Maia Poet: The Final Boss of Detrans Grifters (with Kat Blaque)

When I think about the spread of gender ideology, I actually I liken it a lot to another internet cult of the 2010s, which would have been ISIS.

Which would have been ISIS.

Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity.

I'm Matt Bernstein.

I'm so happy that you're here.

About five months ago, I woke up to a tweet.

Kat, would you like to read the tweet?

You have not seen this.

Tomorrow marks my one-year anniversary of not wearing a breastbinder.

On October 7th, 2023, I awoke to a siren.

I didn't have enough time to squeeze myself into the barbaric breast squashing device I had used to pass as a man.

I had only enough time to run to a bomb shelter.

Wait, oh, are they from Israel?

They were living in Israel at the time, yes.

Okay.

Do you see where this is going now?

Yes, okay.

I was like, why are they running to okay, all right.

Yep, yep, this is about to be as ridiculous as you think it's going to be.

But let me not get ahead of myself.

I thought I'd seen it all, but Hamas Made Me Dransition felt like an AI generated attempt to make me lose my mind in yet another new and ever more creative way.

The tweet came from a user called Maya Poet, someone I've never heard of at this point, but someone whose lore I would quickly become enveloped in.

This is going to be an episode about detransitioners, or people who once identified as transgender, may have gone through various steps of socially and or medically transitioning genders, and then at some point decided, you know, this isn't for me.

While rare, first of all, detransition is something that happens.

And I first and foremost just want to say that I think detransitioners deserve deserve support societally, medically.

They deserve to have their stories heard, not because they're at odds with the life-saving, gender-affirming care that trans people need.

In fact, I think that they can make it better because the perspectives of the relatively small number of people who don't ultimately pursue a lifelong transition can contribute to better care, not only for others who detransition, but also for trans people.

But unfortunately, that's not what's been happening on the world stage, and especially not on the national stage here in the United States.

The political right has found value in exploiting the stories of detransitioners in their ongoing war against transgender people, pitting them at odds with one another, and paying detransitioners willing to participate in that narrative with podcasting contracts, White House visits, and of course, money.

These incentives have created some celebrity detransitioners, the biggest of which is Chloe Cole, a 20-year-old who, at the time we're recording this, was at the White House yesterday, lobbying against what she calls radical gender ideology.

Just a couple weeks ago, the White House held an event for D-Trans Awareness Day and invited a bunch of right-wing D-transitioner micro-influencers to Washington, D.C.

for it.

Today, we're going to be talking about one Maya Poet, the D-Trans influencer I mentioned above, who detransitioned because

October 7th, I guess.

It's a whole thing.

We'll get into it.

We're going to discuss everything everything I've learned about this person, her grift, what I think is the tragedy at the heart of the center of it, and what she has or hasn't received for packaging her story into a right-wing media commodity.

And while Maya Poet is just one person, I think she's managed to simultaneously tell the story of the D-trans grift at large in a way that's, yes, laughable, but also quite sad.

You know, just like Shaka Khan is every woman, Maya Poet is kind of every D-transgrifter.

That was stupid.

To help me do that, Kat Black is here.

Kat Black is a, can I say a veteran YouTuber?

I'm old, apparently.

People have been calling me an elder recently, and it makes me cringe, but I guess I have been making content for 20 years.

And at a certain point, you can't deny that.

I'm not, I said veteran, not elder, for whatever it's worth, but.

No, I heard heard that and I respected that.

I appreciated that.

I call myself a YouTube veteran because I started a YouTube channel in 2005.

I've been on YouTube since I was a teenager, and I largely documented my life as a trans person early on in my YouTube career.

Through that, I expressed a lot about the current state of trans people and transphobia and what I was navigating as a person who was transitioning.

And so I have been having conversations in many different ways around trans issues for a very, very long time.

And detransitioners have been both something that I've seen in terms of people I knew from YouTube or from other platforms coming out and detransitioning, and also the grifting aspect of it, where there has been people who have turned that into a career to join hands with the right in taking down access to gender affirming care.

So I have a lot of things to say about it, but I will say one thing that we've talked about before this is that I, because I've been doing it for so long, have definitely not been as aware of all of the recent transgrifter and our D-transgrifters rather.

So this is going to be very interesting for me.

Yeah, we were texting before we started recording and I said, have you ever heard of this person?

And Kat was like, I have never heard of this person.

And what I'm really thrilled that we get to do right now because of that is like, I get to bring to you this sort of like the Gen Z iteration of the D-Trans Grift in a way that is like particularly ridiculous, which we're about to get into.

And then you get to bring to this your wisdom, obviously, of 20 years of reporting around this stuff.

So I'm really excited.

Yeah, I'm excited too, because you describe this as Ollie London levels.

And Ollie London is so transparently a grifter that I'm fascinated by what this must be.

It is Ollie Lendon levels of fuckery that are happening here.

Before we get into too much of this episode, if you would like to support the show or you would like more of the show, you can find that over on Patreon.

We have some bonus episodes going on over there, a fun group chat that will be linked in the episode description.

And also,

I am doing some live shows this spring, this coming May and June.

I have live shows coming up in, let's see if I can remember, Toronto, Brooklyn, LA, Seattle, Portland, I'm going to say Chicago and Boston.

And we just added a new date in San Francisco.

So if you would like to come hang out in person, it's like the podcast in real time with some guests who you'll recognize from the show.

The tickets for that will be available.

Link is also in the episode description.

I hope to see you there.

I am so excited.

Okay, Maya Poet.

I want to start with a photo because I just want to establish sort of a visual baseline for the Grift du jour.

So I I am going to send you a photo and have you describe to the listener who may not be watching this on YouTube who we're looking at.

There's a vibe, okay?

There's an aesthetic, right?

I do character design, so I try to like think of sometimes people in terms of archetypes.

This is an archetype.

This is an archetype of a person that I've seen.

I'm actually very curious what their current identity is, mostly because I tend to associate this particular archetype with non-binary folks, specifically like educational non-binary folks who are in like academia and such.

So that's the vibe I'm getting.

You know, they're wearing a lot of patterns.

There's lots going on there.

I think that's like, are those jellyfish?

There's just a lot going on.

Yeah, it's just like a vaguely paisly vest over like a similarly patterned button up.

I think the bow tie is really critical.

Yeah, the style says, I'm, I am

different.

um

i love patterns but i don't necessarily know how to style them okay well

um but maybe that's the point maybe the vibe is i don't it's like it's off kilter you know like that's the vibe it gives me i'm trying to say nice things and i'm struggling i'm

struggling i'm struggling um but i love that they did that and that they chose that and that they're wearing it with pride.

I love that for them.

I really do.

Yeah.

You You landed the plane there.

Unlike a lot of what's been happening in this country lately.

I am going to send you one more photo of Maya Poet before we fully get into who she is.

And this is actually a screenshot of a tweet that she made.

So maybe you can read it out.

Who else left the left and joined the Team MAGA?

Oh my gosh.

I just, whenever I see people like this, I just think like,

you are just desperate for attention.

Like, that's all it is.

You weren't able to get attention any other way.

So now you're in this cult, Frank.

You're in this cult now.

Maya Poet, first of all, she's 25.

Okay, okay.

She presents visually kind of like a non-binary theater student, I would say.

That's the vibe.

That's actually a great way to describe it.

Non-binary theater student.

Mostly in tech, though.

They do a lot of tech.

They might audition, but usually for the ensemble.

Sure.

But they really want the lead, but they're really just good at tech.

I wanted to get sort of the visual presentation of this person out early because Maya Poet often goes viral online for reasons that we are about to get into.

But what a lot of people will kind of start and end this conversation with is that they look like a non-binary theater student.

