This message comes from an PR sponsor, Discover. Tired of not getting a hold of anyone when you have questions about your credit card? With 24-7 live customer service from Discover, everyone has the option to talk to a real person. Limitations apply. See terms at discover.com slash credit card. Just the heads up, y'all. This episode contains some salty language, including some slurs. What's good? Do you listen to the code switch? I'm Gene Demby.
The last few years we've seen several waves of panics around trans people and trans women in particular. Today on the show we're looking at the history of those panics and how they've evolved over time.
I'm Parker, did you watch Sex in the City at all? I mean, I was like 15 or whatever, supposed to be around. I was like, you was young and fat. I'm proud of it. Anyway, I remember moving to New York City later on and being like, this is nothing like my life in New York. First of all, you can't get around and heels in New York, they tricked you. I mean, this black carer was always taking care of you know? Yeah, I remember there was a scene in the movie where Carrie, like finally,
relented and it's like swam in it by finally taking the subway. Anyway, I bring it up because there's a scene I've been thinking about that has aged, particularly badly from that show, but it's aged badly in a way that is possibly illuminated. This scene and this whole episode I think kind of shows up on like, you know, cringiest episodes of Sex in the City lists that you know get published online every so often. Wait, Gene, who's that?
Oh, that's. I'm Jewel's Gil Peterson. I'm a historian by day, not sure what that means I am by night. But back to this episode of Sex in the City. Samantha is relocating to the meat packing district. You know, that's a big bold move at this time period for her as kind of a rich white New York social light. And anyways, it turns out that there are some some girls on the street. There they were Samantha's friendly neighborhood pre-op, transsexual hookers, half man, half woman, totally annoying.
But there's one scene in particular where she's in bed with her boyfriend, you know, they're carrying on outside interrupting her private moment and she not only opens the window to yell at them, but Oh, come back then. Like fills a pot with water and throws it the water onto one of them kind of triumphantly. Yeah, and like the scene kind of ends with the cop showing off.
You are the man. Come me back to it in recent years and actually sitting down and watching the whole episode. I was like, OK, yes, this is really cringy. But weirdly enough, what stuck out to me was just how blatant it all was. I am paying a fortune to live in a neighborhood that's trendy by day and trendy by night. Even though it's terrible, it just felt really clarified to me. And so like, I don't know, it's a weird reaction to have, but it just sort of felt like, oh, I get it now.
I see what's going on here, even underneath the so-called humor. So, Jules, she teaches US history at Johns Hopkins specifically trans history. And she recently wrote a book called A Short History of Transmasogy. And in that book, she talks about this scene. And the point she's making is that one of the really big things that's changed in the 20 years since that episode there. Wow, has it really been 20 years?
It's really scary to think about. Oh, my God. But Jules said that the way we talk about those women, those black trans women that Samantha called the cops on, you know, in that show, they were only kind of comic relief or used to show the quirky local flavor in New York City, we've moved the way from that. There has been this really huge shift in the content of representation in the media of particularly black trans women.
This kind of like growing attention and fascination. And kind of this, I don't know, this kind of campaign to humanize and to think about suffering and violence has sort of replaced this sort of impetus to make fun of and demean in the first place.
And I think there's also been this message that like the point is to pay attention. And I don't know that I agree. I'm not sure just paying attention to something does anything. And actually in some cases, I think it kind of extends that dehumanization. It suggests that to be, you know, a black trans woman is primarily to be a victim of violence. And that itself is just like a dehumanizing proposition.
And so that's what we're getting into today because Joel says panics about the way people lived and how they perform gender, they go back to the end of the Civil War and they kind of turn to take the same general shape. And as the history says, that's also about race and place and how those things get policed. This message comes from NPR sponsor Progressive Insurance, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average.
Get your quote at progressive.com and see if you could save progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. And then the potential savings will vary. This message comes from NPR sponsor Progressive and its name your price tool. Say how much you want to pay for car insurance and they'll show coverage options within your budget.
