#1700 Dehumanizing Trans People is Always the First Step for Fascists

For all the details, listen to my comments in the middle of the show. But first, your Call To Action for the week. Hey everyone, Amanda here with your weekly roundup of activism actions. All links can be found at best of the left.com/action. A quick reminder that this is not an exhaustive list, just the largest nationwide opportunities. As always, get involved in your local community, however possible.

First up, a reminder that Saturday, April 5th is the big nationwide protest We've been waiting for Indivisible 50 51 Women's March, and many, many more have teamed up to organize the hands-off National Day of Action to reject oligarchy and demand a stop to the looting of our country. There will be a major presence in DC and Women's is offering bus rides . to dc. You can find an event near you, their social toolkit, printable signs, and more at hands off 2020 five.com.

Just a reminder that a core principle of the hands-off mobilization is a commitment to nonviolent action. March 31st is National Trans Day of Visibility, and if you're near DC Christopher Street Project will be holding a rally on the National Mall. At least 15 members of Congress have confirmed their attendance. If you're not near DC, you can show your support in a wide variety of other ways, but check your local L-G-B-T-Q organizations for resources to share and advocacy.

C Opportunities. In light of Trump's latest attempt to unilaterally impose nationwide voting requirements with an executive order, it's a good time to call your members of Congress to voice your opposition to the Save Act. This bill is a Republican fever dream to unnecessarily overhaul our elections and put barriers on the right to vote.

There's so much crap in this bill, but some of the main highlights are requiring voters to show proof of citizenship documents most Americans don't have and requiring names on birth certificates to match current IDs, which impacts both married women and trans people. It also creates barriers for registering to vote by requiring a visit to a government office to show your documents in person. And finally, if you wanna call in favor of something, tell your members of Congress.

You want them to pass the protect the right to organize or PRO Act Per the A-F-L-C-I-O. The Pro Act would restore the right of workers to freely and fairly form a union and bargain together for changes in the workplace. It is a response to the degradation of the National Labor Relations Act, which transformed Worker organizing in the 1930s. a reminder that All links can be found at best of the left.com/action. Remember that no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.

Finding community and taking action are truly the best ways to deal with everything being thrown at us. We don't get to choose the times we live in, so we need everyone to act like everything is on the line because it is. I wanted to ask you about some of the legal cases that are referenced in here and you've worked on some of them. Bostock versus Clayton County, Georgia, let's talk about that one. What did that case establish and what are they hoping in Project 2025 to change?

Yeah, so let's just get right down to what Bostock was about. Three employees, two were gay, one was trans, were fired from their jobs because they were gay and trans. That was the legal question. And the single question before the United States Supreme Court is, was it lawful under the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in employment to fire someone just because they are trans or just because they are gay?

And the Supreme Court said that federal employment law that prohibits sex discrimination includes discrimination against LGBTQ people. That being gay or being trans and being discriminated against on that basis is a form of sex discrimination. And it was a very logical conclusion. It was a 6-3 opinion, in essence saying, if you are firing someone because they are gay, that is because they have an attraction to someone of the same sex. That is because of sex. There's no other way to look at it.

If you are firing someone because they are trans, it is because they are coming into work in a way that you don't think aligns with their sex at birth. That is because of sex. End of story. Very simple. So that decision was decided in 2020. And then under the Biden administration, the administration, I think quite logically and rightfully, interpreted other federal laws that prohibit sex discrimination to also protect LGBTQ people.

So that includes Title IX, protection from discrimination in education. That includes the Affordable Care Act, in healthcare. That includes the Fair Housing Act, in housing. These are just basic parts of society where, I think, generally, when people step back and think about it, we think we should not be discriminated against just because of who we are in these parts of life.

This document says absolutely not, they want to erode all of those protections that were just confirmed in 2020, and they're attacking each regulatory and subregulatory decision by the Biden administration to ensure that LGBTQ people are protected. And that will be a day one Trump administration action, to get rid of every single federal interpretation of law that protects LGBTQ people. You better believe it. That's happening right away. First hundred days.

It's sometimes hard to envision and understand what the impact of these flips, as you said, at the first 100 days, if they roll back these laws, what does it mean? But we have seen some states that give us a sense, right? Where as much as the Biden administration has tried to protect against discrimination, there are some states that have done the opposite. And some laws that are in place are a roadmap for what this would be like.

Are there some that are most glaring to you or that you think people should really be aware of in terms of what this could look like if these protections are rolled back? Absolutely. I think this is all familiar because we've seen it in the states. We've seen it in Idaho, in Texas, in Florida, in Missouri. 25 states ban medical care for trans adolescents and ban trans girls from women's and girls sports. So we see the blueprint.

We have increasing number of states across the country that restrict access to restrooms in schools for trans students. We have schools that are allowing teachers to misgender trans students in schools. We have laws like the so-called Don't Say LGBTQ or Don't Say Gay laws that restrict discussion of LGBTQ people in the classroom. Increasing censorship in libraries of books that simply mention LGBTQ people.

And of course, they're being pushed in the states by the Heritage Foundation, by Alliance Defending Freedom, by America First Legal, Stephen Miller's organization. And guess who are the architects of Project 2025? Those same organizations that have been using highly gerrymandered state legislatures to push and enact these policies, have them implemented by governors like Greg Abbott, like DeSantis. And then we see the impact.

One of the things that Trump has obviously been trying to do is back away from Project 2025, but there's a ton of overlap between his policies, what he's proposed, what he's advocated for, and everything in this document. So if we look at LGBTQ+ rights and the restrictions proposed in here, how does it overlap with what Trump has proposed and what his administration and people around him are talking about wanting to do?

Yeah. Obviously the incoherence of Trump does make it hard to pinpoint a particular policy that he's proposing. But rhetorically, when he's talking about Tim Walz, for example, it's "He's deep in the transgender world." Well, of course, what he's talking about is he's conflating legal protections for people with an ideology. And it's all coming from the rhetoric from Project 2025. That is Heritage Foundation rhetoric. And he picked J. D. Vance as his running mate.

Who could be more closely aligned with these policies and with this Christian nationalist version of society in which women have a singular role as bearers of children and caretakers of children and grandmothers? Yes. And post-menopausal women, as we know. The assault on trans existence is central, actually, to this notion of how they understand the gender binary more generally, and how they understand the role of cisgender women.

And they are envisioning very much a society in which the role of women is as caretaker, as subservient to the husband. The childless cat lady is as much a threat as the trans person because both are an assault to this vision of the heterosexual nuclear family. And so what transness becomes is an existential threat to that model. But ultimately what they want to impose on society is a model that has hugely detrimental effects for cisgender heterosexual women.

And can you tell us Sasha, what are some of the other orders that Trump has signed that directly affect the  LGBTQ+ community? One of the first one was their attempt to redefine sex. His executive order says "when administering or enforcing sex based distinctions, every agency and all federal employees acting in an official capacity on behalf of their agency shall use the term sex and not gender and all applicable federal policies and documents".

It's interesting because state legislatures have been trying to do this for a while. They have a whole range of different ways to define sex. They define it as your sex assigned at birth, or what's on your original birth certificate, or your chromosomes.

In this case it's the small reproductive cell versus the large reproductive cell, and the only consistency that they have in these wildly different definitions of sex is that they carve out transgender people somehow from protections under the law. That's the consistent motive behind this. But, the purpose of this is to weaponize these definitions throughout federal agencies in the United States.

Specifically, this is the executive order that was issued on the first day, and this definition is being used to push out to agencies to issue their own definitions of how this would look. And then another one that came out, I think, one, seeking to prohibit educational institutions from providing access to pediatric gender affirming care. The president signing an executive order on Tuesday to end funding for gender affirming medical care for people younger than 19 years old.

That includes puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery. On his truth social platform, Trump said, "our nation will no longer fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support so called gender affirming care, which has already ruined far too many precious lives". He also went on to call gender affirming care barbaric medical procedures. The goal here is certainly enforcement, but it's also just to have a chilling effect.

They want people to comply immediately, and to do so under a fear rather than having to actually cut the federal funding. That's part of the objective. And, Sasha, we've already seen the courts forced to act against some of these executive orders, which, as you noted earlier, have been pretty poorly written. And we know that this is how Trump works: throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. It must be kind of exhausting to keep up with them and fight these orders.

What has that experience been like? Yeah, just to, first of all, it's a privilege to fight. I have no complaints. I am like, it's an honor. It really is. And, I just, I hope anybody listening to this podcast in the future, I hope that, now... there's no better time to stand up than now. So if you're going to do it, do it today. I worked in judicial nominees for a while during the first Trump administration.

And, it's just not an issue that people resonate with in ways that they should, because, in the U S anyway, federal judges are appointed for a lifetime. During the Biden administration, last Biden administration, they really prioritized getting folks that come from different backgrounds, diverse judges instead of, unfortunately, the demographics for what we saw during the first Trump administration were pretty specific, and so that's really changed the makeup of the judiciary.

And that's going to be so important as we move into the next four years for the courts to have courage and to be able to represent the communities they serve. And so I'm really excited about seeing how that will roll out in the coming years. Of course, these cases will likely bubble up to the Supreme Court, which has some deeply troubling decisions, but they've also issued really strong decisions in support of, LGBTQ people and trans people in particular.

In 2020, they issued a decision upholding, our federal non discrimination law in employment to include protections for transgender people. I don't, I certainly don't think that's a given that they'll, uphold this kind of, the kind of discrimination that this government's seeking to inflict.

And you mentioned this earlier, but I totally agree that I think that so far, at least Trump's first days in office, even though we've seen this flurry of really controversial executive orders, they aren't spurring the same kind of energy on the left that we had seen during his first administration. It seems like there's a lot of fatigue and maybe even some despair among Democrats after they witnessed Trump's second electoral victory.

And I feel like there are some folks who are just saying, well, it's just four years, let's just get through it and get to the other side, as if to question why you would bother bringing lawsuits against the administration or why the media would bother highlighting everything that he's doing. Why do you think that it is so important in this moment to fight this? Yeah, I think, history is not going to forgive folks that feel like they're just a little tired.

People go to dangerous efforts to even vote in many parts of the world, and it's just so important that what is right is right is right. And, what's happening right now is wrong. And it's negligence and dishonorable in my opinion to stand by and watch this happen to not just trans people, but to immigrants, to women, to any, all vulnerable communities, and it's not going to stop.

So it's important to raise your voice now, because it's just going to get worse, especially if people don't stand up and fight. And on that point about this just not stopping, there are signs around the country that the restriction of rights is not going to stop at trans, non binary, and intersex people.

I saw a story out of Boise, Idaho that the heavily Republican House State Affairs Committee passed a resolution asking the Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 decision that gave same sex couples the right to marry nationwide. Now, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, a concurrent opinion from Justice Clarence Thomas at the time suggested that same sex marriage could also be overturned on similar grounds. Idaho's measure now moves to the state Senate.

So, Sasha, how far do you think things could go here? Yeah, and we've, it's not just LGBTQ issues either. We've seen efforts in places like Oklahoma to impose Bibles into schools here and to eliminate any kind of curriculum that conflicts with the views of the government and all of that is deeply dangerous to the freedom of speech.

And I certainly think that marriage equality has always been on the target list for folks that are on the far right and I think that's just the beginning, in my opinion. So, I think that it's a downward slope and it's hard to predict exactly where these folks are going to go. But I think there's just telling signs that this is a really dangerous moment for our country. So this is just basic constitutional law, like I would teach my first year law students.

Any one of them would be able to spot this. Under our Constitution, our government is one of limited powers. Those powers for the presidency are delineated in Article 2. The responsibility of the US president is to execute and enforce the laws that are passed by Congress, not to make up new laws, and most definitely not to infringe upon the rights that are protected by the United States Constitution. Right.

Well, we know that the law saying they can't do something doesn't necessarily mean -- we can already see that it hasn't meant that nothing happens, including things that can deeply affect people's lives, even if they aren't legal. So accepting that grayness, what should we be concerned about here? Well, first and foremost, I'd push back on the sense that there's grayness. Okay. This is a situation where there's black and white.

Our Constitution, which I firmly believe in -- enough so that I'm an expert in constitutional law and I teach it -- limits what a president can do. So, let me contrast this with the president's power when it comes to immigration. There's a lot of power in the president when it comes to immigration, because that's an issue over which our Constitution gives them power.

But our Constitution is one of the government of limited powers, meaning if power isn't expressly provided via the Constitution, the president can't just make up that power.

So for folks who think the president is doing something unconstitutional, or insists he has powers he doesn't have, the best thing to do is to push back and say absolutely no. Part of what we're seeing right now with some local hospitals in New York and elsewhere, essentially trying to comply in advance in the hope to appease Trump if one day he does have the power to do what he says he's doing, that's absolutely wrongheaded. We don't, and no one should.

That was why our country was founded, despite all the sins on which it was founded. A good reason why we were founded was to make sure that the people retain the vast majority of the power.

And when politicians, including the United States president, pretend they have more power than they do, it's our responsibility as citizens and residents of this nation to push back and say, no. Well, I appreciate that, and that the law is not itself vague, but that with folks complying in advance, as you say, and with us just general confusion, we know that a law doesn't have to actually pass in order for harms to happen, in

order for the real world to respond to these calls as we're seeing now. So it's important to distinguish the fact that the law is in opposition to all of this. And yet here we see people already acting as though somehow it were justified or authorized, which is frightening. It is frightening. And I think, again, that goes to our responsibility as Americans, citizens or not. If you're here, you're an American and you're protected by the Constitution.

It's our responsibility to push back people who are all too ready to take steps against the trans community, against trans people, just like all the other minority groups President Trump is trying to subjugate, and to insist, hey, stop. You're not required to do this. If you're choosing to do this, that's a problem. Well, we are seeing resistance, both these lawsuits and protests in the street. I feel like more today than yesterday and probably more tomorrow than today.

Do you think that folks are activated enough, that they see things clearly? What other resistance would you like to see? What do you think? I think protests are a great way for folks who might not know a lot of these issues, or might have limited capacities, so they're not lawyers, they're not educators, they're not doctors, but they're people who care. That's a great way to push back, put your name and face and body on the line and to show you don't agree with this.

In addition to that, I would suggest that people read these executive orders and know what they say and know what they don't say. When I say right now for the trans community, complying in advance is one of the biggest problems we're seeing, I mean it.

I've been on dozens of calls with members of the trans community, including trans lawyers at large organizations and law firms, people who work for the federal government, who are not what my grandfather would call using their thinking caps right now. They're thinking in a place of fear, and they're not reading. They're not thinking critically.

As one example, if Trump were to put out an executive order today declaring the sky is purple, that doesn't change the reality that the sky is not purple. We don't need to pretend that is the reality. We can just call it out for what it is: utter nonsense. Beyond that, I would say people should not change anything about the way they live their life or go about the world, simply out of fear that something will be done to them that no one has the power to do. I can say it's kind of funny.

I was at a really conservative federal court last year and I lost my passport. I thought I was going to find it again, but I didn't. And then I got busy with work. So, Trump came into office. So, I finally got my stuff together and applied for a new passport. A lot of people in my community were concerned that I wasn't going to get a passport. And all I could think was I read all of the rules, I read all of the executive orders. There's nothing that says I can't get my passport.

I'm not home in New York right now. But my understanding is my passport was delivered yesterday. Okay. So just going forward, people think media critics hate journalists, when really we just hate bad journalism, which there has been a fair amount of around trans issues. But there are also some brighter spots and some improvements, like one you saw out of what might seem an unlikely place. Would you tell us a little about that?

One of my friends, Brittany Stewart of an organization called Gender Justice, which is based in Minnesota, brought a lawsuit against the state of North Dakota, challenging a ban on minors accessing trans health care. This case was filed about 2 years ago. And it just went to a bench trial, meaning it was heard by only a judge in North Dakota last week.

Very lucky to the people of North Dakota, there's a wonderful local journalist by the name of Mary Steurer, who has been following the case for the last 2 years and attended each and every day of the 7 day bench trial. And each day after court, she submitted a story where there were photographs taken straight from the courtroom of the witnesses that were not anonymous and describing what happened for the day. And it's not just passive recording that Mary did. It's really critical reporting.

She picked up on reporting in other states where the same witnesses testified, the shared long summaries of witness testimonies for the day. And my understanding is her reporting was so good that the 2 other major newspapers in North Dakota ran all of her daily reports on their front pages. Mary Steurer writes for the North Dakota Monitor. I looked through that reporting on your recommendation and it really was straightforward just being there in the room, bringing in relevant information.

It just was strange in a way how refreshing it was to see such straightforward reporting. She would mention that a certain person made a statement about medical things, and she'd quote it, but then say, actually, this is an outlying view in the medical community, which is relevant background information that another reporter might not have included. So I do want to say, just straightforward reporting can be such sunlight on a story like this.

Chase, after Dobbs came down, you were on the show with a kind of clarion warning about how the Dobbs decision had just rocket fueled anti-trans legislation across the country and a real, I think, straight line that you drew between what had happened in Dobbs and what we were missing if we weren't connecting it to the trans bans. And I would love for you to just remind listeners why Dobbs was never just about abortion.

I mean, there's so many reasons, whether you look at the equality thread or the autonomy thread in Dobbs. This is about structural efforts to impede people's abilities to make decisions for themselves. And so the way in which Dobbs opened that door in particular for these anti-trans bans, is that first they revitalized this case that we know Justice Ginsburg hated and we know was really never really talked about for a long time called Geduldig.

And Geduldig was the case in which the court said that restrictions on benefits related to pregnancy are not sex discrimination.

And it allowed for this idea to sit dormant for quite a while, but to be reactivated by Justice Alito in Dobbs, which is that when we're talking about things related to medicine or health or areas where we can claim that biological differences between men and women justify some differential treatment, we're going to start to erode those general protections that we have worked so hard to build for sex based protections under law.

And to my mind, what is happening here in the two and a half years since Dobbs was decided, is that you have people who have long wanted doctrinal openings to roll back anti-discrimination protections. Finding a group of people for whom there is more public support to target, and then using that to open the door to big possible doctrinal gaps and how everyone can be protected from sex discrimination. And I see this happening very strategically.

Within a week of Dobbs being decided, it was cited in every single anti-trans-related case that we were litigating. It was cited for the proposition that, in essence, special deference is owed to legislatures when they are regulating in the area of medicine, when it deals with sex-based differences between men and women. And if we take a step back and look at this moment we are in, and the obsession with trans people during the 2024 elections, it wasn't really about trans people.

What it was about, the organizing theme, was about gender roles more broadly. And this is where they are using these attacks on trans people to reentrench old notions of what is the proper role of men and women in society.

It's interesting, as you're talking, Chase, one of the things I'm also really reflecting on is that the two abortion cases last year, both Mifepristone and the Emtala case, in a lot of ways were not about abortion, they were about physicians and their rights and what kind of care they could give. And it is so striking to see a case now that's like, Oh, we don't care what the parents think or what the physicians think.

It really is amazing that just as the parents are always right until they're wrong, physicians are also always right until they're wrong. And it really feels as though that's a through line that we are seeing of like deep, deep, deep trust and reification of parental roles and physician roles, until and unless those parents and physicians make decisions that the state disagrees with. So it's just, it's not just that it's an entrenchment of gender roles.

It's this notion that doctors are the only kind of important autonomous actor in the abortion context in both cases last year. But now they're just irrelevant. They're wallpaper. Yeah, and not only that, there's this stunning thing that we seemingly just accepted as a matter of public discourse, that not only are they wallpaper, they're part of this vast and far-reaching conspiracy to provide harmful care.

We're talking about care that is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Medical Association, the doctors who are providing it at the most preeminent research institutions in this country. And somehow the argument is they're all conspiring to provide harmful care to minors. And if we take a step back, that is quite a conspiratorial argument.

And whatever people may disagree about or feel discomfort about, these are still good faith parents and doctors trying to do right by their patients and their children. But yet we've somehow allowed this conspiracy to fester that actually everyone is just trying to provide harmful care, which is just absurd. It's interesting. I was going to ask you about junk science and bad data, which has been like if our show has a major in the Supreme Court, our minor is like junk science.

