The Billion Dollar War on Trans People (With Alejandra Caraballo)

Alejandra Caraballo is a civil rights attorney, clinical instructor at Harvard Law School, and one of the most prominent trans voices in America. In this conversation, she describes what daily life feels like for trans people right now: driver's licenses revoked overnight, hospitals shutting down care, bomb threats forcing activists off social media. 

We talk about the billionaire money behind the anti-trans movement, why transphobia and antisemitism are nearly inseparable, and what it means to fight for a future you might never see. 

This episode is heavy. For this one, I felt it important we go deep, without qualification and without being afraid to name how dark the moment is. There is no better spokesperson for that reality than Alejandra.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hi, I'm Alad Naharai, and welcome to Here We Come. When I started this podcast, I had this idea that my job was to empower people. Because I had seen what had happened for a number of years as I warned people and screamed about extremism and Trumpism, and it seemed like no one was listening. It kind of became very clear to me that just talking negatively was not enough to move people. And so that was kind of the conception of what this podcast was going to do differently. But I had an interesting experience with this episode as I was interviewing Alejandra, a trans woman and activist about the trans experience. Where the more we spoke, the darker and the more intense and the sadder it got. And I had this instinct that I should stop her or at least try and move things in a certain direction to make it more positive and forward-looking. But the truth was, it became very clear to me the more we spoke that if I did that, I wouldn't be doing justice to what Alejandro was experiencing, to what trans people in America are experiencing. And the reason I realized that was because it reminded me of when I was an activist for abuse victims in the Hasidic community. And there was a very common phenomenon where there were people who claimed to really care about abuse, who, you know, tried to participate, to learn a bit, but the more abuse victims would try to be heard, the harder it would be for people who are sympathetic to really help them. Because what would happen was they would kind of recoil the more they would hear about what the victims experienced. It's hard really to sit with someone's pain. It's hard to really hear it and to really listen to it. When there are people who are being victimized so badly in America and beyond, we have to first take that step. We have to first listen and understand. And then we can get to empowerment. But especially for those of us who are more privileged, we don't have a responsibility just to act. We have a responsibility to hear what it's like for other people. So I hope you'll listen to this podcast in that spirit, really feeling what Alejandra is going through and what trans people are going through, really taking a moment to take it in. Because I do really believe if most of us truly understood what trans people are going through, there would be a very different reaction to what we're seeing out there. Very different. I don't think many people really understand the pain and the fear that's happening in the trans community in America right now. So I hope Alejandra's words can reach you. I hope that you'll take the time to really spend time with what she's saying. Because it's so essential that we hear it. And I think the more that we do, the more things will change, the more we'll act, and the more we will get to that empowered place. So thank you. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. Welcome to Here We Come. I'm excited to have Alejandra Carabaio on our podcast on the Here We Come podcast. Thanks for joining, Alejandra.

SPEAKER_00 3:30

Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 3:31

We go back quite a bit from pre-Nazi Twitter and fighting the good fight when it comes to transphobia, anti-Semitism. And I've always felt so connected to you, even though we're distant from each other. We had one Shabbat together that was so special. And yeah, I'm so excited to have you.

SPEAKER_00 3:50

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's good to see you again.

SPEAKER_01 3:53

Yeah, you too. Alejandro, you're a lawyer. You're also a professor, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Technical title is clinical instructor, but I'm not gonna stop it when other people call me professor. Uh but yeah, no, I I teach cyber law at the cyber law clinic at Harvard Law School, where I work as a clinical instructor. My little focus has been right now on the intersection of digital privacy and healthcare, particularly around stigmatized areas of healthcare like gender for me, care and abortion and the ways that it's being undermined by technology. Outside of that, most people know me through my activism on social media.

SPEAKER_01 4:30

For people who don't know, Alejandra is trans and an incredible advocate for her community and for other people. I know for myself and I know for other people, having trans voices online has been so essential, as much as the internet has also led us to dark places with trans folk. Having an activist like yourself, in my opinion, completely transforms the experience for a lot of liberals and progressives.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

It's uh it's incredibly important to be seen. And I always remind myself like how important that is. Uh, like just half the battle is just being seen because there's not a lot of people like me that that have gotten to where I'm at um as a trans person. It's just not very, it's just not a very common thing. And I always just try to remind myself like there's always like trans kids that are probably thinking that all of their opportunities are closing up, and I I want to just remind them that they can do anything just like any other kid. And so, you know, I always try to and then just to push back on everything. And to be honest, like I wish I could spend my days tweeting about the Patriots and like cyberpunk and random things that I find enjoyable, and it's just you know, it just feels like by necessity I have to constantly be be fighting for what's going on with the trans community. It's uh incredibly frustrating, but what can you do?

SPEAKER_01 5:59

The difficult, among other things, difficult side of being a trans person online simply by being their activist. Even liberals, progressives have difficulty seeing them as whole people, I think, online.

