E2x03 Brad Polumbo wouldn't date F2Ms

A new doll appears! AuthentiKate was a famous trans influencer in the 2000s. She joins the show. Journalist Ben Ryan pops in for a new science update segment.

Some trans people will never appreciate it, but devastatingly handsome Youtube star Brad Polumbo is one of our biggest advocates. He cares enough to tell us our fringe agenda is delusional, and which parts America will support.

Dollcast sat down for a real discussion.

Transcript

Transgender Experience Through Aging and Identity

Kate 0:00

Yes, let's do it. Yeah, let's do it, all right.

Brianna 0:08

Welcome to DollCast.

Taf 0:13

With Kelly Cadigan. I know you guys are going to tell me I'm crazy, but I think all gay men would benefit from a gender transition.

Brianna 0:20

Rihanna Wu.

Kate 0:22

Do you know who Rihanna.

Brad 0:22

Wu is.

Sky 0:35

It was people on the line. I said you were Rihanna Wu, so I don't know who she is now session.

Taf 0:40

Having your story heard, having people empathize with you on that kind of political level, I think is really hard to do.

Brianna 0:48

It's the Dollcast. Mostly normal women.

Sky 0:55

Hey there, welcome back to Dollcast. I'm your host, skylar Bogert, and this is a podcast where we dive into the human experience, all while having just a little bit of fun along the way. Today, I'm joined by my fabulous co-host, as always, brianna Wu, our fearless maven.

Brianna 1:12

Hi, brianna, so good to see you, I do want to say the woman that recorded that intro. Her house burned down in Los Angeles this week. So shout out to Amanda Wynn Lee lee. We understand if it's going to be difficult for you to say taft's name correctly in the intro for a while it's never gonna happen. Yes, I will fly out there and give her a mic, uh, to help her out.

Taf 1:38

So I think eventually it's just going to become a running joke. That is just totally wrong.

Brianna 1:45

Or you can change your name.

Taf 1:46

That would help the show a lot, yeah, or I could just change the name, yeah.

Sky 1:53

Oh, that's devastating to hear, though. Well, either way, we'll continue on and just persevere. You may notice that there's a new person, a new guest here today. Kate, the lovely Kate, is filling in for kelly this week. Welcome, kate, glad to have you here, thank you sky.

Brianna 2:10

I appreciate it of course, our girl kelly cadigan got engaged this week she's doing it today, so very exciting. She asked for the week off and I happen to know a lot of famous people, so I know Kate. It was honored. I reached out to her and I'm like, oh my God, please say yes, we don't have another host. And she said yes, so here we are.

Kate 2:34

I think fame is a lot to put on me, but no, not so much.

Sky 2:40

Well, we're glad to have you here.

Brianna 2:42

Yeah, so famous in our minds for sure, yeah yeah, do you want to tell people your story, kate? So, just so people know, everyone my age that transitioned looked up to Kate. Like there are any number of like gorgeous trans influencers today. Kate was the original super hot, gorgeous, cool trans influencer that everyone looked up to. She had an ultra famous blog. We're editing some pictures of her back in the day. Uh, like genuinely stunning and uh was just super inspirational to most people my age, the transition. So, kate, it's a real honor to have you here today.

Kate 3:21

Thank you I struggle with uh, with flattering, uh, with flattering, uh, it's I don't know. I've never gotten over that.

Ben 3:28

Um, and I certainly didn't intend to be as influential as as I was to that small group of people.

Kate 3:33

Um, but it definitely turned out that way and um, I was thankful for the opportunity at the time.

Brianna 3:39

So do you want to tell people a little bit about yourself? What have you been up to in the last 20 years, girl, uh, yeah um, it's kind of boring right, like so I I disappeared from um in 2003.

Kate 3:53

I kind of faded away off the public internet and I still participated on some you know private forums and had some friends and whatnot. But by 2006 I kind of went invisible and just disappeared, kind of purged everything trans related and just got on with it. Got married in 2010. We've been together for 20 years but it took a while to get married Worked, traveled, lived.

Kate 4:20

Kind of pseudo-retired in 2019 and started a livestock farm as you do. Oh, wow, yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's wild. Until recently, trans hasn't really been a thing in my life. I just kind of I literally went 15 years without thinking about it.

Taf 4:41

So that's so crazy. So what brought you back then? Because you're making, I don't know quite as much. So it was a bit of a midlife crisis a little bit of like coming to terms with aging and that triggered all kinds of emotional stuff right and so, as I'm cleaning my emotional house, there's this rug in the corner and I peek under that freaking rug and there's all this trance garbage stuck under this emotional rug.

Kate 5:02

Yeah, and.

Taf 5:03

I was like god, you, I should have probably dealt with that stuff like 20 years ago, but like I don't know.

Kate 5:09

Let's start cleaning. And so I got online and I started like researching, I stumbled across some, a few ladies and I realized I didn't have a modern position on trans issues. I was clueless. It was so ironic, painfully so. I was like I gotta figure this out, I gotta get a position and I think now, a year and a half later, I think I know what. I think I'm open to change of course. Yeah, so that's it.

Taf 5:41

Aging seasonal depression Nice, Well, we seasonal depression, life stuff, nice Well, I'm glad to have you, for sure.

Brianna 5:50

Yeah, yeah, it's a real honor. I mean, if you don't mind me asking what are kind of your positions? I know you've been thinking through some stuff, kind of what conclusions have you drawn? How are you feeling?

Kate 6:03

Oh gosh, there's so many issues, right? My initial, let me rewind. What conclusions have you drawn? How are you feeling? Oh gosh, there's so many issues, right? My initial, let me rewind. So I started transition in 1998.

Brianna 6:12

And you know, back then, there really wasn't much discussion.

Kate 6:15

We all kind of figured it out on our own. In my case, I didn't meet another trans person for like three and a half years after trans, you know, after starting transition. So we really just kind of grew up in cis culture and just integrated and that was that was our mindset. We want to get through it and get on with it and I'm, not surprisingly, still kind of feel like that. I feel like I feel like transition is a medical process that we have to go through to survive and once you're through that life and I've never had a trans identity.

Kate 6:54

Really it was thrust upon me when I was like in the public eye a little bit, but like it's never been a defining thing in my life. So, yeah, I have a trans experience. For sure it doesn't come up at a doctor's office occasionally, yeah, but that's, that's really about it.

Sky 7:11

Yeah, yeah, wow, that's so relatable. I like I feel like before I was like online and doing doll casts and all these different just video opportunities. I was very much in the same boat. Granted, it was a lot shorter lived um, cause I only started transition in 2018, but for those like couple of years where, like I was starting passing and I was just moving about in life, like being trans just didn't matter at all. It never came up, it wasn't a big deal.

Sky 7:38

And now that I'm doing more stuff online, it's like it's actually in the forefront of my mind all the time and I'm interacting with people and it's like, oh yeah, you're trans and it's like, oh yeah, I guess so, but that's like kind of a small part of me ultimately. So very much relate with what you were saying. Like, through that process, I was just kind of curious. You said, like with aging, was there like a milestone where you were like, okay, now it's like time for me to come out and speak more, or is it like, was it more just kind of gradual waking up in this, like there was more momentum behind that decision to like be on here and like come out again?

Kate 8:14

Yeah. The groundbreaking point was a text from Brianna yesterday.

Brianna 8:22

Brianna- shows up and your life is just changed. Like that, I'm like Willy Wonka.

Kate 8:28

Yeah, yeah, it was amazing. She did the cane stick tumble and sorry classic old person joke.

Taf 8:39

Yeah, I've only watched the Tim and Chris show.

Kate 8:41

It was definitely more gradual. I guess it started with, so this might sound a little weird. Uh, so with aging I I dove into, uh, surgical solutions for uh, not looking ancient and I think some of that like using surgery as a way to kind of become, using surgery as a way to become more comfortable with myself, I think triggered some of the old stuff as well. Like it was like oh, these are old patterns that I recognize and I was cognizant of it, but I might have leaned into it as well.

Brianna 9:21

So I really understand that Because you know I had I don't mind saying $100,000 of you know plastic surgery last year and you know part of that was anti-aging but part of it is just, you know, like my FFS, I had very early techniques with that. It wasn't, it didn't get me as far as I needed to go and I think I look much better now. It didn't get me as far as I needed to go and I think I look much better now. It's been really interesting for me because when I was through my 20s and 30s, no one valued me or gave me opportunities because of my looks. I mean, I wasn't horrible looking, I just wasn't particularly pretty, you know. And now, like I find, having gone through this, like I feel really good when I look in the mirror nowadays which is really odd to happen in your 40s like where you're getting better looking as you get older. So I don't know, I think it's it's a challenge and I don't think trans women are alone in facing that challenge as we age, if that makes sense to you.

Kate 10:23

I mean, it makes sense to me. I hate, I hate that I'm as vulnerable to it as I am. And I wonder, I wonder, if you know growing up feeling pretty, you know? I thankfully I have more in my life than that, but I wonder if. All right, let me give you a quick rewind. I went to Vegas in last January and the last time I was in Vegas I was in my twenties and I, you know, used to think I was a rock star.

Kate 10:51

So I'm in Vegas with a bunch of my old friends for 50th birthday parties and I'm like, realizing I'm invisible in this city, like no one notices me, and it just kind of hit me and I was talking to my friend Erin and she's like, don't you love it? And I'm like no, I freaking hate it, it's awful and it's just vanity and it's just self-worth and it's, it's ugly and and you know, but I think it's normal. Unfortunately I do too yeah.

Brianna 11:23

I think it's. It's very relatable.

Brianna 11:25

I mean, obviously, you know, cis women deal with this as well and trying to stay relevant, and I would imagine for you it's like because you were so, especially in your 20s, like held up as like the ideal that people should shoot for.

Brianna 11:39

You know, I I can imagine that being really hard. Um, what I love is I've gotten to know you is, you know and this is just me being honest like back in the day I enjoyed your work, but it wasn't so much how you looked, as much as I thought you were a really skillful writer, really struggling with stuff in a really personal way and in having an honest conversation that we just were not having 20 years ago. So I really love your work for that. And the reason I brought you here today is like, look, obviously you're gorgeous, but honestly, I think it's because you're witty and smart and kind and thoughtful and I think the entire point to Dollcast is kind of figuring out where we need to go as a community, and I think there's a lot of value in truth in what you've experienced and you know what this next generation of trans girls to hear it and and love you as much as I do so.

Kate 12:36

Welcome to the show kate, yeah, the rare raw honesty is um. Is it really important? But it's hard to get at because it's vulnerability. And you take someone going through transition and it's the most vulnerable experience most of us have ever encountered and will ever encounter and to expose yourself during that takes either exceptional bravery or exceptional desperation, and I think I was the latter, honestly, I would love to say that I was brave, but I think I just hadn't seen the list, or at least I felt that way yeah, so I guess I don't know as much about your like transition journey or, like you mentioned, it was 1998.

Transitioning and Finding Role Models

Sky 13:24

I was a little kid in the 90s so I don't know as well about like what that time was like. But can you just describe a little bit more, if you don't mind, like how, I guess how you figured out like you wanted to transition and what that journey looked like for you in 1998, where I imagine there was less access to like medical procedures and finding a doctor was probably harder, like I'm just I'm just really curious honestly, about what that was like. Yeah, so we were.

Kate 13:53

We were a bit bereft of of role models, of successful, integrated women. Yeah, lynn Conway was a monstrous resource for me. She was, she was perfect and that she achieved in her life and all that stuff. And I was lucky enough to get to know her and a few others that had gotten on with it and just were willing to give their time and energy to me. So that was monstrous and that was really the breaking point for me. You know, like like just having one role model, just one, that first person that I was like, oh my God, like I can have a life.

Kate 14:34

They were very rare back then, and that's that's what triggered me and I remember, you know, I think I assume that most people remember that that moment, that moment where you're like oh my god damn, um, and that was december 1998 so it was late 1998 I just started grad school.

Brad 14:51

I was uh at the university of wisconsin in madison and uh that's where my husband got his phd.

Kate 14:58

That's crazy, yeah yeah, um, uh, yeah, so we were probably kind of together. When was he?

Brianna 15:08

in. I don't know. Frank is older than I am, so I was kind of like he's 12 years older, so he'll be talking. Oh, I was in kindergarten, frank.

Kate 15:22

I'm sorry. Yeah, so I kind of I was pragmatic Skye. I've actually watched a few of your things um prior to this and um your sensibility yeah, your sensibility is spot on with how I went about.

Kate 15:35

Things on the toe, in the water, gradual, reversible. Make sure you're confident, make sure you're aware. Um, you know, we waited uh 20 years. Let's not go crazy, let's just be sure. And so that's what I did. Um, I started immediately with like hair stuff, um like removal and uh hormones, but, of course, doctors weren't a thing, so I was black marketing.

Kate 16:01

For three years I black marketed and just kind of dealt with things myself. I did not go through, even though Harry Benjamin stuff was locked in. At that point I found my own way and, but that was lack of availability my doctor literally said no, never really. I said at least can you you do my blood work. If.

Ben 16:26

I'm going to do this black market.

Kate 16:28

Can you at least? Keep me updated on blood results, and he did that, so I at least had some data to adjust my HRT. Oh my Fascinating. Three years later I did this weird androgynous thing where I was like I do not want to flip the switch until I can flip this switch, which is kind of really dumb, because by the end I just couldn't pass as a boy anymore.

Kate 16:57

I got FFS literally three days after I went full time. Oh, wow, okay, who did your FFS? Oh yeah, I've also had some questions. I mean oh, wow, okay, who did your FFS? Oh yeah, I've also had some questions. I mean the only person? Yeah, who was it? Osterhout? Yeah, yeah, wow, you got the OG. Wow, yeah, yeah, the OG. I mean, what are your options?

Taf 17:18

True, okay. So I have a question Going from you, know, realizing. Okay, so I have a question Going from you, know, realizing that you might want to transition to eventually flipping the switch to FFS. How long were you like in that in between phase before you flip the switch, and had FFS Three years?

Kate 17:43

Okay, okay, that's a decent amount of time, though. Yeah, so I've been hormonally female for a long time. I was binding to pass asing. Yeah, yeah I. I remember thinking like am I the freaking only trans girl on the planet to bind her chest? Like what the hell am I doing?

Brianna 17:59

do you have any pictures of this, because you must have looked. Uh, uh, I I'm trying to think of a boy.

Taf 18:05

Like a trans guy probably.

Brianna 18:06

Yeah.

Taf 18:06

Yeah.

Ben 18:07

Yeah.

Taf 18:07

Like a pre-transition trans guy.

Kate 18:10

Honestly, I, I just I could not pass as a boy. Uh, like I would be out in like shirt and tie, like boy mode, and like people would come up and go. You are so beautiful and I'd be like well that's just confusing.

Taf 18:24

I mean, that's quite flattering, though.

Kate 18:26

Ultimately, yeah, um yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, of course, but I don't know if I heard it at the time.

Taf 18:34

You know, right, I mean you never do um, I mean I don't know. I relate in so many ways because I also I think that I sort of came onto the internet and people like immediately were very interested in me because I was transitioning, so young and as I've like gotten a little bit older and there's just so many like beautiful trans women online and I've like removed myself a little bit. I've had your like vaguest experience where you just get like fewer, you just get less attention in general and then you like sort of realize you're like, oh my god, actually I really liked that attention that I used to get, and so that can be sort of cognitively difficult to deal with.

