In Part 2 of our investigation of Heather Heying's (of the extended IDW, and the Dark Horse Podcast with husband Bret Weinstein) descent from sociobiology into outright TERFery, we get to the really nasty shit. Content Warnings for venomous, hardcore transphobia, albeit couched in an ostensibly reasonable tone. Podcast Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay independent. Patrons get exclusive access to one full extra episode a month. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1 Episode Notes: Previous eps on the Weinsteins and Heying: 60, 61, and 62 Dark Horse Podcast https://youtube.com/c/BretWeinsteinDarkHorse Dark Horse Clips https://youtube.com/channel/UCAWCKUrmvK5F_ynBY_CMlIA Cass Eris on Irreversible Damage, Part One https://youtu.be/2OLNEiECN24 Ty Turner, trans man named as terrible influencer in Irreversible Damage, talks about the book. https://youtu.be/B5kkg90rL1M The Torment and Tragedy of Teenage Girls (letterwiki between Heying and Shrier) https://letter.wiki/conversation/893#letter_2855 Lisa Littman paper on Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0202330 ROGD paper criticism https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-1453-2 The news report Bret & Heather read from https://www.kiro7.com/news/transgender-woman-told-leave-womens-locker-room/246633184/
I'm Jack Graham, he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel he him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he him, about what he learned from years of listening to today's Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, and what they say to each white nationalists, white supremacists, and
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
And we're back with episode 84, which is kind of episode 83, part two, but we're not numbering it that way because that's confusing to my tiny little brain.
But yeah, sorry about the somewhat abrupt end to the last episode, but you know, stuff.
But yeah, we got plenty on Heather Hying being a TERF to cover up two episodes.
So here's the second episode of that, isn't it Daniel?
Yeah, I mean, fortunately, we did kind of end up running into tech issues right at the right moment, because I was about to transition into the actual TERFiness.
And so you end up getting one episode, which is all the prep work.
So if you haven't listened to 83, go back and listen to 83, I suppose.
Yeah, do your homework.
Yeah, do your homework.
Come on, guys.
Go listen to all of them.
Yeah.
But yeah, so my apologies for the technical problems, but we are working with new systems and trying to figure this stuff out, and just bear with us for another couple episodes.
I think things are working.
When they work, they're working well right now, but sometimes they just inadvertently crash.
So that's the issue.
Yeah.
And I guess, as you say, if we're going to have technical issues, we should be grateful if they occur exactly at the right segue moment.
Right.
It could be worse.
Right.
Yeah, I mean do you want to kind of summarize what we did in the last episode just before we kind of dive in?
Yeah, we we talked well, we talked about Heather Hines really really bad opinions really on porn and sex and misrepresenting sex positivity and just being generally a Biological reductionist reactionary.
Yeah, also also misunderstanding what ligands mean, but you know that oh, yes ligands Yes, can't forget the ligands.
That's important stuff the great ligand misunderstanding.
Yeah, and It's a relation, not a thing.
See, even I know.
It turns out that listening to me pound that into your head for 20 minutes last night was enough to convince you.
It's a bit like capital.
Capital is a relation, not a thing.
It's not even really a relation, but it's fine.
Anyway, so... I have to translate it into my native language.
That's all I'm doing.
You understand it better.
Heather Hying understands the actual, like, biology better, no doubt.
You understand the concept much better than she does, based on, you know, what she was spewing in that livestream.
Anyway, so the point of getting to all that was to kind of demonstrate the sort of Stifling kind of intellectual kind of a lack of intellectual curiosity around certain subjects and this kind of like generalized prudishness Probably unfair.
Yes reactionary Nesta seems to come from kind of discomfort with sort of the post, I mean, like post-60s sexual activity, frankly, you know.
There's a lot of kind of like wringing of hands about, you know, these kids and their free love and they're, you know, they're not building real relationships and porn is kind of toxic.
And all of those things can be true for different people, but there is a variety of experience that people have.
And some people will be perfectly happy with a kind of more traditional, you know, sex life.
And emotional life and romantic life.
And some people want something a little bit more non-traditional.
And the thing that really weirds me out about these two and biology is that they are biologists, right?
And biology is all about understanding the variety of, you know, organisms that exist, you know?
It's not about finding, like, the type organism, the median organism, and saying, this is the type specimen that we use for everything.
Understanding biology, particularly evolutionary biology, is about understanding various niches that people can, that organisms can fall into, and various Uh, patterns that might be repeated in various places and, you know, kind of understanding where these things come from and the fact that these are evolutionary biologists who have such a, like, simplistic and reductive view of sex...
It strikes me as this kind of really interesting phenomenon, you know?
I've been chatting with people about, like, particularly Brett's thesis, his dissertation, and I have read about half of it.
And I was in the DMs just chatting a little bit about some of the research.
I actually scanned it a little bit myself, and a lot of it was completely above my head, obviously, not being trained in biology.
But I detected hefty doses of evo-psych bullshit in there, I think.
Well, sure, but even more than that, it's just kind of like, what I heard people saying was, where's the effect of, this is some of the worst writing for a graduate level project that I've ever seen.
Like oh, yeah, I was I was struck by the very long and elaborate sort of opening set of acknowledgements That was basically like a short story, you know, right thanking his grandparents like it felt like a speech accepting the Nobel Prize He believes that this work was worthy of a Nobel Prize and exactly.
Yeah it is very much and you know, like for a lot of people the dissertation is sort of the the final thing that you do in your career it is sort of the the You know, for a serious scholar, for someone going into research, the dissertation is sort of your entry into scholarship and into the field of, like, being a professional scientist.
For a lot of other people, you really never kind of do anything more than the PhD.
You go and you teach, or you kind of do whatever, and both of those options are completely valid, if that's what you want to do, and there's no problem with that.
Just the impression of him sort of thinking that he'd written a world-shattering masterpiece just, it came off it in waves to me, I don't know.
I think the general consensus that I've seen from people is to the effect of, this does not reach the standard that you would expect a dissertation.
Thesis two to reach that this is not a real biology paper.
This is a bunch of like kind of undergraduate level bullshit Lately reads a lot like an undergraduate essay and you know Nobody know, you know, this is just sort of like what I'm what I've been hearing from from various people I'm hoping to get a biologist on to kind of talk about some of the things that Brett says hey a professional biologist PhD biologist to come on and chat about some of these issues and At some point in the near future.
So, um, you know, we'll wet our whistle for that for now, but I did just want to kind of again summarize kind of like why we went through that whole episode Because I think that once you understand or once you've kind of heard the the way they talk about sex and the way they talk about these kind of other topics the structure the way they start talking about trans people and trans Activists and trans rights etc is going to be The parallels are gonna be pretty striking at least in my opinion.
Um, yeah, I also want to say that I Did dot like I have chosen three long clips that we're gonna kind of start and stop during this episode.
Um, I These are not the only three clips I could have picked.
Actually, after Jack and I finished recording the last episode, I went and realized there was a brand new Dark Horse podcast that I could go listen to before bed.
And for about a 10-15 minute segment, they start talking about a proposed CBS segment about detransitioners and the kerfluffle around that.
And we could have just gone through that 10-15 minute segment and it would be... it's disgusting and vile and it's...
They don't understand the basics of what they're talking about here.
Like it really is just that simple.
And they allow their prior opinions to, um, uh, to spread, to, to, to push them to spread from bigotry, frankly.
Um, there's, there's just no other simpler way to say that.
Um, yeah.
Yeah.
Are they as-- Have they got the transphobe thing of becoming obsessed?
Because you say, you know, oh, there's a new episode and you go there and they're into the transphobia.
