Introduction

Cleo 0:00

Why can't we get over trans athletes? Despite the shockingly small number of trans athletes in competitive sports and the general cultural shift towards conservative values we've seen over the past few years, the debate still comes back around over and over again. On today's episode, we will be diving into the deep end and hopefully coming out tied for fifth place. Welcome to recoupling, my show about the space between the world we dream of and the one we live in now. My name is Cleo. It's been about a year and a half since the executive branch passed Executive Order 14201 to compel the world at competitive sports to bar trans women from competing in any sport at any level. In response, the NCAA released new guidelines in February 2025 to explicitly exclude trans women from competing in college-level athletics. Later, the Olympics would update their policies to exclude trans women from the game starting in LA in 2028. And then again, over this past summer, the issue was catapulted to the headlines as the U.S. Supreme Court announced in West Virginia vs. B.P.J. that excluding transgender women and girls from women's sports does not violate the Equal Protection Clause. And now, a few months later, the PSYOP is back, in the form of a few washed-out ex-NBA players announcing their intentions to be drafted for the WNBA. Why does this keep coming up? Throughout this debate, conservative talking heads and well-intentioned advocates have gone back and forth, beating the issue like a dead horse, repeating the same four talking points over and over again. Therefore, this episode will not talk about the science of trans women's supposed athletic advantage in sports. Plenty of people have already done that work, and if the actual science was going to inform the discussion, it would have been settled years ago. I think by entertaining right-wing talking points, I think we've already seeded too much ground. For me, though, this has raised one major question. What if trans sports bands weren't really about trans people at all? This research took me on a ride through the history of trans exclusion from sports and its long intertwinement with racism, fascism, Nazism, and anti-feminist backlash. To understand where we are now, I think we need to look back at where this began over a century ago. While the inclusion of trans people in sports may seem like a contemporary issue, the story actually begins over a century ago. It started as women's athletics began spreading on the European stage, and two world record-setting athletes would transition to become men after setting world records in the women's field. At the same time, the Nazis were consolidating power in Germany in the lead up to the infamous 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Fascist agendas were trying to further entrench Nazism and manufacture evidence for supposed Aryan supremacy. I read a book in 2025 about this that quickly became my favorite of the year. It was written by author and historian Michael Waters and is called The Other Olympians. It details the long history of gender surveillance in sports, telling the stories of a few notable trans athletes in the 1930s and debate about their contentious world records. It also tells the story of the Nazi Olympics and the backroom conversations between sports officials that codified our current obsession with gender deviance in sports. It's really about the birth of a language and a rhetoric that's been recycled so many times and continues to plague our language today. With this context, two things become clear. First, the impact of these policies is the further marginalization of the shockingly small number of trans and intersex athletes that play in competitive sports. But perhaps more consequentially, these policies are built to return to the fascist, anti-feminist control of cisgender women in their bodies. Trans sports bans are meant to worsen conditions for women across the board. Bigotry is fundamentally uncreative. Today's calls for trans isolation use the same language, the same terms, and the same vile accusations as yesterday's calls for racial segregation and Nazi eugenics.

Women's sports & early trans athletes

Cleo 3:52

To understand the current debate about trans people in sports, we have to start back in the 1930s, as women were slowly finding their way into the public eye as athletes. I'll have Michael explain a little bit more about where his book picks up with a record-setting athlete in the women's world games.