Visit progressive.com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. This message comes from NPR sponsor Bluehost, try Bluehost Cloud. The hosting plan made for WordPress creators by WordPress experts with 100% uptime fast load times and 24 seven support your sites can handle high traffic spikes visit Bluehost.com.
This message comes from Schwab with Schwab investing themes it's easy to invest in ideas you believe in like online music and videos artificial intelligence electric vehicles and more Schwab's research on covers emerging trends then their technology curates relevant stocks into over 40 themes to choose from Schwab investing themes is not intended to be investment advice or a recommendation of any stock or investment strategy visit Schwab.com slash thematic investing.
Okay so Jean you're talking to the historian Jules Gil Peterson about her book a short history of trans misogyny. Yeah and to get into this we should define some terms. You're right that the word transgender had two related but distinct births can you talk about those two related but divergent or stories.
Yeah yeah so like this is a story that takes us back to the 1990s the term transgender has a longer history but it's a very nerdy academic subject for another day but in the 90s you start to see it emerge in two places.
So first you have you know mostly white queer activists start to to to use this term transgender in the sense that probably most people would recognize it today as a kind of non medical reclamation of challenging gender norms or departing from your gender assigned at birth without necessarily medically transitioning.
And you know it's supposedly meant as this kind of challenge to the powers that be and to to everyone's gender right to kind of think more complexly kind of the earliest sort of like let's let's break down the binary kind of thing but that's like a very small group of people and honestly they're marked by their class is like a lot of artists a lot of performers right and that's I think that the story that we most tend to hear that this is like this progressive emancipatory movement to challenge gender on behalf of the world.
And so that's like a very tiny part of the second sort of birth of this term that that finishes that story is that transgender was also just basically a social service term. It's for you know for HIV AIDS outreach workers for public and community health centers for state and local bureaucracies and so you have a lot of outreach being done by HIV AIDS organizations by health centers and also by sort of the city's kind of public.
Health apparatus they're the ones that really take on transgender it's like a term you start you seen in grant applications to get money from federal agencies or from private foundations and it's this term that is supposed to make clear what's different about those kinds of poor black and brown sex working kinds of people from specifically gay must be people who are more middle class and have different
living conditions and so transgender is really this word that is introduced primarily to stress that gender and sexuality are different that you know to be a trans woman is a matter of your gender has nothing to do a sexual orientation. Those girls on the street are nothing like the gay men who may be live you know nearby in Chelsea and that we should treat them separately right but the big problem with that is that the girls on the street did not agree.
You have anthropologists other people out there at the time going asking these women or telling them hi you're a transgender woman and they be like what are you talking about like yeah I'm a girl I'm a woman but I'm gay like I'm part of the gay world gay is sort of like a class status it denotes your working conditions it denotes like who you know it denotes what senior part of it's like part of a vibrant working class world that's exist for decades and so transgender kind of comes in like to drive a wedge a class wedge between.
Those women working the streets and a kind of increasingly kind of assimilationist you know civil rights and gay marriage oriented middle class that doesn't really want to have anything to do with these poor women despite the kind of LGBT umbrella going on and so I think part of what happened over time is that like I mean I'm editorializing but that's like my my real analysis of what happened is this kind of social service model really pathologized those girls on the street said that they have a lot of people.
They said that they have backwards ideas about themselves it's actually inappropriate for them to call themselves gay they need to understand that they have a gender identity not a sexuality which is just a very middle class distinction they tried to sort of impose that on them and so I think over time what you see is kind of a mainstream of of that transgender ethos in order to basically tell a more feel good story about what in reality is basically a story about gentrification.
You make a point in the book to talk about the constraint of of a term like trans about how's been used to describe people in different cultural and historical context you know from different from the contemporary American one and people who might not ever describe themselves as such right. Oh absolutely I've always just had this intense skepticism about universal terms that are supposed to encompass everyone and the term trans the term transgender you know has had this incredible career.
