy
over our own body and over our own identity.
And then and, and how we're reflected in the world, the
government is overriding that and assigning its own will on to
US. One way you see this having a
real consequences is that the Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission, where a number of career officials were fired and

(31:38):
Trump appointed his own, you know, troglodytes to run the
place and to basically turn it completely on its head.
And instead of fighting the widespread discrimination that
many people experience in the workplace on race, on sex, on on
disability, using it to largely go after a sensibly anti white

(31:59):
racism and after transgender people on the basis that our
rights must be coming at the expense of someone else's.
And the EEOC when Trump was inaugurated, had dozens of cases
in front of it from transgender people under the Biden
administration and before that under Barack Obama's
administration, they've begun receiving investigating

(32:21):
complaints about discriminatory actions in workplaces.
These are people who experiencednot just, you know, accidental
misgenderings and these sorts ofthings, but avid harassment from
Co workers and from supervisors based on their gender identity.
The the one I remember was a transgender man who was a

(32:42):
employee at the in the Georgia State prison system and his
coworkers outed him as transgender to inmates,
encouraged them to mock him and to threaten him.
There was another who was a worker at a fast food chain who
was being routinely sexually harassed by their Co workers.

(33:03):
The Trump administration droppedall those even in instances
where you could say well never mind them being transgender,
that just seems like open sexualharassment.
Dropped it strictly on the basisof their gender, on the basis
that it was a transgender personwho had filed the complaint
because the administration is not interested in making the
world safer for transgender people.

(33:24):
The end goal of all this, everything from, you know,
banning what bathroom we use to,you know, censoring people from
putting their pronouns in their bio, Like all these small things
they add up in a transgender person's life to try and make it
harder for them to be out and beopen.
And frankly, to send a message to any closeted transgender
people that this is not a safe place, if it ever was, for them

(33:48):
to come out and begin their transition.
So when I say that they're sort of attacking transgender
people's existence, I think sometimes it can seem
hyperbolic, right? I don't think like misgendering
or dead naming somebody is the same as murder.
I understand that. But what it is, is attacking
their existence as transgender people by denying them that
fundamental sense of self, determination and freedom to be

(34:09):
themselves. So Jillian, I want to get your
take on this. It's a big question and I'm sure
there's like 50 different answers that could all be
correct, but how do you think wegot to this point?
Like I've been covering the radical right for a decade now
and I've always heard, especially the religious right

(34:30):
ragging on, they would call it Soji, sexual orientation and
gender identity laws. But things really seem to have
escalated. I I mean, how do we get from
this being like a religious right niche issue that was, you
know, definitely turning in the background long before the

(34:50):
second Trump administration to being, you know, at the
forefront of so much right wing media.
It's a day one priority for the Trump administration.
Like you said, thousands of lawsin state houses.
What What's your read on what changed, if anything?

(35:12):
I think that there's overlappingreasons.
We are where we are right now. First and foremost, I think
organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom and Heritage
Foundation and these other really, you know, load bearing
organizations on the right, theyare advancing a Christian

(35:34):
nationalist worldview. And at the center of that
Christian nationalist worldview is a patriarchal understanding
of gender and gender roles. So not just defining who is a
man or a woman, but what men andwomen can do, what roles should
they fulfill in society. Transgender people by If we are
allowed to thrive in society, we're challenging the very

(35:57):
foundation of that mythology, right?
If gender is something that is malleable based on people's self
determination, that runs entirely contrary to the idea
that God made the man and woman and set out these specific roles
in public life for them. I think at a little more

(36:18):
grounded level than that. In order to bring that kind of
world into existence or back into existence and to enforce it
with the full force of the law, they need to do what the
libertarian I'm, I was going to say scholar, but monster might
be a better word. Murray Rothbard said about

(36:40):
repealing the 20th century and one of the advances over the
course of the 20th century and over the course of, you know,
the dawn of the second wave of feminism and poured from there
was gender neutrality in the law.
And things like the, you know, the Civil Rights Act and its
protections from sex discrimination.