Michael 4:06

Yeah, so the central narrative focuses on Zdeněk Koubek, who is this Czech athlete who's assigned female at birth, plays in women's sports for most of his career. And in 1934, he wins gold in the 800 meters in what was called the Women's World Games, which is this kind of rival to the Olympics. And after he wins gold, he kind of steps away from sports and announces in December 1935 that he's transitioning gender and that going forward he'll be living as a man. And it was sort of fascinating because that was such a widely covered uh moment in December 1935. You know, for like one year, Kobec was this kind of brief international sort of celebrity, object of curiosity, depending on sort of who was writing about him. And so my book really centers on Kobec's story. You know, in 1936, right after he transitioned, he wrote this pseudo-memoir of his life that was published in a magazine that is just a sort of rare archival source showing us what he was thinking at all these different beats of his life. So it centers on Koubek, also on this athlete named Mark Weston, who transitioned sort of shortly after Koubek, and also the sort of ways in which Koubek's story is interlaced with this very long history of sex testing and gender policing in the Olympics and kind of in sports more broadly. And Koubek's transition paired with this larger panic about women's sports as both this like threat to women's health and fertility, and then also as this like masculinizing force for women, is actually kind of what led to the first sex testing policies in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics. You know, this is something that we're still reconciling with today, that's sort of becoming even more prominent today, especially in recent years, and it all kind of traces back in complicated ways to this athlete and to this moment of fascist creep in the 1930s.

Cleo 6:01

Koubek was transitioning at a time when the women's world games was a formidable competitor to the Olympics of popularity. For

Perceived Threats to Womanhood

Cleo 6:07

the dominant sports officials at the time, this was a deep upset to the gender divide. Sports were considered unladylike, unfeminine.

Michael 6:15

Since the origins of women's sports, there was this real sense, especially among like the male sports officials who ran a lot of these leagues, that women's sports were somehow a threat to like women's health and reproductive systems, but also to like traditional femininity. And there was this sense that, especially in sports like track and field, which brought poor women, working class women, it was more accessible than something like tennis because you don't have to join a club, also especially like women of color. In that these sports were often associated with this like kind of masculinizing force almost that like the women who were winning in different like back and field events were too butch and did not fit traditional norms of femininity. And you see a lot of male sports officials who were literally saying this and were sort of hitting women who embody traditional femininity against other athletes they saw as more butch, right? And so this is like all women who are ostensibly cis who are the center of this kind of panic. And so when Koubek transitions gender in late 1935, you know, for a certain contingent of male sports officials, this really affirms this kind of panic that they've had for some time about almost like gender performance in sports, right? And took issue with the fact that Koubek had played in women's sports at all. And it's kind of like an illogical argument in the first place, right? Because like he had not yet transitioned in 1934 when he set this world record at the women's world games, but kind of speaks to the sort of like complicated ideas about transition in the era that a lot of officials thought that the fact that he could live as a man at all therefore meant that there was like something suspect about him that would call his record into question in 1934. And so there was this kind of larger push, led in large part by a sports doctor named Wilhelm Noll, who was a registered Nazi and was also like really significant advisor to the Olympics and to like different kinds of medical issues. Um, and he pushed not just for Kobec's record to be stripped, but also for track and field sports to implement like medical exams of all women athletes, like literally just strip tasks to decide like who should be allowed to compete. And on the flip side, you have Alice Milliot, who is the French woman who founded the Women's World Games as this alternative to the Olympics, who I think pretty logically and like pretty straightforwardly was just like it doesn't make sense to get rid of his records because he had not yet transitioned in 1934 when he said this, and you know, going forward, Koubek wanted to play in men's sports, right? He was now living as a man. He always said, I obviously don't want to go back to play in women's sports.

The Panic Comes for Cis Women

Cleo 8:57

In Berlin, sports officials were forced to confront their fears of cis women, specifically strong cis women, gaining recognition on the international stage. Their intrusion to the Olympics was seen as a certain form of gender nonconformity, and they wrote policies to ease their fears and enforce them against athletes who didn't look quite feminine enough for their tastes.

