Imara Jones: Hey TransLash family. It’s me, Imara Jones. Welcome to the TransLash podcast, a show where we tell trans stories to save trans lives. Well, this is the beginning of pride month, a time when we share the best of ourselves and our community boldly, loudly, and brightly. Now, I know for many of y’all, for many of us actually, pride can bring up so many different emotions, but it’s generally a good time and one where we lean in to joy and what’s best.
But this pride is a little different. We’re all still reeling from the terrible attack and of all day and as if the murder, the slaughter of 19 children and 2 adults, trying to protect them, wasn’t enough and of course, the dozens of people who were injured, many of whom at the time of this recording remain in hospital. If all that wasn’t enough, we then had to endure a terrible event online where group of people decided to use this terrible attack as a way to come after trans people to say that somehow trans people were responsible for this horrible event. And not only did this remain online. It’s also filtered up into the wider and real world, leading to an attack on a trans teen in Texas. Now, to be honest, all of this had me worried. And so, that’s why I decided to talk to journalist, Sydney Bauer to help us unpack through her vast knowledge of this online realm and network, what’s behind all of this, and what it means for our community.
But because joy is important, even when things are dark, especially during pride month, we’re still going to celebrate this week with some trans joy.
Imara: Something that always brings me joy, our Everton ideas, which helped make schools be safe for Trans and non-binary youth. These educational resources create more space for Trans people in our society. And this week, I wanted to highlight some of this work and the amazing member of our community who’s helping us understand it all. CJ Miller is an artist, educator, and organizer, who’s the author of a new piece in TransLash’s writing platform news and narrative about how we can make teaching and classroom supportive for trans and non-binary youth. Here’s what they have to say.
CJ Miller: There’s just ways in which being trans, being non-binary, being intersex gives us the opportunity to sort of like put on these glasses to see the world in sort of a different way. I think it’s a little bit of a superpower to be able to, like, have our perception. It really provides an opportunity for these kids, I think to see themselves in someone or to see someone holding this tender carrying position of cultural importance. I think having that shared experience and having faith and trust in a shared reality where these kids won’t be like gas-lit or denied a receptive ear to these issues or these things that come up the good, the like beautiful, and exciting, as well as the like painful and difficult, think having someone who has like a shared reality with you is like, so huge for providing that space for kids to feel comfortable sharing their experience.
Imara: CJ, you and the educational innovations that you are highlighting are trans joy.
Sydney Bauer is a transgender journalist and researcher based in Atlanta Georgia, where I grew up, whose work focuses on the Genesis of anti-trans rhetoric, online harassment, and legislation. She was particularly interested in the ecosystem which feeds what we have labeled here at TransLash as the anti-trans hate machine and in full disclosure helps us with this series. Sydney has written for the Daily Beast, Have post, the New Republic, and then about the impact of these efforts on our community. Sydney is also a sports writer. Something I have no knowledge about sports, having actually began her career as a sports journalist. Sydney, thank you so much for joining us today.
Sydney Bauer: Yeah thank you for having me on.
Imara: So you’ve done a lot of reporting about the way that the right works in this country and the way in which that hate is starting to spill out online as well, including directed at trans people and you’ve also been a part of helping us understand this entire world as our TransLash, human TransLash reporting over the last year or so. That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to be sure to talk to you about this and to get your expertise because it’s vital for us. Before we get into the specifics of this case,uhm, and what happened and what it may mean for our future, can you just paint a picture for us of what the dark internet is and how it is working to put trans people in danger?
Sydney: Yeah. The biggest thing to know is there are these websites out there where people congregate and they’re allowed to be anonymous. It’s sites like 4chan and what was once 8chan and they share information, trying to manipulate how people discuss certain issues for their own entertainment, which is what trolling is.
They get together and they go.” Okay, let’s blame this person for so-and-so and it’s gonna be a trans person” because they know there’s enough media and commentators and pundits that will fall for this. And they’ve become incredibly successful at getting staff for politicians and journalists to monitor these boards to believe what they’re saying. So that this discourse kind of jumps from like this fever swamp of anonymous posts that disappear after a short period of time and in-jokes amongst these people to being discussed in the news media and politicians making statements saying it’s a trans person who committed so and so we need to bring America back to godliness and stop this disease which is transgender people and their ideology. Does that make sense?
Imara: Sadly it does. Can you tell us when you first noticed this pipeline of misinformation and hate starting, this whole ecosystem that you’ve laid out?
Sydney: Well, I mean I think this ecosystem has been around much longer than people realize. I mean it’s been over a decade at this point. 4chan has been around forever and it always was kind of seen by people on the fringes as this area that was successfully cordoned off and not really part of the mainstream internet and culture makers and so on and so forth.
