Transcript
music
Gentle, trilling music with a steady drumbeat plays under the dialogue.
promo
Speaker: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR. [Music fades out.]
music
“Huddle Formation” from the album Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team. A fast, upbeat, peppy song. Music plays as Jesse speaks, then fades out.
jesse thorn
It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. Dianna E. Anderson, my guest, wrote a book. I think you should check it out. It’s called In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies. As the title suggests, the book is an exploration of nonbinary identity. It sort of decodes the usually very academic theory on that subject, breaks down how nonbinary people fit in with other queer and trans communities and the world at large. It’s also a bit of a memoir covering how Dianna themself came out as nonbinary. Dianna is a writer and former professor. They’ve written books about feminism and Christianity, and they came out as nonbinary later in life as people around them explored identities other than man and woman. Dianna realized the nonbinary label fit them better than either of those alternatives. [Music fades in.] Dianna’s normally based in Minneapolis. I was really grateful that they stopped by our LA studios to talk with us. Let’s get into it: my interview with Dianna E. Anderson.
music
Relaxed jazz with a steady beat.
jesse
Dianna, welcome to Bullseye! I’m so happy to have you on the show.
dianna e. anderson
I am so happy to be here!
jesse
So, I really enjoyed the book. I really got a lot out of it. I wanna start with some real basics. You’re nice enough to throw a glossary in about ten pages into the book. [Dianna confirms.] So, let’s talk about a few terms that some of our listeners might be familiar with, some might not be. First of all, let’s talk about what nonbinary means. And we can get into the depths of what nonbinary means later.
dianna
[Chuckles.] Yeah! So, there are three different terms when it comes to gender, generally. There’s cisgender, which means that your mental sense of your gender matches with what you were assigned at birth. When the doctor pulled you out and said, “It’s a boy!” And you grew up to be a boy. That’s cisgender. Transgender is somebody who has transitioned away from their assigned gender at birth and usually to being a man, if they were a woman—if they were assigned female—and the opposite way. And then nonbinary is sort of the catchall for everything in between. Not a man, not a woman, somebody who doesn’t feel they are part of that gender binary where we have two separate boxes and never the twain shall meet. Nonbinary goes hey! I’m gonna pull them together and meet them or I’m going to do my own other thing.
jesse
And forgive me for asking you to explain things that are annoying to explain. [Dianna laughs.] But tell me a little bit—for anyone who might be listening and might not know—what the relationship between gender identities and gender expressions, the things that we were just talking about, and sexual identities is.
dianna
Yeah, sexual identity who you are attracted to, who you want to either be in romantic relationships with or sexual relationships with. And sometimes, those can differ. Or it can be that you have none of that and you’re aromantic or asexual, which is part of the queer community. And gender identity is how you interact with gendered systems. How you develop your sense of self. The shorthand that some people use is sexual identity is who you go to bed with, and gender identity is who you go to bed as. Which I think is a neat little term.
jesse
Okay, let’s talk a little bit about you and your life. As a person who has occasionally received less than friendly communications from what they call TERFs on the internet, I was surprised and delighted to read you [chuckles] beginning the personal narrative in this book with a story about being a girl or having—presuming yourself to be a girl and climbing trees. [They chuckle.] This is like the classic example that people who—that certain groups of people who are opposed to transgender identities bring up. What was your experience as someone who thought of herself as a girl and climbed trees as a kid?
dianna
Yeah, I say in the book that like when I heard what the term “tomboy” meant, I was like, “That’s me. That’s it.” And I realized, as I’ve grown up, as I’ve looked back on childhood, a lot of my interaction with my gender was me trying to figure out what rules I could follow to correctly perform it for people. And I saw myself as a girl because that’s what was available to me. I didn’t have any other language. And by the time that language came around, I was so deeply invested in the gender system that I couldn’t imagine myself as anything else. And it took a lot of unlearning and unpacking to undo that. But I start with the tree example because I think it’s a good example of how I saw myself not as a necessarily gendered being in a lot of ways, but how I had those rules put upon me. My mom would dress me up nicely for church. And then right after, I’d go climb the tree and scuff my shoes. And a lot of trans people reach for those sorts of metaphors. A lot of trans and nonbinary people need those sorts of metaphors, because we don’t have the language necessarily to describe the incongruence that we feel with what we’ve been told we are and how we act or how we see ourselves. And so, these metaphors of, “Oh, I was a person who climbed trees all the time. I was a girl who didn’t like girly things,” are the closest things that we have to communicate that language to others. Because we’re fundamentally trying to communicate an internal experience to somebody who’s not experiencing that.
