What’s Really Behind the Trans Backlash?

Everywhere we look, the backlash against trans lives is growing louder. We’re facing policies targeting healthcare, book bans erasing our stories, coordinated campaigns to sow fear and confusion. This backlash isn’t happening in isolation, though. It’s part of a much larger cultural and political force determined to roll back gender justice for all of us. Today In the Den, Sara and acclaimed policy analyst Julie Kohler dig into what’s beneath the backlash across America—how it formed, why it’s intensifying now, and how it’s shaping our politics, our families, and our public life. Julie weaves research, history, and storytelling to show the connective tissue between attacks on the trans community, assaults on reproductive freedom, and attempts to reassert rigid gender norms.

Special Guest: Julie Kohler

Julie Kohler is an acclaimed writer whose work has appeared in CNN, The Washington Post, MSNBC, The Daily Beast, and many other outlets. She is also the co-creator, executive producer, and host of the Wonder Media Network podcast White Picket Fence. The podcast has won multiple awards, including a 2025 Webby Award for Best News & Politics (Limited Series & Special) Podcast and a 2024 Signal Award for Best News & Politics Podcast. Julie has two decades of experience working in philanthropy, advocacy, and higher education and is a highly sought out speaker on a variety of topics pertaining to gender justice, policy, and politics. She is the president of BMK Consulting, a philanthropic and nonprofit strategy consulting firm, and a Senior Advisor at the New School's Institute for Race, Power and Political Economy. Previously, she served as Senior Vice President and Managing Director for the Democracy Alliance, a progressive donor network, and as a fellow in residence at the National Women's Law Center. She has served on the boards of many organizations working to strengthen democracy, including, currently, the Pipeline Fund. She has a Ph.D. in family social science from the University of Minnesota and lives in Washington, DC with her family.

Links from the Show:

• Julie’s podcast White Picket Fence
• Julie’s website
• Join Mama Dragons today 

In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today. 

Transcript

SARA: Hi everyone. Welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. A podcast and community to support, educate, and empower parents on the journey of raising happy and healthy LGBTQ+ humans. I’m your host, Sara LaWall. I’m a Mama Dragon myself and an advocate for our queer community. And I’m so glad to be part of this wild and wonderful parenting journey with all of you. Thanks for joining us. We’re so glad you’re here. 

Hello, Mama Dragons! Everywhere we look, it seems the backlash against trans lives is growing louder. It feels like we say this every week, but it is the reality we live in these days. We're facing policies targeting healthcare, book bans erasing our stories, coordinated campaigns, sowing fear and confusion. And many of us parents of queer and trans kids, we feel and carry that weight every day. But this backlash isn't happening in isolation. It's part of a much larger cultural and political force determined to roll back gender justice for all of us. So today, we are digging in to what's beneath that backlash. And we are joined by acclaimed journalist and policy analyst Julie Kohler, who has been tracking, analyzing, and naming these patterns for some time now. 

Julie is also the creator and host of the award-winning podcast White Picket Fence. I am an avid listener to this podcast, so I am particularly excited for this conversation today. The newest season of the podcast, White Picket Fence, explores this gender backlash that's happening across America. It explores how it formed, why it's intensifying now, how it's shaping our politics, our families, and our public life. And Julie weaves her research and history and storytelling to show the connective tissue between these attacks on the trans community and assaults on reproductive freedom, and attempts to reassert rigid gender norms. So we get to learn from her today. What's driving this backlash? What are we getting wrong about it? And what strategies can move us toward liberation, safety, and gender justice? Julie, welcome to In the Den. I am so pleased to have you with us. 

JULIE: Oh, thanks so much, Sara. It's great to be with you. 

SARA: And as you heard, I love this podcast. I have loved every season. It's so in-depth. But this season in particular just felt really important to me personally, to communities of parents and our trans community. You go really in-depth. It's so interesting. It's sometimes maddening, just because you're really exposing what's really behind all of this. And the podcast as a whole takes an in-depth look at the way our society is evolving. And you have tackled issues about race and gender and families and the economy and how all of these things intersect to maintain some unjust status quos, to block progress on policy solutions. So I'm curious if we can start with having you share a little bit about how the podcast came into being, but also the idea for this season, this gender backlash. How did it emerge out of the work that you've been doing with the whole podcast? 

