00:01:02.720Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:10.260These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:14.100Listen to the Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:22.000If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.420Pro 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.
00:01:36.080Each 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.
00:05:05.960would be all about the fallout from the Harper's letter.
00:05:08.980But honestly, Emily is so much more interesting than any of the points made in that letter.
00:05:15.480But the implications of Emily being harassed off of her online platform by people who call themselves champions of free speech isn't lost on me.
00:05:24.880And it wasn't lost on Emily when we spoke about finding freedom online, the enduring power of telling your story, and seeing stories like yours told, starting with The Matrix.
00:05:34.280do you remember the first time that you saw the matrix it just was like it opened up doors in my
00:05:45.200brain i didn't quite realize it was opening up at the time it was kind of one of the first ways i
00:05:50.120started to understand my trans identity without having any clue that's what was happening
00:05:55.560i just knew that when i went online and pretended to be a girl that felt
00:05:59.640really good in some some way pretended air quotes are around that for all my trans friends listening
00:06:05.720um yeah i i but the matrix was kind of the first thing i saw that really delineated that difference
00:06:15.760between reality and the internet and the ways that they kind of feed into each other
00:06:21.740now what's interesting about this is that in the matrix reality is this like gray uh horrible
00:06:30.860post-apocalyptic landscape and the internet is this bustling busy metropolis but the internet
00:06:37.660is like where things are wrong where things are not right and reality is like what you have to0.82
00:06:41.960accept which is a very pre-coming out like sort of trans experience but it's also you know the
00:06:49.500movie's not just about trans identities it's anti-capitalist it's um extremely you know diverse0.93
00:06:56.240and um multicultural you know uh certainly the wachowskis didn't make all the right steps there
00:07:02.440but they were sure trying for the early 2000s late 90s um so there's a lot more in there than just
00:07:09.540a story about transness but there's also a lot of stuff in there about being trans and that's
00:07:15.900a really impressive thing to have pulled off at that point in time.
00:07:20.880Okay, so if you haven't seen The Matrix in a while, here is a quick summary.
00:07:24.860Keanu Reeves has a routine life as a computer programmer known by his alias Neo.
00:07:29.820He has this nagging feeling that something isn't right with the world he's being presented.
00:07:34.400What you know you can't explain, but you feel it.
00:07:38.780You felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world.
00:07:43.260You don't know what it is, but it's there.
00:07:59.400the world will stay as he's always experienced it.
00:08:02.460But the red pill reveals the true nature of the world,
00:08:06.140that the real world has basically been destroyed.
00:08:10.260And what we think of as the real world
00:08:11.940is actually a computer simulation called the Matrix.
00:08:14.580And unfortunately, we humans are actually in pods of goo being used as human batteries for machines.
00:08:22.520You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
00:08:30.540As Emily writes, on its most basic level, the movie follows characters who break free of their real life via the internet, creating online identities that feel more real than their physical ones.
00:08:43.260Once there, they choose new name for themselves,
00:08:45.720their clothes become a whole lot cooler and less traditionally gendered.
00:08:49.460In fact, rumor has it the role of Switch, the blonde side character in The Matrix,
00:08:54.220was originally meant to be a character who explicitly explores gender in The Matrix,
00:09:11.300I believe it would be a man in reality and a woman in the matrix. And that was supposed to
00:09:18.400be kind of an example of like how the matrix could let you explore your truest self. Because
00:09:23.960there is, I believe that Morpheus says at some point early in the film that like who you are
00:09:30.920in the matrix is like your brain's self-image. So in that case, Switch would be like, oh,
00:09:35.680my self-image is a woman. And the only place I can be that is in the matrix. And that would
00:09:39.840of complicated the whole clean dynamic between reality and the matrix so much more. The rumor
00:09:46.460is that Warner Brothers wouldn't allow the Wachowskis to include it. It's been very hard
00:09:51.540for people to track down the source of this story. I tend to believe it because I have talked to
00:09:56.160people who heard about it, but, you know, and it also really fits with what we know about the0.99
00:10:02.600Wachowskis now, which is, I think, which is, I think why it might be a little too clean and
00:10:06.080convenient, but it certainly would have been cool. I wish it had been in there. I think it would have
00:10:10.980helped me figure some stuff out more quickly, or maybe it wouldn't have. Maybe I just would
00:10:15.340have been like, that's cool. When Emily saw the matrix, she connected with it instantly.
