Cool Zon Media.
Welcome to it could happen here. It is continuing to happen stonks, but we will discuss the stonks probably late later this week. This episode's going to be much more fun because I am I am pleased to have returning to the show Elle Yeerman, writer, comedian and creator and host of Going Down with Elle Yeerman, a trans political comedy news show. As well as joining us here is teen Vogue's news and politics editor Lex mcminnimon.
Welcome both of you.
Hi, Hi, Thanks, So we're going to be talking about the recent teen Vogue special issue cover story on Vivian Wilson, the estranged daughter of Elon musk Ella. You put together a fantastic piece last month, and this is what we're going to discuss. How this article came together, that viral photo shoot in Japan, which is fantastic. All the styling
in that was lovely. But I think this this particular piece was really relevant for like trans people and also relevant because of the way like global politics has been uh shaken up by a few specific people, and focusing in on Vivian I think was really special. So I guess I would first like to hear about like yeah, like the broad strokes of how this first came together from our perspective.
You know, I don't know that like everyone is aware of this, and certainly I don't know that all of
my friends in our various trans subcultures know this. But at Tiemvigue, we've been covering like trans politics and trans rites for a long time, like far before I got here, but I've been here for almost four years, and it's been a pretty big part of my beat, in part because of it being like a very unavoidable thing within following like US state legislatures and then obviously like at the federal level, which has only intensified more and more in the last year.
And so that's like one aspect of it.
But at the same time, we love young people that shit post, and so Vivian had been on our radar for a while totally. I also think people are maybe more aware of this whole, like Comrade teen vogue vibe of like we're really interested in talking to people that have a clear political leaning, that have like a sense of how they see themselves in the world in a political context, And Vivian sort of came right out the gate as someone who was really eager to share her
thoughts on these things. So from last summer, like within like a month of when Vivian was kind of introduced to the world through her father talking about her on Jordan Peterson's podcast, we were trying to get in touch with her and with something I was talking a lot about within the office, and we didn't really know what to do because she was just kind of she just kind of emerged from from nowhere onto the internet. And so I had been talking about it a lot, including
with Ella because we talk a lot. And so Ella find eventually revealed like, oh, that's UMPHI I am utuals with Vivian.
You you did? I mean, are you threads? Mfies?
What are you Instagram?
Instagram?
I would never use threads my god.
So over to you. That's my that's my Teen Vogue intro. But Ella, if you want to.
Yeah, no, because yeah, I am interested in contacting Vivian because she was certainly getting like an unhinged number of media requests starting last summer.
Yeah, that's that's true, right, So she did that one NBC interview after after Elon went on Peterson and I do not work at teen Vogue, but lex and I know each other because you're contractually obligated to know everyone else who's part of the you know, deep state illuminati doing trans politics online club.
Yeah.
I was just gonna say trans people club, deep State.
Yeah, the pronoun Council exactly.
We're all established members.
Right, we swear allegiance once a year. There's a whole ritual, don't don't worry about it. So when I got in touch with Vivian last fall, which I got in touch with her initially to see if she would come on going Down, and I reached out to her and I said, do you want to come on my live comedy show? And she said no, I'm actually not sure live comedy is for me. I'm a little worried I'm not funny enough.
And since then she has changed her mind. She's told me repeatedly that she regrets saying that to me, that she has decided she actually is funnier than everyone else alive, all of the things that a prolific twenty year old poster might say.
Absolutely.
But so I got in touch with her and then she said no, and I was like, okay, well, at least I have this mutual now. And then a few months later I mentioned to Alex that I gotten in touch with her, and Lex said, okay, so she doesn't want to do a live comedy show that nobody that nobody knows about.
Does not want to do a live comedy show.
What if instead we did a really fancy photo shoot and put her in teen Vogue, a legacy journalism magazine. And I said, honestly, I think that's a better sales pitch, and it was.
Yeah, No, it is really compelling. I mean that the photo shoot pulls a whole bunch of people in. It's certainly if I was a Vivian's positioned, that would be interesting to me. And it does help spread around like, like so much of the piece is talking about like the struggles of living as a young trans person in America, and the fact that you can use a teen Vogue photo shoot to like spread writing about that around the internet is like super super useful.
