Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compiletion episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. And then the welcome to
Speaker 1: it could happen here A podcast that is today about
Speaker 1: something that did happen here and absolutely sucked. And with
Speaker 1: me to talk about the Atlanta shooting is Scarrison. Hello, Hi,
Speaker 1: not happy to be here? Yeah, yeah, no, this is
Speaker 1: this is not a we're not talking about a current event.
Speaker 1: This happened like what was it last year? So yeah,
Speaker 1: in case someone's listening, I'm wondering if there was another one. No,
Speaker 1: this is specifically talking about Actually there have been a
Speaker 1: couple of shootings in Atlanta since then, obviously there. Yes,
Speaker 1: we're talking about is from from last year and the
Speaker 1: ties into many of the topics we discussed at the show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a March sixteenth, two thowy one, Robert Aaron Long, a
Speaker 1: regular at Young's Asian massage, refused to tip after getting
Speaker 1: a massage shout you a ton. The SPA's owner confronted
Speaker 1: him about the tip. Long simply walked away. He got dressed,
Speaker 1: went to the bathroom, pulled out his gun and started shooting,
Speaker 1: leaving shout you ton dying on the floor. Driving from
Speaker 1: spot to spa, Long shot nine people and killed eight.
Speaker 1: The loan wounded survivor, Alicia Fernandez Ortiz, got on his
Speaker 1: knees and begged Long not to shoot. Long shot him anyways.
Speaker 1: There's a there's a there's a tendency, when confronted with
Speaker 1: true horror, to retreat into abstraction, as if the abstract
Speaker 1: is sheltered from the violence of the storm. I intend,
Speaker 1: if briefly, to do it myself. But there is no
Speaker 1: safety there, only the same violence, repeated again and again
Speaker 1: and again in a thousand ways, with a thousand names,
Speaker 1: wearing a thousand faces. Because this is hell and we
Speaker 1: live in it, So on onto the abstract. There's a
Speaker 1: concept in Marxism called trigger um. It's a German word.
Speaker 1: It's usually translated as bearer, in the sense of an
Speaker 1: individual capitalist being the bearer of capitalist social relations. They
Speaker 1: enact this relation by you know, turning capital into more capital,
Speaker 1: which is what makes a capitalists. Uh. There is you know,
Speaker 1: literally endless debate over what this actually means. Most of
Speaker 1: it is pointless, and the meeting is contested enough that
Speaker 1: I'm going to abuse it a bit further and argue
Speaker 1: that a person can become a bearer of historical forces
Speaker 1: larger than themselves. Robert Aaron Long was the bearer of
Speaker 1: a great number of historical forces. He bore the violent
Speaker 1: of capitalism, of misogyny, of racism, of horror, phobia, of whiteness,
Speaker 1: of Christianity itself, and he unleash it into the world.
Speaker 1: It's just like the idea of like invoking, right drawing
Speaker 1: on these external ideas into yourself and then becoming them
Speaker 1: for like a brief period of time. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think it's slightly different in that with bearing, it's
Speaker 1: it's not so much that that you're briefly invoking them,
Speaker 1: it's that you're you're constantly a part of the relation.
Speaker 1: So theclation defines you and it and you you sort
Speaker 1: of you constantly enacted by the things that you do,
Speaker 1: and in doing like the relation reel. It's more of
Speaker 1: like an ever present thing that is Yeah, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's it's yeah. It's something that's just sort of structures
Speaker 1: how the society works. Right, Like, we're all sort of
Speaker 1: like enacting the wage relation, right every time we like
Speaker 1: do like, you know, like doing this right now by
Speaker 1: doing our jobs. Yeah, we are re enacting the wage relation. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think I think a lot of
Speaker 1: people after the shooting were left asking, you know why,
Speaker 1: And you know, we can name social and historical forces,
Speaker 1: we can talk about sort of antiation, violence and racism
Speaker 1: and horophobia, but what does it actually mean? And you
Speaker 1: know what, what are the forces that Long unleashed in
Speaker 1: this world? What do they look like? And I think
Speaker 1: I think we have we have a good example of
Speaker 1: this from right after Long was arrested. Police Captain J.
Speaker 1: Baker the Cherokee Sheriff's Department said this to reporters at
Speaker 1: a press conference. This is about Long and the shooting.
Speaker 1: He was pretty much fed up and at the end
Speaker 1: of his rope, and yesterday it was a really bad
Speaker 1: day for him, and this is what he did. He
Speaker 1: apparently has an issue what he considers a sex addiction
Speaker 1: and he sees these locations as something that allow him
Speaker 1: to go to these places, and it's a temptation for
Speaker 1: him that he wanted to eliminate. Now, yeah, that there
Speaker 1: there was a lot going on in in in in
Speaker 1: the is like two sentences, Um, so you know Cherokee
Speaker 1: Sheriff's Department. Oh yeah, there is. There is so much
Speaker 1: like there's somebody, somebody somebody later. Yeah, it's incredible. One
Speaker 1: of the things that we're going to go more into
Speaker 1: the next episode is it like this, this is where
Speaker 1: I what's his name? This is where the guy who
Speaker 1: just like drew a random line on a map that
Speaker 1: he found from like that he pulled out of his
Speaker 1: like national geographic thing who divided Korea and half like
Speaker 1: this is where he's from. There's this is Yeah, there
Speaker 1: is a there's a lot of historical violence in this
Speaker 1: very specific part of Georgia that is all coming together here.
Speaker 1: And oh yeah, his school was also super racist, Like
Speaker 1: there's they had a mascot that was like doing all
Speaker 1: the racist stuff. Yeah. Yeah, And you know, before we
Speaker 1: go any further, it's worth mentioning that, like almost immediately
Speaker 1: after the honorable Police Captain gave that press conference, a
Speaker 1: bunch of people on the Internet found out that Baker
Speaker 1: had posted like a shirt that said uh COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: and imported virus from China. I remember this. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: sheriff was pretty pretty racist himself. Yeah, a part of
Speaker 1: many many anti Asian tropes relating to conspiracy theories. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is you know this, this this is classic twenties
Speaker 1: like anti Asian rhetoric. It's you know, it's stuff that's
Speaker 1: led directly to hundreds of attacks nation Americans since it
Speaker 1: started the pandemic. And you know, the race is on
Speaker 1: slot driven by every sector of American society. Now people
Speaker 1: immediately start speculating that Jay Baker had collaborated with Long
Speaker 1: to cover up the racial like motivation for his violence.
Speaker 1: And okay, I think there's some truth to this. The
Speaker 1: cops have been collaborating with Long and his family in
Speaker 1: various ways. I'm going to read a part of an
Speaker 1: article in Vanity Fair written by the journalist May Jong
Speaker 1: called how the Atlantis Boss shooting the victims the survivors
Speaker 1: tell a story of America? Which is it? This is
Speaker 1: one of the best things that anyone's written about shooting
Speaker 1: so far. I'm going to read a little bit offit
Speaker 1: because it's oh boy. I ring the bell at the
Speaker 1: family home. No one answered. Before I could decide what
Speaker 1: to do, a police cruiser showed up. An officer who
Speaker 1: introduced himself as Sergeant Clement, explained that the neighbors multiple
Speaker 1: people had called to report suspicious activity. The one good
Speaker 1: thing about Cherokee County, he told me, is that we
Speaker 1: look out for each other. It's like how it used
Speaker 1: to be in the seventies. I asked Clement what specifically
Speaker 1: the neighbors were worried about. To be honest, he said,
Speaker 1: what they are worried about is they are afraid of revenge.
Speaker 1: What is the context for the like revenge line? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was basically just they were released like they were
Speaker 1: terrified that like Asian people were going to show up,
Speaker 1: like to this community and take revenge for the shooting.
Speaker 1: Thought they were like attack like the church or something. Well, no,
Speaker 1: like they thought they were gonna show up to like
Speaker 1: the family's house and like attack the neighborhood. Ah, when
Speaker 1: is when? When is that ever happened? Yeah? Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know and and and you know and you can like
Speaker 1: what what this demonstrates a is just the kind of
Speaker 1: community you're dealing with here and be also like you
Speaker 1: just you have very obvious close connection between the cops
Speaker 1: and like Long's family at this point. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: mean in terms of like the covering up, the covering
Speaker 1: up of like the anti h violence part of it. Honestly,
Speaker 1: I don't even know how intentional that would be, because
Speaker 1: I don't think he even recognizes that as racism. And
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how much the cops recognize that as
Speaker 1: a super big part, since that they are already uh,
Speaker 1: pretty pretty racist. I guess that Asian people, Okay, Like
Speaker 1: I I don't even know how much they recognize that
Speaker 1: as being like a thing that isn't normal. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: but I think also like I don't know the the
Speaker 1: the explicitness to which particularly Baker is being racist like
Speaker 1: makes me suspect that he does. That he would have
Speaker 1: been able to figure it out, because he's like, like
Speaker 1: you have to go out of your way to like
Speaker 1: have a shirt that says like COVID imported from China,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, but I don't think that he would consider
Speaker 1: that racist, right, Like it's so it's so racist that
Speaker 1: but but he can't even consider that. He just think
Speaker 1: it's just like normal, right, Like he's yeah. It's like
Speaker 1: in terms of like them trying to cover up any
Speaker 1: kind of anti Asian um stuff leading towards the shooting,
Speaker 1: they may not see that as like as anything to
Speaker 1: be covered up because they think that's just normal. So
Speaker 1: they're not going to like even focus on it because
Speaker 1: they're like, yeah, I mean obviously right, Like it's just
Speaker 1: we're so far down the rabbit hole that it's hard
Speaker 1: to even like recognize it. I don't know, I'm just
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm just it it makes it makes sensesciousness.
Speaker 1: And I think also the other thing that's going on
Speaker 1: here that that's I think the other part of why
Speaker 1: they wouldn't have recognized it if they didn't, is that like, okay,
Speaker 1: so like like most people see this and they're you know,
Speaker 1: they kind of like analytically, they kind of throw up
Speaker 1: their hands. They're like, wow, this is anti Asian violence.
Speaker 1: They talk about like the stuff that particular dangerous faced
Speaker 1: by like Asian women and sex workers, and they sort
Speaker 1: of call it a day, and the nowsis sort of
Speaker 1: like stops there, and like they're right, like that this
Speaker 1: is anti Asian violence. The violence is primarily inflicted on women,
Speaker 1: and it particularly on sex workers or and I mean
Speaker 1: this is also very important people who are perceived as
Speaker 1: sex workers no matter what they actually do. And yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's got worse than the pandemic. But there's a
Speaker 1: very very specific kind of violence that long is doing here.
Speaker 1: It is and it's not it's related to, but not
Speaker 1: identical to the sort of post COVID stuff. And I
Speaker 1: think people really like did a disservice to what happened,
Speaker 1: and did a diservice to help the people understand it
Speaker 1: by not actually poking at it, because this shooting is
Speaker 1: at its core and evangelical shooting like this is this
Speaker 1: is this is evangelical violences, is Christian violence, and this
Speaker 1: is this is purity culture. And you know, if if
Speaker 1: you want to understand what actually happens here, you have
Speaker 1: to actually you have to go back and you have
Speaker 1: to understand the Christianity angle because it is critical. Now.
Speaker 1: East Asia's contact with Christianity in the last two hundred
Speaker 1: years has been broadly speaking, extremely bleak. Uh the conclusion
Speaker 1: of the First Opium War in eighteen forty two, which
Speaker 1: Britain forced China to buy opium to cover Britain's trade
Speaker 1: deficit with the country, and then the Britain also stole
Speaker 1: Hong Kong and then allowed critics. Yeah, it all also
Speaker 1: had the effect of allowing Christian missionaries into the country.
Speaker 1: And it is genuinely unclear which one of those acts
Speaker 1: has the highest body counts. The product of the Christian
Speaker 1: missionaries work was the Typing Rebellion, in which the self
Speaker 1: proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ waged a failed war against
Speaker 1: the ruling Ching dynasty. That like, even if even if
Speaker 1: you use like the lower estimates of the body count,
Speaker 1: that war makes World War One with like a minor
Speaker 1: border skirmish. It is a just incredibly devastating war. And
Speaker 1: you know that the product of this is there's there's famines.
Speaker 1: There's also just a bunch of floods that happened at
Speaker 1: the same time, and this sends an enormous number of
Speaker 1: immigrants and refugees fling from their homes looking for any
Speaker 1: way to survive. And a lot of those people find
Speaker 1: their way to the US and they get imported by
Speaker 1: American capitalists, where you know, looking for a new labor
Speaker 1: force to serve. It's like a racial racial buffer between
Speaker 1: right black workers after the Civil War. And the other
Speaker 1: thing is like it's really hard to get to the
Speaker 1: west coast in the like they know, in the Panama Canal.
Speaker 1: You have to go over land and it sucks and
Speaker 1: it's hard, and so they need a labor force that
Speaker 1: they can just get to the west coast. And it's
Speaker 1: literally easier for people to come from China, and you know,
Speaker 1: and so they do, and it is a it is
Speaker 1: a brutal existence. Chinese workers are worked at death building
Speaker 1: the railroads, and they you know, they struggled to carve
Speaker 1: out of life for themselves and they do halting lead
Speaker 1: and leaps and spurts, but they create communities, they build
Speaker 1: towns and temples and cultures in the beginning of a
Speaker 1: new society. And that's when the white working class decides
Speaker 1: they want to exterminate them because this is this is
Speaker 1: a great country. Uh yeah. White workers, you know immediately
Speaker 1: start blaming Chinese workers for the low wages, and they
Speaker 1: use their workers organizations to ethnically climbs the west. The
Speaker 1: result of this is a series of massacres that goes
Speaker 1: on literally for decades, stretching like into the ninth like
Speaker 1: this this these things starting like the eighteen seventies and
Speaker 1: they're still going in like the nineteen like like in
Speaker 1: the in then like the early ninteen hundreds. Um. And
Speaker 1: and it's at this point where Christianity gets involved. Um.
Speaker 1: I think like most people who are listening to the
Speaker 1: show have probably heard at least in passing of the
Speaker 1: Chinese Exclusion Act just this sort of like the great
Speaker 1: triumph of like the dark alliance of racists and the
Speaker 1: white working class. But what I think is less known
Speaker 1: about is the Page Act, of which banned quote lud
Speaker 1: and immoral women from entering the United States. And this,
Speaker 1: this is like this is directly targeted at Asian and
Speaker 1: Chinese women, um, who were seen as a threat to
Speaker 1: the sort of racial and moral character of like the
Speaker 1: white Christian American nation because of like they're supposed to
Speaker 1: like inheritent immorality demonstrated by the popular usical demonstrated by
Speaker 1: the popular image of all Chinese women as sex workers.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think, like looking back on this,
Speaker 1: this is extremely recognizable that this is literally just an
Speaker 1: anti trafficking panic, like this whole thing, it's just it's
Speaker 1: like this this this this is like this is like
Speaker 1: proto this is like proto q shiit um and you know,
Speaker 1: and like like there is there is legitimately like sex
Speaker 1: trafficking going on, but the existence of like like the
Speaker 1: fact that there is sex trafficking gets used as this
Speaker 1: sort of like political and racial image. It gets projected
Speaker 1: onto just like all Asian women who get portrayed as
Speaker 1: a trafficking victims and you simultaneously be like saved but
Speaker 1: then also expelled from the US to preserve both there
Speaker 1: in the U s's purity. And you know, like this
Speaker 1: image of Asian women has literally never changed. You will
Speaker 1: find it today like to this day, people find people
Speaker 1: using like the exact same racist projections like consciously you're
Speaker 1: unconsciously to talk about Asian immigrants and like particularly SPA workers.
Speaker 1: It's it's this like it's it's just like incredibly toxic
Speaker 1: mix of like Christian moralism, sexism, horror phobia, and racism.
Speaker 1: And the racism element is really important because like, okay,
Speaker 1: well this is going on, Like prostitution is legal in California,
Speaker 1: Like you can just do this, like there there's there's
Speaker 1: no law against it um, you know, and so and
Speaker 1: so you think that like oh hey, there, you know
Speaker 1: that the sort of like Christian panic would just be
Speaker 1: targeted against brothels, like no, it's it's like very specifically
Speaker 1: against Asian women. And it's you know, this is because
Speaker 1: all of this sort of like the Christian fears about
Speaker 1: sex work is you know, and and their horror phobia
Speaker 1: is and and still is today incredibly deeply fused with
Speaker 1: this sort of like that this is this is like
Speaker 1: incredibly racist like concern over the purity of the race yea.
Speaker 1: And yeah, you know this this will sound familiar to
Speaker 1: anyone who's been like paying attention at all to any
Speaker 1: of the trafficking panics and if the anti trans stuff,
Speaker 1: any of just interracial dating was only extremely recently allowed
Speaker 1: at all of like the biggest Christian universities, like like
Speaker 1: they have like they yeah, not a it is it's
Speaker 1: a it's a thing. It's a yeah, it's and that's
Speaker 1: and like the thing about it, it's it's really it's
Speaker 1: it's really close to the surface, right, even even when
Speaker 1: they're not explicitly just saying it, like if you look,
Speaker 1: it's been about two seconds looking, it's like, oh, this
Speaker 1: is what's going on here? Huh yeah? Yeah, And you know,
Speaker 1: so so that that that's sort of that's sort of
Speaker 1: one side of this whole thing, right, is you have
Speaker 1: this sort of like you have this sort of like
Speaker 1: Christian like anti trafficking panic that that creates that that like,
Speaker 1: you know, it creates the sort of image of way
Speaker 1: age women are and has a lot of effects. But
Speaker 1: the other side of this coin is that there is
Speaker 1: a just incredible amount of sexual violence that America has
Speaker 1: inflicted on Asian women, like particularly through its war. Successive
Speaker 1: invasions of the Philippines, China, Korea, and Vietnam saw American
Speaker 1: soldiers committing just untold and horrific sexual violence on Asian women,
Speaker 1: like to to the extent that like the US essentially
Speaker 1: just inherits Japan's like mass military rape system in Korea
Speaker 1: and just runs it for itself. Like there's this all
Speaker 1: of all of those things came home so massively, all
Speaker 1: the things that were normalized to oversee is just came
Speaker 1: right back when all the soldiers came back. Yep, yep. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think it's gonna say next year, like the and
Speaker 1: this this has a like the I don't know, I
Speaker 1: think people get the relationship between pop culture depictions and
Speaker 1: of you know, racist despictions of people in pop culture
Speaker 1: and the actual culture backwards, like they don't help and
Speaker 1: they spread it. But like you know, the the like
Speaker 1: me love you long time ship from like Kubrick like
Speaker 1: that that doesn't come out of nowhere. That's not just
Speaker 1: Kubrick like that's that is that's something that was brought
Speaker 1: home by the American racists and you know, like when
Speaker 1: when they got back and that stuff. Like it's it's
Speaker 1: not just that like the stuff is being spread by media.
Speaker 1: It's that the media is being influenced by the people
Speaker 1: who did this stuff and then came home. It is
Speaker 1: the full circle thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I mean
Speaker 1: even still now there's such a such a degree of
Speaker 1: like Asian women being like an object to possess, even
Speaker 1: more so than right, like like it's like even more
Speaker 1: so than like regular women, which obviously under under like
Speaker 1: a lot of like patriarchal stuff in the States and
Speaker 1: you know overseas everywhere, you know, women are seen as
Speaker 1: objects to possess, but specifically there's that is so much
Speaker 1: heightened for uh women of color and specifically like Asian women.
Speaker 1: Um that that idea, I mean you see that everywhere
Speaker 1: for the libertarian Asian girlfriend. You like you see this
Speaker 1: in media all the time. Um that like the Asian
Speaker 1: wife is something you own, and it's it's a very
Speaker 1: extremely pervasive Yeah, And I think the reason why is that,
Speaker 1: like this image gets refreshed every time of generation comes
Speaker 1: from from a war in Asia. And you know that
Speaker 1: that's what because because the US has been fighting wars
Speaker 1: in Asia like forever, I mean basically since like it
Speaker 1: we've been fighting wars and Asians late Asian hundreds, and
Speaker 1: you know, like the violence of each subject generation just
Speaker 1: sort of refreshes this image of like Asian women as
Speaker 1: prostitutes bodies are supposed to just be like accessible to
Speaker 1: white men at all times. But this has a sort
Speaker 1: of there's a kind of clash that happens here too,
Speaker 1: because like on the one hand you have this sort
Speaker 1: of like racial and sexual feticization, and on the other
Speaker 1: hand you of Christian horror phobia. And this gives you
Speaker 1: this culture where like Asian women are at once seen
Speaker 1: as like hyperdesirable and hyper available, but are also just
Speaker 1: like utterly despised for both and this sort of like
Speaker 1: racist pathology, this like this like this like this this
Speaker 1: sexual desire bixed with loathing. He's at just the absolute
Speaker 1: core of of the Atlantic shooting, and as if to
Speaker 1: remind us if its origin, Long carries out as massacre
Speaker 1: on the fifty three anniversary of my lie and we're bad.
Speaker 1: So I think we now have enough context to like
Speaker 1: go back to Long's initial description of why he carries
Speaker 1: out the attack, which to self describe sex addiction. Is
Speaker 1: desired to quote eliminate temptation. Yeah, Because I mean we
Speaker 1: cannot overstate the degree to which both the police, the church,
Speaker 1: and the shooter himself framed this not as an anti
Speaker 1: astion thing, but as like as a as a as
Speaker 1: something addressing his sex addiction. Um, that was the angle
Speaker 1: it talked about it. Now, there's all of the anti
Speaker 1: ation stuff that is like right under the surface, but
Speaker 1: it's like probably up so much of what's going on.
Speaker 1: But the thing that they were publicly talking about was
Speaker 1: this uh so called sex addiction. Yeah. And and I
Speaker 1: think this is this is you know, this is this
Speaker 1: is a very important angle of this is we should
Speaker 1: actually talk about what that is and because and to
Speaker 1: understand because he just not like okay, so like the
Speaker 1: sex edition is I think like actually sort of a thing,
Speaker 1: but people that is a hotly debated Yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm not a psychiatrist. Don't take advice to me. I
Speaker 1: think it's the slightly more legit of the two. Things
Speaker 1: that the of the two like fake syndrome things we're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about here, but this is not what's going
Speaker 1: on with him, and you want to understand it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what's going on with this? We need to go back
Speaker 1: to enemy of the show, purity culture. Um friend friend
Speaker 1: of a friend of the pod. Yeah, I'm gonna say no.
Speaker 1: I I refused, I had I had friends, and there
Speaker 1: are a couple of times and I was like, I
Speaker 1: refused to call this friend of the show. Damn it.
Speaker 1: Like I can't do myself to do it right. Joshua
Speaker 1: Harris just unsubscribed so long, like by all accounts, is
Speaker 1: extremely religious. He's heavily involved both his church and his
Speaker 1: high school. Like his high school he's a public high school.
Speaker 1: But the public high school has like Christian athletic groups,
Speaker 1: which is a fun thing that they let you do
Speaker 1: in public schools. Um, yeah, it's great. H So you know,
Speaker 1: to get it, to get it an understanding of like
Speaker 1: the kind of baptism we're dealing with here. Here's a
Speaker 1: line from the church's by laws. Quote. We believe that
Speaker 1: any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality,
Speaker 1: bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt
Speaker 1: to change one's sex or disagreement with one's biological sex,
Speaker 1: is sinful and offensive to God. Yep, you know, and
Speaker 1: all of that's in the Bible. Yeah, they have you
Speaker 1: you can tell because they cite three passages. Not if
Speaker 1: we say that, Well, okay, I know there is there
Speaker 1: is beast reality stuff. Bit is I think that the
Speaker 1: incess is in there. Well, I mean there's doing this stuff.
Speaker 1: But parts of the Bible are pro incests. Parts the
Speaker 1: Bible are Antians. Yeah, it's um. The Bible has a
Speaker 1: real sticky relationship with the topic of incest um. But yes,
Speaker 1: I'm sure they thoroughly slight all of their passages for
Speaker 1: they talk about when they talk about bisexual conduct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's well, I mean, you know, the one that's great
Speaker 1: is the attempting to change one's sex or disagreement with
Speaker 1: one's biological sex. A thing that I I'm guessing they're
Speaker 1: citing God created males and females, and males and females,
Speaker 1: He created them. And I don't actually think so because
Speaker 1: they're not they didn't. Okay, yeah, this this is me.
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm just speculating based on experience in these
Speaker 1: in these types of types of groups. Yeah. So so
Speaker 1: speaking of these types of groups, so Long is like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so Long's church like expels him after the the shooting murder. Yeah, because,
Speaker 1: like I'm they violated their own by laws because there's
Speaker 1: no way they could have done their expulsion their actual
Speaker 1: explosion protocol and that amount of time, because they would
Speaker 1: have acted like send people to visit him in jail. See,
Speaker 1: I think you're overestimating the degree to which churches care
Speaker 1: about what their by laws actually say. Well, I mean
Speaker 1: it's the blanking on it. What's the thing Matt Matt eighteen.
Speaker 1: There's like the thing that churches have that's like their
Speaker 1: explosion protocol and they like send someone to this this
Speaker 1: is the thing into I think you're I think you're
Speaker 1: slightly overestimating how much people actually care about that, which
Speaker 1: it's all just a racket used to prop up the
Speaker 1: authority of the leaders and push people towards whatever political
Speaker 1: gains that the movement has. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, speaking
Speaker 1: of getting people to submit to the authority and polluting
Speaker 1: instant movements. Yeah, So we talked about purity culture on
Speaker 1: this show, like we had dausium um. So we're not
Speaker 1: gonna go into an enormous amount of detail about it here.
Speaker 1: The very should at least describe what it is. So
Speaker 1: the very very very short version is, it's like it's
Speaker 1: an incredibly patriarchal, like evangelical Christian religious system in which
Speaker 1: like sex before marriage is seen as like an incredible sin,
Speaker 1: and there's just like like focused on the purity of
Speaker 1: the wife and like like a woman is essentially the
Speaker 1: property of her husband, and the entire goal of existence
Speaker 1: just to like bare and raised children. So it was
Speaker 1: it was invented, but it was the modern version that
Speaker 1: was invented in the nineties, strongly influenced by a book
Speaker 1: written by someone named Joshua Harris. It was called I
Speaker 1: Kissed a Dating Goodbye. The book promotes a pro courtship
Speaker 1: to marriage pipeline instead of dating. I think dating will
Speaker 1: probably encourage you to have sex before marriage, which is
Speaker 1: of course bad um. And under under all of this
Speaker 1: under like the actual like you know, if you if
Speaker 1: you if you started digging into this all the stuff
Speaker 1: it talks about in terms of like sexual purity um
Speaker 1: is a about you know, women are responsible for men's
Speaker 1: sexual like um sins right, Like if if a man
Speaker 1: lusts for a woman, that's the woman's fault, not the
Speaker 1: man's fault. Right. It's because women must be presenting in
Speaker 1: a way that causes that to happen. Um. Right, So
Speaker 1: women's women's bodies and clothes should be designed in a
Speaker 1: way so that it will not cause men to stumble um.
Speaker 1: And by stumble they mean get horny um. And you
Speaker 1: know it's something that you know, your your body is
Speaker 1: both this thing that should be pure, but also you
Speaker 1: should be ashamed of it, right because it causes the sin. Uh.
Speaker 1: Women can't really have any sexual desire on their own.
Speaker 1: Women are going to really enjoy sex. Um. It's it's
Speaker 1: specifically for men, and it's for procreation. Um. It's in
Speaker 1: in in intense value tied to your idea of like
Speaker 1: virginity and virginity extending out to like personal purity and
Speaker 1: spiritual purity, Like if you have sex before marriage, you
Speaker 1: are like like unclean. It's it's like it's like your
Speaker 1: it's like you're chewed up gum, Like you like you
Speaker 1: would not pick up someone's Like if you found some
Speaker 1: chewed up gum on the street, you wouldn't put it
Speaker 1: back in your mouth. Right, So that's the idea, Like
Speaker 1: if you if you're not a virgin, you are you
Speaker 1: were like chewed up gum, Like you are already used,
Speaker 1: you're spent um. So you have so you save safer
Speaker 1: marriage so that only your husband can chew up your gum,
Speaker 1: and then after your marriage you're just stuck there forever. Right.
