Speaker 1: Welcome. Did it could happen? Here? A podcast that's being
Speaker 1: done for the first time and not the second time
Speaker 1: because we had bike problems. We did not just record
Speaker 1: a very funny intro that is now completely lost. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll you'll you'll never hear it. You'll you'll never you
Speaker 1: never know what great fun we had. The joy was
Speaker 1: in the creation. They're not none in this sharing Yeah, process,
Speaker 1: not an event structure, etcetera, etcetera. So I'm I'm Mia,
Speaker 1: I'm a I'm gonna doing this episode. Also Garrison, this here,
Speaker 1: hello Hi, and also James, Hi, I'm recording. So we're
Speaker 1: good now. Yet the good news is stunning Lee, as
Speaker 1: as as as much as it seems we are now
Speaker 1: more prepared to record this episode when we're last time.
Speaker 1: So yeah, well what are we? What are we? What
Speaker 1: are we talking about? We we were? We are talking
Speaker 1: about the age of the genter bureaucrat. So as as
Speaker 1: people are probably aware, there is a raft of anti
Speaker 1: trans bill sweeping through state legislatures um. The latest of
Speaker 1: these bills to pass as a time of recording is
Speaker 1: the bill in Utah which is banned miners from getting
Speaker 1: gender affirming care like hormone therapy, hormone blockers, and any
Speaker 1: kind of gender affirming surgery for anyone who's not already
Speaker 1: receiving them. Does Does the Utah one also banned like
Speaker 1: therapy like talk therapy. No, but they're there, so on
Speaker 1: the one hand, doesn't band talk therapy. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: there's a provision in there that I think might also
Speaker 1: suggest that people do conversion therapy. So that's great. Um
Speaker 1: it fucking sucks. Ass uh yeah, kid, kids are going
Speaker 1: to die because of this bill. The people who are
Speaker 1: writing and signing these bills know that kids are going
Speaker 1: to die. We know this because Utah's Governor, Spencer Cox,
Speaker 1: who is the guy who signed the bill, vetoed an
Speaker 1: earlier ban on trans athletes participating in school sports, specifically
Speaker 1: signing the risk of suicide. So she knows this is
Speaker 1: going to kill kids. He signs this anyways, and we
Speaker 1: are now living in what I call the age of
Speaker 1: the gender beercrat um. We're gonna spend We're gonna have
Speaker 1: another episode later on where we spend a lot of
Speaker 1: time going through all of the individual bills and the
Speaker 1: stuff Trump has been saying about this. Because Jesus Christ
Speaker 1: pretty pretty pretty grim stuff that they're I mean, on
Speaker 1: the one hand, making making trains people out to be
Speaker 1: the boogeyman who did not work in their favor greatly
Speaker 1: in the midterms. But it seems like they're not trying
Speaker 1: to They're not trying to change their their tactics here.
Speaker 1: They are still going all in based on Trump's speech
Speaker 1: from a few days ago of of of using the
Speaker 1: using the transgender menace as the as the greatest threats
Speaker 1: to America and the and the and the nuclear family.
Speaker 1: So we'll see how that goes for them, like electorally,
Speaker 1: but it's pretty bad rhetoric to see flying around. I
Speaker 1: think they it does really well with the people who
Speaker 1: who allowed and like like you often see this in
Speaker 1: like primaries, right, like people pushed to the limits of
Speaker 1: their party, because that plays well with the most politicized people.
Speaker 1: And for sure, if you're going to a Trump rally
Speaker 1: like three years after he got kicked out, yeah you
Speaker 1: are also bigot. Yeah. But before we do that, I
Speaker 1: I want to, before we actually really do a NEPs
Speaker 1: on this, I want to take a look at the
Speaker 1: sort of bureaucratic grounding for this entire thing. And to
Speaker 1: do that we need to look at gender bureaucrats and
Speaker 1: the American gender bureaucracy. So I'm going to cite my
Speaker 1: sources a bit and say that I stole this from
Speaker 1: a incredibly unlikely source, which is the Bowist review of
Speaker 1: Shrek to what wait stop, never speak those words again.
Speaker 1: This is the Mallist review of Strek two. Is is
Speaker 1: one of the three great sort of text of American maoism.
Speaker 1: There's this one, there's Torgeable Attractive People's War the Florida Everglades,
Speaker 1: and then there's that time the the RCP got into
Speaker 1: a fight with the PSL. They're both trying to grab
Speaker 1: each other's signs. Amazing, amazing stuff. But unfortunately, you know,
Speaker 1: having having come up with the term gender bureaucrat, which
Speaker 1: is incredibly useful their maoists, so that they're constitutionally and
Speaker 1: politically just unable to understand what a bureaucrat is. So
Speaker 1: I have now stolen this term and I'm using it
Speaker 1: for other purposes. Reappropriate. No, it's stealing their mauists us.
Speaker 1: It's never wrong to steal from maoists. Okay, fine, So
Speaker 1: all right, it's getting back sort of more serious stuff
Speaker 1: to understand what this is. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: sort of the term assigned gender at birth. Um, this
Speaker 1: used to be a like, I used to be fairly
Speaker 1: common kind of in in in circles to like refer
Speaker 1: to people as like a MAB or a FABS, like
Speaker 1: a side mail at birth or assigned female at birth.
Speaker 1: And it's a it kind of sucks as the term.