(37:01):
Things like Title 9, right? Things like the Fair Housing Act
and, you know, employee workplace protections and a
variety of Supreme Court precedents, which has slowly
expanded the definition of sex under the law to protect well,
to prohibit discrimination in the form of sex stereotyping,
sexual harassment, right pregnancy discrimination, not

(37:23):
just like narrowly discrimination against women
because they are women, but broadly on the basis of their
sex. And over the course of the last
few decades, queer people had been winning court precedents on
that same basis. That discrimination against
somebody because of their sexualorientation or their gender
identity is discrimination on the basis of their sex.

(37:45):
That if you would fire a man forbeing married to a man, but you
wouldn't fire a woman for being married to a man, you have
inherently discriminated againstthat gay man.
Or if you would fire somebody assigned male at birth for
taking on a female identity, butyou wouldn't do the same based
on somebody assigned female at birth or as you may deem it of

(38:06):
the female sex, then you are inherently making a judgment
against them on the basis of their sex.
In 2021 of these cases, well, three of these cases actually,
which were filed by workers who have been fired on the basis of
their sexual orientation, of their gender identity because
they were gay or because they were trans, reached the Supreme

(38:28):
Court. And in 2020, the Supreme Court
issued A6 free opinion that I think surprised even many
advocates who had fought for it,declaring that it was prohibited
under Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits sex
discrimination and employment, that workplaces were prohibited
by that law from firing somebodybecause they are gay or because

(38:50):
they are trans. And this really terrified the
right. Josh Hawley, the senator from
Missouri and whose wife, Aaron Hawley, is an attorney at the
Alliance Defending Freedom, called this the end of the
conservative legal movement, right?
And I think it really terrify the right in a new way because
they had encountered Obergefell,the Supreme Court decision

(39:12):
granting the right to same sex marriage as a significant blow.
But I don't think they encountered it as existential
because it was foundationally a right based in the right to
privacy. Whereas I this recognition of
transgender people's discrimination within civil
rights law terrified them. Because civil rights law governs

(39:33):
the public, it governs the comments, right?
And if transgender people have afreedom to be ourselves in
public, that is a new scale of fear.
And it's also doesn't take a great legal mind to see how the
logic that Neil Gorsuch used to write that opinion could thus be
applied to other sex non discrimination laws, including

(39:54):
Title 9, which prohibits sex discrimination in education and
in athletic programs, importantly, and Section 5057 of
the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits sex discrimination and
healthcare. So what did they begin doing
after 2020? In 2020, they introduced, I
think it was around 70 pieces oflegislation and different state

(40:14):
houses around the country just focused on transgender rates.
And people remember, you know, past fights over bathroom bills
and these sorts of things in North Carolina before that,
after that Supreme Court opinionin 2020.
Then in 2021, that number doubleS, and then double S again in
2022 and then double S again in 2023.
We're now every year since 2023,we have seen over 500 pieces of

(40:36):
legislation being introduced in these state houses, and these
are principally being written byorganizations like the Alliance
Defending Freedom to develop these things called model bills.
They host what are basically drill camps for legislators like
the Values Voter Summit and others, where they bring people
and basically, you know, try to sell them on this as a political

(40:59):
crutch, as a matter of policy and also as a matter of
advancing this kind of conservative ideology.
And they knew that these laws were going to be challenged in
court. And what they're aiming to do is
secure court precedents. That cabin, that 2020 ruling
Boston, Clayton County to just instances where somebody was

(41:22):
strictly fired explicitly on thebasis of their sexual
orientation or gender identity, to then try and prohibit trans
people from being protected fromdiscrimination in schools, in
our access to public accommodations like restrooms.
Further, in our workplaces, based on the different kind of
harassment, like can workplaces refuse to generous correctly,

(41:42):
can they refuse to, to use our new names, these sorts of
things, Can they refuse to coverour healthcare?
And I and you know, just what was that just four months ago?
I can't believe there's just four months ago the Supreme
Court handed them just such a victory and US Visa Scrumetti

(42:03):
when it upheld laws which were banning gender affirming medical
care for transgender people under the age of 18, basically
suggesting these laws were not discriminating against
transgender people. And we're now headed towards
another Supreme Court case wherethey are considering laws
banning transgender girls from participating on women and girls

(42:24):
sports teams, which I think has become this like political
shibboleth for a lot of people. And I think a lot of people are
maybe confused about where it's coming from and why it's
suddenly one of the most critical issues in our country's
politics, given that I, you know, many of the states where
they passed these bans have one or fewer transgender athletes.