Kate 19:17

You don't really appreciate it, like when you're in it, I think no, um, I I didn't, you know I I think I it all just happened so fast for me like I went from I went from oh, now I'm full time to being hit on by celebrities that's crazy wow and uh you know, being yeah, it was it was I you know, it was like a tornado in my brain.

Kate 19:49

I didn't know how to process. And then you added the fame on top of it, like this weird like granted, it's internet fame and it's like 1990s, 2000s internet fame, but you roll that all in and I was I was sloppy, yeah it's sort of inevitable.

Evolution of Trans Visibility on Internet

Taf 20:07

But I will say, you know, growing up on a later internet. So I was born in 2000. And so I witnessed a kind of transition in the internet space from there being trans women who I sort of idolized and who I sort of saw like occasional pictures floating by from idolized and who I sort of saw like occasional pictures floating by from. And there are images that are just like seared into my brain of like gorgeous trans women that you would just like see in the ether and then never connect with. And now I feel like the way we relate to the internet is so different.

Taf 20:39

All of those people I can like go to their twitter page or their instagram or whatever, and I am seeing like live updates on their life, and so there's so much more connection and there really used to be like an era, I feel, of like a mysterious and enigmatic and like gorgeous trans women you sort of idolize but like feel so distant and I can just so clearly picture you falling into that role for so many people. You know, I don't know if free can like attest to that, but that's just what I imagine. Well, it was.

Brianna 21:14

It was the fact that how can I say this? You know, you've got to understand. For kate and I, the image of trans girls was jerry springer, right? Um, yeah, so it would be some cross-dresser looking person and you'd see kate, and look it's, it's for me. I I never had any like desire to be gorgeous. I just wanted to have a life where I didn't feel trapped all the time, like I had to act like a boy and people would treat me like that, like I just wanted a boyfriend and a career. I didn't want to hide what I was thinking and feeling all the time. I didn't want to look like some drag queen on Jerry Springer. So Kate was very inspirational to a lot of us because it was like look, you can transition and you can look normal and you can be normal if that makes sense to you. So, um, you know, like you really were the prototype, uh, trans influencer back in the day I mean there were a few of us, fair enough, but yeah, were they, were they?

Kate 22:22

I mean I think so, like ta you were mentioning, on the updates and I actually in a very like, in a very like antediluvian early internet way, I tried to do that with a blog this is before they were called blogs even but like I updated every few days with a fairly usually a pretty long story, and so people would constantly check in and follow me through my to my travels and journeys. Um, I lived on the road back then, so it was always newness and excitement and all that.

Brad 23:03

But yeah, so I tried to do that and I think that level of engagement changes the calculation a lot.

Taf 23:09

Yes, you were really like a trendsetter in so many ways. Yeah, she was.

Brianna 23:13

I watched too much sex in the city, probably that show is super problematic if you re-watch it by the way you're like oh my gosh, carrie not age well. You're like oh my gosh, carrie was actually a horrible person Like I kind of hate her.

Kate 23:30

I still haven't had that take out of the day, though I didn't like her back in the day, All right.

Brianna 23:35

well, Skye, do you want to finish introducing everyone to the show?

Sky 23:38

We did the thing where we go on course, sure, yeah, okay, go of course, sure, yeah, um, okay, yeah. So we have brianna, and then, and then we have taftash and um, she's joining us again. Our muse, as always, our favorite co-host. Um and so, and then um, and then we have myself, but sadly kelly cannot be here, and so we we have Kate filling in for her today.

Taf 24:04

Yeah, and Kelly has a very happy reason not to be here. I know that's amazing. Yeah, kelly's made it. She's married to a straight man. That's the dream. That's the dream, yeah. So I rewatched Envy slash Desire this weekend, envy slash desire this weekend, and so I have, like the the old discourse on my brain trans men and straight men. What are the, what are the possibilities? And clearly there's some good possibility because we've got brie and kelly, both, um, either married or set to be married I don't think it's that hard to find a straight guy.

Brianna 24:44

I really don't.

Taf 24:44

I mean I mean, I found it difficult, but I think that if you're committed, you can make it happen for sure.

Brianna 24:51

I think like the dating time for me was really ideal for it because there wasn't like like the dating apps didn't exist, so you had to go out in real life and actually meet people. So you know, I would go out and just honestly go hit on boys I thought were cute. It worked really well. And then you know, like yesterday we go on a date and we click and tell them I was trans at that point, you know, before kissing or anything like that, and they were honestly interested.

Sky 25:22

So you know that's how we used to do it back in the day, you didn't get a whole lot of rejection, like I feel like I I mean yeah, I was like gonna say like I mean a couple of times that I've mentioned it, only like twice the both the guys were like no, no thanks anymore, like they were over it, and I was like, oh, okay, but I was just kind of like whatever about it, cause for me it was a bonus, um fling, so it wasn't like a an essential thing, um, but it has been like I mean, it's definitely true that sometimes there's a risk of rejection when going up to someone like that, and I think, like dating apps can kind of eliminate some of that risk, um, by like matching you up with people that are already interested. Yeah, how did you meet your husband, kate?

Kate 26:11

It was first off. I think I was ready, like I don't think you ever meet a spouse unless you're, like, emotionally ready. Yeah, it was random, so I'll try to tell it quick. I went to Best Buy, I made it to the monitor, I was like oh.

Sky 26:25

I'll look at video games because let's lean into the trans video game cliche, I'll lean back into whatever.

Ben 26:32

So I went through the video game aisle and I was like, oh, I'm going to buy this video game. It's like some Star.

Kate 26:36

Wars-y video game. Fine, fair enough. I brought it home and I was like oh, there's people, I'm playing with people and I met, meet people and we play together. It was awesome and I met this guy and he ended up being my husband eventually. But we just played this game together for like six months just in our and like then we give a phone conversation, and then he was in um, santa barbara, I was in boston at the time so it was was Thanksgiving and I'm like Yano, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?

Ben 27:09

And I'm thinking about cooking a Thanksgiving lobster.

Kate 27:12

So he flew out. All my friends were on speed dial because weirdo coming to visit who knows? Yeah, so it turned out okay and then we went a few months later, I was traveling to England. And I was like, hey, what are you doing for the next month? And so we took a month off of work and went to England with him. And our second week in England I was like, ooh, actually, right after this, do you want to go to India for a?

Brianna 27:37

month and he was like, let me call my work.

Kate 27:40

So we spent two months traveling the world together and we're like this. This is kind of working.

Taf 27:46

That is quite a way to jumpstart a relationship.

Kate 27:50

Yeah, yeah, and then fast forward 20 years later.

Brianna 27:54

So we were talking like for me, skye was talking on how, for her, the dating apps, like you, deal with rejection sometimes. How did like?

Kate 28:06

obviously I had guys reject me sometimes for being trans. How did you find that back in the day? Okay, so this is gonna be contentious. Um, there weren't rules back then, that's right. So we were all trying to figure this out on our own and so when I approached the relationship, um, disclosure was about what I wanted out of the relationship. So if I thought it was someone I could love, then, yeah, transparency and honesty are paramount, and those discussions may not have been before all intimacy, but they were certainly before the big intimacy. But, like, I had a lot of relationships where I just didn't I will admit to understanding what you're talking about.

Brianna 28:53

Uh, there were not really rules or discourse back then, so you know like, yeah, it was a different era.

Kate 29:02

I the worst was I had. I called him my human dilator.

Kate 29:11

I had a guy that I know so scandalous. I feel like such an ass. I'm so sorry to the world, but, like I really liked him and I dated him for like 18 months, you know I didn't love him. I really liked him, though, and I still feel bad about that, because you know he's the only person from anyone that I've ever dated. He's the only person that I've left in the past, and the reason he didn't come forward with me is because of a lack of honesty, and the reason he didn't come forward with me is because of the lack of honesty. Yeah, and you know, I guess I would encourage people to be honest, be upfront, tell your story.

Ben 29:53

You don't have to use specific terminology or words, but you have to be true to yourself and true to your story.

Kate 30:00

Yeah, I wish I would have done that more often but I didn't.

Brianna 30:03

But don't you think that gets you like crammed into certain boxes, kate? I mean because today it's like a formula for running into like I hate this word, chaser but guys that are really, really interested in trans women and like object. You objectify you about that and it's like if you want a relationship with the, with a normal, like heterosexual guy, like he's gotta like you for you in like spite of being trans right, like my husband has never dated a trans woman, is not particularly interested in trans women just clicked with me and appreciates me, and that's exactly what you want. I think today it's like these dating apps. It's like you've got to classify and disclose so early on that it's, it's a trap. So I actually feel really sorry for trans girls nowadays I do now as well.

Kate 30:54

I? I do not have advice, so I just, you know, two decades of monogamy. I'm clueless on how to how. To date I wouldn't have a clue, um, but it does seem exceptionally limiting it's frustrating for sure.

Taf 31:13

I think dating apps have made it so easy to get casual sex and a lot of young guys like that's all they want, right?

Taf 31:22

And so if you're on a dating app in your 20s and you're looking for guys to date, you're going to find lots of guys who just want casual sex, and, frankly, that's true for non-trans women as well.

Taf 31:37

So our problem is like, not even that unique, um, but then you know, as you get older, the frustrating thing that a lot of women find to be true is that what, whereas in their 20s they were able to get tons of temporary boyfriends, you know, flings and whatnot, they get into their 30s or 40s and if they're still dating, they realize that like, oh, actually now it's way harder to find guys, and it used to be that tons of guys were just interested in sex, and now guys are just interested in relationship, but they're interested in, like, younger women or like you know very, you know, hot women, and that can be really hard for some women. So, yeah, it's not fun out there in the dating world. So getting a husband, um, you know, and and taking him to the end, that is definitely I think. I think you guys made the right move.

Brianna 32:30

So be honest, though y'all Don't you think the quality of men out there has decreased? Because I look at some of these 20-something guys and I'm just like wow, like most guys when I was in my 20s had a job.

Taf 32:44

you know just just three, four yeah, I don't know if it's decreased, but it's definitely it's grim. I will say you have to sort through a lot of guys and I feel like I have very high standards, which is another problem, like when I was trying to date men, you know, before I found my partner. Um, yeah, lots of guys who I was just not that into all right.

Brianna 33:10

How's the dating market? Ben, we're talking about the horrors of dating. How bad is it today?

Ben 33:19

oh, my god, uh, I hear that congratulations are in order for one yes.

Sky 33:24

For Kelly.

Ben 33:27

Not here with us, oh sorry. Oh, there's a new person Hello.

Brianna 33:30

That's right. This is Kate. She's famous. She's filling in. Kelly's doing engagement stuff, so Okay Ben thank you for coming back to the show.

Sky 33:40

Wanted to kind of get a little bit more detail on. I think that you had published a story or a study or at least talked about, yeah, something about one in 1000 kids being on HRT, if I have that correctly. Yeah, by the time they hit 17.

Ben 33:57

So I can just do it, yeah, which is interesting because you know, part of what I would like to talk about is the framing of these studies, because if you tell one group of people one in 1,000 children age 17 who have private insurance are on cross-sex hormones for gender transition, some people will react like you all did, like wow, that's a lot. And other people will say we told you it wasn't that many people. So it's interesting how subjective these objective numbers can be, as objective as they might be in these studies. So what it was, it was a study led out of Harvard's public health school. It was published in what's called a research letter in Gemma Pediatrics last Monday, and research letters are shorter.

Ben 34:40

I suppose they must have very tight word caps so you don't get a lot of the data that you might otherwise like, but in any case it's peer-reviewed. So what it found? They analyzed about 5 million data on 5 million adolescents and they defined that very broadly between the ages of 8 and 17 years old who had private health insurance. So in general, these findings are generalizable to people with large group plans. So you know people are on Medicaid or children are uninsured, and the uninsured rate, mind you of children tends to be fairly low because of various federal programs in any case.

Rates of Adolescent Transgender Hormone Use

Brianna 35:12

But the rates in those groups might be lower and I know that, brianna, you and I have discussed how you think that the rate might be higher than what was reported amongst people with private health insurance, because they might be getting it through the internet or whatever, but that's something yeah, I mean, if you had to guess what, what percentage of kids today, because you're closer to it than I do, like diying when I'm in my private trans discords where there are minors present, like you know, it seems like there are a lot of people that are diying, or do you disagree with that? Would you have to guess? It's higher, lower, how do you feel about that?

Taf 35:46

Jeez, I have no idea how many people are DIYing. I mean I reacted like wow, that's a surprising amount of people. I know that lots of people, I think, massively overestimate the number of kids on HRT.

Taf 36:00

There's like a famous clip of Matt Walsh talking to Joe Rogan where he he like wildly by like a million yeah, millions of people which is just like, of course, like that's absurd and so like I don't know, as someone who has like a more realistic expectation for how difficult it is for adolescents to start this process in general, um, one in a thousand seems like a lot to me. In terms of how many people DIY. I think it's going to be, you know, pretty rare, you know, maybe like one in 10,000 or one in 100,000, maybe something like that. Right, you know, off by a factor of 10.

Taf 36:41

Do you think so Really, I think so. Yeah, I mean, I think that, like it's easy to really overestimate these things and I think that for every you know 10 or you know 20 trans kids who are getting HRT through private insurance I think it's probably like one or two you know people who are getting it through gray markets. But yeah, I think it's probably easy to overestimate and probably not a huge number, but also not like you know nothing to totally ignore, right.

Ben 37:12

So in any case, keeping that in mind as a fact potential factor, what they found was that out of these 5 million adolescents they started at age eight, because that's generally the earliest age of a normal puberty. That isn't precocious. So they figured, you know, for puberty blockers they might start that young and then in the classic hormones a bit later. So they found that overall that one less than one in one thousand children were on classic hormones in particular. So that was the top line finding that was presented in the press release and this is presented as being a very low figure. And so pretty much all the science journalists, quote-unquote in the major media outlets who reported this, all just parroted that figure. Oh, it's less than 1 in 1,000. It's very small. But the problem is they were doing two things with that figure. One is that they were averaging it over time, and so are you able to share the screen with um I will put the thing up in post production so people are seeing it on screen right now, if you look at over time, you can see.

Ben 38:13

Let's look at cross-sex hormones. So that's the blue line and the gray line, and the blue line is assigned female at birth and the gray line is assigned male at birth. So the way that the study framed it was oh, no one under 12 got cross-sex hormones. Another way of saying that is people 12 and older got cross-sex hormones. So you can see how it presented both in the press release as well as in this research letter that it's being framed. As we told you, it wasn't as big of a deal, but I don't know, are that many people really claiming that people under the age of 12 are getting cross-sex hormones? I don't know.

Ben 38:51

Another way of saying it is like this is something that generally is done largely by teenagers when we're talking about minors, and that over time those rates increase, in particular amongst natal girls. So another way of saying it is well, by age 18, what proportion of kids you know had started these drugs when they were minors and those figures were reported in the study. So out of 100,000 natal girls, about 140 in this group started causing hormones by age 17. So that's 0.14%. And then for natal boys it was 82 out of 100,000. So that's 0.082% and if you put the two together that means that by the time they're 17, about 1 in 1,000 kids with private health insurance have started these medications.

Ben 39:34

But despite the fact that those figures were in the research letter, when you just report an across-the-board figure over time, if you stretch that out over to down to age eight, it reduces the figure essentially. And then there are other things that might've raised it, such as we've discussed, or like they didn't report. When they use the diagnosis code it's an endocrine disorder not otherwise specified. So that's often done Like. Sometimes it's possibly done as a way of getting around various regulations, such as in Texas there is the Texas Attorney General has sued a health care provider for doing that since they passed their ban recently, for example. So another thing so they say that advocates of these restrictive laws argue that the rates of gender affirming care are too high. We've certainly pointed to an example where Matt Walsh has done that and he's been very influential.

