Speaker 1: Cool zone media.
Speaker 2: Some kids played football. Homer built rockets. Everyone knows a
Speaker 2: kid like that from high school, right Like, while you
Speaker 2: were stone out of your mind slogging through the newest
Speaker 2: Final Fantasy game and getting fingered at the latest worst
Speaker 2: installment of Indiana Jones. Not speaking from experience, an ambitious
Speaker 2: few were building fucking rockets. Such was the case for
Speaker 2: Homer Hickam in the fall of nineteen fifty seven, when
Speaker 2: he was just fourteen years old. And I know we're
Speaker 2: supposed to be like, oh, a prodigy, but they're just
Speaker 2: making the rest of us look bad, I mean, unbelievable.
Speaker 2: But if there were ever a time for kids to
Speaker 2: be interested in building rockets, this was the time. Nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty seven marked the beginning of the space race between
Speaker 2: the US and Russia, who, if you didn't know, are
Speaker 2: totally cool with each other now. Spot Nick one, the
Speaker 2: world's first artificial satellite, was launched by the USSR on
Speaker 2: October five.
Speaker 3: As if this weren't cool enough, they then launched a.
Speaker 2: Damn dog into space shout out Laika that November. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: in Colewood, West Virginia, Homer Heckem tried his first rocket
Speaker 2: experiment inspired by seeing Sputnik one launched. It was a
Speaker 2: crude cherrybomb powered rocket made with a model airplane and
Speaker 2: the tube of a flashlight, and it's his first time.
Speaker 2: It doesn't work. The rocket explodes and never takes off.
Speaker 2: To improve upon this, he decides to call in the
Speaker 2: boys and get ready for some of the most mint
Speaker 2: century American names you've ever heard. Homer calls in his buddies,
Speaker 2: Quenton Wilson, Roy Lee cook, Sherman Sears, Jimmy O'Dell Carroll,
Speaker 2: and Billy Rose, who all joined the fold to build
Speaker 2: a rocket and get out of coalwood for good upon
Speaker 2: graduating high school. The next rocket the group launches is
Speaker 2: more successful.
Speaker 3: They call it the Auk one and it flies six
Speaker 3: entire feet from there.
Speaker 2: They start calling their operation the Big Creek Missile Agency
Speaker 2: and keep at developing these rockets for the next three years.
Speaker 2: The space race continues in the background of all of this,
Speaker 2: and the BCMA are hopeful that they may get jobs
Speaker 2: at NASA after they get their college degrees. The first
Speaker 2: US satellite, the Explorer, is launched in February nineteen fifty eight,
Speaker 2: followed by the first group of astronauts announced in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty nine. That's the round with John Glenn, member him.
Speaker 4: Loud and clear. He reports back to Mercury Control, reading
Speaker 4: off his instruments, commenting on his reactions, all as coolly
Speaker 4: and calmly as if he was commuting on the eight
Speaker 4: twenty seven. Glenn is able to control the yaw and
Speaker 4: pitch of the vehicle himself.
Speaker 3: My dad was born that year. How fun.
Speaker 2: The BCMA, now more frequently called the Rocket Boys persist.
Speaker 2: They try out mixing different fuels with ingredients like zinc, dust, moonshine,
Speaker 2: and sulfur, and they launch thirty five rockets in total
Speaker 2: while still teenagers. The Boys' final year of high school,
Speaker 2: they win a gold medal at the National Science Fair.
Speaker 2: And at this point, if you're wondering, wait, isn't this
Speaker 2: the plot to a Jake Gillenhall movie.
Speaker 3: Yes, it is.
Speaker 5: To everyone else, it was just a light in the sky.
Speaker 1: Let him have out of space, we have rocket roll.
Speaker 5: But to Homer Hickam, it was the future.
Speaker 2: Sputnik is a milestone in.
Speaker 6: History and just maybe a way out college scholarships.
Speaker 7: Were winning a science fair, I'm rocket.
Speaker 1: You'd better take an interest in your own town.
Speaker 7: Just don't blow yourself up October Sky.
Speaker 2: This is the plot to the movie October Sky, which
Speaker 2: happens to be based on the memoir Rocket Boys by
Speaker 2: Homer Hicckam. Also, Rocket Boys and October Sky are anagrams.
Speaker 2: I just think that's fun.
Speaker 7: So yes.
Speaker 2: From a young age, Homer Hickam's place in history seems
Speaker 2: kind of inevitable. He goes on to graduate from Virginia
Speaker 2: Tech with a degree in industrial engineering.
Speaker 3: He serves in the Vietnam War in the Army.
Speaker 2: And he continues to work for the US Aviation and
Speaker 2: Missile Command through the seventies only ethical things, I'm sure,
Speaker 2: and then at long last, Homer joins NASA in the
Speaker 2: nineteen eighties as an aerospace engineer. He's done it, and
Speaker 2: his career there is a storied one. Homer has worked
Speaker 2: with the Hubble space telescope, He's worked with the Space
Speaker 2: Lab and Space Shuttle mission astronauts, and just before retiring
Speaker 2: from NASA in nineteen ninety eight, he was the payload
Speaker 2: training manager for the International fucking Space Station. But even
Speaker 2: with this successful career at NASA, he still wasn't done.
Speaker 2: Homer's memoir Rocket Boys went to number one on the
Speaker 2: bestseller list in nineteen ninety eight. In October Sky the
Speaker 2: Jake Gillenhall movie came out in ninety nine, which launched
Speaker 2: Homer a long and successful writing career, writing in both
Speaker 2: fiction and memoir. But he still isn't done almost twenty
Speaker 2: years after retiring. In twenty seventeen, he was appointed to
Speaker 2: the National Space Council by objectively horrible recently almost assassinated
Speaker 2: former President Donald Trump. But as I would imagine, to
Speaker 2: Homer Hickham's chagrin, it is in twenty eighteen, as far
Speaker 2: as the entire Internet is concerned, that Homer Hickham the
Speaker 2: Rocket Boy made his greatest historical contribution when he had
Speaker 2: a now legendary run in with Twitter user Naomi H.
Speaker 2: Because one thing about Homer Hickam is that he kept
Speaker 2: up with the times.
Speaker 3: In twenty eighteen, he had a.
Speaker 2: Pretty act of Twitter account and tweeted mostly things related
Speaker 2: to NASA or to his career. But in August twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: if they replied to a tweet from a user named
Speaker 2: Naomi H, whose Twitter avatar is a gorgeous anthropomorphic deer
Speaker 2: in front of a trans Pride flag, Naomi H's tweet
Speaker 2: in all caps reads, everyone shut.
Speaker 3: The fuck up.
Speaker 2: I got accepted for a NASA internship. Nineteen hours after
Speaker 2: the post went live, it was gathering some steam, and
Speaker 2: it ends up reaching Homer Hicckham, Homer whose Twitter avatar
Speaker 2: is a picture of himself. Homer Hicckham replies language, but
Speaker 2: Naomi H will not be silent. She replies, suck my
Speaker 2: dick and balls. I'm working at NASA, And then Homer
Speaker 2: Hickham with the gut punch.
Speaker 1: And I am on the National Space Council that oversees
Speaker 1: NASA fatality.
Speaker 2: Oh yes, oh yes, Naomi H. Your sixteenth minute starts now.
Speaker 2: Six you guys, I'm very excited for this one. This
Speaker 2: is a special little piece of Internet history. It happened
Speaker 2: only six years ago, but six years online is an eternity.
Speaker 2: Today we are talking about the ballad of Naomi H
Speaker 2: and Homer Hiccam. If you were on Twitter at the time,
Speaker 2: you almost certainly knew about it. So let's just jump in,
Speaker 2: Come with me, if you will. To August twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: election rigging in Zimbabwe prompts an uprising, which the government
Speaker 2: reacts to with big surprise, extreme violence. Pope Francis declares
Speaker 2: that he wants to work toward the abolition of the
Speaker 2: death penalty. I have my birthday party at Chuck E
Speaker 2: Cheese this month because I love animatronics first and attention
Speaker 2: in a very close second. And this now legendary Twitter
Speaker 2: interaction takes place between college student Naomi h and esteemed
Speaker 2: NASA alumnus Homer Hiccam. One of the many reasons I
Speaker 2: find this story to be unique is that, in part
Speaker 2: it seems as if it's endured because of the dangling
Speaker 2: mystery that's implied, a mystery by the way that my
Speaker 2: interview with Naomi H today solves entirely. But contextually, you
Speaker 2: need to understand that this is a Twitter story, and
Speaker 2: in twenty eighteen, this is a very particular moment in
Speaker 2: how the platform works. This is a few years before
Speaker 2: the formal Elon Musk takeover, but the late twenty tens
Speaker 2: is rife with pushes for infant user growth in algorithmic
Speaker 2: shifts that simultaneously push for a safer and more engaged
Speaker 2: online community, which in this reporter's opinion, is basically a
Speaker 2: fool's Errand during this time, Twitter is trying to have
Speaker 2: it both ways. In fact, in May of twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: Twitter encouraged a lot of hype over a change to
Speaker 2: their algorithm that they claimed would encourage quote unquote health
Speaker 2: in what users were shown to deter people from trolling
Speaker 2: other users. It's not the first time the then twelve
Speaker 2: year old platform had tried and failed to address this problem.
