00:01:24.240People who may otherwise not be engaged
00:01:26.140with queer political discourse. People like my dad, who I love and who has a genuinely open heart
00:01:32.920and mind about this stuff, but also who sees something written in the New York Times about1.00
00:01:39.240how the crazy queers have overplayed their hand in this whole human rights nonsense and assume0.87
00:01:45.780it's legitimate because of the big name at the top of the paper. So dad, I love you. This one's for0.99
00:01:51.640you. Now, initially, I had a more complicated structure for this episode. But then I realized
00:01:57.340that the most logical way to do this, both for me as a podcaster and for you as a listener,1.00
00:02:03.140is just to read the damn essay. As we go along, we'll get into the meat of questions like,0.99
00:02:08.920what is the best way to ask people in power for human rights? Should gay people have started0.98
00:02:14.340winding down the movement after we won marriage equality? And the question on everyone's lips,
00:02:19.900what is the point of the New York Times? To help me answer, don't I sound excited? I know I am,
00:02:27.960I am. To help us answer such questions, I feel so honored today to be joined by Chase Strangio.
00:02:35.020He is a lawyer at the ACLU and recently became the first transgender lawyer to argue before the
00:02:41.400Supreme Court in the Scrimetti case. And he has also been the recent target of the full weight0.89
00:02:47.440of the New York Times, including of this essay that we are about to dissect. So Chase, welcome
00:02:53.700to the show. Thank you for having me. I am really happy to be here. Chase, it's been a big month.
00:03:01.340How are you doing right now before we start? So I'm actually doing okay. And that's because
00:03:09.160for me, I think there's sort of two things that are always true. And one is that I am always
00:03:16.020just completely and utterly obsessed with being queer and trans. And so I am, no matter what is
00:03:22.820going on in the world, no matter what the public discourse about our community is, I'm always
00:03:26.660grounded in that reality of deep, deep love. And it brings me so much joy and happiness. And I think
00:03:32.460of it every day as such a gift to get to live as myself. That drives both my work and my sense of
00:03:38.660groundedness in the world. So that keeps me doing okay. And I am also okay because it's summer.
00:03:46.020And I love summer. And even though New York smells so bad, I am just like really grateful for the opportunity to walk around, to go on trips on the weekend and to try to live my best trans New Yorker life in 2025.
00:04:05.300Yeah, the scent of urine is really permeating through the windows as we speak. But that's okay. Because in the words of Addison Rae, I love New York. It's my religion.0.69
00:04:15.080So before we get into this essay, Chase, there's two things that I want to establish for a little context.
00:04:22.180One is the New York Times role in the current very successful anti-trans panic.
00:04:32.520I want to yield the first part of that to you.
00:04:34.880For people who aren't super plugged into what's going on over there, could you explain like what the deal is with the New York Times and trans people?
00:04:42.060Yeah, so I have been really focused on the way the New York Times has covered trans people, our rights and our bodies for the last decade, because it is really striking.
00:04:54.740And I think the first thing to keep in mind is that there is a very outsized focus on trans people within the pages of the New York Times.
00:05:05.760And one of the ways that political scapegoating can happen is when a group of people who are a very small minority are given outsized attention because people have this distorted idea of how many people there are and how salient questions about their life are.
00:05:24.460And this is one of the key things about New York Times coverage that we have to put into context, which is that front page, both magazine and newspaper coverage has been devoted to trans people.
00:05:36.660So whatever that coverage was going to be, that outsized focus for a group of people that's a very small percentage of the population should raise some alarms.
00:05:46.260And then when you look at the actual contents of that coverage, it should raise even further alarms because a lot of it is focused on some sort of entry point of, is there a big conspiracy about trans people?
00:06:04.460Are trans people coming for the definition of womanhood? Are there too many trans kids? How are schools dealing with the increasing number of trans people?
00:06:15.900who are coming out at younger ages? Why are all these kids asking for puberty blockers?0.74
00:06:21.940And the problem with that entry point is that it does not provide the reader with any context.
00:06:28.740It is just offering these sort of suggestions that there is a problem, that there is a change,
00:06:36.660and that there's something people should be concerned about. And then in answering those
00:06:41.380questions that they've presented in this outsized fixation, they're laundering right-wing rhetoric
00:06:46.380about trans life and making it seem more palatable. And then over time, what happens is it becomes the
00:06:52.440norm. It becomes the baseline for people who aren't steeped in a conversation about transness.
00:06:58.860And that's the sort of sea that we're living in right now, which is that there is this reflexive
00:07:03.620sense that something about trans medical care is off. There's reflexive sense that there's just
00:07:08.720all these new identities popping up and it's a fad. There's this reflexive sense that someone
00:07:15.960is harmed by the existence of trans people. And by creating that debate and that doubt,
00:07:22.400it has been a very fertile ground for a very well-funded right-wing movement to push a very,
00:07:31.240very insidious political and legal agenda. And those two things are working in concert and have
00:07:36.500been for the last 10 years there was this great episode of the podcast you're wrong about with
00:07:42.700tuck woodstock that if you're interested in more about the new york times and their trans coverage
00:07:46.240i think you should totally go listen to but they'll talk to like doctors who provide trans
00:07:52.500health care and then like someone they found on i hate trans people one two three dot co and be
00:07:59.600like well let's listen to both sides and are they all equal maybe let's find out yeah i mean and i
00:08:05.260think that's one of the problems with this outside coverage without the context. You're sort of
00:08:11.240presented this idea that there's the pro-trans medical care side and then the anti-trans medical
00:08:16.100care side. And then on the pro side, you have the American Medical Association, the American
00:08:20.560Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, the American Psychological Association, all the
00:08:25.540parents who know their kids. You have decades of that evidence and clinical experience. And on the
00:08:30.520other side, it's like the Catholic Medical Association and the same and people who were
00:08:36.620experts in opposition to the provision of abortion. But that context isn't provided. It's just
00:08:42.580the names of two people. And they're both doctors. And yet they're completely ideologically
00:08:49.360embedded when it comes to this opposition side. And I think that it also requires some
00:08:57.600you know, lack of critical thinking, you know, on the part of the reader that we're increasingly
00:09:01.640seeing, which is that the story is trans people are being given health care easily without any
00:09:11.100thought and their parents are just going along for the ride and all good with it. And of course,
00:09:17.560we know that the majority of LGBT young people, you know, experience some tension with their
00:09:21.820families. There's a long process of their families even coming to terms with their trans identities
00:09:25.860in the first instance. And we still live in the United States where you have the worst health0.89
00:09:30.580system you could possibly imagine. So getting to see the doctor takes six to 12 months. And then
00:09:35.900getting to see the specialist takes another six to 12 months. And so this idea that people are
00:09:41.100walking into CVS and getting this medication alone, like it's Advil, is just really does
00:09:47.460not comport with what we should know about our health system and what we should know about our
00:09:50.760family. Oh, and of course, the claims that children are getting sex changes in schools.
00:09:55.140In schools. I mean, you know, it's, I mean, I have a, I have a 13 year old at New York City
00:09:59.520public schools and there's no bathrooms that work. There's barely any art classes. And let
00:10:04.720me tell you, there are no medical procedures. So there's, there's no funding for band-aids
00:10:11.280or crayons, but surely they're having transgender operations in between social studies and geometry.