Michael 9:15

Yeah, right. And so I do think it's sort of important to underscore that. I think the trans panic that we see today in sports really has its roots in a panic about cis women and about like embodying femininity in society and especially in sports, right? And I think you actually see that most clearly with the story of Helen Stevens, who is this American track athlete from Missouri who in 1936 at the Berlin Olympics wins gold for the US team. And Helen Stevens, like there's always been these kind of like misogynistic reports about her talking about how she has like a deep voice and sort of like big biceps and thick legs as a sprinter naturally would. Right, but she's sort of portrayed and perceived as being like overly butch and masculine in all these ways. And that was the case before she s won the gold. But then right after she wins gold, these Polish newspapers in particular publish these articles that essentially and kind of absurdly like accuse her of being a man, seemingly like a man in disguise. It's not really clear like what they're even trying to say. And it actually creates this whole like media circus in the next few days, centering on whether Helen Stevens, by all accounts, is this woman, you know, through to the end of her life, whether or not she is both a man or like somehow is transgressing feminity so much that it would sort of disqualify her from sports. But certainly there was this broader sense of by being a woman who is to the left of center of traditional femininity and winning gold, she had upset kind of like this broader like male sports power structure and also just was herself like a source of gender anxiety. And I think it's a lot of those same gender anxieties that ultimately created these early sex testing policies. So, like a few days after Helen Stevens won that gold medal, the World Track and Field Federation that governs all track and field sports on the elite level, they passed this first sex testing policy in August 1936, basically saying that any athlete can lodge a complaint against any other woman about whom there's quote, like questions of a physical nature, and that woman would be literally strip-tested by a doctor and examined. And you know that's that happens right after Helen Stevens, shortly after Koubek. And so I think you see all of these anxieties interlinked, and it's those policies ultimately that are still with us and are really weaponized against trans women and women on the intersex spectrum today.

Cleo 11:45

In the case of Helen Stevens, the early obsession with gender deviation in sports was used most formidably against a cis woman in the Olympics. Sounds familiar. While today the debate may be more subtle. Back then, the ties to misogynistic definitions of who counts enough as a woman and who the male sports officials at the time wanted to watch on the field were clear. Of course, this was tied deeply to race and class. The definitions were set around white, Eurocentric, affluent definitions of beauty. And those who didn't comply had their personhood thrown into question.

Michael 12:15

Like sports officials like Avery Brundage, who was one of the big backers of sex testing, this American world sports official later became head of the International Committee. You know, he didn't really have like an ideology behind pushing for these policies. And he is someone who, you know, actively in his writing is like expressing contempt at certain women who he thought were just certain cis women who he thought were just like too masculine, who he didn't like looking at, frankly. And I do think that this was so bundled up in misogyny and kind of like this our trip of we can keep these policies so vague and therefore kind of exclude who we want to exclude using them.

Cleo 12:55

It wasn't a coincidence this was taking place at the same time as a hostile fascist government takeover. The enforcement of traditional gender norms has been long linked with fascist projects, which seek to paint women as domestic creatures, with their primary purpose being reproduction. Simultaneously, it becomes beneficial to the state to paint weakness and frailty as core aspirations of femininity, punishing women who fear too far out of that standard through exclusion and public humiliation. I asked Michael to talk a little bit more about the connection between gender policing and Nazis at the time. Just a heads up, my audio from the interview in this section was a little bit choppy. And one of the things that you wrote in your book that I I want to quote just because I really loved it, was quote, There was

Throughout the years

Cleo 13:35

no driving ideology behind these early sex testing proposals. Perhaps that was because these officials were too naive to realize that the sex binary did not exist at all. Or perhaps because the vagueness was the point they could eliminate anyone they wanted just by calling the athlete's femininity into question. I think that is a really good quote to kind of link what we were just talking about into a little bit more of the broader context of where these sex testing proposals were coming from. I know you talked about how one of the doctors that was very integral in implementing this in the Olympics was a registered Nazi. Can you talk a little bit about how sex testing was linked to the Nazis in this particular era?