Yeah, I mean, I just want to like second what Lex has to say. I think the work teen Vogue has been doing is really important. Like so many I mean, Garrison, you know, like so much trans media is like independently distributed and like dhy and I love us for that, but it is always really heartening to see like mainstream media institutions uplift trans voices the way teen Vogue has been doing.
And it's also like Conde Nast as an institution, which is like teen Vogue's parent company, is only one of multiple media conglomerates that will very proudly like use trans people in a representative way, like and like sell magazine covers with trans people on it, like you you could of Hunter Shaffer, for example, she'd been on the cover of several vogues. But at the same time, Hunter Shaffer
also received a misgendering passport after the Trump admints. So like, I think that if legacy media is unwilling to connect the dots between like profiting off of like the aesthetics of trans people but not actually like talking about the political underpinnings of like why trans people are even able to be visible at this time and like what the you know trapdoors TERMALIGNE calls it of trans visibility means, then it's like why you didn't do this work in
the first place. So Vivian was like a really great opportunity for us to like build on, like we've done several photo shoots, particularly with trans Wombia and transgirls at teen vague because we like feel very strongly, and Ellen makes this point in the piece that like the way that transm people are like objectified and commodified, and also like the target of such extreme vitrial is something it
feels really important to take a stand against. It just felt like doing this with Vivian, who's so high profile but also hadn't had the opportunity yet to take control of her own narrative in the public eye, and with this being her second ever for a separate photo shoot, like it just felt like a really big opportunity that was worth using as a big swing, you know.
No, like she is at like this center of this like matrix of trans commodification in so many ways, Like like this this special issue is the first time Vivian was really like framed as the subject matter of like any piece and like framed as her own person. For the entirety of her adult life, she's been used as this rhetorical object, like both by her dad, but as well as like by people on the left who's like objectified Vivian to use her as a bludgeon against her father.
And yeah, like people are very willing to like commodify or use use trans people in certain ways, but but to have like trans people writing about other trans people in a way that frames them as a subject matter is so important.
Yeah, I mean, I think Vivian one of the things that drew me to the story in the first place is that Vivian's sort of case is such an interesting
microcosm of the transfom experience as a whole. Yeah, she's incredibly talked out for something that is not her fault and not under her control at all, in the same way that right now on the national stage, like transfemininity and transits at large, but specifically transfemininity is the like problem to be spoken about, especially conservatives like Butler calls it a phantasm like gender nonsense.
I read that book, you have my copy. I think I'm almost certain I do that.
That makes sense.
Yeah, that makes certainly.
That's the trouble with gender, right, gender trouble.
Yeah, no, No, that's the original book.
It's she was afraid of gender. Thank you very much.
I have your book, but I haven't looked at it in a long time except for to remember the word phantasm, and so, yeah, I totally agree with what like said of it's really exciting to sort of like take her out of being used as a prop and give her
own voice back. I think one of the most exciting moments in the piece to me is the moment where I ask her about sort of the allegations that Elan like shifted right word because of her, and she pushes back against sort of that narrative very strongly, And I think that is the way we've seen her being used both on the left and the rights as sort of
a this is why he's doing this. It's clearly the fact that he has this twenty year old trans girl and she's like, actually, that's a crazy thing to say about it about a twenty year old well.
And especially to like counter the narrative of her life that's been driven by Walter Isaacson's twenty twenty three biography, which is like so hostile and to have like a prominent, like a prominent biography like that, like trying to make a narrative out of out of your existence, and it was something you have like no like input, in no control,
and it's like so demeaning. It's also like a very like you know, trans misogyny moment as well, like, yeah, it is interesting how much of like Vivian is so relatable, Like, like a lot of trans people have, shall I say, challenging relationships with their parents, maybe not to this extreme, but but sometimes frankly right, like there's a lot of people are forced to cut off contact with their family.
Yeah.