It sounds to me like they're getting the very quintessential and characteristic transphobe obsession, because I noticed this with transphobes.
They tend to get obsessed with it, don't they?
It's like a bone they can't leave alone.
It tends to be just a thing that suddenly, well, and you're getting attention for it.
Well, yeah, you get love-bombed by the other trans folks.
The gender-critical crowd.
Also worth noting that you're going to hear Hying reference Abigail Schreier a number of times in these clips.
They are apparently very warm towards one another.
Abigail Schreier recently published a book called Irreversible Damage, which is about
Yeah, the trans agenda is stealing our daughters and turning them into men because they're fundamentally misogynists I'm gonna link you to a letter wiki that Heather and or the Hying and Schreier Had together on these topics in which they largely agree on on a number of things We might read a little bit that a bit of that shortly but I will also link you to a Youtuber that I've been following for a little bit Cass Aris who is a cognitive psychologist
Who recently spent something like a 30 or 40 episode YouTube series going through all of Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.
Which we salute you.
I salute you, certainly.
And is currently working on a series about Irreversible damage, and she actually goes through and checks the references, such that there are, and discusses, like, what the current state of practice is that you would expect, and all these sorts of things.
Cass Ares is cis, as are both of us, and we would never talk—we would never try to speak for trans people, but this is—it's excruciatingly well-researched, and just absolutely destroys this book.
And I'm looking forward to the rest of the episodes because she's done five episodes so far and she's only up to chapter five.
So yeah.
Anyway.
That being said I think we have kind of waffled on this enough I do want to just highlight again before we kind of get into this that To talk about like we're gonna hear them kind of waffle a lot about You know who is and is not trans etc, etc And like this kind of the trans activists are doing things and there's a ton of like really difficult like liberal bigotry kind of going on here before we
Just to have, like, the baseline understanding of, like, getting transition care as a trans person, particularly a trans teenager or younger.
This is not a case in which a six-year-old walks into an office, says, I'm kind of, like, feeling like not the gender I was born into today, and gets, like, a bunch of shots, and they suddenly pull out a scalpel to start, like, doing surgery.
This is a years-long process, even in the best of circumstances.
It is absolutely excruciating to get services and to get care.
Trans people often question themselves for years before they even seek care.
This is just the baseline reality of this stuff and this kind of like basic bigotry that just exists in our society towards trans people that even the slightest gains they've gotten in terms of being able to be um public about who they are and getting like the slightest degree of like even the sliver of legal protection is is too much it's you're you're the trans activist you're just taking over everything etc etc
It's disgusting and vile, and I feel like before we kind of get into the clips, I think it's worth just kind of putting that out there that I am not trans, but I am aware of the struggles that trans people go through in terms of like getting their care, and I think it's important that we highlight that because they're certainly not going to do it.
In fact, they're going to pretend the exact opposite in some of this.
Yeah, we understand on this podcast that this stuff we're about to talk about is scaremongering, it's a moral panic, it's equivalent to, you know, if you abolish slavery the slaves will take over and soon the white man will be under the whip of the black man.
It's what reactionaries always do in the face of movements of oppressed people.
And it's just, it's a bunch of bullshit.
We know that, here.
Absolutely.
And so, here we go!
We're gonna start off with a clip from the Dark Horse Clips channel called Puberty is Optional, and I believe that is from number 38.
So this is going way back a ways.
They're up to 73 now, so that's seven or eight months ago.
So we're just going to start this clip.
What is the purpose of language like people with periods or pregnant people?
Why does this inclusiveness make me so angry?
Why is gender identity not provable and affects less than 1% replacing sex?
Yeah, you're not alone.
You're not alone.
You're being gaslit.
Yeah, you're being gaslit.
I will say, I don't know where all we're going to go, but Abigail Schreier, who wrote the recent book, And I can't remember the name of it.
I'll show it next time we're on.
About the rapid onset gender dysphoria that seems to be happening to teenage girls, specifically as a contagion in teenage girls.
She and I have just begun a letter wiki exchange about what is happening.
Specifically, over the focus she made the initial missive in LetterWiki about what's happening to teenage girls and what we can attribute these contagions to with regard to comparing human females to non-human primates and what friendships among non-human primate females have looked like.
The question more broadly of why gender identity is replacing sex is exactly, I think, that's spot on in terms of the question.
Why do we even call it gender dysphoria?
This isn't gender dysphoria.
Gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex.
In every other species, gender exists outside of humans.
It absolutely does.
People who tell you it's a human creation, no, they're wrong.
We call it sex role, and it is the behavioral manifestation that is typical for the sex that you are born to.
So gender dysphoria, that's just like being a tomboy.
There's so much there already, right?
Yeah.
Where would you like to start?
Um, well, one thing that immediately jumped out to me was the use of the phrase, the word contagion.
Oh, yes.
Oh, yes.
This is a straight out of the ROGD.
That's quote, unquote, rapid onset gender dysphoria, i.e.
that there is a social contagion happening among teenage girls in particular, that they are in their social groups, they don't want to be women anymore, and that this is created by trendsetters or by YouTube personalities or by their friends or whatever, but that they're not really trans.
And the word contagion comes up over and over and over again.
But you are absolutely correct to put your finger right on that immediately.
I agree.
I mean, that's, you know, that's dehumanizing language.
It's...
It's the language that bigots always use to describe the group that they're scaremongering about.
You compare people to infections and diseases and contagion.
That's what they always do.
Is there any evidence for this assertion?
I mean, it seems to me that if you were going to maintain that, you would need to prove two things.
Firstly, you'd need to prove that it's actually happening, that you have this wave of gender dysphoria in girls, and that you can prove that it's happening as a result of Watching influencers, you know, on YouTube, Instagram, etc.
And secondly, you'd need to be able to prove that what's happening here is actually characterisable as contagion.
You'd need to be able to show that it's not just people learning things, learning about possibilities that they didn't know before.
Right.
Like, yeah, would you like to know?
I actually have read the original ROGD paper.
I might include it here if people are curious.
And I have read the circumstances.
By which that paper was written, and essentially we're not going to get into the details here because there are people much more educated than me to kind of discuss this, and in fact Cassie Harris goes through this to some degree in her response to Schreier.
The paper is all about these teenage girls who are transitioning because, and this seems to come about rapidly, it comes about without warning, And the way that they know it comes without warning, that it is rapid, is because the parents didn't know about it.
Right.
They literally, the researchers, and I put this in quotes, okay?
The researchers literally went onto forums of parents with trans kids who were confused or upset about it, went onto some of these forums, found parents who were willing to talk to them, and they get a story that's something like, well, little Jenny, she was just out there the whole time.
She was playing with dolls and everything, and then suddenly she comes home one day and says, like, I'm actually a boy!
And, like, she had these friends who are just filling her head with this, and I see in her YouTube, she has all this kind of stuff going down.
The researchers, again, put in quotes here, do not attempt to contact the girls, for that matter.
Don't have any other, like, way of confirming this.
And I would just like to indicate to you, you know, that you and I probably... Let's not get too personal here.
I will speak for myself.
There were many, many things in my life that I did not tell my parents when I was 15 years old.
Yeah.
And my sexuality and things that I felt about myself in that space was definitely one of them, because I grew up in a family that was not very kind to certain things, right?
And these parents are exactly the kinds of people who are not going to be deceptive to a trans child, by definition, because they're on the forum.
This is the very definition of, like, ultimate selection bias.
I was just about to say, it's normal for children not to discuss intimate things with parents.