Speaker 1: It's also like very very very anti divorce um. And
Speaker 1: there's really no difference, Like there's they don't really there's
Speaker 1: not much discussion around consent. Oddly enough, you know as
Speaker 1: you know that they surprise you based on what I
Speaker 1: all just said, like obviously they don't care about consent. Um.
Speaker 1: There's like they they view any they view a sexual
Speaker 1: assault just as bad as consensual sex before marriage. They
Speaker 1: see them as the same thing. Um. It's it's basically this,
Speaker 1: it's the same structure as that they're both in equal
Speaker 1: sin ah And I mean that is that is purity
Speaker 1: culture one oh one. We could we could just do
Speaker 1: an entire episode on pure any culture, and we probably
Speaker 1: would do. We can do series on it, like yeah,
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, I think the really important thing about
Speaker 1: it is like this is basically like in terms of
Speaker 1: they're sort of being like like I don't know what
Speaker 1: if you call it a counterculture, but they're sort of
Speaker 1: being like an evangelical cultural machine, like it's this like
Speaker 1: this is this is what they're pushing as like as
Speaker 1: like their mass movement for for youth expect especially in
Speaker 1: the nineties and two thousand's, we have we have stuff
Speaker 1: like purity rings, which is like you know, when you
Speaker 1: when you're a teen, you'll get like objects or jewelry
Speaker 1: which are like like almost like magical items do you
Speaker 1: put on to like show that I am going to
Speaker 1: keep myself pure and by doing this, by doing this action,
Speaker 1: it's symbolizing that and therefore internalizing it. There's also um
Speaker 1: purity balls, which is not what you'll so when would
Speaker 1: use the word purity ball, certain things will come to mind, right, Um,
Speaker 1: Unfortunately they're not as fun as what that's what you
Speaker 1: are thinking. Um, A purity ball is just like a
Speaker 1: formal dance event, you know, like a ball that you
Speaker 1: put on um, which is meant to it's a it's
Speaker 1: a meant to. Usually it's like fathers take their daughters
Speaker 1: there and then their daughters swear to make a virginity
Speaker 1: pledge um to protect their purity of mind, body, and
Speaker 1: spirit um so that they will not then infect you know, boys,
Speaker 1: uh and cause them to stumble and and commit the
Speaker 1: sin of lust, which again is an incredibly weird thing
Speaker 1: to do at a ball, Like, yes, it's so weird.
Speaker 1: Well also, yeah, it's most most Yeah, it's well, I
Speaker 1: think I think we've got into enough event. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: the specific sort of thing, I think the last thing
Speaker 1: I will look at. There, there is one more thing
Speaker 1: we're gonna so before that, I do want to point
Speaker 1: out that Joshua Harris, who like is in a lot
Speaker 1: of ways responsible, like single handedly responsible for an enormous
Speaker 1: amount of this, she is Japanese. Yeah, fucking thanks for
Speaker 1: that one, buddy, Great job, good ship man. In ten,
Speaker 1: he announced that he and his wife were divorcing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know, and and and now and now no
Speaker 1: longer considers himself like the type of Christian he was
Speaker 1: before I'm unclear what his actual spiritual beliefs at the moment,
Speaker 1: but he did he did try to distance himself from
Speaker 1: his from from what I've read, like it's unclear that
Speaker 1: he knows. So oh, he he knows. He definitely knows.
Speaker 1: I can, I can, I can. I can guarantee that
Speaker 1: he's he used to be running. He has a new
Speaker 1: grift now. It sucks they always get new grips. But
Speaker 1: actually we will, yeah, we will get into the new
Speaker 1: grift industry in a second. Um. But Yeah, one of
Speaker 1: the other things that's that's a big part of this
Speaker 1: is like a deep and abiding hatred of porn. Like
Speaker 1: all of this is yeah, like as you said, like
Speaker 1: in the list of by laws watching porn again, it's
Speaker 1: the same as sexual assaults. Yeah, it's a huge it's
Speaker 1: morally the same level of sin. Yeah. And and like
Speaker 1: you know, I mean, and and you can read that
Speaker 1: both ways as how seriously they take watching porn and
Speaker 1: how not seriously it takes sexual assault because it does
Speaker 1: go it does go both ways. Yeah. Um. And this
Speaker 1: this thing, the fact that that this is this is
Speaker 1: like considered a sin, is the apotheosis, Like the apotheosis
Speaker 1: that this is is porn addiction, which again like not
Speaker 1: really dubious existence. This is this is even more dubious
Speaker 1: sex than sex addiction, Like there's no there, this is
Speaker 1: this is like this is just fake. Um. But there's
Speaker 1: an entire culture that's that's a like developed around stopping
Speaker 1: manifest seeing poor and these like there's like these incredibly
Speaker 1: elaborate accountability setups where like there's like apps you install
Speaker 1: on your stuff, Like there's ways to alter your IP
Speaker 1: addressed to watch certain sites. Yeah, Robert Aaron Long the shooter,
Speaker 1: like he he uses a flip phone instead of a
Speaker 1: smart phone because he thinks having a phone will like
Speaker 1: lead int senation. Um. Now Long. Yeah. And the product
Speaker 1: of this is that there's like there's like this entire
Speaker 1: industry that is built up around quote unquote treating the
Speaker 1: porn addiction. Yeah. Um, and it's it's all bullshit. But
Speaker 1: Long had spent at twice been in one of these
Speaker 1: facilities called hope Quest. Now, hope Quest is an affiliateive
Speaker 1: for old friends that focus in the family. But that's
Speaker 1: not actually the part I want to talk about, because
Speaker 1: what's more interesting about hope Quest is that it's founded
Speaker 1: by roy A Blankenship, a former ex gay who left
Speaker 1: both hope quests and the X gay community to live
Speaker 1: with his husband. Now, now this what a what a
Speaker 1: what what what a what a funny pattern we keep
Speaker 1: finding out? Yeah? No, now I think I think my
Speaker 1: two listeners, if you were, if you were not as
Speaker 1: cursed as as as we are as we are, and
Speaker 1: you don't know what an ex gay is, um X
Speaker 1: gays were there were this movement of like evangelical gaze
Speaker 1: who claimed that like this this is the thing that
Speaker 1: starts in like the nineties and twos. They claimed that
Speaker 1: like they've gone to conversion therapy and it made them
Speaker 1: not gat yeah yeah, and and this and you know,
Speaker 1: and in partial part of partial was going on here
Speaker 1: is they claimed that that like they did it voluntarily
Speaker 1: because like involuntarily doing conversion therapy had gotten to a
Speaker 1: point where it was like bad pr wise, because Jesus Christ,
Speaker 1: you were like torturing children and they're still torturing children,
Speaker 1: but but this time they're like, no, it's voluntary, and
Speaker 1: that this is like they're big, this is the rights,
Speaker 1: big cultural campaign against the gay right through nineties in
Speaker 1: two thousands and uh, like I I would say this
Speaker 1: like it's it's not exactly the same thing as the
Speaker 1: way they use detansitioners, but like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: it's very similar. And of course obviously that we now
Speaker 1: have the x X gay movement. Yeah yeah, and and
Speaker 1: you know and and and to to like so okay,
Speaker 1: So like the X game movement falls apart in like
Speaker 1: the late two thousands and early doesn't tends because like
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. The leaders personal all the leaders were
Speaker 1: initially gay, said they were X gay and then kept
Speaker 1: having gay sex because that rules. Yeah, and they all
Speaker 1: kind of realized maybe we should stop doing this thing
Speaker 1: that keeps killing kids. Yeah, And Blaken Blankenship too is
Speaker 1: credit like he'd been a big person doing this and
Speaker 1: then he was just like like one of his friends
Speaker 1: like commit suicide and he's like, oh shit, and so
Speaker 1: like he stops, like he's announced this in version therapy
Speaker 1: and he's now appropriar so many of the focus on
Speaker 1: the family. People who were involved in like Love One
Speaker 1: out all of these escape programs. So many of them
Speaker 1: then renounced it, accepted their their gayness, and then moved
Speaker 1: to Portland's fucking Oregon. So many of them didn't this though,
Speaker 1: like this this is what's interesting about this. So okay, So,
Speaker 1: so while he was sort of figuring this out, Blancolin
Speaker 1: ship had a founded hope quest, right, and so he
Speaker 1: leaves with the people who are running it now, like
Speaker 1: our X gays who they're like the only X gays
Speaker 1: left who didn't renounce it and who like still claimed
Speaker 1: to be ex I mean, they they've taken their stuff
Speaker 1: about how like homosexuality should be like dealt with by
Speaker 1: saying by having by marrying women and just not acting
Speaker 1: on it or whatever. Like they they took that stulf
Speaker 1: out of their bios, but they apparently they still believe it,
Speaker 1: like like they've they these people have never probably come
Speaker 1: out against it. And you know what essentially happened was
Speaker 1: that like enough of enough of the X gays, like
Speaker 1: but the thing collapsed enough that like they had to
Speaker 1: find and they had to find a new thing to do.
Speaker 1: And the new thing they found to do was they
Speaker 1: went and they went into the porn addiction treatment industry. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we also if if if you want more background
Speaker 1: like the X gay thing, you can listen to my
Speaker 1: my two part are on focus on the family and
Speaker 1: James Dobson for Behind the Bastards. Also for our week
Speaker 1: on the War on Transpeople, we discussed some of the
Speaker 1: same stuff for the first episode, which is the evangelical
Speaker 1: gay marriage, um like thing that. So yeah, we we
Speaker 1: we have we we we do, we do have something
Speaker 1: like produced scripted stuff on these topics if you want
Speaker 1: more background on them. Yeah. Unfortunately, this is a this
Speaker 1: is a story where there's like every single thread you've
Speaker 1: ever done suddenly is coming together in one moment of
Speaker 1: horrific violence. This is where long like winds up for
Speaker 1: is like treatments for like poor and sex addiction addictions,
Speaker 1: which I kindot emphasize enough. This is literally what he's
Speaker 1: talking about is literally that he watches porn like like
Speaker 1: that that's what porn sex addiction like means. And because
Speaker 1: none of this is real, the treatments like don't work
Speaker 1: because again it's all fake. And I do would also say,
Speaker 1: hope quest Is operates out of Georgia. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: but you know so so so. So he goes into
Speaker 1: treatment twice and he's he's he says it like Maverick,
Speaker 1: which is this like recovery center. Um, it doesn't work,
Speaker 1: and he goes home and his parents kick him out
Speaker 1: of his house for watching porn. And you know, I
Speaker 1: think this is something that like is important to understand,
Speaker 1: which is that the people inside of this world really
Speaker 1: deeply believe this stuff, right and and like watching porn
Speaker 1: has real social consequences for them, and it has you know,
Speaker 1: and this, this has, this has has has like a
Speaker 1: profound fact on how these people think. I'm going to
Speaker 1: read a quote from a Washington Post article. Bayless, who
Speaker 1: was Long's roommate at Maverick Recovery, a sober living facility
Speaker 1: in Roswell, Georgia, in two thousand nineteen and two twenty
Speaker 1: and the months between his stay at Hope stays at
Speaker 1: Hope Quest, said Long felt his very salvation was at
Speaker 1: stake as he told his roommate that he was quote
Speaker 1: living in sin and not walking in the light. He
Speaker 1: was walking in darkness. So this this is how these
Speaker 1: people like see this stuff right, like like this is
Speaker 1: this is literally about whether you're you're like yeah, they're
Speaker 1: talking about like something extremely existential like it like it
Speaker 1: is this all seems very silly to people who are
Speaker 1: not inside it, because it is it is. It is absurd.
Speaker 1: But if the people involved in it it is like
Speaker 1: the totality of the universe, like it is, it is
Speaker 1: so big, it's like the biggest thing. It's so important
Speaker 1: because you're you're determining what you're, what you will, what's
Speaker 1: your conscious being will exist for for thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of years like that, Like this is what they actually believe.
Speaker 1: So it's super important, like it's it is it is
Speaker 1: worth killing before because it's that's that's how important this is.
Speaker 1: Like like I think, I think there's no sense to
Speaker 1: which it is more important than life or death because
Speaker 1: you dying, Like okay, you die, once you go to
Speaker 1: your physical death doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and this, you know, and you know, we talked about this,
Speaker 1: like it's there. There's those things. There's there's a social consequences.
Speaker 1: You can get kicked out of your house, you can
Speaker 1: kick out of your church if you keep doing this,
Speaker 1: like like these churches will kick you out. Um, and
Speaker 1: and this, you know, this makes the ideology at work
Speaker 1: here incredibly powerful. And it provides a mixture of this
Speaker 1: like this this really incredible self hatred for like falling
Speaker 1: into sin and giving him too temptation. And it also
Speaker 1: creates a hatred of the temptation itself. And this brings
Speaker 1: us all the way up to the shooting. UM purity culture.
Speaker 1: Purity culture is the key that unlocks, you know, the
Speaker 1: meeting of Long's words. We can understand the explanation that
Speaker 1: the police gave, which again like he apparently has an
Speaker 1: issue what he considers a sex addiction and sees these
Speaker 1: locations as something that allows him to go to these places,
Speaker 1: and it's a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate,
Speaker 1: you know. And there was a at the memorial for
Speaker 1: for the shooting last year, UM Sex Work or organizer
Speaker 1: kail and Jong said this, they hate us so they
Speaker 1: can hate themselves less. And I think that's that's a
Speaker 1: really great that is a really good analysis. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a perfect calculation of like what's happening here. But
Speaker 1: this is the part of the story with the media
Speaker 1: just violently and spectacularly fox up to endaupt. They they
Speaker 1: dropped the purity ball. You might say, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's it's really horrible there, Like what they've essentially
Speaker 1: done is an act two years of racist violence against
Speaker 1: people who had either literally just survived a mass shooting,
Speaker 1: or who are literally dead. And the way they do this,
Speaker 1: the press reads long talking about sex edition addiction, and
Speaker 1: they immediately assumed that the women in these massage parlors
Speaker 1: have been having sex with him, and they start, there's
Speaker 1: like this whole hunt that they do to like search
Speaker 1: for evidence that massage workers were doing like full service
Speaker 1: sex work, based off of again the words of a
Speaker 1: literal racist mass murderer and their own racist preconception that
Speaker 1: like all Asian women, especially SPA workers, are also sex workers. Yep.
Speaker 1: And like you know, on the one hand, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: true that this stuff is fueled by horr phobia and
Speaker 1: also like morally, who gives a ship what they were doing.
Speaker 1: But the immediate problem here is that by doing this
Speaker 1: witch hunt, you were sicking the police on the survivors
Speaker 1: you're putting you're putting a survivors in immense legal and
Speaker 1: physical danger. Yeah, and and we we will talk about
Speaker 1: this more next episode. But like, these women have already
Speaker 1: seen more police violence and police raids than all of
Speaker 1: the journalists writing about this combined I've seen in their
Speaker 1: entire lives. And if any of these people had bothered
Speaker 1: to spend five sec thinking about what purity culture is
Speaker 1: they would have realized it. Long is from a fanatically
Speaker 1: puritanical culture, a culture where, for example, in massage given
Speaker 1: by a woman where the man is like almost entirely naked,
Speaker 1: uh is something that would absolutely have been considered a
Speaker 1: sexual service. And like you know, and and if you
Speaker 1: think about this again for like five seconds, right when
Speaker 1: he's talking about removing temptation, he already thinks of all
Speaker 1: of these women as sex workers, because that's that's what
Speaker 1: he thinks the massage is. He thinks like that that
Speaker 1: that that's that's how he thinks about massages. It's yeah,
Speaker 1: it is it women are the like women do this
Speaker 1: then they cause men to sin, right, it's not it's
Speaker 1: nothing to do with what's going on with the man.
Speaker 1: It is specifically what the woman is doing. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and and and even then like it doesn't actually like
Speaker 1: I think I think that the important distinction here is
Speaker 1: that it does not matter when Long talks about how
Speaker 1: this is a place that was giving intemptation and also
Speaker 1: like like he was giving intemptation and he was like
Speaker 1: he was going there for his sex edition. Like it
Speaker 1: doesn't actually matter to him whether or not any of
Speaker 1: these women have ever like exchange money set at all.
Speaker 1: It doesn't, It doesn't, it doesn't need to be, yeah,
Speaker 1: because these people are fucking like it just engulfed in
Speaker 1: Like it's so totally engulfed in this incredibly like violence
Speaker 1: and racist and misogynists be homophobic ideology that it just
Speaker 1: sort of you know, like that that's just how they think.
Speaker 1: And I think that this is where we're going to
Speaker 1: return one final time this episode to race, because there's
Speaker 1: a mistake that people make thinking about this analytically that
Speaker 1: prevents him from understanding both what's happening in Atlanta and
Speaker 1: how sort of capitalist and racist violence happens everywhere. Which
Speaker 1: is that like, okay, so right when this happened, um,
Speaker 1: like when when when the press conference dropped, you got
Speaker 1: all that there are a lot of people like I
Speaker 1: think Glenn Greenwald did this like a leaf sing like
Speaker 1: there's a whole crew of people who were like this
Speaker 1: isn't about Asian racism, but all this is about him
Speaker 1: like hating sex workers, and okay, it is true that
Speaker 1: human labor has been transformed into a commodity that can
Speaker 1: be bought and sold at will. Now on on a
Speaker 1: on a more theoretical level. Right, you will see sort
Speaker 1: of incredibly theory brain people who will talk about how
Speaker 1: you know in in March's Critique of Political Economy, right,
Speaker 1: all labor is astracting, interchangeable, each each unit of labor
Speaker 1: time is equivalent, identical, and exchangeable. But here in the
Speaker 1: massage parlor, this is a deadly simplification this labor. That
Speaker 1: the labor that is going on here is Asian. It
Speaker 1: is indelibly stamped with race and ethnicity and nationality and
Speaker 1: hundreds of years of violence and perception. Um Rumors Paca,
Speaker 1: a assistant professor at the Institute of Women's Studies at
Speaker 1: the University of Georgia, roode a piece last year called
Speaker 1: white supremacy in the Wellness Industry, or why it matters
Speaker 1: that that this happened at a spot ah Um, And
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a passage on it because it's
Speaker 1: very good. Massage spas, also called salons or parlors, like
Speaker 1: the one where these crimes took place, are part of
Speaker 1: a broader industrial complex that capitalizes on the racist belief
Speaker 1: that Asian people and Asian woman in particular, possess magical, spiritual,
Speaker 1: and sexual healing abilities. These attitudes belong to an entrenched
Speaker 1: Orientalist infrastructure in the United States that connects yoga and
Speaker 1: meditation and massage to tourism, pleasure, and escape, signaled by
Speaker 1: the exotic tropical flower and the photo above, if there's
Speaker 1: a photo of flower at a parlor. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: And and this this labor, the labor of of of
Speaker 1: the massage that is happening here is it depends almost
Speaker 1: entirely on a very specific performance of a specific kind
Speaker 1: of Asian femininity. And you know, when this sort of
Speaker 1: gender and racialized violence. But when when this gender and
Speaker 1: racialized labor comes into contact with Long and all of
Speaker 1: this historical forces that he's bearing, he murders the workers.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I think, yeah, this is the part of
Speaker 1: the story of the Atlanta shooting that I think if
Speaker 1: people know about Atlanta shooting at all, like, this is
Speaker 1: the part they know about, right, they know the story
Speaker 1: of Robert Darren Long. But there are other stories here,
Speaker 1: stories that aren't stories that in large parts are just
Speaker 1: not about the US at all. Um. There are the
Speaker 1: stories of the victims, the survivors, and the absolute hell
Speaker 1: that brought them into the massage parlor in the first place.
Speaker 1: On the horrific night, and those are the stories that
Speaker 1: we're going to tell him part two. Yeah, well that
Speaker 1: doesn't for us today. I do want to say, I know, uh,
Speaker 1: I know Christmas planning these for the annivers three of
Speaker 1: the shooting, but they proved to be quite the daunting
Speaker 1: task to put together. I had to get had to
Speaker 1: get pushed back for a while. So but but big
Speaker 1: thanks to you for doing the work too. Read through
Speaker 1: all of the horrible things and if like the other
Speaker 1: thing I said about this, like if you if you
Speaker 1: think this is bad, wait till part two, which is
Speaker 1: even more wide spanning, and it has horrific and disturbing
Speaker 1: violence in a way that will I don't know, reduced
Speaker 1: media tears multiple times. And yeah, we'll leave you an
Speaker 1: existential dread of the condition of this world. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I guess again there there is there, There is ways
Speaker 1: to combat it, right, because all of these a lot
Speaker 1: a lot of these things, all right, you know, problems
Speaker 1: with like viewpoint and ideas in terms of how we
Speaker 1: view sex, how we view women, how we view race, um.
Speaker 1: And there are things that when you see you can
Speaker 1: interrogate in people, um, especially if you're especially if you're
Speaker 1: a Christian, if you're if you're going to church, these
Speaker 1: there are things to watch out for and you can
Speaker 1: push back on because and doing so can maybe save
Speaker 1: people's lives, because these ideas have a death count. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think I think there's another part of this too,
Speaker 1: which is that you know, I mean, the reason we
Speaker 1: talk about purity culture stuff so much, the reason we
Speaker 1: talk about the mobilizations of the evangelical rights so much,
Speaker 1: is that they keep producing these movements that you know,
Speaker 1: that that put that put our lives in danger. And
Speaker 1: the only way that we can stop this, and this
Speaker 1: is a thing that we can do, is you have
Speaker 1: to actually destroy their movement, right, you have you have
Speaker 1: to you have to actually break their power. You have
Speaker 1: to you know, you have to find various ways to
Speaker 1: break the power, break the power of these churches, and
Speaker 1: you have to find ways to break the power of
Speaker 1: their political movements. And that is not an easy task.
Speaker 1: But if if we want to live in a world well,
Speaker 1: I mean, just quite blank, if if we want to
Speaker 1: live in a world and not in you know, like
Speaker 1: four degrees fahrenheit, like unlivable death escape, like, we have
Speaker 1: to deal with these people because they are the source
Speaker 1: of almost every right wing movement that that we're facing,
Speaker 1: and they have to be crushed before they do this again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they're they're going to try. I mean there's yeah,
Speaker 1: because the biggest thing would would say is like reaching
Speaker 1: out to people who you know are in us or
Speaker 1: if you if you go to church. I think it's
Speaker 1: your duty as a Christian to push back on these
Speaker 1: things because I'm not gonna bash anyone specifically for whatever
Speaker 1: religion they have. I understand why people have this. I
Speaker 1: I can see how they work. Um. You know, I
Speaker 1: was raised in something very similar. Um. But you can
Speaker 1: you can still push back on the type of rhetoric
Speaker 1: that leads to these things in the type of like
Speaker 1: like objectification and racism that necessitates violence and gets people
Speaker 1: to be okay with violence, um, and pushing back against
Speaker 1: like a Christian apocalypse to worldviews and like the idea
Speaker 1: your your actions will determine your you know how, the
Speaker 1: spiritual quality of your soul and where it's going to
Speaker 1: reside for all of eternity. Right, All these things are
Speaker 1: our ideas that are pretty pretty like innately dangerous. Um.
Speaker 1: And there's ways to do religion that don't have that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think I think that is a good enough
Speaker 1: place till even for today, because I know part two
Speaker 1: we're gonna have some more more fire. Why why widespread problems? Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: well this has been make it happen here. You can
Speaker 1: find us in the social media places that happened here pods.
Speaker 1: You can also flee into the woods. Flee into the woods.
Speaker 1: But but but before you flee into the woods, subscribe
Speaker 1: to the pod and leave a five star review. Bye
Speaker 1: bye bye everybody. I see you tomorrow. Yep, it's it
Speaker 1: could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and
Speaker 1: some other stuff occasionally. I'm Robert Evans. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: show today, our guests fresh off their new hit movie
Speaker 1: by paramount Garrison Davis. Uh and and yeah, what what
Speaker 1: what I'm doing? Like a like a thing, Chris Garrison.
Speaker 1: Garrison's lost the thread? Why don't you pick it up?
Speaker 1: I also have lost the thread. So here's the one.
Speaker 1: This has been very confusing for of an episode, absolutely baffling. Look,
Speaker 1: you want things to not be confusing, you have somebody
Speaker 1: else introduce your podcast. That's just the way it goes noted. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so what welcome to part two of the Atlantis shooting. Um,
Speaker 1: we are back with actually less Atlanta this time, but
Speaker 1: more shooting. Oh good, sorry, this is a very absurd
Speaker 1: Really we found ourselves, dear God, just a normal day
Speaker 1: at work. Oh take it away, Chris, you got this,
Speaker 1: You got this. We believe in you. There's there's a
Speaker 1: tendency I think among Asian American writers where when we
Speaker 1: get confronted with what are you know, considered quote unquote
Speaker 1: Asian American stories, there's almost inevitably an autobiographical pivot that happens.
Speaker 1: Like at some points in the piece Um made Jong,
Speaker 1: the author of the Vanity Fair piece I mentioned last episodes,
Speaker 1: that's been a major source for both these episodes. It
Speaker 1: doesn't her piece, So do I mean? Like dozens and
Speaker 1: dozens and dozens of as American writers who are you know,
Speaker 1: much more accomplished and talented than I am, And like,
Speaker 1: I get it. I I don't blame them for it.
Speaker 1: I think it's a powerful way to anchor a story
Speaker 1: and understand the story. And I also think that it's
Speaker 1: why we miss like half of the story that we
Speaker 1: when we talk about things, because you know, the the
Speaker 1: the audio autobiographical focus has this tendency to narrow the
Speaker 1: scope into looking at just sort of the US. And
Speaker 1: this story and the story of Asian Americans in general,
Speaker 1: isn't just a story about sort of a minority in
Speaker 1: the US or about American imperialism. It's about Asia itself,
Speaker 1: and here especially it's about China and Korea to lesser
Speaker 1: cent Japan. And you know, the histories of these places
Speaker 1: have as much to do with why the people who
Speaker 1: died in Atlanta were in those rooms on that day
Speaker 1: as Christian purity culture does. And you know, by by
Speaker 1: bym actually looking at this, we we got to introduce
Speaker 1: another key player in this horror show who only sort
Speaker 1: of appeared change intily in part one, which is capitalism.
Speaker 1: Because capitalism is about to show up and make just
Speaker 1: all of this monumentally worse. Yeah. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: Steven Seagal in that way. Yeah, I think more much
Speaker 1: more active than Steven Seagal, but by capitalism, unfortunately, moves
Speaker 1: at an incredibly relentless pace. Yeah. Capitalism's knees are an
Speaker 1: incredible shape. Yeah. So, and and this, this, this brings
Speaker 1: us back to Atlanta itself. Now, Yo Fong died a
Speaker 1: hero in the final moments of her life. As shots
Speaker 1: rang across Young Zation missaw she motioned for Marcus Leone,
Speaker 1: still half naked on the massage table, to stay still
Speaker 1: and wait for her to walk in front of him
Speaker 1: before he died behind the massage table by covering Leon's
Speaker 1: movement as she opened the door. She sacrificed her life
Speaker 1: to save the life of a man she'd met just
Speaker 1: minutes before. Her award, in typical American fashion, was a
Speaker 1: bullet in the head. It took six days for her
Speaker 1: family in China to realize that she had been killed.
Speaker 1: By village custom, the remains of an unmarried woman who
Speaker 1: left the village could not re enter it to be buried.