Speaker 2: A few years earlier, in twenty fifteen, the then CEO,
Speaker 2: Dick Costello acknowledged that the company said the platform quote
Speaker 2: sucks at dealing with abuse and trolls unquote radical honesty, thrilling.
Speaker 2: But by twenty eighteen, Twitter and every other major social
Speaker 2: media platform was on the defensive about their various failures
Speaker 2: to prevent misinformation from influencing the result of the twenty
Speaker 2: sixteen presidential election in America. Addressing misinformation was actually a
Speaker 2: steeper request for the likes of Facebook and Google, which
Speaker 2: owns YouTube, because both of these companies' algorithms had intentionally
Speaker 2: pushed misinformation via engagement and utterly failed to moderate their
Speaker 2: content whatsoever, which led to annoyance at very best and
Speaker 2: a genocide in Myanmar at worst.
Speaker 8: In his testimony, he was asked about, for instance, the
Speaker 8: effect that Facebook has had in Myanmar in the massacre
Speaker 8: of the Rohina there. It has played a critical role
Speaker 8: in mobilizing Buddhist opinion, in radicalizing Buddhist opinion, in creating
Speaker 8: an environment where you could have what amounts to something
Speaker 8: very close at least to a genocide and certainly to
Speaker 8: ethnic cleansing.
Speaker 2: For Twitter, whose algorithm at this time was still fairly linear,
Speaker 2: the real issue was assessing which you users were misusing
Speaker 2: the platform to harass and silence others. Regardless, Donald Trump's
Speaker 2: win in twenty sixteen, in no small part due to
Speaker 2: misinformation and high engagement, meant that all social media platforms
Speaker 2: were under fire, and a lack of response could have
Speaker 2: meant a decline in user popularity. So Twitter announced that
Speaker 2: they were taking a more aggressive stance against the abusive
Speaker 2: conduct that had become prevalent in the users that posted
Speaker 2: the most. Co founder Jack Dorsey said at the time,
Speaker 2: it's shaping up to be one of the highest impact
Speaker 2: things that we've done. The spirit of the thing is
Speaker 2: that we want to take the burden off the person
Speaker 2: receiving abuse and mob like behavior. If there's any indication
Speaker 2: that this policy was not successful, it's the one I'm
Speaker 2: about to tell you, because the ballad of Naomi agent Homer,
Speaker 2: in the space of just two interactions between strangers, contains
Speaker 2: so much of what makes the Internet and Twitter, specifically
Speaker 2: empowering of our worst instincts. The followut of this story
Speaker 2: going viral started conversations about modern workplace ethics, generational divide, transphobia,
Speaker 2: targeted harassment, campaigns, misinformation and false demonization, and a general
Speaker 2: confusion around furries conceptually. And yet you are listening to
Speaker 2: this podcast on the Internet. And yet Naomi h loves
Speaker 2: the Internet, and prior to this interaction had no bones
Speaker 2: about enjoying the Internet, and in fact could attribute a
Speaker 2: lot of her self discovery to the Internet.
Speaker 3: You get it.
Speaker 2: At whatever point you logged on for the first time,
Speaker 2: your relationship to yourself became complicated forever. But today we
Speaker 2: are discussing what actually happened in this story. First, let's
Speaker 2: talk about this story as far as the public is concerned,
Speaker 2: because this is the narrative that appears to have calcified
Speaker 2: in the general Internet imagination. Naomi tweets about getting the internship.
Speaker 2: Naomi tells Homer Hickham to suck her dick after being
Speaker 2: told to watch her language and then maybe loses the
Speaker 2: internship and maybe doesn't. The jury remains out on that issue.
Speaker 2: And while this story took place over half a decade ago,
Speaker 2: the Reddit thread on our slash NASA I'm quoting from
Speaker 2: here is less than a year old. People really remember
Speaker 2: Naomi H. There's something about this story that gets to
Speaker 2: people in their marrow. The reddit post says.
Speaker 5: Did Naomi H ever get a job?
Speaker 1: I really hope she did, especially considering I would be
Speaker 1: the one to screw up as bad as she did.
Speaker 1: The whole thing made me really, really sad.
Speaker 2: One of the replies links to a Snopes article that
Speaker 2: tentatively concludes that Naomi H did indeed lose her internship
Speaker 2: at NASA, but the evidence that it points to to
Speaker 2: illustrate this point isn't exactly conclusive. A different Reddit user applies,
Speaker 2: so in essence, we don't know someone else times in correct,
Speaker 2: and this kind of confusion is not surprising at all,
Speaker 2: especially given the way this story rolled out. After the
Speaker 2: initial interaction went viral on Twitter, both Naomi H and
Speaker 2: Homer Hicckim seemed to struggle to know what the best
Speaker 2: way to respond to the virality is, and of course
Speaker 2: their respective reactions are informed by a lot of different things.
Speaker 2: It's informed by power dynamic, it's informed by generation gaps,
Speaker 2: and it's informed by the nebulus question how many people
Speaker 2: have been in this specific situation before. And we'll get
Speaker 2: to Naomi H's line of thoughts shortly, because folks, this
Speaker 2: is a sixteenth minute exclusive. And so while Naomi h
Speaker 2: has not said very much about the fallout of this story,
Speaker 2: Homer Hickham did, but his reaction to the story going
Speaker 2: viral is in my opinion, sort of misremembered, and that
Speaker 2: effect the way that this story is remembered down the
Speaker 2: line into today. And to be clear, this is a
Speaker 2: Naomi H stand podcast. Personally, I think she is guilty
Speaker 2: of nothing but enthusiasm and being a little young and
Speaker 2: naive and being funny. Right, But the way that both
Speaker 2: parties in this interaction are characterized makes a huge difference here.
Speaker 2: And when I hear people talk about this story, they
Speaker 2: generally choose one person as right and one person as wrong.
Speaker 2: Because the Internet is populated by either people who do
Speaker 2: not understand that two things can be true, or people
Speaker 2: who understand two things can be true but are really
Speaker 2: annoying about it.
Speaker 3: So it's easy to ignore them.
Speaker 2: And so at different times many people have physicianed Homer
Speaker 2: Hickham as the villain of this story, and I very
Speaker 2: much hesitate to say that's the case. And while I
Speaker 2: don't particularly like when someone language police is online, I
Speaker 2: don't think there is a villain of this story. I
Speaker 2: think a lot of what happened here can be attributed
Speaker 2: to the Streisand effect, which is not what happens to
Speaker 2: a person when they star in Funny Girl on Broadway
Speaker 2: in the seventies and subsequently become a beloved American gem
Speaker 2: whose directorial career should be referenced as historical more frequently.
Speaker 2: But it does reference that Streisand Comma Barbara, if you
Speaker 2: don't know. The Streisand effect references an incident from two
Speaker 2: thousand and three when Barbara Streisand's lawyer tried to prevent
Speaker 2: a picture of her Malibu mansion from being published, and
Speaker 2: in doing so, drew a shitload of attention. Two said
Speaker 2: picture that probably would never have happened if they had
Speaker 2: not insisted on it never appearing anywhere. So it became
Speaker 2: shorthand for the thing where you're in the middle of
Speaker 2: a room full of people not paying attention to you,
Speaker 2: and you scream for seemingly no reason, please don't look
Speaker 2: at me. Basically a situation where you'd be better off
Speaker 2: just letting it lie. So if you are either Naomi
Speaker 2: h or Homer Hickam, the first mistake you make is that,
Speaker 2: after this interaction takes off in mid August twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: neither of them delete it. And we can speculate as
Speaker 2: to why. Per Naomi h she's a college student who
Speaker 2: thinks it's kind of funny and doesn't expect that it
Speaker 2: will cost her arguably the biggest opportunity of her life.
Speaker 2: And as far as Homer Hickham goes, he's a seventy
Speaker 2: five year old on Twitter whose online behavior was generally
Speaker 2: pretty lighthearted up to this point. In spite of his position,
Speaker 2: Hickham was still mostly retired, and he weighed in on
Speaker 2: NASA news and would occasionally reply to colleagues, but just
Speaker 2: about space Homer stuff.
Speaker 3: He's one of the rocket Boys.
Speaker 2: But what we do know is that the tweet found
Speaker 2: its way to him, and the fact that the original
Speaker 2: interaction was still shareable days after it happened and the
Speaker 2: interaction ended inconclusively kept people talking about it again, think
Speaker 2: about Homer's final reply.
Speaker 1: And I am on the National Space Council that oversees NASA.
