Episode Transcript
Episode 9 — Trans People Drive Fascists Bananas (Part 2)
Host: Matthew Remski
Guest: Sara Rose Caplan
[00:00:09] Matthew: Welcome, everyone—and Patreons—to part two of episode nine of Antifascist Dad Podcast, “Trans People Drive Fascists Bananas,” with Sara Rose Caplan. I’m really grateful for your support, and I hope this project brings some joy, hope, and utility to your works and days. I’ll just reiterate that my plan for these second parts is to review and maybe reflect a little beforehand on what I learned in part one, then roll the rest of the conversation, and then come back with further reflections.
So I’ve got some key quotes from Caplan from part one.
“Fascism is ultimately a flight from freedom—from the uncertainty of existence. It retreats into rigid categories like binary gender because that feels safer than facing chaos.”
She also said, “Just by existing, trans people show that gender isn’t universal. And that’s terrifying to fascists because it proves their whole worldview isn’t natural law.”
And then she also talked about some of the personal aspects of being trans in this climate. She said, “Sometimes being trans feels like being Cassandra. You see what’s coming, you warn people, and still no one listens.”
We also talked about her use of philosophy in her practice of activism, but also community.
And she said: “Philosophy doesn’t give me comfort, but it slows things down and it keeps me from being swept away by the acceleration that fascism thrives on.”
So we’ll pick up part two of my conversation with Sara Rose Caplan right at the point where we’re discussing her one-woman show responding to Matt Walsh’s What Is a Woman?
[00:02:22] Matthew: And your answer for him? It switches the frame a little bit by asking whether or not a regular person can define what a chair is. So how does that one go?
[00:02:35] Sara: Yes. So my answer to him is— the frame that I’m switching is I’m trying not to convince him, because I won’t, but to convince my audience that this is a bad question.
The way that you don’t fall for this is you recognize that it is a bad question.
So, to demonstrate in part why—in philosophy—these kinds of questions of looking for some universal definition are never really how anyone does anything, I return to a classic philosophy example from my intro philosophy class back in college, where many professors all over the world are asking their students to try to define “chair.”
And because this was a show, instead of just asking people to argue about the definition of “chair,” I showed my audience a bunch of different objects that may or may not be chairs, in a slideshow. The game is: shout out “chair” if it’s a chair, and shout out “not chair” if it’s not a chair.
And it is amazing how many objects people disagree about—whether or not they are chairs. The point I’m trying to make here is that Matt Walsh is depending on this fallacious intuition that, because “woman” is a simple word you’ve known your whole life, you know what it is in some universal way. Not just that you know the word and use it, but that you use it “correctly” because it’s a simple word.
But “chair” is also a very simple word we’ve known our whole lives, and yet this room full of 70 adults, all of whom are fluent in English, were routinely disagreeing on whether or not a given object counted as a chair.
And yeah, so the point for me there is: there is no such thing as clean or universal language. There are no clean and shared universal definitions—especially for common words that evolved through social usage, like “chair” or “woman.”
You could probably cleanly define something like “Netflix” because that’s a constructed word, right?
But the word “chair” evolved through endless one-on-one negotiations over centuries between all different kinds of cultures.
And for some people a stool is a chair, and for some people it isn’t.
[00:05:13] Matthew: There’s a street comedian named Walter Masterson, and he makes a similar point as he’s trolling, like, a Moms for Liberty convention or something like that—where he’s asking the panel whether they can define “an adult human female.” But his focus is on the problem of the word “adult.”
And, of course, he brings up the fact that the age of consent is different in different places and that the definition of adult status is a very fluid thing. Is this the same argument?
[00:05:52] Sara: They’re very similar, and they’re both circling the same idea, which is that you’re never going to get to this place of clean universal language that the fascists want to pretend they are using.
There are two key— I’m going to say two, I’m going to force myself into saying two—key spots where they’re different.