And then on top of that, you've got a selection bias where we're talking about children who are in families where the parents are the kinds of people that are going to go on Mumsnet and complain about, oh, suddenly she said, you know, yeah, and it's her friends, yeah.
And so this stuff is anecdotal evidence from Mumsnet posts, basically, unverified.
Basically, yeah.
Exactly, exactly that.
That checks out.
Exactly, that's what it is.
You might as well say there's rapid-onset cigarette dysphoria.
When, you know, like, my child never expressed an interest in any of these things, and then I found cigarettes!
Why are they doing smoking cigarettes?
They're 16 years old!
They're too young for this!
I don't understand!
Clearly it's these influencers.
Joe Cool is out there on YouTube convincing these kids to like cigarettes.
It's rapid-onset Billie Eilish dysphoria.
She never said anything to me about liking Billie Eilish, and then suddenly I say, what do you want for your birthday?
She says she wants a Billie Eilish CD.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, you should take it exactly that seriously, and yet... And it's accepted, of course, as good evidence because it conforms with the pre-existing prejudices of the researchers.
Exactly.
And just while we're talking about influencers, imagine if there were major YouTubers who have degrees in biology.
Say, just for instance, who were talking about these studies and accepting them whole hog and using that as a way of influencing, you know, I don't know, like lawmakers and public, you know, actually able to influence public policy by their nonsense and bigotry.
Can't imagine- That would be terrible.
That would be kind of awful.
Yeah, don't know where we would find people like that.
That would be deeply irresponsible because, you know, you would be doing things that would directly impact people's lives and potentially harm people and their development at very vulnerable stages of their life based on really, really, really bad research and reasoning for nothing really other than pandering to a reactionary audience who've been fed a moral panic.
That would be really reprehensible.
I'm glad that's not Yeah, glad that's not happening.
It's also worth noting that trans, particularly trans kids and trans teenagers, have a really high attempted suicide rate, possibly as many as half attempt suicide at some point.
The overt Nazis use this to say, Yeah, they should just kill themselves.
Just save us all the trouble.
Of course, Hying and Weinstein do not go that far.
They're not saying that.
They believe that these children instead should just not be able to get the medical care they need and to be Tortured further by their bodies.
Yeah, they're concern trolling, and the end result of their concern trolling is that these kids don't get the help that they need, and that, of course, is one of the engines that feeds the higher suicide rate.
Exactly.
And just, again, to put a pin on that, and then we'll move on, one of the major factors that will reduce that suicide rate This is shown in many studies.
I don't have the references on me, but it's been shown many, many times.
Family acceptance is one of the single most important factors for trans teenagers.
Of course.
If you're accepted by your family, even if it's not by the extended community or by your friend group or by your school or whatever, if your family accepts you, that suicide attempt rate drops precipitously.
And what are Brett and Heather doing?
They're taking the advice, they're taking the information from exactly the bigoted parents who are harming their own fucking children.
Great job.
You're doing great here.
You're doing- you're doing this exactly wrong.
You know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
But look at how reasonable they sound.
Look at how reasonable.
Exactly, because they speak in this very quiet.
Yeah.
Would you like to hear them be a little bit…well, Heather in particular.
I mean, the more… Sure, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Another thing in the clip we just listened to is the stuff about conflating gender with, what was it she said?
Behavioural presentation of sex.
With a sex role, right, you know?
Yeah.
Which she proves via proving that animals, you know, male and female animals behave differently.
Right, right.
Well, I feel like I shouldn't have to point this out to a biologist.
But animals are not human beings.
They do actually respond to that in various places.
I don't have a clip here that would demonstrate that, but they do respond to that.
They essentially argue that, well, people are animals, and if we observe the parallel between animals and people, then It's just this assumption, and this is the thing in general with this evo-psych and this biological reductionism.
No one is arguing that there's not a biological reality.
No one doubts that people are made of meat, that there's neurotransmitters and evolutionary processes.
That we are the product of selection.
Yeah, nobody denies that.
There's no one in this conversation denying that, right?
What we're saying and what I would argue very concretely is that the complexities of human societies and human cultures are orders of magnitude more complex and more effective onto the way that individuals behave and individuals think.
And that's what I mean to talk about like cognitive psychology and the way that human beings are orders of magnitude more complicated in terms of our ability to process information and to process the world around us than like a starfish, you know, or a beaver.
Or a lobster!
You know, these animals have what we can observe from the outside.
You know, you can look at a beaver and say, well, the male beavers do this and the females do that.
You can't ask them how they feel about it.
Animal species have natural histories, and so do the human species.
The humans are the only species that have a social history, which involves things like making art and music and complex societies.
I mean, that gets a little bit complicated because there are isolated examples, but the level of complexity in human societies is, again, orders of magnitude more complicated.
That's it.
It's not really a question of quality.
It's a question of quantity becoming quality through sheer magnitude.
Right.
And you know, also, you can't ask the beaver, right?
Like, maybe that beaver does feel like a girl, but like, is forced by circumstance to behave in the quote-unquote, the male way.
I don't- you know, we can't- there's no way to know.
There's literally no way to know, because There's nowhere to ask, you know?
I need to hear the argument which shows me that the incredible complexity of human gender relationships and human gender presentation and etc etc in different societies over time can in all cases be tracked directly back to presentation of sex, behavioural presentation of sex.
Including behaviours that are sometimes so variant as to be exactly opposite to each other in different human societies.
That there is clearly a level of attenuation in human gender, which is so far removed from just a behavioural presentation of sex, mediated through complex societies with complex material histories.
To collapse them down into each other, that is so crassly reductionist.
It's embarrassing.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Just on top of that as well, they'll routinely kind of talk about sex selection and sex is this binary because sex has this kind of particular role in terms of reproduction and that's what matters for evolution.
And I'm just going to say, I, since puberty, could maybe have fathered You know, what, 10 children per month?
If I had, like, you know, enough people who were willing to, like, help me spend my, you know, I could have a lot of children in my life.
Realistically, no human being is ever going to have more than, you know, even someone producing, like, sperm, as opposed to eggs, is not going to produce more than, like, a handful of children, realistically, right?
And yet we have So many more opportunities.
Like, sex is so much more than just the act of, like, releasing cells into another person that then, uh, gestate.
Like, to think that that's all sex is, like, in the previous episode, they were talking about, you know, kind of, like, this mystery of sex, and this kind of, like, the way that it, like, informs bonds between people, etc., etc.
And yet here, it's like, sex is, like, all it is is, uh, reproduction.
Yeah, that's all that's all whatever it is.
Yeah, well, that that doesn't jibe with all their talk about monogamy, does it?
Right, right.
Well, I mean, it just like even like pair bonding even between two humans who are going to bond monogamously for life.
There is a They're, like, the fact that we used to have sex for pleasure means something to, like, maintaining that bond.
Clearly, right?
There's more going on than just reproduction.
Anyway, anyway, we gotta move on.
I apologize.
But, like, it is just this kind of thing, like, every time I start to think about this, just, like, the problems with it just go deeper and deeper.
And none of this is, like, complicated, you know, biological, You don't need a PhD in biology to sort of understand the flaws here, right?
The flaws are much, much lower level than that.
So moving forward slightly, do you know who Judith Butler is?
I do know who Judith Butler is, yes.
Have you read Gender Trouble by chance?
I have, yes.
Okay, I have not, so this is... It's always been on my reading list.
It was a while ago, so don't ask me any big questions about it.
Well, no, no, that's fine, that's fine.
I was just curious, you know, what the... So, would you kind of like summarize who Judith Butler is and give me a chance to catch my breath?
Oh, God.
Spring that on me.
Well, yeah, no biggie.
