At 4000 z, we acknowledge the traditional.

Owners of the land on which we broadcast.

We pay our respects to the elders past, present and emerging of the turbul and jagger people. We acknowledge that their sovereignty over this.

Land was never ceded and we stand in solidarity with them. You're listening to transmission on four triple z, amplifying the trans and gender non conforming voices of Brisbane and beyond. Good morning, everyone. My name is bet. My pronouns are she, they and you're listening to transmission, the trans show on four zzzzzz, 102.1 fm. I have two people in the studio with me today.

Good morning, my name is Liz Witt. I have they them pronouns, and it is a joy to join you in the studio today.

Hello, my name is Ludo. I have he Z pronouns and I'm also very happy to be here.

Okay, great. I've got a couple of community announcements. So the new Farm Queer Film festival returns this month with their biggest and best programme yet, apparently. So we have a giveaway.

We do. We are giving away not one, not two, not three, not four, but five double passes to the new Farm Queer Film festival for people who want to get in a little slice of queer cinema into their lives now.

Awesome. So all they need to do is.

Well, number one, subscribe to four triple z. As this competition is only available to four triple z subscribers. So once you have subscribed at four zz.org dot au dot, send us a text message on the text line. And the first five people who text in saying, shall we make them jump through a hoop for us? The first five people who text in their pronouns.

Okay, yeah, sounds good.

Will get a double pass to the new Farm queer film festival. How's that?

Yep, sounds great. And I'm supposed to alert people to a couple of great films that are going on, so I will do that. Now the people's Joker is showing. This autobiographical trans coming of age tale skews the Joker into a queer icon. With legal support in tow directly, Vera drew finally presents her much anticipated directorial debut two years after it was pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival. Under pressure from Warner Brothers, the people's Joker follows an unconfident, closeted trans girl. And then my text cuts off there.

So she moves to Gotham City.

Yeah.

So I can see why Warner Brothers was getting a little itchy there. Can you? So she moves to Gotham City and then I can kind of guessed the rest of the plot from there.

Considering the name, I think she's on the comedy network or something, isn't she?

She's a comedian, a government sanctioned late night sketch show in a world where comedy has been outlawed.

Right, okay, cool.

Hell of a premise.

And so then the other film is called crossing Leah. A mesmerising Mzia Arabuli, a retired teacher living in Georgia, made a promise to find out what happened to her long lost niece, Tecla. When Leah learns from Archie, a neighbourhood, that Tekla might be living in Turkey, they set off together to find her. In Istanbul. They discover a beautiful city full of connections and possibilities. But looking for someone who never intended to be found is harder than they thought.

Intriguing. So once again, send a text in 042-062-6733 if you would like to get your hands on a double pass to the new Farm Queer film festival, tell us your brainstor.

I like that. Yeah, that's what we're going with. I also have a little bit of news. I'm always on about the cast review, so I'll just give you all a quick update. The British Medical association, which was widely criticised in the uk press for rejecting the findings of the cast review, has voted to retain a neutral position on the review's recommendations while undertaking its own evaluation. The association, which represents 140,000 members, came under fire when 1000 of those members signed an open letter criticising its decision to publicly critique the review due to its unsubstantiated recommendations. In defending its view, the BMA cited a white paper co authored by founding members of the integrity project at Yale Law School and a team of international scientists and physicians specialising in gender affirming medical care, which provided a damning evidence based critique of Hilary Cass recommendations. Still, it appears that with publications across the political spectrum united against them, the UK's largest doctors union and professional body has bowed to external pressure. Oh, I forgot to turn my phone silent.

No, I made that noise.

Oh, I'm a delightful impression. And incidentally, I just wanted to point out for those who think that the Guardian Australia is on your side, they took part in this pile on the BMA as well.

Not necessarily the leftist lean that it is accused of.

No, I don't think so. Not these days. So today we were going to have a general discussion around a couple of things. The so called sex, gender distinction and gender abolition as a concept and what we think about that, whether it's a good thing, bad thing and why. I thought maybe we could have a little preamble before we go into the next bracket of music. What do you reckon?

Yeah, I love that. In fact, I'd love to kick off by hearing a little more about our guest this morning, Ludo.

Oh, that's a good idea.

I'm a transmasc, non binary person who's been living in Megandjan for a couple of years now. And I feel I've learned a lot about the trans community by living in a city where I get to meet lots of cool trans people.

And you're active with Meganjin people's pride? Meganjin people's pride. And you're an artist too, right?

Yeah, I've helped out with just some visual design things with MPP, and mostly I'm unemployed. But when I pretend I have a job, I'm an artist.