One: his specific point there is— the reason he’s focusing on “adult human female” is because that’s the definition provided by people from J.K. Rowling all the way to now. It’s what Ben Shapiro and Matt Walsh and Jordan Peterson and all these sort of fascist intelligentsia use, and it’s made its way into Congress and everything now. And the point is: look, we did it. It’s this simple answer. “You can’t define woman, you people on the left, you woke people. But we can. It’s an ‘adult human female’.”
Their point is to try to combat the point I’m making, which is, hey, words are more fluid than that.
And so he’s taking kind of the next level down and saying: well, no, because you’re still using words.
So yes, you did it in three words, but it’s still not clean, right? It’s an answer. It’s not the answer.
It’s pushing the question off to this other level: but what is “adult”? What is “human”? What is “female”? You could have done it with any of the three, because none of those have clean definitions.
And it’s interesting to me how much he focuses on “adult” as a legal category, because I like using the word “adult” in answering people parroting the Ben Shapiro thing of, like, “Well, can I identify as 60?” Right?
No, you can’t just identify as 60, but people do identify as “adult” all the time. A lot of teenagers out there listening to this, potentially—you might have this struggle where you consider yourself an adult, and then the teachers or parents around you don’t consider you an adult. And so there is a discrepancy there.
Yeah.
I think the other difference for me is: he’s trying to show why that purported definition is fallacious.
And my goal with “chair” is that I really want people—even allies, like, I want all of us, even trans people—I want us all to sit and confront the discomfort of the fact that language is inevitably imperfect.
Part of it for me is I want us all to feel that there is kind of a spooky, chilling discomfort when you realize, like: oh, wait, I’ve been using the word “chair” my whole life, and the way I use it is different from all these other people around me.
[00:08:53] Matthew: You know, I will agree with that. But I’ll also say that I think what Matt Walsh is doing—with the assumption that the word “woman” has a stable and universal meaning that we’re all agreeing to—is enforcing a kind of linguistic dominance that is performative in the moment. He’s saying, “Can’t you tell me what a woman is?” and he’s using the word. But behind the word, you can feel his body looming.
You can feel him taking up space in a way that is not going to be receptive to any kind of answer other than the one he wants.
[00:09:45] Matthew: And so there’s something—you can’t really do what he’s doing—
[00:09:51] Sara: —without also being a bully. And I think that when people have—
[00:09:58] Matthew: —discomfort around “Oh, do I actually know what ‘chair’ is?”—
[00:10:03] Sara: —and they might feel the ground underneath their feet get a little bit, I don’t know, gassy or something. They might feel like they’re falling. They might feel like, “Oh, do I know what anything means?” That is definitely an eerie feeling.
[00:10:17] Sara: But there’s also freedom with that feeling, in the sense that: oh, you know, maybe my ideas about the way things are don’t need to be as rigid as I think.
[00:10:28] Matthew: You know, maybe I don’t know what “chair” means, and maybe that actually means I don’t know everything about who I am either.
[00:10:34] Sara: And maybe that’s a good thing.
[00:10:42] Sara: One hundred percent.
You know, you find out you and your friend don’t agree on what a chair is, or you don’t agree on what a sandwich is—if you’re having the “Is a hot dog a sandwich?” debate or whatever—and people want to dismiss that as stupid, but it’s actually not. It’s actually really important. And I think it’s really important when people have those conversations, because the two main forks in that road are:
“No, I’m right, you’re wrong, and I will be annoyed and frustrated unless you agree with me.” Right? Or: “I will assume you’re just playing devil’s advocate,” which is my least favorite accusation. “Oh, you don’t actually believe that, you’re playing devil’s advocate, you’re just arguing for the sake of arguing.” Right? Don’t let anyone ever tell you that—that’s not how it works. It’s important to poke at the limits of our ideas.
And so you can either decide that you’re not taking this seriously because “You don’t agree with me, you’re wrong or you’re being malicious,” or it is this opportunity to think about: oh, wow, you’re right.
