Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media. Welcome Dick, it happened here a podcast
Speaker 1: about transgender I am your host, Mia Wong. Now, we
Speaker 1: have spent a lot of time on this show covering
Speaker 1: a bunch of really bad stuff and also got me
Speaker 1: some cool stuff. We've had some cool trans things on
Speaker 1: this show too. We're gonna have some more in like
Speaker 1: the coming weeks. But it is a bleak time to
Speaker 1: be trans really anywhere in the world. The United States
Speaker 1: is also pretty fucking bad right now. But in the
Speaker 1: words of lengths andhes between the darkness and the dawn,
Speaker 1: the rises a red star. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that has happened as this sort of like you know,
Speaker 1: sort of the crisis of transphobia and the crisis of
Speaker 1: the genocide and the sort of multiple genocides the government's doing,
Speaker 1: and as sort of transphobia as like an institutional state
Speaker 1: discourse has like solidified. Is that, I mean, honestly, multiple
Speaker 1: generations a trans journalists have really kind of like risen
Speaker 1: to the forefront. And yeah, we've we've been We've been
Speaker 1: seeing a bunch of extremely cool reporting and a bunch
Speaker 1: of very very good work from a bunch of like
Speaker 1: more radical trans journalists and that's a thing that kind
Speaker 1: of like there's been so few of us for so
Speaker 1: long and suddenly.
Speaker 2: There's several and it rips, and I'm really.
Speaker 1: Happy about it. And with me to talk about sort
Speaker 1: of you know, what trans journalism is like in this moment,
Speaker 1: how it functions and you know, and how how how
Speaker 1: it can be sustained going forward and why it's sort
Speaker 1: of important, is David Forbes, who is the editor of
Speaker 1: the Asheville Blade and also an independent journalist. Mirra Lasine,
Speaker 1: who is a freelance journalist who recently launched the outlet
Speaker 1: Free Radical, and medi Cast Again, who's an independent journalist
Speaker 1: and the creator of Maddy cast News. All of you
Speaker 1: welcome to the show.
Speaker 2: Thank you on having me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm ecstatic to have all of you on to
Speaker 1: get to talk about this because I don't know, I
Speaker 1: guess the place that I want to start is, like
Speaker 1: I I remember this kind of like period in like
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, twenty twenty four, it was like, I mean,
Speaker 1: it still is really bleak for trans journalism in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, but like you know, i'man just in
Speaker 1: transmedia in general. Like I was just watching like the
Speaker 1: space that had been opened a little bit in like
Speaker 1: the twenty tens for there to be trans people in media,
Speaker 1: just like closing, you know, And like I've been watching
Speaker 1: like pretty immediately around me, Like I've been watching the
Speaker 1: number of like transferms, especially like non white transferms, just
Speaker 1: like disappearing from media. And it was, you know, it
Speaker 1: was it was like watching the stars disappear from the sky.
Speaker 1: And the thing about the stars disappearing from the sky is,
Speaker 1: you know, there's you don't notice it unless you're looking
Speaker 1: at them, in which case light has fucking gone forever.
Speaker 1: And it was this really really bleak thing. But also
Speaker 1: you know, as it's happening, and as we've been sort
Speaker 1: of like resisting this, I've been getting to watch like
Speaker 1: the stariscope back on in the sky and like watching
Speaker 1: new like people emerge and watching people who've been doing
Speaker 1: cool work for a really long time sort of like
Speaker 1: come out into the open and like get more sort
Speaker 1: of national recognition. And yeah, I don't know, I guess,
Speaker 1: So I guess that's the sort of place I wanted
Speaker 1: to start, is just talking a little bit about like
Speaker 1: what it's like to be fucking doing journalism right now.
Speaker 2: Because Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: I'll go ahead and start. I've been a journalist for
Speaker 3: over twenty years. And for those who might be wondering,
Speaker 3: since you refer to transfems, I am a transwoman. I
Speaker 3: us she they pronounce. I also like the name David
Speaker 3: so but I have seen it kind of wax and wane.
Speaker 3: I've seen it go up and down, and to some degree,
Speaker 3: what we're facing now it is a much worse and
Speaker 3: escalating version, but it is also some of what I've
Speaker 3: seen trans journalists face period. I came out in publicly
Speaker 3: in twenty sixteen. I started my transition in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 3: and immediately my freelance career basically died overnight. And it
Speaker 3: wasn't like I was writing for you know, right wing
Speaker 3: outlets something, And you know, honestly, the fact is, and
Speaker 3: this is I think unusual among trans journalism because a
Speaker 3: lot of it, admirably focuses on international level stuff because
Speaker 3: what we face is so vast. But if it had
Speaker 3: not been for the local support, because the Blade, a
Speaker 3: lot of the Blades subscribers are local that we certainly
Speaker 3: welcome people to subscribe from wherever they are, you know,
Speaker 3: I would be homeless. And there's a good chance I
Speaker 3: wouldn't be talking to you all right now. But at
Speaker 3: the same time, in this kind of what I kind
Speaker 3: of call the quiet purge, which I think has been
Speaker 3: escalating in recent years that you talked about about, you know,
Speaker 3: just we've got trans journalists who used to write for
Speaker 3: national magazines leaving out of their cars. Now that is
Speaker 3: the reality we face our publications, all working class trans people.
Speaker 3: And you know, we've had journalists arrested twice, yeah, oh
Speaker 3: my god.
Speaker 2: For doing their jobs.
Speaker 3: Two of our journalists were were taken to trial in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three on a minor truspassing charge, which is
Speaker 3: almost unheard of in the US as bad as the
Speaker 3: USA often is.
Speaker 1: As you mentioned also, this was like trespassing for fucking
Speaker 1: reporting on the cops doing an helpless.
Speaker 2: And campit sleep, like on Christmas, yeah yeah, on Christmas.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Like I just like unhinged police state shit,
Speaker 1: like yeah yeah.
Speaker 4: Even in LA you'll like sometimes they'll act like accidentally
Speaker 4: a arrest journalist, but then they'll be like, Okay, we'll
Speaker 4: let you go because they're a journalists.
Speaker 2: They don't actually take you to trial.
Speaker 3: This is one of those kind of welcome to Ashville
Speaker 3: moments because I think people by the marketing sometimes and
Speaker 3: think we're this super progressive city and actually it's an
Speaker 3: incredibly repressive like tourism Fife, and that's this is kind
Speaker 3: of really still point though, Like the city government, city
Speaker 3: council here is six Democrats and one kind of like
Speaker 3: Bernie Sanders type independent though even more tepid, and the
Speaker 3: DA is a Democrat. And still you know, they were
Speaker 3: hell bent to persecute trans journalists. Yeah, one of our
Speaker 3: one of our journalist until the Bliss was openly mistreated
Speaker 3: in gendered based on her gender during that So to
Speaker 3: some degree what's happening now is certainly a worsening, but
Speaker 3: it is also an extension what's been going on for
Speaker 3: a very long time. So okay, like it is getting worse,
Speaker 3: I don't know we're going to be in a two, three,
Speaker 3: even one year, but also like this is not a
Speaker 3: new fight.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I can speak to it a little bit too.
Speaker 4: I'm I've been a journalist for I guess a lot
Speaker 4: last six months because it's a long story, but I
Speaker 4: kind of got into it more out of fear for myself.