It has great PR and the thing that is it's greatest strength that it's so supposedly radically inclusive right but one of the things that this is like a ship that happened in my teaching over a number of years when I was just struggling how to kind of introduce students to the term trans and I just wanted to say like I'm not bringing you this concept because like this is the end of history we found the right word I actually started to say this term is just ethnocentric
and that's that's a loaded thing to say but really simply it comes from one specific culture right like the United States it's an English word right it was invented by a single class you know of people with a certain degree of education and then they went on to claim it could apply to anyone in the entire world.
And that's just simply not true I mean or if if we think about what that means like an ethnocentric term is a term that takes one cultures perspective and applies it you know as a yard stick to measure the entire rest of the world and that to me is just sort of an elementary kind of point of like no I don't want to do that you know even as I'm someone who identifies as trans.
You make a distinction between trans womanhood and trans feminists people what is the difference there and I guess why do you think it's so important for us to hold those differences in our head. Yeah well I will say I'm very reluctant to claim terms because I see because I see it happen every day in academia and it's honestly it's a jargity it could be annoying it can be abstract this is like the first I think the only time in my career I've ever coined a term.
And it was after much reflection and it came from a confusion and a frustration we live in a time period where identity is so highly valued we tend to we tend to sort of talk as if identity determines our life experiences and so if you know what kind of person someone is then you can know so many things about them and and that kind of language I think is often idealistically over precise it often misrecognizes how things work and so like we want to talk about the way we want to talk about it.
We want to talk about violence that trans women experience or the general attitudes towards trans women what we call trans misogyny right the set of attitudes and beliefs about trans women that isolate and degrade them well one of the things that's kind of tricky about that is it's a pretty imprecise kind of set of attitudes and presumptions right and they don't even always work cleanly like it's like really hard to to transition
to be a girl or woman in the world there are no resources and support for that everything is kind of stacked against you and so a lot of trans girls and women you know take can take a long time to transition like for for me it took a really long time and but that doesn't mean I wasn't subject to trans misogyny before I transition and I actually really struggled for years to understand how some of the worst experiences that had ever happened to me in my life were also the experiences where pre transition I was actually most
treated like a girl or woman and that was often like a vector of abuse that an abusive person kind of could clock me even before I had you know understood my own identity and could quote unquote you know treat me terribly right like like in a misogynist way but that was a peculiar kind of treatment and I was like what is that called right because it was not my identity it was not my visibility as a girl or a woman it was something else and so I I settle on this term trans feminization which is just like a
verb right think of a two trans feminize someone basically to treat them presumptively as kind of expressing trans femininity as being a dangerous threat as you know basically being worthy of both a kind of preemptive strike or violence but also being put down in general
and I wanted to create this term just to give us something that would allow us to talk about groups of people or individuals who experience trans misogyny without being trans women either because it's not obvious that they are we don't know that they are because they're not out they haven't transitioned or because they're genuinely not trans women right they're just treated like they are
so in the book you write about some groups that have been trans feminized and maybe flattened into this category even though the term trans doesn't speak to how they understand themselves there are two spirit people among indigenous folks in the United States and you write about Higida in India yeah exactly right and you know when it comes to Higida this is a group of people you know who have a vast and complex history that I'm certainly not an expert and and couldn't really
you know boil down but suffice it to say you know in short and there you know in the 19th century when when the British are establishing colonial rule over what is today India and Pakistan and Bangladesh you know Higida has been around already for hundreds if not thousands of years as an ascetic or a devoted type of person there are many different kinds of people who live ascetic lives on the Indian subcontinent
but these are people that the British perceive to be male people who dressed and lived as girls and women usually from a young age and who are initiated into discipleships and have a really important culturally sanctioned role in supporting the household and so they might be you know around to blast marriages or the birth of a child and it was sort of you know understood that they're kind of sacred infertility
could enhance the fertility of households and so they had like a role they you know they they made a living through singing and dancing and providing blessings and a kind of spiritually sanctioned form of begging or receiving alms and the British you know as they're trying to figure out how to kind of pacify that's their term you know Indian society and kind of establish the power of colonial rule in ways more than just pure military violence and repression