00:10:18.640So I want to talk a little bit about Andrew Sullivan and establish who this guy is who
00:10:24.020wrote this essay in the New York Times, which is essentially just like a respectability politics
00:10:29.160manifesto. If you behaved a little more normally, we wouldn't be in this mess. If you gays were
00:10:34.960just a little more like me, we'd be good. So he is a middle-aged white cisgender guy. He is a0.88
00:10:42.400self-identified Catholic conservative out gay man. He has had a decades-long career in journalism
00:10:49.180that's turned him into kind of a celebrity journalist i'd say uh the early years of that
00:10:54.300career he used to be genuinely ahead of the curve in supporting gay marriage uh chiefly since the
00:11:01.14090s andrew sullivan has taken sort of a casual interest in race science chase you know about
00:11:07.980this i do i do um so and he is famous for while he was the editor at a new republic publishing
00:11:16.060the bell curve or sections of the bell curve and ultimately left the new republic and i do think
00:11:24.100that one of the threads of a lot of his writing are different themes of genetic superiority
00:11:31.580and some of that sort of adopting these uh you know race science eugenics frameworks um for for
00:11:40.360a lot of his thought. And I think you can also see it overall in his analysis of of power and
00:11:45.820support for alignment with with power, which obviously in the United States in particular
00:11:51.120means aligning with, you know, systems of white supremacy that elevate white men into positions
00:11:58.360of power and leadership. He has been for decades sort of like casually interested in the, you know,
00:12:05.160obviously widely debunked, very racist junk science belief that there's a link between race and IQ.0.94
00:12:10.360He previously said in an interview with the New York Times just a couple of years ago that he thinks that Jews could be genetically smarter than other people.0.92
00:12:18.420So I love that this is the person who gets the word in the paper of record about the state of trans issues in this country.
00:12:24.720Let's talk a little bit about his decades history of having positions on queer issues.
00:12:30.780So in 1996, after antiretroviral therapy became available for people living with HIV, that is the drug cocktail that turned HIV into something that you can live with and manage instead of die from.
00:12:44.420But obviously, also, there are extreme disparities between who has access to it.
00:12:49.720Andrew Sullivan wrote in The New York Times magazine that when those meds came out, the plague was over.
00:12:55.880And this is something that I think we have to keep in mind in general when we get pieces that are talking about movements gone too far, the radicalization, and then you can trace within both the individual writer or within the movement itself, the same recurring themes, this idea that achievement of a baseline need for the most powerful and wealthy within a subset of the community means that the demands are over.
00:13:25.280and that there is an opportunity to, you know, sort of walk away, that is part of every story.
00:13:33.240And I think what's interesting here is that this particular writer has been making this
00:13:38.780same point over and over again for the last several decades. When, you know, the most privileged in our
00:13:44.860queer and trans communities have access to something, then the suggestion is that we walk
00:13:49.820away. Now, I think that's wrong for two reasons. One is that it is immoral and unethical to only
00:13:57.320service the people who have the most power. But even if we took the idea that that was a morally
00:14:03.280okay position, if you don't continue to demand justice, that it just gets taken away from
00:14:09.720everyone. It's not self-serving to quote unquote, walk away at the very beginning of accessing
00:14:15.920rights or material needs for a community yeah andrew sullivan's idea of social justice is one
00:14:22.160in which where once he's gotten what he needs he declares that like all efforts should end because
00:14:28.360like he's good now when he writes that the the aids crisis ended when meds became available
00:14:35.880theoretically right it's like well who were they available to well mostly rich white people in the
00:14:41.340United States. And this is still the case. Like AIDS medication is still in desperate need from
00:14:46.200underserved communities. I mean, even the availability of PrEP, we know that it's
00:14:50.240less available to black people, less available to trans people, especially low income trans people
00:14:55.360of color. You know, there's such disparity in the availability of these lifesaving drugs.
00:14:59.580But for Andrew Sullivan in 1996, it was over once he was able to get antiretroviral therapy.
00:15:05.880For basically the entirety of his decades long journalism career, Andrew Sullivan has argued
00:15:11.140broadly speaking that the best pathway forward for gay people is assimilation. Jace, could you
00:15:18.240explain assimilation versus like liberation as like social justice concepts? Yeah, I mean,
00:15:24.120I think specifically how this has played out in the gay rights movement, the LGBT movement is
00:15:29.640is the question of, you know, does our movement seek to join, you know, every aspect of dominant
00:15:37.380society and assimilate into the structures that exist? Or is there a demand through our call for
00:15:45.240justice to change those structures, to offer a more liberatory framework informed by our life
00:15:50.740experiences? And this is a tension in all movements. You know, you can look at any civil
00:15:54.860rights movement and there's sort of a rights-based orientation towards, you know, equal access to the
00:16:00.220same things just as they exist for others. And then sort of let's change things so that they're
00:16:05.020better for everyone and from the sensibility that we bring to it. And I think that there's
00:16:10.440challenges to both orientations. I think that I would say one of the salient critiques of1.00
00:16:14.940an assimilationist model is that the dominant society has a power structure. It has a power
00:16:22.440structure that once you assimilate into your community, your marginalized community is going0.68
00:16:27.980to reproduce that power structure. And through the process of demanding, you know, equality
00:16:34.860under those formalistic terms, you know, there will always be disadvantages that are unequally
00:16:41.360distributed across a community. That's sort of the main way to think about it.
00:16:46.040A little bit more of Andrew Sullivan hot take history. In 2000,
00:16:50.920in 2007 he opposed hate crime laws saying that they impeded on free speech also in 2007 he
00:17:02.120argued against the inclusion of trans people as a protected class under the employment
00:17:07.600non-discrimination act saying that it should basically just be a gay person thing that like
00:17:13.020why do we have to do this whole like transgender people too it's gonna weigh us down interestingly
00:17:18.480he argues in the essay that we're going to read today about how great it is that trans people1.00
00:17:23.700have anti-discrimination protections but it's like okay but you didn't support that when it
00:17:29.420was hard to support in 2019 he wrote a column in intelligencer about how a lot of trans youth he0.61
00:17:37.280claims are probably just gay and need time to grow out of it which is something he's like still
00:17:42.540repeating today like it's he's been doing this for a really long time and it's like well if all0.71
00:17:46.740of the trans people who are transitioning are actually just cisgender homosexuals like why
00:17:50.940haven't we heard from more of those people you know in 2021 he wrote that it should be illegal
00:17:56.520for doctors to prescribe hormones to trans youth and so going into this essay the premise that
00:18:04.200we're supposed to accept is that like we all want freedom for LGBT people but Andrew Sullivan the
00:18:10.640author is saying well I just disagree with the methods I think we're being too extreme to try
00:18:15.520to achieve the thing that we all want. But then looking at this history, kind of the question that
00:18:20.360stands out to me is like, well, does Andrew Sullivan actually want freedom for LGBT people?
00:18:24.720It kind of very much feels like that viral tweet that was like,
00:18:28.280this does not help your cause, says the guy who hates you and your cause.
00:18:32.020That's one of the themes of New York Times coverage, too, that we see is this, we're just
00:18:39.020trying to help you while we are undermining your entire framework for existing. The Spider-Man
00:18:48.480meme, when the articles came out after Scrimetti, that sort of like, who did this? Who caused this?