Speaker 2: Pretty understandably, this is often interpreted as a death now
Speaker 2: for our heroine, Naomi H. But where the stras in
Speaker 2: effect really comes in is how the controversy is addressed
Speaker 2: after this initial bump and engagement, because the longer this
Speaker 2: thing stays up, the more the bell can't be on wrong.
Speaker 2: A lot of users have already taken Homer Hickam's original
Speaker 2: response to Naomi H as one that warned that he
Speaker 2: would cause her to lose her job, and the first
Speaker 2: wave of discourse around this story kind of revolves around
Speaker 2: this assumption.
Speaker 1: Here's an example, and intern told an overseer of NASA
Speaker 1: to suck her dick and balls. And there are actually
Speaker 1: people in the comments who think firing her was an
Speaker 1: abuse of power.
Speaker 7: Lol.
Speaker 2: There's people reacting who think that anyone who doesn't know
Speaker 2: Hickam's relevance within NASA doesn't deserve the job anyway.
Speaker 1: I can't believe NASA gave an internship to someone who
Speaker 1: didn't know who Homer Hickam was.
Speaker 2: And no, this user did not spell Homer Hickham's name correctly.
Speaker 2: And then there's people who are leaning into Naomi Ah's identity,
Speaker 2: which should be unrelated to the story, but we're going
Speaker 2: to talk about it at length this week. More specifically,
Speaker 2: how Naomi H's identity as both a trans woman and
Speaker 2: a furry were repeatedly referenced in the reaction to this story.
Speaker 2: Here is a light example of that.
Speaker 1: Be Fourrey became an intern for NASA and got instantly
Speaker 1: fired after telling someone on their council to suck their dick.
Speaker 1: Because this is twenty eighteen.
Speaker 2: Buddy, join us in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: The water's fine.
Speaker 2: But if you've been on social media for a while,
Speaker 2: you recognize this rhetorical format. This is a historically popular
Speaker 2: way to talk about things that the writer wants you
Speaker 2: to feel is uniquely modernly absurd. In this case, the
Speaker 2: user is pointing to the fact that Naomi h is
Speaker 2: a furry.
Speaker 3: That is true.
Speaker 2: At this time, Naomi Ah's Twitter was a mix of
Speaker 2: random personal thoughts, some gaming takes, and yes, furry content.
Speaker 2: And I really hope this doesn't come off as patronizing
Speaker 2: furries for my listeners that live under a rock.
Speaker 3: Hello, hope the rock is doing well. Just so you know.
Speaker 2: Furries are defined in the Oxford Dictionary as an enthusiast
Speaker 2: for animal characters with human characteristics, in particular a person
Speaker 2: who dresses up in costume as such a character or
Speaker 2: uses one as an avatar.
Speaker 3: Online.
Speaker 2: A few of you were just like, oh, the mascot
Speaker 2: costume community. Correct, And to get rid of any confusion
Speaker 2: right here and now, make no mistake, I ride for
Speaker 2: furries because, like many unusual communities, they are not hurting anyone.
Speaker 2: And moreover, I can confirm that furries make excellent stand
Speaker 2: up comedy audiences. So yeah, I ride for furries. If
Speaker 2: you're a better audience member than a garden variety bachelorette party,
Speaker 2: I am your ally one hundred percent. But furries are
Speaker 2: not us an in person community, as the definition implies.
Speaker 2: Furries have always operated via both public and niche channels,
Speaker 2: ranging all the way back to the underground comic scene
Speaker 2: in the nineteen seventies, and in their present iteration in
Speaker 2: online communities that can often lead to in person meetups.
Speaker 2: The online community is often a starting point, and trust
Speaker 2: me when I say that the attendance for in person
Speaker 2: furry conferences is huge.
Speaker 6: So I knew world record was set last weekend, but
Speaker 6: at the same time, I feel like everyone saw it coming.
Speaker 6: Of course, I'm talking about Anthrocon and the seventeen thousand,
Speaker 6: six hundred and thirty nine of y'all that attended.
Speaker 2: And so while anecdotally I have found the community to
Speaker 2: be completely lovely, conflating someone who identifies as a furry
Speaker 2: as someone inherently ridiculous is still a common lazy punchline,
Speaker 2: and I suspect that this has to do with the
Speaker 2: fact that much of the furry community identifies as LGBTQ plus,
Speaker 2: and since the dawn of the Internet, furries have been
Speaker 2: very online. The furry community can be participated in just
Speaker 2: digitally via personas, which is the anthropomorphic animal character that
Speaker 2: furries interact as, and often will commission custom art to
Speaker 2: represent themselves as, for instance, a gorgeous anthropomorphic deer like
Speaker 2: the one in Naomi H's profile picture. But since furries
Speaker 2: have been a subject of low hanging fruit mockery for decades,
Speaker 2: by the time these comments are made, and Homer Hicam
Speaker 2: is objectively a weird person to see indirect conversation with
Speaker 2: a furry who is a half century his junior.
Speaker 3: But remember this.
Speaker 2: Furry art has a background of a trans pride flag,
Speaker 2: because Naomi h is trans. And it's here that I'll
Speaker 2: state the obvious and say, when bigoted assholes perceive a
Speaker 2: trans person doing anything, there is a contingency that will
Speaker 2: relentlessly harass, dox and dehumanize them just for existing. And
Speaker 2: while I have no way of knowing if Homer Hickham
Speaker 2: knew this, that is exactly where this story's virality leads.
Speaker 2: So if you're lucky, you won't recognize the names of
Speaker 2: hate speech forums like eight chan and Kiwi Farms, but
Speaker 2: if you're listening to this show, I suspect you might.
Speaker 2: Both of these forums were inspired by a different forum
Speaker 2: called four chan, the famous anonymous forum founded in two
Speaker 2: thousand and three by a fifteen year old who had
Speaker 2: pulled code from a forum board called Sorry Anime, Death Tentacle,
Speaker 2: Rape horror House.
Speaker 3: But once four chan is.
Speaker 2: Founded, the site's threads range from the innocuous to the depraved,
Speaker 2: and it made way for some deeply hateful communities that
Speaker 2: encouraged harassment, doxing, hate speech, and probably a bunch of
Speaker 2: shorthand terms for those things that I have refused to
Speaker 2: learn of the success of four chan. Eight Chan and
Speaker 2: kiwi farms are founded the same year, twenty thirteen, and
Speaker 2: are built on the same dog whistly innocuous term free speech.
Speaker 2: In this case and many others, this term roughly translated
Speaker 2: to hate speech, which became even more clear just a
Speaker 2: year later in twenty fourteen, when eight chan in particular
Speaker 2: became a critical player in the gamer Gate saga. And
Speaker 2: that's an episode unto itself, because free Palestine. But this
Speaker 2: was a period of months in which people, nearly always
Speaker 2: women and queer people who had expressed interest in virtually
Speaker 2: any progressive values with regards to feminism or representation in
Speaker 2: video games in general, were made to fear for their
Speaker 2: lives due to intricate, terrifying, anonymous online harassment campaigns. Remarkably,
Speaker 2: kiwi Farms manages to be even worse. Here are headlines
Speaker 2: about the continued effort to shut the website down from
Speaker 2: the last two years. From The Hill in twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: Why anti trans web forum kiwi Farms was erased from
Speaker 2: the Internet. From The Washington Post in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: The endless battle to ban the world's most notorious anti
Speaker 2: trans Stalker website and from mother Jones in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: the website that wants you to kill yourself and won't die. Unfortunately,
Speaker 2: at the time I'm recording this, this last headline is
Speaker 2: still correct and Kiwi Farms is still not dead, and
Speaker 2: we suffer for every moment that that remains true. And
Speaker 2: these hate sites would very frequently mock, harass, and dox
Speaker 2: trans people, and in the case of Kiwi Farms, that
Speaker 2: was often the point of the entire platform, because users
Speaker 2: on these sites are cowards, unwilling to put their names
Speaker 2: to their own horrific hateful views, which means that they
Speaker 2: walk among us. Fuck you. The fact that Naomi h
Speaker 2: was targeted and harassed on these sites not for being
Speaker 2: an intern who was fired, but a trans intern who
Speaker 2: had the audacity to exist at NASA and on these
Speaker 2: disgusting sites, the combined effect of disappointment at losing the internship,
Speaker 2: the influx of attention, and the hatefulness directed at her
Speaker 2: general existence made her a prime candidate to feel unsafe.
Speaker 2: And I can't say enough I'm so glad that this
Speaker 2: story has a happy ending, but holy shit, with trans
Speaker 2: people experience online can be just as traumatizing as it
Speaker 2: is in real life, and even more so. And while
Speaker 2: these hate forums have since mutated, there's still around and
Speaker 2: the transphobic harassment that Naomi H received in twenty eighteen
Speaker 2: is pulled from a disturbing playbook that is still very
Speaker 2: much with us.
Speaker 3: And we wouldn't be talking.