and up targeting this group of people because they see them as a threat to colonial order and they you know basically scapegoat them as a population to demonstrate British power and show the rest of you know these are the consequences for stepping out of line and Higida's were seen to step out of line in so many ways they're there accused of being sex workers even though they weren't at that time they were accused of seducing quote unquote normal men into saw to me and all of these sorts of you know
the accusations that allowed the British ultimately to pass a really strong police law that expanded police powers targeted Higida's for in fact genocidal eradication and so there's this kind of long history there in which something that the British see as like gender trouble right gender non normativity gender deviance is being categorized that way but but that's not because it inherently was the case right that's a British like strategy that's a British play that they're bringing for another purpose
of colonization it's not because Higida's inherently are you know this or that gender it's not because Higida's would have considered themselves to be trans and to this day they they don't necessarily consider themselves to be trans
when we come back I think the truth about trans femininity and particularly working class sex workers and black and brown trans women is that they have not been marginal they are on people's minds they are in people's fantasies they're in people's search histories that's coming up stay with us
this message comes from NPR sponsor Shopify the global commerce platform that helps you sell and show up exactly the way you want to customize your online store to your style sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash NPR
this message is brought to you by NPR sponsor Lisa in collaboration with West Elm discover the new natural hybrid mattress expertly crafted from natural latex and certified safe phones designed with your health and the planet in mind visit lees a dot com to learn more.
This message comes from NPR sponsor Britbox streaming a new season of the original crime thriller blue lights a harrowing nuanced portrayal of policing in the turbulent streets of modern bell fast blue lights streaming at Britbox dot com slash NPR I'm Rachel Martin after hosting morning edition for years I know that the news can wear you down so we made a new podcast called wild card
where special deck of cards and a whole bunch of fascinating guests help us sort out what makes life meaningful it's part game show part existential deep dive and it is seriously fun join me on wild card wherever you get your podcast only from NPR Jean Parker code switch. We've been hearing from Jules Gil Peterson she's a historian and the author of the book a short history of trans misogyny.
To do that we started talking about the idea of a trans panic in particular which is actually of really specific legal defense that is used in court today. Okay I'll admit I am not familiar with this so how does this work. Well Jules say that you know trans panic is a way for somebody who was accused of attacking or even killing a trans person to sometimes get their sentences reduced or even just get acquitted outright for the crimes that they're accused of.
For someone who's attacked or even maybe kill the trans woman that involves saying you know I maybe I was on a date with this person or having sex with her or whatever hanging out with her. And at some point I learned that she was trans or she disclosed that she was trans and that revelation you know so disturbed me that I basically experienced a kind of legal insanity and to protect myself from the threat of her existence.
You know I acted and so you know maybe that was wrong and bad but like any reasonable person would do that. I was like okay how long has all this stuff been around right and as I was looking back in time I was just thumbing through you know all of the archival records I've collected and I was just looking for accounts from trans women you know talking about a date gone wrong or you know a guy you know attacking her in the street.
And I could find them you know about as far back as the 1890s but I didn't really see them before that like there were trans women but they didn't talk about like people clocking them in the street they didn't talk about going on dates and having to disclose their trans status as something dangerous. It just kind of starts happening in the 1890s but what I did see was that these characteristic kind of trans panics scenes were happening earlier a couple of decades earlier.
But they were not happening to trans women to they are happening to people like Hichitos whose mere presence in public was panicking you know the British state was panicking right colonial authorities but then I was like okay but then what happened right like sure a state or a government can treat a whole group prejudicially and target them but like how do we get from there to you know women on the street in the 1890s being attacked when they're on a date and and then I saw like through a number of sources that that the bridge was really.
The police and basically that police officers right they are the sort of the front lines of the state on the street and so of course you know in in British in did police officers job to stop Hichitos in public right and what they would often do is you know detain them in in full view of other people and and then defeminize them cut their hair remove their clothing rip off their jewelry force them into men's clothing.
And this is happening in the 1870s 1880s at the same time period in the United States in Canada you have federal you know Indian agents entering reservations were indigenous groups have been forced to live and singling out people right who might today identifies to spirit cutting their hair removing their jewelry forcing them into men's clothes forcing them to do hard labor this kind of.