Michael 14:14

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think the connection to the Nazis and the fact that right this like Nazis Doctor was a big part of pushing these policies is really not a coincidence. You know, kind of the whole story of also the Berlin Olympics is one where the Nazis were actively trying to limit like which athletes could participate were part of like their own sort of like racist anti-Semitic ideology, were trying to keep Jewish athletes out. And that was kind of this whole back and forth, like among Olympic officials leading up to the Berlin Olympics in 1936. And so Wilhelm Null, who's this Nazi sports doctor, right, he ultimately leads the push to keep out, especially intersex women, it seemed like he was going after. But also he had all these writings where he talked about trying to like quote unquote purify sports, which to him meant keeping out Jewish athletes, like athletes of color, and keeping out gender non-conforming athletes of different kinds, was all kind of wrapped up in that too. Right. And so I think these projects are really interlinked of trying to use sports to this political end of these are the people that we want in our society and these are the people that we do not want. And, you know, for the Nazis, sex testing and just kind of like queerness in general is really wrapped up in this idea of natalism and birth rates, basically. And there's this idea pushed by the Nazis that all births were like public act and sort of in support of the nation in different ways. And so you saw, you know, Nazis would be giving lectures in the 1930s that were tying homosexuality to abortion and also to transition. And so like trans people, queer people broadly, and abortion, sort of all of this was wrapped up in this idea of these are harms to the creation of this like natalist state, right? This this sort of harms like reproduction in different ways. And so and that doesn't even sort of get us into all these questions about like who should be allowed to reproduce in the first place. But I think sex testing is this policy that's focused on sports and is born out of sports, but it really links this kind of larger natalist panic pushed by the Nazis and their kind of opposition to queerness was often rooted in this idea of both these are people who we don't want in society, and then also this is like a threat to the birthright in some way.

Cleo 16:34

As a result of the Berlin Olympics and the Nazi sports officials who ran it, sex testing was codified into the books as a priority for sports officials. And the vagueness of those policies and the lack of clarity about the real purpose of those policies continue to remain unsettled throughout the 1900s.

Michael 16:50

Yeah, I mean, I think to my mind, the story of sex testing at the Olympics is this policy that was like put on the books in the 1930s, World War II happens, gets kind of forgotten about. And is this policy really kind of in search of a reason? Right? Like there is this feeling among the sports officials that they should be doing some kind of sex testing. They don't really know why. A lot of people forget the story of Koubek and Helen Stevens and the specificity of it, but they see on the books the Olympics has this policy that we should be doing sex testing. Who should we be excluding and how should we do this test, right? And there was never really, like in the meeting minutes, there's like this constant back and forth from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s today, I'm sure, among sports officials being like, who exactly are we trying to keep out with these policies? And so what happens is that in the early days, um, sex testing takes the form of these strip tests or gyneological exams. So like women athletes in the 1950s and track and field, which has the first of the sex testing policies, have to present doctor's notes basically to say that they were like gynecologically examined and were like okayed to compete. And it's like, what were doctors looking at? Like, what was the line that they were using to define like who was a woman who was not unclear? It was never spelled out among sports officials. So after the 1950s, when sex testing took the form of these strip tests, the sports officials realized both that it was like humiliating to a lot of women and pretty cruel. And also there was this kind of router fear kind of brought on by the Cold War of these women athletes from the USSR who, you know, a lot of Americans were like, oh, they're so butch in this sort of like threatening way. Maybe there's something going on with them. And leads to this more elaborate policy of sex testing chromosomes. So what basically happens is that all of elite sports switch from these strip tests to chromosome testing, where they essentially are looking to see who has XX chromosomes. And, you know, like even when we're just looking at like sex assignment at birth, there is a decently large subset of people who are assigned female at birth who don't even have the XX, right? So like this itself is not like a really good policy. And there are a lot of doctors at the time who are writing to the Olympics, being like, this doesn't really make any sense based on what you're doing. Like, who are you actually trying to exclude here and why? They can never answer that question. And even sports officials, like I found letters in the archives where Olympic officials would be saying, like, we're creating these really arbitrary distinctions, this is pretty discriminatory, like, what are we doing here? And actually in the late 90s, there's just kind of such a chorus of voices who are opposed to these chromosome-based tests that eventually the Olympics get rid of it. And, you know, you have like the American Medical Association comes out against chromosome tests, you have, you know, political moderates like Hillary Clinton are saying, like, this is crazy, why are we doing this? And like athletes themselves are like, why are we doing this? And so you have this kind of mass agreement that this doesn't really make sense. And you have in 2000 Olympic officials saying, um, we're basically trying to get rid of gender testing for good. You know, looking back on it now, we've really just kind of moved backwards once again. And so in 2000, when the Olympics sort of gets rid of sex testing on this kind of trial basis, it actually seems like we've kind of moved past a lot of these policies. It's also forgotten about now, but like in 2004, the Olympics did endorse and did have a rule that said that like all trans women like had a path to compete in Olympic sports, right? There was certain requirements about like how long you had to be on hormones beforehand, but like there was this kind of broad sense over 20 years ago of like this testing procedure is outdated and discriminatory, and then also we should be moving towards this place of inclusion. Um, and I think what we've really seen in the last few years is that as um like the right wing in the US, in the UK have pushed a lot of these anti-trans policies and kind of whipped up this like hysteria around like trans women athletes, that has kind of like trickled back up into the Olympics. And we're seeing not only just like trans women banned from many Olympic sports, but we're actually seeing in track and field today, um in unboxing today, like a return of chromosome testing, this thing that 26 years ago basically everyone agreed was discriminatory and like didn't really make any sense. And yeah, I mean, kind of the whole story of sex testing in sports is one where officials are looking kind of for a reason for why they are doing this, but are kind of responding to their own anxieties and like the public's anxieties and kind of creating these policies that don't really make sense. And it's kind of never been clear like what this is all for, you know, who they're trying to keep out and why. And I don't think they've known either. And again, if you look in the archives, it's like there's so many letters where they're kind of like we need to clearly state who we want to keep out, and they never can.