Just, can you please, you know, nothing too complicated.
Judith Butler is a feminist academic and writer who is probably best known for the theory of gender presentation, gender performance.
Right.
She is one of the top scholars in the field.
She is a legend in her own time.
She recently was interviewed by the New Statesman.
I don't know if you saw this interview at the time.
I'm going to link this in the show notes.
She disappointed the transphobes, didn't she?
Well, she was interviewed by someone named Alana Ferber, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly, who definitely wanted to kind of get into, well, you're a feminist and don't you think that trans Like, trans men in women's bathrooms is bad, and the little girls need protection, etc, etc.
Which again, classic scaremongering moral panic.
It's not a real thing.
Oh, you just wait.
You just wait.
You just wait.
Remember I said this gets much, much worse?
This gets much, much worse.
We have been warned, don't worry.
So, here's Brett and Heather talking about this interview, and I've got a couple of stopping points here, so let's just get started with this.
So, here we go.
This is from an episode entitled Judas Butler, J.K.
Rowling, and Feminist Science, and we are not even going to get into it.
We are only going to do a couple of minutes of this because God, there's so much, because they get into J.K.
Rowling, and they get into quote-unquote feminist science, and it's just, again, it gets so much worse from there.
But it's worth looking at the way that they view Judith Butler.
And in particular in this clip, I want you to listen to the tone of Heather's voice.
Judith Butler, who is the sort of spokesperson, originator of gender theory, she's in her 60s, an academic, just had an interview in the New States.
I'd like to just read a little bit from this interview.
She has given us a ton of the nonsense and the crazy.
That we are living through today, and then I want to provide a couple of examples of how nuts her ideology is.
So really, her book, this is The New Statesman from a couple days ago, and being interviewed on the culture wars, JK Rowling, and living in anti-intellectual times.
So, she published a book 30 years ago called Gender Trouble, in which she introduces the idea of gender as performance, and asks how we define, quote, the category of women.
Okay, so I'm going to read a little bit from this, but Zach, give me my screen back so I can have some quotes.
She says, I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream.
I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.
Oi.
I love Brett's oi there.
I just love Brett's oi.
Um, so.
So here, now I'm gonna say that in this interview, like if you read the full interview, I think Butler is very clear in her arguments, but I think she does sort of like, she's an academic, she speaks an academic language, and she's obviously in at least what's a quasi-hostile interview, and I think she's sort of running circles around the interviewer a little bit because she doesn't respect the interviewer.
Perfectly acceptable.
The argument that Butler is making here, and we're going to play more of this as we get into it, but I did want to just kind of highlight.
The argument that Butler is making, and in which there is, you know, Heather kind of cuts out a bit of this answer, because the question she's asked is, you know, how far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago?
She's referring to gender trouble.
My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia.
mainstream culture and politics and butler like the first couple of sentences of that response are i want to first question whether trans exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists if you are right to identify the one with the other then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position i think this may be wrong my wager is that most feminists support trans rights that oppose all forms of transphobia which is accurate yes The TERFs are a tiny minority of all people who identify as feminists.
Yep.
Again, Heather doesn't include that.
She just sort of cuts in halfway through and kind of makes it sound like Butler is kind of speaking some kind of Holy Detroit language, which even the segment that she read was not completely Too complicated, I don't think.
But, you know, there is a kind of sleight of hand being played here.
So let's just kind of continue with this, because there's...
Oh yeah, this is gonna get funny.
So the New Statesman says, one example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender.
In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would, quote, throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he's a woman, potentially putting women at risk of violence.
Butler responds, If we look closely at the example that you characterize as mainstream, we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life.
The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside.
It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise.
This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality.
Trans women are often discriminated against in men's bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them.
The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.
She uses the word fantasy a billion times in this paragraph, and she engages in really crappy logic in a lot of places.
And the idea that someone who calls herself a feminist and is actually this like, icon in a way that, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually is, and this woman has no business standing for women in any way, but her work is in women's studies programs across the country, you know, probably almost every class that calls itself gender studies or women's studies.
The idea that, oh my god, I can't even believe that she would say some of this stuff.
And that anyone is arguing that all people who are trans cause problems, no.
Right.
No one is saying that.
Maybe a handful of extreme bigots, maybe, but really no one is saying that.
No, not openly.
Well, there are many people who actually do say that.
We talked about them on previous episodes of this podcast.
Yeah, but the vast majority that she's talking about that don't say it are just not saying it openly.
That is the import of what they're saying.
It's what lies behind what they do say.
That any trans woman, that any person, ultimately, We'll see more of this in the next clip, but like that any person who has anatomy that does not match what Heather thinks that a female anatomy should match, that has a penis, let's just, you know, kind of go where Butler goes with that, is kind of fundamentally a threat, right?
And what Butler is arguing there is that this idea is a fantasy that, and what I would say is, I'm not gonna say that, like, literally no trans woman has ever assaulted someone in a restroom, right?
Because I'm sure you could find some... I don't know of an example, and if there was some, like, really obvious example, I guarantee you somebody in my thing would have said that to me, right?
I'm sure we'd never hear the fucking end of it if it ever happened.
We'd never hear the fucking end of it.
There are, uh, kind of, uh, public...
Trans women who engage in some really sketchy behavior.
And there's no question about that, because it turns out that trans women are people.
And sometimes people are not very nice.
Has nothing to do with them being trans.
But what Butler is saying is, there may be some super isolated instance of a trans woman assaulting a young girl in a bathroom or something like that.
And it's actually There may be some example of that.
These are extraordinarily rare, and the fact that we can't find those examples, and the fact that it's not, it is a fantasy.
It is a fantasy built up in the TERF mind, in the bigot mind, to justify their own bigotry, ultimately, right?
Yeah.
And in fact, what we see is trans women are actually assaulted much more often in the bathroom settings Yes.
Then what we see is actually the violence is going the other way, right?
The social violence is going the other way.
But of course, we don't talk about that, although we're going to get to that in the next clip.
Anything else stand out to you about that before we kind of move on here?
Yeah.
I mean, earlier she was complaining about language like people who have periods.
Right.
Right.
Now, that sort of language is an attempt to deal with the proper degree of respect and sensitivity with the fact that we now have a broadening... I mean, we, you know, now have.
Lots of people have understood this for a very long time.
But generally speaking, society is now becoming more aware of a greater level of complexity about human gender.
So, some people are trying to acknowledge that in language.
So, people are doing things like talking about people who have periods instead of just saying women to be synonymous with people who have periods, right?
She's complaining about that!
At the same time, she's saying nobody is saying that all trans women are a threat.
Well, you kind of are, really, aren't you?
If you object to that kind of recognition of trans women as women, you are inherently staking out a position that sees women like that as illegitimate, as in some way, not women.
Well, I mean, you can't have it both ways.
You can't say, oh, nobody's saying that all trans women are... nobody's saying there's a problem with all of them, it's just... apart from the fact that this dangerous minority that you're postulating apparently doesn't exist, except in, you know, outlier cases that you find in every population.
If you're complaining about the recognition of trans women as women through language, then you are inherently staking out that position, no matter how much you deny it.
Exactly.
And, you know, they go on and they kind of talk about, and you'll hear this again in the next clip, so we're kind of jumping ahead slightly, but they'll talk a lot about, you hear this a lot, that like, you know, these are actually men.
Obviously, I don't believe this, please.
Our trans audience should understand.
I don't agree with this.
But these are actually men.
They are natal men is the term that they'll use.
And therefore they have this kind of implicit Well, why are the male and female bathrooms always next door to each other?