Speaker 1: It's been replaced by other stuff. But I think there's
Speaker 1: something important here, which is I want to go back
Speaker 1: and look at the assigned part, and I want to
Speaker 1: I want to look at the scifically the part about
Speaker 1: the gender being assigned, because I think there's something that
Speaker 1: gets lost in sort of popular discussions of this, which
Speaker 1: is that when when people think about like the term
Speaker 1: like the assignment of gender, right, they think about it
Speaker 1: as something that's created socially. Right. They think about it
Speaker 1: as you know, people being like pressured to perform one
Speaker 1: kind of gender or another by the people around them,
Speaker 1: sort of by their families, by just like people walking
Speaker 1: down the street. And this is all true, but there's
Speaker 1: also something else going on here. And that's something else
Speaker 1: going on here is we need to ask ourselves when
Speaker 1: we talk about someone's gender being assigned who is it
Speaker 1: being assigned by? Because this is an actual specific person, right,
Speaker 1: the person who actually assigns your gender is a doctor
Speaker 1: or sometimes a nurse or a midwife. And this person
Speaker 1: is the first gender bureaucrat. They're the first gender breacrat
Speaker 1: because they are the person who sits down and puts
Speaker 1: down what your gender is on a form. Now, Okay,
Speaker 1: you may be asking yourself, right, Mia, why should anyone
Speaker 1: care that your gender is now on a piece of paper? Well,
Speaker 1: because it also maybe like they're they're also mainly, at
Speaker 1: least now in like a like a medical scientific sense,
Speaker 1: it's mainly like, oh, what parts do you have? Um,
Speaker 1: and then using those parts as as a carryover for
Speaker 1: gender as it's been modeled after ever since we stopped
Speaker 1: dressing boys and girls and dresses and all the same clothing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and well we'll get into sort of like how
Speaker 1: this has sort of changed over time. But okay, so
Speaker 1: to understand why this actually matters, I think what we
Speaker 1: need to talk about what bureaucracy actually is, because this
Speaker 1: is a thing that used to be fairly common talk
Speaker 1: about on the left, and then people have stopped doing
Speaker 1: over the past maybe like half decade. The anthropologist David
Speaker 1: Graeber wrote extensively about bureaucracy throughout his career. Probably his
Speaker 1: most famous book is one of his later worst, called
Speaker 1: Bullshit Jobs. But I want to go back to an
Speaker 1: earlier thing that he wrote, called The Utopia of Rules.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna'm gonna I'm gonna read a little bit of
Speaker 1: one of the first sections of it. Bureaucratic knowledge is
Speaker 1: all about schematization. In practice, bureaucratic procedure invariably means ignoring
Speaker 1: all the dutialties of real life existence and reducing everything
Speaker 1: to preconceive mechanical or statistical formula. Whether it's a matter
Speaker 1: of forms, rural statistics, or questionnaires, it is always a
Speaker 1: matter of simplification. Typically, it's not very different from the
Speaker 1: boss who walks into the kitchen to make an arbitrary
Speaker 1: snap pocition as to what went wrong. In either case,
Speaker 1: it is a matter of applying very simple, pre existing
Speaker 1: templates to complex and often ambiguous situations. The result often
Speaker 1: leaves those forced to deal with bureaucratic administration with the
Speaker 1: impression that they are dealing with people who have, for
Speaker 1: some arbitrary reason, decided to put on a set of
Speaker 1: glasses that only allows them to see two percent of
Speaker 1: what's in front of them. So, you know, we we
Speaker 1: can see some of the the core aspects of bureaucracy here, right.
Speaker 1: Bureaucracy inherently is an act of simplification. Um because of
Speaker 1: sort of the tech like literally the technical systems of
Speaker 1: what a bureaucracy is, and because of how it how
Speaker 1: it stores information, how it moves information around, it can
Speaker 1: only see the world in incredibly sort of simplified terms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it has to like abstract these things and make assumptions
Speaker 1: based off those abstractions in order to have any type
Speaker 1: of functionality. Yeah, so so great. Greb later says that
Speaker 1: like this, you know, Okay, on the one hand, like
Speaker 1: the sort of simplification and model making that goes on
Speaker 1: into bureaucracy can be really really frustrating when you have
Speaker 1: to interact with it. But on the other hand, you know,
Speaker 1: so the reduction of the complex to the simple, it's
Speaker 1: not just you know, a thing that's inherently evil in
Speaker 1: its in and of itself. It's the basis of all
Speaker 1: thoughts because you know, like we we we actually can't
Speaker 1: and like in and our ourselves process the world by
Speaker 1: immediately holding in our minds all of the information at
Speaker 1: one time. Right, the way we understand the world is
Speaker 1: simplfications and models. Yeah, and we we it's pattern recognition,
Speaker 1: recreating recursive spot loops that give us the very concept
Speaker 1: of meaning. And like that's how we know what words are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so true. You know, you can you can, you
Speaker 1: can look it's it's also possible to take a lot
Speaker 1: of data and make sense out of it. And this
Speaker 1: is this is this is a field called economics marketing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, you know, okay, so it's it's this is
Speaker 1: also the basis of all social theory, right, Like, like
Speaker 1: social theory is about taking a bunch of incredibly complicated
Speaker 1: like in messy relationships and just statistical stuff and just
Speaker 1: the noise of people doing doing things in everyday lives
Speaker 1: and trying to establish sort of like ways of understanding them.