(42:46):
But the goal is very explicitly to secure a really broad court
precedent that we can transgender people's rights
under civil rights law and the Constitution.
On that note about the trans athletes thing, isn't it also
kind of a cultural issue? I'm just curious if you're, you
know, how you feel about this. Like, yeah, there's the
legislative angle, but there's also, there's been a whole bunch

(43:10):
of changes culturally in the sense of like, there are more
trans people in television showsand in media and in social media
as well that they have access to.
And I, I, I, I feel like that has helped stir up this in part
this obsession as well. Because for the first time
there, there been a lot of victories for trans people too

(43:31):
that I think, you know, over thelast 20 years or so.
I'm just curious what you think about that or just to what
degree the cultural changes and and and sort of this, this
reactionary push are related? I try to remind people that they
didn't need Laverne Cox on the cover of Time magazine in 2014

(43:52):
to tell them what a a transsexual was, right?
That trans person have been a focus of fascination and mockery
and demonization and mass media for as long as there's been mass
media. And that if you're over 35 in
this country, you were likely raised to hate transgender

(44:13):
people, even if you didn't know that.
And I say that because I'm over 35 and the person I was being
raised to hate was myself. So I tried to challenge the idea
that, you know, the 20 tens and onward had a sort of new found
visibility for transgender people.
I think what changed in the 20 tens is that through social
media we were able to challenge those narratives and importantly

(44:36):
write them ourselves. Suddenly what changed was that
transgender people were not a solely a source of mockery could
not solely be written off as devastated loons, sickly
perverts or or absurd Unix. Suddenly you had to listen to us
take us seriously. We almost like came alive off

(44:58):
the screen and started demandingthings like rights and
healthcare and safety. And that I think is really what
challenged from a cultural conception.
That said, looking at a lot of that period now, I'm, I'm
reminded of of what Kurt Vonnegut said that all the

(45:19):
artists and writers of the of the 60s and 70s opposed, used
all their art and all their comedy to oppose the Vietnam
War. And it had all the impact of
dropping a cream pie off a stepladder.
I think that cultural change, it's not invaluable or it's not

(45:40):
it doesn't lack value, but I there's a an artist like on her
name, I who I she's a trans artist by who says that
visibility without protection isa trap.
And I think we had visibility without protection.
I think that we you know, that almost like a product roll out

(46:02):
that was happening in the early twenty 10s that was sort of like
introducing to the world to transgender people.
It was very top down. I don't think it was ever a
suitable replacement for the kinds of like organizing and
cross movement building that needed done.
And you know, certainly we're ina rush to do a lot of that work

(46:26):
and happen in a rush to do a lotof that work.
Now, it's not to say that work wasn't being done, to be clear.
It just wasn't getting the kindsof resources that like, you
know, we're going to get you on red carpets and those sorts of
things. So I want to switch gears a
little bit. Before you came on, we were
talking a bit about how sort of the story that the right has

(46:47):
told about transgender people has kind of morphed into
something really sinister and something I I think is really
dangerous, which is when I, whenI started reporting and covering
the religious right and stuff. The line that I heard so long is
that transgenderism, they would they would call it an ISM right,

(47:08):
first flag, yellow card here. They would say that it is a
mental illness and wall their legal arms and everything for
trying to scramble and figure out a way to prevent the
expansion of civil rights to include trans people.

