Speaker 1: All Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to ike it Happen here.
Speaker 3: I'm your host, Mia Wong. I am happy to be
Speaker 3: here once again with Garrison Davis and doctor Julius Serrano,
Speaker 3: the author of, among many other works, a new edition
Speaker 3: of Whipping Girl coming out in March, so.
Speaker 2: Kind of pivoting a bit.
Speaker 3: One of the really bleak aspects of being trans in
Speaker 3: a hostile world is that we've we've effectively been forced
Speaker 3: to become experts in the architects of her own extermination.
Speaker 3: And I think that's a lot of what kind of
Speaker 3: the new afterward to the upcoming twenty twenty four to
Speaker 3: thirty edition of Whipping Girl is about. So, I guess
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask, what do you see as the
Speaker 3: biggest shifts in sort of the struggle for transliberation between
Speaker 3: the end of the sort of Mitchfest like fighting over
Speaker 3: Mitchfest era that you wrote like Dream, which you sort
Speaker 3: of wrote the second uh, the forward, the preface of
Speaker 3: the second edition, and then the stuff that's happening now
Speaker 3: is the sort of three edition is coming out.
Speaker 4: Sure, I think a huge aspect of transactivism from my
Speaker 4: perspective of like first coming to trans communities in the nineties,
Speaker 4: a lot of nineties and Zero's era transactivism was overcoming
Speaker 4: basically people's ignorance, their lack of awareness about trans people
Speaker 4: and so, and this is one of the things that
Speaker 4: you know, Whipping Girl, for example, there are a lot
Speaker 4: of bad ideas about trans people that had been circling,
Speaker 4: lating for a long time, especially with the culmination of
Speaker 4: Janis Raymond's book The Transsexual Empire the late nineteen seventies
Speaker 4: nineteen seventy nine, I think, and that influenced a lot
Speaker 4: of people, what say, places like Mishfest that had trans
Speaker 4: women exclusion policies. And I felt like during the nineties
Speaker 4: through the Zeros, we were constantly making gains that was
Speaker 4: largely due to people learning more about it and then
Speaker 4: recognizing basically shared goals, shared things in common. I think
Speaker 4: that trans people are marginalized because of you know, mainstream
Speaker 4: assumptions about sex, gender sexuality, and those assumptions also hurt
Speaker 4: LGBTQIA plus people more broadly, they hurt you know, in
Speaker 4: a sexist world, they hurt you know, CIS women, you know,
Speaker 4: all women, all people who move through the world perceived
Speaker 4: as female feminine. So we all have this kind of
Speaker 4: shared thing that we're working towards, and I feel like
Speaker 4: that was where a lot of the progress was happening.
Speaker 4: And I think what really changed in the mid two
Speaker 4: thousand tens, especially two year twenty fifteen, which is literally
Speaker 4: the year after the so called tipping point Time magazine
Speaker 4: declaring the transgender dipping point, was when it was the
Speaker 4: beginning of what I would describe as organized anti transactivism,
Speaker 4: where it wasn't just that people didn't like us or
Speaker 4: they detested us, but it was where there was actual
Speaker 4: coordination between different groups. In the afterward, I describe there's
Speaker 4: the social conservatives and far right who have always been
Speaker 4: anti LGBTQ plus who took an even more intense focus
Speaker 4: on trans people. There were groups that at the time
Speaker 4: that I wrote Whipping Girl, the term turf wasn't around,
Speaker 4: of the term gender critical wasn't around. Now we would
Speaker 4: call them gender critical or trans exclusionary feminists. They've become
Speaker 4: kind of a part of that, and both those groups
Speaker 4: working together in a lot of ways on policies. I
Speaker 4: think one of the things that the average person might
Speaker 4: not know if you're not really in kind of highly
Speaker 4: aware of trans communities and issues is that probably behind
Speaker 4: the scenes, the anti transparent movement as probably aid more
Speaker 4: of an impact than any other group, and they are
Speaker 4: very much like the anti vax parent movement, where it's
Speaker 4: a lot of people who are from their standpoint, they're
Speaker 4: just concerned about their children, they want what's best for
Speaker 4: their children, but they actively seek out and often get
Speaker 4: involved in you know, websites, social media forums and sometimes
Speaker 4: actual activist campaigns that buy into a lot of ideas
Speaker 4: that of children being indoctrinated into gender ideology or being
Speaker 4: infected by social contagion, and there's all this pseudoscience that
Speaker 4: grows out of that. So I would say that that
Speaker 4: was the main difference, that there's this organized campaign, and
Speaker 4: this campaign has just grown and grown and grown to
Speaker 4: the point now where it's just this astoundingly large moral
Speaker 4: panic that the types of things that like thirty percent
Speaker 4: of people in our country believe about trans people is abhorrent.