And this, as you say, you just listed, just a tiny number of amicus briefs suggesting that medical and mental health groups and serious scientific entities, this is not something they haven't thought deeply about. All these professional organizations are right on one side. And then, as you say, on the other side, the Tennessee brief is just teeming with weird, deep state conspiracy theorizing.

And I worry because, as I say, this is my minor now about junk science that infiltrates court doctrine that makes its way into opinions and then gets cited as though that junk science is real. Yeah, it's really scary. And I think it's also a function of the fact that the courts no longer really care or look at factual findings of the district court. They will just pull out the latest newspaper article that they see.

And there is an actual purpose to testing the evidence and seeing whether it holds up, because when we've gone to trial in these cases and these witnesses are cross examined, they have admitted that they're exaggerating, accepted that there's no underlying scientific support for claims that they are making, pointed to the fact that perhaps it is speculative or based on internet searches or Reddit sites.

And so this is why when we look at the outcomes of these cases in the district courts where the judges are the closest to the evidence, you have almost a unanimous set of holdings when heightened scrutiny is applied, that these laws just don't hold up. When you get more detached from the evidence and it becomes more about vibes, for lack of a better word, it becomes very untethered to what is actually going on, which allows people to say things like, well, there's no long term studies.

Well, there are long term studies. There are studies that are tracking people for periods like six years, which is extraordinary long in pediatric medicine, and taking snippets of ideas out of context and not situating it in how pediatric research actually happens. And, I think that's where we find ourselves now. This medical care isn't new. It's been provided for decades. And that isn't new in medicine.

Think about all of the innovations, even in just the lifetime -- I have a 12 year old -- in my child's lifetime that we've witnessed. And so I think that is just so much distortion and out of context polemics. So I'm 52 years old and I have tried to be aware of... You look great for 52, I should say. Thank you so much. I have to say that because as someone else in the fifties. Melon is amazing. Clean living. I don't drink, never done drugs, never smoked. Anyway, thank you. I appreciate that.

But so for my whole life I've been like following anti-trans legislation and the trajectory... I think it's important to remind people that in 2016, HB2, the North Carolina bathroom bill, was introduced and failed and there were several bathroom bills prior to that year that failed.

And once that failure happened, organizations like Alliance Defending Freedom, which has been at the forefront of a lot of this anti-trans legislation, did focus groups and asked people what trans issue would most galvanize you to be anti-trans. And they started with sports. The first anti-trans sports bill was introduced in 2019.

It failed, but by 2021 the first sports ban on trans girls competing in sports was passed in 2021, and now I believe it's 24 states have bans on trans girls competing in sports. Soon to follow was 'we have to protect the children'. These LGBTQ people are indoctrinating our children, and they use this old thing. But, and then it started with gender affirming cure bans for kids. Now 26 states, I believe, ban those.

So it's simultaneously a propagandistic measure that's happened in right wing media that they've pushed.

If you watched Fox News, 'cause I did the research, if you watched Fox News between 2019 and 2023, you would think that trans people were dominating in sports and taking over because every other story, there were literally hundreds of stories on trans people in sports on Fox News, in conjunction with Alliance Defending Freedom presenting this legislation in mostly Republican led, legislators... we can talk about how all that happened, post-2010.

And what the sports thing did was create a permission structure for people to dehumanize trans people. That led to 'what about the children?' That, now, we do have bathroom bans, right? The bathroom bans didn't work in 2016, but now several states, Florida, several states have bathroom bans that criminalize trans folks using the bathroom that aligns with our gender identity.

Obviously, we will get to the federal in a second but one thing that I think this is all leading to is what Michael Noel said several years ago: we wanna eradicate transgenderism from public life. There's a recent bill that was introduced in Texas, it's house bill—it's not likely a pass, but I just wanna make note of it because it's, I believe, a precursor—it's House Bill 3871 that was introduced in Texas. And there Texas is at the forefront of discriminating against trans people.

And that law would make it a felony to assert that you are a gender other than you were assigned at birth to an employer or to the government. It would be a felony. I think two years in prison, $10,000 fines, $25,000 fines, but two years in jail. So to assert your transness in Texas would be a felony. It's not likely to pass this session, but they're gonna keep reintroducing it.

And what we are seeing now, particularly with people like Gavin Newsom and so much of the Democratic Party, who are capitulating to and conceding to right wing talking points about trans people, his just saying he thinks it's not fair, creates a permission structure for trans people just to be dehumanized across the board. And to watch, in the media, in congressional hearings, in Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the dehumanization of trans people.

And when I talk about dehumanization, I love what Brené Brown says about it in her book Braving the Wilderness. She says that we dehumanize using "primarily words and images" to move a particular group into a place of moral exclusion, meaning that like we as human beings are not hardwired to harm each other, to discriminate, to commit violence against someone.

But, if we take a certain group of people and move them into this space of moral exclusion where they're no longer thought of as human beings, then it's fine.

And I think when we look at how trans people have been spoken about in the media, particularly on the right wing that has infiltrated all of media, it is a coordinated, well-funded dehumanization project that has led to all the executive orders that are affecting trans people on the national level in horrifying ways and potentially genocidal ways. And I use that term intentionally. It is really about erasing us from existence.

They're erasing us from websites, literally, not acknowledging us, but all of this is in Project 2025. I did do a post.

Literally, it's page four of the forward, if you recall—I don't know how long ago you read Project 2025—and on page four of the forward they said, "we want to eliminate these words" and some of the words from every government document, piece of legislation that exists, the words where gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender identity, sexual orientation, diversity, equity, inclusion, reproductive rights, et cetera. And they're doing it. We see it in real time.

It's a scary thing to read about and now just watch everything that they've written about come to fruition is horrifying. And I'm just gonna focus on the trans folks, but this is across the board, the dehumanization of undocumented people. It is just... culturally... and then the relationship between... there's a lot of—and I wanna ask you guys about this, because you're steeped in this—a lot of folks, when they talk about trans issues or abortion, they call it cultural war issues.

I prefer civil rights issues instead of that language. And then they also say that it's a distraction. And I get the argument that it's a distraction because we understand that there's a capitalist agenda here, that there's plutocrats trying to take over everything. But when you read Project 2025, it's so clear that the Christian nationalist agenda is about a certain kind of patriarchal White supremacist order that is constantly intersecting with capitalism. So I don't think it's a distraction.

For me, I think it's part of an overall plan that is White supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist in a way that's predatory. What do you think about that? I totally agree with you. I don't like the framing of distraction.

I think it's minimizing and it makes it so that, once again, the person that's saying it's a distraction is validating the idea that trans people are just political footballs as opposed to people who are experiencing real outcomes based on what the Trump administration and what Republican governors across the country and legislatures are doing.

And I guess like the trans sports as a wedge issue thing is something we've talked about before or it's there to evoke a visceral reaction to further dehumanize trans people. The thing that sticks out to me is how Trump brought these folks to the inauguration and Riley Gaines became this kind of celebrity. They're all White women, right?

And they're using these tropes of White women being victimized or cis White women being victimized, whether it be by an undocumented immigrant, they're using that same playbook with the Laken Riley Act, or whether it comes to Riley Gaines who tied for fifth place in a swim meet with a trans woman. They're using age old tropes about protecting White female purity to discriminate against all these groups, and then we're told, oh, this is a distraction.

No, this is just White supremacy and Christian nationalism again. M. Gessen, I wanted to ask you about the House subcommittee hearing that abruptly ended Tuesday after the Texas Republican Representative Keith Self intentionally misgendered the new Democratic Representative Sarah McBride, the first transgender person to be elected to Congress, by introducing

her as “mister.” As Chairman McBride delivered remarks, the Democratic Congressmember Bill Keating interrupted, demanding Self to reintroduce McBride. This was the exchange. I now recognize the representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride. Thank you, Madam Chair. Ranking member Keating, also wonderful — Mr. Chairman — I’m sorry. — could you repeat your introduction again, please?

Yes. It’s a — it’s a — we have set the standard on the floor of the House, and I’m simply — What is that standard, Mr. Chairman? Would you repeat what you just said when you introduced a duly elected representative from the United States of America, please? I will. The representative from Delaware, Mr. McBride. Mr. Chairman, you are out of order. Mr. Chairman, have you no decency?

That was Congressmember Keating: “Have you no decency?” What hasn’t been commented on as much is, after Mr. Self introduced McBride as “mister,” McBride responded, “Thank you, Madam

Chair.” But, M. Gessen, if you can respond to this overall attack on not just trans people, but the overall LGBTQ community, including the national federal website honoring Stonewall removing the “T” from ”LGBT,” despite the fact that it was trans women who led the protest that really gave birth to the modern-day LGBTQ movement in this country? Well, first of all, this isn’t the first time that this has happened to Representative McBride.

She has been the target of systematic, explicit, humiliating, aggressive attacks since she began her term earlier this year. And the fact that we just are watching this as a country and accepting it — not that the sort of television- or whatever-watching public has much power to stop it, but just being subjected to this spectacle of public humiliation over and over again is something that is so destructive to, I think, everybody’s psyche.

And I have a piece actually coming out in the Times this weekend talking about this attack on trans people. And it’s not an attack on trans rights; it’s an attack on trans people, of whom I am one. And I think it’s most useful to think of it in the Arendtian framework of denationalization.

She argued that before people could be herded to concentration camps and death camps by Nazis, they had to be denationalized, pushed out of the national community, stripped of their, what she called, their right to have rights. Right? We think that we have these rights guaranteed to us because we’re born. But, in fact, we have rights because we’re part of a national community, because courts will enforce these rights, because communities will enforce these rights.

And when they are taken away — and they’re taken away through a series of both legal and public rhetorical moves — what happens is the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has dropped cases of anti-trans discrimination, even though there’s a Supreme Court decision from 2020 that makes it very clear that trans people are protected by discrimination because they’re covered

by the clause “on the basis of sex.” And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is basically refusing to enforce the law of the land, because trans people have been placed outside the law. Trans people have been receiving — whoever needs to renew their passport have been receiving passports with the birth sex indicated on them instead of the gender marker that they’ve been living with. And I want to make very clear what that is.

It’s not just an insult when you get this passport in the mail or pick it up from the passport agency. It’s a real obstacle to moving through the world, both sort of on a daily basis — opening bank accounts, applying for loans, applying for financial aids. If you have discordant documents, those are very hard things to do.

If you have documents that you’re traveling with, whether inside the country or outside the country, that don’t match your gender presentation — you know, I was once detained in Russia by an officer who thought that I was a teenage boy — I mean, this was obviously years ago — a teenage boy who was using his mother’s driver’s license, because my driver’s license had a woman’s name and gender marker on it.

This takes away trans people’s right to freedom of movement, one of the fundamental rights of humans, we think. But they’re very easy to take away. So, that’s what we are watching. We’re watching the denationalization of a very small, vulnerable minority group. We’ve seen in this country already the denationalization of noncitizens. Right? Noncitizens are not members of the political community. Noncitizens don’t have the same civil and legal rights as citizens.

And now trans people are being put in the same category. So, as we head into a second Trump term, this case has far reaching implications, and its outcome could determine whether all trans Americans are entitled to receive protections from discrimination or not. So, Chase, break down the case for us. What could it mean in terms of the future of trans rights?

And when I think of you arguing in front of that Supreme court, I'm just like, what an out of body experience, literally, because you know people who are there who absolutely hate everything that you represent. But tell us about the case, where it stands right now. Yeah. So to put it in some context, when Tennessee passed this bill, SB1 in 2023, it was the year that, in essence, half the country bans evidence based medical care for transgender adolescents.

We went from zero states banning this care at the beginning of 2021 to more than half the country banning it now. And so just to imagine that upheaval for people who have been relying on this care, for parents who have been ensuring that their adolescent children can get this care.

And when Tennessee passed their bill in 2023, the ACLU and Lambda Legal and our law firm partners immediately filed a lawsuit, as we did across the country with all of these bills, because we knew how catastrophic it would be for these laws to go into effect. And we were successful in the lower federal court, the district court.

The judge issued an extensive opinion, making factual findings that none of the claims that Tennessee had put forth in defense of this sweeping ban ultimately held up when you looked at the evidence and that the law likely violated both the Equal Protection Clause and the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment. Unfortunately, Tennessee was very aggressive in their litigation.

They went immediately to the next level of federal court to the federal appeals court to try to block that injunction to allow the law to go into effect. And that's really when the tenor of all of this in the courts really changed, in the summer of 2023, because you had an appeals court in essence stepping in and saying, Actually, there's nothing wrong with this law.

We are going to let it go into effect and issued an opinion that if allowed to stand would, in essence, not only green light government attacks on this health care for trans adolescents, but open the door to government attacks on this health care for trans adults and I think importantly, really started to use the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs overturning Roe v. Wade to expand the ability of governments to intrude upon people's bodily autonomy by eroding sex

discrimination protections more broadly. And that's really what's been going on here and what's at stake in this case that's now being considered at the Supreme Court and will likely be decided by the end of this term in June of 2025. What you're saying, Chase, is that this is an issue that, even though you're not trans, it's going to impact you. It has to do with our bodies, right? And in this case, the government literally having power over our bodies.

So, Raquel, you at the same time end up leading this fight in this moment in Washington last week in the Capitol. This extraordinary moment because of course the United States has a history of civil disobedience and resistance. You and a group of 15 other activists, including Chelsea Manning, are part of that history. Now you were arrested after participating in a sit in inside a women's restroom on Capitol Hill. Speaker Johnson, Nancy Mace. Our bodies are no debate. Our bodies are no debate.

Speaker Johnson, Nancy Mace... The sit in was led by a group that you co founded. It's called the Gender Liberation Movement. So, Raquel, you were opposing a bill introduced by far right South Carolina representative Nancy Mace. And this bill would ban transgender people from using the bathrooms that align with their gender identities in federal buildings. It's like, seriously? Seriously.

The bill is part of a vicious attack being waged by the right on Congresswoman Sarah McBride, who we all know was elected last month to represent Delaware, and will be the first openly transgender person to serve in Congress. So, our history is kind of fugata, right? It's like three steps forward and 500 million steps back, right? Raquel, talk about the wider implications of this particular bill and tell us about the action and what you and the liberation movement are calling for.

When I first heard about what representative Nancy Mace was pushing in terms of this anti trans agenda, I, like, I think, many other Americans, felt disgusted. I felt like it was very much an invasion of not just Sarah McBride's dignity and humanity, but also all of the staffers on Capitol Hill who are also trans and non binary. I think that people often forget we've always been here, in every sector and corner of society.

Maybe not every sector and corner of the government, but definitely within society. And I also think the implications of this kind of bigotry to someone in our community who has achieved that status gives people permission to be bigoted towards trans folks who maybe don't even have that power and platform and status.

I am constantly thinking about the young trans people who see how she's being treated and anticipate that kind of treatment in schools, in public life, and also maybe even in their own families. And we don't need that kind of society for our young people. So, those are the things that I think about going into this on a personal level. With this bathroom sit in, we really wanted to draw on the history of these moments, like the Greensboro sit ins, thinking about the Woolworths counter.

Many of us have probably seen, if we had a good textbook, images of folks standing up against racial discrimination. And going to that counter and experiencing the hate, the vitriol from racist White people in that time, but there were also moments like the Julius Barr 'Sip-In' where gay folks in 1966 were like, actually, you need to be serving us in these establishments, oh, also don't criminalize us, my existence is not tantamount to disorderly conduct.

We drew on that history because that is the moment that trans folks are in right now. And let's be clear, trans folks, and Chase has often always rung this alarm, have always in some way experienced some kind of criminalization or ostracization within the U. S. That has been a part of our existence probably since the onset. So right now, what we're saying is things are a little different, honey. We're not just going to sit back and take this.

We have something to say, and we're going to act up in the face of it Before I let you go, I just wanna get the State of the Union, or what are the rights as you see them in this current era of America? What are the LGBTQIA+ rights right now? If you're trying to update your passport or your license or social security card, if you're looking for hormones or medical treatment, what are your rights right now in this country?

Your rights, in terms of what the federal government is doing, are significantly constrained and we are fighting back. So, for federal identification, moving forward, there will not be updates to sex designations. We are suing over that policy with respect to passports and hopefully we will prevail. For people under 19, federal government is endeavoring to create national bans on healthcare by coercing institutions to stop providing care by threatening to withhold their federal funding.

So, there is a real assault on this medical care. I think importantly though, state identification is totally separate. Go get your state ID if you live in a state that allows you to do so. Go update your birth certificate in your state. That is not controlled by these executive orders and those are totally independent. And schools, the administration is trying to punish schools that affirm trans students and we will, of course, fight back against that.

But I think the important thing for everyone: this is scary, but trans people have resisted so much. And I have been privileged to be in the presence of elders, to be mentored by elders who, you know, who led so many movements. Like, Miss Major was part of the Attica prison uprising, and was out in the streets and in Stonewall. Her motto is, "we're still fucking here". I don't know if I'm allowed to say that, but, and we are, and we've lived through many systematic attacks.

And, so look to the elders and look to the ancestors who have paved a path. And, yes, the rights are constrained, but our spirit and our sense of possibility, I think never will be. That's great. I hope we can say "we are fucking here". I don't know how it works. Yeah, me neither. Me neither. It's free speech, right? It's a free speech organization. Free speech! Yeah. Yeah, we're good. We're good. That's free speech. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, I also want to talk about people who are allies and want to be active allies. People who, I think about like federal and state employees, oh, real quick, there's a note in the chat that I'm following that says you're good to say fuck, obviously. So, we've been given official ACLU permission. Ok, well I would have said it a lot more, but I was trying to be respectable. All right. This is not a time for respectability. The time for respectability has passed.

Yeah. So, I think about somebody who, if you're a federal employee and you want to be helpful to someone who's in this position, who's coming to you to apply for this or change their gender marker there or whatever, or if you're a high school PE coach or PE teacher and you work at a public school and this kid wants to play sports and how do you, what would you recommend to federal employees? What are their rights?

If they want to be a good person, but maybe they also want to try to keep their job. I don't maybe that's not maybe that's an impossible thing to answer. I think the overall point is don't comply in advance. A lot of these executive orders haven't actually changed policy, and we're seeing a lot of compliance in advance. We're seeing, the NCAA rolled over in two minutes. That's ridiculous. There was no basis to do that.

And as the NCAA themselves said, there are 510,000 collegiate athletes within the NCAA schools and there are less than 10 who are transgender. So, if we're sitting here, you're going to roll over for that minority group and when you do not have to yet, that is just disgraceful. And I do think we just, we want to see people not complying in advance. And of course, we know that there are times when you're under threat that you may not be able to take another course.

But there's other ways to be in solidarity with people who are under assault right now. You can be a part of changing the narrative about trans life. We are facing, coming off of an election cycle in which there was 222 million dollars spent in anti trans advertising.

We have to fight back against the narrative as much as we have to fight back against the policies because what's happening, as we were talking about, is that people think it's okay to suggest that trans people are a threat to others. And once you legitimize that notion, you authorize the government to come in and attack a group of people. And we have to all be participants in disrupting that, just as we do in all sorts of other ways.

If the government or if our rhetoric and caste and a group of people as an ideology or something the way that the Trump administration is doing with trans people, then it both legitimizes debate over people's existence and then legitimizes policies seeking to attack and eliminate the group. And that is just simply an unacceptable position. That's a great reminder. I've seen that sentiment shared before. Don't obey in advance. Don't comply in advance.

Just because the president signs a thing, that does not always mean that you have to do what that thing says. So don't obey in advance. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's really important. We've just heard clips starting with The Blueprint explaining the plan to roll back sex discrimination protections for trans people. Politics Weekly America looked at the impact of Trump's executive orders targeting the LGBTQ community. CounterSpin highlighted the unconstitutionality of Trump's overreach.

