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Sept. 20, 2024 - Where There's Woke - Thomas Smith
39:16
WTW62: January Littlejohn, Big Activist
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Time Text
What's so scary about the woke mob?
How often you just don't see them coming.
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 62.
I'm Thomas.
That over there is Lydia, today's, or this, uh, this miniseries' expert.
How's it going, Lydia?
It's going all right.
I'm about to get real testy up in here.
Yeah, this one's bad.
This one's real bad.
I don't think this January LittleJon is on the level.
I agree with you.
Well, we'll have to find out more about exactly why and why it was incredibly stupid to present this story the way that Jon Ronson did in part two here.
Well, let's get over to it after this break that patrons didn't have to hear.
So I really am being mindful of how January is approaching all of these interactions, and I don't 100% trust how she phrases anything because that is a clear discrepancy there.
If you were trying to be as supportive as you could, etc., etc., if you really trusted your daughter, I have a feeling she probably would have indicated that on her intake and you wouldn't have been in the dark.
Yeah, also, what's the stakes here?
Once again, they had a meeting.
Yes.
And she got to put her preferences of stuff.
Yes.
Or they got to put their preferences.
I don't know.
I think, as far as we understand... Now it's she.
She identifies as she still.
Yeah.
But anyway, one might wonder, why are we even hearing from this person?
What has happened here that is so alarming that we even know who this person is?
Because right now, even by her own words, boy, even by her own telling of the story, which is obviously mostly bullshit, All that's happened is they had a meeting where they got her preferences after she sent an email saying, hey, however they want to handle it.
She said, that's fine.
What are the stakes here?
Yeah.
Oh, you mean like if you want us to not tell your parents, we won't.
Correct.
They were colluding with children to keep secrets from parents.
And how was your relationship with your daughter at this point?
It created a huge wedge because she was celebrating.
Interesting, created the wedge.
Where she wasn't celebrated when she was just a normal girl student going to school.
Sorry, why does that create a wedge between you and your child?
I don't know.
Her answer is it created a huge wedge because she was celebrated.
Yeah.
I'm sorry, what's the wedge?
Is it that you're like resenting that they feel better about themselves now?
Is that the wedge?
Because that sure sounds like what the wedge is to me.
Yeah.
What you have to understand is social transitioning is the first step toward medical transitioning.
So we were horrified, we were scared, and we felt like we were the only ones not cheering her along this path of self-harm.
Self-harm.
January did some digging to discover that the school, like schools all over Florida, had been working with a particular group to devise their LGBTQ support plans.
A group called Equality Florida.
And by 2020, Equality Florida had trained and partnered with 64 out of the 67 counties.
All had adopted these LGBTQ guides.
Teachers were being trained.
That parents in this area are a danger to their children.
No, I don't think that's... Coming out can literally result in abuse or homelessness.
Could, yeah.
Exactly said that in the guide.
Crappy.
I was not a danger to my child.
That's not... It doesn't matter.
For the love of fucking Christ!
Lydia did all the research.
I'm just listening and it's such obvious bullshit.
I'm sorry.
They are teaching them that their parents are dangerous.
Well, no, the thing you quoted was like, hey, be aware, essentially, that this can be a problem.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, we know this is a problem.
OK, the trans stuff is apparently scary to January Littlejohn.
She's probably also a homophobe, but let's pretend she isn't for the sake of argument.
Wouldn't you see the same thing if it was someone identifying as gay?
Wouldn't you want to be like, OK, I understand.
Hey, maybe I'm a super cool parent.
I would totally understand that my child is gay and I'm not going to, you know, I'm going to support them, all that stuff.
But we're in fucking Florida.
You don't think there's some parents who would be like, oh, fuck, no, and then abuse their kid?
Yeah.
They're just warning them for that and they're just justifying that, hey, if the kid says there's a problem here, by the way, if you have a good relationship with your kid, your kid will probably say, oh, no, my parents are supportive.
Like, I could imagine, by the way, if I were the kid, I don't, it's hard to put myself in, but it's just an intuition.
If I were the kid and I felt like my parents were like, you know, they weren't doing an amazing job.