(47:28):
It had this sort of disingenuousSheen of compassion that they
would put over it, you know, as good godly people of like these
are people who are are ill and like, you know, that we
shouldn't encourage this illnessor whatever, which was already
gross, to be clear, is already fucked up.
But over the last couple years, particularly the line for a lot

(47:55):
of pro Trump influencers, including members of, you know,
the federal government has really taken a dark turn.
I think where now after every mass shooting or attack or
whatever, there is this sort of scramble in right wing media to
try to claim that transgender people are responsible people

(48:18):
like Andy. No, this has been repeated by
Donald Trump junior, the president's son.
Call it Trantifa, right? They're trying to link their
panics about transgender people up with their panics about anti
fascism in the US and try to portray non heterodox gender

(48:39):
identity or whatever. Not as necessarily, you know, a
decision somebody has made that they strongly disagree with or
have contempt for, but somethingthat is akin to a form of
extremism that it is radical anddangerous.
And, you know, we've seen some sort of swirling.

(49:00):
It looks like the FBI is at least entertaining the idea of,
of treating it like a form of extremism in terms of
investigations and stuff. A lot of that it's, it's not
really clear what has and hasn'tpanned out on that front.
I I'm curious your, your take onthat and like, does that concern

(49:23):
you as a trans person? Like when, when you're hearing
that personally, I mean, is it scary?
Is or am I projecting or am I feeling scared for you?
I know what what's your read? I think yes, it is scary because
you're watching people with a lot of power basically have a
psychotic break and I've become deeply obsessed with you.

(49:50):
I when you would love to just mind your own business.
I mentioned like sort of the cultural history trans people.
We are not new to being depictedas monstrous or even as violent
and killers, right? And you think the history of
Norman Bates and I Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs,

(50:11):
right. And I'm reading this book, Men,
Women in Chainsaws, which is about, it's a feminist history
of, of slasher movies, which I thought would be a fun like
October read. And androgyny and fears of
androgyny are sort of littered across the history of, of
horror. And really like even going
further back to the idea of likemonstrous births and the idea

(50:36):
that like a mother of ill reputewill give birth to or basically
intersex children. And so I, you know, I, I can't
say I'm incredibly surprised to see them grasping for that
language. I will say, like I have seen
them try to blame trans people for pretty much every,

(50:57):
everything under the sun, but especially like public acts of
violence since like 2018. And I've seen them been right
out of those thousands of times,precisely twice in almost
literally the way a broken clockwill.
And as I was reading, it was a Yale researcher, psychiatrist

(51:19):
who did an interview with New York Times after one of these
incidences where the person was trans who said that somebody who
commits, you know, this heinous act of violence who also happens
to be transgender has more in common with other mass shooters
than they do with most other transgender people.
That an act of violence like that is so rare among the
populace and such a break in thesocial contract that that is

(51:43):
actually the defining line of their identity.
Not, you know, are they taking the same estrogen medication as
me, Right. Like, and I, I think one of the
reasons it's particularly scary is because it shows a drive to
blame trans people for anything and everything and to encourage

(52:06):
their audience to see trans people, not just as a, you know,
a scary group of people. You mentioned this notion of
like transgenderism or transgender ideology or just
gender ideology. The goal is sort of portraying
our existence and really like gender fluidity and gender
nonconformity more broadly as like a kind of toxin in the air.

(52:30):
And even if we aren't, even if we weren't the ones pulling the
trigger, our existence somehow must have poisoned the culture
and LED these poor souls astray.You know, a lot of this would be
somewhat laughable. And after, like the shooting
with Charlie Kirk where it was like, well, the shooter's trans,

(52:50):
OK, No, wait, the bullets are trans.
No, wait, the roommate is trans.Like, obviously they're just
increasingly desperate. It's also scary because the
message is, wouldn't you, wouldn't you be able to live
without fear if we just got rid of all the trans people?
And I, there's a terrifying similarity to sort of mass
panics and scapegoats of the historic past.

(53:13):
And at a moment when transgenderpeople are, you know, we've
always been, I think as as a population vulnerable.
We face widespread poverty. We're four times as likely to
experience violence as our cisgender peers.
We face common homelessness where I overrepresented in the
sex trade and homeless shelters and foster care and juvenile

(53:36):
detention centers. But right now we're also
politically estranged, whereas politically isolated as we've
been in the decades since I've been doing this work.
And when I look at the ways thatthe sort of right wing figures
that you mentioned talk about us, I don't see a bottom.