jesse
Did you know queer people when you were a teenager or young adult?
dianna
We had one gay kid in my high school that I knew of. And he had bright pink hair and I did not realize he was gay until somebody told me. It was Sioux Falls, South Dakota. There’s not—it’s a very small population and there weren’t a lot of out queer kids, for good reason. Because South Dakota is a very conservative area, very—it’s sort of like the northern bible belt in a lot of ways. So, it’s something where queerness wasn’t a thing I was exposed to. Or if I was exposed to it, it was in negative terms. And so, it took me a very long time to come about to realizing that that category included me.
jesse
To what extent was queerness something that you were—you know—explicitly warned against or that was—you know—addressed directly by people around you in negative ways? And to what extent was it just something that was invisible to you because you—you know, just didn’t know people who were out?
dianna
It was very much cast negatively. I was—you know, late ’90s, Will & Grace was one of the most popular shows on TV, and my aunt and uncle—I remember I was visiting them, and an episode of Will & Grace was on, and they were like, “Oh, those gay people.” Like, making negative comments about them. Never like using slurs, because they were people who didn’t use that language. But the tone was still very much that sort of language. And while my parents didn’t talk about gay people in that way, I do remember the first time I heard about gay people existing was when my aunt divorced my uncle because she came out. She was engaged in an affair with a woman, and the entire family shunned her. I never saw her after that divorce. And that was my experience, was like coming out as queer meant your entire family will abandon you.
jesse
How old were you when that happened?
dianna
[Sighs.] I wanna say nine or ten?
jesse
So, that’s a really impressionable age. [Dianna agrees.] That’s an age where both you’re very impressionable and you don’t necessarily have the agency within yourself to question whether that’s right or normal or okay.
dianna
Yeah! At that age, you’re like, “Well! That’s how the world works.” You know.
jesse
What was the first time you set foot in a world—and I mean like physically—what was the first place you were in where you saw a lot of expressions of gender and sexuality that you had not had the opportunity to see?
dianna
The first time that ever happened was probably in Oxford. In 2015, I went to Oxford to do a degree in women’s studies. And having grown up in South Dakota, having lived in small towns, I didn’t have a lot of queer people around me all that much. And so—
jesse
By this time, did you think of yourself as queer?
dianna
Yes. Yeah. I was out as a queer person by then and as a liberal. I was going to get a degree in women’s studies. And being able to see all the different manifestations of queerness and actually like attend a pride gathering for the first time in my life was really revelatory—to see all these different people who were just unabashedly themselves. And lived in a place where they could be. That was really revelatory for me.
jesse
2015’s pretty late, Dianna. [Laughs.]
dianna
[Laughing.] Yeah! Yep. I was—I was 29. [Chuckles.] So. Yeah.
jesse
We laugh from discomfort.
dianna
Yes. Yeah. Because I grew up in South Dakota, and that wasn’t a thing I was exposed to.
music
Thumpy synth with light vocalizations.
jesse
It’s Bullseye. I’m Jesse Thorn. My guest is Dianna E. Anderson. They’re a writer based out of Minneapolis and the author of a brand-new book. In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies. It’s an exploration of nonbinary identity and a telling of their own story of coming out as nonbinary. Let’s get back into our interview. Did you think of yourself as, you know, as a butch lesbian or as a masc lesbian?
dianna
Yes. Very much as a butch person. I played around with femininity some as I tried to figure out my role within the queer community, but by the time like I settled in Minneapolis—after Oxford, I moved to Minneapolis—and stuff, I was pretty firmly like, “I am butch. I am in this camp.” And then I started meeting more trans people. I dated a trans woman for a long time and realized that maybe my gender is a bit more complicated than I thought it was.
jesse
What first led you into sort of naming who you were in that category? And that category, as a butch lesbian or you know, as a masculine woman rather than as nonbinary?