00:10:22.280Using the internet to become closer to understanding your true self
00:10:25.320is something both Neo and Emily have in common. My sister and I accidentally shared a Yahoo chat
00:10:35.780account this is back when yahoo chat existed and she was a she was a cheerleader so she created the
00:10:41.880name cheer and chick and i accidentally logged in as that one day and it was immediately a barrage
00:10:49.540of people with male coded screen names being like hey asl hey sexy you know all of that
00:10:54.740and i hated it but i hated it in a way that felt good and i liked that attention in a way that i
00:11:04.980never liked attention i got for performing masculinity all i had to do was change my
00:11:11.760screen name and suddenly like people were like oh my god you're pretty oh you sound really cool
00:11:17.060uh cheer and shift do you cheerlead um asl i'm you know 22 male california nice smile and like
00:11:24.680i mean we were all lying we were all lying in some way that man probably did not have a nice
00:11:31.220smile he probably had a cold and chilling smile that would scare you if you saw it in the middle
00:11:36.160of the night but I was lying and I wasn't lying you know I didn't realize I wasn't lying but I
00:11:43.520that was the true the truest thing I ever did was pretending to be a girl online because it was it
00:11:50.220was it was so easy in the matrix Neo's journey is accepting that he is the one the figure who's
00:12:00.160meant to save humanity. He struggles to accept this identity, and at times, questions if he'll
00:12:06.940ever learn how to be the one. But that power was actually within him the whole time. He just had
00:12:14.040to accept it. It's something that really resonates with Emily. What I often tell trans women who are
00:12:24.080newly out is, you already know how to do this. You don't know you know how to do this, but you are
00:12:29.260going to understand how to operate in women's spaces and function as a woman in society both0.98
00:12:36.220in all of the good and bad ways that that is implied within the patriarchy you have this
00:12:42.560knowledge inside of you you don't realize it's there and you're going to unlock it and you're
00:12:47.040suddenly going to be like oh yeah okay this makes sense um talking to women makes so much more sense
00:12:53.980than trying to do the male bonding thing um i like going clothes shopping was the thing i always hated
00:13:00.860and that was one of the ways that i was like oh i'm probably not trans because if i was a girl
00:13:05.220i'd like clothes shopping you know that sort of that sort of reductive stereotype but really i
00:13:10.880didn't like going clothes shopping because i didn't like wearing men's clothes now if like one of my
00:13:14.420friends wants to go shopping that's great it's fun it's a it's a it's a chance to bond and hang
00:13:19.940out with friends and like there's so much more to womanhood to gender to all of that than what
00:13:24.620I'm describing but like you already have the base source code for femininity for womanhood for0.57
00:13:31.880hanging out with the girls in your brain as a trans woman it just you just need to find a way
00:13:38.320to unlock it and um that was what I that was what was happening to me in those chat rooms
00:13:44.560I was logging in as a girl. People were treating me like a girl and I got it. I think I'm remembering
00:13:54.640there were some intensely validating experiences there when like there would be another woman
00:14:02.060logged in and she would like message me and be like, oh my God, it's crazy in here. And I just
00:14:07.040be like, yes, it is. It is crazy in here. We are two women talking about our experiences of how
00:14:12.600crazy it is to be logged into this chat room of this barrage and then you know we do some small
00:14:17.540talk or whatever and it would inevitably come to the point where she was like well you know who are
00:14:21.820you where are you from and like I would kind of freeze up because I would describe this girl that
00:14:26.160wasn't real but felt real and I was describing myself it was the late 90s so I had this super
00:14:32.240strong attachment to Reese Witherspoon who's who did it yeah a little bit older than me but like
00:14:39.240Tracy Flick in Election. You know, a lot of my friends saw her as a villain. And I was like,0.99
00:14:44.060you know, I find her an aspirational figure, but we're not going to unpack that. We're just not
00:14:48.640going to think about that. And for as annoying as she can be, Tracy Flick is who I would have been.0.65