Taf 40:29

We were just talking about this.

Ben 40:30

Yes, but if you look at, say, the Tennessee law that is under consideration by the Supreme Court right now, it explains why they want to have the law in the opening passage of it, and nowhere in there is it saying that lots of kids are getting it. They want to have the law and the opening passage of it, and nowhere in there is it saying that, like lots of kids are getting it, it says the rates are increasingly increasing quickly, but mostly what it focuses on their concerns about harm, and so I find it a bit disingenuous for them to claim that that's like the main issue that people are talking about when they want these laws. So there's a lot of ways that this was just couched in a way to sort of hit a political point and just so, anyway, I'll be here. We all think about this.

Taf 41:10

I mean a one in one thousand still just seems like a lot. Yeah Right, like you know, I think that historically, especially like when I started transition and again this is what you're getting out in terms of the rates increasing is what you're getting out in terms of the rates increasing I just know that, looking at social circles and the proportion of young trans women that I saw out there, it was like almost no one when I started to transition and now I see that like pretty commonly one to one thousand. I mean, at like a big high school, you're gonna have like a few trans women, um, trans girls, and that seems like a lot to me. So I think, when I think about it in that historical perspective, I'm seeing the rates increase and that's why I think people are concerned.

Ben 41:52

One other thing I wanted to mention is that. So this is covering 2018 to 2022, a five-year period, and, as we've seen from the Komodo data that came out, that Reuters did in 2022 and Do no Harm issued a state-by-state analysis that came out, that Reuters did in 2022 and do no harm issued a state by state analysis that came out a couple in October, and all of those show that during that period the rates, as to your point, were increasing dramatically. So if you only report the average rate over time, that's going to be lower than if you reported 2022, it looks like in 2023, the rates declined, you know, pretty consistently, at least a bit. The rate looks sort of like an S on the side of a violin. It went down a little bit during the pandemic and then zoomed up and then there was a bit of a retreat in 2023. There could be many reasons for that.

Ben 42:37

I think it's possible that the doctors are becoming more reticent in the face of increasing lawsuits. They want to cover their faces. Possibly parents are reading a lot of information that makes them concerned and more reticent to consent to having their kids receive these medications. Who knows, but it's troublesome to me when a research like this is published with a specific political goal in mind and then you can see the ways that they've done two things you know doing average over. You know a group of age and average over time, and those will both do this to the numbers. I'm just guessing. Let's say it might be as high as one in 500 kids with private.

Ben 43:18

I think that would be an upper limit Currently yeah 17 year olds, 17 year olds, so like that's maybe the highest, I would guess in 2022, but possibly somewhere between 0.1 and 0.5, and especially I'm talking about natal girls in particular, because those are the higher rate boys. Lower natal boys, um, so, in any case, the question is like is that or a lot or a little? Does this assuage people's fear or concern, or confirm them? And, and you know, it really depends on who you ask.

Taf 43:47

Yeah well, can I ask you a question regarding the change, the differences in rates between natal boys and natal girls? Does that indicate, in your mind, to a different cause of this gender dysphoria between the two sexes?

Ben 44:02

that's something that also gets elided, if that's the right word, between in analyses like these and discussions is the source of people's people's gender dysphoria and their transgender identification, and there's the true. Transsexual is the term that is used a lot I hate it I hate it whatever.

Evolution of Trans Community and Healthcare

Ben 44:22

The traditional natal boy, natal male who since a very young age identified as the opposite sex or transgender, et cetera, couldn't stand being put in whatever clothes, et cetera. And then we have this new phenomenon that's happened over the last 10 years, where we have a lot of natal girls who, after the onset of puberty, start to have gender discordance and express, you know, gender dysphoria, etc. So that's something that gets just sort of lost in the wash in these conversations, or like, basically, people just say, oh well, there always been transgender people like, yeah, but different kinds and from different sources, so why is it bad to talk about this?

Brianna 45:00

yeah, kate, I wanted to ask you that, like tell me this is not just my memory, but back in the day when we transitioned, did you know any trans guys? Because I didn't. I it just seems like something like I look at this data, If you look at the chart, you've got two times as many you know trans guys as trans girls. I mean, this is like did you know anyone that was a trans guy back in the day?

Kate 45:25

girls I mean this is like did you know anyone that was a trans guy back in the day? No, I mean the extent of trans guys was seeing Buck Angel on the cover of the magazine.

Brianna 45:31

Yes, yeah, it just wasn't a thing. So this is I know they would probably tell you it's. I mean, I guess the progressive line on this is you know, you destigmatize it, so people come forward, but I, I just don't find that a satisfactory answer personally well, almost all the growth has been in younger people and natal girls in transit evocation, the trans population in the last 10 years or so.

Ben 45:57

Over 35, you don't see any growth. So why is that why? You know, why is the older group not responding to these signals of reduced stigma in the same way that, supposedly, them people? Maybe they just sort of trench in their lives and it's too late for them. I don't know, but it really that's not how transition works.

Brianna 46:13

There are plenty of 40 year olds had three kids military. The transition back at kate. How many of these did you know? The guys are in the army and they were cross-dressers and they suddenly came out and blew up.

Kate 46:26

No, no I don't think I knew anyone.

Ben 46:28

Yeah, but you heard the new art yeah, right it was a, thing, yeah it's definitely an archetype yeah I can say that, having written about hiv forever, is that until very recently, when it came to breaking down subpopulations in various studies about hiv, trans men were almost never included, because you could only get like two and so there was never enough for some sort of statistically significant result. So that's only a recent phenomenon. Where these studies have started to, you know, cobble together the trans male population. Granted, they have different sort of risk factors, they might not be as high risk for HIV anyway, but that you know they were basically discounted because they were so rare that it almost wasn't worth the resources and studying that population in this context yeah, well, we're gonna have a few more minutes because, uh, our next guest is running a little bit late, brad palumbo.

Brianna 47:14

So I guess, um, like, what is the? What is the? I mean I wanted to ask because this is the data we got after the ban what ended up happening to these kids where you took away their gender affirming health care. I mean, what ended up happening to them? What did they get to continue it? Because I think that would literally destroy your life if you got used to being on estrogen and then you were taken off of that I mean it's different from state to state.

Ben 47:39

Some of them have been held up in injunctions, some of them have been implemented. So everyone's waiting for the spring court to rule in the spring and then there'll be a process, whatever they rule, where that'll filter down to the other courts, so it won't be an overnight thing where all of a sudden it'll be legal or illegal in various states. But I mean, that is indeed a big question. You know, do they move away? But you know there's I got pilloried for using this term on Twitter last year, but it's what's called a natural experiment and it sounds unethical but actually it's quite the opposite. A natural experiment is when you study the effects of something that just happened naturally. Let's say, there's a natural disaster in one city but not another, and they're very similar, and then you can study the impacts of that natural disaster.

Taf 48:22

Like minimum wage laws.

Ben 48:24

Right Another example Like for example, craigslist rolled out in phases across the country and so people studied how that impacted local SED rates and they rose because it impacted the digital performance of that. So I said on Twitter unwisely because I didn't anticipate how people would misinterpret me, but this was an opportunity for people to engage in a natural experiment to study how different laws impact young people. You'd have to be able to monitor them and have various data sets, that sort of thing. People thought that I meant that people were just sort of like this horrific Machiavellian intent studying kids and watching them suffer. That's not the point, you know, because you were just studying the impacts of something beyond your control. So, in any case, wouldn't it be nice if researchers were attempting to study the impacts of these laws?

Taf 49:17

At the very least, we might get some data out of it which will point us towards you know, how effective is this HRT intervention for adolescents Right?

Ben 49:25

And indeed, what is it like to have it taken away?

Ben 49:27

And I think I discussed this last time on the show that Laura Edwards-Lieper, who is a psychologist, and she was a part of the team that imported the Dutch model to Boston Children's in 2007. And she's become a very vocal advocate from within this larger clinical community, advocating for more caution in the way that you know the assessments are done and that sort of thing. And you know I asked her you know what happens to these kids when they're in adolescence and they're told I'm sorry, you're not going to be able to get these medications? And from her work with many families of kids, either their parents won't consent or there's a law in the way, or whatever it might be she says the kids largely accept it and are able to deal with it. And that really speaks to a larger bias in our culture which says that everyone is going to fall apart in some sense of trauma and there's no such thing as resiliency or patience. And that's not a discount that these things are very serious, but it is also nice to stress that people can cope with things.

Implications of Early Transgender Transition

Brianna 50:21

Yeah, but you're coping and you've got to like. Your body is perhaps permanently destroyed, or do you change the way that makes your life.

Ben 50:29

What's different if you started? I wasn't asking about people would start it and then stop. It was. It was more asking about kids who had, who wanted to start and had not yet, and then when our right but still like natural puberty is your voice is going to lower, you're going to get a beard, you're going to be tall, you're like it's.

Brianna 50:44

You know, um, I mean, it will make their life much harder I mean the example I love to give is when I open my mouth, you know it's tilted one way because of nerve damage from all the jaw surgery that I've had. You know. Um, I ended up in the icu when they did my tracheal shave because I sat there in the hospital nearly choking to death. You know there was three days. That was not fun. So I hear what you're saying. It's always I mean it's I feel like we're close enough friends. I can say this Like I, I totally I respect where you're coming from because I think you're a straight journalist on it. It's sometimes hard to hear like cis researchers talk about this Like it's so benign because you don't know the personal cost of it. And that's not to say like we shouldn't do caution, like I fully agree with that. I'm just saying it's so much easier to be like, oh, they'll be fine, right, and I know what it's like see your body changing.

Ben 51:41

I think that when she was saying that I think it's largely she's dealing with a patient population who are natal girls, who come in when they're 14 100, they already have breasts, so like the timing isn't as critical at that point because you know they already would have to have top surgery anyway. It just means that they would delay it. So but so definitely to your point. I think that to what I was saying earlier is like we need to differentiate who we're talking about here, what age they are, you know what perhaps the source of their anxiety is, etc. When we're discussing all these different ways that these laws impact people.

Brianna 52:14

Definitely. I wanted to ask you. Someone was saying to me yesterday I wanted to ask if this was true, true that you know my opinion that, um, as I understand, there's no real rush for, you know, female to male trans people to transition so early because testosterone will, I thought, work very effectively. Someone was bringing up to me that, uh, height is largely set from you know, like before you've hit 17, and that you've only got a set amount of time after that where it's going to do anything. So if you, if these, like ftms, get testosterone early, does that affect their height trajectory and can they end up like because it would be very hard to pass if you're like five foot three?

Ben 52:57

yeah, I, I did see one study that I know of that came out very recently that suggested that. I think it was. You know, when you do have pubertal suppression, that's early on, when the growth plates aren't fused or whatever that it can impact height. So but I don't know as much about, like, if it happens later.

Taf 53:14

If you're a party, I will say my understanding is that testosterone will prevent height growth. So it actually leads to the fusing of those bone plates and if you have high testosterone, it'll prevent you from growing high uh, growing tall. So if you have a lack of sex hormones in your body, if you just take, like, puberty blockers, that actually causes kids to grow taller. So if you give children yeah, if you give children lupron and they have neither estrogen or testosterone, which both inhibit height growth, they'll get tall. That's probably what happened to me.

Taf 53:49

I'm like much taller than either of my parents. I was on Lupron for a while and like a very low estrogen dose. But yeah, I would say that like it's not necessarily testosterone, like that will do that, that. But also interesting fun fact, lots of I know that in um iranian culture they will sometimes give their children puberty blockers early on to cause them to grow taller. So, like rich iranian families, there's like an occasional practice which is like a little bit of puberty blockers so they get a little bit taller. Fascinating as a treat I've never heard that.

Sky 54:24

That's so crazy fascinating, wow, yeah, I'll just say, you know, when it comes to the study you published, ben and, and looking at that graph it, it really wouldn't concern me so much if it was in the mtf population. But I just don't understand, like with the ftm and the rise on the testosterone, what is driving or like what is necessitating the treatment for testosterone in terms of like the risk reward balance, of like with the trade-offs, because testosterone is such like a one-way street. It's like once you do it and you go through the changes, like we were saying, with the deeper voices and such there's it's you can't come back from that and I've seen so many youtube videos of detransitioned natal girls that are like crying because of their voices yeah, I got the phone.

Ben 55:12

It's not like me as I.

Sky 55:14

Just really it makes me worry like is this going to cause greater backlash? Because there's so many, there's the proportion is so much more on the females than it is on the males, right, and it's like ugh, just yeah, it's concerning.

Ben 55:30

I did find that the one study there were two that have to do with height, so this one came out in April of last year Growth and adult height attainment in Danish transgender adolescents treated with puberty blockers and sex hormones. Treated with puberty blockers and sex hormones. So just skipping to the conclusion. It says the minor reduction in adult height of trans girls after hormone treatment may be beneficial to some, whereas trans boys did not experience height gain. So there you have it, and then there was another one.

Ben 55:57

bring that in. This is early puberty suppression and gender affirming hormones do not alter final height and transit adolescence, so that actually found a different result. So maybe people aren't sure. Early puberty suppression and gender-affirming hormones do not impact final height. Supporting the safety of the treatment, however, trans adolescents receive. What does FH stand for? Sorry, final height in line with sex registered at birth rather than experienced gender, so maybe not so much. So interesting yeah.

Brianna 56:27

Well, thank you for coming on today. We really appreciate it, Do you know? Do you know Brad by the?

Ben 56:32

way. Oh yeah, hi Brad, I don't know if you hear me. Hey, how's it going? There's a deep voice.

Brianna 56:39

We got it. We got it we have a voice for television. Thank you, it's a.

Ben 56:45

You have a voice for television.

Sky 56:46

Thank you All right.

Brianna 56:46

Bye Ben.

Sky 56:48

All right, well, that was Ben, he was great, and now we have Brad hey.

Brad 56:53

Brad, Welcome hey everybody, thanks, yeah, thank you for having me.

Sky 56:57

I'm going to do a little intro here. So rounding our guest lineup today is Brad Palumbo, a social media dynamo known for his independent commentary and sharp insights. Again, Brad, welcome to Dollcast.

Brad 57:10

Thank you. Thanks for having me and for that kind introduction.

Sky 57:16

Well, I've been a fan of watching your YouTube series on your podcast, brad Against the World, or, like you know, the one where you give all those sharp insights and commentary. So I just had a question for you what got you into the social media space? Or, like, what made you want to start creating content on like the radical takes that are just proliferating online these days?

Brad 57:40

Yeah, absolutely so. It's interesting I started out in more traditional journalism. So shortly after I graduated college I went to work at a center right magazine called the Washington Examiner in DC and they were very interested in covering kind of traditional political stuff. I remember my boss going we should be writing about what's on cable news and I said well, what about what's on the front page of Reddit? And he looked at me and I'll never forget this moment and said what's Reddit?