Speaker 2: About this story now unless there had been the classic
Speaker 2: backlash to the backlash right. It reminds me a lot
Speaker 2: of our episode on Coffee Wife from a few months ago.
Speaker 2: It's another story that starts with a wave of shaming
Speaker 2: followed by an equal, sometimes more intense backlash to the
Speaker 2: backlash than implies that the first wave of reaction wasn't fair.
Speaker 2: In Naomi H's case, many came to her defense as
Speaker 2: strangers and friends she knew from the furry community came
Speaker 2: to her defense in a public way, which is a
Speaker 2: noble thing to do but almost guarantees that the story
Speaker 2: is not going to go away the way that Naomi
Speaker 2: H might have liked it to by then. And these
Speaker 2: defenses of Naomi H start to portray Homer Hickam as
Speaker 2: a villain. Here are some examples.
Speaker 5: Wow, Homer Hickim is kind of a jerk. Naomi did
Speaker 5: the right thing. This hectoring old dullard needs to be
Speaker 5: told off more. I hope they get their internship back.
Speaker 5: Being told by an old white dude to mind your
Speaker 5: language as irritating as fuck.
Speaker 2: And it is true that Homer Hickham's old person response
Speaker 2: of language and Naomi h young person response of suck
Speaker 2: my nickenballs does directly lead to her losing the NASA internship,
Speaker 2: but the way much of the public remembers it now,
Speaker 2: it's as if Homer Hickam picked up the phone, dialed
Speaker 2: one eight hundred NASA and demanded that Naomi h be fired.
Speaker 2: The truth is Homer Hicckim did not lose Naomi h
Speaker 2: that internship, at least not directly. The streisand effect did
Speaker 2: because the more people talked about this and the longer
Speaker 2: the posts stayed up, the more likely it became that
Speaker 2: someone at NASA was going to find out, and they did.
Speaker 2: When Homer finds out online that Naomi lost the internship,
Speaker 2: he spoke out against NASA's decision publicly. Here's a blog
Speaker 2: post from his website from August twenty first, twenty eighteen,
Speaker 2: entitled social media.
Speaker 1: It reads recently it was called to my attention on
Speaker 1: Twitter that someone was being hired by NASA and that
Speaker 1: they were using the F word in a tweet about it.
Speaker 1: I'm a Vietnam VET and not at all offended by
Speaker 1: the F word. However, when I saw NASA and the
Speaker 1: word used together, it occurred to me that this young
Speaker 1: person might get in trouble if NASA saw it.
Speaker 5: So I tweeted to.
Speaker 1: Her one word language and intended to leave it at back.
Speaker 1: Soon her friends took umbrage and said a lot of
Speaker 1: unkind things, But long after I was gone, and I
Speaker 1: immediately deleted my comments and blocked all concerned. Later I
Speaker 1: learned she had lost her offer for an internship with NASA.
Speaker 1: This I had nothing to do with, nor could I,
Speaker 1: since I do not hire and fire at the agency
Speaker 1: or have any say on employment whatsoever. As it turned out,
Speaker 1: it was due to the NASA hashtag her friends used
Speaker 1: that called the agency's attention to it. Long after my
Speaker 1: comments were gone, she reached out to me with an
Speaker 1: unnecessary apology, which I heartily accepted and returned with my honor.
Speaker 1: After talking to her, I am certain she deserves a
Speaker 1: position in the aerospace industry, and I am doing all
Speaker 1: I can to secure her one that will be better
Speaker 1: than she lost. I have also talked to the folks
Speaker 1: that had to do with her internship and made absolutely
Speaker 1: certain that there will be no black mark on her record.
Speaker 1: Signed Homer Hickam.
Speaker 2: Homer Hickam does delete this blog post the next day,
Speaker 2: but let's pause on it because it's a rich text.
Speaker 2: His post implies that what lost Naomi h the internship
Speaker 2: was not what.
Speaker 9: She herself said.
Speaker 2: It was what her supporters said to Hickam, a respected
Speaker 2: NASA engineer, and it was the slandering of him and
Speaker 2: NASA itself that lost their friend the internship. And if
Speaker 2: this is true, I find this to be really unfair.
Speaker 2: I have no doubt that Homer Hickms's information from NASA
Speaker 2: is sound, but that means that NASA has all but
Speaker 2: admitted that they took an opportunity from a college student
Speaker 2: because of things other people said, and some of Naomi
Speaker 2: H's supporters seemed to recognize this. After Hiccum's statement was released,
Speaker 2: one furry tweeted.
Speaker 1: The full Homer hickhams story is a ride. As usual,
Speaker 1: furry Twitter simultaneously makes a dumb situation worse while never
Speaker 1: actually posting the full story, y'all, Naomi.
Speaker 2: H said at the time, and since that, it appears
Speaker 2: that Homer Hickham didn't genuinely try to get her internship back,
Speaker 2: and that she reached out with a sincere apology that
Speaker 2: Homer told her was unnecessary. The only problem was exclusive
Speaker 2: he was unsuccessful in getting her the internship back, And
Speaker 2: people rarely talk about Homer Hickham's contextual explanation here because
Speaker 2: it was swiftly deleted in a way that I think
Speaker 2: confused the narrative for many people. In the moment, Naomi
Speaker 2: h doesn't really seem to know how to react. She's
Speaker 2: kind of panicking because here's this thing she thought was
Speaker 2: a little Twitter bit that wouldn't affect her career, and
Speaker 2: now the internship she was doubling down on being excited
Speaker 2: about is gone. And then shortly after she's subjected to
Speaker 2: Transphoba harassments, She's subjected to mockery and threats of violence,
Speaker 2: so she kind of stops posting. She makes her Twitter
Speaker 2: account private and then tries exploring her feelings on everything
Speaker 2: on a Twitter wannabe platform called Masadon. Unfortunately, people find
Speaker 2: her there and her personal struggle through this time is
Speaker 2: kind of laid bare for the public. And when it's
Speaker 2: confirmed that Naomi Age's internship has really and truly been
Speaker 2: lost as a result of this interaction, that is when
Speaker 2: the mainstream media hits hard and fast BuzzFeed news a
Speaker 2: woman was fired from NASA after they saw her tweet
Speaker 2: suck my dick and balls I'm working at NASA USA
Speaker 2: today would be NASA intern loses gig after vulgar tweetd
Speaker 2: NASA alum Homer Hicckam, reports say Business Insider, a woman
Speaker 2: lost a NASA scholarship after getting into Twitter beef with
Speaker 2: a member of NASA Space Council. Most of these articles
Speaker 2: imply that Naomi H is either the victim of the
Speaker 2: world's cruelest joke or was genuinely foolish to have posted
Speaker 2: that in the first place. The pieces express sympathy but
Speaker 2: don't imply that Homer Hicckham spoke out of turn, and
Speaker 2: some of the coverage references the transphobic harassment as a
Speaker 2: major part of what fueled the story. But after this
Speaker 2: wave of mainstream attention, the ballad of Naomi H and
Speaker 2: Homer Hicckham doesn't progress all that much. Once these stories
Speaker 2: come out, both parties stop responding for comment, So within
Speaker 2: a few days of this story going mainstream, Naomi Age's
Speaker 2: internship is lost. Homer Hickam releases a statement saying he's
Speaker 2: going to try and help her get it back, then
Speaker 2: deletes it, and finally, Naomi H crops up on Twitter
Speaker 2: on August twenty third to say the following, I think
Speaker 2: I might get my internship again. Thank you all for
Speaker 2: the support and for me. At this point, there's really
Speaker 2: only one ingredient missing in the story. What explanation does
Speaker 2: NASA have for any of this? And while they're too
Speaker 2: classy NASA to comment on this incident specifically, they did
Speaker 2: tell Dan Yvon at Snopes that their justification for firing
Speaker 2: Naomi H was related to their social media code of conduct.
Speaker 6: Ah.
Speaker 2: Yes, the corporate social media code of Conduct, a fearsome
Speaker 2: era of workplace policy that directly led to me losing
Speaker 2: a job at the Boston Globe for saying I come
Speaker 2: so hard that I believe when I was twenty two
Speaker 2: years old. A story for another day. NASA tells Danyvonn
Speaker 2: at Snopes.
Speaker 1: Privacy regulations prohibit the agency from discussing specific details to
Speaker 1: receive a manual that includes expectations regarding use of social media.
Speaker 1: If a student is rejected, they can reapply for the program.
Speaker 2: And from here Naomi H goes silent or private online
Speaker 2: for a while. Homer Hickham returns to posting as usual
Speaker 2: and never reinstates that mysterious deleted blog post, and the
Speaker 2: whole story becomes a bit of an unsolved online mystery
Speaker 2: until now. The most recent time I saw this story
Speaker 2: be reinvoked by a viral tweet, I gave it a
Speaker 2: shot and quote tweeted Naomi H DM me, knowing that
Speaker 2: for sure she wouldn't answer. But several hours later, that
Speaker 2: same day, a Twitter account replies with an avatar that
Speaker 2: is a gorgeous anthropomorphic dear. The reply reads, Hi, I'm
Speaker 2: Naomi H. And a reply to the reply.
