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Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode so every episode of the week. That just happened. Is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ADS package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. He everyone that this is Garrison Davis from, it could happen here. For this week of episodes, the team has put together a special group of episodes, all focused on the broad topic of the escalating war on trans people. We'll cover historical backgrounds, the international turf movement, and all the new anti trans legislation trying to be made into law here in the United States. We won't have time to cover everything. It's only 5 episodes. But we, we tried to cram more stuff in and you know, it's it's we don't make episodes all like two or three hours. So I'm sure we'll cover all these topics more in the future, but we tried to create 5 episodes here that kind of cover a lot of a lot of our bases. Also we've we've tried not to make the episode super depressing because yeah, it's five episodes based on a kind of upsetting topic. So we try to keep them more information based and throwing in some jokes here and there, you know? But it is still not a fun, fun topic. So just keep that in mind. But we've tried to try to space things out and not make them too long and not too depressing. So without further ado, here is episode one of the war on Trans people. Welcome to it could happen here, a podcast about things falling apart and in, in the case of this week, getting very angry at people doing really ****** things to a specific subset of the population. All right, Gary, isn't that every week? Well, no. Sometimes we talk about other stuff, like 3D printed guns, but that ties in. Garrison, take it from here. I'm done for the week, yes. So welcome to Japan here. We're talking about. One of the big it could happens here is it could Alicia here yeah in in in relation to the ongoing war on queer people in general and how yeah that sure seems to be like it's happening so here here right now but but before we get to the actual right now points I still I do want to do want to do a little bit of background on how this kind of gotten to this point in the past few decades and the the the various like precursors to the current moment that has seemed to be really focused on trans people. Specifically, but for a long time a lot of the focus was on protecting Cohen. Quote The sanctity of marriage, which was one of the one of the big one of the big talking points. And to help us talk about this fun and engaging topic of I, I asked on Kieran and Eve from the kitchen Table Cult podcast to assist us in this horrible endeavor. Greetings. Hi, and I'm sorry. Are we are gays who grew up in that universe so hello? Yes, as as as was I as was probably a few other people on this of this call. Yeah, yeah, we, we all, we all have varying experiences growing up in the evangelical movement. While also realizing, huh, maybe we are not straight and or assist children. So yeah, but we're going to, we're going to, we're going to be talking about the kind of the escalating war in gay marriage and how that kind of. Moves over to trans people at a certain point and specifically talking about kind of the combination of religion and politics, because this is something I've discussed before on my two-part focus on the family episode and this really is going to tie into a lot of that stuff. It's a lot of the same people, but I I would love for everyone else to kind of fill in the gaps where I have stuff missing because I definitely have a a good a good point on like the Family Research Council kind of side of things. And I would love for people to fill in the gaps on the other other kind of stuff. But yeah. We're going to start off by talking about Family Research Council and that whole kind of side of things because I mean they they. Josh Duggar. Ohh yes, Josh Duggar is coming off don't don't show. Ohhh yeah, research and families. So this seems unproblematic. I'm going to just mute things from now on. And yeah, you guys continue in terms of all of the save the children's rhetoric. Yes, Josh, Josh Duggar will be coming up. So yeah. But I I do want to actually open up with a quote from Mike Rosebush who was the Vice president of focus on the family from 1995 to 2004. And then a few years ago he came out as a as a gay and as a surprise, a so-called affirming like Christian who like Loves Jesus and endorses rights for gay people. He left, he left Slash got fired from focus on the family. Is he C, side A or side B to see? Is he in favor of the celibacy model or? Show with marriage he's he seems to be excited about ******* OK so he said we like, we like side bees. Yeah it is it is definitely the better side. But I want to start off with a customer by by him just to kind of set the stage for how this type of thing kind of really. Got got started for combining, you know, the evangelical kind of biblical worldview with political organizing. So anyway, going to read a quote here, quote Dobson even more so than focus on the family and that's a that's a James Dobson, by the way, Dobson even more so than focus on the family as an organization. Strongly encouraged all evangelicals to support and express their values in the public arena as background before about 1970, evangelicals often confined themselves within their own. Like cloistered communities, political involvement was viewed as a secular enterprise and suspect at best, and this changed during the Dobson era. He and others encouraged evangelicals to learn and apply the biblical worldview. The evangelical person was coached in applying the apologetics debate method. In publicly sharing the biblical worldview, voting in every local and national election became seen as a Christian's duty. So at focus I learned that the evangelical leaders like. Abson considered the Republican Party to be the political machine best equipped to endorse a biblical worldview. In delighted Harmony, Republican Party strategists salivated to win elections by securing the evangelical vote. Thus, a mutual agreement was formed. The plan became that evangelical leaders would introduce a hot button issue onto ballots at every local and state election. Evangelical ministers would provide voting guides on how to influence evangelicals to vote for the only correct Christian choice, in turn the elected Republican candidate. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. In turn, the elected Republican candidate would champion the corresponding biblical worldview. And this strategy worked. And what was the most reliable hot button to place on the local and state voting ballots? Something that would ensure evangelicals in mass to show up to vote. Yep, anti-gay rights bills. Gay rights were viewed by evangelicals as a threat to the biblical family and society in general. So yeah, that's kind of how I want to open up in terms of kind of the shift in like the 70s and 80s and especially in the 90s. From kind of evangelicals being pretty divorced from like political mainstream action to them becoming a crucial part of the Republican machine and this kind of circle that completes itself at this, at this, like, at this point afterwards. Because yeah, this combined with a whole bunch of Save the Children rhetoric and like saving the family, like, like the unit of the family as a sacred thing to protect. It's really like that that idea really carries over now into, into, into the trans stuff because obviously they kind of lost. A lot of the stuff they wanted to do on gay marriage after a long, a long fight, you know, decades and decades. But it's still the same core idea at the heart of it. Yeah, I just want to put an Evergreen footnote on all of that and say thanks and **** you to Phyllis Schlafly for getting us down that road. Yes. Yeah, that was like blame could definitely be passed around. Originates there like I mean like. Before all of that like the Evangelical Church was not even united on the idea of abortion being bad. Like like we have come so far to merging these these universes in this really ****** ** little marriage that they got going on and and you can't, you cannot divorce the ideas of like the the escalating war against abortion and then also like with the Save the Children, like protect the family idea, right? These, these are the, these are the same issues like these, these do go together in terms of people, you know, making this like fake version of the family that they are swearing to protect, whether that be from gay people or that be from, you know, women's bodily autonomy or, you know, women's rights or like fifth, like feminism. All of it's in the the same is in the same package. It's like that meme of like 2 pictures and pimps like these are the same picture they could see. Literally. It's the same exact. Rhetoric and it's just like reskin slightly to for whatever topic of the day. The the other other big thing I want to mention before I get into Family Research Council is the 2004 book Marriage under fire by by by Doctor James Dobson which was definitely a one of the one of the other kind of key points in escalating the idea of the culture war and you know that that type of that type of like more like almost like tactical rhetoric. It's all. Yeah it's it's it was definitely, it was definitely a turning point. I remember seeing them around the time when fireproof came out. Oh, I think so yeah, it happened close. Yeah. Fireproof and all that came out between like 2004 and 2006, 2007. So that was all around the same time period because they were losing like you said earlier, they were losing the battle against gay rights. That was that was around the time queer I was coming out. That was when they were starting to get nervous that. Maybe they could not stop this particular like like forward slide, but yeah like on on the back cover of their. Robert, just something to say. No, I was just thinking back to that period of time when it it seemed positive progress in that regard seemed inevitable and unstoppable. Yeah that was that was that was nice. The note on Marshall language as used for this is really important here. Like, this is a a battle that is under fire. Like, that's yeah, that is something that was definitely employed to the fullest. All that point. I'm just going to read a little bit of the back cover of of marriage under fire. Here we go. In this succinct analysis of the issue, Doctor James Dobson presents a compelling case against the legalization of marriage between homosexuals and the dire ramifications our nation. Good face same sex marriage will destroy the fundamental principles of marriage, parenthood and gender. Families will be increasingly unstable as their definition expands to incorporate multiple moms or dads in in in quotation marks. Legalization of gay marriages will lead to polygamy and other alternatives to one man, one woman unions. The divorce rate will be higher, making our children less safe. Marriage under fire provides the foundations of a battle plan for the preservation of traditional values in our nation. Our response could not be clearer. The well-being of the family and thus our nation, hangs in the balance. Now it's time to speak out in Defense of Marriage and the American family. So yeah, it is particularly the battle plan. Right. You know, one thing I really loved during this time was the, like, libertarian Christian response to this kind of conversation where they're just like, or we could just, you know, not have marriage speech tied to the state at all, you know? Yeah, yeah, that was that was great. I do remember that this is the, like, this is the backup plan for like, OK, if like if marriage, you know, gay marriage goes forward, then we can just, like do that if we want to, you know, just like completely eliminate it. No absolutely yeah I I absolutely remember that that type of rhetoric even even yeah even around like 2013 when like the Supreme Court cases where we're going forward they were like really set on like this is like you know last resort we have to make sure that make sure that it like like like church marriage is just completely separate which even that that's still the case like in like a lot of places like churches are still in a lot of states like reserve the right to not marry people and you can only you can do it through the courts but not through the church. There's also this subtext in that that I think should be unpacked, which is that the multiple moms and dads kind of image that's given is not a signal of like the non traditional family being bad, but more of a there was this myth that was pushed really hard in the conversion therapy circuit that like if you didn't have a good father figure you were going to be gay. You were, you know, if you didn't have a good relationship with your mom. You're going to be gay, so, like having this as like. This these coded statements in there are giving the clue of like, we're trying to stop this cycle, we're trying to not create more gay kids. And that's why this is important. Yeah, I was reading a lot earlier today from the Heritage Foundation because I remember them being a key part of, yeah, they they are the other big part of this. It was so bad. And their whole thing was like, you have to have a mother and a father, otherwise everything is terrible. And then you get gay kids. And that also lies like goes into the whole other theory that was like, well, which I think. Robertson either made-up or repeated it was like, well, people who are gay were abused as children. Yeah, that is, that is definitely. And then of course, all these all these evangelicals are also all, like, beating their kids. So were you abusing your child because they're gay or because you make mean I was and I am but I don't think circle related. Yeah exactly. They're related in the sense that you being gay is is the is is the one of the triggers for the parents but it's not the the calls are relationship runs the opposite direction. Right. Exactly. Anyway, we are going to take a break and hear from all of our lovely sponsors who. Don't support child abuse probably. Well, I mean, unless it's, unless it's. Which, which does you know, does run that island off the coast of Indonesia where you can hunt children for sport. But we prefer not to see that as I don't think more to see it as Robert, I think you have to bleep that. No, it's not Garrison. We're not gonna bleep an ad. That's what sponsors this show is child Hunting Island, which you cannot say that is designed to do every week. More gay kids. It's designed to make happier billionaires Eve. OK, yeah, there's nothing. There's nothing Elon Musk gloves more than hunting children on his out of private island reserve off the coast of Indonesia. And and like Elon Musk, you 2 can hunt children if you buy anyway, here's here's the hats. Yes, we are. We are back. And now we're gonna we're gonna move on to probably the most unfun portion of the show today. FRC, The Family Research Council. I'm going to actually talk about like, what they are and what they did and how they're kind of important in the evolution of. Rhetoric and various other stuff. So yeah, Family Research Council emerged from a 1980 a White House conference on families that James Dobson kind of Co led with the President of the United States. So that's fun. Yeah. So he he met and prayed with a group of like 8 Christian leaders at a Washington DC hotel, ultimately leading to the creation of the Family Research Council under the direction of a Gerald Regener. And that's how that's how I'm going to say it. That's going to say his name because he doesn't deserve. Respect. So I'm not going to Google it. And it it it, it became a division of focus on the family in like the late 80s under Gary Boyer. And the reason there's a bunch of like complicated like tax stuff because focus on the family can't get too political because then it'll like sacrifice their tax, tax exempt status. So there's a whole bunch of like really shady stuff happening in between Family Research Council and focus on the family proper in terms of not doing any lobbying. Yeah, in terms of like who runs what? And like what crossover there is like the leadership, they're basically the same organization, but they are like legally separate and kind of have different, like operating strategies. But they they really are like, to be fair, lots of orgs do this. This is not unusual. No, it's not unusual. But like it's important to like, they basically are like, they're they're very like, like, they are like like sibling organizations. So yeah, this is a, this is the Gary Boyer, the guy who took over in the late 80s was also the. As the Under Secretary of Education and the domestic policy adviser to President Reagan, so again, all already like fully, fully tied into like the Republican machine. So Boyer brought in several anti LGBT researchers who pumped out like defamatory material about queer people. Robert Knight was a longtime Conservative writer and journalist and the kind of major propagandist against LGBTQ rights. He served as the FRC's Director of Cultural Affairs in the 90s up into the early 2000s. While working there, he wrote, along with some focus on the family editors in 1999, a booklet called the The Homosexual Behavior and Pedophilia. This is a very, very, very common thread, and all their stuff is that. Gay people were abused as kids, and gay people therefore are like wired to also abuse kids. Like it's part of this, like cycle that they like Co opted a whole bunch of research on it, that they misrepresented that all of the researchers who did the actual stuff was like, no, you're totally wrong. Go right here. Yeah, it's it's there's there's I I talked to, I talked with this a little bit in a more in depth in the focus in the family episodes for for ******** in terms of like the actual like research they used. But yeah it is. And the 111 of the remarkable claims inside the 1999 booklet was was the assertion that quote, one of the primary goals of the homosexual rights movement is to abolish all age of consent laws and to eventually recognize pedophiles as the prophets of a new sexual order. So. That's that's great that as profits ITS. What prophets PHETH? This is just libertarianism the place. Yeah, basically, yes. Yes, the. For some reason you cannot find this pamphlet on the FCC website today. I wonder why. Shocked? Yeah. So boy left the group in 1999. Umm. And then AFRC had two presidents and and one emerge and one of the most one of them kind of resulted in becoming the most powerful religious right lobbying group in the country with tons of tons of policy researchers and writers and a lot of a lot of like e-mail, like e-mail lists and like physical mailing lists was a big part of their political organizing. You know, Eve and Karen, we have talked before about the effective power of the rights mailing lists in terms of getting political change. Yeah, Kenneth Connors was a Florida attorney and a leader in the pro-life movement. He served as president in the early 2000s during his kind of tenure. FRC's agenda focused mostly on abortion and then also a traditional marriage of other stuff was like religious liberty, which means Christian supremacy, not actual religious liberty. And then like a like protecting parents rights, right, protecting like parental choice, which we'll we'll talk. We'll talk more about the future, like how do they define traditional marriages? This involving like dowries and land transfers and treaties. I I believe they just. I believe they want one man and then one woman, and the woman doesn't really need to actually want it, but as long as the man wants it, then it's fine. I think that's like the Catholics where they believe it has to be for the purposes of procreation. I mean they're they're part of the mainstream evangelicals like there's definitely there's like the courtship idea. So yeah, like they are, they are, they are for that, but it's. I know it's, it is. It's. It's a very like, patriarchal thing. And it depends playing dumb here, but like, because these are, these are like important distinctions that need, it depends on congregation to congregation, right. Like, like the kind of the stuff that I grew up with wasn't super focused on tons of on having tons of kids, actually. In fact, they kind of prefer just keeping it capped off at two kids because you know, the more kids you had, the less loyal you were to the church because you had to focus more on your kids actually. So it it it does, it does. It does really depend on congregation to congregation. Think Family Research Council tried to keep themselves open to lots of interpretations. So lots of people like gum onto their stuff so they didn't get super specific around like the role of child rearing and that kind of thing. It's important to note around the this time or little before it was when Pope John Paul's theology of the body was coming out, which is this home that's basically getting into like why, you know, the death penalty would be bad and why abortion is bad and all this like sanctity of the body and the body. Existing and then like the sanctity of sex As for the purposes of appropriation, the pleasure that was the things that are like in the in the atmosphere at this time that was definitely a key point is that sex is just for making kids like that is definitely like a big a big part of it. Which like they don't actually really believe but they say right because like if if you look at all of like the all of the extra like the people like all like these leaders like are not like faithful to their wives. The fact that kids are the point, no, yeah, but I think it is like, it is interesting, like the amount of stuff that's like parental choice, like parent rights, which will come up over the course of the next episodes of the series. I'm, I'm, I'm right now at writing episodes about the current, like a book bannings going across the country, and a lot of that is tied to like, Cydia, like parents rights over their children, like they decide what their children gets to read. So this is it's all anything about that. I've never heard of that before in my life. That's definitely not. Also tied up with a bunch of the stuff happening in Florida right now. It's definitely not the same thing. Definitely not related to Mike Farris at all. Yeah. No, yeah, I mean really like, yeah, I mean this is sort of what we're getting at is that the, the, the, the modern anti trend stuff is they're just playing all of the sort of greatest hits of the NDA stuff like bathroom stands and the CRT stuff. Yeah, it's. All is, I don't worry, I'm. I'm planning to tie this up in a nice in a nice little bow. Sorry for jumping in. We're getting ahead of you. Just give me like 15 minutes and I'll do it. So, yeah, up next we're talking starting to 2003. They changed leaders again and this is where they really kind of evolved into their current form with a Tony Perkins who became president. Oh yeah, that guy of the Family Research Council to us and reading prior. Prior to that, he served two terms as a Louisiana State representative in the 90s and even even even when he was president of the Family Research Council, he served 2 two years as State representative. He's also a former police officer. And a television news reporter. So overall just sounds like, oh, quite quite the dude. Yeah, he he he authored a whole bunch of, you know, like all these guys writing tons of like, Christian books that get published by like, Weird Christian publishers. He also served as the senior pastor of a of a church in Maryland called the Hope Christian Church. He and he was he was a leader of an effort by white and black religious right preachers to work together against LGBT equality specifically, like in like the East Coast and the South. That's where there's like cross organizing between like, historically black churches. Of course, not all of them, but like Perkins really tried to like, reach out on that front to get like that coalition going, which was kind of unique at the time. So yeah, a big part of FRC strategy is to pound home the false claim that queer people are more likely to sexually abuse children then heterosexual people. This is a yeah, this is not not scientifically true. You can look up like stats and you can look up. You can look up like a American psychology association. There's a lot of research on this topic because it was such a big point in the early 2000s that people had to, like, talk about it. Yeah, so we get all this, like, one of these things that, like, was a myth. You know, ambiently as a scare tactic and a slippery slope fallacy, but I think there's also it has its roots in a particular misunderstanding of Romans 2, which is the passage that most people point to as their anti-gay rhetoric. And the the context of that is like most like centrist and liberal like. Biblical scholars will agree that that passage was more about the pedophilia that was happening in the Roman Empire and. Speaking out against that. And and not specifically against like. Consulting adults even, even, yeah, even like the old, even even in the Old Testament to a lot of new people going into like the actual translations of stuff and like, even like Leviticus, it is definitely pointing towards it being about specifically like fathers not abusing their like, like, you know, like prepubescent like sons who are like more like androgynous, like it is specifically targeting like this type of idea. It's not, it's not against like gay men. Who are like adults? Yeah, there's, there's this theological conversation on the right that was happening that kind of was like trying to account for that historical context and was like, it's both. Clearly, it's both because we go together. Right. And obviously, like, we have to find a way to justify demonizing gay people in order to protect the sanctity of marriage. So we have to, like, Save the Children in multiple Save the Children. Yeah. So yeah. But Perkins has continued to defend the kind of game and his pedophiles idea. He had a, he had a televised debate on MSNBC in two in 2010 about this. So, like, yeah, that's, I mean that is like 12 years ago at this point. But still, 2010 feels much more recent than stuff, you know, talking about like the late 90s. Of yeah debating with the Southern Poverty Law Center like on the issue of Gabriel. Remember that now? Yeah yeah so some other anti LGBT kind of propagandists at at FRC includes Peter Sprague who joined in 2001. He authored the brochure called Top ten myths about Homosexuality, which was a pretty popular around the time. Such claims inside the book include that like ex gay therapy or conversion therapy works, sexual orientation can be change. A LGBT LGBTQ people are mentally ill because being LGBTQ makes you ill, and that the sexual abuse of boys by adult men is more common than consensual sex between adult men, which is not obviously that's true. That is quite I have questions. That is quite so many questions. That is quite quite the stat. And like spring sources are a mixture of like junk science issued by groups that support conversion therapy and also legitimate science quoted out of context or cherry picked which is a long used tactic by anti-gay kind of groups to bolster their their to bolster like their claims and their general like rhetoric. Right if if if you mix in like a hint of truth it can make all of your outrageous stuff seem more like legible. We knew that from the screw tape letters. Yeah, no. Like one of them. Sorry, would have. What if what if it's better books? I actually enjoyed the screw tape letters. I think it's pretty ******* funny. It's good. But also, like just so like an Easter egg for those who know what we're talking about. Like he was extremely *****. Carry on. Anyway, one of the main researchers they kind of misused research for was Jude Stacy, who was like since issued lots of public statements condemning the condemning what? You know, Family Research Council advocates for and has endlessly requested that anti-gay groups to stop misrepresenting her work. Yeah, so. We're going to jump forward to 2008 because this is, this is, of course, the election of Obama has really kind of frightened a lot of people. This is when Dobson sent out that letter detailing, like, what a post Obama future could be in which he included gay marriage as a part of, like the the dystopian nightmare he was imagining. This is the future that gay people want. Yeah, and interesting. It's just an interesting thing on spring here. He was a he was. He was on MSNBC again, which, I mean, maybe we should stop, maybe we should stop inviting these people on to news channels. But anyway, spring responding works, Spring responded to a question about allowing non Americans, same-sex partners of American citizens, to immigrate into the states by saying I would prefer that we export homosexuals from the United States rather than import them, and saying I think there would be a place for criminal sanctions on homosexual behavior and then when asked, so should we outlaw gay behavior? Spring said yes. So yeah. It's it's like, it's a very much a clear kind of mask off thing. It's they they just don't they just don't want it around at all. And it's an idea I'm going to tie this kind of more towards towards the end of the series with the trans stuff. It's like the idea of queerness has like a contagion. These people having to like the brutality is justified in their own heads because they it's like this idea that queerness can spread and it can infect children. So you have to, you have to contain it, and any action taken against it is justified because it's like you're containing a virus and it's like, this is really what kind of makes them. Feel so justified and righteous in every action they do so. Yeah, including out including outlawing gay, gay people and could have, you know, exporting them from the United States, you know, of a blatantly fascist idea. So yeah. FRC also worked unsuccessfully to continue the don't Ask, Don't Tell Policy. This was up until like 2010, so that was that was a bit definitely another thing that they tried to focus on, but the the slide, you know, the progressive side actually was happening around that time. As you know Syrian discovery installed something interesting about that. Yeah, earlier today, yeah. Ohh yeah. So I was again looking at Heritage Foundation because that was the Heritage Foundation was like my big kind of go to when I was growing up in the 90s and 2000s and doing speech and debate and apologetics camp and all that ****. And I was like, well, what was their take on don't ask, don't tell and they in the early 90s. We're very, very against it. Yeah. In 93 they had like this paper published and they were very against it because they were like, well. Then you won't. Then you'll still have gay people in the military. Absolutely in the military. They're like they will. There will be like, it'll be bad for the unit cohesion. There will be sexual abuse as if that wasn't already happening. There will be like all of these terrible things happening in the military that. Couldn't possibly happen, couldn't possibly be happening. Otherwise it will, like, weaken combat effectiveness is the line that Family Research Council used. Yeah. Yeah. So there was definitely a shift in, like the 90s where a lot of these evangelical groups were against don't ask, don't tell because, yeah, it still allowed gay people and just they didn't say anything. But then as they saw progress happening, they're like, OK, this is better than nothing like this. This is better than them being openly gay. So they kind of switched gears towards late 2010. Which is, you know, they're just like grasping at anything they can. I think it's time for another break and then we will kind of finish this off with some other. Not fun information, but yeah, let's let's let's do, let's let's do let's let's do an ad. Let's let's see, let's see what our our lovely sponsors at. Test to say well. His big thing is trying to get volunteers together to raid child hunting island off the coast of Indonesia. Like a counter raid. Yeah. Yeah, you can, you can volunteer to go fight in Ukraine or you can volunteer to help take down child hunting island. So that can run it. You know, it would be fun to have all of, like the food delivery services have their own like, private militias that take. That's the world we're moving towards Garrison. I mean, the post office already does. So what exactly? Why not the companies? Yeah, yeah. Arm everybody. Everything should be a military. That's the whatever podcast this is. Karen solution here. And we're back and we are still talking about my favorite topic, which is the Family Research Council. During the 2012 election cycle, they donated about 200 and $208,000 to 80 federal Republican candidates, saying that they're using the money to to strategically be used to support Pro family candidates and pro family issues and elections and ballot incentives across the country. Yeah. So this is just, you know, in terms of, you know, keep, keep the keep, keep the Pro, Pro family angle in mind. You know this is that they they they continuously were always donating money to us and 12 was the highest one