Speaker 4: But that's kind of how it played out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, there's there's been a lot of a
Speaker 3: lot of very common, weird pseudoscience myths that sort of
Speaker 3: came out of that. I wanted to talk a little
Speaker 3: bit about quote unquote rapid onset gender dysphoria, because that's
Speaker 3: been all.
Speaker 2: Over the place.
Speaker 4: Me.
Speaker 3: There was like a New York Times article talking about
Speaker 3: it like two weeks ago, and it's, I don't know,
Speaker 3: really been a fiasco, especially given how unbelievably tenuous the
Speaker 3: stuff they sort of faked or not as say fake,
Speaker 3: like unbelievably tenuous to like quote unquote study they did
Speaker 3: that got retracted.
Speaker 4: Was Yeah, and this is something that I actually saw
Speaker 4: developing firsthand and then did research on in twenty nineteen.
Speaker 4: So let me frame this. I'll tell like my personal
Speaker 4: a short version of my oral history of this. So
Speaker 4: it was around twenty seventeen that I first heard the
Speaker 4: idea of children, you know, becoming trans because of social contagion.
Speaker 4: And it just seemed to come out of the blue.
Speaker 4: And it's like, what, you know, it's gender identity is
Speaker 4: not contagious. If it was, like, you know, trans people
Speaker 4: would have infected way more than like the less than
Speaker 4: one percent of us that actually exists.
Speaker 5: Not a very effective contagious go yees rising like no, like.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, exactly. It's like, once you start looking at it,
Speaker 4: it seems kind of ridiculous. A lot of it was
Speaker 4: because well, you know, you know, my kid was hanging
Speaker 4: around a trans personer started watching trans videos on YouTube,
Speaker 4: and now they're trans. It's like, yeah, well, maybe they
Speaker 4: were hanging out with that trans friend and watching the
Speaker 4: YouTube videos because they are trans and they just hadn't
Speaker 4: come out. Yeah, or they're just they're still figuring it
Speaker 4: out anyway. So in twenty eighteen is when the Lisa
Speaker 4: Littmann paper on rapid on set gender dysphoria came out,
Speaker 4: and I wrote this essay at the time talking about
Speaker 4: all the things wrong with it, and then in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: I'm like, where did these ideas come from? And I
Speaker 4: should say that rapid onset gender dysphoria is basically transgender
Speaker 4: social contagion wrapped up in a medical sounding diagnosis. Okay,
Speaker 4: so if you read the initial descriptions of transgender social
Speaker 4: contagion and the description of rapid onset gender dysphoria, they're
Speaker 4: basically the same. It's that kids are infecting one another.
Speaker 4: But the idea of rap it on set gender dysphoria
Speaker 4: was meant to describe this quick infection of transness that
Speaker 4: supposedly was happening. And so in twenty nineteen, I basically
Speaker 4: did a deep dive. I'm not an investigative reporter, but
Speaker 4: that's kind of what I did into like where the
Speaker 4: origin of this was. And basically all of this kind
Speaker 4: of came down to the website Fourth Wave Now, which
Speaker 4: often worked in coordination with two other anti transparent websites.