Speaker 1: Her body thus lay unclaimed in a morgue for nineteen
Speaker 1: days before she was buried in the land of her
Speaker 1: killer at a funerals attended entirely by strangers. Marcus Leone,
Speaker 1: the man Fong sacrificed her life to save, was forced
Speaker 1: to return to work at FedEx just three days after
Speaker 1: surviving the massacre. The sound of the packages he dropped
Speaker 1: on his delivery runs sounded like gunshots. He quit soon after.
Speaker 1: There is no justice in this world. Only an unending
Speaker 1: parade of or the details of which are somehow each
Speaker 1: worse than the last. And it is. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: I think what I wanted to sort of what I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about this episode, which is that, like,
Speaker 1: it's not just that there was a shooting, it's that
Speaker 1: each element of why everyone is there is its own
Speaker 1: successive horror story, and the conditions that produced this horror
Speaker 1: or not. You know, they're not just two conditions that
Speaker 1: produce Probader and Long. They're not just the conditions that
Speaker 1: produced to shoot her. They are the conditions that produced
Speaker 1: sail Fung. She spent almost her entire life as a
Speaker 1: miket workers, supporting a family whose most pressing concern was
Speaker 1: attempting to marry her off. And and I think it's
Speaker 1: worth tracing out these conditions and how they developed. Because
Speaker 1: a twelve year old girl drops out of middle school
Speaker 1: to work at a factory fifty miles away and that
Speaker 1: eventually is gunned down by an American racist is not
Speaker 1: how the future of Asia was supposed to go. Like,
Speaker 1: you know, I I don't have much love and imagine that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like I don't have much loved for now, but
Speaker 1: I don't think if you showed mouth this he would
Speaker 1: be like, oh my god, this is the future that
Speaker 1: I wanted for my people. Like this, things have gone
Speaker 1: very badly wrong, and I think to understand how we
Speaker 1: got to this hell, we need to go back to
Speaker 1: another hell, which is the beginning of the Korean War.
Speaker 1: And you know, we've talked about the effects that the
Speaker 1: Korean War had on Korean women in the last episode,
Speaker 1: but I think there's a few other things that are
Speaker 1: worth emphasizing here, one of which is that the absolute
Speaker 1: devastation that the war rought on North and South Korea
Speaker 1: is incalculable. I mean, the effects of this I still
Speaker 1: felt to this day. It was a utterly devastating war. Um.
Speaker 1: But it also has sort of more subtle effects on
Speaker 1: the sort of politics and economics of of the region
Speaker 1: because what one of the you know, one of the
Speaker 1: very important things about this war is that the US
Speaker 1: is fighting in East Asia, and this means that the
Speaker 1: US is going to leave an enormous army in South Korea,
Speaker 1: which has its own military and sort of political and
Speaker 1: economic consequences. And you know, those troops are still there
Speaker 1: to this day, like technically fighting a war which has
Speaker 1: never formally ended. And you know, we'll come back a
Speaker 1: bit to this later. But this has a enormous application
Speaker 1: for the entire region. Um. I've I've talked on bastards
Speaker 1: before about like you know, about so many effects this has.
Speaker 1: But you know, Korea and later Vietnam are a major
Speaker 1: like the wars, the US fights there are a major
Speaker 1: factor behind the industrialization of Japan, which sees you know,
Speaker 1: enormous U S investment as part of this attempt to
Speaker 1: like shorten American supply lines by exporting their military industrial
Speaker 1: complex to East Asia. You know, we talked about the
Speaker 1: Japanese ankle this, but sell Korea is likewise industrialized, so
Speaker 1: American capital for you know, pretty much the same reason. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and this goes on to the
Speaker 1: extent that like Korean troops like fight on the side
Speaker 1: of the US in Vietnam, and you know, so in
Speaker 1: South Korea's production base proves a sort of a pivotal
Speaker 1: military asset for the US war machine in the East. Now,
Speaker 1: the thing I think, and I think I think that
Speaker 1: part of it like is understood decently well because you know,
Speaker 1: if you if you if if you do if you
Speaker 1: like you know literally anything about this region. You've you've
Speaker 1: seen the effects of this stuff. But the part of
Speaker 1: it I think is less understood is that in China,
Speaker 1: this the war has a similar effect, which is that
Speaker 1: communist leadership fights this war right and it immediately becomes
Speaker 1: clear to them that there is a looping possibility they're
Speaker 1: gonna have to fight the US again. And if they're
Speaker 1: gonna have to fight the US again, they need an
Speaker 1: actual sort of modern industrial base to fight a war
Speaker 1: against the US. And this, you know, this eas to
Speaker 1: sort of militarization, industrization, and you you get a look
Speaker 1: at two very different kinds of state led developments, uh,
Speaker 1: which I'm going to call state led development corruption and
Speaker 1: state state led development socialism question mark, which sort of
Speaker 1: which sort of a play out in China and Korea. UM.
Speaker 1: And you know, I think it's it's it's worth actually
Speaker 1: talking about this because both of these systems are essentially
Speaker 1: going to collapse, and when they do, they are going
Speaker 1: to send an enormous number of people, both in China
Speaker 1: and Korea, you know, spreading, spreading across the world seeking
Speaker 1: like any kind of sort of economic salvation. And a
Speaker 1: lot of the people who are killed in Atlanta are
Speaker 1: in Atlanta because of these because of these crises. Yes,
Speaker 1: so so. The first of these is the chapel system
Speaker 1: in Korea, which is sort of informally established by the
Speaker 1: dictator Park junk Key is like the core of his
Speaker 1: plan for economic development, and it generates a number of
Speaker 1: extremely powerful family owned megan conglomerates with intimate ties to
Speaker 1: the state and these sort of various political factions, and
Speaker 1: these conglomerates which control just vast sections of the Korean economy.
Speaker 1: I like, like, like to this day, Samsung, which is
Speaker 1: the largest the remaining chabels, Like I think I think
Speaker 1: they're they're total percentage of the GDP of Korea's like
Speaker 1: seventeen percent or something. It's like, it's it's absolutely absurd. Jesus, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like and and and and like and the thing is
Speaker 1: that you know, and it's sort of it's basically about
Speaker 1: this is that like the chabels are much weaker than
Speaker 1: the ust to be um for reasons that we will
Speaker 1: get to in a bit. And you know, when when
Speaker 1: when they're found and when they're sort of at the
Speaker 1: height of their powers they have, you know, they're they're
Speaker 1: they're established with three goals. Um, there's an attempt to
Speaker 1: develop the economy. I you know, there's an attempt to
Speaker 1: sort of the fuel. There's attempt to sort of fuel
Speaker 1: the Abaric in South Korean war machines. And the third
Speaker 1: thing I'm trying to do is to make a lot
Speaker 1: of people in the government and their allies indescribably rich.
Speaker 1: And it works sort of amazingly, which is a weird
Speaker 1: thing to say about development regime started by military edcatorship,
Speaker 1: but they have they have an enormous amount of mill
Speaker 1: of American capital military aids, and like they do successfully develop,
Speaker 1: they kill in enormous sumber of people in the process,
Speaker 1: but you know, they do it. On on the other side,
Speaker 1: you have Chinese datelight developments, and this is also about
Speaker 1: economic development and fueling the military. But you know, the
Speaker 1: goal here is to create an economic base for socialism
Speaker 1: and this does not work. Um. There there there's number
Speaker 1: of complicated reasons for this. The simplest one is that
Speaker 1: China just doesn't get the kind of investment technology transfer
Speaker 1: south Korea gets until like way later. Um. But the
Speaker 1: other really important element of this for this story is
Speaker 1: about the urban world divide, and this is another thing
Speaker 1: I've talked about Bastards like on I've talked about on
Speaker 1: Bastards a bit, but I think it's worth going into
Speaker 1: the details a little bit because otherwise a lot of
Speaker 1: the stuff that's going to happen that is, you know,
Speaker 1: the the part of the story that is directly sending
Speaker 1: twelve year olds off to a factory and Shenzen like
Speaker 1: don't make any sense without it. So to make a
Speaker 1: very complicated and shifting set of economic programs like as
Speaker 1: simple as possible. UM. Chinese industrial policy dread what's sort
Speaker 1: of called the socialist period is about extracting grain from
Speaker 1: the countryside and fuelly and funneling get into urban industrial
Speaker 1: developments and you know, to get it, to get it
Speaker 1: like understanding of what we're talking about here. So the
Speaker 1: CCP is essentially deliberately under developing the countryside in favor
Speaker 1: of developing cities. And this is this is the supposed
Speaker 1: to state policy. UM from three in nine of the
Speaker 1: Chinese population is doing agricultural labor, but agriculture receives less
Speaker 1: than ten percent of state investments over the same period,
Speaker 1: so they are like really really really incredibly not funneling
Speaker 1: any resources back into into rural areas. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: is there a degree to that? Is there a degree
Speaker 1: of that that is maybe related to like I know
Speaker 1: in the USS are a lot of the early left
Speaker 1: wing resistance to the Soviet regime came from rural areas. Um,
Speaker 1: is there anything to do with that? Like, is it
Speaker 1: kind of a desire to avoid developing these places that
Speaker 1: are less controllable? No? And this is this is the
Speaker 1: sort of interesting thing about China is that I mean, Okay,
Speaker 1: so the CCP originally has an urban base, but they
Speaker 1: managed to get their retire urban base killed. So this
Speaker 1: is this is this is the cause of like like this,
Speaker 1: this is this is one of the reasons for the
Speaker 1: center Soviet split. Like this is basically like salon in
Speaker 1: Trotsky or bickering, and their bickering gets like a million
Speaker 1: Chinese communist killed, and that means that you know, this
Speaker 1: this this is this is where the sort of rise
Speaker 1: of Mao comes in, because Mao is a mau as
Speaker 1: a peasant organizer, and once the entire World Party is dead,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, okay, so now we have a peasant
Speaker 1: base and they have they actually have a really they
Speaker 1: have they have like a basically unprecedented level of of
Speaker 1: sort of buy in from the countryside. But the problem
Speaker 1: is that the party just isn't interested in world development
Speaker 1: because the thing that they want is they want to
Speaker 1: be able to develop military power and they want to
Speaker 1: be able to develop like heavy industry, and those aren't
Speaker 1: things that they think you can do in the countryside.
Speaker 1: And so their strategy is just to just I mean
Speaker 1: just literally it's just pure grain extraction from the countryside
Speaker 1: and then using that to feel industrial development, which they're
Speaker 1: doing for i mean largely ideological reasons, but it also
Speaker 1: does have to do with the fact that China, like
Speaker 1: like people people talk a lot about how like, you know,
Speaker 1: the communist revolution in Russia happens and like the least
Speaker 1: developed country in Europe, and it's like, yeah, but like
Speaker 1: Russia had like several times more industrial capacity in Russian
Speaker 1: Revolution than China does after the war. So this is
Speaker 1: a country that is like a complete economic backwater. And
Speaker 1: so you know, this, this is this is part of
Speaker 1: what they're doing. I thought it doesn't it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: And you know, I actually mentioned that there's one other
Speaker 1: thing that they're doing here, which is that so they're
Speaker 1: based in the peasantry is fairly solid. But the other
Speaker 1: thing they have to use this grain budget for is
Speaker 1: to buy off this like incredibly bilitant working class that
Speaker 1: they've inherited, because these people are on strike like constantly,
Speaker 1: and this is this is this is a really serious
Speaker 1: problem for the CCP, and so they you know, they
Speaker 1: have all these welfare programs, they have all of this
Speaker 1: sort of these resources that they're they're paying they're putting
Speaker 1: into sort of buying off this class. And the result
Speaker 1: of this is you have just incredible rural poverty because
Speaker 1: like one of one of the things that happens here
Speaker 1: is I guess, I guess you called the benefits, but
Speaker 1: things like there's like housing, education, like medical care, this
Speaker 1: stuff is all distributed like through your work and through
Speaker 1: your household registration. And so you know, if if if
Speaker 1: you're someone who has a job in the countryside, you're
Speaker 1: the resources that you're getting are are also from the countryside,
Speaker 1: and that means that you have just these like awful
Speaker 1: underfooted services, Your benefits are terrible. And even if you
Speaker 1: can somehow get a job in the city, which is
Speaker 1: really hard because China also has these like really intense
Speaker 1: internal like immigration restrictions. So like if if you're like
Speaker 1: in another province that you're not supposed to be, like you,
Speaker 1: you will get deported back to your home province. There's
Speaker 1: all these are these really tight controls, and this means
Speaker 1: that like if you're in a rural area, like your
Speaker 1: livelihood is tied to your family unit in a way
Speaker 1: that's like not happening anywhere near as intensely in the cities.
Speaker 1: And when I say your livelihood is tied to your
Speaker 1: emily unit, what I mean is that like other than
Speaker 1: this like brief like token attempt they make to socialize,
Speaker 1: like housework reproductive labor in the greatly forward men in
Speaker 1: the state are just like entirely dependent on uncompensated housework
Speaker 1: and production by women, which yeah, it's not just a
Speaker 1: China thing. Yeah, I mean yeah, it's like okay, it's like, oh, hey,
Speaker 1: this sounds like your modern system and like yes, this
Speaker 1: is true. Um. But on the other hand, the socialists
Speaker 1: like ideologically are claiming to be better than this, So
Speaker 1: I'm holding them through their own standards and giving them
Speaker 1: just like d on this because this is like yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, like I think this is really one of like,
Speaker 1: you know, Okay, so they failed to end capitalism. But
Speaker 1: I think if if you look at, like, what is
Speaker 1: the other great failure of the Chinese Revolution, it's that
Speaker 1: they never dealt with the patriarchy. And this means, like,
Speaker 1: you know what, when when Mao is saying stuff about
Speaker 1: like women hold up half the sky, like, what what
Speaker 1: he actually means is that like women's labor is holding
Speaker 1: up like seventy percent of the budget and they're getting
Speaker 1: like twenty of the pay. And this this is extremely
Speaker 1: important for reasons that we will get to in a second,
Speaker 1: because it turns out if your entire economy is based
Speaker 1: on patriarchy, really bad things start happening in terms of
Speaker 1: your gender politics, which is a thing that has never
Speaker 1: has literally never happened in any other regime. But we
Speaker 1: should not at all take any lessons from this about
Speaker 1: how our own economy works. It's great, It's completely fine.
Speaker 1: The other thing that we need to talk about is
Speaker 1: the CCPs just utter full scale war against urban workers.
Speaker 1: And this is not the kind of like abstract class
Speaker 1: war that you hear Left is talking about all the time,
Speaker 1: that's you know about like wages, unionization and so forth.
Speaker 1: Like this is an actual war that is resolved by
Speaker 1: the by just the p l A, the Chinese army
Speaker 1: just butchering the Chinese working class. And this comes to
Speaker 1: a head and the Cultural Revolution ends. You know. I
Speaker 1: have I have a whole rant about the Culture Revolution
Speaker 1: that I will do sometime that's not now. But the
Speaker 1: short version of it is that one of the things
Speaker 1: that happens in the Culture Revolution is that the CCP
Speaker 1: crushes these sort of rebel worker factions and they kill
Speaker 1: a million people, like from from from from Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's like it's really it's really slick. Comparing it,
Speaker 1: like to the scale of like the great anti communist purges,
Speaker 1: like this is I think it. I think it's actually more.
Speaker 1: I think it's a million people. I think it's more
Speaker 1: people than than Sue Hardo killed. It's like there you go,
Speaker 1: see there's some left right unity. Yeah, it's well, I
Speaker 1: mean Mount MoU undisputed greatest anti communists, has the highest
Speaker 1: number of Communism kills. Well, I don't know, let's let's
Speaker 1: I mean, Joseph Stalin's in that running. That's true. You've
Speaker 1: got to You've got to. You've got a couple of
Speaker 1: Titans battling it out here. Yeah, it's it's it's definitely,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a difficult choice. But yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: like they are like like this CCP is literally fighting
Speaker 1: a war against against cerverin workers, and like this is
Speaker 1: even by like the mid seventies, there are there are
Speaker 1: moments where the army is sending like tens of thousands
Speaker 1: of work since the thousands of troops like in the
Speaker 1: cities to break up strike waves. And this is this
Speaker 1: is an enormous problem for CCP, you know, Okay, Like
Speaker 1: it's an aorways problem for them politically because it turns
Speaker 1: out that being a communist party and then the thing
Speaker 1: that you're doing all of the time is sending soldiers
Speaker 1: to shoot workers is really bad for your political system ideologically.
Speaker 1: Well okay, that's your opinion. Yeah it does. It doesn't
Speaker 1: go great for them. And and the the other problem
Speaker 1: they have is, uh, you know, this this creates this
Speaker 1: like this incredible militarization of society, and this leads a
Speaker 1: stagnation and there's all this corruption that's happening. But the
Speaker 1: other problem is like, okay, so if you're like a
Speaker 1: cadre like Planner, right, and there's always people on strike.
Speaker 1: You need to not be strike because you needed to
Speaker 1: produce stuff for your like central planning production schedules, and
Speaker 1: so all of these like cadre planners start being like, okay,
Speaker 1: these workers keep going on strike, like where where can
Speaker 1: we get labor that won't do this? And they start
Speaker 1: looking at the countryside and they start going like beard stroke,
Speaker 1: can we send this over here? And meanwhile, like the
Speaker 1: actual world, like real lights are fed up with just
Speaker 1: being treated like shit, and they start decollectivizing their farms
Speaker 1: because okay, there's a lot of reasons why they're doing this,
Speaker 1: but they essentially start forming these things that become called
Speaker 1: town and village enterprises, which are these like the civil
Speaker 1: sixplination of it is that they basically start for forming
Speaker 1: capitalist companies and trying to make money. But the ownership
Speaker 1: structures are a bit different because they're like, you know,
Speaker 1: it'll be like a village, right, and like the village
Speaker 1: like technically collectively owns this like company that makes tires
Speaker 1: or something, right, And this is where you start getting
Speaker 1: markets coming China. And the CCP looks at this, it
Speaker 1: goes like yeah, sure this is fine, Uh that this
Speaker 1: this won't stop our communism thing because we're having budget
Speaker 1: shortfalls right now, and if we let someone else do
Speaker 1: this work, we don't have to pay for it. And
Speaker 1: these so these town of village enterprises are called tv s.
Speaker 1: Like mostly what they're doing is they're like selling parts
Speaker 1: and stuff to like these giants. State own enterprises, which
Speaker 1: are you know, your state own enterprises are things that
Speaker 1: are building like bikes, like tractors and refrigerators, so they're
Speaker 1: like you know, they're selling them like wheels or like
Speaker 1: refrigerator parts. And this is this is the thing that
Speaker 1: becomes the core of the Chinese economy, particularly in Dario
Speaker 1: Fung's home province of Guandong, because Gando is really unique,
Speaker 1: well okay, really unique province. Like this is the thing
Speaker 1: you can say about literally every province, but Gwendong is
Speaker 1: particularly unique in this period because it's right next to
Speaker 1: Hong Kong. And this means that, I mean, there's always
Speaker 1: been sort of like capital kind of through really shady
Speaker 1: black markets and like people passing each other like notes
Speaker 1: under dinner tables and extra like all all of the
Speaker 1: weird like diplomacy stuff that like like Kissinger and Dixon
Speaker 1: get up to is happening through these like weird back
Speaker 1: channels that a lot of which are running through Hong Kong.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of stuff that's been sort of running
Speaker 1: through there. And when this stuff starts to happen, um
Speaker 1: you uh Gwendong gets these special economic zones and this
Speaker 1: becomes sort of the prototype for China's like eventual sort
Speaker 1: of capitalist centric like export development model. Um Gwendong is
Speaker 1: like they're they're literally there, They're they're they're they're taking
Speaker 1: like form capital from Hong Kong and they're using it
Speaker 1: to produce good for the market. And this is the
Speaker 1: world that Dano Fong and shout Jitan grow up in. Um.
Speaker 1: It's a world where on the one hand, there's enormous
Speaker 1: economic growth. On the other hand, like all of the
Speaker 1: safety nets that Chinese socialism have put in place are
Speaker 1: just like being completely destroyed and everyone is once again
Speaker 1: dependent on wages to survive. And it's also an incredibly
Speaker 1: deeply patriarchal world. You know, and we've seen this already
Speaker 1: right with Diane Fung's village, just like refusing to bury
Speaker 1: her body because she's not married, and you know, this
Speaker 1: is this is something that's only gotten worse as the
Speaker 1: sort of as the eighties where we're on, you get
Speaker 1: into their form period. You have simultaneous you have the
Speaker 1: one child policy, which is this incredibly draconian state and
Speaker 1: forced destruction of bodily autonomy, and it also serves this
Speaker 1: really horrific role and devalue in girls because girls are
Speaker 1: as having less economic value than boys. And so you
Speaker 1: get all these things where like you get these you
Speaker 1: get targeted like gender targeted abortions. They're these masterializations that happen,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's this just enormous patriarchal engine and it sucks.
Speaker 1: And there's also there's a return to Confucianism as well,
Speaker 1: because like, and this is one of the things is
Speaker 1: like the most infuriating about this because like like of
Speaker 1: like what the original Chinese Revolution was about was like, hey,
Speaker 1: Confucianism sucks. Like this incredible like reactionary patriarchal ideology is
Speaker 1: in fact bad. And then like forty years in there,
Speaker 1: like hold on, wait, what if we bring this ship back?
Speaker 1: And it is it is it is extremely bad, and
Speaker 1: you know, and it serves as a sort of like
Speaker 1: like this pacifying picture archical ideology that they're using to
Speaker 1: sort of hold the family unit together because the family
Speaker 1: unit are so there's a lot of the firms in
Speaker 1: this period they're just like owned by families, right, and
Speaker 1: you know, you can there's there's a lot of sort
Speaker 1: of similarities here between if you look at your like,
Speaker 1: you know, you're you're sort of like right wing, like
Speaker 1: culturally Christian like small business owner families, and you look
Speaker 1: at this and it's like, uh, we've we've we've redeveloped
Speaker 1: the wheel here. We we have once again created the
Speaker 1: patriarchal death engine. Good who it's it's great, it's yeah.
Speaker 1: And this this is basically this is the world that
Speaker 1: Dayo fang like grows up in. And this is the
Speaker 1: period where the old urban working class is just hammered
Speaker 1: to pieces so that the state and capital just gorge
Speaker 1: itself as well for benefits, and the new Chinese working
Speaker 1: class is born, and this migrant working class, it's vanguard
Speaker 1: are these women who are given to imperatives by their families.
Speaker 1: And these these these imperatives are given I mean literally
Speaker 1: Dayong fang like Dayo fang Like directly and I think
Speaker 1: indirectly to um shout git on well because it like
Speaker 1: with with Daya Fong, like we literally have the quotes
Speaker 1: of this right, like she she is told by her
Speaker 1: family get married and find a job and shout Shitan
Speaker 1: gets married off at twenty but a middle school day
Speaker 1: Fog like drops out of school and just goes to
Speaker 1: work in a factory in Shenzen, and this like these
Speaker 1: are the women who built modern China, like these are
Speaker 1: these are literally these are the people who turned shens
Speaker 1: In from a tiny rural town into a world class
Speaker 1: manufacturing caub that is literally larger than any city in
Speaker 1: North America. And I mean this happens in the span
Speaker 1: of like a couple of decades, and they get jack
Speaker 1: shipped for it, like the wages they are working for.
Speaker 1: Like Dayan Fong's brother is working on rubber plantation. He's
Speaker 1: making five dollars a month. And you know, in Dion
Speaker 1: Fong's case, like the other thing she's dealing with is
Speaker 1: literally these constant demands for a family to get married,
Speaker 1: and Fong just refuses. They try to was a young adult,
Speaker 1: she just goes no, and they try to try to
Speaker 1: to get like when she's like thirty eight, they like
Speaker 1: they bring her back to her village and her like
Speaker 1: pick a husband, she just goes no, and she just
Speaker 1: like they keep showing your guys gypsy come like no.
Speaker 1: And you know what she does instead is charter her
Speaker 1: own path by managing to secure a visa to the
Speaker 1: US where and this this, this is so Diao pongs
Speaker 1: like he's a margant worker for ages and eventually I think,
Speaker 1: like she wasn't sixteen, she moves to the US to
Speaker 1: support her family. Again from afar, there's there's only there's
Speaker 1: one more piece of macroeconomics. I mean you talk about
Speaker 1: before we can follow Dio Pong to the massage parlor,
Speaker 1: and this one is going to get like everyone else,
Speaker 1: to the scene of this massacre. So what when we
Speaker 1: last left our Korean corruption chapels, business business is booming,
Speaker 1: and in the early nineties business is like even more booming.
Speaker 1: It is this is this is the best I've ever
Speaker 1: done economically. And the reason is the best I've ever
Speaker 1: done economically is because is by in large part because
Speaker 1: of the thing that I am just perpetually cursed by
Speaker 1: when I do research for this show, which is the
Speaker 1: Plaza chords. Um. I've talked about this before, but I
Speaker 1: will once again, do a brief summary of this, which
Speaker 1: is that so in the nineties, as people probably are
Speaker 1: aware of the U s the US manufacturing economy is dying.
Speaker 1: And this is a real problem for Reagan because everyone's
Speaker 1: like Reagan, why does the economy suck? And his solution
Speaker 1: to this is just basically, at gunpoint, forcing Japan and
Speaker 1: West Germany to like let the U s D value
Speaker 1: its currency relative to the end of the Deutsche Mark.
Speaker 1: And it's like, Okay, this is a this is a boring,
Speaker 1: tetocratic thing. But the thing it actually does is if
Speaker 1: if your currency is weaker than another currency, it's easier
Speaker 1: for you to like sell them to have an export
Speaker 1: economy and sell them stuff. And this sets off just
Speaker 1: like an incredibly catastrophic chain of events where the US
Speaker 1: manufacturing actually comes back because you know, hey, hey, look
Speaker 1: the dollars the dollars week and now we can produce
Speaker 1: it again. But it just, you know it, it combines
Speaker 1: with this like structural weakness, Japan's economy, Japan's economies dimplodes,
Speaker 1: and Japan goes, okay, funk it. How do we keep
Speaker 1: the economy going without manufacturing sector? And their solution is
Speaker 1: invest in other countries and do real estate speculation, and
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so obviously nothing bad ever happens happens
Speaker 1: when you do real estate speculation. And the Japanese economy
Speaker 1: was completely fine until it collapsed like five years later. Um,
Speaker 1: but this this is a series of effects. One of
Speaker 1: them is that the Korean shables, you know, those those
Speaker 1: companies that are doing like literally the best business I've
Speaker 1: ever done. The reason they're doing this is because of
Speaker 1: Japanese credit and the fact that like there's there's more
Speaker 1: complicated currency bullshit going on. But basically, like the value
Speaker 1: the value of the Korean currency was pegged to the dollar,
Speaker 1: and so when the dollars value decreased, uh, the wand
Speaker 1: also decreased, and so you know this, this this gives
Speaker 1: Korea like a big manufacturing competitive manufacturing edge. But then
Speaker 1: you know, Japan goes under and they start to lose credit,
Speaker 1: and then the US does the reverse Plaza Chords where
Speaker 1: they just reverse the thing that they did before, and
Speaker 1: so now the dollar is incredibly strong again. Every other
Speaker 1: currency is really weak well due to it. And this
Speaker 1: just like this just obliterates like every economy in East Asia,
Speaker 1: like they all just implode, Thailand goes under, and most
Speaker 1: of these countries that have never recovered, like Thailand trickler,
Speaker 1: like the I mean, South Korea kind of does, but
Speaker 1: it's basically the only one. All the rest of the
Speaker 1: economies are just obliterated. And you know, this, this is
Speaker 1: this is the Asian economic crisis, and you know, saddle
Speaker 1: with like enormous debts and declining profits like these tables
Speaker 1: started collapsing left and right, and South Korea just is
Speaker 1: just on the edge of bankruptcy and right on Q
Speaker 1: the I m F shows up and makes everything worse
Speaker 1: because yeah, it's great, it's the I m F. They yeah,
Speaker 1: they do, they do normal I m F stuff, and
Speaker 1: they you know, they impose a bunch of austerity measures,
Speaker 1: and this just this annihilates the Korean middle class. Like
Speaker 1: it's just it just gets obliterated. This is this, this
Speaker 1: is just a death knell. And it it also has
Speaker 1: you know, it has a lot of effects. But one
Speaker 1: of the other ones is the Korean labor movements is
Speaker 1: really severely damaged by just all the economic devastates that's
Speaker 1: happening around them. And the product of this is just
Speaker 1: as sort of rural poverty drives Dayong Fong and Jan
Speaker 1: from their villages. The economic collapse drives Kian Jung Kim grants,
Speaker 1: who's one of the other people who died in this shooting,
Speaker 1: from Korea to the US. And this is something that
Speaker 1: this is there's there's something about the U S here. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: something about the US is that it's economy is incredibly strong,
Speaker 1: and the dollar is incredibly strong. And even in people
Speaker 1: who come to the US for other reasons that the
Speaker 1: two of the women who went up here, like are
Speaker 1: here basically because they buried someone. And but even that,
Speaker 1: you know, they like there's a couple of people like
Speaker 1: they marry someone and they break up, divorces the but
Speaker 1: they stay in the U s. And they stay in
Speaker 1: the US because like the median American income is like
Speaker 1: three times the median American income in China, and that's
Speaker 1: like now, and so you know, and the combination of
Speaker 1: that and the strength of the American the American dollars
Speaker 1: sort of it brings it brings the brave, the desperate,
Speaker 1: and just the love struck to our shores. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: if you remember lcs Hernande's Ortiz, Who's who's the man
Speaker 1: that long like shot while he was on his knees
Speaker 1: begging for his life. Um Hernanda's Ortiz was in that
Speaker 1: mall because he was wiring money home to his family
Speaker 1: in Guatemala. And you know, we could do another entire
Speaker 1: story here about Guatemala and the United Fruit Company and
Speaker 1: these the u S baccus and genocides. But I think
Speaker 1: the thing about this story is that every atrocity is
Speaker 1: tied to every other atrocity, you know, and it creates
Speaker 1: this web of death that we sort of you know,
Speaker 1: we we euphemistically call it capitalism or society or reality.