(53:59):
Like, I don't see a moment wherethey're like respecting any
degree of humanity. To your point, and it's been a
while since I had, you had mentioned this like kind of like
head padding, like humanitarian way that they may speak about
trans people. To be clear, I use humanitarian
and air quotes there. Oh no, no, I understand.
I. I It is the veneer of, well,

(54:21):
caring. Yes, and veneer is exactly right
because they what what they're doing when when they're
suggesting like, well, these trans people are just lost or
whatever else right is sort of giving a nod to like elite
opinion. And what they've seen is that
they actually don't need elite opinion or they don't need to be
concerned about like liberal gatekeepers in this way.

(54:43):
And over the last, especially over the last five years, really
the last decade, they've basically just been like pushing
the line further and what they can do to us and seeing when and
where they'll get pushed back. And they just haven't received
that much, unfortunately. And a lot of that comes from the
fact that transgender people are, you know, politically

(55:04):
unrepresented. We're politically powerless.
We're not, you know, we, we are institutionally powerless.
And I we're not without, you know, our own organizing power.
We're not without our own abilities to keep each other
safe. We're not without, you know,
senses of community and community based organizations.
But when you're facing these like mammoth right wing

(55:27):
organizations who can fly legislators around the country
to pass all these hundreds of bills and defund all these
hospitals and it's, you know, thinking of on it gets cream pie
again, like it feels it's it's definitely asymmetrical to say
the least. One thing that I thought was,
you know, that I want to bring up there because you you
mentioned the lack of support ostensibly from liberals and

(55:50):
things like that. One, one tactic on the right is
they seem to be trying to createdivisions between lesbian, gay,
bisexual and trans right. But to make certain, you know,
to you have Andy know who is, you know, he's gay, right?
But there's also these like gaysagainst groomers and these type
of groups that are I'm, you know, identify as bisexual, for

(56:13):
what it's worth. The there it seems like a push
to say like, OK, this is, you know, we maybe we'll defend
this, but we're not going to defend that.
It seems to be a dividing tactic.
I'm just very curious of your thoughts about that, you know,
because, because I find it very upsetting to see people like
Andy know who's got like a prideflag in his, you know, his his

(56:35):
Twitter thing. And then then everything is like
Trantifa and all this like dehumanizing, horrible.
He might as well be. He might as well be a white
supremacist the way he talks about trans people.
I'm just curious your thoughts about that.
Well I think there has always been within the LGBT rights
movement and its various iterations over the last like

(56:56):
6-7 decades since like the post war era, there's always been a
divide that I don't even think really falls along like sexual
or gender lines. I think it falls along class
lines first and foremost. And those themselves are
structured along, like, your proximity to the norm of, like,

(57:18):
the white Christian heterosexualmale.
Like, there's been always peoplelike Andrew Sullivan and sort of
like the world of, like, gay Republicans, right?
And there's one running for Lieutenant governor of Virginia
right now. We talked about Dave Dave Rubin
on a premium episode. Yeah, there you go.
Well, yeah. I mean, even like I there there
was a great book by Neil J Youngcalled I not not the singer Neil

(57:44):
Young, but the historian Neil J Young called coming out
Republican. And it came out last year and I
bought it. And you think it's going to be
this like quixotic history of the strange little meaningless
movement. They wielded a pretty massive
amount of power over the years. Like Peter Thiel is a gay
Republican, right. Like, and even, you know, they

(58:08):
really defined the gay agenda inmany ways by primarily focusing
it on marriage and the military and these really conservative
institutions. And a big goal of a lot of that
was in addition to, I should say, and to trying to like, you
know, bring gay people into the fold of mainstream culture and

(58:31):
mainstream society was not just saying, look how much like you
we are, but look how much unlikethose people we are, right,
those radical queers who were, you know, throwing ashes on the
White House lawn. We're the good ones.
We're the good. Ones, right?
And I and trans people were sortof always on the other end of