00:14:54.020That's that girl I was always describing in the chat rooms, like kind of driven and type A,0.96
00:14:59.160and a little bit annoying and a little bit irritating, but inevitably is going to like
00:15:04.000take over the world um and i think the universe saw how potent that energy was within me and was
00:15:10.700like we gotta tie one hand behind her back um so i think that's i think that's what happened
00:15:15.560and my joke was you know it's just like how the wachowskis cast keanu reeves and carrie ann moss
00:15:20.840as trans women because like they are both analogs for trans women in this movie and you know it was
00:15:26.460joke but it's really true like keanu uh like neo's neo's journey towards self-acceptance is exactly
00:15:33.140what you're describing and um so honestly honestly so is the whole thing that trinity's on like
00:15:40.560trinity is like a trans woman in like her third year of transition who's found this like girl at
00:15:45.240her support group who's like i don't know what i'm gonna do i'm so scared and then trinity's like no0.64
00:15:50.420we're gonna fucking run up some walls we're gonna bring helicopters down you have no idea how much0.94
00:15:56.780power you have inside of you. And yeah, it's a movie about what we in the trans community call0.99
00:16:04.180self-acceptance. The moment when you're like, okay, something's going on here and I need to
00:16:10.180admit it to myself. And maybe you don't even admit you're trans, but you do admit to yourself0.95
00:16:15.400that there is this world inside of you that you are not exploring and something needs to be done
00:16:21.460about that the matrix is really about that and i think it's telling that when it was written both
00:16:27.800lana and lily wachowski it seemed to have even been closeted from themselves the recent documentary
00:16:33.160disclosure on netflix lily wachowski is interviewed about the matrix and she's like at the time i
00:16:38.040didn't know but i watch it now and i'm like oh yeah okay um lana wachowski came out sometime
00:16:43.020in the early 2000s came out to herself she came out publicly in i think 2008 2009 some somewhere
00:16:49.120in there. Now, she came out publicly around the release of Cloud Atlas, which was 2012.
00:16:54.160There were rumors about her for like the entirety of the 2000s. And they were pretty cruel and
00:17:01.960nasty rumors. And I don't recommend going to look up those stories because they are bad.
00:17:07.740The Matrix was directed by sisters Lana and Lily Wachowski, who would later both publicly come out
00:17:12.640as trans. In 2012, Lana gave a moving acceptance speech for the HRC's Visibility Award, and the
00:17:19.120about her journey to self-acceptance and the desire to imagine and build worlds
00:17:22.760where all people can see themselves fully reflected.
00:17:26.140I am here because when I was young, I wanted very badly to be a writer.
00:17:30.860I wanted to be a filmmaker, but I couldn't find anyone like me in the world.
00:17:35.620And it felt that my dreams were foreclosed simply because my gender was less typical than others.1.00
00:17:43.480But Lana Wachowski was kind of on the cusp of coming out when they were making The Matrix.1.00
00:17:49.120And you can see that within that movie.
00:17:51.740It is about taking that journey towards self-acceptance.
00:17:56.220And honestly, the poor reputation of the Matrix sequels, both of which I really like, and the second of Matrix Reloaded, I adore.
00:18:04.720I think it's one of their best movies.
00:18:06.520Both of those sequels are about what happens after you self-accept and the ways that it kind of deconstructs the world in ways that you're not ready for, that you don't always understand.
00:18:16.180there's this famous meme joke in um in trans women circles that's like
00:18:23.080it's the galaxy brain meme so it starts i wish i was a girl um and the second one is i can just
00:18:29.640be a girl and the third one is i always was a girl and then the final one the galaxy brain is
00:18:34.180destroy capitalism because that's what happens is you realize you question the gender binary and
00:18:40.380you're like oh wait i should i just should be on the other side of it or i should not be on the
00:18:44.340binary at all, or I should be totally removed from the spectrum of gender or whatever your
00:18:48.720experience is. And you're suddenly like, wait, all systems are kind of made up. And you're like,
00:18:54.200oh, we can just, you know, once you see that, you're seeing the matrix, you can't unsee it.
