Episode Transcript
Episode 9 — Trans People Drive Fascists Bananas
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Sara Rose Caplan
Additional voices: Reporter, Zohran Mamdani, Donald Trump
[00:00:00] Matthew: So why do fascists panic about gender?
Because if you can choose your pronouns, you might also choose to block them on Twitter.
I'm Matthew Remski. That was an antifascist dad joke. Welcome to episode nine, Trans People Drive Fascists Bananas, with trans philosopher Sara Rose Caplan.
[00:00:26] Sara: I think what happens when a fascist confronts a trans person—specifically a transphobic fascist, which I would assume they all are, but I don’t know—when they confront a trans person, they’re seeing someone who doesn’t even have to say anything in particular. We don’t have to say, “What you are doing is wrong. You are living wrong. You should live a different way.”
By our very existence, we force them to reckon with the fact that their whole idea of gender roles, as one of the grounding social cornerstones of their unquestionable identity—the way that they deny their own freedom by retreating into categories—is not necessary. We’re telling them that other people choose to live differently and can be happy doing that and can live full, fulfilling lives doing that.
[00:01:23] Matthew: So that’s coming up. But first: like, I don’t know how you can go out and protest the structure of the entire economic system if you can’t keep your room organized. Yes, housekeeping.
You can find me on Bluesky and on Instagram under my name, and on YouTube and TikTok as Antifascist Dad. You can also join my Patreon at AntifascistDadPodcast. And the way it works is that I post the first half of my guest interviews here on the main feed, but the second half is instantly available to Patreon subscribers.
But that’s a temporary paywall, because eventually everything gets released to the public. I just strongly believe that all of this should be shared. But also, it’s really great to have—
[00:02:10] Matthew: —some patronage and some support that way.
So the second half of my interview—
[00:02:16] Matthew: —with Sara is already up on Patreon. It’ll be exclusive to Patreon for two to three weeks.
And there are other temporarily paywalled episodes up there, including a series called Antifascist Dad Basics. I just released episode three, which is called Fascist Psychology, in both audio and YouTube formats. Lastly, as always, in the show notes you’ll see a preorder link for the book that this podcast is based on and is supporting. It’s called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. The publication date is April 26 of this coming year.
Okay, Fascist Squish and Antifascist News of the Week.
Reporter: Are you affirming that you think President Trump is a fascist?
[00:03:06] Mamdani: I’ve spoken about—
Trump: That’s okay, you can just say it. It’s easier. It’s easier than explaining it. I don’t mind.
[00:03:13] Matthew: In the wacky weirdness of this very famous moment, I think we have to recognize that Trump is making the F-word acceptable.
He’s actually destigmatizing the concept of fascism.
And this is in line with the criminalization of antifascism. Doing it in front of Zohran Mamdani, using Mamdani’s own words, really absorbs the confrontational energy of the term.
Now, antifascism historian and friend of the pod Mark Bray—he’s now in exile in Spain because of death threats provoked by Turning Point USA actions—says that fascism, of course, has a technical definition. There are many technical definitions, actually. We’ve covered a lot of them here. But the term fascism also has a moral register, which makes it useful as a shorthand for political derangement in regular discourse.
Now, through cunning or instinct or luck, Trump is taking that away.
And so everyone in this space now, including me, has a new rhetorical challenge: to make the description of fascist behavior as impactful as the word has been in the past.
Now, how about this moment?
Reporter: You accused the U.S. government of committing genocide in Gaza while President Trump was working on these. Why that?
[00:04:43] Zohran Mamdani: I’ve spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide, and I’ve spoken about our government funding it. And I shared with the president in our meeting the concern that many New Yorkers have: they want their tax dollars to go toward the benefit of New Yorkers and their ability to afford basic dignity.
[00:04:58] Matthew: I’ve seen a lot of people be very impressed at Mamdani’s ability to speak truth to power here.
And I agree. I think he’s doing an incredible job. He’s certainly doing as much as he can.
But I also think that we should note that Trump does not bat an eye at the G-word.
So we learn that it’s okay for Mamdani to call him a fascist. We learn that it’s also okay for him to accuse Trump of funding genocide—to use the word that his comrades have been shouting in the streets for months, the word that people have been arrested for, maybe even deported for.