No, I've just been thinking a lot about this because, you know, Trump released yet another executive order. I think that this one was today basically trying to codify allowing trans youth to access gender affirming care as abuse quote unquote, which is like something that the Republican Party has been flagging for months that they were going to do at
the federal level as well. It has already shown up in the rhetoric around trans youth healthcare, which obviously is going to be used as justification for targeting trans adults access to health care and something that you know, I'm the only transperson on my team. Something that kept coming up in Vivian's story was that it was almost like anyone could relate to this, because anyone can relate to having like a shitty parent, an abusive parent, like a
bad dad, whatever. And so I think there's an extent to which the story has like a lot of value in like forcing SIS people to really be confronted with the fact that like how trans youth are treated like objectively is like abusive. And it's not the access to healthcare that is the abuse. It's like the way that
they're dismissed. It's the way they're belittled. It's the way they can't even be like trusting their own parents to be looking out for them, and to the extent that they have to push themselves out into the world to clarify that point. So like that's one aspect of it. I totally agree with what you were both saying that
it is like a microcosm of the trans experience. But I do think there's like this other valance for like allowing her to like control how this is being perceived or received sort of by CIS media and like SIS like the CIS political spirit, which is like how trans people are just getting shoved into that over and over and over again with very little context, felt like a really valuable thing to be able to do, given how like frankly, so much of my coverage right now just
feels like it's like trying to raise attention to the fact that like these are kids, these are young people. Like everyone should be able to relate to a young person saying, like I have a bad parent and that sucks and is a formative thing for me, Like that is something that like other children are afforded the ability to do, and like we just don't let trans kids like have that as something that's part of their truth when it's such a key part of like growing up trans in a hostile household.
And something like Vivian talked about at length, is like, as someone who did transition as a minor, there's all this like villainization around whether that's whether that's puberty suppressing hormones, whether that's having HRT, and how like the landscape that like me, like her Ella and like a lot of people that our age like came out of is not going to exist for the next generation of like trans kids, or at least it's going to be very different, and we need to do everything we can to stop it
from being as bad is what it looks like it's going to be. And Vivian like talked about this at length, and the peace with the restriction of puberty blockers, all this stuff in schools and this complete demonization of not just the healthcare but also like the people like trans kids as his own demon of America's that's like invading or is like threatening.
So I think it is.
Really cool a Vivian do talk about that at length in the special teen Vogue Cool Photo Shoot article.
I will say, I think, yeah, I think it's so important that that's talked about, and I'm glad she did. I'm also really glad as someone who covers like trans politics and news all the time, it was such a breath of fresh air to be able to frame this piece as like a look into what like the joy of transition looks like and looking at like, yeah, Howard, transition has brought her closer to the life she wants
to be living. And I'm not that old, but like talking to someone who's a few years younger than me and who transitioned at an earlier stage in life gave me like such a beautiful vision of what the future could look like if we if we fix some of the bullshit that's going on these days. All Right, I'm being clowned on in the chat. I'm not that much
older than Vivian, is what I meant. And now I'm peaking my microphone and the podcast gonna sound terrible, but what you said, I'm not that much older than Vivian, but she started transitioning at a much younger stage of life than me, and to see like what that has done for her, and like the way, I don't know, it was just really beautiful to talk to like a twenty year old girl and be like, oh, you're like trands. But it's like it's like not actually that big of a deal, and it like it also.
Like confirms a thing that like, I mean, I made a joke about this earlier with like we love young people that ship post, but like I think so much of liberal and right wing talking points about like young people in general like sees them as so humorless, like they are like cancel culture, meaning like are nonsense, whereas
Vivian is so funny. Like we actually struggled to cut jokes out of the piece, like Ellen and Ellen could tell you we went back and forth for hours about so many jokes that did not and just one liner is like she's so quickie and so like so funny. She's extremely funny.
A very dense style of humor, as in.
Like there's a lot of there's a lot packed in like almost every other sentence.
Alex and I are both some of the fastest talking people I know, and I I would put Vivian in that same group of people who can keep up with us or out talk me.
Uh huh.