I mean, doesn't that encourage men to sneak from- it's so easy to just go from one door to the other, you know, and then you can go in there and you can assault all the young girls in there.
Why isn't this happening all the time, to the point where, historically, And socially, we've had to develop a system where the male and female bathrooms are on opposite sides of the building, and the female bathroom is protected by security guards that check your genitals before you go in.
We don't do that because we recognise that although things like that can happen, it's not a problem that we need to take that level of Care and and and security over because it's not actually It's not it's not something that you can assume as a constant problem except suddenly now it is in this particular instance Yeah, it's funny how that justifies itself, right?
Yeah.
And this is not, by the way, you know, I want to be extra careful about this.
Nothing I've said, by the way, is to deny the fact of sexual assault of women by men in public places.
That happens.
Well, and the real problem, like, again, the biological reductionist version of this, the biological essentialist version of this, is that there's something, like, wrong with men.
That men have higher testosterone, higher I mean, statistics bear this out.
Men are like 96% of all murderers or something like that.
Various things biologically built that make men more apt to commit violence against women than the other way around.
And, I mean, statistics bear this out.
Men are like 96% of all murderers or something like that.
It's a thing.
This is not because of inbuilt biological functions.
It's because of the fucking patriarchy, right?
It's because we built a system that forgives these things of men and does not hold men to account in the way that it should, right?
Yeah.
And it's actually that kind of analysis of society that doesn't fall into the kind of trap that these reactionaries would be accusing the feminists of if the context were different, which is, you know, demonising men.
In a different context, the same sort of arguments are used to say all feminists demonize men.
Well, this sort of biological reductionism, it just, it does.
It sort of essentializes men as this inherently dangerous and threatening, just in a biological way.
Whereas it's actually, you know, they're not doing that here because here the focus is demonizing trans people.
Exactly, exactly.
We should finish the rest of this clip here real quick, and then move on to the really bad one.
All right.
Yeah, there's about 20 seconds left of this, and I could have left this out, but the end of this is really...
Yeah, it kind of says it all.
And I've been asking you to, the audience, to kind of listen to the tone of Heather's voice in this, and the way that she speaks.
And while she's trying to be like, even and measured in terms of her, the words that she's using, I want you to listen, I want you to listen to the tone, particularly right here.
So just one more little quote here.
Butler, feminists know that women with ambition are called monstrous, or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologized.
We do?
Since when?
Yeah, since when?
Since always!
Since when?!
We fight those misrepresentations because they are false, and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women.
I'd say Butler's the misogynist here, but okay.
Judith Butler is a misogynist!
Based on what?
Because Judith Butler accepts trans women as valid, and therefore is anti-woman, because she wants to put women, she wants to put quote-unquote men, into women's spaces.
This is straight up 100% TERF logic, and this was months before Heather did the, I'm coming out as an official TERF thing.
That's the logic.
She has been building to this for a long time, and that's what we're demonstrating here.
She directly compares Butler to RBG, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at a certain point.
This was right after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, so it gives you some sense of when this episode aired.
But yeah, no.
I listened to this clip the first time.
I literally had to play it back because the idea of calling Judith Butler a misogynist was that ridiculous to me.
So anyway.
Yeah, she's a misogynist because she's standing up for categories of women that Heather Hying has decided need to be excluded from the category.
Right, absolutely.
She's not engaging in cis supremacy.
Exactly, exactly.
And, you know, the other, kind of the flip side of a lot of that is, you know, she's talking about like, since when are women considered monstrous?
Since when are women considered And it's like, who believes that?
Who could possibly believe that?
And it's like, you live in your fucking liberal arts bubble, wealthy white people bubble, in which you only deal with people to the left of you.
You have no idea.
Go to Alabama!
I'm just saying, go to Alabama sometime!
Or maybe even just read some of the full and large and rich feminist literature that you're obviously profoundly ignorant of.
Maybe read Gender Trouble.
Maybe you could do that.
Or there are many websites I could recommend.
You could listen to a trans person and tell you about their experience in a bathroom at some point.
Maybe that would be useful.
Yeah, just engage with reality instead of your bigoted biological reductionist fantasies.
There's that word again.
Can't use the word fantasy.
That's what it is, though.
It is, no, I agree.
Judith Butler is absolutely right to characterize it in those terms.
Like all bigotry, it's based on a fantasy.
No, absolutely, absolutely.
I just love that clip.
It's so glorious to me, just because it's so batshit on every conceivable level.
And she kind of gives up even trying to make an argument as well.
She kind of gets into just spluttering outrage.
Yes.
And again, that's going to become even more relevant in this final clip we're going to play.
Okay.
And this one does require a bit of setup, because the long... I've actually trimmed this one down a bit.
Like, typically in these clips, in these episodes, I have not trimmed at all, which I could have cut out some extraneous bits, but I wanted to kind of include the full argument, or the full... so that, you know,
I did have to trim this down some because they kind of crosstalk a bit or sort of they'll get distracted and kind of move on to a different topic and that sort of thing and even then I've got like a four and a half minute clip to finish this episode with and we are gonna like pause it in a couple places here so it's fine but the thing that they're talking about is a story that happened in 2012.
At the Evergreen State College, where, if you'll remember, Brett and Heather were teaching at the time, and had been teaching for something like ten years at that point.
Until they were run out by the student Maoists.
By the Struggle Sessions.
By the Shining Path Militia.
Exactly.
We covered that already, it's fine.
So I've included a link to the local news story, which they are actually going to read from, and they actually played a bit of this video.
So you can watch this video if you want to, or you can, you know, read the article.
This clip comes from about, it comes from episode 60 of the Dark Horse Podcast.
It starts around the one hour mark, like almost exactly the one hour mark as I recall.
So if you do want to get the full context, I've given you every opportunity to do so.
And the story is, in October 2012, there was a trans woman using a sauna, using a woman's locker room at Evergreen.
Her name was Colleen Francis, and she was using the sauna in a locker room.
I think the story differs somewhat.
Some say these are Girl Scouts, and some say these are a high school girls swim team.
I think most sources say swim team, but for some reason it's in my mind as Girl Scouts, but anyway.
These are teenage girls.
It's good fantasy fodder for bigots, either way.
Well, sure.
It's a high school girls swim team.
It comes into the sauna.
A couple of the girls say there's a man in the sauna, right?
Report it to the people who run the sauna.
And this is on the Evergreen State College campus, right?
So they had permission to use this locker room as part of their, like, swim practice or whatever.
Like, they get kind of a special dispensation, despite not being university students.
It was kind of an arrangement that they had.
This becomes kind of a kerfuffle.
At a certain point, the girls are offered alternative accommodations, and they are allowed to use another kind of separate locker room and sauna that isn't connected to the larger one where the incident occurs.
So this becomes kind of a local news story.
Interestingly, Brent and Heather did not notice it at the time, despite being right there.
Which shows you kind of how much they were paying attention to the news at that time because you can kind of Google this story You find links in the Daily Mail.
This became kind of a big like right-wing thing for like a week or something in 2012 Oh, yeah So anyway, but this this was before they were on the lookout for stuff like this to be grist for their Yeah, because I weren't podcasting at this point, you know, yeah It was before they were getting paid to be terribly concerned about it, right?
Notably, Colleen Francis was not, at the time at least, was not undergoing a like a chemical transition, a medical transition of any time, and this becomes like the kind of really important bit within, you know, Heather and Brett's version of events, is that there are real trans people, is what they will often say, but those are people who actually engage in like kind of medical transition and make their Physical body match in their opinion what should be right?
Yeah, so they're true scum as well true scum That's exactly what they are.