00:18:55.180And it was, you know, it's the coverage. It's the coverage that caused this. And yet they were so
00:19:00.740eager to put the blame on the group of people who has desperately been trying to dig ourselves out
00:19:08.240of thousands of bills limiting our rights, a public discourse that situates us as a threat
00:19:13.480to others. And then the ongoing suggestion that this is a debate that needs to be waged.
00:23:06.320I was counsel in Obergefell, which is the case that got gay marriage.
00:23:10.240And I was also counsel in Bostock, the case that secured Title VII employment protections.
00:23:14.440The ACLU was counseling both, and all the same organizations that worked on each of these things were all part of these fights. No new entity came in and drastically changed the contours of this very, by the way, conservative demand of legal equality. And that's where I'm operating in a very conservative way.
00:23:34.340So that piece of it, I think, is important just as a, you know, in terms of who's been doing what and where. And then the other thing is that everything that happens post-Obergefell is, you know, in one sense prompted by the right coming in, trying to undermine marriage and the non-discrimination protections that he hails as the right demand.
00:23:55.280And they're the ones who introduced the attacks on trans people to a road support, which he is now helping to facilitate on the very things that a lot of the people who are saying, oh, the movement used to be making the right asks.
00:24:08.500Well, those things were under threat by the attacks on trans people, just as much as our rights as trans people are under attack.
00:33:59.820Ground News has been a really fascinating and honestly singular tool for me.
00:34:05.000as someone who has spent a lot of time desperately trying to understand how fractured our shared
00:34:11.020reality has become, especially in the last few years, as all of our information diets seem to
00:34:16.540be getting further and further away from one another. Ground News is also purely subscriber
00:34:20.980funded. It's ad-free and not backed by any venture capitalists, so it can keep its mission and have
00:34:26.320no allegiance to billionaires, unlike, I don't know, the New York Times. If you would like to
00:34:31.660subscribed to Ground News, you can get 40% off a Vantage plan right now at ground.news slash
00:34:38.620fruity. Or scan the QR code on the screen if you're watching the video episode. That is ground.news
00:34:45.440slash fruity. Thank you so much to Ground News for being a very timely sponsor to this specific
00:34:51.540episode. And now let's get back to it. Should we keep reading because he's about to get really
00:34:58.880petty okay i'm ready they needed a new banner for that so the rainbow flag invented back in 1978 at
00:35:08.700the request of harvey milk was replaced over the last few years by a new progress flag representing
00:35:14.740intersectional oppression black and brown stripes were added to the rainbow for black and brown
00:35:19.660people and the people lost during the aids crisis and pink light blue and white for trans people
00:35:25.280That flag now demarcates not simply a place friendly to all types of people, as the old rainbow flag did, but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome.
00:35:38.860Queer was a way of summing up the new regime, a clear sign that this really was a different movement from the gay, lesbian, and transgender civil rights movement of the past.
00:35:49.120it's a word that can easily trigger gay men over 40 who remember it as the last slur they once0.85
00:35:55.440heard before being bashed in the head but one of the striking aspects of members of the younger
00:36:00.400queer generation is their disdain for those who came before them i read this and i was just like0.63
00:36:06.080whoa we're doing flag discourse in the new york times this can't be good the thing is like just0.85
00:36:15.800like they're like you can't even say gay or lesbian anymore it's like go to any pride parade
00:36:20.980andrew sullivan which i know you don't because you probably think that they're like over the top1.00
00:36:24.900and you're nothing like those faggots on the street but like you you will see any flag they0.99
00:36:29.780are all there you can get the six color one you can get the 16 color one no one gives a shit it's1.00
00:36:36.100like so much of this stuff focuses on like i'm being oppressed by like one person who's like0.75
00:36:42.760an autistic teenager in tumblr in iowa who uses neo pronouns like andrew sullivan you're fine
00:36:48.880well first of all i am over 40 so it's also and have been the subject of slurs and since i've
00:36:54.860been little and and so it's this isn't like special um to have experienced violence and
00:37:01.020oppression it's horrible it's just we all get we can all respond in different ways but this
00:37:06.560suggestion that members of the young the younger queer generation like whatever that is um is their
00:37:12.260disdain for those who came before them. I mean, every single thing I do is in honor of those who
00:37:18.140taught me and came before me. And that there are lots of different types of people who came before
00:37:23.880us. There's not just one, A, but B, it's like, we're also those of us who are trying to, you know,
00:37:30.940have a critical analysis at all times are following the tradition of Urba Shibad, of
00:37:36.680Sylvia Rivera, of Miss Major, of Lorena Borjas, of Flawless Sabrina. That's who I live my life
00:37:42.540for. So I don't have disdain for people who came before me. I am in debt every single day. And
00:37:49.420Polly Murray is the person who I am most inspired by. So I just that that's just not right.
00:37:55.620Yeah, you know, I was at gender liberation march in Washington, DC. I can't remember,
00:38:01.800maybe like six months ago, maybe even a year ago at this point. But I remember I met Miss Major
00:38:06.200there who is a Black trans woman who has been, you know, doing LGBTQ movement work for so long.
00:38:13.820And like, she was there to support the gender liberation movement, which is a movement right
00:38:18.440now that is pushing for a much more radical freedom than, you know, Andrew Sullivan is,
00:38:23.440for example. I don't have disdain for my queer elders. Like, I have a little bit of disdain for
00:38:29.660Andrew Sullivan personally. He's just describing a very specific type of elder, which is sort of a
00:38:34.960white gay man shaking his fist at the cloud kind of thing.
00:38:37.960Yeah, I mean, let's read to the next paragraph0.92
00:38:39.640because I think he himself invokes such a thing.
00:43:21.840I didn't and don't believe that being a man or a woman has nothing to do with
00:43:26.360biology. And it's like, well, to your point, like, okay, well,
00:43:30.620what part of it is biology and what is biology? And like, what are you talking,
00:43:34.200what are you talking about? Then what is it?
00:43:35.520And who are you responding to? Like, what is this? Like who,
00:43:38.220who told you like like this it's all these like straw men because you're like you're just fighting
00:43:44.140like these ideas that sound like the thing that is most upsetting to people but it's also not
00:43:51.000the thing that any of us are precisely saying it's so crazy because i was reading the new york
00:43:56.400times comment section on this essay and there was a lot of pushback but there was also a lot
00:44:01.200of people being like finally this should be required reading and i'm like this is probably
00:44:06.620if you feel that way it's probably just reaffirming your own bigotry and lack of desire to like learn
00:44:12.240about anything because this is poorly written and these are poorly parsed out ideas and and i also
00:44:18.140just want to add to anyone who says like my sexual attraction whether it's homosexuality
00:44:24.140heterosexuality what have you is based in biology it's chromosomal and i'm like well that's just not
00:44:30.040how attraction works. Google a picture of Hunter Schaefer and Google a picture of Lath Ashley or
00:44:36.800any number of trans women and men. And tell me that your attraction and that your understanding
00:44:42.480of your own sexuality is based not on what you see, not on what you instinctually feel when you
00:44:47.480look at someone, but on chromosomes. You're lying to yourself. You're lying. What are you talking
00:44:53.900Yeah, I just, I think that we just have to accept that it is more complicated than that. And I just don't know what would be so scary about accepting that reality. But I do think that a lot of these very, very strong aversions to trans people, and to frankly, to access to gender affirming medical care at a young age, is this idea that all of a sudden, our attractions might be to people in a way that we were not suspecting.