And that’s because I think the word does not matter to Trump and his regime. The moving-forward strategy is to continue the killing and evictions in Gaza and to do the resort building as per the demands of capital.
He doesn’t need to defend himself against this accusation.
And I think that if this doesn’t prove the hollowness, if not even the uselessness, of the charade of diplomacy with fascists, then I don’t know what does.
Now, I’m not saying that Mamdani shouldn’t have gone to the Oval Office. But I am pointing out that he’s doing everything he can within the rules and that his highest eloquence can be swallowed whole by the machine.
Now, how about the Squish category?
On the same day as this Oval Office meeting, November 21, Congress passes the non-binding House Resolution 58, denouncing the horrors of socialism.
Of course, all the Republicans signed it, but members of the Democratic leader class—people like Hakeem Jeffries and Debbie Wasserman Schultz—also signed it, as part of a contingent of 86 Democrats who joined Republicans in voting to denounce the motivating values of the Mamdani campaign.
Now, what does this resolution say? It opens:
“Whereas socialist ideology necessitates a concentration of power that has, time and time again, collapsed into communist regimes, totalitarian rule, and brutal dictatorships…”
And it goes on.
Now, this is a very typical slippery-slope version of American propaganda: to imagine that any movement to socialize resources and services will end in catastrophe.
As Ben Burgess points out in response to the resolution in Jacobin magazine, quote: oddly enough, this resolution does not cite a single instance of this actually happening.
Instead, the resolution lists off a number of regimes whose leaders started out as authoritarians and saw the Soviet Union as a model to emulate, rather than identifying any cases of democratic socialist governments that became authoritarian. Yet it frames that degeneration as an inevitability.
For example, the resolution’s authors make no mention of the fact that a democratic socialist party was in power almost continuously in Sweden from 1932 to 1976, without the inevitable collapse into one-party rule and brutal dictatorship playing out. But perhaps Sweden’s socialists were just too busy creating an expansive welfare state and empowering labor unions to set wage floors for whole sectors of the economy to remember that they were supposed to be building gulags for their political enemies.
I’m going to finish this segment with a better example than Sweden, so hang on for that. But there’s another line in the resolution that stuck out for me:
“Whereas socialism has repeatedly led to famine and mass murders, and the killing of over 100,000,000 people worldwide…”
And it goes on.
Now, I’ve heard this “100 million deaths” statistic for years, but it wasn’t until 2016 that I first looked into it. That’s because Jordan Peterson began his rise to fame over his pronoun-obsessed opposition to Bill C-16, which proposed adding “gender identity or expression” as protected grounds against discrimination under federal jurisdiction here in Canada—making it illegal to deny services, employment, or accommodation based on gender identity or expression.
The bill also included gender identity and expression in hate crime provisions, criminalizing hate propaganda and incitement to hatred against transgender and gender-diverse people.
Now, the bill itself didn’t mention pronouns at all. But what got Peterson revved up is that, according to legal and human rights experts, the refusal to use a person’s chosen pronouns could be considered discrimination or harassment if it is intentional, repeated, and consistent. No legal expert believed it would discipline accidental misuse of pronouns.
But for Peterson, the right to intentionally and consistently misgender someone was a bulwark against a larger horror. Because in the National Post he wrote, quote:
“I will never use words I hate, like the trendy and artificially constructed words ‘ze’ and ‘zir.’ These words are at the vanguard of a postmodern radical leftist ideology that I detest and which is, in my professional opinion, frighteningly similar to the Marxist doctrines that killed at least 100 million people in the 20th century.”
Okay. Looking into Peterson’s number of 100 million excess deaths from state communism shows that it comes from a 1997 collection of essays called The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. This book was edited by the French historian Stéphane Courtois, who was actually a committed Maoist in the 1960s and then had a big swing towards the right.
But the historical consensus from most scholars now is that this book is pretty much a hack job that’s packed with inflated and arbitrary figures, and that poorly distinguishes things like political repression and killings—which are real—from indirect deaths such as famines and war casualties, or deaths linked to blockades and trade embargoes.
