A TERF and a Tranny Walk Into A Podcast Studio: Geeking Out With the Heterodorx

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 24 November 2022

⏱️ 87 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Nina Paley is an illustrator, filmmaker, and self-described TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist). Corinna Cohn is a transwoman who happens to be Nina's good friend. According to the culture war playback, the two should be mortal enemies. Instead, they have a podcast together; Heterodorx, which focuses on their daily lives and the current state of the gender wars. In this conversation, Nina and Corinna talk with Meghan about what drew them together as friends, how the podcast emerged, and, above all, how their individual experiences around sex roles, stereotypes and power differentials led to their "gender critical" stance. They also get candid about their relationships to their own sexuality. Nina recalls her adventures in sex positivity in the San Francisco counter culture in her younger years, including putting makeup on her crossdressing boyfriends. Corinna speaks candidly about the physical, psychological and sexual effects of her transition, at age 19, and why she urges caution in kids now seeking medicalized transition. Finally, Nina explains why she uses he/him pronouns for Corinna and Corinna explains why this doesn't bother her since she has better things to do.

This episode is sponsored by Better Help online therapy.

Guest Bios:

Corinna Cohn writes about life having undergone the process of gender transition as a teenager in the 1990s. Corinna's writing has appeared in Quillette and the Washington Post.

Nina Paley is the creator of the critically acclaimed animated musical feature films Sita Sings The Blues and Seder-Masochism, a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, and Free Culture advocate. Find her at https://blog.ninapaley.com.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dau. My guests are the hosts of
0:08.9	the heterodorks podcast, Nina Paley and Corinna Cohn. But before I introduce them, I have a
0:15.6	quick announcement regarding the unspeak-easy. That is the intellectual community for free thinking women.
0:22.4	You keep hearing me talk about. We're going to have a number of retreats in 2023.
0:28.1	And the first one, I am hereby announcing. It's going to take place in Los Angeles, February 18th and 19th.
0:36.5	That's a weekend. Most of the retreats are a little longer,
0:40.6	three nights, four days kind of thing. This one is just two days over the weekend, but it's going to be
0:47.2	pretty spectacular. We're going to have guest speakers, all kinds of fun, unspeakable, nuanced AF activities, discussions.
0:57.5	We don't do activities. Don't worry. There's nothing. We don't do like trust exercises or
1:01.6	anything like that. So if you want to find out about that, go to the unspeak easy.com and
1:08.4	request information. Okay. So if you are interested in the subject of wait for it,
1:17.1	gender, you should be familiar with the heterodorks podcast. Its hosts describe themselves as a
1:24.5	turf and a tranny. That's their words. And for the last few years, they've been
1:29.3	meeting regularly to talk about the new gender movement. Now, there are more and more podcasts like
1:35.2	this, but heterodorks is different in that it pairs two people who occupy social categories
1:41.6	that are generally thought to be at odds with one another.
1:45.8	Nina, who has reclaimed the label Turf, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist,
1:51.2	found herself on the wrong side of the trans rights movement after some Facebook comments
1:56.4	led to the censorship of her work and boycotts in her local community, her real life community,
2:03.2	that is, not just her online community.
2:06.0	Karina is a trans woman who began a gender transition at age 17 back in the 1990s.
2:13.1	She makes a point of saying that she is a biological male and that neither science nor medicine
	...

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