But I think the biggest turning point had to have been in 2014 with something called gamergate, which was this scandal where this one Indie video game developer developed a game, and then some journalists trashed it and the reviewer at one point was dating the developer and started to go on and accusing her of like trading sex for good reviews which then broke off into the mainstream through a website called Breitbart with a quote-unquote journalist named “Milo Gianopoulos” who covered this like it was breaking news and tried to expose this cabal of female game developers that were undermining a historically male industry,
And it just became this pile-on of people that was relentless and no one stopped it and it kind of made some careers out of these right-wing commentators who turned this into a story and got people to believe them when in reality it was just unending unrelenting harassment towards women in this industry and other minorities as well. And that let the containment out and changed how people experience Twitter. It was never a great platform and people were constantly at risk at it, especially minorities and marginalized groups. But this turned it from beneath social website that journalists use to monitor breaking news at a very fast piece to a culture maker where you could become an internet celebrity overnight and posturing is an authoritative voice and using that in a very scary way against people.
Imara: So you painted sort of the timeline and how all this happened. So for me with regards to the Valdez shooting,
I was following the horrific news about the murder of these children, you know, dozens, dozens more in the hospital. And then very late that night, maybe around midnight, someone from my team sent me these pictures from 4chan, of the way in which people were starting to, as you say, congregate there and to say that the shooter was trans.
And I began to be really alarmed and horrified and I am wondering. When did you pick up on this? And what was your reaction as a person who follows this when you first began to see the same?
Sydney: It was pretty much almost immediately that people on 4chan started to try and spread around the internet, that the shooter was a trans person. And I remember seeing it a couple hours after the shooting and seeing people share the Reddit post that this person had been making being like, I don’t live in Texas. I am alive. I am a different person. Please stop connecting me to this, and this person eventually talked to, like, NBC and they were like, this is not the first time that people on 4chan of accused me of really heinous things. They had this person’s pictures from different points in their transition and basically would just go and try and connect them to different parts of different things to demonize them. And that’s just the way that a lot of people on 4chan who were these really, these trolls, they operate. It was alarming to see how different more quote-unquote “mainstream people” picked up on this and started referencing these photos, but not outright saying it.
As in, you know, Candace Owens doing and representative Paul Gosar from Arizona who is one of the most far-right politicians on the planet. The way that it spread from just being a trolling operation that’s coordinated, like a lot of things are, to a talking point by far-right commentators was very alarming.
Imara: When you first saw those pictures, what was your gut reaction? What was your feeling when you began to see the shooter being portrayed as someone who’s trans?
Sydney: Yeah. I mean, I just want to say these are my personal feeling.
Imara: That’s what we’re asking [Laughter]
Sydney: And [Laughter] I mean I was afraid. I was just afraid that other trans people were going to be harassed because of this and that ended up happening which is terrifying because people who don’t have the media literacy of understanding what is, you know, a rolling campaign, are going to read this and they’re gonna say that we’re evil. And they’re gonna demonize our community far beyond this one photo that was being shared.
And I’m just afraid of people, especially in Texas right now because the government is coming after trans kids. That is, that’s not my opinion. That is the actual facts on the ground. They’ve been investigating trans kids and families for providing gender-affirming care but the facts remain. This is a state that has used state resources to investigate trans children. Things are not safe for a lot of families of trans kids in Texas and now you have internet trolls, trying to paint this heinous crime as someone from the trans community doing that. That creates a volatile situation that is terrifying to watch play out.
Imara: For me, as I began to look further into this. There began to be actually pretty good reporting from Newsweek from NBC news about the fact that the shooter Salvador Ramos was being portrayed online as a trans person and that a person by the name of Sam who is a trans person who’s experienced multiple harassment, was the person who is being used as the source material for doctoring photos and all of the rest of it.
And then what shocked me is how despite some of that early online reporting, representative Paul Gosar, who is labeled as one of the most conservative members in Congress by conservatives, [Small laughs] began to say early on that this person was trans. He actually said, quote in a tweet, “It’s a transsexual leftist illegal alien named Salvador Ramos.” And I’m wondering, how does that happen with such speed? How does it go from its on 4chan and then there’s reporting even early on saying, hey, this is happening, it’s false? But then, despite that, a congressperson picks this up and tweets it out, and then, you know, it went like wildfire on conservative websites and even other people like Hennis Owens and it happened within hours.