JULIE: Oh, yeah, that's such a great question. And thank you so much for your kind comments about White Picket Fence. Really, the podcast came about with a conversation between my executive producer, Jenny Kaplan, who's one of the co-founders of Wonder Media Network, which has now been acquired by Acast. And we were just talking about some of the writing that I had been doing at the time, which was really focused on white women's politics, and delving into a little bit more of the contradictions and the complexity behind what we were seeing with how white women were voting. And this was sort of in the aftermath of the 2016 election. So she, in talking about some of the articles that I had been writing – I was writing a lot for The Nation at the time – she said, “I think that could be a podcast.” And so here we started it out. And then we were able to kind of keep going in with different seasons and expanding. And so the topics, what we really wanted to do very intentionally was take a very fresh topic each season. So we weren't kind of continuing to talk about the same specific issue. We've gone on to talk about the care economy, and motherhood as a political identity, and the moral panic around declining marriage rates, and then this season with the gender backlash. But we've tried to weave through it some consistent themes and specifically highlight the way that this idealization of a privatized “traditional nuclear family” has really been evoked by bad actors in ways that thwart progress. It thwarts the development or a more solid, broader, multiracial democracy. It thwarts public investments in care in ways that really make life harder for all of us, all of our families. It maintains inequities, inequalities, and hierarchies in our society. And increasingly, it's really a tool for democratic backslide. And so, over these seasons, I've kind of felt in some ways that we've been increasingly hand-wavy, as we've seen this ideology kind of move from the margins to the mainstream. And we ended, not this last season, but the season before, on the marriage panic. I think it was right before, like, maybe even the day before, J.D. Vance was announced as Donald Trump's running mate. And so then, all of a sudden, we were in this new reality, not only where he was the potential vice president. And then the election happened and this is now our president and vice president. And so, really, we've seen this ideology come into the highest echelons of political power. And so when we started thinking about this season, it felt like we could no longer sort of be talking about these ideas that are out here, but rather what is happening right now and really unpacking how it got to this point, this level of severity, this level of seriousness, this level of threat. 

SARA: You do it so beautifully and so comprehensively. And this season, you look at the whole world of gender and this gender backlash from trad wives to the manosphere to reproductive rights in South Korea as examples. And I know that for many of us in the Mama Dragons community, we're really experiencing it personally, most urgently, in the targeting of trans people and trans youth. 

JULIE: Yeah.

SARA: And so I'm curious, through your experience and reporting, what are you seeing as the main drivers behind this hyper-focus on trans communities? 

JULIE: Yeah, it's a really important question, and one of the things that we really spend a lot of time thinking about – my producers and I, before this season – is we, of course, wanted to acknowledge that for transgender people, gender-expansive people, like, this is a deeply scary, personal, existential threat on your lives and existence, and the family's well-being. And so we wanted to make that front and center, and not sort of water that down any way or minimize the severity of these attacks. And we wanted to also link it to a broader political project that it is one piece of. And so we really wanted to kind of have this be the tip of the spear so that we could center the experiences of transgender people in this moment. And that we could draw these linkages between this larger kind of anti-gender movement that's happening, not just in the U.S., but really globally. 

SARA: You build this really interesting story where you set that groundwork up and then kind of show these other threads. I know many parents of trans kids and folks in our trans community feel like the ground is constantly shifting under their feet. And you name that feeling as whiplash. And that feels accurate. And it feels like it's been rising so quickly and so intensely, which is true. But your reporting shows that the attacks that we're now experiencing have been part of this long game targeting gender, and really slowly building consistently over time with these specific targets now focused on trans community and trans beloveds. In your research, how do you understand this moment of backlash and this spark that is so intense right now, and has become such a coordinated political strategy? 

JULIE: Yeah, I really think that even though I think for many of us it feels very sudden – and I think it's because of the intensity of the attacks and the severity of the attacks – It really has not been sudden. It's been this kind of slow burn, and this slow, kind of turning up the heat. And we've just really reached a boiling point in the wake of the 2024 election. What's been happening is that there's been a rise of far-right politics around the globe. And they are xenophobic. These political movements, parties, individuals, they're xenophobic. They are misogynistic. They are anti-LGBTQ. They are increasingly autocratic or authoritarian. So what's happening in the United States is not unique. We are seeing a rise of far-right politics and far-right movements across the globe. And the targeting of women and LGBTQ people in particular, have been foundational to those movements. I think that what we really tried to highlight in this season of the podcast is that misogyny and homophobia, transphobia are not just sort of accidentally add-ons to authoritarianism. They are actually very core to any ideology that is designed to consolidate power and concentrate power. It's how authoritarians legitimize their power. It's how they make it seem natural or divine, and justify the concentration of powers by, like, sort of maintaining these hierarchies throughout society. So this has been rising globally. We've seen far-right leaders really model this kind of legislation and these kinds of attacks in countries all over the world, from Brazil to Poland to South Korea to Hungary. And U.S. conservatives have been taking note. This is not something that just sort of incidentally happened. This is a very well-networked community. And we have seen U.S. conservatives prominent conservatives, really fanboying over, for example, Viktor Orban in Hungary for years. Tucker Carlson broadcast his show from Hungary. Viktor Orban has come over here and spoken at the CPAC conference, the Conservative Political Action Conference, and been like a marquee speaker. J.D. Vance has had many audiences and many conversations with him. This is a very well-networked community. And what has been happening here in the U.S. is, they've sort of been laying the groundwork for the current federal backlash and sort of institutionalizing of these policies, is that they've used the states as laboratories for authoritarianism. And so, we actually saw in Ron DeSantis' Florida, many of the ideas for the legislation that he proposed and that was ultimately enacted in Florida came from Hungary. It was modeled after what was being enacted there. So they have been building, building, building. And then, of course, then in the, you know, lead-up to the 2024 election, the Heritage Foundation convened all these conservative think tanks to put down their policy blueprint in Project 2025 so that they would have it ready to take off the shelf and go if they regained governing power. And not only did they have the policy prescriptions, but they also had a very orchestrated campaign for filling key personnel roles. And again, being ready to go the second that an election was won. They knew who they were going to put into a lot of these key positions so that it wasn't just that they had these ideas. They had ideas and they had people who were ready to execute and implement those ideas. So what felt, I think, just as, like, this sudden onslaught of, my gosh, how are they doing so much so quickly, really has been the result of very carefully laid plans that have gone back many, many years. And really span a whole international and global community. 