00:18:59.500And suddenly you're like, how could we build better systems? Like if human beings require
00:19:04.380systems to operate and live and evolve, how can we do something better? And that's kind of what
00:19:09.160the matrix trilogy is about. Let's take a quick break.
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00:22:12.440At its core, The Matrix is about someone seeking out the framework for understanding who they really are and having a hard time figuring out what it all means.
00:22:21.720At the beginning of the film, Neo's life is, quote, normal.
00:22:30.980And while The Matrix can be read as a metaphor for trans identity, built by two trans women,
00:22:36.120it's pretty interesting that the language of the red pill has been latched onto by anti-feminist white supremacist groups.
00:22:43.380In those online spaces, being, quote, red-pilled is a means for men to open their eyes to all the ways that women and feminists have misled them.
00:22:52.420And it's kind of funny when you think about it.
00:22:54.520Yeah, I think there is this element of trying to build careful scripted routines for yourself that I found to be often very true of pre coming out trans people across the board. You don't entirely understand the gender you were born into, but you can like make rules for yourself. You can create a programming language. You can exist within it. That's exactly what Neo is doing at the start of the movie.
00:23:20.600He has all these routines. He has all these subsystems. He's a program working within a program. And when he breaks out of the matrix, he begins to understand the ways in which he was misled and the ways in which society did not give him a language for who he was.
00:23:42.220so yeah i think there is i think there is a lot of metaphorical power to that idea of the red pill
00:23:50.500clearly a lot of people have taken different ideas from it but there is metaphorical power
00:23:55.840to this idea that you are being lied to your life is a program you do not have free will
00:24:01.500you need to develop free will by any means necessary etc etc etc and that is such a beautiful
00:24:09.380idea and a beautiful realization of trans identities that is simultaneously something
00:24:15.140that apparently spoke to the alt-right so which is so funny i mean you point this out in your piece
00:24:19.760that the alt-right sees like taking the red pill as this you know breaking through this lie that
00:24:26.760you know that has been holding down men and we're so oppressed but it's like actually you're
00:24:32.000latching on to something that trans women like like a framework that trans women built for you0.88
00:24:37.240you know it's like very it's like almost kind of funny oh yeah yeah yeah um it's uh it's horribly0.77
00:24:45.700hilariously misguided but at the same time it makes sense because like i said earlier this
00:24:53.120movie is pretty anti-capitalist not like hugely anti-capitalist but quite a bit and there's this
00:25:00.900There's this range of movies from the 90s that are sort of about the ways in which the quote-unquote victory of capitalism over communism and sort of the end of history, as the writer Francis Fukuyama dubbed it, the end of history had resulted in neoliberalism triumphing over everything else and capitalism, the best system, and all of this.
00:25:26.600movies and there's all these movies about, well, then why does that feel so empty? You know, you
00:25:32.900have, I think an early example of that is Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day is about like being trapped in
00:25:38.560these routines that don't really make sense. And then learning to become a better person through
00:25:42.940those routines. But right in the year, The Matrix comes out in 1999, you have The Matrix, which is
00:25:47.980about that. You have Fight Club, which is about that. You have American Beauty, which is about
00:25:51.640that. You have Being John Malkovich, which is kind of about that. I think The Matrix is the one
00:25:56.540that's held up best of those i love being john malkovich um american beauty let's not talk about
00:26:01.340that it's like kind of a fucked up movie when you think about it yeah fight club is good but so many
00:26:07.640people have taken the wrong message from it that um it's it's also harder to defend at least with0.70
00:26:12.480the matrix you can be like yeah a lot of people have taken the wrong message from this but it was
00:26:15.740directed by two trans women so um but yeah there's this element of anti-capitalism so when people are
00:26:24.140like i need to reject the prison that society has placed me in they're so they're so close to what
00:26:30.740this movie is about they're so close to this idea that like even if you don't want to go so far as
00:26:36.060to say capitalism is broken to say that consumerism is broken the idea that you can find freedom and
00:26:41.740self and identity in things like in essence i think every major philosophy every major religion
00:26:48.880rejects that idea things are not ourselves we are not our things so like at the very least that's
00:26:55.080what the matrix is really talking about so to talk about like to take get that far get that far in
00:27:02.120grasping its message and get to a place where you're like actually it's talking about how women
00:27:07.000have made the world bad like i don't know how you make that that swerve but every time i talk about
00:27:13.940this movie and i talk about it as an allegory for trans identities um you know like vox or someone
00:27:18.980posts it on facebook and the comments are full of people who are like no it's not about that it's
00:27:22.780about this and like yes that's your that is absolutely your right to that interpretation
00:27:26.460that's how criticism works that's how um our understanding of art and the death of the author
00:27:32.780and all of that works but at a certain point the fact that it was written by two trans women and
00:27:38.160directed by two trans women has to enter into your consideration of what it's all about.
