143: Trans Reality, Trans Possibility (w/Beau Brink)
For three years, we’ve covered a forest fire of body fascism, unleashed by the culture wars and the pandemic. With the help of many esteemed guests, we have tracked its hateful and eugenicist impacts on marginalized groups: the disabled, the racialized, the fat, the neurodivergent.
We have taken too long to host a trans person who can give us both a front line personal and analytical report on what it feels like, and what it means, to live under the current regime of moral panic and legislative assault.
Today we welcome artist and journalist Beau Brink. Beau is a longtime activist and advocate for LGBTQ+ communities, and a member of the Trans Journalists Association. After hours, he’s an outsider artist who works primarily with cosmetics and crafting materials.
Please visit the episode page on our website for all of the citation links we didn't have room for here!
Beau Brink has created a resource page for this episode, which includes a statement on the labour that went into this episode. It's here.
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Hello everybody, welcome to Conspiracuality Podcast.
I'm Matthew Remske.
Remember you can subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, you can follow us individually on Twitter, you can find us on Instagram, and you can subscribe to our feed on Patreon at patreon.com slash conspirituality for access to hundreds of hours of research and analysis, and you can pre-order our book out June 13th through the link at the bottom of the show notes for this episode.
This is episode 143.
Transreality.
Transpossibility.
43. Trans Reality, Trans Possibility, with Beau Brink If you've been listening to our show for long enough, you'll
know that conspirituality is a ragged spiderweb of ideas and commitments that tries
to map out and stitch together a chaotic world.
It's a tangle of conspiracy theories, positive affirmations, akashic record readings, transmissions from the Galactic Federation, satanic fetishes, poorly pronounced Sanskrit mantras, turmeric supplements, and MLM pitches.
But all of these ragged threads cover over something more primal, and that would be a pulsing sense of anxiety that we call body fascism.
This is the rigid, armored demand that we must perfect our bodies in order to be healthy, pure, virtuous, worthy of the divine.
It's the defensive but pious feeling that we, individually, must exhibit and enforce something we call natural immunity, not only against viruses but against anything that challenges our sense of moral cleanliness or biological order.
Many vaccine-hesitant folks cite reasonable concerns about Big Pharma profiteering, but those who are truly seized with body fascism seem to believe that any substance entering their bodies from the modern world will overtake and corrupt them.
Some COVID skeptics plausibly wonder whether masking will really help cut transmission, but the hardcore body fascist is insulted by the idea that anything foreign could enter them without their knowing.
Are body fascists bigots?
Individual members of the yoga and wellness demographics we study might be explicitly racist, misogynist, homophobic, or anti-trans as they post about free birthing, muscle tone, and green drinks.
But there's a larger contingent whose body fascism is internalized and non-verbal.
They nurture a vague but ever-present craving for things to be simpler, older, easier to understand, and homogenous.
They're offered countless consumer choices to feed cravings for purity and virtue.
Bourgeois body fascism looks for order, a slower pace, for a nostalgic but regressed place where the stories of childhood make sense, with princes and princesses played by boys who are boys and girls who are girls, a world in which you don't have to think about J.K.
Rowling's politics.
So here we come to sex and gender.
Fascism proper has always been creepily obsessed with bodies and genitals.
And in Europe, its eugenicist roots were soaked in fears of white racial suicide or the belief that sexually deviant brown people enabled by Jews were building their muscles and vitality and their non-urban connections to the land and would eventually overrun the fjords if white men didn't pump iron and white women didn't stay pregnant.
In the 1920s, the physical culturists doled out fitness protocols, and in the 1930s, the brown shirts firebombed gay and lesbian bars in Weimar Berlin, and we know how that ended up.
But we also know how people fought back.
Today we see the same regressive violence blaring throughout the right-wing media sphere and red state legislatures through the groomer discourse, through open attacks on the privacy, dignity, and healthcare of queer and trans people.
But it also simmers in every crunchy social media space where yoga moms save the children from GMOs and drag shows in the name of preserving the divine masculine and feminine.
Meanwhile, the liberal abandonment of coalition politics and activism in favor of individualism means that support from would-be allies is tepid.
Watching Democrats trying to reason with red-pilled MAGA activists has a real Neville Chamberlain visits Berlin in 1938 vibe to it.
So we've covered this beat for three years, but what we've taken far too long to do is to host a trans person who can give us both a frontline personal and analytical report on what it feels like and what it means to live under the current regime of moral panickery and legislative aggression.
So today we welcome artist and journalist Bo Brink.
Bo has worked in digital publishing for a decade, moving from producing feminist personal essays, to editing and training writers, to data reporting, and finally into search engine optimization.
As an independent researcher, Bo uses SEO data to investigate online hate networks, and all of this is grounded in over 20 years of activism and advocacy for the LGBTQ plus community, starting with leading his high school's
queer straight alliance and lobbying with GLSEN as a student leader and continuing
through current day reporting on gay rights and advocating for strategic improvements to
LGBTQ plus coverage in the media.
Bo is a member of the Trans Journalists Association, but after hours, he's also an outsider artist
who works primarily with cosmetics and crafting materials.
Bo Brink, welcome to Conspiratuality Podcast.
Hello.
Now, we're going to dive into the architecture of anti-queer and anti-trans hatred, but I want to just start by saying I'm 51, I'm white, I'm cisgendered, I'm male.
In what ways might I be prone to totally fuck up this interview?
Do you have any pointers for me?
Remember what time recording starts.
Right.
I was late.
Sorry, I had to.
Pointer number one.
Okay, good.
Pointer number one.
Right.
No, but not to get too philosophical right off the bat, but what would it mean to fuck it up?
Well, I mean offending you, and then like getting all canceled, and then winding up with all the bad feelies.
So can you just take care of me, please, to start?
Now isn't that what cis guys always ask of people assigned female at birth?
Interesting, right?
Interesting.
No, I think that cis folks have kind of worked yourselves up into some very unnecessary anxiety about making mistakes with trans people.
And that the anti-trans lobby, so to speak, does a good job of reinforcing and escalating what starts out as well-meaning anxiety by spreading around videos of, for instance, newly out middle-aged trans women having public freakouts when they're misgendered.
Which is the exceptional reaction to mistakes, not the rule.
Trans people are misgendered all the time, and most of the time we do not say anything about it because, believe it or not, we don't want to draw attention to ourselves in public.
My, I guess, second pointer would be, it's okay to relax.
Okay, so we need to do the yoga, in other words.
Yeah, you can do the yoga, I'll do the transcendental meditation, because I did pay for my mantra.
Alright, good.
My second pointer is that when cis people are talking to trans people about trans issues, they almost always make it about themselves.
About their lack of understanding around trans identity, their discomfort with what we do to medically alter our bodies, their sexual disgust toward trans people.
There's nothing much to debate for trans people.
their own manhood or womanhood.
And in that sense, the trans debate or the trans issue really isn't about trans people at all.
There's nothing much to debate for trans people.
We're pretty settled on who we are and what our understanding of gender is
with some variations within the community.
But it really becomes like the cis issue and the cis debate when cis people
are really just talking about their own anxieties.
And because of that tendency to make the conversation about yourselves, trans people are rarely afforded the curiosity with which cis people treat other cis people.
So third pointer is try to put your anxiety aside and just stay curious about other people.
Now, anti-queer, anti-trans hatred is at a boiling point, but it's also nothing new.
And in our pre-interview discussions, you threw back to an old piece of theater.
You mentioned feeling like Herr Schultz in Cabaret, which is the 1966 musical by Kander, Ebb, and Mastroff.
Maybe listeners will know that Liza Minnelli starred in the famous film from 1972.
But the setting is nearly a century old, so let's just start there.
Who is Herr Schultz, and why do you identify with him?
Cabaret is a play that's set in Weimar, Germany, right as the Nazis are coming to power.
In the play, Herr Schultz is a Jewish fruit merchant who lives in the same building as the other main characters on the Nollendorf plots, and he falls in love with their landlady, Frau Schneider.
He's a hopeless romantic and he and Frau Schneider eventually decide to get married despite being older and a little jaded about romance and like what they can expect out of their lives at that point.
And then at their engagement party Frau Schneider realizes just how many of her friends and acquaintances are in the Nazi party and to protect herself in her older age she decides to call off the engagement.
Herr Schultz never wavers in his commitment to staying in Germany and refuses to fear the Nazis, which is part way foolish, but mostly, I think, an act of heroism.
Oberlein Schneider!
Good morning!
Good morning, Herr Schultz.
New apples.
Fresh from the tree.
Delicious.
Please?
Perhaps later.
About the party last evening.
I'm afraid I do not remember it too well.
Was I that inebriated?