And of course, people on Twitter are not so nice about it, but you know, it's easy to make fun of people for how they look.

And you'll relatively often see people online dogging on this person for looking like a non-binary theater student while being a right-wing activist.

And we're not going to do that.

We're just maybe going to note the hypocrisy.

So, are you ready to go on the biographical journey with me, Kat?

Yes, I'm very curious.

Maya poet is a 25-year-old.

She's born in Portland, Oregon.

Yep.

To Soviet Jewish.

Why do you say like that?

that?

Because I have stereotypes.

It gives Portland.

It gives Portland.

It does.

I don't want to generalize.

Some of my best friends are from Portland.

Some of my best friends are theater kids from Portland.

I'm just saying

that is the vibe it's giving.

She grows up in Portland with these Soviet Jewish parents.

And at 12 years old, she comes out as a trans man.

Her parents were not accepting, and they refused to buy her a chest binder.

So she began DIY chest binding with, you know, information that she found online, which she would later tell the press was painful.

And it's also, I should note, unsafe.

What do you know about DIY chest binding?

That's standard.

You know, a lot of people DIY and they can't afford something at first.

And so they unfortunately end up hurting themselves trying to give themselves, you know, gender euphoria in their own body by doing certain things that are not usually that comfortable or safe.

It's worth it.

That's why so many trans people transition.

It's like, it's worth the pain and the discomfort in order to have that feeling.

For a lot of us, that's the thing that we are willing to accept in order to be ourselves, you know?

A lot of the biographical details of Maya's journey, by the way, come from her, and we will establish why she seems like a pretty unreliable narrator.

So just take some of these details with perhaps a grain of salt.

Maya eventually goes to college and she socially transitions there and starts binding her chest with a real binder that she buys herself away from the threat of her parents.

But her parents eventually find out and they threaten to stop paying tuition for her unless she studies abroad somewhere quote unquote non-Western.

So knowing that this person would end up becoming a detrans activist and we're kind of establishing the fact that she has these like pretty awful parents.

What do you make of that particular detail?

I mean, people detransition for different reasons.

One of the big reasons that a lot of people detransition is because they have disconnections from their family that they feel are because of them being trans.

I mean, there's a lot of people who they literally are disowned by their family because they came out as trans.

That was kind of my situation, not 100%, kind of, sort of.

So, for a lot of people, detransitioning, it has the added benefit of giving them access to their family again, who is going to be incredibly excited to hear that you are no longer doing the thing that you know that is right for you, right?

Like they're going to be very happy to hear that you relinquished your gender and have stopped doing the whole trans thing.

So for some people, especially when they're in a situation where maybe their family members are towards the end of their lives and things like that, for some people, they will detransition just to get closer to their families again.

It's sad.

Yeah, it's very sad.

Very sad.

So they threaten to pull Maya's tuition unless she travels somewhere and like starts going to school somewhere in the United States, which I guess they claim is like poisoning her with like, I don't know, thoughts of like gender ideology or whatever.

The woke ideology, the woke gender ideology.

Of course.

And so in 2019, she chooses to study abroad and move to

Israel.

Which, like, okay, pause.

As one does.

Good shopping.

It's a haven for the LGBT, I guess.

But that's actually what I was going to point out because famously, Israel touts its own progressiveness when it comes to LGBTQ issues, often, as I've discussed in other episodes of this podcast, as what I believe is pinkwashing or diverting attention away from crimes against humanity it's committing elsewhere.

This is kind of a part of Maya poet's story that doesn't really add up to me because if your parents are making you go to a place where you're like less likely to pursue being transgender, why Israel?

Yeah, I mean, I think that Israel isn't actually that pro-LGBT in all reality, but

of the places to go.

It's certainly a choice.

It's certainly a choice.

So Maya goes to Israel and lives in Israel for a few years as a trans man.

And my understanding of this is that she never actually undergoes any sort of medical transition, but she does socially transition.

And I believe that she's not even really out as trans.

She's living quote-unquote stealth as a man, which maybe you want to explain what that means.

Well, I mean, first and foremost, I have questions.

Okay.

Stealth for a lot of trans people essentially means that you're living in a way where the people around you don't know that you're transgender.

And generally, this is done for safety.

It was something that was a little bit more common in the olden days when there were no protections against discrimination for trans folks.

I was stealth for a very short period of time in my life.

I also came up during a time where that was more of the standard.

It wasn't really a thing to be transgender and then to like very publicly talk about being transgender and then be known as trans because it just wasn't safe, frankly.

So a lot of the people that I came up with, stealth was like the end goal because that was one of the only ways you could viably function in a society.

And it's something that I would say is a little bit more common in more conservative spaces where that really would be a bit more scary.

I really didn't stop being stealth and stop intentionally trying to be stealth until I moved to Los Angeles because I didn't live around a lot of very accepting people.

And it's funny because every time I visit Orange County, I sometimes forget that I was stealth when I was in Orange County because

I always run into people who, you know, because I'm so out and open in LA, but in the OC, there were people that knew me but didn't know that I was trans.

And so that's always funny when I run into them because I'm very much more open about things these days.

Sure, sure.

In an interview that Maya would later give to the New York Post, she describes sort of her motivations, I guess, for being trans.

And I want you to read a quote from that that I've pulled here.

So I'm going to send this to you.

She says, there was no lesbian culture by the the time I was coming of age because gender ideology totally destroyed it, said Maya, who is from Pacific Northwest, and asked to withhold her last name for privacy reasons.

It didn't have any good role models.

All lesbians I knew were transitioning.

Okay.

Intresante.

Intresante.

So when I said at the top of the episode that Maya poet is every D-trans influencer, this is kind of what I mean.

She clearly, before becoming a D-trans influencer, had studied the notes of like, what does the right love to hear right now?

What narratives are they just sinking their claws into?

And one of those narratives we know is this idea that all lesbians are becoming trans men.

We're losing the lesbians, right?

Like, Ariel Scarcella, who's like a right-wing lesbian YouTuber, she loves to talk about how it's like, all the lesbians are becoming trans men.

And I'm like, okay, all right.

So, Kat, take it away.

I mean,

stuff like this is annoying to me because it relies a lot on people not having access to these spaces and these people.

You know, what's true is that there are more people who are opening themselves up to transition now versus 20 years ago, right?

Like, for me, there are perceptibly, I would say, more trans people and more people who feel like we currently live in a society that's more accepting of it and they have transitioned, right?

But I wouldn't say that there's like an increase of like specifically lesbians transitioning to, you know, trans men.

That's not really something I've personally seen.

Now, of course, I will state I am a very tragically heterosexual woman, you know, unfortunately.

Start apologizing.

Well, you know, I do see it as a flaw of mine.

I do, I do see it as a flaw of mine.

I wish I could be attracted to women, but alas, my perception from just my sapphic friends is that lesbians have often had more of a complex relationship with gender in general.

And I know that there's a big debate about like, are you like mask or are you trans mask?

And like, are you a stud or are you, you know, trans mask?

Like there is contention around like that a little bit.

But like, first of all, I think that sapphic women, lesbians specifically, there's a, there is a struggle to find content for sure.

but I have not really seen, like, I'm thinking of like a lot of the lesbian creators that I've known.

I can think of one,

one,

who is now trans masculine.

It's not a trend.

If I'm thinking of like people who have made a job at like being visible lesbian creators, there's one I could think of off the top of my head that has transitioned.

Yeah.

So I don't really know where they're getting that from.

I could see maybe that being a complex conversation about, you know, with lesbian spaces and such, but like when it comes to like the lesbian creators, keeping in mind that I've been doing this for 20 years, and so I, I know a lot of these people, I haven't, I can't think of many that have transitioned at all.