00:27:45.460And that for a lot of people, the idea that it's a trans metaphor is mind blowing. Like
00:27:52.640a friend of mine, Aaron Reed, another trans woman posted on Twitter, you know, the matrix was
00:27:59.720directed by two trans women. And there's a metaphor for coming out something that simple
00:28:03.240And like 50,000 people liked it and were like, this blew my mind.0.75
00:28:07.520And the sis, I just don't know what we're going to do.
00:28:11.500Why do you think the idea that The Matrix is a metaphor for the trans experience kind of goes overlooked so often?
00:28:20.780You know, Star Wars is probably the movie before The Matrix.
00:28:24.240Yeah, it's definitely the movie before The Matrix that changed the film industry the most.
00:28:28.180And The Matrix lives in Star Wars shadow in the way that everything after The Matrix lives in The Matrix's shadow.
00:28:33.240So you look back at Star Wars. Star Wars is a movie that George Lucas, when he started writing it, was like, OK, America's the empire. The Viet Cong are the rebels. Yet Americans always self-identify with the rebels because, you know, that's how we like to think of ourselves.
00:28:50.500Our foundational myth is scrappy underdogs overcoming this gigantic colonial power, but we don't think about how the makeup of those scrappy underdogs was all white landowning men, you know, many of whom were slave owners, many of, and even other people, you know, who weren't slave owners had done other horrible things.0.89
00:29:09.460And we were displacing indigenous peoples and forcing them to move further and further west. And there's a lot to that foundational myth that gets written out so we can see ourselves as the rebel alliance in Star Wars.0.77
00:29:21.900But the movies continue to make more and more explicit that any colonial power like the United States is in line with the Empire and the people who are being colonized are in line with the rebels.
00:29:34.420And yet, you know, we still continue to be like, yep, we're the rebel alliance.
00:29:39.000Anytime you take a story that is based in reality and move it into metaphor, there's going to be so many people who are like, yeah, I see this metaphor as directly reflecting my experience.
00:30:30.120If you haven't already guessed, stories have been immensely gratifying for Emily's understanding of herself.
00:30:36.460When she publicly came out as trans, she'd already made a career out of writing publicly online.
00:30:41.900In a piece for Vox, she used The Handmaid's Tale as a means of coming to terms with, and breaking down the walls around, what it means to be a woman.
00:30:51.520At once a kind of freedom and oppression.
00:30:54.880What is it about stories and movies and science fiction and TV shows
00:30:58.740that really helps you understand the world around you and your place in it?0.99
00:31:03.480Understanding womanhood is understanding your oppression within the patriarchy.0.94
00:31:09.320That doesn't mean that you yourself are always oppressed.0.96
00:31:49.380And I think especially when you grow up as a seemingly, when you grow up seeming to the world like a white, straight, cis man, you don't encounter a lot of structural oppression.
00:32:03.320One of the ways that film and television helps us understand ourselves better is exposes us to the stories of other people.