Speaker 1: And the survivors of this are just flung from meat
Speaker 1: grinder to meet grinder, desperately looking for a new life
Speaker 1: in new country, and you know they get there, in
Speaker 1: the country just buries them instead. Yongfang was also you know,
Speaker 1: constantly sending money home to her family. When she arrives
Speaker 1: in the US. She and she's supporting like ten members
Speaker 1: of her family off of a salary. That is, like
Speaker 1: I mean, like she supporting to members her family off
Speaker 1: of the salary that you get from massage work. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that this is like like again, I think
Speaker 1: something like people don't understand about the US is that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: American wages are low, but the dollar is so strong
Speaker 1: that even like like like small amounts of money that
Speaker 1: you can send, like small amounts of money in dollars
Speaker 1: you can send back home have this enormous economic impact.
Speaker 1: And there is there is an enormous like an absolutely
Speaker 1: enormous sort of network of of immigrants in the US
Speaker 1: who are here basically to work in the center business
Speaker 1: is back home. And this is I mean, this is
Speaker 1: like this is an enormous part of just how the
Speaker 1: economy the Philippines works because of yeah, a bunch of
Speaker 1: the just incredibly fucked up stuff that the marcos Is did. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, for for Asian women in particular, once
Speaker 1: they get here, they're often drawn to spot work because
Speaker 1: and there's there's a lot of reasons we'll get into
Speaker 1: in a second, but these spas, the spas are some
Speaker 1: such just like a microcosm of the US, Like the
Speaker 1: pay is good, and the people doing the work often
Speaker 1: like for it to other jobs that are accessible to immigrants. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: they're accessible to immgrants with their levels of political and
Speaker 1: economic capital and social connections, which is usually really not
Speaker 1: that large. But the problem is, you know, as as
Speaker 1: with everything in the US, it's also often dangerous, like
Speaker 1: the particular kind of sort of exposure and performance of
Speaker 1: femininity that you need to do. This leaves these workers
Speaker 1: incredibly vulnerable to stockers, and you know, they face sort
Speaker 1: of constant like racial massages abuse. UM Butterfly, which is
Speaker 1: a Toronto based sex worker group, released a report that
Speaker 1: said that half of all massage parlor workers reported some
Speaker 1: kind of threat to their safety at work. Jesus, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's workplace is both incredibly dangerous. And then you know,
Speaker 1: and when when when when we're saying like threat to
Speaker 1: their workplace, that doesn't that's not even like that's not
Speaker 1: even counting the police. And if you've read anything about this,
Speaker 1: you'll read people saying things like massage parlors face constant
Speaker 1: police raids and this is true. But if anything, it
Speaker 1: understands how bad it actually is because like Asian massage
Speaker 1: parlers are subjected to two different kinds of police rates
Speaker 1: that just happened constantly. Um, I'm going to read a
Speaker 1: thing from BuzzFeed. Yeah, it's it's great, it's it's really fun.
Speaker 1: Fro from three thousand six of people arrested for unauthorized
Speaker 1: practice of a profession for any job requiring a license
Speaker 1: in New York. We're Asian and nine percent were women,
Speaker 1: according to data from the New York Division of Criminal
Speaker 1: Justice Services, and our prostitution is a misdemetor defense. Unauthorized
Speaker 1: practice of a profession, which is the charge that covers
Speaker 1: unlicensed massage along with roles like veterinary medicine, engineering is
Speaker 1: a felony that carries higher penalty, including up to four
Speaker 1: years of jail time. Now I'm no expert, but that's
Speaker 1: sure does sound like racism of that misogyny, because like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's an argument to me, like if you're if you're
Speaker 1: moonlighting as a bridge engineer and you're not qualified, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's it really just calling me on on the pod,
Speaker 1: just right right in the garrison. We've agreed not to
Speaker 1: talk about all of those people who died when that
Speaker 1: bridge collapse that you built in Florida, on that university campus.
Speaker 1: The thing of value was lost. No, it was Florida.
Speaker 1: Like that's why that's why the d A is not
Speaker 1: coming after you. Yeah, US government not pressing charges. It's Florida.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm. So okay, back to back to back to
Speaker 1: the racism. It's like, okay, so, so you you have
Speaker 1: these raids that are like literally only like targeted against
Speaker 1: Asian massage workers and then on top and so that
Speaker 1: that's type one. And the second type of raid is
Speaker 1: that the other thing that happens at these places constantly
Speaker 1: are I are these anti prostitution and anti trafficking raids
Speaker 1: And I'm putting both of those in enormous quotations. You
Speaker 1: know this, Okay, I'm gonna gonna go on a side
Speaker 1: tangent rant here, which is that Like okay, so, like
Speaker 1: every single person who does reporting on this, and I
Speaker 1: don't know if this is like a journalistic standards thing,
Speaker 1: but like even the good reporting on this, they like
Speaker 1: almost always have like a section that says, I, oh,
Speaker 1: the the Georgia, like Georgia's like resources on sex Trafficking
Speaker 1: says that, uh salon Asian salons are a place where
Speaker 1: there's a bunch of sex trafficking. And it's like mm hm,
Speaker 1: really like this this, this is what you're putting in
Speaker 1: your article about a bunch of people getting murdered by
Speaker 1: a racist dude, Like this is the thing that that
Speaker 1: you're gonna put in here, and you know, and like
Speaker 1: this this is sort of like all of that stuff
Speaker 1: that I talked about, like last episode about Robert Aaron Long,
Speaker 1: like all of your gratification and the racism and the
Speaker 1: horror phobia and that like mixture of like desire and loathing.
Speaker 1: Like the cops have this, Like also the journalists who
Speaker 1: are think about this have this stuff, and the the
Speaker 1: people who don't are sort of like picking up on
Speaker 1: on the sort of like abbeyant racism. So you get
Speaker 1: all this coverage that's just focused on like trying to
Speaker 1: figure out if there was sex work going on here.
Speaker 1: And you know, and like I talked about the last episode,
Speaker 1: like this is really dangerous because exposing people, exposing these
Speaker 1: sites the police investigation means you get more of these stings.
Speaker 1: And you know, like we we we mentioned at the
Speaker 1: beginning that uh Dayong Fong like no no no one
Speaker 1: she knew showed up to her funeral. And the reason
Speaker 1: that no one she knew showed up to her funeral
Speaker 1: is that no one wanted to be at a place
Speaker 1: where they could potentially be cops, so they wouldn't be deported, right,
Speaker 1: How could anyone who knew her come to her funeral
Speaker 1: because that would be well and her her brother wanted
Speaker 1: to come, but the like travel to the US was
Speaker 1: expensive enough that he was just like, yeah, we can't
Speaker 1: do this, and you know, and like and I that
Speaker 1: these these anti trafficking, anti prostitution raids are so common
Speaker 1: that two of the Atlanta victims have been arrested as
Speaker 1: part of raids like before this, and even though both
Speaker 1: of them are innocent. Uh Sum Chung Park was convicted
Speaker 1: of criminal trust passing anyways, again, which is like one
Speaker 1: of the most insane things I've ever heard in my life,
Speaker 1: because she was arrested at the place where she worked
Speaker 1: and they convicted her of criminal trust passing. Because this
Speaker 1: entire system is made up of just like Robert are
Speaker 1: and long levels of of racism, but they have they
Speaker 1: have a legal outlet to do it so they don't
Speaker 1: have to just go murder people and and sometimes they
Speaker 1: still do. Yeah, definitely, yeah, I mean we talked about
Speaker 1: very generous with that sometimes, Garrison. Yeah, I mean there
Speaker 1: there there, there's a really horrific story of that. There
Speaker 1: was there was a Chinese sex worker who the NYPD
Speaker 1: like repeatedly attempted to force her at gunpoint to have
Speaker 1: sex with them, and she refused and they so and
Speaker 1: you know, because because she refused, the NYPD kept doing
Speaker 1: raids on her, and eventually she died because she jumped
Speaker 1: out a window trying to escape one of the raids. God.
Speaker 1: Because these people are just literal monsters. Um. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: you know Sun Chun Park, like, she's convicted of criminal
Speaker 1: trust passing and she gets, you know, the sort of
Speaker 1: particular American humiliation of being forced to wear an ankle
Speaker 1: monitor that you have to pay for around your house
Speaker 1: while being under house arrest. And I've I've talked about
Speaker 1: this with the journalists, but again, like there, this is
Speaker 1: an entire system full of robber aeron lungs. It's the judges,
Speaker 1: is the prosecutors, it's the social workers, is the journalists,
Speaker 1: it's the cops. And this is this is an incredible
Speaker 1: level of systemic state violence that makes these already tenuous
Speaker 1: migrant working communities even more vulnerable because you know, if
Speaker 1: someone's harassing them, they can't call the cops because if
Speaker 1: the cops show up, it's like, oh hey good, this
Speaker 1: is this is even worse than the harassments and that's
Speaker 1: I think where I want to want to end here
Speaker 1: today on with things that can actually be concretely done
Speaker 1: about this to help spot workers and sex workers. Um,
Speaker 1: there's two proposals that spot and sex workers have been backing,
Speaker 1: one of which is just ending the licensing licensing requirement
Speaker 1: from massages because it's it's literally only ever used to
Speaker 1: target Asian massage workers. Yeah, that seems that seems like
Speaker 1: a good call. Yeah, it's definitely not the law, but
Speaker 1: oh yeah, yeah, getting rid of its, getting rid of
Speaker 1: it clarify there. Yeah, yeah, I mean it's you know,
Speaker 1: like this, this is my this is my my, my
Speaker 1: most libertarian position is just being against like a lot
Speaker 1: of these licensing things, because what's next to license to
Speaker 1: make their own toaster. If it's a thing that people
Speaker 1: just do all the time, uh, and in fact cannot
Speaker 1: be stopped from doing under any circumstances, then it shouldn't
Speaker 1: require a license to do, like flying exact Garriet, like
Speaker 1: flying a plane, like performing surgery, you know, um, like
Speaker 1: being a police officer. Just make everybody everything all licenses. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I've lost the thread. It's okay, I mean, well I
Speaker 1: think that the actual thread here though, is that like
Speaker 1: you know, okay, so like yeah, on the one hand,
Speaker 1: in theory, it is good to have licenses that that
Speaker 1: you know, like have a way to tell who knows
Speaker 1: how to do something and who doesn't, Right, But the
Speaker 1: thing is that's that's not what does Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: and like and the thing that the state actually does
Speaker 1: even with licenses, like and they do this driver's licenses,
Speaker 1: Like even even with driver's licenses, which is the thing
Speaker 1: that like, yeah, like people should know how to drive
Speaker 1: before you put them behind like the four wheel death machine.
Speaker 1: Like what do they do with it? It's like, oh,
Speaker 1: they used to go after a documented immigrants because the
Speaker 1: state is just incredibly racist and that this is the
Speaker 1: thing that's happening with with these licenses is yeah, they
Speaker 1: just they just do racism with it. Well, it's it's
Speaker 1: why you can't have like the common sense. I would
Speaker 1: be like, okay, well we're gonna have sex workers, so
Speaker 1: there should be some sort of system to make sure
Speaker 1: that people are getting tested for things and that basically
Speaker 1: you know, certain safety procedures or that at least people
Speaker 1: know what safety procedures are being you know, used at
Speaker 1: the place or whatever. Um, But what It always boils
Speaker 1: down to, is uh, this is an excuse for police
Speaker 1: to funk with vulnerable people. Yeah. The thing that this
Speaker 1: brings us to is the second proposal, which is just
Speaker 1: decriminalizing sex work, Like, don't prosecute people for this, don't
Speaker 1: send the cops after them, just don't do it. Like
Speaker 1: it it only ever causes violence against people who are
Speaker 1: already the most marginalized people. It doesn't actually help against
Speaker 1: traficking either, in makes it makes pend against trafficking actually harder.
Speaker 1: People feel not able to talk about things when they
Speaker 1: see stuff that's questionable. It's it's I'm sure we can
Speaker 1: do more content content. Um, I'm sure we could do
Speaker 1: more stuff about sex work in the future. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it really should be uh not a crime. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I think this is something like you know, it's it.
Speaker 1: It reminds me a lot of like of of the
Speaker 1: anti trends stuff where it's like, okay, so you should
Speaker 1: care about the stuff because you should care about trends people.
Speaker 1: You should also care about the stuff because it affects
Speaker 1: people who are not trans and this this is this
Speaker 1: is this thing where these massage workers are like most
Speaker 1: of them are not sex workers. And it doesn't matter
Speaker 1: at all, and it's the splash over effects are hitting
Speaker 1: them too. And yeah, the consequence of that is eight
Speaker 1: people are dead. Yep. Yeah, go hope your local sex
Speaker 1: work or organization and go hope you help your local
Speaker 1: spot workers associations like get rid of this licensing stuff
Speaker 1: and fire for decriminalization because this, this this kind of
Speaker 1: ship doesn't have to happen, and we can. This is
Speaker 1: something that we actually can concretely do and when that
Speaker 1: will make an enormous number of people whose lives are
Speaker 1: incredibly precarious enormously better. Yep. Okay, so we have already
Speaker 1: seen before our eyes that you can do. You can
Speaker 1: do things that involves safety where the police are just useless.
Speaker 1: We we have seen we we we have seen. We
Speaker 1: have seen Zach. But what is his name, Zack? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Zack is his name. Yeah. Yeah, but look we we
Speaker 1: we we we have we have yeah, he rules. We
Speaker 1: have seen Bodega Zach outwit like outdo the entire police force,
Speaker 1: even after literally the guy called them the churn himself
Speaker 1: in and Bodega Zach still got there before they did
Speaker 1: the entire New York Police Department. This isn't himself in
Speaker 1: and left his wallet and good at the scene. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then again, this is this is this is this is
Speaker 1: this is a ten billion dollar police force. The thing
Speaker 1: that the thing that they mostly do is harass homeless
Speaker 1: people and sex workers. For the love of God, we
Speaker 1: don't need them. We could, like literally one man could
Speaker 1: do their job for them. H yeah, get get rid
Speaker 1: of them. Okay, yeah that sounds nice. Okay, well there
Speaker 1: we go. We did it. Happy episode. Everybody's an introduction.
Speaker 1: Good for you, we did it. Yeah, I love what
Speaker 1: what show is this? Uh? This is? This is it
Speaker 1: could happen here a show that is also currently in
Speaker 1: the middle of about seventeen thousand personnel disasters. But it's fine.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I am I am Christopher Wong and with
Speaker 1: me is Garrison. Hello, Hi, good morning or afternoon or evening,
Speaker 1: depending on when you're listening. And also Sophie, Hello, Hi.
Speaker 1: So we are we're going to talk about something that
Speaker 1: is I guess technically over. But it was extremely weird
Speaker 1: and did a lot of harm. And that is the
Speaker 1: very weird stuff that Texas General General Jesus hopefully not
Speaker 1: Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had General the General of Texas.
Speaker 1: Greg at I mean, like you're kind of not wrong,
Speaker 1: but I he wished like that, he wishes, he wishes
Speaker 1: he was the general of Texas. I mean, I feel
Speaker 1: like that's me one of those things words like that.
Speaker 1: That's when we know the coup started, is when he
Speaker 1: promotes himself to general takes over Texas. So Greg Abbott
Speaker 1: is extremely mad, and he's actually mad because Biden finally
Speaker 1: decided to end one of like the absolute worst Trump
Speaker 1: era border policies, just called Title forty two, and it's
Speaker 1: for it was like nominally an anti pandemic measures, like
Speaker 1: the CDC. That's so I don't know why it took
Speaker 1: me like five seconds to remember the name of the CDC,
Speaker 1: the Central Defense Agency. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it's normally supposed to be a thing where it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: you can you you cut off migrants from coming into
Speaker 1: the country because there's a risk of a pandemic. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: if if if you have lived the last two years,
Speaker 1: you know that the US just literally does not give
Speaker 1: a single ship about the pandemic at all, like ending yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so this this whole thing really has just been
Speaker 1: a justification to just boot out. This prevents every like
Speaker 1: asylum seeker, in refugee, an immigrant for getting into the country.
Speaker 1: And you know that you can tell this because the
Speaker 1: title forty two when it was originally invoked, didn't cover
Speaker 1: people who were like driving trucks across the border. Like
Speaker 1: he didn't cover economic activity of course not. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: it's it's it's just a way for the US to
Speaker 1: like not have asylum seekers. And Biden let this go
Speaker 1: for like another fucking year while he was in office,
Speaker 1: and so like it's like like late last monthy like
Speaker 1: he finally got rid of it. And you know, this
Speaker 1: means that like immigrants and refugees now once again have
Speaker 1: their legal right under both American and international law to
Speaker 1: a petition for asylum, which again the US doesn't give
Speaker 1: a shit about because you know you doesn't care about
Speaker 1: laws unless they do bad things. But this finally happens.
Speaker 1: And Greg Abbott, who is once again we must remind
Speaker 1: of you one the great habit, is running for election
Speaker 1: in November, and she's it's thus just literally running through
Speaker 1: the entire right wing like every single right wing scare
Speaker 1: we can possibly think of. Don't worry, Chris, don't worry
Speaker 1: Chris Beto will get him. I believe, I believe, I
Speaker 1: believe in Beto this time lose by like slide. You know. Well, Okay,
Speaker 1: so the thing that could stop him from this is
Speaker 1: Greg Abbott decided to do like two PR stunts, and
Speaker 1: one of them is he's taking busses of of immigris
Speaker 1: than asylum seekers and just busting them the d C
Speaker 1: and I want to talk about this for a little
Speaker 1: like a second, because like this is really shitty and
Speaker 1: that shouldn't be legal. It shouldn't be allowed to really traffick.
Speaker 1: You're trafficking people across the country for a political stunt.
Speaker 1: That's like that that should be allowed. Yeah, Like and
Speaker 1: like I think like everyone's like this book is like
Speaker 1: it is, but like the thing with American political sence
Speaker 1: is that real people get hurt constantly. Yeah, And we're
Speaker 1: gonna come back to that theme more in a second.
Speaker 1: As we talked about the second stunt that he did,
Speaker 1: which was so essentially what Abbott did. Is there are,
Speaker 1: in a norm just a number of trucks that cross
Speaker 1: the US Mexican border into Texas like every day, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's like there are individual bridges that are
Speaker 1: moving SI seventy billion dollars of just produce like every day,
Speaker 1: and so that produced when it when it comes into
Speaker 1: the US, it goes to a bunch of checks by
Speaker 1: the border patrol and stuff, and there's all these checks
Speaker 1: and this is this whole thing. But uh Abbott went
Speaker 1: on this incredibly bizarre rants about well, I mean it's
Speaker 1: not bizarre. I guess if you're right when we went
Speaker 1: on this rant about like the cartels and there's immigrants
Speaker 1: we need to stop them, and so he very scary. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really weird. Okay, So he's he's doing all these
Speaker 1: bird fairymongering and he's like, Okay, we need to stop
Speaker 1: the people from getting across the border. So we're gonna
Speaker 1: inspect all of these trucks, which again like they're already
Speaker 1: being inspected by the FEDS. Like this this is this
Speaker 1: is you know, this is where like the horrible ice
Speaker 1: budget is going. Right. So he he does this and
Speaker 1: he he calls in a bunch of just like the
Speaker 1: border patrol to just literally do all of the same
Speaker 1: checks again. And this has an enormous economic impact. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a quote from the American Statesman
Speaker 1: The delays have resulted in a six drop in commercial
Speaker 1: traffic at the border, according to ums U S Customs
Speaker 1: and Border Protections. The agency said the delays are a
Speaker 1: direct results of quote additional and unnecessary inspections being conducted
Speaker 1: at Abbott's request. I I do like that the same
Speaker 1: people who were shooting moms in Portland now inspecting produce
Speaker 1: at the Texas. It's it's pretty well. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think I think that there there there's an important thing
Speaker 1: to note here, writes like, so, why why are these
Speaker 1: the people who are like doing both these things? And
Speaker 1: the answer is that, like those organizations like that, the
Speaker 1: thing that they're designed to do is to protect the
Speaker 1: interests of American capital. And you know, so the interests
Speaker 1: of American capital are we need to move capital across that,
Speaker 1: we need to move goods across the border, and we
Speaker 1: need to just like absolutely obliterate like a bunch of
Speaker 1: teenagers who don't like us. That is pretty much their
Speaker 1: bit um. I mean, yeah, I know we've talked in
Speaker 1: the past about us like customers and worter and water
Speaker 1: protections and the weird the weird like agencies and weird
Speaker 1: kind of almost militias that they operate, and how they
Speaker 1: get deployed into certain areas if there you know, x
Speaker 1: x miles away from the border. Um, it would be
Speaker 1: worth talking about more in depth in the future, because
Speaker 1: I know Robert has done some historical background on them
Speaker 1: for Bastards. UM. But I think, yeah, that is something
Speaker 1: I would I would be down to talk more about. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think they are a very bizarre agency. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: very weird. They're also really not like in this story.
Speaker 1: They're basically really just sitting there being mad because it's
Speaker 1: taking longer at what they do. Yeah. And and you
Speaker 1: know because because again like these these actual these inspections
Speaker 1: are being run by like state troopers, and because because
Speaker 1: because Abbott has more direct control over stage. Yeah, because yeah,
Speaker 1: Abot direct power for them. And this means that like, okay,
Speaker 1: so you have your truck right, your rock has a
Speaker 1: bunch of produce in it, you would be it across
Speaker 1: the border. Um. This usually takes about two hours of
Speaker 1: you know, being like sitting there in a truck while
Speaker 1: you're stop your every once cargo gets inspected and stuff,
Speaker 1: which I will say the truckers don't even get paid
Speaker 1: for that. When they're waiting two hours. Yeah, and and
Speaker 1: and you know what would make that worse. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: now it takes between ten and thirty hours. Because intentionally,
Speaker 1: on purpose, was like, okay, we're just we're gonna put
Speaker 1: six thousand like people total to do this whole thing.
Speaker 1: And so, you know, like hundreds of millions of dollars
Speaker 1: of produce like sins like onions and tomatoes and avocados
Speaker 1: are just sitting in these trucks, rotting in the Texas heat. Yep.
Speaker 1: Hopefully the trucks are refrigerated, but still, well, the trucks
Speaker 1: are refrigerated, but like the people in them, I'm sure
Speaker 1: the cabins are not. Yeah, I'm sure it gets mighty well.
Speaker 1: You know, I I do have some family who would truckers,
Speaker 1: and some of the cabins can't be nice. But still
Speaker 1: that's sitting for thirty hours without getting paid because you
Speaker 1: only get paid when you are moving um to oh
Speaker 1: uh not a great way to you know, run our
Speaker 1: entire economy. Yeah, I'm going to read a quote. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read a suction from the paragraph of the Texas Tribune. Felix,
Speaker 1: a sixty year old Mexican trucker who was transporting tomatoes, onions,
Speaker 1: and avocados, waited about thirteen hours in line at the bridge.
Speaker 1: He has to be identified only by his first name
Speaker 1: for fear of retribution and targeted inspections from CPB officials.
Speaker 1: Hearing of the delays at the border, he packed water
Speaker 1: and food for a few days, but other truckers didn't
Speaker 1: come as prepared, and we're sitting in stand still traffic
Speaker 1: without anything to eat or drink. Felix said he was
Speaker 1: told by a CPB official that the agency would be
Speaker 1: putting portable bathrooms along the bridge for the gridlocked truckers,
Speaker 1: but he never saw them. Once Felix made it to
Speaker 1: the state troopers inspection point around nine pm, he said
Speaker 1: they didn't even peer into his truck, which had been
Speaker 1: sealed since Mexican authorities inspected about six hundred miles away
Speaker 1: in the state of Sinaloa. There's no possibility of bringing
Speaker 1: legal immigrants in the merchandise or in the cabin, he said,
Speaker 1: referencing one of Abbott's explanations for the inspections. I can't
Speaker 1: bring any illegal immigrants here from money because I know
Speaker 1: inspectors are going to discover them. It's not a thing here.
Speaker 1: I don't know what the politicians ideas are. I don't
Speaker 1: know what they're talking about. So that seems not good.
Speaker 1: It's it's really bad. And like again, like this is
Speaker 1: this whole thing is nonsense, Like that I didn't even
Speaker 1: I didn't even think about having to, you know, use
Speaker 1: the bathroom for hours. Yeah, and like do you think
Speaker 1: the thing with this is like this the backups are
Speaker 1: eight miles long, so like if you want to go
Speaker 1: to the bathroom, you have to walk for like miles
Speaker 1: depending depending on where you are in this backup. And
Speaker 1: you know, this is having like these just enormous horrifying
Speaker 1: because there's like these normous horrifying knock on effects. Um.
Speaker 1: Because you know, it's not that the truckers are really
Speaker 1: affected by this. There's a bunch of workers whose job
Speaker 1: it is, you know, it's to process these goods, right,
Speaker 1: take them out of trucks, put them into American trucks
Speaker 1: to like sort through the vegetables and figure out like
Speaker 1: which ones are good and which ones are not. And again,
Speaker 1: like just enormous amounts of just produce that is like
Speaker 1: fresh and good to eat. It's just being intentionally destroyed
Speaker 1: because it's being forced to sit at the border for
Speaker 1: this long. Uh, there's a bunch of these people whose
Speaker 1: whose job like who who are contract workers whose job
Speaker 1: it is to like go through this stuff, and they're
Speaker 1: all getting fired because they're like there's no work for
Speaker 1: them to do. Um. There's all of these people who
Speaker 1: like their their jobs and they run bodegoes and they
Speaker 1: run like like they were in restaurants. Did they run
Speaker 1: a buch of stuff on the border for these truckers
Speaker 1: and they also don't have any work and those people
Speaker 1: have to on a day by date like it's like
Speaker 1: I think it's per day to rent a terminal in
Speaker 1: like yeah, and they're making nothing, and it's it's it's horrified.