Speaker 4: Sometimes people think I'm selfless, and maybe I am a
Speaker 4: little bit, but a lot of it is really selfish
Speaker 4: and just feeling like I have to do stuff to
Speaker 4: protect myself and my friends basically. But even in that
Speaker 4: short period of time, I have faced a lot of
Speaker 4: bad stuff from honestly predominantly the left and liberals and
Speaker 4: sometimes even though they're queer people being a woman of color,
Speaker 4: and that wasn't really initially what I was afraid of,
Speaker 4: you know. I was afraid of like I'm going to
Speaker 4: get death threats and Nazis, something like fandox being Actually
Speaker 4: none of that's happened. I can't really explain why, other
Speaker 4: than that I just don't use Twitter, and I guess
Speaker 4: so they don't know I exist. But I have like
Speaker 4: one of the first national news story that I broke,
Speaker 4: or one of them, I guess. So it was about
Speaker 4: like Metai being like super racist and I like kind
Speaker 4: of figured that out. I like proved that it was racist. Basically,
Speaker 4: I just like use my brain to make it tell
Speaker 4: on itself and explain it's prompt and all that, and
Speaker 4: it became this huge international news story, but it was
Speaker 4: like immediately co opted by a Washington Post journalist who
Speaker 4: retreated me and then recreated the conversation and posted it again,
Speaker 4: and then I had to go on like this week's
Speaker 4: long like kind of campaign to try to just get
Speaker 4: basic credit for that. And eventually she did credit me
Speaker 4: in the column to give her credit, but that was
Speaker 4: not something that was forgiven, and a lot of others
Speaker 4: that I said the thing to you also didn't credit me.
Speaker 4: And that's just been a recurring trend that, uh yeah,
Speaker 4: like I'm kind of invisible even though I make a
Speaker 4: lot of important years, so that kind of sucks.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is something that happens fucking constantly. I'm like, my, my, like,
Speaker 1: welcome to the this this is before I was out too,
Speaker 1: and this is also like you know, part of part
Speaker 1: of what's going on here is like one of the
Speaker 1: things you learned really quickly in media is the extent
Speaker 1: to which so much national media is just like what
Speaker 1: they do is steal stories from like people like who
Speaker 1: are you know from sort of like like more regional
Speaker 1: media or people that think they can get away with
Speaker 1: taking stuff from like if. And this goes all the
Speaker 1: way up the chain, right like if if. If you
Speaker 1: want to know what's going to be on Rachel Maddow Show,
Speaker 1: look look at what's happening on behind the bastards whenever
Speaker 1: they cover someone on the right, and within about three
Speaker 1: weeks you will get a Rachel Mattour episode that is
Speaker 1: five minutes a thing. But like you know, but like
Speaker 1: you know, it's obviously like it'ignificantly worse with like trans people,
Speaker 1: because like, yeah, they can just fucking stell stories like
Speaker 1: I remember, God my, like my fucking like the first
Speaker 1: like journalism well that's not true, but the first journalism
Speaker 1: e stuff that I did with like po zone people
Speaker 1: was like we were dreaming like the Atlanta Spas shooting.
Speaker 1: We tracked down there there's like that there was a
Speaker 1: Facebook post that people were circulating reportedly from the shooter
Speaker 1: that was like basically blaming like anti China media stuff
Speaker 1: for it. And we tracked down that this person did
Speaker 1: not have a Facebook and that all of this was fake,
Speaker 1: but that that post had been circling into the national
Speaker 1: news and we were like, well, yeah, this is like fake, right,
Speaker 1: And then like every single news like every single like
Speaker 1: CNN fucking Fox News, like every single major news outlet
Speaker 1: just like took all of our work and like repackaged
Speaker 1: it and then never fucking mentioned that it was like
Speaker 1: Garre and I who did this, because you know, why
Speaker 1: would you credit the transgender anarchists when you could simply
Speaker 1: repackage the story yourself. And this is a problem that's
Speaker 1: like goes all the way up to like this is
Speaker 1: part of the reason we're here right now, right Like
Speaker 1: we're complaining about this on sort of like professional level
Speaker 1: because like it's annoying, but also like the reason we're
Speaker 1: fucking here right now is because the person who got
Speaker 1: to write about trans stuff was fucking Jestison Gull, who
Speaker 1: is a sis man whose only qualification it was the
Speaker 1: thing he previously wrote about was men who fuck other
Speaker 1: men who don't consider themselves gay. And because he was
Speaker 1: the person who got to write all of the like
Speaker 1: trans coverage, though he's just like some fucking cis dipshit right,
Speaker 1: Like he's now the guy who's like been being cited
Speaker 1: in fucking legal cases for ages and ages for why
Speaker 1: you should restrict trans healthcare.
Speaker 4: The Atlantic and its consequences on society.
Speaker 1: Asters Yeah, me, or do you want to talk a
Speaker 1: bit about your experience with it?
Speaker 2: Honestly, what you just described has been happening to me
Speaker 2: this week. So I've been in the industry for about
Speaker 2: three to four years now consistently inconsistently for a little
Speaker 2: bit longer. And initially it was way easier for me
Speaker 2: to get eggs, Like within the first few months of
Speaker 2: me seriously starting, I got up to pitches into Discover
Speaker 2: magazine and places like that, and then like but in
Speaker 2: like six months after that, it became a nightmare to
Speaker 2: get pitches accepted. Yeah, and it just so happened I
Speaker 2: became more out as trans I'm not time frame definitely
Speaker 2: not a coincidence at all. But more recently, this week
Speaker 2: I launched my independent newsletter, The Free Radical.
Speaker 1: Go subscribe, You go subscribe. It's it's legitimately great. You
Speaker 1: will get reporting there that you won't fucking get well, okay,
Speaker 1: you will get recording there that you won't get from
Speaker 1: anyone else until about three weeks later, when all the
Speaker 1: national out let's pick it up and it will be
Speaker 1: better and you will have it first to the person
Speaker 1: who actually reported it.
Speaker 2: In every articuar I've written so far, I've taken a
Speaker 2: second to basically be like, Okay, here's some anarchists shit
Speaker 2: you should read. Y'all. Audiences mostly like libs and I'm
Speaker 2: just like here here read this please. But my first
Speaker 2: story broke this week was about a trans woman who
Speaker 2: was legally held in Guantanamo Bay, and that story got
Speaker 2: picked up by a bigger media outlets pretty quick. But
Speaker 2: in the first like twelve hours, the news uplet then
Speaker 2: did a very good story that basically cited me every
Speaker 2: chance they got. Come to find out, this is because
Speaker 2: a trans woman wrote that she's awesome. I just followed
Speaker 2: her the other day. But then bazillion it was out
Speaker 2: started picking up on this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this was a Brazilian trans woman who got like
Speaker 1: sent to Guantanamo.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And the first one to do this was the
Speaker 2: newspaper forgive me if I am mispronouncing this full Hall
Speaker 2: dais self Polo. I believe it's called I might be
Speaker 2: mispronouncing that. I apologize I am, But they are one
Speaker 2: of the biggest newspapers in Brazil and definitely one of
Speaker 2: the oldest, and that story was all right, you know,
Speaker 2: they credited me sure breaking the story. I was talking
Speaker 2: to the person who wrote that she's sweet and you
Speaker 2: did original recording it's awesome. And then right after that,
Speaker 2: like dozens of other outlets came in. None of them
Speaker 2: credited me, and they posted like social media stuff about
Speaker 2: the story. Not a single one of those credited me,
Speaker 2: and they're getting like thousands of lights and comments and shares,
Speaker 2: and most egregious I think is I've seen a few
Speaker 2: of them credit the journalist with Fulha as breaking the story,
Speaker 2: and have you seen one sank them as breaking the story?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, whose article?