Links to Fascism

Cleo 21:51

From the start, these policies were created to enforce a very narrow definition of womanhood. Therefore, it should be unsurprising that the policies today have regressed to the same format as the 1930s. Strip testing and later chromosome testing. While maybe the anti-feminist context has been lost a bit in today's discussion, the story doesn't feel that much different. It's two fascist projects that want to enforce stricter and stricter ideals for what type of women should be allowed to exist in public. Trans women, of course, are the more explicit target of these policies now, but also different sections and types of sports, recreational sports, younger athletes, kids are now being subjected to strip search.

Michael 22:26

What both like the 1930s and now what is in common is these fascist projects to use sports to push this very like conservative idea of gender. And I think in both cases, right, it's pretty clear, it's I mean it's pretty clear to us now in the Nazi example that like this policy that you know like some Nazi officials pushed for implementing these medical tests of women athletes, it was never about sports, right? It was all about kind of tying the broader Nazi like eugenics day ideology into sports and kind of using sports almost like a showcase for what they stood for and just for eugenics more broadly. And I think like similarly today, we see the right using sports as a way to like spread panic against trans women in particular, and then also to use sports as like this tool of isolation. I actually think what's sort of different about then and now that I think is important to highlight is that these Nazi policies that we're talking about in the context of the Olympics are focused on the Olympics and this like elite level of competition. Whereas now, you know, in the US, the right is crafting these anti-trans sports laws that affect kids as young as kindergarten. And so it's going after kids who are very young, and like for a lot of people who play sports literally just as like a way of making friends, as this sort of like social vehicle, this way to find community. And I think actually what these policies are about on this very personal level is to make trans people feel ostracized from the time that they are young, and particularly like trans girls and trans women. And I think in that sense it feels really similar, right? Which is you do have this fascist cult that is using sports to push their own ideas about ultimately keeping out people based on gender.

Why Sports?