SPEAKER_00 6:09

Yeah, there is kind of a dehumanizing aspect of the activist label, and it's always kind of frustrating because literally you're just asking for bare basic equal rights, and then suddenly just being asked for other people to be, I don't know, just have basic manners is considered activism, or even just having a uh trans flag on your profile or having she, her pronouns, suddenly you're an activist. And I think that's what's always frustrating is like you just existing in the world, you just get boiled down to activist. And sometimes, like some most of the church people I know are not activists, they're just trying to live their life, and the minute that they even speak up and say, Hey, maybe you shouldn't take away my healthcare, suddenly, oh, trans activists, and then it gets swept up and and categorized as this broad thing. Like, you know, I was posting today about the New York Times where they said, like, to get on the wrong side of trans activists is to endure their unsparing criticism. And it's just in the New York Times, yeah. That was a Jeremy Peters piece from a year and a half ago, right after the election. Right. It's just like, you know, and it was just, I mean, your biggest gripe with us is that we're somehow assertive on social media. I'm sorry, the other side is inciting bomb threats against children's hospitals. Yeah, like I I you know, so that's always incredibly frustrating on that end, but you know, you just have to kind of push through it and don't let the other side or or the other, you know, define who you are. You have to define it yourself. And so I always try to remember remind myself of that.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

I was thinking about Gavin Newsom, who, you know, I'm sure you're a big fan of his. Um, but he, you know, on these recent podcasts where he said this idea that, you know, we need to stop talking about pronoun stuff all the time, you know, we need to be more quote unquote normal. And I just, it was of course, there's a million things that are frustrating about hearing that, but the irony, I think, of that is similar to what you're describing, which is there's a reason that pronouns are so in the lexicon or so in the ether, and it has very little to do with trans people, has a lot to do with the people targeting trans people. I 99% of the time I hear the word pronoun, you know, it's maybe in an English book and then from the far right, you know?

SPEAKER_00 8:34

My friend Jessica did a really great analysis. She's been running basically a uh archive of every news piece that hits Google News that mentions trans people. And for basically the last five or six years, Fox News writes more pieces about trans people than even the advocate or LGBTQ nation, which are like two of the bigger LGBTQ-focused media organizations. Wow. So it part of it is the faulty logic that Gavin Newsom engages in is that thinking that somehow saying, Well, we got to stop talking about pronouns, the Democrats are not the ones that are doing that. They're never talking about it, they're never mentioning trans people. Kamala never mentioned the word trans her entire campaign, but she was painted as being obsessed and and whatnot because of the reality distortion field of far-right media. They were able to basically paint her as like someone obsessed with only helping trans people. When the reality is it's the Republicans that have introduced thousands of bills focusing on trans people, spending hundreds of millions of dollars of ads focusing on trans people, and their media outlets are running thousands and thousands of articles focused on trans people. If there's anyone focused on pronouns, it's the right. I I'm trans and I don't even spend as much time thinking about trans people as like the far right do. And I I monitor their Twitter accounts, these people are obsessed, like they just post about it like 20, 30 times a day. And I it just I don't get it. I really don't.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

There are similar dynamics, I think, between anti-Semites and transphobes. And of course, there are many who are both. Well, I would say almost every right-wing anti-Semite is also transphobic. This inability to think outside of this framework and constant post and constant thinking, overwhelmed with it and conspiracy theory thinking is very connected to both our communities, or the targeting, I guess, of both our communities.

SPEAKER_00 10:44

Yeah. When I I testified in Congress about, was it now two and a half years ago? And it was overshadowed for other reasons. But my written testimony, which was like a 25-page memo, delved into this because the original hearing was the looking, or was it looking into white supremacy? I forgot the exact title of the hearing. But essentially, I made the ties between a lot of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and attacks and broader tropes about uh trans people. And one of the things I included was this meme that had circulated on 4chan, which was listing all of these prominent founders of trans orgs and basically trying to find any Jewish person associated with them, and then putting the Star of David. And also there, there's the the this theorizing that that basically it's Jewish billionaires that are funding the trans movement as part of this transhumanist plot. Like it's just it's crazy stuff, and it's always like hard to get people to understand like that was like the beginning seeds and the stages of it and how that spreads. And you can just basically the types of people who are the most anti-trans and the most anti-Semitic, if you did a Venn diagram, it's almost it's basically a circle. And you're right, there is an entire level of obsessiveness that is is very difficult to parse.

SPEAKER_01 12:10

I had like a very interesting experience a year or two ago where Seth Dylan, the editor in chief of Babylon B, is really sharing an anti-Semitic conspiracy there. It was really it was really interesting because I thought it was a big mask-off moment. And he responds, Why would you think I'm talking about Jews? I'm talking about trans people. And I was blown away by this. One of the things that's been so hard for me has been seeing how many right-wing Jews or how how many people in general who will be upset about anti-Semitism have not said anything about transphobia and now seem surprised that transphobia has led to anti-Semitism. One of the most obvious ones just today, Anna Kasparian was like overtly anti-Semitic. It was her first time, I think, totally masked off. And she started as a transphobe, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:57