Speaker 1: And you know, this in some sense is a kind
Speaker 1: of violence, right, It's it's a violence of simplification. But
Speaker 1: on the other hand, you know, the violence are during
Speaker 1: to reality here bears more resemble to sort of like
Speaker 1: Bacunian's creative destruction. Right, You're you know, you're imposing a
Speaker 1: kind of violence on reality, you know, in in simplifying
Speaker 1: and destroying a bunch of aspects of it so you
Speaker 1: can understand just like one part of it at a time.
Speaker 1: But you know this, this is a useful thing, right,
Speaker 1: It's how we think, like we we literally couldn't do
Speaker 1: anything without it. But as Graver puts it, the problem
Speaker 1: of right the problems arise at the moment that violence
Speaker 1: is no longer better oracle here, let me turn from
Speaker 1: imaginary cops to real ones. Jim Cooper, a former l
Speaker 1: A p D officer turned sociologist, has observed at the
Speaker 1: overwhelming majority of those who end up getting beaten or
Speaker 1: otherwise brutalized by police turned out to be innocent of
Speaker 1: any crime. Cops don't beat up burglars, he writes. The reason,
Speaker 1: he explained, is simple. The one thing most guaranteed to
Speaker 1: provoke a violent reaction from police is a challenge to
Speaker 1: their right to as he puts it, defined the situation.
Speaker 1: That is to say, yeah, that that that perfectly describes
Speaker 1: any any physical interaction with police like this is one
Speaker 1: of the things I like about Greater because I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is something that I noticed and I
Speaker 1: was in academia. Is it is very very easy to
Speaker 1: tell who, like when you're reading a theorist social theorist
Speaker 1: talking about stuff like who has been to your gas
Speaker 1: before it? Who hasn't. Yeah, I'm always reminded when we
Speaker 1: talk about like academics who have a real life of
Speaker 1: that picture of Edwards said throwing stones. Yeah, most based
Speaker 1: academic thing anyone his death and like graver, graver, I
Speaker 1: think I think it's been ture gas on five continents
Speaker 1: or something like that, Like he's gotten around, He's used
Speaker 1: on a lot of stuff. Yeah, it is. It is
Speaker 1: always nice whenever you can whenever these types of theorists
Speaker 1: who like, you know, they often will philosophize about like
Speaker 1: the nature of power, in the nature of the state,
Speaker 1: and sometimes it can get a little bit wishy washy,
Speaker 1: and it's nice when there's people who do that. Also,
Speaker 1: you know, like the material like the material reality of
Speaker 1: like power and how that yeah like how how how
Speaker 1: like the how like the philosophy of power transfers over
Speaker 1: to street politics is always always an interesting difference to
Speaker 1: to compare compare various theory too. In I was teaching
Speaker 1: a world history course and obviously it's remote because of
Speaker 1: a pandemic. Right, Um, so, like we would just log
Speaker 1: in in the morning and like fully aware that I
Speaker 1: had seen and been tear gassed with some of my
Speaker 1: students a night before. I've just discussed like how the
Speaker 1: state has a monopoly on violence. People are gonna Yeah,
Speaker 1: all the fucking lines up. It's like you've got a
Speaker 1: massive bruise again. Yeah, it was. It was very instructive
Speaker 1: and everyone should do it in their history classes. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna keep reading from this quote because there's
Speaker 1: a couple more things I want. I want to get
Speaker 1: out of this. So okay, So you know he's talking
Speaker 1: about how, like you, you get a violent reaction from
Speaker 1: challenging their right to define the situation. That is to say, no,
Speaker 1: this isn't a possible crime situation. This is a citizen
Speaker 1: who pays your salary of walking his dog situation. So
Speaker 1: shove off. Let alone the invariably disastrous. Wait, why are
Speaker 1: you handcuffing that guy? He didn't do anything. It's talking
Speaker 1: back above all that inspires beat downs and means challenging
Speaker 1: whatever administrative rubric and orderly a disorderly crowd, a properly
Speaker 1: or improperly registered vehicle has been applied by the officers
Speaker 1: discretionary judgments. The police truncheon is precisely the point where
Speaker 1: the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema and
Speaker 1: it's monopoly on coercive force come together. It only makes
Speaker 1: sense then that bureaucratic violence should consist first and foremost
Speaker 1: on a tacks on those who insist on alternative schemas
Speaker 1: or interpretations. At the same time, if one accepts John
Speaker 1: Page's famous definition of mature intelligence is the ability to
Speaker 1: coordinate between multiple perspectives or multiple or possible perspectives, one
Speaker 1: can see here precisely how bureaucratic power, at the moment
Speaker 1: it turns to violence, becomes literally a form of infantile stupidity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it is this weird, like childlike sense that is
Speaker 1: a that is an interesting combination of thoughts. That's a
Speaker 1: fantastic I love it. I like literally read reading this
Speaker 1: book is like one of the things that really sort
Speaker 1: of like committed me to anarchism because you know, like
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's a book that actually takes violence seriously,
Speaker 1: and while talking about bureaucracy with something that really doesn't.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's a good critique, and we kind
Speaker 1: of have lost it over the years. I feel like
Speaker 1: we've gotten into arguments about this sort of thing when
Speaker 1: discussing the usefulness of like a Fuco's theories of power
Speaker 1: and like and like how power functions. You've definitely brought
Speaker 1: up this passage before talking about how the extent of
Speaker 1: that is always is always measured by where the truncheon
Speaker 1: is hitting on, like the actual street level. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: you know, okay, Graber isn't writing about gender here really, right,
Speaker 1: He's he's mostly writing about sort of direct police violence.