Amicus explained how the repeal of Roe versus Wade paved the way for broader discrimination based on sex. The Majority Report interviewed Laverne Cox about the past and present of anti-trans legislation. Democracy Now! spoke with M Gassen about the tactic of dehumanization being used against trans people. In The Thick had on Chase Strangio to discuss some of the legal cases concerning trans rights.

And the At Liberty podcast also spoke with Chase Strangio about knowing your rights and the importance of not complying with discriminatory policies. And those were just the Top Takes. There's a lot more in the Deeper Dive sections. But first, a reminder that this show is produced with the support of our members who get this show ad free, as well as early and ad free access to our freshly launched other show, SOLVED! That's all caps with an exclamation point, just so you know.

That show features our team of producers discussing a carefully curated selection of articles and ideas to then solve -- that's how the show got its name -- some of the biggest issues of our day in each episode. Members get the podcast of SOLVED! first each week, but we're also launching it on the Best of the Left YouTube channel, where episodes will come out a week later, because we don't want to keep all of our great ideas hidden behind paywall indefinitely.

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If you have a question or would like your comments included in the show, upcoming topics you can chime in on include a deep dive on the shifting internal dynamics of the Democratic Party that absolutely needs some shifting, and the Republican effort to dismantle public education and the role of Christian nationalism in the effort. So get your comments and questions in now for those topics or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991.

We're also findable on the privacy-focused messaging app Signal at the handle bestoftheleft.01 or you can simply email me to [email protected]. Now for today -- and this is very much off topic I know -- but as promised, I just want to give a bit more detail about our new show SOLVED! For years now, the Best of the Left production team has been creating conversational bonus episodes for members, and that show is exactly what the new show has grown out of.

What's different now is that we're shifting to, all new branding. SOLVED! All caps, exclamation point, and we'll be putting the show on YouTube and other social video sites. Now to address the most obvious question first: If the show was for members only and now it's gonna be on YouTube, aren't I worried about members canceling because they'll be able to get the show for free? And the answer to that is Yes, I am very much worried about that, and hope that they won't cancel.

And to that end, I'll explain why we're doing this. For all that's great about podcasts, the big drawback is that it's very much more difficult to find new audiences compared to shows on sites like YouTube that have algorithmic recommendation engines, so that when people watch a video it says, Hey, you might also like this. We don't get that benefit. So as one point of reference, David Pakman is the host of The David Pakman Show. He and I are almost the same age.

We started our shows at almost exactly the same time, and we've been friends for about 15 years. David just got to his 3,000,000th subscriber on YouTube. And we did not. You'd have to chop off several of the zeros before the decimal point before you started getting close to our subscriber count compared to his. It's not a perfect comparison. We do very different shows with different goals, but it still gives you an idea of the power of the recommendation engine.

So if we want to grow this show to a reasonable size, we need to branch out to these platforms that will help recommend our show for us. Now, what's a reasonable size, you might ask? The baseline goal would be to get to the point where everyone who works on the show could do it full-time without having to hold down other jobs. And if we could do that, we could probably even produce more episodes. You know, if that's the sort of thing you might be interested in.

And of course it's not just about us. We believe -- and hope you believe too -- that we are creating shows that help boost good ideas into the world, doing what we can to help bend the arc of the moral universe. So now you might be thinking, "Well, Jay! and his team seem like good folks and he certainly paid his dues curating the best of other great shows for nearly 20 years, if you can believe that. I wonder how I can help him launch this new project?

Is there anything I can do to help?" To which I reply, "Well, that's very kind of you. I appreciate you saying that, and I'm glad you asked. Because the answer is a resounding yes!" Here is what you can do.

To David Pakman's viewers or watchers of The Majority Report or fans of The Young Turks or Tom Hartmanniacs, which I assume his fans call themselves, or any other progressive show with viewers who would also like our show. The way to train the algorithm to recommend us to them is for you, super supporter, to watch full videos, not just of us, to watch full videos of those other shows first. Like, Comment, Subscribe, whatever you feel comfortable doing.

That way the recommendation algorithm learns that enthusiastic and engaged David Pakman Show watchers or Majority Report viewers or whatever are also likely to be enthusiastic and engaged SOLVED! fans. And then it will make the proper recommendation. So that's the news. A newish show, , on a brand new platform for us. I mean, we've dabbled in YouTube in the past, but not really. And a new goal to take this whole production to the next level.

Oh, and make sure you're following us on all the video sharing platforms for the same reasons. We're gonna be posting clips on Instagram and TikTok at a bare minimum, so you can help boost 'em there. And then lastly, did I mention that we decided to do SOLVED! as an animated show? I promise that it looks nothing like anything you've seen before in the world of news and politics. So check it out for the novelty of it, if for no other reason.

And now we'll continue to dive deeper on five topics today. Next up, section A policy rollbacks followed by section B, dehumanization, section C, historical attacks, section D, stories and Section E, trans joy and resistance. OK, Han, so we were just talking about biological sex and how there's, like, a lot of variation in other animals. But what about humans? Like, what's the determining factor for, like, sex in us? So in humans, sex is determined based on a variety of factors.

But for the purposes of this episode, we're going to focus on three of the main ones-- chromosomal, chemical, and physical. Wait, I think we need to slow down and, like, break down each of them, right? Like, so the first one you said is chromosomal, right? And I remember learning about this in, like, high school bio. All the genetic information in our bodies are packaged in 46 chromosomes, and they're coupled up to make 23 pairs.

The first 22 pairs tend to look similar like in all humans, but the last one is usually either an XX or an XY pair. And XX is usually assigned to female. XY is assigned to male. Right, that's true for most humans, not all-- I'll get to that later-- but most. And Hannah Claire says that nowadays, when doctors predict fetal sex, usually, they're looking at the chromosomes.

Right, and you mentioned the second metric being chemical, right? Like, what do chemicals tell us about sex? Yeah, so a big part of sex and how it develops has to do with hormones. Right. And those chemical hormones, they fluctuate through your whole life. Like, as a little kid, you had a different hormone profile than when you went through puberty or than when you start going through menopause. Wow. Yep, yep. So when does this, like, first chemical change actually happen? Puberty? Way earlier.

All humans have hormones like testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, et cetera. They just have them in different quantities and different cycles. Wow. And those hormones really fluctuate through life. So a fetus gets the first hit of these hormones in the womb. That triggers things like genital growth and certain types of brain development. Then there's another hormone surge in babies after birth within the first six months. It's one that endocrinologists call "mini puberty."

Wow, I did not know any of this. It's like baby puberty. OK. [LAUGHS] Yeah. And after that, in early childhood, the hormones kind of take a break. One pediatrician I talked to said-- and I quote-- that "the testes are fast asleep."

Well, yes. This can refer to internal genitalia, like ovaries, or external genitalia, like penis and testes. Or we could also look at secondary sexual characteristics, things that usually don't develop until puberty, like breasts or facial hair, or even things that are determined, in part, by hormones and are often used to differentiate sex, like your voice or your height or the distribution of fat and muscle on your body. Wow. I didn't even think about those last things.

Like, you're totally right. Yeah. And those physical traits are really the main observable characteristics, the ones that don't require lab work. So usually when people who are not doctors or scientists are talking about biological sex, this is what they really mean. But these physical characteristics don't really fall on a strict binary. I mean, we have tall women and short men. We have women with flatter chests and men without facial hair. Yeah. People's appearances can really vary.

But I digress. OK, so physical traits, hormones, chromosomes-- we have all these different ways to determine sex. And I'm guessing, like, that most of the time, they align, but not all the time. Exactly. All of these things have the potential to differ from one another or to be ambiguous or unclear. Like, someone's chromosomes might be XY, but they don't have a penis. Or they do have a penis, but they also have internal ovaries.

And these differences generally fall under the umbrella of something called "intersex conditions." Intersex is an umbrella term for biological conditions where a child is born with, like, physical characteristics or genetic characteristics that don't fall into our society's neat definitions of what is male or female. This is Ilene Wong. She's a physician, specifically an adult urologist. And she says that although intersex conditions are rare, they're not as rare as you think.

Wait, like, how common are they? Well, estimates can vary, but the most common number that I've seen thrown around is that intersex conditions overall affect 1 to 2 people in every 100. So that would make it about as common as having red hair and even more common than being born an identical twin. So chances are, if you're listening to this episode and you're not intersex, you've probably at least encountered someone who is.

Exactly. And Ilene is really passionate about intersex awareness because, she says, her training-- she went to med school at Yale; she did her residency at Stanford-- it still left her really unprepared to treat intersex patients.

Trans rights are human rights. Trans blood will be on your hands. Trans people shouldn't bother you more than fascists. And honestly, family, this was my favorite. Is this hell? No. It's Iowa. Now, as somebody who went to school in Des Moines, Iowa, attended Drake University, I'm familiar with this entire area. And Iowa's actually one of the leaders of LGBTQ rights. When they included sexual orientation and gender identity into their civil rights. Policies 18 years ago. Well, here we are today.

Nearly 2, 000 people gathered inside and outside of the Capitol to protest against Iowa removing gender identity as a protected class in their civil rights law. And it passed pretty easily. Let's be very clear. The Iowa Senate passed the bill 33 to 15 along party lines and less than an hour later The house passed the bill 60 to 35 and actually five Republicans joined Democrats against removing gender identity as a protected clause and family. Can I just tell you how quickly this all happened?

They just introduced this policy change a week ago, one week. So when they tell you legislation can't move quickly, it's a lot. A week ago, they introduced this, it passed the Senate. And then less than an hour later, it passed the house. And then their Republican governor signed it into law just like that. And so now Iowa makes the worst kind of history becoming the. First state in the country to remove gender identity as a protected class. And I just can't overstate how extraordinary it is.

Right. To continue to reverse law in this way, just to be discriminatory, just to be hateful against less than 1 percent of our population. And it's truly wild to watch your country regress in real time versus progressing. You feel me? And like I mentioned earlier, right? In Iowa, sexual orientation and gender identity were added. When the legislature was mostly run by Democrats, right? And 18 years later, it's been removed.

Iowa is basically following in line with Trump's executive order, declaring there are only two genders. Which isn't even legally binding. These executive orders are declarations from the highest office. That is it. That is all. They absolutely have impact though. They aren't legally binding, but they have impact. Because when it comes from the president's office, it directly impacts federal government, funding, and the workforce. It also greatly impacts policy.

Here we are in Iowa. 167 people actually signed up to give public testimony during the 90 minute public house committee hearing. Only 24 of them were actually in favor of this policy. The people shared their stories. They pleaded to their elected officials to not strip them of their rights. Senator Tony Bezziano was truly a bright light who called out Republicans for their complete disregard for trans folks. He said this, These people aren't downstairs because they got nothing else to do.

Their lives are on the line. And should be taken seriously. Most of you don't even know someone who's transgender. You don't even know them, but you hate them. You have to hate them because you cannot do what you're doing today if you didn't. He goes on to say, Shame on all of you Christians. Who want to keep talking about your faith, when this is what God talked about.

Family, he said, I don't know where you go to church, and I don't know what you read, but being a good Christian doesn't take much. Do unto others, take care of your neighbor. It is so simple, but alas, here we are. And Republicans are claiming this isn't a step back because federal laws offer protections and having it in the state law is redundant. Family, when I read this, I promise I said, I'm mad they get, they are gaslighting people with this propaganda. I mean, it is literally gaslighting.

Iowa's governor, Reynolds, said it's common sense to acknowledge the obvious biological differences between men and women. In fact, it's necessary to secure genuine equal protection for women and girls. Republicans continuing to say that this is about women and girls continues to infuriate me.

It's nonsensical to think that removing rights from a group of people somehow helps to ensure The rights for another group of people, I promise you, when you protect the most vulnerable among us, everybody else is more protected. Everybody. But the moment you choose to remove, to pull back rights from people, you make everyone more vulnerable, especially women and girls. So what does all of this actually mean? Civil rights acts prohibit discrimination at your job.

When you're seeking housing, an education, applying for credit, and for public accommodations. So now, birth certificates in Iowa reflect a person's sex at birth. They also added new definitions for male, female, and sex. The first trans person elected to Iowa's General Assembly, Representative Amy, said this, felt like a gut punch. This bill revokes protections to our jobs, our homes, and our ability to access credit.

In other words, it deprives us of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. She went on to say, our trans siblings in Iowa refuse. Refuse to give up in despair because the greatest act of rebellion that you can do in these dystopian times is to live your life unafraid and be happy. That is her message to our trans siblings in Iowa. So Bostock is the thing that makes it hard to understand how the Sixth Circuit got where they got to, Chase, because in some sense, Bostock is a Title VII case.

This is an equal protection case, but Bostock already decides that discrimination against trans employees. Is discrimination on the basis of sex, right? Done and dusted. And I just would love for you to explain to us. And, and, and, and let's just explicitly say, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Chief Justice John Roberts agrees with the reasoning. The notion that this is, uh, untraveled ground goes away after Bostock. And yet, here we are.

And I would just love for you to explain how the Sixth Circuit. gets around it. So the Sixth Circuit decides, and this is a departure from all other cases in which the court doesn't do this, but the Sixth Circuit in essence says, well, Bostock is just about Title VII. It is just about the statutory context in which people are prohibited from discriminating in employment because of sex and says it's based on the particular language of that statutory protection.

The problem with that is that, yes, Title VII and the Equal Protection Clause are different. Everyone agrees about that premise, but they're different in terms of what is ultimately prohibited, not insofar as what is identified as because of sex.

If the funeral home in Bostock was a government employer and that government employer fired Amy Stevens for being transgender, the court wouldn't have said that, well, it is because of sex for Title VII, but it's not because of sex for the Equal Protection Clause because both provisions are about protecting individuals, and they make a big deal about this in Bostock, that Bostock is about the individual. But guess what? So is the Equal Protection Clause. It refers to any person.

And for the originalists on the court, that provision of the Constitution was designed so that People were treated as individuals, not just as members of classes, and so they have that in common. And then the other piece is that, you know, Title VII asks, Would the outcome be different if you were of a different sex? Well, so does Equal Protection. It asks, Would the outcome be different if you were of a different sex.

And so the logic of Bostock applies to the Equal Protection Clause, and I think you have to do a lot of, you know, distortion to suggest that somehow a sex line becomes sex neutral when you're looking at it through the lens of the Equal Protection Clause. You've slightly said it, but I would love to have you give the most charitable iteration of what Tennessee is saying in defense of its law.

I mean, I have to say, like, it's hard to read the brief because it's like, Europe, bad, you know, we found a doctor, like, give me the most, if you can, compelling argument for what Tennessee says they're doing here. And I know, let me also be really clear, you said that. It starts from the premise that people make wildly reckless, unresearched decisions about their children. Right. That is sort of the underlying premise.

I do think it's hard to come up with a grounded, doctrinal explanation of what they're arguing because even if you take everything they say about Europe, which we fundamentally disagree with and the record doesn't support or the risks of the treatment that simply does not change that it is a line based on sex. So that is still not answering the question of sort of what has Tennessee done if not ban treatment because of sex. So that piece of it.

It goes to whether that line is justified, and we obviously disagree about that piece. The way they claim that this is sex neutral is in essence to say, we're just banning a medical procedure, not something based on sex, and this isn't about men and women being treated differently. And I think that really is the crux of their argument about why the heightened scrutiny standard that attends to sex classifications doesn't apply here.

And from my perspective, it's really hard to reconcile that with the text of the statute and the Supreme Court's precedent. And somewhat puzzlingly, Tennessee even says in their brief that a law that bans sex inconsistent dress would be a sex classification. A law that bans sex inconsistent professions would be a sex classification. And this is just a law that bans sex inconsistent medical procedures.

And so it is not clear to me how you get from those points about those other hypothetical laws to saying that this is not a law that imposes disparate treatment based on someone's sex. There's one other piece of this that I'd love for you to poke at with me, which is it's not just an argument about the civil rights of trans youth, but there's this argument about the rights of parents to make medical decisions about their children's care that is kind of the wrong.

Beating heart of substantive due process. It's the beating heart of how we think about, you know, family autonomy and privacy and everything that we have protected constitutionally goes to this notion that parents get to make their kids medical decisions. It is why we have judges who are saying, you know, parents get to decide if their kids can have an abortion or use contraception. So how do you get around? I'm not. asking how you get around it.

It is very, very strange to have Tennessee taking the posture that the state actually gets to override this parental interest in making medical decisions about their kids. I completely agree. And of course, we have a due process claim on behalf of the parents that is not before the court because they did not grant that question, but it bears on. The Equal Protection claim because at the end of the day, Tennessee is claiming that they are doing this to protect Children.

But who do they otherwise expect to protect Children and weigh the risks and benefits of potential medical treatment, if not the parents? That is the role of parents. Traditionally, and Tennessee is coming in and displacing the line judgment of an adolescent that adolescence parents and that adolescence doctor you have on one side, and The adolescent, the adolescent's parents, the adolescent's doctor, the entire mainstream medical establishment in the United States.

And on the other side, you have the government of Tennessee. And as you know, it is quite stunning to see state governments like those of Tennessee and Alabama and Arkansas, all of a sudden arguing that parents rights don't mean anything because these of course are the same governments that have aggressively asserted the rights of parents to, for example, not have to.

have their children mask in school, not have to have their children get vaccinated, not have to have their children learn about other people in their school history and other classes. So of course, this is quite an about face for those who have been robust defenders of parents rights to come in and say, but not these parents, not these parents who are loving and supporting their trans children and making this.

same types of informed judgment that parents make every single day in complex medical decision making, because that is what we do. We know our children best. We are the ones who are incentivized to do the research to ensure that our children get the care that they need, and Tennessee has come in and decided that they know better. Right.

I just think it's such a poignant Marker of where we are that after years, as you say, of hearing parents know best, get the state out of my kids reading list, get the states out of my kids sex education, get the state out of my kids masking mandate, but parents. No best until and unless the state disagrees with them, which is in this instance, and it's really a shattering inversion of how we think about how families make decisions.

In more anti trans political news, the military is once again removing trans service members from active duty. In a memo filed in court last Wednesday, the Pentagon has 30 days to identify service members who have a quote, and I'm quoting here, a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria. Once this list is compiled, family, all of these people will be removed and lose their jobs.

They will lose their benefits, but you know, because there's such good people, our trans siblings who are being kicked out of the military, they will be listed as honorable separation. Now a waiver can be issued for some trans service members, but you know, That comes with conditions. These will be reviewed case by case. And essentially if they think you can fight and be an asset for war, you can stay. Let me tell y'all what it says directly.

It says provided there is a compelling government interest in accessing the applicant that directly supports war fighting capabilities. They literally say war fighting capabilities. These waivers can only be granted if the service member also can show evidence of 36 months of stability in their sex assigned at birth without distress or impairment, so three years, okay?

They also must demonstrate they've never attempted to medically transition and must be willing to adhere to the military standards for their sex at birth. Now after hearing all of that, you tell me who's getting a waiver. Heh, come on, never attempted medical transition? Essentially, this memo just falls in line with Trump's, you know, Voldemort's executive order of there being two genders. This policy has stated that the greetings will be binary, okay? Yes sir, yes ma'am.

The defense department can no longer use funds for gender affirming care and surgeries that were scheduled are now canceled. No more hormone therapy either. Now last month, if y'all remember family, because let's be clear. All of this political nonsense is truly overwhelming, so it's hard to keep up.

But last week I shared here on the pod, right, that there has been a lawsuit filed in response to Voldemort's executive order banning trans folks from serving, right, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, NCLR. and GLBTQ legal advocates and defenders are fighting on behalf of six active duty trans members and two trans members of our community who want to serve. They are standing on the 14th amendment's equal protection clause as why this is unconstitutional.

Well, we already know lawsuits take a whole bunch of time. Okay. Now the number varies. But approximately 10 to 15, 000 trans folks actually serve in the military today. And I will say this time and time again, we live in a country with a volunteer service with a service that is declining, okay, in recruitment. And yet here we are talking about kicking out 10 to 15, 000 service members who want to serve this country, Chile.

