There Are No Girls on the Internet - February 26, 2021


DISINFORMED： Republicans are leaning into transphobia

DISINFORMED： Immigrant communities are facing a flood of disinformation DISINFORMED： Meet the activist using data science to fights Nazis

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

165.97

Word count

2,393

Sentence count

127

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

14

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 This is an iHeart Podcast.
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00:00:50.080 I survived nine months in captivity,
00:00:53.240 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920 These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.080 Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.740 Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:01:44.000 Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:01:45.760 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:51.160 You're listening to Disinformed, a miniseries from There Are No Girls on the Internet.
00:01:59.680 I'm Bridget Todd.
00:02:05.280 I am so excited about next week's guest that I couldn't wait until Tuesday for you to hear some of what she has to say. 0.96
00:02:11.540 Emily Grzenski is an activist who uses her data science background to fight Nazis.
00:02:16.480 Yep, you heard that right.
00:02:18.220 After being pepper sprayed by a well-known white supremacist at the deadly Unite the Right Valley in Charlottesville in 2017,
00:02:25.300 Emily built First Visual, a resource that documents and tracks the court proceedings of Nazis and white supremacists.
00:02:31.700 This work has not been without significant personal risk for Emily.
00:02:35.320 She even relocated out of the United States to Germany just to get some space.
00:02:39.300 And when the white supremacists that Emily tracks try to attack her, they often do so using transphobic attacks on her identity as a trans woman.
00:02:47.360 Unfortunately, weaponizing trans identity is not isolated.
00:02:51.500 And just this week, there was a flood of irresponsible public transphobia from our elected officials.
00:02:56.540 During the Senate hearing for Dr. Rachel Levine, the first transgender person to be nominated for a Senate-confirmed position in the federal government,
00:03:04.080 Ray and Paul asked her a series of completely offensive, deeply transphobic questions that pushed harmful misrepresentations obviously meant to attack her identity as a trans woman.
00:03:13.700 And after Rep. Marie Newman, whose daughter is trans, hung a trans flag outside of her office and advocated for the Equality Act, insurrection supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose office is across the hall, went out of her way to cruelly antagonize her for supporting her kid.
00:03:29.320 To make matters worse, when Newman posted a video of her putting up the trans flag, she says Facebook took it down and labeled it as, quote, hate speech, while leaving Marjorie Taylor Greene's transphobic nonsense up.
00:03:40.820 Now, I'm being purposely vague here because I don't want to spend too much time talking about the specifics of their antics because that's exactly what they want.
00:03:48.560 These people are scammers who use trans people's actual lives as stunts for attention and to score ideological points instead of actually doing their job and governing.
00:03:57.680 From fear-mongering about bathrooms and trans kids on sports teams, these kinds of stunts prevent trans people from just being able to safely live their lives.
00:04:06.320 Now, in our interview, Emily says this is an intentional strategy to cause harm.
00:04:11.320 Here's a preview of our conversation.
00:04:14.740 You're already dealing with so much, and it's like one more thing that you don't need,
00:04:19.180 one more thing to take you out of your work, or one more thing to take up your energy or your capacity,
00:04:23.420 which we already know is scarce.
00:04:25.620 That's part of the plan, right?
00:04:26.760 This is a weaponized sort of war of attrition, right, that they do this.
00:04:30.380 Because if they get you spending your energy on all of these little things,
00:04:33.800 ultimately if you needed to swallow it you could to get the job done you would just swallow it to
00:04:38.400 get the job done but you want to fight it right and so they're trying to distract you they're
00:04:42.720 trying to steal your energy fighting these pointless battles and they're not pointless
00:04:46.940 battles but they're not the main point of battle right so it's like death by a thousand paper cuts
00:04:52.340 with all of this stuff and yeah i don't know it just it just seems like that's part of this like
00:04:59.320 fascist strategy is to just keep you constantly occupied so that you can never get ahead because
00:05:05.400 they know that if you had a moment peace right imagine what we could all do given that like
00:05:14.100 the the stuff that I'm accomplishing now having moved to Germany having
00:05:18.620 gotten some space between you know the trauma and the noise and all of that and like the healing
00:05:26.160 that i've done like i'm doing the best work of my life right now because that's the power that i have
00:05:31.460 and i got that power by having to fight all like by surviving all of these fights for so long you
00:05:39.860 know as somebody that's mixed race as somebody that's transgender as somebody that's queer right
00:05:43.740 it's just a constant battle well surviving that has given me the tools to to excel but at the
00:05:50.980 same time like sometimes i wish i could just be kind of normal and just like exist like everyone
00:05:55.500 else and just have a normal life right and not everyone gets to make it through all of that
00:06:01.620 noise and and they you know that's that's the point that's how they keep us down yeah I even
00:06:08.280 see it in you know I feel that a lot of the online conversation around issues impacting the trans 0.92
00:06:15.760 community people like bad actors and shitheads have have dominated especially online dominated 0.94
00:06:23.240 those conversations and so every conversation is like trans people in sports bathrooms and it's 0.97
00:06:27.900 like if we if folks did not have to constantly you know contend with these very loud people who
00:06:36.160 essentially in my opinion have been able to really own the conversation online like could we actually
00:06:41.540 have a a productive conversation that moves us forward but I feel like we can't because we're
00:06:48.200 still the people who who want to be flooding every conversation with like a bunch of nonsense
00:06:54.600 they they have dominated the online space i feel yeah and it's it's all culture war stuff right
00:06:59.640 like this whole thing now it's about trans trans kids in sports right there's no problems with
00:07:05.120 trans kids in sports all of these things that they're talking about there's no statistics
00:07:09.180 whatsoever that suggests that this is a problem in any any way shape or form if a bunch of trans