But they were trying, and I was like, all right, they're doing their best.
I probably would be like, oh yeah, you can still tell them.
They're not quite fully there yet, but you can still communicate with them.
I likely, I'm just going by my own intuitions, even if my parents were how January described herself, even if they were like, well, we're kind of letting her handle it, I'd be like, Yeah, no, you can communicate to them about this, that's fine.
Like, they're not really super supportive, but like, they're also, you know, they're not gonna kick me out of the house, they're not beating me.
I'm not at risk for, yeah.
I would probably answer, yeah, you can include them, but like, they're not super amazingly supportive.
And it sounds like based on everything you read me that like, There would probably be an intermediate level of thing there where they're not going to like keep secret.
It sounded like the kid could be pretty customized with that.
Like they could really like dictate how they want to do it to the level of detail of like substitute teachers.
And so I imagine January's child could have said that and could have said all that stuff.
And then January probably would have been more included.
Am I crazy?
No, I don't think you're crazy.
And I also want to drill down into this.
January says she's all about statistics, right?
She says that, you know, it's statistically impossible that all of these people could come out as part of the LGBTQ plus spectrum in some fashion.
And then here, she's saying all of these things, you know, they're being taught that there's potential for harm there, etc.
I'm not a danger to my child.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah, I want to make very clear.
She is insinuating that the default is to teach them that the parents are a problem.
Right.
She is definitely saying that.
And that's fucking bullshit.
It is.
So let me tell you specifically from the guide where the support plan was part of.
So this is for Leon County specifically.
But as she mentioned, Equality Florida, this nonprofit organization, did work with 64 out of 67 counties in Florida to develop these things.
A lot of this language is from Equality Florida and the research that they've helped gather.
So LGBTQ plus students are more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide as their heterosexual peers.
More than 50 percent of transgender youth report having attempted suicide.
Yeah.
And, you know, they talk about bullying instances at school and then specifically transgender students are four times more likely to live in poverty.
LGBTQ plus students account for 7% of the general population, but they're more than 40% of homeless youth.
Wow.
That is something that is real and scary.
And if that is the risk that you take by disclosing to parents, if you don't know that they're going to be supportive and loving, that's just not, that's not acceptable.
Yeah.
What is the cost to January right here?
What is the cost?
That's what I want to know.
Yeah.
What is the actual fucking cost, you asshole?
So there are some statistics for you, January.
Yeah.
How did this get into our school system so fast?
So how did it happen?
Because trans people were just invented yesterday.
How did it happen so fast?
Yeah.
Brandon worked full-time at Equality Florida until 2023.
Just when he first joined, a decision was made inside the group.
If we were going to stop things like Pulse from happening in the future, then we had to go to the source and uproot that hatred and bigotry where it starts.
And so, in the summer of 2016, Equality Florida launched the Safe and Healthy Schools program, and the goal was working alongside school districts to help re-imagine a school system that treats all students with dignity and respect, and tells LGBTQ students that they are perfect exactly as they are.
So January Littlejohn says that Equality Florida's training in schools leads to parents... I read, Brandon, the passage from the school guide that says the parents in this area might be a danger to their children.
We're going to get the other side here.
From a family where things weren't great with your father, but what's the thinking behind it?
So Equality Florida doesn't implement policy in schools.
Equality Florida makes recommendations and helps work on support resources with schools.
Sometimes the student is going to share something with a teacher before they're ready to talk about it with their parents.
And so it is incredibly irresponsible for a teacher to take this trusted information and immediately run to the nearest phone, pick it up, call the parent and say, by the way, I think your kid might be gay.
Yeah, that sounds very reasonable.
Yep.
Sure sounds like what I would have figured out just by listening and having any sort of literacy with any of this stuff.
Now, I wonder what Jon Ronson's response is going to be to this incredibly reasonable claim about, like, in his mind, I don't know the ordering of the interviews and whatever in his process, but let's assume that he sounds like he's talked to January already at this point in his interviewing process.
And he's like, well, what do you say about this?
At that point, aren't you like, oh, yeah, no, that makes complete sense.