SARA: So as you're describing that, and I'm hearing you talk about these attacks on gender, queer folks, trans folks in particular, being a core part of the systematic core to consolidating authoritarian power, I'm really curious to hear how you respond to some of the Democratic left in the wake of the election that has said, “You know, we over-focus on trans people. And that has lost us the election, and so we should just be silent about it in order to get power back.” Because when I hear you talk about the long game, I think, “Oh, no, they're going to do it regardless of how the left is going to respond.” So I’m curious how you think about that. 

JULIE: Exactly. So we had Imara Jones from TransLash Media, who I know you're familiar with as well and is incredible, on the first episode of the season of the podcast. And the line that she said that completely stood out to me is “I've never seen a moment in history–” I'm paraphrasing – “where appeasement worked well. Like, show me that time where if we've just appeased authoritarians a little bit more, then things would have gone better.” No, the goal is to carry out this agenda, right? And not only are they trying to consolidate as much power, but they are really trying to reestablish a mid-20th century social order and all of the race and gender hierarchies that it encompassed. So their game plan is clear. And if we acquiesce to it, then we just give that validity. And I completely agree. We can be talking and leading on issues that maybe have broad, that many, many people, the majority of people, are experiencing. But also be very true to our values, and never have to sacrifice vulnerable communities in a quest to gain political power. I don't believe that's how elections are won. I think people want authentic leaders who they believe are going to actually fight for them. And I think that fighting for vulnerable communities is a way of showing that we care about everyone, that we care about the well-being of everyone in this country. 

SARA: Yes, absolutely, yes. And thank you for that language. That is really helpful. I feel like myself and our other listeners, we can take that language with us in how we talk about this with other people, with our families, with our political leaders, to say, “No, this is important to us, and here's why.” I found the episode, I think it was your second episode, about the Institute for Sexual Science in 1930s Germany to be such an interesting and helpful perspective. And you began the episode by sharing the really beautiful, almost idyllic story of the heyday of this institute, when in the Weimar Republic, and it's very progressive and people are finding community, and they're finding medical care, and their mental health care all in one place. I mean, I'd listen just thinking, “Oh my god. I can't believe that was 1930. And I wish something like that existed today.” It was really groundbreaking. And then also you share the brutal attacks by the Nazi regime on the Institute and the queer folks who were part of it. And you do that to illustrate that what we're experiencing today, as you have already said, is not unprecedented. It's a feature of authoritarianism, and you show that intertwined connection. I'm curious if you'll share a little bit more about that episode and why you felt that story in particular was so critical to the whole story? 

JULIE: Yeah, I found it to be a really fascinating piece of history that I knew a piece of, but did not know at the level of depth that we were able to cover. And that was really thanks to Dr. Brandy Schillace, who was my guest on that episode of the podcast, and who has written this incredible book called The Intermediaries, which chronicles Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, who was the founder of the Institute for Sexual Science and was just really incredibly ahead of his time, and a true visionary. I think that one of the reasons, you know, yes, we wanted to draw the historical parallels to sort of continually, in many ways fight back against this false notion of American exceptionalism, and that what's happening in the U.S., like, has never happened anywhere else, throughout history or currently. But I also think we really wanted to highlight this sort of precipice, or pivotal moment that we are now in, and the fact that that also existed at other periods of time. And one of Brandy's lines in that episode is that Nazis were far from a foregone conclusion in the Weimar Republic. This was a moment of tremendous investment in science and science exploration. And progressive ideas were coming into the mainstream and it was vibrant. And there was an arts community. And things could have gone in a very different direction. And so I think that that is really important, even though it can be very scary for us right now, that, yes, like, we could be at a point now where we are descending into authoritarianism, fascism, whatever it might be. But I think it also provides us with an impetus to act, and to say, “We are going to help determine where we go from here.” And so, to me, it was an opportunity of saying no future is a foregone conclusion of where we are at this moment in the United States. And it is incumbent on all of us to ensure that we are bending our future towards, bending the arc of history towards justice. We have to be shaping that because it's not just going to happen inevitably. It is based on how we all, as citizens, decide to act and react. 