Speaker 1: There's all there's this's just enormous economic devastation that that
Speaker 1: that's been sort of like you know that that that
Speaker 1: that's been happening because of this and well, you know,
Speaker 1: you know what else reminds me of economic devastation, Ah,
Speaker 1: the fact that the fact that our paychecks are solely
Speaker 1: reliant on the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 1: It's true. Yeah, Well, we'll talk about the problems they're
Speaker 1: having in a second after this break. Yep, one second. Wow,
Speaker 1: that was that was a fast second that just that
Speaker 1: flew right by time is not real? Destroy the clocks
Speaker 1: the scientists sart the police, all right, if you press,
Speaker 1: if you press the if you press the thirty second
Speaker 1: button four times? Yes, yeah, real speedy. Now this is
Speaker 1: having other problems because, as you talked about the show,
Speaker 1: literally ad nausea, our supply chains are really bad. And
Speaker 1: it turns out, yeah that that does seem to be
Speaker 1: a recurring character on the pod. Is that supply chains uh,
Speaker 1: not the most stable thing we've invented. Yeah, and especially
Speaker 1: with especially with with with fruit and vegetables. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: well we will be getting some of the other supply
Speaker 1: chains that are like fun because of this. But like
Speaker 1: Prudent VEGTA was in particular, like the way that we
Speaker 1: do them, they're they're designed to be in motion for
Speaker 1: like a very specific amount of time so that when
Speaker 1: they show up to you, they're right, yeah, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: you add a few hours onto that everything falls apart.
Speaker 1: And this like I'm not sure if it happens because
Speaker 1: I'm not in Texas, but there was there were a
Speaker 1: bunch of articles are talking about like yeah, like avocados
Speaker 1: and Texas are gonna cost five more dollars, Like like
Speaker 1: a single avocados price is gonna increase by like five
Speaker 1: dollars over the weekend because like because it was just
Speaker 1: the enormous amount of produces that that's being destroyed here,
Speaker 1: and you know there there's there's a lot of other
Speaker 1: stuff going on here because American and Mexican supply chains
Speaker 1: are enormously integrated from now. I mean they've always been
Speaker 1: into good to some extent, but like particularly post NAFTA,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like auto supply chains in particular
Speaker 1: that are that are tied to two plants in Mexico,
Speaker 1: and you actually this occasionally has like interesting effects, like
Speaker 1: Mexico's has a lot of auto strikes, and you get
Speaker 1: like you get these things where like people will like
Speaker 1: tuck messages into like auto parts and like send them
Speaker 1: to the US. People will open these messages from like
Speaker 1: a worker in Mexico too, Yeah you need And it's
Speaker 1: it's cool that there's lots of there's interesting stuff there,
Speaker 1: but this also means that like, yeah, so if those
Speaker 1: parts are moving across the border, those just in time
Speaker 1: production schedules are even more omega screwed than they've been
Speaker 1: already and so yeah, there's been a lot of sort
Speaker 1: of economics stuff that's been happening here. And you know,
Speaker 1: the other people who are getting just completely screwed by
Speaker 1: this are the are the Mexican truckers and so yeah
Speaker 1: and so so so this this this starts on April six,
Speaker 1: on Monday, April eleven, I the truckers are just like
Speaker 1: fun this and they start just completely blockading the largest
Speaker 1: border crossing between like this, it's on the Giant Bridge.
Speaker 1: They started they literally just blockade the bridge and but
Speaker 1: prevent any goods from from getting in. And this this
Speaker 1: has an enormous impact because again, like you know it
Speaker 1: it was going like yeah it was production was down
Speaker 1: by sixty percent, but that means still means are getting
Speaker 1: through and now you know, and bye bye bye. By
Speaker 1: the eleven it's just nothing. Um I do I do
Speaker 1: hope the one the one good thing that can come
Speaker 1: out of the whole Canada COVID isn't real protests, um,
Speaker 1: is that people have learned that blocking off supply chains
Speaker 1: it's a really effective way to do protest because you
Speaker 1: can stop the import of thousands and millions and billions
Speaker 1: of dollars of trade um pretty easily actually, and it
Speaker 1: would be cool if more people realize, Hey, obviously the
Speaker 1: COVID stuff they were talking about in the whole overthrowing
Speaker 1: the government part um to install a right wing dictator,
Speaker 1: that part's obviously bad, but some of their tactics were
Speaker 1: actually pretty interesting. Yeah, we're we're going to get more
Speaker 1: into that, uh like later, Yeah, I mean I will say, like,
Speaker 1: I think that the thing with the U S is that,
Speaker 1: like I think there's been a lot of focus on
Speaker 1: the American left on ports because yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of reasons for that, but like, yeah, you can do
Speaker 1: the border crossings too, and the the Mexican rucker is
Speaker 1: really effective. I mean, okay, so that's this has been
Speaker 1: a thing where it's it's it's kind of hard to
Speaker 1: get information from. I saw a few like newspapers talking
Speaker 1: about um like cartel people like like attacking the blockaded,
Speaker 1: lighting trucks on fire to try to force goods to
Speaker 1: go through again, which it's possible. I I don't know, um,
Speaker 1: but this you know, once once there are like once
Speaker 1: the block like the border is completely block headed, this
Speaker 1: completely changes like the entire political situation because now, like
Speaker 1: you know, ab Abbot's been running this thing sort of
Speaker 1: as a political stunt and as this game he's playing
Speaker 1: with you know, I suppose he's trying to play a
Speaker 1: game with Biden, right, and he's like, Okay, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: you gotta decently about the border or whatever, like you
Speaker 1: know's he's been challenging Biden over like immigration bullshit. But
Speaker 1: you know, now now they're there's a third party involved,
Speaker 1: and that third party is Mexican truckers. And now and
Speaker 1: now Abbots not just in the it's like abbotts in
Speaker 1: a confrontation with the people that he needs to make
Speaker 1: the entire Texan economy run yep, And this starts going
Speaker 1: very badly for him. And the other thing that starts
Speaker 1: going very badly for him is that I it turns
Speaker 1: out if you shut down cross border trade, you really
Speaker 1: really piss off the bourgeoisie. Turns out, it turns out
Speaker 1: that will happen if you ain't careful. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: really interesting and you know, and and I think I
Speaker 1: should mention like stressed this, like they're piste off on
Speaker 1: both sides of the border, and like obviously you can
Speaker 1: talk about the ecents, which like, yeah, they're the same class.
Speaker 1: But like capitalists on both sides of the border start
Speaker 1: exerting their political pressure because they're I mean, they're losing
Speaker 1: enormous amounts of money off of this. That's what they do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, the way their ability to do capitalism
Speaker 1: as capitalists, they're going to be mad. Yeah, which again,
Speaker 1: you think you would think that the abbot would like
Speaker 1: get this, but he just he it seems to have
Speaker 1: not occurred to him that he was gonna piss off
Speaker 1: like either or like he he thinks he didn't care
Speaker 1: enough and thought it wouldn't matter, but like, no, it
Speaker 1: turns out like you know, one of the things that happens. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's amazing, Like he's you know, like I mean,
Speaker 1: I think this is this is you know, I think
Speaker 1: this is this is sort of a symptom of like
Speaker 1: people lose like right wing politicians losing sight of what
Speaker 1: their actual basis because like this is all this is
Speaker 1: all supposed to be like campaign trail feeding the anti
Speaker 1: immigrant base. But like, you know, you you are a
Speaker 1: politician in the US, Your actual constituency is the capitalists,
Speaker 1: and like do you have an actual job? And let's
Speaker 1: make the economy keep going and keeping people in power
Speaker 1: to have all the power, like you're not just like that.
Speaker 1: That's one interesting thing that Trump was kind of one
Speaker 1: of the first big um indicators for which is like
Speaker 1: a politician now is just the endless cycle of campaigning
Speaker 1: and they don't actually have a job. It's just always
Speaker 1: campaigning and that it's always campaigning. Uh, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: I guess I should do my actual job that I
Speaker 1: was elected for or I could just do more rallies
Speaker 1: and that seems like it would be less work. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: and I think I think what Trump was like there
Speaker 1: was those things out to which the bureaucracy kept functioning,
Speaker 1: and you know, like like he like Trump got Trump
Speaker 1: got the tax cut right, and like he didn't really
Speaker 1: start getting in trouble with them until he started doing
Speaker 1: the anti China stuff, which was sort of a disaster
Speaker 1: because there was a lot of people who turned out
Speaker 1: like need those trade connections to make money. And you
Speaker 1: saw like and like it was weird. It was a
Speaker 1: very weird thing. Like you started to see even some
Speaker 1: of his like like domestic like small business base. I
Speaker 1: started to get really mad at him because he's putting
Speaker 1: all these sanctions up and it's like, oh, hey, look,
Speaker 1: all these sanctions mean that all these people who are
Speaker 1: reliant on Chinese supply chains have to pay this stuff.
Speaker 1: And an Abbott Abbott has like done this in microcosm,
Speaker 1: and like these these people like the star, they start
Speaker 1: going to the press. Um, I'm going to read a
Speaker 1: quote from Bloomberg. Uh. Some retailers, particularly those in the
Speaker 1: grocery industry, have experienced supply chain delays resulting from the
Speaker 1: extended wait times a lot Texas Mexico border. John McCord,
Speaker 1: the executive director of Texas Retailers Association, wrote in an email, so, like,
Speaker 1: you know these are like like the Texas Retail Association
Speaker 1: is like this is like the most republican solidly institution
Speaker 1: in the country and and you can watch them over time,
Speaker 1: like these people are getting really mad. Like one of
Speaker 1: I I was like, like what if Abbot's like I
Speaker 1: get the exact title, like what one of abbots like secretaries,
Speaker 1: like they're look at the secretary or something. One of
Speaker 1: the like economic bureaus was like, yeah, man, Alvaca is
Speaker 1: gonna cost five more dollars, And you know, you know
Speaker 1: this really hits me hard. Because everyone knows it's about me.
Speaker 1: I care a lot about retail. UM. Retails like my
Speaker 1: one of my big core of personality traits UM. And
Speaker 1: you know who else wants you to care about retail?
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness is that the wash Upton State of
Speaker 1: That is right, Sophie, it's the Washington State Patrol. Are
Speaker 1: are are good friends? Um? So here here is some
Speaker 1: here's some messages about about how you can improve your
Speaker 1: retail decisions. Okay, I I can't find this George Bush
Speaker 1: quote that I was going to use as a bit,
Speaker 1: so instead of that, we will return to this. And
Speaker 1: you know, and one one thing I think we should
Speaker 1: also mention is if you ran into this on Twitter, um,
Speaker 1: you will see a lot of videos of people like
Speaker 1: Democrats like standing at the border and pointing at the
Speaker 1: trucks and going, uh, this is this. This is abbot
Speaker 1: attempting to like make inflation to get worse by sabotaging
Speaker 1: the economy. Cringe and like cringe cringe moments. Yeah, Like okay,
Speaker 1: Like I cannot rule out that this was like a
Speaker 1: part of what he wanted to do, but that's not
Speaker 1: really why he's doing this. Like this, this is this
Speaker 1: is like mostly and I some people talking about like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is like the trucker's buckage and Chile, and I'm like, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's not at all, like like yeah, yeah, yeah, like yes,
Speaker 1: Chile has a bunch of right had I had a
Speaker 1: bunch of right wing anti communist truckers unions that tried
Speaker 1: to shut down the government. But like, that's not what's
Speaker 1: happening here. This is the state and Abbott trying to
Speaker 1: do this is like an immigration pr thing like this
Speaker 1: isn't like he's not actually he's not actually trying to
Speaker 1: destroy the government, because the the only way you can
Speaker 1: get stuff like that is if like is is it
Speaker 1: the capitalist classes like genuinely afraid that they're about to
Speaker 1: get like like wiped out by communists And it turns
Speaker 1: out that is not about to unize the entire US.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's actually a looming threat at the moment. No,
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's like no, it's like it's it's not
Speaker 1: it's not really about that, like it's it's it's it's
Speaker 1: mostly about this sort of this sort of like border
Speaker 1: game that the Communis are coming free of off Picados. Well,
Speaker 1: this is sort of this is the interesting thing here,
Speaker 1: because it's like you have this really weird scenario where
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's the right wing governor like shutting
Speaker 1: down the flow of commodities, and like the liberals are like,
Speaker 1: we must restore the flow of commodities, and the like,
Speaker 1: we must restore the flow of commodities, and like even
Speaker 1: the cartels or something extential, like come on, like we
Speaker 1: all we all need the border open. Uh. It really,
Speaker 1: it really does just showcase the entire bit. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: but I mean, like we've been talking a lot about
Speaker 1: the human cost of this, and the reason this stuff
Speaker 1: works is because American politics is literally just a machine
Speaker 1: that turns human suffering into stories and then turns those
Speaker 1: stories into percentage points at the polls. And that's Abbot's
Speaker 1: entire weight. Am I getting him confused with no Greg
Speaker 1: Abbots the governor? I momentarily got him confused with the
Speaker 1: UK guy Tony Emmett ris so bad in very similar ways. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think I think we're allowed to have two
Speaker 1: bad Abbots. Yeah. I thought there's kind of Australia too,
Speaker 1: But well, the bad applets are multiplied. To get on this.
Speaker 1: We need we need to deal with the anglos theory
Speaker 1: before they produce the fourth produced the fourth one when
Speaker 1: we get the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. That would
Speaker 1: be funny if you just have four Abbots bringing the apocalypse. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But I think I think that the thing that's important
Speaker 1: to understand about like about Abbott is like that that
Speaker 1: everything that Abbott does is just about inflicting suffering on
Speaker 1: people and trying to use that to do polls. Right,
Speaker 1: Like he he has genuine right wing beliefs, but like
Speaker 1: the timing of everything that he does, that's what all
Speaker 1: of his that's that's that's what all has had anti
Speaker 1: trans stuff is is that he couldn't beat his primary challenger,
Speaker 1: who was trying to campaign a little bit fur them
Speaker 1: to write than Abbott was. Yeah, and this is the
Speaker 1: thing where like politicians are allowed to play games with
Speaker 1: all people's lives, that that's their job. But they're allowed
Speaker 1: to do this up until the exact moment at which
Speaker 1: those real people are the bourgeoisie and the moment this
Speaker 1: is this the thing that Abbott is learning is that
Speaker 1: you can do this kind of stunts all you want,
Speaker 1: Like you can you can like you can shoot every
Speaker 1: trans kid, you can like I don't know, like you
Speaker 1: can you can ban like every school from like saying
Speaker 1: the word race, but you can't funk with the bourgeoisie.
Speaker 1: And you know this, this is this, this is the
Speaker 1: problem that he has is bye by like by like
Speaker 1: the middle of last week. He has the like the
Speaker 1: ruling classes turning on him. The truckers are blockading the
Speaker 1: bridges that preventing all travel, and Abbott is like basically
Speaker 1: scrambling to find a way out. And the thing that
Speaker 1: he does to do this is he like he goes
Speaker 1: to a bunch of Mexican governors who who are like
Speaker 1: that the governors of border states. And these governors had
Speaker 1: like sent him letters being like hey, like what are
Speaker 1: you doing, Like we need like we we we need
Speaker 1: our economies to function. Can can you can you actually
Speaker 1: do this? And you know, so he starts doing these
Speaker 1: negotiations with him where he's like, well, okay, if you
Speaker 1: guys like inspect all of these trucks or whatever before
Speaker 1: and you ensure that there's no immigrants and then where
Speaker 1: whatever before they get here, like we'll reopen the borders.
Speaker 1: And you know, so they do this, and I think
Speaker 1: there's a couple of interesting things about this one is
Speaker 1: that most of these I think there's one guy who's
Speaker 1: from the p r I, but like almost all of
Speaker 1: these governors are from the p A N, which is
Speaker 1: Mexico's like far right wing party, and like these guys,
Speaker 1: these guys are also like hard right, like we're on
Speaker 1: drug hard liners, you hate immigrants and and this this
Speaker 1: has been another big part of how the sort of
Speaker 1: border machine works, which is that like, yeah, on the
Speaker 1: one hand, you have you have Abbo and you have
Speaker 1: like Texas, so you have just the US government like
Speaker 1: projecting its power like into Mexico, which is you know,
Speaker 1: another big part of what this is. But the other
Speaker 1: part of it is has been the US essentially outsourcing
Speaker 1: it's it's border regime and border policy just in like
Speaker 1: to Mexico. And so you get a lot of there.
Speaker 1: There's been a lot in the last especially to dn
Speaker 1: Trump administration. Uh, I mean it goes back much further
Speaker 1: than that, but like in in the last like five
Speaker 1: years have been a lot of really egregious examples of
Speaker 1: just like border patrol ship but by the Mexican police,
Speaker 1: because it turns out there's also a bunch of people
Speaker 1: in Mexico who fucking hates Central American refugees and be
Speaker 1: uh the police or the police literally everywhere. And yeah,
Speaker 1: and this this also for example, like this this is
Speaker 1: how this is how a lot of the border regime
Speaker 1: stuff works in um, in Europe, front ACKs of the
Speaker 1: European border like thing makes you to do like makes
Speaker 1: like basically just negotiates with like literally every like I
Speaker 1: don't even know what you call them, like border state,
Speaker 1: I guess in Africa to ensure that like refugees coming
Speaker 1: up to North Africa like don't ever get to Europe.
Speaker 1: And like this is that they make deals with Gadaffi,
Speaker 1: they made deals with the people who came after Gadaffi. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's the border system is horrible and this is sort
Speaker 1: of the border system like working as intended. Now, the
Speaker 1: other thing that we should mention is that like, okay,
Speaker 1: so they're they're stopping and like supposedly searching all of
Speaker 1: these trucks and they find literally nothing the entire time,
Speaker 1: because like there's there's you know, there's ever anything there.
Speaker 1: But you get all these press conferences they were like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course there is nothing. It's because the cartels were
Speaker 1: tipped off. Of the raid because we did Presston conferences
Speaker 1: about it, and that's why they announced. We announced the
Speaker 1: thing that we were gonna do. So it gave him
Speaker 1: a chance to smartest Wow whoa. Yeah, So that that
Speaker 1: that that's been fun um And the last thing I
Speaker 1: wanna talk about, Yeah, this was part of what we
Speaker 1: were talking about earlier, which is that like, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is the second time this year that we've seen right
Speaker 1: wingers like block off a border for political reasons. And
Speaker 1: I think there's a few interesting things here. Um. One
Speaker 1: is that this is the kind of stuff that from
Speaker 1: like basically from the start of occupy and even before
Speaker 1: then until like the Bernie campaign. This is like the
Speaker 1: core of like what Marxists we're thinking about in the US,
Speaker 1: and also anarchists or something sent like if if you
Speaker 1: go and read anything from that period, like it's all
Speaker 1: about logistics and kinter logistics and how you can like
Speaker 1: disrupt them and whether or not we should try to
Speaker 1: take control of logistics. And you know, and I think
Speaker 1: you see here like like attacking logistics is a very
Speaker 1: powerful political tool, but it's tool that has like limited um,
Speaker 1: like it it has limited utility for the right because
Speaker 1: you know, the right depends on the backing of capitalists
Speaker 1: for the politics to work. They really really need buy
Speaker 1: it capitalists, and those capitalists need cross border trade and
Speaker 1: you know, and the other thing like they also need
Speaker 1: they also need migrant workers to make their money. And
Speaker 1: if you cut that stuff off, your political base starts
Speaker 1: to collapse. And the second part of it that's interesting
Speaker 1: is you get to see how powerful this is as
Speaker 1: a weapon for you know, like the working class because
Speaker 1: of just like how instant enviously Abbott back down when
Speaker 1: the trucking blockhead starts because this this is all over.
Speaker 1: Um last Friday, I think the what date is that?
Speaker 1: That was good Friday, I mean the goodest, the goodest Friday. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Abbott was like, oh, oh, it's all over. We secured
Speaker 1: the border. Yeah everything border, sure, buddy, Okay, yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know, and you but like that's the thing, like
Speaker 1: you can see like, yeah, you gotta see you gotta
Speaker 1: see a rare moment of like Mexican workers and also
Speaker 1: like the the sort of international capital class working on
Speaker 1: the same side. And you've got to see how fast
Speaker 1: they just like collaborate their politicians because yeah, like yeah,
Speaker 1: like that the state is that the state is the
Speaker 1: powerful force, but it turns out it's it's class politics
Speaker 1: all the way down. And I think I don't know
Speaker 1: this in Canada. I think there's a couple of interesting things.
Speaker 1: One is which, Okay, yeah, you're like if you're on
Speaker 1: the left, like already automatically you're going to be fighting
Speaker 1: the capital business ois just always mad at you. So
Speaker 1: that's concern. You will face more suppression immediately obviously. This
Speaker 1: this is this is how the game is played. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your face one suppresion deedily. But it's also like that
Speaker 1: that's not like a your base turning on you, Like
Speaker 1: that problem doesn't stem from capital is not making money.
Speaker 1: The problem you have with your base turning on you
Speaker 1: is about being being able to provision supplies to people.
Speaker 1: And I think this is you know, against even you
Speaker 1: know more about this than I do, but I will
Speaker 1: finish the sentence and then stop talking. Which is that
Speaker 1: like like, yeah, if you look at Canada, it was
Speaker 1: like part of the reason their occupations failed was that
Speaker 1: like yeah, like just like a bunch of ordinary people
Speaker 1: got really really mad at them because their whole their
Speaker 1: cities were being locked down. Yeah, yeah, they started impacting
Speaker 1: not just the economic drivers, but the people who live
Speaker 1: in those areas regularly and need them to operate. And
Speaker 1: that gave politicians enough enough of the incentive to be like, see,
Speaker 1: actually hurting real people. It's not just hurting the economy,
Speaker 1: but it's hurting you know, your grandma who could be
Speaker 1: living in like Ottawa or something. Right, So when you
Speaker 1: when you use these tactics, it's about balancing the propaganda
Speaker 1: of like not severely impacting the people who actually live
Speaker 1: in these places very much, but but targeting the economics,
Speaker 1: policies and the you know, you know, the corporate elite
Speaker 1: or whatever kind of framing you want to use. Because
Speaker 1: as as soon as you start doing tactics that just
Speaker 1: hurt you know, regular people, that is such an immediate
Speaker 1: like propaganda l as the kids would say, um, because yeah,
Speaker 1: you're but you're just giving them the tools to easily
Speaker 1: fight you back. And yes, they're gonna they're gonna try
Speaker 1: to invent tools to to to stop you no matter what.
Speaker 1: Like they're they're gonna, they're gonna they're gonna try to
Speaker 1: do something the via propaganda lens. But there's some propaganda
Speaker 1: is way easier and uh much harder than others. So
Speaker 1: I think a big part of these types of things
Speaker 1: when you're starting to like block off you know, roots
Speaker 1: to cities, block off supply chains as you need to
Speaker 1: be cognizant of making sure that the people who are
Speaker 1: like immediately next to kind of things that you're also cool,
Speaker 1: because that can give you so much more legs. I mean,
Speaker 1: we saw this in the Red House in Portland. There
Speaker 1: was a there was a lot of effort, um to
Speaker 1: make the immediate neighbors not hate the occupation there, to
Speaker 1: to stop the family from being evicted, um, And there
Speaker 1: was a lot of debate around like how much graffiti
Speaker 1: should be allowed in the surrounding area because you know,
Speaker 1: you don't want to piss off the neighbors too much.
Speaker 1: Now that this can obviously stem in bad directions in
Speaker 1: terms of like there was then like self self appointed
Speaker 1: security guards like beating up and shooting people with paintballs
Speaker 1: who were doing graffiti, which is obviously like not not
Speaker 1: not how you do good anarchism um. But then there's
Speaker 1: other stuff being like no, we should just trash this
Speaker 1: area anyway. It's all in the process of being gentrified,
Speaker 1: which mean it is, but you're like, yes, I understand
Speaker 1: that emotional impulse. Um, and you may be right in
Speaker 1: a lot of senses, like like more like more correct morally,
Speaker 1: but to play the propaganda game to actually stop a
Speaker 1: black family from being evicted, maybe we can actually to
Speaker 1: look at this at a more tactical level. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think that there's a lot of examples things we
Speaker 1: can learn from strikes that do is very efficiently. Like
Speaker 1: one of the things one of the reasons the wildcats
Speaker 1: in West the wildcat teacher strikes West Virginia and he
Speaker 1: doesn't seventeen worked was that the striking teachers in West
Speaker 1: Virginia were very very careful about making sure that they
Speaker 1: did things like you know, like making making sure that
Speaker 1: kids got like the meals that that the school would
Speaker 1: have been like providing like like you know, like this
Speaker 1: is why this is why mutual aid is extremely important
Speaker 1: because it lets you It lets you provision services, not
Speaker 1: just when they collapse because of like you know, oh,
Speaker 1: hey the government's doing weird stuff or like there's a plague.
Speaker 1: It lets you do it, lets you shut down logistics
Speaker 1: slnes yourself and still have community support and still be
Speaker 1: able to provide people. To think that provide people things
Speaker 1: that they need, and it's just like, you know, if
Speaker 1: if you carry this all the way to like the
Speaker 1: macro macro level, it's like yeah, okay, So like why
Speaker 1: did why did the Russian Revolution not work? And you know,
Speaker 1: like like why did the Pairs Commune fail? And it's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's because instead of like giving peasants things, they went
Speaker 1: into the countryside and shot them into actepting to get
Speaker 1: those things. And it's like, yeah, like you have to
Speaker 1: what what what what whatever. The thing that you're doing
Speaker 1: is in in in your sort of like base area,
Speaker 1: right whatever. You're like, hey, you're you're doing a strike,
Speaker 1: You're shutting down a bridge. You're like, you know, you're
Speaker 1: blocking up border, you're trying down a port, right you
Speaker 1: you have to make sure you're constantly expanding and building
Speaker 1: out support outside outside of that, outside of that action,
Speaker 1: and making sure you're you're you're able to provision the
Speaker 1: people who are affected by it. And if you don't
Speaker 1: do this, you end up like Abbott. And it's like yeah,
Speaker 1: you know he Abbott had like the entire power of
Speaker 1: the American state behind him, and he was able to
Speaker 1: keep this up for like less than two weeks before
Speaker 1: he had to just pull out. So, yeah, we can
Speaker 1: do this better and for things that are good and
Speaker 1: in ways that don't hurt people or at least hurt
Speaker 1: people significantly less or you know, don't not hurt the
Speaker 1: wrong people instead try to try to hurt the right people.
Speaker 1: Just like an incredible lack of like thinking. That's my
Speaker 1: that's my summaries. Yeah, better do you think? Like? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I think also like again like Abbott, Abbott's politics
Speaker 1: like is entirely about like infricting cruelty on people, right,
Speaker 1: and ours like shouldn't be and shouldn't Yeah, And the
Speaker 1: fact that we actually care about people makes our politics
Speaker 1: were effective and sho in theory. In theory they should
Speaker 1: um and any time when we take a misstep from that,
Speaker 1: I think is of it is a big loss. Yeah.
Speaker 1: There's there's one more strike thing that I just remembered
Speaker 1: that I was going to talk about, which is I
Speaker 1: So these also trains a lot. There's there's a type
Speaker 1: of striker's name I'm forgetting because I'm a hack and
Speaker 1: a fraud where like the people, the people, the people
Speaker 1: just like take over a train and they'll run it,
Speaker 1: but they just won't take fars. That is incredibly bit Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, so that's that's that's like level one
Speaker 1: of it. And then level two of the strike is
Speaker 1: insteade of just we're on strike, but we're running the
Speaker 1: service and not taking any money. It's we now control
Speaker 1: this train and that that has happened on several occasions,
Speaker 1: and well, yeah, you do that. It's cool. You heard
Speaker 1: it here. First take over your local train. Um, it
Speaker 1: could happen here. We could, we we can do it.