Speaker 1: Although I mean it is worth noting that like all
Speaker 1: of the stuff that he's writing is informed by sort
Speaker 1: of like like by by actually specifically by by actual
Speaker 1: critical race theory and by sort of like uh like
Speaker 1: feminder standpoints theory stuff. Um, but you know, okay, if
Speaker 1: if if you, if you, if you look back at
Speaker 1: this right and you look back at sort of you know,
Speaker 1: the point at which the state's bureaucratic impetue imperative for
Speaker 1: imposing simple administrative ski seams and the monopoly and force
Speaker 1: come together, or specifically the parts that are about right, Like,
Speaker 1: the way you get a violent reaction is by being
Speaker 1: something that being something that a bereacrat thinks you're not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is it's challenging their their version of reality. It's
Speaker 1: the challenge. It's challenging the validity of their perception of reality. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And you know, and if you think about this about
Speaker 1: five seconds, if you're a transperson, that's not good because someone,
Speaker 1: a bureaucrat, has already assigned you a gender at birth
Speaker 1: and if you're not that gender, things are going to
Speaker 1: get really bad really quickly. Well, do you know what
Speaker 1: bureaucracies are actually worthwhile and things that you should definitely
Speaker 1: consider greatly is all of the breaucracies that support the
Speaker 1: products and services that that fund this podcast. Well, I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoy your your your your five new bars
Speaker 1: of gold. Thank you for supporting the show. Um, we
Speaker 1: are back. Uh, let's talk about gender and the bureaucracy
Speaker 1: that seeks to contain it violence. So you know, if
Speaker 1: if if you are, for example, intersects the point at
Speaker 1: which the state's bureaucratic imperative for imposing simple administrative schema
Speaker 1: and it's monopoly on course, if force comes together is
Speaker 1: on the operating table of the hospital where you're born. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, first you a doctor assigns you a fucking gender,
Speaker 1: which is never intersects by the way. The doctor just
Speaker 1: decides whether you're male or female, and then you know,
Speaker 1: puts that gender und your birth certificate. Um, it's technically
Speaker 1: possible in some places to get it changed to intersect
Speaker 1: later in life. But when I say it's technically possible,
Speaker 1: I there might even more people who have done it.
Speaker 1: The first person who we know ever change their gender
Speaker 1: to intersect did it in So yeah, I'm sure there
Speaker 1: were I mean, pre bureauqucy indigenous societies. I know that, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: but this is this is yeah, this is yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean like yeah, like and and this is like the
Speaker 1: way that like we treat intersext people also has gotten worse.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, and we're gonna get into this, but it's
Speaker 1: like it's like, you know, this is a very like
Speaker 1: it's a very obvious thing where there's clearly more than
Speaker 1: two genders. And how how society reacts to that, I
Speaker 1: think says you know, A it's it's an enormous sort
Speaker 1: of like it's something enormously impact intersect people, right, like
Speaker 1: you know, you have like an incredible amount of violence
Speaker 1: that has flicted onto them. And then secondly, the way
Speaker 1: intersext people is dealt with, it's something that reveals a
Speaker 1: lot about how this society is going to look at
Speaker 1: gender and how society is going to look at the
Speaker 1: enforcement of gender. I think on the point of how
Speaker 1: it's in a lot of ways, the treatment of intertext
Speaker 1: people has gotten has gotten worse in the past like
Speaker 1: a few years. I feel like as the bureaucracy grows,
Speaker 1: the amount of violence that is necessary to maintain it
Speaker 1: also grows, and the bigger any any small thing threatens
Speaker 1: the validity of the entire bureaucracy. So they have to
Speaker 1: come down hard on anything that that is that is
Speaker 1: like deviant from that because they need to maintain the
Speaker 1: validity of the system that they have built. I think
Speaker 1: that's definitely an aspect. And the other thing that's really
Speaker 1: really bad is that, you know, we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about bore this more a bit later, but like the
Speaker 1: actual capacity of the bureaucracy to enforce this stuff has
Speaker 1: increased so dramatically even in the last fifty years. It
Speaker 1: is like like the the u S is a if
Speaker 1: to someone to someone living in eight nine, right, the
Speaker 1: modern US is an incomprehensibly bureaucratic society. It is like
Speaker 1: like it may even like the even like the like
Speaker 1: you know, like like some people like yeah, like even
Speaker 1: like the most sort of like totalitarian style and is
Speaker 1: bureaucrat like looks at the u s and it's like,
Speaker 1: what the funk guys, you guys are taking taking bureaucracy
Speaker 1: too far? Like the surveillance capacities definitely would like you
Speaker 1: would have loved that well, to to be to be fair,
Speaker 1: to be fair, the East Germans did really well with
Speaker 1: what they had, but I think it's really so. I
Speaker 1: think also just in terms of how surveillance impacts the
Speaker 1: way you're able to do gender when you're well and
Speaker 1: when you're getting targeted advertisements for stuff based on your
Speaker 1: Internet searches, they're like that that that's one side of it,
Speaker 1: and there's other sides of it in terms of like,
Speaker 1: you know, people people seeking to make like different gender
Speaker 1: presentations illegal, how the how how that type of surveillance
Speaker 1: will eventually lead into pretty pretty druycon Ian well and
Speaker 1: and I think I think in a lot of ways,
Speaker 1: like the violence that has done to intersects kids is