dianna
I felt queerness very strongly. Like, once I had admitted to myself that that was part of me, I wanted to put myself into a category that was well-defined, that was easily explainable, and that had an aesthetic that I identified with. Because there were different like gender aesthetics and different gender categories. And butch was one that I felt really was cool and fit and was something I was very comfortable in. And the line between butch and trans masc or nonbinary is very blurry and always has been within the lesbian community. And so, I think I had started to feel that pull towards that, started to recognize that within myself and then sat in butchness for a while before finally coming out.
jesse
What was your relationship to womanhood at the time? I mean, I imagine that—as a lesbian, as a women’s studies studier— [Dianna laughs.] Like, there’s a lot of cultural baggage there associated with—you know, women and women’s liberation being driven by women. So, if you’re not gonna be a woman, it can be trickier.
dianna
Yeah, I—part of my journey over the last five, six years was me recognizing that I was using the label of woman more as a tool to put myself into that group than I was for any actual descriptive purpose for me. I didn’t feel much connection to it. I didn’t feel the need to feel a connection to it. And so, “woman” was—for me—functionally a political label for a very long time. I saw it as solidarity with trans women and with cis women and with the reproductive justice movement and all that to identify myself that way. And that all came to a head during the pandemic when I realized that womanhood wasn’t the right term for me anymore. It wasn’t something that I necessarily experienced. If there was this thing called woman, I didn’t know what it was. And I realized using it as a political label wasn’t all that useful anymore, either.
jesse
I think you’re putting your finger on something that can be difficult to understand for people like me who have never had to question their gender identity or expression—eh, expression a little bit. But like mostly just as a fancy lad. [Dianna chuckles.] But like, you know, I was born—I was born cis. You know? I’m a cis dude, so I never had to interrogate it particularly much. But there is an important communicative aspect to our performance or displays of gender and there is an important kind of self-descriptive aspect. And those are a little different. So, can you pick those sort of—pick those little tributaries apart for me a little?
dianna
Yeah! We hear about gender as performance a lot. And that idea comes from Judith Butler, who is themself nonbinary and came out kind of about it during the pandemic. A lot of it is that we consistently perform these categories, these social genres of cultural constructs, whatever that is depending on which culture you’re in. And so, that is very roughly women wearing skirts and makeup and high heels, performing that femininity. Or men wearing suits and ties and things like that. And that is the performative part of it, where we perform all these little actions throughout the day that reinforce and reinscribe gender. And that doesn’t mean that it’s fake. That doesn’t mean that it is not a real thing. But it is something where we have learned each day this is how I am doing this. And very often, for cis people, it’s unconscious. It’s something where, “Well, I’m a man, so I’m doing it this way.” And so, that is sort of the way in which we are communicating our performance, our outward expression to others. And then there’s the internal self-identity of how we view ourselves. And that is intertwined. We can decide to change our performances to match our internal identity or just to ignore the performance altogether. And I’ve experienced that a lot with myself, with decided to present more masc, to deliberately move my gender presentation from just sort of a butch person to deliberately trans masculine, deliberately shopping in the men’s section and deliberately presenting myself with suits and ties and button-up in order to evoke that performance in other people, as well.
jesse
And there are two pieces to that. Right? One is trying to reflect who you are within yourself; one is trying to communicate who you are to others. I mean, you mentioned how—you know—identifying as a butch lesbian was a category where you were like, “Well, I like the aesthetics of this in an aesthetic sense. And it’s easy to read for people. Like, people get what that is around me.” Whereas, presenting yourself as nonbinary is—you know, it’s a trickier sentence to make understood.
dianna
Yeah! There’s so much explanation that has to come with being nonbinary and telling people that you’re nonbinary. Because we don’t have that cultural language yet. And I’m hoping we do eventually. But for a lot of people, especially cis people, their image when they think of nonbinary, they think of androgynous. They think of David Bowie. They think of Prince. And that image is always somebody who is thin, very often White, and very often masculine of center who plays with femininity. So, that makes it very hard for nonbinary people who are assigned male to present androgyny in ways that make sense for them, that are fun and playful at the same time. And it ends up being our identities coming up in clashing with this cultural image of what we are. And I am—this is a radio interview, so you can’t see it, but I’m a fat person. And existing as a fat person in a nonbinary space when fat is so immediately gendering in a lot of ways is very tough, because there’s not—you’ve got this cultural layer of fatphobia and anti-transness that makes it very hard to present as the gender I want to and not have that be met with aggression.