Speaker 3: It won't let me DM you.
Speaker 2: And finally, Jamie, please when we come back, I talk
Speaker 2: exclusively with the one, the only, Naomi H. Welcome back
Speaker 2: to sixteenth minute. Someone shot Donald Trump and that's the
Speaker 2: fifth strangest thing I've experienced this week. And here is
Speaker 2: my interview with Naomi H.
Speaker 7: My name's Naomi I often go by Naomi H. On
Speaker 7: the Internet. You'll forgive me if I don't really feel
Speaker 7: like giving out my full name. Absolutely, and I'm a
Speaker 7: transgender woman. We can get into that a little bit later.
Speaker 7: But the big thing what brings me to this podcast
Speaker 7: is that in August of twenty eighteen, I landed and
Speaker 7: then fumbled a NASA internship in a very hilarious way.
Speaker 7: Because I just couldn't stop myself from posting about it.
Speaker 7: In my hubris, I sort of assumed that nothing bad
Speaker 7: would happen. I love telling this story to people because
Speaker 7: it's a whole in the time since people have a
Speaker 7: lot of misconceptions about it. People have this idea that
Speaker 7: I got the internship back or something, and I just
Speaker 7: want to come out and say that's not true. I
Speaker 7: did not internship back.
Speaker 2: Okay, that was because it does seem to be a
Speaker 2: rare still mystery of the internet.
Speaker 7: Homer tried very hard to get me on fired, but
Speaker 7: they had already kind of made up their mind. We'll
Speaker 7: get into it starting from the top. It's the spring
Speaker 7: summer of twenty eighteen around like May. I think I
Speaker 7: had applied for some NASA internship that had opened up
Speaker 7: at NASA Glen in Cleveland because I was, you know,
Speaker 7: going to school in Cleveland studying engineering. So I applied
Speaker 7: for it, didn't get it, but you know, my my information,
Speaker 7: my resume was in their system. The rest of the
Speaker 7: summer goes by, you know, and that was I had
Speaker 7: just started hormone therapy. I was like just starting the
Speaker 7: process of coming out to people as transgender, which is
Speaker 7: a very scary time in my life. You know, it's
Speaker 7: it's I'm glad I did it, but it's it's really
Speaker 7: hard to put yourself out there like that. So anyways,
Speaker 7: so it's August and I'm just like chilling in my room.
Speaker 7: We're like maybe three or four weeks away from class starting.
Speaker 7: I had already like picked up my classes for the
Speaker 7: fall semester and everything, and I get I don't remember
Speaker 7: if it was an email or a phone call, but
Speaker 7: they're like, hey, we have your resume in the system.
Speaker 7: We see that you have a lot of experience with
Speaker 7: CAD and this internship like that, Oh, cad is is
Speaker 7: compute assisted drawings. It's like you know, in three D
Speaker 7: modeling in engineering for like manufacturing and designing and all
Speaker 7: sorts of stuff.
Speaker 9: Fascinating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you will find that many of my questions are like, huh.
Speaker 7: That's okay. So yeah, it was something that I had
Speaker 7: a lot of experience with. So I get this call
Speaker 7: and they're like, hey, this internship doing CAD work like
Speaker 7: just opened up. Are you interested? And I'm just like, well,
Speaker 7: fuck yeah, I am so, Like you know, they schedule
Speaker 7: like a video interview for like a day or two
Speaker 7: after that, maybe like the next day, I get the
Speaker 7: offer letter in my email and I sign it and
Speaker 7: I fill it out. Now I am like out of
Speaker 7: my board excited. Of course, that's of course it's a
Speaker 7: big fucking deal. So I was specifically, I was studying
Speaker 7: aerospace engineering, and if you are, like in the aerospace
Speaker 7: industry in general, if you have NASA on your resume,
Speaker 7: you can basically do anything you fucking want. Like you know,
Speaker 7: it's it's it was such an insanely huge thing for
Speaker 7: my career. Yeah, And for context, my younger sister, Sophie,
Speaker 7: she's two years younger than me. She was a physics
Speaker 7: student at University of Michigan, and she had gotten all
Speaker 7: sorts of these crazy internships over her time, including one
Speaker 7: or two at NASA, studying like astrophysics and stuff.
Speaker 9: So whoa like a whole stem family.
Speaker 7: Well yeah, yeah, yeah, it's where a bunch of overachievers,
Speaker 7: which I didn't really realize how sort of abnormal that
Speaker 7: is until I like went to college and kind of
Speaker 7: got out of my bubble. I grew up in a
Speaker 7: very extremely like white, extremely privileged life, and I don't
Speaker 7: want to be like one of these white people who
Speaker 7: is just like absolutely about like shitty things happening in
Speaker 7: the world. My parents are doctors, Like they paid for
Speaker 7: pretty much my entire undergraduate education. Okay, you know, I
Speaker 7: I got as far as I did because I had
Speaker 7: a lot of advantages on my side. But that's a
Speaker 7: little off topic.
Speaker 9: So you get the internship, and it's really fun.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's so exciting. This is like the biggest thing
Speaker 7: ever for me. So this was on like maybe like
Speaker 7: a Wednesday or a Thursday. So I spend the weekend
Speaker 7: just kind of like telling my friends, and everyone's really
Speaker 7: excited for me, you know, people are really happy. I
Speaker 7: start like trying to arrange like housing, Like I'm gonna
Speaker 7: be down there for like five or six months. Where
Speaker 7: am I gonna live. I'm gonna need a car because
Speaker 7: it's fucking Houston. The weekend rolls by. You know, we're
Speaker 7: all we're all drinking, we're all celebrating. Tuesday decides to
Speaker 7: roll around, and like Tuesday evening or afternoon, after I
Speaker 7: get it from work, I make the fateful decision and
Speaker 7: I log onto my Twitter account and I make that
Speaker 7: famous post all caps. I say, everyone, shut the fuck up.
Speaker 7: I just got a NASA internship and it starts to
Speaker 7: get some attention. You know, people are pretty happy for me.
Speaker 7: It's starting. It's got like a thousand likes, two thousand,
Speaker 7: a lot of attention, but still kind of rookie numbers.
Speaker 7: Some of my friends even go so far as to
Speaker 7: say to me, like, hey, Naomi, like maybe you want
Speaker 7: to delete this, Like this isn't a good look. NASA
Speaker 7: and NASA, as they warned me and I later learned,
Speaker 7: they're They're very particular about their presence on social media.
Speaker 7: It's they have a whole they have a whole guidebook
Speaker 7: for it, a guidebook that if not read until way
Speaker 7: too late.
Speaker 2: I guess this is where I will reveal I don't
Speaker 2: think you did anything wrong.
Speaker 7: Like I don't think I think I think that if
Speaker 7: I had made different this decisions than the ones I made,
Speaker 7: I could have come out without losing the internship, but sure,
Speaker 7: I have to acknowledge that there is a lot of
Speaker 7: it comes from hubrits on my part. We'll get to that.
Speaker 7: So then this, like, you know, one afternoon, a day
Speaker 7: or two after the fact, I log on and this like,
Speaker 7: old ass man, he's not verified, he's got like no
Speaker 7: information on his account or whatever. He responds to me.
Speaker 7: He says just one word language. I'm like, who the
Speaker 7: fuck does this guy think he is? I don't know, you, Like,
Speaker 7: can't you just be happy for me? Like, fuck you,
Speaker 7: old man. So I said back to him what I thought,
Speaker 7: and I maintained was a pretty funny thing to say back.
Speaker 7: I said, suck my dick and balls. I'm working at NASA,
Speaker 7: And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I
Speaker 7: picked up that phrase from a video game bunkie video
Speaker 7: YouTuber I used to watch a lot of So anyways,
Speaker 7: and then he responds to me and he says, I'm
Speaker 7: on the National Space Council that oversees NASA. I'm like, wait, what,
Speaker 7: I google who is Homer Hicckham like Wikipedia dot com
Speaker 7: And it turns out Homer Hiccklam is a pretty important
Speaker 7: dude in the space industry. Do you know the movie
Speaker 7: October Sky.