Speaker 4: So Fourth Wave Now is an anti transparent website, arguably
Speaker 4: the very first one that came out, and a parent
Speaker 4: posted the idea that her child was like being infected
Speaker 4: by transgender social contagion, and it's almost definitely clear. Now
Speaker 4: I will leave a little caveat even though I think
Speaker 4: the evidence is pretty strong that that was Lisa Marchiano,
Speaker 4: who's anti trans therapist who's very very involved in anti
Speaker 4: transactivism right now, Okay, so and like all everything points
Speaker 4: to that being her, and she also seems to have
Speaker 4: in some capacity worked with Lisa Littman. So basically the
Speaker 4: first paper about rapatan sat gender distory that came out
Speaker 4: was not Lisa Littman's, it was actually Lisa Marchiano's, which
Speaker 4: came out in twenty seventeen. So basically kind of grew
Speaker 4: from these anti HRIS transparent websites. It really quickly within
Speaker 4: six months. Not only was Lisa Littman doing her survey,
Speaker 4: Lisa Littman, being someone who has no experience in trans
Speaker 4: health ever before then just decides to go in and
Speaker 4: only survey parents from an from three anti transparent websites,
Speaker 4: and it gets taken very seriously just because the media
Speaker 4: fan the flames. A lot of these groups were very
Speaker 4: excited to have something that seemed to be a case
Speaker 4: study on their side. The paper was heavily critiqued when
Speaker 4: it came out. There are now and I described this
Speaker 4: in an all nine SI have. It's free if you
Speaker 4: google my name, and all the evidence against social contagion
Speaker 4: it's in there. There are now ten papers that have
Speaker 4: tested the idea of rap it on set gender dysphoria
Speaker 4: and or social contagion and found evidence that contradicts the hypothesis.
Speaker 4: So it's still being talked about that Pamela Paul, it
Speaker 4: was an alped that looked like an article in the
Speaker 4: New York Times. It's not the first time Pamela Paul
Speaker 4: and or the New York Times has done this. They
Speaker 4: seem to have a particular acts to grind against trans
Speaker 4: people and putting out specious articles suggesting that gender firming care,
Speaker 4: especially for trans use, is bad, when actually all the
Speaker 4: evidence points to the opposite. So so yeah, that's a
Speaker 4: brief discussion of rapid on set genders, for which I
Speaker 4: think is the most popular of these kind of pseudoscientific ideas.
Speaker 4: But there are definitely others that are like about like
Speaker 4: four or five others that I could get into, and
Speaker 4: I do get into in the Afterword and in some
Speaker 4: of my other writings, but uh yeah.
Speaker 5: And.
Speaker 4: You know, I don't use the word pseudo scientific lightly. Basically,
Speaker 4: there's like science, which is where different research groups try
Speaker 4: to answer a particular question and if they all get
Speaker 4: similar answers, then that becomes okay, well that seems to
Speaker 4: be established. Now let's work from there and ask more
Speaker 4: questions and do more studies. Junk science is when you
Speaker 4: do kind of a crappy study that doesn't really interrogate
Speaker 4: all the possibilities, that either doesn't use controls or you know,
Speaker 4: only looks at you know, a bias sampling size or
Speaker 4: a bias sample or small sample sizes and comes to
Speaker 4: a conclusion that it wants to come to. That's junk science.
Speaker 4: And then pseudoscience is when multiple independent groups all find
Speaker 4: something different to what you're saying, but you keep touting
Speaker 4: the thing you're saying is science. And that's definitely where
Speaker 4: our GD is right now. Same thing with one of
Speaker 4: these ideas that I talked about way back early and
Speaker 4: Whipping Girl, and I've written other, you know, both academic
Speaker 4: papers and online essays about this concept of autoginophilia, which
Speaker 4: is this really old theory that just like it's kind
Speaker 4: of like this zombie. It doesn't matter how many groups
Speaker 4: find evidence to the contrary. It jibes with what basically
Speaker 4: certain you know, gender disaffirming practitioners, practitioners and researchers and
Speaker 4: anti transactivists. It jobs with what they want to say,
Speaker 4: so it just kind of continues to be out there.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, I.