Tell me about your practise. Tell me about your visual arts practise. Oh my God. Art card is taking over. Transmission once again.

I draw mostly just kinda lefty propaganda type looking things about my political opinions. Do stuff that's pro abortion, pro trans people, pro decolonisation, all that good stuff.

I've seen you a couple of times at stalls, at MPP events.

People may have seen my pins around.

Yeah, okay, cool.

A non binary person making pins.

So rad, so unique.

Hey, ma'am, we're all singing in the.

Non binary pin industrial complex. So the reason why I invited you in, Ludo, was because a while ago I posted something in a local trans group about this whole topic and you chimed in and we had quite an interaction on there and it was completely civil, even though we didn't always agree. And I thought that you had some great things to say. So I just thought, let's have that conversation or something like it on air.

Where more people can see it.

Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

I have terrible news about how many people can see this.

What's that?

We're on radio.

Yeah, well, they're not seeing it though. At least they're hearing it.

Amplifying the voices of the trans and gender non conforming community of Myanjin, Brisbane and beyond. Transmission on four z brings you the latest in trans community news, music and events every Tuesday from 09:00 a.m. till 10:00 a.m. join our team of hosts.

For an hour of celebrating the unique.

Perspectives of the trans community. Transmission Tuesday mornings from 09:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. on four. Zzzzzz.

So we're gonna discuss some potentially contentious issues today. Let's get into it. I thought first maybe we should define our terms so that we all know we're talking about the same thing. So when I talk about.

That's good.

Yeah. So when I talk about the sex gender distinction, I noticed, ludo, that you prefer the term biological sex, I guess, to differentiate it from social sex or something.

Yeah, from, I guess what I feel is the common usage of the word sex, which refers more to, I believe, like the social construct of gender that we project onto sex rather than, you know, biological sex traits as a group.

And how would you define. So do you have a definition for biological sex? Or is it not something you think about that much?

I guess I think of biological sex as the sex characteristics that are associated with reproductive sex, binary sex roles. I definitely. I mostly just think of my biology as biology and its relation to sex and gender is more nebulous.

So kind of biological sex defined as reproductive organs.

Not necessarily, because I guess my vibes for biological sex are like, it includes your hormones, it might include your height, it includes bone shape, it includes, I don't know, just a lot of things that people don't usually mean when they mean by when they talk about sex, they usually just mean either genitals or your hormone profile, maybe chromosomes if they're weird.

Or the latest definition seems to be the latest gotcha definition by the so called gender critical brigade seems to be the large and small gametes that. Oh, not the gametes is what Wikipedia is saying now too. I don't know for how long. Something I read which I thought was apart was in this study that someone linked to me, trans women are becoming female by Matilda Carter. So Matilda Carter says that sex is best thought of as a quote unquote cluster concept, consisting of traits that usually, but by no means always, encourage one another's presence. So sex being a particular sex is merely a matter of having enough of the traits that in aggregate generate and entail the imposition of their related gender norms, if that makes sense. Does that make sense?

That does make sense. That's probably a definition I could agree with. But it's not worded in necessarily the clearest way.

No, it's a little confounding. But the cluster concept, I like the idea of that.

Yeah, I definitely agree with that vibe.

Okay, cool. And then gender. So I've noticed that in trans circles often gender is used as shorthand for gender identity. So whereas like the World Health Organisation or folks like that will define gender more in a social sense. And I think that's how you were using it. More. Also, when we were talking, I'm not sure, but I generally speak about gender identity, if that's what I'm speaking about. But sometimes I think I shorten it to gender. Do you have thoughts about that?

Yeah, it's definitely very nebulous, because when we talk about things, we are very rarely defining our terms before we have the conversation. We're usually figuring out each other's definitions by having the conversation. Yeah, that's a good point, but. So, yeah, gender is, to me, just a very big nebulous block of associated traits that's very culturally dependent. It can be related to aesthetics, it's mostly related to social roles. I suppose it can be seen as, like a class. It depends on your analysis.

Yeah. So you're kind of going more with the social gender definition, which kind of does seem to be the, let's say, most commonly used definition of gender. I think. I don't know. What do you think?

No, I'm on board with that. The idea that the kind of social biological divide is that that's the sex gender divide, if we're defining the terms, to me, and then the gender identity, and then kind of just the gender thing, as you were talking about before, is almost just the social aspect, but the internal external dividend.

Yeah, totally. And I think gender identity is what's most important to trans folks.

Yeah.

