Bridget Todd (00:03):

You're listening to Disinformed, a mini-series from There Are No Girls On The Internet. I'm Bridget Todd. I am so excited about next week's guest that I couldn't wait until Tuesday for you to hear some of what she has to say. Emily Krzyzewski is an activist who uses her data science background to fight Nazis. Yep, you heard that right. After being pepper sprayed by a well-known White supremacist at the deadly Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017, Emily built First Visual, a resource that documents and tracks the court proceedings of Nazis and White supremacists. This work has not been without significant personal risk for Emily. She even relocated out of the United States to Germany just to get some space. And when the White supremacists that Emily tracks tried to attack her, they often do so using transphobic attacks on her identity as a trans woman.

Bridget Todd (00:55):

Unfortunately, weaponizing trans identity is not isolated. And just this week, there was a flood of irresponsible public transphobia from our elected officials. During the Senate hearing for Dr. Rachel Levine, the first transgender person to be nominated for a Senate confirmed position in the federal government, Rand Paul asked her a series of completely offensive, deeply transphobic questions that pushed harmful misrepresentations obviously meant to attack her identity as a trans woman. And after Rep. Marie Newman, whose daughter is trans, hung a trans flag outside of her office and advocated for the Equality Act, insurrection supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose office is across the hall, went out of her way to cruelly antagonize her for supporting her kid. To make matters worse, when Newman posted a video of her putting up the trans flag she says Facebook took it down and labeled it as "hate speech" while leaving Marjorie Taylor Greene's transphobic nonsense up.

Bridget Todd (01:49):

Now, I'm being purposely vague here because I don't want to spend too much time talking about the specifics of their antics, because that's exactly what they want. These people are scammers who use trans people's actual lives as stunts for attention and to score ideological points instead of actually doing their job and governing. From fear-mongering about bathrooms and trans kids on sports teams, these kinds of stunts prevent trans people from just being able to safely live their lives. Now, in our interview, Emily says, "This is an intentional strategy to cause harm." Here's a preview of our conversation. You're already dealing with so much, and it's one more thing that you don't need, one more thing to take you out of your work, or one more thing to take up your energy or your capacity, which we already know is scarce.

Emily Krzyzewski (02:34):

That's part of the plan. This is a weaponized war of attrition that they do this, because if they get you spending your energy on all of these little things, ultimately, if you needed to swallow it to get the job done you would just swallow it to get the job done. But you want to fight it. And so they're trying to distract you. They're trying to steal your energy fighting these pointless battles. And they're not pointless battles, but they're not the main point of the battle. So it's like by 1000 paper cuts with all of this stuff. And yeah, I don't know. It just seems like that's part of this fascist strategy, is to just keep you constantly occupied so that you can never get ahead, because they know that if you had a moment of peace, imagine what we could all do given that.

Emily Krzyzewski (03:23):

The stuff that I'm accomplishing now, having moved to Germany, having gotten some space between the trauma and the noise and all of that, and the healing that I've done. I'm doing the best work of my life right now, because that's the power that I have. And I got that power by surviving all of these fights for so long. As somebody that's mixed race, as somebody that's transgender, as somebody that's queer, it's just a constant battle. Well, surviving that has given me the tools to excel, but at the same time, sometimes I wish I could just be normal and just exist everyone else, and just have a normal life. And not everyone gets to make it through all of that noise. That's the point. That's how they keep us down.

Bridget Todd (04:16):

Yeah. I even see it in I feel that a lot of the online conversation around issues impacting the trans community, people, bad actors and shitheads, have dominated, especially online, dominated those conversations. And so every conversation is like, "Trans people in sports, bathrooms." And it's like, if folks did not have to constantly contend with these very loud people who, essentially, in my opinion, have been able to really own the conversation online, could we actually have a productive conversation that moves us forward? But I feel like we can't because we're still, the people who want to be flooding every conversation with a bunch of nonsense. They have dominated the online space, I feel.

Emily Krzyzewski (05:06):

Yeah, and it's all culture war stuff. This whole thing now it's about trans kids in sports. There's no problems with trans kids in sports. All of these things that they're talking about, there's no statistics whatsoever that suggests that this is a problem in any way, shape, or form. If a bunch of trans girls were out there winning every sports championship in high school women's sports and college women's sports, even I would say like, "Maybe we need to revisit this." But that's not happening. There's none. There's none. There are no trans women dominating collegiate athletics. There are no trans women dominating high school athletics. There are no trans women dominating the Olympic women's competitions. There are some trans women who are successful in those competitions, but we do not see a wave of cis men trying to pretend that they're trans women so they can get a gold medal.

Emily Krzyzewski (06:02):

We don't see that. We don't see trans women, trans girls joining these teams to dominate them. This is a completely fabricated issue, and the reason it has been fabricated is in order to create this polarization so that the right can stay relevant by creating this cultural division. And trans people have been historically used as scapegoats as just we're just one identity that has been used as scapegoats. Three, four years ago, this was all about bathroom bills. Okay, well, there was no evidence of any trans women ever sexually assaulting anyone in a bathroom or any men, cisgender men, trying to pretend that they are trans women to assault women in bathrooms. There were plenty of cases of cisgender men going into women's bathrooms when a cisgender woman, who was like a butch lesbian, went in there and then beat her up.

Emily Krzyzewski (07:02):

So the actual threat of, again, men on women violence in women's bathrooms was the opposite of this problem. The thing that they were saying was going to happen was the thing that they were doing. All of this is culture war stuff. All of this is designed to keep inflated this polarized version of politics and to rally people. The right knows that it is a losing cause, but they create these fake issues to mobilize people, and it works, because we're left here holding the bag because we have to be outraged and we have to fight it, because if we don't fight it, it's a catastrophe. If we do fight it, it becomes this polarization vector, and then all of these talking heads on social media and in the New York Times op-ed and on cable news, they're all sitting here going, "Hmm, is America so polarized? Is it really both sides that are bad?"

Emily Krzyzewski (08:07):

And fuck you, buddy, you're not affected. You're not going to get beat up if you go to try to take a leak in the bathroom at a court house or a school. This is not an issue of people becoming polarized. This is an issue of people who have always had a right defending against lies that are being used to try to remove that right in order to further a different political agenda. We're not a football. We're we're people. And then us fighting to retain whatever little dignity we are granted somehow becomes a both sides issue. Fuck that.

Bridget Todd (08:52):

It's so insulting, and I think people forget that these are people that we're people. I guess I hate when I see people talking about other human beings as if it's some ideological exercise or something, not someone's actual life. It's very frustrating. People shouldn't have to go through this. Trans people are valid and trans people belong, and we shouldn't stand for their identities and lives being used for cheap political stunts. Emily's work is so incredible, and she's so cool, I was almost nervous to talk to her. Tune into Disinformed from There Are No Girls On The Internet this Tuesday to hear our entire conversation. You won't want to miss it. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please help us grow by subscribing.

Bridget Todd (09:47):

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi? We'd love to hear from you at hello@tangoe.com. Disinformed is brought to you by There Are No Girls On The Internet. It's a production of iHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our supervising producer and engineer. Michael Limato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. For more great podcasts, check out the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.