Speaker 2: Mind you? Literally in a subheading says I broke the
Speaker 2: story and I didn't check in on it today yet,
Speaker 2: but last night I was like up late just looking
Speaker 2: at all the news outlets that was boosting, and it's like,
Speaker 2: I'm why the stories getting coverage. Don't get me wrong,
Speaker 2: it's an important one. It's just like yeah, no, it's great. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Almost none of them are seeing where they got the
Speaker 2: story from. It's just like, oh wow, there's this bigger
Speaker 2: outlet cover. I'm gonna credit the bigger outlift.
Speaker 1: So to to explain why, we're also sort of concerned
Speaker 1: about like the way this attribution stuff works, right, this
Speaker 1: is an incredibly material problem for us, right, and like
Speaker 1: I am very lucky in that, like in terms of
Speaker 1: trans journalism, I have like a stable job. But the
Speaker 1: thing is right unless unless you fucking got really lucky
Speaker 1: and you got hired like as assis person, and then
Speaker 1: you have a bunch of very very supportive like coworkers,
Speaker 1: and like your bosses are supportive. You are like trying
Speaker 1: to cobble together like every scent that you can possibly
Speaker 1: pull out of a fucking couch cushion, because like you know,
Speaker 1: I've said this other show before, right, like, if you're
Speaker 1: a transperson in the US, even when even before all
Speaker 1: the turf tariffs hit, right like you you were living
Speaker 1: in the night in like nineteen thirty six, great depression
Speaker 1: levels of unemployment, and you know, so so that means that,
Speaker 1: like it actually matters a lot when when other outlets
Speaker 1: do your studies and don't attribute it to you, because
Speaker 1: like you have to find a way to fucking make money,
Speaker 1: and like almost all trans journalists are like the most
Speaker 1: hideously broke people you've ever heard of in your entire
Speaker 1: fucking life. Like and this is also you know, and
Speaker 1: this this is also part of the way that like
Speaker 1: class plays out in the transmitting you see, is like,
Speaker 1: you know, the people with the biggest platforms tend to
Speaker 1: be trans people who were already doing okay, because those
Speaker 1: are the only people who can afford to fucking do this,
Speaker 1: and like that's why most of you have heard of me,
Speaker 1: and most of you probably have not heard of David
Speaker 1: and Mirror, even though David and Mirror do like quite
Speaker 1: frankly more important journalism than I do, and like and
Speaker 1: in terms of especially in terms of like like and
Speaker 1: like break a lot way more fucking stories than I do,
Speaker 1: because it's not kind of like not exactly like my thing, right,
Speaker 1: But that's because I was, like, you know, like I
Speaker 1: was already sort of like in a place that was
Speaker 1: financially secure, and everyone else is so unbelievable fucking broke
Speaker 1: all the time, and it matters when fucking stories get
Speaker 1: stolen because the only way that if you're a trans
Speaker 1: journalist and you're you know, you're working at your own outlet,
Speaker 1: because outlet won't fucking hire you because that's just the
Speaker 1: way that the fucking media is structured. The only way
Speaker 1: for you to get paid is by like people seeing
Speaker 1: your stories. And that's part of why there's like just
Speaker 1: not that many trans journalists because like the level of
Speaker 1: discrimination on top of the kind of like erasire of
Speaker 1: independent journalist, it already happens makes it just like financially
Speaker 1: impossible to fucking do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's not just liberal media. It's not just
Speaker 4: like the ciss had liberal media too sometimes, Like I
Speaker 4: had a similar thing with when I broke the story
Speaker 4: of Rain and some other sexual abuse nonprofits submitting all
Speaker 4: of the trans people from their websites. That became a
Speaker 4: national news story, and the Washington pillst kicked it up also,
Speaker 4: and I think part of that was because I complained
Speaker 4: so much about the previous time where they almost didn't
Speaker 4: cite me, that maybe they were a little bit more
Speaker 4: cautious about me, is my theory. But anyway, after that
Speaker 4: initial news story that cited me, same thing happened where
Speaker 4: it's like everyone's like, oh, well, we can just cite
Speaker 4: the Washington Post now, and so this person no one knows.
Speaker 4: The first website to do that was like a queer
Speaker 4: news outlet, and then I just kept watching as like
Speaker 4: I think it was like three or four different queer
Speaker 4: or like feminist women focused news outlets did the same
Speaker 4: thing of not citing me, And there was even like
Speaker 4: a really long piece from this other like that was
Speaker 4: it felt like it was going out of its way
Speaker 4: not to cite me, because it was talking about this
Speaker 4: entire issue about nonprofits censoring people, and that was an
Speaker 4: entire conversation that was started specifically because of the news
Speaker 4: article I wrote, but it specifically did not cite me,
Speaker 4: even though they mentioned how one of the organizations that
Speaker 4: I reported on had reversed course, which is something that
Speaker 4: they emailed me and said it was because of me.
Speaker 4: So that's how well, that's how deep this does. They
Speaker 4: will like go out of their way to like carve
Speaker 4: you out of a story that exists because of you,
Speaker 4: even if they are ostensibly, you know, not just a
Speaker 4: liberal like a New York Times outlet, but like a
Speaker 4: left wing like progressive facing outlet that's trying to like
Speaker 4: reket it stuff like that. They they just want to
Speaker 4: exclude trans women from their own stories, even it's kind
Speaker 4: of crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the extent of it is actually telling of the
Speaker 3: local level too. Here the blade Diddle number of reporting,
Speaker 3: and we also featured some like really well thought out
Speaker 3: in pretty sharp opinion columns, which is one thing we
Speaker 3: kind of specializing. So I think you're really good for
Speaker 3: like raising issues in the local level about how awful
Speaker 3: the Tours and Development Authority is which is this hotel
Speaker 3: or cartail that takes every dime of all the local
Speaker 3: hotel tax, every bit of it, and then uses it
Speaker 3: to market the place to more rich people and push
Speaker 3: crackdowns on pretty much everyone else. So we pushed this.
Speaker 3: It became a widespread public demand. A lot of organizing
Speaker 3: happened around it, and there was zip zilch zero mentioned
Speaker 3: that like spurred by investigations and editorials in the Asheville Blade.
Speaker 3: Even one of the people who wrote that editorial, who
Speaker 3: was a local resident activist who dealt with some tourism stuff,
Speaker 3: was literally being quoted the fact she'd written a piece
Speaker 3: for the Blade and that you know, was just not mentioned.
Speaker 3: And it actually became kind of a running kind of
Speaker 3: grim joke because we're all working class trans people and
Speaker 3: you know, half of us are transferm is just the
Speaker 3: Asheville Blade does not exist. And some of that was
Speaker 3: for liberals, but honestly, Asheville has a massive trans misogyny problem,
Speaker 3: which think we were the first meet outs to do
Speaker 3: like a quick guide to trans misogyny, which we did
Speaker 3: kind of like a slide show about it in our
Speaker 3: Patreon and stuff, because it was that extensive. But even
Speaker 3: the left in Ashville has some real problems with trans misogyny.