Can you ever forgive me?
For what?
A few glasses of schnapps?
I promise you, no more drinking.
On our wedding day, you will be proud of me.
I'm already proud of you.
But... As far as the wedding is concerned... Yes?
There is a problem.
A new problem.
A new problem?
It's new to me because I had not thought about it.
But last night at the party, my eyes were opened.
And?
I saw that one can no longer dismiss the Nazis.
They are my friends and neighbors and how many others are there?
Of course, many.
And many are communists and socialists and social democrats.
So what is it?
Do you want to wait till the next election and then decide?
But if the Nazis come to power, You'll be married to a Jew.
But also a German.
A German as much as anyone.
I need a license to let my rooms.
If they take that away... They will take nothing away.
And for a night's night, it's not always a good thing to settle for the lowest apple on the tree, the one easiest to reach.
Climb up a little way, it is worth it.
Up there, the apples are so much more delicious.
And if I fall?
I will catch you.
I promise.
So this clip takes place just after the engagement party where a Nazi character denounces Herr Schultz as not a German on the basis of his Judaism.
Herr Schultz insists on his identity as a German, that his Judaism is important, but is one part of a whole human being who also has a national identity.
I often feel the same way.
Yes, I am transgender and I am an American.
Being trans is just one part of who I am, and my citizenship is another with all the ways that I am obligated to my country and in all the ways my country is obligated to me.
I try very hard to have faith that America will weather the storm of anti-trans bigotry and come out the other side more compassionate and inclusive, and that I will be able to stay in my home without worrying about my safety, my husband's safety, and most of all, My child's safety and stability.
But given the way that pundits across the political spectrum talk about trans people, I'm increasingly worried that that won't happen.
The philosopher Michael Clifford has a great essay on fascist aesthetics that compares fascism to an ulcer eating away at the flesh It's such an amazing point.
lives on, which is an analogy for the way that fascism purports to be nationalistic
and patriotic, but destroys and consumes other groups of its own citizens in order to function.
It's such an amazing point.
So to accomplish that consuming of itself, fascism has to claim that these marginalized
groups are not citizens.
In Cabaret and in historical fact, that claim is explicit.
Nazi propaganda outright says that Jews aren't Germans.
The way that American anti-trans politicians and pundits make this claim isn't so explicit yet, but it's implied in the ways that they talk about trans people and people of color, religious minorities, disabled people, fat people, poor people, homeless people.
They believe that they are entitled to the privacy of our homes and our medical care to invade that privacy in a way that they don't invade the privacy of cis people.
And they constantly frame being cis as if it's natural without acknowledging that we have records of trans people existing going back to the literal beginning of recorded history when I think it was, was it Herodotus?
I don't know, but it was the Scythian disease in ancient history.
They're establishing trans people as a second class and outside the realm of American law, and as invaders into American culture and civic life.
A colleague of mine told me last week about a TikTok that she had seen where this woman was talking about trans people and saying, like, I invited you into my home and now you're rearranging the furniture.
And it's like, wow, Mary.
You did not invite me anywhere.
I was born here.
Are you kidding me?
But that is, that is the way that they talk, that not just the pundits and politicians talk about us, but it's the way that, that, you know, the cis populace has started thinking of trans peoples.
Well, we welcomed you in.
Well, we were already here.
We are American.
It's very fucked up, but in what particular way?
We invited you in, you were here, but what are they actually saying?
They're saying, we became aware of you and now you're taking up psychic space within us and we have to grapple with that.
Is that what they're saying?
I guess.
I mean, the point that this woman made was, I waited 30 years to become a mother, and now you're telling me I can't call myself mother.
It's like, Mary, yes you can.
You can call yourself whatever you want.
I don't care.
And I would point out, I waited 34 years to live as a man.
Nobody's going to take that away from me, you know?
I feel the same way.
But the thing is that people are actually trying to criminalize my existence, where she's complaining about people saying that maybe we should use more inclusive language about parenthood.
Rearranging the furniture is an interesting way of putting it.
I mean, there is this assumption that trans people want to dictate the way that people think.
I will tell you, I think that there is a strain of that.
I think there is a strain of that, that there is a huge anxiety in the trans community based on the fact that we are being targeted, harassed, killed.
There's a huge anxiety that motivates some trans people to advocate for completely changing the way that we talk and think.
And I would hope that cis people would be reasonable enough to understand where that's coming from without feeling like anybody's going to knock down their door and arrest them for Honestly, for thinking I'm a woman.
I don't care if anybody thinks I'm a woman.
I just want to be referred to the way that I want to be referred to.
I follow a number of queer and trans writers on Twitter, including those who keep track of, you know, the real material at play, the anti-trans legislative efforts in red states.
Aaron Reid tracks daily legislative activities and is always publishing these long lists of anti-trans bills being introduced on You know, single days across the country.
And then just, you know, at the end of January, Alejandra Caraballo tweeted out details from a new bill tabled in Arizona.
She writes, a new intro bill in Arizona would criminalize drag in presence of a minor as a felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison and a requirement to register as a sex offender.
The bill defines drag as just singing and dancing while wearing makeup.
And then a little bit earlier, she noted, there are now 242 anti-LGBTQ introduced bills, with at least 238 of those being anti-trans bills.
That is more this year than in all of 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 combined.
of those being anti-trans bills. That is more this year than in all of 2018, 2019, 2020,
and 2021 combined. This is a war on trans existence. Then on February 1st, Trump went
on Rumble to give an anti-trans platform speech for his assumed 2024 run.
The speech is super structured.
He probably does better here with a teleprompter than I've ever heard him.
Trigger warnings all the way around.
Here is the opening.
The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse.
Very simple.
Here's my plan to stop the chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth.
On day one, I will revoke Joe Biden's cruel policies on so-called gender-affirming care.
Ridiculous.
A process that includes giving kids puberty blockers, mutating their physical appearance, and ultimately performing surgery on minor children.
Can you believe this?
I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.
Okay.
That's enough.
That's enough.
I should note that he goes on to say that he'll bar federal money for any gender-affirming care and cut Medicaid and Medicare funding for hospitals that provide it.
He's going to facilitate the suing of doctors who provide gender-affirming care.
He'll investigate Big Pharma over profiteering from gender-affirming care.
He'll investigate and punish school teachers who teach about trans existence.
Quote, as part of our new credentialing body for teachers, we will promote positive education about the nuclear family, the roles of mothers and fathers, and celebrating rather than erasing the things that make men and women different and unique.
Unquote.
Quote, no serious country should be telling its children that they were born with the wrong gender, a concept that was never heard of.
In all human history, nobody's ever heard of this.
What's happening today?
It was all when the radical left invented it just a few years ago.
Alright, so the hits keep coming, and it's like too fast to track.
And, you know, just a few days ago, Candace Owens is on her Daily Wire show outright calling trans people demonic.
Cara Baio uses the term war to describe this landscape.
So, Beau, is war a good descriptor here with its implications of casualties and refugees?
God, first of all, I'm not going to give an accounting of all the lies and inaccuracies there because other people have done a better job, but to answer your question, yes, I'm going to answer yes two ways, but yes, it's a better descriptor than a lot of cis folks would give it credit for.
So, as far as Trump goes, I need cis people to understand that the stakes for trans people are way higher than sports or pronouns.
The first gender-affirming surgery I got was a total hysterectomy.
So, like every cis woman who's had a total hysterectomy for other valid medical reasons, my body no longer produces sex hormones.
If I don't take hormones, I will enter menopause and develop osteoporosis and I'm only 36.
I will be hobbled and living in excruciating pain for the rest of my life and all to satisfy something as trivial as cis people's discomfort and lack of understanding, something that they could go ahead and remedy on their own without depriving me of completely appropriate medical care.
And to be clear, nobody's going to force me to take estrogen ever again.
Okay, so can you say a little bit more about this because under proposed gender affirmation treatment bans, you could be barred from HRT, but is there also an implication that you would be forced to chemically detrans, like if that's possible, or is that a choice you'd be forced into to try to prevent downstream health challenges?
The first thing I would point out is that cis men don't go through menopause.
So if I'm taken off of testosterone and I go into menopause, all of a sudden I'm in a cis body again.
I don't think that cis people really appreciate the cognitive and emotional changes that you go through on hormone therapy.
I can't speak to what it's like being on estrogen for a trans woman, but for me, A lot of things about cis men became a lot clearer once I started testosterone and there are emotional patterns and cognitive patterns that happen due to your primary sex hormone.
So going off of testosterone in addition to going into menopause and those physical changes would also cause cognitive changes that I really don't want.
The thing about saying, like, I'm never going to go on estrogen again is more of a preemptive thing.