Transpanic and violence is being executed first by the police but if you think about the spectacle of it in public it's happening in plain sight and you have the police officer demonstrating kind of like a teacher on behalf of the state and the law how everyone else is supposed to treat this group of people and I think that's actually you know kind of the bridge where then you start to see this sort of radiate outward into just every day life and you start to see men who are sex work customers or men who are just going on a date.
Right kind of playing the same role they're acting out a similar violence script that is not the product of their like inborn evilness or something psychologically wrong with them they're actually acting you know with impunity informally on behalf of the state. Yeah I mean just listen to you right now makes me think about the story you tell about Mary Jones right on can you tell us about Mary Jones and just her life.
Yeah I mean Mary Jones is just one of the most incredible people that that you ever get the privilege to meet as a as a historian or just a reader of US history so yeah Mary Jones is really part of a first generation of black New Yorkers experiencing emancipation New York state you know it took a very time for New York state to to abolish slavery and it did it in a very conservative way very slowly over many years.
And by the time Mary Jones was an adult she was part of this generation where you know all black New Yorkers were ostensibly free and so in the run up to the Civil War this became a real lightning point to New York City was the capital of finance and kind of the capital of the industrial north and so often you know white Southern politicians were very resentful of that there's this whole smear campaign against New York City and so they'll point to all sorts of things and say this is not the kind of country we want to have and want to do it.
One of them is that black New Yorkers in general live freely right that they're out there like one of them is just that black New Yorkers are dressed well right their cultural taste makers their music is more popular there you know their dance styles are more popular and they're out strolling Broadway you know with well to do white gentlemen and women as well and this is terrible right like in the white supremacist as a bad you know but one of the kinds of people who's out strolling Broadway are sex workers and Mary Jones is one of them and she's a pretty you know she she blends in.
Very well she passes perfectly right and you know she gets arrested yeah you know in the 1830s ostensibly because she had stolen the wallet of a white client and she's put on trial and it becomes this huge spectacle in the press and like you were saying what's so fascinating is like although supposedly in the course of her rest the police officer you know finds out that you know she has a male body like that's not really the spectacle it's not that she's trans.
And under oath in court by the way she testifies that they ask her like why do you wear women's clothing and she says well you know I always dress this way among my own people which is to say amongst free black people and she says in New Orleans I always dress this way and at the time yeah sex work is not illegal right and there's bear there's no official New York City police department there are private police officers and that's who arrests her she's put on trial she you know she ends up getting convicted and she is sent up state to immense prison.
And she gets out later but but part of what's so fascinating is is one she's lampooned in the press the the disturbing part as proof of what would happen if slavery or abolish nation wide that there would be quote unquote practical amalgamation that there would be sex across the color and Mary Jones is is made to emblematize that because she's actually selling it right and and white man or pain for the privilege.
So the press basically turns her into a satire there's this like incredible image of her that's created after the trial you know this picture of a beautiful black woman dressed very finely right and it says underneath the man monster and that kind of jack's to position is supposed to signal right that it's actually black women's propriety that is the proof that they are you know corrupt and immoral that they could pass so well.
And so part of what really kind of stopped me was I was like oh my god like she wasn't clocked right like her clients didn't know she was trans and the police didn't know she was trans in fact like no one knew she was trans until she was put on trial and told them and so I was like oh that structure of trans massaging doesn't exist yet in the 1830s that trans panic doesn't exist yet but here is a black trans woman in this era it doesn't mean her life was easy she's part of this you know general.
And the generation that has a certain kind of freedom kind of like a capitalist freedom right in the sort of capital in the North in New York City but it's hardly a freedom at all you can make your money yeah she's making money right but the same time even though she's kind of an entrepreneur of her own self she is subject to and is basically one of the first people to experience a kind of police violence and carceral violence that is very characteristic of the modern era so actually the story of her life sadly is that over the decade she's getting arrested and she's not going to get arrested and she's not going to be a criminal.