00:32:13.460um for instance i am never going to have the experience of growing up that uh perry jenkins
00:32:22.140and terrell alvin mccrary did but moonlight is a movie that opens that window to me i can't
00:32:29.320completely understand it but i can empathize with it because i've seen through that window i've seen
00:32:33.420people live those lives and the thing that happens is when you that film and television
00:32:39.020are such potent, powerful, such potent, powerful expressions of the self because they're so
00:32:48.660riveting. They draw you in so much. I know plenty of trans women who found themselves through like
00:32:53.220video games, which is a similar situation. You know, they famously would always play the female0.99
00:32:57.860character and be like, this feels good. Movies and television give you that space to open up
00:33:34.880When I became an adult, I was like, oh, she's always overlooked for her work. And my brain would be like, you are not overlooked for your work. So part of it is understanding the structural oppression that women face throughout the world, particularly in the United States, and coming to understand that within yourself and the ways that you see it out in the world.
00:33:52.880but also there's an element of personal oppression i wasn't facing the oppression i wasn't facing the
00:34:02.900the roadblocks that peggy olsen faced to get my writing noticed to get things published the second
00:34:09.320i was like you know i think i'd like to be a tv critic like people were like here's some jobs
00:34:13.600white man um and i kind of like now i look back on it kind of blows my mind like i my qualification
00:34:21.880was I was a good writer and I don't want to besmirch that. That is a good qualification
00:34:25.440to have if you want to be a writer. But I just kind of asked for the job and people gave it to
00:34:30.600me and like, whoa, what is that? So I was not being kept down like Peggy Olson, but I was,
00:34:37.880I was keeping myself down. Peggy Olson was doing all the writing in the back of my brain and this
00:34:42.080guy was getting all the credit for it. And there is an element of yes, understanding structural
00:34:49.140oppression yes understanding the patriarchy yes understanding the ways that women are are just0.82
00:34:53.920just the microaggressions that women face every day when someone's like hey sweetie how you doing
00:34:58.840and you're just like fine but even deeper and more powerful is the the the coming to understand
00:35:09.380and conceptualize of yourself as a woman and breaking through the layers of oppression you
00:35:15.300have placed upon yourself. And the reason the internet is such a powerful tool to do that
00:35:19.960is because it gives that Peggy Olson in the back of my brain an outlet where she can keep writing
00:35:27.120and she can keep leaving me messages in that writing. And I can be like, you know, this is
00:35:32.860really interesting the way that you seem disconnected from yourself as though your true
00:35:36.200self is someone else and then be like, oh, it's 2013. Let's put that on hold for a while.
00:35:40.300So, yeah, it is a way in which the larger oppressions of society become visited in the personal oppression of the self because you're terrified of the thought, if I'm trans, that seems really hard.
00:41:02.500And yes, I have been subject to Twitter harassment, both on a hugely large scale and on a really minor scale where you just learn to tune it out, which is maybe not what you should do.0.87
00:41:13.080The second I came out, somebody on 4chan doctored up an article supposedly written by me about how white babies are white supremacy.
00:41:23.580I had supposedly written this, and it was obviously fake.
00:48:42.280I think it is an exciting time. I think that in the U.S. especially, there is a dawning awareness of the ways in which trans identities are real and intersect with other identities, be that womanhood, be that racial identities.
00:49:02.300There's a much greater awareness of the ways that trans women of color, particularly Black and Latino, Latina, particularly Black and Latino trans women are hugely at danger of violent crime.
00:49:12.900But there is now increasingly an awareness of that. Awareness is not action. Awareness does not save the lives of any of those Black trans women.
00:49:22.380But hopefully it makes it easier and better and more just for future generations.
00:49:26.940and hopefully that life expectancy, you know, raises up to a level where, you know, the same
00:49:32.460as any of the rest of us get to lead long and fulfilling lives. And we have things we need to
00:49:39.400work on in the U.S. where it's far worse as the U.K. The U.K. has become just a disaster area for
00:49:46.120trans people. The structural barriers they face, the degree to which folks with very large platforms
00:49:52.340like jk rowling are making it harder for people to exist there i live in a country the united
00:49:58.160states where there's a a extremely conservative supreme court that is making the country
00:50:03.780demonstrably a worse place for equality and yet they enshrined trans rights basically um
00:50:10.720like the very baseline level of trans rights let's not go crazy like the least they could do
00:50:16.880the least they could do they enshrined it because they were like you know what the constitution
00:50:20.120forces us to do this and like that was the piece was like you know what i don't want to do this but
00:50:25.440i kind of have to so thank you thank you neil korsuch for that um that's not happening in the
00:50:33.780uk the uk is increasingly run by transphobic people for transphobic people and that's going
00:50:40.380to be a fight we have to win um that's going to be a fight i'm glad to undertake um but also i'm
00:50:46.160not in the UK. I have trans women friends in the UK and they are terrified, you know, especially
00:50:52.460now that the UK is no longer in the EU and they can't just decamp for like Germany or a country
00:50:56.380that's better for trans rights. You know, I'm going to have to marry all of them so they can0.95
00:51:01.600move to the US where we have the, where we have the, you know what, I don't want to do this,
00:51:07.540but I have to. While Emily was offline, her friends took over her social media accounts
00:51:12.840so she wouldn't have to deal with the barrage of threats and harassment.