A lot of cis people treat being trans as if trans people could just choose to live as cis people if we wanted to.
And in this case, like, I could imagine me saying, like, I'll develop osteoporosis and have Swiss cheese bones.
And they could say, like, oh, well, you could just take estrogen, you know, but the answer is no.
Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing a face and body that didn't belong to you and didn't reflect to other people who you are.
I did that every day for 34 years.
I spent half of my energy trying to act like a woman and understand what it's like to be a woman and project womanhood.
When I'm not a woman, every day for 34 years.
Transitioning removed those burdens and allowed me to live with the ease and sense of self that cis people get to have by default.
Going back on estrogen would kill who I am.
It would kill me spiritually, emotionally.
I mean, it might be a little melodramatic to say maybe physically, but for some trans people, that is true.
Being forced back into the closet is a death sentence for a lot of trans people.
When the chemistry is involved, the changes are so dysregulating and disorganizing that the person becomes a stranger to themselves again?
Yes.
I mean, that's dysphoria.
That's gender dysphoria.
You are a stranger to yourself.
Yeah, that's a good way of putting it.
One way, kind of grotesque way I put it when I was starting my transition is that I feel like I'm wearing a skin suit, you know?
That you had been wearing a skin suit and that now that was going to come off.
Yep.
Yeah.
I'm so determined to live as a man that I would rather have osteoporosis for the rest of my life than ever go on estrogen, but those shouldn't be my only two choices.
No, no, okay.
Alright.
So, when Donald Trump threatens to put up barriers to accessing gender-affirming healthcare that are this high, it's not a trivial threat.
It's not something that trans people can just adapt to or work around.
It's an existential threat, and I mean that not in terms of saying he'll wipe out our At the same time, it is also the culture that is particularly egregious to reactionaries.
So, libs of TikTok might target individual LBGTQ plus people on Twitter, but the overall target is abstract.
So, they talk about the elites or the transhuman agenda or grooming in our schools.
And so to me, this makes it all the more important to emphasize the material impacts on real people when their medications are taken away or their privacy is intruded upon.
Right.
You know, they mean the Jews, doctors, and trans people when they say the elites, the transhuman agenda, and grooming in our schools.
And they're using these dog whistles so they have plausible deniability when someone rightly calls them out for it.
They're concerned about covering their asses while I'm concerned about whether and how long my family can safely stay in the U.S.
in the political environment that they're creating.
But in terms of the question of like, is war a good term here?
I also wanna point out that most folks tend to see the current wave of transphobia
as its own distinct event or an isolated war on trans people.
But it's actually an extension of a culture war that started decades ago.
So to give you a timeline, the culture war started because on the one hand,
from 1944 to 1974, you had the beat generation and 60s counterculture.
In 1954...
In 1954 through 1968, you had the Civil Rights Movement, which saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.
1964 to 1965.
Now, this is a piece of history that I wish more people my age had context into, but you had LBJ's Great Society programs, which included the War on Poverty, various civil rights, voting, education, Consumer Protection Acts, the creation of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the Job Corps, the Peace Corps, and a lot more.
All these programs benefited the most vulnerable Americans, and the War on Poverty drastically reduced both the raw number and the percentage of Americans living in I really like this timeline.
Right?
In 65, you also had the Hart-Celler Act, which reduced limitations on immigration and increased the rate of immigration to the U.S.
And then from the late 60s through the 80s, you had the women's lib movement and the gay lib movement.
So this is really the progress timeline, but I think you're going to tell me about something else going on too.
Yeah, and stop me if this sounds familiar, but there was immediate backlash to the Civil and Human Rights Movement, to counterculture, and to these policy initiatives that benefited Americans of color and the poor.
So, on the other hand, you have in 1967 and 1968, you had the creation of the Hyde School and SEDU, which were the first troubled teen schools as we know them now.
In 68, Nixon ran on a promise of welfare rollbacks.
Also, the Population Bomb was published, which kicked off the racist and anti-immigrant Zero Population Growth movement.
70s, widespread backlash to welfare based on the racist narrative that welfare enables people of color to be lazy and take handouts.
71, you had the War on Drugs, which now we understand is a targeted assault on the black community.
1980, Stabio, this sounds familiar, Michelle Remembers was published, which kicks off the satanic panic.
1981, the first attempts to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, which was justified by moralizing about which projects the NEA funded, which included projects by gay artists, which you could argue was the first official push of the culture war, at least in the 80s.
Yeah, the most visible and sort of visceral push, I would say.
Right.
Yeah.
81, Reagan dismantles the Office of Economic Opportunity, which was established during the Great Society programs.
81, you also had the first cases of AIDS in the US.
In 84, you had the creation of the Corrections Corporation of America, which officially establishes the private prison industry.
In the 90s, politicians across the spectrum adopt the super-predator theory of crime, which creates a media narrative of crime that suggests that criminality is an inborn trait.
And in this case, it's inborn to Black people, but it goes on to include trans and gay people with the groomer narrative.
In 93, Clinton puts through Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
In 96, Clinton cuts the legs out from under welfare with the Welfare Reform Act.
And then in 96, you have the Defense of Marriage Act.
So that's the really bad timeline.
It's the darkest timeline, and we're living in it still.
Because, really, you could continue this on to include things like Citizens United, or the attack on Muslims and Sikhs after 9-11, or the panic over trans people.
I'm kind of stopping here in the mid-90s because, to me, this is the point at which all of these tactics On the part of centrist and conservative politicians, harden into a go-to strategy that they can use anytime that marginalized groups challenge the status quo.
And these policies have resulted in the deaths of millions of Americans.
Now, I imagine that you've brought numbers with you.
I can't not.
So to be as brief as possible, as a result of the war on welfare,
one in seven Americans now depend on food banks for nutrition.
And just in 2020, 9,152 children under the age of 14 died due to malnutrition.
As a result of the war on teenagers and the counterculture, American parents
put their children into troubled teen schools to be kidnapped, tortured, and in cases of at least 159
children killed at their parents behest.
And that's not even touching the 331,000 children who have experienced gun violence in American schools since Columbine, while American politicians refuse to do anything to help.
As a result of the war on civil rights and black Americans, we created a war on drugs that fed a disproportionate number of black people into prisons that exploit their labor in a form of modern day slavery.
Between 2001 and 2019, 8,573 prisoners died of unnatural causes in state and federal prisons, which is to say nothing of the 135 unarmed black people who died in police shootings just between 2015 and 2021.
of unnatural causes in state and federal prisons, which is to say nothing of the 135 unarmed black people
who died in police shootings just between 2015 and 2021.
And you could really cite endless data about the number of black people
who have died at the hands of the state.
As a result of the war on gay Americans, Reagan intentionally ignored the AIDS epidemic
for as long as possible to cater to his homophobic base.
And between 1981 and 2016, 675,000 Americans died due to AIDS.
Incredible.
All the while, our politicians, conservatives in particular, but with the complicity and policymaking of liberals, have raised moral panic after moral panic to justify this legislative violence against the most vulnerable Americans, whether those panics are over drugs, welfare, immigration, super predators, feminists, gay people, trans people, or unruly kids.
The anti-trans bills that are being proposed and passed now are just conservatives once again falling back on the same old strategies to uphold the status quo.
I don't even really need to cite specific murders of trans people to call this a war.
The culture war has had millions of casualties over the past few decades, and most of them weren't individual acts of violence against marginalized people.
They were acts of state violence against American citizens.
Okay, so all of these themes bring us to the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.
We were emailing in preparation for this, and you asked me to read an essay by him called Public and Private Spheres of Influence, and you told me It has very deeply informed the way I think about these issues.
So, we'll get to the essay, which will return to the themes that you've just been articulating, but first off, why is Gonzalez-Torres important to you as an artist and a thinker?
So, I might cry.
I'm going to try not to cry.
Okay, so, I mean, I first encountered his work When I was much younger, because the Art Institute of Chicago has a fair number of his artworks, and I grew up here, but I started studying his artwork when I was in college, and at the time, I was in a long-term abusive relationship.
I had taken this class on contemporary art, basically to say, like, I don't get contemporary art, so I'm gonna take a class on it and see if they can convince me to like it.
Right.
Which they did!
It was really the right time for me to come across this.
This relationship had abuse dynamics that I think a lot of straight cis people wouldn't really understand.
He had isolated me from my family, he had isolated me from my friends, from people who knew who I was and what I valued.
In high school I was Very, very involved in LGBT activism.
That died the minute that I started dating a Missouri Synod Lutheran.
No offense, Missouri Synod Lutheran allies.
This one was particularly hardcore.
So I started studying this gay artist and when I learned...