Speaker 3: Mean something that Garrison we were talking about before, this
Speaker 3: is the extent to which the extent to which the
Speaker 3: rapid onset gender is for you study is almost exactly
Speaker 3: the same study as the first anti VAC study. Like
Speaker 3: it has almost exactly the same It's the same thing
Speaker 3: where you find a group of people who think their
Speaker 3: kid has autism because they got vaccinated, or you find
Speaker 3: a group of people who think their kids are trans
Speaker 3: because social contation or something, and then you ask them
Speaker 3: about it, and then you report the results of the study,
Speaker 3: and it's like, well, now and you report the results
Speaker 3: of you asking the people the thing that they believe,
Speaker 3: and now it's a study, and it's I don't know,
Speaker 3: it drives me insane, they extent to which he is
Speaker 3: literally exactly the same thing.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that was something. So I didn't know
Speaker 4: this until h bomber Guy, who's a YouTuber who does
Speaker 4: really good investigations and video essays, and I saw his
Speaker 4: autism and so this is something that you know. I remember,
Speaker 4: I'm old enough to remember the Wakefield paper being in
Speaker 4: the news and then you've heard lots of people debunking it,
Speaker 4: and then it's officially retracted and basically all you know,
Speaker 4: the scientific field has settled that it's like vaccines do
Speaker 4: not cause autism. A lot of that is just like
Speaker 4: a coincidence of the time that you first start noticing
Speaker 4: that children maybe autistic is like right around the time
Speaker 4: after they've had vaccinations. But but yeah, it wasn't until
Speaker 4: the h bomber Guy video that he talks about that
Speaker 4: the Wakefield study is a study of parents, not the children.
Speaker 4: A study of the parents, and the parents already had
Speaker 4: were already suspicious of the vaccines, and so they said, oh, well,
Speaker 4: it happened right after they had these vaccines, just like
Speaker 4: rap it dont set genders for it happens. Oh, it
Speaker 4: happened right after. You know, one of my child's peer,
Speaker 4: their cheer peers came out as trans. It's like, yeah,
Speaker 4: maybe they're connected. Maybe that's why they're good friends. You know,
Speaker 4: most of my friends, you know, like when I go
Speaker 4: out and stuff like that. You know, a huge chunk
Speaker 4: of my friends, way higher than the average person, are
Speaker 4: trans people. And it's not because any of us infected
Speaker 4: each other. It's just that you have that thing in common.
Speaker 4: You also, really importantly, when you're part of a stigmatized group,
Speaker 4: being around other people who won't stigmatize you often because
Speaker 4: they're part of that same group, that can be really
Speaker 4: freeing and really supportive.
Speaker 3: So yeah, yeah, Sally, we need to take another AD break,
Speaker 3: but when we come back, there will be more. I
Speaker 3: don't know, I'm really kind of blowing the ad pivots
Speaker 3: on this one. I'm very sorry, and we are back,
Speaker 3: so I guess speaking of moral panics, speaking of social contagions.
Speaker 4: Yes, moral panics are always very socially contagious.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's really truly, really truly. They have described their
Speaker 6: own ideology and they projected it out to everyone else.
Speaker 6: Uh So, one of the things that you talk about,
Speaker 6: both in the Afterward and in sext up is about
Speaker 6: the relationship between stigma and contagion and how it's this powerful,
Speaker 6: incredibly powerful force for moobilizing moral panics. Can you explain
Speaker 6: sort of how that works?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so, and this was something that when I was
Speaker 4: first working on sex Up, it wasn't kind of my idea.