Sadly is that over the decade she's getting arrested more and more and more it shows up in the press over and over and over and over and over and she becomes a joke in fact when other people get arrested and there's their quote unquote cross dressing they'll call them Mary Jones like like it's like a moniker and she spends so much of her life upstate in men's prisons where we can only imagine you know what her her experience was like but but the one thing that I think is is still really powerful to is that reference to New Orleans.
Like that's the thing that really caught my eye. Can you say more about why culture? I because when you said when I read it in your book I was like okay so she lived the kind of life that allowed her in the 1830s to travel back and forth from New York City to New Orleans. Louisiana like right. Like how there was so many things you have to hold in your head about like just the way she can move through space and what that must have been like.
But also why would a black person in the 1830s like voluntarily go to the deep south it was fascinating. Yeah I know right no that's exactly what went through my mind to because people have been writing about Mary Jones for quite a long time but no one had ever written about this line in the court testimony. The question that she'd been asked was why do you wear women's clothing. She didn't have to say because I wear it in New Orleans right that was totally irrelevant to the case.
The transcript for her trial is very short as most anti-bellum trial transcripts are so it's like a pretty big deal that she said that and they wrote it down. And I don't know why and there's really no way to find out why and so instead I chose to imagine that she was trying to communicate something you know for for for either for posterity or for herself and we'll never totally know why.
And so instead I was kind of you know able to turn to a really rich and growing field of black feminist historians and and you know scholars like Sydea Hartman who have really helped kind of flesh out a methodology of speculation of taking archives that are you know very very sparse and actually still using every methodology in our toolkit to reconstruct as much as possible.
And so what I end up doing in the book which was really just sort of an immersive exercise for me was okay we don't know the details but let's take it on faith that when she's testified that she had been to New Orleans that it's true.
What would it have been like what would the city of looked like smelled like who might she have met there where in the city might she have gone and what might have drawn her there right maybe she wanted to to to to to embrace and dare and live a kind of mobility and freedom that so few people like her had ever.
And also if we come back to the 21st century what does Mary Jones have to tell us about you know two centuries of our attention on black trans women being trained on only the worst things that have ever happened to them and not thinking about their demonstrated courage right there political sophistication their understanding their diagnosis of the problems of the American project right and I just think again it's like Mary Jones can tell us a lot about the criminalization of sex work about the advent of trans panic and trans massaging.
You know the mechanics of of law and policing but there's just so much more there and although we'll never know the full truth about her I think that's exactly the point right what what what are we going to do about the fact that we still don't want to know and don't tell the full truth about black trans women today.
You write that a big part of what animates trans massaging is a fear of closeness of proximity quote trans femininity is too sociable to connect it to everyone to exuberant about stigmatized femininity and many people fear the excess of trans femininity and sexuality getting too close.
A lot of what we talked about today from sex in the city to Mary Jones is about you know air quotes respect to society trying to keep trans women and an arms length so how do you think we should be thinking about these ideas of proximity and community differently than we are.
Yeah I love that I mean it calls to mind to me what as a as a US story and I might say is one of the principle kind of creations of the United States racial segregation is just one of the enduring forms that this country has promulgated naturalized entrenched exported yeah not the only place in the world to do it but but you know it is really created.
A system and part of what racial segregation does is provide all these alibis for how we conceive of of community right that you can you can acknowledge that you live in the same quality as other kinds of people but you don't have to know them you don't have to live in the same zip code you don't even have to drive on the same roads is them you don't have to shop in the same stores.
You know your kids don't have to go to the same schools right and I really see gender broadly speaking as derivative of that racial project you know gender does involve segregation as well but I think in the US it often ends up kind of working you know hand in hand it's kind of incahoots with with racial segregation. And so when it comes to you know trans misogyny the way we talk about gender and particularly you know black black trans women there is this kind of arms length work.
I mean so much about trans people is like you don't really know trans people you never met them I mean there aren't that many of them around but like you just need to think about them differently in your own mind privately and kind of go under that like. Empathy process but there is I think this real fear of by sociability I mean the fact that you know gender desire these are things that connect us and I think the truth about.