Gonzalez-Torres was deeply in love with his partner, Ross.
Deeply in love with his partner, Ross.
And the artwork that I got really involved with was the artwork, Untitled Portrait of Ross in LA.
So this is a pile of candy that's 175 pounds, which was Ross's weight when he was healthy.
Felix and Ross both had AIDS and they knew that they were imminently dying.
So, Gonzales Torres made a lot of artwork about this, and Portrait of Ross in L.A., that was, you know, when they were living together for the first time, and maybe the happiest they had ever been, but Ross was dying.
He was wasting away before Felix's eyes, and so this pile of candy, you're invited as the viewer to take from it, and in taking from it, you are reenacting Ross's death, the wasting away of his body.
And at the same time, I mean, this is a pile of candy that's like, it's those hard candies that are fruit flavored and wrapped in like multi-colored cellophane.
And it's beautiful.
I mean, when you come across it in the museum, it's sparkling and gorgeous and it's on the floor, which is unusual.
What's really cool about it is like it's like right at kids level so if you go there on a field trip day you can see kids like turn the corner see this artwork and just beeline for it and start digging their little hands and stuffing their pockets full of candy and that's the way that Felix felt about Ross and that's I mean how beautiful I believe I remember reading an article about it or seeing it in a magazine and thinking that was the most extraordinary idea I'd ever heard of.
It's exceptional.
And I had spent so long working with people when I was a teenager, working with people who had AIDS.
And I knew what they had been through in the 90s and the 80s.
and the 80s and it is an incredible act of to be loved like that.
To be Ross and to be loved like that.
I mean, Gonzales Torres created eternal life for his gay partner.
Yeah.
You know?
He created a body that wouldn't die because the museum has to keep refilling it.
So, it lives forever.
This is something super important because that stipulation about the installation that the gallery has to replenish the pile.
Is also Gonzales Torres' way, I think, of saying that institutions can mitigate the disappearance of our loved ones.
Like, as a society, we can actually account for and help preserve the memory of those that we love.
Absolutely.
And whereas the children and all of the other participants are actually like, they are reenacting but also sort of existentially performing a participation in his death, but also taking away with them a kind of sweet memory of who this person was that they never met.
And in that way, he is disappearing.
Society is in like tasked with keeping him there at the same time.
Like exactly.
And that's what makes him a political thinker, right?
Let me get to the politics in a second, but let me just.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Yeah, no.
You know, um...
There is this quote that I have here from an interview that he gave, and he says,
love gives you the space and the place to do other work.
Once that space is filled, once that space was covered by Ross, that feeling of home,
then I could see, then I could hear.
And that struck me so hard, being in an abusive relationship.
It hits you in a very personal and transformative way.
And then I think you also become aware that he's also like a political scientist.
Yeah.
Very much.
You dug up an old lecture for us where Gonzales Torres is speaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he's reading from a bit of this essay after this fascinating discussion of how the art world makes ideology invisible.
Yeah.
It's no accident that culture is now the new battleground.
After all, the economic and social changes that the Reagan regime sought to bring about an unaccomplished deal.
Our national deficit in 1980 was $74 billion, but by 1990 we had a deficit of $221 billion.
You know, so I think we can hear how strongly he echoes in your own analysis.
That's from 1994.
for housing to his budget for the military was one to five.
By 1981, 1989, it was $1 for housing and 31 for military.
So I think we can hear how strongly he echoes in your own analysis.
That's from 1994.
He died two years later of AIDS related causes at the age of 38, for fuck's sake.
And so, he starts the essay with, it's no accident that culture is the new battleground.
He goes on, as you have, to list the accomplishments of repressive capitalism.
I think he's saying that once the powerful have exerted control over the money, what's left is to come after bodies and minds.
But what else does Gonzales Torres say in this essay in a nutshell?
The thesis is that, as he says, there's no such thing as a private sphere, not when the state claims that it has a vested interest in what happens in the bedroom.
He was referring especially to the 1986 Supreme Court case Bowers v. Hardwick, which decided that there's no constitutional protection for the practice of sodomy, specifically when it's between two men, and states were at will to outlaw it, essentially making it possible for states to criminalize having gay sex.
This wasn't undone until the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, which decided that it was a violation of the Due Process Clause to criminalize consensual sexual conduct between two adults of the same sex, which was seven years after Gonzalez-Torres died.
And by the way, Greg Abbott wants to take Lawrence v. Texas back to the Supreme Court now that it has a religious conservative majority.
Yeah, this is the governor of Texas.
And just to underline it for a moment, if Lawrence v. Texas is overturned, The state could prosecute anyone for consensual sexual behavior in the privacy of their homes.
Is that the deal?
Yes, and Ken Paxton, the Attorney General in Texas, has said that he would enforce it.
I would not underestimate these people.
They are trying to create a registry of trans people in Texas at the moment, so they are Violently in favor of these incredibly appalling, repressive policies.
And in favor of criminalizing gay and trans people.
And that's a great example of Gonzalez-Torres' point.
You know, it feels like he's saying essentially that when the corporate state cannot be moral, when it's shown to be immoral, it has to invent and to prosecute immorality in its citizens.
Do you think that's fair?
Yes.
I'm trying to think of maybe a more lay person's way of putting it.
Right.
That's always good.
Yeah.
That's what I'm constantly trying to do.
Yeah.
Let's, let's, let's work it out.
It would be, it would be, um, you need somebody to blame and we will find the blameworthy group for you to, you know, exercise yourselves upon.
Right.
And that is despite the fact that, Our politicians are the people who are creating the conditions in which you do not have a fulfilling life.
They are depriving us of The opportunities that we had decades ago, not all of us, not equally, but you know, there was progress in the right direction.
They have deprived us of that progress.
They have done everything they can to stymie progress.
Of course, people are unsatisfied with their lives.
And yeah, they find the targets to distract from the fact that they should be the targets of our ire and disgust.
Now, so do you imagine that as economic and institutional crises continue to crest, that the pressure will continue to increase?
Yes.
I think if the arc of history tells us anything, the attacks will increase until they're too extreme and violent for cis people to ignore, and then it'll start getting better.
Although, With gay people being roped into the trans panic, it's like we're kind of going backward on that too.
But I think Matthew Shepard was probably the turning point for a lot of straight people in terms of gay rights.
But I think it's really notable that it took one good looking white guy to be brutally murdered on the side of the road for straight people to start caring, despite the fact that for two decades, the government had neglected the AIDS crisis and killed hundreds of thousands of gay men.
Who knows who will have to die and how brutally they will have to die in order for cis people to start caring about trans rights as a group.
And who knows how many trans people will die via state violence in the meantime.
Fascinating that you bring up Matthew Shepard because I think that also emerges in a completely different media landscape in which something about the reporting and something about the imagery could not be ignored And today it seems like as soon as something appears on Twitter, it can be spun, or it can be named as a deepfake, or it can be... There's a reality distortion principle at play here as well that I think is very confounding.
Yeah, I have to wonder if maybe there's a lot of cis people out there who think that trans people don't have it that bad because of this reality distortion.
It's like, live our lives, you know?
Like, go touch grass, come out and meet us, find out what our lives are actually like, get off of Twitter, and maybe you'll find out that no, we're not exaggerating, that it is that bad.
Right.
And kind of to that point, Chaya Raychik has already used Libs of TikTok to incite bomb threats against children's hospitals on the basis of lies about gender-affirming care for children.
There's also a sort of clique of anti-trans activists who are waging a very effective astroturfing campaign by forming overlapping advocacy groups that focus on gender medicine and detransition.
The Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine is the best known of these groups, but it also includes GenSpec, Rethink, Identity Medicine, Ethics, Gender health query, lots of like groups with like really legitimate sounding names.
Yeah, but yeah, these are these are a bunch of social workers, a couple of actual like MDs, some physicians, but none of them have any experience in gender medicine.
And they don't they may have worked with some D transitioners, but they don't specialize in gender medicine or work with Trans people on a regular basis you know that's that's training that you have to do to be like qualified to speak on this stuff and they haven't gone through that training.
They completely misrepresent the research on gender medicine and and on transition.
They they really warp data and intentionally misinterpret scientific research to make it seem like there's more of a consensus than there actually is that gender medicine might be dangerous.
They are waging a really, really effective campaign.
The Alabama Attorney General cited them while defending anti-trans laws, like on the record.
And that is the political Activity that they're not going to bother with town hall meetings because who needs to go to town hall meetings and say that stuff when you can get the information out there, the misinformation, the disinformation out there and have and inflame conservatives so that they can go to the town hall meetings.
You know, it's pretty sophisticated.