Speaker 4: I didn't think I was going to write about the
Speaker 4: concept of stigma much, but it really ended up being
Speaker 4: very central the more kind of research I did into it.
Speaker 4: And so I think most of us are familiar with
Speaker 4: the idea of stigma in terms of like feeling embarrassment
Speaker 4: or being made to feel lesser than other people because
Speaker 4: of some aspect of your person, right, And there is
Speaker 4: that aspect of it that's often called like felt stigma.
Speaker 4: But then there's the way that other people view stigma, right,
Speaker 4: And so you know, people weren't necessarily stigmatized in that
Speaker 4: way themselves. They might view people who are stigmatized in
Speaker 4: particular ways. And one aspect of stigma that I learned
Speaker 4: a lot of this from psychologists, I think it's Paul Rosen,
Speaker 4: I know the last name is Rosin, and also Carol
Speaker 4: Nemarov and they both worked together and they had other
Speaker 4: colleagues who worked on this. But a lot of this
Speaker 4: comes from this really unconscious idea of contain agent that
Speaker 4: seems to be it's like pan cultural. It's just kind
Speaker 4: of a way that people tend to view the world
Speaker 4: kind of like a lot of people and a lot
Speaker 4: of cultures have essentialist views. Contagion is sort of along
Speaker 4: those lines. It's often described as a type of magical thinking.
Speaker 4: And the idea is if something in your mind has
Speaker 4: this contagion, if you get too close to it or
Speaker 4: you interact with it, it can like permanently corrupt or
Speaker 4: taint you. And so it has this kind of contagious
Speaker 4: like property in people's minds, and so people often view
Speaker 4: groups who are stigmatized, especially groups that are highly stigmatized,
Speaker 4: as essentially contagious, where that stigma that they have could
Speaker 4: rub off on you if you get too close to them.
Speaker 4: And so this happens like when I was really young,
Speaker 4: the idea of like if you were friends with the
Speaker 4: trans person, a lot of times people or even someone
Speaker 4: who is gay back then people be like, oh, so
Speaker 4: what are you? You must be gay too, right, It's
Speaker 4: almost as if that stigma would then like kind of
Speaker 4: migrate to you. And that's a lot of why stigmatized
Speaker 4: groups face a lot of ostracization in society, and so
Speaker 4: so this idea of contagion has been around. I think
Speaker 4: groups who are lesser stigmatized, one of the ways that
Speaker 4: that plays out is they're viewed is less contagious. So
Speaker 4: you know, when I was really young, the idea of
Speaker 4: if you had a trans person in your life, people
Speaker 4: would really question you. Whereas by the time I came out,
Speaker 4: you could have a trans friend and that would be fine.
Speaker 4: It wouldn't necessarily be contagious, unless, of course, you were
Speaker 4: interested in them, and then that stigma would If you
Speaker 4: were like attracted to them, then there's that stigma. And
Speaker 4: I think that stigma plays a lot into kind of
Speaker 4: dynamics of and I write about this and sex stuff
Speaker 4: that the whole idea of like fetishes and chasers and
Speaker 4: all that. That's basically all this stigma that contagent stuff
Speaker 4: playing out in different ways anyway, So I also think that,
Speaker 4: and I write about and sext up, I think people
Speaker 4: view sex and stigma as really closely intertwined, such that
Speaker 4: I think people view the average person views heterosexual sex
Speaker 4: as a stigma contamination act where the male is the
Speaker 4: corrupting force and it's the woman who is corrupted by sex,
Speaker 4: which is why you know virgins are pure. But then
Speaker 4: once a woman has sex, she's like, you know, she's
Speaker 4: become contaminated or tainted, and she has a lot of sex,
Speaker 4: then people view her as like ruined, right, So that
Speaker 4: idea is bell in there, And I think this combination
Speaker 4: of viewing sex and stigma is kind of intertwined leads