00:51:16.780Her friends used the opportunity to raise money for House of Tulip,
00:51:20.620an organization that supports trans and gender nonconforming folks experiencing homelessness
00:51:25.420as a way of finding a little light amidst all the darkness.
00:51:30.340So what have the last 48 hours been like for you?
00:51:33.800The thing I found so interesting is when I was harassed,
00:51:37.200it was about 48 hours of the worst I've ever been online.
00:51:40.460and i posted a thread about how hard it had been and just like how i couldn't sleep and how i faced
00:51:48.900death threats and how i just kind of wanted to no longer exist not in a self-harmy way just like
00:51:54.180oh it's really hard to be alive right now so i posted that and a friend of mine who works at
00:52:01.340twitter and then uh people at box media who have contacts at twitter both were like i think i can
00:52:06.500I think I can find a way to take care of this. Instantly, the harassment dropped by probably 90%.
00:52:13.400And it wasn't because it wasn't happening. When I go and look for it, I can still find it. But I
00:52:18.140really have to poke around because it's been hidden beneath so many layers. And good, I'm glad
00:52:24.380it's hidden beneath so many layers. That kind of hateful speech is, I believe, you know, exists
00:52:31.100within society, but doesn't have to be on privately owned platforms. Like if somebody wants to stand
00:52:35.760in the public square and yell about how trans women shouldn't exist i'm not going to stop them0.78
00:52:39.980but they should not be given a bullhorn you know they should not be given a bullhorn a corporation
00:52:45.720should not come down to that person and hand them a bullhorn emblazoned with their their their symbol
00:52:50.360or their logo rather and let them just shout into it like if they want to shout in the park whatever
00:52:55.700but uh what happens functionally is that online they you know one person becomes 500 people
00:53:02.920sometimes literally sometimes they set up 500 accounts and sometimes it's just like they shout
00:53:07.840loud enough that other people start shouting what they're shouting other people start shouting what
00:53:11.020they're shouting and like sometimes that's how good ideas spread but most of the time that's
00:53:15.640how bad ideas spread we know so much about how that um takes people who maybe have a couple of
00:53:21.060questions about trans identities that they're not sure about and it radicalizes them it pushes them
00:53:26.300further and further in the direction of transphobia and then there's somebody right there reaching out
00:53:30.660their hand to be like have you heard about anti-semitism or you know have you heard about
00:53:34.660here are some of the other other things you can do to make the world the worst place and that
00:53:39.840person's like thank you i didn't know but now i'm gonna try this doesn't happen with everybody you
00:53:47.220know i don't think i don't think jk rowling is suddenly going to you know start um i don't think
00:53:52.120jk rowling is suddenly going to start like hurling racist racist slurs on twitter but this is much
00:53:57.460like now she's much less likely to examine the way she uses characters of color in her books,
00:54:01.800which is almost never good. And you know, like, like that's just, that's the, the, the prevalence
00:54:10.100of social media makes it so easy to not self-examine, to not ask those questions of yourself
00:54:15.280and just like find some of those people with bullhorns and just be like, I agree with you.