The last thing they need to be doing is kicking people out because guess who's not signing up. That would be me. Right, and I just want to, I just want to clarify that the DeAnda case you're talking about is DeAnda versus Becerra. It's a case out of Texas.

where this Christian patriarch basically wants to make sure that his, his potentially slutty daughters, you know, keep their legs closed and don't go to title 10 family planning clinics in order to get contraception on a confidential basis, which they are entitled to do. This is a man who wants to make sure that his daughters who have never sought birth control and have never even expressed an interest in seeking birth control.

But cannot seek birth control at some other point without his say so. And so the way that ties back into the gender affirming care cases is that you have to think about, about parents being aligned with their children in terms of seeking healthcare, right? When it comes to LW, right? Who is the, the, the trend, the trans kid at the center of this, uh, the when it comes to LW and their parents.

wanting to seek gender affirming care, then that makes sense because the parents are aligned with the kids. When it comes to, I don't know, parents trying to give their kids lobotomies, which apparently is a problem in Texas, well certainly the child and the parent are not aligned in seeking that kind of care because the kid doesn't want a lobotomy even though the parent does.

So it's really, once you sort of look at the examples that they're given, they're giving, and then you think about them logically, you see what this is. It's about parents wanting to control their kids, and it's about states wanting to control the kind of care that parents can provide their kids. No, no, no, no, Imani. It's not at all. If you ask Justice Kavanaugh, though, what this case is about is the importance of constitutional Right. The importance of doing fuck all.

I think that's his memoir in the works. The importance of doing fuck all. Because he basically does fuck all on the bench. I'm still irritated that he's even sitting there. But, but truly, that is, that is the man's most Honest principle as a jurist, he was up there today saying things like, well, you know, we don't discriminate on sex by not discriminating on sex, right? Like the constitution is colorblind, is neutral to these questions.

And that should be a tremendous flag, because what that is, is caping, it's covering, right? The constitution is not neutral on these questions. If it only protects the status quo, like the equal protection clause actually exists to disrupt that. And I thought that again, Solicitor General Prelogar, Prelogar, I'll never get it right, but the Solicitor General was phenomenal here. She was like, well, sure, Brett, like I take your point, but. Have you heard of the 14th Amendment? Right.

It exists for a reason. It exists, right? And these principles aren't neutral, but what's irritating is that even, you know, the great Chief Justice seemed to be siding towards, or leaning towards Kavanaugh's position of Well, you know, the science is just so unsettled, don't you know, and because it's so unsettled, we should just probably stay out of it. Let the states do their things.

We're just going to, we're just going to let the constitution leave this really hairy question of the science around trans medicine, puberty blockers, et cetera. We're just going to leave that issue to the people's representatives because that's where it belongs. It doesn't belong with us nine. We're not doctors. However, could we possibly make any sort of ruling from a constitutional perspective on this very difficult issue? It's like, come on, man. You do it all the fucking time with abortion.

I was just gonna say, are you familiar with a case called Gonzales v. Carhartt? Chief Justice Roberts and the unsettled question around abortion and the science, like again, we're still mad at you, Tony Kennedy, right? Like this is all your legacy, but you're exactly right. That's pearl clutching around like, Oh my God, whatever should we do? It was the same bullshit framing that they used in the state's battle around abortion until Dobbs. Right.

And we have to remember, like, the reason we're still mad at Tony Kennedy is because in Gonzalez, they struck down a, they struck down a method of performing an abortion. And in his opinion, he's like, I'm not really sure if those bitches start regretting them abortions. But they probably do. I don't have any science to back it up, but my gut says they do. So that's what we're going to go with. I mean, that's basically what he said.

And there is that same sort of concern trolling about gender affirming care. Like, I don't know. Are we using puberty blockers to block puberty because of precocious puberty or to deepen people's voices? It's real weird. I don't think we can really make a rule. It's just right. It was fascination with D transitioners, right? Like trans folks is justice. Sotomayor already comprised such a small fraction of the population. And within that D transitioners even more.

And that is the object of their focus. You know, you want to know who, I want to know what, what the object of focus was for a man that we both know. As Neil Gorsuch. That man was not even there today. You can not prove to me that he was. Where the hell was Neil Gorsuch today? Because frankly, the reason why it's significant that he did not have a thing to say.

at all during these oral arguments is because he is the man who in 2019 said in a case called Bostock v. Clayton County that you cannot discriminate on the basis that, uh, on the basis of being trans because, because that is. Discrimination on the basis of sex, right? You cannot discriminate against trans people in the workplace. Why? Because that kind of discrimination is sex discrimination.

There was so much discussion today during arguments about whether or not this Tennessee law was a sex based classification. And if it is, what do we do about it? And Neil Gorsuch said nothing. He was the Mariah Carey GIF. Bostock, I don't know her. Never heard of her. Never heard of her. Don't know her. But for real, like, this is part of his legacy, being the great textualist, right? And Bostock had been something that he had been very proud of.

Until it became uncouth to be a person that stands up for trans rights, because you have to remember that Bostock was 2019. That's a mere two years after the hubbub in North Carolina with that bathroom ban and the NCAA pulled out of North Carolina. And then I think Indiana tried some shit and everyone was like, don't you dare. People were up in arms in favor, backing trans people's right to use the bathroom. And then here we are five years later.

And it's like the deluge of anti trans legislation has made anyone who stands up for trans people a victim of the woke mind virus or what have you. And so Gorsuch was just dead ass silent. And that bodes, that bodes ill in my, in my estimation. Now entering Section B dehumanization. It's always like, we're pursuing this truth. There must be something here where we can portray both sides. But they, by asking some of these questions repeatedly and with the emphasis they do, yeah.

They call into question kind of just like basic. Facts about trans identity, and it's this paternalism that bothers me. Yeah. Of, uh, we know better as New York Times reporters than the very people who are saying, this is my reality. Um, yeah. What, like that, that, if you could just explain what that's like and, and Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I always start this off by saying that, um, you know, gender affirming care for youth is probably the most prominent one that they.

Go long on all the time. Um, and the treatment that they're attacking has been endorsed by every major American Medical Association in existence. Um, it's endorsed by numerous international boards, you know, um, the French government just came out basically and said the affirming approach is. The correct one. Um, so you have this laundry list of just the biggest medical experts. In the world basically saying this is the, the right treatment.

And then you have like a handful of crank doctors on the other side saying, well, no, no, we think there's an issue with it. And the New York Times gives both of them equal weight or sometimes gives the crank doctors even more weight. It reminds me a lot of the climate change debate, um, which they, I think pretty much did the same thing. Um, but I, I'll say this about the New York Times.

I think that they, more than any other news organization did more to take, uh, transphobia from a fringe right wing position to making it this hotly contested political issue that we have now. Um, and bringing by bringing it into polite, liberal discourse essentially, right? Correct. Yeah. And I would say hyping up hysteria, uh, in.

Communities, like wealthier suburban communities that, uh, per, you know, about this being some sort of thing they'd have to worry about with their child that it's spreading. So, so, um, uh, like, almost like they portrayed it as like, as it's an infection or something like that, right? Yeah. Um, and it's crazy because in 2022. We saw the Republicans try to run on transphobia. Mm-hmm. And they did not do well in that election cycle.

But I, it's hard for me to assess if it's just like kind of Trump and his force of personality or if it's what you described this like normalization of transphobia by these elite media institutions, or, it's probably both. Yeah. Uh, I do think that the trans athlete issue more than any other is the most difficult for the left to counter. Um, I, you know, I've written about that issue more than probably any of the others in my career, but that's also because I have a degree in sport management.

I was an athlete growing up myself. Um, I have an inherent interest in it. Uh, people forget. I also have two cisgender daughters. Um, so. I can see all sides of this issue, and my focus has always been on the science and I, I don't think people have a grasp on the science of trans athletes. I'm not gonna sit here and recite it back to you now because it would take too long, but I wish that science would lead on the trans athlete debate.

Instead of like this gut feeling, quote unquote common sense that we get, um, from conservatives and a lot of quote unquote conserved liberal. Well, I mean, it's, frankly, it's a gut feeling because it's just this like old adage about protecting little white girls. Yeah. That you'll see across, uh, you'll see in historical portrayals of indigenous Americans, of black Americans and their threat to white women. I mean that like, what, what's her name? The fifth place? Idiot swimmer.

Oh, Riley. Riley Gaines. Riley Gaines. Like that. That's what she's invoking. Um, and. That when people say that's their gut reaction, it's like, have you ever seen ba, especially pre pubescent kids playing sports? Yeah. Like there is no, there is nothing you need to worry about. And if these trans girls get their gender affirming care in the way that they need, none of this is gonna be an issue. It wouldn't even be an issue without that. But it's solved just by trans care immediately.

But they, but then those same folks are disinterested and skeptical of transcare, right? It, it, it's really interesting that, uh, when they're making a medical argument, it's this, uh, like horribly irreversible, permanent. Drastic change, but, uh, when it comes to trans athletes, transcare doesn't do anything actually. Yeah. Um, they're talking outta both sides of their mouths. Uh, and I mean, I've seen my own athletic performance. Uh, it, it dipped dramatically.

I was a runner when I transitioned, although, um, I haven't been able to run since Covid, since getting Covid. Um, and my times. It took an immediate dip when I started estrogen. Uh, it, that's unscientific. Like there wasn't anybody studying the before and the after. It was just my anecdotal report. But every trans person I know that was an athlete before will tell you this. Um, so to us it's common sense to everybody else. It's like, you know, these men who think that they're.

Physically superior to all women. It's the same people who think that if they played Serena Williams in a tennis match, that they could win up and play off of her. And it's like, no, you, you're not going to. Right. Right. You just overestimate your own abilities. It's like the guys who think that they can wrestle a bear and win, it's like, no, you would die. Um, and, and as we wrap up, Caitlin, I guess that that part of it is really.

Um, I think important for people to just think about the, the overfocus in particular on trans women versus trans men. Can you talk a little bit about what conservatives, why they're fixated particularly on trans women? Yeah. I have my own theories, but yeah. What, what's your assessment? Um, I think it's easy. And girls, I should say trans women and girls. Yeah. I, I think that they.

It's easy to demonize the appearance of a trans woman, especially somebody like me who transitioned a little older, um, and maybe doesn't pass as well. I think it's easy to portray us as this grotesque other when in actuality where you're next door neighbor, you know, we're the. Best player in your video game lobby. Sorry. It's true. Um, you know, we, we use your grocery store. We, you know this, that I could go into everything. We are your neighbors.

Um, but it's very easy in an online setting to go. You know, they could take my worst selfie. And believe me, I've taken bad ones who hasn't. And say, look at this person. You believe that is a woman. And it's very, very easy to radicalize folks. And I think that's why there's so much focus on trans women. Um, and the thought that I'll leave you with is this. The arguments for trans rights. What, in other words, what trans people are asking for from society haven't changed in 50 years?

Um, I found a speech the other day from like the 1974 St. Christopher Street rally of a famous trans woman. I apologize her, her name escapes me off the top of my head. Um, it's the, y'all better quiet down speech. If, if you're LGBT, you probably have heard of that. Uh, but. She's talking about trans people in prisons. She's talking about how the f you know, gay and trans people can't find housing. Gay and trans people can't find work.

And those are the same issues that we've been asking for, you know, the same rights that we've been asking for for the last 50 years. So there's this sense on the right that I think pervaded. Unquote Normy Society that, oh, trans rights went too far. And my counter is, is I think you all became way more obsessed with us because what we're asking for hasn't changed in all of that time. I think that. You all just needed somebody else to focus on once gay marriage became the law of the land.

Yep. Um, Senate Twink a great name, right? It's in Sylvia Riviera Rivera. Uh, I think it's excellent. Thank you. I mean, one of the things I've seen is the thing about passports and the, and gender markers on passports. And there was a trans woman who had applied for her new passport and she had fully transitioned and had her F on the passport. And then she got her passport and they said, we corrected it.

Uh, and turned your, turned your F back to an M. She did a social media video about it, and the ACU, I think, has taken on the case for just that idea of like, And, as she says, and I think this is such a complicated issue, but please talk about this, She presents as a woman. So if you're not gonna make her go to the men's room, it doesn't make any sense.

First of all, this entire administration's policy is premised on the idea that every aspect of life has to be sorted based on our, you know, cell size at the time of conception. So the idea that if you have a large cell, you produce a large cell at conception, therefore you're a female and you go to the And if you have a small cell, you're male, we don't order the world that way.

It's not like people are walking around being like, Oh yeah, let me go to the small cell bathroom and then, you know, doing genetic testing at the door. Because of course, nothing is binary in that way, including, you know, the breakdown of any aspect of, of sex. And the reality is, is we live in. Move through the world with a self determined sense of our sex with that. That's what happens.

There's there's not guards at the bathroom door and and they're trying to enforce this idea that they alone can control what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman on federal identification in restroom uses in public buildings in In sports and health care and how each individual and each individual family understands their bodies and and that is a dangerous thing to see to the government.

And the more we see that, the more we give them the type of surveillance and control over our bodies that allows them to build the type of government that they want, which is where they are singularly powerful and our rights as individuals are diminished. I would imagine you're hearing stories from trans folks around the country about how this is impacting their life now. Is there any stories you could share with us that you're hearing about from people around the country?

I mean, it's I mean, I can't even tell you it's so it's so many stories and I'm, you know, first as each of these executive actions with the health care, you know, I'm hearing from what's so heartbreaking is I got so many message from from 18 year olds who are like, I was waiting and waiting until I was a legal adult so I could go out and have control over my body over my life.

And they canceled my doctor's appointment on the way to the doctor because of this executive order, or parents who have, you know, their kid has been so distressed about the onset of puberty, and they've only ever been known in the world as a girl, but were assigned male at birth, and they were on the way to the doctor to get the care that the parents and the doctors and the young person all agree was essential. And then care is shut down.

And families who already relocated from a state where their care was banned moved to another state only now to have the care band. Again, I mean, these stories are are just so devastating. And then with with identification. I mean, for me, I've had an M on my driver's license, my passport for a very long time. And the idea of me having to leave the country with a document that classifies me as female. Um, and when you're traveling abroad, you use your passport for everything.

You check into a hotel, you, you turn over your passport. So it would, in essence, announce in every interaction, you know, both with private citizens and with government officials that, that you're trans. Then they, you know, and it brings suspicion. It creates instability. And, and that's what people are. And that's what I'm fearful about is, is to be forcibly, um, misidentified by the government and then to have to carry that around, not just domestically, but around the world.

And, and, and I think people are very, very scared, which is why, you know, we're taking legal action in the context of passports, in the context of healthcare, uh, in the context of schools, because we need people to feel like they can exist in the world safely. And, and, and if, if litigation is one way to show people that we're fighting back, then that is what we're going to continue to do.

Yeah. And we've talked about this a little bit, but I'd love for you to sort of even go a little further about how the Trump administration, some middle aged comedians, uh, have made it seem like trans is separate from all other categories. So you can't be, you can't be black and trans or trans is you can't, trans is just trans. It's not. Poor and trans. It's not rich in tra like, you know, in that that there's just this category of people called trans or separate from the rest of us.

Can you talk about how those intersections actually do impact the trans people's identity? Yeah, I mean, I do think there's this way to try to exceptionalize trans existence in an and, and it happens in a number of different ways. It's sort of this idea that transness is so foreign that you can't ground it in anything else that we might considered human. Um, but then of course, that's so disconnected from, from reality.

Uh, where obviously there's, you know, there's unhoused trans people, there's disabled trans people, there's black trans people, there's trans immigrants and all, you know, there's trans people in all communities and Al always, there always have been across, you know, all of history and they, there is this effort to sort of cast transness as this new and, and, and, and weird and unsettling thing. But, but transness has, has always existed and, and simply mocking.

trans people doesn't make us any less real and make us any less part of, of all, uh, all these communities. And at the end of the day, what all of this reflects from the government policies to comedians fixating on trans people with basic jokes that aren't even funny is that the, there's an anxiety about, uh, sort of the malleability of, of the gender binary, the idea that there are. So many ways that we can be, you know, more than just, uh, sort of how we think of men and how we think of women.

And that causes people a lot of anxiety because it does remind us that the world is more expansive than we're told. And with that freedom comes a lot of questions for people about, well, what, what am I supposed to do with all of that possibility? And so I think the reaction is to try to make people. smaller. Um, and that happens by suggesting that trans people are so anomalous.

But another thing I think is important is the very same ways that trans people are cast as dangerous or weird or different than other historically oppressed groups, that every iteration of discrimination looks precisely the same way. Gay people, also, we don't want you in our, that, you know, the same stories were told. We don't want gay people in the locker room because they will sexualize us. We don't want gay people in the military. We don't want gay people to be teachers.

That was Anita Bryant's campaign. And then, you know, we moved on from that, sort of, and put the hatred on, on, on trans people. But, and then, you know, historical oppression and anti blackness takes the same form. It's the same story over and over again, suggesting each time that it's new. And it's not. It's never new. It's always the same.

Um, but what was surprising to me was the ways in which Justice Barrett so easily piggybacked onto that with this idea that like, wait a second, you're telling me trans folks have faced discrimination historically? Get out! Well, I'm that out! What? What? I don't know if trans people suffer the kind of discrimination that the Blacks did. I mean, Jesus Christ. Is there a history of de jure discrimination? And if so, can you explain it to me? I, which, I mean. They did.

Yeah, Chase was like, uh, cross dressing bands. Have you heard of them? And she literally was like, Oh, well, gee whiz, I didn't even know that such logs existed. Like Jesus Christ, Amy, you're only sitting on the bench about to rule on one of the most historic cases facing trans people in history. You don't think you could have taken some time to read any of the 7, 000 amicus briefs that were filed in support of LW's position talking about the ways in which these bands will be.

It will be expanded to reach things like cross dressing. I mean, how do you, how do you sit on the bench and ask that question? But she is exactly the kind of justice that the conservative legal movement wants to continue to, uh, you know, sort of bring up. Like I made this point on blue sky, which by the way, so fun. Thank you for bringing me over there. But blue sky, I was like, this is why conservatives pursue things like. Book bans, right?

Like, um, control over curriculum, abstinence only, like the lack of knowledge and particularly historical knowledge drives present day policy. So if you control the historical narrative, you control the legal narrative. And that's what Amy, uh, Coney Barrett was showing in her ignorance on the bench today. But it's like, where is the historical narrative?

They don't even understand the historical narrative because apparently, Sonia Sotomayor is like the only justice who's ever read the goddamn Federalist Papers. Federalist Paper number 10, to be precise. Oh, we're going to talk about Jimmy Madison? Like For fuck's sake, look, I don't want to sit here and have to quote these old white wig, wig wearers of yore, like that's not my jam, but this falls squarely into what James Madison, y'all conservatives love James Madison, right?

We don't leave the rights of the minority to the tyranny of the majority. That's just, that's basic federalist paper number 10 101, right? And, and trans people are 1 percent of the population. Sonia Sotomayor pointed this out. Trans people are 1 percent of the population. How is it that they are going to, they're going to, they're going to somehow, uh, be protected by the democratic process? Right. But they want to just send, just send the issue back to the people's representatives.

The democratic process will take care of it. Well, as Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, it, it took, it took judicial intervention to protect black people who are about 13 percent of the population to protect women who are about half of the population. So what the hell are trans people who are 1 percent of the population supposed to do? Where's the political power that they have accrued over the years, right? It doesn't, it's just nonsense. And it's, it just, it's such bad faith. Right.

It's just such bad faith. I got to say, and again, a point that I made on, on social media, Justice Sotomayor sounded weary in today's arguments. Not like unhealthy weary, but just tired of this shit. Right. And at the same time was one of the most effective and forceful. advocates for trans folks and trans kids in particular that I've heard from anybody in a position of power in a long, long time.

And it was refreshing and I can't even imagine what that must have been like for trans folks who are listening to the arguments because she just straight up wasn't having any. of it today. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is who she is on the bench, right? She ties these vaunted legal principles, these constitutional principles to real life consequences to what people are going to face. How is this going to affect actual people? Not just some sort of chin stroking exercise.