Speaker 1: Anarchism can make the trains run on time. Oh I'm
Speaker 1: not sure about that. Pug punk time it is as
Speaker 1: an unstoppable Okay. Here, here's the thing. Here's the thing,
Speaker 1: right like punk time. Like okay, so you don't have
Speaker 1: the punks running the trains. You have the train nerds
Speaker 1: running the train, people who should spend all of their
Speaker 1: time playing train simulator running the trains. Okay, that the
Speaker 1: trains will run great? Alright, that is that is completely fair. Um.
Speaker 1: Where can people find you and or the show on
Speaker 1: the internet. You can find me at three on Twitter
Speaker 1: if you want to do that for some reason. You
Speaker 1: can find us that happened here pod on Twitter, Instagram. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's also the Cool Zone. We have Zone Media. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have a we have a new podcast that is
Speaker 1: coming so if you do want to want to go,
Speaker 1: we actually got we got two new ones for you
Speaker 1: coming soon. We have a Ghost Church by Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 1: Episode one is out April, and then we have Cool
Speaker 1: People Who Did Cool Stuff hosted by Margaret Killjoy. Trailer
Speaker 1: is out next week and episode one is out on
Speaker 1: May second. Check both of them out. So many, so
Speaker 1: many pods in the pipe, as you say, that is
Speaker 1: the technical term, pods in the pipe. These these are genuinely,
Speaker 1: legitimately very good shows and you should listen to them.
Speaker 1: And I'm really excited. So alright, well, thank for listening,
Speaker 1: and uh go go take over a train. Greetings listeners
Speaker 1: in the podcast verse, this is it could happen here,
Speaker 1: the podcast about things falling apart and sometimes how we
Speaker 1: can put stuff back together. I'm Garrison Davis are Resident
Speaker 1: Gender mess. In the past few weeks, we've been talking
Speaker 1: a lot here on the show about the escalating war
Speaker 1: on trans people and queer folks in general. There's been
Speaker 1: a wave of bills making any gender affirming healthcare of
Speaker 1: felony for people under the age of eighteen, which forcibly
Speaker 1: detransitions teenagers and multiple states, and we've had a lot
Speaker 1: of banning trans people from participating in sports and trying
Speaker 1: to ban books and discussion in schools about the just
Speaker 1: the existence of queer people at all. But today we're
Speaker 1: not really going to be talking about that. We've talked
Speaker 1: about that plenty for the past few weeks. It's good
Speaker 1: to have a little little bit of a break, but
Speaker 1: we'll still be talking about stuff around trans people. Because
Speaker 1: with all the discussion around gender affirming healthcare, I thought
Speaker 1: it would be a good idea to put something together
Speaker 1: talking about what HRT or hormone replacement therapy actually is,
Speaker 1: as since it's the most common form of trans healthcare,
Speaker 1: and since many states are trying to or already have
Speaker 1: criminalized it, perhaps I can use the pod to point
Speaker 1: people towards alternative means of receiving care, you know, in
Speaker 1: the vein of the putting stuff back together side of
Speaker 1: the show. Now, I want to clarify upfront that we're
Speaker 1: not giving anyone medical advice, obviously, I'm just making observations
Speaker 1: and talking about things as they exist, um and talking
Speaker 1: about things that many trans people have been doing for
Speaker 1: a long time, and that includes d y h RT.
Speaker 1: My doctorate program is in parapsychology, not medical science, so
Speaker 1: just keep that in mind. First, I will quickly clarify
Speaker 1: what HRT or hormone replacement therapy actually is for specifically
Speaker 1: non CIS gender individuals because HRT as a term is
Speaker 1: also used for SIS women to describe similar but different treatment.
Speaker 1: So HRT as a form of gender affirming treatment is
Speaker 1: when someone receives sex hormone medication that produces a number
Speaker 1: of desired secondary sex characteristics. There are two broad types
Speaker 1: of hormone therapy that one would receive, depending on what
Speaker 1: direction you want to go in gender of wise, there's
Speaker 1: feminizing hormones and masculinizing hormones. Feminizing hormones produce more typically
Speaker 1: feminine traits, right, big big shocker there. Uh. It usually
Speaker 1: consists of a form of estrogen, usually called estradial. There's
Speaker 1: different types of estradial and also it can include anti
Speaker 1: androgen's aka a testosterone blockers. Masculinization therapy consists of taking
Speaker 1: to sosterone or androgen's and then also less commonly anti estrogen's,
Speaker 1: but usually just taking testosterone will suffice now I'm no
Speaker 1: expert in hormones despite my weekly shot, but lucky enough
Speaker 1: I was able to sit down with an actual expert
Speaker 1: on hormones and talk over zoom. So what follows is
Speaker 1: segments from our conversation. I guess first, do you want
Speaker 1: to introduce yourself? Sure? I am the Reverend Dr Victoria
Speaker 1: Luna B. Grieve. I am an assistant professor at the
Speaker 1: University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. My primary clinical focuses
Speaker 1: on gender affirming hormone therapy, other kind of advocacy work
Speaker 1: in queer healthcare, and I do a lot of other
Speaker 1: stuff on the side, heatago g LUDC, instructional design, game design,
Speaker 1: just anything that strikes my fancy. Really found fun stuff
Speaker 1: in with within kind of our our coverage of trends
Speaker 1: stuff the past few weeks and months, it's been mostly
Speaker 1: on like the bills and like the politics side of things.
Speaker 1: I definitely had some people like reach out and be like, okay,
Speaker 1: but how like why why trands? Gender? Why why hormones?
Speaker 1: Like why are hormones actually important? Like could you actually
Speaker 1: explain like why, like you know, with all of these
Speaker 1: all these states banding hormones, let's I would like to
Speaker 1: kind of explain why it's such a big deal and
Speaker 1: like how much these things actually are like life saving
Speaker 1: medication for so many people. Yeah, so why hormones? I
Speaker 1: love it because it's a question that as like a species,
Speaker 1: we've been we we have known the answer to for
Speaker 1: like five thousand years. It's it's very funny, but um,
Speaker 1: hormones are Okay. A big part of this requires to
Speaker 1: like acknowledge something that is very wrong in in like
Speaker 1: the medical literature. There's a lot of elements of healthcare
Speaker 1: that are coordinated between like male and female, and there's
Speaker 1: a kind of like obviously is a little so there's
Speaker 1: a lot of mean I mean like from like from
Speaker 1: people's I know, when trans people talk about interacting with
Speaker 1: the medical system, it's always like, oh, yes, we're gonna
Speaker 1: be doing this bullshit, yes of course. Yeah. Well but
Speaker 1: it even goes to it like a really deep level,
Speaker 1: like if you're in the hospital and you get a
Speaker 1: CBC count, there's a male profile and a female profile
Speaker 1: of what your hematocrit should be on, like what the
Speaker 1: level of red blood cells are and and the general
Speaker 1: understanding and like the health industry is that there's a
Speaker 1: biological anatomical difference between them, and for the longest time,
Speaker 1: certainly in this country, trans women would have would be
Speaker 1: compared against the male profiles. But but it's nonsense. It's
Speaker 1: actually should be thought of in form of hormone dominance,
Speaker 1: because the vast majority of medical differences are not anatomical.
Speaker 1: They're hormonal, and and that right there should should give
Speaker 1: the game away, which is really funny, which is why
Speaker 1: I why I kind of hate the term biological woman
Speaker 1: whenever people start using that, because that's not really how
Speaker 1: biology works. Yeah, I mean the joke is my my
Speaker 1: nesting partner, my fiance, wishes that she could be a robot,
Speaker 1: and then if she were to do that and upload
Speaker 1: her brain into an immortal robot body, she would no
Speaker 1: longer be a biological woman, but she would still be
Speaker 1: a woman. It's just cybernetic um. I hate that. It's
Speaker 1: like organic. Organic just means it has carbon in it. Like,
Speaker 1: give me a break. So yeah, hormones, what's what's what's
Speaker 1: the deal do they? Because I know all of people
Speaker 1: will be like, well, all of these treads people sure
Speaker 1: do seem sad. I want that's how how how can
Speaker 1: we make things better? Does this thing actually work well,
Speaker 1: So it's somewhat multifactorial. I have a friend who does
Speaker 1: um sell imaging and her like working theory, which I'm
Speaker 1: a little dubious of. Is it like the brains of
Speaker 1: trans people like have receptors for hormones that the body
Speaker 1: doesn't make, and we should think of being transgender is
Speaker 1: having like a form of hypogonadism. Yeah, there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different trains of thought there in terms of
Speaker 1: the different theories of why trans people exist and how
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, the girl's brain, boys body, blah
Speaker 1: blah blah blah blah, which all, if you dig deep enough,
Speaker 1: goes back to eugenic so it's all. Yeah, I've always
Speaker 1: not liked that model. I've always it's always I've always
Speaker 1: found it to be a little bit uncomfortable because I
Speaker 1: take hormones because I want to, and I don't think
Speaker 1: it's because my my my brain is like secretly looking
Speaker 1: for girl receptors or something like, right, I totally agree,
Speaker 1: Like it also requires a certain like extremely binary understanding
Speaker 1: of gender, which I also do not ascribe to. So
Speaker 1: it's a very like odd thought. But putting aside all
Speaker 1: of that if you just wanted to look at the
Speaker 1: like why people want hormones, Because when a person who
Speaker 1: wants hormone gets the hormones they want, their suicidality goes down,
Speaker 1: their anxiety, depression goes down, gender dysphoria, if we wanted to,
Speaker 1: you know, talk about the problems with that, essentially like
Speaker 1: goes away. Uh, and they get they start to get
Speaker 1: treated like the way they want to be treated in society.
Speaker 1: So from the if if you want to look at it,
Speaker 1: not from like the causes, but from the results. Giving
Speaker 1: gender affirming hormone therapy to a person who is requesting
Speaker 1: gender affirming hormone therapy has a success rate. The rate
Speaker 1: of regret from starting hormones is one percent or less,
Speaker 1: which is unbelievable in the health care field, like like
Speaker 1: having a child, like biologically giving birth has a seven
Speaker 1: percent regret rate, Like the idea of any therapy having
Speaker 1: that high of a rate of preventing death, anxiety, depression, bullying,
Speaker 1: like all of the different effects. Being that successful should
Speaker 1: be like a miracle. It should be looked at as
Speaker 1: the thing we in healthcare are like should do absolutely ethically. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it is. It is so much more complicated than that.
Speaker 1: So like hormones from the results obviously makes sense. It
Speaker 1: aligns your body's shape and like fat fat deposits and
Speaker 1: the way that you feel, the way that you relate
Speaker 1: to your emotions, it all goes back to the way
Speaker 1: that hormones work on your body. And there's there's like
Speaker 1: the old saying that like assis person would never want
Speaker 1: to try gender forming hormerone therapy, so like if you
Speaker 1: have the in if you want to try it, you
Speaker 1: should be allowed to try it. I mean, like you're
Speaker 1: you're kind of a good example right here, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'm sitting Yeah, if you're sitting around a bar
Speaker 1: with a bunch of like ciss guys and you're like, hey,
Speaker 1: who wants some estrogen, they would all like shrink away
Speaker 1: from it, Like no, absolutely, because yeah it's definitely a thing.
Speaker 1: Like I'm not the most dysphoric person, but like sure,
Speaker 1: I'll take estrogen. That sounds fun. That's like it's like
Speaker 1: that that sounds like a thing that I could enjoy
Speaker 1: watching my body change. And I'm you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: I'm happy that we're moving more towards that and not
Speaker 1: having to deal with Oh, I'm so dysphoric. I want
Speaker 1: to die, which is obviously a big thing for a
Speaker 1: lot of people. I'm not I'm not minimizing that right um.
Speaker 1: But also a lot of trans people have had more
Speaker 1: kind of complicated feelings on gender, whether they're like gender queer,
Speaker 1: non binary. Having the past had made it more difficult
Speaker 1: to get gender firm in care because they don't fit
Speaker 1: into those specific like male female boxes as easily. Well,
Speaker 1: and what you're talking about is really something that's relatively recent,
Speaker 1: the idea of gender euphoria, like the idea that people
Speaker 1: want to take und because it gives them joy to
Speaker 1: like dress or act or feel a certain way, and that,
Speaker 1: I mean, health care is all about, at least up
Speaker 1: until well, the reality of health care is that it
Speaker 1: is all about finding problem to solve and not really
Speaker 1: looking at like your life just better in general. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: So you know, I know plenty of people who started
Speaker 1: hormones of any type just because they felt it would
Speaker 1: make them happier, and they were correct, And that gender
Speaker 1: euphoria is just as good of a reason to take
Speaker 1: it as the dysphoria. The problem ends up in how
Speaker 1: the medical industry treats it because dysphoria quote unquote is
Speaker 1: something as long. Oh my gosh, I could go into
Speaker 1: the whole history of that if you wanted, but I'm
Speaker 1: sure we could talk about the ds M four and
Speaker 1: five for a long time. Oh it's so frustrating. I
Speaker 1: spend I spend a two hour session in my queer
Speaker 1: healthcare class specifically just dunking on the d s M
Speaker 1: five definition of gender dysphoria. Um. But the real problem
Speaker 1: is like this focus on this negative quality and how
Speaker 1: that actually damages a lot of the conversations around uh,
Speaker 1: gender firming hormone therapy and trans people in general, Like
Speaker 1: instead of seeing it as like this manifestation of people
Speaker 1: like truly taking control roll of their lives to become
Speaker 1: authentic in like the truest way, Like you have never
Speaker 1: met a more truly well self made man than a
Speaker 1: transman who gets hormones. Like it's I mean, it's and
Speaker 1: it's still something we're even we're not quite at the
Speaker 1: at the gender utopia, I mean obviously because of all
Speaker 1: of the anti tran stuff, but even even on like
Speaker 1: just purely purely the medical side, like I even for
Speaker 1: for informed consent um I still needed to get diagnosed
Speaker 1: with gender dysphoria at the Informed Consent clinic in order
Speaker 1: to get hormones, which is in part like an insurance thing,
Speaker 1: and you know it has has all of these all
Speaker 1: of these bullshit reasons. Um, but that is that is
Speaker 1: something we're still we're still definitely dealing with. Oh my goodness. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the better informed care clinics are the ones that
Speaker 1: they realize it's just like an effort in box ticking.
Speaker 1: So they're just like, Yep, sounds good. You came here
Speaker 1: to this clinic and you asked about hormones. Sounds like
Speaker 1: gender dysphoria to me, Like, we'll say your insurance whatever,
Speaker 1: we gotta say, yes, event we will go into like
Speaker 1: hormone blockers as well. Um, but I want to talk
Speaker 1: about there's a lot of this, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: rhetoric that's been we're growing for a long long time
Speaker 1: about the extremely damaging, irreversible effects of of hormone replacement therapy, um,
Speaker 1: and how they're gonna permanently alter your biology. If you
Speaker 1: give these two children and there's five year olds taking
Speaker 1: testosterone and it's gonna like you're like, you're like really
Speaker 1: that sounds very scary. Um, So that's something I would
Speaker 1: like to discuss. It's like because a lot of people
Speaker 1: when we when we do we talk talk about hormones,
Speaker 1: they think of it as this like big, extremely life
Speaker 1: altering thing, um that has like these you know, irreversible
Speaker 1: effects on your your your bones are gonna get weak
Speaker 1: and trivel to never and never get big again, and
Speaker 1: all of all of this very scary stuff. Um. What's
Speaker 1: up with that? I think a lot of it goes
Speaker 1: back to the biological essentialism, because hormones, even for the
Speaker 1: people who give them, are considered partially like reversible because
Speaker 1: the majority of the things that happen one take a
Speaker 1: long ass time, like you will know whether or not.
Speaker 1: This is a good idea for the majority of people
Speaker 1: well before the physical manifestations occur. Uh. And and considering
Speaker 1: like one of the biggest problems we have with certain formulations,
Speaker 1: like in the once a week or once every other
Speaker 1: week injectable version of estrogen, by the time you get
Speaker 1: to right before your next dose, your estrogen is so
Speaker 1: low you're feeling it and it's starting to like reverse
Speaker 1: some of those So like if you're feeling it after
Speaker 1: two weeks. How irreversible could it be? Uh? And some
Speaker 1: of it depends on like eight timing, because if we're
Speaker 1: talking about a person who has say, already gone through
Speaker 1: a testosterone mediated puberty, then some of the things are
Speaker 1: just not going to be affected. You can't change like
Speaker 1: bone size, height or anything like that. There's some interesting
Speaker 1: things about like hip uh, like flexation and and and
Speaker 1: and pivoting and actually yeah, yeah, and and and even
Speaker 1: like shoe sizes can can change because of the way
Speaker 1: the ligaments work on hormones, but like the bones aren't
Speaker 1: going to change once they're done growing. But that's sort
Speaker 1: of where the puberty blockers come in that we can
Speaker 1: we'll talk about later. Um. But for the for the
Speaker 1: majority of people, if you are going through if you
Speaker 1: have gone through a puberty that you did not want,
Speaker 1: you can take hormones to go through puberty you do
Speaker 1: want and get the effects that you do want. And
Speaker 1: some of the elements sure, like you know, growing breasts
Speaker 1: uh guna coomastia as we would call it, an assist man,
Speaker 1: which is another whole nonsense, UM, is not irreversible, Like
Speaker 1: you can have them removed if you decided that you
Speaker 1: needed to like de transition, which is a whole another story,
Speaker 1: but even then, it takes like five years to see
Speaker 1: your final breast size. Like if you if you're on
Speaker 1: hormones for five years and you're worried about the ir
Speaker 1: rever posable quote unquote effects, like what are we doing here?
Speaker 1: I mean, and even I've heard from a lot of
Speaker 1: my elder trans friends that whenever they go off hormones
Speaker 1: sometimes their breasts just kind of go away because they're
Speaker 1: not massive to begin with. Like if it's generally generally
Speaker 1: generally you don't get the massive, massive honkers immediately. Um
Speaker 1: working on it. I know, I know we're trying, um,
Speaker 1: but a lot of a lot, a lot of even
Speaker 1: the you know, that was one of the big things
Speaker 1: that informed consent thing was like, you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of these changes are reversible except for breasts. These are
Speaker 1: these are these are these are permanent change. Be careful
Speaker 1: and all my transferends are like a little bit but
Speaker 1: I mean, like your nipples won't shrink, Like your nipples
Speaker 1: will definitely be bigger, and that that won't change, but
Speaker 1: a lot of like the size actually does fluctuate, and
Speaker 1: I can't even tell that on like depending on if
Speaker 1: I like missidos or something, being like oh yeah, like
Speaker 1: there is a lot of a lot of fluctuation, even
Speaker 1: like on like you know, like temperature and stuf how
Speaker 1: cold it will determine how how how how how my
Speaker 1: chest looks it is. It is, Uh, it's pretty fun.
Speaker 1: I mean, I am I just like the bio hacking
Speaker 1: thing in general. It is like the cyberpunk and me um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I guess I guess we could talk about
Speaker 1: hormone hormone blockers as well, because this is the other
Speaker 1: kind of thing you hear a lot about when conservatives
Speaker 1: are very scared about transpeople. The idea of hormone blockers
Speaker 1: like making people infertile or making permanent changes to children's
Speaker 1: health or something blah blah blah blah blah. Gosh, that's
Speaker 1: the thing that is like really really frustrating for me,
Speaker 1: specifically because puberty blockers, the Ganada troupe in the g
Speaker 1: n R H antagonists and agonists which have been around
Speaker 1: for like long time, like ever for for I want
Speaker 1: to say it was like a hundred years, but I
Speaker 1: might be misquoting something that I'm half remembering, but they've
Speaker 1: been a down for like a really long time to
Speaker 1: the point where we have generics and in the in
Speaker 1: the pharmaceutical industry, that means that it's been like decades
Speaker 1: at the very least, something that had rigorous testing that
Speaker 1: has an indication with the FDA for precocious puberty, which
Speaker 1: just means a person who is usually SIS who for
Speaker 1: whatever reason has puberty at a very young age. With
Speaker 1: some of the some of the specific cases that I've
Speaker 1: seen that that I've that I've looked into, um involved
Speaker 1: giving puberty blockers to like a three or four year
Speaker 1: old because their body is trying to undergo puberty. So
Speaker 1: even the idea of like, oh, well, I don't know
Speaker 1: this twelve year old being on a puberty blocker for
Speaker 1: three years, that sounds very dangerous when we have a
Speaker 1: person over here who was on it for fifteen years
Speaker 1: with no ill effects, like like no long lasting ill effects. Um,
Speaker 1: that the idea of anybody describing it as like experimental
Speaker 1: is absolutely a historic outside of the realm of reality. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's it's it's basic anti anti intellectualism, because yeah, we've
Speaker 1: been giving six children hormone blockers for a long time
Speaker 1: for early onset puberty, and it turns out they work
Speaker 1: and they're pretty safe. So yeah, maybe we should give
Speaker 1: those two trans kids too if they want them. Uh,
Speaker 1: it seems like something we could at least try and
Speaker 1: see if it improves mental health. And then it's it's
Speaker 1: not even a matter that we have to try it.
Speaker 1: We've been doing it for like almost ten years, like
Speaker 1: the it was first and think it was like two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen. There's a there's a ted talk I use
Speaker 1: in my class of a of a physician who like
Speaker 1: pioneered the use of puberty blockers in trans kids and
Speaker 1: showed that any trans kid who got puberty blockers and
Speaker 1: then was allowed to undergo the puberty that they desired
Speaker 1: at an appropriate age, which is actually like fourteen fifteen,
Speaker 1: at the same time as their peers um. But even
Speaker 1: if they had to wait till eighteen, the psychological effects
Speaker 1: of having in appropriate puberty are essentially nullified. They are
Speaker 1: otherwise psychologically and physically like identical to their their CIS
Speaker 1: gender peers. So it's like we have actual evidence that
Speaker 1: it is extremely beneficial and extremely worthwhile, and like the
Speaker 1: one kind of long term side effect is you might
Speaker 1: be up to an inch shorter than you otherwise be
Speaker 1: which is a wildly like problematic like study that was
Speaker 1: done because like we don't have time machines to know
Speaker 1: whether or not that work, Like what would your control
Speaker 1: group be? Um, And it's just wild. It's very bothersome
Speaker 1: to me because a lot of the gender affirming hormone therapy,
Speaker 1: the evidence is all over the place for a variety
Speaker 1: of political reasons and historical reasons. But for hormone blockers
Speaker 1: or for puberty blockers specifically, the evidence is like really solid,
Speaker 1: really strong, and it's, ah, this is the question I
Speaker 1: actually have because I'm actually unfamiliar with this specific thing.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if you give like, um, hormone blockers to
Speaker 1: like a kid who's tend they still kind of like
Speaker 1: grow at the same rate as a lot of as
Speaker 1: a lot of their peers, and that is it just
Speaker 1: it's it's this specifically like the secondary sex characteristic changes
Speaker 1: that get put on pause. UM. But there's just so
Speaker 1: much Yeah, there's just so much fear around the even
Speaker 1: even just the hormone blocker thing. Right when we're getting
Speaker 1: you know, just like prescribing hormone blockers being like a
Speaker 1: felony offense, and multiple states now you're like, it's like
Speaker 1: it's it is just an extreme degree of anti anti
Speaker 1: intellectualism just like just like purposeful like ignorance, um and
Speaker 1: just extreme hatred and uh bigotry, and it's it is uh,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, it's a I'm kind of speaking to
Speaker 1: the choir here. But but but but that's the trick.
Speaker 1: And and even like the purity blocker thing, like you
Speaker 1: were saying, your body will still make human growth hormone,
Speaker 1: You will still grow, it's just that the modulation of
Speaker 1: that with testosterone, which would increase the overall growth like
Speaker 1: just doesn't there. And people say make a lot of
Speaker 1: you know, talk a lot about the idea of um
Speaker 1: bone mineral density because you don't have testosterone estrogen, which
Speaker 1: are both necessary one or the other necessary for your
Speaker 1: like bone mineral density to not like have like easily
Speaker 1: fractured bones. But like you don't even have that until
Speaker 1: you go through puberty. If you're just like preventing one puberty,
Speaker 1: the endogenous puberty, and then providing the hormones for an
Speaker 1: exogenous puberty, they're fine, Like they have the hormones they need,
Speaker 1: their bones are happy. Uh So yeah, I'd like to
Speaker 1: talk about I guess kind of access to hormones and
Speaker 1: in like the like the different models of of obviously
Speaker 1: we're not giving up medical advice, but like access to
Speaker 1: hormones and the different ways that people can go about
Speaker 1: that now through doctors, through in form of consent um
Speaker 1: and all of all and all of that jazz. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the informed consent model is a much more recent option,
Speaker 1: and it's not available everywhere. I have a friend in
Speaker 1: Texas we had to find a clinic that was like
Speaker 1: two hours away to get her hormones. But here where
Speaker 1: I live, we actually have too informed consent clinics, So
Speaker 1: it's pretty convenient, but it varies wildly by by region. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the informed care clinics are great. It means you
Speaker 1: come in, they say this is what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: Do you still want to do it? You say yes,
Speaker 1: They take some blood, they run some tests, you come
Speaker 1: back in two weeks, and they go here. You go
Speaker 1: like that's They work really well depending on the clinic,
Speaker 1: I guess and uh, but the more traditional quote unquote
Speaker 1: standard model would be going to your pc P or
Speaker 1: or whoever and saying that you want to do this,
Speaker 1: which makes most of them very concerned because most physicians, pharmacist, nurses,
Speaker 1: they don't get taught anything about trans people, are caring
Speaker 1: for trans people or gender affirming hormone therapy in their
Speaker 1: school like, so they have nothing to fall back back on. Uh.
Speaker 1: So that makes them very nervous to do it. And
Speaker 1: then UH, if you if you look at gosh, I
Speaker 1: really want to tell you about the guideline stuff at
Speaker 1: some point here because it is buck wild um as
Speaker 1: to why that would be a concern. But another part
Speaker 1: of it is is also the insurance you know, America's
Speaker 1: original sin in our healthcare dystopia, if you will. Uh,
Speaker 1: the insurances historically have required and part of this is
Speaker 1: also from antiquated guidelines that has been somewhat like just
Speaker 1: grandfathered into excuse the term, uh, this idea of like
Speaker 1: we you have to go to a therapist, if you
Speaker 1: go to a psychologist, and they have to say that
Speaker 1: you have gendered dystoria, that's why it's in the d
Speaker 1: s M. And then after you do that, some places
Speaker 1: require you to socially transition before getting hormones or anything,
Speaker 1: which can be extremely problematic for some individuals. That just
Speaker 1: increases like visibility and bullying and and such in a
Speaker 1: way that it may drive people. It's it's sort of
Speaker 1: was intentionally required back in the day to drive people
Speaker 1: to not want hormones anymore. And it's all of these
Speaker 1: gate keeping steps. And it's even worse if you wanted
Speaker 1: to get a surgery later on, where you have to
Speaker 1: have been on hormones for a certain length of time,
Speaker 1: you have to have two different generally like susgender right.
Speaker 1: Healthcare practitioners who don't necessarily understand like the full like
Speaker 1: everything that's going on, write you letters before. The most
Speaker 1: insurances up until recently wouldn't even cover it. So it's
Speaker 1: just gate keeping step after gate keeping step. Because even
Speaker 1: the big guidelines, which is w PATH, which is about
Speaker 1: to put out their so gate guidelines. Um, there's a
Speaker 1: guidelines out of San Francisco, and the Endocrine Society has
Speaker 1: guidelines from two seventeen that are but all of those
Speaker 1: are made by cisgender people, usually with the intent to
Speaker 1: gate keep this care because it's either they're uncomfortable with it,
Speaker 1: because they're unfamiliar with it, they have some kind of
Speaker 1: ideological reason to be against it, or whatever whatever else.