00:45:21.600And there's deep anxiety about that in a society that has deep anxiety about sexual attraction and desire.
00:45:29.560Quote, I'm more than happy to accept that there are some people, not all that many, who don't fit in that binary and want to be protected from discrimination and allowed full access to medical interventions in order to live lives that are true to who they are.
00:46:56.220What if I redefined what it is to be heterosexual and imposed it on straight people?
00:47:00.920Or changed what it means to be a man or a woman, for that matter?
00:47:04.740Then it ceases to be accommodation of a minority and becomes a society-wide revolution,0.55
00:47:10.400an overreach that would soon lead to a potent and sane backlash
00:47:14.000against not just trans people, but gay men and lesbians as well. Can I just say this whole thing
00:47:19.000is just like one long JK Rowling tweet? I mean, the other thing is that we have like, I really I'm
00:47:23.960a big fan of just like taking a step back for a second. Because first of all, I mean, certainly
00:47:29.300as a lawyer, the last thing I'm doing is abolishing the sex binary for the entire society. If anything,0.89
00:47:33.740I'm reinforcing it in ways that, you know, are probably unfortunate. But this is exactly what's
00:47:39.700been said about every movement. When women demanded to work outside the home, it was seen as1.00
00:47:45.120abolishing the sex binary for everyone, as making a revolutionary demand that society change. It0.99
00:47:50.300wasn't just about what it meant for the women. It was what it meant for men. Every demand for
00:47:55.680inclusion and equality, even the most basic for a group, have been exactly framed as this,
00:48:01.840as demanding society change. If Black people and white people are going to go to school together,
00:48:07.820That is not equality. That's transforming society. If people can marry someone of a different race, that's going to create a totally different society. If gay people can get married, that is not just equality. That is transforming society and demanding that everyone go along. So again, let's not exceptionalize this critique. It's old and consistent across history.
00:48:30.920And I want to add here that like, as someone who does talk about queer issues and lefty politics to a large audience online, I am aware of optics. I understand that there's a lot of people who think the way that Andrew Sullivan is writing in this essay.
00:48:47.820And that regardless of how they got there, it matters that I'm able to change their mind or offer them something different. And it matters that someone like my dad could be very susceptible to adopting this style of thinking from Andrew Sullivan and thinking that these wild statements like you'll be crucified if you use the regular rainbow flag or you can't even say that gender exists anymore because everything's so radical and whatever.
00:49:14.580whatever. I guess my question is for the people who are starting to adopt that mindset, I guess
00:49:22.140I just want to ask, did you hear those things from a trans person? Did you hear those things
00:49:27.720from someone who believes that you, that it's homophobic to fly the wrong flag or that you'll
00:49:33.340be killed if you use the wrong pronoun by accident? Or did you hear it from Andrew Sullivan
00:49:38.000or someone on Fox News? Did you hear it from a fear monger? Did you hear it from an actual person
00:49:43.080claiming it earnestly. You know what I mean? I just again, it's this conflating of all of all
00:49:47.920different things. It's sort of taking a tweet and saying this is the entire movement's objective
00:49:52.280and suggesting that the demands we make in court are the same as the, you know, things we say with
00:50:00.180our friends and that, you know, a lot is being taken out of context. And, you know, I come from
00:50:04.880a conservative family. I go travel all over the country. I have all different types of conversations
00:50:10.140all the time and believe in it fully and have people in my life who think all different things.
00:50:15.680This idea that there's one way that we're all moving or one thing that the movement is trying
00:50:20.320to do that's really scary is a product of the way in which movements are always discredited.
00:50:26.880And it's just a tale as old as time. Every movement has been sort of cast as too much,
00:50:32.600too extreme, moving too fast. And so I think we have to ask ourselves, who's telling us that and
00:50:37.380why. Quote, the gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, had long asked for simple
00:50:43.680liberal equality and mutual respect. Live and let live. Reform, not revolution. No one's straight
00:50:52.160marriage would change if gay marriage arrived, we pledged. You can bring up your children however
00:50:57.940you like. We will leave you alone. We will leave your children alone. I don't know. I guess I
00:51:07.280guess, die young or grow old enough to see yourself become Anita Bryant, right?
00:51:11.940I mean, I think that's, yeah, there you go. And again, I just want to say that it was seen as
00:51:18.600revolution to demand marriage equality. So this is not, oh, it was such a simple, you know, demand
00:51:25.240of, you know, liberal equality and mutual respect. I mean, one could say the same thing about trans
00:51:30.800people accessing healthcare. We're just asking for equality and mutual respect. Our accessing
00:51:35.860health care doesn't change anything about anyone else. We're just asking to go to the bathroom at
00:51:41.280school, at work. It doesn't affect you. You're not, you don't have to be with us like in our
00:51:46.260little bathroom stall or at the urinal. It just, our existence is not actually changing yours.
00:51:52.400Your perception that it does is your choice. Just as the idea that gay people getting married was
00:51:57.560changing the nature of marriage was someone else's choice about how to pass the marriage. So again,
00:52:03.640you can put every single one of these things is either revolution or demand for liberal equality.
00:52:09.740It's a choice how you cast it. Also, and again, just a historical, you know, this, this idea,
00:52:16.240he says that the gay rights movement, especially in the marriage years, was all about reform,
00:52:20.820not revolution. One of my favorite old sort of vintage gay protest photos is this one that I'm
00:52:28.240going to throw up on the screen if you're watching a video episode, but it's from San Francisco Pride
00:52:33.300in 1990 and it is a group of people holding up a sign that says no apologies no assimilation
00:52:42.000and in front of it is this queen in heels voguing down on the ground it's just a fabulous image and
00:52:50.740it's one that i think andrew sullivan could benefit from seeing quote but in the wake of
00:52:57.280victory, LGBTQ groups reneged on that pledge. They demanded that the entire society change0.52
00:53:03.340in a fundamental way so that the sex binary no longer counted. Elementary school children were0.90
00:53:09.540taught that being a boy or a girl might not have anything to do with their bodies and that their
00:53:14.180parents had merely guessed whether they were a boy or a girl when they were born. In fact, sex was no
00:53:20.040longer to be recognized at birth. It was now merely a sign penciled in. We got new terms like chest
00:53:26.300feeding for breastfeeding and birthing parent for mother you can't even say mother anymore
00:53:32.800exactly it's like we all say mother we all say breastfeeding you know and the reality is that
00:53:39.940some people use different words for themselves and again that is not a demand that other people
00:53:45.040change how they are operating in their own lives this sense that you know the fact that a trans
00:53:52.880dad exists and gave birth to his child it doesn't actually affect anyone else it's you can make it0.62
00:53:59.780affect you by getting very agitated about it they love to lean into and when i say they i just mean0.72
00:54:04.500conservatives because that's ultimately like all this is despite being published by a gay man0.87
00:54:08.500despite being in the new york times like this is just like a conservative screed they always do0.85
00:54:13.900this like it's leaning into the like your kid could go to school and come home transgender
00:54:17.940gender and it's like i've like talked to like teachers in california and they're like i am in
00:54:23.240the most liberal district in the country and like we're not doing what they pretend that we're doing
00:54:27.900but it really it's the same thing anita bryant did she said we we can't have gay teachers in0.97
00:54:33.360schools because they're preying on your children and they're going to turn them into homosexuals0.82
00:54:36.560yeah i mean again this this idea is entirely not new it's the way that you know the movement
00:54:45.420against LGBT people has always centered the the risk to children of proximity to queerness
00:54:53.060it's it's Anita Bryant save the children campaign it's just being repackaged we're so back the 70s
00:54:59.560has never been back quick shout out to NordVPN for sponsoring this episode I obviously write
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00:56:49.320Chase, do you want to take the next paragraph? Because I fear you are about to be invoked.