Brad 58:09

And that's when I realized that traditional media was not super long for this world and that if I wanted to have a long-term career I couldn't just pursue TV radio what I might've pursued if I was, you know, entering my career in the 1990s or early 2000s and I'd have to do something kind of different. So shortly after that, I started to dabble in YouTube and Instagram and TikTok content creation, doing the same kind of thing, kind of commentary and opinion journalism, so based in facts, and some reporting but giving my perspective on things, but just in a multimedia form instead of the traditional writing columns and all that. And then I really my backgrounds in economics and I covered. I was a policy correspondent for several years. I didn't talk a lot about LGBT issues, but a year or two ago, as just as I had followed the discourse on it and I saw things going off track. Really, I guess it's a lot more than a year or two time flies, but this would have been maybe around 2020 and I predicted that if things kept going the way they were going, that we were going to have a backlash and that the LGBT community would lose support. Support for gay marriage, support for trans rights would all significantly decline. Because I think that the movement was going too far, pushing into radical and unreasonable territory, and that Americans were at some point going to rebel against all of it, and I predicted that was met with very vicious backlash by kind of the LGBT Inc. If you search my name on Pink News or any of those websites, you'll find very unflattering images and articles about me. But unfortunately, I wish I'd been proved wrong.

Brad 59:55

I do feel I was proved right, but that's what I try to do with my commentary and my content is provide an alternative to people. To show that, one, there are many gay people who are not far left in their views and are people that you might as, even as a Christian mega conservative, be perfectly content to coexist with and live side by side. To kind of push back on the terrible representation that I think the everyday LGBT person gets from Alphabet Inc, that I think the everyday LGBT person gets from Alphabet Inc. And then, two, to kind of push back on the excesses, to make it clear that we're not all like this, basically, so people hopefully don't fall into the black and white thinking, mistake of thinking. Oh, if I don't want biological males in women's prisons who, even if they've done essay offenses. I must reject gay marriage or want to ban trans people from the military. Those things don't have to go together, actually, and that's kind of what I try to explain.

Brianna 1:00:51

So let me ask you this from the really beginning. I want to ask you really directly this isn't meant to be hostile, it's just so people can get on the record. So, how do you feel about trans people? Just give it to me from the start, like when you, when you're around a trans girl, like when we hang out, right, uh, do you feel like you're talking to someone that shares an experience with you? Do you think our civil rights are important? Uh, can you just give it to me from the beginning, like, how do you feel about trans people?

Brad 1:01:17

well, it depends who you ask. If you ask radical, I will explain.

Brianna 1:01:23

I just I think it's interesting.

Brad 1:01:25

Um, the far right calls me a woke, libtard, um who's pro-trans, and then the far left calls me a radical bigot transphobe. The truth is I'm a libertarian and my principles apply to everyone, including trans individuals. So I have, on the record, over the years, repeatedly defended the rights of trans adults. I disagreed with Trump heavily restricting transgender people's ability to serve in the military. I said very simply you know, if they can meet all the requirements anyone else has to meet and their doctor says they're fit to serve, so be it right, thank them for their service and be on with your day. But I have spoken out against things that I think are unfair or against basic common sense, like having no solid sex segregation in women's sports. I don't believe in kind of what I would call the alphabet people nonsense, the TQ plus, not just the traditional. I'm never going to believe in neo pronouns Sorry, they're not real, they're not valid, but I've always been willing to use adult people's pronouns.

Brad 1:02:36

I actually got in trouble and this is funny. There was a transgender person who I worked with. I went to a very liberal college. I got formally written up by the student newspaper because this person identified which actually isn't transgender, but that's a whole other category. As they them and I would. Typically I never. I don't believe in in using they them for non-binary people. But I also try to always be polite. So in that instance I will try to avoid using someone's pronouns and I'll just say their name. So I'll say Nate says this, nate says that, and I referred to Nate as the boy who cried wolf. But Nate was a non-binary identifying male at birth. Nate reported me and I got written up and threatened that if it happened again I'd be terminated for misgendering. And I'm, I'm like bro.

Brad 1:03:24

That's an expression yeah, it's just an expression so the short version is I've always and always will support the rights of adult people to do whatever they want with their bodies. I've spoken out against republican state laws that, for example, set the age at 21 or 25 to access medical transition I'm like no, these people are. Or 25 to access medical transition. I'm like no, these people are adults with human rights and freedom, and if they're old enough to do anything else. But I've also I have supported restricting the age to irreversible treatments to the age of consent, so 16, 17, or 18, depending on the state.

Brad 1:04:00

I've supported restricting participation in women's sports, though an interesting nuance that I have that I think people often miss is I've always fully supported trans men being able to participate in men's sports, because they're only putting themselves at a disadvantage. Seriously, if a trans man wants to play with me and the boys playing soccer, a trans man, power to you, because you're not putting anyone at a disadvantage. But there are some elements of biology that don't always aren't completely ameliorated by hormone replacement therapy. Obviously, it takes away a lot of the advantage, but not all of it, and so that's something I've spoken out about. I've spoken out about the prisons issue but I've also.

Brad 1:04:48

I've also disagreed with bathroom bills. I don't think bathrooms are an issue and I think policing who goes in what bathroom is far, far more trouble than it's worth into a, a basically imaginary problem.

Brianna 1:05:00

I think if the four of us started using male bathrooms, that would be pretty disruptive. That's kind of the point I've always made is in.

Brad 1:05:07

Equally disruptive would be forcing Buck Angel to use the women's room. This is my critique of Nancy Mace. I'm like one, the whole thing is grandstanding and virtue signaling. But two the approach that she's advocating, with no nuance whatsoever, forces by a lot or not biological males but trans men to use the women's room. That's going to make women far more uncomfortable than a passing trans woman using the women's room.

Brianna 1:05:33

I hope that sums it up.

Brianna 1:05:34

I'm kind of the worst of both worlds or the best of both worlds, depending who you ask I want to drill down on this with you because what and I'd love to know what my co-hosts think of this too but I knew I wanted to be a girl from very young age. But I remember when puberty started kicking in and I can read like gay, like you know, um, remember, you know, like like stories of gay men when they understood that it's very, very much the same thing, right, like attraction to men trying to hide it, like disassociating in the locker room, all that kind of stuff, like just being really terrified by that. So I I really want to hammer down on this. Like what I get is like kate and I are a little older and I think we remember a version of the lgbt community that was a little bit more together or felt a common sense of purpose.

Brianna 1:06:23

But I've always felt a kinship with gay men because I think we are like similar to y'all, but like an additional layer of complexity. But I feel like that that connection has been broken. So how do you feel about trans women? Do you think we are? Do you consider us part of the, the LGBT movement? Do you consider us like? Do you think we're gay men? Ultimately, kind of? How do you feel philosophically about us?

Navigating LGBT Community and Identity

Brad 1:06:50

well, I think trans women, um and this is, I guess, some people consider this offensive sure, at the most base level, biologically male, um, and I think trans men are, at the most basic level, biologically female. I don't believe people can literally transform their sex completely, but I've always believed that people should be free to express themselves and live as the other gender for all intents and social purposes. To the core of your question, I don't really believe that the LGBT community exists. I think more accurate language at this point would be the LGBT category. It's a bunch of things that have been lumped in together somewhat incoherently or even contradictorily at times, but also it's just not a community in the sense, and maybe I'm too young to remember a better spirit of togetherness. I've just found it so incredibly hostile and toxic. I mean to me as a right-leaning gay man. I've received a lot of vitriolic hate over the years from the far right and the Groypers and the neo-Nazis, but I've also received intense vitriol and hate from woke gay men in particular.

Brad 1:08:00

I was actually kicked off or basically excommunicated from a gay men's soccer club when I lived in DC, which has a very politically active gay community. I've always played soccer, I'm a lifelong soccer player and it was interesting. Their rationale was that somebody from Media Matters was somehow involved in the club and he claimed that my presence on the team or in the club made hypothetical, that my presence on the team or in the club made hypothetical there weren't any, to be clear, hypothetical trans members unsafe because of my opinions that minors shouldn't be allowed to transition. And there's a couple things about that. One, there were no trans people participating. I wasn't saying my political opinions at soccer practice. I wasn't bringing this up and causing debates or issues. And three, there's a very infantilizing view of a trans person that they are somehow so soft and fragile that they can't coexist with a person who might have a different perspective than them without what melting into a puddle. That I actually find incredibly paternalizing. It's my experience with trans people legitimate trans people, not neo pronoun fake people is that they're actually incredibly resilient and have often endured a lot of hardship and they don't need to be protected by woke gay men fighting for them to have a safe space. And it's often, I think, virtue signaling and activism where they're seeking to paint themselves as some sort of savior. But so I found the gay community or the LGBT community to be incredibly hostile to diversity of any more interesting or meaningful kind.

Brad 1:09:31

And I guess the base of your question. I don't know if I feel that same kinship between the gay experience and the trans experience, because it does feel fundamentally distinct to me. I've gone back and forth on the question of whether it should be LGB or LGBT. I think it's a moot question. I think it is LGBT. I think people who are trying to go LGB without the T are fighting for a cause that the ship sailed so long ago.

Brad 1:09:57

These are linked together, but I think gender identity and sexual orientation are different things. I don't have any kind of common overlap with the sense of not feeling right for your gender, but I do have common overlap with the feeling something's wrong with you and trying to change it and trying to resist it. I mean I can remember being like 12 and stealing the Victoria's Secret magazine out of the mail and like looking at it and trying to make myself interested in it and just not it not working. And I I can remember being um 17 and simultaneously fully understanding and I won't go into detail, but fully understanding what I was attracted to and that it was having a girlfriend and not thinking of myself as gay. So this, this level of of denial, of struggling to accept something with yourself that I think a lot of trans people experience and that's why they ultimately transition, that I think is relatable and similar, but I do think sexual orientation and gender identity are fundamentally distinct concepts.

Brianna 1:11:04

I think that's fair. I mean for me, like my sexual orientation was almost incidental part of what was wrong with me, right, like I didn't. I was like when I was trying to figure my sexuality out I was almost agnostic, like okay, if I end up with girls, that's fine, like if I end up with men, that's fine. So I agree with you, it's a different journey. I know Kate has seen your YouTube channel and wanted to ask you some questions. So, kate, do you want to go ahead?

Kate 1:11:31

Absolutely, I'd love to push back on something. Brad, I've watched you for a while and I absolutely enjoy you, by the way, so the term biological it's just like this is a super pedantic thing so take it for what it's worth, and I certainly wouldn't make a big deal to anyone, but you probably, because so the way I think about biology is certainly more nuanced than the way I think about chromosomes. So, for example, when I think 46 x y.

Kate 1:12:02

That's very clear to me. But when we look at mammals and biological sex per se, it still is a Gaussian distribution around male and a Gaussian distribution around female and there is overlap in the middle, especially around intersex conditions. I was born with disorders of sexual development and required numerous surgeries in the first few years of life to normalize. To me it just seems like there's weird biology there that causes all kinds of variety and development that deviate from conventional male and conventional female. The other thing is man in the fullness of time. I bet you anything that there's some biological causation for gender identity. We don't have that yet. We're not there, but we're learning constantly. I would not be surprised if it's there. I'm not searching for the trans gene, but I guess I expect it to be there somewhere.

Taf 1:12:59

So that's my pushback.

Kate 1:13:01

Again, it's a pedantic argument and by no means would I march down the street on it.

Brad 1:13:07

Let's talk about both points. The first point, I think, is totally valid. Obviously, intersex people are real and their conditions exist. I think what I would say is this that the intersex thing often feels like a red herring to me, because it's often and that's not to say it doesn't apply to some people. Of course it does, but it's often brought up by people who are not intersex, or in a discussion of Leah Thomas, who's not intersex, to kind of just complicate a truth that we all know, which is that almost all humans can be easily categorized as either male or female, and there is a very small percentage where even the percent of people that are intersex most within that can actually usually be identified as male or female, though there's just conflicting traits and other issues.

Brad 1:13:58

It also depends how you talk about sex. I actually don't think about biological sex in terms of chromosomes anymore. I used to I was discouraged from doing that A good friend of mine, colin Wright, who looks at he's an evolutionary biologist and a PhD. He looks at biological sex in the terms of the shape of your gametes, and so there are only two sexes from this lens, because there's only egg and sperm. There is no third option and everyone's system is oriented towards the production of one of the two, with, I think, like 0.003% or a tiny, tiny amount of people where that's not the case. Now, that's kind of like to me to say well, sex isn't binary because of those exceptions. Well, I can flip a coin, and one out of 10,000 times it will land perfectly on its head, but we still think of a coin as having two sides, and so I think it's fair to say that sometimes the way I talk about biological sex is probably doesn't apply to a tiny slice of the population.

Brad 1:14:57

That's intersex, but it applies to almost everything we are talking about, and it's hard to discuss things with every possible carve-out and nuance, and I feel that intersex is often brought up as a red herring by people who are it's like oh well, why should Leah Thomas not be allowed to swim with the women? Well, leah Thomas is biologically male. There are some unfair advantages there. She went through male puberty, whatever, and they're like well, how do you know? So not everyone is male or female, okay, but leah thomas does, doesn't claim to be interested, like. It's often kind of a distraction, I feel, from from the question, because almost everyone can be sorted, but I do try to speak with nuance on these subjects Sometimes.

Brad 1:15:43

I'm sure it fails to be captured in what I say, especially in short-form formats. But I also. Intersex to me is like an explicitly medical thing, whereas gender identity is much more of an ideological concept, right, or a nebulous kind of societal concept and maybe psychological. Intersex is to me like hardcore. That's just a biological condition and experience, right. It just feels like so categorically distinct to me. And then I'm sorry for going off, but what was the second point that you asked about, you know?

Kate 1:16:21

I got lost in your eyes, Brad.

Brianna 1:16:26

Come on your eyebrows, your eyebrows. They are iconic.

Taf 1:16:31

Yes, we all do I think I mean gay men are just good at those things.

Kate 1:16:37

Yes, Like I said, I would not march anywhere with this banner. And honestly it doesn't have a lot to do with policy. Policy positions and gamete specifically seem a mile apart, but policy positions and the biological sex someone was raised in aren't miles apart. They do relate and it's fair for 99% of people to speak with assumptions that are accurate for 99.99% of people, I mean.

Brad 1:17:11

I encountered this also. One of the things I also speak on is fat positivity movement, which I really disagree with. I was pretty overweight in my teenage years and obesity is really, we had fat Brad at 13.

Brianna 1:17:24

Yeah, you had some pictures overweight in my teenage years and obesity is really fat.

Brad 1:17:26

Brad 13.

Brianna 1:17:27

Yeah, you had some pictures of fat. Oh gosh, there are some on the Internet.

Brad 1:17:32

I played World of Warcraft and I sat in my pajamas in my own sweat all day and ate Cheetos Puberty helped.

Brad 1:17:41

But I think it's what I speak about it. I'll say something like if you're morbidly obese, that's a result of your choices. I acknowledge that there's a tiny sub percentage where that's not true, right, and I'll often say something like with rare exceptions for medical conditions or thyroid disorders, but 99% of people in America who are morbidly obese it's because of their sedentary lifestyle and it's because of the choices they make around food. It is not because of some rare thyroid disorder. And every time I talk about it I have to go pause. What with the exception of people with these three extremely rare genetic and thyroid disorders.

Brad 1:18:17

It's like I try to throw that in there sometimes but it is going to get lost and I think for intents and purposes I mean, my mom is probably the most loyal consumer of my content, or one of them she doesn't like when I speak in generalities and I try to avoid doing so, but sometimes I'll say like Democrats believe this, or X or Y, and she'll be like well, not all Democrats believe that I'm a Democrat and I don't believe that. And, for example, I'll say like well, democrats Democrat and I don't believe that. And, for example, I'll say like well, democrats elected Democrats, want to replace the notion of sex with self-identification in federal law. I don't know if that's so true. Well, the Equality Act would do that.