Speaker 3: So and it's applied everything got just from trans issues,
Speaker 3: but even to bread and butter kind of local stuff,
Speaker 3: which we also do a lot of reporting on. You know,
Speaker 3: it's we can't admit that trans leftists and anarchists are
Speaker 3: shaping the discussion in any way, shape or form.
Speaker 1: It's funny because like like even us, like even like
Speaker 1: the podcast it could happen here, which is like a
Speaker 1: pretty big national thing, Like there's no one else talks
Speaker 1: about us. It's fucking amazing. You could just like see
Speaker 1: you can like literally watch like every other podcast that's
Speaker 1: like a tenth of our size there's like media coverage
Speaker 1: of and there's nothing, and they will never admit that
Speaker 1: we fucking did anything.
Speaker 2: It's awesome. It's so cool.
Speaker 1: And I think there's like a conversions of actoracy too,
Speaker 1: because like you know, on the one hand, like in
Speaker 1: terms of sort of the way that hyper visibility works, right,
Speaker 1: hyper visibility for transferms only works negatively, like there's only
Speaker 1: the kind of like you get fucked by it. But
Speaker 1: then also on top of it, you get the reverse
Speaker 1: version of it, where it's like, yeah, you know, your
Speaker 1: labor was stolen all and this is you know, this
Speaker 1: is true both in movements. This is true of the
Speaker 1: way the sort of capitalist media functions. And then on
Speaker 1: top of that, we have the kind of like trifecta
Speaker 1: of like we will never mention that you exist, which
Speaker 1: is trans independent and radical at the same time, and
Speaker 1: like this is the thing happens like every fucking trans
Speaker 1: fan like journalist like friend of the show Maya Arson
Speaker 1: crime w has had this happen to it like a
Speaker 1: billion fucking times. I want to talk a bit more
Speaker 1: about kind of just like the financials of how this
Speaker 1: plays out and how independent media is sort of being
Speaker 1: supported in this era because you know, like it's also
Speaker 1: really true that like even even the like nominally trans outlets,
Speaker 1: like a lot of it functions a labor exploitation. And yeah,
Speaker 1: let's let's talk a bit about that.
Speaker 2: Like we have a lot of strong cakes.
Speaker 1: Seen some shit.
Speaker 2: Oh boy, I have so many opinions, So I mentioned
Speaker 2: I kind of more formally got to start three to
Speaker 2: four years ago. My first article was published in twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: and it was just like a local thing when I
Speaker 2: was living in Scranton, Pennsylvania area where bathing happens, but
Speaker 2: I found something to report on. The reason I got
Speaker 2: started that would have been like early twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: Reason I got started then because I was homeless and
Speaker 2: I needed a way to make money, and where I
Speaker 2: was living at the time it was a complete job desert.
Speaker 2: I didn't have a car and there was nothing in
Speaker 2: walking distance to me. The only things that were like
Speaker 2: minimum wage food service jobs that over half an hour
Speaker 2: walk and my long disabled. My body is in pain
Speaker 2: if I stand up too long. So those jobs did
Speaker 2: not last long because I physically couldn't. And so I
Speaker 2: tried to find something that I could do remotely, more consistently,
Speaker 2: and I went all in into freelance writing and journalism.
Speaker 1: Real really the money making career.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm totally I'm just in this for the money,
Speaker 2: you know. I made such amazing profits that year, which
Speaker 2: is why I ended up homeless again and by the
Speaker 2: end of the year I was living in a motel.
Speaker 1: God.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And a lot of the writing I was doing at
Speaker 2: that time was very generalist and I hadn't really found
Speaker 2: much of my niche yet. But as I began to
Speaker 2: zero it more on trains issues over time and just
Speaker 2: politics and stuff like that, because as an aside, I
Speaker 2: also tried to break into gaming journalism because I unfortunately
Speaker 2: am a gamer regredibly such cases, many such cases, and
Speaker 2: that industry is just dead. It was dying at that
Speaker 2: point and now it's just like, if you want to
Speaker 2: get a job as a gaming journalist, you're not gonna
Speaker 2: I tried. We need more people to do it, but
Speaker 2: it does not pay. So I'm going into vix journalism,
Speaker 2: which pays like marginally better, and by marginally better, let
Speaker 2: me talk about some of my rates. Oh god, yea
Speaker 2: one outlet I've written for pretty consistently go for a while.
Speaker 2: To start, it paid me about one hundred bucks an
Speaker 2: article flatter rate, and this includes for highly research in
Speaker 2: deft reporting articles.
Speaker 1: My god, yeah, this is again like shit that's going
Speaker 1: to be stolen by a national outlet in.
Speaker 2: Two days, like like and find you. A lot of
Speaker 2: these stories took weeks to make and fell for a
Speaker 2: hundred bucks, and so I eventually got quote upgraded to
Speaker 2: that outlet to doing seventy five a piece, but four
Speaker 2: pieces in a month, and so that was great. You
Speaker 2: know that two hundred dollars a month for each individually
Speaker 2: reported piece that really paid the bills, and eventually it
Speaker 2: changed into one fifty a piece for endef reporting pieces
Speaker 2: that often took over a month's worth of work to
Speaker 2: get going, and I had to meet my deadline or
Speaker 2: as they would get really angry at me and and
Speaker 2: they would be really dickish. And that was one of
Speaker 2: my better experiences, certainly not the best. I've had plenty
Speaker 2: of people who were wonderful, who I've written for, and
Speaker 2: I've had great times with. But the through line of
Speaker 2: all of it, even the places that pay better, they're
Speaker 2: for one off stories. They're for things that do not
Speaker 2: giving key a source of and com long term. Even
Speaker 2: the places that have paid me the best for individual stories,
Speaker 2: it's not enough. Not the least of which because you know,
Speaker 2: the cost of living is borrible right now, Terris, they're
Speaker 2: going show up and oh god, where what the fuck
Speaker 2: is happening? But also because none of it's consistent. The
Speaker 2: closest to consistent I had was overworking myself by writing
Speaker 2: like upwards of like ten articles a week, sometimes upwards
Speaker 2: of like five to seven in one day and all
Speaker 2: of them being reported and in that and it's not
Speaker 2: sustainable doing that, No no, but that's just common. That
Speaker 2: is just normal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and it's and it's like the sort
Speaker 1: of bleak thing about it is your your options are
Speaker 1: you have money already, you won the fucking lottery basically,
Speaker 1: and like you got a stable position, you work at
Speaker 1: a rate that is like genuinely hideous, or you have
Speaker 1: a second job, and sometimes it's a lot of these
Speaker 1: things combined.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think there's a tendency to talk about discrimination
Speaker 1: as something that's sort of like abstract or something that's
Speaker 1: even just kind of like point of hiring stuff, which
Speaker 1: is all true, and like you know, it is like yeah,
Speaker 1: like part of the problem with this is that it's
Speaker 1: impossible to get like fucking staff positions and like and
Speaker 1: like I could say this is like like so I
Speaker 1: mean I got hired like as a SIS person, right
Speaker 1: and like and like they would have hired me if
Speaker 1: I was trans But like that's also just true for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, which is that like that's like
Speaker 1: the way that you can do it. So like there
Speaker 1: is the like front toward discrimination. But then also the
Speaker 1: second aspect of it is that like the way that
Speaker 1: all of this stuff plays out structurally in the economy
Speaker 1: is that you get reduced to sort of contract labor
Speaker 1: unless you try to go and go it by yourself.