on on record and I think I I don't think they've even matched that since then. It was it was pretty high because that was that was Obama's second term. So they were definitely like trying to really, really organize, right because this is this is like right before 2013 when the Supreme Court was going to be ruling on gay marriage as well. So of course which didn't get finalized till 2015, but they were starting to hear cases. We're going to it's going to kind of briefly go back to to. To James Dobson here, just as reference to people are if people do not listen to the behind the ******** once. He's an evangelical Christian author and the self-proclaimed psychologist who you know if you if you don't know who James Dobson is, please preserve your innocence and just quit. Like just go enjoy it. Don't know. Log off now forever. Log off now. Just don't know. Love the idea of a self-proclaimed psychologist. That's that's that's the energy I want to bring up. 2022 child psychologist. Yeah, just like I know what kids need. They need to be on hunting island, you know? And and this guy doesn't even believe in like, child develop. Like, no, he doesn't. He doesn't want child development. But also, you do know that I'm getting a PhD in parapsychology, right? I know, Garrison. We're paying for it. Yes, this podcast is going to have the highest rate of doctors. Of any podcast on the Internet other than the one that our friend David does anyway, I I will be happy to to be invited back onto Campus podcast as a doctor in Paris Psychology, I think I'll be able to offer some really unique insights. OK, any anyway. Dobson founded focus of family in 1977, which is unfortunate because he could have just watched Star Wars, but instead he didn't. He doesn't. He hates fun. We knew he hates fun. That is. That is a key part of his ideology. Yeah, yeah, he was. He's, he's a founding, he's a founding member of several LGBT hate groups. Family Research Council are being one of them also a lot. He is a founder of Alliance defending Freedom. So yeah, he he got, he got, he got two under his belt. The the organization, which is now based in Arizona, became a very powerful kind of fundraising behemoth dedicated to fighting so-called marriage, like marriage equality for for queer people and trans inclusive nondiscrimination protections. And with a big part of the thing that they were fighting for was enshrining a quote, right to discriminate against LGBTQ people in state law, which is, you know, all the stuff around. Like, you know, what if a Baker is forced to bake a cake for, you know, all of this nonsense is what is what. That's an obvious case, yes. So that that that is so like that that that is that that is Dobson he he started that kind of thing. Yeah. So I'm going to, I'm going to now have a little fun though because we're gonna jump ahead a little bit just to kind of get the rhetoric kind of nailed down on what, on what kind of house that we're going to start shifting towards the trans stuff at this point. But 2015 after, after the Supreme Court ruling for nationwide kind of marriage equality, Dobson has had this had this beautiful, beautiful quote. I had this black cloud over me on June 26th when that decision was handed down, and I was contemplating this foreboding, this black cloud and hit me like a ton of bricks. The decision was not really about gay marriage. It's not. It's about everything else. It's about the entire culture war. It's about it's about control of the public schools and it's about what's happening in universities. It's about the economy and it's about what businesses and it's about the military and it's about medicine. It's about everything. We lost the entire culture war without one decision. The gay marriage thing was just a part of it, but it's going to touch every dimension. So this is what we like to call foreshadowing. I wish that was true. But in terms of, yes, in terms of kind of how this gets expanded to like businesses, schools, universities, medicine, I just love the historyonics that they start kind of focusing on in terms of like, well, we lost this culture war. I guess we got to move on to the next one, which is, you know, the even more freakish thing, which is oh, kids wanting to kids realizing that maybe they have a different view on gender. So that's the next kind of like rotating target that that that they that they move, move. Awards. So, yeah, yeah. Earlier that year, Dobson late laid bare his his fundamental confusion on what it means to be LGBT. He claimed on his radio show that being bisexual meant that you have ****** which I mean not. Well, OK, so we wish. Yeah, yes, I want to live in that world. Complicated. Yes, he also blamed in 2012. He also blamed the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre on queer people because forgot about that our nation. The nation turned, turned their back on God like it allowed. It allowed judgments to fall on us. Which is why I said this happened. That's one of the interesting splits in the right between the people who think it's fake and people who thought it was peoples fault. Yes, yeah, it's because of the. They've all come back together now. But it was it was a real it was a real split and one of one of the other great things about Dobson is so after my behind the ******** episodes on Dobson like literally like the day after it dropped I found this extra little disturbing nugget of info about him in a in an old blog post titled Is My Child becoming Homosexual? A Dobson recommends a Dobson recommends things that a father can do to help his child fix homosexual symptoms fix sorry including. Taking your child into the shower with you to compare penises. It was, yeah, yeah, it is not good. I will. I will quote from. I will quote from the blog. The the boy's father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son's maleness. He can play rough and tumble games with his son in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help us on learn how to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square foot in peg into a square hole in the fake. He could even take his son into the shower with him, where a boy could not help. Notice that dad has a penis just like his holy. Let me figure. Oh my God. You know what this reminds me of? So that is a quote by Doctor Tibbs. Dubson symbologist. Wow. Oh my God. Anyway, I'm sure there's nothing, nothing, nothing at all to just. Hey, Jimmy dabbs. How's your son? How's he doing? Yeah, that's good. How are you talking? Nothing at all to kind of interrogate there. Yeah. The other thing that I really love, and by love, I mean don't love, is that, like, the only gay people who exist. Are gay boys. Yeah. They really means and by people don't exist at all. Like, it's yeah, this is a really interesting thing. It's because it's about why would a. It's about. If it happens to a woman, it's like, ohh well, they're a woman anyway. They're already not as good as men. I guess it kind of makes sense that they would do that. If it happens to a guy you're like, well then obviously like, why would you do that? You're part of the patriarchy. Why would you? Like, you're supposed to exert power over women. What is wrong with you for not wanting that? Like, there's a whole bunch of other, like patriarchal stuff going on and like, why they focused on that? Also because they undeniably find lesbians attractive. Like they can't like, they can't help but find it. Thought so they definitely focus it more on gay men because they find that more gross because it is like a defiance of patriarchy into like a different way you but stuff. Yeah. And of course about stuff, yeah. And I think also this is the same reason why transmisogyny becomes such a huge sort of driver of the anti trans movement because you know, I mean you see this a lot also with you see with non Christian like transphobes too, but like the the the the the the ultimate sin you can commit. If if if you were, if you are a person, that is or if if like yeah, the ultimate said you can commit against sort of the family is. Having someone who like being born and being seen as a man and then, you know, becoming a woman, a woman and that's like that's, you know that that's that's transmisogyny is right. It's it's about, it's it's the specific kind of transsexual transsexualism that you get when you do that when you specifically like, you know, in in these people's eyes it's like you give up being a man and become a woman and these, they go ballistic over this because it's, you know, like it's it's it's it's it's a rejection of patriarchal power. And then, you know and they they have they have to do all of this sort of like. Incredible pathologizing to explain why this would happen and ignore just like this person was always a woman, that's. You know, the real and also you're it's like it's it's a condemnation of your misogyny and your misogynistic behavior to, like, go join. You know the the victims of our hate. So like. It has all of these, these layers here. Yeah and it's gonna, we're gonna get like right, right, right into trans stuff now because yeah and in 2015 Supreme Court ruling making same sex marriage legal throughout the United States which are sent LGBT anti LGBT can have hate groups into a furious reaction. A family Family Research Council was no exception and it started working in tandem with other groups to support so-called kind of religious liberty you know laws which allowed people who object to same sex to same-sex like couples. And just, you know, Queen, it's a general to to deny goods and services to same sex couples and just, you know, queer people in general. It is, it is very, like nonspecific. So, yeah. Well, also in 2015, Family Research Council faced its own set of scandals, referring to a friend of the pod, Josh Duggar. Who was executive who was executive director of the Family Research Council action political arm of the organization was obviously revealed that he had molested several save the babies to your hard drive several children. And yeah, I had a lot of had a lot of children on his hard drives so much that like even like the FBI was kind of surprised at how much she had. Like when when when the FBI is surprised on how much child **** you have, you're like quite. The FBI. Yeah, you are. You are clean when you surprise them. Have you? Have you read his his appeal? I have not have not participated. It's basically making it out to be like there was this other guy who had access to that computer. What's his name? Josh Tucker. Able to win? No. It's just like you. Just like you. Just like somebody else probably did it. It wasn't me. Yeah, so he resigned from Family Research Council after posting a brief message on his website saying that he resigned after waiting on concerning events were made public. I think he resigned from Family Research Council because of the Ashley Madison. Yes, well, yeah, he resigned. Listing listed listing concerning events as the recent he's still start to. Ashley Madison accounts got hacked and leaked, and it was revealed that he had his e-mail was also on there. Yes, yeah, yeah, I I feel like that's what, like kicked it off, but that was around the time that was he didn't get. Yeah. His sister's case got released to the press. It is. It is frustrating how? Yeah, definitely. The Ashley Madison thing was seen as more of a moral failing than molesting children and having tons of child **** that was definitely like within like the church and within within the kind of the whole like like church, like network. If they actually, Madison thing was seen as much more of a kind of like a egregious sin. Well, because that's infidelity and that's just like that destroys the entire, you know, nuclear family, whereas molesting your siblings is. Just. Boys doing boys stuff. See, I I grew up a boy and I never I never did that. I kind of. I'm not sure whether they never did that either. So anyway, back to any real boys right in and let us know. You know this. back-to-back to Perkins. So Perkins was elected head chair of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom in 2019 to 2020, which was a an independent, bipartisan federal government entity established by U.S. Congress to monitor, analyze and report on threats to religious freedom. So who sponsored that ******* bill? That's a good question. Over the course of this time, he he continued to work at the Family Research Council as well, including the annual Family Research Council sponsored Values Voter Summit in 2019. I've been to those which featured President Trump as a speaker as well as Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. So yeah, this was the the first time a sitting Health and Human Services Secretary was addressed like gave an address at at the gathering at so at the 2019. CVS the Values Voter summit. They featured an anti trans panel that illustrated the anti LGBTQ rights shift to kind of a storytelling as a way to further marginalized trans peoples and like the battle against JK Rowling getting invited to CPAC next year. Oh God the the panel hosted like a multiple kind of anti trans activists. Lynn Mager was there. Two of makers children identify as trans and they no longer speak to her. Andre van Moll, the the Co chairman anti LGBT hate group of the American College of Pediatricians Committee on Adolescent Sexuality used to use like pseudo scientific claims telling the audience that yeah that that that dissidents from gender dysphoria is the norm calling they they used this weird problematic study that left like that left trans kids together with non trans kids studying this idea of gender identity. It's a whole bunch of like the same like you know how like they like early 2000s they were they were misusing like. This research to say like, oh, look how all of these gay people are all also all pedophiles. Also, they have sex with kids more often than adults. Like what? No, it's it's the same. It's just it's the same type of thing. They also feed me the false claim that the majority of trans kids are also like a diagnosed with autism, which makes it easier for them to be recruited into being transgender because they can be tricked because they're autistic so you can collect them all. This is like the the they then diagram of autism caused by vaccines is causing trans kids. Oh God. Also also the idea that, like trans, affirming care causes more dysphoria, which causes more suicide, as opposed to the scientific reasoning that affirming care causes less dysphoria, which causes less suicide. You know, a whole bunch of a whole bunch of nonsense stuff. The panel also features. You can't expect a group that will not acknowledge the fact that having access to birth control as a way to prevent abortions would acknowledge any of this is real either. Yeah, no, I mean, yeah. The panel also featured a Kathy Grace Duncan from a from the Portland, OR based Portland to Fellowship, which states that it was offers a freedom to people from homosexuality. Duncan claims that she did transitioned and is proof that transitioning is always wrong because that she detransition that means it's proof for everybody that everyone should because trans people are a monolith. More about we're gonna be talking more about. The sort of how how people who do transition get weaponized against trans people. And and and I also, I also need to point out like just immediately that like most people who do transition detransition because they are under immense social pressure too, because society is enormously transphobic. And then there are a small number of people who do who do treat detransition because it's not for them and good for them. But yeah, they get a very, very small minority of those people basically get used, but you know, by people who don't care about them. Other people get gender affirming surgeries and change their minds. A bit later there's this whole movement of, you know, women who are getting their breast implants removed. What's the difference? It's the same picture. Yeah, same picture. Picture. Another really fun. Another fun thing I do at least once a year is I go on to the focus on the family and Family Research Council websites and look at that. Look at, look at their entire like queer section. That's really interesting. Like, like Pre 2015, all of them around like gay people. Like is is my kid gay? What to do, what to do with my kids? Gay is my is my kid showing gay symptoms, like all stuff. And then post 2015, it's all like the gender issue, you know? They called the people trying to get your kid to become trans is my kid. Trans why is my kid dressing up in girls clothes? It's like, it's, it's such a it's such an immediate shift. But, you know, if your kid is taxing, trench it. All of this homosexual, like, fear stuff to immediately being scared about, like the agender identity kind of movement and like the cult of transgenderism. Yeah, it is. It is. It is such a stark, stark change. Heritage Foundation website is the same I looked up when they added their gender page and it was in 2017. When they started going after trans things, that the only thing was like, Oh well, it's actually OK that there's a pay gap between men and women. And in 2017, they were like trans. From 2015 to 2018, you see a massive explosion in all of these, in all of these, like, stuff about trans and like, trans science, whether it be like the, whether it be like the answers in Genesis, whether it be focused on the family, whether it be because of the Heritage Foundation, all of this stuff you can watch watching the immediate shift in the type of stuff that they they start talking about. I will just say I am a little glad they're doing that. Not for the reasons you think, but because this means that they're their kids growing up like we grew up who know that this is an option now, whereas like that is true, we didn't know that it was an option until we got out. Yeah, is it's. That's true, yeah. But you you can see the kind of the switch and stuff there's a in the in a Family Research Council pamphlet written by Peter Sprague called how to respond to the LGBTQ movement, published in 2018, says people with gender dysphoria or transgender identities are more likely than the general population to engage in high risk behaviors, which may contribute to psychological disorders or both. High rates of suicide exist among those who have already received gender reassignment surgery, which exists suicidal tendencies resulted in an underlying. Anthology. Wait, did the same people write the script of euphoria? But yeah, whole bunch of stuff around like Tom Perkins, Peter Sprigg, you if you just look at all of this stuff it's this is such a such an explosion to Tony Perkins wrote a pamphlet called I Have a Girl Brain, but a boy body for a for a for a Virginia kindergarteners like a transgender story thing that he was doing around 2019, saying for years LGBTQ activists wanted to keep the goal. Of luring children into sexual confusion under wraps. But now that they've hoodwinked a lot of the country on their agenda, these extremists no longer have to hide. In fact, they're increasingly bold and even boastful about their real intentions of recruiting kids. So in terms of like, yeah, it's it's it is in it, it is an infection. It's a contagion that they're trying to, like, infect a recruit children. And again, all of that kind of rhetoric is in a. Post like in in a in like a in a pamphlet a call you know about about trans being about being trans saying I have a girl brain. But in about body it's like the fact that they this artwork is happening is going to is going to convince kids that they fall prey to it. Like it's this whole this whole thing that is such a such a marked kind of change you can read. You know the other titles include stuff like the regressive cult of transgenderism all this kind of stuff talking about our country understands that Scientology is a cult but we don't seem to understand is how the much. How much the transient, how much the transgender movement mirrors cults like Scientology. It's it's all, it's all of the same. It's all of the same stuff. And if the transgender cult is a cult is the best cult I've been in yet rates like I I feel like we need to leave anytime. Podcast. Nobody will give me ****. I uh, weekly injections whenever I want to, and you won't lose your friends. Amazing. No, I will not. So anyway, that was putting to saucer or not at any point. That's kind of the bulk of the stuff I had gathered around, specifically talking about kind of family, Family Research Council and how, you know, the change happened around 20182020172016 from all of the stuff around, you know, protecting marriage equality, protecting, you know, the sanctity of marriage to changing. It's like it's the same Save the Children rhetoric, but now shifted over to gender issues. I mean, they're just moving the Overton window because they can't win on the gay issue anymore. So they've just gotta, like keep pushing in that direction. But it's the same organizing forces. It's the same organizations, it's the same mailing lists, it's the same pamphlets, it's the same writers, right. It's all the people who wrote the all the same stuff, just moving it over to trans things. So, yeah, I just wanted to kind of lay this groundwork for us when we, when we talk about kind of the ongoing legislative fight against trans people in these next few episodes. I just wanted to kind of lay this out for an example of talking about. Yeah, it is really just, you know, there was all these fears around, you know, gay people in the change rooms, gay people in the bathrooms just gets shifted over to trans people and change rooms. Those people in the bathrooms, it's just this. It's just moving. It's just this, like this turning of the clock that just shifts it over to the transgender o'clock tie. I don't, I don't know where I was going with that metaphor, but it's easier to like to pull it. Parental rights stuff is on the rise in the in this community as a talking point, and so it's easier to pull that in with trans issues than it is with gay issues. Yes, well, I think that we are running out of time, but even Karen, where can people find you online? Our podcast is the kitchen tip Colts. You can find it at kitchen table cult.com. Our handle on Twitter is kitchen cult pod. I'm at blue put boy on Twitter and I'm at EVE under score Ettinger. I would also recommend, like if you want to have a like, you know, trans authors take on detransition the novel detransition baby is out there. It exists. It is again one person's take. It's not a monolithic. Thing, but it's a it's a good novel. And then, if you want to learn more about the effects of the deconversion therapy universe, Gary Conley's book Boy erased his ******* great. I just want to thank you both for coming on to talk about again one of one of the most fun topics our favorite people near and dear to near and dear to all of our hearts. With yeah, featuring friends, friends of the pod, James Dobson and his urge to take his kids in the shower with them to compare penises, and our good friend Josh Duggar. Maybe to your hard drive, save, Save the Children. Not like that. Not like, yeah, alright, that's that's the episode. Welcome to Aidan here, a podcast about the war against trans people. I'm your host, Christopher Wong. In February, a camp of indigenous and ecological protesters attempting to stop the Thacker past lithium mine in Nevada was thrown into chaos over an unexpected issue transphobia 2 of the camp activists, including a man who had volunteered to act as an attorney for the group, revealed to be members of another organization called Deep Green Resistance, or Degr. Nominally, deep green resistance is an ecological organization dedicated to destroying industrial society to preserve the environment through promoting the destruction of dams and other infrastructure. Deep green resistance found little success on this front, but they have been much more successful in spreading the other core of their ideology, militant, ruthless and fanatical transphobia. When the indigenous protesters at Thacker Pass discovered the Two's membership in DGR and their result in transphobia, they were furious. Falk, the TGR lawyer who had offered to represent the protesters, was kicked off the case, and the presence of the two DGR members was used by Lithium America as a weapon against the protesters. This is a familiar cycle for deep green resistance. Soon after its founding in 2011, the group fully embraced radical feminism, staking out a position in old debate inside the feminist group in raging since the 1970s over whether trans women are, in fact, women. These feminists, I use the term loosely here, became known as trans exclusionary radical feminists, or turfs through heroes, where people like Janice Raymond, author of the vehemently transphobic screed the Transsexual Empire. Raymond, whose baleful influence will return to next episode, was largely ran out of the mainstream American feminist movement. With the rest of her turf companions, a similar fate would befall deep green resistance. Ecological activists and groups like Earth First, Greenpeace, the Iowa, and the broader green anarchist movement, SIS and trans alike ran DGR out of the ecological left for the transphobia and waged an incredibly successful no platforming campaign against DGR's founders Derek Jensen and Leary Keith driven from the left so thoroughly they were reduced to slinking into protest camps in secret, only to be expelled upon discovery. Members of Deep Green resistance move right. And increasingly to other countries to seek an audience for the transphobic bile. Leroy Keith founded a turf organization called the Women's Liberation Front, or Wolf. More on them later. This brings us a terrific extraordinaire, Jennifer Billick. Bullet had been a member of Deep green resistance, in charge of booking appearances for Derrick Jensen. The success of the No platforming campaign waged by the left confessed her that trans people were secretly backed by a conspiracy of billionaires. This idea spread like wildfire across the UK and has will discuss next episode Mexico. To understand what happened in the UK, we spoke with Krista Peterson, a graduate student at USC who a significant personal cost confronted the rise and spread of transphobia in the English speaking world. Krista, welcome to the show and thank you for joining us. Hi. Thank you. I guess I wanted to start with. Jennifer Billick and talking a bit about how how she sort of moved into increasingly, increasingly transphobic territory and I guess. How she started moving into the sort of follow the money conspiracy theories that she's been peddling for the past several years now. So I can give you her narrative of this, which is that in 2013, I think she was supposed to be on a panel about think trans people. That was. Cancelled because of pushback and then because of that, she thought, what is the big force behind this and then got into it from there. She has really. I think, you know that deep green resistance was kind of into. Focusing on trans people for a while, but she really has gone from an environmental activist to someone who is just solely focused on trans people. It's basically all she is ever talking about, and she's kind of. She started as. Opposing this kind of existential threat that was real, which was ecological destruction to climate change and she has kind of maintained that tenor in the shift where now she's portraying this as an existential threat, but instead of climate change it's trans people. So the way she got into the money, she's just a very prolific kind of at home researcher and she kind of had this anti corporate mindset going in from her background. And she just, she produces a lot of research. There's not that many people in the gender critical movement who are really producing a lot of original content. And so when someone is, there's really, they can get a lot of uptake from that. Her made her first thing was actually a federalist article about who are the rich white men, institutionalizing transgender ideology and just by being a pretty big platform. I think that got some. Big initial distribution. I think that was how people initially started seeing her, kind of beyond the deep green resistance type. Audience yeah, that. I mean that's one of the things that that's been very interesting to me studying this is that you you see this a lot, you see a lot of people who. We're sort of run out of the left by the transphobia, like pivoting really hard right and then using right wing media platforms and using sort of also right wing political backing to start pushing this stuff and I think. Yeah, but Bill Bill's interesting example to me because. Yeah, she. Is he talked a bit about this more? I mean, she has this weird. OK, so she she has two weird angles, she has the weird transhumanism angle, and then she has. This, like, incredibly like, becomes like an increasingly anti-Semitic angle. Yeah so where she so she's following the money is the original thing. Where she follows the money to is trans rights are a conspiracy to usher in transhumanism. So her thing is she often says transgender is an ad campaign for transhumanism. So quote to get people comfortable with actual merging with machines slash AI. There must be a complete dissociation from biological reality. So you see this a lot with conspiracy theories I think. There you have this kind of like metaphorical goal, right where it's all about getting people to dissociate from their bodies. It's like not very clear what that looks like when an actual causal level. But that's that's the big goal, right? And they they need a big goal, it's there's kind of. This mysterious part of this supposed conspiracy that is trans rights, which is like, what is this for, right? They lots of people now are accepting that there is like this big dark money push behind it. Which raises the question, why? Why what, what is this doing? And the answers are kind of kooky, right? And so this one has caught on more than. I would have expected yeah if it was really weird. So like. They kind of walk into it slowly, right they? I've start off and it's. I think there's something weird with trans rights and they. Have. It's very common for them to think that their opponents don't really believe their beliefs that something is up, and for some reason all these people are supported trans rights when they know it's bad. That you need it. You need something to go with there to explain why. And this is a note of it fits with bilix worldview. You know, you can see how someone with her background would get here. It's kind of unusual for all these ladies from the UK now to believe that trans people are transhuman conspiracy, but they needed something to go there as the goal. They picked it up. Yeah, I guess. I guess we should get into. Mum's net a little bit because. Most of that's a really weird, like, specifically UK thing that I don't know if there's like, there's not really an American equivalent to it. Like, I guess it's like, it's like, it's like, what if you took the worst parts of Facebook and next door, I guess, yeah. Can you talk a little bit about like, what Mumsnet is and how this stuff sort of, sort of seeping into it? Yeah. So this is part of this bigger question, which is why in the UK has just taken off so much in the way it has. A big part of that story is bombs, that which is a website for moms to ask kind of parenting questions and it's really widely used, I think, especially amongst kind of like white, upper middle class educated. Population. A lot of people are on and it's kind of a trusted website for a lot of familial type things like advice about what to do when your kid has lice, things like that and moves that has become. Just like the main inflection point I think in the gender critical movement. OK. With why it happens more generally, you have to look at it as kind of part of this global resurgence in fascism around the same time period. It's like the mid 2010 S on. You know, like the most obvious instances of that have the kind of traditional fascist targets and ideals. But I think what's essential is this kind of logic that you really see in the gender critical movement also, which is you have this kind of background climate of anxiety and fear. Then you get this narrative that's minorities are rising up against you. You've lost something. Your identity used to give you a special status and now they're taking it from you and you have to fight back. And they've kind of switched out like what the big identity is, who the minorities are, what the special status is with this poor feminist thing. But it really does have that kind of. Internal logic in the same way. And I think you just had this kind of moment. Globally, where you had the kind of background emotional state that was ripe for fascism a lot of ways, and then this ideology was just infectious in that way. And that in bumps that it was able to catch and it really provided. Right, with this place where really grow into this kind of unusual? Demographic group. For a kind of fascist movement, yeah. I mean, I, I think there's, there's, there's an interesting, I think there's the other interesting thing to me about it is like, I don't