They're transmedicalist or true scum.
This is this is the position they take They will always say we support trans people.
We've had trans students.
We've had trans friends I do I would love if you are a trans student of Rhett and Heather's from back in the day or Email me, I would love to have a conversation with you.
Do get in touch.
Anyway, so that's the basic story.
And so the question here becomes, whose point of view are we going to take?
Whose point of view do you think Heather is going to take in this story?
Because this was kind of a minor incident, ultimately in the thing, but what happens in this story is...
You know, by all accounts, and you'll even hear Brett acknowledge this in the clip, there's a trans woman who has not undergone medical transition, who is sitting peacefully in a sauna or whatever, the swim team comes in, they recognize that there are pieces of anatomy that they find unpleasant to look at, and then they go and reach for authorities To correct this, right?
They go to the point that the local news gets involved.
I don't think that like the police ever got involved.
But let's just start this clip.
And I've given you the background.
And I promise you I have not manipulated this.
This is the this is the story.
And they will tell bits of the story.
I didn't want to include their full segment on it.
Just I didn't want to play that much of them talking.
But here we go.
In fact, In writing, they remedied this in a clumsy way, but in the written piece, they clarify it in parentheses, and they say that in fact it is the swim teams that are using these separate
Smaller, less good facilities because of this one person who, in a separate report, is revealed served in the military for 20 years and is now wearing a low estrogen patch and lipstick, apparently.
And that is... I'm sorry.
This makes me so angry.
So, we've talked about trans a lot, in a lot of places.
I encourage people to look at my letter wiki exchange with Abigail Schreier.
If you're concerned that I'm not being respectful, we have trans friends.
Say over and over that trans is real.
And actually one of the, I think the first question we're going to get to in our Q&A this next hour is some people who are really concerned that, you know, what could we possibly be talking about when we say that?
But create a system that's gameable and it's going to get gamed.
And how dare any system?
Put girls and young women at risk because a dude wearing lipstick who has sort of girly affectations wants to be in the sauna with his bits hanging out.
It's not okay.
Yeah.
It's not okay.
I agree it's not okay.
I'm not, you know, I'm not sure.
I told you this was going to get bad, right?
Like, I warned you enough times.
Yeah.
I am like this.
This may sound.
You know, unfair to trans people, and I'm not trying to make the direct comparison, but ultimately I imagine like what if this woman had been a cis woman who had, you know, leprosy or, you know, someone's slightly skin condition or, you know, had lost her hair someone's slightly skin condition or, you know, had lost her hair or, you know, kind of whatever, you know, Some form of disability that was, you know, unpleasant to look at.
Yeah.
Would they also?
Like, ultimately the thing that they're saying here is you do not...
Share the shape of what I consider to be a woman, right?
You have a piece of anatomy that does not fit my conception of what a woman is, and therefore you are not to be allowed in our spaces because you do not fit this, you know, ideal.
You do not fit the model, right?
And I'm not trying to be like, I'm not trying to be bigoted in this.
I'm not actually saying this about any particular person, but Heather Hying is in her 50s.
She is not a svelte 22-year-old fitness model or whatever.
She is not asked, presumably, to go and share the details of her genitalia before she is allowed to use, you know, the locker room of her choice.
Mm-hmm.
It's just like, it's so fucking stupid.
It is just so based, it's just so built on this baseline bigotry, which they use this kind of like biological reductionist framework to justify ultimately.
There's someone with balls in a sauna, and a young girl might have had to see them, and she was uncomfortable by that.
And instead of taking the actually hugely marginalized person, the trans woman, And if you talk to any trans person, and they talk about their problems, every trans person I know has a list of places where they can safely go shit if they need to.
Going about in their day-to-day life, they know that there are certain places that they think are safe, and certain places they think are not.
This is a calculation that they run into every fucking day of their lives.
This trans woman...
You know, uses a facility which, by the laws of the state of Oregon at that time, or Washington, it's Olympia, Washington, by the laws of the state of Washington at that time, she had every right to be there.
Because they're not allowed to discriminate on the basis of gender identity at this time in that place.
She had every legal right to be there.
And because somebody threw a stink, She ends up on the local news, having to talk about this shit.
Right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's despicable to me.
Heather's about to use that word later on, and we will see how she uses it.
Believe me, there's more.
This gets worse.
Oh yeah, I'm sure.
No, when they get started.
This gets worse.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
You've gotten the pattern of these now, y'know?
They start off with the baseline stuff, and then...
Her name was revealed, I think there's no harm in using it.
Colleen here, you know.
I'm not sure that the onus is on her to figure out how to navigate this.
But I do think that the institution has an obligation to protect those girls first and foremost.
Well, as was the case in 2017 when what happened at Evergreen happened there, it is not primarily the individuals who are spouting garbage's fault.
It is the responsibility of the so-called adults to walk in and say, you're spouting garbage and you will stop now and we are going to take whatever power you have arrested illegitimately away from you.
This person, Colleen, is it?
Has the fricking audacity to say this isn't Alabama 1959, I think is the random year that she comes up with, rather than I think 57 is probably what she, 55, I don't remember.
No, it's not.
And frankly, A guy with an estrogen patch and lipstick is not a black person using a drinking fountain.
A guy with an estrogen patch and lipstick naked in a sauna with a bunch of girls?
It's a different situation and Everyone knew that until yesterday, and this is something we talked about.
This is Douglas Murray's formulation.
It's one of these things that we all knew until yesterday.
Douglas Murray?
And how is it that we are all pretending that the emperor has clothes?
Emperor has no clothes here.
Oh, yeah.
Douglas Murray is a personal friend of these two.
Okay.
You note that you need an adult to come in the room to take away the power that these people have fraudulently taken for themselves.
That's right.
Their power is inherently illegitimate, and somebody should come along and take it away from them.
Take it away from them and make sure that they can't harm the little girls.
Now, again, of course, we are fully in favor of young girls and everyone being protected from violence, from predation, from sexual predators, etc., etc.
That's not the point here.
There is also a long history, if you know anything about lynching, in the United States, in which black men were lynched for supposed crimes against white women.
Yep.
Many of them, some of them were actually real, you know, assaults, real rapes.
I'm not questioning that.
Many of them were not.
The point was, we're going to bring the state in, or we're going to bring a lynch mob in, which acted in the service of the state, in terms of taking care of these problems.
The adults need to come in and just understand, look, these black people, they're just inherently violent towards women.
And the only way they're going to understand is if we make an example out of one or two of them, it's going to be okay.
It's going to be okay.
We just, we don't want to be cruel.
We just have to enforce rules and we need to make sure that these vulnerable people are not set upon by, um, the bad people, you know, who have inserted power that they don't deserve.
They even let them vote these days.
Did you notice that?
Do you notice?
Again, they're not saying, we want a police state to come in and enforce rules against trans people using, but that's what they're arguing, right?
That's the thing, that's the end of this line, is, look, we can't have- Oh, this is a specialty of theirs, isn't it?
Clearly saying, I'm not saying X, and then just implying X repeatedly through everything else they say.
Exactly.
Exactly.
They do this all the fucking time.
And of course they're not saying, they're probably not even thinking, look, we need a police, like, you know, this woman should have been like hit in the face with a truncheon for being in this place.
But ultimately what they're talking about is enacting rules and laws and regulations and, you know, kind of protecting young girls at the cost of enacting state violence against trans people.
Yeah.
That's what banning trans people from the bathroom of their choice means, is you're going to get the cops involved at some point in this process.
That's the thing that you're saying, is we need to make a law, we need to exert the force of the state against these people.
That's what's being said.