jesse
So, when you say that fat is sort of inherently gendering, what you mean is that—maybe is that when someone is very thin, it can be difficult to read their body as gendered simply because if they were—you know, if they were assigned female, they might have very small breasts and narrow hips. If they were assigned male, they might not have broad shoulders or other things that are—whereas when women gain weight, they tend to gain more weight on the hips and in the breasts. Men tend to gain it more in their middle. That kind of thing.
dianna
Yeah, and we—as a society—despise fatness in so many different ways. And we—one of the ways we punish fat people is by denying them their gender. Fat women very often have to perform femininity to a point of almost caricature where you get like these pinup—and that is a completely valid form of femininity, but I do wonder like what that would look like if there wasn’t this pressure because of fatphobia. And so, because our cultural images of nonbinary are so closely tied to androgyny that is White male thin, fat nonbinary people have trouble finding a place.
jesse
You describe really eloquently in the book the feeling that you had learning to use binders, which are—you know—physical tools similar to like a corset or something like that that physically restrict the breasts, typically compress them, make them appear smaller. To the extent that you’re comfortable describing [chuckles] stuff you did to your breasts— [Dianna affirms with a laugh.] What was your—what was your sort of process and experience of using them?
dianna
I wanted to wear button-ups, and I had fairly large breasts and I could never—whenever you bought button-ups, there would be the boob gap where they couldn’t quite close, and it would always look weird. And so, I experimented with like putting my tie over it and just clipping it there so it would cover it and stuff. And then eventually, when I came out as nonbinary, I was like, “Maybe I could buy a binder and try that out!” And I did! And the first time I looked down and saw what looked like me—it was a flatter chest; it was something that looked more like a fat man rather than a woman. And I felt euphoria over that. And that’s—gender euphoria’s the opposite of dysphoria where your gendered body gives you feelings of pain or psychic trauma. Gender euphoria, you look at it and you go, “Oh! That’s me! This is finally what I look like!” And I was using binders for a while and then decided I need to make this permanent. And so, I pursued top surgery and got it this last April. And I—
jesse
And top surgery is essentially breast removal.
dianna
Yes. It’s a double mastectomy. And I, luckily, had it fully covered by my insurance, which was fantastic. And I remember the week after just looking down and being like, “This is me now! This is what I look like now.” And it’s had a very profound effect on my mental health because I have, for years, suffered from anxiety and depression and struggled with that. And since getting top surgery, I have taken my as-needed anti-anxiety meds all of once in two months, which is wild for me. And it’s something that has improved my life so much that I feel like—I feel like a religious convert of like this is something that helps people! You need to be able to access this if it’s something that you want, because it just feels great to be me. [Chuckles.]
jesse
I really appreciated the part of your description of using binders where you described figuring out that you could kind of like mush your breasts down into your tummy and then that would make like a—that would make like a flat thing. [Dianna agrees and they chuckle.] Like, the geometry and geography of squishing your boobs against your chest. I was so thrilled with the idea that you like found a way fit it together that seemed right.
dianna
Yeah! There are entire forums online of trans masc people talking about like how to make the binder look right and to give you the impression that you want.
jesse
Now, I think there are people out there who might be thinking in their own internal monologues, “Well, you’re just matching other people’s expectations of your gender and so on and so forth.” So, to what extent is that true and to what extent does that matter?
dianna
I don’t feel like I’m matching anybody’s expectations, at least not anymore. It’s hard to describe, but I’ll use this metaphor. A few weeks ago, my brother and sister-in-law visited me up in Minneapolis and their hotel has a pool. And so, I got to go swimming topless for the first time ever in my life. And it’s very obvious that I have scars there. I have very obviously done something to remove my chest. And I don’t feel like that is meeting anybody’s expectation. That is just me allowing myself to be me. And whatever expectations other people have for me no longer matter for how I want to present myself. And that has really made all the difference in who I am as a person, because I’m no longer trying to meet the expectations of what I thought my gender was supposed to be. And now I can just sort of create it myself.
jesse
I’ve read a couple of articles in let’s say major, mainstream publications. The one I’m thinking of was in The New York Times a few days ago—but also elsewhere—that seek to answer the question—they’re often well-written and well-sourced. Not always. But often. But they seek to answer the question, “Why are there more trans people now than before?” Or why are there more trans children or why are there more trans children and teenagers now than before. So, my first question, and it’s the one that I don’t always see asked in those articles or certainly not asked in the lead graph, is are there more trans and nonbinary people, children, teens now than there were 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago?