Speaker 4: to the sexual predator, the sexual predator stereotype that we're
Speaker 4: seeing play out in really strong ways with trans people
Speaker 4: right now. But actually, if you look throughout history, like
Speaker 4: a lot of marginalized groups like deal in different ways
Speaker 4: with the sexual predator trope.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 4: I think this really clearly plays out with the kind
Speaker 4: of what I call the Groomer explosion that started in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two, where you know, people were accusing trans
Speaker 4: people being groomers before then, but it really exploded in
Speaker 4: twenty twenty two. And if you listen to what people
Speaker 4: are saying, that they're using the word groomer, which sounds
Speaker 4: like a sexual predator thing, like there's a real thing
Speaker 4: of grooming children that sexual abusers do, but they're using
Speaker 4: it against trans people in a way that has nothing
Speaker 4: to do with that. But what they're talking about is corrupting,
Speaker 4: you know, so their children who are presumed to be
Speaker 4: sisgender and who often I think this is why a
Speaker 4: lot of these anti trans discourses continue to paint like
Speaker 4: trans children as being girls, right like, because then it
Speaker 4: kind of plays into these feelings of like, you know,
Speaker 4: transgender people are the adult men corrupting young girls. It
Speaker 4: plays into a lot of people's view like messed up,
Speaker 4: messed up heteronormative views of sex and fears of you know,
Speaker 4: sexual abuse, child abuse being a very real thing, but
Speaker 4: people greatly misinterpret it so that the people who are
Speaker 4: the usual perpetrators, which are usually you know, by and large,
Speaker 4: straight men who are like adults who are close or
Speaker 4: sometimes even family members of the child in question. But
Speaker 4: like when they say grooming, they just mean corrupting or contaminating,
Speaker 4: And I think that both grooming and social contagion. I
Speaker 4: think both of these basically play off of this stigma
Speaker 4: contamination idea. Right, the kids are pure, but then transgenders
Speaker 4: like a type of coodies that if one kid becomes
Speaker 4: trans then they spread it to the other kids. And
Speaker 4: so yeah, so I feel like it plays a really
Speaker 4: big role not only moral panics, which amost all moral
Speaker 4: panics are. There's some kind of corrupting force that is
Speaker 4: often attacking otherwise pure and innocent children. Sometimes it's technology, right,
Speaker 4: and so people will be like, oh, we have to
Speaker 4: ban you know, social media apps, you know, because it's
Speaker 4: hurting the children. Or it could be transgender people who
Speaker 4: are the things we need to ban because they're corrupting
Speaker 4: the children. But I definitely think that both these ideas
Speaker 4: of stigma and contagion play a big role in the
Speaker 4: way in which moral panics, why they resonate with a
Speaker 4: lot of people, even though they don't make any rational
Speaker 4: sense if you just think about them kind of from
Speaker 4: a very realistic, practical point of view.
Speaker 2: And we have to go to ads, but really back
Speaker 2: in a second, and we're back.
Speaker 5: This is something that you mentioned briefly in the afterward.
Speaker 5: And that's something that we've reported on is how a
Speaker 5: lot of this groomer thing that started in twenty twenty
Speaker 5: two and a whole bunch of this kind of modern
Speaker 5: wave of transphobia is mirroring a lot of the anti
Speaker 5: gay stuff from like the eighties that was pushed forward
Speaker 5: by a lot of like evangelicals into just like mainstream
Speaker 5: conservatism and specifically how it functions as this. Yeah, this
Speaker 5: is sort of like moral panic and even social contagion.
Speaker 5: The way homosexuality was treated as this thing and this
Speaker 5: this sort of social contingent aspect is so common now.