Weird.
Let's see what he says instead.
January got so angry.
It's because her child was 13 years old and until just a few weeks earlier, had never had a problem with their gender identity.
This was going around her child's friend group.
Her nightmare vision was that the next thing she knew, there'd be some medical transitioning going on.
What?
And the school knew about all of this, kind of in concert with Equality Florida, but she was oblivious to it all.
How?
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
That's very offensive.
Yeah, her nightmare vision is that a dragon would come and eat the family.
The next thing she knew.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Okay, you're describing something that's not real.
We're both sides in this, okay?
This is a problem with both sides.
Well, on one hand, here's this saint of a person who lost friends in a Pulse nightclub shooting who is now trying to protect the lives of LGBTQ youth.
There's one side of the activists that are, you know, just playing games with these people.
The other side, well, it's someone who thinks that if their kid is trans, then the world will end and a doctor will kidnap them in an unmarked van and then transition them, cut off their boobs and stuff, and just overnight.
So, I mean, it's equal fears, hun, is the thing.
Equal fears on one side, someone who was in a shooting and made a promise to try to help protect LGBTQ youth.
Those are the two sides.
Right.
This is what is really, really fucking irresponsible about Ronson here.
He has just introduced this is the first time in this episode that I can remember.
I think January might have alluded to it slightly earlier, but Ronson is now bringing in the concept of medical transition.
Now, is it anywhere in the guide that you have all these materials, right?
Yes.
You have everything we're talking about.
Yes.
Is there anything in there where it's like, and also what we're going to do is we're going to medically transition your child without telling the parents?
Absolutely not.
Is there even talk of medical transition?
No.
That's not what they're there to do.
They're there to support the kid.
Create a safe environment for the child.
Yeah, I don't think they have anything the fuck to do with like the medical side of this.
Why would they?
Yeah, they'd just be like, oh, okay, well, They have no legal authority over that at all.
Yeah.
The closest thing I could see, and this is just pure speculation, is maybe there'd be language on like, yeah, if your kid medically transitions, then we're going to like that.
There'll be some process that we'll do to like help them along.
But there probably isn't even that because it doesn't happen when they're this young, like at all.
Yeah, well, if there's medication that would need to be administered during school hours, right, it would be treated like any other medication that you would do through the nurse's office.
But that's not there.
It's not happening.
And so here is Ronson talking to a guy who lost friends in the Pulse nightclub shooting, who is doing saintly work of trying to protect trans youth.
And he launches at him with this insane, fictional, nonsense, fear-mongering statement.
Oh, next she knew.
Her fear is next.
What is he going to say?
And I don't know how this was edited because I feel like he probably had a different response.
It'd be hard to imagine that he didn't respond to like how fucking absurd that was.
Or maybe he's trying to be diplomatic.
I don't know.
But like, if I were him, I'd be like, sorry, medical transition?
No one's going to medically transition your fucking kid.
Anyway, I forget.
Let's see what he says here.
Before you move on, one more little pin I want to stick in here too.
John Ronson, when he says, you know, this was going around her child's friend group.
Hmm.
That sounds like something.
Identity and so on.
You know, this was going around her child's friend group.
Her nightmare vision was that the next thing she knew there'd be some medical transitioning going on.
And the school knew about all of this, kind of in concert with Equality Florida, but she was oblivious to it all.
Listen, I value the voice of a concerned parent, of course.
Unfortunately, there is a concerted right-wing effort right now to paint transgender people as contagious, as a virus in society.
And this idea that one day someone walks into your kid's classroom or follows them on TikTok, convinces them to become trans, and the next day they're walking into a plastic surgeon and saying, I think I'll take the double mastectomy today.
That is not how any of that happens.
Yep.
Yeah!
The truth is, in 2020 in Florida, when it came to gender reassignment surgery for minors, doctors followed the guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, both of which suggested that doctors affirm and work with each child on an individual, tailored basis, quote, considering the risks and benefits to each patient's unique circumstances, while making every effort to be aware of the doctor's own biases.
But that's not the case in Florida anymore, for reasons you'll discover.