know, I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of. Yeah, why? Why specifically the UK and why the US doesn't have this? And I mean, I mean, you know, I mean I guess 11 explanation for it partly is like. The US is so much more religious than the UK is, and a lot of these people sort of would have been evangelicals in. Like in the US, but. But yeah, I think. The the Mumsnet angles. Interesting to me in that it really seems like because there's so few people publishing anything that's even remotely tangible, like a very, very small number of actors were able to very quickly radicalize people. And and I think, I don't know. And I think it's interesting that like, like people like Jesse Singal, like I think wind up being much more influential in the UK than they are in the US, even though they're getting sort of. Published in in in these US publications because. There's sort of. I don't know. I guess there's there's this like hunger for it on mom's night like for for anything that sort of supports this worldview in a way that there's kind of wasn't in the US. I think part of why like why UK question. There's some part of it that's just kind of by chance moms not existed and was a place where it could really take off, but also to some extent like you were, I think. Kind of part of the relevant group in the US is, I think, a little more inoculated against this stuff. I mean that it doesn't really have the same initial appeal among women who. Would like to contribute construe themselves as feminists because many many Americans see anti trans stuff and immediately connect it to like the religious right. So it doesn't it you don't really get the initial. Way into it where? You know, you come across this thing presenting trans people as. Encroaching on your space and taking something from you. And for us, we see that and it's like, Oh yeah, bathroom bill laws really just have this a few years ago and it was this right wing religious thing. We know what this is. The UK has kind of had a more prominent turf activism for little while, and that Julie Bindel it's kind of long been a thing there, but it wasn't really catching in the same way it is now. Really caught? Yeah, I guess. I mean, one of the other things I was talking, I had an interesting conversation that sadly didn't wind up getting recorded. But I was talking with some Mexican feminists, like trans feminist, about this. And one of things they were saying was the way, like, talking about the way, like, intersectionality is a framework. And the fact that there is, there is an incredibly strong black feminist current in the US insulated like the the main line of of American feminism from this stuff in a way that didn't really happen in the UK because the like the the blasphemous movement there is just not as strong and not as sort of. Mainstream and that has this knock on effect I guess where like you get. You know, without an intersectionality framework, it's easier to have this sort of like totalizing, like identity of like the woman, as like a a thing that's just one object that you can like pin down to biological markers instead of having to sort of like look at all of the different actual, like relations that are going on. Yeah, so my read on. Them is that most of them are not really, we're not pre-existing feminists. They're not people who are very interested in women's rights and then kind of took this turn. My pressure is that there are largely people who really started identifying as feminists once that that could be a guys to kind of taking things out on trans people and I think I'll probably why it was able to get so big on moms net. So eventually the women's rights for about Mom's net which is just one of the sub boards. In addition to all the childcare stuff, I've just became almost all anti trans stuff and so that is partially. That this stuff was popular. But I also, I think that, you know, normal, mainstream feminist stuff wasn't as popular and they weren't getting a lot of engagement on normal, important feminist issues, and instead this was what their user base was really going for. It's really striking, I think, how? There's exceptions, but in general. The big gender critical people talk very, very little about all feminist issues. It's like, yeah, this is the thing they care about all this all the time. Yeah. That's definitely a pattern with turf. So it's like, yeah, once once once you're a turf, like this is the only thing you care about. Like, you don't, you don't do yeah. I mean, I guess like one of one of the. We'll talk more about this in the next episode, but one of the sort of big. Like flagship things in in. Like with the UK and Ireland was like a bunch of the turfs getting extremely mad at the at at these and at the at the pro like at the the the Pro abortion activists in. And Ireland, because they weren't being turfs. And so, you know, the turfs were like, no, no, no, we're gonna, like, try to sabotage this act, the actual feminist movement trying to get access to abortions because we're turfs and they're not. Yeah, they could be, really. If addictive against women, who they yeah, say are like selling out women's rights by focusing on anything other than. The tiny presented the population that is trans is V1 issue you're allowed to focus on. And if you say like no, please, please leave us alone. We're focusing on something else really. Do not take the pump. I guess everything I wanted to ask about was I think the thing that happened in the UK that only really started happening in the US like pretty recently. And even then was kind of like it was an event in like a way that I don't know how much it was in the UK is the extent to which like people like JK Rowling and like the the sort, the sort of mainstream of British famous people and and like British, British journalist and stuff like that like start started rallying around this. Of. Yeah, this is. It's been wild for me, seeing I like don't think super highly of the American media, but seeing how much worse the British media is really wild. They just have been publishing stuff. Things like the Times of London have been the worst, right, more conservative outlets, especially bad. But even, you know, like the Guardian has in some BBC and some of these things are just kind of like demonstrably false coverage of trans rights stuff. It just gives a lot of credence. To this transphobic movement, it's kind of this like. Near blackout of serious consideration of what trans people are experiencing and what their actual position on this stuff is, it's just really grim, I think. I think part of it is maybe that Mumsnet did have this reach to a lot of people who are like professionals, their audience is pretty professional, and it was this kind of trusted website where this got normalized a lot. The last thing I wanted to talk about before we go to break is do you want to talk about Kathleen stock and that whole thing a little bit? Yes, OK. Also we should talk about we should connect billeck too. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we should. We should do that first, yeah. That is, there was, you know, moms that started. I think the initial narrative was kind of. Trans people are being really unreasonable, they're really demanding, they're infringing on our status, and this is the thing that was more localized about. This group that was easy to cast as unreasonable and they were able to take kind of a victim stance relative to them and then it just kind of kept escalating, right, just kind of shifted to more and more of this kind of content and then eventually they're. Yeah, there really was a great appetite for this kind of anti trans content and. It just got increasingly conspiratorial, I think. So people at this point, I think almost everyone in the gender critical movement thinks that there's dark money behind trans rights. They think it's like some kind of astroturf movement for. Who knows what lots of them will say? The goal is like selling, you know, hormones and surgery to people. Like, yes, yeah, it's funding, you know, a global conspiracy. It's like pretty expensive. And it's like. The most plausible way to get an audience. For this kind of thing. But Jennifer Billick is. What a relatively few people doing this kind of deep research and so it's just kind of. The kind of thing they were looking for and they have. Pretty minimal ******** filters about what they're willing to see. It is just. Pretty rare that they. We'll see a source that seems to be on their side and be like, no, there's something wrong with us, and so she. Increasingly got fans and that a lot of people hear her stuff second hand. I think they're not directly reading her, but people are repeating her in so much of her stuff now is part of the just the background of this movement. Like there's this woman, Martine Rothblatt, who's a kind of like random rich woman who was she was involved in kind of early trans rights activism. And kind of moved on and got interested in transhumanism stuff instead. She's like kind of a strange lady and she is interested in trans humanism stuff and French and is not the architect of the Trans rights movement. But now you know, they just all think that this person has central role and when you see them talking about her, it is Jennifer Billy's influence and they just don't have. They're. They just don't have any defenses against. Kind of increasingly radicalized stuff and when I started. Kind of looking into Jennifer and I started seeing her get. You know when you see people talking about a conspiracy of people like George Soros, Jennifer Pritzker, Jewish. Rothblatt is also Jewish. There. There's a red flag and then conspiracy spaces. I just kind of tends to towards anti-Semitism if you're not on the lookout for it and if you're not defending against it. And Bill, it's not. And she has gotten increasingly into. Yeah, anti-Semitic side of things. Up to the point where she was boosting Keith Woods, who is just a Nazi, and his content that was largely inspired by her work. About the Jews behind the transgender movement and just taking kind of going from. Is it a non explicit antisemitic conspiracy theory where you have? This group of people who happened to be largely filled with Jewish people. Kind of orchestrating this global conspiracy. To explicitly naming the Jew and saying no, this is a Jewish movement. And yeah, and she just, like, followed it all the way. And there was some. They started making a big deal about this. You know, there was some pushback from the general critical movement. But largely. I think I'm like a bad faith actor, right? I'm the enemy and they're not going to take anything. I say really seriously. But also it was really struck by how some of them were arguing with me about this Keith Woods video that was, you know, about how this was a Jewish plot and why the Jewish religion would inspire you to do something like this. And there's no, this isn't anti-Semitic, there's nothing you, you know, it's just, it's very interesting. It's about Judaism because they already believed all the background stuff, right? They thought that there was, in fact, this conspiracy. That's populated by people who happen to be Jewish. And so then when you take the explicit step, it's they're like, well, yeah, there's a interesting question, right? Why are all these people Jewish? They're just going all the way. Best Yep. And yeah, just in general, the movement is like just really not have good defenses against this kind of stuff at all. And. Yeah, it's kind of conspiratorial stuff. Will take you there if you don't have defenses against it. It's just a very old road. That goes in exactly that direction and is ready for you if you start getting into this stuff and aren't watching out for it. Yeah. All right. So let's let's let's talk about Kathleen stock philosophies, horror child. Oh no. So I mean, not just Kathleen, but you have one of the things that is noteworthy. About the movement, I think is you have these this unusual prominence of academics, one of them being Kathleen stock, maybe the most prominent being Kathleen stock, but also like Rosa Freeman and Selena Todd, and you have this kind of academic face. Of it. And it's very interesting, I think, how that works and that these people. Are in generally not doing kind of substantive research on. Anything related to this instead? What I see is, you know, stuff starts out in the community. It's like on Mumsnet, it's on Twitter, and then the Kathleen stock picks it up, right? She is getting her stuff kind of from Mumsnet and stuff and then just legitimizing it, right? It's like, oh, this is what all these fancy professors think. And then centrally, their role is claiming that there are all these serious issues, you know, on the basis of their academic status and saying that. Trans people aren't willing to discuss that. You know, trans people are shutting down debate. They're being silenced, and it gives it this legitimacy that the movement, I think, really capitalizes on. Yeah which I think was stock in particular. You know they're part of what's happening is like the the the anti trans different kind of like moves between different conservative panics and so like the modern one they're on the Save the Children panic but when stock was sort of like getting big and. You can see this with the end of her career arc. She'll get you in a second. But she was big on the whole, sort of like, like conservative, callus cancel like college free speech, crisis, like, can't I guess sort of cancel culture also. But yeah, she was really big on the on the whole. Like, yeah, the Conservatives are being silenced or like, even services, like, I think she was kind of doing the like. Liberal, centrist thing. But but she was, yeah, she was doing all these censorship claims and then turning around and just actually censoring people. And it was. Yeah, I gave a talk at Sussex. Kelly sucks University that I believe she tried to. Have cancelled. Come on, it's just kind of interesting because I. Initially, this talk was kind of scheduled as a protest at the same time as one of her. Let's talk. She was going to give on a related topic and then she cancelled her talk. So I thought she might come to mine, right? Like for debate, like ask me questions. And I was like, OK, but of course she didn't. Right this instead. Seemingly tried to just get it shut down and but I think this is, yeah it's one kind of the cancel culture thing is kind of one element, but I think it's really central and a lot of their stuff that the, the kind of in the background of other stuff is like, you know, somehow. The consensus has been controlled and like it's the result of. Like the truth not being heard and people not considering all these important things that they need to consider are kind of from care for trans youth to, you know, trans women being able to use the bathroom. It's kind of across all this, they're running this narrative that. The truth has been silenced and you know. Trans people are being unreasonable and have shut it down. I think that is a pretty. Foundational the other, yeah, the overall narrative they've built. Yeah, and and it and you, you see this is like. This is one of the ways they try to. I guess rest the Bachelor of authority back from literally every actual Medical Group who all agree that you should actually let kids transition and you should let adults transition and that this is in fact good and like a a thing that medically is is like, I mean, like I said. Yeah. I mean, this is. Yeah, this is a huge deal, right? So, like, Kathleen Sock is a philosopher, right. And so she started off, her first thing was like, something is afoot in academic philosophy. You know, academic philosophers aren't debating whether trans women are women in the way that they should. And this idea that the debates being silenced in philosophy, you know, like doesn't have really important consequences. I think the idea that, like all mainstream research on trans healthcare. Like what is in the good, in the best interests of trans kids? Being able to delegitimize that is really serious. Yeah, right. That it just has these tremendous consequences, and I think they've been able to be pretty effective on that, too. Yeah and and that's been really scary in a lot of ways because you you see like the the arguments of these people pioneered and the sort of the techniques and the the the the groups that they're part of like wind up being core parts of of the anti trans push in both the UK and the US. And yeah, that's extremely scary. It's really scary. I mean, it's just. It's just awful, right? These are these are children and. For them to become the focus of this kind of hate movement is just horrifying. Just off on the. You know the history of healthcare for. General conforming kids is really grab and it's like they are just pushing to kind of go back there and. It's just ghastly. It's really horrifying to. See? Yeah. I guess, I think that's it. That's a good point. We can. OK, this is this would probably be the second outbreak, but yeah, you know what else is horrifying? Ads. And we're back. What one, one of the scariest parts I think of of what was happening in the UK was the extent to which. I mean, not just mainstream, uh, British media gets involved in this, but I mean literally the BBC, which is, which is the, you know, this, this is, this is the state media organization, right? Starts to. Just push. Unbelievably transphobic articles out as just regular contents, I think. I think probably the most famous one is. Yeah, and in October 2021, the BBC. Publishes this article. That's. Called were being pressured into sex by some trans women. That is just in. Just absolutely appalling. Display of of transphobia. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about? That and so the this article was framed around the question is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans woman? Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners and so the the overarching perspective in the piece that you get is that this is a significant problem among lesbians. They are experiencing sexual pressure from trans women. The. Reporting strategy that the reporter used was, you know, just soliciting. This one kind of particular narrative from lesbians who said that they had had. These kind of experiences with transwomen, the people who are quoted in the article who aren't anonymous, are gender critical people if they're like rose of Dawn, Debbie Hayden. And then there's these anonymous woman who we don't know who they are. But it's not. They didn't go and approach, you know, normal, like mainstream lesbian activists or lesbian organizations to see like, what they were experiencing the community, right. There's kind of no perspective just from any kind of. Mainstream lesbian organizations and all those one of the things that like sort of haunting about this like this journalist is working on this for eight. I think it was like years trying to find this and like like she was specifically trying to find these people. These people like people who like had experiences specific thing and like no normal. But she couldn't find normal people because it's not a thing. And so she she it after like many many years she was able to find like a couple of examples, like a few examples and. Mostly from yeah, just open transphobes. And the article is just, like, so conceptually sloppy that it doesn't distinguish, you know, theoretical discourse about whether, you know, it's transphobic to just say out of hand you never date a trans woman. It doesn't distinguish this from sexual abuse. It just kind of takes for granted that they're just saying in kind of an abstract theoretical context. That some of these like. Just saying that you won't ever sleep with a trans woman saying that that is transphobic is itself treated as akin to pressuring someone into sex, right? Like that, yeah. Journalism that doesn't distinguish between just a conversation about sexual issues and sexual abuse is just disastrous. There's just something serious about this piece, and it's just kind of throughout it. It's just like one of the things about this is so they they. They found like a survey, right? Because the the the the journalist went looking for a survey about like how like what percentage of lesbians have like encountered this and encountered this pressure and the only thing they could find was. Well OK, the only thing they could find that would like support their actual claim was this this poll from this group called Get Out the L which is just like a group that whose entire purpose is just being anti trans people and trying to get rid of them. And it was just, it was just like, it was like a Twitter poll, right. It was it was like they they're, they're they're publishing as as statistical evidence for their claim, a Twitter poll from a from a turf group and trying to like claim this is serious journalism and it's just. Yeah. I mean, so literally on the page of the statistic they cite in this report, the report approvingly cites Janice Raymond saying, quote all transsexuals, rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact and so like. Are we talking about metaphors here? Or are we talking about sexual abuse? Yes. It's just sick, right? And so one of the people. Who was interviewed in this? Was Lily Cade, who was an adult performer and again throughout this, just a trans woman saying that the way someone is treating her in a sexual context is transphobic is itself treated as sexually abusive, and so Billy Cade. You know she. Refused to think initially she refused to be in a scene with a trans woman with them. Later on also refused to shoot a transplant at all when she was working as a producer, so they kind of get. Quote from Lily now saying something about. Women being pressured into sex by trans women. And it turns out that Lily Cade was pushed out of the adult industry because she's like a serial ****** right? So this is their. Source on whether this is problem for assist woman. Is herself as this woman who is a serial ****** right? And they're using this person to portray? Transylvania is the victimizers and. It's just so grim. Yeah. Just most of it is just sort of like haunting. Like one of the other things that came out was, like, part of the story is that they said that, like, no prominent trans women would speak with them for the story. And then a prominent trans woman was like, no, you guys interviewed me, and that didn't include it in the article. Yeah. So this was one of the people who Lily Kate had had a conflict with was Chelsea Powell. Another woman in Port Hood asked. If Lily if she could work for this company and Lily said no because she was trans, so they talked. Chelsea was is a reasonably prominent person and they interviewed her, didn't include her in the article. She says that she told them that Lily had this predatory past. They also didn't say anything about that. And so we have the situation where we have this person who is this, this woman, who the author. Has been told is a serial sexual predator. Being presented as kind of an authority on women's sexual victimization, supposedly by trans women when she is the victimizer. And not only is she a serial sexual predator, but she's like specifically attacked people in bathrooms. Which is like the famous fear mongering, transphobic thing, right? Is that trans people are going to attack you in the bathroom. You know, because you're a source has attacked people in bathrooms and. There's just very little interest like how women are actually victimized and by who? But I think like that. That's amuse. The disturbing part here is, like, this isn't just like a negligence of reporting thing here. This is just malice. Like if if if you are tall and The thing is like, it's it's not. It's not like it was hard to, like, find out that that, you know, it's OK. So someone, someone tells you that someone else is, is, is an abuser, right? It's like, OK, like maybe you're a journalist, maybe you're going to be like, oh, I should check this out, like. Lily Cage assaulted so many people and like rape so many people that like just scrolling through Twitter I found multiple people who have been abused by her. Like this was this was not something that was like like she she admitted it publicly is something that was like hard to find right and and to be clear, she yeah, I just want to underline that, which is that. After these accusations really got going, she did like publicly. And she did not deny accusations. And then she retired from ****. And, you know, and this is something like, the BBC does this they they do this weird backtracking at this article comes out and everyone gets really mad at them. But they, they they refused to release the like the tape of the interview they had with Chelsea Poe, which you know, would have proved that Chelsea Poe did in fact tell them that Lily Cade was a ******. And they published the story anyways. And there's there's so much of this stuff was like, yeah like. They the, the the way they backtrack about it, the way that also like. So the two places where this thing with the story ran was the BBC in Britain, and they syndicated it out to Brazil. And if you have places that were like, that are incredibly transphobic, and it ran like, just really, yeah. And this stuff, like in Brazil, like, ran as a bunch of mainstream news headlines, like, where, like news stories and in the major newspapers, like, ran this. And and and it was, I don't know like there there's there's there's this extent to which yeah like you're watching. British state media decide that they actively just want to go to war on trans people and they literally just do not care that like they are, you know, publishing little rapists and then. Yeah, just just the BBC's policy now is when we interview those responsible for anti social behavior or crime it may just cause distress to victims and we should contact victims and advise them of our plans. Yeah, when viewing criminals, care must be taken to minimize potential of stress this may cause to victims of the crime. They they didn't see Lily. As is applying to her, right? This is this woman who they have been told is a sexual predator. You can find this information. I found it pretty quickly, all of these victims talking about it, her acknowledging it and they didn't. Identify this this woman as a predator with victims who would be like very plausibly upset by seeing. They're rapists. Treat it as an authority on sexual abuse, right? And this is kind of pervasive, I think, in the gender critical movement, right where. If any of you were out there, I'm sure you're thinking women can't be rapists. Rape requires subpoenas, which is in the UK. It's kind of a. You know, most women consider this a pretty reactionary way to define rape, where it has to be penetration with a penis and. This isn't reflective of. You know how women experience sexual assault? That it's just kind of totally other category and most countries feminism consider it quite important that you don't kind of. Treat this as this like categorically different offense. But the general really pushes this perspective where it is literally impossible for women to to commit rape, you know? And this is. They think that when they a brief period where they thought that they had identified like that every rape that was recorded as committed by a woman was trans woman, because they thought that. It required if he does and they thought that that was the only way that is possible and you can actually be convicted of it if you were like aiding and abetting. I think they thought they had all these things and they just have this overall perspective where it is literally impossible for, you know, they say. A woman meaning the assessment to commit a sexual offense. And in doing this, they create cover for ciswomen predators like it. It creates this context where their victimization just disappears. People can't even acknowledge it. And yeah, and like, I think like the the extent to which this whole movement is, is, is built on violence and is, is built and there are so many people that the that the general critical people work with who are abusers. There are. You know, and I don't know, like I want to come back to like the last piece of the Lily Cade thing, which is that after this article came out, three BC initially basically didn't do anything right even after the the rape out the yeah. And then Lily Cade published. One of. Like one of the most transphobic things I've ever encountered in my life. Like a just. This is it. It it it gets called a manifesto. Like, I don't think that's like a manifesto. It was terrifying. Yeah, like she, she, she she's explicitly like like, like names specific trans women that she wants lynched. Like there's a bunch of stuff about those people she wants raped. She wants like, she wants all trans people to die. I there's a, there's a bunch of there's, like, weirdly racist stuff. There's like, it's it's just, it's it's it's it is a document that calls for genocide and the part where it's calling for genocide. Probably isn't like line for line the most disturbing part of it because the individual threats are like so graphic and. I was terrified when I read this. I I was the person who. You know, initially dug up the sexual abuse allegations and when I did it, I knew it would kind of. It would throw a wrench into her life. I thought that they hadn't, you know, they were there, they were visible, you could find them. But when it had happened, she had not really been a in the mainstream eye. And so I knew if this got uptake, it would. Make it bigger and. What happened? And then this woman is posting this terrifying manifest in red like. Yes, because she shooting someone now, it was just so it was just terrifying. It was like something would be written, you know, immediately before someone. Goes to shoot someone. And she's tweeting it and tagging the BBC in it. Yeah. And like that. That finally, like, one of the most disturbing things I've ever read in my life. Like that was finally the thing with BBC was like. Maybe we should do something about this. It was just so, so little, right this is. They took her out of the article. They added an update that says we have updated this article published last week to remove a contribution from one individual. In light of comments she's published on a blog post in recent days, which we have been able to verify, we acknowledge that an admission of inappropriate behavior by the same contributor should have been included. In the original article. This is. You know there's kind of a racer, right? So they didn't. Acknowledge that they had included this person in the article who just published this genocidal ran, right? So one of their sources is. Person who is advocating for killing trans people, that is important, right? That is pertinent to this narrative they're pushing and they also are not saying. You know, they should have. We acknowledged that an admission of inappropriate behavior should have been included in the original article. It really changes the overall narrative of the article, right? If you acknowledge this, this woman is a serial predator, right? The the overall picture is like this woman are at risk from trans women. It's a reality check, right to hear. No, in fact. This woman who we're presenting as, like, victimized. Is one of the women who is praying on people and she's not a trans woman and. It's just. They just, you know, even after this responded in a way that protected the narrative of the piece, right? They were they weren't going to let in anything. That acknowledge this. The people they're finding with this position are transferred back. This person was very in that. It just says. They've removed the contribution in light of comments she has published. What kind of what are they about? It's serious, right? It's serious and not acknowledge that one of their sources. Is a file transfer. It. This is how I. Found out that she was alive also the them saying that they had been able to verify it before that I had been like she's not very online. In a lot of cases. So I was really worried. I didn't know how long it was going to be before, you know, there was confirmation that like. In fact, like Kate had not just shot someone and herself, yeah. This was it was just really. It's manifest. It was terrifying. I don't know. It's just awful, yeah, and I think. You know, one of the things that that's happening here is you you get to see. There's a couple of, like, there's a couple. There's like layers at which this stuff operates. So you have, you know, you have your BBC running delegitimization, right? But then you have the stuff beneath it, which is just apparently genocidal. And I think, you know, sometimes, like with Lily Cade, like. If if you're going to be a turf Lily, Cade kind of blew it, right? Because like you can't like, OK, like you you can be really, really transphobic in a lot of in a lot of ways. But like, you know, actively calling people to get lynched is a thing that like, even, like transphobes are are normally like, wait, what? Why are you. Yeah, they didn't like this. Yeah, yeah. But I don't think like the the the mainstream turf movement is not in a place where you can do stuff like that. But in some ways I think you know the the the stuff that's more moderate is more dangerous. Last thing I want to talk about is. A document called the Declaration of on Women's sex based rights, which? Was was put together by a bunch of turf activists at fairly prominently featuring Arch Australian turf Sheila Jeffries. But yeah, can you, can you talk a bit about like, what this is? And yeah, so this is a document that basically all of the gender critical organizations and between people have signed. And it is extreme, right? It calls for trans women to be banned from all women's spaces, including toilets, which, you know, if we had to go to the bathroom, they can't participate in society, right? It's just like a basic need people to have to exist in public. That it. Bans all it has to ban all internationally recommended healthcare for trans children. It has to legally protect deliberate misgendering. You know, allow you to be. Just treat it with such hostility, like at work, just in public. This is a just kind of a direct assault on trans people's ability to exist with dignity and society. Just live normal lives and. You know a lot of. Gender critical, people will say. Will portray themselves, you know, as only opposing. Advances for trans rights. You know, not wanting trans rights to be rolled back, but with this document calls for us like basically every right trans people have to exist in their genders, in particular trans women, especially concerning trans women, to just take it all back and leave them with. Basically nothing. Yeah. Yeah. Like this is like they they they have this whole thing about, like, basically, like they want to erase the concept of gender identity from law, which is like the thing that does is it eliminates all trans people from. Like, it eliminates trans people as a thing that the law recognizes exists and things should have protections. It's like it's it's it it it it it is, you know, like it it it is it is the legal genocide of trans people like that. That's that's that's what it is. It's yeah. Yeah. So they've basically all signed this, you know, this is a. Yeah, it's. This is not at all French document positions itself as like. You know, the demands kind of of this movement and it's extreme. The organization's spokeswoman is Cara Dansky. Who uses almost all of her public appearances. She has a number of times been on Tucker, Carlson said. She boosts Jennifer Billick all the time she thinks her. Biggest supporter and was formerly the Chair of Wolf, which is their Keith's organization. So she is in front is what stands for. It is a cool name for an org that sucks and they should give it back to someone better. Yeah, so this is. I mean generally you see the. American turfs. Kind of. In this more radical direction also. Especially explicitly collaborating with the right and here they've made this document that just. Reports so and everyone has signed it, kind of like direct the. Overall agenda to one that just. These trans people with just no protections at all. Yeah. And I think I think it's you know, the the the reason I think this is a lot of ways like more dangerous and Lily Cade thing is again it's it's in this. Like it's not actually in legalese because none of these people are lawyers and so yes oh, so how how did an actual, I mean OK, I shouldn't be asking how did an actual lawyer produce this because I've met lawyers and they're they're not they they are not as smart and above board as as they pertain to people. Yeah like the stuff isn't making legal arguments like one of the things that they they've like I guess the whole sort of gender critical like turf movements invented is like this, this concept of sex based. Rights, which is not a thing. Like, yeah, like, like they, they, they they all think that there's like rights that you have because of your sex and like, no, this doesn't exist. They completely made this up. They keep on, like, referring to it as if it's like a concept that exists in the law. Like none of this stuff, like in terms of legalese, it's like it's it's nothing. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a jumble of words. Yeah, I know. You've really see, as the movements go, they really have really robust movement, discipline and kind of taking up these. In terms, and then saying them all the time as though it's a thing everyone's familiar with. One of them is I was like women sex based rights. Women sex based rights. Like what? People's rights aren't based on their sex. Yeah, kind of like a whole thing we're doing with feminism, you know? It was like, you don't have special rights based on being a man, and now it turns out that like. Supposedly Allah, we've thought that you have special rights for if you're a woman to exclude whoever you want to exclude, I guess. It's yeah it's just goofy. Yeah. But but I think like it it it's weird but like it's also it it has dysfunction which is that it the the the sort of like and like OK so like I I don't my my guess is that most of the people who have signed this document have not read it because you know but but you know like I think the the thing that it does is it gives them this this legitimization it it gives their goal of exterminating trans people. This sort of legal jargon apparatus that can hide behind them. Go it's actually from the UN and we're basing it on international law and that. Yeah. And the organization used to have this fancy name, which was the women's Human Rights Campaign, and they have now dropped that possibly valuable reasons, but it sounds good, right? Yeah, the websites polished and. It seems like. Or feel safe and the. You know, they really try to take this phrase to. And. Using it just kind of sneak everything and so they'll ask people questions like, well, what about women? Sex based rights? These are a thing I've never heard about before in my life. And. But people just get on board, don't really know what's happening, and they've. Another thing they do is they always. Portray like bathrooms as sex, segregated spaces and every bathroom I've ever been in since women on the door doesn't seem like female bathroom, but they're like, this is like, this is based on sex, not gender. Just making these assertions and they have a lot of assertions, yeah. Yeah, I think, I think that's a good place to wrap up. I guess they have a lot of assertions, yeah. Yeah. I guess they're just underwriting again. What a serious kind of attack on trans people's rights. This is right. And this is calling for things that would make it very hard for trans people to exist. And. It's really scary to watch this. I think I'm watch it kind of progress across this movement and be boosted. It's awful. Yeah, and next episode we are going to take a much deeper dive into some of the people who signed this document and we are going to see what happens when this kind of. Bloodless but genocidal legalistic rhetoric makes it into the hands of people who are not afraid to do physical violence. And. It is. Worse, it it it it is, it is going to go worse than you're probably imagining. Just to underline this, we said earlier that Jennifer Billick stuff is. You know, just widely now accepted and within this movement and her stuff is portraying trans people and trans rights as this existential immediate threat, right she portrays. She often says that doctors are like butchering children, right, is they're making children into slaves. It's stuff that, if it was true, would call for kind of an extreme level of resistance. And that's kind of what this stuff functions to do, right, if you are accusing people of these. Really extreme offenses and of hurting and threatening all of these people with that motivates is extreme responses and violent responses and billing herself is sometimes engaged in violent rhetoric. But. I think. Many of us who've been following this movement are just kind of waiting, afraid, because that's just where it looks like it's going in the US and the UK too. It's kind of hard to. It's just so scary and like. You know they're mapping out where the gender clinics are, and it's it's scary because where rhetoric like this goes is to a violent place and. It's hard to see it letting up right now. Yeah. And yeah, that is, that is the subject of tomorrow's episode, which. Yeah, in which a bunch of people will start attacking gender clinics and a bunch of trans people are going to get violently assaulted by turfs, who are directly affiliated with Sheila Jeffries and our followers of Jennifer Bilek. So, yeah. Krista, thank you. Thank you for coming on and doing this. Thank you. Yeah. This has been naked happened here. Right. You can find us at happened here pod on Twitter and Instagram. We are also there is other stuff that we do at the cool zone. And yeah, go, go fight for the rights of trans people before they cease to exist. Welcome to Ichidan here, a podcast that this week is about the war on trans people. I'm your host, Christopher Wong. If you've been around the left long enough, you've probably heard people call Transclusion Mary, radical feminism, or turkism a colonial ideology. Broadly, the accusation of colonialism is about the erasure of non Western genders that fall outside the Christian gender binary. But turfs are colonial in another sense as well. Exported by white academics through a network of fall feminists and anti trafficking groups, the ideology has imposed itself on the global S with devastating and violent consequences. As a product of this colonial imposition, Mexico has become one of the front lines in the war against trans people. I spoke to Amy Flores and Giuliana and Neuhauser, two members of the sexual and gender dissidents. Assistance Network, a group of activists aligned with the Zapatistas who've been documenting and resisting the spread of turfs in Mexico. When the new turf wave started in Mexico. Several years back. Umm. At the time. I thought thought of it as something that like a radicalization that went too far. You know, like kind of like thinking back to like the new left. And there was a point. During the new left Twin Lakes, suddenly everybody. Joined a Maoist cult and they were angry for the right reasons, but it just went off at some point. I thought that's what was going on in Mexico, but then slowly it started to come out more that more and more turf groups were had ties to political parties. And one of the foreign agents and one of the one of the most dramatic cases is from Toluca. City near Mexico City. Just recently at the International Women's Day, protests like there were turf groups that had made a pinata out of the trans flag had been burning the trans flag also in this same city, one of the main turf groups turns out that their leader is on government payroll, and if you've seen Roma, for example, the incident, the political incident that happens in that movie is based on a real incident from the 70s. And the tactics of that political party, which is the party that controls the state government of the state Toluca is in, basically it hasn't changed. And they seem to have been using these turfs basically as shock troops. At one point, there were two citizens outside the State Congress, one to push for a gender identity law and another to push for legalization of abortion, which are obviously both important things. The latter, however, was controlled by these turf groups. Who? Later, mysteriously never seems to appear at other protests asking for the legalization of abortion, but they were there and they ran off the trans encampment. One of the big incidents was defending the sanctity of the women's bathroom with barbed wire wrapped baseball bats. Jesus. These groups have deep ties to right wing Mexican political parties, the police and the growing turf international, and they seem to be very chummy with the local police. Their leader gives classes. But just like trainings to it's the state government. Like this. It's not subtle. You know, you can see live streams of their quote UN quote protest and it was mostly them like drinking coffee with the cops, like they were on first name basis with the cops while the the other camp had like. Trans women there were too scared to go to the bathroom because they were going to be attacked. And so that's the starkest group, I think, right, the the the Toluca tariffs, which are. Yeah, it's funny because almost every party has their own, their own group, but yeah, so it's no surprise that PR is the scariest. Yeah. We should also say that these groups are affiliates with Sheila Jeffries Women's Declaration International. And so this is also a case of an ideology developed in the first world, in this case England, which is. Largely a safe country where even as fascist an ideology as terrorism doesn't or only very rarely leads to real violence. And then it gets exported to countries that are not safe, where it does turn into real violence. So another affiliate of Sheila Jeffries who's declaration in Mexico would be less Brujas Del Mar. Who is another case of? At first they seemed to be. A group that was just. They just radicalized a bit too far. Then photos came out of their leader, who was on the time 100 a couple years back with Felipe Calderon. An ex president of Mexico and like by far one of the worst in the country's history. And not like a like just ohh I saw you walking in the street. She was at a book signing. It was not a casual encounter. It was a clear sign of admiration. And it's been more than confirmed since then that that her political ambitions lie with the the PN the the the farthest right mainstream political party in Mexico. This political alliance between the Turks and the right has benefits for both sides. The turfs gained funding and institutional backing for their war against trans people. The right gained a way to attack the vaguely. Which are left, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, by blaming him and trans people from Mexico's horrific wave of Femicides will distracting from its actual sources, NAFTA and the war on drugs. Mexico's trans population, however, gained a new Western educated threat. When I say the the radical feminism was a complete import, it's from its very beginning and the for a long while there was like 1 turf in Mexico. And she was she's called Jean Maria. Tell YouTube don't even try to pronounce her name. I don't think she can even pronounce her name because she's white as hell and she always dresses like she's a ******* Rachel Dolezal from Mexico. Yeah. Should that music irony that the first originary? Perfect in Mexico is also the Mexican Rachel Dolezal, right? Because she went abroad and was like the only Mexican everyone knew. So even though she's white as hell and has blue eyes, she started wearing some Coachella ************* *** feathers and ****. Look, right? Yeah, I've seen, I've seen these pictures. It's. It is. It is like it it it is, it is. It is the Mexican version of and not even just the IT is the Mexican version of those people at Coachella who, like, wear indigenous headdresses who are just like just like look, look like they're descended from. Like. Hydric hemmler or something. Like she's she has like she has like half French, half Spanish name and she changed it to 1/2 Maya, half now little name. It's gross. So this this person has been active since the 70s, right. She went to she was present in the first pride in Mexico and she hoped that was that was also the the two year anniversary of the 68 massacre. So pride was from the start really leftist here in Mexico but it also. At these kind of people, the. Who? Who went to the UK, France and the United States? And I think. She was there when Janice Raymond was like sending her her friends with guns to to threaten trans women, right? So that's she she she was there when the turf wars were at the at the highest point during the 70s and then came back in. She pledges made in a lot of history of Mexican feminism, but the time that she came back in 2016 with that letter, with that backing, because she is also close to Janice Raymond with the Coalition against Trafficking in Women. Uh, who? The Coalition against trafficking in the Coalition against Trafficking Women Cat West. Has a lot of. After the Triforce, they they went underground in the in academia and the universities, right, because they were no longer accepted, but they were in the process of building NGOs that could globally affect policy on specifically sex work and trans rights. And you can tell the John Maria saw that that was her only opportunity to resurface and to make her 70s as she saw that 70s. Ratham discourse was retro now, and so she became like this founding matriarch for the new generation of trans folks. One of them which is Laura Lecuona, who is part of Femba and. The John Marina and like wanna were not fazed at all by the accusations of of aligning with the reactionaries because they know their history, they know where they come from and they know that this is how Dorkin survived. This is how. How Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond survived. This is where you get the ******* money and literally gonna John Maria and Bruchsal Mar turned the whole environment around them into this. Well, this tough questions the only two issues that we talk about nowadays. In Mexican feminism. Are are president and trans people. It's kind of gross. Jesus. And that and like. Remember, like, there's only. A handful of states that have legalized abortion. There's femicides happening all the time. And but we're. We continue to debate these two issues over and over and over again, like a feedback loop. And like as trans people, we don't have any choice because. We're the targets of this, right? And it's not, it's not an academic debate. Last fall there was. Some. Turfs, who had taken over a public park to set up their separatist space, and there was a disabled SIS woman and her trans girlfriend who were denied entry at the park and threatened with Tasers. And so when they're taking over these public spaces and. Using violence to defend them because the next week there is a protest over this and they there is a they taste a trans man, Jesus. And it's like, this is like a public park, like of course we have to defend ourselves. The Coalition against trafficking in Women or Cat W, an international anti sex worker group which provided a refuge for white turfs driven from mainstream feminism in their home countries, has been a major source of turf influence in Latin America. The reason there is so much importing of this ideology towards radical feminists in Mexico, it's that they needed something to say and something to do and something to fill the void. In organizing and in NGOs, and the people who stepped up were Janice Raymond's cat. Doubly right, the coalition against trafficking in women who sings the 90s spent. A decade and 1/2. Building contacts in the in the UN, in the OAS, in several international organisms to extend their influence across the whole continent, specifically in Latin America. And you can see this affecting stuff like stuff like Venezuela, where they broke up sex worker unions to to with the the OAS right, and in Mexico, the founding leader of the Mexican. Bunch of of cat W Teresa Ujala used to be a UN employee, specifically its drug and crime segment, and before she was like a radical feminist, she used to conduct drug raids in chapas. And yeah, and after that, she became the founding member of W Latin America and the Caribbean. And with Janice Raymond they you can see them go together to the 1995 Beijing Conference on women and they influence like they they were a big part of why gender is not recognized as a social construct by the UN. They allied with the Holy See, with the. The representative from the Vatican in the UN. Got together with a couple of radical feminists and pushed back against gender being recognized as a social construct. In 1995. So that's the the level of influence these groups have in Mexico, these groups which morphed into the CAP West. Supported the war on drugs from the GETGO. They were. Uh, Barry. In some of the biggest events inaugurating the War on drugs, they were present right there because. If you're fighting drug trafficking. It's very easy to just slip the word human right there, right? No politician is gonna say no. They all ******* love to say, yeah, I'm hardened on human trafficking. And the way that showed itself was just targeting trans sex workers and migrant sex workers. And with that, and that feeding the agenda of Janice Raymond perfectly, Sheila Jeffries got a basically survived the whole 2000s on writing garbage for reports for the UN. Most of her published works during the 2000s and early 20 tens is stuff paid for kadau. And they, uh, they they they. In 2016 they started pushing for more and more anti trans legislation worldwide because they could see the writing on the wall right they were behind the the women's declaration that Sheila Jeffries is not. OK, she's part of Catholic. She's, I think, catalogue Australia. She has her own other collective called Space International, which is behind Foster system, by the way, in the US. Where she allied with a couple of conservative sheriffs to write that legislation. So we could go on and on on how like people that read about transitions think. Are gone and forgotten by history, right? The the authors of these horrible books that haunt us to this day are still active and not just in the US. They're active in Mexico, in the UK, in France, in South Africa, in Korea. Korea is huge in I think I would say Korea is has a as big a problem as Mexico and the UK. We just don't talk to them as much and we can't realize that. But if you check them the the languages. That have signed the Sheila Jeffries Declaration against Trans People, which is a specifically genocidal declaration declaration. It doesn't stop at like legislation, it wants to exterminate us out, right? Yeah, and most of them. You are going to see a lot of resilient flags, a lot of Mexican flags, a lot of Korean flags. Even more than you United States flags, and if you track the the USA flags, it's mostly like weird randos that have yoga classes and ****. It's not relevant politicians, but if you track the other countries, you're going to find some of the biggest collectives in the in their own countries. You're going to find or just Spooks, right? You're going to find a lot of people who have really weird careers that spend a lot of time in Italy and Uganda. It's it's it's a never ending rabbit hole of Spooks, of conservatives, of has been feminists that have rebranded as Ingos to get money from those groups and direct it towards breaking up trans rights, towards affecting sex workers, towards breaking unions, breaking student movements. It's a global movement, that is. Birthed by conservative thought, but getting more and more reactionary and more and more organized as time goes by, that international transphobic movement has increasingly found purchase in the US. I spoke to Lee Leoville and Kai Shivers, two members of health liberation now with intimate experience with the turf movement, who spent years meticulously documenting its rise. So. My first question is, can you all explain what Wolf actually is and I guess subsequent to that, what the relationship to hands across the aisle is? Umm. Yeah, so wolf is. Is there a transphobic feminist group? With at this point extensive ties to right wing organizations they've worked with Family Policy Alliance, Heritage Foundation, Alliance defending freedom, concerned Women for America's Family Research Council, among others. But they. They got their start. We started back in 2013 around when they were founded by their Keith, who also was one of the leaders of Deep green resistance. And she basically got like kind of run out of anarchist and environmentalist groups and then kind of like went over to a established like turf communities to try and recruit there. So it's sort of like stirred out trying to like recruit from these, like older turf and transphobic lesbian communities. And then after Trump got elected and, you know, the conservative Christians on the far right became more mobilized and more empowered. They kind of like rebranded themselves and were like, oh, let's form alliances with these right wing groups and they kind of like traded their sort of like like crunchy lesbian feminists like like image for like Kara Dansky who like you know is a straight fairly feminine looking woman who used to work for the. CLU. And then, like a Democrat, and like, you know, she's way more presentable to like a conservative audience. You know, by working with the right then they have access to like money and power and they can. It's easier for me to get on the media like like Carrie Dansky is no longer with both, but like she was with them for years and still has relation like like good relations with them. And she's been on the Tucker Carlson show like many times. So I I think one of the important pieces when it comes to understanding like how this relationship with the right started so. In in late 2016, Wolf put forward their filing against the US Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Education, Right. And they were going up against aspects of like trying to reform Title 9 to include gender identity, you know, to to protect folks who need to be able to use their like women's restroom or locker room or whatever, right? And this is the case that they ended up getting some of that ADF funding for. So it's like one of the first official seeds, I guess, of the the direct collaboration that ended up happening. Those a lot of that stuff did eventually end up getting leaked, and then they started doing some more official collaborations. Just a few months later when they were working with like Family Policy alliance to file amicus briefs against Gavin Grimm again on the bathroom case, they took something like, I think like $15,000 from the Alliance defending Freedom, which is one of the main like right wing. Groups like Path, like trying to pass all these like anti trans bills, like going after pediatric transition and and trans girls and women sports. So they took that money and then yeah, then later like I think like the whole working with family Policy Alliance I believe was the first time they like publicly allied with what the right ring group I think. So that happened in January of 2017. Yeah. And then they're just sort of like. Yeah. Like they also were involved with like the amicus brief against was it Amy Stephens, another Supreme Court case? I can't remember. Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me. And like, members of both have appeared on like Heritage Foundation panels. They helped like release the parent Resource guide and Anti Transparent Resource Guide that was also sponsored by like Heritage Foundation Family Policy Alliance. This, this, this is very similar to almost exactly what you see in Mexico with just sort of slightly less. Physical violence, which, yeah, it's, it's a lot of, you know. And the other thing is that these are two large extent exactly the same organizations and that was one of the other things I wanted to talk about was the influence of Sheila Jeffries and the women's decoration, which has been all over. This whole movement. Yeah. The one thing to point out so like, you know, the Women's Declaration International is in this in the US is led by Kara Dansky, who you know, she like basically like left. She worked at Wolf for a long time and still has, you know, lots of connections with them, is on good terms with them. But she like left and now is like working with Women Declaration International, US branch. So. She winds up having kind of like a foot in both worlds at the same time too, so like, she'll. Like that, the US chapter of Women's Declaration International. Previously like women's Human Rights Campaign before they had to rebrand they would. But it if if you if you read this stuff, it's yeah, yeah yeah exactly, exactly. So what what ends up happening is that Kara Dansky will either like have the the chapter sponsor particular events or she herself will become actively involved in the formation of the events right which we saw happen with. Come and pick a DC last year where they were parking themselves outside of that was like it was a. That was that was a whole big thing. Oh God, it was a purchase that happened on International Women's Day to protest the The Equality Act. It's not like it's peoples first time dealing with the Equality Act either. I mean like so. Prior prior to that point, which in this starts to to go into the like hands across the aisle coalition because they were actively involved in opposing the Equality Act as well. So. To, to kind of roll back a little bit that the hands across the aisle coalition, this was something that started developing in early 2017, you know, not that long after Wolf started building the more direct relationships with the the right and so that the people of this coalition would have like you have members of the right itself and in the process of that towards the beginning of 2019 and may. They filed this joint letter to the House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to oppose things like the Equality Act. And they did so alongside with Natasha chart representing Wolf concerned women for America, American College of Pediatricians, Family Research Council. You know, a whole bunch of really just awful names in there. Oh yeah, the ADF was involved on that one, too. Really? the Rose gallery of all of the people who were anti-gay marriage until still are, but have downplayed it? And yeah, all people who led the anti-gay marriage campaigns, all of the sort of weird right wing. Pseudo medical bodies. The next thing I wanted to ask about is what's been happening in the last couple of years with the fusion because so you already have your your alliance between the turfs and the evangelicals, but in the last couple of years we've seen. A I don't know if full scale is the right term to use for it, but we've seen a merger of this with Save the Children in Q Anon stuff and was wondering if you could talk about that. OK. So that's an interesting one because like I've I've been digging into the timeline of this stuff extensively. It's like I've got hundreds, hundreds of listings trying to figure out where different cases are coming from and trying to understand like the the phases, right. So you've you've got like the the formation, the solidification and then the escalation and we're kind of in the escalation stage right now, but so. One of the things that I I started to to notice is that. Elements of this crossover like the cross pollination that was happening actually predated certain key events that we now know are affiliated with Q Anon right. So if if we think about. The actual like development of Q Anon itself. So you've got the pizza gate thing that was happening in like October 2016, I believe that was, you know, right before Trump was getting elected and you know, kicking up some stuff about like you know, Hillary Clinton's emails and stuff like that to to go up against her election campaign in opposition to Trump and then, you know, folding in the the harassment towards. Comet Ping pong to the point where like Edgar Madison Welch shows up at Comet Ping Pong in December of 2016 with an AR15 style rifle and starts, you know, firing off his shots and stuff like that, right? And so eventually. Most people know that the timeline of that the Q Anon drops happening around like October 2017, like if you look up the original like the first known queue drops. I believe that was like October 28th 2017 on 4 Chan. But The thing is that if you look at references to Save the Children or save our children on like Twitter, the hashtags and you're also looking for transphobia. Related stuff, you can actually start to see that crossover happening before the original Q drops happened, right? Yeah, I found I found tweets that were connecting trans inclusion education in schools to pedophilia and using the Save the Children hashtag in August of 2017. The queue drops hadn't started yet. So and this is something this pattern continues to happen, right? There were also multiple. You know, tweets or Facebook posts or whatever that would start to use things like Save the Children, save our children, wake up America and stuff like that. Before you would have the big scale takeover by Q Anon when things were starting to get really popular because the Save the Children thing really went viral in the summer of 2020. But you could still see elements of it before that point. Repeatedly. So another early instance of using both Save the Children and Wake up America hashtags started happening on April. I believe that is of 2019. And bear in mind, wake up America is a hashtag that's not only used by Q Anon proponents. In relation to the whole like acceleration as I'm trying to, you know, deep state stuff, but also like Aaron Brewer, one of the people that was involved in some of the clinic protests, harassments was using that hashtag. They just threw it was like both Brewer it was that was the the clinic protest that involved both partners Healthcare PC which Brewer was a member like one of the founders of the time, one of the leaders of and Joey Brights like can I get a witness? Like they teamed up to stage a bunch of clinic protests and they used wake up like Waco. America was one of the slogans that they used in one of the hashtags. To to admit it to me, to make sure we're getting this these are protests against clinics that offer gender affirming care. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that. Yeah, that that happens. That one. So, yeah, the wake of America one was in Salt Lake City, New York City and LA. Yeah. And they also, I mean, Speaking of of hashtags, they also have used the, the slogan, pull back the curtain. Which is also been used by like anti choice activists like that was I remember like like finding like they used pull back the curtain a lot to be like they what they mean is like they're like expose the evil gender industry but like this other this like. Anti abortion group. I'm blanking on which one off the top of my head, but they also use that pull back the curtain to go after Planned Parenthood. I think it's like probably like that doesn't? I'm fine, direct connection, but it seems like that's too much of a coincidence in a lot of ways. One of the one of the things that I really want to stress about this whole, like what I call tennon thing is that like. The seeds for this the cross pollination that we are seeing happening between the gender critical movement, Pizzagate, and Q Anon like these were already in place before Q Anon formally developed as its own phenomenon. This keeps happening. It's you can't really like figure out where one particular type of rhetoric is necessarily coming from in terms of its source because it just keeps going back and forth. Repeatedly people are acting like. They're coming up with a lot of the same ideas together because in the end, in the end they are of the same roots. They are in fundamental agreement with each other, whether they're calling themselves different names. I think that's that's worries me in a lot of ways, partly because, you know, I mean. This has always been something where if you look at the rhetoric that these people are spreading, it's like it's explicitly exterminationist like it's it's, you know like they, they, they're, they're stoichiometric terrorists like in search of a like a quote UN quote lone wolf. And in a lot of you know in in the 70s I think they were there's there's a lot more. Explicit violence that these people are doing directly and now they're kind of like. They're they're they're trying to find people who will do their dirty work for them. And there are places where they found them already. We've seen this in Mexico and in the US, the people who they seem to be recruiting are. People who are extremely dangerous. I mean, we've seen Q Anon people have killed enormous numbers of people. You know, we've there there's a long history of, of abortion clinic bombings and people getting assassinated for that. I mean, I think, you know, one of the connections that I've been. Sort of like. Looking at is the extent to which this stuff is connected to the Atlanta shooting. Because if you if you look at the stuff the Atlanta shooter believes, it's, you know, like he's in this, like in the same sort of Christian patriarchal project and his thing is specifically about sex workers. But hey, look, if you look at, uh. Yeah, most particularly Asian sex workers and you know, if, if, if you, if you look at the anti trafficking groups, you look at the Christian anti trafficking groups and you look at the Venn diagram with them and the turfs, it's like, ohh yeah. And people are involved. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah particular world and and yeah there's, there's this kind of vice closing in on trans people where on the one hand you have. These people attempting to employ the violence of the state. And on the other hand, you have this sort of stochastic terrorism where they're attempting to incite violence by sort of individuals. And then also, I mean, I think, I think there's, you know, there's sort of two forms of this, right? There's the explicit people who are explicitly like, quote UN quote political, right. You have, you have your sort of like ideological St Fascist. You have like, you know, you, you have your people with baseball bats covered in barbed wire, but then you also have. The stuff that's been fueling intiation violence where it's not necessarily like. You know, there is a, this is an organization that, like, hates Asian people. It's we we'll just sort of passively increase the rhetoric until the level of violence increases. Yeah. Yeah. It kind of got like, you've got the street bash and then you've got the intellectual fashion. Yeah. Well, and I think, but I think also there's there's another like, if it was just those people, I think it'd be less bad. But there's also just the way in which just random people who are encountering this become very quickly radicalized. And it it becomes part of sort of, I mean, and traffic violence has always been part of the sort of background. In the same way that anti black and just I mean you know OK the level of anti black violence is much higher but like the the level of violence against black trans people in particular and the level of anti Asian violence we've been seeing that has just sort of is just a part of the background violence of American Society and that. The levels of those things, the the more this rhetoric gets circulated and the more this activism happens, that background level of violence increases. And that to me is also terrifying because it it it means, like it's not just sort of like fascist, so you can track it's just someone on the street. They're just sort of like trying to like, like, yeah, associate, like. Well, I mean a lot of the like, yeah, that like people like, like feel like in Aaron, Alex, Sarah and the Gender Mapper and Joey brand and stuff like that, like they're they're ******** like elimination is like, they're like they say over and over. There could be no compromise. And I would also especially like anti fascist networks to pay more attention to it because, you know, the solidarity with trans people is just as important as solidarity with like, racial and ethnic minorities. When it comes to combating facts, right, especially since like there are a number of us that are in multiple categories. So like let's all work together and try to like, you know, be proactive about combating the threat, right? So my, my TN on collections, I guess like I only have 2 reports on it so far because getting into the full detail is just, it is a lengthy. Projects and I keep getting distracted by by the. Conversion therapy stuff. There's just like there's so much stuff to research and there's like more like 2 people and and yeah anyway, so ever also like to try to live in terms of finding the like. The original kind of like broader views of TNT on both like what it is in terms of like the 101 kind of stuff and also like the the timeline of where it came from. You can find it on healthliberationnow.com. We have a little tab there that has like analysis and then if you go down to key issues, you can find a TNT tag there, right, and it'll have that stuff in there. This has been a thing that throughout this entire series, which is that most of the information on this stuff has been compiled by a very small number of trans people. And that cannot stay the states of this because there are just not enough trans people and they are extremely overworked. Yeah, and if, if that's a project you can take up, please do that. Please, yeah, all hands on deck. All hands on deck. Because the the seriousness of this is such that if you want there to be trans people living in a way that does not actively destroy them. You have to act now. Yeah, basically, yeah. This has been a good happened here, a product of cool zone media. Suppress your local turfs before it's too late. Goodbye. You know what I love is decadent Western sexual morays. Well, that actually does tie you into what we're talking about. Today's into what you were reading. Jesus there. God. When I when I logged into this call an hour late, Garrison was studiously reading reading a book by. With the screen centered on the cover, we gotta bleep this out and have it have it be the new thing that's bleeped out. I agree with that actually. Yes, really good call. That way we can just do a whole series of jokes where we just like pill people on on. That's just, that's so terrorism. What a what a fun joke that would be welcome here. The show where we talk about things that could happen. Other about just talking about the onslaught of of bills that have been introduced the past few months, that attacking kind of trans rights and queer people in general. Yeah, so we've, we've, we've, we've heard about gay marriage, we've heard about turfs a lot the past, the past few episodes, and now we're going to be kind of focusing on. Yeah, like I said the the kind of current legislation that's happened specifically within the past six months that have been targeting kind of LGBTQ people in in schools particularly that and a lot of it's been targeted towards towards minors, teen teens, adolescents and restricting the visibility and and kind of what's allowed to be said and mentioned in schools, so. We're gonna kind of actually talk about books first, because a lot of this stuff is kind of tied into the critical race theory, kind of like organizing that the right was doing in 2021. So yeah. The American Library Association says that between September and December of 2021 alone, they received more than 330 reports of a book, challenges for which is the most in over 2 decades in terms of people trying to restrict what books are allowed to be in schools. So I experienced a book challenge lately. Tell you what, trying to read through the new James Patterson book. What? Do either of you know who James Patterson is? No. Vegas was. This was a this was a bad idea on my back. Please continue, Garrison. I I was I was busy reading the. Before you logged on, I have a different interest in books. You know, actually very similar books, very similar. And the Pelican brief? Basically identical. Have no idea how much that's gonna get bleeped, but it's gonna be funny. So yeah, a Tennessee schools removal of amaz the Holocaust graphic biography became kind of the most famous example of this trend a few months ago. The book was allegedly banned due to due to nudity and because of curse words, but this is kind of, you know, it was they, they claimed it had nothing to do with actual political content of it was just because of the the inappropriate images for children, which is a little, a little dubious since it's all, you know, starring mice. Yeah, yeah. But the majority of challenged books have been kind of those focused on LGBTQ characters or themes. Back in November, nearly two dozen people a day were dying from COVID-19 in South Carolina. Thank God that got better. Thank God we knocked that **** out. But rather than try to handle the public health crisis, Governor Henry McMaster seemed more interested in pressuring the state's Department of Education to crack down on queer themed books. He directed the Department of Education. And the State Board of Education to create, quote, statewide standards and directives to prevent *********** and other obscene content from entering our state's public schools and libraries of the governor said in the letter to the Superintendent of Education. Inside the letter, it was specifically targeted towards Maya Kobey's book Gender Queer, a memoir, which is a genderqueer graphic novel kind of detailing what it's what it's like to be gender queer. It's definitely popular among kind of the adult. Like a young adults kind of age range and is and is a good resource for kind of gender bending type stuff and it has faced a large amount of a large amount of the onslaught and like the bashing of of queer books have been focused on this specific book. It's an autobiographical book based on the Bay Area non binary writer and illustrator. It's been challenged. It started being challenged at one of South Carolina's nearly 500 schools and then got banned from all of them just because people were mad about it at one school. It was being recommended for those in the 10th grade or higher to learn about kind of queer issues, and it is now become one of the most banned books of this past year. It's been removed from schools in Virginia, New Jersey, Florida, Northern South Carolina, Texas and a large amount of other states in the South. Speaking Speaking of Texas, the genderqueer graphic novel was just one part of a massive kind of horrifying purge led by Texas Republican State Representative Matt Krause. He he he led an effort to pressure and force schools and libraries to remove books based on a list of undesirable reads that he compiled himself. The list is a 16 page spreadsheet with over 850 books catalogued. On krauses 850 strong list of titles that he once banned from Texas libraries, 62% of them concern LGBTQ issues. It's kind of clear that what he did to make this yeah, what, what, what, what what what he did to make this list is just like Googling the words like queer and LGBT Q and gay and trans like with book and just found a list of books that have it like mentioned to somewhere. So like a lot of the the so many books are just like completely abandoned. I don't even really like, yeah, like the the list is nearly 1000 books, like, long. So, like, he was just like Google searching to, like, add as many books as he could. Yeah, it's not actually about the content beyond the fact that the content acknowledges the existence of of queer people. Like, yeah, that's to the extent that he knows about the content. That's it. Like you you can't be reading all these books. No, because you like. One of the more interesting trends that you can find on this list is that it challenges and tries to ban books that teach students. Like their legal rights, like not even counting books about like reproductive rights or rights as like LGBTQ people. It also it includes in this list like titles like the Legal Atlas of the United States, Teen Legal Rights, Identity Right Kids to know about their legal rights, equal rights, we the students Supreme Court cases for and about students. Yeah, I mean this is my, my support for LGBTQ people is is warring here. With my belief that children should not know their rights because they're they're they're they're getting too uppity as it is. We gotta we gotta crack. Look, could we crack down on kids in a way that isn't bigoted? That's all I'm asking for. Nope, no. Absolutely no way possible. We got to slow them down, kids. Just know your rights and the the very important thing here is that if you keep reading your locker, the school can just search it. So don't put it in your locker. If you put it in your car, they it's it's way harder for them to search it even if the car is on school premises. Principles car store guns that. Wait. OK sorry, let's. Yeah. I'm not sure if you can find that in the legal access to the United States, but to be fair, Texas kids can't read that book either now. So who knows? Who knows what it says? Yeah. So two Virginia school board members kind of called for. Sexual books, quote UN quote. Sexual books to be burned at a meeting last year. And a lot of these, like a lot of the rhetoric around like book, book burnings and book bannings was specifically tied to the kind of the effort to harass and gain support in school boards. We saw this last year with like proud boys and extremists and it's like other like random people who got their brains kind of warped by propaganda, kind of leading these like incendiary charges against against school board members, some, you know, school. Members got fired. Like threatened with arrest, uh, just for allowing books that mention the existence of being queer. It was, it was a it was quite a quite a problem that is now influencing this current legislative cycle. In almost every case, quote UN quote, like concerned parents have swarmed school board meetings and flooded kind of mailboxes with outrage over what they call *********** being distributed to their children. You know, people will will plaster signs with, you know, scenes from the genderqueer graphic novel that is like what they they they deem as being like **** like pornographic when it just depicts. Like how how like adults and young adults behave accurately, just like you can find it any like ******* like Batman comic. Like it's not like it's it's like, it's like not. It's it's it's it's both in line with other comic books and also like it's obviously dealing with like issues around being queer as like that's the whole point of it. So. But yeah, just blasting this. Blasting like queerness as innately pornographic is, you know, a big a big part of this type of propaganda push. It's it's it's pretty upsetting because I mean, a lot of these adults and like, quote UN quote parents, you know, who knows if they're actually parents? You know it, it, it even goes and stuff to being like, you know, they're accusing librarians and teachers of being pedophiles for having this, for having these type of materials. In Wyoming, prosecutors considered charging library staff with stocking books about sexuality, including like, literary classics under, like, the Sex Ed banner. Like sex is a funny word and this book is gay. But consider considered charging library staff, like with crimes for for stalking, these books, which are like very typical sex Ed books. It's it's incredible because when I was in a Texas public school, I read all of the wheel of time books from my school library, and those are ***** in a much, much more unhealthy way than any of the books that you talking about could possibly be described as. What you get that you get this fun thing where it's like they're basically running in the clock back on the turf arc. Like, if you remember we were talking about the church in Mexico. It was. OK so the the the arc that they did was they were anti **** people but then they lost the anti **** wars. So they they they became anti trafficking people and then when sort of surfacing came back they they went from that trafficking back to being turfs and it's like they're this, this is literally the they're doing this whole thing in reverse, right. Their starting position is that they're anti trans and they're just going back to like the anti **** stuff but like bringing in a certain like bringing in an anti trafficking angle and it's it's great. It's extremely fun. Yeah, this is. I would describe this as fun. This is what I consider a fun time. Yeah, well. I know what you consider a fun time here. You you do notice my my carefully placed, carefully placed books on on my yes, yeah, bookshelf. I'm extremely aware of that Garrison. Garrison is reading books that will get them cancelled by like 5 specific people if we talk about them too much on this show. That is always the fear of. There's always the fear of Twitter. It's being cancelled by 5 people. My favorite thing about doing a podcast for an audience of 1,000,000? Garrison is telling a joke. That is it. That is precisely. For you and me. And then making that like several minutes of content, sorry. And Oklahoma Bill was introduced to the state Senate that would prohibit school libraries from keeping books that focus on sexual activity, sexual identity, or gender identity. You're going to use the word gender identity a lot. That kind of just refers to anything that even mean like, it refers to even mentions of being cisgender, right? Because if you bring up the concept of cisgender, that infers that there is an alternative to that. So it's so like even anything, even mentions being sis, that means there must be something other. So that already falls into the gender identity kind of framework. So it's just like anything that suggests that you are, that you, that there is like gender identity is not something you are innately born with and are forever. Is is it gonna be, it's gonna be. Is, is is banned and is seen as pornographic or obscene or is like grooming children or whatever kind of words that they use. And like all of this rhetoric, is is much worse for LGBTQ authors who are black or people of color. There's books like all boys aren't blue by writer George M Johnson, who's whose book LED one White School Board member to call the police on her own districts. Librarian for keeping it in stock. It's a the these these Central York School district in Pennsylvania Band an extensive list of books last year that was almost entirely written by authors of color. This is all the stuff's been happening, like concurrently with the anti critical race theory. Like organizing and protests, which again obviously isn't about actual critical race theory, just about the suggestion that maybe racism is something that is not just an individual problem, but it's maybe kind of built into our entire culture and system of like governance and education. So it's it's it's not actual critical race theory, it's that. But I think everyone listening to this kind of already already knows that Texas Governor Greg Abbott, which is going to be just who's going to be a recurring character on this episode of kind of. That has taken this whole, you know, calling the police on librarians thing much further. Kind of a demanding that the state education Agency, quote, investigate any criminal activity in our public schools involving the availability of ***********. A move that kind of librarians in the state fear could make them targets of criminal complaints for again stocking books about sex dead or, you know, stocking books that not even, not even, not even about, like sex Ed, just just like books that mention an alternative. To the heteronormative like you are the gender that you are signed at birth like idea like anything other than that is now could get them in trouble. So anything that doesn't kind of fall under the Christian supremacist like worldview of sexuality and gender, it's it's not great. There's a it's so yeah, all boys aren't blue. The book written by by George M Johnson has been similar to the gender queer graphic novel. This is one of the most banned books of last year targeted for removal in at least. 15 states. It's a lot of the organizing of these efforts kind of start online. There's like telegram channels, Facebook groups and they carry over into like school board protests and then eventually like, you know, maybe some school board members will, will will catch on to this and start advocating for it. Then you know the state governor does, you know, the city, City Councilman, like all of this thing is, is, is his whole cycle of organizing that's really picked up alongside the anti CRT stuff many, many parents have seen like Google Docs or spreadsheets. Like the 16 page one made by Matt Krause of of contentious titles posted on Facebook by local chapters of organizations such as Mamas for Liberty. So people will make these giant, giant spend streets talking about books that they don't like, and then they'll get shared around on Facebook groups telegram channels. From there, librarians say that parents will ask their schools if these books are available inside libraries, and then we'll start rallying and organizing to get them banned from. Being available. In any kind of public, public government setting, whether there be school libraries, whether it be like public libraries, whether that be like online access, all this type of stuff. So yeah, it's a. It's. I don't know. It's organizing against these types of things is never the easiest thing because a lot of times they these people get really get get really dedicated onto this because it is such a. It's, it's it's the whole Save the Children kind of idea which gave Q Anon such strength and Q anon's kind of taking a dip down this stuff is taking a rise up. It's kind of, it's passing over the same type of organizing principles online as as mentioned before, the Governor of South Carolina asked the state Superintendent of Education, but also its law enforcement division, to investigate the presence of quote, obscene and pornographic materials from its public schools of, you know, citing the gendered queer graphic novel as an example. That you've seen? You've seen mayor is in difference in different cities withhold funding from county libraries, saying that he will not release money to these County Library systems until books with LGBTQ themes are removed. It's it's pretty grim, and so far, efforts to bring criminal charges against librarians and educators have largely faltered as is as law enforcement officials in like Florida and Wyoming and other states for this type of thing's been attempted have, you know, found really no basis for criminal investigations? But still it's like the same thing for like. Even even if this process gets started, it's about building, like, fear that it could happen to you. It's about, you know, this fear that someone's always watching and someone's always wanting to report you. And it's the thing that, like, happened with Texas and abortion. It's like trying to have, like, the bounty hunter idea, be like parents are trying to find examples of this, to report it. So then, so it's like this, like proactive kind of surveillance of anything that doesn't fall into the Christian supremacist idea of gender and sexuality. It's. You know, the, the, the. Now, of course that's like a specific interpretation of Christianity. I'm not not saying all Christianity is like that, but it is the one of it's in the South. It's it is like one of the bigger strains of that type of, of that type of kind of religious and politic synthesis. Let's let's see so. Courts have generally taken the position that libraries should not remove these books from circulation, but sometimes due to pressure via like loss of funding or depending on how like the how much, how much, like who is in charge of each states that kind of education system. A lot of, a lot of, a lot of these books have been banned and have have been pulled from many school libraries and many public libraries. Even if it doesn't like go all the way to being like, you know, court mandated all of it, sometimes it doesn't. It doesn't even need to get that far. So. Yeah, because like, even if it doesn't get to the court, librarians kind of librarians have said that just the threat of having to defend against charges and having to defend against, like, accusations of pedophilia and grooming and all this kind of nonsense is enough to get many educators to censor themselves by just not stocking these books to begin with. To avoid that whole kind of debacle. Because even just the public spectacle of an accusation can be enough to, like, ruin someone's life inside like a small, like in like a small community, right? It's it's it's is if you know parents, if you know kids. This is like part of your social group. It's part of like wherever you're like situated in in your community. If this type of thing starts up, it can really be devastating to someone's personal life. And of obviously this is very ironic because all these same people who are trying to get these books banned also cry and scream about like censorship and cancel culture while literally advocating the burning of comic books. And even like ******* like you advocating the burning of know your rights books. So it's it's like, yes they they they will cry and scream about cancel culture, but they will do all of this stuff as well. It's not it's not I there is no ideological consistency. There's they're they're not they're not trying to that's not, that's not. Part of the point it's because it's not even hypocrisy in their own eyes, because all of this is for the greater good. It's it's about protecting the innocence of children, right? If you'll notice that a lot of these bills and efforts try to not explicitly attack books for being gay or queer. Instead, they will label them as pornographic or obscene. Obviously, many books that conservatives will defend have just as graphic depictions of intimacy or autonomic like or or or anatomy. But usually heterosexual in nature and alongside other kind of values that the right wants to push. You know, even like the ******* Bible is more graphic than the gender queer graphic novel. But when conservatives say *********** what they just mean is that this is any display of queerness, right? Anything outside the mold of the fundamentalist Christian supremacist worldview that they're fighting for. Just like when they say banning critical race theory, they don't. They don't actually mean that. What they mean is ban any discussion on racism. That kind of disrupts white comfort. It's it's it's it's they they they have their own framework to view this and they can justify it within their own framework. So. You know it it it should not surprise anyone that many of these queer book bannings are being organized alongside bands on books focusing on race and racism. Matt Cross's 16 Page spreadsheet was was was made to accompany House Bill 3979, the so-called anti CRT bill that bans teaching of any materials that could mean quote, an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other psychological distress on account of the individual's race or sex. So just banning teaching of things that could make a theoretical person kind of uncomfortable, which is seems like a. Great way to view. Education? Uh, yeah. Let's just skip over the parts that are uncomfortable and that'll make a Great Society. Wow. Umm. So I'm gonna, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Quote from a a great article by Samantha rydellinthem.com quote. Small wonder then that much of the current of fervor can be traced back to the conservative group No left turn. Founded in 2020 to ban books about racial inequality from classrooms by Alina Fishbein and Elana Fishbein, believes that Antifa children, quote quote UN quote Antifa children are going to assault her kids for being white. The organization no left turn rocketed to prominence in the anti education right wing after Fishbein was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. On Fox News, a title which similarly lifted like minded boats such as Moms for Liberty No left turns website directs parents to a laundry list of books that they claim are used to, quote, indoctrinate kids into a dangerous ideology, including a robust selection on quote, comprehensive sexual education. Here the *********** lie is laid bare with over 40 books whose only kind of through line is that they deal with LGBTQ themes. The picture book I am jazz. Kate Bornstein's my gender workbook and the YA novel two boys kissing also included as Margaret Atwood's the hen. The handmaidens tale no left turn indiscriminately targets all these titles because they simply feature queer people having lives, or in the case of like Margaret Atwood, having their lives be ended. So after all, ideas ideas like that might influence kids to think that they could be different, right? And and for conservative parents, there's no greater horror than the thought of not being able to control. Their children or the idea that their kids might not be straight. It should come as no surprise that the grassroots campaigns, quote UN quote grassroots campaigns like no left turn are in reality linked to influential conservative donors and packs like the Cato Institute and the former Federalist Society pardon. Yes, like the kiddo it's named after. Kato Kaelin, the guy who lived behind OJ's house. Is that true? No, it's name. Like, wait, what? I should have just let that I should have just got? Slightly, slightly expand by like red string. Like my red string born inside my head. Like what? Oh yeah, Cato Institute, named after Kato Kaelin, the guy who. Jay, Surfer bro, buddy. But it should come as no surprise that the grassroots, quote UN quote, grassroots campaigns like no left turn are in reality linked to influential conservative donors and packs like the Cato Institute and former Federalist Society Vice President Leonard Leo. But then again, lies don't matter to the reactionary base that Republicans are hoping to rally to the front of this culture war. What matters to them is controlling the information that children have access to to extensively keep them safe and innocent. But in truth, because they think that if kids don't know but LGBTQ identities, they won't form one. It's conversion therapy by ignorance End Quote, but that that's an idea I'm going to kind of come back through. Come back to you a few times throughout the course of this episode is the idea of conversion therapy by ignorance, which really does, kind of, I think. Have introduced a really good like mental framework to understand why these things are happening because they think if they can keep kids from learning about these things then they won't become gay or trans. It is it is like trying to isolate them so that so that their reality tunnel is so small, so that they won't hopefully will never like break out of it. Now obviously if kids feel, if if kids start having feelings that break that piano, if they don't know that there's an alternative to that, that really kind of leads to things like depression and suicide. Which is why it's so high among among queer kids in that region, because it's like there's, it's like they're fundamentally breaking reality, so it it's that's hard to cope with. And we're it's gonna it's gonna do what's gonna do kind of one more segment quickly before before we have an ad break. It is a it's, it's interesting. We have like a lot of the parents that have been rallying for this have some interesting track records themselves. We can even, you know, go back to to the Family Research Council with Josh Duggar having the Save the Children idea. Well, you know himself being a child molester or help Lily Cade like serious, serious boy. Yeah, yeah, so. In a sickeningly ironic case, a Missouri parent named Ryan Utterback was charged in December with multiple accounts of child molestation and giving and and distributing *********** to minors, including a child as young as four. On. Upon his arrest, Utterback was heavily involved in the book banning advocacy, including protests against the books all boys aren't blue and and other sex Ed books. He he he said. He he he he gave a quote before he got arrested. And when he was still doing like the book banning advocacy quote only I have the intimate understanding of what is and isn't appropriate for my children, which is quite, quite the quite sentence to say on someone who is now arrested for child molestation. So yeah. That's not yeah, that's that sucks. But yeah, so, like, it's it's the idea that erasing, erasing documentation of queer lives and making it so that so that people that their kids only are exposed to a very kind of isolated worldview will make it easier to control. And if they don't hear about something, maybe they'll just, you know, live their life as a regular straight child and that's that's their hope. Now, obviously that doesn't that doesn't really happen in practice, but that's kind of what they're working towards that that's why this Save the Children thing is so important to them, because they really do think that they can Save the Children. Like they they they do think that they can keep, keep, keep them from this stuff. So I I think there's one other reason that they're doing that specifically they focus on books too, and specifically the pornographic attack, which is that. It's the the these kind of like. Incredible hard, right? Evangelicals are not the entire Republican base and so, like there are people who they have to convent like they have to fully radicalize into, into, into the extermination of where people, especially the terms of trans people and the like. The easiest way to do that is just by constantly associating anything queer with pedophilia and with like specifically pedophilia and specifically grooming. And, you know, these kind of campaigns, it's like they have dual effect. They have the the effect on the one hand of, of the actual material harm to children. And they're, you know, like preventing them from having any access to anything that shows them that they could be queer. And then simultaneously, it has this effect of of creating this association inside of conservatives that allows you to push for even more genocidal stuff that without this they might not have been able to swallow. Yeah, well, Speaking of genocidal actions, I'm sure that one of our sponsors have contributed to at least one attempted genocide. So I mean we we are actually entirely sponsored this week by the former Indonesian dictator Suharto. So, you know, big, big thank yous to him Pancasila. Forever. And yeah, here's some ads. Ah, we're back. I don't, don't don't Google what Sukarno did in in West Papua. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Suharto and Sukarno. Different guys, totally different guys. Yeah, I'm very clear on this. And that's why you should not Google what's you Carno did in in Papua. Because, dear God, but we will put his Patreon in the description. We will be backing his Patreon heavily. Look at the show notes for that. Hi, welcome back. We're going to, we're going to segue into other types of legislation now, but still kind of focusing on the whole parents rights to decide what scientific and medical knowledge children can have access to in terms of like the conversion therapy by ignorance category. So we're going to talk about the don't say gabil. So Florida's House and Senate just passed the so-called don't say gay bill that bans mention of anything other than the strict heteronormativity and the you are the gender assigned at birth kind of idea for at least most of elementary school. It's banned and possibly farther reaching than that, with teachers also opening themselves up to lawsuits if they fail to comply. It's formerly known as the parental rights in Education Bill and the text of the legislation. States that quote classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through third grade or in any manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards. So it it is it is very intentionally vague for how far reaching this can be, for how much they will determine what and what isn't appropriate for grades four and up. Who knows? Yeah, so, but it's not just, it's not just limited to early grades. Classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity could be prohibited or at least taken to court at all grade levels, depending on what the parents find. Unacceptable, right? It is, it's it's it's based on what? The parents. Wants to wants to happen to to to the kids that are under their care. So it's it's specifically following kind of the the framework that yeah you can you can report something if you don't like it. So it's it's it's very much pandering to like a reactionary conservative. All this stuff that conservatives said was a nightmare about like the Stasi in East Germany and the KGB they're like but what if we just decentralized that you know and and let anyone who's a bigot. Report and ruin the lives of people around them for a variety of ******** reasons. It's it's good. Yeah, it's a. And we just like other States and like in in Texas, the enforcement of it is not initially done by the government, but is open to a concern of fanatical public saying that parents may bring action against the school district to obtain a declaratory judgment and a court may award damages and attorneys fees if it finds the school violated the measure. So there's like a financial incentives for parents for this. The bill will come into effect on the 1st of July with all school districts. Required to update their policies by at least June 2023, there was a there was also a proposed amendment that would have required schools and educators to report if they knew or suspected a child with LGBTQ to their parents within six weeks of learning. That so within six weeks of learning, if they're not SIS or straight, they would have to be reported to the parents. But that that part was withdrawn before the bill reached the house. But in terms of like, this is the type of thing that this that like, the legislators are thinking. Of when it became increasingly apparent the bill was going to be passed no matter what, a Democrat Chevron Jones, the first openly gay Florida State senator, tried to amend the bill to narrow the language to say that in classroom instruction should not be intended to change students sexual orientation or gender identity, and specifically not marginalized queer people, and instead just limit the bill to H appropriate sex Ed. And that amendment obviously failed, with Dennis Backley, the Bills main sponsor, saying that it would significantly gut. The Bills intent, so it's it's, it's it's specifically to suppress knowledge of being queer, that is that is the whole that's the whole point of the bill. You know? I mean the the governor claims that the bill addresses quote sexual stuff and quote telling kids that they may be able to pick genders and all that saying that that has nothing to do like this is nothing to do with sex at all. Like literally nothing at like nothing. Yeah, but. They still view it like the pornographic, obscene kind of category because like, it's right. It's the same thing like if you show gay people kissing, that is sexual. If you show straight people kissing, that isn't right. It's it's being queer as innately more obscene. It is, it is, it is, it is so much more of an issue. Ronda Santos governor also said, like, how many parents want their kindergarteners to have transgenderism or something injected into their school discussion? But that's so that's type of stuff. He says it like press conferences and stuff. So yeah. It is it is very clear that the bill is targeted specifically towards gay people and being trans or being queer, being non CIS, non straight, that whole that that that whole category. The Governor's press secretary called it the anti grooming bill. You know, reviving the type of like, you know, rhetoric that LGBT attacks have had for years suggesting that, you know, being gay means that you are a pedophile or being trans means that you're a pedophile. And it ties in with this thing you'll see in like the far right and the libertarian right where people have like kill your local pedophile bumper stickers and stuff because you can't argue with like, yeah, pedophiles are are the worst. That's horrible, but you don't actually mean. People who molest children? You mean people who live in a way that you consider obscene, which you are equating with pedophilia so that you can justify murdering those people eventually? Yep. Uh, yeah. And when and when confronted with actual pedophiles, they literally don't do ****. Well, they are off. Like Andy, know for a great example, has regularly hung out around a specific I think Amos Lee is his name pedophile. The longest serving Republican speaker of the house was a pedophile and passive scale. Then it had Dennis Hastert D hast dohas that's what that that's what that what's that German band. This would have been a decent joke, if I remember their name right away. Rammstein. Yeah, well, I ****** it up. OK, so. Anyway, please, please continue. So, yeah, but like they don't say gabil tries even less than some of the like, school book bands to hide behind the defense of prohibiting ***********. Like, it just says the quiet part out loud, you know, saying that this bill is grounded in the belief we're not going to say it loud part out loud. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like the the the Bills just grounded in the belief that LGBTQ people, simply by existing, are a threat to like children and must be completely erased. Like, that's that's the whole that's the whole idea. Following several hours of debate ahead of the vote in the Senate of a bill, sponsor Alana Garcia claimed that, quote, gay is not a permanent thing and LGBTQ is not a permanent thing. So yeah, it's the type of like, conversion therapy by ignorance thing a lot of these people have advocated for. Immersion therapy to be legalized in the past or re legalized in the past. So yeah, they just they just don't want gay people to be around because they're you find the Nikki so. It's. It's not it's not just Florida though, right the the fear is with like hyper focusing on you know just just just don't say Gabel and Florida kind of you know it. It ignores a lot of the other stuff that's happening across the entire country if you just focusing on state because there are like 15 similar bills moving through state legislators that are strict, how textbooks and curriculums are allowed to teach LGBTQ topics. And even like who could be hired as teachers and what are, what are like what's allowed to be said when it comes to gender identity and sexual orientation. All this stuff happening all across the country. A house bill in Tennessee would ban textbook and instructional materials that promote, normalized support or address lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender lifestyles. Quote UN quote. And in in K through 12 schools, so also also high school in in in Kansas, there's a bill that seeks to amend the states obscenity laws to make using classroom materials depicting homosexuality a Class B misdemeanor. Legislators in Indiana are working to bar educators from discussing any content about sexual orientation, quote, transgenderism, or gender identity without permission from parents. In Oklahoma, there's a Senate bill. That would ban public schools from employing anyone who, quote, promotes positions in the classroom or any or at any function of the public school that is in opposition to the closely held religious beliefs of students. So that's that's interesting framing there. Yeah. And and again, we need to be very clear about this. When, like when these people say deeply held religious beliefs, they mean fundamentalist Christianity. They they are, they are. These people are very specifically attempting to turn the state into a Christian ethno state, and this is the **** that they used to do it. And it's. Yeah, Yep. It's it's it's grim. We get, we can look at like a recent report from the Trevor Project, which is a an LGBTQ suicide prevention and crisis intervention group. And they did a recent report finding that LGBTQ youth who learn about LGBTQ people or LGBTQ issues in the school have a 23% lower odds of reporting a suicide attempt in the past year. So just that, like the the knowledge that there is an alternative is like, is life changing for people? Right. The ability to to realize that there are other reality tunnels is can save people's lives like it is, yeah. I like I I watched this happen, like my my public school, like I was in a public school, but I was in public school and really conservative area. The only time anyone even mentioned being gay was screaming about gay marriage and like, we ******* saw some ****. Like a lot of extremely bad things happened to the queer kids there, including me. Like, it like, this, this this stuff kills people itself. Hurts people it is. I think that's something that people in, like more blue states don't quite understand, is how how absolute this type of thing is like living in these communities. How how narrow your version of reality is. Like how how everything you're exposed to is so hyper focused that even knowledge of an alternative can be so mind-blowing that it really is important to have at least this, to be knowledgeable. Because yeah, a lot of people who, you know, a lot of people may not have access to the Internet in the same way. It's like a lot of these groups, especially, like especially Christian groups specifically, have like, like, you know, services that you can buy. To like, suppress websites on your Wi-Fi routers so that only you're only available to access like certain websites like, like, all like it is a whole effort to restrict the reality that kids are exposed to, to kind of railroad them into this hyper specific kind of heteronormative idea of existence. So yeah, any type of thing that breaks these kids out of, out of these reality tunnels can be, can be life changing, which is why they're trying to ban all these books at libraries because yeah, even if you even if you block. Websites. Even if you restrict Internet access, even if you restrict what can be taught in schools, you know, there's the fear of what if a kid goes to a library and finds a book about being gay, then, oh wow, that could, that would, you know, undo all of the effort that undo the thousands of dollars we spend on blocking Internet access to, to websites. So, like, that's why they're talking about libraries and stuff, is because, yeah, if they find out about this stuff anywhere, then they're going to be in trouble. Like that's that's the whole point of, like, isolating people and isolating what they view as possible. So. Yeah, uh, we're not gonna talk about some, uh, we're we're gonna, we're gonna talk money, money, money, money. The other thing that they don't say Gabriel has highlighted is the extent to which big businesses and corporate America. Is financially funding many of these recent efforts to hack away at queer rights? Yep. This has kind of been like a back and forth thing though, especially if you look back at the past few years under the Trump era. Let's take the 2016 N Carolina bathroom bill, for example, arguably the opening act for the current onslaught of socially conservative legislation targeting trans people. Remember, this was like right after the Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage. So this is when the needle starts to shift towards trans people. This is the bill that said that you have to use the bathroom assigned at matching the gender you were assigned at birth on your participate. All this kind of stuff, putting, again, unspoken bigotry, unspoken stuff, you know, you could be, you know? Arrested or harassed for doing this previously. But it's like putting this type of idea into concrete law, right? This is once, once progress starts, there's this, like, backpedaling so they, you know, they put, they put that, they put what was once, like, unspoken bigotry and just like obvious bigotry into actual written law. It's like make making it concrete. So during the 2016 bathroom bill, kind of whole thing in North Carolina. We saw corporations trying to stay conscious of culture shifts, attempting to stay on like the sympathetic side of the rising generations who would, you know, become their future employees and customers and customers trying to appeal to them and keeping that in mind, so in the aftermath of the passage of the bathroom bill, multiple companies like PayPal, Adidas, Douche Bank, all rescinded plans to invest in the state's wild, too. Like, I mean, if there's, if there's evil going on, Deutsche Bank is providing money. Make it. Yeah, it's, it's it's it's it's stunning like how bad you have to be that Deutsche Bank is like, no, I like. Like every every person who's like, I know you're being pulled out of Russia yet. Like no like pushback. Like I was before. Like I I knew someone who worked there. Who yeah two of his coworkers like started like doing audits of their accounts. Both of them wound up dead in their hotel rooms. Non extradition countries. Yeah that's yeah like even though so OK. So yeah Deutsche Bank initially said they weren't going to pull out of Russia, but like 2 days ago as we record this started pulling out so but they they pulled out of North Carolina. They pull up North Carolina. Jesus Christ. Big, big, big. You know, there's a degree to which it's probably just like that Raytheon energy, where it's like Raytheon, we're great with trans people. Yeah. You're making missiles, then you're fine. Exactly. Yeah. I mean big musical artists like Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and a former former R.E.M. Member Ringo Starr Kezele concerts there. Did you call Ringo Starr, a member of R.E.M. Garrison? The end the NCAA announced that it would not. Was championship tournament. OK, OK, OK. If you'd lived through the 90s, you would never make fun of Michael Stipe again, and the National Basketball Association pulled its All Star game from the Charlotte almost 70 companies. Joy did a lawsuit against the bill. And, you know, money talks. The pressure worked. The state repealed the law in 2017. The same year, a broad coalition of business leaders in Texas blocked a similar bill pushed by these tonchi conservative, then Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick. And we've seen the same type of thing happen in Georgia the past few years with the with actions like corporate boycotts, many large employers pushing back on the succession of socially conservative bills, including, like racist voting restrictions, six week abortion bans, and, quote religious freedom bills that would give businesses protection. Who refused? Customers or higher employees that are queer? A prominent in that resistance was a Disney, which cast a long shadow over Georgia's economy via its filming of Marvel movies inside Atlanta. Yeah, so. Yeah, across many states, big corporate brands were quick to condemn obviously bigoted political moves. Prominent Tennessee employers like Nissan, del, Amazon and Vanderbilt University sent a sent a letter last year opposing a suite of of bills targeting LGBTQ rights and a similarly, a group of Texas businesses business leaders declared opposition to Governor Greg Abbott's recent directive to investigate parents and others who provide transition treatment. Over for transgender youth. But after Trump got out of office, and particularly during this recent round of attacks on queer rights, companies have not released a backing up their words with any equivalent actions. After Tennessee last year passed all the Bills that targeted LGBTQ rights, including measures restricting a classroom discussion barring trans girls from any high school sports, and it's in its own version of, like, the bathroom bill, it faced nothing like the North Carolina. Boycotts there was, there was, there was, there was just nothing. Because this is when Biden was president now. So whether it be the anti CRT stuff, voting restrictions or stripping away LGBTQ rights the past year under Joe Biden companies have not really bothered to push back on the socially conservative bills overtaking many states. It's it's they don't it's it's easier to push back but it's easier to push back on something when you know when you have a big bad in office I guess. Well and I think also it's it's the companies can see which way the wind is blowing right. Yeah like it's the same thing with grifters when when you when you watch people like when you watch streamers like somebody starting to their political positions when you watched a lot. The live stream is particularly do this when you watch them starting to flip that that's how you can tell which way the wind is blowing and this is really ******* scary because you know the the the the way the wind is blowing. Right now that that these corporations are, are are you know drifting towards is just you know refusing to oppose is just this extermination ISM. Yeah. I mean so thankfully Disney got, you know. Shouted. To like, we're gonna talk about. Yeah, OK, we're getting into that. Yeah. So creators of the hit movie song of the South was a notable that in their refusal to criticize the bill as it moved through the legislature under. The kind of recent stuff inside Florida specifically so but this was part of an overall pattern like the the corporate response was was much more muted. So they go to the don't say Bill in Florida compared to other stuff across across the country even and this shouldn't really surprise anybody. Many of the Republican backers of the bill in Florida are actually bankrolled by the very same businesses that have done performative virtue signaling, boycotts and protests under the Trump era. Listening and Disney World in Orlando is one of the state's biggest employers and an enormous economic force inside Florida, and when Disney Silence was met with pushback, Bob Chapek the CEO. Tried to kind of do damage control at first, like internally within the company and then for outside press last Monday I think, which was the 7th. In a in a in a memo to Disney staff, Chapek argued that the company can do more to promote tolerance quote through the inspiring content we produce and the welcoming culture we create and the diverse community of organizations we support. Which is funny if you know anything about the history of Disney. Also saying that the messages in their movies are more powerful than any law being effort, which is wow yeah yeah, that's a good line. Which is also you know. Great, coming from the company's most famous for queer coding, almost all of their fellows. Great. So sure, sure, Bob. Two days later, at a shareholder meeting, a check was a little more open and told she told shareholders that the company had privately opposed the bill, and they're trying to explain why the silence. In the recent legislative efforts to attack LGBT P LGBTQ people, he said that we chose not to take a public position on the bill because we felt like we could be more effective working behind the scenes engaging directly with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. But it it it later came out that Chapek had only reached out to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis just that morning after the bill had already had already passed. Yeah, we we we need that cat from saga that just yells lies. Well, yes, lying cats. My favorites. Definitely appreciate lying. Cat lying. Yeah. So of course none of this satisfied anybody, and there's been increasing pushback from both within the Disney company and outside. A Pixar sent a letter to Chapek criticizing his wishy washy stance. On the on the on the don't say bill and even goes on even goes on to goes on to criticize the corporation for capitalizing on pride through like a through Rainbow Mickey merchandising and stuff saying quote, it feels terrible to be part of a company that makes money from pride merch when it when it chooses to step back in times of our greatest need and when our rights are at risk, says the Pixar letter so. Yeah, after after a few days after the shareholder meeting, Chapek said. Third times the charm, and tried again to save face, announcing the company would immediately begin supporting efforts to combat similar legislation in other States and would pause all political donations in the state pending a review of the company's political giving, conceding that the company fails to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights. And all that is well and good if you ignore the fact that in the past two years alone. Disney has given $300,000 to politicians in Florida who voted for the Don't say bill. Disney entities donated at least $4000 in the 2022 reelection campaigns for the Bills. Chief sponsors, state Representative Joe Harding and state sponsor Dennis Baxley, and Disney entities also donated $50,000 to Political Action committee tied to the Governor, Ron de Santos, in 2021, so just last year. So yeah, that's a that's a lot of money. Yeah, and and I think I think it's worth like noting for people who. Like, are somewhat younger, which is that, like, there there's a whole thing where corporations pretend that they like queer people now, and this is the thing that has existed for maybe a decade, and the other several 100 years of capitalism are them, like, ruthlessly crushing queer people of all kinds. So. Yeah, this is this is their normal stage. Queer capitalism is like, not a thing. It's a thing that exists solely to sell you sweatshirts. It's not a thing. Get that Rainbow Mickey merchandise. Yeah, they they want to. They they they are actively OK with funding people who want to kill you. So as I as I was writing this last week tonight, the show with Jonathan Oliver came out with a small piece that was covering similar ground to to, to my writing that also included some nice. Nice background on Disney sponsored politician and lead sponsor of they don't say bill that, Dennis Baxley so yeah, apparently Baxley has said that quote. Abortion is causing Europeans to be replaced by immigrants, Disney's going backwards, Nazi roots nice little light replacement lie. In 2020 he worked on bills to repeal protections for queer workers and worked to re legalize gay conversion therapy. And in 2018 at some kind of. Fundraising event, he said that quote. I know some districts where there's a big infestation of homosexuals that are pushing their agenda. Infestation. Hmm. Under the screen and then trying to get more people hired like them and set up get it options and all this stuff. It's a continual fight for the values that we hold dear boy. So brought you. Brought to you by Disney. Wow. And yeah, take, take. It has station, huh? Yeah, it's a yeah. Take, take, take note of the use of the word infestation there. That kind of ties into my whole, my whole like a viewing, you know, queerness as a contagion kind of idea. Well, which I mean all viewing the enemy as a contagion is also older than just viewing queer people as a contagion because it's exactly how Hitler talked about the Jews. And, you know, it it goes we can look at, like some of the things the Turks would say about Armenians. It's this idea of, you know, you. There's no, there's no middle ground. With a virus and if you turn people into a virus, then you don't have to consider a middle ground. Yep. So before we go and break, I'm going to, I'm going to do one more. I'm going to do a quote from an article in the Atlantic titled Want to understand the red State Onslaught? Look at Florida. It's a, it's a, it's a decent article kind of going through the financial stuff that Disney has kind of backed. But yeah, quote, why have so many companies backed away from these fights? The fights against the legislation. Some corporate lobbyists I spoke with said that one reason is that they believe the public opposition is counterproductive because more Republican elected officials in the Donald Trump era find it politically valuable to be seen as fighting bigger companies. Businesses also frequently complained that the widening gulf between the parties leaves them in a lose lose position of alienating an important block of potential customers, whatever they come down on policy debates. Activists, though, point out that businesses often try to have it both ways by rhetorically identifying with causes such as inclusion and diversity, without taking any tangible steps to defend them. Another factor probably looms larger than any of these considerations. However much they want to publicly align with the values of younger customers and consumers and workers, big companies want to only want to go only so far in fighting these proposals because they still mostly prefer Republicans in control of state governments to deliver the low tax light regulation policies that they favor. State Republicans have, in turn, have grown more overt about threatening those beliefs when business leaders raised objections to the culture war components of their agenda when American Airlines criticized the restrictive. Voting bill in Texas passed last year. Lieutenant Governor Patrick openly threatened to kill other legislation the company had cared about. So yeah, like obviously companies want Republicans to be in charge because it will make it easier to run their big giant corporate businesses that basically are as powerful as a lot of as a lot of other like government entities. So yeah, they're going to spend fifty $50,000 supporting Ron DeSantis. They're going to spend $300,000 in the past, the past two years, we're supporting all these Republican candidates that voted for, for the don't say bill because that makes them more profit in the long run. And that's, you know, if you're, if you're running a business, that's what they want. So Yep, that is a I'm gonna take another break and then we will we will come back to talk about Texas and and and bathroom bills and healthcare and all of the other kind of stuff that's happened in recent weeks. Hot. Yeah. Hello, we are back. Sorry I was, I was taking some time to listen to my favorite Ringo Starr R.E.M. Album in the break in in between Reading Books by the Really Good Combo of of a media how how dare you not the. Not properly appreciating Michael Stipe, the the voice of several generations. Michael stiper. Steepener. Michael stipe. Yeah. So he was a I mean, yeah, I, I, I, I really like The Black Keys. So. Anyway, I'm gonna make more bad music jokes. Or I could continue my script. Yeah, so please continue so we don't have to talk about all of the wonderful contributions your generation is made to music. Like like you two with hits like you two fame Zoomer bands. You two with hitman George Harrison. Yep. You're gonna make a lot of people happy, Garrison. A lot of people. Real happy. At least 31 states have introduced bills that would ban trans athletes from competing in sports that correspond to their gender identities. Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee have already signed such bills into law. At the start of this year, a new restrictions were put into place for in for in in Texas to also restrict. UK through 12 school sports, people can be on now making them specifically match their sex listed on their birth certificate at or near time of birth. And even when they're states who don't just have blanket bans, there's other horrifying things happening. Like in the beginning of last February, it came out that the Utah Republicans are making and have proposed a Commission to analyze the bodies of trans kids that would determine student athlete eligibility on a case by case basis. With having the authority to establish a baseline range for physical characteristics affected by puberty, banning schools, school school athletes who do not fall within these established limits from participating in gendered sports. Also a non fun fun side side but about the bill is that in their efforts to analyze the bodies of trans kids, the bill would also remember the Commission immune from any lawsuit with respect to all acts done and actions taken in good faith in carrying out their purposes. This is something that I think is really common, specifically with transphobia, which is that like. All of the rhetoric about transphobia is about sort of like like a huge amount of, it's about molestation. He was about amount, amount of, it's about pedophilia. And then, I mean, especially with the molestation parts, like, yeah, OK, so we're going to have this Council, right? We're going to have this ******* Commission. These people are going to, they're going to just like they're going to molest these kids, right. But like this, this is just what happened to trans people constant like the TSA, like constantly. It's just an enormous engine for just like, like sexually abusing every single trans person who go. Who goes into an airport like, I've definitely had not fun experiences at the airport the past few times like, this is this is The thing is. It's like it's. It's. See? They they impose as a sanction on trans people the things that they claim trans people are doing. Yes, and it's it is. And it's also interesting you'll find how many of these kind of bill sponsors or politicians eventually have it come out that, like, they watch a lot of like, trans *********** and stuff. It's like it's it's all, it's all fake, like all, like everything, like everything they say they don't actually mean. It's all about the culture war, it's all about all the ******* like Save the Children stuff. It's all in opposite that they can get. Elected into politics, right? Well, we'll talk about this, but like with like the with the Texas thing, how all of the big new Texas stuff happened like days before the primary election because they were being challenged by by, by other politicians that were farther to the right of them. So it's all like a political ploy, but the problem is, is that at certain points. Because of how long the culture war kind of ideas been going, there's people who, you know, sincerely bought into the idea of the of the culture war now themselves running for office. So like it is like they do actually genuinely believe the things now like it is, it is like it is like a full circle thing of things that were just, you know, just to get votes initially, like things that weren't really believed sincerely just just to hold votes. But now people who were brought up in that whole political idea are are starting to run for office who do actually believe those in those things sincerely. So now it's it's leading, leading to a whole new kind of onslaught of rights because these people have just escalated and accelerated the whole culture where idea yeah well and the other thing is like they've linked up. The people who like. People whose politics is the church or people whose politics have specifically been about eliminating trans people for like half a century, right? Like there's, there's there's the, the linkages that are being formed between people who have sort of like. You know between these? Like militantly anti trans organizations in between sort of these people who buy into this. Like either you're very who are cynically deploying this sort of the the sort of Christian supremacist rhetoric, or the people who are just actual. Like Christian fascists, right? Like these people, like these people are going together to the point where it doesn't, it doesn't really matter why they're doing it. OK. At a certain point like the the reason why specifically they're doing it becomes immaterial and you're just sort of left with. The things that they are doing. Yeah, it's. I mean and there's just been so much of it the past the past year specifically like, yeah over like overall more than 100 bills designed to restrict the rights of transgender, transgender people have been introduced in at least 33 states. It just in just in 2021, which is like it's become a record-breaking year for any kind of anti trans legislation. It's just it is accelerated to such a extreme degree and now continuing in the 2022 legislative cycle last spring and in, in, in, in. From Arkansas, the state legislature banned gender of her main care for minors, including, you know, puberty blockers, HRT, all this stuff, you know? And house Bill 157 O prevents trans people from receiving a hormone therapy, puberty blockers, similar treatments. It was called the save adolescence from Experimentation Act, you know, referring to medical treatment as experimentation and shortly after the bill. Was was was signed into law. The the doctors who run the largest or who ran the largest provider of of hormone therapy in the state reported an increase in suicide attempts in their patients during like just that same month. It was, it was the first of its kind of bill signed into law, and it was it was initially vetoed by the governor, but then that veto was overturned by the state legislator. So. And that kind of similar laws have been have been happening in states ever since then. We're not gonna talk about Texas because that's. One of the one of the biggest, one of the biggest kind of things in this whole fight is the stuff around Texas. So. Texas officials have begun investigating parents of transgender adolescents for possible child abuse, according to a lawsuit filed on a few a few weeks ago after Governor Greg Abbott directed the the Child Protective Services Agency in Texas to handle certain medical treatments, including puberty blockers and HRT, as possible crimes. The directive from Governor Abbott was following a nonbinding opinion by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Saying that parents who provide their transgender teenagers with doctor prescribed care could be investigated for child abuse. So. The moves by both Abbott and Paxton, which are two Republican incumbents, came just days before the primary election, in which each of them faced significant challenges from farther right opponents. So they've both say they've faced criticism from not being. Staunch staunchly anti. Trans enough in the past in the in like in the months prior to this and they did this to hopefully you know gain support from the more radical more radical voters in Texas that's like that is that is undoubtedly a big a big a big part of why this happened at the time that it did they did the same thing both Paxton well lesson Paxton. But Abbott did basically the same thing with like masks in the last year. To where it's like, yeah, you know, I mean it's it's great because if people are just they they will literally kill thousands of people. In order to just hold on to their power and it's. Among to be the first people investigated for child abuse was actually an employee by the state's Protective Services agency who had a 16 year old transgender child. On March 1st, the ACLU of Texas and the Lambda Lambda Legal great great name went to state courts in Austin to try to stop this inquiry into this family. Who again, who who worked for? Who worked for the Child Protective Services Agency. The employee, who was not named in the court, filing, works on reviews of reports of abuse and neglect. She was placed on administrative leave a few weeks ago, according to the filing, the Friday after Governor Abbott made the initial kind of letter. She was visited by an investigator from the agency who was also seeking medical records related to her child. The the family of the child, identified in court documents only as Mary Doe, has as as refused to voluntarily turn over records and is taking the case to court. According to the lawsuit, the state investigator told parents that the only allegation against them was that their transgender daughter may have been provided with gender affirming healthcare and was currently transitioning and that was that was the claims. That was the. That was the basis for the claims of of, of, of of child abuse. It's so like, initially it wasn't clear if Abbott's order would survive kind of judicial scrutiny because the order does not need the order doesn't change any Texas law. It's just it's just an opinion piece. And several county attorneys and district attorneys of Dallas and Houston have publicly condemned Abbotts and Pakistan's directives. I'm clarifying that they would not prosecute families for child abuse under the new definition, and they would not irrationally and unjustifiably interfere with medical decisions. The mayor of Austin announced that Austin should be considered a safe place, a sanctuary for transgender children and their families, and they would not be enforcing the governor's mandate. So it's quite a time to be alive, to have sanctuary cities for being trans, and of course, all of these things, whether it be from like the DA or the mayor, that doesn't stop Child Protective Services from not investigating you like, that, doesn't like, that, doesn't like. They can still investigate and harass you. They can still send agents to your door. They can still try to seize medical records. Right. They can still investigate claims even if even if the DA won't prosecute, there's still that massive, like looming threat of and like that, like terror, like holding over, you know, people's heads. You know, it's it's it's a it is like a mass. It's a massive scare tactic, right? It is. It is to terrorize people like they'll be too scared to transition because they don't want their family to get in trouble. It's. It's pretty grim. It's pretty, it's pretty it's pretty evil. So on the for for the for the ACLU and the Lambda Legal Court filing. They they're they're seeking to block the request for medical records from the employees case and more broadly kind of challenged the legitimacy of the entire investigation and the power that the government has to change this definition of child abuse. It's because it's it's it's it's it's also important important to mention that the mandatory the the mandatory reporting aspect of the bill which was well not Bill of the of the legal opinion that was really emphasized and Governor Abbott's directive, Abbott described in his letter. That the order would mean that all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children, including doctors, nurses, therapists and even school teachers would be required to report to state authorities if a if if they believe that there is a minor who is trans or could be receiving any kind of gender affirming treatment. And if they don't report this, they could themselves face criminal penalties. So the whole, the whole mandatory reporting aspects and other like insanely like insanely bad thing that, you know, we could talk about it. For a long time this episode is getting long enough, so we're just going to continue through and we can we can ponder at how at how bad that is. One parent of a transgender teenager in Houston said that the family's health clinic, legacy community health, has suspended all refills and a new prescriptions for transgender youth in light of Abbott's new order. So it's it's happening like, yeah, it's there, it's this, the stuff has happened, the stuff has started. It's already scaring people into not doing stuff. Like it's it's doing what it was designed to do. Yeah, yeah. And and and I know we keep making this episode longer, but like it is. Worth mentioning that like. It actually like. Having someone even temporarily like being off of the hormones that they've been taking for, for HRT, like, that ******* sucks. Yeah, it's like it has really bad negative effects. I mean, yeah, like people will be surprised how fast hormones start working and how fast going off of them they stop working. Like, it is it is, it is pretty, it is pretty surprising. And like, I didn't want to get tons into like, the science of being trans in this because that's not the focus of this week. We're talking about the legislation and the onslaught of queer. Rights of people trying to hurt them. But like, you know, it's it's obvious that like there is not many cases at all where there's being, you know, like genital surgery done on minors. Like if that does, that does not happen. Yeah, it can happen for like medic, like that can happen for medically necessary reasons. Like if there's like accidents and stuff like that doesn't happen for gender affirming care. What happens is you get on you, you you go on puberty blockers, which are already prescribed to cisgender kids all the time. If they have early onset puberty, they have no lasting side effects. They're completely safe. And in some cases, depending on the kids therapist and their doctors, they may be prescribed HRT or they'll be prescribed that of a bit later, but that is that even still that is, that is the only things that happened and what they're trying to suppress is both. Both have like those things, but also like the ability for like therapists to even talk about gender with kids. Like if kids are having problems with like with gender dysphoria, they don't feel comfortable to even have to not even be able to talk to that. To talk about his feelings with therapist is like part. It's part of the goal because that can be considered gender affirming care. I I think that there's one I think we really should mention, which is that I so there there is one kind like one that there's few, but that there's there's a very important kind of like quote UN quote, like gender surgery that is done on children, which is the stuff that's on intersex. Kids and kids, yeah, they also like circumcisions are already. Yeah, I mean with with specific with intersex kids, this stuff matters because all of these bills that you're talking about, it's like, oh, you can't have gender affirming surgery. You can't have like surgery on kids like every single one of these bills, like they they all have, they all specifically have carve outs to allow doctors to **** ***. I the the gentles of intersex kids, yeah, yeah, that that's all carved out there, so. Yeah, well, let's see. We we are, we are near the last, we are, we're near, near, near, near the last little stretch here. On March 11th at Texas State Court halted the new Department of Family Protective Services policy of investigating the parents of transgender children. District District Judge Amy Mentium concluded on concluded the hearing on the requested statewide injunction by saying, quote, the governor's directive was given the effect of new law or new agency rule despite there being no new legislation. Regulation or even agency policy, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Department of Family Protective Services Commissioner Baby masters of their actions violate the separation of powers by impermissibly approaching into the legislative domain. Judge Mentium also granted a temporary restraining order blocking the state from investigating the family that that that prompted this lawsuit from happening from the person who already worked at the Department of Family Protective Services. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed this decision. Well, first of all, he he appealed the restraining order and lost that appeal. And and the the SLU is trying to make this temporary restraining order against the state permanent and extends to all parents of all transgender kids in Texas. And there's there's going to be a whole trial scheduled for this topic on July 11th 2022. So this is going to this is going to get this is going to happen like where where we will figure out what is going to happen with this later on this year and after the judges ruling the halting the investigations due to lack of legal binding Attorney General Ken Paxton filed. An appeal for for for the ruling so and that's so so that's that's gonna get appealed and he he tweeted out that the quote Democrat judges order permitting child abuse is frozen. Much needed investigations will proceed as they should. The fight will continue up to the Supreme Court. I'm ready for it but it's unclear how much legal backing this actually has. So we don't know if if the if the if the Protective Services actually has permission to keep investigating or not. It is kind of unclear. Paxton says that they can this, this this state judge says they can't, and that's kind of legally up in the air right now. So we don't totally know, but there's going to be a whole trial on the topic in July. Kind of. One of the last things I want to mention is this, this Idaho bill that was passed by the House of Representatives that would that would criminalize gender affirming medical procedures including puberty blocker, sorry, including puberty blockers. And HRT for any kind of transgender youth. And it was also reported that the bill would make it a felony punishable by life imprisonment to anyone who helps a kid travel across state lines to get gender affirming healthcare. But this actually maybe isn't actually true. Like this actually probably wasn't part of that bill. The bill just amends current laws regarding female genital mutilation, of course, of carving out a specific section to allow the mutilation of intersex kids. But but yeah, it it added a section also criminalizing gender affirming care. But the section of the bill making it a felony to travel out of state only refers to the genital mutilation section. It doesn't refer to the gender affirming care section. And it's unclear if that was an oversight or if the limitation was intentional. Who knows? But it it it still did attempts to criminalize gender affirming care within the state. The bill was I believe. I think. Earlier this morning, as of time of recording, the bill was not passed by the Senate, so that's good. They said the the the Senate said that it was too vague in scope and it was unclear how it was going to be enforced. So that bill was halted and it did not did not continue. Yeah. But, you know, that's yeah, there is a lot of the reason why all stuff is kind of started is that like, there has been so much progress happening in queer rights in the past like 10 years, right. So now because the progress is more visible, what was once like obvious but like low key bigotry is trying to be put into law, right? There is, there is. There used to be so many medical hoops to jump through to get any type of gender affirming treatment. But now almost every, like legit medical organization recognizes the importance of gender affirming care. So that, plus the visibility and the cultural acceptance of queerness, is making some, you know, mostly good old white Christian conservative populations a little bit uncomfortable, right? There's there's this increasing fear that what if your kid thinks they're trans? Well, what if what if they become an unholy degenerate? What if and what if there are people trying to make that happen on purpose, right? All of the brutality, all of like. All of the brutality in these bills, the kind of the not like the the total nonchalance that the possibility of you know, kids killing themselves because of this bill and because of all these legislations like all of like the transphobia negatively contributing to mental health. All of that brutality is justified in the minds of these anti trans like people because it's to save the it's to save their kids from experiencing that in the 1st place right. It's the idea that queerness is an infection that it can spread from person to person. It's like it's a it's it's like a contagion. If if you hear about it you could yourself. Become gay. So if they don't hear about it, then that's not going to be a possibility. So all all of the brutality. Is like it's, it's, it's it's both the point, but it's also justified because this thing is seen as such like an it's seen as such an ontological threat to their whole idea of like the world. So. Yeah that's uh and it's I mean it's not gonna stop right every you know 2021 we saw a massive increase in legislation on this topic. 2022, We're seeing an even bigger increase in legislation on this topic and you know attempts to physically oppose it. You know our can can kind of be done. I mean like you can you can see all there was some some successful counter protests to the whole school board thing. You can also like you can sneak queer books into libraries so you can just you can just put them in there. You can request queer books in your library systems. You can, you know, attend school board meetings and again it's sure the the the institution of of the institution of schooling is problematic in a lot of ways. But it's we shouldn't make it worse for queer kids. So maybe it still is worth actually focusing on. And there is there's a lot like, you know you can like in the case of the ACLU suit there is legal challenges being taken up against all of these things. We'll see how that goes. The there's always been a it's always been a shaky. Record of the legal you know of like the the courts ability to protect these rights but every once in a while it does happen like with like with gay marriage. The last thing I'll mention with like specifically with like HRT being made illegal in a lot of these places at least like prescribed via doctor I will kind of talk. I will mention DIY HRT as the thing that that that is a thing that exists. You can go to DIY HRT dot GitHub dot IO to get information on this. It's been it requires a lot of like research but you can find like you can get HR, you can get like estrogen and stuff from like like made by the companies that supply. Pharmacies, you can buy that legally. Testosterone is a little bit more iffy because that is, I think that is like a scheduled tour Schedule 3 drug. But estrogen is much more available to buy legally online to just make sure you get it from a good place and make sure that you, you know, know how it affects you and all that stuff. Like do lots of reading, but that is a possibility. So I will probably plan an episode on DIY HRT in the near future, just like it's like a whole episode on the topic, but I just wanted to kind of mention that as one of the last things being like. Yeah. If they're restricting all these stuff, we should probably, you know, learn to provide it ourselves because there's no guarantee that the governments or any kind of even like pharmacies will be able to do that forever, right. Like it's it's good to have alternative methods of figuring out how to get the drugs that make you feel nice. So, yeah, that was that is my episode on the on the legislation that has been happening in the past, in the past really like six months. Umm. Yeah, that's fun. Yeah. And but by the time this is up there, there might there might be new stuff that has happened. Oh, most certainly, yeah, that's good. That's why, you know, when all this stuff gets very depressing. I just like listening to my favorite Wayne Cohen song by Pink Floyd, and it really, just really does well, Garrison called. Call me down and make me feel much better. Wow. Well, I'm gonna go listen to the new. Double album that 100 gecs did with Billy Joel. I do. I do love me some 100 gecs. Hmm. Yeah. The Gex Joel concert. It's even I I hear that that Elton John's gonna get in too and they're gonna they're gonna do. That would be quite the show. Honestly. That would be that would be a fascinating experience. That would be a very good would be interesting. Mix of like ***** women in their 60s and ***** 17 year olds. That is credible thing that would that's what would happen. Well, Yep, that is a there are plenty of organizations that are, you know, fighting against this stuff in Texas. I could list them, but honestly, if you if you, if you're not there. It's it's it's iffy. I mean you should, you should, you should look into what's happening in your area, learn what legislations being passed in your area, learn what your you know, state representatives are doing and look into helping people get DIY HRT. That's really, that's really. I mean like if there's a way that bodybuilders can get testosterone, there's a way that you can get testosterone for trans guys if estrogen is much easier to get. So look into that. Don't, don't, don't, don't be stupid. But yeah, that is a. That's that is that is that is my piece. Yeah, alright. I enjoy find violence and find the correct application of the two that allows people to stay alive. Yeah. Yeah and yeah and. Listen to. Listen to music that makes you happy. That is, that is. That is all you can do. All you can, all you all you can do. Yeah, is find your favorite YouTube album featuring Roger Waters. Alright, bye. Oh boy, welcome to America, the podcast. Wait, is that is that what we're calling it now? I don't think that's true. We just had like 2 episodes on international trips that we are going to. We're trying to be a little beyond America. I ****** it up. I ****** it up. Well. That's the podcast. Goodbye, everybody. See, usually at this point you say Garrison, take over. Alright, well, let's let's get into this. What are we talking about today? Who are we? Where are we? What is life? Where it could happen here? Where is God's final episode of the War on Trans people? Which means when this episode, when this episode is done, that means the war will be over. We did it. Everybody and whatever gods once were have long abandoned this place. We did get pretty good news about the Governor of Utah. Kind of surprising me here. Yeah. That just hit. That's nice. There's this, there's that. I mean luckily looks some of some of the bills that we've talked about actually have been shut down at this point. The Wisconsin, Wisconsin bill got shot, got got kind of down in surprisingly and in very, very recently like yeah past few days, yeah there was a looks like there's still going to be injunctions on any investigations in Texas until the case gets uh put. Yeah that's still very much in the air. It's still in the. Yeah, it's been it's like it's it's trying, it's at least it's kind of paused right now and it's going to get settled at some point in either the lawsuit or in the higher courts. So we'll see, we'll see how that develops. But for right now seems seems things seem to be paused and some states are not are not fully passing it. I know there was a, a walkout by Disney employees today about over there don't say gay bill and we're going to see if that's going to get signed. So yeah, still still up in the air, but we're going to be talking about something a little bit different. We're gonna do some. We're gonna do some time travel. Ohh boy. That's, that's what I had to say was, oh boy. So we're going to go back to another time in which there was a for a very brief period, a massive expansion in the knowledge about and sort of, but both knowledge about and appearance of and safety of trans people. And then it all catastrophically came crashing down. Oh good. And to help us with that is Robert Evans, my boss. Hi, everybody. How are we doing? Garrison, how are we doing? Ohh, I'm doing actually fine. Yeah, I'm just, I'm just waiting for you to do your job and not pass over. Alright, so the important thing to understand is that like the kind of very concept of not just gay rights, but like our our modern attitudes towards like what it means to be a homosexual and trans all have their origins in Germany in the not not just in the post war period, but really the last couple of decades. Of the the Kaiser and the Weimar Republic like that is where kind of the modern western attitudes towards what it like is to be homosexual really get formed. Because obviously, like gay people have existed for forever. There's quite a bit of documentation. But if you look at like, for example, you know, two spirit folks within some indigenous American cultures, that's a very different attitude towards like, what? Like trans people, I suppose, to the Western idea of gender. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So this is like, there there's Western, quote, UN quote, you know, whatever. Yeah, there's the actual thing that's going on and like the the individual sexuality. And then there's kind of the the public concept of what it is and and that is really forming in probably the Seminole moment that kind of starts this progress is in August 29th, 1867, when a lawyer named Karl Heinrich Ulrichs goes before the 6th Congress of German Jurists in Munich to urge them to repeal laws forbidding sex between men. So again, there is still a Kaiser in like this is this is before Germany is actually fully a nation, right, because 1870 is when that happens. So Germany doesn't even really exist at this point. There's a series of like kings kind of being welded together slowly into a German state. And there is a lawyer getting up in front of like the Council of different German jurists to urge an end to the laws that make it illegal for for men to have sex with each other. Now one thing that's important to note is that obviously there are lesbians in this period of time. Again, there have been throughout all of history, that's not really a legal problem, right. They do not face really legal repression. And, and I mean not to say that, like there's not repression and things that they're dealing with, but it's not the same as as it is for like men who want to be in relationships with men. That's it's in fact a lot easier for women to be kind of like, and this is not just Germany to be built to like kind of say like even like the Victorians and we live together, right? Like we're on Tees and we live together like we're. Yeah. In part because men, just like, I think a lot of like the men in this. Just assume it's impossible, like that women would do that. Or or the other side of it is like, femininity is always present, juary. It's always like it's you as soon as the beauty symbol. So it makes more sense for women to find other women attractive because that's what beauty is, is when is performative femininity. So, like, that's like way more obvious and it doesn't make sense for but, and it makes less sense for men to find other men attractive, and that's way more taboo because of the way that messes with, like, patriarchy. So yeah, I think there could be a like gender studies and sexuality studies, you know, have a lot of theorizing for how this is developed. But yeah, this this idea you can even see in like Victorian era and like Renaissance era of, yeah, women who who live together and are very good friends, very, very, very close friends. I hope people don't feel like I'm trying to like, flatten the history of like the concept of, of being a lesbian in the West to, to, to that at all or trying to for that matter, flatten like homosexuality between men. But I am kind of making the point and I I am not the the person who kind of initially made this point, the scholarly work that I'm kind of basing my research on this on largely right now. And we're going to do an episode of behind the ******** that gets in to more of this, I think, in the near future. But it's called Gay Berlin by Robert Beachy. And in in the book, one of the things that Beachy argues is that even though obviously same-sex love is as old as the existence of it, quite a bit older actually than the existence of human beings. The public discourse around it and like the the political attempt to win rights for gay people starts in Germany in the late 1800s and it starts in this conference in 1867. And and the the guy who does this ulrichs is a number one is a gay man. And he had he had been open kind of to his relatives, he had started in the period before. He gets up in front of all these lawyers to be open with like his family members that he was homosexual. But he had never like, he was not publicly out. And so on the same day that he appeals for a change in the legal code to make homosexuality legal in the German states is the day he comes out publicly as a gay man. Like, he does both of these things at the same time. And I want to read a quote from a New York yeah, it's quite a moment. Yeah, holy ****. I want to read a quote from a New Yorker article that's covering all of this, and that's based again on the book Gabriel Lynn quote. He faced an audience of more than 500 distinguished legal figures, and as he walked to the lectern, he felt a pang of fear. There was still time to keep silent, he later remembered telling himself. Then there will be an end to all your heart heart pounding. But Ulrich, who had earlier disclosed his same-sex desires and letters to relatives, did not stop. He told the assembly that people with a sexual nature opposed to common custom were being persecuted for impulses that nature. Mysteriously, governing and creating had implanted in them. Pandemonium erupted, and Orix was forced to cut short his remarks. Still, he had an effect. A few liberal minded colleagues accepted his notion of an innate gay identity, and a Bavarian official privately confessed to similar yearnings and a pamphlet titled Gladius Furens, or Raging Sword, Ulrich wrote. I am proud that I found the strength to thrust the first Lance into the flank of the Hydra of public. It be like that sometimes, but incredibly based. Wow, what a if there's a heaven, I hope this dude made it there, because what an absolute. Yeah, unbelievable. So no, but like, what a like like, yeah, the the astonished, like the astounding bravery that that takes. Yeah. And he's essentially the first gay activist in a modern Western political context. And it's interesting, like within kind of the the next couple of years, things start to happen very quickly. Two years later in 1869 and Australian and Austrian writer I know right named Carl Kurt Benny, who is kind of fighting ****** laws in and and ****** laws are laws that make everything that's not like ********** ******** sex illegal. They're obviously targeted towards towards gay men. Primarily so Carl, Kurt Benny create like, he's the guy who invented the term homosexuality. Like like two years after this as