Hello and welcome to the first 2020 episode of Outward.

I'm Christina Cotarucci, a senior writer at Slate, and I want to talk about an Instagram ad I saw recently.

It was for a queer company hyping up a hairpomade.

The hair pomade was made for, according to the ad, women and folks. The two genders.

The two genders. I mean, it took me a second. I thought I had misread it, but then, you know, maybe it's

just the logical end result of what queers have been doing for a while now, which is replacing the

word people with folks for some reason, sometimes with an ex, sometimes not, which I'm still

waiting to hear about how that makes it more inclusive. But it kind of bug me just because it feels

like this is like a bick for her situation. Like we're existing pomades made for men and not folks inadequate for my

womanly hair? Yeah, it's very, I don't know if you remember those old Target women sketches,

which was done by that great comedian Sarah Haskins. It was like making fun of exactly that

kind of marketing. It feels, yeah, it feels entirely like that. So, well, we welcome women and folks and everyone to our podcast.

Today, I am Brian Lauder, editor of Outward.

And what I want to talk about right now is my favorite Christmas present, which I may or may not be wearing during this recording, which are a pair of totally fluffy, very unsexy, supremely cozy flannel pajama bottoms

that are covered in the Peanuts characters.

Oh, that's cute.

Ice skating and playing in the snow.

I might have been wearing these honestly since Christmas,

but no, they're very cute for sure, and I love them so much.

It's my favorite thing I got this year.

Well, listeners, we have a great show lined up for you this month. The new year is always a time to take stock of who we are, what the hell we're doing. And maybe how many of us there are. But counting queers and studying us as a population has never been

easy. And showing up in official numbers can actually have some downsides. Scotland's own

...