Sydney: Yeah. So I think it’s important to know that there’s an infrastructure here behind all this. So most people don’t realize that you know, they’re sitting congressperson and I mean, this is the case for some people is not the one tweeting everything out on their official accounts. They have staff that handle this but in 2022, politics is very reactive. It’s not very proactive these days. Otherwise, you would be seeing lots of legislation being passed. You would have platforms from the 2020 election, coming to fruition. The government process that you learned in by fourth-grade civics class, growing up happening, but because of social media politics has become very reactive where politicians are constantly positioning themselves with messages after things happen in real-time.
And, you know, frankly, I hope that we get to see some reporting to see how government officials were going through and we figure out where their staff is finding this information because it’s very clear that someone saw this in his office, flagged it to either him or someone else and was like we gotta get on message about this. We don’t like trans people. We have advocated against them before, so this plays into our policy positions.
So now we tweet this out and conservative media over the last 40 to 50 years has evolved from mail and letters from the John Birch Society to a full-fledged ecosystem with tons of right-wing websites that aggregate reporting from different areas and get it out at breakneck speed so that the talking points then get filtered, so you have websites that are On The Fringe like Infowars and then different websites such as let’s say, like the post-millennial, for example, we’ll sanitize it and aggregate that reporting, going to find the original sources on these websites like 4chan. And then you have websites like The Daily Wire that aggregate that reporting and continue to site saying, we’re not exactly sure where this is from but this is what the internet is talking about. Here are Twitter posts about it. So you have people on Twitter that aren’t fact-checkers, tweeting about this. Then right-wing websites taking that and talking about people online, having conversations about this, which then slowly gets filtered down and down to, you know, something like Tucker Carlson in his monologues, which is how you get him talking about the great Replacement Theory, and how he sanitizes that for his audience and talks about it constantly. So there’s an entire media ecosystem where more and more reputable outlets take the aggregate reporting from less reputable places. Sanitize it, keeps the message, and essentially filters it down into talking points which then get used by other politicians because they’re seeing it on the more media literate websites.
Imara: Yeah, and we should say that some of these sites are not just one off even though Daily Wire sounds like it’s just one of these random right-wing websites. It’s actually an arm of the Heritage Foundation, which we reported last year as a part of the anti-trans hate machines. So it’s a way in which all of these things are working together.
Sydney: Exactly. So websites like that, and websites like the Federalist. They get money from a lot of these organizations but they say that they maintain their editorial independence, and they serve as part of a larger ecosystem, even if The Newsroom is not getting fed talking points from the Heritage Foundation.
Imara: So, is this a blip? Do you think that this situation is just another eruption of this dark corner of the internet, this organized ecosystem that’s just putting something out, or do you think that this is perhaps a harbinger? Is it a sign of perhaps a new threat for trans people?
Sydney: I don’t wanna say it’s a blimp. So I would say that these very far fringe websites do this stuff all the time and there was a line by Steve Bannon when he was running the Trump campaign. He said that his goal was to flood the zone with shit. Basically, what he’s saying is his strategy was to put so much news out there at all times that people don’t know what to believe is the actual news and what is part of their agenda. So that’s how these trolling campaigns operate and sometimes things break through, which we saw with this one. And I think it was telling that it was a hoax about a trans person committing mass murder because you’re seeing in state legislatures across the country, so much anti-trans legislation, which has built up continuously over the last 5 years after hb2 was defeated in North Carolina, the Bathroom Bill. Businesses spoke out against that. So then the right in this country, kind of pivoted to how it was going to approach that legislation going forward. And for 5 straight years, they have been pushing different bills and have had probably their most successful legislative session in terms of stripping trans people’s rights this past year. So this hoax coinciding with that, I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Maybe this was the time when people start to see finally, oh, this is what’s going on. It’s coordinated. Hopefully, it won’t happen in the future.
Imara: You have been ringing the alarm about this ecosystem.
We’ve been working on, doing the same about kind of broader inputs into this world. And so I’m wondering what you hope is the change that results from this potential understanding of this threat that you are outlining, like what do you hope is the thing that shifts as a result of this being so clear?
Sydney: I mean, I personally hope that people understand the asymmetrical aspects of political life in America right now and how that plays at a national level and what the implications of that are. We don’t have the same coordination at state and local levels in the 2 major parties in the United States and that has shown itself at the national level with the struggles to pass an agenda, even getting a slim majority. It’s almost like the car is in neutral and one side is slamming the gas trying to get things done and then the other side is tinkering in the hood. You know, setting themselves up for when they’re the drivers of the car and their agenda will have essentially already been passed through using the courts using state legislatures, undermining things. So, they can just push the car over a cliff because the politicians in charge believe in the status quo because they have no reason not to because they’ve been elected. They have this power and it’s always been that way their entire life. Whereas a lot of young people have seen the political reality and how our institutions have allowed this political reality to flourish, you know, they understand what the implications of that are.