Speaker 9: Yes, that's what I'm gonna say.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I have to this day. I've never seen the movie,
Speaker 7: but I later learned that they made a movie about
Speaker 7: this guy really important. He is on the National Space
Speaker 7: Council that oversees NASA, and so I'm like, wow, this
Speaker 7: exchange is really fucking funny. And this is when some
Speaker 7: of my friends were like, Naomi, I really think you
Speaker 7: need to start deleting this, and I'm like, no, it'll
Speaker 7: be fine. Everything's fine. This is just a funny thing
Speaker 7: happening on the internet. Everything is gonna be fine. So
Speaker 7: I leave it up for I don't know, a week,
Speaker 7: two weeks, and it is getting like a lot of attention,
Speaker 7: like tens of thousands.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I think this is when I didn't see the post
Speaker 2: before the interaction took place.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, well this is at this point. It's still
Speaker 7: just online. It hasn't even leaked out into real life yet. Okay,
Speaker 7: So anyways, so now we come back to my brother's
Speaker 7: wedding going ahead. It's August twenty eighteen. I am back
Speaker 7: in Buffalo, New York because my older brother is getting married.
Speaker 7: It's a Friday night. I'm like getting dressed to go
Speaker 7: to the rehearsal dinner, and I get this phone call
Speaker 7: from the NASA people and they're like, hey, did you
Speaker 7: post this? What I should have done is I should
Speaker 7: have said yes, that was me. I can delete the
Speaker 7: post right now if there's a problem. That's not what
Speaker 7: I said. Okay, We're like again, like thirty, I'm like
Speaker 7: dressed in like a nice shirt pants for my brother's
Speaker 7: rehearsal dinner for a wedding.
Speaker 2: Of course, it's yeah, like the most high stake situation
Speaker 2: you could posibly.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm like sitting in my room looking at housing
Speaker 7: in Houston, and I get this call. They're like, was
Speaker 7: this you? And I panicked and I tried to lie
Speaker 7: my way out of it. I was like, no, it
Speaker 7: was a friend, but you know, I don't even remember
Speaker 7: what I said it. I stammered my way through some
Speaker 7: very obviously fake, very obviously bullshit excuse. They're like, we'll
Speaker 7: be in touch. I'm sitting there in my room and
Speaker 7: I'm like, oh my god, I just fucked up so bad.
Speaker 2: My stomach just like turned at Yeah, that's not something
Speaker 2: you want to hear.
Speaker 9: From now.
Speaker 7: You don't ever want to hear someone say we'll be
Speaker 7: in touch in that like tone of voice. I was like,
Speaker 7: I have never fucked up this hard before. Maybe ten
Speaker 7: minutes later, I get an email from them saying in
Speaker 7: writing that my my internship offer has been rescinded. I'm like, ah, fuck,
Speaker 7: I don't know why I in this moment, I felt
Speaker 7: the need to tell my family, but I was like, guys,
Speaker 7: I just lost the NASA internship. We're like leaving to
Speaker 7: go to the dinner. We're like out the fucking door,
Speaker 7: and everyone's like, Naomi, why are you telling us this now?
Speaker 7: And everyone's excited for Max's wedding and I'm having just
Speaker 7: the worst day of my fucking life.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 7: So where we are at the rehearsal dinner and one
Speaker 7: of my friends hits me up on Discord and they're
Speaker 7: like Naomi, like you're you're you're a really good friend
Speaker 7: of mine. Like I can't just stand idly by and
Speaker 7: do nothing. So they like on my behalf like reached
Speaker 7: out to Homer Hickham and like, oh so, I'm like
Speaker 7: it was so sweet of them, and I'm I'm really
Speaker 7: grateful that they did that. And this like I didn't
Speaker 7: speak to him over the phone and anything, but I
Speaker 7: like stepped outside during the dinner and I'm like, hey,
Speaker 7: Homer Man, like I'm really fucking sorry. You know, I
Speaker 7: didn't mean anything by it. And he's like, oh, you know,
Speaker 7: I used to be a Navy pilot, Like I'm no
Speaker 7: stranger to foul language, like you know he was. He
Speaker 7: was just like, you know, trying. He didn't really mean
Speaker 7: for this to blow up this way either. He's not
Speaker 7: on the bleeding edge of the internet. He wasn't even verified,
Speaker 7: which this was back in the days when that mate,
Speaker 7: when that meant something that's true.
Speaker 9: So when you spoke to Homer, did you speak on
Speaker 9: the phone? Did you speak?
Speaker 10: Uh?
Speaker 7: It was it was it was over email. But he
Speaker 7: was pretty quick to respond and he was like, hey,
Speaker 7: you know, I feel really bad about this, like let
Speaker 7: me He basically I don't remember his exact turn of phrase.
Speaker 7: He basically said like, let me see what I can do.
Speaker 7: And he like made this like whole post on like
Speaker 7: his own personal blog. And this is where people get
Speaker 7: the misconception that I got the internship back, because Homer
Speaker 7: basically came out and said I'm going to get her
Speaker 7: internship back, but he didn't. The people at NASA had
Speaker 7: basically already made up their minds and it was like
Speaker 7: two maybe three weeks before class started back up again.
Speaker 7: So I was like, fuck it, I'm just gonna go
Speaker 7: take my classes and finish my degree. And by the way,
Speaker 7: at the rehearsal dinner and at the wedding, because it
Speaker 7: was it was a gorgeous wedding. The food was great.
Speaker 7: It on paper, it was a lot of fun and like,
Speaker 7: you know, I'm really happy for my brother and his wife.
Speaker 7: But I was like trying to have a good time
Speaker 7: to be happy for my brother. But on the inside,
Speaker 7: I was just so miserable because people kept coming up
Speaker 7: to me and they were like, Naomi, I heard about
Speaker 7: the NASA thing, congratulations, And I kept having to be
Speaker 7: like about that.
Speaker 9: Oh my god.
Speaker 6: It was.
Speaker 7: It was brutal. It was the worst.
Speaker 2: I have to imagine. Yeah, your family must have been stoked.
Speaker 2: And did you get into it at the wedding or
Speaker 2: were you like, oh, it didn't work out people.
Speaker 7: I mean I told my family about it, and they
Speaker 7: my dad just sort of shook his head and went
Speaker 7: like hem, like we didn't really get into it, but
Speaker 7: I could tell they were like not happy. It's after
Speaker 7: the wedding. Fast forward to Monday, Okay, the story gets
Speaker 7: picked up by like the local news in Houston. They're like,
Speaker 7: here's an interesting thing that happened, even.
Speaker 2: Though it's just because of their twenty year old intern
Speaker 2: that they figure it out.
Speaker 7: Yeah they probably. Yeah, the local news in Houston picks
Speaker 7: it up, and then from there like USA Today picks
Speaker 7: it up, and then it's on Buzz Speed and then
Speaker 7: it's on Fox. At this point, I had deleted the post,
Speaker 7: but I left my account up, and this is I
Speaker 7: started to have reporters like hitting me up in my inbox.
Speaker 7: They're like, can I talk to you? And the advice
Speaker 7: I was getting from everyone is Naomi, just shut up
Speaker 7: and keep your head down and wait for this to
Speaker 7: blow over. Yeah, which was the right move. So I
Speaker 7: so I deleted, I nuked that account, and waited for
Speaker 7: it to blow over. But like, it was everywhere everywhere
Speaker 7: for months. I mean, you know, my roommate who was
Speaker 7: a grad student at the university and did some work
Speaker 7: at NASA in Cleveland, was like, yeah, Naomi, like even
Speaker 7: I heard about he had heard about it. Independently of
Speaker 7: me telling him.
Speaker 2: Is it well known like within your like college friends
Speaker 2: and everyone, like, does everyone.
Speaker 9: Know like this this happened to you?
Speaker 7: Okay, yeah, because I love telling the story because so
Speaker 7: for a long time I was very very bitter about it.
Speaker 7: I mean, how how could you not be right? And
Speaker 7: every time every time I heard about anything cool happening
Speaker 7: in like the space industry in general, that like bitterness
Speaker 7: would would come back, especially when I was sort of
Speaker 7: struggling to get like my job and my career off
Speaker 7: the ground. But six years later, you know, I live
Speaker 7: with my girlfriend, who I love very much. She's so
Speaker 7: good to me, and I've got a good job going
Speaker 7: and I'm back in the aerospace industry that is.
Speaker 9: Oh. I feel they're going to be really happy.
Speaker 7: I took such a roundabout way to get back into it.
Speaker 7: And I'm not doing space. I do commercial jet engine
Speaker 7: stuff wi that industry. You're telling me Boeing killed a guy.
Speaker 9: Boeing killed a guy. There's no way around it.
Speaker 7: And they asked the CEO in front of Congress and
Speaker 7: he's just like, I know what happens, And I'm like, what.
Speaker 3: Do you mean?
Speaker 7: You know what happens? You know you killed Hi. Hi.
Speaker 7: It's just it's it's insane. Yeah, the whole thing, top
Speaker 7: to bottom is so even as someone who knows stuff
Speaker 7: about airplanes and the FAA and and engineering and stuff like,
Speaker 7: the more I learn about it, the more I'm like,
Speaker 7: Jesus fucking Christ.
Speaker 9: Aerospace is lucky to have you back.