So that does sound like saying what they know the conservatives want to hear.

That does kind of sort of seem like that, or literally just repeating Arielle Scarcella, who's been doing it for a very long time, this like anti-trans stuff.

Or honestly, like JK Rowling.

Like J.K.

Rowling loves to like white knight for lesbians.

Is she a lesbian?

No.

Okay.

No!

But she's, but she's just got a lot of opinions about it.

She's just always on Twitter, like the lesbian population is disappearing.

And then you'll have a bunch of cis lesbians in the replies being like, what?

What are you talking about?

Like, this is also not something I've ever heard.

Like, I have many lesbian friends and I would, you know, just like to point out that all of them are completely trans friendly.

Yeah.

People, I think, like, especially like J.K.

Rowling, love to make it seem like, you know, trans people are posing a threat to cis lesbians.

Yeah, specifically.

Yeah.

And I've just not seen that.

It's because they function as like an ar a point in an argument, right?

Because usually the way this conversation goes is lesbians like cis women and only cis women.

That is, that's like where it starts, right?

So any context where, you know, there's a possibility of a romantic or sexual interaction, right?

Which is like basically every context.

It's predatory, right?

And these people are trying to force these women who only like cis women into liking someone with a dick, right?

Because that's the way that they always think of it as all trans women have dicks.

That's it, right?

And so it ends up being this thing where now we have to protect lesbian women who, of course, are transphobic, right?

We're granting from this premise, they're inherently exclusionary and they're inherently hateful of trans people.

So they don't want to be around them.

We have to save them.

You hear this from straight men and straight women all the time.

When in reality, my experience with lesbians, just the ones I've known, maybe I just know a lot of cool Silver Lake lesbians, far more accepting of gender diversity than like, I would say, gay men are, frankly.

Like I said earlier, like lesbians have often had a complex relationship with gender in general.

So gender bending and things like that is often a little bit more understood.

And I know from my own friend group that there are people who are more than comfortable with trans women being in their spaces and such, because that's not, from their own experience, a threat to them, you know?

And so it is interesting how there's this narrative of cis lesbian women being so exclusionary of trans folks because I haven't really seen that to be the case.

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Now, let's get back to the show.

Okay, so Maya Poet is in Israel as a trans man because I guess at this point he never had lesbian role models because they were all disappearing to trans men.

Quote, all the lesbians I knew were transitioning and so did Maya in Israel.

So I'll just say this because this was something I thought of earlier.

So maybe I'm ignorant.

It's very possible that I am ignorant here.

But usually for trans men, there's a lot that's kind of required for them to start like passing, being perceived as a cis man, right?

Obviously same for trans women too, but like I'm fascinated by, so they weren't on hormones, they weren't out as trans, they were just binding and socially transitioning and were able to pass and be seen as a man in a, and be stealth.

in Israel.

See, again, maybe this just sounds ignorant.

There's layers of premises that I have a hard time granting.

I guess just file away your

holes that you might be poking in the story.

I guess just file them away

as they come.

You know, like, like, like put them, put them in the filing cabinet and we'll come back to it.

Okay.

October 7th, 2023 comes around.

And I would like for you to read this New York Post headline.

It's the headline of the article that we've been pulling some quotes from.

October 7th made me realize being trans is a luxury belief.

So I'm detransitioning.

Wow.

It's just, again, it feels like this was a headline that was concocted in a lab to upset me.

I detransitioned because of October 7th.

I'm trying to understand the logic and it's not logicking.

Well, it's about to logic even less.

So

according to Maya's own self-mythology, she was in her apartment on October 7th when sirens started blaring because of the massacre at the Nova Music Festival.

And as she ran for shelter, she did not have time to grab her chest binder.

And in that moment, she realized that thinking about gender was, quote, a luxury belief.

You're not a dude if you don't have your binder on.

Like, that's weird to me.

I don't know.

That's weird.

It's

luxury.

Anyway.

No, please.

It just doesn't make sense.

How does not being able to bind your chest, which I understand is a thing that would, like, you know, give you, you know, gender euphoria and make, you know, there's reasons why you're doing it in a life or death situation, you know, granting the premise of this.

Why would you feel like the most important thing in that conversation is for you to grab your binder?

And if you don't grab your binder, somehow that makes a large statement about whether or not you're trans or whether or not being trans is something you can continue doing.

Because I guess to me, I guess the way that I'm looking at it is, you know, the things that I've done to affirm my gender in my life are not the things that are required for me personally to accept my gender and to understand who I am, right?

I'm not trans because I wear makeup and because I have tits and ass.

That's not why.

I'm trans because that's who I am.

Whether I have something on or not doesn't, you know, really shift that for me.

It's just not computing to me because I guess if I was getting bombed, would it be cool if I grabbed my tucking panty?

Sure, sure,

sure.

But I will eventually find a new pair of underwear.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, it doesn't really, like, yes, binders are like, I guess you could say those are a luxury, but if you are someone who has gender dysphoria and you being in your body kind of requires you to do that, you will find a way.

And that's kind of the difference, I think, between some of these people that I've heard, their stories, right?

And I think that's kind of why sometimes people end up having not so favorable attitudes about detransitioners, because for some of us who are trans, right, there's nothing that would ever get us to stop being trans.

There's nothing.

And us being trans doesn't rely on whether or not we have our binder or our tucking panty or our packers.

Or it's that stuff is nice.

They help people living with dysphoria be a little bit more livable, right?

But we will make a we will make do.

You don't have your binder.

You're going to figure out a way to bind your chest.

That's not maybe important right now, but once you're a bit more comfortable, you will eventually find that shit because it's important to you.

Sometimes when I listen to some of these people talk about this stuff, it's like you detransitioned because we have a very different way of looking at our genders.

Like it wasn't that deep for you and that's valid, that's fine, but for a lot of people, it is.

And just because you didn't have that experience with gender doesn't mean other people aren't, you know, like you weren't trans.

That's great.

That doesn't mean I'm not too.

And that's the issue I have with grifters.

I know we're getting so off topic, but this quite literally is topic.

So

they like to make the argument that because it turned out not to be a good thing for them, that somehow, some way, it must not be good for other people.

That's why on the White House is doing D-Trans Awareness Day and shit like that, because they want to make a point that there are people who transition and then regret it and then D-transition, right?

But they don't understand that, like, a lot of us who are trans, even if we detransition for a moment, we're going to re-transition.

Most people do, because those of us who are actually trans, there's nothing that will get us to stop.

It's us actually being trans and living with gender dysphoria and needing to be be genuine with ourselves, you know, and not being able to be livable otherwise, right?

For a lot of us, that will always be the thing.

We might detransition for a moment, but the vast majority of people will re-transition.

And I wish that people recognized that, you know, we also don't tend to categorize detransitioning in one particular way.

For a lot of people, detransitioning could be that they had a negative reaction to hormones and they can't take hormones for a bit.

That might be a detransition.

It could also be that they don't have access to it anymore.

That can be a detransition.

Just because someone isn't transitioning doesn't mean that they regret being trans.

Also, it doesn't mean that they're transphobic.

Most detransitioners still, in so many ways, rely on gender-affirming care and access to it.

So there's just a lot of false dichotomies.

Again, we haven't even gone through the whole story, but like it's telling to me that like the binder and being able to leave the binder behind if we're buying into this mythology was the one thing that got them to realize that they weren't trans and this was all like luxury bullshit because like that just doesn't compute to me and i think a lot of people who would be dysphoric enough to bind their chest well and it feels also specifically like it like plays directly into the audience that maya is clearly trying to accrue which is full of people who do think that being trans is a costume like drag that when you take it off you're you know out of drag, yeah, and that it's all just a luxury that you know we entertain too much.