That's a lot of these conservatives seem to want to have. And just as sort of wary. or weary as Sonia Sotomayor sounded, Jackson sounded like a combination of like beast mode and also extreme frustration, right? Like real frustrated with Tennessee's lawyer for just being a jackass, right? And refusing to see clear connections between, you know, SB1, this, this gender affirming care ban and Loving v. Virginia. Am I right? Right. Oh, yeah. No, this woman ate her Wheaties today.

She was sounding the alarm on the fact that Tennessee was putting forward arguments that would upend almost all of equal protection jurisprudence. She came into this argument clearly suspect and then saw they were going for it and was like, guys, what the fuck? Like. And you can hear it in her voice, you like, but why, what are you talking about? I don't understand what you mean. No, that's not what you've been arguing. You've been saying this.

I mean, it was very, she was really going back and forth with the lawyer and the lawyer was just kind of like, almost like, I don't know, like the conservative is going to rule in my favor. Why do I need to even make sense? Right. Right. Great. No, I mean, he, you know, he didn't have to think about it. And the reality is, is that Justice Jackson is the deepest constitutional thinker we have on the bench right now.

The fact that she came into this argument and was immediately able to make the equal protection analogy between what Tennessee is trying to do here and in Loving versus Virginia, which is the interracial marriage case. And basically she said, look, Tennessee, it sounds like Virginia could have gotten away with its anti miscegenation ban if they had just classified it differently. And Tennessee was like, yeah, probably.

Right. And, and, and Tennessee, you know, wants to classify this law as an age classification, right? It's preventing. Minors from using puberty blockers or wants to say, well, even if it is a, even if kind of, even if it is a sex based classification, it discriminates, discriminates against boys and girls equally, right? Because neither can use puberty blockers. And Jackson's point is.

Well, you could say that the anti miscegenation laws discriminated against white people and black people equally because it disallowed them marrying each other. But the point is, it's still a racial classification, right? The point is, the gender affirming care ban is still a sex based classification. Even if there is some other component, the fact that it's sex based, the fact that in loving it was race based, that triggers heightened scrutiny. That just makes sense.

And the Tennessee lawyer was like, no, well, and then shot, you know, started making analogies with morphine and euthanasia and really degrading just the level of care that is just degrading trans people, degrading their lives, to create degrading what they need in order to live full, successful lives.

And what is so important and what was so smart about what Justice Jackson was doing in arguments today is that it really exposed the lie or the truth, depending on how you look at it, behind the Tennessee ban. And, you know, that is that Tennessee is insisting that this, that the purpose of the ban is, you know, A medical classification ban. It's not sex based. It's dependent on the care, right?

That's a tell though, because to make the argument, Tennessee has to say that gender affirming care is never medically indicated, right? That there is no, since there is no case where puberty blockers, for example, for the purposes of transitioning would be allowed. That's the same argument conservatives make with abortion. We saw in Tala, we see it all over the place that abortion is never medically necessary. In other words, neither abortion nor gender affirming care are healthcare period.

Full stop. If you ask conservatives and they, they have such disdain for gender affirming care, that they're even willing to go outside the country to find other countries who have. similar disdain for gender affirming care, like the UK, for example, is become just like turf central, right? Like, or gender critical. Now they're calling it the gender critical movement.

And they put out this report, the cast report, which was referenced multiple times during oral arguments and the cast report, you know, there are There's a, an organization called Transactual that is made up of trans people who basically debunked the CAST report as having used a fatally flawed methodology, as having recommended things that would be harmful to trans kids.

It dismisses all clinical evidence about how trans people need this kind of health care and the, the, One of the, the heads of transactual said that underpinning this cast report is the idea that being trans is an undesirable outcome rather than a natural facet of human diversity. And if you keep that in the back of your mind, you can see why these oral arguments went the way they did, because they're not comfortable.

with even the idea of transness and kept wanting to liken gender dysphoria to just having psychological problems, right? Or like being mentally ill. And we don't use this type of medical care for the mentally ill. And it's just, I find it, I find it disgusting, disgusting and distressing. And I can only imagine what trans people listening to this bullshit. feel like after having to listen to all this crap.

I just, Absolutely. And I, in Tennessee, the, you know, the, the guy from Tennessee was basically arguing that, I mean, he said at one point that the, there is a state interest in gender conformity and that exists well beyond blocking access to gender affirming care for minors, gender. Conformity and a state interest in that is how you got cross dressing bans. It's how you could be fired for being gay. It is how women could not own property in their own name. Right?

Like that is when people say that these are the canary in the coal mine kind of cases. That's precisely what we're talking about. Last thing, on an entirely different matter, and I ask because Stonewall is in your district. Um, I don't know if you've seen this development from the Trump administration or the response to it.

I have a statement here by New York State Senator Brad Hoylman Siegel on what he describes as the decision to remove references to trans transgender people at the Stonewall National Monument. And according to the senator, The Trump administration has decided to strike the word transgender from the website for the Stonewall National Monument.

Did you know about that, and is there anything, as, you know, the congressman from Stonewall, as well as the rest of your district, of course, um, If there's anything you would do about it. It's, it's despicable, Brian. Um, and the way that this, uh, this Trump administration is essentially trying to erase all diversity in our country. Uh, it is attacking, uh, is misrepresenting DEI. It is attacking diversity. It is attacking the very groups that create the dynamism and fabric of this country.

Uh, it is true with Black history. It is true with Asian American history. And so we will continue to speak out. And just as a matter of factual history it's probably worth noting for some people who don't know that history from long ago that there were some trans individuals who were very prominent in the original Stonewall Uprising. So it's not like it was gratuitously put in there for any reason.

There were individuals who were central, uh, To, to that day and those days, and they're taking that identity out of the And I will just say Brian is Lawyer's website apparently. Yeah, it's an attack on transgenders, but it's an attack on all of us. And we all need to unite against this disgusting hate. Against transgender and everyone else. And I take it personally, when they go after the transgender community, which is a vulnerable community.

People trying to live their own lives as they want to. And the government is trying to come in under Donald Trump and tell people how they should live their lives. It is the same. exact thing as they're doing with reproductive freedom. They're trying to be in our, uh, doctors offices. They're trying to be in our places of worship. They're trying to be in our, uh, community centers and cultural centers. It's despicable and it's anti American. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And, and what we're seeing too, and, and a OC made this point, like, how do you enforce a bathroom, a bathroom ban, right? Are there gonna be police outside bathrooms, sort of inspecting genitals? How to use enforce the sports band, right? Are we inspecting people's genitalia? But then what we're. Seeing in real time empirically is that there are gender police, trans investigators, um, saying, oh, I think a man, man just went into the bathroom.

And we see, um, many cases on TikTok where usually women of color have been accosted in bathrooms. You are a man, you shouldn't be in here. And they're not men, they're not even trans. They don't identify as trans. Um, they're just cisgender women who are trying to use the bathroom. So these, what, what, what we know, um, is that these anti-trans laws a, um, affect all women in negative ways.

I mean, the Imani Klif situation at the Olympics last year, I mean, there's so few trans athletes that we have to invent them. That was. So incredibly shameful in how, you know, the, um, JK Rowlings and Trumps continue to assert that she's, um, trans and she's not, is sort of an indication if there's a certain kind of, but then that again is linked to a certain kind of, um, white supremacist delusion that, um, wants womanhood to be a certain kind of woman. Yeah. And also.

But it's linked to capital and, and, and rates. Yeah. I I would add that the way I think, I mean, what you're talking about, uh, to just go further in that, that connection is, you're talking about control as if we're talking about a piece of property. Yeah. And, and, and ultimately this is a, a property Right, that goes along within the context of that hierarchy. Uh, and you know, we don't hear that much about trans men. In the context of, of, of, of these things.

And I think that is, uh, a part of the conscious effort by, you know, sort of like making it clear, um, when we put people in front of the, uh, the women's bathroom because of it, because we're protecting our property, women's bodies, essentially. We have the ability to inspect it. And that inspection also sort of edifies the idea. This is our property.

I would inspect it is we would inspect any other goods that are, uh, you know, traveling across state lines or, uh, you know, uh, and this all, I think, uh, uh, ties in. I mean, I think there's no doubt that the, um, this, the, the use of this by the right is, was in part distracting, but really ultimately to feed in and essentially fire up those cylinders from an easy entrance.

From their perspective in sort of like triggering that notion of hierarchy and triggering that, that notion of patriarchy, which both functions within the context of, of Christian nationalism and within the context of, of, of, of capitalism. Because, you know, you, I just remember like, you know Paul Ryan with that fake story about the brown and bag lunch of kids.

And, and, and the, the whole push in that era of Republicans to talk about rich people as being morally righteous and poor people not being, I mean, this is why Donald Trump was able to get on that stage with eight other Republicans and completely blow them away because George Bush had set the table. We need a CEO presidency. The idea of moral righteousness being a function of how much money you have.

Uh, you know, so who's gonna argue with Donald Trump definitionally everything he says is correct because he's, uh, you know, a supposed billionaire and that. That, that's where it begins to tie in. It's no coincidence that, you know, Kings were there because God said they could be. They were the sort of the first stop on the hierarchy. They also had all the money. Yeah. And, and that's where this all sort of, I think sort of like it, it combine.

So I. Um, yeah, I had, I was on the view, um, promoting my, my new show, clean Slate, currently streaming on Prime Video. Well, I wanna talk about that too, but, but on, when I was on the View, I, I, I, I said that, um, we're, um, they're, they're focused on the wrong 1%. That it is not trans people who are, are the reasons for the price of eggs and that we can't, you know, housing prices are through the roof and people can't afford healthcare. Trans people are not the reason.

There is another 1%, um, that is responsible for that and that. I think for, I think part the damage, so much damage is being done. And you've, you've spoken about this across the board on so many levels that, that it's gonna be really hard to undo. But I think on a messaging level, on a cultural level, um, for people who claim to be allies, people who are, you know, liberally or in the Democratic party are left aligned. What I would really suggest is, um, is.

Embarking on a rehumanizing project and, and setting that agenda instead of reacting to one that we, you know, that, that, that, that everyone does ultimately, like some of these, um, anti-trans laws too, were also a response to states, uh, state legislatures including trans people and civil rights protections in states. Right. That literally was what, what happened in North Carolina. But so, so we have to. Change rehumanize trans people. We, and, and that is about language.

When we use words like, um, chemical castration, mutilation of children, um, surgeries on trans, all of that language is false and it's dehumanizing. So we have to, and I don't wanna be language policed. And I think that like it's, we get really tricky around like, you know, people feeling censored, but language matters. And, and for me, I think. Thinking about whether this language is dehumanizing or not.

I mean, it was really clear when Trump said they're eating the cats, they're eating the dog. But that was dehumanizing. But when, um, um, Rand Paul or um, or Josh Hawley says, you know, um, they're mutilating, um, and chemically castrating children, that language is dehumanizing. And it redu and it re because it reduces us to procedures and medicalization and. That of human beings. There was a recent, um, um, bill in, uh, two bills in Montana that one would ban, um, drag all together.

And another one, I forget it was Vanessa Anti-Trans Bill and Zoe Zephyr, um, got up and made this impassion speech and. Another, then a Republican woman stood up in support of her and they overturned this bill. And I think part of it is that they, these legislatures and legislators in Montana know Zoe, uh, and, and work with her. And most Americans don't actually know a trans person. They've met her child. Um, she is human to them, and that is so much of the work.

And since most Americans don't know someone trans, the media is. Really important in that, and that's part of what I try to do with my work as, as an, as an, as an artist, as an actress, as a documentary filmmaker, et cetera, is it is to humanize us and invite people to see us as human beings and not as these sort of. Made up fictional characters that have come to sort of ruin, um, humanity. You've reached Section C historical attacks.

And today we end In Europe, Hungary is witnessing massive protests at the Prime Minister. Victor Ban's government passed a sweeping new law banning all LGBTQ plus pride. Marches. The law is being seen as the most damaging crackdown on lgbtq plus rights in Hungary. Now, while Orban claims the law will quote, unquote, protect children from woke ideology, his critics are calling it a systematic attack on the rights of Hung East gender minorities. Our final story has all the details.

Hungary, a country once known for its vibrant pride marches is now at the center of a human rights storm. Earlier this week, within a day of introduction, Hungary Parliament passed a controversial law that bans lgbtq plus pride events, calling them harmful to children. The passage of the bill sparked chaos inside the Hungarian parliament. Where opposition lawmakers set off smoke bombs and threw leaflets during the vote. Amid chaos and a pro, the bill was passed with a 1 36 to 27 majority pride.

Marches have taken place in Hungary for three decades, but under this new law, any event that violates a 2021 ban on lgbtq plus content for minors is now illegal. The violators will be fined up to $500. Police will also use facial recognition to identify offenders. What is happening in the country is worrisome. They're trying to take away more and more from the Hungarian people what is actually ours and our rights.

Hungarian's latest crackdown on lgbtq plus rights has drawn alarming parallels to the suppression of lgbtq plus freedoms in Russia. If Jenny ov a Russian living in Hungary believes that in restricting lgbtq plus freedoms, prime Minister Victor oban is simply following his Russian ally President Vladimir Putin. It's quite terrifying, to be honest. 'cause we had the same in Russia. It was building up step by step and this is what's, I feel like this is what's going on here.

Uh, I'm not surprised that Victor Orban doesn't have any regional ideas. He only hoping, uh, Putin or Trump. Uh, but it's really terrifying. I just only hope that there will be more resistance like this in Hungary. 'cause in Russia, we didn't resist on time and now it's too late. Ban's party was instrumental in getting the new ban passed and the Hungarian Prime Minister has vowed to protect his country's children from what he calls is wok ideology.

A tone which is similar to OBA's closest ally in the west. US President Donald Trump. Trump and oban call themselves the crusaders against woke ideology, and they are both cracking down on rights of the LGBTQ plus community. At the same time, human rights groups have called the New Law a distraction from the country's deeper problems. As smoke lingers in the Hungarian air on Budapest's bridges and in the Parliament, the message from demonstrators is loud and clear. And engage art.

And engage art, and engage art. Despite increasing restrictions, the lgbtq plus community and its allies say they will not be silenced for them. This isn't just about pride. It's about the right to be seen, to be heard, and to exist without fear. When the British were busy colonizing the world between the 16th and 19th centuries. They also exported their own laws to the places they took over. It was kind of like the rest of the world were school kids who had to play by their rules.

One of the laws they exported was the charmingly named Buggery Act of 1533, which was passed by Parliament during the reign of Henry VIII. You know, the one with the six wives. The Buggery Act did pretty much what it said on the tin. It banned male homosexuality and made gay sex punishable by death. But it didn't bother to ban lesbianism, probably because nobody really thought about women at the time.

When the British Empire got going, the authorities were keen to enforce their idea of morality on the people they'd colonized. They also wanted to make sure that its soldiers and administrators weren't tempted to shag each other or their new subjects. So they imported this anti buggery law overseas.

Homosexuality was finally decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967, but not before the U. K. had done some extremely uncool stuff, like force war heroes like Alan Turing to undergo chemical castration or throw people in jail simply for being gay. But although gay sex stopped being illegal in the rest of the U. K. by 1982, the laws that forbid homosexuality are still in the penal codes of many of our former colonies.

It's the reason why LGBTQ people in countries like Barbados, Pakistan, Guyana, Kenya, Ghana, and Singapore, where I'm from, still don't have equality today. Many of Britain's former colonies don't have histories of being hateful towards LGBTQ people. Basutu women in present day Lesotho, Africa, still engage in socially accepted relationships with each other. They call each other their motswale, or special friend.

Mwanga II, the 19th century king of what is now modern day Uganda, had sex with men until white missionaries brought Christianity to his kingdom, and everyone changed their minds about their gay king. Britain literally exported hatred and homophobia to the countries it colonized. It's not like these laws just gathered dust in the wind. They continue to be used against LGBTQ people to this day.

Between 2010 and 2014, almost 600 people were prosecuted under Kenya's anti gay laws, according to official government figures. In 2010, two gay men were sentenced to 14 years hard labor in Malawi after being convicted of gross indecency and unnatural acts. They attracted the attention of the authorities after holding an engagement party. When the judge passed the sentence, he said he wanted to protect the public from people like you.

In August 2018, 20 men were charged with illicit behavior after a raid on a gay club in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Uganda still actively persecutes gay people to this day. In November 2019, police raided an LGBTQ bar in Kampala. dragging out at least 120 people and arresting them and throwing them into the backs of vehicles. Because institutional homophobia runs deep in so many former colonies, some countries have chosen to keep these regressive laws in their penal codes.

In March 2020, despite the best efforts of LGBTQ activists, a court in Singapore ruled in favor of keeping homosexuality illegal. Jamaica was once known as the most homophobic country on earth, with gay people being lynched by angry mobs into the 21st century. These days, we've mainly left it up to LGBTQ campaigners to sort out the trouble that the UK left behind. Would these countries be such difficult places for queer people if it wasn't for the British?

Even former Prime Minister Theresa May doesn't think so. In 2018, she said she deeply regrets the role that the UK had to play in introducing these anti gay laws to its former colonies. It's a nice gesture, although extremely belated. But saying sorry doesn't mean anything to the people who've had to live in fear and hiding all because of their sexual orientation. Some sins you just can't apologize away.

And again, you know, to the point that the ambassador was making earlier, all of this was taking place without any legal recourse. or any kind of protection. So even if the community no longer supports you, there are no laws that you can look to to defend you. And, um, would you say that the homophobia and the transphobia was part of the totalitarian ideology of Nazi Germany? And the second question, how is it used for Nazi propaganda?

So the Nazi state labeled many groups as worthless and even subhuman. And one could say more and more groups, the longer they were in power, so anti Semitism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, the persecution of people with disabilities of Roma and Sinti became the foundation upon which a racist German society was built. So yes, homo and transphobia were central elements of the totalitarian ideology in Nazi Germany.

The Nazis employed propaganda to divide society and promote the belief of racial superiority by marginalizing minority groups. Propaganda framed homosexuality as a threat to the racial purity of the German. And accusing someone of being homosexual was also a way to discredit them. Everyone knew that few people would defend homosexuals. And the Nazis made use of that. So it could also be used by the Nazis to silence any form of a, um, opposition.

If somebody was being problematic, this was another accusation that they could potentially lay against the person and isolate and remove them. They did in politics, political opponents, military, the churches, they used it many times. How did the nature of this persecution change? Persecution escalated quickly, so after the Nazis changed paragraph 175, in 1935, the police and Gestapo started to target homosexuals, Systematically.

And in 1936, the Reich Central Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion was established, directly linking the fight against homosexuality with Nazi population politics. So arrests became routine. In 1940, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered that convicted homosexuals would automatically be deported. Two concentration camps after having finished the sentence in the prison. And each year, stricter measures were added. Even castration was discussed.

So as the atmosphere closes in and becomes increasingly terrifying, what was the response from gay men and lesbians? Did LGBTIQ people, sorry, IQ plus people foresee the radical persecution coming after 1933? Tracey, this was a community that was just starting to find its way. No one expected that something as simple as address books or private letters could become evidence against them.

So if you could have imagined that the country would transform so quickly into a totalitarian state, that would eventually become The killing machine. Most other communities did also not foresee such a descent into barbarism and evil. So the exception were those who already had been directly attacked. Many of them went into exile right away to survive, but many others believed or hoped that fascism would not last.

And how did the rest of German society or to the matter other countries react to the persecution of LGBTQIQ plus people? I don't think that many people were concerned about what was happening to homosexual and transgender people in in Nazi Germany. Many denunciations coming from neighbors and from inside Germany seem to have been motivated by proving loyalty to the Nazi regime.

And in many European countries in the United States, they've also lost discriminating against homosexuals and widespread prejudice. So I researched, for example, whether homosexual men could escape Nazi Germany by going into exile. And one key requirement, as one survivor shared with me, was to be very, very secret about your orientation, your sexual orientation. No one would have given you a visa. The 1950s and 1960s saw the rise of the term Lavender as a code word for homosexuality.