You know, a team of Yale researchers found that the quote-unquote research on SEGM's website is actually mostly just opinion letters that they write to the editors of medical journals and then they'll link to them on their website as if this is actual medical research because they'll be able to say, oh, this was published in XYZ Journal.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
They'll write a letter to the editor and then link, and because the link goes to the journal, they'll say it's peer-reviewed research?
I don't know that they'll say that it's peer-reviewed research, but I think that they're hoping that nobody will actually click through the link and see that it's just an opinion piece.
And also, I mean, there's not that much scientific literacy in the public, so I don't think that a lot of people understand how to evaluate scientific research or methodology, or even understand what is research and what is an opinion piece.
We cover this all the time in relation to how vaccine science is presented by right-wing activists, right?
It's the same thing.
Yeah, and also there's a similar dynamic with people who might have medical or academic credentials in one area who have no real research experience or on-the-ground experience with trans people stepping out of their lane and using their credentials to sort of charismatically suggest that they have some specialized knowledge where they don't.
Yeah, and I would say to cis listeners, if you hear the guys talking about this stuff when it comes to COVID vaccines and you're like, wow, that's really objectionable, go and look at what they're doing with gender medicine.
It's the same thing.
We need to object to it as hard as we do when it's vaccines.
Right.
These groups are being cited by policymakers as justification for anti-trans fear mongering and legislation, and they're being cited and or uncritically linked to by publications like the Daily Mail, the New York Post, Medscape is really bad about this, Newsweek, the New York Times, holy The stuff that the New York Times has published about gender medicine is reprehensible.
This is despite the fact that the people who comprise these groups have no real qualified occasions to inform policy or the public, and if cis allies don't start holding themselves, the media, and politicians accountable for factual accuracy around trans identity and around gender medicine, 2024 is going to be a bloodbath for the trans community, psychologically and emotionally for sure, but it Look at what happened at Club Q. It might also be in terms of actual human loss.
And, you know, that is something that Chaya Reichick and Alex Jones really want, is human loss.
If I zoom in on my own experience many years ago of being confused and triggered by the reality of trans existence, I feel like I know something about where some of this is coming from.
If we set the politics aside, I guess.
Because I remember getting to know a trans colleague as a friend and having these weird bodily sensations that curled up around questions like, you know, why don't they just accept themselves as they were born?
And do they really need to change who they are?
And at a certain point, I guess I just got over it.
You know, I realized it was none of my business, but then it went farther than that because one day I remember that I was riding the subway and I suddenly realized that I was not looking at people as biological men and women because if I was, I would have to be imagining weird things about their genitals, like I was just looking at people, and realizing that was a very liberating, I would say almost spiritual experience.
I mean, I know that we're not talking primarily about psychology with this material, but that's in the background as well.
I think neoliberalism has done a really good job of convincing liberals and progressives that all it takes to enact change is a hearts and minds campaign, that you just have to do the internal work and everyone else will follow you.
Isn't everybody so moved by my experience on the subway?
I hope so.
Didn't I do a great job?
You did a great job, and you didn't share it with anybody, and you didn't do any coalition building, but the people will follow you, Matthew.
Politics will definitely follow you if you don't do anything to act on it.
No, no, because years in the yoga world taught me that if I just did my yoga, that I would become a better person too, right?
And if I just do my transcendental meditation.
Yeah.
Well, you should because you paid for that fucking mantra too, right?
I did pay for the mantra.
Okay.
I paid for the training.
Let's be fair to TM.
I paid for the training.
The training was excellent and I paid for the mantra and the mantra is great.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Okay.
But yeah, I have certainly come across this attitude from cis allies.
I can't tell you how often I hear things like, well, for what it's worth, not everyone thinks like that.
Or like, most people don't think like that.
And when they say like that, they mean like, you know, like a transphobe.
But that's not true.
That's demonstrably untrue.
Pew found in 2022 that 62% of Americans either think that greater acceptance of trans people is actively bad for society or they're undecided on whether it's good or bad.
And that includes a whopping 40% of Democrats.
They found in a separate 2022 study that the share of people who believe that gender is determined by your sex at birth is actually rising over time, not falling, and that about a fifth of Democrats believe it should be illegal to teach about gender identity in grade schools and that parents who support their child's gender identity should be investigated by law enforcement.
And what frustrates me is that, like you said, cis people, including allies, often demand explanations from trans people before they're willing to even accept that we're real in the first place.
Yeah, that's so uncomfortable because I remember getting to know the first trans friend I made and realizing that somehow for my own safety, I felt compelled to ask them all kinds of intrusive questions.
You know, and I'm not going to lie, I was for some reason thinking about things that I never think about when I'm with cis people.
And I restrained myself from, you know, saying Those things out loud, but there's a very weird impulse there that's really real and has to be dealt with in some way.
Well, I wouldn't even call it a weird impulse because it's curiosity.
And I wouldn't want to discourage natural curiosity.
Trans people are, I don't want to say unusual in the sense of being strange, but we're not typical.
We're in the minority.
So curiosity is understandable.
I get it.
But it often crosses into cis people silently evaluating trans people to figure out if they think we're actually men and actually women by their narrow individual standards.
And That is, like I said before, making it about themselves.
They don't make much of an effort to put themselves in our shoes, understand that our lives are unbelievably difficult under current conditions, and actually work to change those conditions.
They don't get that.
I don't understand cis people.
I tried!
I tried for 34 years to understand what it's like to be cis, and to understand what it means to be a cis woman, and I don't get it.
And you might never get what it's like to be a trans person.
You might never.
No explanation will be enough.
So you have to, at some point, start putting aside your lack of understanding and saying, like, I support human rights, period.
It doesn't matter if I understand.
Because look, I don't understand you and your experience as a cis person, but it doesn't mean I'm going to withhold my support for your civil and human rights until you can explain it to me.
Beau, we're totally normal.
We tell you who we are every day.
I mean, maybe you're just not leaning in and really listening.
I don't know.
I listened to my great detriment.
I listened.
I won't even get into it.
Yeah, okay, so speaking of listening, the reason why we're talking at all is because you had responded to some of our coverage of the satanic panic.
And you specifically responded to a listener who complained about how we framed certain things.
She said that we weren't giving enough credit to the satanic panic as a movement that made it permissible to finally talk about child sexual abuse.
She was implying, as a lot of people do, that it was an important development in feminist activism.
And then you had a response to that exchange.
What did it bring up for you?
Without getting too hyphy about it, because it still makes me angry thinking about it.
I got frustrated at the fact that you bothered to respond to such a ludicrous claim that so obviously throws the LGBTQ community under the bus.
It's very clear to me that the satanic panic is part of a larger culture war that I outlined earlier.
That has set its sights on gay and trans people, black people, indigenous people, people living in poverty, immigrants, and teenagers as its scapegoats.
And women.
And women.
Right.
I agree with your analysis that Pazder was reacting to Vatican II and the decline of Catholicism in America when he published Michelle and We're Members, but focusing on the satanic panic as just a vehicle for buttressing Catholic influence ignores the next four decades of anti-gay, anti-trans rhetoric and moralizing that condemns us based on our supposed violation of Christian principles and outright calls us satanic and demonic and suggests that we're lusting after nice white Christian children.
And that's moralizing that comes not just from Catholics, but from many Protestant denominations as well.
So the idea of gay Satanism is clearly useful across the divide of the Reformation.
And that's beyond the fact that the satanic panic made gays and lesbians into supposedly anti-Christian scapegoats, targeted childcare workers, and placed blame for the alleged abuse on working mothers for putting their children in daycares.
Okay, so here's a good example of my own journalistic myopia, because it's very natural for me, as a lapsed Catholic with a chip on my shoulder, to focus on pazders like kooky trad-cath fantasies as morally and intellectually repugnant, but then I like completely miss the on-the-ground impact on people with less privilege.
Okay, so busted.
You know, there are a lot of victims beyond just the obvious, like beyond child care workers and gay people and working mothers, you have other victims of the satanic panic that include, you know, just if you're if you're just looking at the satanic panic on its own divorce from the culture war.
The victims are also the wrongly imprisoned children who are subjected to the traumatic psychological baggage of the adults in their lives and unnecessarily exposed to high stress environments like investigations in courtrooms.
Religious minorities, everyone who has been smeared in the press as satanic or demonic, QAnon and Pizzagate are an extension of the satanic panic.
Many artists, particularly gay artists, have been accused of satanism and harassed for it for years, if not decades.
I'll also say, look at all the musicians who have been called satanic and attacked for that for decades.
Satanism has become a default accusation against any ideological opponents of conservatives and is weaponized to immediately curtail any productive conversation about diversity and difference.
I'll also say, for a more recent example, the reaction to Lil Nas X. His video, Call Me By Your Name.