00:56:52.820I fear it too. I fear it too. Okay. A key leader of this movement, Chase Ranjio, informed us that
00:57:02.000quote a penis is not a male body part it's just an unusual body part for a woman
00:57:06.520end quote we all were suddenly expected to announce our pronouns as if everyone didn't
00:57:11.520already know then neo pronouns z them were added the movement came up with a mantra trans women
00:57:18.400are women trans men are men it was not an argument or a proposition to be explored or debated it was
00:57:23.640a theological command in all caps was there any debate among gays and lesbians about this profound
00:57:29.760change a vote taken or even a poll of gay men and lesbians none that i can find or recall
00:57:34.880okay this is all you so i just want to say at the at the top the the quote of mine supposedly
00:57:44.200is referring back to a different new new york times article and to two unnamed sources who
00:57:49.400seem to remember exactly what i said in a meeting in 2016 i also think that whatever i did or didn't
00:57:55.420say, I certainly don't remember to be perfectly honest, because it was 2016. I also think what
00:58:01.100we say in meetings, when we're having what we should be having, which is robust debate about
00:58:06.020anything, is not the same as a movement command. And it certainly is not the same as a public
00:58:10.460command on how other people live or act. And I think one thing that's been repeated over time
00:58:15.840is this idea that a challenge to some way in which we're talking is demand that other people
00:58:23.020change everything about their lives. But instead, it could just as easily be understood as I think
00:58:27.860it should be as us asking questions about what it is that we're doing and saying and how it affects
00:58:33.980others. That is one part of this project. And the reality is that in 2016, North Carolina became the
00:58:43.160first state to codify in law, quote unquote, biological sex. There was no notion of biological
00:58:49.640sex in law. There was just sex. And sex had a lot of different meanings in law, just as it does in
00:58:55.580medicine. And the invocation of this biological sex construct as a legal matter emerged solely
00:59:02.760and exclusively to exclude trans people from legal protections. This entire reference to the
00:59:08.000Slate article from 2016 to the meeting I was in was about contending with this new paradigm of
00:59:13.840using the term biological sex as a legal term to target transgender people, which emerged in 2016.
00:59:21.740It was not an organic legal concept that was imported from England and common law and then
00:59:26.040was persistent through the centuries. It's a 2016 concept that emerges as part of the backlash to
00:59:31.680Obergefell and with the goal of not just targeting trans people, but undermining marriage equality
00:59:37.280and protections for LGBT people. And I just want to emphasize before we move on that this is another0.63
00:59:43.160one of the things just like you can't even say this anymore that anymore conservatives love to
00:59:47.400do like and the neo pronouns look i'm always gonna call someone what they want to be called
00:59:52.760i really just like don't care and it does not impose anything in my life like i and if you
00:59:58.240feel like the biggest issue in your life is someone asking you to use their pronouns i'm
01:00:01.380very happy for you that you don't have many issues but also i want to know a single person
01:00:06.080in andrew sullivan's life that has asked him to use neo pronouns for them i just don't believe he
01:00:11.080knows any I know one yeah and I didn't even know what a neo pronoun was so and if Chase Strangio
01:00:17.980doesn't know then Andrew Sullivan she does just means that yes and I too will use whatever people
01:00:22.620ask me but that I again is I live a very trans life and this has not come up for me quote as in
01:00:29.840other social justice spaces dissent was equated with bigotry dissenters from gender ideology
01:00:35.880dissenters from gender ideology are routinely unfriended shunned and shamed almost all of the
01:00:45.860gay men trans people and lesbians who have confided in me that they don't agree with this
01:00:50.220or think that jk rowling and martina navratilova have some good points have said so sotto voce
01:00:57.420i feel like that's an italian expression i don't know it i'm sorry less to anyone over here that's0.93
01:01:03.160the extremely intolerant and illiberal atmosphere that now exists in the gay, lesbian, and transgender
01:01:08.520space. This little community used to champion all manner of expression or argument or speech,1.00
01:01:14.800eccentrics and visionaries. Now it's fearful, self-centered, and extremely uptight.
01:01:20.380Debate has been all but snuffed out. Total uniformity of thought is demanded.
01:01:26.440I mean, this, again, this just is not true. I mean, even just the framing, it sort of suggests
01:01:31.700that there's this thing called gender ideology and then there's things that there are people
01:01:35.280dissenting from it. But first of all, we are not a gender ideology. Gender ideology is a right-wing
01:01:41.580criticism of trans existence and advocacy. So I think we need to be really clear that when you're
01:01:49.880casting something as gender ideology, when what we're talking about is just trans people existing0.95
01:01:56.620and not asking anything of you that, you know, I think that should raise some alarms. But I guess0.91
01:02:04.640the question is, who are we supposed to be talking to? And what does it mean to compromise and allow
01:02:10.700for dissenting voices? Because I listen and compromise every single day of my life. I've
01:02:17.360been at the ACLU for 13 years that we have made incredibly, you know, modest conservative demands
01:02:24.440that in this article, they are celebrated. Marriage equality, inclusion within Title VII,
01:02:30.900access to healthcare for trans people, ability to go to school without discrimination.
01:02:36.160And that is being cast as extreme and imposing upon others. And I think that we're caricatured
01:02:44.200when we are, you know, really open-minded. I mean, I've actually tried to engage with some
01:02:50.300of the people on that list and have not been met with a very hospitable openness to engagement.
01:02:57.280And my experience has been when I am open to engagement and compromise, I met with extremism
01:03:05.100and categorical bans on healthcare, sports, restrooms.
01:03:12.400It's also just interesting because he's like, well, what happens if you agree with a little
01:03:18.860And I'm like, well, can we be a little bit specific about which thing you're agreeing with? Because like JK Rowling doesn't think trans people exist. JK Rowling thinks trans women are predatory men who want access to, you know, women's bathrooms and changing rooms. So what exactly are you agreeing with her on?
01:03:35.460And again, it's just like the premise of this article is like, we all want equality. We all want lives with dignity and happiness. You're just going about it the wrong way. And I'm like, well, but if you agree with some of the things that JK Rowling is saying about trans people, Andrew Sullivan, then I don't think we want the same thing. I don't think we're on the same page at all.
01:03:55.560I feel this way with like Bill Maher too. Bill Maher will always be like, I'm a liberal. But you know, the way that the liberals today have gone about it is and I'm like, you could just be a Republican. Like you could just be a conservative. You can just even just like self identify as a white supremacist, instead of speaking over these movements that you're not actually a part of or invested in the success of.
01:04:18.780I will also add, it's very funny in this tangent about like, the tolerant left, not so tolerant after all. What about if you agree with Martina Navratilova? Well, Martina Navratilova blocked me on Twitter, despite there being no interaction history between us ever. So I don't know, maybe Martina Navratilova should be a little bit more tolerant of Matt Bernstein.