So it’s a really useful book for hacks like Peterson, who need to ignore that the global death tolls of capitalist and colonialist systems are estimated to be far higher than that of communist states.
It’s currently estimated, for instance, that European colonialism in North America killed over 50 million Indigenous people, or 90% of the pre-contact population. So imagine that just on the level of your neighborhood: nine out of every ten people gone, exterminated.
It’s estimated that British colonial rule over India caused over 100 million excess deaths.
France, Spain, Portugal, many other European powers had their own colonial projects. And this is to say nothing of the ongoing deadly grind of capitalist industry over the past two centuries, beginning with the horrors of the slave trade, deaths in coal mines and factories, deaths by poverty and neglect, and now deaths from the unequal effects of climate disaster.
Peterson’s selective focus on the failures of state communism serves an important purpose: it makes it seem like the history we have under capitalism and colonialism has just been fine. It’s just worked out.
But for whom? And where does it lead?
But this is my Squish section, right? So let’s keep in mind that the Democratic leadership in Congress voted to co-sign this piece of propaganda at the very moment that Zohran Mamdani needs infrastructure support for his populist win.
Now, my antifascist news of the week is about a successful socialist project that has not devolved into totalitarianism.
This is the communist provincial government of Kerala, India, which has consistently been in power since 1957 and has just declared the eradication of extreme poverty via an extensive intervention program launched in November of 2021.
They took four years to identify 64,000 extremely poor families, defined by a per capita income of $3 per day or less, but also factoring in things like income and food insecurity, lack of safe housing, and poor access to health care.
And they’ve said they’ve lifted 96% of those households out of extreme poverty with micro plans that are supported by local self-government departments and community workers.
These plans involve securing ID documents for folks, benefit cards, travel allowance cards, ration cards, setting up bank accounts for those who don’t have bank accounts, sorting out social security and pensions, and also house repairs, prioritizing electricity, sanitation, and water supply. They’ve provided food kits, sometimes cooked meals for people, and palliative care for the terminally ill so that other family members can still find employment.
So if anyone comes at you with “well, it’s never worked,” here’s an enclave of 36 million people, surrounded for 12 years now by Modi’s antagonistic ethno-fascist government, where communism has transformed society for—well, it’s coming up on 70 years now.
Now, it’s not without its problems and hypocrisies, as the Kerala-raised novelist Arundhati Roy makes clear in a lot of her writing, specifically about whether Kerala’s communism has done enough to challenge casteism in the province.
But some of those problems—which exist alongside soaring literacy rates and plummeting teen pregnancies—stem directly from the fact that there was no sudden or violent revolution that overturned everything at once.
“It was a reformist movement,” Arundhati wrote, “that never overtly questioned the traditional values of a caste-ridden, extremely traditional community. The Marxists worked from within the communal divides, never challenging them, never appearing not to. They offered a cocktail revolution: a heady mix of Eastern Marxism and Orthodox Hinduism spiked with a shot of democracy.”
Now, it’s a very different context, I know, but this description makes me think of the flexibility and intelligence of Mamdani’s campaign masala.
So I came across Sara Rose Caplan on Instagram, and I was instantly caught by her super clear and almost soothing use of philosophical reasoning to undermine the fascist house of gender cards—specifically in her response to Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman? doxploitation event, with her one-woman show about whether there is consensus on what a “chair” is or how we define it. We talk about this at length in our interview.
Sara Rose Caplan is a trans woman performer and educator. She’s originally from Houston, Texas. She studied philosophy in undergrad before spending a decade in L.A. as an improv comedian.
This fall, she started working on a master’s degree in philosophy at Cal State Los Angeles under the mentorship of trans philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher.
She has, sadly, had to put her studies on hold as she and her wife—also trans—have decided to leave the United States for safer, hopefully less Christofascist shores up north.
Hello, Sara.
[00:18:32] Matthew: Welcome to Antifascist Dad.
[00:18:35] Sara: Hello. Thank you so much for having me here.
[00:18:37] Matthew: I’m really happy that you’re here. And I want to just get to the big-picture question first, which is: why do trans people, and maybe trans women in particular, drive fascists bananas?