And there is this freedom of breaking objects away from the categories we use to limit them. Like, really, is there anything in common between a Subway sandwich and a torta? Those actually are completely different things that get reduced into the category “sandwich.”
[00:12:07] Matthew: But, you know, if a guy in Washington, D.C. throws either a Subway sandwich or a torta at an FBI agent, he’s going to get arrested either way, right?
[00:12:16] Sara: Oh yeah.
[00:12:17] Matthew: But it’s also going to make for great social media.
Very inspiring, yeah.
[00:12:22] Sara: I’m not saying you should do that, because it’s a waste of a torta. But a Subway sandwich? Go for it.
And the other option is to use it as a chance to embrace each other. Like, “Wow, isn’t it cool that we don’t agree on this? I wonder why. Why do you think that object is a chair and I don’t?” Then you get to find out more about each other. “Yeah, you know what? My mom is German, and in German, ‘Stuhl’ refers to both objects equally, so she probably just used ‘chair’ to refer to both, and that’s why I do.” Wow, that’s interesting. Every one of these disagreements—or not even disagreements, just places of dissonance in our systems we use to understand the world—are opportunities to learn more about each other and ourselves.
Yeah, I’m a big advocate of that.
[00:13:09] Matthew: One advantage, I think, conferred by philosophy—and I’ll just point out that you kind of started out on a negative note, but I think we’re talking it up a bit here—
is affect. The first thing I noticed about you in your online content was that you have this really calm and measured delivery. It is relaxing to listen to, to be honest. You have another register on stage in the one-woman show. But I’m wondering whether there’s something strategic about the vibe of philosophy.
Like, it seems to convey: I’m a reasonable person who doesn’t get too excitable, and you can be too.
[00:13:55] Matthew: But I’m wondering: does it also hide rage or help manage conflict in a way?
[00:14:05] Sara: Yes, it’s definitely strategic for me. Online, I sometimes record videos that are much angrier that I don’t post.
[00:14:15] Matthew: They go in a special file.
[00:14:18] Sara: They go in a special file.
[00:14:19] Matthew: They’re burning up your hard drive somewhere.
[00:14:23] Sara: A lot of that is just something that—I’ve always been that way. I think it’s a big reason why, even though I was a nerdy queer kid, I wasn’t ever really bullied growing up, is I was always very good at the appearance of equanimity and not reacting in the way that bullies wanted me to, which makes you less fun to bully.
And I think a lot of that was also just depression because I didn’t know what being trans was. And so I just existed in this space of detachment and depersonalization.
[00:14:54] Matthew: You know, it’s funny—whenever anybody says, “I seem to have this natural, I don’t know, Buddhist approach to life, and that was really helpful for me, but maybe it was also depression,” I always hear those two things together.
[00:15:11] Sara: Yeah, it’s—I mean, of course.
There’s no way to know. I mean, I think when they go together, it’s… Depression is, in many ways, just a deeper awareness of reality.
And in some ways it’s not. In some ways it’s your brain lying to you. And it’s really hard to parse.
But on Instagram in particular, it is 100% a strategic choice.
[00:15:36] Matthew: Right.
[00:15:37] Sara: It is, for me, a recognition of the fact that it’s something I can do because I’m maybe less, by nature, reactive and less prone to performing anger.
And because I have the language of a philosophy degree and education, and I’m an improviser, and so I’m comfortable adopting whatever emotion and performance I need to in the moment.
That’s a role I can play that most trans people right now simply don’t have the bandwidth to, because these questions are unfortunately increasingly life and death. Right? These matter.
And so it is, in part, 100%—it comes back to the fact that I am privileged and I am in a position of… I tell trans people this all the time in my comments who are like, “There’s no point arguing with these people. There’s no point doing this. You’re trying to be calm, they won’t listen.” And I’m like, I know, but for me, it’s important to try and reach the people I can. I’m not saying this is how other trans people need to be interacting with the world. This is how I can.