So I would like to look at the flow of logic of what has happened here.
So you've got a quote unquote concerned parent and she is very worried about a meeting that happened without her, even though she expressly consented to it.
And by the way, what happened as a result of that meeting?
Fucking nothing, nothing bad.
Like what, what bad thing happened?
Well, now there's a wedge because my daughter is having their gender affirmed and that's somehow bad.
I don't like that's a wedge.
What is the wedge?
When I said that it was okay for them to express that gender at school?
What is the fucking wedge other than one you're creating?
That's all I... Like, there might be a wedge.
The wedge might be, I thought that they wouldn't affirm gender and I could continue to, you know, just tell my child that she's imagining it.
And now, like, the child is having their gender affirmed and is doing better.
So that's going to complicate my plan of not accepting their gender identity.
I'm sorry.
That's not the school creating wedge.
That's you.
And so, Ronson, in an effort to uncover what's behind all this and the connections and what's going on, Ronson has said, ah, now remember that person from the beginning of the show.
They are responsible because they're part of a group that's trying to save trans kids' lives.
So just recapping, there is nothing in there about medical transition.
There's absolutely nothing about any part of this process ever at all that would affect the child and the parent's decision and process of medically transitioning.
Nothing!
Correct.
That's not how school works.
Like, what other part of school is it like, well, I didn't want to get this medical procedure.
Aside from vaccines, jeez, I guess there's that.
But like lice checks.
Yeah.
One other part of school is going to be like, well, they decided to do a whole plastic surgery procedure without my, that's just not how school works.
An appendectomy.
Yeah.
And he brings that in and asked it to the guy who's like, yeah, this is kind of fucking bullshit in so many words.
And then his follow, his God voice follow up.
One day someone walks into your kid's classroom or follows them on TikTok, convinces them to become trans.
And the next day they're walking into a plastic surgeon and saying, I think I'll take the double mastectomy today.
That is not how any of that happens.
So here's the follow-up that he does do.
The truth is, in 2020 in Florida, when it came to gender reassignment surgery for minors, doctors followed the guidelines of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association, both of which suggested that doctors affirm and work with each child on an individual, tailored basis.
Quote, considering the risks and benefits to each patient's unique circumstances while making every effort to be aware of the doctor's own biases.
But that's not the case in Florida anymore, for reasons you'll discover.
So he doesn't say, Brandon's right.
There is no medical transitioning happening at schools.
It's the truth is doctors are expected to be affirming and affirmation can be a whole host of things.
It doesn't necessarily mean conducting surgery to align your body with the gender you identify with.
There's a whole other set of things that can happen.
Yeah, this is how it's presented.
I strongly believe that rhetorically what he has done here is he has set Brandon up.
He set that up and said, look, this is just not how it happens.
And he says, the truth is that doctors follow the guidelines.
And I think the very clear implication is because the guidelines are to affirm And that's what Brandon's guidelines, what Equality Florida's guidelines are too.
Linking it together.
Oh, he's saying there's no, this isn't how it happens, but Equality Florida's guidelines are about affirmation.
Doctor's guidelines are about affirmation.
So the implication is that actually Brandon was lying to us and they are like medically transitioning your kid.
Like, isn't that the clear flow of the logic?
I think it could be interpreted that way.
Yeah.
What are the actual stats on medical transition?
Do we know?
Here's the other thing.
Ronson says they follow the guidelines.
Like essentially what he says is they follow the experts.
Here's the experts recommendation.
Here's the experts medical recommendation.
And at the time, They followed the experts.
Is there some reason that that's not a good idea?
Is there some reason?
What is the implication?
It's unclear.
It shouldn't be unclear.
I admit, maybe the other interpretation is that he's actually confirming what Brandon's saying, but that doesn't really strike me as the tone and the flow of the logic of the conversation.
He could have used some different words there to make that clear.
Yeah, make it clear which side is correct on there.
And now he says they no longer follow the medical recommendations.
They are no longer using expert medical recommendations to make this decision as a result of all this.
So which side maybe is in the right then?