Brianna 1:18:59

Yeah, well, that's a longer discussion of how GLAAD and the ACLU like this is a whole discussion I'd love to have sometime is we've essentially, as a party, outsourced our gay legislation to GLAAD and HRC and all these alphabet groups.

Government Regulation and Trans Rights

Brianna 1:19:19

The Equality Act replaces the term GLAAD, the outcome is the same. I'm saying elected Democrats, I think in my experience, because I write checks to politicians all the time and when I talked to them, the first question I always ask is like well, what do you think the top trans public policy issue is? And it's always stunning to me how little they've thought about it, brad like they don't know anything. They don't know the difference in non-binary people. So I think it's just like the culture of the party rather than the people actually elected. I know Taff had some questions for you, so I'm going to let her answer.

Brad 1:19:52

Let me just say one quick thing about that. What I'm going off with that statement is the text of the Equality Act redefines sex under federal law. In adds a parentheses that says or self-identified gender identity. And most democrats in congress have voted yes multiple times to pass the equality act, and so I'll say something like democrats support some form of self-id, and my mom will be like well, not all democrats and I'm like that's true, some did vote against it, but most democratic politicians are on the record for this, and so I feel like generalizations have some context.

Brianna 1:20:26

That's the only reason I mentioned that it's a very salient criticism and I think everyone on the show probably would. I think most of us think self-ID is probably not a good idea though I don't want to speak for my co-host so I think that's a salient criticism. Be careful what you want to say.

Taf 1:20:41

Yeah, I mean I relate so much to your story. I feel like I also saw the trans community and the LGBT community kind of go off the rails with their messaging and it's been really scary because for me, the core rights that are essential to me as a trans person are bodily autonomy, control of my own body and self-expression, and I think those are core fundamental rights that Americans can broadly get around. But and I'm writing a piece about this for Reason Magazine, which is a libertarian magazine and one of the things that I think has happened with legislation and not so much through like the Equality Act but through civil rights legislation and the Supreme Court's rulings on things is the government has really stepped in to try to regulate how people interact with each other and I just don't think it's very good at that. And so, like you're talking about about your you know gay soccer team, I think there's so many instances of that. In my article I use this other example. I'm talking about a steel mill in Gary, indiana, and this steel mill is using all of this like DEI language about inclusivity and transness and whatnot.

Taf 1:21:57

I doubt that there's any like trans guys that work there, but if there are trans guys that work there, I'm pretty sure that they're going to be like some hard nosed son of a bitch who can take a little bit of ribbing on the job site and he doesn't need the government to come in and regulate what those boundaries are for him.

Taf 1:22:17

And, in fact, like by having the government say, like you know, you can't engage with each other in this way or that way there's this culture where the trans guy is sort of encouraged to go running to the authorities if anything happens and people are walking on eggshells around him, which is probably, if anything, not helping his ability to integrate into that job culture. So I think I've been really frustrated by just the fact that, like. So I think I've been really frustrated by just the fact that, like you know, I think that different people they disagree on these big questions about, like, are trans women, women, do trans women belong in the women's restroom, et cetera. I think that those things need to be negotiated between individuals and the people around them, the businesses that they are employed by, and it's really tragic that we've sort of forced one standard upon all of society when trans people themselves don't have a single set standard for what is or is not acceptable language. So I don't know, I just that whole piece very much resonates with me.

Brad 1:23:26

I agree completely, and it's funny because I've always been willing to use trans people's pronouns. But I think the only thing that could get me to want to, not to, would be the government trying to force me to, and I don't. This isn't so much an issue in the US because we have the First Amendment protecting our speech Bless up for that. But in countries like the UK or Canada they've had some sort of pushes at governmental levels or university levels to compel pronoun usage. I don't believe in that and I don't think I would, but like a piece of me would be tempted to start misgendering people if they started to tell me I couldn't. Just because I'm such a believer in First Amendment freedoms and freedom of conscience and freedom of speech, uh, even in cases.

Brad 1:24:12

I mean, one of the things I've talked about is I uh agreed with the decision to protect the ability of the uh Christian baker, who refused to make a wedding cake yeah, because I always flipped on it and said, if I ran a bakery and somebody wanted to come in and have me print on the cake the Leviticus message about gay people, I would want to say no, but their religion is a protected class under discrimination law. So I've always believed firmly that you have to have the rights. You have to offer and extend and protect and defend the rights of people that you disagree with or, on the opposite side, that you want for yourself. So I've always used to be into things like that. But I do agree with you that I think that steel mill steel mill example is such a good one that, if I remember actually this is um I, I went to high school in a rural massachusetts town and one which one, bellingham Massachusetts.

Brad 1:25:05

Oh, okay, there was a girl in my grade named Jen and one summer I think it was freshman to sophomore year, could have been sophomore to junior Jen came back as Jay and no one cared. He started going into the men's bathroom, the men's locker room, in gym class and I just remember being totally. I wasn't political, I wasn't thinking about this. I played basketball, I played soccer. I'm 16 years old. I remember just not caring at all.

Brad 1:25:45

Now, if they had come in and we had had, as part of health class, a pronoun lesson Everything can be a pronoun, fairy pronouns If we had them showing us the gender unicorn, I can imagine my friends and I making fun of it, becoming intrinsically hostile to it, thinking it's annoying and dumb. But when it was just a person who we knew, who we liked, had no issue with, who was asking essentially nothing of us other than to let him live his best life, we had no issue with it. And this was a rural. I mean, a couple of kids would fly around and pick up trucks with the Confederate flag. It was that rural, even though that makes absolutely no sense.

Taf 1:26:21

I grew up in a very similar circumstance. In Colorado, people do the same thing.

Brad 1:26:26

Yeah. So I think there's a point to which, when government or very powerful institutions try to shove things down people's throats, it engenders more resistance than it actually achieves in support, and it's much better slowly happening at a decentralized level.

Brianna 1:26:44

That's one thing let me push on that just now. Br thing, because, okay, so I hear what you're saying and I think all of this here would agree. A big part of like integrating as a trans woman is not making a big deal out of stuff, helping people understand your stuff like I. I fully support a model where, if you're not being gendered correctly, you first take that as signal. Like am I doing things? Do I need to change my voice? Do I need to change my presentation? I think all of us here recognize that. But let's say you come work for my super PAC. Okay, I hire you today to work for my super PAC and produce media.

Brianna 1:27:21

In every single team meeting on Monday I'm like oh, here's Brad, that F slur. You know I say that in front of my whole team over and over and over again. And if you like, screw something up. I'm like, oh, you're screwing that, just like the gay men screw blah, blah, blah. And I'm just making these inappropriate jokes again and again. It's a hostile workplace. Everyone there is super anti-gay or is just making you feel uncomfortable. Everyone there is super anti-gay or is just making you feel uncomfortable. I mean, do you think that there is a? I think in a private situation like that. Do you think, if you have a leader or someone on the team that's just incapable of treating a teammate with respect, something teams need to do their best work? I can tell you that as a team leader. Do you think that's a point where it is reasonable to have consequences for that Something over the line where someone just will not behave like an adult?

Brad 1:28:15

Yeah, well, what you just described is sexual harassment. First of all, I think we can agree sexual harassment should be illegal and is in a workplace setting, or fireable, yeah yeah, or fireable at the very least. And I think what I would say is what I advocate for, because I'm a critic of the excesses of DEI, but what I advocate for is non-discrimination. So what you're describing would be discrimination. What I would say you shouldn't do is what I'm saying is this LGBT awareness month at the company. Brad's, our gay employee of the month, right like. I don't think companies should be sending out free copies of white privilege to their, or white fragility to their employees, and I don't think that's going to engender positive race relations at the company. But I do think they should fire someone who discriminates against black employees, who doesn't hire black people, right Like. So what I'm saying is don't force it or go over the top with it, but also ensure a fair and equal access to opportunity for everyone.

Brad 1:29:23

I think that's the middle ground there. I mean, I'm sort of a libertarian at heart. So, whether this is private mechanisms or government mechanisms, I've made my peace with the state of anti-discrimination law and it's just a part of our fabric is. Maybe in my utopia, everyone could just fire whoever they want for any reason. That's just not the world we live in. So I think the standards should be across the board, and I do believe that sexual orientation should be a protected class.

Brad 1:29:52

I struggle with how I want gender identity to be a protected class.

Brad 1:29:58

I just struggle with how to define it in a law or legislation in a way that doesn't become self ID, because I don't support self-id but so a some form of gender recognition, a process you have to go through that you're legitimately trans. So so that, because here's the thing I need to be able to fire somebody who comes out as non-binary at my job because I can't employ delulu people. Wow, I shouldn't be hiring somebody because they're trans, because of a medical experience that they have and a different way they want to live their life. Those aren't the same thing, and so I would just want to find a way to protect one without opening the whole rainbow. Everything is in and now? Um, because once you do that, it's very hard to even say how could you legally separate the born biologically male sex offender from the women's prison? If you have unambiguous self-ID protections in law, I don't know how you could do that, and there has to be a way to protect actual trans people in discrimination law without totally opening the floodgates, and that's what I would support.

Taf 1:31:06

I think there is a way. I think what you're identifying, you're seeing all of these excesses right and you're saying that, like clearly, people are going to chafe against these excesses when they're forced on them. But you also want to protect people in some way, and I'm not like a crazy and cap radical libertarian person, nor am I, so I also yeah, I also support some set of protections, but what I think is happening here in the law is a lot of those excesses are actually downstream from the current way in which we legislate these. So, like right now, when discrimination suits are brought against companies, one of the things that the judge will ask is is this company following best practices to reduce discrimination in the workplace? And companies are kind of finding themselves in an arms race where, as some companies adopt more and more progressive HR policies and techniques, affinity groups for gay or Hispanic or Black employees, as companies adopt all of these policies, that becomes a best practice, and so failure to follow then becomes a legal liability.

Taf 1:32:21

And so what I see is all of this ambiguity in how the law is structured, which causes companies to radically overshoot. Part of that is, you know, legal fees. There's fee shifting, which makes civil discrimination suits extremely costly for the defendants, and so, you know, I even disagree a little bit with Brianna, and maybe even you a little bit, like you know. I think that if you have a super PAC and people occasionally joke and they say, like you know, f? Slur or T? Slur or whatever you know, they're using these words. I think there are instances in which individuals can decide for themselves that, like you know what, I'm okay with that kind of workplace environment as long as it's in good spirit, um, and people are right if they really don't like it and they can quit and I think it's okay if people sort of um, self-organize, find groups that match their own preferences and they go and they find their people.

Taf 1:33:24

But I think what's happening right now is if you are that steel worker um at the mill, gary, indiana, right Like you don't have the option to go, and you know, go to a job site and be like you know what, I'm fine with things, you know you can call me like a tranny or whatever and I'll call you like a Polack or whatever, and you know that's how a lot of men bond. I think that they should be allowed to do that and I think that, like part of making that happen is just relaxing some of these regulations just a little. So like, if we remove the best practices standard or make the law a little bit less ambiguous, maybe a little bit less punitive, I think you would see companies relax some of those excessive hyper-progressive policies. I think they are already to some extent.

Brad 1:34:13

A lot of companies are rolling back DEI stuff.

Taf 1:34:16

I think so and that's why you mentioned it's unlikely that these civil rights laws change. I actually think that it's very likely that under the next Trump administration, these things are going to get ruled on by the Supreme Court. We're going to have a relaxing of these standards which, you know, frankly makes me optimistic, because a lot of the things that are currently being pushed in the media landscape, a lot of the power that's given to activists, which I think ultimately hurts us as trans people who we care about our core rights of bodily autonomy. You know, I don't want to force everyone on earth to like have to use Z's or pronouns, that's just. You know that doesn't help me to like force.

Taf 1:35:01

So I think that relaxing those standards a little bit might make people a lot less hostile. Those standards a little bit might make people a lot less hostile. Um, hopefully. And again, like, I think it's really horrible and tragic. You see republicans now also trying to regulate these things. Just, they're trying to change the line in the sand, but they're still believing that the government needs to put that line.

Brad 1:35:21

Well, that's one of my big complaints with kind of what I would call populist populist a wing of the Republican Party now is basically like we'll do big government but we'll make it patriotic and we'll force things and push down our vision, and it's like they don't seem to realize that. I've even seen some conservative writers be like we need to expand the regulatory state, but just put conservatives in charge of it. And I'm like at some point you're just want their own government handouts. Yeah, I mean even some of the economic policies. They're like well, we just want our turn as the welfare queens give us this stuff for our interests, and obviously that's just totally anathema to my belief system.

Brad 1:36:06

But I think it's just a problem in politics. People are deeply tribal. Most people aren't committed to ideology or principles in any real sense, especially those who run for office. One of the theories that informs my school of thought is public choice theory, right, and the idea that the people who seek the highest levels of government power are, by their very nature, the people least suited to exercise that power. Because who is drawn to being a politician? I think I would actually be a pretty good senator, but I could never get elected as a senator.

Brianna 1:36:40

It's a horrible job, though, brad, you have no idea how bad it is. I have heard it is so bad. I was 100 pounds heavier because I sat in this chair, spending eight hours a day calling random people asking for money. It hurts your marriage Like. I remember this time I was out at this event and I'm looking at this guy and I'm like what is his name? I know his name, what is his name? And it was my husband. That's how tired I was. But I don't want to. I want to make sure we get some other opinions here, because, kate, I know, like me, you've been a project manager, so I want to see do you agree with taft's assessment, uh, about kind of teams, like that free-flowing thing? Do you think, like having a, do you think having an HR process has value, kind of? How do you? How do you feel about what she was saying?

Kate 1:37:32

so I transitioned before any protections at all. Right, and when I talked to HR, I'd only worked there for a few months. I had very little value.

Ben 1:37:41

I was a neophyte completely expendable, so I came to my HR department like a partner, like an equal, with plan.

Free Speech and LGBT Dynamics

Kate 1:37:48

I thought through things, I compromised on many things in order to make it as easy as possible for them to accommodate me. And it was just this very human discussion with my HR department. And I tell you what 20 years later, it has never come up at work, you know, because we just got on with it and I try to demonstrate my value in other ways. I do agree with cath and that and brad and others that policing language with policy is just a bad idea. It's still your word anathema brad.

Kate 1:38:24

I love the word. It is an anathema to who we are as Americans. Language should be free, and let society, let public discourse decide on the way these things follow. It's not, it's never going to, we're never going to win by forcing language. Now, basic constitutional rights, yes, please, but that's a different thing altogether.

Taf 1:38:52

Yeah, and the other thing is like there really is a business value to having strong protections for employees, right, and there's going to be some segment of trans people and gay people and black people and all sorts of people who like that when they go to work. There's an affinity group for that right and they like that, they can go to HR and they like these strong protections. I think that's fantastic and companies are going to offer those things to employees because they know that it's one way to recruit and retain talent from minority populations. So I think like all the more power to these companies who are doing that and if they want to do that and they want to attract the employees who really value those things. And then if there's another company that wants to relax the standards a little bit, the people who prefer the relaxed standards can go there.

Brad 1:39:44

I was going to say I get what you're saying, but for me personally, if I saw that a company had gay affinity groups, I'd be like I don't think free market right can sort that out. What I would push back on is the ron de santa swing of the republican party would want to ban them from doing that yes, I can say you can't stop woke act right that got struck down by courts for violating the first amendment.

Brad 1:40:11

They're basically trying to do woke legislative policing, but anti-woke and no, just let individuals sort by what they believe in and what they want. Is my default position on all of these issues? Uh, really, because, because that's how I see it.