I mean, that's also kind of like the subtle narrative being made about trans folks.

People often will see like the Dylan Mulvaneys or some of the more popular, well-off trans women and say, oh, these trans people, they're all just living it up.

Why can't I live it up like them, right?

Oh, it's because they have these luxury lifestyles where they're being rewarded.

Like they create these narratives in their hot their minds where being trans is something that people who have money and are luxurious do.

And then that doesn't allow them to recognize that the vast majority of trans people live below the poverty line, right?

And that, of course, the people who you see on the internet are going to be people who have resources and are privileged because they have the ability to, you know, it's like ABC 123, but people's perceptions are so limited that when they see a trans person online, especially doing a bit better than them, they think that trans idiot shouldn't have it, you know?

unfortunately, that is a thing that gets a lot of people going.

Why do these trans people get this?

Just slight advocacy for trans people.

People feel like we don't deserve it ever, you know, because a lot of people are relying on the narrative of the dejected, oppressed trans person who they can feel a bit better about.

So yeah, to me, like you can tell there's some pandering going on.

People on Reddit were talking about the relevance of the fact that Maya Poet has never medically transitioned.

Not because whether or not you've medically transitioned determines like if you're actually trans deep down, obviously, but because so much of what these de-trans activists fight for and argue against is this idea that like medical transition is dangerous for people.

And so Maya Poet has never undergone any sort of medical transition.

One person wrote, of course, medical transition isn't inherently what makes you trans.

The point is that when people use detransitioners as a talking point, it's used to argue against medical transition because of the quote-unquote irreversible damage to healthy bodies.

Someone who never medically transitioned does not have a horse in that race.

And I feel like this is actually kind of a common theme with a lot of these D-trans influencers is many of them aren't actually quote-unquote victims of the things that they're advocating against.

You know, some like Maya have never medically transitioned.

So it's it's like, how can you become this like personal warrior against medical transition?

But also, and I think this is way more common, a lot of them transitioned as adults, and yet they'll kind of take the mic and start rhapsodizing about how dangerous medical transition is for children and sort of be like, oh, you know, all these horrible things happened to me by the doctors and the gender cabal.

And they're doing it to children.

And it's like, wait, but you made those decisions as like a 20-something year-old, right?

What's annoying to me about this, too is a lot of this is a response to the hurdles that used to exist for trans folks.

Like, is it a little bit easier for people to gain access to gender-affirming care now?

Yeah, and that's a good thing.

Because in the olden days, people used to like have to sell themselves in order to do it because it was so expensive to gain any access.

It was so impossible to gain any access.

It was so much harder in the olden days.

And I don't think most people have an appreciation for that.

And medical transition is kind of for most of us it is important.

Not every trans person medically transitions and I want to make it super clear that it's not a requirement but for people who do have gender dysphoria and do feel that their biology is working against them, the way their body is developing is working against them, it is life or death.

And people who don't feel that way and haven't really had that experience, I don't think are necessarily the best to have some of of the murkier conversations that we should be having having about why some people detransition.

Because I think there are a lot of things to learn from D-transitioners for sure.

But it is interesting to me how frequently a lot of these people haven't really navigated through a lot of these things.

They really experienced being accepted in a space, and then they're kind of upset, I guess, with that.

That's kind of one thing I've noticed too.

And let's just myth bust for a second, because another really common idea that these D-trans influencers love to push out and now, you know, on the world stage at places like the White House is this idea that it's like you like walk into the doctor, you're like, I would like to be transgender, please.

And they like hand you a prescription for like hormones and surgeries.

Yeah, no, no, that's not happening.

Could you maybe like color that in with some of your own experience?

Yeah, so I will say that my own experience may not be reflective of today's current process, but I will share my own experience because I think it's very relevant.

So for me personally, when I first recognized that HRT was what I needed to do, I was so determined to do it that I started doing it basically the black market way, where I would buy from, you know, sources that might not have been super reputable.

And I

would get information about my dosages and everything from like Yahoo groups way, way, way, way, way back in the day.

That dates me a bit.

And that was like the way that a lot of trans women who didn't have access would go about gaining access to HRT.

So you have to start with an understanding that for a lot of people who do need HRT, that is how serious it is.

It is so serious that we're willing to buy from potentially unreputable websites or people because there's a street level to this too, where, you know, in certain cities, especially there's like a guy who sells hormones and then some girls will go and like do sex work to make the money to buy from that guy.

you know, that's just the start, right?

So when I was trying to change my gender marker in such an LA, I needed to prove legally that I was on hormones.

So I needed to go through the official path, right?

So what that required is that I have several therapy sessions, which were expensive.

That was another hurdle.

Fortunately, I was able to eventually find some free therapy, but I had to get some therapy done.

I had to have those people write me a letter that I then took to a doctor who then got me on hormones.

That was a long process.

And then I had to prove from my doctor that I was on hormones for over a year.

And then I could go and legally change my gender marker.

That's in California.

Other places, you have to like actually get surgery.

So the path for trans women changing their gender markers in other states is way more severe, right?

So if you want to get surgeries, you would have to also go to a therapist and you would also have to get that signed off on.

And then you would take that letter to that, you know, person who would also evaluate you.

And then, you know, so I think from what I can piece together, things are a little bit more accessible now, but it's never been a one and done process.

And also, what I hate about the narrative, especially about like kids getting surgeries, is that one of the common things that you have to do with trans surgeries is give HRT time.

You know, like if you just started hormones and you get your appointment for a breast augmentation like the first month of your transition, you're not actually going to be able to get the result that you probably will be happy with because you don't have any space to put that yet, you know?

That'll just be putting a balloon under a hard piece of skin, right?

So you need to give your body time to develop because what will happen is if you do it too quickly, your hormones will start to like fill that part in and it might not look the way that it looks, right?

So with most surgeries, you have to give it time.

You have to give it time in order for it to be a successful surgery.

They're especially not giving kids sex changes.

That's another one of those surgeries where, you know, it kind of requires you some time.

You got to get hair removal if you're having bottom surgery and things.

Like none of this is an easy, quick process.

And if it was, if it was, we probably would wouldn't be having the conversations we're having right now about how trans people need some of the, you know, some of that to be subsidized, right?

Because it's such an expensive, long, and often uncomfortable process.

So, this idea that people are walking in and just getting approved, it's just not a thing.

It's just not a thing.

One of the murky conversations that people have that I know comes up a lot with detransitioners is sometimes when you are defab, there's a way that some people can internalize being a woman.

Wait, defab.

Designated female at birth.

Sometimes when you're designated female at birth, there's a way some people internalize how the society is treating them as a woman, especially if you're someone who has experienced sexual violence and things like that.

Sometimes people who have been going through that will think that they're trans, or wanting to distance yourself from femininity or being perceived as a woman, which is a really common response to sexual sexual violence, sometimes is a thing that can present similarly as gender dysphoria.

So, I know that there have been some people who have detransitioned who recognize that, that they weren't necessarily trans men, but that they had discomforts with femininity that related to sexual violence.

And those are like, I think, some real valuable conversations to be had

with detransitioners and such.

But, you know, a lot of this other shit is just conservative propaganda.

And that's kind of the frustrating thing about this narrative.

A lot of what sells in terms of like what you can use to grift with conservatives is not necessarily the conversations that like detransitioners want to have, are having, or need to have.

Because, contrary to popular belief, I would argue most D transitioners are not right-wing grifters or interested in being right-wing

grifters.

You know, those are just the ones that get the most support.

Because, and a lot of people don't understand this, There's a lot of money in the right.

Like, let's break it down.

One of the reasons why the right is so targeted against transness right now is because, first of all, it's a hot button issue that people on both sides have feelings about.