(58:54):
that because we look stranger, we sound stranger, right?
We're harder to grasp in many ways, and our existence cannot
be cabined in the sort of private sphere way that, say,
opposition to sodomy bans can, That opposition to marriage bans
can. You know, I, there's an almost

(59:15):
libertarian sense to a lot of gay rights discussions.
Whereas trans people are fighting for healthcare, we're
fighting for safe communities, we're fighting for our freedom
to be ourselves in public, whichdoes in fact, I, you know, it's
certainly helped by civil rightslaws which govern the public

(59:37):
sphere. And you know, there's also a, a,
a weird like macho sense that goes with it too.
And so if you're like James Baldwin wrote about this, right,
like in Giovanni's room or and IQueer by William S Burroughs,
these books are 70 years old. And in each there's each book is
narrated by this like self hating gay man and his foil in

(59:59):
each are these like painted ladies, these drag Queens that
were like hovering around the clubs of Paris or or Mexico.
And at each point. The narrators, they're saying,
and I'm thinking of Daniel Craigand the the movie that came out
a while ago, but are saying like, oh, well, my fear was I
was like them. I didn't realize that I could be

(01:00:20):
gay and just a normal man. So a lot of the time I think
it's like not even along those gender lines.
I think it's really trying to like define themselves as like,
well, look how like posh and youknow, middle class or upper
class I can be. Look how much I can be as easily
defined by the same ideals, the same conservative ideals that

(01:00:45):
govern so much of society. And look how strange inherently
they are. Look how distant they are,
right. So to see the right trying to
deploy that one, if you look into like pulling of LGBT people
on like support for policy, supporting trans people, they
are far, far, far and away more likely to support, you know,

(01:01:07):
transgender people's inclusion and civil rights laws and things
like bathrooms and sports participation, access to
healthcare, right? There's really no daylight that
I see between. They're they're also more likely
to have met a trans person. Yes, very much.
You're right. So that's also.
Something yes. And so I want to stress that

(01:01:27):
like trans people as a population and non transgender
queer people as a population, I,I don't see much daylight this.
The organizations you cited likelike GAG or whatever they're
called, they are very clearly astroturfed and tried to build

(01:01:49):
out. And in fact, like the Family
Research Council was saying thislong ago is 2017 saying that
like, well, actually the LGBT coalition is very fractured and
trans people depends on LGB 4 legitimacy.
And I, and I can promise the Family Research Council that we

(01:02:09):
will fight for legitimacy whether others join us or not.
But I, I, but I, I do think it'simportant to stress that like a
lot of that is, is cafe like, I don't see a lot of that.
And, you know, in the general population or, and, and
especially, frankly, like all the people I'm working with now
in my professional life and, youknow, fighting for trans rights.

(01:02:32):
What were they doing before that?
They were fighting for same sex marriage, right?
They were fighting against HIV criminalization laws, right?
And they will again if they haveto.
So I don't see that. I, I, I don't see that reflected
sort of in the places that it counts.
But that said, you know, like I said, there have always been gay
conservatives, and I'm sure to some degree there always will

(01:02:54):
be. You, you don't have to.
You could pass or whatever. Like of all these horrific
transphobes who are just blabbermouth online, is there
anyone who irritates you the absolute most?
Or do you just tune them all out?
Oh God. Like, is there somebody who,
like, go to hate read their feedbecause they're just like, so
insufferable Or, you know, couldbe an obscure person?

(01:03:17):
No, I wish there were fewer, I think.
I mean, I wish my reading habits, I did not drive me to
say like, Gee, I wonder what like, you know, I'm trying to
decide who I want to dignify. I find Elon Musk's story

(01:03:38):
fascinating to me because of hisjourney around trans rights and
and specifically his leg, his understanding of gender broadly,
which I think is very tied to this.
Like First off, his own narcissism.
Second, the sort of pro natalist, like you have to breed
as many people as possible and seeking like as many male heirs

(01:03:59):
as you can. It's all very Haas Berg.
It's all very like old world. And at the center of it is his
daughter, Vivian Wilson, who came out and transitioned.
And, you know, I have never seenpeople as horrified around like

(01:04:20):
the discourse around trans rights as they were by the way
that he talks about his daughter, the way that, you
know, he says that that she doesn't exist, that his son,
quote, UN quote is dead to him, right?
And people who would never speakup otherwise for like, that's an
insane way for a father to talk about his daughter.