SARA: It was such a powerful story, and a little frightening, also, at the same time, because it feels so parallel to where we are today. 

JULIE: It feels so parallel. And I think the other point that I would just highlight, what we used as the title of that episode is Hatred Rolls Downhill. And the metaphor that Brandy used in the episode was that “hatred rolls downhill like a snowball.” And so what we saw in Nazi Germany was, of course, rampant anti-Semitism combined with rampant homophobia, combined with rampant misogyny. And all of this hatred took on more and more and more power. And so, the point that she was making is that we all have an investment in – even though we cannot say DEI and diversity, equity, and inclusion – but we do all have an investment in it, because it is not only what protects the most vulnerable communities but it is what protects all of us because this can only expand. And so it is, again, incumbent upon us to be stopping that snowball from rolling downhill, and to be pushing it the other direction. 

SARA: Yeah, and I want to get to that, and I have some questions about that. Before we do, because you do talk about the active strategies. But before we do, I want to keep kind of going around some of these key narratives and intersecting beliefs and spaces that are part of this coordinated wave of attacks that we're seeing are targeted, it looks like sort of in layers, primarily trans folks right now. But underneath it's women, it's reproductive rights, it's even this ideal of masculinity. And so if you don't fit that ideal, you're part of that wave of attacks. And I just found that really interesting. And so I'm curious, as you were building the season, and as you were encountering and doing the deep dive into the manosphere, and we had Dr. Cynthia Miller Idris on the episode, who talked very deeply about the manosphere and its contribution to the rise in extremism in young men. And you talk about trad wives in an episode, and all of these sort of gender roles and rigid gender politics. And I'm curious, as you were building it, did you learn anything you didn't know before? Did anything surprise you? 

JULIE: That's a great question. I'll answer it in a couple ways. One of the things that I felt so strongly about really laying out over the course of this season, is why trans people are sort of at the forefront of this anti-gender movement in the United States and highlighting that this gender binary, the maintenance of a fixed, immutable, and gender binary, linked to biological sex is really foundational to this whole larger ideology. And it's like the house of cards, right? So, if gender is not fixed, then how can you have a whole patriarchal system in which, in families, communities, in a society in which men and women play separate and unequal roles. You can't. So that is why, kind of ideologically, it is this existential threat. And I think it was sort of something that I knew. But when you really laid out how all of these attacks related to one another, I think that was something that we really wanted to bring to the forefront. What I learned, I think is an optimistic note. And that was just the power of feminist organizing and women-led organizing in preventing democratic backslide, or reversing democratic backslide. And so we very consciously highlighted some examples of that in South Korea and Poland. But I think that that is a reason to also give hope and give some opportunity to really think about, again, that this is far from a foregone conclusion, that we have agency at this moment and that women in particular have tremendous agency in being able to reverse these tides and move us not into just a more equitable place, but to really to a stronger democracy. And one of the other lines, I think it was Annie Wilkinson who said on the podcast, is that gender justice is not sort of like the nice-to-have, once we have a functioning democracy. It is actually foundational to a democracy. That you cannot have a society in which power is shared unless you are grounded in racial and gender justice, right? And so, these fights, they're not just kind of like, oh, a side fight for gender justice. It is a foundational democracy fight. And one, again, that I think we all need to be in if we believe in having a multiracial democracy. 

SARA: Yeah, thank you. Again, great language for that context. I think that really helps us see the whole picture. And I'm curious if you have any analysis about why these women-led movements were so successful? Like, that seems to be a pattern. And I'm curious how you think about that. 

JULIE: Yeah, I think it is kind of the nature of feminist organizing, right? Like, it tends to be highly relational. It is about sharing power. So you're sort of organizing in ways that are democratic. You are organizing in a way that is representative of the larger society that you are trying to build. I think that what we've seen is that it can be highly adaptive. The example in South Korea was really interesting because with all of this, we are, you know, we know we go through cycles of progress and regress, right? You know, we have gains, we make, you know, it's one step forward, one step back. But our guest really put that into much deeper perspective. Like, South Korea had one of the most impactful Me Too movements, not only in Asia, but really across the globe. Huge gains for women at that time, which then sparked a huge backlash and the rise of ultimately the election of President Yoon, who ran, really, on an anti-gender campaign promising to abolish the Ministry of Gender Equality, and really gained a lot of support from young men who felt very threatened by kind of the progress that women had made through the Me Too Movement. And so a lot of that feminist organizing had to kind of go underground during President Yoon's tenure. And on one level, it was very chilling. But it was also a very adaptive. And so people found ways to network with one another differently. They weren't leading the same kind of public protests. And so they were able to change strategies. And so when the moment presented itself, young women were really at the center of the effort to fight back when President Yoon declared martial law. And many South Koreans took to the streets, and ultimately he was impeached and forced to resign. But that was because of all of that muscle, that political muscle, that organizing muscle that had been built. You know, it's not just a linear process. These muscles, the organizing that we can be engaged in, that will reap benefits many years into the future. And the more that we can kind of be continuing to innovate, adapt, think differently about how we're doing that, I think the more we're going to be able to kind of carry that forward and make maximum gains when those opportunities present themselves. 