00:54:20.080So my experience with Twitter was, I think they could make the platform better if they really
00:54:26.460wanted to. For all the people on Twitter accusing Emily of wanting to crush free speech,
00:54:31.980she's actually really open with free discussion and criticism. In fact, she says criticism has
00:54:37.860been helpful for her own understanding of the world and her place in it. The nice thing about
00:54:42.620Twitter is if I say a thing and somebody doesn't agree with that thing who's from a different
00:54:49.440identity than my own and they push back against it, that's valid. I don't do everything
00:54:56.320perfectly. People should criticize me. I'm not above criticism. People have criticized me and
00:55:00.740tried to make amends or edit the article that they're not happy with or whatever.
00:55:08.520And it always feels kind of shitty. You're always like, oh, I can't believe I screwed up. I wish I
00:55:13.620hadn't screwed up. And you're kind of like taking it on yourself. It's a natural human reaction.
00:55:19.340But I've learned to not push that out. I've learned to be like, I've learned to have the
00:55:24.660self-pity. That's okay. That's a human thing. But also be like, okay, when you screw up,
00:55:29.000you screw up. A lot of people don't learn that. And honestly, me learning it was directly tied
00:55:34.780to coming out as a trans woman, because you kind of have to learn to just deal with.
00:55:39.740You realize all of the ways in which society is telling lies about you. And then you start to be
00:55:44.680like, well, what are other lies I believe about people who aren't like me? I think it is hard to
00:55:51.280escape the lies that are told about groups that are not like you, but it's even harder to escape
00:55:57.100the lies that you've told about yourself. I spent years and years and years and years
00:56:05.180knowing I wanted to be a girl, but thinking that that didn't make me trans. I hadn't known from
00:56:10.720when I was a little kid. Well, actually I had, I just had those memories forcibly taken away from
00:56:15.500me. I, you know, I wasn't in tremendous pain about my gender. Well, actually I was, I was
00:56:20.320hiding it from myself I just felt like an automaton and then one day I read this interview
00:56:27.180with Daniel Lavery the trans guy writer and he was like I felt my whole life like I was a brain
00:56:33.860in a jar and now I don't I was like I feel like a brain in a jar and I had known I was trans
00:56:41.460but I thought there was like a like a test I had to pass I thought there was like a PSAT for0.62
00:56:47.280trans name. Get me into all the elite programs. And right up until I published my essay, I was
00:56:52.700convinced that somebody was going to come and say, you're not trans enough. Wow. And then I published
00:56:56.820my essay and everyone was like, oh, cool. Your name's Emily? Great. We love it. And now I have
00:57:00.960so many people. And this is kind of, this is kind of a shitty thing to say, but I hope people never
00:57:05.220stop saying it. I've forgotten your dead name. And like, I'm sure they have. But that's also0.87
00:57:12.840kind of great. It's also kind of great to know that like, Emily makes more sense to the world
00:57:16.700than my old self did if you go look up videos of me on youtube they're there i'm just kind of
00:57:20.460sitting there like a lump just like gazing inarticulately into the distance and then
00:57:25.680somebody will ask me a question and i'll i'll speak up very you know whatever i'll speak up
00:57:29.660very smartly about whatever it is i'm talking about because my brain you know is is still
00:57:36.000interested in the same things and whatever but there were so many lies i've been told my whole
00:57:42.300life that i had internalized about what it meant to be trans about what it meant to be a woman about
00:57:46.580what it meant to be the intersection of those two identities of trans women about what it meant to
00:57:50.800be you know a gay or straight or whatever all of these sort of spectrums that we fall on or fall
00:57:56.360within and i think one of the reasons that uh transphobia has run so rampant right now uh some
00:58:02.620of it's because we're the flavor du jour which will pass in time um i mean never entirely structural
00:58:08.940inequality never goes away. But some of it is also, we symbolize a breaking down of that order
00:58:19.260a little bit. We symbolize a breaking down of, oh, if this binary isn't real, what other binaries
00:58:25.420aren't real? What other systems are inequitable? What other systems can or should even be burned
00:58:33.400down how is the matrix real and how is it false what does it mean to take a red pill what does it
00:58:39.500mean to take a blue pill what are you comfortable with that you shouldn't be comfortable with and
00:58:42.880what are you uncomfortable about that you should examine more what does it mean to live in a world
00:58:49.180that is not entirely real that is built for you by people who want to maintain their own power