dianna
You can’t see it on the radio, but I immediately started shaking my head, because there’re not. They’re just out. You just know about them. For centuries, trans people who knew they were trans, who knew that they were different, had to hide it. And so, yeah, there have always been trans people around. We’ve just had to hide, because when we were our authentic selves, we were met with violence and aggression and were eliminated from society. And that’s part of our past. There aren’t more trans people; we’re just more visible and we’re more out and we are finding our political voice in a way that we haven’t been able to for a century.
jesse
I have a transgender daughter, and when I hear from transphobic people on the internet, they often suggest that my wife—her mother—and I drove our daughter to this or encouraged this in our daughter, pushed this on our daughter. And what I often hear from trans—adult trans people when they talk to us about having had this experience is they understand so deeply that like the area where, as far as I’m concerned, we just got lucky with our cultural context but like the special thing that happened that allowed our daughter to be trans was not that we pushed her towards it. ‘Cause goodness knows we didn’t. It’s hard and unpleasant in America in 2022 to be trans. But rather that like we were able to describe different ways of being in the world so that she was able to describe herself, pick the one that was right for her. And I hear from so many people who had to wait until they were 20 or 30 or 50 to be able to see those—to see those other kind of opportunities.
dianna
Yeah. The idea that parents can trans their kids or make them queer or trans or anything is kind of laughable, because if parents or teachers could do that, classroom management wouldn’t be a problem. Like, behavioral things wouldn’t be a problem. And lots of trans people wouldn’t exist?
jesse
“Be good at baseball!”
dianna
Yes! [Laughs.] Like, I can’t get you to—
jesse
I can’t even get my kids to like baseball! Much less be good at it! I would accept liking it and being barely passable at it. That’s the standard I set as a child.
dianna
[Laughing.] Yeah, like if I had been the—if my parents had been able to make me who they wanted me to be, I would have been like a track star athlete who was a very good Christian woman. And that is not who I turned out to be. And I just have to sit back and ask those people like what do you think the role of parents is? Because if it is to make copies of the people—of the parents, that’s not a good role for you to be [chuckles]—you shouldn’t be having kids at that point. And I’m saying that as a childless person.
jesse
And with the understood exception of making them like baseball. [Dianna agrees with a laugh.] That’s important.
dianna
We’ve gotta have more kids to like baseball. That is the American pastime. So, kids will be who they are, and they know who they are. My two nieces could not be any more different as people. One of them is—I’m sorry to say, an anxious mess. She overthinks everything. She worries about all this and she’s extremely musical. The other one will, when told to clean her room, decide she’s going to pretend to be a cat and pick things up with her mouth and put them away that way. And has like no worries whatsoever. And just within that family with the same parents, with two straight parents, and one queer, nonbinary aunt/uncle person, those kids know who they are. They know what they want to be, and they have the freedom to express that. And there’s nothing that my brother or sister-in-law could do to make them be any different from who they are at their core.
jesse
When you decided to come out as nonbinary and get top surgery and—you know—shave the sides of your head and dye the top blue. [Dianna chuckles.] You’re sitting across from me right now. Did you feel that you had to consider your safety, physically or legally?
dianna
Yeah. I am very lucky to live in Minnesota, which has had protections for trans people—Minneapolis itself has had protections for trans people since 1975. So, I feel very safe where I am. But when I go back home to South Dakota, I am very careful with where I go and what I do and who I talk to and how much of myself I reveal. I went back to South Dakota just this past weekend for Vermillion’s Pride. Vermillion’s probably one of the most liberal cities. It’s a college town. And it was astounding to me to see like so many happy queers in South Dakota. It’s not something you get very often, ‘cause very often you hear about the state legislature being kind of terrible toward trans people. And so, to see trans people thriving in South Dakota was very good. But it is not a place that I necessarily feel safe anymore. So, that’s why I ended up moving to Minnesota. Which is like so many other queer people before me. That’s how so many cities end up with huge LGBT populations, because it’s not safe for us in other areas.
jesse
Is it safe for you in terms of the state and in terms of legal and civic things? Marriages, property, jobs, trying to buy birthday cakes, whatever those kind of non-physical categories are?