Like, that's another one.
This is a pretty sophisticated critique of the way that Christianity has targeted gay people, and it was him saying like, okay, let me go embody what you're so afraid of.
And what?
And what?
What now?
But yeah, to get to that, people looking in the mirror and seeing the devil, white feminists aren't immune to that impulse.
And that's what I identified in that listener's argument, was white feminism.
I want to encourage your listeners to read White Feminism by Koa Beck and Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria if they want to know more about deeply entrenched white supremacy in American feminism.
But the thrust is that white women have dominated the feminist movement, carefully and intentionally excluding the activism and perspectives of black, brown, indigenous, Asian, working class, Jewish, Muslim, fat, disabled, elderly, and queer women.
And that as a result, feminism in America is centered on the priorities of affluent white women.
These priorities have become deeply and increasingly individualistic, and in the last several decades feminism has been reduced to advocating for individual wage earning, individual achievement in the workplace, individual sexual liberation, and individual self-care.
Leaning in.
Leaning in, leaning in.
Thank you, Cheryl.
When it comes to the discussion of child sexual abuse, I am a survivor of long-term child sexual abuse, so I do empathize with the need to recognize and process your trauma and to have something prompt that recognition in the first place.
But saying that we should feel more positively about the satanic panic on the basis of it helping people talk about their history of abuse would be like saying that, well, the Holocaust woke the world up to the dangers of anti-Semitism, so maybe Nazism can have positive effects, you know?
Oh, gosh.
Call up Ye, let them know.
It's a reprehensible, self-centered, highly individualistic way of interpreting history.
If we're going to approach this really critically, too, I think it's important to find out exactly which and how many victims have benefited from the satanic panic opening up conversations about child sexual abuse.
I wonder if there's data.
I wonder if there's literally just one study that I could find, Matthew.
It's admittedly old, but a 2003 Department of Justice study found that at that time, 86% of victims of child sexual abuse did not report that abuse.
To me, that doesn't scream such a resounding success on the part of the satanic panic quote-unquote opening up the conversation about CSA that it's worth all of the harm.
I don't know how many cases of CSA were reported prior to the satanic panic, but when it comes to brass tacks, 14% is inadequate and we need better solutions for victims of child sexual abuse than quote-unquote conversation opening moral panics.
Yeah, now with regard to the satanic panic timeline, 2003 isn't bad.
Like, it's not a bad benchmark because the last major cases were tried in the mid-90s, so you'd expect an increased reporting rise right after the panic, right?
You would expect that by 2003, there would have been some difference.
If we're saying, like, this starts with Michelle remembers, and that opens the floodgates, Then you would expect that in the 22 years after that, there would be something better than 14%.
So, I will also point out that if the satanic panic was really so good at opening up a conversation about child sexual abuse, why can't I find anything better than this 2003 study?
It was 20 years ago.
Why isn't there more?
Like, it's so hard to find data about the actual reporting rates of child sexual abuse.
So clearly, it hasn't done a good job.
We're not talking about it enough.
Or that there isn't actually the will to answer the question.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that the satanic panic didn't create the will to answer it.
Believe it or not, creating lies about supposed satanists and ritual abuse and shit, which is not how child sexual abuse normally happens, but propagating those lies didn't do a good job.
Right.
It's not effective.
Heading towards our home stretch and back to social psychology for a moment.
And very, very broadly, why the fuck is the dominant culture so obsessed with trans people?
Well, the simplest answer is that if you're looking for a scapegoat, you'd be hard-pressed to find a group that's easier to scapegoat than trans people.
As far as the data tells us currently, we are less than 1% of the population.
So if you lie about who we are and what we want, it's going to be harder for us to be heard when we refute your claims by virtue of us just being a tiny community.
And you can see that in the public debate now.
The cis community has dictated to trans people what we supposedly care about and what we supposedly want, and now we have to react to it.
For instance, cis people really have it in their heads that trans folks are demanding that trans kids be able to play sports on the sex-segregated team of their choice.
They have it in their heads that we are demanding this.
But have you ever met queer people?
We are not.
Some of us, some lesbians and there are some gay leagues and stuff, but like for the most part, we are not exactly the biggest sports fans in the universe.
On the whole, we were not the sporty kids.
This issue is not organically on most trans folks' agendas, and it was put there by cis people who deflected from our actual needs by demanding that we come up with an answer for how trans people fit into something as trivial as sex-segregated sports.
The whole time cis people have been bringing this up to me personally, I've been sighing and rolling my eyes because I didn't care about kids' sports when I was a kid.
Ask my dad.
He was my soccer coach and my t-ball coach.
It was a mess.
I didn't care about kids sports when I was a kid.
I continue not to care about kids sports now.
And the fact that I'm being forced to think about it when really annoys me when all I really want is an assurance of me and my family's physical safety and the freedom to make my own medical choices.
So, there's a seeming exaggeration of a demographically tiny concern.
So, issues around fairness when, for instance, trans women are presented as outperforming cis women in individual sports like swimming is something that's talked a lot about, but we are talking about a fraction of the 1% of the population, right?
Yes, and I gotta point out it is always trans women.
People don't think that trans men can compete with cis men, so they're not worried about it.
But the the ACLU of Indiana made a really salient point in a fact sheet about trans youth in sports that the legislators in Indiana who were passing HB 1041 to ban trans kids from sports couldn't produce evidence that this was even really a problem in the state and outright admitted on the record that it wasn't a widespread problem.
ESPN reported that only about 1.8% of high school students identify as trans, and of those trans students, only 13% play sports.
Oh, jeez.
Yeah, so when you're kind of calculating how many high school athletes are trans, ESPN's estimation is it's about 0.44% of all high school athletes are trans athletes.
And even fewer than that are trans girls, which is what anti-trans activists are actually scared of.
I would not call that widespread or worth legislating around.
And I find it extremely interesting that trans, anti-trans people chose to zero in on team sports in particular as their battleground, because to my mind, as admittedly a not sporty person, team sports are arguably the sports in which physiology matters the least.
A lot goes into winning a game in team sports other than raw physical talent, like strategy and collaboration and teamwork and leadership.
They all arguably matter more than any player's physiology.
Every team is going to have a lot of physical variation between players, so theoretically, there absolutely should be room for trans players on team sports.
No matter who's on your team, a big part of working together is going to be playing to each player's strengths and working around their weaknesses.
Yeah, for sure.
So why team sports of all the sports?
I had to ask my husband about this because he is a sporty person.
And he pointed out that from a bigoted parent's point of view, it probably has to do with the implied intimacy and camaraderie of team sports.
Beyond the fact of sharing locker rooms, athletes who play on teams become quite close and friendly and invested in one another.
And if you hate trans people, you can't have that for your cis child.
Okay, so I would agree here with your husband.
And I'm also going to focus in on the locker room aspect and say that that's the site of what I would call permissible, but repressed sexual transgression and hazing.
So, as a straight cis guy, I can tell you that we can shower together, we can swing our dicks at each other, we can laugh about each other's dicks, we can make racist comments about size, etc.
I'm not speaking about myself in the present tense, but I know this culture.
We can snap towels at each other's asses.
We can show each other porn on our phones.
Also, this was before, this was after my time.
But all All of this edgy stuff is permissible only if there's a very rigid rule in place, which is that nobody here is actually queer.
Right.
Because if a queer person is present, that queerness will make the homoerotic nature of the play transparent.
So, you know, the locker room is also a place where, you know, men can talk shit about women, and they can even assault women if they get too close, because I don't know if you've seen these instances where, like, a female reporter is assigned to do post-game interviews of, like, a baseball team, and a bunch of them feel like it's their right, and it's, like, really funny to surround her or brush by her while they're naked, even while the camera's on them.
So they're basically saying, this is our dick-swinging space.
But if you tell them, you know, here's a trans man and he's one of you, suddenly, like they have to become more self-aware in a way.
They have to become more polite.
They might feel infiltrated in a space where they've been blowing off repressed steam.
You know, they're going to be confronted with the notion that someone is breaking some kind of rule that they barely understand.
And meanwhile, the actual reality is that the trans man just wants to change their damn clothes, right?
And get their shoes.
So, this stuff is so viscerally present for me that when I bring my six and ten-year-old boys into the locker room when we go swimming, the only thing I'm actually anxious about are the dick-swingers, because they're definitely going to be there.
So, I'm on the lookout, and if there's dick-swinging vibes over in that part of the locker room, I'm going to steer us towards another part.
And it literally never occurs to me to be concerned that my children would be around gay or trans men.
Because my experience so far is that gay and trans men are just more self-aware and boundaried.