Speaker 7: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everything has a way of working out. I'm glad
Speaker 2: that it shook out, but of course, and it's like
Speaker 2: that has to be a very bizarre thing to be
Speaker 2: triggered by space conceptually.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and you know, I'm I guess now that I'm
Speaker 7: doing better, I'm I'm over all of that. But for
Speaker 7: a long time I had a lot of very bitter
Speaker 7: feelings about it, and sure, and when I would express this,
Speaker 7: people would not and be like, yeah, I guess that
Speaker 7: makes sense that you would feel that way.
Speaker 3: We'll be back with more in just a moment.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the ads about to play are.
Speaker 2: Welcome back to sixteenth minute. I keep drinking this thing
Speaker 2: called vibe wine that I'm pretty sure could fuel a plane.
Speaker 2: And here is the rest of my interview with the
Speaker 2: incredible Naomi h Going back.
Speaker 7: It's like August or like early September twenty eighteen, I
Speaker 7: just deleted my Twitter account and tried to keep my
Speaker 7: head down for a little while, but like you know,
Speaker 7: it was everywhere. I had a hard time getting away
Speaker 7: from it. At that time, I was like still among
Speaker 7: transgender women, we call it boy moting. I was still
Speaker 7: boy mooting, okay, because I was like on HRT and
Speaker 7: it was obvious that something was up, but I wasn't
Speaker 7: like out to people, and I was still going by
Speaker 7: like my old, my dead name, even though that was
Speaker 7: not the name I used on Twitter. That was how
Speaker 7: my parents found out that I had chosen the name Naomi.
Speaker 7: By the way, I hadn't told them that detail yet. Yeah.
Speaker 7: They were like, why are you Naomi? And I was like,
Speaker 7: do you remember, like three months ago when I came
Speaker 7: out as transgender.
Speaker 9: That's how they learned your So that's.
Speaker 7: How that's how they learned that my chosen name was NAILI.
Speaker 9: This is this is wild, okay.
Speaker 2: So this this is like a pivotal moment for I
Speaker 2: mean in more ways than one.
Speaker 8: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 7: I'm like, I'm like back at school one day, a
Speaker 7: lot of my close friends were like, they were like,
Speaker 7: you know, Naomi like you've got you've got friends about you,
Speaker 7: like on Kiwi Farms, which.
Speaker 2: I wish I didn't, but yeah, I know that the
Speaker 2: Fortune and the Kiwi Farm, they they.
Speaker 7: They want nuts, they want nuts about it. And I
Speaker 7: have to say, although I do have some responsibility on
Speaker 7: my own end for how I handled it, I I
Speaker 7: definitely think that that crowd shares a lot of the
Speaker 7: blame for basically taking umbrage with the fact that a
Speaker 7: transgender person had something good happening to them and they
Speaker 7: just sort of like mass reported me at NASA until
Speaker 7: I assume like the thing actually came to their fucking attention.
Speaker 7: Otherwise it would have just otherwise it would have just
Speaker 7: blown over.
Speaker 2: So this was just to get the timeline correct. So
Speaker 2: like when the original Twitter interaction is going viral, it's
Speaker 2: not Homer who reports you to now, No, he's.
Speaker 7: Some old fucking man and he tried. Homer tried very
Speaker 7: hard to get me onfired. Yeah, to be clear, it
Speaker 7: sounds like he didn't even really give a give a
Speaker 7: ship that I said a swear word on the internet.
Speaker 7: He was just like sort of trying to be like
Speaker 7: a funny old man. He came back to me like
Speaker 7: a couple of days later, and he was like, I'm sorry,
Speaker 7: but like, I can't help you. You know, they've made
Speaker 7: up their minds already. And I at this point, it
Speaker 7: was blowing up and it was on the news and shit,
Speaker 7: and I just wanted it to go away. So I
Speaker 7: was like, dude, don't worry about it. I'm just gonna
Speaker 7: go back to taking class.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Oh yeah, I guess that. That's like a thread
Speaker 9: that I feel like was really lost.
Speaker 2: Even though the four Chan people and the Kiwi Firms
Speaker 2: people were mentioned in the original reporting, it was never
Speaker 2: clear that they were the ones mass reporting you who
Speaker 2: are likely.
Speaker 7: Very I don't I don't really know for sure, but
Speaker 7: I I mean I have to assume, right, Like this
Speaker 7: sort of thing happens very often. You know, some some
Speaker 7: some transgender woman says or does something online and everyone
Speaker 7: fucking gangs up on it. I mean you see it
Speaker 7: all the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, It's like a part of like the Kiwi Farm's
Speaker 2: playbook is just to sabotage by any means. There's so
Speaker 2: much going on at and that this is going on
Speaker 2: right as you're starting to come out.
Speaker 7: Like, yeah, it was it was a really it was
Speaker 7: a really complicated and difficult time in my life. I
Speaker 7: was also in this relationship with my girlfriend at the
Speaker 7: time that with the gift of retrospect, I could say
Speaker 7: that that whole relationship was like a little abusive. It
Speaker 7: was definitely bad. I have not spoken to her since
Speaker 7: we broke up. I saw her at a furry convention.
Speaker 7: Did not mention? Did I not mention that I'm like
Speaker 7: a huge, terminally online piece of ship furry weed nerds?
Speaker 9: Well see that. We have so much going on though,
Speaker 9: I was like, I'll get to furries.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but we'll we'll, we'll talk about that. Like I
Speaker 7: I saw her a few times at the convention. We
Speaker 7: never spoke. I would just like see her in the
Speaker 7: crowd and then like turn around and leave.
Speaker 2: Basically, Wow, another really cinematic moment. Yeah, basically going back
Speaker 2: a little bit when this happened, because you just said
Speaker 2: you're a terminally online furry weeb. I want to know
Speaker 2: a little bit about your history of your relationship with
Speaker 2: the internet and with social media, like how do we
Speaker 2: get from zero to August twenty eighteen interaction with Homa Hicam.
Speaker 7: When I was a youngin when I was maybe fourteen
Speaker 7: or fifteen, I was really into reading comics on the internet,
Speaker 7: as any teenage boy is. Yeah, I guess not really
Speaker 7: a teenage boy, but I was fourteen. I had no
Speaker 7: concept of that at the time, So we'll say I
Speaker 7: was a boy, okay, And I'm sure someone is going
Speaker 7: to get mad at me for describing myself that way,
Speaker 7: but I don't care. And I stumbled. I stumbled into
Speaker 7: what I now recognize as as furry web comics, and
Speaker 7: I was reading one in particular, I think it still exists.
Speaker 7: It's called Bittersweet Candy Bowl.
Speaker 9: Good title.
Speaker 7: It was about a bunch of like they're like teenage,
Speaker 7: They're like, they're all cats, They're all cat furries. One
Speaker 7: of them, the comic relief character is a dog. Anyways,
Speaker 7: I'm just on Facebook like shit posting, but like in
Speaker 7: a way where I was like, I guess, trying to
Speaker 7: be low key about being a furry because I was like,
Speaker 7: for whatever reason, terrified of people finding that out about me,
Speaker 7: because I guess I perceived it as being like cringe
Speaker 7: and weird.
Speaker 2: So you're a kid in Buffalo, You've found these furry comics. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what was your conception of how furries were perceived? At
Speaker 2: that time, because this would have been what like early
Speaker 2: twenty tens.
Speaker 7: This would have been around twenty ten to twenty twelve era, Okay,
Speaker 7: And I mean, you know, I wasn't like someone who
Speaker 7: was active on like the forefront of the website of
Speaker 7: the Internet. I like maybe went on Runnit a little bit,
Speaker 7: but I was mostly on Facebook and like nine gag,
Speaker 7: like just looking at shitty.
Speaker 9: Oh my god, I haven't thought about nine gag in
Speaker 9: a day.
Speaker 7: Yeah, wow, But that's I guess I didn't. I didn't
Speaker 7: know any better. So that was how I sort of
Speaker 7: got into being a huge furry. I was always, for
Speaker 7: a long time, like too afraid to like post about
Speaker 7: any of that stuff. Maybe this is like me projecting
Speaker 7: some of my own anxieties or whatever, but I was
Speaker 7: like really terrified of people finding that out about me.
Speaker 7: Until when I and like three maybe four years later,
Speaker 7: I was a senior in high school, my friend Josh
Speaker 7: like really introduced me to like furries as like a concept.
Speaker 7: Fast forward a few years, I'm like eighteen years old.
Speaker 7: I'm a freshman in college, and I'm like chilling in
Speaker 7: my dorm doing homework one day, and I promise these
Speaker 7: stories are connected. I trust you, and this dude, Derek
Speaker 7: walks out without his shirt on. Now, Derek was on
Speaker 7: the swim team, so he just he was dumb as hell,
Speaker 7: but he was just this gorgeous, gorgeous dude. I mean,
Speaker 7: like just gorgeous. That was sort of like one of
Speaker 7: the first inklings that I might not be like exactly
Speaker 7: one hundred percent straight. Of course, up to this point,
Speaker 7: I had been cranking my hog to gay furry porn
Speaker 7: for years for whatever reason. With the furry porn and
Speaker 7: the furry ulufemboys. There's like enough of like a cognitive
Speaker 7: dissonance where it didn't really register that that was like
Speaker 7: gang like that was not heterosexual behavior, but it reached
Speaker 7: a point where I couldn't really ignore it. So so
Speaker 7: fast forward another couple of years. It's it's twenty seventeen.
