Hey, out with listeners, happy Pride Month.

Producer June Thomas here with some news.

Once again this year, we're going to

celebrate pride by providing our listeners with some extra queer, extra episodes. This year,

we'll have fresh new shows every Wednesday. You'll still get the biggie on June 21st with

Pride and Provocations, the gay agenda, all the usual fun,

but we'll provide short bursts of rainbow content throughout the month, including some really

wonderful conversations with authors and activists and thinkers. And on Saturdays throughout June,

we're also going to share some great LGBTQ content from around the Slate Podcast Network.

Today, we wanted to highlight a really fascinating conversation from The Waves, Slate's podcast about feminism and gender.

Back in October 2022, Slate audience engagement editor, Saul Wortham, spoke with trans rights activist and author Paisley Currah about Paisley's book, Sex Is As Sex Does. Take a listen.

Right now in the U.S., trans people are a major boogeyman.

Gender identity, trans rights, non-binary people, they're all often treated as a punchline by the right and supposed proof that society is falling apart.

One common transphobic argument is that trans people are deceptive or even delusional because at the end of the day,

sex is this concrete, fixed, unchangeable thing, and trans people are basically trying to override that

reality. So in this vision of the world, whatever it says on your birth certificate is essentially

something that will define you forever, no matter

what you do after you're born. I find this argument really offensive and frankly tiresome.

It's not some bold new claim. It's old news. Trans activists and scholars have spent a long time

and a lot of energy explaining the nuances of sex and gender and making the case that self-identity matters more than whatever your legal documents say.

So I went to women's college, and when I first got there, the admissions policy was that only people whose identity documents said that they were female were

eligible for admission. I was involved with student activism to get the admissions policy changed

...