And if I feel a threat on my kid's behalf, it's going to be the threat of a culture that's going to encourage them to become both repressed and aggressive at the same time.
And it reminds me of how Bell Hooks talks about patriarchy in its primal stages, disconnecting boys from their own feelings.
And that allows them to evade the challenges of empathy.
And I think the locker room is the scene where this unfolds, where boys are told that in their essential selves, they should be dick swingers.
This is interesting, because I use the men's locker room at my gym, which is a new development.
Right.
How's it going?
I mean, is it okay?
Yeah, it's fine.
Uh, I mean, I, I, this is, this is the thing.
I've always felt comfortable in men's spaces like that.
It has never fazed me even when I was presenting as a woman.
But, uh, yeah, no, I mean, the, so what you're saying about like gay and trans men being more boundaried, I think that that has to do with like when we're in shared spaces with Straight people and cis people, but straight people in particular.
I think there's this sense of like, OK, we're not going to be the gayest right now because we're in a shared space.
But we have private spaces and spaces that are kind of ours, that are more culturally ours, where, like drag shows, where we can be more flamboyantly gay, more queer.
So there's this sense of like, some stuff is appropriate here, but not here.
And straight people are not going to understand.
So, you know, let's not subject them to it.
Do you know, it just occurred to me that there could be an entire protest movement outside of men's locker rooms.
Oh God, right?
Right?
Where like queer and trans people came and they held signs about how, you know, we don't want our children groomed into dick swinging spaces.
Exactly.
Exactly.
I mean, certainly that's how I feel.
Obviously it's how you feel.
But yeah, I mean, the nice thing about the club that I go to, so when I signed up, um, My license had my dead name on it, so I had introduced myself as Beau.
The guy who was signing me up was the manager of the club, and we were having a nice conversation, and then it got to the point where I had to give him my license, and I said, so I'm trans, so the name on this license is not going to be the name that I go by.
He was so great.
He was like, oh yeah, I kind of figured and just kept moving, which is, by the way, the best response anybody has ever given me.
I love that because you're simultaneously saying, I accept that you're trans.
I did clock you, but I'm not going to treat you differently.
And I don't really care.
I don't care. I don't care.
Let's keep moving. And then he showed me in the men's locker room.
So there you go.
But yeah, I mean, it certainly communicated to me that that's where I belong
and that, you know, it is the club's stance that that is where I belong.
So I feel entirely entitled to be in there.
I don't feel like I have to hide anything necessarily, although I am
a little more on the modest side.
There's only one guy who I think has like really clocked me and it's not hard to do.
I still shave my legs.
I have very wide hips and I have two huge scars on my chest so...
It's not hard to do, but most people aren't looking and this guy just happens to usually be in the same bay of lockers as me.
He acts kind of uncomfortable and I don't know if it's that he's uncomfortable with the fact that I'm trans or if he's uncomfortable because he's like, I don't want to fuck up.
Or like he's just trying to give me space, which is like either no matter what it is, I don't care.
Like I said, I'm entitled to be in there.
So it's an amazing moment where you don't actually know whether whether the discomfort is an actual discomfort or an altruistic discomfort.
Right.
Yeah.
And, and I'm, I mean, it doesn't matter to me either way.
Like I said before, like if people see me as a woman, I don't care.
That's fine.
You can think whatever you want to.
It's not my business.
I'm not the thought police, but like this guy, as long as he is just letting me do my thing and staying out of my way and I'm staying out of his way, we're good.
You know, I, if this is coming from a place of bigotry, that's fine.
He's allowed to be a bigot, but like, you know, as long as we're just like, Living and letting live.
That's all I can ask for.
That's the very American part of your argument, I find.
Right?
Like, it seems that so often the discourse is really really enmeshed in the particulars of Identity, politics, and the jargon that can flow through that at times.
But you're also really making a civics argument that is really unimpeachable.
Thank you!
Like, leave me alone.
Please.
I have the same rights as you, so respect that.
Yeah, and that our internal sort of paradigms are really not on the table here.
They are matters of privacy.
Like, it's almost like an establishment clause argument as well, right?
You're saying don't have, you know, psychological or religious sort of feelings or beliefs intervene in this space where we simply should be sharing civil rights.
Yes, and I would point out that my point of view, most trans Americans' point of view about this, is way more tolerant and permissive of free speech than trans and gay people have to be in other countries.
Like, Germany has a hate speech law that forbids hate speech against trans people, but it happens all the time in the U.S., and my stance is Say whatever you want, just don't legislate about me.
I don't care.
That's fine.
People are allowed to have their opinions, but there is a constitutional issue here and a civil rights issue here that I have a line, and the line is when you start legislating against me, when you start projecting your Christian morality or even your personal anxieties as a cis person onto legislation, that's when I draw the line.
You know, this brings us back to Herr Schultz, actually, because one comment that you made was, My identification with him might be naive, that his argument that he's as German as everybody else is, and that's going to be the pillar that he stands on, is something that this current wave of legislative and cultural violence is actually
Undermining.
And so when you say, you know, I don't really, I'm not concerned about the speech issues, at the same time, that's the tip of the spear, isn't it?
Where when hate speech becomes louder and louder, then that begins to influence legislative movements.
It is something that I worry about, but it's something that I try to respect because I think that there's room for... I think that there's room for people to hate each other, honestly.
There's so much that we don't have control over.
There's so much that we don't have control over.
We can't control how people think of us and we can't really speculate on people's motivations.
One of the things that I learned in therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder One of the things that I learned in cognitive processing therapy was that one of the sort of disordered ways that you start thinking when you have PTSD is you start trying to figure out what people's motivations were for the violations that they inflicted on you.
Oh, yeah.
And then you start trying to avoid those things.
Right.
That is at the heart of PTSD.
Really?
And yeah, well, according to Patricia Resick, she's the one who created CPT in response to the needs of rape victims in the 70s.
She was working in women's shelters when she developed this, but her way of thinking of it is This is, like, if you can undo that way of thinking, if you can undo this, like, constant anxiety over, like, how do I avoid this and accept the fact that you can't control what other people think or what other people do.
And if you try to find motivations for it, it's just a losing game.
The objectionable thing that happened isn't why somebody violated you.
The objectionable thing that happened is that they violated you.
And that's enough.
It's like the second arrow teaching in Buddhism where the Buddha says to the person who's in mental or emotional suffering, isn't it enough that you have been struck by this arrow?
Yeah.
Why is it that you regret being in the wrong place?
Exactly.
Why is it that you blame yourself for being such an easy target?
Why is it that you stress about how long it will take to get the arrow out?
These are all reasonable and they distract from the basic fact of the matter.
I will say as soon as I stopped worrying about why my ex-husband did what he did, why the rapist who came after that did what he did, I found this sense of ease like just it unburdens you mentally to to stop wondering
What their motivations were.
It just doesn't matter.
And as soon as you stop thinking about it, like you can get down to brass tacks and just be like, you know, in the case of my ex-husband, he had a million choices for how to respond to me being unusual, which is what it comes down to.
And the response that he chose was not to be compassionate or curious or tolerant or accepting or interested.
He chose to try to exert as much control over me as possible so that I would be shaped into the person, the wife he wanted.
That, you know, that is, that's, that's it.
That's it.
That's all it is.
And I can say like, well, I know that he had a history of abuse.
He had this religious belief.
He had like X, Y, Z, other thing.
And, but when it comes down to it, it was just that he chose to act in an abusive way.
Period.
In your list of choices, I think you left out ambivalent.
He could have not cared and moved on.
He could have not cared and moved on.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Everybody, everybody has that choice.
You know, when you see something that you object to, you can choose to be ambivalent.
You can choose to not care.
Right.
Right.
So to the question of why cis people are so obsessed with us, if you'll allow me to get really philosophical here, if we were going to be really honest about how we define manhood and womanhood in white western cultures, the fact is that It's not chromosomes.
It's not appearance.
It's that we have defined women as the objects of men's sexual desire and men as competitors for sexual access to women for so long that it's become the default way of thinking about other human beings.
And in that way, men have decided who's a quote-unquote real man and who's a quote-unquote real woman based on either who they're competing with or who they want to have sex with.
Yes.
Okay, so this brings me back to my subway moment because as I'm, you know, in this crowded car, I realize that I'm typically going through this mental calculus that is usually not transparent.
Suddenly, that internal monologue becomes audible to me.
And I realize I don't actually know what the words mean because my definition of them depends on creepily imagining people naked.
So that was suddenly absurd.
And so in that absurdity, I start seeing something else beyond man, woman, man, woman.
And that makes me wonder about what it means to fall in love with a person instead of a man or a woman.
So this litany of man, woman, man, woman, man, woman is this internal scorecard of Who I should be allowed to think about in a sexual way, if I'm totally honest.