Speaker 1: And because of the incredible just my material financial oppression
Speaker 1: of trans people, this is another big part of the
Speaker 1: reason why there's just so few, you know, and like
Speaker 1: there's there's becoming more, right, and I'm incredibly happy that,
Speaker 1: like you know, like.
Speaker 2: I'm fucking talking with three trans journalists. This rules.
Speaker 1: And also the reason is not more of us, which
Speaker 1: is important because like sis people trying to cover our
Speaker 1: stories is a fucking disaster, like that's how we got here.
Speaker 1: But like part of the reason why there's not more
Speaker 1: is just that, like it's so difficult to survive doing
Speaker 1: this and y you know, and that's also I'm gonna'm
Speaker 1: gonna sur this into a minor plug, which is like,
Speaker 1: go subscribe to the Asheville Blade, Go subscribe to Free Radical,
Speaker 1: Go subscribe to Manicast News, because like literally the difference
Speaker 1: between like people being able to have an apartment and
Speaker 1: pay their rent or like living in a car is
Speaker 1: the amount of support that you get from this stuff.
Speaker 3: That's absolutely true. Yeah, and I should note the you know,
Speaker 3: the Blade's a co op. We've been one for half
Speaker 3: a decade now, and part of the reason for that
Speaker 3: was we'd seen how unfairly like income was treated, just
Speaker 3: in the press in general. And also I'm an anarchist,
Speaker 3: and while I love being an editor, I don't want
Speaker 3: to be a boss. I want to like work with
Speaker 3: other people. And it's made us a lot more effective.
Speaker 3: I would say we wouldn't exist if we hadn't become
Speaker 3: a co op. But also when we do hit a
Speaker 3: difficult financial spot and we operate in a shoestring budget,
Speaker 3: especially post Helene as sadly a lot of folks have
Speaker 3: been driven out of Ashville by the refusal of farious
Speaker 3: governments to do anything about rental aid, by the resumption
Speaker 3: of like very quick resumption of fvictions, and a lot
Speaker 3: of other horrible stuff, Like it's a struggle. We all
Speaker 3: are working class folks. We all work of their jobs
Speaker 3: and face trans the discrimination, trans misology, and transphobia. So
Speaker 3: it's it's difficult. And even with being a co op,
Speaker 3: we do the best we can, and we do, unlike
Speaker 3: other places, pay freelancers fair rate. But sometimes it's legitimately
Speaker 3: difficult to divide up our tiny budget, and at some
Speaker 3: points we say, look, we can't cover this right now,
Speaker 3: or we have to say okay, yea in some cases
Speaker 3: I've done it before. Certainly I'm covering this, but I
Speaker 3: am going to literally have to split up payment forward
Speaker 3: over multiple months because we just don't have the money
Speaker 3: in there. But I feel it does need, it does
Speaker 3: need to get out there, and even if those decisions
Speaker 3: are made more fairly, it is still a real problem
Speaker 3: that we are dividing up us fairly small pool of resources.
Speaker 2: We do a lot with that, but it is a
Speaker 2: real limitation. Mm hmm.
Speaker 4: Yeah. And I'm kind of in a similar boat in
Speaker 4: terms of my publication Maddie cast News. So I'm in
Speaker 4: one of the categories you mentioned. Actually I'm in two
Speaker 4: of them. Where I found what I'm doing not from
Speaker 4: my work, but from my first job, my main job.
Speaker 4: I guess which I got. I guess pretending to be
Speaker 4: assis or maybe you know, non binary BESAM or whatever
Speaker 4: and then kind of jump scare them. But anyway, that
Speaker 4: job pays pretty well, thankfully, you know, software engineering one
Speaker 4: of the of the lottery professions for trans women. You
Speaker 4: get your healthcare, you got your money. But I've been
Speaker 4: trying to go beyond just me and try to help
Speaker 4: other people as well. So recently we just applied for
Speaker 4: fiscal sponsorship with five to one C three, which hopefully
Speaker 4: hopefully let us become a charity tax deductible and all that.
Speaker 4: And I've also been putting a bit of my own money,
Speaker 4: and I've also been you know, pretty much begging all
Speaker 4: my readers to give us money because one of the
Speaker 4: biggest goals of my publication has it kind of started
Speaker 4: off more about like, you know, reporting on the news,
Speaker 4: of course, but now it's reporting on the news and
Speaker 4: also you know, making sure the people who report on
Speaker 4: the news aren't holmost actually, maybe that's a bad thing.
Speaker 4: Everyone I know in my life knows people like all
Speaker 4: these journalists who report on this news, but a lot
Speaker 4: of them probably don't even know how much like they suck.
Speaker 4: They struggle, just like getting through their daily lives. So
Speaker 4: I'm really trying to hopefully create some structure for us
Speaker 4: to have at least one nonprofit that will fund trans
Speaker 4: journalists at like a living wage of at least you know,
Speaker 4: twenty five dollars an hour, which I honestly don't think
Speaker 4: is a lot, especially like in a place like La
Speaker 4: but twenty five dollars an hour is probably more than
Speaker 4: you can get almost anywhere as a trans journalist. Also,
Speaker 4: I've heard a lot of jokes about, you know, we're
Speaker 4: passing around the same point dollars in the trans community,
Speaker 4: and it's a little bit more of that. But I'm
Speaker 4: also hoping to see if I can try to fundraise
Speaker 4: from other people and try to you know, raise awareness
Speaker 4: for this issue because I don't have a lot of
Speaker 4: time myself to be writing articles these days, because I
Speaker 4: do have a full ten job. But yeah, hoping to
Speaker 4: kind of make a dent on this issue and raise awareness.
Speaker 4: And it's really a win ran for all trans people
Speaker 4: that you know, if we're paying people who need this
Speaker 4: money to survive, but they're also creating really important news
Speaker 4: coverage that literally is like life changing for hundreds of
Speaker 4: thousands of millions of people at many times. And that's
Speaker 4: how I see it's an exceptionally important issue that is
Speaker 4: completely unaddressed.
Speaker 1: This is also part of the issue with the way
Speaker 1: that like trends issues are reported on by the media
Speaker 1: is that they're they're largely you know, and it's not
Speaker 1: things like healthcare aren't important, right, but like just the
Speaker 1: raw class dynamic of all of this just does not
Speaker 1: get talked about, right, the homelessness rates that don't. I don't,
Speaker 1: actually fuck I should have the homelessness race off top
Speaker 1: of my head. Things like three or four times of
Speaker 1: the very least more likely across the entire transpopulation to
Speaker 1: be homeless than people. And like you can just fucking
Speaker 1: see that if you know trans people. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: fucking everyone's spent a bunch of time being homeless, and like,
Speaker 1: you know, that's just the conditions of this. And you
Speaker 1: know this is the thing that like, as you the listener,
Speaker 1: like it is possible for this. It doesn't have to
Speaker 1: fucking be like this. Yeah, like it doesn't. You have
Speaker 1: the power in your hands, like to keep people off
Speaker 1: the street and like with a roof above their head,
Speaker 1: and you could do this by clicking The links in.