01:06:36.880So right after Obergefell, if you look at the moments when this focus on bathrooms and sports takes hold, it's upon a vote on a non-discrimination ordinance in Houston, just simple civil rights protections, liberal demands for equality, and in Charlotte, North Carolina that results in HB2 with a bathroom ban across the state.
01:06:57.600And from there, because of the sort of success of the rhetoric, trans kids in schools are the thing that become the focal point of the opposition in an effort to undermine civil rights protections for LGBT people.
01:07:11.540the movement to not put kids into the conversation, that this was a way in which our opposition was
01:07:20.420trying to undermine the successes that we were having. And when we tried to just divert attention
01:07:25.920from them, we lost even more catastrophically. And it was an unsuccessful opposition strategy,
01:07:31.640and we lost the non-discrimination protections. So that's number one. But another thing to keep
01:07:37.000in mind is that the quote unquote gay rights movement also had to contend with questions
01:07:42.940about children. That was in fact the central opposition to marriage equality. And I know
01:07:48.960because I spent 12 years of my life litigating marriage cases and the entire conversation in
01:07:55.320those cases and the justification for the bans was that it wasn't good for children to be raised
01:08:00.240by same sex couples. And the entire conversation turned on the welfare of children and having0.96
01:08:04.680conversations about children. And at the same time, we affirmatively were making demands for
01:08:10.240gay and lesbian people specifically to adopt children in states that have bans on such
01:08:14.900adoption. The first case that I worked on at the ACLU was one of the last bans on gay and lesbian
01:08:20.040people being foster parents in Nebraska. So all of that to say is it's not true that this never
01:08:27.000came up in the gay rights advocacy that Andrew Sullivan focuses on as sort of the model. And
01:08:32.560it's also not true in the context of trans advocacy that LGBT people and the movement
01:08:37.800put kids in the center. They were put in the center, but we had an obligation to preserve
01:08:43.060the equality demands we were making to fight back and to protect the young people. And the last
01:08:48.120thing I'll say about the parents here is that in this context, it is the cisgender, mostly cisgender
01:08:55.220parents of trans kids who are having their decisions about their own children overridden
01:09:00.020by the government when it comes to the medical care decisions, that it's the parents whose
01:09:05.460consent is being overwritten by the government.
01:09:08.040You're just a wealth of history and knowledge.
01:09:30.120Your daughter found herself running against a trans girl, in parentheses, a biological male, in athletics.
01:09:36.500Children in elementary schools got to pick pronouns, and some children socially transitioned at school without their parents' knowledge or permission.0.56
01:09:44.020I suppose there are other ways you can resurrect the ghost of Anita Bryant and all the homophobic paranoia that followed her, but this will probably do the trick.
01:09:52.380Well, at least you're self-aware about the fact that you've basically just become Anita Bryant.0.51
01:09:57.280And the thing that I noted here was just like, and this is so much of the coverage of trans
01:12:33.580If transitioning this young in life helped some pass better as adults, good for them.
01:12:38.080Still, questions lingered, drawn from my own life.
01:12:41.280As a child, uninterested in playing team sport, but very interested in the boys who played
01:12:45.720team sports, I was once asked by a girl when I was just 10 years old, are you sure you're not
01:12:50.700really a girl? Of course not, I replied. But I wonder how I might have responded if someone in
01:12:56.480authority, a parent or a teacher or a doctor, had suggested that my difference and occasional anxiety
01:13:02.700was because I was, in fact, a girl. That my body was irrelevant and that I could choose to be the
01:13:09.160opposite sex before puberty and all my confusion would disappear. I just don't know what I would0.56
01:13:14.620have said or done to be honest this is where it's like actually just literally what Anita Bryant
01:13:20.820was doing in the 1970s which if you don't know and you haven't listened to this podcast a lot
01:13:25.840because I do talk about Anita Bryant all the time she was basically this anti-gay activist who was0.83
01:13:30.100like there are gay teachers in the schools like proposing homosexuality to your young children0.98
01:13:35.420and they're falling for it and we must get the gay teachers out of the schools this is just that0.99
01:13:40.180it's it's a it's a fantasy he's describing where teachers are like hey hey did you know you could0.95
01:13:49.140just be transgender if you want like it's not it's just not happening yeah it's just not happening
01:13:53.080and it's doing this insidious thing which i think is really important to debunk which is suggesting
01:13:57.660that it's that transness and the experience of trans kids is just gender non-conformity in the
01:14:05.120ways that we all have experienced it because every person has had moments of gender non-conformity
01:14:09.920That's just the way it is, including as Andrew Sullivan and many other gay men have referenced a lot of gay people.
01:14:17.840But knowing a lot and having worked with a lot of young trans kids who have no contact with other trans people often and have a persistent and consistent insistence of who they are that is different than what their sex assigned at birth was.
01:14:33.260It is not just a casual. I don't like to play team sports.
01:14:36.680And so when we are, you know, sort of conflating those two things and also adding on top of it the lie that there's all these teachers and doctors being like, you know, it would be good for you if you just became the opposite sex.
01:14:50.760It's tapping into people's fears that their non-trans kid could be turned trans.
01:14:55.580And that is exactly what the same fears that Anita Bryant tapped into.
01:14:59.640But the reality is that in the same way that just a bunch of gay people existed with straight parents and no other gay people around them, that's true for trans people as well.
01:15:10.800And it's not, this is not the, this is not the story that's accurate.
01:15:15.500It's one that's designed to tap into people's anxieties.
01:15:18.920Quote, and how do today's parents, teachers, and doctors know for sure that a 10-year-old child isn't, well, like me, and really is trans?
01:15:27.280how can they know for sure that the gender dysphoria isn't instead a manifestation of
01:15:32.960being gay or lesbian and wanting to change it like i said he's been really on this for a long
01:15:38.860time that like trans people are actually just confused gay people which is also something jk
01:15:43.680rowling does how do they know for sure there isn't another complicating personal or psychological
01:15:48.200factor i was told not to worry a child had to demonstrate a persistent consistent and insistent
01:15:54.840trans identity for years, even to be considered for medical intervention. But this, I found out,
01:16:01.000was no longer true. The whole point of the new regime of gender-affirming care, I love how he
01:16:05.700talks about it, like it's like a powerful cabal, they all do this, was that it rejected broad mental0.59
01:16:11.340health assessments of children that could ensure that mistakes really didn't happen. The old
01:16:16.380persistent, consistent, and insistent model was deemed transphobic and loosened to become an
01:16:22.120affirmation policy. As soon as the kid said he or she was the opposite sex, further counseling
01:16:28.320and mental health exploration was deemed problematic because it amounted to transphobic
01:16:33.600conversion therapy, we were told. When I said that seemed crazy, and surely we needed more
01:16:39.240safeguards, I was sternly told children know who they are. Of course, no citation on that quote.
01:16:46.000Again, it's just like kids can go to candy shops now and they just can buy hormones over the counter with their Tic Tacs.
01:17:08.120I don't honestly know what he's talking about.
01:17:11.580The reality is that there are robust evaluations that happen when we're talking about minors.
01:17:19.540And the reality, too, is that by the time a parent even brings a child in, there has usually been a very long period of some amount of consistent distress that the child has been showing.
01:17:35.080So then you not only have that long period before you even see a provider, the requirement remains.