[00:16:51] Matthew: I also want to say, though, that if you’re able to pull it off—which you clearly are—I wonder, and I don’t want to make assumptions here, but I wonder whether the person who isn’t able to affect 60 beats per minute or however you organize your rhythm, which is very methodical and, I would say, soothing—
[00:17:21] Matthew: —that provides a model.
[00:17:22] Matthew: It’s like, “Oh, this can be done.”
And I think it brings a kind of promise of dignity. It’s like, I did not have to be triggered in order to do what I’m doing, or I can do what I’m doing without the feeling of impending danger.
[00:17:48] Sara: I hope so. I mean, the comments I get that I love the most are from trans people saying things like, “I’m so glad you made this video. You said something I’ve felt for a long time and not been able to put into words, or wouldn’t have been able to say.” That’s really the thing I would most love to be doing with this platform, because I’m not an “influencer.” When I posted that chair video, I had 1,100 followers, and in the few months since, I’ve gone from that to 45,000 as a result of that video. Instagram tells you—it’s like 90% that one random viral moment.
And so, for me, that’s been a lot of thinking about: what do I want to do with this? This isn’t a thing I worked to build up. It’s not a thing that I wanted, necessarily. But I do have it now. And if what I can do is perform this kind of calm, intellectual transness that—
Also, to be completely honest, a lot of it for me is a calculated reaction to the Gamergate–YouTube misogyny, “angry red-haired feminist yelling and freaking out.” That’s so much of what the Matt Walsh documentary is too: triggering people to the point of them acting “irrational” by having emotion.
And if I can outperform Matt Walsh in the arena of detached, calm, emotionless, masculine discourse, then to me that feels like a win.
[00:19:36] Matthew: I think it’s huge. I think that the study of affect and presentation is underdeveloped, but I think it is profoundly influential. And obviously it takes all types to fight fascism, and I think this is a really strong register for it.
So the last question I have: you’ve talked about a number of aspects that make your situation unique and privileged and your own, but I also think you probably have some generalized advice. And that’s what I want to ask you about to finish up.
What would be your key advice for, let’s say, the 13-year-old queer, non-binary, or trans kid who wants to learn about, survive, and also fight back against fascism?
[00:20:36] Sara: The most important thing you can do right now, if you’re a 13-year-old queer kid out there—or any kind of kid who’s worried about what’s happening here, but especially the queer kids that I like to reach—
The most important thing you can do right now is: do your best—I know it’s hard—do your best to allow yourself the space to grow up.
You are not “la Résistance” right now, you know?
[00:21:14] Matthew: Yeah, there was a little bit of pressure in that question, eh?
[00:21:16] Sara: Yeah, well, I mean, I assume they’re feeling it.
I don’t think that—obviously that’s not coming out of nowhere. We’re all feeling that right now. And especially when we exist as much as we do on social media and everything, everything feels urgent and everything feels like our responsibility. Some of that is good, and too much of that is misleading. As we’ve talked about already multiple times here: fascism is powered by this sense of urgency. They want you to feel that. And there are all kinds of little, little, little fascisms out there.
I don’t know if you know anything about this, Matthew, but there are all kinds of cults and groups and communities centered around charismatic leaders out there.
[00:22:11] Matthew: I know a little bit about cults, yeah.
[00:22:14] Sara: And they want you—like, all these different groups want you—to feel this urgency and make fast choices. Right?
And if you’re 13, some of you, unfortunately, are going to be put in situations where you do have to make fast choices right now. But to the extent that you don’t have to, allow yourself the chance to develop, explore, learn about yourself, try on different ways of being yourself. Who you are right now—who you are socially—doesn’t have to be who you are tomorrow.
If you want to try to be a different person, you can. And if you’re worried about people—this was a big thing for me growing up—I was so in my head about people calling out anything I tried that deviated from the patterns I’d already built up.