It's such a gateway drug to broader far-right radicalization uh into extremism. It's I and I've seen it. I mean, you you could see it with Elon Musk. Uh, he's been a stark example of this, right? Like he, you know, I don't think he was ever really a liberal. He just did whatever was in his own best interest. But his daughter coming out as trans, that happened. She she filed for her name change in 2022 that coincided right with him purchasing Twitter.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 13:31

And you know, it's been reported that the Babylon B being uh not they weren't suspended, they had their account locked for misgendering the uh assistant health secretary Levine was one of the like motivating factors for him to purchase Twitter. And it was very much, you know, he felt that trans people were somehow being protected and that he needed to end that. And he's just become more and more extreme, and he's pushing stuff now, basically saying that trans people are killers and threaten like are threats to women and children. And his his own daughter is trans, right? Like he's pushing that out there and knowing that it's going to make his own daughter's life that much more difficult, and it's just insane to watch it just play out in real time, yeah. And he still dead names her and says she's dead to him, essentially. The woke mind virus killed her. It's just it's crazy, and it there's many such cases of this. There's the Jeff Younger case out of Texas. I've seen at least multiple instances of this where a father has a trans kid, does not accept them, and then just embarks on this pathway that inevitably leads to them engaging in Nazi content. Like it's the same thing happened with Jeff Younger. He started associating with far-right uh nationalists and others like Patriot Front in Texas, and it's just it's crazy. I just they they they start down that path. And I can't really explain the rationale behind it, but it's something I've I've seen happen.

SPEAKER_01 15:18

I think it can go both ways. One is that I think a lot of them are already harboring some anti-Semitism, but trans people have been an easier target for so long, and so they start there and then they radicalize in this like loop. You know, I think Elon Musk is such a good example of that, where he started radical, but he's still radicalizing himself constantly. On the other hand, I think there's a lot of people who are afraid of being anti-Semitic and this like trans issue, like like you're saying, you know, there's so many things that align with anti-Semitism. I almost feel like it's completely unsurprising to me that the two, you know, are connected.

SPEAKER_00 15:55

It's connected to ableism, misogyny. I mean, the amount of people that I've seen being like, we have to protect women from trans people, and then they engage in just utterly misogynistic stuff. Just the way that they talk about women, just as essentially as property, it just horrific stuff. And it it that desire to so-called like protect women is more of one of that's patriarchal that has been used forever to go after minorities, to to use white womanhood in particular as a means to stoke and incite violence against minorities or groups that you want to uh marginalize. And but regardless, it it just the transphobia right now is an acceptable way to be just the worst version of yourself in a way that is still socially acceptable. You can go and and troll and mock people, you can make jokes about the suicide rate for trans people, like just yesterday. Graham Lynham Glenn or Glenner, as he's known in the EK, was literally saying lol and uh laughing about the fact that the the number of trans youth that attempt suicide and saying, oh, it could be higher or it should be higher because you know all teenage years are terrible. And it's just he's just finding it funny that a substantial proportion of trans youth are so distraught at what's going on in their lives that they're attempting suicide and he thinks it's funny. Like it just it's so incredible the lengths of the amount of cruelty and just inhumanity that they they display.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

I was thinking about that with this Elon Musk stuff because I understood that if I wrote about Elon Musk's transphobia, Elon Musk's racism, which were both so blatant, so hateful, you know, I would get very little traction. I would not get a lot of people paying attention. And of course, anti-Semitism took some time too, but it was so much easier. So much easier to talk about that. It really breaks my heart, I think, because you know, I'm thinking about ICE and how it really took, you know, as we know, it took white people being murdered for people to really, really speak up. And it's just if there's like one thing that I want with this podcast and with my writing and all these things, is that we start to until those people are really speaking up and as heartbroken about trans people and immigrants, you know, we're not we're not actually resisting, I don't think. We're not truly resisting.

SPEAKER_00 18:46

Yeah, I you know, one of the things you mentioned is just it took some white folks getting killed by ICE to turn around that. And I think back to like the civil rights movement with you know Joe uh Joan Mulholland, who was killed in Mississippi as a white woman and was was smeared. Um and it is frustrating because when you are part of a targeted minority group, your power is not only limited by society, it's like limited in the ability that even your suffering can serve as a symbol of injustice, right? It takes someone from another group sacrificing themselves to actually reveal how bad things really are, because it takes, I don't know if it's just an empathy gap, it takes like people having to see someone else that they feel like could be them. I honestly don't know what what the rationale is there, but that's what makes it so hard and why it's so important for cis people, especially for to speak out on behalf of trans folks, it's for non-Jewish folks to speak out on anti-Semitism, because that is taken oftentimes more seriously. And it's also one of the reasons why the far right always goes after the people speaking out who are not members of that community the hardest. Some of the biggest dogpiles of the last year that I've seen was oh my gosh, why am I forgetting her name? The gymnast, the gold medal gymnast. I'm like forgetting her name. Simone Biles. Um you know, she went after Riley Gaines for just being horrific against trans people. And the entire the entirety of Twitter and all of the right media apparatus just went into overdrive, just blowing up that whole spat. And eventually Simone Biles backed down and had to basically, I don't even apologize to Riley Gaines. And what that showed was if you're an ally of trans people and you have a big platform, don't use it because you and I guarantee you that's probably what the publicists and the managers are all saying. The PR people are like, don't get involved because this is gonna drag you down. You're gonna have to spend money on security because you're gonna get tons of death threats, and it's just gonna consume everything in your social media and your media brand for potentially a week or two weeks, and you just don't want to deal with this, so just don't say anything. And that's exactly how they condition allies to not speak out, and that is the goal, and that is meant to marginalize and isolate trans people as a community. And they've been remarkably, especially since Elon took over Twitter, have been remarkably effective at doing that. And so anyone now who speaks out in favor of trans people on Twitter is just basically thrown to the wolves, and it's by it's by design because it's meant to change. The incentives and change the system so that anyone speaking out in favor of a marginalized group is disincentivized either through immediate dogpiling, death threats, slurs, you name it, just it just raises the social cost so high that they just don't even bother.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