If what we're saying is after January Littlejohn making a huge deal about this, they're no longer using medical fucking recommendations from the experts.
They're doing something other than that.
Boy, I feel like you could emphasize that a little bit.
Yeah.
So to put this into perspective a little bit, Reuters put together data to demonstrate that diagnoses of gender dysphoria among youth has grown.
Sure.
In 2021, in the United States, patients ages 6 to 17, new diagnoses came in at 42,167.
Now, the number of patients that initiated puberty blocker treatment, which is that first step generally with medical transition, in 2021, 1,390.
In the whole country?
Out of 42,167.
I mean, like if you equated new diagnoses and they made that decision within that same year.
Yeah.
And out of the entire country.
1,000 kids in the entire country.
Do we not think That that's probably legit.
Like, yep.
I mean, that's such a tiny, tiny, keep in mind.
I don't know even how many people, you know, there we've talked about like the ways people can be born with, you know, there's all kinds of ways people can be born intersex, kind of all that stuff, like setting aside like, oh, this new identifying as something.
I mean, there are people where they're born intersex and I know that they have to like, I think, make a decision at the time of birth.
It's like a thousand kids in the whole country.
In a given, what is that, a given year?
Mm-hmm.
Like, that's nothing.
What the fuck are we talking about?
For all... I'm just saying, like, who knows what that... If we were talking a million kids, like, okay, yeah, that would be concerning.
I'd be like, what?
A million?
That's a... A thousand?
That's fucking nothing!
In the whole country?
And let's take it to January's extreme nightmare, right?
Top surgeries.
Patients ages 13 to 17... Yeah, I'm sorry, that was only... That was puberty blockers.
Puberty blockers.
Yes, if we go to top surgeries for patients ages 13 to 17 undergoing mastectomy that had a gender dysphoria diagnosis.
In 2021, it was 282.
In the whole country?
In the whole country.
It is uncommon in patients under age 18.
Some children's hospitals and gender clinics don't even offer surgery to minors.
They require that the individual be an adult before deciding on procedures like that.
And then if you look at genital surgeries, there's an analysis of insurance claims to kind of identify how many within a given year.
And this doesn't have a specific number tied to 2021 Itself.
But from 2019 to 2021, patients ages 13 to 17, there were 56 genital surgeries over the course of three years.
Yeah, who knows what those circumstances are.
Yeah.
Well, and I think that's the other interesting thing, too, is that, you know, you have folks that have overdeveloped breast tissue that identify as men.
So you have gynecomastia.
Oh, yeah, that's a good point.
That's top surgery.
That's a great point.
That's incredibly gender affirming for that individual.
No one in the January Little John camp would possibly ever argue with that.
Yeah.
That's irreversible though.
I have a friend who had it.
Yeah.
I remember somebody in school.
I remember seeing a guy in school in like basketball camp.
I was very confused because I was only in like, I think seventh grade.
I was like, kind of looks like he has boobs a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No one in January's camp would ever, ever argue with the idea that that probably male identifying person would like, yeah, I want, this affirms my gender to get these, what kind of looked like boobs removed.
Yeah, I'm uncomfortable in my body this way.
But that's permanent.
It's a permanent decision.
How could he know?
Maybe he would want those when he ages into it.
How could he make that decision?
But because they're cis, it doesn't matter.
Right, exactly.
And to that point, with these numbers, I honestly wouldn't be surprised Maybe it's mostly that, because I really just don't think this happens much.
They don't really let kids do this, you know?
Especially if the parents didn't want to, who the fuck's paying for it?
What do you think, all of a sudden medical care is just free now in this country?
Yeah.
Like, we all know how hard it is to get proper medical care at any time for anything, but if you're a kid who wants to be trans, oh yeah, we'll just do it for free.
Planned Parenthood doesn't do this.
Yeah, exactly.
It's almost like this is a fucking moral panic that you should not be both sides-ing!
God, unbelievable.
Okay, where does this fucking nonsense go from here?
Soon after the altercation with the school, January went public.
She gave speeches and interviews.
Sometimes it has to be said, leaving out an important fact.