Well, the ultimate basis of all law is always force.
So if you're talking about laws and rules, you're talking about them at some point down the line being enforced.
And if you're talking about laws and rules of this type, discriminatory laws, you're talking about ultimately force being used against people that resist them.
So ultimately, the logic of your position is always going to end up with somebody who tried to resist an unjust law on the ground, on the wrong end of a policeman's truncheon.
It's just, it's ineluctable in that position.
Exactly.
I think this next little bit, about 40 seconds, is, I think we've already kind of responded to a lot of this, but I'll play it anyway before we kind of get to the end of it and wrap up.
Go ahead, go ahead.
I just want to say, fighting oppression and fighting institutionalised and systemic bigotry, it's always going to involve making some people uncomfortable.
It's always going to involve these difficult situations.
If you're upending what is institutionalised, you're upending what people are used to.
So you are going to have to do this.
There are going to be these awkward confrontations.
Exactly.
And I think we all go through a process of learning about things and listening to voices that are not your own.
And, you know, it is like when you first kind of learn about it, it's like, well, that seems a little, I'm a little uncomfortable by this.
You know, this seems kind of weird, right?
Like that's not, I mean, you shouldn't feel that way.
I'm not saying that's good, but like people go through that and it's ultimately, If you listen to trans people and you listen to and you like are actually like empathetic towards people and build a sense of solidarity with people.
It's very easy to get past that and to understand, oh, no, this is a person just like me who has beliefs and has feelings and has needs.
And I understand that while it may be uncomfortable for certain things to happen, you know, I need to get over that because ultimately there is a greater harm that is being prevented by that.
Right.
Yeah.
And that there is a balancing act here.
And, you know, again, I'm not trying to justify, you know, even kind of microaggressions and that sort of thing, but I think the vast majority of trans people would also say, look, we're not, you know, the point isn't, you know, you who have never been around a trans person before need to be, you know, 100% up on, you know, gender trouble and be able to quote, you know, Kimberly Crenshaw, chapter and verse.
The point is, like, treat us as people and treat us as human beings and understand when we tell you this is a serious problem.
And in 2021, or even 2020 when this clip is from, and especially if you say we have trans friends and we taught trans students, you know, like, this isn't- you don't have the fucking excuse, you know?
You're talking to like hundreds of thousands of people, you know?
Like, what are you talking about?
Oh right.
But if they're true scum then they're, you know, obviously, you know, they're engaging in the, you know, the good trans versus the bad trans thing and the good, you know, there's this whole complex thing about, you know, the good trans person, the real trans person is the one that passes or tries to pass, you know.
Hence Heather's absolutely disgusting description of this woman as a dude wearing lipstick, you know.
Oh, oh, there's more of that coming.
That's classic stuff.
There's more of that coming, don't get me wrong.
Yeah, well clearly, because she's very worked up in her venom here.
She's getting there.
Let's just play the next, like, 40 seconds.
I think we'll kind of just be able to skip right past that here in a second.
So I agree with you.
I still think the onus is on the institution.
And while I think it is very clear, for many reasons, some of them biological, That the analogy to the drinking fountains is completely out of place.
It's despicable.
Well, is it despicable?
It's despicable that this person would claim that they were fighting a civil rights fight when what they're actually fighting for is the right to be naked in front of young women.
Look, she shouldn't be in that locker room.
You and I agree on that.
The question is, this is on institutions as a reflection of the rest of us to get this right and to prioritize those who actually are in need of protection.
We've gone over this, right?
The comparison to Alabama 1957 with drinking fountains is despicable, but we both agree that she shouldn't be in that sauna.
Right.
And that the institutions... So you're in favor of segregation?
Yeah.
Separate but equal, maybe?
So that's exactly... You've just proved what she was saying!
Well, and just to... I mean, again, even if we accept all their sort of basic premises here, right?
If you take a trans woman who is gender non-conforming, you know, a woman with a penis, you know, if we take this Colleen woman, Who's wearing lipstick, who's wearing a dress, but has not been on hormones for very long, if at all.
You know, again, I'm not trying to make any kind of statement about passing.
It doesn't fucking matter.
Like, appear the way you need to appear.
Fine with me.
I am not making any judgment on that.
But, you take a person who is gender non-conforming in that way, and you put them into a men's restroom, and Their whole fucking point is that there's something inherently dangerous and violent about people being in men's rooms with men who do not fit traditional male standards.
What do you think you're fucking doing?
Even under your own goddamn logic?
Like, right?
You're taking a vulnerable person a completely vulnerable person you're ripping away all their legal rights and then you're throwing them into you know the exact same violence that many times were violent than the situation you're trying to protect the swim team from yeah this like lack of this complete lack of balance is the thing that just it's i mean it's so endemic to these arguments and like i'm not just underlying it is just a disregard for that person's rights and that person's safety
Exactly.
And that can only be based upon discriminatory bigotry.
Right.
And of course, the institutions need to get this right, is Brett's softer version of this, right?
Look at how reasonable he's being.
Yeah, that just means that at some point the institution should have told her, you can't go in there.
Right.
And if you do, we're gonna get a security guard, we're gonna get an armed person to remove you.
And if you feel unsafe being in a men's room with your gender presentation being the way it is, that's on you.
Maybe you need to not be trans anymore.
Yeah, just don't come here, or don't be who you are.
Yeah.
And if that's too difficult for you, and if you have issues with that, if you don't feel like... if that causes you trauma, well, tough shit.
Yeah.
I'm sure you can find a pill bottle to swallow, you know?
I will feel really bad about that afterwards, but there was a girl's swim team that was slightly uncomfortable for a couple of minutes, and that's more important.
That's more important to me, right?
Yeah.
I am now getting angry the way Heather's getting angry in the clips, but I have fucking justification for it.
Let's plow through the end of this and wrap this sucker up, okay?
It's time.
Yeah.
Let's do that.
I'm about done with this person.
Yeah.
I'm gonna end up ranting if I say much more about this.
Wow.
So, you know, a 16-year-old girl who walks into a women's sauna naked and sees someone with cock and balls and reports that there's a man in the locker room, the person in possession of said cock and balls not being offended that someone saw them and identified them as male, that's a really low bar.
That is a really low bar for being impressed with this person's response.
Well, come on.
I do.
I do think we because and I agree with your your assessment.
All right.
Sorry.
I did a clip a little bit there in which Brett was appraising Colleen.
He was trying to kind of justify, you know, pull back a little bit and trying to justify Colleen's kind of experience with this situation and that she seemed to have taken it well and understood why people would be upset.
And Heather, and sorry, I clipped that out just because it was long and meandering and whatever.
And then Heather responds that way.
Oh, this man?
Heather is not doing anything to modulate here.
She is not trying to understand the perspective of the trans people involved in this in any way.
And we're supposed to give him credit for that?
Heather is not doing anything to modulate here.
She is not trying to understand the perspective of the trans people involved in this in any way.
She has no interest in that, despite her protestations to having trans friends and having trans students, et cetera, et cetera.
There's absolutely no balance being given in the slightest.
And this you hear over and over again within, with the TERFs in general, with these anti-trans bigots, with the people who do this kind of like true scum transmedicalist position.
This is routine, you know, and they always frame it In terms of like, we gotta protect the young girls, or whatever, and it's just the parallels to Jim Crow era, the parallels to the way that race has been used, that racism is justified by protecting white women, the way that race and patriarchy and capitalism, the conflation of this, it's like, I never want to listen to this shit again, but it is fascinating.
In that kind of weird way, because it does, it all plays together so well.
Yeah.
And why does this matter, right?