But at the court, what they're getting at is trans people break away from a binary that is very required to control people, right?

If men and women are these solid and immovable things, that makes men and women very easy to control.

You can say, men do this, women do that, da-da-da-da-da.

And people who break away from that draw attention to the bullshit of that binary.

And that's a binary that people have used to control humanity forever, basically.

And so trans people end up being a target because, well, we challenge that.

We draw attention to the matrix and the flaw in the matrix, right?

We draw attention to that.

And so that's what they want to

get rid of.

Right now, it's, you know, you've got people on both sides of the table who they don't like trans people because of the binary existing in the way that it has in our society and that being the norm for so many people.

So there are people across political spectrum who will be supportive of this sort of bullshit, but there's more money in it on the right.

There's way more money in it on the right because the right is more invested in that binary.

The right really requires it.

Well, speaking speaking of money on the right, Maya Poet immediately gets slotted into this like Turning Point USA extended cinematic universe.

If you don't know, Turning Point USA, it's just one of these companies that like does podcasts and live events

for right-wing influencers and up-and-coming right-wing influencers.

It's Charlie Kirk's media company.

And Maya Poet instantly, with this incredible ID transitioned because of October 7th and Hamas made me realize that being trans isn't important to me anymore.

She immediately gets slotted into this like Turning Point USA ecosystem and starts doing speaking events at universities.

And someone on Twitter who attends a college where Maya Poet was doing a speaking event posted a picture of a flyer that Turning Point USA had put up to advertise Maya's talk.

I want to send it to you because I want to draw attention to something.

Maya, a University of Oregon alumna, is coming to debate her experiences as a detransitioner and Israeli-American October 7th survivor.

Join us with your response.

So

now would be a great time to introduce a little extra fuckery into the mix, which is that Maya was living in Jerusalem on October 7th.

Maya claiming that she survived October 7th is like, like, so I grew up in New Jersey, right?

Yeah.

And that would be like me claiming that I like survived 9-11 while being in New Jersey

you were there like we kind of all survived October 7th in the same way that Maya survived October 7th in the sense that we were existed at the same time

it's so absurd that is very strange but not that surprising people would point out like Maya your apartment was in Jerusalem like you weren't even close to the Nova Music Festival or the kibbutz like it wasn't you were not close to where violence took place.

And Maya Poet made this amazing retort on Twitter.

I'm going to send you the tweet.

I'm not saying I survived Nova or survived the kibbutz massacres.

I'm saying I survived October 7th, the day.

Okay, so do we all.

We all, we, in that way, we are all survivors of October 7th.

Why would you say that?

The only reason you would say that is to like indicate that you were basically there.

It's crazy.

I just watched this documentary about like a woman who said that she was at the towers on 9-11th.

And like, that's not something people take lightly.

So I don't know why people are so comfortable coming close to that.

Ugh.

So tasteless.

That is pretty crazy.

That's what I mean by like, I mean, it kind of reaches like an all-e-London level with that kind of shit.

Yeah.

But you know what this is?

You know,

this is going to maybe sound mean, but

this is what I'm intuiting just from the little bit that I've understood of Maya.

Maya doesn't come off as a very remarkable person.

I don't think Maya has had remarkable things happen to them, with the exception of them at one point thinking that they were transgender and then also existing in Israel at the time of October 7th.

So now those have become the things that they're trying to get attention.

with

and that's all they've got that's all they've got and that's actually actually what I perceive of a lot of these grifters is that they really don't have much going for them.

They're not particularly interesting people.

They are connected to a hot button issue in one way or another.

And there's a lot of rich people who are willing to give them money.

But I bet if I went to one of Maya Poets' presentations, it wouldn't be a particularly good one.

They would just be being supported by people who are very interested in supporting this shit, right?

And promoting these ideas.

And I feel like what you just said is true of a lot of grifters in general.

Like, I've used the word commodify quite a few times this episode, but it reminds me a lot of how Riley Gaines, who famously in a single college swim meet against trans swimmer Leah Thomas, Riley tied with Leah for fifth.

Neither of them won meddling positions.

But for Riley to turn that into a story that's commodifiable for the right wing, she had to flatten it into, I had my dreams taken from me by a trans athlete.

Yeah.

Even though it's like, okay, the reality is this was one race of your entire years and years and years long swimming career and you both tied for fifth behind four other cis women.

But that's not the story that gets you a speaker position at CPAC.

The same way that I was in Jerusalem.

on October 7th doesn't get you, you know, your little turning point USA slot.

You have to be like, I am an October 7th survivor and I was never medically transitioning, but medical transition is bad for people.

And it's like this need to flatten your story into something that like Charlie Kirk will want to throw money at.

It's

so sloppy and it's so sad.

Yeah, it's pathetic.

And you point out earlier that I wasn't so aware of these people.

And it's because for me, I always perceive the patheticness of these people.

And it's just for that reason, I just, I have no reason to listen to them.

You know, I don't think I'm the most interesting person in the world, but I know I've had some damn experiences that are way better stories that I don't need to exaggerate, right?

I don't need to exaggerate any of these stories because they're real and they're actually interesting, you know.

In no other time in our history have I, you know, and I'm not particularly sporty, have we thought of getting fourth place as someone taking away your opportunity?

Fifth cat black, fifth,

fifth, fifth, you know, we've never said, oh, the fourth place, third place, second place, first place.

They stole that from me.

No, what we've said is, I simply didn't measure up.

I wasn't good enough.

I need to use that as inspiration for me to do a better job next time and move the fuck on.

We want to like act like these people who don't measure up were robbed of something.

And it's just not true.

And, you know, I don't want to go on this route too much, but a lot of these people have inferiority complexes.

A lot of these people, like all it is at the end of the day, everything isn't flattering them at every moment.

And they, and, and that really bothers them.

And ironically, that's what they think trans people are doing.

Like, you don't need to exaggerate these stories to make yourself the most remarkable person in the room.

But, you know, it sells.

It sells to these people.

I mean, and that's the thing.

Like, there's a graphic that came out not that long ago about all of the most popular political content creators and things on the internet, and they were right-wing and left-wing.

Some of those left-wing people were right-wing, but I mean that's another conversation for another day.

But the most popular shows online were right-wing content creators, right?

Why?

Because right-wing content creators are the ones that billionaires are willing to fund.

Yep.

And so there's some people like Maya who, you know, they are unremarkable, right?

They don't actually measure up.

They have nothing really sufficient sufficient or good to express that is interesting.

But

the little bit of exaggeration that they've done is profitable enough, and especially spreading some of these narratives that they're willing to get, they're going to get investment, they're going to get people throwing money at them.

And a lot of these people, I point out how they're not very good at it because I think of people like fucking Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan's not funny.

You know, Joe Rogan's not funny.

A lot of these like turning point, you know, Daily,

whatever daily wire, I think is Ben Shapiro's company.

A lot of those guys are just rejects from Hollywood who didn't fucking measure up.

But because they have some talking points that rich, boring white men are willing to invest in, they get the investment, which for a lot of people gives them an air of authority with, you know, their nice cameras and their nice equipment and everything.

And that's how we got to the unreality we're in now where people are like believing these things that aren't actually true.

you know?

That's how we got to this point where this person who never medically transitioned, who

wasn't actually there during the attack, right, is now suddenly hoisted to the forefront because a bunch of rich white men are willing to invest in it.

Not because it's good, not because it is actually

a useful piece of media, but because it spreads the narrative that billionaire men want to be spread, right?

Fucking Elon Musk hates trans people, hates trans people.

I would too, if, if, you know, my ex-wife started dating a trans woman, I guess.

I think that's also part of it, too.

I think that's Ariel Scarcella's issue, too.