Senator Everett Dirksen stated that a Republican victory in the 1952 election would mean the removal of Lavender Lads from the State Department, and in 1969 Betty Friedan would comment on how the Lavender Menace, meaning lesbians, would destroy the credibility of feminists. Therefore, titling this 20th century moral panic the Lavender Scare is actually pretty fitting.

While the topic of same sex relations may have been glossed over or even a bit taboo for most of American history, with sodomy laws dating back to the early colonial period in the 1600s, the fact is that most of these laws had not been strongly enforced, and most did not even specifically target same sex relations. It wasn't until the 20th century that American culture began to seriously enforce sodomy laws and with that came additional risks for homosexuals.

This was likely magnified by the fact that homosexuality was becoming a subject that the public was itself becoming more aware of with the publication of Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male published in 1948. OK, with that background, let's look at how this manifested in the early Cold War. On February 9, 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy made his infamous claim of having evidence of 205 known communists working at the State Department.

Eleven days later, he revisited the issue with a lengthy speech on the Senate floor which offered more specifics. It was in this speech that he made the link between homosexuality and communism. But this wasn't out of the blue, mind you. Prior to McCarthy's statements, anti homosexual programs and laws were already beginning to appear in America. Beginning in 1941, the military discharged suspected gay men with so called blue discharges.

In 1946, the State Department had begun more stringent security checks. 1947, the US Park Police began the Sex Perversion Elimination Program, which targeted gay men for arrest and intimidation, and even labelled them as mentally ill. This atmosphere of institutionalized oppression towards homosexuals, especially homosexual men, was an ideal breeding ground for McCarthyism's anxieties about communism to become enmeshed with fears about homosexuality.

McCarthy claimed that intelligence officials had told him that, quote, Practically every communist is twisted, mentally or physically, in some way, end quote, and it was from there that McCarthy made the logical jump that because homosexuals were mentally ill, or as he put it, had peculiar mental twists, That they were more susceptible to communist recruitment.

There were also concerns that homosexuals were more at risk for blackmail by the Soviets, making them a greater risk for national security. A week later, deputy under Secretary of State, John Puro, the same purify who would go on to beat US Ambassador Greece, and then Guatemala revealed the firing of 91 homosexual employees from the State Department as they were deemed security risks. And with that, the Lavender Scare was officially off to the races.

Two government committees were formed during this time to investigate the issue of homosexuals employed by the US government. The first, which operated from March to May of 1950, was known as the Wherry Hill investigation, and consisted of only two men, a bipartisan team of Republican Senator Kenneth Wherry and Democrat Senator Jay Lister Hill.

Unfortunately, very limited records from this investigation have survived, but we do know that they heard testimony from the head of the DC Metropolitan Police Department, Vice Squad Lieutenant Roy Blick, who claimed that 5, 000 homosexuals lived in Washington DC and that 3, 700 of them were employed by the federal government. Figures, by the way, that appear to have absolutely no basis in fact, but were highly reported by the media at the time.

Lt. Blick also claimed that since the committee had begun their investigation, almost every agency of the government had sent an official to him in order to ask Blick about his knowledge of any homosexuals employed by their agencies. Blick believed that around 100 moral perverts had recently resigned or been fired since the Wherry Hill investigation had begun.

The Civil Service Commission sent recommendations to the Wherry Hill Subcommittee on suggestions for a routine procedure to rid the offices of government of moral perverts and guard against their admission.

These suggestions included a recommendation that all arrests related to homosexual activity should be reported to the FBI so that the Civil Service Commission could be alerted, thereby ensuring that all federal employees arrested for reasons related to sexual perversions Could be removed from employment. Both Senators wary and Hill believed that this information meant that a wider investigation was required.

And on June 7th, 1950, the Senate resolved to undertake a more comprehensive investigation of the alleged employment by the departments and agencies of the government of homosexuals and other moral perverts. On the Senate's recommendation, the HOI Committee was formed a much larger undertaking far from the two members of the Weary Hill. This investigation had seven Senators and various other investigators and clerks.

Included on the committee were Chairman Senator Clyde Hoey, three Democrat Senators, James Eastland, John McClellan, and Herbert O'Connor. and three Republican Senators, Karl Mundt, Andrew Schoepel, and Margaret Chase Smith. Senator McCarthy was on the subcommittee originally, but ended up excluding himself from the investigation, although he did periodically forward information on suspected homosexuals. to the committee.

The Hoey committee sent out questionnaires to all branches of the military as well as 53 civilian departments and agencies. Committee investigators also interviewed agency officials and summarized these conversations in memoranda. The agencies came out strongly against the suitability of homosexual employees in the federal government.

In Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer's response to the committee on July 24, 1950, he said, The privilege of working for the United States government should not be extended to persons of dubious moral character, such as homosexuals or sex perverts. The confidence of our citizenry in their government would be severely taxed if we looked with tolerance upon the employment of such persons.

However, some responses took a slightly less aggressive tone, including this statement from Howard Colvin, Acting Director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Since it is possible, according to our understanding of medical and psychiatric opinion on the subject, for a homosexual to lead a normal, well adjusted life, we do not consider that such a person necessarily constitutes a bad security risk. We believe that each such case would have to be decided on its own merits.

Not exactly an endorsement of civil rights for homosexuals, but certainly a bit more progressive a stance than most of the government were expressing at this point. However, many investigations begin to have greater and wider impacts. Government employees could not even resign quietly without having the permanent tag of possible homosexual on their record.

At the end of their investigation, the Hoey committee issued a report entitled Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government, which indicated, among other things, that during the three years of the committee's investigation, close to 5, 000 homosexuals had been detected in the military and civilian workforces.

Additionally, the Hoey report also indicated that all the government's intelligence agencies are in complete agreement that sex perverts in government constitute security risks. The report concluded that gay people should not be employed by the federal government because they were generally unsuitable and constituted security risks. In addition, it reported that gay people had a lack of emotional stability, weak moral fiber, and were a bad influence on the young.

The report warned that, quote, one homosexual can pollute a government office, end quote. This report would go on to be highly influential in shaping government security manuals for years after the investigation concluded. the question that you hold here is, is, is, is, is critical and history or herstory, as we like to call it is, Is something that the, our movement, um, has been built on.

And to know history is and to know history herstory is critical for, um, our movement to not just only survive, but also thrive. Um, this history is also in particular cri um, um. Key for our movement because often we think of our movement starting as early as the 60s or as recently as the 60s and 70s with the Stonewall riots. But what Klaus and the work Joanna has shown is that no, in fact, our movement building predates Stonewall.

We have always been here as a movement, and I think it's really critical to mark that from the beginning. Then I think for us, this relevance is to understand the roots of oppression.

I mean, as Klaus pointed out, the Nazi era marked one of the darkest history, darkest periods of history for LGBTIQ plus people, particularly gay men and trans people who were targeted under paragraph 175 of the general penal code, where we saw thousands arrested and thousands sent to concentration camps and forced to endure inhumane conditions.

And whereas this did not You know, end with the fall of the Nazi regime, but continued for decades after, and many survivors were then reprisoned post war as well. Um, we look at the resilience of the individuals who then formed secret support networks. Klaus mentioned the work of, uh, uh, Gerhard Gadbeck, um, and those who survived even within concentration camps and worked covertly to protect others, such as those that Klaus also mentioned.

And these acts of defiance were not just about survival, but they were about preserving their identity and humanity against all overwhelming odds. So here we're really talking about a recognition of resilience. And these stories, um, strengthens the LGBTI community's understanding of its own resilience and capacity to fight oppression. And so we have seen this before. We have been through this before. And we will go through it again, sadly. Right.

And we are going through it again sadly in parts of the world where we see the rise of the anti rights movement. And so as a community, we will learn from this and how they have survived, as how our ancestors and transcestors survived through this, but how we will then also thrive and rebuild from this as well. So from this history, this is what has actually shaped modern LGBTIQ plus activism.

The pink triangle that Klaus and Joanna also mentioned, and that has been reclaimed as a symbol of resistance and pride. You know, movements like ACT UP, which drew on this history to fight against the AIDS crisis. Um, slogans such as the lie, silence equals death have been picked up by the HIV and AIDS movement, by other movements, by Um, movements, um, are pushing back against current conflicts going on around the world.

And this history is important to ensure the, uh, to preserve and prevent the erasure of LGBTIQ plus histories from mainstream narratives. This is critical. The work of Klaus that they have done is very critical to ensuring that preservation continues. And this marginalization ends to the ongoing struggle for recognition.

So, um, recent efforts have included, uh, classes where, you know, the work that class has also done and the perspective in Holocaust remembrance, such as memorials, museum exhibits and scholarly academic work. Let's just say that Joanna refers to. Um, so remembering this history is not just about past, but it's shaping the future.

And ensuring that these voices are heard, but it's also relevant to the current, um, um, context that we are facing with over 110 conflicts going on in the world and how LGBTIQ plus people are particularly vulnerable during this situations, whether it's in Syria, whether it's in Afghanistan, whether we've seen the specific targeting in Chechnya right now in Russia, in other parts of the world as well. And therefore we can learn from this history. So documentation is key.

You know now, and this is how we sort of build our resilience. One of the key things and key activities we do as ILGA World is work with human rights defenders where persecution continues. Against our identities on how to document these crimes, and we've been able to learn that from the past histories and bring this evidence to the forefront and use it not just for archives and a memory as a preservation, but actually as a form of resistance and as justice for our communities as well.

So there, I think it's very important. Um, and I think in terms of going back at just one more point that, um, Klaus mentioned was around the deep roots within genetic purity.

We've seen this, many of this, uh, work and this press, this, um, acts of crimes against us, uh, this preservation of society in particular around eugenics, this sort of ethnical, uh, ethnic cleansing, it's, um, And this denunciation or perception of homosexuals continues to this very day, where someone perceived of homosexuality is punished.

You know, if you're in, it was only up until recently, where if you were not wearing the right type items of clothing, i. e. what is considered masculine clothing, you could be arrested on the streets. You could be, you know, and this sort of fear and perception of homosexuality as well. We also saw, you know, LGBTIQ plus people.

I think I'm perhaps, um, jumping onto the next part, but what we're actually seeing as well is, um, this sort of targeted, um, examples where experiments were conducted on gay men in particular to convert them and to, um, um, see if conversion therapy can work. And we still see that today. We still see those continued practices. We still see forced sterilization, as particular against our trans siblings across the world, who are forced to be sterilized if they want to transition.

So this is something that Restarks reminds us what this is where it's deeply rooted in, and that we are still facing this, and how it's spread and used across other countries as well, especially with the rise of the anti right movements.

Gosh, thank you so much Namu for elucidating so clearly, uh, why the past matters, uh, and And for the LGBTIQ community today, both in terms of a reminder of the resilience, uh, that, that is there, and that should serve as an inspiration today as we go forward, and to also understand, you know, that this is not the first time that one can recognize, obviously, and understand the differences, as no history is ever identical, but to understand why it is important to

be vigilant for the signs, and, and so thank you so much for doing that. A follow up question. Why would anyone who doesn't identify as LGBTIQ, why would they, why should they care about this history? What does it got to do with them? Well, this is our history. Yeah. Um, and I'm, in my opinion, and this history or this history is to, is how we can draw parallels from Um, other persecutions under the Nazi regime.

We've seen how, and Klaus and Joanne have talked about how the same machine was used to oppress LGBTIQ plus people today and used against Jewish people, against Romani people, Sinti people, people with disabilities, as well as others. Um, and understanding how the system targeted specific groups helps us see the broader dangers of authoritarianism and unchecked prejudice and how we must work to maintain the sort of balance and checks against.

Um, of power and how democracy today, which is under threat in many parts of the world is integral to this, despite its flaws that we know that democracy is not perfect, but we know that this is the one tool that we must preserve to keep, um, Human universal human rights, um, um, applicable to all. And this, I think this is also clear that there's a universality of human rights that applies to all of us as well. Um, and I think it's also back goes back to this idea of of impression that.

Talks about, for example, Nazi ideology talked about those who were deemed a degenerate, unfit, and that characterized a span of many groups, and this is deep rooted in eugenics and a medicalized model. And this continued today, even in today's systems as well. It was only until the late 90s where the WHO De pathologized homosexuality. I mean, the word homosexual, as Klaus rightly pointed out, comes from German, comes from German psychologists.

And, and, the word that we, you know, and it, with the pathologization that we needed to be fixed. And, and we've seen this throughout history, again with conversion therapy, but we're not just seeing it with homosexuals. We're seeing this now with our siblings who are intersex. We are seeing this now with our siblings who are, are, are trans as well.

And these examples of medical experimentation on marginalized groups, including LGBTI individuals, shows how these systems of oppression can harm different populations. We also have a historical responsibility again. I think after the war, after the Second World War, especially after the Holocaust, we said never again.

But sadly, we see that we're still Still not learning from those mistakes and still crimes against humanity are being conducted, uh, being carried out across the world with these 110, uh, conflicts that are ongoing. And then we still see a lack of apology as well. Very few countries have apologized publicly and openly to LGBTIQ plus persons. Canada, UK, the USA, Germany. And I think there are a few others to mention, but very few as well.

And so when we talk about the importance of this, it's stronger that we protect the most vulnerable members of our society. And how we must stand up for minorities. I think it goes back to that, you know, that very, very famous quote of Martin Niemöller, and it's been overused. And I am, I'm sorry to those who know this, but you know, first they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak for me as well. And this is a stark reminder that, you know, um, it goes back, uh, how united we must be. And I really liked, um, what, um, Klaus talked about population politics. And this is really what we're facing today.

With the rise of the anti rights movement, we see, uh, abortion rights, sexual reproductive health rights, feminist rights. Um, Women's rights, all being attacked. And these are the same rights that are being attacked that are the same as LGBTI rights. It's all comes down to bodily autonomy as well. This is Section D stories. This is Max Kuzma. He's 33 and he lives in rural Ohio. Max grew up in a very conservative Catholic family.

There were like times when I was a child where it was time to go to church on Sunday and they wanted to put me in a dress and I was so opposed to it that I actually tore the dress as a child. Max voted Republican for most of his 20s. I was. Very conservative politically, I very much felt like I had to be a one issue voter on a lot of things, kind of looking away and voting, like not looking too deeply, just voting for the thing that they kind of told me to, to vote for and just moving on.

But in 2019, at the end of Donald Trump's first presidency, Max decided to transition. I didn't just come out and be like, all right, everybody, I am now transitioning. And now all my political views are super different. And like, everything is completely changed. I tried not to make it a bomb, but, uh, what ended up happening is that like, when I talked to my immediate family, my parents, My mom's reaction was, transgender is a political word, and kind of just hung up the phone.

Max doesn't speak with his parents anymore, and he has lost a lot of friends. But he's happy, and he feels transitioning helped open his eyes to what else was happening in the country. I really felt that when I transitioned that I became political for the first time and I think that my mom in a way was right when she said that transgender is a political word.

Not because transgender people in and of ourselves are an ideology or anything like that, but because to be a marginalized person means that politics are so much more important to your life because it really tangibly affects you. Max found last year's campaign hard.

It was very painful to experience the escalation of the anti trans atmosphere and attacks that had been, already been going on, just to know that the, the Trump campaign Spent more on anti trans ads than they did on almost any other strategy. It's hard to believe, but it's true. Even the liberal media was shocked. Kamala supports taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens. Every transgender inmate would have access. Kamala's for they, them. President Trump is for you.

I'm Donald J. Trump. Now we are seeing the consequences of all of that rhetoric in policies that will actively harm transgender people. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order, which said that from now on, it will, quote, be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.

The executive order requires, quote, government issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and global entry cards, accurately reflect the holder's sex. Following up on that order, the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, ordered the U. S. State Department to freeze all applications for passports with ex sex markers and changes to gender identity on existing passports.

My transition was already well underway when the election results were announced, but there were a few Legal things that I hadn't fully buttoned up yet. I had a court order for my name change already from a judge, but I hadn't gone through and updated every single federal document and all these other things that need to be done. And so, that was honestly my immediate move, was to make sure those things were buttoned up. Max is now in limbo with some of the documents he didn't get sorted in time.

And he isn't sure what will happen over the next four years. Sitting on the sidelines as somebody who is a white man with a beard and a deep voice, and knowing that I'm probably not going to be the one who is attacked when I'm trying to go to the bathroom but having to know and watch and hear and see as the stories are inevitably going to come out about violence towards the trans community happening. That weighs really heavily on me.

I also am not currently married and so some of these changes, depending on what happens with my paperwork with my official documentation or what happens with other laws. That could impact my ability to marry my partner, which is something I wanted to do. Despite his anxiety, Max has hope. I take a lot of hope from knowing that trans people and LGBTQ people firstly have, have been around forever throughout all of human history.

And also that We have faced challenges like these before I have had to find my own family, a found family. I have had to learn how to engage in mutual aid and social action that tie together solidarity amongst marginalized people into resilience. And it's that resiliency that is one of the most beautiful gifts to me of the LGBTQ community.

And I know that it's that resiliency, which is what is going to sustain those of us who have to go through these next four years into whatever may come into the future. I'm glad to hear you describe this as your like Americana Western story because I want to shout out how incredible the language was throughout that novella, it was all in this old timey vernacular and it gave such a clear picture of the world that the characters were in.

It gave me such a clear picture inside Babe, the main character's mind. The thing I was really interested in was Stag Dance. was how Babe came to understand his feelings about gender without having any of the modern language that we have. But even when there are no, you know, available words for Babe to understand his desires, he goes on desiring to feel Feminine anyway. In what ways does our language around gender today help people to understand themselves?

And in what ways does it fail at explanation? Yeah, I mean that was actually part of the project of that story, is that I've been, you know, talking about trans stuff for ten years, and in a lot of ways I oftentimes feel That the language is ossified, that actually it's, you know, you hear a word like gender dysphoria and you have a sense of what it means, but you don't really have a sense of how it feels.

And in writing this book, I came across this dictionary of logger slang, so like a word for egg, for instance, might be cackleberry, like the hen cackles and it lays eggs, which are like berries that they can pick. So they would say we're eating cackleberries. And so the language is totally strange. And the project was partially. Can I describe the feelings that I relate to in language that's totally alien to me, that's strange to me?

And I found that over the course of the project, yeah, I could. Actually because, again, the feelings of like trying to get right with yourself, the feelings of having desire, the feelings of frustration with the body that you might have, these aren't things that you need, you know, a degree in gender studies to talk about.

And they were actually almost fresher and more easily available to me once I sort of develop the cadence of this character's voice where I could put it in weird logger slang and I'd be like, Oh wow, that's actually exactly how it feels for me too. Even though obviously I would never have said it in logger slang.

You mentioned that Babe is the biggest, strongest, ugliest person in the entire Logging camp, there was a lot of discussion of Babe's looks and Babe's actually a mean nickname because you know He's described as looking like Babe the blue ox like Paul Bunyan's ox It hurt my heart a little bit every time I saw you know, this character respond to that name But there's another person at the camp who's also going to the stag dance as a lady named Leeson who's smaller prettier more feminine.

I understand that this is kind of taboo to discuss, like who passes less naturally, or as my producer, Liam, tells me, you know, calling someone quote, unquote, bricky, why was it compelling to you or interesting to you to explore that? Well, one of the things I was kind of looking at is actually what constitutes a transition. In the logging camp, anyone who had a brown fabric triangle over their crotch would go to the dance as a woman. And that's like a very gendered symbol.

I oftentimes think of transition as you're kind of putting on symbols because a transition You know, I think in the sort of, like, dogma of, kind of, trans thought, the idea is that, like, well, you declare yourself a thing, and then you go out and kind of become that thing. And that's not actually how I see it working. I think that oftentimes gender is actually a negotiation. with all these people around us.

The dream is that you live in a society where you can just say, this is who I want to be and everybody accepts you. But in fact, they don't. You're sort of negotiating with people. And I don't just think that's trans people who are negotiating. I think if you're a woman and you're like, I want to be taken seriously at the office, well, you might wear a suit because that's a symbol, you know, and it's unfortunate that one would have to like, sort of take on these gendered symbols.