SARA: Yeah, and that's great, and that's such an inspiring story. And I feel like we're seeing some of that underground work starting to happen already. We're working those muscles, we're putting those pieces together. And so it's hopeful to hear that story and know that that is a good direction to move in, and that will have some fruit, perhaps, in the future. 

JULIE: Absolutely, and even that it doesn't all need to be taken to the streets. Like, yes, protest is important. I support that. But like the mutual aid societies, the informal networks and ways that people are showing up for one another, that all matters, right? Like, those real connections I think they are the antidote. Like, care is the antidote to despair. Like, that is by caring for one another is how we then have that community, that strength to then really make those more public gains when the moments present themselves. 

SARA: Yeah. You talk a lot in the podcast about how backlash movements, like happened in South Korea is a really good example, are about manufacturing fear, right? Manufacture this fear, so much so that it can tip the electorate. And so in your reporting as you're watching all of these different threads of this manufactured fear come together, what did you notice about the narratives about trans people that were being weaponized and manufactured into fear? 

JULIE: The attacks that they've used have been primarily around trans girls in sports, right, that they've used to greatest political effect. And the conservative movement didn't just happen to use those, right? Like what Imara Jones talked about is that years of focus group research, years of testing, went into figuring out “what is it going to take to cleave off just enough political support from key constituencies to get a governing majority?” So part of this, what we're experiencing right now, it's an ideological project, right? Like, it is the true believers that really want to be reinstalling this patriarchal world order. And there are people that just care about political power who are capitalizing on fear in order to just think about how you wedge. And so they had tried bathroom bills that actually didn't work that well. Then they moved on to trans girls in sports. Now they're moving on to gender-affirming care for minors. Like, they are trying to figure out perhaps some of the issues that are less well understood or people maybe are just less familiar with, and then stoke that fear, misinformation, disinformation, intentionally in order to use it as a political cudgel. So it really, it's depressing to see anyone sort of exploited for these political purposes. But that is kind of the choice that they are making on how they win elections and gain power. 

SARA: Something that I have been thinking a lot about in noticing all of this that's really reflected in your work and in this particular piece of the conversation is the fear around gender-affirming care and healthcare for trans folks and youth, but anyone about being about fertility. And shutting down and meaning making someone infertile and thereby making them unable to have children. And I know when I have sat in my own legislative hearings listening to some of that rhetoric and fear-mongering, I have had a moment – and I think your show really exposes this – where I thought, “Is that all that I am good for in this society is childbearing? As a female-identified human with a uterus that is my sole purpose, if I take this argument at face value.”

JULIE: Yeah. 

SARA: And that's really disheartening. I'm like, that's terrible!

JULIE: It is. It is, but it is. Throughout authoritarian regimes, we see this repeatedly, right? The valorization of motherhood, or a very particular form of motherhood, where women bear many children and stay at home to rear them, and devote their whole full identity and existence to that work. Like, that is presented as the highest purpose of womanhood and also is twisted to be a nationalist, or a civic duty. And so we're starting to see this with all this kind of push of pronatalism within the Trump administration that “Society's going to die off. What are we going to do? We won't be able to have Social Security. We won't have enough workers.” There are many ways that we could solve this problem, not the least of which is immigration, right? I mean there are many ways, but instead, it is women need to have more babies. And so it is this positioning of women's purpose within a society. And I think you're absolutely right, that then that narrative around gender-affirming care, it's all part of the same package. 

SARA: Yeah, that pronatalism episode was wild. I think because I hadn't – I wonder if you could just talk about that and just kind of give us a primer on what it is. Some of our folks will be familiar, but many not. It was a new learning for me. 