Taf 1:40:29

Yeah, the government just sucks at regulating these things.

Brianna 1:40:32

All right. So I got a question for you, brad. This is a little spicy. I hope I can ask you a spicy question, go for it.

Brianna 1:40:39

So I went and got some gorgeous foods downtown in Boston the other day, and so I go to downtown Boston, I go down to near the Prudential Center, so the fancy, fancy part of Boston and as I park my car down there and I'm walking down the street, I run into not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but no, it was five different FTM trans people, like trans men, right, and I'd never like I just don't run into them that much in my life.

Brianna 1:41:10

You know Boston has a large student population and like it was really obvious they were trans men, like they were shorter but they had beards and you know they were just obviously trans men. So I guess my question to you is, as I was talking to one of them that was selling me some boots, like he had like sparkly fingernail, polish, like exactly like a gay man and some long, beautiful hair. So I guess for you, like I feel like we talk so much about the other way, like would straight men be comfortable with dating trans women? So I would ask you as a gay man. Would you be comfortable dating a FTM trans man, because a lot of them are interested in men?

Brad 1:42:00

No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't. I mean no shade to anyone who does, sure, just no, because for me the anatomy would not be Gender is. People talk a lot about whether gender is a spectrum. Sexuality is actually a spectrum, right, very, or at least there's people who are 100% straight and 100% gay, but a lot of people are somewhere in the middle and I would put myself at like the 95% gay.

Brad 1:42:32

Well, no, no, but it's actually an interesting concept because some gay men would be like and I don't want to TMI anyone here physically incapable of having sex with a woman, right? So when you think about, like back when they used to marry women and still have children and everything, some gay men literally couldn't do that. I could do that, right, and I think a lot of gay men could do that, but it just um, and obviously a gay man dating a trans man is not the same thing as that. It's different because you're going to be more attracted to them.

Brad 1:43:03

Even sometimes I have encountered, like a content creator, an influencer, who's a trans man, who in the first glance I'm like, oh, he's cute, um, and then I find out that they're trans and I just don't think that, upon learning that information, I would, I'd still be interested. I've also been off the market for almost six years and so it's never come up for me. But I guess my gut says no. But I understand that for some people who are just a little bit more fluid or a little bit more on the spectrum in terms of what they're into, it's a no-brainer and they're fine with it. And yeah, to me the only thing that I bristle at is sometimes the fringe. Trans types will be like genital preferences are transphobic.

Brianna 1:43:52

Yeah, no, no, no. Fringe trans types will be like genital preferences are transphobic. Yeah, no, no, no. I can tell you like for me, receptive sex is very important for me and a partner and that's like for me. It's kind of weird because what I love about some trans men is there's a wonderful emotional richness to them and a sensitivity that I find really attractive in men, right, you know. So I could see running into someone like that, but it's like for me to enjoy myself in the bedroom, like I have a vagina and there's stuff I like and there's stuff I want. So I think I 100% with you with the needing certain parts to enjoy sex. I just I think it's so interesting because, like, is there, have you seen in gay culture like the same discussion about ftms kind of encroaching over on gay men's faces, the same way that we're seeing lesbians talk about trans women in this?

Brad 1:44:44

no, I I think there's a difference. Difference that gay men who aren't into trans men just keep it moving. You know what I mean.

Kate 1:44:55

Yeah, they just move on. Women write a blog post.

Brad 1:44:58

Well, to give those women a little bit of their due. Male violence towards females is a much, much, much, much more prevalent and real thing than female violence towards males. So I never feel threatened or endangered by a trans man. Now, most trans women wouldn't make a woman feel unsafe. There are some who I can understand why a woman might feel intimidated or unsafe or feel like they're interacting with a man.

Brad 1:45:31

I'm thinking of it's ma'am person from gamestop. Oh I, if I was speed dating and I was a lesbian woman and this person sat across from me, I'd feel like, okay, this is a male. I could understand why they might feel much more trepidation about it than I do. As long as a trans man is disclosing that that's what they are and they're on Grindr, I'd just be like not for me. The same way, I might have other preferences and just keep it moving and it wouldn't affect me. But I can see why it might be a little different for lesbians and there's just a whole nother dynamic between women and males that they perceive that. I'm not going to sit here and totally invalidate Sure.

Brianna 1:46:21

Sky, did you have any questions? Kate, I want to give some other people some chance to jump in here.

Sky 1:46:27

You know I had more of just a comment on something I noticed that I really like about your show is the emphasis on free speech and I think it really like ties into what we've been talking about here with, like the genital preferences, our transphobic thing.

Sky 1:46:42

It's just like this whole, I don't know. I I've long been uncomfortable by the I guess, cultural elements of the lgbt movement gaining traction and like the pronoun pins is like a great example of this, where it's like you know what you put on your pin is what you're supposed to be called, or whatever. Or announcing your pronouns, the preferred pronouns thing, like at work, and it's funny because I had a co worker who was actually planning to transition but hadn't transitioned yet, make a comment about they didn't want to announce their pronouns because it would have a way of like outing them, and so it's. It's interesting to me how, like the cultural um elements I guess of like the LGBT movement, um sort of like backfire on themselves, and this is very much where, like again, what you've done with your channel and your work really like criticizes this effectively, I think Um, and so I didn't have like a.

Sky 1:47:44

I didn't have a particular question here. I think we've hit on like all the questions that I was basically thinking of, but I get what you're saying.

Brad 1:47:51

I actually had, um, just the other day I'm doing an event with a liberal leaning group that they're putting on and I had a zoom call where everyone except me said their pronouns during the introduction going around and I was like I hate it, I hate it it was.

Brad 1:48:05

That's such a stupid ritual because no one on this call is trans. We all know that no one on this call is trans. We all already know each other's pronouns that we want to be called and I feel like if there was a trans person, they would probably feel put on the spot by this and also they'd probably hope that we don't need to be told to know what pronouns they're to be called. Like if I was, if I didn't know, uh, any one of you and I saw you on a zoom call I would, I would kind of assume, to call you she, her. And if I and if you came and said my pronouns are she, her, then you'd probably make me think about it more than I otherwise would the whole thing felt because we please.

Brianna 1:48:51

That's the whole reason I had all the surgeries, so you could assume my pronouns.

Brad 1:48:58

The whole thing felt like such a a cultural ritual that they the real goal of it had nothing to do with trans people, but simply about virtue, signaling to signify like we're good progressives, we're part of the good tribe and I'm like, I'm not going to participate. And it might be awkward at the actual event. If they all ask pronouns, I'm just not going to participate, like I'm not going to say give them a hard time about it, but I think it's weird to do that. Yeah, I think we agree.

Kate 1:49:29

Can I ask you a very serious question? Sure, how has your mission to normalize the term DeLulu been?

Brad 1:49:38

I was the first person that I can see and I searched the records for exactly zero minutes. I was the first person to say the word Delulu on cable television, on Fox News. So I think it's going good. I certainly didn't invent it, I just think it's a funny term and I like saying to people that their Delulu is showing.

Brianna 1:49:58

I love it. Is our Delulu showing today?

Brad 1:50:01

No, I think you guys make a lot of sense from what we we all have a little bit.

Online Discourse Impact on LGBTQ Community

Brianna 1:50:06

That's right. Get to know us better and get there for a little to lose. I'm also.

Brad 1:50:12

I'm just an open person in that I've always and this is actually kind of sad even since 2018, 2019, when I first started my career, I wanted to have more conversations or dialogues or even just friendships or connections with LGBT influencers or commentators or journalists who were left of center, but they almost all of them I'd go to look them up and I'd be blocked and I'm like I've never interacted with this person, I've never said anything negative to me. They just must have seen my opinions and not wanted to hear them. And it's interesting because at the time, some of the things I was saying like opposing child transitioning time things, some of the things I was saying like opposing child child transitioning, medical transition I'm fine with social transition um, they were minority opinions and now they've become much more commonly held opinions. And now it's like you tried to ignore us and it didn't make the thing that you disagreed with go away. In fact, it just continued to grow.

Brad 1:51:04

And that's one of the problems with kind of trapping yourself in an echo chamber, which is what a lot of these LGBT, especially the nonprofits which, boy, I think, are so financially suspect and corrupt and so self-serving and have actually, at this point, so many of them have done so much more harm than good. I mean, glaad pisses me off. Glaad just recently declared homosexual an offensive term. The gay community you can't say gay community anymore.

Brianna 1:51:34

You can say trans community.

Brad 1:51:38

You have to refer to. If you're talking about gay men, you have to say LGBTQ plus men. I saw this video on TikTok, which tells you what my algorithm shows me right, it's like 10 hottest LGBTQ men in the world and I assumed it was going to be a trans man on the list, because why else would they have said LGBTQ? It was nine gay men and one bi man and I'm like so you, these are LGBTQ plus men. There's no such thing as an LGBTQ plus man, because you can't be all of those things and a man Like it doesn't make sense and I just I don't think they should be erasing or problematizing gay people in the name of some sort of community cohesion.

Brianna 1:52:22

This drives me crazy, because you'll see this in headlines all the time too, where it will be like LGBT rights under attack, and I'll be like, oh, I guess they're going after all of us. And you read the story, it's like, nope, just the trannies today.

Brad 1:52:34

So yeah, well, this is something that's hard um, because it's okay for us to have different cultures.

Brianna 1:52:40

Like gay male culture is its own thing and I say that as someone who spent plenty of time in that right Like it's just. It is. It's drag queens and golden girls and just other stuff and it's Grindr and it's just, it's a thing. Yeah, I didn't want to say anything, but yeah, it's just different and I think it's okay for us to like.

Brianna 1:53:06

Where I have a I don't want to say a problem is I often feel frustrated because I can tell you, as someone that did the work to help gay marriage get passed I helped raise money, I pressured, I was out there like like doing like protests. I called my congressman, I, as a democratic operative, I did a lot of work on that it does feel to me in some ways like I think we're different, but it's hard for me not to feel resentful. Sometimes, like in this really dire moment where we need our our gay brothers and sisters to step up and help us. It kind of feels like a lot of you're looking out for yourselves and talking about like transphobia, like it's this edgy new thing that you've just discovered. It's like, no, I wish that there was a little bit more solidarity, but I also understand how the fringe activists have pushed the discussion so hard, particularly in the lesbians' faces, that it's hard for there to be that goodwill there Does that make?

Brad 1:54:10

sense? Steve, yeah, it does. I think I've always would have felt, and I, to be clear, like I said, I have stuck my neck out and I will continue to, but that's because I've always just not minded saying a popular thing. But I think what's happened with a significant number of gay men, but particularly like online gay men, is that they've just totally rejected trans. They've totally turned their back. You're right, there's no sense of defense or loyalty whatsoever. But I think that's because of the face of trans that they've been presented with online, which is not necessarily representative.

Brad 1:54:42

But when that Eli person that you're on Piers Morgan with, who's literally illegally sending medicine, I think to my it is 100% true when that's the face of the trans community, or if the face of the trans movement is California putting biologically male SA offenders in women's prisons, right, I can understand why people are like oh, nothing to do with me. Now, the problem I have is like that throw, that's kind of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. But if the trans movement had always been legitimate transsexual people and not kind of the Q plus nonsense, I think you have would have encountered that less, that less of that kind of abandonment or or total kind of honestly. Some people are.

Brad 1:55:33

Some of the gay right-wing people I see on twitter are actually come across as hateful against trans people. Now, yeah, I find that sad. Um, I had to unfollow several who were mutuals because they're just posting one. There is an obsession with trans people that I don't. I understand when it's politicians or activists, but there's these accounts that just post like images of an ugly trans person and it's just a person they found somewhere on Instagram that posted an image of themselves and they'll just be like the text of the lives of tiktok tweet will be like this is a man yeah what's just?

Brad 1:56:11

what's the point of this beyond cruelty? You know there was a very interesting divide on the right because I am not a fan of dylan mulvaney. However, matt walsh did a monologue about dylan mulvaney. That was one of the nastiest and most dehumanizing little bits of rhetoric I've seen in a long time and I and many others spoke out about it against it at the time. Like listen, you can even believe that Dylan Mulvaney is a man and not be so nasty and vitriolic. I mean, I think he called Dylan alien and like basically some human.

Brad 1:56:49

And it was a very interesting divide between people on the right who still had empathy and compassion and were able to say that's wrong to treat people that way, even people you think are bad or harmful and people who are like no, this is war and the TQ are after kids, anything goes. I will never believe anything goes in any walk of life because I have my own principles and I'd rather sometimes people on the far right will accuse me of being a loser because I want to like play by the rules or I won't censor somebody because they disagree with me and they're like no, we have to censor them back. This is war. Censor somebody because they disagree with me and they're like no, we have to censor them back. This is war. I'm like I actually would rather lose if that, by their definition, then become the thing I'm supposed to be fighting against in order to defeat it, because then you haven't defeated it at all, you've just replaced it with another version of itself and compromised yourself in the process.

Sky 1:57:44

You know, brad, I just want to say I saw that video that Matt Walsh did on Dylan Mulvaney and I you know it broke me a little bit to see how mean he was and just how awful and, like you said, it was like basically describing him as subhuman. And then it hit me. You know, if I'm feeling this way, there's a dozen other people that are watching the same thing and feeling the exact same way, and so, in the ironic twist, it's almost helping bring back a little bit of that sympathy for trans people because of how, like crazy, the right wing side has sort of kind of gone off the rails in their own way of criticizing people just on their looks and just picking them apart and and just having no standards, like I just called out, a bunch of right-wing influencers who are rehabbing Andrew Tate.

Brianna 1:58:34

I saw you doing that, thank you.

Brad 1:58:37

Some of these people have no integrity or principles or values beyond what will get them attention and it's kind of a a spinning circle with, like the Matt Walsh's of the world. They get noticed the most when they go into new extreme territory. Matt Walsh, calling a trans woman a man is something he does every day, so that's not going to get him coverage from media matters that will then get denounced by all the liberal media in process, guarding him way more attention. So he has to take it to a new extreme. It's kind of this vicious feedback loop. He has to do something new attacking Dylan Mulvaney to make it noticeable and to get attention for it, and it's been a very successful business model for people like him in the daily wire. I try to do a similar style of content in terms of infotainment, but without that, without that toxicity, and it's been a slower build, but it is successful now on YouTube.

Brianna 1:59:31

For me, the difference is you're someone with integrity that I respect and they're not. Last question this is someone we ask everyone on Dollcast. This is the big question, brad are traps gay?

Brad 1:59:48

What is a trap in this context?

Taf 1:59:50

like you, don't know that it's a straight man, gets with a trans woman and doesn't know it's a trans woman yeah, I mean like trap, I think, is like a term that shows up on like message on the early internet to refer to a character that is trans, but you wouldn't know it looking at them. It's a question sort of memed on. Over decades. Straight men have debated this in every hallowed hall of 4chan there is. Is it gay to be attracted to a trap? To a passing trans woman Can they join your soccer team? If a guy's like yeah, I saw trans women.

Brad 2:00:34

What I actually said about men who are interested in trans women is it's not the same thing as gay, right? Because I wouldn't be interested in a trans woman, even if they're technically bio-male at birth or whatever, because they're so many in ways present female and their secondary sex characteristics and that's a huge part of sexual attraction. So it's not gay, but it's also not the straight thing in the world said. It's just a little bit in between, it's a little bit on the bi spectrum maybe, and that's okay, there's nothing wrong with it.

Brianna 2:01:09

I think of myself as a very, very spicy heterosexual. So there it is I love it.