Throughout American history, we’ve seen consequential elections that are realignments, 1968 being one. Before that, 1932 when FDR was elected, for example, and a lot of people thought 2020 was going to be that after what 2016 was, but now we’re starting to see this can getting kicked down the road, a little longer. And I think a lot of people especially trans people are scared that there aren’t politicians willing to meet the moment to go above and beyond and say we need to make wholesale changes to the way that we operate to protect us. So we’ll see what happens.
Imara: And what do you think that trans people can do to protect ourselves? What can people do to try to fortify themselves against this kind of online organized cesspool that’s designed to frighten and to put people in danger?
Sydney: We have to rely on each other. First of all, community is huge and we have to work together to push back and most importantly people outside our community need to step up. Trans people take care of each other and we care about each other. And we have these mutual aid infrastructure to always take care of our own and really work with each other, and let that flourish, and that’s great, but at the end of the day, we can do everything we want and work as hard as possible to fix it. But until people outside our community are, are willing to show that they’re gonna lay themselves on the line to step up for us, I’m not sure what will change.
Imara: Yeah. And it’s really hard with regards to the way in which we engage the internet because, for so many of us, the internet is the way that we find community, that we connect with people. The place where so many trans people have told me that they’ve been able to make it through the pandemic is through online engagements. And yet, at the same time, there’s a part of the internet that is making it unwittingly I would assume also throughout the rhythms at these major companies, a place that is also unsafe for us. So it’s a very tricky place for us to be in with regards to what’s happening on the internet.
Sydney: Yeah, I mean, we need to push back against this always and, you know, there are reporters doing that and their prominent trans people consistently denouncing the stuff and saying this and begging people to listen. And you know, you can only do so much. So the internet is a tool to push back and it’s being done. It just people need to listen.
Imara: That’s a perfect place for us to end and we hope that people listen to everything that you have connected for us today. I appreciate everything that you’ve said because it’s helped me to frame this in a way to be able to understand that this is, as you say, a part of an organized effort and is very much in line with these political efforts that are all a part of the same mechanism that we’ve been working to spotlight. And so I want to thank you for helping us do that. And for all of your help and helping us as a TransLash to understand this world and now our audience. So appreciate it. Thank you so much, Sydney. And of course, please be safe.
Sydney: Thank you for having me. And I just want to stress that you know, the work is being done by so many, so many people giving me the platform to connect some dots for y’all. I wanted to just thank the people that are constantly monitoring these sites that are bringing attention to it. It makes it easier for someone like me to be able to follow along and without them, we wouldn’t be able to do this. So God bless them and their mental health for getting through and finding this stuff and highlighting it.
Imara: Of course. Of course. Thank you so much.
Sydney: Thank you.
Imara: Thank you so much for listening to the TransLash podcast and stick around all the way to the end for something special. You can listen to TransLash wherever you get your podcast. Check us out on the web at translash.org. To sign up for our Weekly Newsletter, follow us on Twitter and Instagram at TransLash media. Like us on Facebook, and everywhere else, and tell your friends.
The TransLash podcast is produced by TransLash media, the TransLash team includes Oliver-Ash Kleine and Kelly Right, who’s sadly, this is their last episode that they’re producing today. Our interrn is Morano Munzenberg. Xander Adams is a contributing producer to the show and our digital strategy is handled by Daniela Capistrano. The music you heard was composed by Ben Draghi and also courtesy of ZZK Records. The TransLash podcast is made possible by the support of foundations and listeners like you.
Imara: This week, I, I mean probably next week. I’m looking forward to seeing the result of this entire effort that I did with Logo. They selected me as 3430 during pride month which is cool. But we filmed like all this video and like the psychedelic room with like floor from Alice in Wonderland and glitter and obvious like a lot of stuff going on, really ornate chairs, on top of that. So, I’m actually looking forward to seeing what that video looks like. I have no idea. I was getting directions like blow kisses and you know, make dramatic arm movements so I’m actually excited to see what that is like and also excited to see what other people’s videos turn out from this effort that we did. So be sure to check out Logos 3034 pride and tell me what you think of my performance in a second Alice in Wonderland room.
And also be sure to subscribe to Kelly Right’s podcast. Chris waning, of course, I’ve mentioned a couple of times that Kelly is moving on from TransLash sadly, to bigger and better things and alongside of that, produce terrific media for our community through career spending. So make sure that you subscribe for that. Have a safe pride month y’all and we have 2 more programs this month and we’ll be bringing you some great conversations and topics. Hopefully a lot, a lot less heavy.
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