Speaker 5: I mean, even even the way we've already alluded to Musk,
Speaker 5: even the way he mentions like the woke mind virus
Speaker 5: ist is exactly this thing, and as it really like
Speaker 5: moral panics and stuff. Right, this was kind of predated
Speaker 5: by the critical race theory debacle, which then got you know,
Speaker 5: turned into the groomer thing, and now exactly and now
Speaker 5: it's even changed again. And these moral panics can have
Speaker 5: like devastating results in terms of pushing forward legislation that
Speaker 5: outlasts the actual moral panic, But the actual things themselves
Speaker 5: are very short lived. They don't seem to have very
Speaker 5: much like staying power as as like cultural moments. They
Speaker 5: move on so quickly, Like no one talks about critical
Speaker 5: race theory anymore. You don't even hear this sort of
Speaker 5: groomer rhetoric as often as you did two years ago,
Speaker 5: and it's being replaced by new versions. And yeah, like
Speaker 5: Mia said, the DEEI thing is that is the current
Speaker 5: current thing that is wrecking American society if you ask
Speaker 5: about maybe one third of population. But yeah, how do
Speaker 5: you feel about like the life cycle of these moral
Speaker 5: panics and how they relate to like the social contagion aspect.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, no, And I agree with what you're also
Speaker 4: all the things you're citing that like, I think these
Speaker 4: are all different variations of kind of the same idea.
Speaker 4: And I do really appreciate the idea of the woke
Speaker 4: mind virus as being kind of like the perfect like
Speaker 4: the exemplar of this, and that you know, people were,
Speaker 4: you know, people were complaining about you know, stuff being
Speaker 4: woke for a while, and you know it is usually
Speaker 4: it's often coded as something that's woke, is like anti racist,
Speaker 4: or you know, is something like it's very much associated
Speaker 4: you know, infused with like when people complain about wocism,
Speaker 4: a lot of times they're like they're racist or or
Speaker 4: there or at the very least they have fears about
Speaker 4: kind of the corruption of pure whiteness being corrupted by
Speaker 4: increasing you know, people of color and and you know,
Speaker 4: like making gains in society. Right, But the woke mind virus,
Speaker 4: because no one could really explain what woke is because
Speaker 4: then it keeps shifting and it refers to trans people
Speaker 4: or or critical race theory and et cetera. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: the woke mind is like perfect because that's how they
Speaker 4: think it all works. Like it's just this thing that
Speaker 4: infects people, especially children. And the way in which there
Speaker 4: is a recent thing just today, I think it was Ackerman,
Speaker 4: the billionaire has been involved in a lot of this
Speaker 4: DII stuff, complaining about his child being infected in college
Speaker 4: with Marxism, and Elon Musk had similar issues with his
Speaker 4: trans daughter, like becoming pro marx or anti capitalists, and
Speaker 4: so they just assume that, like, no, my child was pure,
Speaker 4: but now they're infected. It's like, well, maybe there are
Speaker 4: other ideas out there that are better than your idea.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and maybe that's.
Speaker 4: All it is. But yeah, so I think in all
Speaker 4: of these cases, yes, I think that there's this idea
Speaker 4: of a contagion or corruption, often involving children, and it is. Yeah,
Speaker 4: a lot of the moral panic, a lot of the literature,
Speaker 4: like the social sciences literature, all moral panics. They often
Speaker 4: describe them as fleeting. You know, this one, the anti
Speaker 4: trans one, isn't fleeting enough right now from my perspective.
Speaker 4: But people will tend to kind of move on, like
Speaker 4: the Satanic panic of the eighties, you know, like that
Speaker 4: was a really big deal and then all of a
Speaker 4: sudden it was just gone and no one ever talked
Speaker 4: about it again. I think the difference here is that
Speaker 4: a lot of these moral panics are really tied together
Speaker 4: with what's happening in the country more generally, with anti
Speaker 4: democratic and authoritative, you know, views coming from you know,
Speaker 4: particularly the right wing of the country. You know, like
Speaker 4: one of the two major political parties is really pushing
Speaker 4: a lot of just generally across the board. You know,
Speaker 4: they're against feminism, they're you know, against people of color,
Speaker 4: against LGBTQ plus people, and I think it's all wrapped
Speaker 4: up into the same thing. I think that while individual
Speaker 4: parts of the moral panic may go away. They may
Speaker 4: talk about critical race theory for a bit and then
Speaker 4: shift to trans people being groomers, then shift to DEI
Speaker 4: but I think a lot of this is they're all intertwined.