That comes across in the writing too, like the way that the interview is transcribed. You can read that pace into the piece.
She's awesome.
So much of our editing was just like sort of taking out yeah, like little jokes, or like she's twenty so she is swearing all the time, or dude, the amount of cursing I much love.
But also that was the editing process for this.
Was much less like stress and we're just like how many f bombs are we keeping today? Hearthand emojis.
The way edits goes is you send in a piece and the editors give you like change some stuff, and then I get to look at a new draft and I could be like, hey, why do you change that? And then we go back and forth over and over again until eventually it's not up to me anymore. But at one point I did have to I did have to say, actually, femboy is one word correct. It's different from fem space boy and space She meant something specific, and I felt really like I was bringing.
I'd like to verify I was not involved in the grammatical edit of that. There were multiple editors who was hands.
That as a subject matter expert of.
What can I say?
And can excuse me? Kande nasked, theemboy means something.
No.
I am so happy that you have someone like Vivian who's able to appreciate drag way more than what I'm ever like able to even though I can like appreciate it like on like a conceptual level. Having this like complete, sincere like engrossment in it is so is so thrilling because a significant portion of this piece is talking about how much Vivian loves drag.
Oh my god, and and so much.
Ellen knows nothing about drag also, so that was like a really good combo for all of us.
That was I. I Yeah.
I sat down with her and we started talking him very very quickly. She brought up RuPaul's drag Race, and I would just like she kept calling it RPDR, which I'm pretty sure I've told my sources, Garrison, is that something you call drag race?
Have you heard RPDR?
So it out loud.
I've never heard this.
No, okay, okay, whatever.
What I'm want, what I'm here to say is as someone who actually watches drag Race, Ella, that is actually not that uncommon to refer to it that way. But you know, we had two different roles as the two trans people whose brains were wiped by the story. Ella's job was to actually write the Peace of Mind was to interface with Viviana.
About drag Race.
So clearly it all came together the way it was supposed to.
I get at the very end of our first call, I said, you, is there anything else you want to say? And she talked to me for another fifteen minutes about about drag Race, specifically.
Classic Rules, A Classic Rules.
Yeah, like I know, I'm I like sort of meant about your dad or about like any of the important things. We talked about this that you're like, No, so in season fifteen of drag Race, that rules.
That's so cool, She's the best.
But no, I it's it's so funny that you you you talk about how like there's this there's this caricature of like humorless trans people, which is very funny because like all of like the biggest shit posters online right now are mostly trans women. The trans comedy scene is huge, and like this is something that Ivian talks about, like spending the COVID lockdown and like online queer communities and how how like the the like drama and like conflict in those spaces trains you for how to be like
relief like funny and snappy. How fighting with with like like fellow queer teenagers like like prepared you for for that which has like certainly been like my experience.
I mean, there's a reason you can sort of tell, and I'm sure this applies to beyond trans people, but you can sort of tell which social media you grew up on, like were if you were a totally Tumbler teen or a Reddit teen or a four chanteen. You can tell because your style of fighting and making jokes changes, because it's it's it's such a deeply formative part of it. And I I don't know what online forums the right we're on growing up, but they were the wrong ones.
Well a lot of four Chan as well.
Sure, just the not funny parts not funny.
Yeah.
No, I'm still trying to untrain my like defensive way of writing that I learned on Twitter because it's a horrible style where hor have.
To like have like twelve prefaces exactly. Yeah, yeah, you're article one. I am not a racist.
Waffle pancaking the entire time, which is it's weird because like it's like Twitter does have its own style of humor, which I also like, also like picked up on, but it also has that defensive style of writing, which which needs to get untrained. But it is, you know, a work, a work in progress.
I think it's downstream of Tumblr. I read to remain strong on my stance that the Tumblr porn band ruined the Internet.
No, absolutely absolutely.