Speaker 1: sort of it's is one of the sort of origin
Speaker 1: points of this. Right Um. I I do actually want
Speaker 1: I want to sort of get into what what this
Speaker 1: is a little bit um since the nice in sixties
Speaker 1: and again that what I'm saying this like this stuff
Speaker 1: is kind of recent, right um, doctors have started commonly
Speaker 1: performing non consensual surgery and intersex kids to force them
Speaker 1: to conform to a gender. Um, here's so much two
Speaker 1: thousand and thirteen report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur
Speaker 1: on Torture that's sited by Human Rights Watch. Children who
Speaker 1: are born with atypical sex characteristics are often subject to
Speaker 1: irreversible sex assignments, involuntary sterilization, involuntary genital normalization, surgery performed
Speaker 1: without their informed consent or that of the parents in
Speaker 1: an attempt quote, in an attempt to fix their sex,
Speaker 1: leaving them with permanent, permanent, irreversible infertility and causing severe
Speaker 1: mental suffering. And this is fucking horrible. It happens, it's
Speaker 1: all the time, and on all of the people who
Speaker 1: write these fucking laws that are like giving giving someone
Speaker 1: gender affirming care is like mutilating them. Specifically carve out
Speaker 1: sections so that doctors can keep sucking doing this intersex kids,
Speaker 1: and it's horrible. It's really interesting how like, um, so
Speaker 1: often the sports field is a terrain where they kind
Speaker 1: of gets hashed out or like this brutality happens for
Speaker 1: the first time, Like the sports governing authorities have been
Speaker 1: fucking brutalizing intersect athletes for fifty years now, and every
Speaker 1: time it's because yeah, they'll and they'll they'll put forth
Speaker 1: an argument and then lose in court most of the
Speaker 1: time because they'll they'll seek to advance like a very
Speaker 1: narrow definition of gender based on chromosomeality or something or
Speaker 1: testosterone levels or something, and then demonstrably this binary doesn't exist, right,
Speaker 1: and then they'll lose, and they'll respond to losing by
Speaker 1: fucking destroying that person. Yeah, it's there are plenty of
Speaker 1: cases people can confined in history of that happening, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it's sucked out. And I think the more I've been
Speaker 1: thinking about this, the more I think that the sort
Speaker 1: of like that a lot of what turfism is is
Speaker 1: this kind of like it's it's attempting to take the
Speaker 1: bureaucratic categories as literal truth but that doesn't work. It
Speaker 1: doesn't It doesn't actually work on a sort of on
Speaker 1: a scientific level or on a sort of more philosophical level,
Speaker 1: because again, what what what what that sort of bureaucratic
Speaker 1: assignment is is there is a radical simplification of reality
Speaker 1: that destroys it destroys reality itself in order to create
Speaker 1: a sort of like an m or and on a page.
Speaker 1: And when you when you try to go back into
Speaker 1: the real world that it doesn't work. It only works
Speaker 1: when you can enforce it with violence. Test do be
Speaker 1: loving to enforce gender with violence? Yeah? And you know,
Speaker 1: I mean this is this entire thing is sort of
Speaker 1: this this is the basis of the sort of of
Speaker 1: the of the American gender bureaucracy. Right. It's inherently violent.
Speaker 1: It's it's not just sort of a procedure for recording
Speaker 1: what your gender is. It is it always sort of
Speaker 1: has been, and is increasingly more so now becoming a
Speaker 1: system that imposes it imposes a gender on you. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, and there's also a lot of ways that
Speaker 1: this bureacracy you gets imposed on you that are you know,
Speaker 1: less extreme. You know, if if if we go back
Speaker 1: to the question of like, who are us signed a
Speaker 1: gender for? Right? You're signed a gender for the state,
Speaker 1: And you know, almost everything in your life depends on
Speaker 1: these bureaucratic documents, because that's how the state understands you
Speaker 1: as a person by by these bureacract documents, like specifically
Speaker 1: birth certificates, like driver's licenses, social Security cards, and sports
Speaker 1: ination papers. Yeah, I mean, like here here, here's the
Speaker 1: American Bar Association talking about birth certificates. They are so
Speaker 1: common that we might even overlook their significance. In the
Speaker 1: United States, birth certificates serve as a proof of an
Speaker 1: individual's age, citizenship status, and identity. They are necessary to
Speaker 1: obtain social security, apply for a passport, in roll in schools,
Speaker 1: get a driver's license, gain employment, or apply for other benefits.
Speaker 1: Humanitarian Desmond too to describe the birth certificate as quote
Speaker 1: a small paper, but it actually establishes who you are
Speaker 1: and gives access to the rights and privileges and the
Speaker 1: obligations of citizenship, you know, And I think that doesmen
Speaker 1: too two as being enormously optimistic about sort of what
Speaker 1: it means to be seen by the state here, because
Speaker 1: the other thing that it does is it exposes you
Speaker 1: to the state's violence in a way where you know
Speaker 1: it now the state like this is this is the
Speaker 1: mechanism with you which it now knows who you are,
Speaker 1: so it is not having one like yeah, it's when
Speaker 1: the soft sids try to not have birthtificates for their children,
Speaker 1: gets real violent and this and this is the thing.
Speaker 1: And one of one of the things hear about this
Speaker 1: is that like, you know, okay, you used to be
Speaker 1: able to, like get away with not having birth certificates, right,
Speaker 1: like a lot of a lot of Americans used not
Speaker 1: to used to like not. But one of one of
Speaker 1: the things that happens over the course of World War
Speaker 1: two is there's this enormous expansion in the state's bureaucratic capacity.