[00:18:53] Sara: Yeah, I mean, that’s a big one to just jump right into.
Okay, first answer: I don’t know. I want to be very clear that I don’t know.
I do have my sort of pet theory.
And that is: I think for a lot of people, fascism—the psychological motivator of fascism—there are many, but I think a big one is fear of uncertainty. It emerges after, like, the death of God.
I’m stealing from Camus here. People are looking at two options. One is to dive into the void and embrace the possibilities of radical freedom, which are stressful and immense—
[00:19:40] Matthew: Right.
[00:19:42] Sara: —but there’s reward on the other side for those who pursue it. And the other response is to cover your eyes and go “la la la,” and deny the freedom altogether.
And those are, in my opinion, the fascists—or some of those people are the fascists.
They want to retreat into rigid and clear systems through which to understand themselves as having clear and definite places to fit into the world, because they don’t want to have to do this scary, existential work of figuring out where to fit in.
[00:20:17] Matthew: Right.
[00:20:18] Sara: And gender—the roles of man and woman—are so primary in the worldviews of, well, everyone, but especially European Christian culture and then American modern culture. Man and woman are the two most fundamental social roles in that elaborate system they turn to.
[00:20:45] Matthew: Right.
[00:20:46] Sara: And I think what happens when a fascist confronts a trans person—specifically a transphobic fascist, which, again, I would assume they all are, but who knows—when they confront a trans person, they’re seeing someone who doesn’t have to say anything in particular. We don’t have to say, “What you’re doing is wrong, you’re living wrong, you should live a different way.”
By our very existence, we force them to reckon with the fact that their whole idea of gender roles, as one of the grounding social cornerstones of their unquestionable identity—the way that they deny their own freedom by retreating into categories—is not necessary. We’re telling them that that’s not necessary, that other people choose to live differently and can be happy doing that and can live full, fulfilling lives doing that.
[00:21:44] Matthew: But you’re not telling them that they should do the same. So what’s so personal about it?
[00:21:51] Sara: I think they need it to be universal in order for it to have its full soothing power.
[00:22:03] Matthew: Right.
[00:22:03] Sara: I tend to think of all of this in terms of—there’s this philosopher, C.T. Nguyen, who’s working in Utah right now.
[00:22:12] Matthew: Yeah.
[00:22:12] Sara: And y’all had— I learned about him from your interview with him. And listening to that interview unlocked a lot of this for me in my own trying to think through the philosophy of fascism and transphobia.
I love his whole take that games serve as an existential balm, where we carve out a clearly delineated rule system in which things make sense, our agency is limited and clear, and we get to ignore everything outside of that.
[00:22:42] Matthew: Right.
[00:22:43] Sara: And I think fascists are trying to do that to their entire lives. They believe that that loses its efficacy if they recognize it as a game.
It has to be reality, because if it’s a game, then that big scary void is still out there. They need to be able to deny it exists.
So a trans person—yeah, we’re not telling them to do anything. We’re not saying, “You have to transition” or whatever. But we are asking them— I guess the one thing we are asking them to do, which the transphobes in my Instagram comments love to point out, is: we’re asking them to treat us with respect and call us by a different name or use different pronouns.
And for them to respect that what we’re doing is a legitimate human choice and not a fit of insanity or debauchery, they would have to acknowledge that the gender elements of their big social game are not universal and necessary, and therefore are these kind of arbitrary human constructions. That’s what they can’t admit them to be, for their own psychological, existential need for soothing from that big game.
[00:24:05] Matthew: I want to pick up—especially for younger listeners—on the thread of the “existential.”
So this is a big word.
And the general idea, historically, that you’re pointing toward is that, at a certain point, thinkers began to—because we’re going to talk about how you’re using philosophy in your self-understanding and also your work, your professional work—but I think you’re referring to a point in history in which a number of old rules about how we believe the universe is constructed simply fall away, or are understood to be fictional or imaginary or unnecessary.
[00:24:53] Matthew: And in that absence, or in that gap, people become more free to imagine what human life can be like. Is that the general historical moment you’re pointing to? And where would we put it?