Cleo 24:16

I think that there's a reason that the most visible debate and policies about who should and should not be considered a woman is taking place in the arena of sports. Sports bodies are one of the most effective governing agencies that we've given permission to create restrictions and limitations on the size, shape, and capacities of women's bodies. We give them passes to invade our hormonal systems in the name of fairness, but there's never been real clarity about why we should let them or how they should go about it. Trump named non-white cisgender boxer Imane Khelif as a core reason for his executive order. Khelif, an Algerian boxer who won gold at the 2024 Summer Olympics, is the constant subject of vile attacks from spectators who believe that she's not woman enough to compete as a woman, despite being born a woman and being raised one. Trump also brought up a fellow female boxer, Lin Yu Ting, as another example of a supposed man in sports, despite the fact that she is, by all accounts and measurements, cisgender. If, to justify a policy supposedly about trans women, the president could only point to cisgender athletes, then what is this push really about? Because really, if Imane Khelif were a man, she'd probably be treated the same way we treat Michael Phelps, not as a plight to her gender, but as an athlete at the top of her game for whatever biological and conditional reasons that brought her there. It's not a coincidence that these gender policing policies have been enforced much more viciously against nonconforming cis women. It's also not a coincidence that these policies have been enforced against nonconforming non-white women. Sex is not simple, nor is it binary. The deeper you go trying to define what sex is, the harder it becomes. That's part of why we've abandoned all of these testing metrics like chromosome testing in the late 1990s. So instead of having to do all of that work, the Trump administration and Nazis alike have found a new tool to seek to define womanhood in the eyes of whiteness, in the eyes of patriarchy. These policies are still today, but they were about a Nazi Germany. The ability of old white men to decide and enforce the definition of femininity. Who counts as a woman, and what role should a woman play in society? These are inherently anti-feminist projects that seek to define a smaller box of womanhood and ensure adherence to Western beauty standards, thinness, weakness, whiteness. That's also not to mention the ways in which these policies act as barriers to social and financial mobility. These policies restrict access to scholarships, visibility, and even friendship and social inclusion. By accepting these ideas, we further entrench a message that has been told to almost every young girl in America today that to be accepted into society, to be allowed to play sports, you have to be properly ladylike in the ways defined by the patriarchy. Even outside of the world of sports, cisgender women are finding themselves more often the victim of the current trans panic. Like cisgender hockey star Madison Packer, who was forced out of a women's restroom in Florida, or a cis-lesbian couple in Boston that was kicked out of the bathroom at a hotel after one of them was ordered to quote, prove to a security attendant that they were a woman. It's functionally state-sponsored sexual harassment. In Washington, in the Pacific Northwest, a ballot initiative may spread this to kids. It may require kids as young as sixth grade to be submitted to general inspections to compete in sports.