I think trans baddie got at her and took her girl.

Happened too many times.

You know, so anyway, I didn't mean to be mean.

That's just, you know.

This is my perception because why would you care?

You know, the obsession people have with trans people is so weird to me because I don't, I don't spend that much time thinking about even the genitalia of people that I like.

These people are so weird.

Ew.

So, speaking of kind of making an unremarkable story into something that you can commodify and sell, Maya, like I said, gets slotted into the conservative D-trans speaking circuit.

She does one podcast titled, this really tickled me, Running from Rockets and Walking Toward Womanhood.

Oh my God.

But you know what though?

I will say that that is kind of a bar though.

It's county.

I just wish it was an accurate reflection of any part of this.

She really continues to lean into this like, I'm going to combine the trans culture war and the American relationship with the Middle East culture war

into one thing.

I feel like that's the beat where she really felt like, okay, this is mine.

This is going to be my territory.

Like I'm going to be the Hamas D trans person.

And so this extended further.

Maya was speaking at a conference called Genspect.

Oh, you know, Genspect?

Not at all.

Okay.

Not at all.

Okay.

Not at all.

But I'm like, they have conferences now.

They got conferences.

Yeah, yeah.

They have conferences.

And, you know, it's just some like anti-trans.

Like, we hate trannies.

We just, they just get together.

And that's like, I don't know.

It's very weird to be.

They're so obsessed.

They're so obsessed.

They're so fucking obsessed.

It's weird.

Maya speaks at this conference and her speech gets packaged into a YouTube video on the Gen Spec YouTube channel right now called Trans Ideology and Isis, a parallel.

What?

I need to hear the argument.

I need to hear the argument.

Lucky for you, I have pulled it and we're going to watch it together in real time if you don't mind.

Oh my God.

Okay.

When When I think about the spread of gender ideology, I actually I liken it a lot in the mechanism of the spread to sort of how, to another internet cult of the 2010s, which would have been ISIS.

I mean we know that ISIS radicalized a lot of Western youngsters including those without an Islamic background and both of these kind of internet cults took place around the same time.

They are inherently international phenomena and if you think about it, like both in the case study of ISIS and in the case study of trans indoctrination, you have the cohorts of kids that you would expect to get wrapped up in it, and also an entirely new emerging cohort that you would have never expected to get wrapped up in it.

So I, you know, I've and this is some research that I've been doing on my own.

I mean, I think I was right about their public speaking ability, frankly, just from that, just from that video.

Trans people and ISIS have a lot in common in the sense that they are both broadly speaking groups of people.

Groups of people who use the internet.

Like,

they're so similar.

Groups of people who use the internet.

Oh, so ISIS is also like Pokemon, right?

Like, um,

like, literally anything that uses the internet to advertise and to specifically target a specific group of people who you would expect to get wrapped up in it.

It's so weird.

You know what aggravates me about these people?

Because I have this thing where when I listen to these people, like, all I can think about about is like how I would make their argument for them.

Like, you could have said a little bit more.

You could have really gone into it, you know, you could have made clearer examples.

But what I know it is, is there's just a group of people out there that really like hearing about ISIS and trans ideology in like one conversation.

So, like, it doesn't even matter that there are no good connections made between these two things.

They're just repeating the script that they know will get the reaction they want it's it's kind of like a ron de santis wet dream oh yeah it's like i mean it really is giving like i remember the first time the world heard donald trump say like they're giving trans surgeries to illegal aliens in prisons and it just felt like a mad lib of things that would like make conservatives tick They know that they can say one sentence, one sentence that will like get all of the, hit all of the marks.

And that's the thing, too, like listening to these people, it's like, and I can't feel bad for them because they're terrible, but like they don't respect their audience.

Because I listen to some of these people and I'm like, I know that you know what you're saying is bullshit.

I know that you're smart enough to understand that what you're saying is bullshit.

But they say, they say these things knowing that their audience is just going to eat it up.

Like, I don't think that, you know, Maya is silly enough to really believe these things necessarily, but knows that it will sell well.

You know,

as a former transgender, former member of ISIS myself.

Yeah, I mean, what was the ISIS?

What was so simple?

Like, yeah.

See, now I want to do a video where I'm like, yeah, and these are the ways in which the trans ideology is just like ISIS, just because

I feel like you could make the compelling argument, but I know they don't care.

ISIS is a lot like Wordle in the sense that it takes place on the internet and there's a lot of people who do it that you would expect to do it and also some people that you might not expect to do it who are also doing it.

So many things fit into that description.

So this takes an even more complicated, fact-based, sort of darker turn.

Oh, boy.

And I would like to preface that turn with another one of Maya's tweets.

Would you like to read this one?

If being trans is making your life so much harder, just detransition.

You can just choose to stop being trans.

I did, and it has improved my life significantly.

I'm no longer at war with myself and my biology.

I'm no longer living a lie.

How beautiful is that?

Maybe because you weren't trans, like maybe because you didn't transition, you know, like maybe you were just wearing a binder because you didn't like your boobs.

Maybe you just wanted a reduction.

Maybe that's what it was all about.

Maybe that's the body you could have lived in.

You see, the thing that's frustrating to me about some of the conversation about detransition is that i think there is actually a very useful conversation to be had about accepting your body in a wide range of being right like i have known people who have detransitioned In fact, one of the very first people I saw that detransitioned was someone I used to follow online.

I still follow them.

And they were like a beautiful, like post-op.

Imagine your idealistic 80s trans woman.

Like that's who they were, right?

And she came to YouTube one day and she was totally like duded out in her way, in a way that you would, right?

Like she cut her hair and put on some flannel.

It wasn't a huge transition, but was noticeable enough, right?

And she told me that because of the time that she was, she came up in, she was older than me, she came up in like the 70s and 80s, she kind of felt in that time that because the conceptions people had about gender were so narrow that she kind of had to choose a side.

And that was sort of what was encouraged around her.

People who said that you probably do, because you're feminine and because you want to look this way, you probably should start taking hormones, you probably should start doing these things.

And this was not the official way, this was all underground.

And as she's seen at the time, the increasing acceptance of non-binary folks, the increasing acceptance of people who are gender fluid and stuff, she recognized that she was more in line with that.

And so there is something to be said about how some people can't imagine their life as a person who might want to transition, but not completely, right?

Maybe what they want is just a reduction of their chest, right?

There's a lot of people who just get top surgery and keep it there.

And I think that we should be more embracing of that, not less, right?

And I think that that's kind of one of the cool things that we do learn from people who detransition is that you don't need to do all of these things.

And I understand actually how some people could think, well, I don't want to have boobs.

Maybe that makes me a trans guy, right?

Like, I think we need wider, more inclusive conversations about gender and gender expression and what transition can look like, not less.

We, you know, and I think really what Maya is advocating for is not helpful.

Well, up until this point, Maya has been using the name and still Maya uses the name Maya Poet.

And in a lot of press opportunities, she simply goes by by Maya, which I find really bizarre.

Like, not that I look to the New York Post for any sort of like editorial standard, but when they did this exclusive profile on Maya Poet, they simply refer to her the entire time as Maya, a 25-year-old detransitioner.

And it's like a full-blown piece about her life.

And like, they never inquire about her last name.

And the internet starts asking questions like, okay, this person is accruing sort of a following among the right-wing press and its audience.

Who the hell is Maya Poet actually?

And so internet sleuths discover that Maya Poet's real last name is Abruzese.

Ooh, Abruzese.

That's a great name.

Abruzese.

Abruzese.

Where's that from?

Well, she's the daughter of Jenya Abruzese, who is the co-founder of SEGM or the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine.

Okay.

Which is an anti-trans lobbying and advocacy group, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group and a quote-unquote hub of pseudoscience.