[00:25:06] Sara: When I cited Camus earlier—he’s a French philosopher, for listeners—he’s one of the first big existentialists who actually used that word. He was living, writing, acting, “adulting” during the Nazi occupation of France. So this is the early 40s.
The reason I’m referring back to him and have been looking back to him in recent months is because he was living and working during the OG fascist takeover of Europe.
[00:25:43] Matthew: Right.
[00:25:43] Sara: And that’s not to say that that period was the first time humans realized all this. This was specifically a European phenomenon, coming out of centuries of domination by the Catholic Church and particular social structures that were very top-down: aristocracy, nobility.
As that all started to break down in this perfect storm of different social factors, you started having new social organizations coming about. You had industrialization, people moving to cities. You had influxes of all these different cultural influences as a result of European colonialism—importing people and ideas and cultures from around the world. You had a society confronting all these new ideas and ways of being, and having to grapple with what that meant for them as humans.
[00:26:47] Matthew: Right.
[00:26:49] Sara: And yeah, so existentialism is one response to that.
The other response is fear. It’s fear that there are too many of these new things, that our systems of meaning are crumbling and breaking down. Society is dissolving. It doesn’t make sense anymore. Boys are being girls, girls are being boys—stuff that will sound familiar from the propaganda you see all over the Internet now. People are freaking out about that. Fascism is fundamentally motivated by fear.
[00:27:23] Matthew: Whiplashing, then, to the personal realm: what is the toll of this kind of ocean of fear around us personally, with regard to your sense of yourself? What does it mean to have who you are be a matter of constant public debate or disinformation or acrimony or persecution?
[00:27:51] Sara: First of all, Matthew, I’d say it sucks. Yeah.
Overall, I am a trans woman, but I’m otherwise very privileged. I come from an upper-middle-class white family and I have parents, siblings, friends who are incredibly supportive of me as a trans person, which is obviously not the universal experience. But that means that I get to exist in a place where, even on the scale of everybody in this country, I’m remarkably stable in my economic position, in my social and family position.
So a lot of the specific ways that I feel this onslaught you’re talking about—I definitely feel them. But the reason I start by pointing out my privilege is because I am not touched by them as immediately as most other trans people are. I feel them as this pervasive background.
It kind of feels like global warming in a way, where I’m not specifically touched by it day to day, but every summer does seem hotter. And a lot of the distress I feel is frustration and the particular anxiety and depression of feeling like a Cassandra.
For our younger listeners: Cassandra was the Trojan princess who kept telling everyone that this Trojan War was going to destroy her people and her family, and no one listened to her, and it sort of drove her insane.
I’ve been calling this alarm for many years—with family, with friends—from Trump’s first campaign, saying: “Guys, we need to start saying fascism. This is fascism. You need to look at how he’s talking about trans people.” And so, for me, it’s been incredibly scary, obviously, but also just frustrating. Trans people and other impacted groups have been calling out what is going to happen, and what has happened, for a long time. And to be ignored, and watch it play out, is heartbreaking.
Because none of this had to happen.
That’s the feeling I keep returning to: none of this was anywhere close to necessary. None of this was inevitable. These people were not genius political maneuverers playing 4D chess. The fact that we’re here is the result of the willful ignorance and ineptitude of the people put in power and who claimed power.
[00:30:50] Matthew: Right.
[00:30:51] Sara: Who should have seen it coming, and had many steps they could have taken to prevent it.
And… yeah, then there’s the fear. My ex, who’s also trans and is married to another trans woman—she and her wife are moving to Canada because they no longer feel safe living in the United States, even here in L.A. My girlfriend and I have that conversation all the time: can we leave?
We would feel safer leaving, but we have so many people we love who don’t have the means to leave this country. Those are the kinds of negotiations that are happening.
So I guess I’m wrong to say I’m not directly touched by it. I’m touched by it in the way that people of privilege are touched by these things, which is having to grapple with: do I stay or do I go?
Because I have that option.
[00:31:51] Matthew: Picking up on the Cassandra theme, it seems to me that it makes a lot of sense—and this would be true for Black people, immigrants, or anybody else who’s marginalized by the fascist impulse—that you are being told and shown very early along the arc that your existence, or your way of being in the world, or the way in which your life challenges what they believe the natural order of things should be, is just unacceptable.