But my feeling is, well, if, you know, because we're going to touch on gender abolition later, well, what happens if you abolish gender and no one has an understanding of gender, then what happens to gender identity as a concept? Can you have gender identity as a concept in that case?

But then aren't you just a person who has certain traits and behaviours and mannerisms that make you feel comfortable in the world and now there isn't an incorrect way to be. I suppose, to me would be the optimistic take on gender abolition.

Yeah. When trans people talk about gender abolition, I find they're usually talking about not the abolition of gender identity, but the abolition of social gender and legal gender and all of those larger systems that reinforce themselves and coerce people into gendered roles that they wouldn't choose naturally under an uncoercious system?

Totally, that's true. Like the idea of gender, non conforming cis people, like a butch who is comfortable being a woman, being she her, and yet often is mistaken for a man, often is harassed in feminine bathrooms.

Or even a butch person who identifies fully as a woman but still uses he him pronouns, maybe medically transitions, but it looks indistinguishable from a trans man or a cis man, but is a woman.

I guess I think that gender abolition is a utopian idea that I don't really see happening in my lifetime. What do you think about that?

I do feel very similar, 100%.

Like there's definitely a kind of high minded level of idealised thinking about how the world could be and how we can start to act in our own personal lives and how we treat each other and I guess the real politic of other things. And also we, each of us, to an individual, you, the listener, are at the mercy of how you are being perceived by other people. What is it? Hell is other people? There is a version of you that lives in my mind that you can't control and isn't you in your totality and isn't that.

I've been watching you think, Elian, it's all about the transgenders were right.

What was that you were watching?

Evangelion.

Anything but Evangelion.

Let's not talk about Evangelion.

All right, hang on back to gender, you know, please, you guys, I want to hear your thoughts.

One thought I've often had is that gender is collaborative, right?

So I definitely feel that.

And that can be a beautiful thing sometimes, but it can be a terrible thing at other times because, like, for instance, I don't generally identify myself as a woman or a trans woman, even though there's some part of my mind that wishes that I did. But I just don't feel ready to take that leap. Like, I'm. I'm a bit new to being openly open about my gender identity. Like, I made that decision about four years ago and I kind of put it into practise a bit more than two years ago. So it, you know, and I'm pretty old, so I've had a lot of self conditioning and social conditioning to not think of myself as a woman. And so I'm not quite ready to take that leap. But when a friend, usually it's a cis woman that I'm friends with will kind of anoint me as a woman. Like, in their mind, I'm a woman, right. And that feels so great and it kind of helps me to more fully inhabit myself because.

Yeah, it's very difficult to tell, you know, what person, body combination you are independent of society. Because we aren't independent of society.

That's right. And often, I mean, as part of my kind of social transition, a big part of it actually, is that pretty much every day I will put on makeup and, you know, I don't go over the top with it, but I'll put it on every day. I'll dress in something that I like and I'll go out and I'll sit at a cafe or I'll interact with people. And it helps to remind me, because if I'm just at home, like in my pyjamas or something, I sort of forget and I just find myself kind of drifting back into my past way of thinking about myself. I talk to myself a bit and when I'm talking to myself at home, my voice will drop and I'll kind of lapse back into. But it's where I was before.

You are performing gender in a certain way, not for your own inherent sake, but to get that external affirmation of who you are. That if we don't have a certain, like you were saying, like a collection of behaviours that then can readily communicate to someone else, like, oh, this is feminine. This is a signal that I'm sending to somebody else, that I am expecting to be treated, or like I am inviting you to treat me in a certain way. And why would letting your voice sit in a lower, maybe more comfortable range detract from your identity in any way except that it's an external performance that you are trying to bring people in on the affirmation.

It's not an either or question. It's like, yeah, there's an aspect of that, but it's also so. I remember a line from a novel I read a long time ago. Music wants to be listened to. I'm going off on Tangent here, but I'm a musician and often I'm at home just playing music by myself. It sounds different when you play music by yourself than if you have an audience. Right. And sometimes the audience brings great stuff out of you. And I think it's kind of similar that being out in the world inspires me to enjoy myself and enjoy my gender identity in a way that I don't so often at home. Like, at home, I'm just like, I don't know, making music or whatever, you know, reading or whatever, and I become this genderless entity and that. Look, for some people, being a genderless entity might be ideal, you know, for the gender abolitionists. But for me, that's not.

It doesn't.

It's not as fun, safe and.

Right.

Well, yeah, the voice, for instance, when my voice drops, it doesn't feel more comfortable, it feels less. It feels like, oh, it's that again. It's.

It's a habit you haven't broken out of.