Speaker 1: And there's an expansion the state's bureacratic capacity because it
Speaker 1: has to you know, it has to go to war.
Speaker 1: But simultaneously this and this is something that didn't have
Speaker 1: to happen but did, is that you get the army
Speaker 1: and you get employers starting to ask people's birthtificates. But
Speaker 1: if people don't have them, because like I don't know,
Speaker 1: I was, why why the fund do I need a
Speaker 1: record of me being born? Right? Like this is this
Speaker 1: this is only this is an every thing you need.
Speaker 1: It's only a thing that's state needs. Yeah, it's interesting
Speaker 1: to look at, Like I was thinking about how this
Speaker 1: is also where the kind of front line of colonialism happens,
Speaker 1: like the enforcement of a binary gender on indigenous people.
Speaker 1: Like you can look at specific individuals um osh tissues.
Speaker 1: One of them, they were a crow person in the
Speaker 1: cronation who like for for the United States as a
Speaker 1: scout what's what's called bad ay and then was like
Speaker 1: in later life kind of forced to conform to a
Speaker 1: binary gender with which they didn't identify and they hadn't
Speaker 1: lived that way and because they had to, having being
Speaker 1: assigned identity papers to live on a reservation, you have
Speaker 1: to take one of the fucking boxes. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: and the thing about those sucking boxes, right is you know,
Speaker 1: even like to this day, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: states where you can't change your gender, like on on
Speaker 1: you can't change what doesn't the card. You just can't.
Speaker 1: And you know, if they've assigned you a gender that's
Speaker 1: not your gender, then well tough luck. They have they
Speaker 1: have an up, they have a monopoly and a legitimate
Speaker 1: use of force. And you don't you know there's other
Speaker 1: stage where you need a fucking court order saying that
Speaker 1: you've had surgery in order to get the fucking you know,
Speaker 1: in order to change your bureaucratic person. And again the
Speaker 1: reason for this is and I kind of emphasize this enough,
Speaker 1: fuck you. That is that. That is that, that is
Speaker 1: the reason for this. Um, yeah, I want to I
Speaker 1: want to go back also to you know, look to
Speaker 1: to look a bit more about sort of bureaucratic effects. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read from a n triple epiece about transguy
Speaker 1: in the UK and the fifties. From the start, the
Speaker 1: sensensialized press coverage or ferguson this transition focused on some
Speaker 1: surprisingly quote tition elements. Quote change of sex puts them
Speaker 1: in a different employment category with a raisin salary, reported
Speaker 1: one newspaper, underscoring the fact that being reclassified as male
Speaker 1: in the eyes of his employer the British government tied
Speaker 1: into a complex network of gendered economic and labor discrimination.
Speaker 1: In fact, not only did his pay change, but his
Speaker 1: whole job category changed, even though he was doing exactly
Speaker 1: the same work under the same conditions. This was because
Speaker 1: women workers were simply were not simply paid less, but
Speaker 1: also kept in feminized job grades in the Civil Service,
Speaker 1: despite the government's claims that service was a meritocracy. A question,
Speaker 1: a question raised in Parliament by an MP who had
Speaker 1: heard about Ferguson, demanded to know what form and number
Speaker 1: of proofs other than a mirror announcement by the subject
Speaker 1: they miss endered them a couple of times. All right,
Speaker 1: it is required before a female quote like like civil Survey,
Speaker 1: is permitted to obtain a higher salary in a different
Speaker 1: employment category owing to a change in sex. By gaining
Speaker 1: a quote official change, Jonathan Ferguson suddenly transformed himself, suddenly
Speaker 1: suddenly transformed into chief Experimental Officer with a male breadwinner
Speaker 1: salary large enough to support a family, rather than a
Speaker 1: woman's lower wage that was expected to be supplements mental
Speaker 1: to a family's earnings. For obvious reasons, noted the Treasury,
Speaker 1: we should not have to say anything which would have
Speaker 1: led to a request for the mail pay rate to
Speaker 1: be applied from his data's entry to the Civil Service.
Speaker 1: In other words, the Treasury wanted to ensure for that
Speaker 1: Ferguson did not try to claim back wages in Turf
Speaker 1: Island always been very normal, um, and there's I would
Speaker 1: read a little bit more of this um. Conversely, a
Speaker 1: different civil servant, this time a trans woman who was
Speaker 1: working in the Admiral p Department and transitioning around the
Speaker 1: same time, was advised it was in her quote interest
Speaker 1: to delay official recognition of the change until at least
Speaker 1: January nineteen sixty assuming full equal pay in the civil
Speaker 1: services introduced by nineteen sixty one, Her employers wrote that
Speaker 1: it was in her quote own interest in their opinion,
Speaker 1: to continue wearing men's clothing for the time being in
Speaker 1: order to avoid her significant reduction in pay. That's it's
Speaker 1: funny because like I it's not funny. It's sucked up
Speaker 1: and it's not stupid, isn't it. But uh, like I
Speaker 1: knew trans people in Britain who would have grown up
Speaker 1: around this time who like socially transitioned after retirement. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or at least like openly to you know, we went
Speaker 1: like BFF or anything. But it's absolutely fucking insane that
Speaker 1: like that this argument was deployed. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: you can you can see what's sort of going on here,
Speaker 1: which is that like, you know, it's more it's more
Speaker 1: explicitly obvious and here that it is in a lot
Speaker 1: of other cases. But your status in the gender bureaucracy
Speaker 1: is a key element of how you're able to extract
Speaker 1: resources from the state. And you know, sometimes that's literally
Speaker 1: just an explicit pay gap, like it was based on
Speaker 1: institutional sexism. But you know, I think I think the
Speaker 1: second case in a lot of ways more revealing. Right,
Speaker 1: the state and its gender bureaucracy is very explicitly saying
Speaker 1: conform to what the jet the bureaucracy says your gender
Speaker 1: is and you it'll you'll get paid more, and if
Speaker 1: you don't, you'll get paid less. And if you look
Speaker 1: at this more abstractly, right, in order to interface with
Speaker 1: the state in order struct well for benefits, in order
Speaker 1: to pay your fucking taxes, in order to drive, in
Speaker 1: order to buy alcohol, apparently now in order to buy
Speaker 1: the stupid cleaning bottles you of of compressed air but
Speaker 1: you have to use to to clean out your computer keyboards. Uh,
Speaker 1: in order to buy alcohol, in order to get on
Speaker 1: an airplane, you have to conform to the state's bureaucratic
Speaker 1: view of you. And if you don't, you can't do it.