Yeah. What is it what is the experience right now for trans people in America?

SPEAKER_00 22:30

I wrote about this last year. I had to basically like put it down to words because I don't know. It's just so it feels like every day is a waking nightmare in some sense because you just every single day it's something new. It's some new like some new attack or some new thing that you just know is going to cause immense suffering in your community, and you're really powerless to do anything about it. I mean, like less, for instance, just in the last day, Kansas invalidated the driver's licenses of 1,700 people, 1,700 trans people, and made it so it's illegal for them to drive until they update their driver's license to match their sex assigned at birth, which for most trans people will out them, subject them to harassment, discrimination, violence, and just humiliation, right? And and they their licenses got suspended literally overnight, and many of them would can't even drive to the DMV without potentially risking arrest for driving on a suspended license. And so there are thousands of trans people being directly affected by this policy that was rammed through last on an emergency posture. They stripped a hole out of the bill, they bypassed the committee, they overrode the veto of the governor, they fast tracked this and passed it basically. They got it passed in two days. Got the veto happened, they did the veto basically in two weeks, they had this whole bill from start to finish. It's just incredible the speed that they went, and it's just another thing. Like it's hospitals closing services for trans youth, NYU Langone, Mount Sinai. And when I hear from some of the families affected, like some of the time, like some of this has been their second or third time having a provider stop providing services to them. And so this and many of them have had to move. Like there are people who have moved from Arkansas or Alabama to Connecticut or New York or Massachusetts simply to get this healthcare. And then they're having the door shut on their face again. It's just it's so disheartening. And it what's worse is that the people with the money and the power and the resources to fight back are the biggest cowards. They're the ones who are like, I don't, we don't want to deal with this. This is too much of a hassle. We're willing to make this Sophie's choice and just say, you know, trans community is gonna have to deal with it. We don't want to be bothered by this, essentially. We don't want to have to deal with filing lawsuits against the federal government. We don't have to deal with litigation. And it's just incredible to watch. And I think what's the most disheartening is just the hardest part about this is seeing like how much of this is funded by billionaires, and how much of this is just coming from a handful of billionaires. Um you have Elon Musk, obviously, who bought Twitter, and he's turned that whole thing around like the whole you can explain so much of the retreat on trans rights in the last three or four years among liberals and democrats to Twitter because the disappearance of trans voices, and I I think about this all the time. I'm not on Twitter because it is literally a threat to my safety. I used I have a folder in my email inbox that was labeled bomb threats because I had hundreds of bomb threats emailed to me, death threats. And since I left Twitter, I haven't gotten any. Like being on that website is literally a hazard to my personal safety. And so, of course, there's less trans people on there, less visible trans people, and then the far right's emboldened, and it's of course going to shift the political class that stays on there, and then you have you know the Ellisons buying CBS and putting Barry Weiss in charge, and now she's changing the standards at CBS. They just now are about to go through with acquiring Time Warner or Warner Warner Discovery, and they're gonna get CNN and they're gonna make sure that starts pushing out anti-trans stuff. And then you've got you know J.K. Rowling spending tens of millions of dollars in the UK pushing anti-trans policies, funding lawfare. It just endless amounts of money coming from you have uh the Uline family spending millions on a um ballot initiative in Maine, and it's just incredible. And I don't know what to do because we have been outspent by over a billion dollars. They're buying entire media like institutions to turn them into anti-trans propaganda organs, and I don't know how you fight that, and that's what I think is the most difficult aspect because it just feels so overwhelming.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

I've been watching The Wire recently, and it's a great show. The thing that overwhelms me in that show uh is how you just know the incentive structure, the way things are built. You just kind of have no hope in a sense when you watch that show. You can just kind of see this whole power structure that makes it so that the people on the ground are caught in this web. You know, when we had Shabbat together, I remember it was both inspiring and painful in the sense of I felt like we were so aligned and on the same page and in this movement together, right? I mean, this is like what I kind of frame the podcast as and how I introed it to you and stuff. And I think it's so beautiful and so powerful for trans people, brown people, black people to be together in this movement that I think is forming online, and it's painful to have that feeling of like so how is the change gonna happen? I think 2016 to 2020 and post-BLM, post Me Too, post-women's march I think shook a lot of progressives and liberals to wonder just because it feels good, just because I'm in the streets, just because I'm going viral, does not mean I've changed anything. We had this mass movement, people in the streets everywhere. Like, has anything actually changed?