Speaker 1: There's a survey that I often quote to my students
Speaker 1: in class that, Um, they surveyed a whole bunch of
Speaker 1: trans individuals trying to get care from their physicians, and
Speaker 1: it was nearly a quarter of them said that they
Speaker 1: avoided healthcare because of discrimination, and half of them reported
Speaker 1: having to teach their health care practitioner how to care
Speaker 1: for them, which is wild. Like imagine going to the
Speaker 1: hospital with like heart failure and having to like talk
Speaker 1: your physician through how to care for you. Can you
Speaker 1: can you live for two years with heart failure first?
Speaker 1: Before we go, Oh my gosh, could you imagine if
Speaker 1: we treated other things this way? I'd be like, well,
Speaker 1: are you sure that you have diabetes? Are you sure
Speaker 1: that you're? Like, well, we can't treat your diabetes you're
Speaker 1: too fat, Well, your b m I is too high,
Speaker 1: so we can't give you the insulin. Like, give me
Speaker 1: a break. What is happening? Uh? It seems like, uh, basically,
Speaker 1: what you're is that we got a good system. We
Speaker 1: gotta oh, we gotta figure it out. Absolutely no notes
Speaker 1: perfect and every well that does it for us today? Here? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: specifically if I could, Um, it's really interesting from like
Speaker 1: the healthcare perspective because from you know, the practitioners perspective,
Speaker 1: because there's essentially two kinds of like treatment. There's guideline
Speaker 1: based medicine and evidence based medicine. And a lot of schools,
Speaker 1: like my school teaches a lot of guideline based medicine,
Speaker 1: which is for something like hypertension or diabetes, is put
Speaker 1: out by like large organizations with a ton of evidence.
Speaker 1: It is actually like pretty reasonable. But that means that
Speaker 1: if you're going along with what they say, that means
Speaker 1: that you believe that they read those studies correctly and
Speaker 1: that their interpretation is in no way compromised by like
Speaker 1: sources of their income, say, and that those guidelines actually
Speaker 1: match your patients. So it's a lot of assumptions that
Speaker 1: you're making, which can be extremely pro ablematic an evidence
Speaker 1: based is where you dive into literature and you figure
Speaker 1: it out yourself, which is very time consuming and requires
Speaker 1: an awful lot of like professional uh, like you know,
Speaker 1: criticism in a way. Uh, but when you look at
Speaker 1: it for for trans care, for for gender affirming hormone therapy,
Speaker 1: those guidelines are unbelievably compromised. To give you an example,
Speaker 1: a hotly contested issue in feminizing therapy is the use
Speaker 1: of micronized progesterone in feminizing care. Uh, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like all over the place. There's a long history of
Speaker 1: it of this controversy. In the upcoming w path socate
Speaker 1: guidelines that I had like a preliminary copy to to
Speaker 1: provide notes on there, there's a single statement that just
Speaker 1: says that there's a controversy that exists and you should
Speaker 1: not use micronized progesterone and transfiminine care. And they list
Speaker 1: a study. Okay, if you pull up that study, the
Speaker 1: title of it is progesterone is important for transgender Women's therapy.
Speaker 1: Applying evidence for the benefits of progesterone insists women. And
Speaker 1: it is like a pretty long document that concludes that
Speaker 1: it is like an ethical imperative to offer it. So
Speaker 1: the idea that the people who are writing the w
Speaker 1: PATH guidelines read this article, read this this like meta
Speaker 1: analysis and went, yeah, I don't really agree with any
Speaker 1: of that. I'm just gonna say no, is just so infuriating. Again,
Speaker 1: that seems like we've got a good system going here. Yeah, no, notes,
Speaker 1: I guess on that note, let's do what did discuss
Speaker 1: some of the some of the things that an't talking
Speaker 1: about as much as like um antiandrogen's, uh, progesterone spiro
Speaker 1: and what all kind of those do and how they
Speaker 1: can kind of supplement a regular estradial regimen regiment regiment. Yes,
Speaker 1: that sounds that sounds fancy. Sure, sure, So generally speaking,
Speaker 1: if you're maybe you give a baseline for for folks
Speaker 1: who are unaware. The way that we do feminizing arapy
Speaker 1: is we offer estra dial, which is a bioequivalent version
Speaker 1: of E two, because there's like three different versions of
Speaker 1: estro of estrogen UM and an antiandrogen because testosterone tends
Speaker 1: to be somewhat of an overriding hormone. The presence of
Speaker 1: testosterone will override the effects of estrogen to a certain
Speaker 1: extent depending on doses and stuff like that, which is
Speaker 1: for the transmasculine individuals, why we just give testosterone. It
Speaker 1: just does the job. You don't need to block the estrogen. Uh.
Speaker 1: So there's a you know, there's a lot of history
Speaker 1: and just those hormones as well that we could talk about,
Speaker 1: like conjugated estrogens versus estra dial and and all the
Speaker 1: different other stuff. But for the antiandrogens that we give
Speaker 1: Historically in this country we give spironal lactone, which is
Speaker 1: a mineral corticoid. It's a potassium sparing diuretic, and it's
Speaker 1: just really good at higher levels. We usually use it
Speaker 1: in like cardio issues, like it can be used for
Speaker 1: like hypertensions and other things. Um, I believe it makes
Speaker 1: you pee a lot, So it's a diuretic, meaning that
Speaker 1: it makes you urinate an awful lot. And it's a
Speaker 1: potassium sparing because it prevents your body from eliminating potassium.
Speaker 1: So uh well, so that is that's the thing that
Speaker 1: I think is really really wild because you're using these
Speaker 1: high levels of it. It is preventing your production of
Speaker 1: your endogenous production of testosterone and making you pee all
Speaker 1: of the time, which spoilers estradial also makes you pay
Speaker 1: more often. So like that's a real fun combination. But
Speaker 1: then physicians, if they don't know what the heck they're doing,
Speaker 1: they might say something like, well, you can't eat any bananas,
Speaker 1: and like, historically the people who are on feminizing therapy
Speaker 1: are healthy enough that their body just accommodates for it.
Speaker 1: And if you have hyper kelmia, which is like too
Speaker 1: much potassium, you're gonna know, like your muscles are gonna ache,
Speaker 1: and there's gonna be a lot of like tell teal
Speaker 1: side effects. Usually it's only a problem if you are
Speaker 1: like only consuming a like salt alternative that has potassium
Speaker 1: instead of sodium, which is not super common, not super common,
Speaker 1: or if you have some other reason why your body
Speaker 1: is like holding onto potassium. Um, So it's not usually
Speaker 1: an issue. Uh, it's an inspiral actone isn't sufficient for everyone.
Speaker 1: There's plenty of people who have like refractory testosterone after
Speaker 1: some time, and there's some other options. Uh. There's kind
Speaker 1: of a weird controversy about it that is sort of
Speaker 1: heralded by the San Francisco guidelines. I mentioned earlier that
Speaker 1: spironal actone uh leads to Okay, well, I want to
Speaker 1: make sure I get the wording right. It's leads to
Speaker 1: premature fusing of the breast bud uh and overall smaller
Speaker 1: breast size, which the document that they cite for that
Speaker 1: is a real weird retrospective study from like a bunch
Speaker 1: of years ago on the rate of trans women getting
Speaker 1: breast augmentation, and it found that the vast majority of
Speaker 1: trans women who were on spirontal actone got breast dogment great,
Speaker 1: but the problem is like of their sample group of
Speaker 1: like two people, almost all of them were on spur
Speaker 1: on elactone, Like there's like a sampling error, Like it's
Speaker 1: not it's very silly. Um And also even like that
Speaker 1: premature fusing in the breastbed. I have never been able
Speaker 1: to find anything that suggests that that's a thing or
Speaker 1: even like a way to explain what that statement even means.
Speaker 1: But the San Francisco guidelines, to go back to the
Speaker 1: my guideline thing actually says, has some like maybe don't
Speaker 1: use spur on a lactone, even though it's something we've
Speaker 1: been using since literally like the fifties or sixties for
Speaker 1: this purpose. In other countries, you'll use what's called cyprotorone,
Speaker 1: which is a synthetic progesterone, but it's not actually approved
Speaker 1: in the States because it has a like there is
Speaker 1: actually some evidence that it causes increase in certain specific cancers,
Speaker 1: but it's like a pretty limited overall risk, Like it's
Speaker 1: not like something like you know, going outside increases your
Speaker 1: risk of cancer. It's it's not like a huge deal,
Speaker 1: but it was enough that they don't it's not approved
Speaker 1: in the States, but in a lot of other countries
Speaker 1: you might get cyprotarone, which there's a lot of you know,
Speaker 1: controversy around that too for those reasons. UM. Here, the
Speaker 1: other option that we usually see is finasteride, which is
Speaker 1: a five alpha reductation inhibitor that essentially is preventing testosterone
Speaker 1: from being turned into dihydro testosterone, which we use normally
Speaker 1: for UM to prevent quote unquote male pattern baldness and
Speaker 1: in higher doses for prostate cancer because it's real good
Speaker 1: at because it like reverses some of the feedback loops
Speaker 1: just reducing product testosterone production. UM. So it's just fine
Speaker 1: like that one has like very limited side effects, but
Speaker 1: it might not have as substantial of a UM reduction
Speaker 1: of testosterone that spiral lactone does. UH. And then the
Speaker 1: kind of third one that we really we don't see
Speaker 1: very often but there's a lot of interesting evidence about
Speaker 1: is called bicaludamide. It's also a UH prostate cancer medication.
Speaker 1: It actually blocks all of the receptors of testosterone in
Speaker 1: your body while not reducing the production of it. So
Speaker 1: you'll see a person who has like you know, they
Speaker 1: have like seven hundred there their testosterone comes back is
Speaker 1: like seven six whatever, But they're entirely feminized because none
Speaker 1: of it has anywhere to work. Um. But the problem
Speaker 1: with that is by plutamide being an anti cancer med uh,
Speaker 1: primarily is ridiculously expensive. I think it's like fifty bucks
Speaker 1: a dose or something like here, it's so great, uh,
Speaker 1: I will say, and and for my gender queers out
Speaker 1: there or any anyone else. So you can also just
Speaker 1: take estrogen without any without any blockers UM and you
Speaker 1: still get results as I can, as I can confirm
Speaker 1: UM and for a subset of the population, just taking
Speaker 1: estrogen A sufficient dosages will also reduce your levels of
Speaker 1: progester of testosterone. Like it's your body knows what it's doing.
Speaker 1: Is it is? It is? It is pretty cool. How
Speaker 1: but you can just change things up in your body
Speaker 1: is like, oh, we're doing this now, Okay, got it? Great?
Speaker 1: I have all these mechanisms. It's wonderful. It was that
Speaker 1: That wraps up part one of our little two part
Speaker 1: series of episodes talking about hormone replacement therapy. Tomorrow, I'll
Speaker 1: talk more about access to gender affirming treatment and touch
Speaker 1: on d I y h R T special thanks to
Speaker 1: Dr Victoria Luna Brennan Grieve for chatting with me about
Speaker 1: gender affirming hormonal treatment. You'll get to hear more of
Speaker 1: my discussion with her tomorrow as well, including a brief
Speaker 1: tangent about the Scythian priestesses, which I was it was very,
Speaker 1: very very excited to talk about, but that doesn't for
Speaker 1: us today. You can follow this show at Happen to
Speaker 1: Hear pod and Cool Zone Media on Twitter and Instagram,
Speaker 1: and you can look at my late night gender tweets
Speaker 1: at Hungry about Tie on Twitter dot com. So see
Speaker 1: you all on the other side. Welcome back to It
Speaker 1: Could Happen here, the podcast about things falling apart and
Speaker 1: sometimes how we can put things back together. I'm Garrison Davis,
Speaker 1: Aspiring Rebus, and this is part two of my little
Speaker 1: two part series talking about trans hormone replacement therapy. Last episode,
Speaker 1: we discussed what HRT is, it's various benefits as gender
Speaker 1: affirming treatment, and the informed consent model of receiving hormones.
Speaker 1: Before we continue on with my discussion with Dr Grieve,
Speaker 1: I would like to talk a bit more about informed consent.
Speaker 1: So the informed consent option can be great for many
Speaker 1: many people as an attempts to bypass some of the
Speaker 1: red tape around receiving gender reforming healthcare. For its form
Speaker 1: of consent, all you gotta do is set u an appointment,
Speaker 1: signed the forms, maybe get some blood work done, and
Speaker 1: then pick up your hormones. Right. You don't need to
Speaker 1: live as trans for like two years or have letters
Speaker 1: and therapists. It's it is. It is just up to you,
Speaker 1: so it is. It is really convenient if you can
Speaker 1: get that option. Some places even let you do it
Speaker 1: via telemedicine appointments, so you can just sit at home
Speaker 1: holding your little I keya shark and then get your hormones,
Speaker 1: which does sound very very nice. Planned Parenthood offers informed
Speaker 1: consent trans health care in many states, and in the
Speaker 1: show notes I will link a Google map of the
Speaker 1: informed consent clinics from across the country. Depending on your insurance,
Speaker 1: you can get hormones for a little to no extra cost.
Speaker 1: This way it can be really convenient. The biggest asterisk
Speaker 1: for informed consent is that since it's based on you know,
Speaker 1: informed consent, it often is just for humans age eight
Speaker 1: teen and older, or sometimes teens a few years younger,
Speaker 1: but only if their parents or guardians signed the forms. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this is not ideal for a sixteen year old with
Speaker 1: transphobic parents, who would really be helped by receiving like
Speaker 1: hormone blockers or something, right. Another potential drawback is that
Speaker 1: the clinics can sometimes have quite the wait list. I
Speaker 1: started off with the informed consent model because it was
Speaker 1: the easiest, but by the time I needed more blood
Speaker 1: work done and my prescription refilled, setting up more appointments
Speaker 1: that planned parenthood became kind of a nightmare. I was
Speaker 1: continuously having appointments being canceled on me last minute and
Speaker 1: just getting pushed back months and months into the future. Eventually,
Speaker 1: I just resorted to getting hormones through my regular doctor
Speaker 1: instead of just continuing on within formed consent. Now, this
Speaker 1: is obviously a regional issue, right. I don't know what
Speaker 1: it's like in Florida, for example, but the COVID andeen
Speaker 1: pandemic has stressed a lot of the medical infrastructure here
Speaker 1: in the States, and scheduling some appointments in these clinics
Speaker 1: can be still quite challenging. And as you know, a
Speaker 1: big theme of this show is that maybe we shouldn't
Speaker 1: assume the structures that hold up our society are concrete,
Speaker 1: permanent fixtures. The term the crumbles that we used to
Speaker 1: describe the slow deterioration of the systems that we rely on,
Speaker 1: was initially coined in reference to our medical system by
Speaker 1: a friend of the show who works in the medical field.
Speaker 1: Listen to the first five episodes of The Daily Show
Speaker 1: talking about climate change for more on that. But a
Speaker 1: part of the criminal's idea is trying to learn how
Speaker 1: to become less reliant on the systems that we take
Speaker 1: for granted, right, trying to solve for the fallacy of
Speaker 1: misplaced concreteness before it's too late. On that note, back
Speaker 1: to my discussion with Dr Victoria Luna Brendan Grieve, Assistant
Speaker 1: professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy. For
Speaker 1: places that are getting, uh, you know, all of these
Speaker 1: anti trends bills criminalizing all of this stuff for miners,
Speaker 1: and then you know, eventually maybe even you know, my
Speaker 1: big fear is that, you know, first off, they're gonna
Speaker 1: criminalizing it for minors, and they're gonna say the brain's
Speaker 1: not fully developed, your twenty five, and they're gonna criminalize
Speaker 1: it until you're twenty five and they're just gonna criminalize
Speaker 1: it for everyone after that. Um So for all of
Speaker 1: these places that are making access to healthcare is so
Speaker 1: much harder, What what is what is one to do?
Speaker 1: Like if these if there's these kids and then even
Speaker 1: adults who are like just find it so much harder
Speaker 1: to get stuff. Like I know there's the informed consent clinics,
Speaker 1: but there's there's like there's like a few in Texas,
Speaker 1: but I don't even know what they can even offer anymore, right,
Speaker 1: Like it's really unclear. Yeah, well, I'll tell you some
Speaker 1: of that fear is already becoming reality here in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: Just two days ago HP. I think it was HBO
Speaker 1: passed by the House in don in Harrisburg that prevents
Speaker 1: it's a ban on trans people playing sports up through
Speaker 1: the college level, not just high school and grade school,
Speaker 1: it's all the way up through you know, secondary education. Uh.
Speaker 1: And even though our governor like has valve de Vito,
Speaker 1: it like who even knows what's going to happen. But
Speaker 1: they're already taking taking aim at this higher level kind
Speaker 1: of thing. And there's a lot of pressdent for that.
Speaker 1: But my goodness, if there's a long and storied history
Speaker 1: of d I Y hormone therapy, and it's easier for
Speaker 1: the trans feminine individuals because testosterone is actually a scheduled
Speaker 1: to control I think it it might be a three
Speaker 1: I think it's scheduled three steroid. I'll write a little
Speaker 1: thing about it, and I'll say in the episode. And
Speaker 1: it's such a funny reason too, because it's just you
Speaker 1: can use it to dope for endurance based like like
Speaker 1: cycling and running, because it will increase your red blood
Speaker 1: cell account that's a like. And so it's a controlled
Speaker 1: substance because people can use it to dope for for exit,
Speaker 1: for for sports. So it's that's a little bit harder
Speaker 1: to get ahold of in like a meaningful way. But
Speaker 1: there are a lot of different allegedly, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of different place is online that you can acquire
Speaker 1: estrogen or estra dial relatively easily. Now I'm gonna actually
Speaker 1: pause the discussion with me and Dr Grieve to talk
Speaker 1: a little bit about d I Y h R T
Speaker 1: or for those anti acronym people out there, do it
Speaker 1: yourself hormone replacement therapy. Again, I'm not a medical doctor.
Speaker 1: Unless you have a problem regarding parapsychology, I cannot offer
Speaker 1: you any expertise, but I can talk about d I
Speaker 1: Y h R T as it's existed for trans people
Speaker 1: for the past two decades. Because an unfortunate truth is,
Speaker 1: although it's gotten much easier to get gender affirm and
Speaker 1: care and hormones the past few years, even in states
Speaker 1: that aren't facing this wave of anti trans healthcare bills,
Speaker 1: the medical establishment hasn't been the most trans friendly place
Speaker 1: in general. A recent Center for American Progress report found
Speaker 1: that nearly half of transgender people and sixty of transgender
Speaker 1: people of color reported having experienced to mistreatment at the
Speaker 1: hands of a medical provider, including refusal of care and
Speaker 1: verbal or physical abuse, just in the year before the survey,
Speaker 1: which took place in June, so this is this is
Speaker 1: still very much an ongoing issue. One in two trans
Speaker 1: people reported that their access to gender affirming healthcare was
Speaker 1: curtailed significantly during the pandemic, and nearly one in two
Speaker 1: transgender adults have had insurance providers denying them coverage for
Speaker 1: gender affirming care, and very often doctors don't even know
Speaker 1: how to properly treat transgender patients, and often it's up
Speaker 1: to the patients to educate the doctors on trans health
Speaker 1: care issues. The Center for American Progress survey from last
Speaker 1: year found that one in three trans people report having
Speaker 1: to teach their doctors about trans people to get them
Speaker 1: appropriate care, and reported having been asked innovasive or unnecessary
Speaker 1: questions about being trans which were not related to the
Speaker 1: reasons for them visiting the doctor. The report cited a
Speaker 1: twenty eight team brief from the Kaiser Family Foundation that
Speaker 1: found that more than half of medical school curriculums lack
Speaker 1: information about unique health issues the LGBTQ community faces, and
Speaker 1: doesn't cover treatment beyond HIV prevention and care. So obviously,
Speaker 1: that leaves a lot to be desired for people wanting
Speaker 1: to receive transgender health care. Between medical mistreatment, insurance complications,
Speaker 1: and doctor ignorance, many trans folks have taken it upon
Speaker 1: themselves to get the drug necessary for hormone replacement therapy
Speaker 1: because the alternative is often just having to face not
Speaker 1: being able to receive the health care that in many
Speaker 1: cases makes it possible to live. The Center for American
Speaker 1: Progress survey found that twenty eight percent of trans folks
Speaker 1: report having postponed or not gotten necessary medical care for
Speaker 1: fear of discrimination. Taking your endochronology and hormone treatment into
Speaker 1: your own hands has a lengthy history and used to
Speaker 1: be much more common in the days before informed consent.
Speaker 1: In a survey of trans people in Washington, d c.
Speaker 1: Circus two thousand, over half of the respondents so that
Speaker 1: they had used non prescribed hormones also known as d
Speaker 1: I y h RT. So information on how to go
Speaker 1: about d I yng your HRT spread via online forums
Speaker 1: and websites in the early two thousand's, and after some
Speaker 1: trial and error, the information is kind of consolidated into
Speaker 1: a few main information hubs, that being the d I
Speaker 1: y h r T Wiki, HRT dot Cafe, and d
Speaker 1: I y HRT dot get hub dot io. Now, obviously,
Speaker 1: when you're getting into taking drugs from online sources, you
Speaker 1: need to be extremely careful and cautious about what foreign
Speaker 1: chemicals you're putting into your body, including and trying to
Speaker 1: only acquire drugs from trustworthy sources, doing drug testing if
Speaker 1: you can, and doing your own blood testing before and
Speaker 1: after to keep an eye on your testosterone and estrogen levels.
Speaker 1: It is possible to order blood tests via online and
Speaker 1: send it through a lab that you have to ship
Speaker 1: your blood too, but often it's just easier to do
Speaker 1: it by going through the medical system. Now, one massive
Speaker 1: caveat with d y h r T is although it's
Speaker 1: more straightforward to acquire extra dial and antiandrogen's like spiro
Speaker 1: from online sources, getting too stosterone for masculinization therapy is
Speaker 1: much more tricky because in most places it's a restricted drug.
Speaker 1: Here in the States it is a Schedule three substance,
Speaker 1: so technically buying it without a prescription would be a
Speaker 1: felony um. So for this reason, most d I y
Speaker 1: h r T stuff focuses on feminizing hormones since that
Speaker 1: is less legally complicated. Now, obviously you know steroids exist,
Speaker 1: so it is possible to get them, but I will
Speaker 1: not be giving out guides on how to do that
Speaker 1: here on the pod, but you know you can. You
Speaker 1: can look into it if you so desire for feminizing hormones.
Speaker 1: The main way of going about it requires obtaining bioidentical
Speaker 1: extra dial. It can come in a few forms pills,
Speaker 1: which are not difficult to acquire, and assuming you get
Speaker 1: the dose right, it's pretty easy because it's just a
Speaker 1: process of dissolving the little pill tablets under your tongue,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of it, right. Dosage is its own thing,
Speaker 1: which you can figure out if you do reading, but
Speaker 1: the actual taking of it is pretty straightforward. Transdermal estrogen
Speaker 1: or transdermal estra dial is kind of the new hot thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: Usually this has you taking weakly estra dial patches which
Speaker 1: you just switch out every week um or you can
Speaker 1: also do daily gels, which you just rub out your body,
Speaker 1: although unfortunately for dosing gels it can be more tricky
Speaker 1: if you go d I Y because it's hard to
Speaker 1: know what concentration just the jela is if you're just
Speaker 1: rubbing a sav on yourself. It's not already prepackaged, but
Speaker 1: the patches are pretty good. And lastly, the classic method
Speaker 1: is injectable estradial at various concentrations in the form of
Speaker 1: some oil solution. This can usually be the cheapest option
Speaker 1: if you can figure out how to buy estra dial
Speaker 1: and needles. Syringes can be bought at any pharmacy just
Speaker 1: over the counter in most countries without a prescription. For
Speaker 1: ferminizing hormones. Some people also take antiandrogen's a k A.
Speaker 1: Testosterone blockers like spiral lactone, which can be acquired online
Speaker 1: and are almost always taken orally in the form of
Speaker 1: a pill. Now, when getting these drugs online, there are
Speaker 1: two main categories of purchase. There's pharmaceutical grade and home brewed.
Speaker 1: Pharmaceutical grade refers to HRT produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies
Speaker 1: that are licensed and subject to regulation. They should be
Speaker 1: of the same quality as those found in your local pharmacy,
Speaker 1: and they can be ordered without a prescription from websites
Speaker 1: based in countries that allow for the legal exportation of
Speaker 1: certain medications. These will almost always carry less inherent risk
Speaker 1: versus receiving and taking home brewed hormones, which leads us
Speaker 1: to the second version that you can buy, which is
Speaker 1: home brewed. This refers to HRT produced by individuals by
Speaker 1: sourcing raw extrodial or whatever other chemical you're taking in
Speaker 1: the form of a powder, and then compounding the medication themselves.
Speaker 1: They do not synthesize or from scratch these hormones, but
Speaker 1: they do use the powdered versions of them, and they
Speaker 1: get them from sources from drug manufacturing companies to synthesize
Speaker 1: it into their own estradial or whatever other drug you're taking,
Speaker 1: you know, in the antiandrogen list, there's there's too many,
Speaker 1: too many to name. Now. While this this concept does
Speaker 1: sound scary and it can obviously go wrong if someone's
Speaker 1: not synthesizing it correctly. Uh, there are a couple of
Speaker 1: well respected members of the community that have been known
Speaker 1: to produce high quality and safe HRT medications. But before
Speaker 1: anyone decides to take drugs that you get on the internet, please, please,
Speaker 1: please please do lots of reading beforehand on on dosage effects,
Speaker 1: side effects, and be very cautious with your drug sourcing,
Speaker 1: right you should know who you're buying it from. You
Speaker 1: don't want to just buy from whatever it's catchy website.
Speaker 1: You should make sure that what you're doing is other
Speaker 1: people are backing up on this decision. Make sure that's there.
Speaker 1: You can cross reference information here, because there's a lot
Speaker 1: of information out there online and not all of it
Speaker 1: is good information, obviously, but really try to cross reference
Speaker 1: information on any drug sources, on hormone dosage, on any
Speaker 1: possible drug interactions. If you're taking multiple drugs or you
Speaker 1: already have prescriptions, now I should I should note that
Speaker 1: supply chain issues that affect the medical system can even
Speaker 1: extend out to d y A h r T. There's
Speaker 1: no true escape. There's no true other. One of the
Speaker 1: main pharmaceutical grade online sites to source HRT from is
Speaker 1: currently out of estradial pills, so there there is there
Speaker 1: is no true escape sometimes, but to learn more about
Speaker 1: d I Y HRT, you should check out d I
Speaker 1: O Y HRT dot get hub dot io or HRT
Speaker 1: dot cafe and the d I y trans dot wiki.
Speaker 1: And keep in mind not everything you read on those
Speaker 1: sources is necessarily good advice or up to date with
Speaker 1: the current information on how these drugs work. Recently, I
Speaker 1: would reading a guide I found via one of those
Speaker 1: sites on how to homebrew my own estrogen by buying
Speaker 1: the powdered version of it that synthesizing it myself to
Speaker 1: level up my alchemy stat um, and I found the
Speaker 1: guy that I was reading contained quite a bit of
Speaker 1: outdated misinformation about progester around, So don't take everything you
Speaker 1: read as gospel, but those resources are at least a
Speaker 1: good place to start anyway. Now back to the interview,
Speaker 1: the problem that you might run into with the I
Speaker 1: y ng it is you might not be able to
Speaker 1: get the bioequivalent estradial in some form, you might have
Speaker 1: to settle for conjugated estrogens or even something like an
Speaker 1: ethaniol estradiale, which is like hormonal birth control, which because
Speaker 1: they are synthetics, they actually have a much rougher time
Speaker 1: on your body. And that's where a lot of the
Speaker 1: side effects quote unquote like come from. Like all of
Speaker 1: the worry about like blood clots and things from taking
Speaker 1: estrogens comes from conjugated estrogen sethanio estrodi. Yeah. The actual study,
Speaker 1: uh that a lot of that is citing goes all
Speaker 1: the way back and it was studying the rate of
Speaker 1: plotting in cis gender women taking hormonal and it's just like, okay,
Speaker 1: so this is the wrong population with the wrong medication. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems like not a great scientific study, Right, what
Speaker 1: do we do? I mean, it might be great to
Speaker 1: talk about for the rate of yeah, right, or doesn't
Speaker 1: really right, it doesn't it doesn't really help so much.