Push through that. That’s a bad impulse that I fell victim to. I never hugged anyone growing up, and then when I was a teenager, I started trying to hug my grandma and stuff. And every time she would say, “Oh, this is new,” and I’d be like, “Well, Grandma, now I don’t want to do it.”
But it’s important to play and experiment and grow. You will be a better fighter against fascism—a better and more productive (productive not in the capitalist sense, but in the helpful and creative and imaginative sense) member of your community, the communities that will need you in the future—if you’ve given yourself the chance to really grow into yourself in all the ways you can be.
And I think if you limit yourself right now to who you “have” to be in this moment to fight fascism, you will be stunting your own growth.
And we don’t need you today.
We need you ten years from now, thirty years from now—whenever you’re ready. And that’s going to be really hard right now, I think, but vital.
Oh—and don’t worry about college, money, job. I work with high schoolers on their college admissions essays.
Don’t create your teenage years in service of a college application.
That is not going to turn you into a cool, creative, interesting, fully fleshed-out person. Some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met ended up not going to college, or going to colleges you’ve never heard of, and then still living full, creative, fascinating lives.
So people will tell you stuff is “the most important thing,” and it’s not.
[00:25:09] Matthew: Sara, thank you so much for your time. It’s awesome to talk to you.
[00:25:12] Sara: Thank you so much, Matthew. Yeah, it’s been such a pleasure.
[00:25:19] Matthew: You know, as I was listening over this conversation with Sara, I realized that we didn’t really go into that more private territory of transness—the nuts and bolts of being trans in this world.
Now, that subject area is extremely important when it comes to understanding the material impacts of current fascist culture-war attacks on trans people: the cancellations of care, the barriers in public space, the rage that just bursts out in response to the simplest requests for accommodation.
So that’s all very important material. For that sort of examination, I highly recommend any episode of Death Panel where Jules Gill-Peterson is a guest or co-host.
So I think it’s okay that we kept things out of that more granular territory, not just because there are so many great people doing that work, but because one of the things I see happening with trans people and activists is that even when supported by allies, they can wind up doing a lot of hand-holding for people who struggle to understand the very basics.
I’ve had some friends say that, while it’s politically helpful, worthy, and noble as a responsibility, it can also shrink their experience down to gender alone when—as for all of us—gender is only a part of who they are. I’ve spoken to friends who say, “I would really love to not be thinking about this as much as I do, but I don’t really have a choice at the moment.”
Not having to think much about gender is exactly where most cisgender people, especially male ones like myself, live our lives.
And it’s a kind of invisible privilege.
Whiteness is the same. For a white cis man whose success in life is aided by whiteness and cisness, these are things that are largely invisible to me. That’s the self-protective power of “the normal.”
But I have had some revelatory moments.
So in the spirit of doing some of this gender-reveal labor that trans folks are always getting stuck with when they want to be doing something else, I want to close with my own story about the granular quality of gender in my experience.
I remember about ten years ago, a colleague of mine posted a call-out for a GoFundMe to help pay for gender-affirmation treatments.
I remember feeling really weird about it. I didn’t know any other trans people personally at the time, and I suppose I hadn’t put much thought into that experience of being in the world. I found that I just couldn’t understand it, for all of the typical sort of bigoted reasons.
But it wasn’t just about a lack of understanding. It didn’t stop at bafflement. It went farther into a kind of irritation—into “Why couldn’t this person do therapy?” Why couldn’t they accept “reality” and just get on with things and not put their friends in this awkward situation of having to support or decline the request? Which, in itself, I didn’t realize at the time, is a sign of stigmatization and marginalization and othering.
Because gender care was not seen, by myself or by the majority culture, as healthcare—because it was considered, and in many places still is, a cosmetic patch for a psychological issue—of course it wouldn’t be covered by insurance or national health.
So I remember that this all bothered me. And then it started bothering me that it bothered me. Like, why did I feel so strongly about it? Why did I care if my friend got the $15,000 they needed for gender care? Did somebody lose something?