JULIE: Yeah, well, we are seeing, um, a real revival of pronatal rhetoric and some kind of on-the-margins policy proposals come out of the Trump administration. And what's so bizarre, I think, about this pronatalist movement is that it's a group of very sort of unlikely bedfellows. Pronatalism is not new, right? There are many religious communities and religious traditions where large families and having many children is something that's highly valued. So that has always been, there's been a segment of society in which that is something that is embraced. What is also happening is we sort of had these tech bros – and Elon Musk is sort of the face of that segment, I guess, of pronatalists – who not only are sort of interested in repopulating or maximizing population growth within the U.S., but are also really interested in sort of like it's almost like optimization of babies. Like how can we create the perfect baby? They're very in favor of IVF, whereas some of the religious traditionalists may not be. But it's about this: “How do we manufacture the best possible human and have the most of them?” And, of course, when you look at pronatalism throughout history, you don't have to go too far under the surface to know that it is deeply connected historically, to eugenics, that movement. And so all of this rhetoric around, like, who are we really talking about when we're talking about who should be having more babies, what do the ideal babies look like? You know, it has some very dark either implicit or with some of the folks, explicit implications, uh, that I think we have to be paying attention to also. But this is all sort of coalescing right now. And I think what we highlight in the episode is that J.D. Vance is really at the epicenter. Like he has a lot of trust among all of these various kind of pronatalist forces, the tech bros, the religious traditionalists, they all see him as sort of representing their interests. And so the Trump administration's embrace of that is something that is really uniting these unlikely bedfellows together. 

SARA: Yeah, that was the new learning for me, just kind of how it's appearing in this, the tech bros, and in this particular way, outside of religion, right? 

JULIE: Exactly, exactly. 

SARA: It’s just wild. Did your deep dive into all of this work – and you talked a little bit about the wedge issues starting with bathrooms and then sports bans and book bans, you know, wherever they can chip away at making queer and trans identities this wedge issue – What do you think most people still misunderstand about the lived realities of trans folks in this moment?

JULIE: Yeah, that's such a good question, and it's really hard to sort of put your head around it if it's not something that you're personally struggling with, right? I think that there still is concern, at least I'm guessing, that this notion of, sort of, “kids don't know themselves. And they may just have a transient identity. And, you know, and unless we sort of police this, God knows what they're going to do with their own bodies or themselves.” So I think that there's just this real fear about, sort of, children are minors, not sort of knowing who they are, or not to be trusted in talking about their own identities, which is really demeaning. I mean, it's a really demeaning approach to take to young people. And I think that there is just also tremendous misinformation or lack of understanding about what gender-affirming care actually is. Right? And I think people think gender-affirming care for minors is gender reassignment surgery. And I don't think they understand all of the mental health care, which is really first and foremost, and the biggest component of gender-affirming care. I think that they just don't really understand what actually is happening, and how this is so important to young people just being able to be happy, healthy, full humans, right, and separating kind of gender reassignment surgery, from the multitude of other aspects of gender-affirming care. 

SARA: Yeah. One of the things that is happening that we're noticing, I'm sure you're noticing, is that there is a lot of media and misinformation in the public media around these issues, around what healthcare looks like for trans youth and trans adults, around what gender really is and sports, and all of that. 

JULIE: Yes. Yes. 

 SARA: It's been a firestorm in the last couple of years. And most of it is wildly inaccurate. And most of it really, really negative, and really scary. And it's grown into mainstream media organizations. And we've touched on this in a bunch of different episodes so this shouldn't be new to our community. But from the very first episode of the season, you make your position, and you've shared it with us already today, really clear that these are cruel attacks. They're dehumanizing, demeaning. This is a political ideology that is meant to create chaos and overwhelm. And I want to thank you for that clarity of your position. As a parent of a trans daughter, I could tell from the first episode that you were supportive of the community, which to me was a signal that I could trust your reporting because of that clarity of your position. You interview Gillian Branstetter from the ACLU, you interview Imara Jones of TransLash Media who, as you said, has been very vocal about the Christian nationalist calculated propaganda strategy of misinformation. That they have created and funded their own alternative media that has been pushed into mainstream media in order to foment this kind of misinformation and fear and hate that is fueling this moment. And I bring that up because I want to ask you as a journalist, how do you understand the media's role in this moment in shaping the public understanding of trans people and gender justice? 

JULIE: Yeah, I mean, I think that the media has an incredible responsibility in really separating fact from misinformation right now. And I think it is increasingly harder and harder to do that, right? But to be extremely skeptical in reporting to really demand the most accurate scientific-based information. And then to stop sort of feeding this false equivalence. And I do think many mainstream media outlets, I think, have gotten better at this. You know, the further we've gotten into the various Trump administrations, right. That it's not sort of like, on one hand, and on the other hand, and that we do sort of say we’re not going to treat a lie, this someone is saying it is the same as factual information just because we're going to try to give political parity or something like that. I think we have a responsibility to really call out disinformation. But I think it's also one of the things that we really wanted to highlight was just how robust the conservative  media ecosystem is, and how much investment, like billions of dollars that have gone into this, and that it is not just only to create, sort of, an echo chamber that folks who are sort of listening or tuning in to conservative outlets all day are hearing. But that they then have a plan for how they can start something that can then ripple in to other media outlets and really gain wider distribution. This is all very intentional, and so we have to be looking at where this is all coming from. You know, like you think, “Oh, that's interesting… I just heard about… huh, this sounds like an interesting issue.” But we have to actually go to why is this coming up at this moment? It just requires, I think, a lot of peeling back the layers of this and critically analyzing why is this being seeded as an issue that we should be paying attention to? What's behind this? And that, I think, is our responsibility in doing responsible reporting. 