And the signs must be very clear.
So I imagine that the frustration is that you’re being given information that is so obvious to you, and you really need people who can’t feel it directly to listen to you. Is that fair?
[00:32:57] Sara: One hundred percent.
[00:32:58] Matthew: Yeah.
[00:32:59] Sara: That’s been a lot of what I’ve been trying to figure out how to do as a communicator.
Like, how do we get people—because fascists are going to fash. Especially at this point, there are probably a lot of people in that movement who we could have reached but who are now not going to listen to me.
So: how do we get all these people who are sympathetic, who would consider themselves allies, but who can still ignore it or don’t want to recognize how bad things have gotten? That’s their own version of the denial game, the game of fear. They don’t want to admit that this is where we are as a country.
So I’ve been trying to figure out how to break through that mental barrier.
[00:34:08] Matthew: And, I mean, part of what you’re doing is turning to philosophy and to your graduate studies. I’m wondering if that was partly for relief—and whether it’s worked.
[00:34:23] Sara: Oh, no.
For relief?
[00:34:29] Matthew: I—
[00:34:32] Sara: When I initially studied philosophy in undergrad, I was hoping for relief.
But yeah, by the end of my four years of studying it, one of the main things I learned about philosophy is that, no, it’s not going to make you feel better. Not if you’re doing it right, in my opinion.
[00:34:58] Matthew: I think you’re putting a negative spin on it. But you have moved towards it.
[00:35:02] Matthew: I’m going to assume it’s not just masochistic—that there’s something there that you’re okay with.
[00:35:10] Sara: I guess it depends on what you mean by relief. The reason I’m putting this negative spin on philosophy is not to discourage people from it—which I guess I should, so that I get more grant money or something—
[00:35:21] Matthew: So that you get more grant money?
[00:35:23] Sara: Yeah, I need to be the only philosopher.
No. What I mean is: I do think everyone should take a philosophy class. If you’re a young person, you’re in undergrad, you’re in high school—I 100% think you should take an intro philosophy class.
My philosophy advisor in undergrad, Alison Simmons, always started every intro philosophy class by saying, “Philosophy is thinking in slow motion.” This is the one place where you can come and take seriously all those tiny little questions that pop up in your head that other disciplines don’t have the time to consider as real questions, because then they would—
[00:36:10] Matthew: Yeah, that’s really great. So this is the place where you can think those questions in slow motion.
[00:36:18] Sara: Thinking in slow motion, yeah.
For example, if you’re in a physics class and your physics professor is asking you to calculate the gravity exerted on a chair in a particular problem, and you have a moment to wonder, “Well, what really makes it a chair? Can I calculate the gravity of a chair if I don’t know for sure whether this is a chair?”—and you try to ask your physics professor that—he’ll say, “You’re wasting everyone’s time.”
But in a philosophy class, there are whole dissertations written about that.
So it is a place where those questions are treated as real. And that’s important, because they are real questions. What they aren’t necessarily is practical questions. But there’s a difference between “important” and “practical.”
[00:37:10] Matthew: There’s also a difference between fast and slow. And I think one of the key characteristics of any fascist movement is acceleration.
If any young person has training in, or at least the permission to say, “Yeah, let’s slow down here and take something step by step,” I think that’s an inoculant against the indoctrination, impact, or tactic of fascist discourse.
Because the aim so often is to overwhelm the person—or the listenership—with bullshit that can’t actually be questioned, that can’t be broken down, that you can’t really take time with. So I think there’s something about time there that’s pretty essential.
[00:38:10] Sara: That’s 100% true. I mean, to go back to Camus and that essay I believe I sent you on Instagram, “Letters to a German Friend”—
[00:38:19] Matthew: Yeah, it’s beautiful.
[00:38:21] Sara: He talks about that. He talks about why the Nazis—like, the literal German Nazis—were able to sweep through France so effectively and quickly at the start of the war.
[00:38:36] Matthew: Right.
[00:38:36] Sara: And why it took the French Resistance literal years to build up the strength and consensus necessary to push back.
For him, the difference is: we cared about truth and you didn’t. We cared about humanity and you didn’t. So it took us a lot longer to decide it was okay to kill you than it took you to decide it was okay to kill us.