The broader story

Cleo 27:21

It's not a coincidence that this is happening at the same time as a broader social push towards more restrictions on women and their bodies. Because by pushing the lie that trans women have an unfair advantage in sports, it implies that women are not supposed to be strong. By enforcing the standard on cis women that too many masculine features, including muscle density or height, will force them into constant public questioning of whether their womanhood is valid, it sends a clear signal. Strength is not a desirable trait. Thinness and frailty has long been a beauty standard for women, but the expectations of womanhood are now coupled with any number of medical interventions. It doesn't take much scrolling to notice that our celebrities are getting thinner and thinner and more full of Botox. Where the 2010s saw a very slight movement towards more openness towards body types, the current environment is a lot less welcoming. Eating disorders are on the rise, especially among kids, and especially since the pandemic in 2020. And as the GLP1 boom makes thinness more achievable, it becomes easier to compel people into a specific shape to define their womanhood. Botox and related aesthetic procedures are making billions. Baby Botox or preventative Botox is also on the rise. There's even one article that I found about how GLP1 use has correlated with an increase in Botox to correct for the sagging face associated with the use of the drugs. I bring this up not to stigmatize the decisions women are making about our bodies and our health care, but to paint a picture of a slowly shrinking box of acceptable, impalatable womanhood, in first culturally, but also politically. In this way, trans women have become less of a policy debate and more of a caricature of unacceptable womanhood. Sharper features need to be smoothed, strength needs to be lost, noses need to be dainty, and the lack of adherence to those standards will subject you to punishment, regardless of whether or not you're actually trans. Through this process, it defines an in-group of acceptable womanhood and an outgroup of unacceptable womanhood. Thin women, white women, lean women are welcomed, women who cannot reproduce are not. Once the groups are defined, you can entrench the new values of proper womanhood with a zero-sum mentality. Heather McGee's 2021 book, The Sum of Us, lays out this thinking deeply in the context of race in the US. Consent for American repression leans on this lie that for someone to win, somebody else must lose. For opportunities to be available to one group, they have to be taken away from someone else. This mentality is at the heart of white supremacy, defining whiteness and by extension maleness as the default as to who is entitled to any number of opportunities. Within this worldview, any number of intrusions by another group is an injustice. It's a great replacement theory. It's the same message we hear about immigrants taking away jobs, to people of color taking away Ivy League positions, to trans people taking away fifth place trophies at swimming events. Therefore, it would make sense to force trans women or any other non-feminine enough women out of sports. Their ability to simply exist in spaces is unfair to a much more deserving and traditionally feminine cis woman. I find it funny how zero-sum entitlement is always coupled with this helpless victim complex shown by Republicans and transphobic activists. Despite tying for fifth place with trans women Maria Thomas, Riley Gaines has made a career of this, claiming she was somehow wronged by Thomas' participation. She's made up lies about her behavior in the locker room and become a continuous voice, parroting the same billionaire think tank written talking points that everyone on the left is stuck responding to. I think it's the job of writers, speakers, and public figures more broadly to reconsider our rhetoric. How do we go about winning over the public more broadly and fighting back against fascist propaganda? It's not going to happen by giving up ground and sacrificing trans people or their participation in sports. I'd argue a good first step is to recontextualize the discussion, stop playing on their home

It's not just sports

Cleo 31:08

field. It's honestly not just about sports or even just about beauty standards. In the same way that trans women in sports are being used to push cis women into smaller boxes, trans exclusion in any number of avenues is drafting the blueprint for future systemic abuse of cis women. For instance, right now, the Trump administration is attacking Blue State hospitals, like NYU Langone, for providing health care to trans youth. By holding funding hostage and leveragi ng the courts to request private medical records, they're trying to manipulate hospitals into refusing care from some of the most vulnerable kids in our society. But it's not really about the kids. They're trying to prove that they can levy the power of the federal government and the courts to withhold whatever types of health care they disagree with. So far, they've been pretty successful when it comes to trans kids. Next it'll probably be trans adults, and after that, they will have paved the path to do the same thing with abortion and birth control. This is why I really don't think at its core the obsession with trans athletes is really about trans people at all. It's about figuring out the ways in which a fascist government can mold our lives and punish the women who refuse to obey. Despite the pleas of TERFs on Twitter, transphobia is bad for all women. Our fates are intertwined.

Conclusion

Cleo 32:20

I know this isn't the most hopeful note to end my first episode on. That's part of why I wasn't sure if I want to launch the podcast with this piece. Between some technical difficulties in the interview and a frankly depressing ending, it isn't the perfect tone of everything I have in store for this show, but I'm really, really proud of where this piece landed. I hope you enjoyed it. Big, big thank you to Michael for being willing to chat with us. If you want to listen to the full hour-long interview with him, that'll be up on my Patreon. Otherwise, consider subscribing. I would really love to have you come along with me throughout the upcoming season of recoupling. From the ways in which Big Oil wrote the Trump playbook, to the abandonment of pigeons, to the breakdown of Gen Z working culture, we have a lot to talk about. I hope to see you there on the next one. Recoupling Podcast is hosted by, written by, executive produced by, and edited by me, Cleo. Clay Parcels is our producer and our editor. Our theme song was produced by me and Clay. Eme Lawton designed our logo and graphics. Recoupling Podcast is presented by Recoupling Media.