As the school district later told CNN, January had, quote, clearly instructed school staff via email to allow the child to take the lead on this and to do whatever you think is best.
It's difficult for me to watch her use her story as a bludgeon against our community, while she often fails to mention that she told the school district to go ahead and trust the child on how they should be respected in school.
But January said she would never have said those things to the school if she knew where it would lead.
I knew nothing about support plans or guides, so I don't know how it's even possible for me to consent to something I did not even know existed.
In her speeches, January denounced groups like Equality Florida for their impact on schools.
They have infiltrated the classrooms and they are usurping parental authority.
Putting guardrails in place for what is appropriate in a classroom is absolutely necessary under these situations.
She sued the school too, but lost, and is now appealing.
And she contacted Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis knew that lockdown meant that parents could suddenly see into their children's classrooms, and some of them didn't like what they saw, and he was tapping into that unease.
He declared 2022 the Year of the Parent.
As he began lining himself up to enter the race for president, he started telling January's story.
A lot.
Often embellishing the details.
We had a mother from Leon County and her daughter was going to school.
Some of the people at school decided that her daughter was really a boy and wanted to identify as a boy.
So they changed her name, they changed her quote pronouns, they did these things without telling the mother.
But the school didn't change her name.
Yeah.
Nor, as DeSantis claimed in other speeches, did they have her dress like a boy.
Some people in the school had decided that the daughter was really a boy and not a girl.
So they changed the girl's name to a boy's name, had her dress like a boy, and doing all this stuff without telling the mother.
I've watched videos of Ron DeSantis where he mentions your story.
He does seem to exaggerate it and twist it in his speeches.
So for instance, they didn't have her dress like a boy.
So much emphasis has been placed on that.
The gaslighting I have experienced has been unreal.
There are people that would rather focus on a detail like that than the actual evaluation that occurred with my daughter.
And that is very frustrating to me.
Yeah.
We got to stop.
Oh my God.
This is very frustrating to me, January, because, oh my God, that is insane to me.
Unbelievable.
She says, I'm just a mother concerned about my kid.
And then when something like this comes up where her child is being used as a political pawn to accomplish a conservative agenda at the state level.
With lies!
With lies, with actual lies.
It's gaslighting to point that out.
I'm sorry, a detail?
A detail?
Oh, just details.
The actual story is that you authorized them to do this, and by the way, they had a meet, what, fucking what happened?
They had a meeting!
That's it!
She is a political operative at this point.
Like, I do not think she is a good parent, honestly.
Oh, yeah, to say the least.
The way that she does not, well, yeah.
But this specifically, how would you not say, like, hey, don't use my kid that way?
That's not how it happened.
That's inappropriate.
I'm sorry, I want to line up the two stories because let's look at the gaslighting and what the meaningless kind of detail is.
So the real story is they, your child, told the school they wanted to identify as non-binary, told you, by the way, you were in on that somewhat, and you wrote an email authorizing them to deal with that however they wanted and the school to take the lead on it.
We've already heard that to death.
Yes.
And then when they did that, they had a meeting.
And in the meeting, your child expressed some preferences that they probably wrote down on a fucking piece of paper and filed or whatever.
Now, what else happened?
Because we fucking know at this point, if what happened next was that contrary to my child's will, she was put in a male locker room and all ripped it out.
Like if anything, At all!
Happened.
You know we would hear about it.
I'm struggling, struggling to even figure out what the harm is by their telling of it.
At no point did John think to ask, hey, what was the harm though?
For one, she said that now her child no longer identifies as trans.
I don't fucking take her word for anything, but again, Just even from her perspective in talking about the harm, well what was the harm?
Nothing happened, there's no surgery, there's no medical whatever, and now your kid is not even trans apparently.
So what was the harm?
Yep.
What was the fucking harm?
And so that's the real story.
And then the lie that's being told is some people, the governor of your fucking state, who's not just on a state level of prominence, is in national prominence.
National province is telling a version of your story that is so fucking significantly changed that it's some people at the school decided that your child was a boy when they were actually a girl.
Just one day.
Hey, we had a meeting and they called her into the office.