01:17:41.720I do not know where this idea is coming from, that people are saying it's, quote unquote, transphobic, that all providers of care that I'm aware of require a mental health evaluation and diagnosis.
01:17:54.760And the diagnostic process requires that you assess other co-occurring conditions, including ones that may interfere with the proper diagnosis.
01:18:03.180You say who you are and you get access to medical care. That just is simply not how it happens. And again, a lot of people don't have access to this care. The other thing is almost nobody has access to the puberty blocking care.
01:18:19.140And so this idea that there's, you know, hundreds of thousands of trans people accessing puberty blockers, I think there was a study that suggested that there are around 4,000 minors in the United States receiving puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria.
01:18:35.500We live in a very large country that is a very, very small number of people.
01:18:41.400It's like the same as the number of trans athletes is like four, but people think it's
01:18:46.60040,000 because we're getting this consistent misinformation that is creating this outsized
01:18:54.100sense of the population and the medical care or the participation in athletics.
01:40:51.680and C-SPAN, and published an anthology that included views from both sides. We knew that
01:40:56.980if we wanted to win, and not just posture, we needed to reach conservatives and moderates
01:41:01.580and explore where we might agree. And it worked. It took time, and we were laughed at at first,
01:41:07.720But you could see the polling slowly, inexorably shift toward us from one quarter to two thirds in our favor from the 1990s to the 2010s as our arguments and openness slowly, person by person, won over the country.
01:41:22.720Yeah, I mean, so I think it's not different than what we continue to do. The same people who, you know, were part of litigating marriage equality, advocating for marriage equality are also part of doing the advocacy on behalf of trans people. And this is one approach. It was one approach for marriage equality.
01:41:41.980there were also protests in the street. There were also kissings. There was also the 1980s that
01:41:47.680happened. And there are all sorts of examples of how you make change. And the way that change
01:41:55.900happens isn't because of a singular strategy of being pathologically civil. There's many different
01:42:01.460pressure points as there are now. And the part that he's forgetting is the backlash that requires
01:42:07.440the continued persistence to defend the change that you've made. Again, walking away just seeds
01:42:13.460the ground. You know, one thing he touts a lot in this essay is like one of the big things that we
01:42:20.240won and that we should have just stopped after was when we got HIV drugs. And I'm like, how do you
01:42:27.080think we got HIV drugs? I know he knows how we got HIV drugs. Was part of it getting our feet in the
01:42:33.580door at the FDA and getting meetings? Yes. And do you know how those meetings were secured? By ACT
01:42:38.420UP, which was a radical protest, direct action group, where people were literally living and
01:42:44.200planning on dying with HIV, who were laying down their bodies in the streets to stop traffic,
01:42:49.200to stop people from getting to their office to work at the FDA. These were radical protests,
01:42:54.040they were getting arrested, they were being dragged off the streets by cops. And those are
01:42:57.240the people that got us HIV drugs, which Andrew Sullivan seems very thrilled about, and which I am
01:43:03.400too, but how does he think that we got them? It's just a historic. Quote, now look at the
01:43:10.380recent results of the LGBTQ movement. In the past five years, activists have managed to move public
01:43:16.220opinion away from their causes in many respects. In 2021, for example, 62% of Americans said that
01:43:23.800transgender athletes should be able to play only on teams that match their gender at birth. By
01:43:28.7802023, that figure had risen to 69%. This is not bigotry at work. This year, the same pollster
01:43:37.820found that a solid majority of Americans, 56%, it's not that solid of a majority, favor policies
01:43:44.940protecting trans people from discrimination. The same policies that Andrew was opposed to in 2007.
01:43:50.500Americans are broadly fine with transgender people. They are fine with gay people. They just
01:43:55.840reject replacing the fact of biological sex with the phantasms of gender ideology now i looked he
01:44:03.420did link the study where he's referencing these numbers of approval and disapproval on various
01:44:08.280trans and lgbt issues and i looked and it was a pure research study he's referencing and this
01:44:13.420is misleading first of all i would not call 56 percent of americans thinking trans people should
01:44:18.140be protected from discrimination a solid majority that's my personal opinion on the language there
01:44:23.120But second of all, all of the statistics that he's referencing moved together over the years
01:44:30.340that he's referencing. So people did not become friendlier to non-discrimination laws at the same
01:44:36.920time that they became less friendly to trans inclusion in sports. Less people today believe
01:44:43.020in protecting trans people from discrimination in jobs and housing and public spaces than they did
01:44:48.780a few years ago. Less people believe in allowing them to use bathrooms aligned with their identity
01:44:53.320than they did a few years ago. And less people believe health insurance companies should be
01:44:57.580required to cover gender affirming care than they did a few years ago. And this is just why I always1.00
01:45:02.880say that it's like the whole sports thing, in my opinion, it's like a Trojan horse for all of the
01:45:08.920other issues that affect way more people. Including all cisgender gay people, by the way, and all cis
01:45:15.100women, for that matter, because this is about laundering in rhetoric and ideology that leads
01:45:19.520to policy changes that erode bodily autonomy and protections for everyone, whether that's1.00
01:45:24.940abortion, sex testing in sports, marriage equality, or trans people's ability to access
01:45:31.500healthcare. It's all related, and I think that's really important. And these numbers are going down
01:45:35.160not because quote-unquote activists went too far, but because there's been hundreds of millions of
01:45:40.620of campaign and advertising spending going to make people afraid of trans people in sports
01:45:47.060and trans people in society. Well, hold on, because, next paragraph, quote, on the medical
01:45:53.020question, 46% of Americans supported banning medical care related to gender transitions for
01:45:58.540minors in 2022 today as people have learned more 56 do as people have learned more it's it
01:46:10.080nowhere in this does he bring up the extremely well-coordinated well-funded well-strategized
01:46:16.700right-wing culture war like did that have anything to do with people's changing perceptions of trans
01:46:21.400people, Andrew Sullivan, or was it entirely the kid on Tumblr with neopronouns in their bio?
01:46:28.900And most people don't know what Tumblr is or what neopronouns are. So I'm going to guess
01:46:32.700it's the hundreds of million dollar campaign to make people afraid of trans people, even though
01:46:38.120there were 928 people prescribed puberty blockers in a five year period in the entire United States.
01:46:44.500Quote, I hope this might prompt a rethink as the election results sank in. Last week's
01:46:50.080Germetti decision at the Supreme Court was another reality check as the court upheld Tennessee's ban
01:46:55.580on certain medical treatments for transgender youth, including puberty blockers and hormone
01:47:00.100therapy, rejecting claims that the ban violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause
01:47:04.780and shielding similar laws in other states. When the ruling came down, the mood among LGBTQ groups
01:47:11.200was defiant. So the ranks are being closed again. If Mr. Trump is against childhood sex reassignment,
01:47:17.900then we must be for it. If Mr. Trump says there are two sexes, we must insist that there is a1.00
01:47:23.820spectrum. It will be very hard to break this dynamic in such a tribal atmosphere, especially
01:47:29.780when there is genuine transphobia among, especially when there is genuine transphobia among some
01:47:36.280on the right. First of all, this, this idea that like I'm against the statement that there's only
01:47:45.040two sexes or that sex camp is a binary because i just want to position myself in opposition to0.95
01:47:51.160donald trump and not that it's like that's an authentic belief in and of itself is ridiculous0.51
01:47:56.200and also this assertion that like somewhere on the right there's genuine transphobia but surely
01:48:01.440none of it is in this essay and again i think this is coming back to the times coverage and
01:48:05.500coming back to this we're just asking questions it's it's sort of like there is real transphobia
01:48:11.080There, you know, there's things we should protect. But by focusing on this, we're doing a disservice to the movement. Going back to the tweet says person who doesn't care about you or your cause. And I think it's it's just it's very insidious because people become really enchanted by the idea that they can still be, quote unquote, for trans people and against transphobia, but also be against health care for trans people, bathrooms for trans people, sports for trans people.