Why does it matter what Heather Hine believes and says on a YouTube show?
Well, as of a few days ago, and I've got a link to this ACLU piece about an Arkansas anti-trans bill.
In which trans people are not going to be able to get any kind of medical care in the state if the doctor will not perform it, and that is any medical care, not just transition-related.
If you are trans, and your doctor notices that you're trans, you cannot get treatment for diabetes, for instance, or a broken leg.
You can be turned away in the state of Arkansas, and there are going to be no funds.
No public funds are being given for transition treatments in the slightest.
I've linked to a piece from the ACLU.
Not always the biggest fan of the ACLU these days, but they're good on this kind of issue.
It's worth reading to kind of look at the details of this.
It is from These kinds of arguments.
It is from these influencers who have the ears, you know, Brett Weinstein and Heather Hying, get to appear on Joe Rogan.
They appeared on Bill Maher talking about how the COVID-19 is a, it was a lab leak.
They believe that the lab leak hypothesis has a 90% possibility of being right.
They said this on the Bill Maher Show.
Don't even, we're not even getting into their COVID-19 bullshit.
We might have to come back to that sometime.
Except to briefly note that that's the kind of company Transphobia keeps, you know.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.
It's in the same ballpark of whack jobbery.
Yeah, Joe Rogan.
Abigail Schreier recently went on Joe Rogan, by the way.
I did check out a little bit of that just to see if there was anything interesting there.
There really wasn't.
Once you understand how this shit works, it's pretty boring.
One interesting thing we should close out on, just because we are talking about this and we're kind of contrasting this slightly with the full-on Nazis.
Interestingly, the full-scale Nazis are mostly interested in, again, apologies, men chopping their dicks off to become girls because they can't hack at being men.
whereas this kind of gender critical stuff tends to come at it by attacking like trans men like our girls are being subverted into becoming men because they're misogynist and it's interesting how you really do see like the nazis spend virtually no time caring about trans men because They just don't.
It's just not in their, it's just not in their field of view.
They kind of think that that doesn't even exist, whereas the, again, the gender critical, the TERF side, is much more about, like, kind of attacking trans men, right?
It's an interesting, it's, again, another really interesting tidbit that I'm hoping to, at some point, get... I have had trans people message me and say, hey, if you ever do an episode about trans issues, I'd be happy to come on and we can talk about it.
I didn't want to do that here because we just had a lot to talk about, right?
Yeah.
But I do really want to do something, maybe get a couple of trans people on from various... I may reach out.
So, If you're a trans person and would like to come on the show and kind of talk about some of these issues, or if you want to tell me I'm full of shit on some stuff, please, I'd be happy to listen.
You know, get my DMs, email me, we'll kind of figure that out.
We'll try to set something up that's a little bit more kind of conversational.
Because I would love to also like highlight some of those voices, because I realize that I've spent a lot of time talking about that stuff.
Really not my lane, but I don't feel like you have to be.
I feel like you can argue against this.
You can understand the bullshit here without having to have the kind of specialized knowledge.
So my respect to all the trans people listening, and I do hear your voices, and hopefully I have not stumbled too badly here.
Yeah, echoed.
I feel like one should try to stay in one's lane, but also there's doing that so much that you keep quiet when you should speak, you know?
And I think it's always better to speak out about this stuff and make mistakes, and then take the criticism and correct yourself if necessary, than to keep silent.
And also, far-right dipshits are my lane.
I think there's no argument from listening.
One of the reasons I played these clips is so you can't argue that I'm cutting this out of context or doing some bit of sleight of hand with this.
They're saying all of this.
We're highlighting it, we're commenting on it, but this is really straightforward.
Reasonable people have reasonable concerns.
We're fucking lying, and we're embracing a hugely reactionary position that involves state violence against some of the most marginalized people in our society.
But we don't frame it that way.
We don't frame it that way.
It's outright hateful, furious bigotry based on patently false misrepresentations, outright lies.
And it's, as you say, it's being listened to, it's influencing, it's creating things like this Arkansas bill, which is, you know, it's incipiently murderous.
It's telling trans people, well, just go die, you know.
That comes from exactly the same position which underlies everything we've heard from these people in these clips, which is that, you know, these lives are just worthless.
That is the operative assumption under all this.
These lives are just worthless because I don't, you know, they disgust me.
That's essentially what's going on here.
Particularly when you hear the venom of Heather going, like, cock and balls, the way she pronounces cock and balls there.
Presumably Heather is straight.
I believe she has fucked Brett at least twice.
They have two children.
Apparently, referring to our earlier conversation, the only thing they believe sex is good for is reproduction.
But presumably, and we don't know, I mean, I assume Brett is also cis and has a cock and balls.
That they had some utility out of at some point in the past, right?
You know, the hostility just seems to come from... It isn't built on a disgust around the anatomy, but a political disgust that is built on particular kinds of far-right reactionary ideas.
Yeah, it's not disgust at cocks and balls, it's disgust at trans bodies.
Yes, absolutely.
And again, that kind of comes back to, you know, that trans bodies are considered monstrous, etc, etc.
And again, I do want to highlight, I was kind of talking about, you know, various kind of other things that obviously being trans is not the same as having You know, leprosy or whatever.
I just want to be clear about that.
I was trying to draw the analogy to something that would not be looked at in the same way that there would be empathy towards someone with leprosy, which is not for trans people.
And this comes to the way that trans people are seen as monstrous in our society, which Judas Butler was gesturing to in the bit that Heather even read.
And if Heather was able to read for comprehension, And actually took this seriously and was not stuck in her reactionary right-wing bullshit headspace.
Maybe she would have learned a few things from that, but she's just not too.
Yeah.
And then to use ostensibly feminist concern over young girls, and it's always the young girls.
Whether it's the blood libel or the girls supposedly in danger from black men in Jim Crow South, it's always the young girls, isn't it?
And that's patriarchy again.
Even QAnon and the child sex slaves and all that kind of stuff.
The mole children, yeah.
Yeah, no, it's a trope of this stuff, and itself a sign of patriarchy actually, the construction of the female as victim.
But yeah, to cloak it in this ostensibly feminist concern, that's disgusting and it's retrograde, and the thing that's going to address this problem is sexual assault.
and transphobia is ultimately, you know, feminism in common with other radical liberatory ideas and struggles.
So that's how we know this is ultimately reactionary on so many fronts at once.
Yeah, no, absolutely agree.
That's 84.
Look, we had two episodes in it to begin with.
I kind of figured we did.
We should not have even tried to prep this as one episode.
I'm glad we did it.
I think it's great.
I usually don't try to announce what we're doing for the next episode, but I think if you've been following my Twitter feed for a while, James Lindsay.
We are going to be doing many episodes of James Lindsay.
I've got at least three in preparation.
We will not do them all in a row, because that is way too much, but the next episode will be an overview of James Lindsay's bullshit.
So look forward to that.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
It's going to be great.
I've got a ton of research already prepped.
And yeah, that's where we're going.
I'm looking forward to that one.
I think you and everybody else.
So yeah, that's it.
Thank you for listening.
Thank you to our Patreon backers, et cetera, et cetera.
We did our best, and cheers.
Yeah.
Goodbye, everybody.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
If you want to contact me, I'm at underscore Jack underscore Graham underscore, Daniel is at Daniel E Harper, and the show's Twitter is at IDSGpod.
If you want to help us make the show and stay 100% editorially independent, we both have Patreons.
I Don't Speak German is hosted at idonspeakgerman.libsyn.com, and we're also on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, and we show up in all podcast apps.
This show is associated with Eruditorum Press, where you can find more details about it.