Speaker 1: And and you know this, this brings up the question
Speaker 1: what right does the state have to assign my gender?
Speaker 1: And you know, the state will spit out a variety
Speaker 1: of sort of like pseudo medical and pseudo political explanations,
Speaker 1: but the answer is that the state has no right
Speaker 1: to tell you what your gender is except force. And
Speaker 1: you know, the the the extent to which the state
Speaker 1: has actually been able to sort of do this kind
Speaker 1: of stuff has changed over time. But we we've talked
Speaker 1: about this a bit. But what like, you know, over
Speaker 1: the course of sort of over the course of sort
Speaker 1: of of the twentieth century, and you know, we can
Speaker 1: also look at things like, uh, we can look at
Speaker 1: the War on Terror, we can look at the liberalism
Speaker 1: and David Graber's Iron Law of liberalism, which the Iron
Speaker 1: law of liberalism states that any market reform, any government
Speaker 1: initiative intended to reduce red tape and promote market forces,
Speaker 1: will have the ultimate effect of increasing a total number
Speaker 1: of regulations, the total amount of paperwork, and the total
Speaker 1: number of bureaucrats, the government employees, which I always love.
Speaker 1: But you know, like we we we've we've seen the
Speaker 1: sort of consequences of this playing out over the course
Speaker 1: of of you know, the last about a century. Right,
Speaker 1: if you go back to the age nineties, it was
Speaker 1: possible for basically private citizens to have just full on
Speaker 1: wars with each other in parts of the US, and
Speaker 1: that the government would just be like, sure, okay, whatever,
Speaker 1: Like the people mining bird ship off of the coast
Speaker 1: of California are shooting each other with cannons again, like whatever, Right,
Speaker 1: Like it's it's not really until the twentieth century. And
Speaker 1: really even in like the last fifty seventy years has
Speaker 1: been a last expansion of this that like the state
Speaker 1: actually has full territorial control over everywhere that it claims
Speaker 1: to have control of. Right, we were like we we
Speaker 1: are just now getting to a place where the police
Speaker 1: can actually you know, like have like militarily hold the
Speaker 1: entire country at one time. And even then they can
Speaker 1: only do it as long as people sort of cooperate
Speaker 1: with them. Um, but you know this, this is really
Speaker 1: bad if you're a person who doesn't who who who
Speaker 1: the bureaucracy has deemed to be something else or and
Speaker 1: this is another you know, another sort of angle on this, right, Like,
Speaker 1: if you're someone who does not have documentation, the state
Speaker 1: very very quickly will just attempt to destroy you because
Speaker 1: you know, oh hey, you don't you don't know the
Speaker 1: right papers. This means the government can fucking arrest you
Speaker 1: and kick you out of the country. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: know this is fucking horrible. Um, there's a lot of stuff, Like,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of other angles you can look at
Speaker 1: this from, right. I mean, like at some point we
Speaker 1: probably will do an episode about like the process of
Speaker 1: getting medical care and all of of people who you
Speaker 1: have to convince that you are your gender. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's another episode in tirely what I want to
Speaker 1: get at here is that state bureacratic power is being
Speaker 1: used by by just increasingly politicized gender bureaucrats not only
Speaker 1: to force people to comply with their sort of state
Speaker 1: mandated gender when they deal with the state, but also
Speaker 1: to force them to inhabit that gender in their private lives,
Speaker 1: which is constitutes nothing less than a form of full
Speaker 1: scale genders hotel terrianism. Um. We talked about that fucking
Speaker 1: Utah bill, which you know again prohibits miners from getting
Speaker 1: gender affirming surgery people blockers are hormone treatment. That that
Speaker 1: is a bill that forces people to live in their
Speaker 1: state mandated gender In Florida, gender bureaucrats are allowed to
Speaker 1: physically inspect athletes they suspect of being trans, which is
Speaker 1: to say, not conforming to fucking state bureaucratic gender controls.
Speaker 1: It's children, right, like, yeah, children, Like they are allowed
Speaker 1: to molest your child because they think that because there
Speaker 1: they think they're trans. The other aspect of this is,
Speaker 1: obviously there is something we've talked about before that's something
Speaker 1: that you're starting to see with these bills is they're
Speaker 1: trying to make the bills UH age number go as
Speaker 1: high as possible. Yes, there's bills for people, there's bills
Speaker 1: proposing twenty five not so, it's trying to trying to
Speaker 1: police and control the bodily autonomy of of complete adults,
Speaker 1: which obviously is not not a new thing for the GOP,
Speaker 1: specifically especially in the wake of the Roe v. Wade
Speaker 1: overturning um. But another aspect of like this, this this
Speaker 1: goes beyond just people who are younger than the age
Speaker 1: of nineteen. This this this they're going to try to
Speaker 1: keep raising this as much as as much as possible.