01:48:39.380And guess what? If we can't have health care, we can't go to the bathroom. We can't play sports with our friends in school. We can't assert that we use a certain pronoun. We can't go anywhere in society.
01:48:50.820Can you talk about that like dissonance? Because clearly he doesn't think he's transphobic. And clearly the readers of this essay who left comments like finally some sanity. They don't think they're transphobic. I mean, Andrew Sullivan genuinely thinks that he wants freedom and dignity for LGBT people. Just he's only against all of the things that would provide that.
01:49:11.140Yeah, I mean, I guess at the end of the day, it's like if you just if I think about it, just myself as a human being, if I couldn't, you know, if I couldn't say, you know, my name is Chase, I couldn't say, please call me him at work. I couldn't go to the bathroom at work. I couldn't have the health care that enables me to feel, you know, like I can move in my body and tolerate looking at myself and living in my body.
01:49:34.920What is the world that I am living? It's one where I have to use my old name and be called something that I don't feel is who I am. I can't go to the bathroom at work, which means I can't really go to work, which means I can't have a job, which means that I likely can't have housing. And then what? What is it that what is this promise of equality?
01:49:56.580then. It's mythic because they actually can't maneuver in the world. And these efforts to ban
01:50:04.520trans people from using bathrooms are a ban on public space. Public restrooms have always been
01:50:09.600a site of civil rights discourse because whether or not you can move into and out of public
01:50:15.560bathrooms is really a proxy for whether you can move in and out of the common spaces of society.
01:50:22.160and the public bathroom is not this dignified place and that's why we're protecting it so
01:50:29.240what it is is a place where people have to interact with people who are different from
01:50:32.420themselves and that is why it causes so much anxiety and why it's been at the center of
01:50:37.460the disability rights movement the women's rights movement and the black civil rights movement
01:50:41.380and does andrew sullivan's belief that trans people should be excluded from certain portions
01:50:46.960of society begin and end with sports and puberty blockers for minors? I'm not so sure. Let's find
01:50:53.160out. Quote, returning to a civil rights model and abandoning the quixotic attempt to end the sex0.92
01:50:58.760binary does not mean, as some might have it, throwing trans people under the bus. Trans people
01:51:04.320are already on the bus. They are protected from employment discrimination under the 1964 Civil
01:51:09.940Rights Act. Their existing rights should be defended and expanded to public accommodations,
01:51:14.560especially the adult right to have access to gender medicine through medicaid which is now
01:51:19.520being threatened americans should back us on that but fighting a losing battle to allow trans women0.82
01:51:25.800to compete in women's sports and for biological men to be in women's intimate spaces and to0.91
01:51:33.460perpetuate risky inadequately tested sex changes on children including gay and lesbian ones he0.99
01:51:41.060always comes back to that he's like some of them are just like me is dumb offensive to common sense0.99
01:51:47.360and risks a much bigger backlash so okay he does not think trans women should be able to use women's0.95
01:51:53.000restrooms no he doesn't and i just this part kills me because how did trans people get protected from
01:52:01.180employment discrimination under the 1964 civil rights act it was by the groups that litigated it
01:52:08.160and pushed for the protections for LGBT people in court, not through Congress, because we have
01:52:17.400consistently faced uphill battles in our efforts to pass non-discrimination legislation. So again,
01:52:24.760the paradigm that equality has been reached in the way that Andrew Sullivan has suggested
01:52:29.940is false. You know how we got the sports discourse started? In 2019, when the Equality Act to add
01:52:37.680sexual orientation and gender identity and trans status protections into federal civil rights
01:52:42.880statutes, the entire bill was opposed on the ground of allowing trans women to participate
01:52:50.540in women's sports. Guess what the bill did not do? That, because it did not amend Title IX and it
01:52:55.360didn't address sports. So it was this entire red herring that was used to undermine the equality
01:53:00.940protections that he hails and he purports to support. And so at the end of the day, I really
01:53:07.340just want to ask everyone the question is do we fight full force for full equality for all of us
01:53:14.380or do we just lay down and let our opponents take over the the contours of the discussion
01:53:20.240ready to round it out ready we've been at this for a while we have help us quote this does not mean
01:53:28.500the lgbtq project should be shut down entirely we need to defend our wins we need to protect the
01:53:35.740interests of gays, lesbians, and trans people. We need to greatly expand help and care for children
01:53:41.440with gender dysphoria, prevent bullying, and increase mental health resources. Protecting them
01:53:47.100from often irreversible sex changes should not mean abandoning them. It should mean renewed
01:53:52.760concern, support, and above all, solid evidence-based research on how best we can help.
01:53:58.800Just not using any of the evidence I personally disagree with.
01:54:02.000All of these laws have banned the research, to be clear.
01:54:04.720But in America, on this anniversary of the Obergefell decision, we also need to remember
01:56:51.280It's one we've seen time and time again. Let's talk about all of the other times we've heard that, whether it was about sit ins during the civil rights movement, whether it was about women's demand for access to the work to work outside the home.
01:57:05.740So so that's that's one thing. And then the other thing I would say is how many trans kids do you think there are in this country?
01:57:11.980How many trans kids do you think receive puberty blockers? How many do you think played sports?
01:57:16.860But how much have you heard about it? And do you think perhaps that the outsized focus is to invoke
01:57:22.980a sense of fear and change for an ideological objective? And instead, do you think perhaps
01:57:29.900that the kids who are loving and caring for those kids are the best to make the decisions about
01:57:34.260their medical care? Do you think perhaps that the schools that are supporting the kids who
01:57:39.240playing sports may be the best equipped to decide how to continue to administer those schools,
01:57:44.540because that's what we're talking about here. And every single demand for change has been called
01:57:49.680radical at one point or another. And yet we have to persist in sort of continuing to demand that
01:57:56.940we live in a more just world. I'm going to close this with a comment on this essay on the New York
01:58:04.280Times website from someone named Edith from New York. Edith wrote, the homophobes at my high0.93
01:58:10.240school do not specify if they mean a neopronoun user or a cisgender bisexual girl when they call
01:58:16.980us the F slur. They do not ask our pronouns before regularly excluding us. They do not consider who
01:58:23.480is a correct transgender person, who is not loud with their gayness, and who is easy to understand.
01:58:30.040Mr. Sullivan, as a young queer person today, it really feels as though you're misinterpreting
01:58:36.280both how we got here today and how we are falling backwards. Acting like conservatives will treat
01:58:42.540you better if you're a more palatable gay person, and acting like younger people don't have the
01:58:47.460right to identify the way they please is how we slide back into further homophobia. The way we0.80
01:58:53.160keep our rights is by staying strong with each other, not picking apart the community to find