Speaker 2: The description.
Speaker 3: Are from our co op. Thank you for repeatedly mentioning
Speaker 3: that aspect. I think also this does this class nymic
Speaker 3: does shape the type of trans coverage you see two
Speaker 3: quite a bit. We did sur importing one time on
Speaker 3: the city of Ashville spending over a million dollars to
Speaker 3: the Salvation Army, which is basically a queer and transphobic cult.
Speaker 3: But that piece is reported very differently from if it
Speaker 3: had been reported by, say a trans journalist who'd been
Speaker 3: very well off their entire lives, you know, because a
Speaker 3: lot of us people in our co op have either
Speaker 3: been close to or been homeless before, and so we
Speaker 3: were able to bring in the experience of knowing that
Speaker 3: if you are a trans homeless person, the Salvation Army
Speaker 3: isn't letting you in or is one of the worst
Speaker 3: possible shelters you can end up in. And that piece
Speaker 3: was written and read very differently because we were drawing
Speaker 3: from that, from that on the ground experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, on that note, I've I've written so many stories
Speaker 2: that have been about just the poverty rates of trans
Speaker 2: people and what we've all gone through. I used to
Speaker 2: be a daily contributor for LGBTQ Nation. They were one
Speaker 2: of the outlooks that I was trying to crank out
Speaker 2: as many articles as they could for and the editors
Speaker 2: lovely people. There no issues with them, lovely folks. They
Speaker 2: just they don't They didn't have enough money to begin
Speaker 2: with to pay me enough, so you're goin to do.
Speaker 2: But I remember working on a story sometime like the
Speaker 2: summer of last year for them where I was I
Speaker 2: was writing about some new report that came out talking
Speaker 2: about just like poverty rates, job discrimination rates of trans people.
Speaker 2: And one thing I've noticed is, like David mentioned, there
Speaker 2: is a huge disconnect between even if you have like
Speaker 2: wealthier trans people write about an issue versus those who
Speaker 2: are in poverty. Like a lot of the sources I
Speaker 2: had for a specific article, I don't remember the headline
Speaker 2: because I wrote like five hundred or goalster q Nation
Speaker 2: last year, but a lot of the sources I used
Speaker 2: for that article, and like other ones like it, are
Speaker 2: like big nonprofits, And you know, obviously your mileage maybe
Speaker 2: very depending on which nonprofit. But most of the folks
Speaker 2: who like were writing these reports or who were doing
Speaker 2: the press releases and stuff like that, you could just
Speaker 2: kind of tell that they maybe did not have quite
Speaker 2: the same experiences as say, trans people who have been homeless,
Speaker 2: trans people who have had to deprive themselves of medical
Speaker 2: care because they couldn't afford it, trans people who have
Speaker 2: had to go without food because not enough money. And
Speaker 2: it's almost like a lot of people who didn't have
Speaker 2: to go through this stuff, like intellectualize it more. They
Speaker 2: see it as like these abstract numbers and they know
Speaker 2: it's bad, but they don't have that like individual connection.
Speaker 2: Like even many of the nonprofit folks, a lot of
Speaker 2: their friends, even their social circles are all going to
Speaker 2: be on average, you know, I can't say for every
Speaker 2: single person, obviously, like on average more wealthy, more stable,
Speaker 2: they have family to back them up, they have plenty
Speaker 2: of options, and I don't know, rambling a bit, but
Speaker 2: there's just a disconnect, you know, whenever reaching out to
Speaker 2: folks who won the birth law a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: One of the most the most expensive article that we
Speaker 4: did Maddy cast News earlier last month was about Maryland
Speaker 4: prisons and how they're basically torture chambers for trans women,
Speaker 4: as most prisons are, but it seems like they're especially
Speaker 4: bad in Maryland, you know, despite it being supposedly a
Speaker 4: safe trans today you know, seventy percent Democrats. And that
Speaker 4: was a kind of an example of just like how unprofitable,
Speaker 4: how possible to not just unprofitable, because when you think unprofitable,
Speaker 4: it's like, oh, you're not making money. It's not about that.
Speaker 4: It's like if you're losing, like eighty percent of the
Speaker 4: money you put into these articles because it takes so
Speaker 4: many Like I'm a very strong believer of paying people,
Speaker 4: you know, a living wage. So I was paying the
Speaker 4: journalists like well over twenty five dollars an hour for
Speaker 4: you know, dozens of hours of work, and that adds
Speaker 4: up really fast. And then court feet, like pacer fees,
Speaker 4: all these other costs are adding up and it ends
Speaker 4: up being like around the thousand dollars for the single article.
Speaker 4: And it's a really important article that you know, raise
Speaker 4: a lot of awareness. Everyone in Maryland, in the trans circle,
Speaker 4: they're talking about it. But at the same time, it's
Speaker 4: basically a charity product, right, This is why I'm trying
Speaker 4: to become a nonprofit because there's simply no other way
Speaker 4: to be able to fund this stuff. There's no capitalist
Speaker 4: model for reporting on trans women in prison. It's not
Speaker 4: something that people are you know, like I definitely get
Speaker 4: there's a lot of people who support us out of
Speaker 4: the goodness of their hearts, and that's really nice, but
Speaker 4: even that is not enough, because that's just how it is.
Speaker 4: There's just not enough people who care about these issues. Sadly,
Speaker 4: especially the more intersectional it is. You know, even a
Speaker 4: lot of people in the queer community aren't as wory
Speaker 4: necessarily about people in prison. They're more a worried about
Speaker 4: people not in prisons. And you know, of course everyone matters,
Speaker 4: but I think it's really important to focus on those
Speaker 4: most intersectional issues because when you really think about it,
Speaker 4: like prisons are basically, you know, where they do every
Speaker 4: thing they want to do to transom and aren't in prison.
Speaker 4: That's where they get to do all of it, and
Speaker 4: no one's looking on, no one's watching them, no one's
Speaker 4: holding them accountable. But yeah, I think it's basically a
Speaker 4: complete failing of capitalism, Like it's there's definitely be some
Speaker 4: outlets that, you know, maybe they could be doing better,
Speaker 4: but at the same time, a lot of the time
Speaker 4: that's basically, you know, be really shitty. The people are
Speaker 4: closed down and neither of those are great options. And
Speaker 4: personally I would close down, but I can't tell other
Speaker 4: people what to do. And I think really it's a
Speaker 4: systemic issue that society doesn't care about us, that the cists,
Speaker 4: people who really should be funding these things and trying
Speaker 4: to solve these issues, just pretend like we don't exist,
Speaker 4: and you know, go out of their way to even
Speaker 4: erase our presence even when we do, you know, create
Speaker 4: national needs.