In order to get respect, but we're all constantly negotiating that way, including trans people. Whenever you decide that you're making a transition, you take on certain symbols. And the thing is, those symbols, they don't work equally for everybody. The reality of the way that we treat bodies in this moment is that. Certain people could say, well, I'm going to transition, like the Leeson character who's young and pretty. He puts on a triangle, he goes to the dance.

Everyone is going to use she pronouns because they all want to dance with the prettiest logger. Well, when Babe shows up, there's no amount of symbols and makeup or anything. That he could put on his body to have people agree to that negotiation. And so there's a way in which certain transitions become felicitous and certain transitions don't become felicitous. And for me, I wanted to write about it because it seems like something that's actually very painful.

Within kind of queer liberation, you can say whatever you want and that's what you are. But pretending that's the case when people are actually in pain, when they're like, no, nobody's treating this way, even though I'm doing it, it's a painful thing. And it's something that's difficult to talk about. And for me, those kinds of stories work best in fiction. I can create a logger and I can be like, how might this feel? What's this frustration like?

And when you say that your heart breaks for that logger, every time He calls himself ugly, that's the kind of empathy that I'm looking for. I'm looking to generate that for readers. That makes me think also about how, like in the 1960s and 70s, they mostly let people who were thought to be people who could pass easily get gender reassignment surgery. You know, that also affects who we understand as trans historically. Yeah. And certain people.

Those symbols work on them even though they're not trying to transition. I know somebody who is a sort of masculine presenting woman who is cis and considers herself cis. She doesn't identify as trans. And you know, she had an altercation in an elevator because somebody misunderstood the ways that she presented herself. You know, these are things that are operative for all of us, all the time.

And I think it's why I sort of say that like, oh, this binary between who's cis and who's trans. I'm interested in kind of breaking it down and seeing how it works for everybody. Well, I think the most obvious one is you wouldn't see it as much like thematically of them just being like, I am putting this together. You see it more like externally kinds of like. They're taking in their own lives. Mm-hmm.

The most obvious one for me is our third chapter was about a black gender fluid teen, a Micah in West Virginia who had recently been experiencing some pretty grave depression, which was a surprise to me because when I met Micah, I. They're just such a force of nature in this really larger than life personality. Like just so big, so buoyant, so just lovely and full of life. And one of the reasons I wanted them to be in this book was to showcase that, right?

Like, here's this person that just was this incredibly vibrant personality. I was thinking like, wow, that's a character that would just really leap off the page, you know? Mm-hmm. Because if you meet Micah, you'll never forget it. And I wanted to give readers like, you know, someone they'll never forget. And I, we still do get to that. Micah is still all those things. But at the same time, Micah was experiencing a pretty severe mental health crisis.

Hmm. And that had to do with the fact that for years they'd had this dream of going to NYU majoring in musical theater, and they sort of had this entire like life plan mapped out for themselves. But unfortunately, as sometimes happens, they bombed their audition. Mm-hmm. Um, they had covid during the week of their audition. I know, I don't know why they didn't reschedule, but that's another thing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. They go with the au through with the audition.

They're barely able to sing, very pitchy, you know, as, uh, Randy Jackson was once says, and I think starts crying during like one of the numbers because they know they're not doing well. Like this is not going the way they thought it would because they, you know, they just had this built up in their head for such a long time. Mm-hmm. And then seeing it actually was, was just soul crushing. And of course they ended up not getting in. Mm-hmm. It was just kind of like, well, what is my life now?

Essentially, I was there as this like young person, was really realizing just how difficult life can be and that your dreams don't always work out for you in the way that you thought. Right. And it's like how? Right. How do you sit with this person as they're finally realizing that? How do you tell them to like, it's okay, you can still go leave the house. You can, you know, there are other dreams out there.

They were still figuring that out and they hadn't left the house in like weeks, like months even, because it just had hit them so hard. And Micah just wasn't the person that I knew. Mm-hmm. But, you know, through two and a half weeks of me being there, have somebody. To just like witness your pain and like the grief and trauma that you're going through. I think that it wasn't anything I did, I think it was just my physical presence because they had someone to share with. Mm-hmm.

You know, to share. And it wasn't like it was just them doing it because, you know, they, their family is there and supportive and like trying, but their mom's busy. You know, she has to work, they have their own stuff going on. Mm-hmm. Feel sometimes, like they can't always make adequate space for each other's struggles. But here you had somebody whose job. It was to be there for your struggle. Mm-hmm. And to talk about, yeah. And that really made a big difference.

And sadly, not all kids get that. Right. Not all kids are gonna have this reporter come to their home to listen to them for two and a half weeks. Yeah. So I think for me, I hope that, you know, seeing Micah and the journey that Micah goes on during, you know, during the two and a half weeks we were there, they ended up accepting, how do you say it, the acceptance admittance. Mm-hmm. Um, to another call. Um, that they've been going through and doing great.

Okay. Um, they, you know, they started leaving the house again. They started volunteering with the A-A-C-L-U of West Virginia. Mm-hmm. We went on tour, all these different places that they might like, get a job and, you know, it all ended up going okay. But the thing is, is that it went okay because they had an ally, they had like support and mm-hmm. Other kids need that, right? Mm-hmm. So for, don't have. A private social worker to come to their home or a journalist for two and a half weeks.

You know, what can we do in local communities to make sure that they do have access to those resources? Mm-hmm. You know, that can be pride groups, that can be like a local community center, but again, not everybody has that. Yeah. Something I think is.

Great is that, um, there's this Alabama organization called the Magic City Acceptance Center, and they have a discord platform for L-G-B-T-Q youth across the state where people can come, they can like build community, they can just like vent if they need to, and especially if they can't access that in-person space, it means that they have a digital space that they mm-hmm. And I just wish more queer youth and wherever they are, wherever they happen to live, had something like that. Mm-hmm.

Or even had an. Community that would be even better, just so that way they can have these kinds of experiences. I think we just forget like how impactful and transformative small things can be, especially when you're young. Definitely. I was just talking to someone about this the other day, about having peer spaces for trans and queer youth and how important that is, and having the, the, like you said, the mentors and the allies to listen to them and, and help them along in these journeys.

Like if you, if you don't have a, you know, live in social worker for, with you for two weeks and, and the demand for digital online virtual services because. You know, like in Houston where I am, we are so lucky to have a community center that has an in-person youth group, and I'm not sure if they have the discord. They probably do, but not everybody has that, and so I. That, that's something that I know parents struggle with to try to find that space for their kids.

The parents who recognize like, my kids need something else besides me to, to, for me to talk to, they need some, a third person, a third party, to, to hear them and to, to get advice from, you know, something that struck me when you were talking about Micah's story, just thinking about how universal that is of this either unfulfilled or I guess shattered dreams or just this.

Oh, it just, my heart hurt when you were talking about I'm clutching my, my chest in thinking about just watching someone grow up in a way, in real time and, and recognizing that those things don't always come true. And I would, I would hope that that kind of thing resonates. With a very wide audience and not just someone who is, or, or, or maybe a reader, an audience who's looking to learn more about trans kids, but just like, here's what teens are going through.

They have to learn these really hard lessons and kind of grow up right in front of your eyes, which is heart wrenching and beautiful in a way. I guess just watching that process, I'm wondering if there were any. Themes that you saw with the eight kids that, that you talked to and followed? Anything overarching? No. And that's what's cool about the book is that one of the things that made this book so hard to pitch is that publishers didn't understand what it would be. Mm-hmm.

And that all of the kids have such different stories from each other. Like people wanted this idea that I'd be really like drawing out connections and making. Like, you know, bigger proclamations of like, oh, these two kids were both like this, thus all trans or kids are like this. Mm-hmm. You know? Um, but I thought what was so neat is that, and this was not, I kind of wanted this a little bit, but I got it even more than I thought. Like I wanted people who would have different stories.

From each other. But I didn't just realize like how wildly diverging everyone would be. That you'd have like, you know, some, one kid would be like, I love being trans and it's the coolest thing about me. And another kid would be like, I hate being trans or not, I hate being trans, but I hate being known as being trans. Right? Like, that's not my goal at all. Like, um, Clint is a great example. He was our like. Six, seven. Wait, how does this go?

Fifth chapter, um, in Illinois, like he said that his goal is to be known as a boy, not a trans boy, and that he doesn't really identify with his transness. It's not that he thinks there's anything wrong with being a trans as a trans person, it's just not really how he thinks of himself. Especially because he had such severe dysphoria about his body before, you know? He's got underg undergone, like, you know, a medical transition and it's gone really well.

And it's been such like a benefit to his life that he doesn't want to think about all that stuff before. And when he thinks about being trans, it forces him to think about like where he came from, right? Mm-hmm. And all these things he had to go through to get to the good place he is now. So he doesn't really identify with that. He identifies with his muslimness, um, because his family is Pakistani Muslim, right? Mm-hmm. So. That's the part of his identity that he puts first.

And that felt like a really cool perspective to include because I just never heard anything like that. Mm-hmm. And I think with this, with this book, I really wanted to make space for so many kinds of stories that I just hadn't heard in so many different ways. Whether that was the stories of the kids, the stories of the families, or just like the ways that they exist in the world. For me that like multiplicity, the ways in which all of these families are so divergent from one another.

That's what makes a book like this really special. 'cause it makes it feel like life. Like we're all so different from each other. Mm-hmm. We all have such different ways of existing in the world. Why would I want to create a book where I'm trying to make the argument that everybody is the same? Mm-hmm. To me it's, the argument is everybody is different. That's really good. We should protect that difference. We need laws protecting that difference.

Because right now I think you have all of these lawmakers who are going, well, these trans kids, they're different in a way that I feel like I don't understand and doesn't comport with my worldview. Or, you know, my religion seems to like, you know, cast aspersions on. And because of that, that difference needs to be restricted or illegal. Right. And the more that we'd make it clear that these kids might be different from you. They might be the same as you.

You could have a lot in common with them, right? Some of these, like kids, there's so much that we had in common, even though we've come from different backgrounds, different experiences, there was just so much that we would just really bond over. Like whether that's, you know, shared interests, liking the same movies, having some of the same things happen to us. But at the same time, there were ways in which we couldn't relate at all. Right. And that we were just so different from one another.

And I think that both of those two things are equally beautiful. To your point about the possibility that the things that you write about, things that you're thinking about could be weaponized, I mean, I get the sense from reading your work that you cover a lot of stuff that perhaps trans people don't always want to talk about in mixed company. And to a certain degree, I get that. Like in a way, being at NPR for me is being in mixed company. Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. You know, this show has.

It's a really wide, diverse audience with all kinds of people, which I love, but it's a very different experience than the kinds of shows I worked on in the past. Like for years, I hosted shows that were primarily speaking to black audiences. And so, you know, I felt free to talk about certain things without adding as much context. But even now, you know, sometimes it's worth saying something.

a little spicy, or, or getting into a conversation that might, you know, not be so cut and dry, because I value having a certain conversation more than the possibility of non Black people being in Black people business. Yeah. But I see you having this like very rich line of inquiry into all of these taboo topics. And it feels like a bid that it's worth discussion. Like you say, it might help somebody, it might free somebody.

Talk to me more about how you value, you know, getting into it more than you're worried about anybody or any haters, let's say, weaponizing it. Well, I think that there's a tradition of this, outside of just trans communities, of great writers creating characters who are really difficult to talk about the real issues in a way that feels, in the end, liberatory.

You can think of Philip Roth writing Poor Noise Complaint, you know, which was totally Jewish communities were like, this is an outrageous caricature. I think a lot about Toni Morrison writing The Bluest Eye. Oh, yeah. There's kinds of things that The 10 year old girl thinks about, you know, sort of valorizing blue eyes or certainly the treatment of her very abusive father towards her in a black family. All of that could have been weaponized.

But to me, you can't understand the context of racism if you don't see the tragedy of it, if you don't see the way that it can warp a young girl's visions of beauty or warp the way a family looks. And similarly, I think you can't see Like, how transphobia and fear of trans people's expression and the way that that locks us down can cause such suffering if you don't show the bad parts, if you don't show the consequences of that.

And to me, I think that's both important for trans people to recognize and it's important for other readers to recognize that if you say this character seems to me sort of monstrous, Well, why? You know, the first story, they unleash a contagion that kind of almost destroys the world and world ending fury is a result of the kind of treatment that these characters feel. Yeah, let's talk about that story called Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, if you don't mind giving us a synopsis.

Sure, it's the sci fi novella in the book. It takes place in Seattle where two trans girls infect the entire world with a contagion that has the effect of blocking the body's ability to produce hormones so that everyone will have to basically take artificial hormones because their own body's not producing it. Meaning that everybody in the world will have to make the explicit choice to cultivate their gender. That trans people already have to make.

And so the question is sort of like, What if everybody has to choose their gender the way that trans people do? First of all, I want to say you were in your bag writing this genre. I just want to say I was like the pages turned themselves. I think it's really interesting to make a world where everyone must choose, but in that world it's still a very constrained choice.

It's not like a utopia of gender where, you know, everyone can kind of pick and choose as they wish because it's hard for people to get some of these hormones. Talk to me more about that. Like why having to choose and getting to choose are different things. My joke about it is that actually we already live in a world where everybody has to choose their gender. And everybody already is choosing their gender. It's just they're not aware of it. They're like, oh, I was born in this gender.

Well sure, you were born in that body, but you're choosing your gender. You're choosing how you present yourself. Based on the constraints that you have, what kind of clothes can you afford? What kind of body do you have? How much time do you have to work on your body or negotiate that stuff with other people? These are all constraints that we already have.

And so the irony is actually like a dystopian world where everyone has to run around trying to find the things that they can scrounge up to make a gender that feels good to them. Well, it's almost exactly. The world that we live in now, the joke of the dystopia is actually like this contagion. Maybe it changed everything Hmm, or maybe it just reveals the world that we already live in.

Yeah, you know I hate to bring politics up because I enjoyed your book and was interested in your thoughts before This new administration, but we live in a country now where trans people can't change their gender markers on their passports. And there've been executive orders aimed at restricting health care and sports participation for trans people.

The T has been cut out of LGBT on things like the Stonewall National Monument website, which I'm like, there wouldn't be no Stonewall without the T. You know, it's, it's an erasure. Given all that, you started the book with the question, What does it even mean to be trans? Does that question have a different dimension to it now? I don't think it has a different dimension, but it definitely has different stakes.

You know, I spend part of every year in Columbia, and in a year I have to renew my passport, and the F marker, which I've had for years, and which corresponds with like how I look and things like that, is going to be taken away from me. I show that passport, and there's a lot of police blocks because, you know, the roads are just policed, so I show that. I'll be on the empty road somewhere showing my passport to a couple of cops. I do that frequently.

And in two years, you know, I don't know if it's going to be a danger or not, but I'm going to be showing something that has an M on it, you know, in an empty road. And that's a small thing. I wrote an essay about that for New York Magazine. That's a small thing, but it's A new and increased danger in my life that's a material danger in my life that is going to be the case.

In so many ways for so many people that things are going to be more dangerous where prisoners, you know, they're moving all the trans women prisoners, or they're attempting to, to move them into male jails. That's going to cause violence. Your listeners can look up the word V coding. V coding to see what happens to trans women in male prisons. Right. I will spell it out for them in case they don't have Google handy.

V coding is the practice of placing trans women in cells with male prisoners as a reward or a form of social control that hinges on trans women being raped. Yeah. These kinds of things, they have horrific stakes. And I hope to be able to, you know, kind of write into those stakes, even though I'm no longer eligible for an NEA grant, you know, I still, I still hope that I'll be able to write into those stakes. And finally, section E. Trans joy and resistance.

But in December of 2024, you became the nation's first openly trans person to argue in front of the Supreme Court in U. S. versus Skirmetti. I, I just want a second, just the fact that you're Are you in front of the Supreme Court? I know it's hard to separate what you were arguing about, but I would imagine that that was a big day, that there was, that there was a lot going on for you that day. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, I guess I'm trying to say like, there's the, like, I'm here to present the case, but also like I'm in front of the Supreme Court, you know? Yeah. It was a big day and it was, um, It just, it takes a lot. It takes a lot of preparation. It takes a lot of emotional energy. Obviously, that emotional energy is escalated when it's a huge civil rights case and it's a civil rights case that implicates your own life.

Um, when there's this narrative of, of his, you know, it's the first of something which always, you know, in the U. S. people love that. So it creates all of this extra. feedback. Um, but in general, it is, it's, it's, it is somewhat surreal as a lawyer to say, okay, I'm, I'm walking up to the lectern in the Supreme court and, and going to start my legal argument. It is a surreal experience that I certainly will never forget.

Was there any, I mean, again, I know that we were talking about the case. Was there any sort of Pride or joy in that experience as someone who's a lawyer that like, that's a thing that that's one of those like goals that I'm sure many lawyers imagine and have. Was there, did you feel the pride of that moment? That's a, so in the moment, I think I was just very focused. And so I didn't, I wasn't like, Oh, I'm very proud in this moment.

It, it was also a very epic time because it was right between the election and inauguration. And I was very, uh, you know, wicked had come out the week before and I was like, very much like, Cynthia Erivo, Elphaba, like, it's just sort of like, this is going to drive me and Cynthia's voice is, you know, it was a little bit of defying gravity on repeat and trying to get myself into, um, to, to the zone.

And, and that was helpful, the, the sort of, you know, musical fight against authoritarianism, um, in the lead up to inauguration and our Supreme Court case. So, so that I think was, was where I found the energy in a, in a very dramatic sense. Um, and then afterwards, I think when I, when I was able to actually take a deep breath, I, I was like, wow, that, that actually happened.

And, and that I think was, you know, there was very little time to feel pride given that we went right into planning for the Trump, Trump presidency and then inauguration. But I did try to sort of sit with it, um, and, and sort of feel the energy. And I, I did.

I love the idea of you like, on, with uh, Defying Gravity, on repeating Cynthia Erivo as you sort of like, we all have our get hype music, and that's a, I love that song being uh, the song that's getting you hyped to argue for trans folks in front of the Supreme Court. That's beautiful. Uh, you know, it felt like it really fit, and, um, so Oh yeah, for sure.

That, that was, uh, really grateful for, for Cynthia and Ariana and, and that coming edge on to it, to come out right before, uh, it felt really good. I would, I would imagine they'd feel honored to know that you were, uh, that you were, that that was the song that was going through your ears before you argue for trans rights, before you were defying patriarchy. Yeah, exactly. We'll do a sort of A remake, yeah. You know, a remake of it, yeah.

Cynthia Erivo, if you're, I know you pay attention to things, let's do defying patriarchy with Chase here. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom, boom. This win is coming out of Montana. Now, Montana is where Representative Zoe Zephyr serves. And if you've listened to this podcast, you've definitely heard me mention her. Because she's not only made history in Montana becoming the first trans person to serve in the House.

But she's also married to Aaron, who runs the Aaron in the Morning Substack, which is one of my trusted news sources, along with 20, 000 of you, okay? She does an incredible job reporting on the news affecting LGBTQ folks across the country. Well, in Montana, something unprecedented happened. 29 Republicans stood up to their party and voted against anti trans legislation.

That would have banned drag performances and pride parades, HB 675 and HB 754 that would literally take trans kids from their parents. Yeah, you heard me right. Take children from their parents for being trans. Let's start with the ridiculous drag ban. They would have also given parents the right to sue drag performers for harming children. Drag performers could have been sued. 5, 000 a pop by parents, they lost that vote.

Okay. 44 to 55. And for context, the Montana house is controlled by Republicans. The count is 58 Republicans to 42 Democrats. Yo, this is huge. Their house speaker tried to say. Actually, he didn't try, he did, said that transgenderism is a fetish based on cross dressing. That's how he described it. In response, Representative Zephyr said, When I go walk him, speaking of her son, to school, that is not a lascivious display. That is not a fetish. That is my family. This time her speech hit home.