Hey, come in here, whoever your name is.
Apropos of nothing, we've decided you're a boy.
How?
No fucking idea.
Here's your new name.
Yep, here's your new name.
You will have these pronouns.
There's no option here.
You don't get to decide.
This is how it goes.
And don't tell your parents because your parents are evil and they're going to harm you.
And that's their version.
And then when confronted with this by John, in what little confrontation he does, she says, they would rather focus on a little detail.
On a little detail.
I'm sorry, a little detail?
The difference between my child transitioned versus the school decided to transition her against her and my will.
That's a little detail.
Yeah.
Stop gaslighting me.
Absurd.
How could you tell this with a straight face, John?
There's also like this really subtle anti-trans, like not believing trans people exist because her daughter never came out as a boy.
Her daughter came out as non-binary.
So now, not only is Ron DeSantis saying like literal lies, that's also a lie.
If you understood that there could exist in the world transgender people, maybe you didn't see it for your kid.
Right.
But you understood and were supportive of that for the general public, you would have corrected that and said, like, well, that's not actually correct there.
You know, my child never came out as a boy.
They came out as non-binary.
And here she just elides over all of that.
Well, that is a great point.
Yeah.
It just drives me crazy.
It just drives me crazy.
She's very clearly anti-trans.
Yeah, she's an anti-trans bigot activist.
Yeah.
- Of course.
I wanna ask John what he thinks.
John, do you think that trans kids exist?
Yeah.
I want to know, because I don't know, based on your both sides in here, which is really, really favoring one fucking anti-trans, anti-queer, by the way, Nazi-esque when you look at the rest of their platform side, you're very much giving them a prominent seat here in your coverage.
Do you think that trans kids exist?
Because if you do, If this process isn't right, John, assuming that trans kids are real, what process would be correct?
Like, I actually think that's important because what I worry that is happening here, and I want to tell you, maybe I should have said this at the outset, I very much worry, and this is speculation, I want to make very clear, this is my worry.
I worry that John is anti-trans and is using this story To express skepticism of things that, in my opinion, he shouldn't be expressing skepticism about.
Because I don't understand how you would tell this story from this perspective any other way.
I really don't understand how you would tell it this way.
If you were not anti-trans, let's assume you still want to both sides it.
Okay, both sides it.
Wouldn't you ask January?
Hey, Hey, January, your kid... Okay, we'll go with you.
We'll take your word for it.
They weren't actually trans.
But, January, you recognize there are trans kids, right?
Do you think there are trans kids or not?
Does he ever ask her that?
Hey, January, do you think there is such a thing as trans people?
No, he never asks her.
Why not?
Why wouldn't you ask her that?
Wouldn't that be very important?
Because right now what you're doing is you're giving her cover.
You're giving her cover to speak as a concerned parent.
She's a concerned parent.
She's just concerned about how fast this process... Maybe the process is a little too fast.
I think it's very important to know, as a listener, if she's coming from that perspective or from a perspective of, trans people actually don't fucking exist, so no process is acceptable to me.
That's important.
But as we go through, the more I learn, I'm curious where John's coming from here.
And as of now, really worried about that.
Yeah.
We've got an all-star cast of folks here that are joining us.
January Littlejohn, who's a parent from Leon County, who's going to speak.
January got her wish.
It is now Florida law that a student's gender identity should be disclosed to parents if the school is making accommodations for it, like allowing the child to use a different bathroom.
And they don't say Gable itself has created some startling ripples.
A fifth grade teacher in Florida says she is under investigation after she showed her students Strange World, which is a 2022 animated Disney film that features a character who is both biracial and gay.
Since last year, the district and school board have banned or restricted more than a dozen books and are currently evaluating roughly 200 more.
One of those, quote, inappropriate books is And Tango Makes Three, a picture book based on the true story of two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo who raised a chick together.
Michelangelo's classic David statue is the center of controversy in a Florida classroom.
A private school principal in Florida resigned over it.
According to the Tallahassee Democrat, she was ousted by angry parents after the Renaissance masterpiece was shown to sixth graders at Tallahassee Classical School.