SPEAKER_00 29:29

I think what's hard is you know, I I especially after the last election, I just threw myself into every political theory and a book I could find. I read Thomas Hobbes the Leviathan, I read uh Hannah Rent, basically everything, every book I could read about uh authoritarianism and autocracy. And I think one of the hardest things to deal with when you you you dive so much into the history is you realize there are just these, you know. I think the classic quote is just it's I think captures it so well where the Lenin quote where he says there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. And I really feel like that's basically been the last few years where it's just been this kind of sea change. And what I worry is that there are moments in time that lock us into trajectories that we don't realize have passed until maybe a decade later or a few years later when we we you have time to take stock and realize, oh wow, this was actually that was the moment that we had to have done something and it's kind of too late. And I think the 2016 election is gonna be that one for me, because you know, it's it's like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. You know, at the time people don't think it was that remarkable. It took a few months and then the war started, and people thought it was gonna be quick, and then World War I dragged on, and tens of millions of people died. And it all started because one of a like it was kind of comical if you know the actual story of how Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. It was just like a comedy of errors. I I like is the best way I could describe it, and it just feels like that's how history unfolds is like this comedy of errors, and there are these moments that are just like nexus points that can't be undone. And I think part of it was you know, we're trying to desperately always undo the 2016 election and what that unlocked in this country. And I think the worst instinct is to think that we can ever go back and that there's ever a return to normal because there is this is the new normal, and there's an entire generation of kids now that this is all they've ever known. And what's disturbing is like you see the rise of anti-Semitism among Gen Z, the like, especially among white boys, the grapers, the the Nick Fuentes followers, like the amount of youth that are involved in that is like extremely concerning. And there is no going back to pre-2016 years, like we have to forge something new, but it's also incredibly scary because you don't know how things are gonna shake out, right? And I think one of the the thing that one of the things that stuck out to me the most in the last year that I've I've heard was Tenehasi Coates talking about in an interview with with Ezra Klein, and I don't I try my best not to listen to Ezra Klein. I only listened to that episode because it had Tanhassi Coates on. And he was talking about, you know, there's this kind of sense of fatalism that activists or movement people have, where you can do everything right and nothing will change. And then suddenly decades later, everything falls into place, and you may have laid the groundwork, but you'll never see the progress in your lifetime. And I think that is incredibly hard to stomach and fathom, where it's like you may have to do a ton of work, it may be thankless, and it may feel like futility. And then a few decades later, it's set something in motion that other generations can pick up and make the change. And you know, I think of all the figures, you know, Frederick Douglass and and others that he was like talking about. He's talking about these figures that were essentially doomed to history. And it's difficult because you don't know if you're in that moment. If you you don't know that basically your life is locked into this trajectory and you're never gonna see the other side of it. And I worry, at least for trans folks, my generation, like millennials and others, we're gonna be locked into this for the rest of our lives. And we have to just survive so that the next generation can make more progress. Because this it wouldn't be the first generation of trans people to that to happen to. There's an entire generation that started to see some progress in the 70s and it got ripped away. And then on top of that, the AIDS crisis happened. Yeah. And I always think back to how if you've ever seen the I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Paris is burning, the documentary.

SPEAKER_01 34:37

I haven't seen it.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

I recommend watching it. It's a time capsule of drag ball culture in Harlem in the 90s, early night, late 80s, early 90s, like right as the AIDS epidemic is at its peak. And I remember the first time watching it in 2017, and I started looking up all the cat all the people who are featured in this documentary, and like pretty much all of them were dead, either from intimate partner violence, HIV, AIDS. Uh it just it was one of the most depressing things, and just watching these people like talk about their hopes and dreams. And then like I in some way got to live it because I was able to succeed, and like if that generation hadn't struggled and put the infrastructure into place, I wouldn't be where I'm at. And I think for me, I think one of the hardest things is to not think about the fact that in some ways, yes, I got to have maybe a decade of that, and then we're gonna regress back, and then my generation might be another generation that's essentially lost, that we have to bear through it, survive, and then lay the groundwork for another generation. And I think that is really hard to deal with.