(01:04:40):
And I what's crazy to me is that, you know, trans people are
sort of defying our assignment and our assigned role in life,
according to people like Musk and others.
And Musk, who is also, you know,an anti union and an anti worker
boss and the world's richest manand like the face of like global

(01:05:05):
capital, he is reacting to the notion of one of his own, you
know, progeny seeking self determination and seeking her
own happiness and seeking her own joy the same way he does to
a disobedient worker, the same way he does to like, you know,
degrowth, governmental policies and these sorts of things.

(01:05:27):
So he provides sort of this perfect re line between
transgender people's fight for own freedom and really the Poly
crisis that we're all enduring, including like the relationship
between self determination and self governance, the
relationship between self determination and you know, your
ability to exert power over yourworkplace, your ability to exert

(01:05:52):
power over your life. I think that what transgender
people are fighting for is a very fundamental, like small D
democratic principle around not just self determination, but
also a freedom to be weird, right?
I get very uncomfortable around political conversations about.

(01:06:12):
Where? Pulling in these things stand
and I have to know them for my work and I have to understand
and process them and respond to them and develop like persuasive
tactics and and messaging and like, we can't just ignore them
wholesale. But I also think that if, you
know, a free society is 1 where it's safe to be weird.
Like I think it like I'm OK being stranger than other

(01:06:34):
people. And I think most trans people
know they challenge assumptions in every single room they enter.
And that should be something we can do safely.
That should be something we should do.
You know, the freedom to do thatshould be of concern for any
person because it's the foundation of the society where

(01:06:55):
your own freedoms are at stake. I don't know if any of that's
making sense. But if it's a crime, If it's a
crime to be weird, This podcast is so fucked.
Well, so many. People are fucked, right?
Like I love, I've always loved weird people.
I've always loved originals. And I think as much as they want
to portray us as like a cult, right and and sort of mindless,

(01:07:16):
like that's so far from the truth.
Like I see every transgender person, well, most every
transgender person I know has pursued something that the whole
world was telling them not to doand did so knowing they could
lose everything. Like that is a commitment to
authenticity and a commitment totheir their own senses as an

(01:07:38):
individual that I think we should be cultivating in most
people. And that obviously won't drive
all of them to a sex change, butit might drive them towards
greater self determination over their material life and
including over their body. I just want to say before we get
to the last question, Jillian just called herself weird.

(01:07:59):
But of all the people in the civil rights community in
general, I don't know anybody who is more professional.
Like if I, if I go, if I go to ask Jillian a question that the
answer is like the most professional, astute, sober
minded answer. And so I just want to just say
weird is relative. Well, I appreciate that.

(01:08:20):
Yeah. I, I, I don't know.
This is where I'm comfortable. I think like put me in a social
situation and ask me to do smalltalk and, and then then you'll
see. So we've got a closing question.
I always hate it when people askme questions like this.
So I'm sorry in advance, but youknow, our listeners might be
hearing all of this, be thinking, holy cow, that sounds

(01:08:44):
terrible. This sounds awful.
How can people support the transcommunity right now?
Like, is there anything that comes to like top of mind?
I don't know if you're, you're like, people ask me if, like,
what should people do about, youknow, the growing far right?
And I'm just like, I don't fucking know, dude.