Speaker 7: Now I was having a lot of strange feelings about
Speaker 7: my gender and my body that I really didn't understand
Speaker 7: at a time. I just knew that I was like
Speaker 7: really uncomfortable and sad and frustrated a lot, and I
Speaker 7: really didn't know why. The one sort of consistent feeling
Speaker 7: that I had was like, oh, man, like girls are
Speaker 7: like so pretty, like I wish I could be that
Speaker 7: pretty or something. It sort of reached a point where
Speaker 7: I could like no longer ignore it. So it's twenty
Speaker 7: seventeen and I'm like, okay, Like, you know, furries Are
Speaker 7: is an online group I was really was kind of
Speaker 7: still am really involved with, and they're overwhelmingly LGBT. I
Speaker 7: don't remember if this was an idea I came up
Speaker 7: with myself, or if someone suggested it to me, but
Speaker 7: the idea came to me to just sort of like,
Speaker 7: try making a persona that's a girl. Just dip your
Speaker 7: toe and see how that makes you feel.
Speaker 2: And had your previous personas not been all guys.
Speaker 7: Okay, you know, cycled through a couple, but don't. I
Speaker 7: don't have any of any of the art of them.
Speaker 7: It's all buried on like old hard drives, buried in
Speaker 7: a cardboard box somewhere in the basement, I think. So
Speaker 7: I was trying a different persona. I made a persona
Speaker 7: that was, you know, a girl, and I specifically I
Speaker 7: made a persona that was a deer because I really
Speaker 7: liked the imagery of having like a female fear that
Speaker 7: still had the distinctly male antlers. As like, you know,
Speaker 7: transgender imagery that felt very compelling to me. I don't
Speaker 7: want to say it happened instantly, but it happened very
Speaker 7: quickly where I just had a moment where I was
Speaker 7: just like, oh fuck, I realized I was actually transgender
Speaker 7: by you know, being a queer furry on the internet.
Speaker 7: The wider quote unquote furry community is not really something
Speaker 7: I really associate myself with anymore, but like, you know,
Speaker 7: it definitely, I can't deny that it was something that
Speaker 7: was really important to me for a long time. And
Speaker 7: it was like this really critical avenue for me to
Speaker 7: like have this space where you can explore yourself like that.
Speaker 7: And I find out that this is super common for
Speaker 7: trans people to have this exact experience. Wow, that happens
Speaker 7: all the time. It's a space where you can literally
Speaker 7: like you literally invent a persona for yourself and then
Speaker 7: you sort of interact through that persona. So that's a
Speaker 7: really really powerful thing for a lot of people.
Speaker 9: I am curious about if you.
Speaker 2: Know, NASA, Homer suck My Dick and Ball's Gate, did
Speaker 2: it affect choose it?
Speaker 9: Choose your title?
Speaker 7: Just I like I like Dick and Ball's gate. Let's
Speaker 7: go with that.
Speaker 2: Did it change the way you use social media? Did
Speaker 2: it change the way you relate to the internet.
Speaker 7: It definitely, it definitely did. For a long time, I
Speaker 7: didn't go back on Twitter for about a year or two.
Speaker 7: I maintained my presence on Tumblr because Tumblr was still
Speaker 7: is low key enough that you can just use Tumblr
Speaker 7: and it's very difficult to trace that back to like
Speaker 7: real life shit. I used something called mast it on
Speaker 7: for a little bit while it was a fad at
Speaker 7: the time, In like the immediate weeks after, I made
Speaker 7: some posts on masted on about my own feelings of it,
Speaker 7: and I was in a very vulnerable place, and I
Speaker 7: remember seeing those screenshots of my very vulnerable posts being
Speaker 7: like circulated around because I didn't really understand how to
Speaker 7: use the privacy setting, so everything I was saying was
Speaker 7: like viewable to the public. These days, I am on Twitter,
Speaker 7: and I guess you could say I've kind of come
Speaker 7: back to the posting where I was before. It's weird
Speaker 7: because in some ways I love to just like, you know,
Speaker 7: post with reckless abandon you know, I definitely understand that
Speaker 7: if you go too wild and too out there that
Speaker 7: things can circle back and bite you in the ass.
Speaker 7: I definitely understand that now, But like I'm on social
Speaker 7: media just kind of doing whatever the hell I want
Speaker 7: because it's like, I guess that's perspective as it feels like, well,
Speaker 7: I already had the worst fucking thing possible that could
Speaker 7: happen to me over social media has already happened, and
Speaker 7: I survived, So I don't give a shit anymore. Like,
Speaker 7: what are you gonna do make me lose my NASA
Speaker 7: intern You.
Speaker 2: Know, with regards to the twenty eighteen suck my dick
Speaker 2: and balls gate?
Speaker 9: Do you have any regrets? Would you change anything?
Speaker 7: Well, I wouldn't have lied and said that someone else
Speaker 7: made the post. I wouldn't have done that. I mean, like,
Speaker 7: you know, there's plenty of things I can look back
Speaker 7: and say if I had behaved differently, I could have
Speaker 7: kept the internship. But it's kind of hard for me
Speaker 7: to say that because that happening was such a turning
Speaker 7: point in my life that sort of indirectly led to
Speaker 7: me being where I'm at today, And it sucked for
Speaker 7: a long time, but it had to be like that
Speaker 7: to get to where I'm at now, and where I'm
Speaker 7: at now is really good.
Speaker 9: That's amazing.
Speaker 2: Ah, thank you, thank you so much for being willing
Speaker 2: to to talk about this experience and just and solve
Speaker 2: one of the Internet's great mysteries.
Speaker 7: Thank you, thank you for having me on AH.
Speaker 2: This interview was genuinely so exciting. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: to Naomi H. And you can follow her at the
Speaker 2: links and the description. I mean, listeners, my sweet sweet listeners.
Speaker 2: It was such a joy to talk to Naomi and
Speaker 2: hear that, in spite of this one off interaction literally
Speaker 2: changing the course of her life, but she's happy with
Speaker 2: where she is now, and fuck you, she is a
Speaker 2: working aerospace engineer and maybe Boeing should stop ragging about
Speaker 2: killing that guy. While some still find heroes and villains
Speaker 2: in the Ballad of Naomi H and Homer Hickam, what
Speaker 2: I've learned in the course of revisiting this story is
Speaker 2: what I learned so often in the making of this show.
Speaker 2: That both parties were just people behaving in their respective
Speaker 2: flawed ways, and that while the consequences of that harmed
Speaker 2: them both, it certainly harmed Naomi H.
Speaker 9: More.
Speaker 2: She made a mistake, an Internet mistake, not an aerospace mistake,
Speaker 2: and the fact that something innocuous like that can lead
Speaker 2: to a targeted transphobic harassment campaign and fundamentally changed relationship
Speaker 2: dynamics with parents and friends. Is I don't know. It
Speaker 2: makes one want to go to the rooftops and scream
Speaker 2: at the gaping maw of the night sky, suck my
Speaker 2: dick and bass. She was right to say that, right,
Speaker 2: And Naomi h your sixteenth minute ends now.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 2: For this week's moment of fun, here is Jake Jillenhall
Speaker 2: claiming he met Homer Hickham before he played him in
Speaker 2: a movie. But listen to the answer, I don't believe him.
Speaker 1: What did you learn about him or with some of
Speaker 1: his experiences that are not in the movie?
Speaker 10: Hm? Well, I think reading the book there are certain
Speaker 10: experiences that you don't find in the movie. There's the
Speaker 10: there there are many times in which, uh, it didn't
Speaker 10: get in unfortunately, because there are certain things that are
Speaker 10: just as interesting. I think that I think that always
Speaker 10: there's there are different aspects of life and the ambiguity
Speaker 10: of life that don't get completely filled in movies because
Speaker 10: it is a separate reality and it's not as and
Speaker 10: reality is slower than the drama in which movies s
Speaker 10: run in so I I I'm I'm not totally I'm
Speaker 10: not sure I cause I forgot the question.
Speaker 2: Sixteenth minute as a production of Cool Zone Media and Iheartradia.
Speaker 2: It is written, posted, and produced by me Jamie Loftus.
Speaker 2: Our executive producers are so the Elichtman and Robert Evans Famazie.
Speaker 2: Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor. Our
Speaker 2: theme song is by Sad thirteen and Pet. Shout outs
Speaker 2: to our dog producer Anderson, my Cat's Flee and Casper
Speaker 2: and my pet rock Bert, who will outlive us all.
Speaker 7: Bye.