SPEAKER_01 35:53

I think sometimes on this podcast, I hope that listeners sit with the darkness a bit, like sit with the thing you're experiencing because they really want the world to be easy to fix, they want solutions, they want a sense of hope. And when I hear you talk, like I think what part of what I hear is that you don't get afforded that.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

That's one of the hardest things, is is you don't get the luxury of pretending that everything is okay and you can just kind of go about your day and that things will be okay because they won't be. And it's just it's really difficult and precarious. And I think one of the other unique aspects of trans people is that oftentimes it takes some trans folks from a relative position of privilege. There's a lot of you know, white trans women that were pre before they transitioned were treated as white men, and there's a lot of uh privilege afforded to that. And then the minute they transition, it's they realize, oh, they're getting catcalls. And I mean, that was jarring for me when I first started transitioning, was getting catcalled in the street and being followed home and threatened. That happened to me twice in Brooklyn. That's something I never had to deal with before I transitioned. And so you have this unique viewpoint that others don't, that you've especially for trans women and somewhat for trans men too, they get the kind of opposite where they get privilege thrown to them. They suddenly realize, oh, people are listening to me when we speak, when I speak in a room. And it's kind of the opposite effect. But there's kind of a unique perspective there because you get to see the world through two sets of eyes, like the one before you transition and the one after. And it's really unique. And it makes you, I think, much more cognizant. It's one of the reasons why I'm just so much more sensitive to seeing the kinds of techniques being used on trans people on other communities. Like I see it being used on people with autism, people with disabilities, just Palestinians. Like it, it's just it's very you see the dehumanization tactics, the the ways that these things are asserted. And I don't know, I think that's why there's so much intersectionality with trans activism, because the only thing that we have in common is our gender identity, and some of so many of us bring so many different things. Like, I bring us a substantial understanding of colonialism as a Puerto Rican woman, like understanding what America and Spain did and to to my ancestors. Um, and so there's like a lot of complicated layers, and I think that's one of the reasons why LGBTQ movement is always been one of the most intersectional movements, is because we are all brought into this by accident of birth.

SPEAKER_01 38:58

It's been really powerful to see the LGB movement has committed in such a large way to this, like, oh, they have so many letters and they're adding letters. I mean, that's actually such a beautiful idea that you're like, no, no, no, like gay people might have more privilege now, but we're bringing along trans people. You know, like not that things are peachy for them, but you know, it's just like identity is there.

SPEAKER_00 39:23

Yeah, absolutely. And it's not, you know, this attempt to manufacture division where I've never felt any in my own actual life. When I go to gay bars or queer bars or lesbian bars, I feel at home. Like I never feel any issue. Like I actually feel more connected to community than ever. And it's actually one of my favorite things to do, especially when I'm in New York, I go to Covey Hole, and it is like I always feel like I don't have to worry about anything in those spaces. And then you go online and it's like the LGB movement is divorcing from the TQs, and it's it's so astroturfed. It's very clear because you know, when you do the surveys, because they always try to say like trans people are a threat to lesbians, and then when you do the surveys, lesbians are like the most accepting of trans people of any demographic. And it's just incredible to watch it, but you know, I think part of it is it's a very intentional thing. The far right, you know, they said that they were gonna try and create a wedge because they realize our our powers are solidarity with each other, right? That's our superpower solidarity. And so what they try to do is try to break that solidarity. They go to the Muslim community and say, hey, these LGBTQ folks are threatening your religious freedom. We're gonna fund your lawsuit so that we can use your religion to undermine LGBTQ rights. And that's what happened with Mahmood v. Taylor and Supreme Court case. And then they turn around and say, you know, and start pushing anti-Muslim policies. So that's that's what they do. They love that that divide and conquer strategy. And the thing that's the most disheartening to me, because the divide and conquer is always feel so external. What worries, what always worries me or always gets to me, is like seeing members of our own community internalize the external hatred and try to rationalize it when there is no rational explanation. And so they try to then police the rest of the community. They'll try, they try to say, look, we have to be respectable. We we can't do this or that. We have to like assimilate into society, we have to do all of these things. And so there's this strain of trans folks that you know, we call them trans medicalists that say, You only you're only a real trans person if you medically transition. Non-binary people don't exist, that's a fake identity. They immediately start to police the community because they believe if that somehow they can make the community this like acceptable small thing, and if they somehow like make it pure enough that they'll be accepted, and that never works. And there's historical analogues with the um association of national German Jews in the Weimar Republic and something into Nazi Germany that basically said we just have to assimilate, we have to give up our Jewishness and become German. And once we assimilate, and then the founders were sent to concentration camps, anyways. So it just like there's this inherent, I think, need for communities that are under this kind of attack and hatred to rationalize and feel like there has to be a reason for this. And if somehow it, you know, it's it's our fault, if maybe if we hadn't done this or anything, and it's it's not because you're just engaging in victim blaming when you do that. And it's really hard. And I think that's what's so because some of the most hurtful things I see are sometimes members of our own community being like, you know, it was you know these trans people over here that caused it. If they hadn't been so uppity, you know, none of this would be happening. And it's like, sis, they'd be doing this anyways.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

It reminded me of this idea that con men and fascists, part of what makes them effective, and part of what leads to like conspiracy theories and all these things, is that people really want to believe the world makes sense, the world is good, right? Like people are desperate to believe that. And so what happens is their brains like have to grapple with a world that is not inherently good, that often makes absolutely no sense, like on an existential level, right? Like I'm seeing with the Epstein files what's happening with so many people are being Radicalized by it. The irony is I was talking with a friend of mine, and they were starting to believe in some of these conspiracy theories. And I said, Did you not understand that powerful people abuse their power? And if there's nothing holding them accountable, that's what's gonna happen, and it will be as dark as you could possibly imagine when that happens. And I realized that she really didn't think that way. As much as she's an activist and a thinker. I think the Epstein file thing like really exposes how hard it is to be in a world like that, and how then you jump to things like conspiracy theories, because then you can at least simplify the story. And it sounds to me that's what some segments of your community, I think every community has that.