Right.
And part of the reason feminism is so offensive to patriarchy is that it asserts that women can also define men as the objects of women's sexual desire.
And homosexuality is considered deviant under patriarchy because it defines men as the objects of men's sexual desire and women as the objects of women's sexual desire.
Right.
But trans and non-binary people break this system entirely by saying, we are not defined by who wants to have sex with us, we define ourselves.
Who wants to have sex with us and who wants to compete with us for sex is absolutely irrelevant to our identities.
Okay, but hold the phone, because this makes it sound like trans identity is not socially constructed.
Right.
So we have stumbled onto the hill that I'm going to die on.
Okay.
All right.
Go for it.
Okay.
So when we say that gender is a social construct, which I don't like phrasing like that because it feels very zhuzhi, we're saying that man and woman are roles that we, our culture has sort of agreed upon collectively.
Yeah.
And that is why Manhood and womanhood are context dependent because they're different in different cultures.
Gender is a social construct, but identity isn't at all.
Trans identity is not a social construct.
Cis identity is not a social construct.
No identity is a social construct.
The only person who gets to construct an identity is you as an individual.
So, nobody gets to tell a cis man, you don't make enough money, so you're not a real man.
Nobody gets to tell a cis woman, you're not able to have children, so you're not really a woman.
Or, you're not attractive to me, so you're not a good enough woman.
Or, you're not whatever, you know?
Or, to go back even further, You're a Jew, so you're not a German, or you're black, so you're two-thirds of a person.
This is a power that White people, white, cis, straight, able-bodied people have had for a long time, and they have used it to legislate against marginalized people.
And what's so offensive about trans people is that we're saying you do not actually have that power or that entitlement to tell other people who they are.
You don't get to tell anybody that.
It's not just about trans people.
It's about everybody.
You don't get to tell other people who they are, period.
That does feel like a hill to die on because that is a very, um, that's coming close to a universal message, like a gospel message.
Yes.
Uh, yeah, and, and I just, you know, when I think about this, when I, because this is probably my most deeply held belief, when I think about this, it breaks my heart Thinking about all the people who have been hurt by people telling them who they are, by people passing judgment.
And it's not just marginalized people.
It's everybody.
Everybody gets hurt by this.
I'm sure you can think of many times in your own life where somebody told you, you're X, Y, Z, and you're lesser than because of it.
Oh God, yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
Everybody can.
I mean, it kills me To think of little boys being told that they're not good enough, being bullied by other boys.
It kills me to think of these children listening to Andrew Tate And hearing him say that if you don't make enough money, you're not a good man, or that if a woman has had multiple sexual partners, then she's not really a woman.
You know, we have told cis people that they are not good enough or enough of a man, enough of a woman.
I want cis people to feel grounded in their identities.
I don't want the realization that trans people exist to threaten cis people.
I want it to empower them to define themselves and to stand in their truth and to have a really strong sense of who they are.
I think that is one of the things that I love most about gay and trans people, is that we have been forced by necessity to have a very strong sense of who we are and to stand for it.
And I want that for cis people, too.
I want cis people to feel very strong.
And, you know, to that woman who's like, I waited 30 years to become a mother.
It's like, I don't want to take that away from you.
I want you to identify as a mother because that's who you are.
And that's something that's very important to you.
And I honor that.
There's probably some contingent, some minority contingent of trans people who are like, no, we get to, we, you, people don't get to call themselves that, you know, like, or we shouldn't use gender terms or whatever.
Like, there's probably some contingent of like Tumblr teens who feel that way, but I don't think that's the majority of trans people.
I think that's Tumblr teens being teenagers, you know?
And cis people have gotten really hung up on what I think was intended to be a mild suggestion that we think more intentionally and inclusively about the way that we talk.
And they have interpreted that as, I don't get to have my identity.
And it's like, look, I'm not the one who's going to tell you that you don't get to have your identity.
Maybe you should take this up with all of the cultural commentators who have been saying, men are this, women are this, if you don't live up to this standard of manhood and womanhood, then you're not good enough.
Yeah, you need to take it up with your parents.
No comment!
Let me just reflective listen for a bit because this is blowing my mind.
We did not discuss this before this conversation.
No, you brought up the question and I was like, ooh, here we go.
So, what has happened and what seems to be instinctual is that the awareness of trans-reality destabilizes cis-psychology.
But what you're saying is that can only really happen if The person's self-identification has been subjected to a lifetime of accusations and belittlings and judgments, and you've always been told something that is somewhat shameful about who you are.
And as soon as you encounter A person who is taking ownership of an identity that you cannot conceive of for yourself.
And maybe they're even expressing pride about it.
And that's why the pride parades are such an incredible fixation for this crowd.
That suddenly, your own sense of insecurity is laid bare.
Is that what you're saying here?
Yes.
And you have spent your whole life Trying to live up to other people's demands of you.
Whether or not they are relevant to who you are, and you have been told that you are not good enough unless you do it.
And that is so damaging.
That is so psychologically damaging.
And when somebody waltzes in and says, now I'm this thing, now I'm a one, now I'm a man, and their experience doesn't line up with yours, you feel like they're stealing something from you.
Goddammit, so what you're saying, actually, is the trans person who is willing to change themselves in a public sphere, in a way that other people become aware of, that they're actually making an assertion about the fluidity of identity that everybody actually yearns for.
Yeah.
Yeah, we're making a statement saying, like, you just, you don't have to.
play along. You don't have to. Nobody does. You don't have to live up to anybody's standards but
your own. And I think there's a sense, this kind of gets back to Gonzales Torres a little bit,
but there's this sense that there's this anxiety that we all have to cooperate and follow the same
rules for a society to function.
And it's like, to a certain extent, yes, I feel very strongly about civics, as we've mentioned.
But in terms of identity, who does it really actually affect if you say, If you put your foot down, if you put your stake in the ground and say, this is who I am and nobody's gonna tell me otherwise, how does it affect other people?
For cis people, I'm not saying this about trans people, for cis people, if you are a cis mother, if your identity includes, I don't know, how much you care about your grandmother or whatever, I don't know, anything, anything, if you're an artist, if you're whatever, Well, that kind of gets to it, too.
Think about all the people in the world who have been saying, like, oh, I'm not really an artist.
They're making art and they're saying, I'm not really an artist because I'm not good enough, according to XYZ standard, that they heard from some book or some podcast or some influencer or something, you know.
You just, you get to be whoever you want to be, you know?
And as long as you are engaging in civics and playing along by the rules that we set out to cooperate with each other and keep society functioning, you get to be who you say you are.
For the straight and cis person who wants to help, what is the best first thing to do?
If I have to choose just one thing, join your local chapter of PFLAG and actually go and attend their meetings.
They operate more or less independently, so it's not the same everywhere, but my local chapter meets once a month for an hour, so it's a big payoff for not a big investment of time.
If you're not familiar with PFLAG, it stands for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, and the name is a relic of an older time.
They do support trans people and our loved ones, and they do incredible work that actually positively affects the lives of queer and trans people by providing support for the people who support us.
You don't have to currently know or love a queer or trans person to join.
You will be welcome so long as you're dedicated to your allyship.
But just don't just donate, actually go to the meetings.
Oh, well, but why?
Why is it important to go?
Beau, I might have to meet people.
And God forbid you meet more queer people and trans people and find a loving and supportive community of like-minded people.
I might feel like my identity is more fluid and that I can actually make choices about who I am in the world.
Yes, yeah.
Why would I want that, Beau?
What's in it for me?
A lot more peace in your life.
Also, like, there is the whole, like, touch grass thing.
But yeah, I mean, part of it is just you can't Build coalitions from your couch, unless you are hosting a group of like-minded individuals on your couch.
You can't change anything on your own.
People have to work together, and if your allyship stops at your wallet, it's never going to go anywhere.
Because look, the people who Oppose us?
Have lots and lots of money.
Joanne Rowling is in the top 200 wealthiest British people, you know?
That puts her in the 0.04% of British wealth, you know?
She has more money than God.
Most of these people do.
There's so much money behind it that just throwing money at it isn't going to do the trick.
You have to actually go out with your body and Say, I am a person who cares about this and I'm not going to let you abuse my friends and neighbors and community members.
You have to show up.
Sorry.
Bo, thank you so much for taking the time with us here today.
I really appreciate it.
Of course.
And thank you very, very much for having me.
me. It's been a pleasure.
So Bo has provided a statement about this on his website, which will clarify the costs of doing this work, and also the limits he needs to put on it in order to also have something approaching the normal life that we all deserve.
So I'll link to that in the show notes where you will also find all of the citations for the materials that he brought.