And so,

first of all, I do believe this is our first case of an anti-trans nepo-grifter.

Yeah, I mean, that also would explain it.

You know, they didn't really need to be good at telling their story.

They just needed some money from daddy.

Her mom has really campaigned hard against trans rights.

Like, they have both spoken at that Gen Spec conference.

And it's like, okay, the the pieces are fitting together now it is kind of weird because it's the way that like sometimes like nepo babies in hollywood like will go out of their way to not talk about their famous family members it is like literally that for the anti-trans space

but to me when i you know i've been really attuned to this person's life and grift over like i said like the last five months as they've continued to go viral but when i found this out i got like actually very sad for the first time for them because like we know from their own story that Maya grew up, you know, with parents who didn't accept her when she came out as trans.

But we did not know that her mother is like a literal established, full-time career anti-trans activist.

And that makes me sad.

Yeah.

I mean, there's probably a reason why they felt that way and went down the path they did.

We'll never know probably like what the actual deal is inside of this family, but a very possible conclusion that arose to me was like, oh, maybe this is someone who is trans.

Yeah, it's possible.

And whose parents are just really that awful and also presenting them with a job opportunity if they fall in line, you know, who knows?

And a hallmark of, you know, things and people we talk about on this podcast are people who do harm politically onto others and who are also very harmed and sort of tragic in their own right.

And one does not excuse the other, but perhaps explains it.

And when I learned this about her mother, I was like, oh, you're like, this is tragic.

Definitely.

If my parents were obsessed with

evidence-based gender medicine and like really all it was was them hating trans people like professionally, that would, yeah.

I think those people have to be one of the least pleasant people to be around.

Because how do we even get into that?

How do you even start?

Because here's, here's my big annoyance with all of this, right?

Like I turned 35 this year.

I transitioned a while ago.

I've been on HRT for pretty much my entire adult life.

I'm happy.

I'm content.

I feel very at home in my body.

I love my body.

Show it off too much, actually, I'd say.

It's one of those things where people are so obsessed with the narrative that trans people live these unhappy, miserable lives.

And yes, existing in a culture that is as transphobic as ours will make life not so easy, right?

But I think people aren't, and this is, there's a reason for this, people aren't as privy to the fact that many transgender people live comfortable, happy, content lives.

I say there's a reason for it because while to my point earlier, a lot of trans people, when we transition, the goal for a lot of us is to kind of like fade into the background.

Like we're not going to try to draw attention to ourselves necessarily.

I do because I've I've been doing YouTube for most of my life and I've accepted that it's something that is helpful for me to talk about.

And that's why I make content about it.

But there aren't very many people who make content from the perspective of being a happy and content person who transitioned and has been out as trans for a really long time and is functional and happy and living and not in a situation where everything is just so terrible and sad for them.

So much of the transphobic argument relies on the narrative of trans people being in a perpetually low place in society.

And it's sad to me because really it all boils down to like the worst thing that Maya apparently could have done was to be someone who was designated female at birth who bound their chest.

The way they're trying to present it as if that was like the worst thing ever,

a trauma that they survived, right?

There's reasons for that.

There's reasons for that.

Really, a lot of this boils down to people just being upset with people deviating from gender norm.

You know, it's not a coincidence that these conversations are being had alongside conversations about how women need to go back to the kitchen, stop having so many abortions, and start living in a way where they're submissive to men.

These conversations are related.

I've very rarely seen the people who are this obsessed with trans people.

I've very rarely seen those people be liberated from the idea of gender roles and expectations.

Very rarely.

And if they are, they're people like Ariel Scarcella who delusionally believe that they'll be an exception, right?

Some of the like queer grifters for this are really funny to me because especially the LGB, the LGB ones don't recognize that even though it doesn't seem like this, you being a woman who's attracted to women, that's, in in many people's opinion you deviating away from gender norm right hard to see it right now but the end of the conversation will always be and you also need to be heterosexual and perform your role in society where you are only available to men and only used as a a womb for white children frankly that's why so many of these grifters are like white women too because D-transitioners come in all shades, you know, like a lot of the D-transitioners that I follow are people who are not white, right?

But they'll promote the white ones because it fits into this conversation they're trying to have about how white women need to go back and to stop doing this whole liberation thing.

And I know people don't like see those connections, but what is the name of the book?

I wish I could remember it.

There's a very popular D-trans book that has like a baby on it, and there's like a hole where the baby's womb is, right?

And it's a little white baby.

And of course, they fixate on, well, if you take testosterone, it's going to make it so that you can't have children.

Now, any trans man who's ever been on T knows that T is not birth control and that you can still get pregnant.

You know, it's a little bit harder, but you can still get pregnant.

But the fixation of trans people, the reason they say that HRT is one of the most damaging things is always on procreation, you know, you going infertile, you becoming infertile.

And it's ironic because trans people people still have children.

Trans people still get pregnant.

They still, you know, impregnate people.

Like it's not a thing.

But the narrative is so fixated on that.

And HRT being the thing that like ruins it because they're focused on returning women back to a particular role and forcing them to stay there.

Right.

That's why these motherfuckers are talking about how, oh, we need to incentivize towns where women are having children that are more family-oriented, you know, all of this shit.

It's all about that.

It's all about that.

And so, a lot of people are going, they're going to sign on to all this transphobia.

And the grifters are always going to stand there as like representations of lost women who eventually came back, running from rockets into womanhood, right?

That's why they're promoting it.

That's why they're paying for it.

Because it actually doesn't matter whether or not trans people are harmed by their access to HRT.

We already know the reality, which is that medical transition is like the treatment for gender dysphoria and that it is actually only helpful to a trans person's survival for them to transition.

But it doesn't matter if it's actually good or not because that's not their focus.

They don't actually care about these trans people.

I kind of wanted to round this out with one other point that I had while looking at this whole Maya poet situation, which was, you know, I talk about grifters of all flavors on this podcast.

Someone close to me recently actually told me that they thought my podcast was like a study in grifter anthropology, which I thought was a huge compliment.

You know, I'm always interested in who these people are, what part of their soul they might be selling, and notably what they're getting in return for it.

You know, Ollie London gets a book deal.

Candace Owens becomes a conservative media superstar.

Riley Gaines gets to whisper in the ear of the president of the United States.

And so does Chloe Cole, for that matter.

But what's becoming clear to me as I chronicle these people is that they're doing this for less and less power and money.

You know, Maya Poet has gone viral basically every day over the last five or six months, mostly because she's funny.

And

the way she's trying to make her grift creative and different by incorporating this whole like Hamas slash ISIS thing is so absurd that people love to laugh at her.

And, you know, us included.

Is she a comedian?

No, but she probably could be and perhaps should be.

But for all of this, she hasn't cracked 30,000 Twitter followers.

So many people are trying to hop on this conservative grift wagon that I think it's become like oversaturated.

Because all of these people are saying the same thing, right?

They're all saying.

exactly what they think conservatives want to hear which to your point cat is this return to this like gender essentialist women get back to the home and start popping out white conservative children, men go to work and be big and strong.

And it's like, there's only so many new and creative ways that you can present that information and present yourself as like an interesting chess piece in that conversation before there are no more spots for Charlie Kirk to dole out to you, right?

And so I look at Maya poet attempting to differentiate herself in this like D-trans Griff space by being like, I'm a D-transitioner who also loves Israel and survived October 7th.

And it's like, none of that's true.

And even if it was, which a lot of conservatives seem to believe it is, it's still not good enough for you to achieve any sort of fame.

Yeah, that is the sad part.

I have noticed that a lot of these people don't get a lot back.

But you know what?

Here's the thing I will say: like, we're thinking about this as creators now.