SPEAKER_00 44:41

It provides an easier narrative that there's a small group of people that are like ruining everything. And it's so it always try to like walk that line because I I you know when I'm I'm you know looking at like who is responsible for all of the anti-trans ads and everything else, and you're like you're going through and you're like, oh, it really is like a handful of billionaires, right? And you're like there, there's a very specific set, but it's you know, you're just you're just trying not to be like conspiratorial about it, and you're just like, no, there's just a very reactionary set of billionaires in Silicon Valley that cook their brains on Twitter. It's it's it's dumber than you think, it's not some grand conspiracy where they're like plotting all these things, it's really just they cooked their brains on Twitter and they are completely detached themselves from the human experience. And they just have and yeah, and they have so much power, and they have so much power and money, and so when they lose it, it's everyone's problem now. You know, if if some random guy working at a factory goes down a conspiracy rabbit hole, you know, it might be a problem for their immediate friends and family. But when Elon Musk does it, now it is a problem for the whole world. And it's tough. And I think you're right about the like needing to feel like there's something good because it falls into this kind of binary thinking that there's just this a small group of people that are responsible for all the bad things, and if we just got rid of them, all you know, suddenly everything would be better. And I think that's just it's simple, people want simple answers, and I think that's why conspiracy theory thinking is so uh powerful and why it's so um alluring to people because it just it creates a simple narrative, it's like these people are responsible for everything bad in your life, and it takes away from realizing this is systemic. Like you said, the reason why these groups of people can have that power is because of the systems and incentives we've set in place, and we have power to stop it, but it's just much easier to just say no, it's it's this or that and fall into conspiracies.

SPEAKER_01 47:03

Your point earlier about this is gonna take decades, we might not see anything and all that stuff. I obviously agree with that in many ways, and I also think we're already starting to see some of that. Um, and I think Minneapolis is an example of when my last guest was Andrea Pitzer and Fair actually before also we were talking about how these networks in Minneapolis that are resisting started because of uh 2020. Like that that set the groundwork for what we're seeing today. I would like to think that what we're building now we're going to start to see results, but I don't know, I'm curious what you think about that.

SPEAKER_00 47:46

Yeah, and I think the reason why they let their foot off the pedal in Minneapolis was like if you analyze movements in other countries and look at uh other movements and repressive authoritarian regimes, that kind of solidarity and organizing is the most is the biggest threat to authoritarian regimes. When you have just random parents realizing, hey, my kid's friend, their parents could be pulled away just for dropping their kid off at school and deported. This is somebody I know. They come to birthday parties and it becomes much more immediate. But from a 30,000-foot view, one of the reasons I really think that the Trump administration retreated, and I think there are a lot of it, but I think they really started to be scared because that's the roots of an insurgency. I don't really need to like necessarily cast it in those kind of terms of like inherently being violent. But if it kept going, if they had kept murdering people on the streets, like there's only so much a community would take. And the kinds of informal networks that they were building up, the signal groups, the chats, the everything, like the kinds of organizing they were doing, they were creating essentially alternate economies. Right. When they did the general strike within Minneapolis, they were organizing so that some people would be able to cook meals so that they would be able to pass it to folks who wouldn't be able to afford it otherwise. They were organizing fundraising for businesses that were shut down that needed the money to operate. Those kinds of networks, once they start forming, like that's the kind of things that usually lead up to insurgencies against authoritarian regimes. And I think they realized they were making a mistake because they thought they could come in and I guess this goes to like the fundamental miscalculation of the Trump administration and the Stephen Millers of the world, is that they think that everyone else is like them, that they will resolve, resort to their baser instincts and hate everyone else around them when they're faced with oppression or inconvenience. That, oh, these ICE officers are here because of my neighbor. If they just got rid of them, they'd go away. No, it actually was the opposite. They were proven wrong that it no, this is my neighbor. I need to protect them. And they made that miscalculation, and they are you know left with their tail between their legs. And, you know, I think it it's one of the most powerful things I've ever seen is just the way nobody's not very many people are ever going to get credit. Like this one of the downsides of the 2010s era being like this flashy, visible social media act style activism, you know, and I say that as someone who you know made my platform on social media, is that so much of the activism that matters will never be credited. It will never be seen. It will never get, it will never go viral on social media, but it matters more than anything. The people who the person who cooked, you know, a hundred meals for their neighbors because they can't even leave the house for fear of getting detained by ice and they're doing that for the whole neighborhood. Like every day that they prevented someone from getting deported, that's an entire person's world that is being affected. And it's you cannot underestimate the impact that has. But that's not going to be on social media, it's not going to be flashy. And I think it's we have to break the hold that social media has on us as being inherent to activism. It's a tool, to be sure, but it is no longer the means for social change that I think we thought it would be.