Speaker 4: And actually, I think that's like the last couple of
Speaker 4: paragraphs of the afterward, I talk about that as a
Speaker 4: potentially good thing, because even though it's been a horring
Speaker 4: time to be a trans person, with all the anti
Speaker 4: trans legislation and all the anti trans news stories, all
Speaker 4: the pushes back on gender firm and care, despite all that,
Speaker 4: I think the good thing is that I think there
Speaker 4: are clear sides here, and I think, well, this wasn't
Speaker 4: true early on in the anti trans backlash in the
Speaker 4: late twenty tens. I think most people realize now that
Speaker 4: all these things are tied together from like kind of
Speaker 4: you know, the right wing perspective in this country is
Speaker 4: just against all these things. You know, they want a white, Christian,
Speaker 4: straight minority of people running everything about this country, and
Speaker 4: so I think the rest of us really need to
Speaker 4: recognize that and work together to defeat that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I think I think that's a pretty
Speaker 3: good place to end on. Let's you have anything else
Speaker 3: that you wanted to make sure you get in.
Speaker 4: No, I mean I feel like we touched, We covered
Speaker 4: a bunch of the book past, present, and hopefully future
Speaker 4: being better than the present right now.
Speaker 3: Hopefully hopefully hopefully.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: So okay, where can people find a the new additional
Speaker 3: Whipping Girl and be you and your work on the
Speaker 3: internet and or other places?
Speaker 4: Sure? Yeah, so the book should be available. So it's
Speaker 4: available for pre order right now, so you can do
Speaker 4: that through like, you know, online places. I often suggest
Speaker 4: people go to the Seal Press, my publisher, because they
Speaker 4: give lots of options there. But you can also go
Speaker 4: to your local independent bookstore and say hey, I'd like
Speaker 4: the pre order this book and they will do that
Speaker 4: for you. So the book will be available everywhere and
Speaker 4: should be in stores starting in March. As for me,
Speaker 4: my website Juliusarana dot com, particularly if you go to
Speaker 4: the writings page there, I have like literally links to
Speaker 4: everything I've written online over the years, so it's kind
Speaker 4: of a clearinghouse of free writings of mine. There are
Speaker 4: also links to my books there, and then if you're
Speaker 4: looking for me on social media, I'm at Julius Serrano
Speaker 4: on most platforms that I'm at.
Speaker 3: I don't know how much stronger I can possibly recommend
Speaker 3: reading Whipping Girl. It had I don't know, it had
Speaker 3: an enormous impact on me when I first read it,
Speaker 3: and yeah, yeah it will, it will. It will do
Speaker 3: good things for you if you read it too.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and it's all still incredibly relevant. Like I was
Speaker 5: breezing through like fifty pages just to refresh my memory
Speaker 5: this morning, and I'm like, oh wow, so many of
Speaker 5: the like intercommunity trans discourses that are constantly happening have
Speaker 5: already been addressed, like twenty years ago, so many of
Speaker 5: like I all the time I spend trying to write
Speaker 5: about like trans misogyny of like, oh I I forgot,
Speaker 5: this is already like all like written down, Like I
Speaker 5: spent so long writing about the Daily Wire movie, and like,
Speaker 5: oh this is hardly all this work has already been done.
Speaker 3: I can just like stop.
Speaker 5: Oh man, Yeah, cannot cannot recommend enough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you all for the kind words. Yeah, thank
Speaker 4: you for having me And it was great and thanks
Speaker 4: for all you do too.
Speaker 3: Oh thank you.
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