Yeah, exactly. And there's a few of them. There's a few of them, yeah, yeah. Anyway, I've gone off on a personal tangent. Maybe we should have some music what do you reckon?

Yeah, let's do it.

Peter Sterling, the only man in the world who's given birth to a child.

Someone might say, you're a bit of a queer, and they'd be right.

So, Ludo, when we were talking on facebook, you said, I don't like it when even feminists and trans folk act like biological sex represents an inherently truer reality than social gender.

Yeah, I do. I do think that.

Yeah. So truer reality, I thought that was. That made me think, because like, I don't think I think of it as a truer reality, I just think of it as another reality.

Yeah. Like it's, you know, my biological sex or my sex characteristics that are associated with, you know, hormones and genitals, etcetera, those. I can understand why they're important to people, especially trans people, but I dont think that the validity of gender is stored in aligning trans peoples biological sex with an acceptable vision of female biological sex or male biological sex. I think that trans people are what they are more philosophically than, I dont know, biologically.

You also said that lived gender as experienced publicly and socially, makes more sense to record than either gender identity or biological sex.

Yeah. Because as far as the government is concerned, I can be non binary, I can be a man, but my personal identity and how I relate to those terms doesn't really matter. But it matters if I want to take advantage of sex segregated spaces, that someone who lives as a woman and identifies as a woman can access female segregated spaces regardless of their biology.

Yeah, totally. So this brings me to why I started this conversation on Facebook, which I was a bit sneaky about at the time, because I'd already posted in a different group and I'd made it clear what I was talking about. And everyone just piled on me. It was about the tickle versus giggle case, and everyone wanted to celebrate. And I was just sounding a note of caution because in that case, the judge kind of reached a judgement at the end where he said that the court accepted that it was possible to change sex, that this was based on a legal precedent going back 30 years. And meanwhile, in court, Roxanne Tickle's lawyer had made a point of stating that Roxanne Tickle had had bottom surgery.

Oh, okay. I see the edges of the trap here as they start to.

Exactly. And I was like. And then. But then this was widely reported. So the Guardian reported this made a point out of the fact that Roxanne Tickle had had gender confirmation surgery. And we even reported it here on this show it wasn't me, but it was another announcer that read that off too. And I'm like, we are discussing Roxanne Tickle's genitals and we are using that as part of the evidence towards why she should have access to women's spaces. And I thought the self id had.

Done away with that because she has a state of sanctioned vagina, which is an insane thing to become a topic of any kind of public facing conversation.

Exactly. And it seemed to me like it was like, well, okay, I should qualify it by saying that she's born in New South Wales and they still haven't updated the self id laws there. But this became like, I mean, this was reported worldwide. And I'm just thinking, look, if I was an ignorant Cis person and I was reading this, the takeaway message for me is, oh, okay, so you can change your sex by having.

As long as you do that.

As long as you do that. And then you get to change your marker on your birth certificate, and then you get your rights.

As long as the government has come in and intercepted and had their bureaucracy applied to your life.

Yeah.

And then, and only then you can move through the world with any kind of validity or dignity.

Yeah, yeah. And that really troubles me.

Yeah. I worry when trans rights are built upon the same systems of colonialism and legalism that produced the gender binary and its problems and patriarchy and all that moving beyond that in some way.

Well, we saw this with the marriage debate. We saw this like, there is this urge in marginalised groups to either assimilate or destroy. And the marriage rights movement was definitely like an assimilate. Like, we can be normal as well. You know, we'd like to serve and.

Have a military, we can have a nice little wedding in a church and it'll be very acceptable and very polite.

Whereas, you know, is that what we want to really uphold in the long term, or do we want to assimilate or do we want to destroy?

That's an interesting point because another link that I wanted to bring into this is this gender nihilism and anti manifesto by Alison Escalante. I'll just read a little quote from it, if I can. We have heard the suggestions that non binary identity, trans identity and queer identity might be able to create a subversion of gender. This cannot be the case. In staking our claim on identity labels of non binary, we find ourselves always again caught back in the realm of gender. To take on identity in a rejection of the gender binary is still to accept the binary as a point of reference in the resistance to it, one only reconstructs the normative status of the binary.

You can be a man or a woman or the third one.

Yeah, you can be a man or a woman or something else. And the something else has often been used as a category to lump in even binary trans people. You know, people who very publicly identify as fully female or male are still considered a weird third thing.

Oh, totally. I'm sure both of you have had the wonderful phenomenon of introducing your trans friend and being like, her name is Hayley. And then they go, oh, they're very nice.