I guess I'd like to talk a little bit more about like the structure of the piece and how it succeeded so much in putting Vivian as a subject right, because like the first half is written in more of like a traditional like article format to give context and frame Vivian as like a person, but then halfway through it switches to like a back and forth interview, which
allows Vivian to just speak for herself. And I think having both of those and not just one or the other, strengthens the piece entirely, and strengthens like being able to see Vivian as a complete person because like as I'm as I'm getting the context like for her life and the political situation in the first half, then I get to see how much she reminds me of like regular twenty something trans girls and you know, like half of the friends I have. Though I do disagree on team Peta.
Pete's a bitch boy. It's team Gale all the way.
Thanks Contrary.
All right, all right, all right, I'm excited that we agree on this, but those those sorts of like offhand comments and like there's other things that like give you like a you know, a view into into this person. It's so useful to have, like you know, like at least fIF fifty percent of the piece be this like just straight interview.
We unsurprisingly talked a lot about how we were going to structure this piece and partially landed on Q and A format for like we knew this was going to be a behemoth, like no matter how we tackled it, given the subject matter and then ultimately how long the
transcript was, and you know, just like it. There were many aspects of this that like we were like, okay, how do we how do we do this in a way that's going to read well to people, because something we also think about a lot is like accessibility, Like young people famously hate reading now, but we wanted this to actually be something that like a young person could sit down, dash through, still get some like you know, historical political context out of and still come away being
like Haha, team Peta, team Gail or whatever the hell right and so and.
Maybe have like subway surfers on like another phone at the same time.
Exactly, yes, exactly exactly, And then I would say the I want Ella to talk about the transcript and like interview stuff, but like the intro I think is probably where I spent the most of my time editing this piece, and like adding stuff and a lot of adding stuff. It ballooned like we wanted this to be luch shorter than it was, and then it just kept feeling like
there were more pieces to really tie it together. But I would say, like, the reason that was the case is because it was a really hard line to walk to acknowledge that like people would be clicking on this in part because of Elon, but that we wanted to like trick them into coming for Elon, but staying for Vivian, yeah, like.
It's it's not about Elon nor like yeah, should it be?
Yeah?
Right, and so like when like Ellen and I had a zoom with Vivian and what November was the first one?
Or was that? I think?
So yeah November December to just like so she could kind of get our vibe and just kind of suss out if she was willing to consider this at all. And one of the earliest things she said was like, I don't really want to talk about him. I don't want this to be about him, And we were really downe for that, like we don't think that her story
is about him. Ultimately, it felt really important, and it was also challenging to make sure that we felt like people were coming away with it from this without like a garbled interpretation of what the stakes were for her to be coming forward like we wanted it to be, especially right now while so much of mainstream media is really fumbling their coverage of like politics at this moment, it felt really important to be.
Like trans politics, especially.
Especially and then also just like all of it, So like all of it and then especially trans politics, we just really wanted the intro to be like as strong and also like informative, and also like kind of funny, and also like just all the things because and I would say that probably took the most time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but.
Yeah, I mean I think the intro started off as probably an eighth of the piece, and yeah, now is closer to a half of the piece.
And there were so many hands on it. I wrote like.
Sort of a very loose like skeleton of what that intro ended up being.
And I would say, like, it wasn't that many people outing text. It was mostly means, it.
Was mostly legs.
But part of that is because I mean everything like said, but also that Musk is currently a high level government official and is in the news all the time. I mean, when we started writing the intro said that Musk had thirteen children, and then we had to update that twice.
New kid just dropped. Yeah.
Over the edit process, things wouldn't stop happening. And then also Vivian wouldn't stop posting, which was a little bit frustrating.
At one point I had to DM or I said, hey, if you.
Get any more information, can you please just tell me and not post it on threads?
And she said, oh, totally.
That girl is a poster post had hard for.
Sure, But yeah, I mean, I think I really love the balance the piece found it in the end. Early on, when we were talking about structure, I think I pushed for more of a standard profile, mostly because you know, then I get to show off my writing scales more
and I liked to write. But after talking to Vivian, even after our early pre interview, but certainly after the full interview where I sat with her for a very long time over zoom in a fourteen hour time difference, I immediate it was like, no, if I write this out, it's going to be mostly dialogue anyway, because her voice she has, she's so voicy, and it's so fun to keep it in that voice.