Speaker 1: You know, I think part of the difficulty of it, right,
Speaker 1: and this is specifically the way the trends that she's
Speaker 1: foctioned around class journalism are a microcosm. It's like the
Speaker 1: most intense version of the stuff that's happening to the
Speaker 1: entire journalism industry, right, or like, you know, part of
Speaker 1: what we're seeing is like is just that it's been
Speaker 1: the destruction of local news, right, And the product of
Speaker 1: this is that the only people who can be journalists
Speaker 1: are like a bunch of fucking rich dipshits and you know, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you've all fucking read like New York Times columnist is
Speaker 1: like the platforming a genocide denier today, right, like that,
Speaker 1: and that's that's sort of the product of this. And
Speaker 1: it means that like unless like literally like people like you,
Speaker 1: the fucking listener, And I guess this doesn't apply to
Speaker 1: you if you're you know, like statistically a good number
Speaker 1: of you are like you are also transgender, and you
Speaker 1: make like fucking nine dollars an hour like running a
Speaker 1: forklift or something like. This is not this is not
Speaker 1: on you, like, I know much of you are gonna
Speaker 1: be like, holy shit, actually give money these people. It's
Speaker 1: like okay, but like this stuff is only possible if
Speaker 1: people are actually fucking willing to support it, like until
Speaker 1: we can like fundamentally change the way that the entire
Speaker 1: political and economic system works in this country and in
Speaker 1: this world. And until then, it's like yeah, like it's
Speaker 1: this is a fucking problem for like us here too,
Speaker 1: because you know, like again, like I got fucking lucky,
Speaker 1: Like I am extremely dissimilar, Like I am the transfoman,
Speaker 1: like one of the transfomens who you will hear from
Speaker 1: the most. And I have like a stable job. I
Speaker 1: haven't been homeless, and I haven't done sex work, and
Speaker 1: this makes me completely unlike a huge portion of trans people,
Speaker 1: especially transferms, right, And yeah, it's like, yeah, it fucking
Speaker 1: colors the way I do this shit in ways that
Speaker 1: like I don't see because like I haven't had to
Speaker 1: like do this shit, and this is a real fucking problem.
Speaker 1: The only way that it can not be like this
Speaker 1: is if people are actually willing to support the people
Speaker 1: who understand these things because they've fucking gone through it,
Speaker 1: and so so your options are like all of our
Speaker 1: stuff gets reported on by Jesse Singahl and we all
Speaker 1: fucking die, or we fund's journalism if we fight them
Speaker 1: and we all live in a fucking better world.
Speaker 2: My backup option if trans journalism doesn't work, you mentioned
Speaker 2: sexpert is quite literally to write furry smut and hope
Speaker 2: that pays.
Speaker 3: The last year, the Asheville Blade marked our tenth anniversary,
Speaker 3: So I think I think that is worth mentioning too,
Speaker 3: Like I think sometimes things and they truly are precarious,
Speaker 3: they truly are difficult in some ways, they're only getting
Speaker 3: more precarious and more difficult. But at the same time,
Speaker 3: despite our journalists being arrested, despite being kind of like
Speaker 3: targeted and ignored by a lot of liberals and even
Speaker 3: some leftists in town, we're still here. We're still doing journalism.
Speaker 3: We just put out a really powerful investigation about you know,
Speaker 3: more yet more mouthfeasance in the police department. So so yeah,
Speaker 3: like it can be done. It's not impossible, And as
Speaker 3: tight as things are, there is also a lot of
Speaker 3: resilience and we do get a lot of very genuine support.
Speaker 3: I do think that's worth them sizing two. So, like,
Speaker 3: there is strengthen there is some hope here. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: you know, and again it's like it's it's not impossible.
Speaker 3: It just requires it.
Speaker 1: Requires a bunch of fucking work from the trans people
Speaker 1: who are doing it. And then also it requires, you know,
Speaker 1: putting on my fucking MPR pledge to my voice. It
Speaker 1: requires viewers like you to you know, it requires people
Speaker 1: to care enough about it to support it and make
Speaker 1: it exist. And yeah, I think that's a that's a
Speaker 1: kind of good note to start wrapping up. You have
Speaker 1: anything else that you want to make sure you get
Speaker 1: in before we move too plugs.
Speaker 4: I guess yeah, for me as as I'm also kind
Speaker 4: of in that spectrum of like being a little bit
Speaker 4: more privileged as far as trans women go financially. And
Speaker 4: my message to other people who make especially since if
Speaker 4: you're a SIST person you make over one hundred thousand dollars,
Speaker 4: you're comfortable and you're feeling bad listening to this, you know,
Speaker 4: go give a trans person money, Go give my relizine
Speaker 4: my go give David Forbes money, like we have to.
Speaker 4: We really need everyone to start pitching in, especially people
Speaker 4: who aren't trends, and we really need like it's it's
Speaker 4: literally life saving the money. Like and I think one
Speaker 4: thing to consider is, you know, one thousand dollars to
Speaker 4: someone who makes a lot of money is completely different
Speaker 4: from one thousand dollars to someone who is like a
Speaker 4: month away from being homeless.
Speaker 1: And twenty dollars functions like.
Speaker 4: That, Like yeah, twenty dollars is then like no, I
Speaker 4: know so many people like one thousand dollars, like they'll go,
Speaker 4: they'll spend a thousand dollars in a couple of weeks
Speaker 4: on restaurants, right, And then there's people there's trans people
Speaker 4: with a thousand dollars it's like change their life forever.
Speaker 2: To look on your's face, like the.
Speaker 4: No, there's people who spend and I don't even do
Speaker 4: twenty thousand dollars a year on sushi having worked in
Speaker 4: the service industry, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I feel bad when I spend like twenty bucks on
Speaker 2: Popeyes once a week, Like yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: So if you spend twenty thousand dollars a year on
Speaker 4: two if you please spend nineteen thousand dollars a year
Speaker 4: this year and said and give one thousand dollars to transperson.
Speaker 2: That's my advice for you.
Speaker 1: Double the income of a transperson today. This is also like,
Speaker 1: you know, part of what I was talking about with
Speaker 1: like the Great Depression, Like we don't live in the
Speaker 1: same economy that everyone else does, Like it is literally
Speaker 1: a different fucking world. And the more fucked you are,
Speaker 1: like down the fucking scale of like of like trans poverty,
Speaker 1: the more it's like you literally like the reality that
Speaker 1: like the people live in is just completely alien to you.
Speaker 2: It's like, what the fuck I want that kind of money?
Speaker 1: Fuck, you're a David Diah. Do you have anything else
Speaker 1: that you want to say before you like wrap up?
Speaker 2: Please support trend journalists, please, dear God, Please, everyone I
Speaker 2: know who is primarily a journalist for work is broke.
Speaker 2: Need the money please toar God.
Speaker 3: Yeah I would, yeah, add to that. But another thing is, look,
Speaker 3: uhould support trans journals because trans people deserve to, you know,
Speaker 3: to be supported and to be able to make a living. Also, frankly,
Speaker 3: we're really good at this, like generally as a whole,
Speaker 3: like we have a lot more perspective I think on
Speaker 3: how this healthscape social structure actually does and doesn't work,
Speaker 3: and a lot more determination to actually tell the truth
Speaker 3: in general, and so you know, dollars to the actual
Speaker 3: blade for example, or to or Tamra or too maddicast,
Speaker 3: Like they go to journalism. You know, they're not going
Speaker 3: to like some baroque hierarchy of you know, of gentry
Speaker 3: administrators or something or CEOs.
Speaker 2: Like it goes to journalism.