00:07:15.520 girls who are out there winning every sports championship in high school women's sports and 1.00
00:07:21.220 college women's sports, even I would say, maybe we need to revisit this, right? But that's not 1.00
00:07:27.780 happening. There's none. There's none. There are no trans women dominating collegiate athletics.
00:07:33.180 There are no trans women dominating high school athletics. There are no trans women dominating
00:07:37.820 the Olympic women's competition. There are some trans women who are successful in those
00:07:45.000 competitions. But we do not see a wave of cis men trying to pretend that they're trans women
00:07:52.220 so that they can get a gold medal. We don't see that. We don't see trans women, trans girls
00:07:57.720 joining these teams to dominate them. This is a completely fabricated issue. And the reason it 0.82
00:08:04.540 has been fabricated is in order to create this polarization so that the right can stay relevant
00:08:11.680 by creating this cultural division.
00:08:14.900 And trans people have been historically used as scapegoats,
00:08:18.620 as just, you know, we are just one sort of identity
00:08:21.420 that has been used as scapegoats.
00:08:24.020 You know, three, four years ago, this was all about bathroom bills.
00:08:27.200 Okay, well, there was no evidence of any trans women ever
00:08:31.620 sexually assaulting anyone in the bathroom
00:08:34.620 or any men trying, you know, cisgender men 0.99
00:08:39.000 trying to pretend that they are trans women to assault 0.93
00:08:40.880 women in bathrooms. There were plenty of cases of cisgender men going into women's bathrooms 0.79
00:08:47.620 when a cisgender woman who was like a butch lesbian went in there and then beat her up. 0.98
00:08:53.680 So the actual threat of men, again, men on women violence in women's bathrooms 0.98
00:08:59.080 was the opposite of this problem, right? It was the thing that they were saying was going to
00:09:04.380 happen was the thing that they were doing. All of this is culture war stuff. All of this is
00:09:08.660 designed to keep inflated this polarized version of politics and to rally people to, you know,
00:09:20.880 the right knows that it is a losing cause, but they create these fake issues to mobilize people.
00:09:28.700 And it works because we're left here holding the bag because we have to be outraged and we have
00:09:34.720 to fight it because the, if we don't fight it, it's a catastrophe. If we do fight it, it becomes
00:09:41.000 this polarization vector. And then all of these talking heads, you know, on, on social media and
00:09:48.980 in the New York times op-ed and on cable news, they're all sitting here going, Hmm, is America
00:09:55.260 so polarized? Like, is it really both sides that are bad? And like, fuck you, buddy, you're not
00:10:02.340 affected. You're not going to get beat up if you go to try to take a leak in the bathroom at a 1.00
00:10:07.200 courthouse or a school. This is not an issue of people becoming polarized. This is an issue of
00:10:15.620 people who have always had a right defending against lies that are being used to try to
00:10:24.360 remove that right in order to further a different political agenda. We're not
00:10:30.760 you know we're not a football right we're people and then us fighting to retain whatever little 0.99
00:10:38.480 dignity we are granted somehow becomes like a both sides issue fuck that it's so insulting and 0.97
00:10:45.260 I think people forget that these are people's that yeah we're people it's like you're yeah you're not 0.96
00:10:51.480 I guess I hate when I see people talking about other human beings as if it's some sort of
00:10:56.320 ideological exercise or something, you know, not someone's actual life. It's very frustrating.
00:11:04.340 People shouldn't have to go through this. Trans people are valid and trans people belong.
00:11:09.480 And we shouldn't stand for their identities and lives being used for chief political stunts.
00:11:15.200 Emily's work is so incredible and she's so cool. I was almost kind of nervous to talk to her.
00:11:20.400 Tune in to Disinformed from There Are No Girls on the Internet this Tuesday to hear our entire
00:11:23.980 conversation. You won't want to miss it.
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00:11:45.400 Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls on the Internet.
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00:11:50.980 Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer.
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00:11:56.100 Michael Amato is our contributing producer.
00:11:58.400 I'm your host, Bridget Todd.
00:12:00.200 For more great podcasts, check out the iHeartRadio app,
00:12:02.520 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:12:14.400 If your bookshelf and your For You page
00:12:16.660 are equally important to your personality,
00:12:18.880 welcome home.
00:12:20.460 Pro Society is a weekly podcast
00:12:22.340 that's part book club, part group chat
00:12:24.260 for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island
00:12:26.640 deserve the same level of discourse.
00:12:28.740 Each week, we're connecting the dots
00:12:30.120 between books, the internet, and pop culture
00:12:32.240 with your favorite writers, book talk creators,
00:12:34.940 and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:12:37.000 Yeah, I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:12:38.780 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app,
00:12:41.500 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:12:44.880 I survived nine months in captivity,
00:12:47.740 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive
00:12:51.480 what should have destroyed them.
00:12:53.560 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:12:57.160 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:13:04.700 These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:13:08.540 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:13:16.660 I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.
00:13:20.620 You know, I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy.
00:13:26.340 Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out.
00:13:33.360 You're not hired just to fill time and space.
00:13:36.180 You're hired to fill the space with you.
00:13:39.340 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:13:47.400 Our hometown is not a test tube.
00:13:49.700 90 miles northeast of Nashville, a battle for the future of America plays out in one small town.
00:13:56.160 Developers with right-wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land.
00:13:59.840 We need cities on a shining hill.
00:14:02.040 This is Our Town, a podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment and fights back. 0.97
00:14:10.080 Guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you?
00:14:12.800 Listen to Our Town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 0.98
00:14:19.700 This is an iHeart Podcast.
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