Speaker 1: Um And what I think is also pretty wild too.
Speaker 1: I mentioned the progesteran thing earlier. A lot of that
Speaker 1: controversy comes from the fact that the original studies on
Speaker 1: whether or not it could be beneficial. We're done with
Speaker 1: medroxy progesterone, a synthetic progesterone that has a really nasty
Speaker 1: side effect profile in a lot of different ways. And
Speaker 1: now that we have micronized progesterone where the evidence suggested
Speaker 1: not only is it safe, actually makes estrogen safer, and
Speaker 1: now they're like, no, we can't give that, that's just
Speaker 1: that's just crazy talk. I will say, I have heard
Speaker 1: from people with more experience taking hormones than me that
Speaker 1: progesterone does make you way too hoarny um heads up
Speaker 1: for for side effects, TAG can confirm, but um, well,
Speaker 1: but but progesterone can have a lot of other really
Speaker 1: beneficial side effects. It can really increase the fat deposition
Speaker 1: to various places. It can help with your mood, it
Speaker 1: can help with your sleep. It actually reduced the period
Speaker 1: symptoms that I was having because I because there's surprise,
Speaker 1: people on estrogen can also have periods. Uh And because
Speaker 1: your body again knows what it's doing, it's gonna modulate
Speaker 1: it through the E one, E two, E three pathway
Speaker 1: like throughout the month in a sixal fashion, and you
Speaker 1: can get bloating and cramps. And I had really bad
Speaker 1: morning sickness like for for three days every twenty eight
Speaker 1: days for months until eventually I started micronized progesterone and
Speaker 1: those some them's alleviated, Which makes a kind of sense
Speaker 1: if you know that progesterone only birth control reduces periods.
Speaker 1: So like there's a there's there's a lot of precedent,
Speaker 1: a lot. It makes a lot of like sense that
Speaker 1: it would work. God, I it's I need to tell
Speaker 1: you have have you ever heard of the Powers method
Speaker 1: of of Oh Garrison, I am so excited to introduce
Speaker 1: you to this person. Like doctor Powers is a fascinating
Speaker 1: grifter in the trans health care space because he is
Speaker 1: a He's a physician who like has has made it
Speaker 1: his duty to to to make sure that trans people,
Speaker 1: especially trans women. He actually doesn't like really have anything
Speaker 1: to say about trans men because the the therapy is
Speaker 1: so like easy to to to do that. He has
Speaker 1: a wild postulation as to like better ways to give hormones,
Speaker 1: and he he has things where it's like, we don't
Speaker 1: need antiandrogens, you just give really high levels of injectable estrogen,
Speaker 1: which like I mean that will probably work because for
Speaker 1: some people, but yeah yeah, but but also estrogens like
Speaker 1: really safe and so like you can give it to
Speaker 1: an unbelievably high level. It's not really going to speed
Speaker 1: things up exactly like it will maybe a little bit,
Speaker 1: but not that much. And any of the side effects
Speaker 1: you might experience, which could also come from the the excipients,
Speaker 1: the non active elements of it, like you can be
Speaker 1: allergic to those if you ever really high dose, if
Speaker 1: you're real problem. Um. But the big thing for him
Speaker 1: is he pushes that micronized progesterone is not only necessary
Speaker 1: and good, especially for breast size, you should also stick
Speaker 1: the oral capsules in your butt. Oh we're we are,
Speaker 1: we are officially boofing estrogen now yes, yes, okay, well
Speaker 1: I'm I'm switching back to pills. This sounds very exciting.
Speaker 1: Well so well, oh my gosh. So the the idea
Speaker 1: is his line is, um that you know that the
Speaker 1: oral capsules you only get a tiny fraction of the
Speaker 1: total progesterone, and you get a lot more if you
Speaker 1: stick it up you get the whole dose if you
Speaker 1: stick it up your butt, which, like if you know
Speaker 1: literally anything about pharmacology is both right and entirely insane
Speaker 1: because anything that you take orally, there's a bioavailable like
Speaker 1: level of it like so oral. Uh, micronized progesterone has
Speaker 1: a bioequivalence of I think like two or three percent,
Speaker 1: which is why when you take like a hundred milligram capsule,
Speaker 1: you get like a certain blood level. If you take
Speaker 1: it rectally, it's like a twelve. It's still not the
Speaker 1: whole thing, which is why the the micronized progesterone rectal
Speaker 1: suppositories or twenty five milligrams to give you the same exposure,
Speaker 1: so it's four times the systemic absorption, which means that
Speaker 1: if you are boofing a micronized progesterone capsule, you getting
Speaker 1: three to four times the dose that you should be getting.
Speaker 1: And uh, the I pulled because I get into fights
Speaker 1: with people all the time about this. I pulled the
Speaker 1: original FDA filing for micro and I progesterone, and they
Speaker 1: suggested that three hundred milligrams is basically getting to what
Speaker 1: like a cis gender person's maximum progesterone levels would be,
Speaker 1: meaning that if you're boofing one or two, as some
Speaker 1: of his regimens suggests, like, you might be essentially overdosing
Speaker 1: on progesterone for no reason, like there's no real reason
Speaker 1: to do that and it is just crazy. When when
Speaker 1: I started this call today, I did I did not
Speaker 1: think we would get to boofing progesterone. It is a weird,
Speaker 1: like a weirdly large part of my Twitter interactions have
Speaker 1: been fighting people to stop boofing progesterone. UM, so I
Speaker 1: needed to say unfortunately, just exposed this idea. Two millions
Speaker 1: of more people know well, no, I'm saying, don't do
Speaker 1: it well and so but you know, you know, you
Speaker 1: know that's not how that works. I do know that's
Speaker 1: not how that works. But I mean, I I tell you,
Speaker 1: if if your your friend Robert Evans were here, I
Speaker 1: could pitch a hole behind the bastards on this Dr
Speaker 1: powers guy um sounds, he sounds fascinating. He has a subreddit,
Speaker 1: like all good physicians do. I love the doctor has
Speaker 1: a subreddit and my my favorite post other than recently,
Speaker 1: he's been pushing this like miracle hair tonic that he made,
Speaker 1: which is like come on, buddy, like like now it's
Speaker 1: just obvious. He calls it to yep, yep, the verbon.
Speaker 1: He might call it. He might even call it an elixir,
Speaker 1: which is very funny, but from a magical hand, tonic exactly.
Speaker 1: It's so funny because one of the components of it,
Speaker 1: I think is finasteride. Like I I looked at the
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yes, that is something for bald for
Speaker 1: male pattern baldness. It will probably work. Congratulations, you just
Speaker 1: remade rogaine. Uh. But the single post that I feel
Speaker 1: like perfectly encapsulates this guy's mentality. Um is, there's this
Speaker 1: big post that went around through like cis gender like
Speaker 1: kind of like centrist spaces that every trans person I
Speaker 1: saw was just like, excuse me, what the fuck? Where
Speaker 1: this guy was secretly micro dosing injectable estrogen that he
Speaker 1: prescribed himself, which sounds kind of illegal. Not gonna lie. Uh,
Speaker 1: and messed up the dose by a thousand percent by
Speaker 1: a thought, by a times thousand Yeah yeah yeah. And
Speaker 1: um like, I can give you the link. I I can.
Speaker 1: I know exactly where it is. I can give you
Speaker 1: the link if you wanted to read this. It is
Speaker 1: buck Wild. But the thing is, he goes on to
Speaker 1: describe this like acute dysphoric episode that he had from
Speaker 1: one high dose of subcutaneous estrogen, a thing that is
Speaker 1: not physiologically possible and completely insane. That and he but
Speaker 1: he was like, but I understand the pain the trans
Speaker 1: women go through because I fucked up a dose where
Speaker 1: I was secretly taking estrogen to make my face look younger.
Speaker 1: So I understand your pain and have so much empathy
Speaker 1: for for the trans women's that I am trying to save.
Speaker 1: And it is so frustrating to me how many people
Speaker 1: give him like credence, give him credit um because he
Speaker 1: he has He has claims like apply progesterone cream to
Speaker 1: the the the smaller breast to even them out, and
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, my dude, have you ever met like
Speaker 1: people with breasts one is larger than the other. That's
Speaker 1: how breasts work. It's like, well, what's your evidence for that? Well,
Speaker 1: I had two people who did it and they said
Speaker 1: it worked. Okay, cool. Do you have those those reports? No? No, no,
Speaker 1: they got burned up in a house fire. It's very sad,
Speaker 1: and I can't give you that act. Yes. So, so
Speaker 1: he worked in a clinic that a friend of mine
Speaker 1: actually moved to after they got rid of him because
Speaker 1: he made all these wildly and total claims and whenever
Speaker 1: anybody challenged, and then his house burned out, which is
Speaker 1: actually very sad because his cats died in it, and
Speaker 1: he didn't deserve his cats because cats are perfect creatures
Speaker 1: and this man is insane and cats never do anything wrong.
Speaker 1: Cats are perfect, magical beings. I love yours so much
Speaker 1: as they keep crossing in front of the screen. They're perfect. Um.
Speaker 1: But so whenever anybody challenges him on literally any of
Speaker 1: his claims, he goes, well, I had all of that data,
Speaker 1: but it burned up in my house, and then he
Speaker 1: like makes it a sob story about like how like
Speaker 1: like horrible this was, which like I'm sure it was
Speaker 1: really bad, Like I'm sure it was like really really bad.
Speaker 1: But even his um like power point presentations that he
Speaker 1: has that he like goes through to like really like
Speaker 1: talk about the powers method and make it sound like
Speaker 1: really really good, has a like fire safety section specifically
Speaker 1: so he can garner this like sympathy so people will
Speaker 1: not question his claims that have no evidence behind them.
Speaker 1: And so it's just such a fantastic examinated to me.
Speaker 1: I like, it's just so weird seeing like a space
Speaker 1: that has historically been denigrated in the evidence. You know,
Speaker 1: you had that whole episode on like the Hirshfeld Institute,
Speaker 1: and you know, we see all this like anti anti
Speaker 1: trans uh like propaganda and legislation going on right now
Speaker 1: that there's a lot of like empty space in the
Speaker 1: medical record and in the evidence record for what to
Speaker 1: do in these situations. There's a lot of confusion from
Speaker 1: the guidelines in these other societies, like I was talking about,
Speaker 1: and in steps this guy who sees an opportunity to
Speaker 1: be like, uh like popular, like powerful individual in this
Speaker 1: space to give people hope that he can cash in
Speaker 1: on uh And since the medications and since the hormone
Speaker 1: therapy is so safe, he doesn't actually hurt that many people.
Speaker 1: And it's it is so wild seeing this juxtaposition of
Speaker 1: individuals being like, well, this is unsafe experimental nonsense, and
Speaker 1: seeing this guy flagrantly overdosing people on hormones with no
Speaker 1: ill effects because they're that safe. Uh. That is that
Speaker 1: is pretty funny. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's funny in
Speaker 1: that like laughing until you're crying kind of way. What
Speaker 1: is the way that people can try to combat all
Speaker 1: the medical disinformation around HRT specifically because we do this specifically,
Speaker 1: let you see this a lot and to save the
Speaker 1: children rhetoric, we see this a lot for just anti
Speaker 1: TRN stuff in general of and like, yeah, just in
Speaker 1: terms of someone who has to deal with this stuff
Speaker 1: on a professional level, like when when we're just faced
Speaker 1: with all of this just complatantly, just like wrong stuff
Speaker 1: being treated as absolute fact when your experience, what's kind
Speaker 1: of the best ways to go about that in people?
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, UM, it kind of depends on the audience.
Speaker 1: When I'm talking to other other healthcare practitioners, I, UM,
Speaker 1: I can. I I have historically because I do a
Speaker 1: lot of like teaching and advocacy in this area to
Speaker 1: other health care practitioners and UM holding sessions like volunteering
Speaker 1: for to hold sessions of like to educate on this
Speaker 1: and say like these are the kind of regimens that
Speaker 1: are commonly used in clinics. This is why these are
Speaker 1: things to look out for and to stress the importance
Speaker 1: of believing the patient and um, the importance of you
Speaker 1: don't want to gate key because if if which they're
Speaker 1: not that dangerous, but if there is to be a problem,
Speaker 1: you would rather have that patient want to work with
Speaker 1: you to solve it. Is like such a big part
Speaker 1: of it, Like even just understanding that from that level
Speaker 1: that you're not like delivering this kind of like life
Speaker 1: saving medication to them as this like Lord on High.
Speaker 1: It's this idea that like, no, you should be working
Speaker 1: with this person and if you're not familiar with it,
Speaker 1: you need to do your fucking research. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: will give you the resources for that. I will. I
Speaker 1: will walk you through those resources. And that's that's awfully
Speaker 1: convincing for the majority of healthcare individuals at any level,
Speaker 1: because I've done I've done talks for students and nursing
Speaker 1: programs and physical therapy programs all the way up to
Speaker 1: like actively practicing physicians, nurses and pharmacists, and it's basically
Speaker 1: the same. You just you make the argument, you show
Speaker 1: the evidence, You give them the evidence, and you walk
Speaker 1: them through uh like kind of and and then and
Speaker 1: then have a robust question and answer period where they
Speaker 1: will ask you those questions and you can explain why
Speaker 1: they are wrong. Having that kind of dedicated space can
Speaker 1: be really beneficial, but not scalable in a way that's
Speaker 1: necessarily helpful, Like I've made a positive impact on my city,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't really necessarily help if you yourself are
Speaker 1: not a health care practitioner and want to like explain
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff. And I mentioned earlier that on Twitter,
Speaker 1: I've spent a lot of time like arguing that people
Speaker 1: shouldn't be boofing their progesterone. But I've had to stop
Speaker 1: because it's exhausting every single person like coming back. It's
Speaker 1: like the same conversations over and over again, and there's
Speaker 1: no good way to like have a central location that
Speaker 1: just has all that information that anybody is gonna believe
Speaker 1: because of the way the internetworks. Um So, I guess
Speaker 1: my answer is I'm not sure, Like there's so much
Speaker 1: misinformation out there, and so much of it is so
Speaker 1: wrong and not in alignment with reality that looking at
Speaker 1: it at all, it falls to pieces and and the
Speaker 1: idea of the majority of people to I guess I
Speaker 1: could say, if a person is coming to you and
Speaker 1: asking legitimate questions and they don't really know, like they're
Speaker 1: just like parroting stuff that they heard, they they're much
Speaker 1: easier to convince because you can show like, oh, like
Speaker 1: we have a long history of doing this, like look
Speaker 1: at you know. I tell my students about how like
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty two was the first like recognized hormonal mediated
Speaker 1: transition in the United states like she was like a
Speaker 1: movie star. Um and and you know, I talked about
Speaker 1: a lot of the history to be like this isn't new,
Speaker 1: this is something like we have been here forever. Um
Speaker 1: my my favorite story. Do you know about the story
Speaker 1: about the Scythian priestesses? Yes, I actually do, but I
Speaker 1: would love for you to explain it. But oh my god,
Speaker 1: I found out about that a few months ago and
Speaker 1: I was like, oh my god, it makes me so happy.
Speaker 1: So so to to explain very briefly, I think it's
Speaker 1: it's an old um. I think it was like Herodotus.
Speaker 1: It's like an old like Crestian like author that we
Speaker 1: have information, author, philosopher, whatever, historian. But they talk about
Speaker 1: in one of the texts the Scythian priestesses who essentially
Speaker 1: distill the poison of woman. They call it in one
Speaker 1: of the text which I think is just such a
Speaker 1: great term from um uh, pregnant mayor urine, which interestingly enough,
Speaker 1: we actually still make today conjugated estrogens. The brand name
Speaker 1: is Premarin because it comes from pregnant mayor urine, Like
Speaker 1: are you serious? Yeahah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's literally
Speaker 1: a thing that we still do today. That is hilarious.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful, it's so good. Um. And so they were priestesses.
Speaker 1: They were like, you know, people would come to them
Speaker 1: to seek out their wisdom and they're like the spiritual thing.
Speaker 1: And it was a it was like a bunch of
Speaker 1: trans women who like got high, told stories and probably
Speaker 1: sucked each other. And that sounds like a policule to me.
Speaker 1: But like the silly the Sithians were like a nomadic
Speaker 1: group of people who would travel all around kind of
Speaker 1: what is now the Middle East. Um. And yeah, it's
Speaker 1: I mean, I do love the idea of trans people
Speaker 1: having like specific like more esoteric insight almost naturally because
Speaker 1: they've had to deal with ideas of ontology and ideas
Speaker 1: as ontology is just like the nature of being um
Speaker 1: and so having to people with that, having to deal
Speaker 1: with like the nature of reality from a much a
Speaker 1: younger age because their whole perception of reality and self
Speaker 1: is obviously so different because of their experience of being
Speaker 1: what is now called trans um. So it makes a
Speaker 1: lot of sense that a lot of these people would
Speaker 1: have been like basically different forms of Shabin's mediums. We'll
Speaker 1: just have like esoteric insite because they've been thinking about
Speaker 1: these types of like reality altering topics for so much
Speaker 1: longer because it's so much more personally affecting to them. Um.
Speaker 1: But yes, what I specifically read about the cythy and
Speaker 1: priestesses and like, oh my, they're just like doing the thing,
Speaker 1: just doing the thing. It turns out we've been doing
Speaker 1: this forever. My favorite account is one of the reasons
Speaker 1: they commanded respect of the like masculine leaders that would
Speaker 1: come to get information was because they were all terrified
Speaker 1: that they would inflict the poison of women, which of
Speaker 1: them it does spread by the way it is, it's
Speaker 1: highly contagious, contagious. But it's just the idea that like
Speaker 1: there was like some of the respect was from like
Speaker 1: this fear of being force femed is hilarious, from like
Speaker 1: this early BC, the primordial fear of the primordial fear.
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, Garrison, you mentioning like ontology. My
Speaker 1: original degree was in psychology and philosophy, So like, let's go, baby,
Speaker 1: we can go deep on some of this stuff. Sure,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, I'm sure we couldn't talk to the mysticism
Speaker 1: and magic and gender for a long long time. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, that would be a whole another podcast are
Speaker 1: big areas of interest. But I but I, but I
Speaker 1: super agree with you because I've been thinking about this
Speaker 1: and I've ended up having conversations with a lot of
Speaker 1: my peers in pharmacy and in the university. Because people
Speaker 1: might not recognize this, but pharmacy is actually one of
Speaker 1: the more conservative spaces in healthcare. Uh. Like my my
Speaker 1: school had a dress code for the students until two
Speaker 1: years ago when I fought hard enough to get it removed.
Speaker 1: Like it was wild. Um, Like the code of Conduct
Speaker 1: committee tried to get me, tried to prevent me from
Speaker 1: getting my ears pierced. Like, yeah, it's a wild space
Speaker 1: for me to exist in. Um, it's extremely conservative, extremely traditional,
Speaker 1: like the some Like yeah, I got stories that I'd
Speaker 1: love to tell if you wanted to hear them. But
Speaker 1: the thing that I think is really interesting is when
Speaker 1: you look at me in comparison to my my colleagues
Speaker 1: who are predominantly like Christian, predominantly like traditionalist, predominantly capitalist,
Speaker 1: and I roll in as this like anti capitalist, like anarchists,
Speaker 1: trans woman, who's Polly, who's pan sexual, who's a pagan?
Speaker 1: All the p's and it's like, well, once I question gender,
Speaker 1: I started realizing all of culture and society is bullshit,
Speaker 1: and now I can tell you the truth. Come to
Speaker 1: me for the truth of reality. No, it even makes
Speaker 1: sense in terms of like you know, why why did
Speaker 1: two trans women make the matrix? You're like, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's like it's it is. It is the same thing
Speaker 1: as your Your entire nature and basis of reality was
Speaker 1: severely questioned. So so you're trying to trying to understand
Speaker 1: these feelings. And for you know, mid modern days we
Speaker 1: have like stuff like simulation theory, we have the matrix, um,
Speaker 1: and then you know, but before before then, you know,
Speaker 1: it would have been taken out in like spiritualism and
Speaker 1: religion and you know, the different levels of reality on
Speaker 1: like the whole like mystic side of things as opposed
Speaker 1: to like the more sci fi side of things. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like it's it's all the same stuff. Like
Speaker 1: you're you're, you're, you're playing with the same things. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is. It is just a funny a funny trend
Speaker 1: that once you once you notice it, you'll you'll start
Speaker 1: seeing it in in like different places. Yeah, so we
Speaker 1: are still mystics who understand the true reality of the
Speaker 1: world and will force them you if you don't give
Speaker 1: us respect. I just don't see what the problem. I
Speaker 1: believe that That was my takeaway from Matrix Resurrections. Oh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: of is there is there anything else you would want
Speaker 1: to you would want to add? Oh my goodness, Um,
Speaker 1: I don't know fight for trans people. One of the
Speaker 1: things that I end up always having to talk to
Speaker 1: my students about in colleagues and things is what ally means,
Speaker 1: because I've literally gotten into arguments with people who are like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's l g B t Q I A because A
Speaker 1: stands for ally, and I'm like, oh, I will knife you,
Speaker 1: like like, it doesn't stand for ally, it stands for
Speaker 1: a sexual or romantic of all of all of the
Speaker 1: other a's yes. But it's the it's this thing where
Speaker 1: people think being an ally is just being like like
Speaker 1: okay with a person existing the kind of like, well
Speaker 1: if it makes you happy, which is like okay, motherfucker,
Speaker 1: that's not like. That is so belittling of the experience. Um,
Speaker 1: that's not ally. Ship. To be an ally, you have
Speaker 1: to leverage your privilege by not being a member of
Speaker 1: that community to protect people in that community. You can
Speaker 1: be tolerant, but not an ally. And that's sort of
Speaker 1: where the old saying comes from that if that's what
Speaker 1: being an ally is to you, we don't need allies,
Speaker 1: we need accomplices. And um. With the current legislative push
Speaker 1: against trans people, I mean, like literally what I do
Speaker 1: is like a felony in three states now, are almost
Speaker 1: a felony in three states, and it's going to be
Speaker 1: a growing number of states. Yeah, and and and it's
Speaker 1: just so unbelievably depressing. And there aren't enough. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of trans and non binary and and
Speaker 1: every kind of expression you could want people in this country,
Speaker 1: way more than than a lot of surveys suspected. Um,
Speaker 1: but we're not enough to necessarily fight this in a
Speaker 1: way that isn't going to end up with increasing violence.
Speaker 1: I mean, the the FBI statistics of random violence against
Speaker 1: into like hate crime specifically has been rising against LGBT people,
Speaker 1: especially trans people, in the last couple of years, and
Speaker 1: I'm sure it's only going to get more in the
Speaker 1: next few years. Still with all of the with the
Speaker 1: wave of stuff happening in the past few months. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if you're if you're not. If you're assist person
Speaker 1: and you want to be an ally, you gotta fight
Speaker 1: for us. And if you're a trans person, if you
Speaker 1: don't have other reasons why you can't maybe arm yourself
Speaker 1: in some way at this point, if you if you
Speaker 1: feel mentally capable, it's not a bad idea to learn
Speaker 1: how to do things. It's not a not a bad
Speaker 1: idea to get stop the bleed training, not a bad
Speaker 1: idea to get you know, emergency first aid training, right
Speaker 1: all of all of all of the things. Because things
Speaker 1: are things are happening and they're going to keep happening.
Speaker 1: One might say it could happen here. Wow, I know,
Speaker 1: we really we really put this together, just pulled it back,
Speaker 1: just just really encapsulated it. So yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: does it for us today. Um, do do you have
Speaker 1: do have any of plugables that you would like to
Speaker 1: uh plug? Yeah? Sure, So if you wanted to talk
Speaker 1: to me more, you can. I'm on Twitter for now,
Speaker 1: assuming that elon must doesn't make it entirely unlivable at Vixen,
Speaker 1: which but the w S two vs. I don't post
Speaker 1: a hole up, but you can you can find me there.
Speaker 1: You can also just straight up email me if you
Speaker 1: had questions. My like work email for that purpose is
Speaker 1: just Victoria dot grieve at pit dot e d U
Speaker 1: I'd have I'd be happy to answer any questions that
Speaker 1: people have. UH. And it's a robust university firewall, so
Speaker 1: if I get hey that, that's fine, it won't get through. UM.
Speaker 1: The and then outside of like my classes and stuff.
Speaker 1: The only other thing I wanted to plug because you
Speaker 1: brought it up. I am a frequent guest on a
Speaker 1: podcast that a friend of mine hosts called School of Movies,
Speaker 1: and we actually did Matrix two, three and four UM
Speaker 1: and I was on those episodes and talked a lot
Speaker 1: about the trans narrative there in UH. We also did
Speaker 1: an episode on Priscilla, Queen of the because that's great.
Speaker 1: I was always lucky enough to watch for Siliquin of
Speaker 1: the Desert a few a few months ago UM with
Speaker 1: some queer friends of mine with Hugo Weaving, and in
Speaker 1: both of those he is he is. It is pretty
Speaker 1: It is pretty fun watching Hugo Weaving go from agents
Speaker 1: Smith to his character and Prisili Queen of the Desert,
Speaker 1: it's beautiful. It's a beautiful metamorphosis. It is it is
Speaker 1: very good, But yeah, thank you so much for coming
Speaker 1: on to talk anytime. Thank you for listening to my
Speaker 1: little two parter on hormone replacement therapy. If you want
Speaker 1: to start reading more on the d I Y and
Speaker 1: mutual aid side of things, check out d I Y
Speaker 1: HRT dot, get hub dot, io HRT dot Cafe and
Speaker 1: d I Y trans dot Luckie as a jumping off point.
Speaker 1: But obviously you don't take everything to read on the
Speaker 1: internet as gospel. I do think it's worth learning how
Speaker 1: to make your own drugs possibly and learning how to
Speaker 1: source your own estrogen from play says that are not
Speaker 1: just a doctor, because who knows what other states will
Speaker 1: start criminalizing getting drugs for doctor right, it's it is.
Speaker 1: There seems to be a trend of making HRT illegal
Speaker 1: via the medical system, So if this is something definitely
Speaker 1: to look into, because it seems more and more people
Speaker 1: will face restrictions in this vein. So yeah, that's kind
Speaker 1: of a big reason for why I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about this today on the pod. Big Extra special thanks
Speaker 1: to Dr Victoria Luna Brennan Grieve for coming on to
Speaker 1: talk with me about gender affirming hormonal treatment. You can
Speaker 1: check her out or ask her questions on her Twitter,
Speaker 1: which can be found at vixen which with a two
Speaker 1: vs for the w in which or you can email
Speaker 1: her queries at Victoria dot grieve at pit dot e
Speaker 1: d U and that doesn't for us today, everybody. You
Speaker 1: can follow the show at Happened Here pod and cools
Speaker 1: one Media on Twitter and Instagram, and you can look
Speaker 1: at my late night gender style tweets at Hungry bow Tie.
Speaker 1: See you on the other side. Hey, We'll be back
Speaker 1: Monday with more episodes every week from now until the
Speaker 1: heat death of the Universe. It Could Happen Here is
Speaker 1: a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot
Speaker 1: com or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
Speaker 1: find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
Speaker 1: cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.