SPEAKER_01 51:50

Yeah, it's interesting because I remember when Trump won, there were a lot of liberal commentators who have never done anything on the ground, not movement work, not connected to communities. They were people who happened to have access to the New York Times and and other places. And they wrote a lot of think pieces about the fact that there weren't all these huge marches after Trump was elected as evidence that progressive groups had laid down arms. They've retreated and now they're going to reassess and become less woke, and they've basically surrendered. And I remember I asked one of the writers directly, have you ever done any movement work? Are you connected to any movements? You know, he didn't respond. And I think they didn't understand what was happening, really, which was we had been humbled, but I think it was a reassessment of what you're exactly describing. The going from flashy to we're about to enter insurgency era, resistance era that actually has to resist, actually can't just go viral. We actually need to like get on the ground, be quiet, ensure our safety, and build networks and work together. It's a real testament, I think, to the potential for change in the fact that that happens so broadly that we now are seeing some results from that in a very powerful way, so quickly, I think.

SPEAKER_00 53:15

Yeah. And it's the it's heartening and it's also disheartening at the same time because it's like it took all of this for that to happen. Right. Like for that solidarity and for people, you know, and it's humanity can be so frustrating in the sense that like we always have to be forced to do the right thing. And it's like it takes us making catastrophic mistakes with unimaginable horrors for us to correct. I know. I always think back to like how many people died in World War II that got us the UN, that got us this, like, you know, and people and not that it was perfect, but no means perfect. But the post-war era is probably one of the most stable eras in all of human history. And it took millions of people dying and unimaginable horrors for us to finally have some relative stability in a in a good portion of the world. That doesn't mean you know there wasn't neo-imperialism by the US and Latin America and and missing you know all kinds of atrocities in Southeast Asia. I don't want to discount that by any means. But at the same time, you did not have major European or global powers engaged in in all that war. And you know, I uh and it bears out like, you know, I think one of the things we we think about is like, oh, there are these conflicts here or there. When you compare it relatively to the death tolls of prior major wars, like these things are still like relatively small. And I don't mean to discount it, but again, I think just generally humans just don't do the right thing until we've done everything else, and we have to be forced to. And I I worry that that's essentially what's happening here is that we have to be faced with catastrophe in order to finally like get uh to to fix things. I I always go um to Star Trek is one of my favorite analogies because everyone always knows like Star Trek is this kind of utopian view of humanity where it's post-scarcity, you can get anything you want, humanity is under one global government, and uh there's no more war, everyone like there's no more disease, everything is there's no more hunger, and then you read like the actual history, which is like kind of like the the backstory into Star Trek. There was a bench of uh effectively a 30-year um world war, like nuclear war in the history of the Star Trek cannon from that started in 2026 of all years. I really hope that is not prophetic. But it took 30 years, and then there was the invention of the warp drive, and then first contact, and then that's what spurred finally you know this advancement. But if you look at the start, you think Star Trek's utopia, and if you lived in through that generation that had to go through that, you would think it was a hellscape, like the worst possible dystopia. And I think that frames my broader view on how things are. I'm very long-term an optimist. I think eventually we'll get to the right place. That doesn't mean I will see it in my lifetime, and it doesn't mean that it will be all you know peachy keen for the next 20 or 30 years. It's could be really bad. It could be catastrophically bad, but then people will eventually be forced to do the right thing, and I think ultimately I hold out hope for that, and I'm long-term an optimist, but it doesn't help with the depression of like realizing that maybe my I may not live to see that.

SPEAKER_01 57:16

Thank you for sharing. I it's interesting. This episode is gonna be. I I really, I really I don't know. I just feel like it's important for people to hear difficult things. And I appreciate you sharing that, you know. I think I have like thoughts about all that stuff, but I actually just kind of want to let it sit uh again. This stuff. Yeah, yeah. Star Trek. Well, I'm glad at least we share Star Trek.

unknown 57:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 57:42

Well, thank you, Alejandro. I really appreciate that. Do you wanna do you want to tell us like how we can follow you and yeah, hear more from you?

SPEAKER_00 57:49

I'm on all all the major socials except X as S squeer, E-S-Q-U-E-E-R on Blue Sky is my main place that I'm on, is Squeer.net. You can read my work at theddissident.news. It's where it's a mixture of news and commentary. I also write a lot of essays of where I'm at in my headspace on things. It's my only way of managing things. But yeah, if you want to read my work, check out the dissident and follow me on Blue Sky.

SPEAKER_01 58:22

Thank you so much, Alejandro. It was so good to talk to you. I actually hope we can do it again. Like the moment we were getting into it, I was like, oh, I've got to do it again. So thank you again for joining. I know how busy you are. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 58:33

Thanks for having me. And uh, I definitely gotta make a trip out to LA sometime and have another Shabbat dinner with you.

SPEAKER_01 58:39

Yes, please.