SARA: Yeah. And I think for the mainstream consumer, it gets really complicated when there are media outlets that we have historically trusted and seen as being as unbiased as possible, right? You know, which is, I think, really hard in the Trump era of wagging the finger and fake news. But I know in an interview we did with Erin In The Morning, we were talking about how it's gotten so complicated when the Supreme Court now is using inaccurate evidence that's been published in the New York Times . . . 

JULIE: I know. 

SARA: . . . by these right-wing propaganda outlets. And it's just trickling down in this really complicated way that I think makes it very confusing for the average citizen. 

JULIE: Yeah, absolutely. No, absolutely. You know, and look, I don't actually consider myself a journalist, like I've spent most of my career in philanthropy and nonprofit work. And what I would say is that I think in doing this podcast, we really try to hold ourselves to the highest reporting standards, and be very accurate. You know, we have Fact Checker, and we, like, you know, we're very careful with what we are saying. And we are very explicit with the values that we come into this project with. Like, we have a set of values about justice and equity and its value in society. And I think we can still do very, you know, we can tell very important stories factually and accurately while also being transparent with the values that ground our work. 

SARA: Yes, transparent about our values. I like that. And that felt very true in the experience of the podcast. Based on this season of White Picket Fence and your research, I do want to talk about strategies. I want to hear from you a couple of strategies. What actually works to push back against these gender-restrictive movements and this gender backlash that we're experiencing? 

JULIE: Yeah. It's a good question. And I think if I had, like THE answer, then boy, we probably would be in a different position right now, right? 

SARA: Wave your magic wand and give us THE magic answer. 

JULIE: Exactly. Do we have to combat misinformation when we see it? Absolutely. Is that sufficient? No. We know it's not sufficient, right? I do think that telling stories really matters, that being able to see people as human beings and connect to them and relate to them is what can prevent us – people in general – from reacting with fear, right? And so I think that organizing that is relational is ultimately what's most effective, that we have to be having these difficult conversations with all of the people around us that are trusted, you know, that trust us, and that we trust because it is through those conversations that I think we can evolve our own thinking and get out of these partisan polarization bubbles that we're in. So I think all of that really matters. I think that there's no replacement for just being face-to-face with people, that we have to be in community, that that is how we ultimately will prevail. I do think that one of the really  scary things, and this is hard at this moment, is that I think storytelling does make such a difference. You know, I think about the marriage equality movement, like so it's not only storytelling, it's narrative, right? When marriage equality, when they sort of made the choice to move from a rights-based frame to love, that is when we were able to make tremendous policy gains. And I think that the work that you're doing, and that so many are doing about talking about families raising queer or trans kids. And just who can't relate to parents fiercely loving their kids and wanting to have them thrive and be happy and be safe? I mean, these are just, these should be sort of universal feelings that we can help connect. But, I think what is hard right now is that it is not a very safe environment in which to tell your stories. And so, I mean, I was really heartened to hear on the Daily recently, a family with a trans child telling their story about how they had to relocate. And I thought it was really brave, right? And so I understand all of the reasons why people may not want to, or feel that they are able to do that right now. And yet, I think that's so important. And I think it is also not coincidental, why we are seeing the book bans, and having that be such a central component of this effort, right? Because it's another way of humanizing. It's another way of telling people stories in ways that allow us to connect across dimensions of difference. And that is a fundamental threat to this ideology. And so any way that they can block that, that they can silence people or reduce their exposure to other ways of being, they are trying to do. And so I think it is one of the reasons that we have to be fighting so hard against those book bans and the freedom of expression and freedom of speech, how fundamental that is to be able to bridge these differences and to be able to create a more accepting and ultimately just world. 

SARA: Thank you for that. That's really, really meaningful to hear that and really helpful. And it leads into sort of my final question here, one of my final questions, in that your last episode is titled, Hope is a Discipline, and it's a bit of a departure from your other episodes. I found it really moving. You share hopeful stories. You share your own perspective about moving forward with hope in times like these. So without giving away the whole episode, can you give us your thoughts on hope? Where do you see glimmers of hope and transformation and possibility for the future that we want to build?