If your pronouns are she, they or they them. Best way as a trans woman, best way is to just say, or like she her, everyone will they them you anyway.

Yeah, well, it's interesting because I find a bit the opposite. If I'm in cis spaces, I find that when I try to introduce nuance into the conversation, they don't understand. So. And as I said, my cis female friends will refer to me as she and call me a woman, even though I've said that I don't identify as a woman. But I guess they know that there's this kind of loophole where I am actually flattered when they refer to me that way. So it's okay. But I think it's also that they can't see outside of the binary as.

Easily as you can imagine affirming your femininity and womanhood without you being a binary woman.

Yeah, exactly.

I also think it's more just knee jerk than that, is that you have a feminine haircut and you have flowers on your shirt and your face looks pretty in a way that I think you might be wearing some makeup right now. I don't want to assume.

Yeah, well, I told you I wear it every day.

So there we go. So there we have tick, tick, tick. She.

Yeah.

Pretty hair, flowers, makeup. My knee jerk brain goes woman.

Yeah, but I, like, I mean, you know, this is a first world problem, but like, I. I would like people to recognise that I'm trans feminine. Like that I can be feminine, feel very woman.

That's so real.

My identity with manhood is not an identity with manhood as defined by cis terms. It's an identity with masculinity and manhood as defined by queer people.

Yeah, totally.

The subversive versions of gender that we've been able to create and proliferate and experiment with.

Yeah, yeah, I get that. Totally.

But again, hell is other people. We cannot explain ourselves into being understood. And I guess this is where at the end of the day, people, I think trans people are going to continue to aspire to passing for the societal combination. Confirmation. Sorry.

And if only for safety reasons.

And what a valid reason.

Yeah, but that is something that, like. Cause sometimes I'll prowl around on Reddit. I don't very often post there, but every now and then I'll read stuff there just to kind of, I don't know, keep an eye on what's going on. And I find there are a lot of what sound to me like young trans people who are really worried about not being able to pass. And it makes me feel really sad because I'm like, oh, wow, like, we haven't really come that far, have we? Like, why is this such a concern? I can't accept that it's just for their own personal benefit all the time. I think it is mostly a safety concern and a fear of being ostracised in society.

A fear of being seen as the trans and being seen as the other. Therefore being seen as being perceived in the same way that trans people are projected as in society and in popular media is. You know, it's not a flattering image.

Not at all. And I guess a lot of young trans people are very much online. And, I mean, at least my clients that I work with are often quite introverted, don't get out all that much. So they're seeing more the media and Internet portrayal of themselves, which is the most negative portrayal there is.

It's the most idealised and the most normalised version of anything.

We got the anime Catgirl and the worst cringe compilation you've ever seen. There's your role models.

Oh, ouch.

Sorry. I'm also incredibly online and it is a terrible place to be.

It's an interesting place to be.

Yeah.

The discourses. It's part of why I really like having conversations with trans people about our differing ideas on gender. But online, it can get a bit heated and a bit personal in a way that, you know, I'm not trying to invalidate people. I'm fine with self identity and whatever people imagine themselves as and like, what they're then want to present to the world. But I also want to talk about, you know, gender as a system and gender as.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And I really appreciated the way that you were able to have that talk with me online without ever setting me up, like with a straw man or making me the enemy or anything like that, which I find happens so often.

Yeah. It's just not helpful to disagreements or conversations to treat another person as if they are stupid and malicious.

No. Until you've worked out that they really.

Are, which you can tell. And a lot of people are trying to be, especially online.

Yeah, totally. But, you know, like, let's face it, not only is the trans community not a monolith, but, like, we are so diverse in our attitudes to, especially this topic. I think, like, these topics that affect us the most as trans people.

Yeah. Because there are many trans experiences. There's the trans experience people where. In countries where medical transition isn't possible, there's the trans experience in just anywhere that isn't in the imperial core, which is vastly, vastly different from our discussions of our needs as trans people.

Oh, 100%. And even the kind of prevalence of the self as opposed to how you are existing in a collective is.

Yeah.

Your mindset shifts depending on where you grew up, depending on what language you speak. We are going to need another out of time.

Yeah. So thanks so much for coming in, Ludo. So great. Thanks for having this conversation with you, and thanks for being here, Liz.

Thanks. So if people want to find the work that you're doing, Ludo, where can they track you down?

You can find me at McGannjan People's Pride events and online athlete pinko pansy. I make art. I haven't been posting a lot, but I promise I still do it.

I feel that. I feel that.

Thank you so much for listening to transmission. See you next Tuesday, 9th, 10:00 a.m. on four triple z.