[00:39:05] Matthew: Exactly. It wasn’t just that you were tweaking on meth as you rolled in your tanks westward. It wasn’t just that. It was that you didn’t have to think about what you were doing.
[00:39:16] Matthew: It’s a great disadvantage. So I guess you’ve gone into philosophy. There might be some relief in having to take time with things, but you also have to be in a safe place if you’re going to take time with things.
[00:39:30] Sara: Yeah. So for me, the reason I’ve returned to philosophy: I initially returned to philosophy as research for this one-woman show I did called What Is a Woman? A One-Woman Question Mark Show.
That was, two or three years later, an attempt for me to actually address Matt Walsh’s documentary.
[00:39:53] Matthew: By the way, he’s fascist dad of the week.
[00:39:55] Sara: Oh, great. Yeah. Wonderful. Well, he really demonstrates it in that documentary.
The point of that documentary is that it is fundamentally an anti-intellectual documentary.
[00:40:09] Matthew: Right.
[00:40:10] Sara: What he’s doing is going around and interviewing all these different people and asking them, “What is a woman?” He’s pretending to be coming from a place of curiosity, but we all know he’s not. Even his fans know he’s not.
[00:40:26] Matthew: Especially his fans know he’s not.
[00:40:28] Sara: That’s the point. For them, it’s a joke. It’s a comedy.
[00:40:32] Matthew: Right.
[00:40:32] Sara: And that’s part of what I had to explain to my audience in the show. We laugh at this because we think we’re laughing at how stupid they are, but when we laugh at that, we’re laughing at the joke. We’re in on the joke. It is stupid.
[00:40:45] Matthew: Right.
[00:40:45] Sara: He goes around and interviews a bunch of people. Many of them are smart people who professionally think about the nature of gender and womanhood.
The goal of his interviews is to make them look stupid or make them look dishonest for not being able to give immediate, clear, simple answers—
[00:41:09] Matthew: —to what they understand and probably intuit immediately as a bad-faith question.
[00:41:15] Sara: Yeah. There are multiple interviews that break down at that point. You have this one professor—a trans person who’s a professor at the University of Tennessee—who’s like, “Well, these questions are transphobic.”
Matt Walsh’s retort is, “It’s transphobic to want to know the truth? I don’t know—are you saying the truth is transphobic?”
It is pure sophistry. Pure, performative pseudo-debate.
[00:41:48] Matthew: Right.
[00:41:48] Sara: That documentary is such a perfect example of this discrepancy between the fascist, who doesn’t care about truth and instead cares about their own ideology and power—it’s like the classic Sartre essay, “Why Not to Argue with an Anti-Semite,” where he says they don’t care about truth and so they have the right to play.
If you do care about truth, and you take these questions seriously and you take other people seriously, then these aren’t questions of play. These are questions of life and death.
The reason you’ll never win an argument with a guy like Matt Walsh is because to win an argument requires your opponent to actually care about being consistent.
[00:42:40] Matthew: Right.
[00:42:41] Sara: You should never be trying to “win” arguments. If you’re a young person listening to this, that’s the wrong mindset. Ideally, you have two people who disagree on what is true or correct, who are together trying to come to a mutual understanding of what is true and correct. Sometimes you’re right from the beginning, sometimes it’s somewhere in the middle, sometimes they were right.
But if you’re trying to just win, then you’re not actually doing it from a place of truth-seeking. You’re doing it from a place of personal victory.
[00:43:38] Matthew: So remember, you can catch part 2 on Patreon right now.
And if you’re in Ontario, you should be on the lookout for Sara’s solo show called What Is a Woman? A One-Woman Question Mark Show.
It will be showing in Toronto sometime in January.
Next week, Sara Stein Lubrano is my guest. Her recent book is called Don’t Talk About Politics. We’ll be talking about why we shouldn’t be talking about politics, but rather focusing on action and interdependence and building new social ties. One of the most impactful lines in our conversation was when she said: you shouldn’t even try to persuade someone with a political view until you’ve shown them some kind of kindness or solidarity.
So see you then.
Take care of each other.