She's a very very distinctive voice.
Yeah yeah, and so do you, Ella, And so like it's like that's really the strength of the piece in so many ways, is that like people come away with it. It doesn't feel like you're in the background or like hiding behind something when you're writing this piece, Like it very much feels like the success of it is because.
You are a part of it.
And The New York Times reported that this was Ella's first che lance article. So I just wanted to add that you know, Ella kind of did her did her big one with her first article.
Thanks all.
This is now everything I've read a big one. The next fifteen years will be underwhelming.
It's all downstream from here.
Woo, it's not true, Baron Trump, I'm coming for you.
You're gonna re enroll at NYU exactly.
They'll never see me coming.
I am waiting for him to get fixed by like a bisexual she they it's gotta happen, right, No, I don't think something.
I don't know Obama was like into a bisexual she they and he's still yeah, bombed the Middle East or whatever.
But no, like like mainstream coverage is just completely failure and trans people right now. I got so mad at a Washington Post article yesterday that I that I skeedd about it, something I never do.
Was it the sports one yes playing.
After President Donald Trump band transgender girls from competing in girls sports, of Virginia high schooler joins the boys team. She wasn't gonna let the President's executive order stop her. Framed is like a feel good story, fucking infuriating and it's.
So like transparent like and I again I feel like I keep.
Bringing the system into the space. I'm really sorry.
One of my like cist colleagues was like, this is disgusting. Why did they write this like a feel good story? And it's like, my thing is is if if anyone with some amount of criticals thinking skills can see exactly through what you're doing, why even do it? Like it's so transparent like the way that that story was.
Written, because it gets clicked.
I mean, I guess you know what got clicks was Vivian. So I actually don't know about that.
That's true and say that and say that, and I did and I will.
Do you want to talk about the length of the transcript because I am curious how long Vivian talked for?
Am I am I allowed to say that?
Yeah?
I think I'm legally say can we explain why.
When we're not recording, I can explain why?
Okay, I think I got to say most of what I want to say. I mean, I think Vivian's just like a delightful person and I'm really excited for her that she gets her moment in the spotlight and that hopefully this like helps her build herself as a public figure outside of and away from Elon Musk and she has all of these aspirations to perform and model, and I hope she gets to do Her and a Winter Drag one day soon.
I love that movie.
It's a great movie. Hi and a Windsor Lex. Do you want to plug your little outlet?
What was this teen Vogue?
Oh yeah, I don't know if anyone's heard.
Actually so frequently people haven't heard of it, so it's actually fine.
Yes, you can find us at teen vogue dot com.
We have no paywall, we have a fact checking department. Most of mainstream media is not doing it like us, if you consider those two points.
So yeah, labor politics, especially teen Vogue's been phenomenal the past like eight years.
Yep.
So true.
If you love Kim Kelly, she is our labor columnist, so comes through. I also do some of our labor coverage, but like definitely not today than Kim does.
Yeah, I'm on the things. I'm on the socials. Yeah, that's it. That's all I had. Little Ella.
Where can people find you on the worldwide Web?
I'm on on Instagram and actually everything app as Ella Yurman or Ella dot Yeerman on Instagram.
We're gonna get you on Blue Sky. One of these days we can fix the vibes.
I'm on Blue Sky. I just forget about to do it, can we? I suffered through twenty twelve Tumbler once. I don't need to do it again.
That is so not the vibe. I wish it were. But it's not a clue.
Scot No, it's more twenty nineteen Twitter.
Yeah, I agree.
You can also find my show at going Down TV on Instagram, Going Down the Show on YouTube, Going Down Show on Patreon.
I don't know. I make a transgender daily show. You guys know about it.
New studio looks great.
It's so fun. We got to get you on there. We got to get you to come hang out.
Okay, well I will. I will be in town shortly so hell yeah.
Oh fun.
I go to the taping so I can crash. That'll be fun. You should do it. Hell yeah, we did, we do it.
Yeah, We're done.
It could happen.
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