Brad 2:01:18

Alright. Well, thank you guys. So much, Thank you for coming on.

Brianna 2:01:20

Brad, this is such a good time. I'm such a huge fan of your work and we gotta keep this going. I always love seeing you, thanks, thanks for showing on. Alright, do we want to wrap up with the final story that we were talking about?

Taf 2:01:39

The final story Orion.

Sky 2:01:47

That's right, okay, yeah, so for our segment today, uh, we're going to talk about pariah, the doll's detransition video. Um, yeah, it was loaded and had a lot of religious overtones to it, um, but also very provocative, especially with the um, the connection with Milo Yiannopoulos I hope I said his name right. Oh, my good buddy. My good buddy Milo, oh you know him, we're best friends.

Brianna 2:02:14

yes, wow. So, we hate each other.

Sky 2:02:19

Yeah, we've known each other for a long time.

Brianna 2:02:22

We're very different people. We got added to the chat. It was just like instant hating each other after 10 years. It was great.

Sky 2:02:31

Oh, oh gosh well, okay, I will say I saw it before. I saw the the shave the buzz, the buzz cut video that they released also, did you all see that one? I did yeah, yeah, yeah, um, that kind of changed it a little bit for me. So in what sense? Like I, I thought it was a little bit more genuine at first. I mean, it comes across, I mean I want to say she, but I guess he, um, really, just, you know, I felt emotional and I felt sad.

Sky 2:03:01

It was very genuine coming across, um, but then when I saw that buzz kidding video, I was like, oh, I don't know, like now this looks like it's part of some like I don't know just agenda of some kind and I just can't see all of it. I felt like a stunt to you, I guess. Yes, I wanted to believe it was sincere, but now I'm like, oh well, yeah, social media, it's all a game, right, like is it I, I mean, I do social media to be to do things I believe in, but I also get the sense I'm not.

Brianna 2:03:34

That's not the only paradigm out there. Kate, I guess I wanted to ask you, because you're closer to my age, like have you ever in your entire life had a second of seriously thinking about detransitioning? Because I haven't. Like, like I got on estrogen and I'm just like this. Is it like I've never regretted or thought about it ever? So it's hard for me to understand Eden. I mean, how do you feel?

Kate 2:04:01

I feel like detransition in general is just a result of lowering the bar for transition itself. If it's a life or death situation, if it is the last hope that someone has, they're going to cling to it and it'll continue to be a flotation device for them throughout the rest of their lives. But if the bar is quite low and people are just putting things on like an outfit, it's not surprising that they get sick of a particular outfit one day and try are just putting things on like an outfit. It's not surprising that they get sick of a particular outfit one day and try to put something else on. I'm not surprised by the number of detransitioners at present. I think everyone is a little bit tragic, and certainly the female to male is more tragic, simply because of the permanence of testosterone.

Kate 2:04:47

But yeah, no, I'm not surprised, I've never encountered such a thing back in the day, it wouldn't have been a thing, yeah.

Brianna 2:04:55

How do you feel about it, Taff?

Taf 2:04:58

I reached out to Miles, who used to go by Salome like years ago to do an interview, mm-hmm, and I like found out about him through his sub stack and he was saying kind of like radical, maybe even kind of I don't know even like slightly, slightly like racist things on there, and I found it fascinating that here was this person who was a trans woman and a model in New York and you know someone who is singing at a professional level as well in you know the female register and they're also writing these like radical and strange things online. And so I reached out and I did an interview with him way back then and it was really interesting the entire interview. We just talked about his twitter profile, um, like, not just his twitter profile, just Twitter bio, because it had maybe like five things in it, and we just went thing by thing, talk to me about everything about this. And even then I was struck that I was struck by the sense that Miles had a really deep religious conviction. Deep religious conviction, um, really believed in the catholicism that they practiced, and this was also like deeply, deeply at odds with their trans identity. So I think what they talk about in the video, you know, feeling like they had to choose between the transness and God.

Taf 2:06:49

I think I'm not surprised that they chose God.

Taf 2:06:53

Based on what I know about him, I think it's something you probably could have seen coming.

Taf 2:06:58

But I also think it's unique in that I think there probably is something like very deep and underlying and biological about their transness. Um, that isn't going to go away, and so I think that they're going to be like struggling with that forever and I hope they find what they're looking for in God in their relationship with Milo. Um, I can like only hope the best for them, but it does like worry me as well, because I just don't know if I don't know if they're going to be like happy long-term and maybe like, in a way, I would be like it would be nice if it was just like kind of a stunt and you know they had more clarity on like what they were doing and it was just like a temporary thing that you know. Maybe then they would like really commit to religion or to transness or you know, whatever it is. But I do, in that video, I think I I get the sense of someone who is kind of like lost and still finding their way.

Sky 2:08:02

I agree yeah, I think it's interesting. You say that because the speculation on, like, how they're going to manage, I mean, if gender dysphoria was a part of their story I mean that's what I sort of wonder and where I think the speculation here comes from, because he doesn't talk about it in the video at all. I think about, like, what led to that decision to transition in the first place. So now, detransitioning as a means of, I guess, being more honest with people that was a theme in the video at least. Like that they're not that he's not like being dishonest when people refer to him as a woman or an actress, and I found that compelling. But also I was like, like you said, where does this go now? Does that mean you're going to keep your hair short and you're going to go on testosterone and all these things? What does detransition mean?

Taf 2:08:59

I think you might still be taking estrogen. I'm planning to continue doing that, which is why some people were kind of memeing on the video and saying things like oh, you know, like all you've done is like cut your hair and this is like so dramatic and that's. You know, the most womanly thing you could do is cut your hair short and then break down.

Sky 2:09:22

So it almost sounds more like it's what I've been, what I've also been seeing more online, I think lately too which is like an ideological detransition where it has a lot more to do about your self-conception and less about, like, physical appearance or taking hormones. I mean, granted, they shaved their heads, so there is that, but in which case then, like I, would also be detransitioned.

Taf 2:09:44

Um, yeah, like ideological. So I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I think that they'll like figure it out eventually, but I don't know. Milo is kind of a an interesting chaotic character he's, so awful.

Brianna 2:10:00

He's so bad faith, he's so narcissistic, he has nothing interesting to say. He's just a broken person. I can get along with a lot of people, but he's just a bad human being in my view. But what I wanted to say is this is look, next week we have John Michael Bailey on and I'm sure we will get into the problematic and somewhat questionable AGP versus HSTS typology, of which I am kind of unconvinced. It's completely there. But what I have heard is my friend I don't want to say their name, I have a good friend that's told me this that what happens for people that are more autosexual and they detransition is they have to stay on that estrogen, because the stuff that made them transition in the first place comes back if they try to get off of that. So I would be very interested. Like I can't see pariah like being happy, like going back on T and trying to live as a man. That's just really hard for me to see. So I don't know.

Taf 2:11:12

I will say I think saloon or like miles, the one of the only trans men who I had ever met who I thought like you know, yeah, I would like totally. You know, if you like, fell into the hsts, I would totally believe that for you. Yeah, I think mostly I meet trans women who I think feel AGP or they don't feel like either necessarily, but she definitely presented as like a gay guy who had depression, yeah, 100%. And so, yeah, I think she, if anything, falls into that category and obviously I don't know, know like what goes on in her brain. Maybe she's like the most AGP person, but just like, in terms of presentation they seemed like ASL students, whatever that means.

Brianna 2:11:55

I mean can't you see in this political climate? I'd love to know what you think of this, Kate, Like can't you see in this political climate, because I think you're so right when you say you know. Like for us, you had to really, really, really, really, really want it. So the people that transitioned in our era were the like extreme cases. But can you not see a lot of people that just get to be exhausted with the political conversation and it's just like the mental, the mental barrage of being in this social media world right now? Can you not see a lot of people just going like, yeah, I just give up. I mean, I think this is going to happen more and more.

Kate 2:12:37

Actually, I miss the silence. The silence on all these issues was just lovely, wonderful, just get on with it. Yeah. And there are people working behind the scenes on on all these issues was just lovely, wonderful, just get on with it. And there are people working behind the scenes on policy improvements and anti-discrimination and they were working their butts off, I'm sure, but it was quiet and we all loved it, yeah.

Sky 2:13:01

It's different.

Kate 2:13:03

One of the things I wanted to expound on when I was thinking about way back then. There was a lot of self-hatred One of the things I wanted to expound on when I was thinking about way back then. There was a lot of self-hatred associated with transition back then and that held people back Once that self-hatred is no longer an oppressive force. Yeah, you're going to see more people transition.

Kate 2:13:24

And I think you know, obviously, getting that load off of people's back is just an amazing thing. Self-hatred is probably one of the worst crippling things that anyone can deal with in life and it drives you, in most extreme cases, to suicide. So, yeah, get rid of that Open. You know, let people explore their gender. But, yeah, transition is going to be part of it. Whenever there's an expansion of liberty, you have mistakes made, but if you trust people, if you believe fundamentally that people deserve to be able to make their own decisions, we have to, as a society, expect a little bit of that, and this is true whether it's Second Amendment or freedom of speech, or the right for an adult to manage their own body.

Sky 2:14:14

Correct, yeah, and this is where, like also when it comes to the concept of detransition, I like it being framed as part of for me at least, as part of someone's journey, as opposed to it being a necessarily regretful decision off of their transition. Because I just don't think, like, if I was to ever detransition, I do think about this sometimes from the basis of the long-term medical aspect of being on HRT. Otherwise, I'm completely happy and, like Brianna said, I would never, ever consider it. But let's say, like I had a blood clot or something and estrogen was a problem or something, and then this I don't know presented itself as a problem.

Sky 2:14:52

Um, I would never think that my detransition means that, like, transition didn't help me in the first place, like it was absolutely essential for me managing my gender dysphoria, and I will always say that. And it's like, if I ever did have a detransition, it would. It would be in that same course of critical decision making based on what I have to do to manage my situation. Um, and so that's where, like, I also would be so curious to hear more from Miles, like do you regret your transition at all or do you feel like it helped you reach where you got today?

Brianna 2:15:31

so I wanted to ask you, I wanted to ask you, sky, like I, I consider like I am religious, but I'm not. I wouldn't say how can I put this? I'd love to know how you feel about this too, kate, but for me it's like I grew up in a really religious household, right, and when I transitioned I turned really really atheist, really really aggressively, just because, like back in these days, there was no space for trans people to be like religious right. It was very much the religious right versus LGBT Turned against it really hard and then, after I got past the transition part and put my anger aside, I was a lot more able to look at this and be like no, this structure has value, this belief has value, this principle of grace towards others has value.

Brianna 2:16:23

But there's, admittedly, always been a distance there, because I never feel like the church is ever going to really enthusiastically be behind my husband. So you know, when I go to church, it's like, oh, brianna Wu, the local person who's well known, is going to church, but it's not like do you know what I mean? It's more of an event than like a community, because I can't be anonymous the same way I could as a child. So I don't know, I see this and I see pariah detransitioning because of religious reasons and I see that and I go.

Brianna 2:17:00

Well, that doesn't have anything to do with any of the religious lessons I learned or anything I find valuable from religion, like, so I guess, as the person on this show who I consider you to be, more like faith to have a bigger component in your life than mine, how do you kind of take that? Like like the religious pressure internal being such a big part of why they decided to to move away from this? Like, do you ever feel like you're living in sin? Because I don't. Like I think God made me this way and I have to deal with that. I think that's the challenge of my life.

Sky 2:17:38

Ooh yeah, very loaded, very loaded question. But is it loaded? Is it loaded? I'm trying to be neutral, no, I mean, it's just that the content of it is so. It's so heavy, um, in terms of like growing up in a religious household, that absolutely would have considered. I mean, there were, there were derogatory comments about gay people all the time, because they from my you know I don't want to say from who exactly, but um, from people I grew up with, because of it being considered sin and et cetera.

Sky 2:18:10

And I think the big shifting point for me because I did struggle with thinking, oh yeah, this is sin, Like this is a bad part of me, this gender dysphoria. I'm feeling I need to be happy with who I am. And ultimately I think it was a gift because it gave me the impetus to challenge my natural inclinations, my own thinking. But ultimately the shift for me was realizing that it's really a medical issue when it comes to how I'm navigating my daily life, because I can't interact with things I just can't like exist and do well at anything without having disruption and thoughts about my gender becoming a problem because it became a bigger problem over time, and so, like from looking at scripture, because that's like the basis of how Christians, you know, will make decisions and live their life is scripture. I came to see like, okay, yes, god created me as a male and that is never going to change, and that's okay. Like I can accept that reality. But God has also given, told us to be good stewards of our bodies and ourselves, and, quite frankly, gender dysphoria was causing me to be a bad steward of myself and all those ways besides just rendering me ineffective and in so many other capacities, and so I think what really shifted for me was again that viewpoint of seeing it more as a disability, as something to be managed, and then seeing, like technology, as the means by which you know, we can.

Sky 2:19:44

In this day and age, we have more options available to us to make it through that struggle, through medical transition, and this is where, like these detransition videos of people that are detransitioning for religious reasons, really it rubs me the wrong way, because it's like well, what about the Christian that is transitioning? Like, does that mean their faith is invalid? Now, because you're interpreting it this way, like scripture can be interpreted a lot of different ways, and this is where I always come back to when it's like you got to be really careful with like rigid readings out of scripture and I don't know. I just I think it has a lot more to do with the heart, and God judges the heart. That's what he says in scripture and that's what Jesus is about is about your heart, and so I think, like your heart can absolutely be in the right place and be transitioning, like the two are not at odds, yeah.

Brianna 2:20:41

Kate, did you grow up in a religious house at all or did you struggle with this at all?

Kate 2:20:45

Yeah, I grew up in a fairly devout Catholic home. My mom was literally a nun like ex-nun, but a nun. She had divorced from the church and the Pope. It's papal decree. They have to sign off and things. So she's still very devout and one of the biggest things that helped her through my transition again this is a long time ago but was her priest. She went to her priest and her priest just taught her about goodness and humanity and morality and continued to empathize with her on this medical situation, not impacting those things.

Kate 2:21:36

I went through a different journey. I think transness was a significant component to me becoming atheist, honestly. I mean there were times. I don't know if you've ever read the book the Sparrow. It was one of my favorite books I've read that Fantastic science fiction book.

Brianna 2:21:52

Yeah, what is this about? Oh, it's so good.

Taf 2:21:56

It's about the Jesuits who, like they, end up traveling to a distant planet, and it deals deeply with themes of religion.

Kate 2:22:05

Oh, my gosh. I remember when I hit that part and I'm not going to spoil it because honestly it's brilliant. But there's this one part back toward the end of the book where everything came into question for me and I remember sitting there, screaming, wailing, in my car at an airport because I couldn't leave the airport. I had to finish this book. I screamed and cursed God to the extreme that had been building for decades, since I was a child. That book got it out. I tell you what.

Kate 2:22:47

It was a fight for me, and I'm not saying that being you know, being atheist at this point in my life is the right choice for me. You know who knows, Frankly, I'm agnostic, but you know anyway, yeah, yeah, I grew up in it and still exist in it when I go home. Yeah, yeah, are you religious?