(01:09:05):
If I knew I'd have a gazillion dollars.
But yeah, is is there anything just like people can do in their
their daily life? I mean, I mean, no single
podcast listener or whatever is going to be able to like, go
knock on the door of the White House and say, hey, man, cut it
out. I'm one of the few trans

(01:09:26):
activists I know who does like trans activism specifically.
And what I mean by that is most of the trans people I know who
are engaged in organizing our activism in some sense are
working with a far broader lens.And they're organizing
workplaces. They're in the, you know, the,

(01:09:48):
the environmental movement, they're, you know, leading PSA
chapters in these sorts of things, right?
And they're often doing so from like a classical, like think
globally, act locally sense. And I think especially right now
when the power at scale seems very difficult for people to
imagine capturing, it's actuallyat that local level where I'm

(01:10:12):
pointing people and specificallylike 1, if you want to support
trans people, like I said, thereare trans people in your
backyard who are absolutely fighting for their own safety
and dignity as trans people. They're probably also fighting
for your safety and dignity, whether you know it or not.
And that if you get engaged at that community level, you're
going to find trans people amongyou.

(01:10:32):
Because one of the through linesfor a lot of trans people is we
have to challenge this hierarchythat we're told is innate and I
as old as time and impenetrable.And we challenge it and defy it.

(01:10:52):
And it kind of feels like magic in a lot of ways, but it also
makes you realize how much otherbullshit you've been tolerating,
how many other hierarchies are built on bullshit.
And I, I think, you know, especially for listeners of a
show like this, and I don't say that's to put anyone down

(01:11:14):
because I'm absolutely one of these people as well.
It can become very easy to feel like you're doing something when
you're consuming and posting and, and sort of engaging with
these things online. But that's not actually politics
as much as like we call it politics.
Politics requires other people. It requires you interacting with
other people. It requires you building power

(01:11:34):
with other people. And to my point earlier about,
you know, sort of pop culture and trans visibility and these
sorts of things, we really need to bring ourselves back down to
first principles. And how do you actually build
collective political power? How can you actually Marshall
people to challenge the materialconditions around your everyday

(01:11:57):
life, around your community, around your neighborhood?
And I guarantee you, like I said, you will find trans people
doing it there and working with them towards that common goal is
I think actually how trans people are going to go.
Save for ourselves. As well, Jillian Prancetter,
thanks for coming on posting through it.
We'll put a link to your newsletter, to your social

(01:12:17):
media, all that in the description of this episode.
Folks, go follow Jillian. She's.
She's fantastic. Thank you so much.
Thank you. I really enjoyed talking to

(01:12:40):
Jillian. I've been following her on
social media reading her work for so long.
It was it was so nice to talk toher.
I although I do wish the circumstances have been a little
better. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, this, this is this is anepisode that I wanted to do for
a while. And they really forced our hand
with all the rhetoric after Kirk's murder.

(01:13:03):
It seems like I, like I said at the time of Kirk's murder, this
is just one of those events thathas reverberations that kind of
shift the way we talk about things.
And you know, as soon as they pulled trans people out after
that shooting as, as, as a, as atarget, I knew that we had to
talk about it. Well, I think that's about going

(01:13:25):
to do us for this week. We will see you all back here on
the main feed next Monday, and we'll see our Patreon supporters
over on the Premium feed on Thursday.
Yeah, that's It's going to be Jared's turn at the album
recommendation. Yeah, I I feel like on the
preview of episodes, that's likethe most pressure I feel when

(01:13:47):
we're putting them together as I'm.
It's like a chess match. It's like every time you move.
Just like, oh man, MM picks up something really good.
Like I've been really rocking the that Earl Sweatshirt album
that you recommended on the. List it's so.
Good. It's so good I had like stopped
paying attention. To the most college album.

(01:14:07):
Yeah, but but I feel like that was always like where he was at
his best. But I I mean like I totally
tuned him out. I listened to Earl Sweatshirt in
college a lot. Like I had a friend, Jimmy, and
we were like super into like OddFuture and all that.
But but I kind of like forgottenabout him.
But this, that album's fantastic.

(01:14:28):
It's so good. So how I got to pick a better
album than that? Well, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll
talk to you on Thursday, everybody.
And then after that, we got a little bit of Laura Loomer
coming. Take care guys.
Bye. I'm just.
Saying.