Jesus fucking Christ.
Yeah.
A lot of people are looking at what's happening in Florida and thinking, wow, he's really using stories like yours to sort of hammer people with that heavy hand of government.
I don't know any parent that has that viewpoint.
I don't have experience.
With any of the things that you're asking me, frankly, I really am just commenting this as a mom.
But really, January is a mother and an activist.
So I want to be very fair here.
I don't want to say, and it wouldn't be fair to say, that Ronson is like endorsing all of this anti-trans, don't say gay stuff.
That would not be, there's no way, like contextually, I don't think that it would be fair to say that he's doing that.
But it sure doesn't seem like he's properly accounting for what's happening here, or is covering it in the most truthful way that I think he should, which is, hey, when it comes to these activists, here's one side that has used a made up version of a story, a made up version of a story about one trans kid who nothing happened to, To pass the don't say gay bill and has all these and to his credit, he's covering all these ridiculous knock on effects.
It would not be appropriate to read him as saying like, yeah, this is fine.
No, he's covering these.
He's talking about these things, the Statue of David, because they are absurd and they're, I mean, downright scary and how ignorant and backward it is to be firing teachers for stuff like that.
But does it feel like he properly accounts for how the root of this is a bullshit fake story about one trans kid who nothing happened to?
Does it really feel like that proper weight is being given?
No.
Because he asked her about it and she's like, look, I don't know, man.
All I did was stand behind the governor as he signed the don't say gay bill.
I'm just a parent.
Yeah, she's not just a parent.
She is an activist, and Ronson acknowledges that, that she's an activist.
But he doesn't really get into what kind of activist.
She's the senior fellow with Do No Harm.
Do No Harm is Stanley Goldfarb's organization, an association of medical professionals that had a problem with DEI in the medical industry.
They specifically say on their website, We are a national association of medical professionals combating the attack on our health care system from woke activists.
So they're anti-DEI, anti-trans.
Those are their two platforms.
And she's a senior fellow on the anti-trans project, I guess, of Do No Harm.
Now, to be clear, she wasn't that before this, though.
It's not like she...
Not before her experience, but she was before Jon Ronson interviewed her.
And she regularly gives speeches.
We'll play a little bit from one in a bit.
And her Twitter, her Twitter, her Facebook, it's all just a garbage fire.
It's so bad.
She is regularly retweeting libs of TikTok.
And Wokeness, last week or so, she was retweeting Gays Against Groomers and your favorite person, James Lindsay.
And she was helping promote, this is like, it was just a little side thing, helping promote his new book a couple months ago.
And she wrote, I adore at Conceptual James like a brother and proud to call him a friend.
Aside from my husband, he's the most brilliant man I know.
Not only does James know what a woman is, But he's trying to save our country from Marxism.
Geez, what a genius.
Only a 200 IQ could know what a woman is.
Yeah.
And recently he, I just mentioned this to you earlier, he tweeted this ridiculous thread that just like you scroll and scroll and scroll and it's nonsense.
And she retweeted it.
Like she's one of his biggest fans.
So there you go.
Yeah.
She is certainly not just a concerned mom.
She was at the time that this occurred, but then she decided to use it and create space for her in these political places.
Well, we're going to have to pause there for part two.
Look, my hands are tied.
I wish we didn't have to, you know?
If I had my way, it would all be in one convenient long episode at patreon.com slash where there's... Oh, wait, it is!
Oh, amazing.
That's awesome.
So we already did that.
Sorry, non-patrons.
You're going to have to wait for part three.
And in part three, next time... Oh my God.
...on Where There's Woke.
Yeah.
Oh my God, you guys.
You thought this was bad.
There is some real obvious stuff that I found that did not take me long at all.
But John Ronson, did he talk about it?
You're gonna have to find out.
The answer is no.
If you open up BBC, is it just a couple of mice that do all the like research and fact checking?
And it's not actually- It's gotta be, it's gotta be.
Like, oh crap, darn it, it's just these mice.
That's why none of this easy stuff was found.
Maybe that's the problem.
Well, tune in for part three.
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