dianna
Yeah. It’s—because Minnesota, thanks to LGBT pioneers within the state, particularly a man named Jack Baker, who was a cis gay man who liked to do drag and did—he was the president of the U of M’s law school in the 1970s. And he did a ton of work with the city council of Minneapolis and with the Minnesota legislature to codify protections for LBGT Minnesotans. Not just gay and cis, but also trans. And the original like city ordinance for Minneapolis was so broad that it protected cis women as well, because it was about presenting in a manner of dress or style that is incongruent with your perceived sex at birth. Which is really broad language, and it protects like butch women as well as the trans woman. And that, for me, is very meaningful to have a state that has set out for decades now protections for people like me. It’s still not great. There’s still a lot of work that we have to do. Cece McDonald, the famous Black trans woman who had killed a man in self-defense, that happened in Minneapolis. And she was housed in a state men’s prison. Laverne Cox did a documentary about her. And so, there’s still a lot of work to do, but as opposed to my home state of South Dakota, it feels like the work that I’m doing in Minnesota is going somewhere. Like, there’s receptive people within especially the city council of Minneapolis and within the state legislature for my community. Which is not the case in a lot of red states.
jesse
More to get into with Dianna E. Anderson after the break. When we return, we’ll talk about what cis people—people like me, who identify with the sex they were assigned at birth—can do to be better allies to nonbinary people. It’s Bullseye, from MaximumFun.org and NPR.
music
Thumpy synth with light vocalizations.
jesse
I’m Jesse Thorn. You’re listening to Bullseye. My guest is writer Dianna E. Anderson. Let’s get back into our interview. I think for a lot of people, especially people who’s ideas of how the world works were largely settled 15, 20, 30, or 40 years ago, all this stuff is a lot. They’re really trying to figure it out. So, my first question is: if there’s somebody listening right now and they’re 50 or 70 years old, and they’re not against it. They’re generally for it, but it’s a lot for them to understand, what do you think you would like to communicate with them on the most basic level? Like, what can you offer them that they can chew on for a while?
dianna
I think my first thing would be to be patient and be curious. One thing that I, as a gender studies person, who at some points thinks I know everything—I will be confronted with a new concept that I haven’t heard about before. And rather than going with—as humans, when we are presented with new things, we have a naturally conservative reaction of wanting to like just say “no” immediately. That sounds weird. That’s different from how I’ve ever done it. But if we commit to keeping an open mind and saying, “Huh. I don’t understand that. Can you explain it to me?” That will go a very long way toward building bridges and toward understanding not only other people but understanding yourself a bit more. Because I believe that cis people could learn a lot from trans people, in terms of just thinking about how gender works in the world. And so, maintaining an open and curious mind toward that and not—and deliberately working not to shut yourself off from other options is very important for approaching any social issue.
jesse
There’s a lot of work to be done to alter and dismantle the many cultural, legal, and other structures that cause people disproportionate amounts of pain in this country and in the world. Right? A ton of different work. [Dianna agrees.] For folks out there who are listening who are cis, what’s an example of a chunk of work they could do [chuckling] that might seem manageable, given that they have to pick up the kids or get to class or whatever?
dianna
My first thing that I tell cis people when they ask how to be better allies for trans people is to think about their own gender. To think about how it functions for them in the world. And that will help give you a little bit better understanding of how trans people have to navigate. Think about like if you woke up one morning and everybody read you as a man, if you’re a cis woman, how would that change how you function within the world? And that often is a thought exercise that teaches cis people a little bit about gender dysphoria, but it also teaches them about the way the world is structured and helps them see those gaps where it is structured in a way that is actively hostile to trans people. And once you see those gaps, you can start advocating for those. Don’t make trans people do our own fights all the time. One of the ways that you can speak up is speaking up in legislatures, testifying on behalf of how—on behalf of trans people. Not speaking for us but speaking with us. And one thing that really helps with pro-trans measures, like promoting gender neutral bathrooms and things like that, is doing cultural education among your peers, teaching them about what the necessities are and what those—what people are going through. And that sort of word-of-mouth stuff can help change minds much better than an ad or a TV commercial or whatever.