Speaker 1: And this is where the types of surveillance that I
Speaker 1: was talking about before it's gonna become a problem because
Speaker 1: if you're if you're googling how to do d I
Speaker 1: y h R T and get stuff shipped in from Brazil. Uh,
Speaker 1: don't think that the surveillance stuff is not gonna not
Speaker 1: gonna impact your ability to do that. They had also
Speaker 1: polices like the gender presentation of SIS people, specifically CIS woman.
Speaker 1: I think like the people who are getting physically inspected
Speaker 1: because of these laws are just girls who are good
Speaker 1: at fucking sport. Like there's CIS girls that just they
Speaker 1: might be like like taller or stronger or and like
Speaker 1: it's some anyone has the power to just be like,
Speaker 1: oh you're not you're not a girly enough girl. Uh
Speaker 1: that's so fucking now you get to go to the
Speaker 1: pervert room and get expected. You know, like in Texas.
Speaker 1: Right the law right now is that if the state,
Speaker 1: if the state thinks you're fucking child is not sufficiently
Speaker 1: close to the gender, they can fucking take your child
Speaker 1: from you and force them to be whatever fucking gender
Speaker 1: the state wants them to be. Right, and you know,
Speaker 1: any other period in history, if you walk into a
Speaker 1: room and tell a bunch of people the state is
Speaker 1: going to decide your fucking gender. Everyone would lose their
Speaker 1: goddamn minds. This would be like this, This is a
Speaker 1: this is a like unfathomable like even in sort of
Speaker 1: like the depth of the sort of totalitarian like nightmarr
Speaker 1: or states, this is like an unfathomable level of sort
Speaker 1: of state bureaucratic like in position onto people's lives. And yeah,
Speaker 1: you know it's the fucking us right, we have, we
Speaker 1: have We are the most bureacratic society humanity has ever produced.
Speaker 1: Nobody thinks that's the most bureacratic society has ever produced.
Speaker 1: And you know we are right now every day seeing
Speaker 1: the points at which bureaucracy meets violence. The last thing
Speaker 1: I have to say is that you know, like this, this,
Speaker 1: this is the future of gender. The future of gender
Speaker 1: is government bureaucrats, whether they're cops, politicians, doctor's shop, protective service,
Speaker 1: as a school board, administrators forcing you to be a
Speaker 1: gendor that they're not. But fundamentally, they have no fucking
Speaker 1: right to do this, right. What they have is power,
Speaker 1: and their graspmant power is still right now tenuous. So
Speaker 1: you know it is possible to stop them from going
Speaker 1: any further than this. It is possible to beat back
Speaker 1: the power of the state, and it is possible you
Speaker 1: have a world that's not this. And we know it's
Speaker 1: possible to have world is off this because it wasn't
Speaker 1: like this like fifty years ago. So yeah, fuck him,
Speaker 1: and that's that's. That's that that that's that's that's gender bureaucrats.
Speaker 1: People should read David Gray. But learning about intersectionality for
Speaker 1: a fucking second. Another another another great resource to learn
Speaker 1: about how you can like mix up gender stuff. There's
Speaker 1: this new video game out right now which has a
Speaker 1: pretty intense character creation selection you can It's called let
Speaker 1: me See, It's called Hogwarts Legacy. Is that no I
Speaker 1: thought you were going with side called but it has
Speaker 1: it has It has a lot of different customizations that
Speaker 1: you can do for your gender presentation and and and
Speaker 1: your body parts. I've been refusing could do this on Twitter,
Speaker 1: but I need, I need, I need to take fucking
Speaker 1: one minute talk about the dumbest argument anyone has ever made,
Speaker 1: which is that I have to buy this game in
Speaker 1: order support developers, which think about this five seconds, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: if you have to buy this game to support the developers,
Speaker 1: don't you have to buy every other game to support
Speaker 1: their developers? In fact, are are you not morally obligated
Speaker 1: to buy every single product on Earth? Because if you
Speaker 1: don't buy every single product that's ever been made, you
Speaker 1: those those will not be deployed. It's bullshit here. This
Speaker 1: is such a weird like capitalism of a poison development
Speaker 1: thinking you're obligated to consume lots of people on I
Speaker 1: have been holding my tongue on Twitter about this from
Speaker 1: monks now watching people watching people. Maybe the argument I
Speaker 1: have to buy something to sport developers, which again buy
Speaker 1: a different game, support those developers, buy fucking go on strike.
Speaker 1: Fucking I don't know if you want, if you want
Speaker 1: to want to support the develophy give you money to
Speaker 1: someone who is in a fucking video game developer. Well
Speaker 1: I'm glad. I'm glad. Glad we could have that that
Speaker 1: special bonding movement over the very inclusive gender settings inside
Speaker 1: this new hit video game. So that's that's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: I feel get an ad from them soon, but I hope, so,
Speaker 1: I hope. So the worst Twitter day of my life
Speaker 1: is the day we get the fucking ad gold presented
Speaker 1: by Hogwarts. It could happen Here as a production of
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
Speaker 1: for It could happen here, updated monthly at cool zone
Speaker 1: Media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.