SARA: Yeah. I mean, thank you for saying that, so it's very kind. But we feel very strongly, my producers and I, that we had to end on a more optimistic note than we had. We felt sometimes like people were just going to be like, “Oh my god, it feels impossible.” And this quote of “hope is a discipline" is one that is credited to an activist in prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, and so I want to give credit to that because I've reflected a lot on that. Like I've heard it, and I've said it, and I was like, okay we need to really, like, unpack and examine what that means. Like, what does it mean to say that hope is a discipline? And so we tried to kind of lay out the different ways that we can exercise hope. So let's think of hope as like a muscle that we're actually exercising, rather than just a feeling. And the ways that we sort of talked about it in that episode was you can do that through resistance, like through formal political work in whatever way, shape or form that that might take. You can exercise that through reimagination. What is our vision? We know what their vision of a family ideal is, of a society, a patriarchal society, of these hierarchies that they want to have us to have guide us and structure our society. But what's our ideal? And again, I think this is where queer communities have really led the way. It's one that we kind of keep coming back to over the various seasons of the podcast, of how can we think about family more expansively, how can we think about community more expansively, how can we think about giving and receiving care and love in different ways that is not sort of only confined to those in our household or those that we are related to by blood or adoption? So that reimagination, I think, is a really important way of exercising hope. Pushing ourselves to think bigger and differently, and not to sort of be stuck by what's politically pragmatic, but actually, like, what is a society that we would like to build? Like this project of moving to a more just and equitable society, it's never going to be – We're never going to hit it. We're never going to be like, “Okay, work is done. We've solved all the problems,” right? This is going to be generations and generations and generations of work. And hopefully we're just kind of continuing to improve. And so I think that reimagination is a really important piece of it. And then finally, we just talked about existence as really a way of exercising hope, and that in these moments when people are facing such personal attacks, that living your true self is also a form of exercising hope, like refusing to sort of be silenced or forced to conform in a way that doesn't feel authentic or real or true to who you are. And I think we need to be honoring all of these as real demonstrable ways of exercising or showing us what hope looks like, and ways that we can all kind of find a pathway in that doesn't feel so like, I can't possibly do this, and I can't be doing this. But all of us can be doing something to move us in a more hopeful direction. 

SARA: That's beautiful. What a beautiful way to wrap up the conversation. I do have two final questions for you before we go. And these are questions that we like to ask all of our guests at the end of every episode. Before I ask you, I will say to our listeners, we will be sure to put links to the podcast and Julie's work in the show notes so you can access it directly from there. Please take a listen. It is so worth it. You will appreciate this season so very much. So, Julie, our final questions. The first one has to do with the Mama Dragon's name, which came about out of a sense of fierceness and fierce protection for our kids. And so we like to ask our folks, besides all that we've been talking about for this last hour, what is it you are fierce about? 

JULIE: Oh, that's a great question. The Mama Dragons name resonated very deeply with me. I'm the parent of a neurodivergent child and the attacks right now on the autism community, on autistic people, and other neurodivergent people, the threats to special education, are really very scary as a parent who really relies on this and the misinformation, the rampant misinformation that's being promoted. And so I am fierce on these issues, and I'm really, I'm thinking about how I can become more active in standing up against the misinformation and harm that's being inflicted on millions of neurodivergent people. So that is something that I'm fierce about. 

SARA: Thank you. I know many in our Mama Dragons community share that same identity, too. Many of us have also neurodivergent kids, and thank you for naming that and mentioning that. And my final question is, what is bringing you joy? As we recognize that part of the discipline of hope is cultivating as much joy as we can in these times when we can. So, where are you finding joy? 

JULIE: Oh, well, with my son. We have a one-year-old puppy who is barking earlier in this interview and got very excited. But that certainly brings me a lot of joy. And one of the things, I live in Washington, D.C., which is not a very joyful place all the time right now. It feels pretty dark. And so one of the things that we've made a very conscious decision to do is just get out of the city on a fairly regular basis, and sort of experience life in different places. And I have a group of very close friends that we go on an annual bike trip every fall. And that process of being in nature, moving your body, being with people that you love, right? Like, enjoying good meals together, that is definitely what brings me joy. And I feel, like, so kind of revitalized after being able to do those kinds of trips to come back and, you know, fight another day. 

SARA: Oh, I love that. Oh, that's really beautiful. Julie, thank you so much for your time for this conversation. Thank you for the work that you are doing and the stories that you are telling, and for your clear, unwavering support of the trans community. This has been a delight. 

JULIE: Oh, well, it's been a delight for me too, and I echo the thanks right back to you. I think what you're doing in the community that you've built is so important, and I have such deep respect and gratitude for the work that you're doing. 

SARA: Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us here In the Den. Did you know that Mama Dragons offers an eLearning program called Parachute? This is an interactive learning platform where you can learn more about how to affirm, support, and celebrate the LGBTQ+ people in your life. Learn more at mamadragons.org/parachute or find the link in the episode show notes under links. 

If you enjoyed this episode, we hope you’ll take a moment to tell your friends and leave us a positive rating and review wherever it is you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from being part of this community. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ+ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website mamadragons.org.