part of his like fight against these anti ****** laws. In the 1880s, a Berlin police commissioner makes the decision to stop prosecuting gay bars. And in fact, not only does he stop doing this, but he starts leading tours of the gay districts in Berlin just to, like, show off. Like, look at how tolerant Berlin. It's kind of dope, right? That's such a weird wow. Yeah. What a weird picture to put in your head, at least. Even like, yeah, especially with cop being like, why are we arresting these people? Let's show this off. No, that is, that is boggling. Yeah. So in 1896 the very first gay magazine starts publishing in Germany in Berlin. Really? Do you want to know what it's called? Yeah, of course. Why? Of course I do. The German name is Derek Eijin and that means the self owning. That's great. It's pretty. It's pretty ******* cool. So the very next year, 1897, one of the primary heroes of the early gay rights struggle physician Magnus Hirschfeld, starts the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which is the first organized gay rights group in Western history at least. So by the start of the 20th century, a lot of stuff is in place, right? And I, I think I'm even have been a little bit guilty of this in the past of kind of focusing so much on Weimar Germany and all of the stuff that happens around game by rights there and how progressive it was. This is building in Germany. Again, we don't consider the Kaiser Reich as a particularly progressive, but all of this is happening under the KAISERS and it it it it there's, there's so many things that are happening in the 1890s and the start of the 1900s that directly. Newer things that are happening in the United States in the 1980s. In fact, right as the century turns, you start getting an advocate. One of the first gay rights advocates in gay literature uses the phrase coins. The phrase staying silent is death. To, like, talk about the importance of gay literature of Utah, which is essentially the same slogan that gay rights activists picked during the same stuff we're talking about right now. With all of that, with all of, like, the with, with all, like the book bannings taking, you know, doing a massive sweep of that the past, the past few years. Yeah, this is 1900, like, basically that this is starting the flat circle. Umm. So yeah, and there's, you know, there's even, there's a lot of activists start to complain and start to try to complain both within like their own magazines and within like more public magazines about things like negative depictions of gay people in popular novels. Yeah, they're start to be the first arguments about whether or not it's morally right to out people who are gay but who are attached to anti-gay organizations because that starts happening in this. So absolutely it's it's ******* wild how gold off this is nothing new under the sun. Yeah, no, but this is also like the first time it happened in these types of countries, in these societies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is like it is that it is. So yes times a flat circle, but this is like the first time it's happened and it's just kind of been really happening ever since then. It's important to note, I didn't, I didn't cover when we start talking about Orix. Well there's a lot of people who get angry and obviously Orix is not successful in repealing the anti homosexuality laws. When he makes his speech in addition to the people who are like yelling at him to sit down there are like German. Deputies yelling no, no no, let him continue, let him continue like he needs to be allowed to talk. Umm, so even like in this period of time there are non gay people at a fairly high level in German politics who are like vocal allies and starting to become vocal allies, you know? Yeah, it's, it's it's pretty fascinating. So obviously World, World War One happens, doesn't go great for Germany, but you know, we we get after that the Weimar Republic and the Weimar Republic is kind of the traditional era in which we talk a lot about, you know, gay rights starting to really move forward in significant ways. And so there's a lot of even kind of into the early 1930s, some pretty interesting things that are happening in German society and like the mainstream. Elements of it. There's a film called Madchen in Uniform in 1931, which is the first like positive portrayal of lesbians in Western cinema. OK, like 31 is like, again, we're talking like right before. The Nazis kind of kind of come around. And yeah, there's these like this, this, this police Commissioner that we chatted about earlier I think is one of the people who's most interesting to me. We're going to get to Hirschfeld a bit in in a little bit, but this this guy is named Leopold von Mir, Shiite hushim. I'm not going to get that right, but he's a big part of when we talk about Gabor Lynn, particularly during the Weimar years, even though he's like during what while the the Kaisers in he's why Gay Berlin really happens in a lot of ways. And it's in part because like he. Decides to stop cracking down on on gay people and like, he's not gay, although his boss is, which is part of like, what makes it easier for him to do this. And there's like a lot of debate about why he does this because he's not like a gay rights activist. Some people say that it's because he's worried that, like, gay people will become politically radicalized by the Reds. And so if you stop cracking down on them, they won't go communists. Like, there's a lot of like, debate about like why he does this. He's also. There's a number of things that he like. He takes a lot of data on, on gay people in Berlin and he does this on everybody. He's a big data guy, so it's not particularly. A harmful in his era, but it some of the stuff that he gathers will be used by the Nazis later, which is kind of a broader thing about like the wisdom of not letting the government get access to this like he has. He founds a department of homosexuals in 1885 that like lists the people that they know are gay and and again like this is all. So it's really a complicated thing that's that's happening here because he's not, he's not this like thoroughly sympathetic figure. He's doing a lot of stuff that's that's weird and that will later have negative. Outcomes. But he's also by ending police persecution of gay people. Uh, at least in an organized way, really allowing gay culture to to blossom in Berlin. And it's it's it's yeah, I'm going to read another quote from that New Yorker article here. For whatever reason, Murshid Holsen Heim took a fairly benevolent attitude towards Berlin same-sex bars and dance halls, at least in the better heeled parts of the city. He was on cordial terms with many regulars, and none other than Audius Strindberg. Testified to in in his autobiographical novel The Cloister, which evokes a same-sex costume ball at the Cafe Nationale, and this is in 1898. The police inspector and his guests had seated themselves at a table in the center of 1 end of the room, close to which all the couples had to pass. The inspector called them by their Christian names and summoned some of the most interesting among them to his table. So he's kind of like going on Safari, like among the the gay people in Berlin. Like there, there's a lot of we it's it's weird in a lot of way, but he's also one of the things he does. Is he provides police help to gay people who are being blackmailed and like, threatened with outing, and he'll even, like, counsel them on how to handle it. Like, he provides like counselors and stuff. And he does this in part because, like, he's worried about them committing suicide because they're being blackmailed, which is like a real problem in Germany and a bunch of other places. Yeah, and this guy, like, why this police Commissioner winds up killing himself kind of in the early 1900s, I think because he wound up getting found to be taking bribes from some millionaire who gets in a lot of legal trouble for ****** somebody. So again, he is a sketchy dude. But he's also, like, because he's he's got this weird, almost, like, voyeuristic fascination with gay people and some legitimate because there are legitimate humanitarian concerns, he's really worried about people committing suicide as a result of blackmail. So he's one of these figures. We don't talk about it. Often history where it's like the overall outcome of this guy's at work is pretty positive, but he does it for this, like really confusing mix of reasons. He's just a very strange figure in history. Why? I think it's interesting looking at him like, like comparing him to like if you look at like what the US is doing in the 50s, right, where there's this whole thing about like, gay people are getting, are going to get, are getting blackmailed. And you know, the the US, the entire US security state loses its mind and becomes convinced that like these people are. Become Soviet agents and, you know, and instead of like doing counseling that there's the thing that they do is they they do the lavender scare and they start purging every gay person they can find from the entire U.S. government. And it's like. You know, it's it's it's interesting that like, yeah, this is this is a guy in like late 1800s, early 1900s, but like. Like, literally ruled by a monarch, Berlin and his policies are enormously better than like, anything you're going to see for like half a century. He's he is way more woke on on on this than like any New York Police officer for a century today, like backed up to the present day in a lot of ways. Yeah, so let's talk about Magnus Hirschfeld a bit. Umm. Hirschfeld is very influenced by Ulrich, the guy we started this story with. His first, like, publication on the matter is called Sappho and Socrates in 1896, which is, again, it's a story of a gay man who gets coerced into marriage, so this, like, and who commits suicide as a result. So there's like a big with both, you know, the police Commissioner with Hirschfeld, with a lot of people who are becoming activists in this. A big part of why is, for one reason or another, the suicide rate. Among gay people, which is a huge problem today for for trans people in particular. And this is what it's interesting like that that Utah governor, you know, made the announcement today that, like, he's vetoing this transports ban in Utah and he specifically cites like, the suicide rate among trans people is so, like high. And it it he, he could not morally conscience doing anything that would like make these kids feel othered and likelier to commit suicide. I mean OK, let's let's. Let's not go that far. He he he he was he was willing, he was willing to do the commissions. He just wasn't willing to do a full band. Yeah, I'm just saying the the justification he gives for what he's doing is like the is is the the rate of of suicide attempts among trans people not to like whitewash that guy or Utah. Like again we've been doing this whole week episodes but it's interesting that you get again it's just kind of like the the issue for a long time has been that when you like other people and make it dangerous for them to be who they are openly, they will kill themselves. A lot of them will and that's that's a thing that is even by very problematic people in Germany in the 1890s. Folks recognize that like, this is a huge issue. So yeah, Hirschfeld starts this first organization, this like gay rights organization and he also is doing like a huge amount of of research. He is fought again. He's following an Ulrich's footsteps because he too believes that that homosexuality is congenital, right. It's something you're born with. As opposed to like a choice people make because of deviance or whatever, which is still the big fight that we're having to this day. And he's also like, it's hard to there's a lot that, like, you can criticize about hershfeld scientifically, and a lot of the research he does. Among other things, there's like difficulty with like, control groups and actually like being the kind of scientific sort of detachment that is necessary to study. There's like critiques of his of his research that are valid, but one of the he's he's really. Like it's wild how far ahead of the curve he is because one of the things that Hirschfeld introduces is the idea that sexuality is a spectrum where there's what he calls sexual intermediaries between male and female. He doesn't believe that, like those are even particularly useful terms that sexuality kind of like it it it again that it's a spectrum, which is this thing that we are just now really starting to have good wider kind of ranging conversations about today. And Hirschfeld is a very much like. Kind of utopian. And his belief that if you can scientifically study and understand where homosexual like what homosexuality is, and that it is an innate characteristic that people will stop being bigoted against gay folks, right? Like his belief is that science will end prejudice just because the German people are so scientific and like, they'll have to accept this. If I could just like prove it with enough rigor, which is heartbreaking. A heartbreaking that he was very, very wrong. And yeah, there there's a number of things that are like really worth kind of within sort of the, because he he's not he he's kind of come down now as this sort of like St like hero of the gay rights movement for good reason. But that does tend to flatten the fact that within his his day and within kind of the gay culture in Berlin in particular, there were a lot of people who were frustrated with him for a lot of reasons. There were a lot of. So there's this, there's this split in gay culture in this period of time. Between gay men who are seen as more effeminate and what are called the masculine lists and the masculine lists, they are not all or even mostly Nazis. But all of the gay Nazis are what you'd call Masculinist, right? Who are like, I'm not having like, like, like, I am so manly that the only person I can have sex with is a man, right? Like that. Like, I'm flattening even that quite a bit. But like, you have guys like Ernst Rohm, who is the head of the brown shirts, and is, is, is. Is a gay Nazi and is like that's that's a significant not an insignificant chunk of the Nazis. They all get murdered in the night of long knives. And it is interesting that that Rahm was outed by anti fascists. Yeah he sure was like 2 years before he was murdered and it was, it was, it was he was specifically outed to so division within the Nazi Party. Yeah and that does like also just playing you know you were talking about like you know people having a debate over whether it's OK to out somebody if they you know are part of bad organizations, right. Something we mentioned previously and yeah, just like an interesting historical tidbit. Yeah. And it's it's so, uh again among like one of the things that the the masculine lists are doing is like a lot of them are married to women and they're, they're actually fine with this because again, they think that like, well, you still need to like procreate and have like not it's not even all just about being having like a beard or whatever you want to call it. Some of it is just like this attitude that you have a responsibility to make more Germans for the Fatherland. But like then when it comes to, it's kind of like the Greeks, there were not wildly dissimilar concepts and a lot of them. Masculine lists ideologically are wrapped up in the work of Max Stirner and in fact like the self owners that first gay magazine is because it was the first thing I thought of sterner that was that was like, oh, that sounds like sterner egoism. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. There's a lot of that going. And we, we, we again I went to at some point provide a lot more detail on this because it's it's all fascinating but there there are these big sort of like this big split and there's he gets a lot of **** from the masculine lists for because he also studies lesbians heavily. Like there's a decent chunk of the gay male. Population in Berlin who's against the research in the medical practice he's doing to help trans people, who is against his research on lesbians because they're like, well, this is this is the fight, right? Like, we're the ones who are being legally cracked down on or whatever. Like, so there's a bunch of, like, different cleavages and fractures kind of within the community at this time. And Hirschfeld is not universally beloved. And there are people kind of within the gay community who have a lot of issues with them. And I just think it's important to note that because we often do. Again, kind of flattened things because the Nazis flattened things, right. Because these were all, it was all the same to them and and we often flatten them in a different way to where, like, yeah, you've got this guy and he's the, he's the hero of the of the of gay Berlin and he's this, like, thoroughly positive. No, there were a lot of people who hated him for like all these different reasons because this was these like all people had a million different kind of fractures and ideologies sort of running within what what someone who was not, well looking in from the outside. Would have just called Gay Berlin, you know. And yeah, obviously this all falls apart or is is cracked down horribly when the Nazis come to power. Hirschfeld is doing a lot of some of, I mean all of the very earliest research on like what it is to be transgender. And he is performing surgery on like gender operations on on trans people for the very first time and and that gets all kind of destroyed in in. Day of 1933, which is about 3 months after Hitler becomes Reichs Chancellor. Uh, Nazi sack Hershfeld Institute for sexual science. They burn its library. They go after a lot of of of his of the people he had been working with and on are killed. Others have to flee. Hirschfeld is thankfully out of the country on tour when the Nazis rise to power and just, you know, doesn't come back. He he sees he watches his institute get burned, and all of his his research get burned in a a newsreel in Paris, and he dies the next year. Yeah. So that's the, that's the, the, the, the broad details of kind of the story of this early period of, of the birth of kind of like a lot of our, our legal fights around, you know, gay rights and like the birth of kind of western gay identity. Like this is where it comes from. And and, yeah, there's a lot that's important in understanding this. And this is one of the points that gets made in Gabor Lynn. We often see the vimar years as this kind of inevitable. March towards fascism and the reality is that there was. 50 something years of of incredibly progressive movements on on gender and sexuality and you know, even outside of gay rights, just in terms of like attitudes towards democracy and attitudes towards the nature of like the state that were very progressive and very powerful and very popular. And they do get, you know it's important to understand both that like the Nazism was not inevitable the regressive ISM and the violence and the the the like that. Kind of flattening of human life under the fascists was not an inevitable progression for Germany. But it's equally important to understand that, like a tremendous so much progress had been made in German culture by the period of time when the Nazis rise and it does get wiped out. You know, it does not recover right away. It's still recovering now. Yeah, exactly. And in fact, one of the groups of people when when the allies liberate the concentration camps, we don't free imprisoned gay people, they go back to prison. Because what they were doing was still seen as criminal. If you have the uh is the pink triangle, you don't just get out because the Nazis, because you were in a concentration camp with these other people, because the allies to a large extent are like, well that was it was OK for them to punish those people. Anyway, that's the story. Another interesting thing is on like kind of on the same note is that if you look through all old German war photography from World War Two, you will actually see a higher than average rate of men cross dressing inside photos. Now there's always cross dressing during war is not uncommon, especially during like performances of like theater and stuff because there's not as much women around but specifically comparing. Like the documentation of the Nazis and all of all of the German soldiers there was like, yeah, absolutely higher than average amount of of people comfortable cross dressing despite, you know being a soldier for the Nazis. It is, it is like an yeah. It is an interesting thing in terms of how. How some of those kind of more advanced views on sexuality still carried over, at least in like, in terms of like gender presentation among, you know, even even if you're among this genocidal group who's imprisoning gay people by the hundreds of thousands. Yeah, it's it just it. Just it just it just it just like, kept happening. Yeah. It also sort of points to just like how bad everywhere else was also. Oh yeah, like, it's yeah. World Berlin just got so progressive that even when suppressed there was enough like stuff there that things could kind of there was there was still there was still a bit. There's still a bit of some remnants and I mean and it still, it got it didn't get horribly obliterated and and we're still recovering now in terms of our views and medical knowledge on like gender and you know social contracts, sexuality, you know all this kind of stuff. But yeah, the the German law code that made homosexuality illegal again after it was briefly more OK than it had been, it doesn't get repealed until 1994. Yeah, I mean a lot of a lot of ****** laws did not get repealed until the 90s, and a lot of cases they're actually still around. You just don't enforce them. Like a lot of this, a lot of flaws that are actually just still just hanging out. Texas had anti ****** laws on the book until. A 2003 Supreme Court case, yeah. And invalidated all ****** laws, right? That's that's why there's some that are still on the books, but they they but they're now invalid. Yeah, prosecute people. Yeah. Yeah, Magnus Hirschfeld was pretty based though, so it was ******* orix, some pretty based, this really interesting stuff. And then that's why we wanted to talk about this is to kind of show the historical background and show like there's a precedent for all of the same stuff happening before. And you know, there's ways people fought against it back then who didn't necessarily succeed, but also did have a lot of progression and a lot of like views socially on these types of topics. You know, you just need to make sure that you're also very. Very aware of of the rise of fascism and being able to counter that as well because they can just do so much damage in such a short, short amount of time despite, you know, 50 years of progress. Yeah, yeah. And I think, I think. Understanding the fragility. Of everything that exists that I don't know. I mean, there's this is, you know, one one of the sort of American mythos, right. Is that like the the moral arc of the universe bends towards progress that everything is getting better and that's not true. Nope, it's not. And like every, every everything good that you see in this world is there because people fought for. It was fought for. Yeah. And and if they lose, it all goes away. Yeah. Yeah. It it we we we absolutely could go back. It's like you have that. I mean, he backpedaled, but you have that Republican. Uh, legislator who was like making comments about how he didn't think the state should be forced to honor interracial marriages. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, there's people who want to go back on all of that stuff and they could do it. It doesn't even and it doesn't matter. I like when people criticize kind of like some of the the attitudes we have, the fear we have towards this, especially on on the subreddit. I've seen people be like, well, look, these are not popular laws and like. Didn't matter. They weren't, yeah, they they weren't as popular. They weren't like necessarily all that popular in in in Germany. You know, when some like a lot of the thing, not specifically even talking about what was done to gay people, but a lot of the things that were done by the Nazis were not necessarily popular. It it doesn't matter. What matters is power. And this, like plays into how like much it's worth focusing on electoralism and being like, yeah, these laws obviously aren't being pushed as far in blue states because there's not enough electoral power there. But that doesn't mean that we can flip Texas blue, if we will, it into being like there's so many other cultural factors that are keeping red states red. And yes, of course, voting suppression, all of those things, gerrymandering, all these things are contributing factors. But the overall political bent of those states right now seems to be pretty firm because there's so many people invested in maintaining that power. So when we complain about kind of how electoralism is not often a super reliable solution to securing these things. Over long stretches of time, it's more kind of talking about that because even though we have, you know, Democrats in power in the executive branch and they, you know, make statements about trying to secure things, they make, they make some gestures, they follow through on those things is always so minimum and so bare and there's. It's like. It's it's it's the thing that like Trump was able to do so much and now we have Biden so less willing to use executive power. This is the same thing that like like with with with Obama and the Supreme Court when the Senate would refuse to put through any any candidates. Obama technically had the power because the Senate refused to do to do their job. There is a very strong argument that Obama could just put someone into the Supreme Court because of the failure of what the Senate was doing was specifically doing a thing that meant because they were not doing the job. At all that he can't get, he can't get fully put through. And we so we could have that could have happened and Obama just didn't. Because, you know, you want to play, you want to be the good guy, like you want to be the person who follows the rules. But the other side doesn't care about that. They're not playing a genuine game. They're not following the rules. They're doing whatever they can to win. So this isn't about being plugged into Lefty Twitter. I I get, I get almost none of my takes from Lefty Twitter. I get them from, like, reading, reading stuff and thinking about how electoralism. Affects all of these issues and where to focus, like my attention because no matter what I say or what I do, that's not going to affect whether Texas is blue or red. Yeah. And there's this. I I think like one of the things that is an argument against Obama, you know, intervening in that way is like, well, that would have created precedent that would have like further centralized executive power and could have been used by their only if the Senate refused to do their job. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, look at what we got. Look at the Supreme Court that we have, which now has a 6 to 3. And conservatively, no. There was just another ******* shadow ruling today that was about gerrymandering, and God, I was. Wisconsin, one SEC. I'll I'll look it up. But yeah like you're you're getting like we're we're already living through that scenario and it's like like in this I mean centralization of power like Obama claimed the legal authority to kill any man woman or child regardless of their citizenship as the as a U.S. citizen without trial the moment they left the United States like that that is that is the that is the authority that he claimed. Like when, you know, in order to in order to run the drone assassination program and it's yeah. So like at that point, like, yeah, OK, we we we literally have a person who can go, I'm going to press a button and kill you, like. Like, Oh no, we might centralized. Like, it's just, I mean, it's not even a centralization because it was specifically within the context of the Senate not doing their job. And I kind of just all plays into like, it seems like Democrats are more politically successful when they're losing. Like, it seems like they want the other side to be in power because that's when they actually do things politically. Then when they have power, they're just so scared to use it that they don't even do anything to really help people that much. And I mean, this is the other thing is that like, yeah, the Democrats like. Like most of like, they're their actual constitute. Like they have two constituencies, right? They have like, you know, they, they, they, they they have the people they're passing tax breaks for and then they have a bunch of, they have a bunch of consultants. And the consultants, like, the thing that they care about is campaign donations. Right. Because that's how they get paid. Yeah. And, yeah. Hey, guess what happens when you're in power? Oh, people don't give you any. People don't give you much money. This is this is this is a problem. The program in the 80s, they they get more power when they're they get more money when they're not in power because they're trying to organize to get in power. But then once they're in there, it's like, Oh well, you're not really using the same power capabilities that the other side does when they're in charge. And they're all willing to play dirty politically. And we. And for some reason, the Democrats are not. And that was kind of like, they don't like this thing. Like, they don't actually care about any of this stuff. Right. This stuff is useful for them in terms of fundraising, right. But it's like, Yep, yeah, I don't know. Like, they they don't like if if if every trans person in the United States was killed, right. The Democrats would be sad for a little bit and then they wouldn't move on. Like, it's not that that's that's not a thing that if you're in a hard blue state, we know what's more important than actually voting for support of, like, this kind of stuff is actually just giving trans people money like that. It's gonna have much more of a positive political effect. It's just give trans people money whenever you see it. Go fund me for a trans person, donate to that instead. That's going to have a much more lasting effect than voting if you're in, you know, New York or if you're in Oregon, right, because like that, those states are there, they're going to be blue. That's always going to happen. But other states like Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Alabama, like these are going to be red states like there's and. As much as we would be nice if, yeah, if Democratic senators and and people in the House were in there instead, then yeah, these trains probably wouldn't be happening as much. But that's not going to happen. So if that's not going to happen, we should focus on other ways to do that politically. And, yeah, sure, fixing jury mandering will be great, but I don't think you need me to tell you that. No, anyway, we should probably that's that's probably more or less a sode. I, I will, I will, I will plug next week if similar, similar on a similar train for for kind of talking about queerness and fascism, which, yeah, we are. We are planning a 2A2 parter, which is a pretty going to be extensive deep dive into explaining the curious case of Nazi catboys and Garrison says Garrison says we as if any of the rest of us had any choice in this Garrison. Garrison forced this on us through violence. But yes, we we will be talking about this, which kind of touches on some similar topics in terms of like gender and sexuality and how it intersects with politics and how there can be, you know, seemingly contradictory claims of, you know, game Nazis and all that kind of stuff. So similar, similar train will be kind of discussing that and how that works. But yeah, this is a. End of Trans Week. Honestly, at this point as we're ending, as we're ending it, I'm kind of more optimistic than I than I than I was when we started Trans Week in terms of like watching kind of how some of these bills have played out, how some of them were not, were not fully carried through. There is protests and stuff being organized. I know for March, I believe it's March 31st, which is a a trans day of visibility. There's gonna be protests and a lot of conservative states I know there's going to be. Let me, let me actually let me check because I know there's, there's going to be, there's going to be multiple, multiple things happening and I will, I'm going to be trying to, I'm going to try to be in Idaho next, next week for that because it's going to be a protest in Boise, which I think Boise ID that's the place. But there's going to be, yeah, there's going to be events in Austin, Tallahassee, Montgomery. So yeah, I will look up tearitup.org. At for event, for info on all of the events, at, different, at, different, at and in different states. For for Trans Day of Visibility, March March 31st. And, yeah, be gay. Do crime. Yeah, throw bricks at transphobes. Yeah, all that stuff. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for. It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com/sources. Thanks for listening.