Speaker 3: It goes to actual interesting reporting and views and things
Speaker 3: that need to be said. So if people are even
Speaker 3: just looking, if it's some journalism is something they care
Speaker 3: about or think it needs to be stronger, this is
Speaker 3: the way to do it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And like, like this is also a directly political
Speaker 1: thing because like the word that you'll do, Like I
Speaker 1: have literally watched it change the sort of political landscape.
Speaker 1: Like that's just like a thing that happens, you know,
Speaker 1: Like and I think we're all we're all very cynical
Speaker 1: about sort of the power of like the truth to
Speaker 1: do anything because it requires people to act on it.
Speaker 1: But you know, if you don't know anything is happening,
Speaker 1: it is not possible to act on something. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: like you know, you are simultaneously you are supporting, like
Speaker 1: you are supporting trans people in like the most vicarious
Speaker 1: position we've been in in fucking ages. You are like
Speaker 1: supporting your supporting journalism. And you are not even poking
Speaker 1: a stick. You are helping build a lance to like
Speaker 1: stab into the side of the people who are like
Speaker 1: destroying this world. And yeah, I think that's fucking important.
Speaker 1: So if people want to support you, where do they go?
Speaker 1: Where do they go?
Speaker 2: Go?
Speaker 1: Go, go go.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So if you want to support me, go to
Speaker 2: the Free radical dot org. That that that is my newsletter.
Speaker 2: There's stuff to subscribe and and and give money. You
Speaker 2: can do a free subscription, you know, especially for broke,
Speaker 2: please do a free subscription, like we don't. I don't
Speaker 2: need your twenty dollars. I'll give you my twenty dollars please.
Speaker 2: And also I have a cofi if you know, need
Speaker 2: to like a one time saying, it's mirror Lusine. I'm
Speaker 2: the only one only mirrors and Losine on there. And
Speaker 2: if you subscribe, you're supporting some of the only trans
Speaker 2: anarchist national news coverage. Basically in every single article I write,
Speaker 2: I try to find a way to shoot order anarchist
Speaker 2: theory and what fucking I'm sucking. Like my first article,
Speaker 2: I was like, hey, go check out crime thing, the
Speaker 2: one who one I published yesterday. I just I went
Speaker 2: on a whole like page long tangent where I'm like, okay, cool,
Speaker 2: so this is what more liberal people are saying. But
Speaker 2: go read Lorenzo O. Kombola Irvin, go read queryan anarchism,
Speaker 2: Go read this shit, and yeah that's I just want
Speaker 2: to shoehorn anarchist theory and get more people will be anarchists.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So if you ever want to support maddiecast News,
Speaker 4: to be clear, I don't take any income from the website,
Speaker 4: actually having plant plans to put lots of money into it,
Speaker 4: but all of your money will be going towards supporting
Speaker 4: other trends journalists, So that's one way to contribute to
Speaker 4: the cause. So or even if you just give me
Speaker 4: your email, I appreciate that too. But my website is
Speaker 4: maddiecast dot com and that's only one b So m
Speaker 4: a d y cast dot com and round bluebliskuy too
Speaker 4: with the same same website named and yeah, thank you.
Speaker 4: People can find our co ops work at Ashville Blade
Speaker 4: dot com and there's a giant link to our Patreon there.
Speaker 4: For fifteen bucks a month, you can get a lovely
Speaker 4: Gentry Tears mug, which we're particularly proud.
Speaker 2: Of it, so cool it rules.
Speaker 3: Thank you for the endorsement, And at the end of
Speaker 3: each article we have addition to our Patreon a link
Speaker 3: if folks just want to send us some one time support,
Speaker 3: we'll certainly put that to use as well, and if
Speaker 3: they would like to see some of my personal writings
Speaker 3: about trans survival as well as some anarchists looks at
Speaker 3: various periods of history Patreon dot com slash David Forbes
Speaker 3: if if that is, if that is more of their
Speaker 3: cup of tea.
Speaker 1: Satistically in our audience, I know there are a bunch
Speaker 1: of you whose special interest either is or could be
Speaker 1: medieval peasant uprisings. You were not going to find better
Speaker 1: writing on medieval peasant up risings anywhere else. Yes, there
Speaker 1: is a limit to the extent to which you can
Speaker 1: actually talk about the structural problems that are happening, and
Speaker 1: you can't fucking talk about how to solve them. And
Speaker 1: this is also partially why I have a cogul journalists
Speaker 1: like I kind of jokingly refuse to call myself a
Speaker 1: journalist because, like I, fucking I refuse to be associated
Speaker 1: with like all of those goddamn Atlantic mother fuckers who
Speaker 1: institutional jobs to endanger trans people, like you know.
Speaker 2: But also around of fascist though that's.
Speaker 1: True, that's true, yeah, you know, because it's like we're
Speaker 1: the ones actually fucking doing this shit. But also yeah,
Speaker 1: like this is you know, to do my one, to
Speaker 1: do my one Karl Marx quote. It's like, you know,
Speaker 1: philosophy has hitherto only sought to describe the world. The
Speaker 1: point is to change it. And that's a thing that
Speaker 1: we could that like, we like have the power to
Speaker 1: collectively do together. And that's something that like the New
Speaker 1: York Times does not want you to know that you
Speaker 1: can change things.
Speaker 2: Now, Yeah, they to borrow a trem David has recently
Speaker 2: gotten into my vocabulary. A bunch the gentry really fucking
Speaker 2: do not like the idea of solutions. Their idea of
Speaker 2: a solution is go vote for Pete Boudage egg, go
Speaker 2: sign the Acal Years petition.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want, I want to read this this fucking
Speaker 1: post that I saw for at Kencher Rights about the
Speaker 1: New York Times. I think a lot about the top
Speaker 1: New York Times editor who I told the historians were
Speaker 1: warning were in a similar period to the ramp up
Speaker 1: to the Holocaust, And maybe we could look back and
Speaker 1: see what NYT had done wrong to not repeat his mistakes.
Speaker 1: He shrugged, New York Times didn't really cover the Holocaust.
Speaker 3: Oh my god, what, So don't support these people, support
Speaker 3: the people who actually.
Speaker 2: Do this shit, you know, like I.
Speaker 1: Go, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a cut of comparison.
Speaker 1: But it was like, at the time this shit was happening,
Speaker 1: there was a bunch of very good coverage of the Holocaust,
Speaker 1: of what was happening, but it was because it was
Speaker 1: all happening from fucking like, because it was like largely
Speaker 1: Jewish radicals who were doing it, All that shit fucking
Speaker 1: got ignored, and shit that could have been fucking prevented wasn't.
Speaker 1: And we don't have to live in a world where
Speaker 1: that shit fucking happens, and we can make it not
Speaker 1: be like that. But like the structural, the structural like
Speaker 1: structural dature of the media is one of the ways
Speaker 1: that this fucking happens. And we don't have to let
Speaker 1: the New York Times do this again.
Speaker 3: No, And that's a good reminder there is another way
Speaker 3: with journalism, you know. Ida Welles was able to detail
Speaker 3: the extent and horror of American segregation and lynching, and
Speaker 3: also called for people to shoot the clan. Yeah, this
Speaker 3: is the you know, the modern idea that you have
Speaker 3: to be detached, inevitably attached from pretty gentry perspective.
Speaker 2: You know, there's a world elsewhere, there's other ways to
Speaker 2: do things.
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