And it wasn't alone, Representative Sherry Easeman, a Republican. Representatives spoke up against the bill. She said. So much here, in just a few lines I want to share with you. Everyone in here talks about how important parental rights are. I want to tell you, in addition to parental rights, parental responsibility is also important. And if you can't trust a decent parent to decide where and when their kids should see what, Then we have a bigger problem.

She went on to say, trust parents to do what's right and stop these crazy bills that are a waste of time. They're a waste of energy. We should be working on property tax relief and not doing this sort of business on the floor of this house and having to even talk about this. family. After these speeches, 13 Republicans flipped their vote and voted against the bill. And get this, that wasn't it, right? You heard me earlier. There were two bills. That was just one.

The next anti trans bill was up and trans representative S. J. Howell spoke up. They said, I stand to oppose this bill. When a state intervenes to remove a child from their family, that is one of the most serious and weighty responsibilities that the state has. That is not something to be taken lightly. Every time a child is removed from their family, it's a tragedy. Sometimes a necessary tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless.

This bill does not come close to the seriousness with which those decisions should be contemplated. They went on to say, put yourself in the shoes of a CPS worker who is confronted with a young person, 15 years old, maybe, who is happy, healthy, living in a stable home with loving parents, who is supported and has their needs met. And they are supposed to remove that child from that home and put them in the care of the state. We should absolutely not be doing that.

Come on S. J. Come on S. J. And thank you Erin in the morning for reporting on this. Family, I'm telling you right now. If you do not follow Erin's sub stack, do it. Okay, follow it. Figure it out. You understand? The things she's reporting on are so important. The depth in which she reports is so important. Now. When this bill went for a vote, after S. J. 's speech, 29 Republicans voted against it. If you remember earlier, I said that there were 58 Republicans serving in Montana's House.

That was nearly half of them. Wow. Thank you, Representative Zephyr and Representative Howell. All of the activists and advocates in Montana that are doing the work every single day. Yo, I hope you got to smile after these wins and take a man a little bit Because I know y'all got back to work. I know you did.

I know you did, but I really do hope That you were able to take this in a little bit, soak it up, because to get Republicans to cross the aisle right now in this climate today, that takes relationship building, that takes time, that takes getting to know them, right? This, this is what we need. More relationships being built, less ignorance. So the fourth executive order that I'm catching during the show here and the recording of the show is.

called Ending Radical Indoctrination in K 12 Schooling, and I think for this one I'm gonna read a little bit of it because otherwise I'm gonna muddy the waters on it. So, the purpose and policy, parents trust America's schools to provide their children with a rigorous education and to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible nation and the values for which we stand.

In recent years, however, parents have witnessed schools indoctrinate their children in radical, anti american ideologies while deliberately blocking parental oversight. Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination. In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors, solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.

In other instances, young men and women are made to question whether they are born in the wrong body, and whether to view their parents and their reality. As enemies to be blamed, these practices not only erode critical thinking, but also sow division, confusion, and distrust, which undermine the very foundations of personal identity and family unity. Need I go on? Probably not. No, no, you really don't. You really don't. You really don't.

Yeah, so So this executive order references other executive orders in order to kind of bolster what its goal is. I mean, nobody's been recording our history yet, so we're the ones doing it. We're the ones writing it. That's what TransJoy is. We're rewriting this narrative, right? We're going to keep making history. We're going to keep being us, whether you teach it in schools or not. And not only that, we'll make it accessible. Exactly. The community will make it accessible to itself.

Right, right. We talked last episode about Social media and its influence on our ability to do that and the reminder that I'd put out there Just like what we were talking about a moment ago is that we're creative. We've we've got People in all walks of life with all manner of skill sets if we need to make another Site for our community. It wouldn't be the first time. It won't be the last time there's going to be places for us to Maintain our history document our history.

I know that even here in Georgia. Is it Georgia State that had a project going on for? documenting LGBTQ histories QIA histories I can't remember how far out it expands whether it's like specific to Atlanta or or broader than that and their objective was to is was and is to capture stories of just You know, members of the community to get oral histories from. I participated in that a couple of years ago and that's here in Georgia.

So know that that work continues on and all the noise that's going on in public education. It's just noise. It's noise. all sorts of challenges around it. There already have been. And so we just got to keep doing what we're doing and bob and weave to adjust to, to the different tactics, tactics that come up. So what day is this of the administration? 10, I think. When did he get sworn in? Martin Luther King, unfortunately. So it was Monday. So it's been. Eight days, right?

I gave it too many It's fine Probably shouldn't even put that in here because it's going to take another couple days to get this thing out but right You know, so that's by the time you all are listening to this I'm sure there will be more that more to come out of that and I know I know that it's stressful.

I know that it is really difficult to read I I can say that for me some of what i've struggled with really It goes all the way back to, well, well before this too, but really at time of the election and all the commercials that were paid for that were anti trans and then the response from the media after the election of, you know, the Democrats really should have spoken out against trans ideologies and air quotes, you know, and that sort of thing. All of that, it weighs heavily. It's hard to.

Yeah. It's hard to constantly be surrounded by noise that doesn't, doesn't even, it's more than thinking that we're bad people, it's, it's thinking that we, like, don't exist, and wishing that we didn't exist, and plenty of people being willing to make sure that we don't exist. And that's heavy for us as adults, imagine that for those children.

Right. And so I know that I'm, I'm feeling the weight of that and as Adam said earlier on this show, we were talking about, man, how do we bring the, the trans joy, capital letters, joy into a space like this. And I think something that I have thought a lot about around these conversations, because truly we've had a lot of bad news over the last, really, since we started doing this podcast. Uh, and, and. prior to that too.

So I think some of what I continue to try to remember is that simply my existing, simply my willingness to laugh at myself and laugh at some of the silliness that goes on around us. Don't get me wrong. I'm taking it very seriously, but my joy is resistance. My love of my community and my people. is resistance, my love of myself, my respect for myself, my willingness to stand up for myself is resistance. And I, I just don't see a way for them to take that away from me.

Oh, so I was on vacation last week. Part of the reason that we, well, the reason that we didn't end up getting a podcast out over the last week. And so I'd gone on a cruise ship and there was a gentleman who was sat down next to me on the ship and All week i'd seen him around he'd been wearing this.

We make america great again hat Of course, this is after the inauguration and i'm seeing some of these Executive orders getting signed and I was just so annoyed that he would have gotten sat next to me because Of all the people on this ship Although my guess is that this ship was pretty I shouldn't say my guess there was a lot of this The ship is very queer family. So I was thinking of all the people To sit next to, why am I sitting next to the MAGA guy?

And there was something within me that just couldn't help but start speaking louder about just how much fun my trans ass was having on that cruise and how queer friendly the space was, and just how welcome I felt and how much I was enjoying myself. And it was all true. Like it all, all, everything I was saying was true. And it was a, a good, I mean, most importantly, a good reminder to me of. Whatever, man. You do you. I'd rather not be sitting there grumpy looking like you are.

You know, B, there was something nice about being able to know that I was talking about myself in such a positive way that somebody else really had to kind of sit and listen to, or I mean, I guess he didn't have to, but You know, he was stuck there next to me, at least until he finished his meal, uh, if he wanted to eat. So it was kind of one of my little ways of joyfully spreading the, the good news of being a queer person and just living a happy life. Didn't hurt him at all.

It. Didn't hurt me, but there was something about being able to own myself and take my frustration with the things that are going on and turn it into something kind of honestly kind of joyful and be able to remind myself out loud that I'm having a wonderful time and that I am worthy of having a wonderful time and saying it loud enough that I knew that Somebody else who probably doesn't share the same ideologies I do could hear, and could hear a human speaking about. Yeah, I don't know.

Something about that helped me feel better. It's obvious from what we've spoken about that there is a lot that still needs to change and so much that needs to happen. And it's amazing that we've got such great advocates like you three who are helping that all happen. But I think You see that there is, there's obviously quite a lot of progression, especially with visibility of trans people as well at the moment.

And as you say, Sky, you were saying you grew up with no internet and such a lack of resources, and now we are in this age where people can actually find that information. really quickly and explore who they are a lot easier than when you were doing it, Bobby and Sky. But generally there is quite a lot of progression in some areas. For example, Greece has just put in the anti discrimination law, which explicitly protects trans people in education, health, housing.

You've got a lot of countries like Norway and Portugal who are prohibiting conversion practices on the grounds of gender identity, stuff like that.

But then, We're also in other areas where stagnating or we're regressing that there's quite a few countries now who do not have gender recognition or going back on their gender recognition or there are countries that even these countries who are thought of as progressive are actually elapsing on their equality plans and that's not great to see but I was wondering where you think we can take this in the future and what can actually be done about it and Bobby, to

use your words, how do we get straight white men interested in this subject? How do we take this forward? So getting straight white men interested in EDI in general, I think one of the important things to do is to recognise that being, being a straight white man is a diversity type in itself and every diversity type, including straight white men, have diversity type challenges. So I think if you can start exploring.

The challenges that they face, always having to be seen to be in control, have the answer, always having to compete with the challenges of what to do with all their power and money, all of those things. If we can explore those challenges that they face and start helping them deal with them, then hopefully that opens up those empathic barriers to them understanding that they can help other diversity types, uh, themselves.

We're in a very precarious place, I think, not just for trans and non binary people, but for societies in general. We're seeing a big resurgence in right wing beliefs across America, in the UK, across Europe and beyond. And that's fairly typical for a reaction to times of socio and economic pressure. And we've had some extreme pressures over the last five years. We've had the pandemic.

Before the pandemic, we were in a, Uh, a depression, then we've had the pandemic, and now we're in a time of economic recession again. So one of our base instincts as a species is when we feel under threat, then the first thing we do is throw around protective barriers around ourselves and our families, our tribe, and anything that isn't part of that tribe or we perceive to be outside of that tribe is perceived as a threat. And that's what the right wing.

Views and political parties thrive on it, leverage, and that's what we're seeing. And that's why we're seeing the pushback against the trans and non binary community, because we're the easy target. We're the easy ones to start with, to start driving a wedge into wider human rights, whether that's bodily autonomy for women or rights for people of color or rights for the wider LGBTQIA communities. So where do we go forward from here?

Well I think really we've got to dig in, dig in and really start trying to push forward, or at least hold the line.

And I think that's what the trans and non binary community have been trying to do in the UK and the US for the last five or six years actually, is not actually make any progress, but just try and hold the line, try and be the breakwater for future generations, because it's, however hard it is, To here, I don't think we're going to really get any massive improvements to trans equality in my lifetime. I would appreciate that my lifetime might not be as long as other people's lifetimes here.

But I don't see that's going to be, I don't see we're going to have a lot of improvement now. Because we've had such regression, such pushback, such undermining of the foundations, that we've spent the last 50 years. Building that actually, I think, just holding the position of where we've been. I mean, certainly that's what, why I've been doing the last sort of five, six, seven years.

And I've been doing it for 22 years now, you know, and the last seven years have been by far the hardest out of all of those times. If I just would jump in as well and following up on what Bobby said, we've seen, I think, a lot of like, intentioned work in the courts and politics get shot down very easily with what I would consider quite flimsy justification afterwards. Not just what I mentioned earlier about the NHS, but recently Ryan Castellucci's case about legal non binary recognition.

In the UK as well and obviously the SMPs self made the and making like a GRC slightly easier to get Getting shot down by the use of section 35. So and following up on like also another thing about how I think Trans people are just the current other.

I would recommend anyone who listens to this to read a book that was really helpful for me for understanding the intersectionality of like, the issues that trans people face are often the same as how other previously and still persecuted minorities face, called the Transgender Issue by Sean Fay. This was a huge I think a hugely influential book from my understanding in early transition of actually i'm not alone There are things as a trans person.

I should be doing to help out cis people of color other lgbt people trans people of color immigrants people with uh Disabilities and that we we all could be doing that because a lot of the battles we face are the same secondly, I would this stuff you want to do to help there's so much you can do to help in the Immediate, in the immediate future, find mutual aid networks, not just explicitly for trans people, but for communities with large amounts of trans people in.

Well, there are so many of us, like, who aren't as fortunate to be in a position that Bobby, Sky, or myself are in, who always need help paying rent, paying for healthcare, look at, if you know a trans person who's doing a fundraiser for surgery and stuff, consider giving towards that, there's all sorts of things.

I think we've seen, due to, I think trans people just broadly and statistically being among the more Prejudiced, or was prejudiced by the state members of society that, yeah, we've had to set up our own means of looking after ourselves. And there's a line I always hear about passing the same ten pounds or ten dollars back and forth amongst ourselves. And I'd like, there's something I do with my career to help trans people, I'd like to make that amount a lot bigger for us.

And be able to say, like, get in, uh, into a position where I can look at it.

Make the type of work I do or the type of work that so many of us in the city do more attractive for trans people to want to get feel they can want to get into no matter what their employment history or their transition history or If they've had problems or a gap on their CV or whatever because it's just that feeling like okay I'm in a position of what can I bring to the table right now instead of having to have lined your life up perfectly from The age of 13.

Yeah, so that's what I Like to achieve and what I tell people looking to be an ally to consider is not like just very obvious stuff about Oh Being nice and treating a trans person at work in the correct gender, but one thing to do, I guess, just a bit more reading into it. And being proactive, and I think that's so much beyond, I think, I've seen most cis people do that, anyone who does that, I think is like really inspirational. Raquel, take us to the grassroots.

Help us understand how you and your fellow activists are preparing the conversations that you're having and especially for young people. I have so many young trans people in my life and so I'm wondering, you know, what should I be saying as a good ally?

Yeah, well, just to go back to talking about families and young trans people, what was beautiful about the day that Chase was arguing inside of the Supreme Court was that outside of the Supreme Court, there was this amazing, beautiful, glorious rally. Freedom To Be Ourselves, co created by ACLU, Lambda Legal. And they really created the space on the streets outside of the Supreme Court that can maybe serve as a vision of what we want to see.

I'm 12 years old, I'm in eighth grade, and of course, I'm a trans girl. Despite me having a normal life, it's wild that people think that trans kids are just a danger to society. How did they get that? But, you know what? In spite of all of that, I'm standing right here in front of the Supreme Court because to make change, to do what's right, to make things, let me tell you something, I'm proud of being a trans girl. They might want to take away our rights.

We had a multi racial, gender diverse, intergenerational, cross movement group of folks out there in the streets really just celebrating the fact that we are here and we're fighting as trans folks. and as folks who love and care about us. So I want to share that because I think that that's kind of the perfect encapsulation of this effort, right?

We have Chase and other attorneys on the inside of this hallowed institution and then on the outside are folks who are both rallying themselves but also cheering on Chase, right, for being a champion. So that was beautiful. In terms of grassroots activism right now, I mean, obviously, I can't speak for everyone's experience, but I will say one thing I want to make sure I do is talk about really just what the bathroom said. And it wasn't just the folks who got arrested, right?

Who made that happen? It was all of the folks who maybe weren't in photos, right? Who haven't been quoted. who also made that happen. The folks who couldn't risk arrest, but showed up and put their body on the line in other ways. It was also the media folk, right? Who were like, we need to document this. Oh, also we believe in what you're fighting for because we believe in the dignity of trans folks lives. So that's important.

It was the legal support, the safety support, all of these different elements that made that action successful. And I think that's how we have to approach Organizing always, but especially right now is that there is a role for everyone to play and you have to get creative with what your gifts are, what your skills are, right? Chase is using his skills, his expertise in law to transform things. As much as he can, to what he was just saying, right?

But folks are making sure that people are fed and housed, right? So we need to be putting resources into mutual aid efforts, into direct services, right? Which have been a hallmark of keeping our people alive in our community. We need more political education, right? We have to be getting all of this brilliance. Out to the people because we know that the mainstream media ecosystem is failing a lot of people.

We know the educational system, even before Trump is in office is failing a lot of people. So we've got to be firing on all cylinders. And I don't say that to be incendiary and violent. I just mean we've got to be active. I don't want the right to misconstrue what I'm trying to say right now. I feel that. No, I, I, I absolutely feel that. And you know, Raquel, you've really been living this because last year you published a really beautiful memoir.

It's called the risk it takes to bloom on life, love, and liberation. And you tell your own coming of age story as a black trans woman from the South, and you detail your journey as an activist and as a journalist fighting simultaneously for your own liberation as well as. Collective liberation in your communities, right? So I would love it if you would read a passage. It's from your epilogue and it feels really frankly pertinent right now.

And you reflect on the disillusionment that you felt after many of the revolutionary demands of the summer of 2020 were then brushed aside by politicians. Many of us have realized that the precipice of liberation we tasted a short while ago is much farther than we imagined. I wish I could provide a soothing conclusion where everything feels hopeful and bright. But it seems we will have to continue to hold the uncertainty of progress.

We'll have to find the balance in those things that make our lives harder and those things that make us helpful. One thing is for sure, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, classism, ableism, Christofascism, and other systems of oppression won't be eradicated unless we truly believe that we are the fruit of precious seeds. I am constantly in awe of what our ancestors and trancestors were able to plant despite the wildfires they endured.

They didn't wait for the perfect conditions or to be understood. They had dreams and wittingly or unwittingly crafted the scaffolding for our movement. Like them, we must continue to build sites of accountability, connection, dreaming and healing. Even when the flames It really feels very relevant for this particular moment. Chase, what's your message to the trans community and to all communities that are under threat right now?

First, with Raquel's prescience and insight and wisdom and so I think just the reminder that You know, even if we are confronted with hope and then disappointment that we have the tools and the capacity to rebuild together, uh, because I think one of the things that does happen is you are confronted with this sense of progress and almost intoxicated by the ideas of, of change and only to often be disappointed with the resurgence of the very things that you thought you were moving past.

And so contending with hope and despair together can be a draining project, but one that we can tackle together. And I guess for me, coming out of the argument at the Supreme Court, what I'll say to the trans community is, is going back to Raquel's message about the rally outside, which is that.

You know, we are inside navigating these old, not very malleable institutions, and yet coming outside, you're reminded that no matter what happens in there, we are building something more beautiful outside of the literal architecture that this country was built upon. And looking out at that sea of young people who had the self awareness. to demand that they be allowed to claim themselves and listening to those young people interviewed on CNN that are in essence like, I exist.

That is not an opinion. So this is Violet Dumont. She's a 10 year old trans girl who traveled with her family from Arizona to DC to make their voices heard. And here she is. 10 years old, being interviewed on CNN. What does that feel like, to have so much attention by all these politicians on your identity? It's probably, honestly, the worst thing I've ever felt. I've heard principal weak politicians that say, No, you have the wrong gender, you're confused, honey.

No, myself is a fact, not an opinion, and they don't get to decide that for me, I get to decide that for myself. And here's Daniel Trujillo, a 17 year old trans boy who also traveled to D. C. from Arizona with his mom. When politicians focus on turning us into numbers, a lot of times they've never met trans people, they don't know trans people. I've been disrespected, misgendered, dismissed just because of how young I am by these people who want to protect me.

Oftentimes our lives get turned into numbers. and trauma stories with no name and no face. Our existence is so, like, so beyond that. I am just so inspired by the power of our younger generations of trans people. And so whatever is coming, I know that we're calling upon our transcestors and looking at the people who are much, much younger than me, that we have so much beauty that we're building and that those flames will not be extinguished. That's going to be it for today.

As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or our upcoming topics. We're doing a deep dive on the shifting internal dynamics of the Democratic Party that absolutely needs some shifting, and the Republican efforts to dismantle public education, and the role of Christian nationalism in that effort. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991.

You can reach us on the privacy focused messaging app Signal at the username bestoftheleft.01, or you can simply email me to [email protected]. The additional sections of the show included clips from Short Wave, Queer News, Dora's Deep Dive, Amicus, Boom! Lawyered, The Majority Report, the At Liberty podcast, The Brian Lehrer Show.

Firstpost America, Empires of Dirt, the United Nations Outreach Program on the Holocaust, The Cold War, Politics Weekly America, It's Been A Minute, Everyday Trans Activism, Trans Joy Cast, T Break, and In The Thick. Further details are in the show notes. Thanks to everyone for listening. Thanks to Dionne Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and their participation in SOLVED.

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