jesse
I have an aunt—my mom’s sister—who is a lesbian and, you know, came out before I can remember. And I was born in 1981. And has spent her life, as you would expect a baby boomer lesbian or pre-baby boomer, actually in her case, lesbian, dealing with her sexuality and gender. Like engaging with it very actively. Moving to the Bay Area, spelling “womyn” with a Y sometimes, making me an honorary girl at one point. [Dianna cackles.] I think that when my daughter came out—which was now five or six years ago—I had this brief moment of thinking, “Well, gosh, what is Gail gonna think about this?” You know, her understanding of these things is she’s old. [Laughs.] Sorry, Gail. She’s very vibrant. She’s very vibrant as anyone in our office who has ever met her and the many husky dogs that go with her wherever she goes can attest. But like, I thought, “Well, gosh. You know, Gail is—Gail’s ideas about this were developed a long time ago. And they were really about protecting her place in the world as a woman.” And I thought, “What is she gonna make of my daughter being a girl?” And I think one of the most touching things in my life in my family was how immediately readily she understood the common cause between her and my daughter, as queer people, as people who were born different from others who had to do extra work to define themselves in the world. And that has been my experience, substantially, with feminists. And with feminist lesbians both. That the common cause of understanding what it is to be different and to have to do extra work to keep yourself safe, to gain prosperity and happiness and success in the structures of our world, is almost always much stronger. So, I hate the prospect of someone defining feminism in terms of picking on someone.
dianna
Yeah. In terms of hating on a specific gender for just being that gender. And I think that leans into the caricature of feminism that we get all the time. When I was at Baylor, I taught freshman English while I was there. And at one point, I asked this class of 18-year-old freshmen evangelical Baptist kids to define feminism. And so many of them came up with hairy, lesbian, man-hating. All these things. And “lesbian” was a slur to them. And that, to me, has never been feminism. Feminism isn’t about equality between the sexes or whatever; it’s about making sure that the world is not a harder place to live just because of your gender. Or that because of who or how the circumstances of your birth shouldn’t dictate who you grow up to be in such a way that it limits your opportunities, limits your access to the healthcare that you need, to the opportunities you have in jobs, or to the life that you want to lead. And that, to me, is a much more hopeful and better vision than feminism being about smashing the patriarchy of men and eliminating male violence and casting of all this as a men versus women thing.
jesse
Nah, I’m not against smashing some patriarchy. [Dianna agrees.] And eliminating some male violence. We have an excess of it. There’s no doubt about that. [They chuckle.]
dianna
Yeah, I guess by that I mean like categorizing violence as a male thing rather than as a thing that is bad for everybody. [They chuckle.]
jesse
I mean, it’s been bad for me in my life. So, I promise you. Well, I Dianna, I sure appreciate you taking the time. And thanks for this wonderful book. And as a former culture studies major, congratulations on the clarity you brought to the theory in this book, because there’s a lot of very clearly described theory that—[Laughs.]
dianna
Good!
jesse
That when I read it in college, I really struggled to wrap my head around. So, thank you much, Dianna. Thanks for taking the time.
dianna
If I made it easier to understand Butler, then hey. [They laugh.]
jesse
That’s the W you’re looking for.
dianna
I did my job.
music
Chiming synth.
jesse
Dianna E. Anderson. Their book, In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies, is moving and fascinating. Really wonderfully written. It gets into some deep and complicated ideas in impressively clear ways. I really liked it. Go check it out. [Music fades out.]
music
Bright synth with a steady beat.
jesse
That’s the end of another episode of Bullseye. Bullseye is created from the homes me and the staff of Maximum Fun, in and around greater Los Angeles, California. Here at my house, my son Oscar just got eight fish, and four of them are named Greg. Our show is produced by speaking into microphones. Our senior producer is Kevin Ferguson. Our producers are Jesus Ambrosio and Richard Robey. Our production fellow at Maximum Fun is Tabatha Myers. We get booking help from Mara Davis. Our interstitial music is by Dan Wally, also known as DJW. Our theme music is by The Go! Team. It’s called “Huddle Formation”. Thanks to The Go! Team for sharing it with us, along with their label, Memphis Industries. Bullseye is also on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. You can find us there and give us a follow. We’ll share with you all of our interviews. And I think that’s about it. Just remember: all great radio hosts have a signature signoff.
promo
Speaker: Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR. [Music fades out.]
About the show
Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.
Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.” Since April 2013, the show has been distributed by NPR.
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