And I, as a person who does public speaking, this is just, this is the reality of it.

Maya poet, she's leaning into those things because that is what makes her unique.

And if she leans into those things, she can get invited to israeli conferences she can also get invited to the anti-trans conferences and that will work really well for her what doesn't really work really well for her is that to your point it is kind of oversaturated at this point right and there will be frankly uh a detransitioner who appeals a bit more to the the lens that these people want frankly who will do much better one who is less visually non-binary theater kid you said it not me okay

you know okay if you look at the people that end up getting like at the top of the fucking you know conservative whatever whatever they all have a look they have a vibe

they've been made in the same factory i'll just say and i think the people who end up kind of becoming known are either really unique in their like their way of being like ariel scarcella and blair white for example blair white has medically transitioned we know that that makes a lot of what she's saying so useful, right?

We know that Ariel Skircella is a lesbian.

It's obvious, right?

So

yes, yes.

So

when she's saying all of this anti-LGBT shit for the audience, they love that.

Candace Owens, despite her best efforts, is a black woman, right?

So she's going to get a lot because she's a visibly black woman saying anti-black bullshit.

So people like Maya, they're not as unique as they actually need to be in order to really capitalize on this shit.

Maya has the benefit of having nepotism, frankly, but I'm only but so familiar with the detransitioner grifters.

I'm sure the ones that are a bit more successful look a certain way, you know, because all these people really want, I mean, they're so, they're so capitalistic, they're so weird and shallow.

Like the things that they want to see, it's a very particular look.

Like, Ollie London, right, was able to be heard because Ollie London fucking went under the knife and like did it.

There's like a weird area that some people are able to exist in where they're able to take their experience and use it to like make what they're saying more entertaining, I guess you could say, to the people that are watching.

And unfortunately, I think there's going to be better D-transitioners that are going to take the spot.

America's next top D transgression.

Transitioner.

I want to see that show.

Tell us in what way.

I want to hear the unique story of how the woke agenda got to you.

I want to hear it.

Ollie London's drag race.

Yeah.

I would love to be a judge on that show.

I want to hear the sob story.

And then I want to be there when Maya pulls out like, yeah, well, I was, I was there on October 7th in Israel.

You you know I just want to like you know and everyone

I want like no because I'm so bored by half of these these narratives because it is just like a mishmash of what conservatives want to hear and like over exaggerations and it's so boring and if I feel that way I know the audience got to feel that way Wow I didn't think we would end this episode at a place of like advice for future D-trans grifters do something more interesting than October 7th Yes.

I want you to be at a terrorist attack.

I want you to have had bottom surgery of phalloplasty.

I want for you to have a tragic story about recognizing how you will never actually be a man.

Give me the drama.

Give me, you know, like we need literal Amelia Perez.

I do.

We need a literal former cartel leader who faked her own death.

Yes.

Yes.

And you, and you became trans in order to avoid like some human trafficking situation.

I want to hear it all

i desperately want better stories and it makes me kind of sad that these people they have such a a low like that's the thing that gets me these these the people who are really entertained by conservative media i'm like your standards are so low that the stories you guys clap they're budget stories that show during the daytime they're not very good but for some reason like

I was fifth place at a swimming meet and that that is a compelling fucking story to you.

I was a few cities away while a terrorist attack happened.

And I had to run to my bomb shelter.

And I couldn't grab my binder.

And that's a compelling story to people.

It's sad, the lack of taste that people have these days, frankly.

Not to sound like too much of an elitist, but make your detransition story more compelling, please.

Please.

You know, I like to end these episodes with giving people a little bit of a takeaway.

And when I do episodes that really focus on grifters, I'm not trying to reach Maya Poet and be like, I think you should ground yourself in a reality.

I don't have anything to say to Maya Poet, nor do I have anything to say to like Riley Gaines.

But I feel like my advice, and you tell me what you think, is more aimed at audiences.

Like, I think the purpose of talking about this stuff, generally speaking, is just to shed light on the fact that these sort of right-wing ecosystems are filled to the brim with bullshit stories about bullshit people with the ultimate goal of like taking people's rights away.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I feel like you just have to create a more cynical audience to be like, wait a minute, what am I actually consuming?

Did that happen?

And what's the goal here?

Yeah.

And you know, the thing that is unfortunate is that a lot of people,

they are ignorant about trans people.

And for a lot of them, they will never know a trans person.

They will never meet a trans person.

They will only ever hear about the few trans people who get presented to them.

And I do feel the need to point out that quite frequently, people are invested in negatively representing transgender people.

And most trans people who exist are probably not drawing attention to themselves in the way that they would like for you to believe.

And I want for some people to be a bit more critical and more thoughtful about that.

thoughtful about the fact that there are people who are really invested in making you have a negative opinion about trans folks.

There are several detransitioners who make content about their experiences.

They share their experiences very honestly without a desire to gain a right-wing audience and become known as a right-wing, you know, detransitioner.

There are people who genuinely have things to say about their complex experience, being a person who medically transitioned and then detransitioned, right?

Like there are some very important conversations to be had.

And I want for people to be a bit more invested in finding those conversations.

I want for people to be a bit more interested in not just believing the propaganda.

There's too many people who are empowered to represent us for us.

And I want for people to recognize, at least for now, you do have access to trans creators who are speaking about their experiences, detrans creators who are also speaking about their experiences.

I made a video on my channel where I kind of talk about my experiences with detransitioning and not me detransitioning, but other detransitioners that I've known and kind of the things that I've recognized from them because the narrative is very different.

Like there are conversations to be had about detransitioning, but these grifters aren't having them because they're trying to have a completely different conversation, which has a lot of,

it's about trans people, but it's not really about trans people, you know?

And that's kind of what I wish more people were aware of.

People who are invested in the gender binary and shaming people for veering outside of it are generally invested in some politics that are not good for anyone, really, women especially.

That's part of why I get kind of sad when turfs go the way they do.

Because if you think that these people who support this shit are going to also not turn around and say, and also women shouldn't have rights anymore, and also women shouldn't be able to vote, you're delusional.

You know, you know, if that's, it's going to happen.

It's going to happen.

It is happening.

And if you must, if you absolutely must become a right-wing detrans influencer just get a little more creative you know get the juice in you before you go down that path and give us something give us something to talk about give us something to sink our teeth into

i want a better story i want to i will i will be grading the story so um cat black will be here grading papers

Just pull pull on my heartstrings.

Don't just like repeat the same script.

Come on, give us something new.

Give us something new.

Kat, thank you so much for being here today and shedding your 20 years of trans creator wisdom on the Abit Fruity podcast.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

I will continue to act like I have only been here but so long because I don't want to...

I don't want to acknowledge that it's been 20 years, but it has.

I can't deny it anymore.

But thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

Where can people find more of you?

Well, I'm predominantly a YouTuber.

so mostly on YouTube.

Youtube.com slash catblack, K-A-T-B-L-A-Q-U-E.

Also, sometimes TikTok, but my TikTok is kind of messy.

TikTok is where I think out loud and sometimes say unpopular things.

So, so yeah, but my YouTube is probably the best place to see me.

And thank you so much.

If you have made it to this point in the episode, I am so appreciative.

I hope it was, you know, thoughtful.

I hope you could laugh a little bit.

I'm trying to laugh as as much as I can these days, and I love you.

And again, if you want to hang out in person and I'm coming to your city, check the link for the tour in the bio.

Tickets are available.

And if I'm not coming to your city yet, there is a place on the tour website for you to request your city because we're figuring out where we should go.

And by we, I mean me.

I love making it sound like I have a bigger team than I do.

Can't wait to edit this myself later.

I love you all so much, and until next time, stay fruity.