Trans femininity and particularly working class sex workers and black and brown trans women is that they have not been marginal they have not been hidden off in an underground or just to the side they have been extremely important to the history of the service economy they are like the premier sex workers like they have been in position they have been next to men empower for centuries like in in the nation's cap but all you all over this country like these these women are everywhere right they are on people.
People's minds they are in people's fantasies they are in people's search histories they are in people's dating and relationship history they are not hidden or absent they have just been secreted and devalued and punished for actually what they really hold which is quite a lot of power and that's actually incredible source of strength but I think the first thing we have to do is to admit right that it's everyone else who has been trying to maintain this fiction of separation or an arms length relationship.
I think ultimately if gender has anything you know valuable to teach us it is radical inter to bend and see and I think that that could allow us to completely reframe the kind of competing rights framework that we often see today. What I mean by that is that like well there are women's rights and trans rights and we can only have so many rights so they're they're impinging on one another and so you will have anti trans feminists be like my woman who does not secure if a trans woman
plays sports or use the bathroom or frankly I think more importantly if a trans woman is working on the street corner in a neighborhood in my city or you have gay men being like you know I don't want to be associated with a feminists see and I don't want to be you know liable by homophobic stereotypes or you have straight men who are like I don't want to acknowledge my desire and interest I wanted to
accept those relationships keep them secret I don't want it to threaten my masculinity you know there's all of these kinds of ways that people try to refuse that original social relationship they already have to trans femininity and so I think if we if we break through that we can break out of this kind of competing rights and scarcity framework and we can start to think about what solidarity looks like which is to say like a politics of solidarity is I don't share your immediate material interests but I'm willing to put myself on the line for what you need.
Because I understand one that it has inherent value but also that because one group of people has been so degraded and experienced so much inequity prioritizing them actually does serve everyone because if we had created an American society and which black trans women were genuinely free to enjoy life on their own terms well by definition everyone else would already be well served because that is already the one you know group experience that is the most important thing is to be able to see what is going to happen.
And we've never actually tried that and I think if we were to give up the punitive pretence of repressing that and actually think about being in solidarity with those girls I think we would have you know a road map to to a much less unequal and a much more enjoyable world for everyone. Jules Gil Peterson is a historian at Johns Hopkins University and she's the author of a short history of trans misogyny Jules thank you so much for the one that's appreciate you so much.
Oh my goodness Jean thank you this has been a fabulous conversation very grateful. And that that's our show you can follow us on Instagram at mpr code switch all long word emails more your thing ours is code switch at mpr.org and subscribe to the podcast on the mpr app or you know wherever you get your podcasts you can also subscribe to the code switch newsletter by going to mpr.org slash code switch newsletter.
And another way to support our work here is to sign up for code switch plus it's small but really makes a difference for us and you'll get to listen to every code switch episode without any ads check it out at plus dot mpr dot org slash code switch and thanks to everyone who's already signed up. This episode was produced by just Kong and Xavier Lopez it was edited by the denella and our engineer was James Woolitz and a big shout out to the rest of the code switch massive.
Christine a collar Courtney Stein Dalian Mortata virland Williams and loyal is a raga as for me I'm Jean then be an MBA Parker be easier. Hi, great. Are you a carrier Miranda are you a hater of the franchise I feel embarrassed because I think that ultimately I'm probably a Miranda but like no fads to the character because like you know I bookish kind of uptight scholar.
Support for this podcast and the following message come from the United States Postal Service turn shipping to your advantage with us PS ground advantage service learn how to gain a competitive edge at usps dot com slash advantage usps ground advantage simple affordable reliable.
This message comes from npr sponsor capela university capela's programs teach skills relevant to your career so you can apply what you learn right away see how capela can make a difference in your life at capela dot edu. Npr plus is a new way to support public media and get more from your favorite npr podcast like fresh air sometimes I'll actually preface the question with if it makes you to uncomfortable to talk about if it's too personal just tell me here's the question.
For behind the scenes content bonus episodes and more sign up at plus dot npr dot org.