Did somebody get injured? Did anyone die? Was the great communist revolution delayed?
No.
But sometimes if you really ask that question about feelings you can’t understand, the answer swings around to: “Well, I’m the problem here. This is making me feel a whole bunch of things, and that’s what I’m responding to, and I should try to figure this out.”
So I had started that process of investigating why I had felt feelings at all about this—why I should care.
And then I was riding the subway one day and I had this experience of a kind of déjà vu that reminded me of this moment in my teens, which is related.
I’ll try to tie these things together, but it’s the first thing that I connected it to.
I’m maybe 13 years old and I sit down on this subway car and—like a light switch going off—I experience about ten minutes of profound alexia. Some of you might have heard of agraphia—that’s losing the ability to write—but alexia is losing the ability to read, sometimes spontaneously.
And, as I said, the condition just snapped on like a light bulb.
I was looking at all of the advertisements and I just couldn’t, for the life of me, read any of the titles or copy. There were letters there; they were ostensibly Roman letters. But they might as well have been in Cyrillic, or even Klingon.
Suddenly, I was in a world in which I was mystified as to the meaning of things.
It had never happened before. It hasn’t happened since.
But I can say that this instant of acute mystification has never left me.
But was it mystification, actually?
Or was it me seeing the granular detail of how I was constructing my world unconsciously—because suddenly it wasn’t working?
Okay, so that’s when I’m 13. About ten years ago, I’m 44, and I’m struggling with my colleague’s choices.
In fact, I’m having intrusive thoughts about how exactly the treatment would go. What would the surgery be? What would they look like afterwards? Where would the scars be? What would they look like?
And I’m feeling conflicted about all this sort of gross, intrusive stuff, because a big part of me knew it just couldn’t be any of my business.
Maybe there was enough pressure in that, that it came to a peak and I had no choice but to resolve it.
So I walk into a subway car and I look around and suddenly everyone I see is somehow different—odd in the same way. The invisible normalcy of written English had vanished all those years ago to reveal mere forms.
I was now seeing people without the ubiquitous and unchallenged categories of “man” and “woman” laid over them.
I had actually stopped doing something I had been taught to do, which is to sort people into a gender binary through an instantaneous abstract process that let me read and understand the world and let me feel safe within it.
I could see that the process was triggered by ephemera: cheekbones, hair, heels, a suit and tie, a type of bag.
Suddenly Judith Butler made sense when she says that gender is not something that one is; it is something one does—a doing rather than a being.
I had been enough of a feminist to be aware of the demands of women’s clothing, hair, and makeup—how much work and concern could go into all of that, how much labor it took up. But I hadn’t got to that deeper level where notions of gender itself were being put on by everyone, but with varying degrees of social necessity.
I was dressing as and performing maleness without realizing it.
Suddenly the conflict over my colleague evaporated because it was replaced by a new question: “Who are you really? And why do you think you are essentially you and not who you have been conditioned to be? What costume are you wearing?”
As I came out of that reverie, I realized that over my whole lifetime I have thought I am clocking “biological men and women,” when really I’ve been encountering gender.
And that the only way of measuring one thing against the other would be to take an interest in people’s genitals—to have that be an underlying thought.
And how weird is that?
And not only weird, but contradictory to the entire experience of attraction and intimacy in my life. Because I’ve never once been attracted to a person after doing some internal checklist on whether I think they have certain genitals. I have always only ever been attracted to what people do, because I can’t know who they are until much later.
And when I find out who they are, it’s not about their genitals.
So there I was on the subway, just looking at people and the multitude of their expressions: femme, jock, frat boy, andro, twink, butch, leather daddy. Who were these people underneath and through their performativity?
Who was I?
Why would I begrudge anyone wanting or needing to change anything about themselves?
So yeah, that was pretty much a spiritual experience.
Thanks for listening, everyone. Take care of each other.