Taf 2:23:13

at all. How do you feel I am not religious. I think I'm fairly solidly in the atheist camp, very, very influenced by Nietzsche and his writings on religion. So yeah, that's kind of where I tend to come at it from. But I'm interested in religion and I've been reading the Bible, still working through it. I read ahead and then I've come back recently to the book of Jeremiah, which is fantastically. Ooh, that's a good one. It's so intense and it's interesting to read and be like oh, I really like how this section is written, or I don't super like how that section is written. So I have a lot of respect for religion and I'm sort of fascinated by it and I think it's important to understand deeply. But I also, you know, when I think about Miles and his detransition, it makes sense to me and I can imagine someone who's very into Catholicism, specifically Skylar. I don't know what denomination of Christian you are, catholicism specifically.

Sky 2:24:28

Skylar, I don't know what denomination of Christian you are Growing up. It was always non-denominational, but effectively it's like evangelicalism.

Taf 2:24:39

Yeah, yeah, because I think that Protestants also have like a very different view on this. The relationship with God is much more personal and I think from the Protestant perspective it makes more sense to kind of be like well, I have my personal relationship with God and it entails these sorts of things. You know, maybe transition is a part of that relationship. But I think for someone like Miles who is very much on the Catholic side of things, it's kind of like, you know, you're either part of the Catholic Church or you're not, and he takes those Catholic precepts very seriously and so if there's prohibitions against transition from a Catholic perspective, I think that's a lot harder to justify. Like it's probably a big tension.

Taf 2:25:24

I don't know if you found this to be true in your transition, kate, because yeah, it's hard to marry Catholicism with that. And your mother I'm so glad that she had like a priest to navigate her through that, to approach you with like kindness and empathy. But from like a personal perspective, it's totally different to have like agency over your transition and to be sort of forced with that tough decision.

Kate 2:25:47

Your transition and to be sort of forced with that tough decision. Sure it's fun. I? I'm married a devout christian, um, although he does parts more calvinist. Um, from a liberal bible perspective. Um, you know it's. It's a funny thing, balancing, balancing religion with, with transness, I don't think is. I mean, I hope people come to terms with it at some point and find their little slice of peace.

Sky 2:26:13

Um, I'm not the one to to guide through that, unfortunately sometimes I think you can find like peace in the tension of the two in a way.

Sky 2:26:26

It's weird to say, but it's like that's sort of what I found is like I'm happiest when I'm not in just one group or the other, when I'm like tethered in between, taking the best parts of each. That's just how, like I don't know, I I've always felt that way because I I feel like transitioning, even though we say like or like I'll say like I'm a trans woman, but it's like transitioning is something you do too, like you have to like medically transition, and so it's like I don't know. I feel like that ongoingness is part of like the element of where I want to hold everything in tension when it comes to my beliefs and what like scripture says and what people say, because the moment I stop holding it in tension, I'm a closed book. People say, because the moment I stop holding an intention, I'm a closed book and I want to be like an open book and able to like adapt and understand, like where I need to go next or what I should do.

Brianna 2:27:15

I think that's amazing. Yeah, before we um end this topic, I want to ask you, kate, because I'm, I'm, I'm very Protestant, I'm very Presbyterian. If you're not familiar with that, we're kind of the hardcore, very formal, very storied, very stiff rule following. We're not like Baptists or Evangelicals at all. We're much more like hey, here's the philosophy. We're going to go do a three-hour seminar on this so you can know exactly why you believe in predestination. That's kind of culture. So how we understand, like with catholicism, why would pariah or miles I'm doing my best here, I apologize, but why would the catholic church make them feel all this pressure to detransition? Because it's hard, like I think it's exactly like you said, taff, for me because of the culture I grew up in. It's so my interpretation of the good in what I found and those values I bring in my life and the standards I hold myself, to help me understand like an institution having that much power over your own identity, because that's really hard for me to conceive of it's.

Kate 2:28:32

It's difficult for me too, yeah, but it's. It's generational in some families as well and it's tied into um culture and family culture and and with with institutions like Catholicism and, probably to a similar degree, aspects of Judaism. It's wildly mixed into your customs and your history and, if you feel like that's at risk, it's a big chunk of who you are. From a specifics perspective, I didn't see anything in particular that would drive me one way or the other, except for the sacrament of marriage, which is fairly stringent with respect to biological sex, to steal Brad's term. Well, that crushed my mom.

Kate 2:29:25

You know when she was like oh, she's not going to be able to be married in the church. It didn't bother me so much, but yeah that was probably the main thing, and that was the thing the priest couldn't compromise on, because it's indoctrinated.

Brianna 2:29:39

That's so hard, oh my goodness. So I guess, before we close the show out, taff, I wanted to give just a minute to talk about this. You were telling us a story about leaving a discord server this week. Do you want to talk about that really quickly?

Taf 2:29:58

yeah, I think I can talk about it. It's something that I don't necessarily know, I have, like the perfect language for, but I was friends with a group of people for a very, very long time, like I. You know, I started talking to them in like 2018. Spoke with them like every day of my life, uh, just incessantly shared everything with them, you know, as there's many trans people in this group, so as people got like surgeries, they would post like surgery photos and, you know, I got to see all of these people's transitions from beginning to end, and they got to see mine.

Taf 2:30:48

And, yeah, I don't know if there's so much of a story, but just in my life I um, I think I've sort of like grown apart from these people over the time. I think part of that is my fault, uh, because I think I've not always been like the best friend and I think that I've often been dealing with my own things, my own problems, and that's led me to, you know, be more quick to anger or to argument with people, and I think I have not always been the best at reaching out to people and deepening connections with them or really showing like genuine interest in their lives. One of my 2025, like new year's goals, is to really become like deeply interested in people, like really deeply care for them, and to practice that care. I think that's kind of the foundation of friendship, yeah. But yeah, so I think there's, over time, like a sort of gap between me and these people developed, and I think it's been frustrating because, as maybe the personal gap grew, tensions around politics have become like more intractable or difficult to deal with or they become nastier.

Taf 2:32:16

And so, even though, like I don't usually have negative or personal feelings regarding political differences with people, I have noticed that, like, when there is a point of disagreement, it sometimes turns like really personal and really nasty very quickly. Yeah, and I noticed that like as far back as 2021, but I sort of didn't say anything or really stand up for myself, I think, because at that time I dealt with a lot more self-image issues and I didn't really believe that I could like find other friends or I felt kind of like trapped, unable to speak my mind or stand up for myself. And now that I've dealt with a lot of those issues, I feel more comfortable just sort of putting distance between myself and this group of people, really just like a few people within the group, but it's been like hard emotionally to kind of like put that extra distance between myself and people that I really do genuinely continue to care about very deeply, and so I don't know, I'm continuing to navigate that. I don't know what it'll look like.

Brianna 2:33:51

But yeah, in my life that's what I book, like learning how this works, because that's like one thing. But like sometimes, like I have someone who I genuinely, genuinely care about and I thought we were really good friends in this israel palestine thing, like I'm on one side and it has genuinely destroyed our friendship into a way that they've just been tremendously abusive to me and you know I almost want to call her up and be like you know we just like it hurts me when she starts to tell me but is it someone that we know?

Taf 2:34:24

I don't know if y'all know her now.

Brianna 2:34:25

Okay, okay, yeah, know I don't know if y'all know her. No, okay, yeah, but it's, it's just it's. I think it's. This is something I think about. A lot is, I think, like the purpose of Dollcast is I think we're trying to model some better friendship and social patterns for the community.

Brianna 2:34:44

It's hard for me not to notice, like, like I'd love to know if you've experienced this, kate like it's really hard for me to think of trans friendships I've had for like 10 years. Right, it really feels like we tend to dip in and out of each other's lives and it's. It's weird, because we have such a bizarre experience that you would think we would be extremely close and instead I think it's almost like we end up becoming the vessels for all this self-hate or neurosis that each other feels about stuff, or either we're like such damaged people that it's hard for us to have friendships long term. I don't know what it is, but it's like sometimes I talk to cis girls and they've had friendships since kindergarten and I'm so jealous of that. Does. Does that make sense to you?

Kate 2:35:36

does I? My story is a little unique in that I actively um stepped away from everything I did too. I did too. I kept one friend with the same experience but ironically we never talked about it. It wasn't part of our friendship. Our friendship was just friendship based on common experiences. We were in our 20s together, you know she was at my wedding.

Kate 2:36:08

I was hers, but it wasn't a. It wasn't a trans friendship. I recently connected last week with a group of women that really helped help me through in the mid-2000s after I pulled away. But I still needed support and camaraderie and we connected after 15, 20 years of not speaking and it's been lovely. The families and the marriages and the education and the lives just these amazing lives that all these women have lived and I could not be happier reconnecting with them and getting to learn what their lives have turned into. But I've also lost some. I've lost some that never recovered from me separating for for so long.

Sky 2:37:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I feel like for me it was very similar to what you described of like pulling away.

Sky 2:37:10

I did have a couple of friends that I managed to kind of keep through the transition and through the years, but I did lose some as well, and some really close friends too. But I think I found that, like it was kind of what you said. Um, really with like, when it comes to just not talking that much about being trans, like I don't know, there's just like not a lot that I have to like talk about that I really have that I want to talk about there, as opposed to like what do you do? Like what are your activities or what are your interests? Like that's where I'll gravitate a lot more naturally. Um, because I guess you know, part transition it depends on who you are, but like I mean, for all of us it's it's very true that like we don't want being trans to be something that's part of our lives every day, so we're not looking to connect on that, we're looking to connect on other things, and so it ends up being like, well, do you have the same interests or not, kind of deal.

Brianna 2:38:08

I don't know though, because, kate, I really identified with you with what you said at the beginning of the show, where it was like there was this unpacked box of trauma that you put away, because for me it really was. Like I transitioned, I got on hormones, I came to the conclusion the community was too unhealthy to spend a lot of time in and, by the way, this is the 2004 version of the community right, and I just very consciously left the community did not talk about it. Like I went many, many years, like I knew trans people occasionally, but I literally just it's not that I was ashamed of who I was, it it was just I wanted to focus on my own life, on my own marriage and my career, and really was very conscious of building that. And like I came back to it last year and it's been very interesting because, like you, kate, I was really unsure of how I felt about a lot of modern trans politics.

Navigating Trans Visibility and Obligation

Brianna 2:39:05

And you'd unpack like non-binary stuff, or you know, like trans women that go non-op, or you know, like this agp thing, like I needed to like figure out my positions there in some ways, like I, I don't mind just being vulnerable and saying like y'all are deeply important people in my life taft and uh sky Like I. Really I feel like the show nourishes a part of me every single week and I look forward to it in a way. I don't other professional projects that I do, but it's also like the amount of headspace that I spend thinking about trans stuff is so much higher than it used to be. Yeah, I have really mixed feelings about that. If that makes sense to you, yeah, I like never.

Taf 2:39:52

I used to never think about trans things really. Or for like a long period in my life I thought about trans things and I stopped. I made a conscious decision to sort of like move away from that, and then I just didn't. And then I started this show and now I like talk about trans, started this show and now I like talk about trans things weekly and I think about it a lot more than I did previously. So I don't know, I think that that there's a feeling of like obligation in this moment in time to address these issues, to come back into talking about them and to help make sense of things, especially when we've allowed people to speak for us for so long you know this and oftentimes say things that aren't helpful to us.

Sky 2:40:37

So I think it's yeah, yeah, yeah, obligation duty. I couldn't agree more like that's I'm. I am in a unique place here, I feel like because I don't like the spotlight, like I don't like being on podcasts. To be honest, like the format is scary to me, but I love each of you and I love the guests we have on and I love what we talk about is fun, but I'm not the best speaker and I don't even need to do this and it's like, but I feel obligated deeply to help write the ship that has gone so long, so it's about to sink, like it is so close.

Sky 2:41:15

And I know, brie, we've talked about this and you know you've seen the writing on the wall and I believe you and I believe everyone here knows can see where things are going. You don't need to have a microscope to see that. It's easy, and so, like I I just wanted to echo again and be like yeah, I'm here for that exact reason, um, because I want to help be the voice. I want to override the voices that have been speaking to us, speaking on our behalf for us, for so long.

Brianna 2:41:43

Um did you feel any responsibility to do that and kind of saying yes today, like, do you, how do you feel about the way trans stuff has gone? Like, do you, do you worry about the future? How, what's kind of your assessment of everything?

Kate 2:41:59

of course I worry about the future although I didn't for a very long time and know that is the best way to live is just to get on with it. But when you're bombarded nonstop with talking heads on television and headline advertisements on newspapers, it just gets to you, it eats away at you, even if you're invisible and unaffected. Practically it's a poison and we have to purge the poison. We are not ever going to be able to survive in a world that looks at us in that way. I haven't lived in that world for a long time, but I was born in a state where I could change my birth markers. I was born in a time when I have no internet presence. That doesn't exist, except maybe on Napster or something like that.

Brianna 2:43:02

I got lucky up on Napster, I'm going to find it. Yeah, look.

Kate 2:43:08

Yeah, so I'm not worried about myself when will we find it? My conservative dad is like oh, that has nothing to do with you, right? But it does, and it has a lot to do with the next generation who are going to be fighting this publicly with long histories on social media. So, yeah, I felt obligated. Now I'm still practically stealth in my day-to-day life. My in-laws don't even know, so I will resolve that issue, probably shortly before it's resolved for me, but yeah.

Kate 2:43:48

I've got a lot of coming out to do in the next whatever if this becomes a thing I'll have to resolve those issues. Yeah.

Brianna 2:43:57

Yeah, how do you feel about that Coming out? Yeah, ah, gross, it's awful. It's awful. I hate having these discussions now Like it's awful. I hate that I do media. It's the first thing people ask me about. I hate that Pierce Morgan is not calling for me to talk about Israel-Palestine. He's asking me about trans stuff. Like I just hate it. I hate it.

Kate 2:44:25

Yeah, and it's anticipating being treated like other. I haven't had. Yeah, and it's anticipating being treated like other. I haven't had to deal with it for a very long time, but I remember and I hated it back in the day, when people they're respectful, they're lovely, but they keep you at a distance. You are an at-arms reaction because you're other, and that is some of the that's uh that eats away at me and I I'm kind of bracing for impact if that works its way back to my life.

Brianna 2:44:58

But don't you feel like there's a cost to hiding it all the time? Like I felt that as well, like the fact that I can't tell you how many times I was in a meeting someone would start going off on trans people, right, and you'd just be sitting there thinking like, oh my goodness gracious, like you know. Or seeing stuff and talking around it like it's. It's really challenging to keep that hidden. So it's like lose, lose.

Kate 2:45:24

I think yeah, the thing that bothers me the most is with close friends that don't know. Yeah, 100%. Not being whole is awful, yeah, it's, you know. Does that affect what we talk?

Ben 2:45:38

about on a day-to-day basis.

Kate 2:45:40

No, we have the same experiences in life and my friends and I can talk for a million years on normal life stuff. But there's a context to to being raised in the way we were raised you know that adds character and depth and and to set that aside and ignore it sucks.

Brianna 2:46:00

So you know it's a. It is a double-edged blade. I don't know.

Kate 2:46:05

But, I'm racing for impact to some degree. Oh, don't feel bad, I'll get over it. You're tough, come on Some days. Yeah, we all have our days right.

Brianna 2:46:20

Amazing. Yeah, tess, did you have anything else you wanted to say on that? Nothing else.

Taf 2:46:26

All right, all right, alright.

Sky 2:46:29

Alright, we're going to wrap up the show. Alright, got kind of sobering there at the end, but otherwise was pretty happy. Anyways, just wanted to thank all our listeners for tuning in today and all our viewers for watching us. Just want to say if you want to check us out and get a little bit more into the mix, you can find us at dollcastshowcom. Again, that's dollcastshowcom, and until next time, stay fabulous.