over time we're just gonna see that we're making these choices and the more comfortable we are with the reality that your rule is no neater than ours that we're just gonna have to come to terms with like the fact that you might be peeing next to someone with different genitals than you and that's just been true forever.

Hello and welcome to why is this happening with me your host Chris Hays.

So when I was in college in nineteen so 1997 2001 my then partner now wife we were in college together we met freshman year and as one does when one is young and in love and in college we spend a lot of time like talking about the things that we were reading and studying and staying up late and debating them and Kate who's been a guest on with pod before was gender studies major.

Well gender studies and in general studies she was reading all this literature that I would then kind of like read as well so that we could talk about it and one of the things she read then was the theorist Judith Butler.

Judith Butler you may or may not know her she writes in this incredibly difficult some might say recondite or impenetrable prose but some of her basic theoretical ideas are both fairly simple and elegant and also really profound.

And one of the most central is the idea that gender, mailness and femaleness as we think about it is performance it's something that is produced by a set of performative actions in a social context and that may seem I think in 2019 that doesn't seem like a crazy radical thing to say partly because of the success of both movements for LGBT rights and also Butler and other theorists work in popularized.

But at the time you know I remember having my mind blown a little bit because we are taught from such a young age that male and female man and woman boy and girl are central characteristics of the universe like there just things out there in the world like atoms like there's you know an atom just is that's a unit of mass and it is a sort of coherent entity in the universe itself as part of the fabric of the universe.

And I think that we learn that like mail and female are part of the fabric of the universe like that's just the way it is and I read Judith Butler thanks to Kate and she is not really it's a category that we make a category that is maybe not that different from say bra man and untouchable right now bra man and untouchable we don't think are if we live in the West particularly and are not born into the subcontinent where there's a long tradition this.

We from the Western perspective we look at bra man and untouchable like you guys made that up that's not like a thing actually in the world like that's just like a cultural thing you guys made like we all know that that's not like a part of the universe of course people raise in that tradition can see it as part of the universe which is the way these categories work.

But the idea that gender was like that the idea that gender was not a part of the universe that it was something constructed and performed socially was a radical idea.

And part of understanding that is dividing the concepts between gender as a kind of social contract and then biological sex which is the sort of physical attributes a body has.

But then there was another theorist who actually was at Brown who was both a biologist and a gender studies the repetition name and a fast Asturling who wrote this book called sexing the body which I also read because we're also read parts of were got downloads of from Kate because she was reading it in class.

And that that book actually says look biologically there are lots of folks who are born with features that are somewhere between male and female as we sort of traditionally understand them and the medical complex goes to work kind of actually changing their bodies so that they fit more squarely into these binary categories we have so even at the level biology this thing that we think of as.

inherent into the universe is not as complicated by an area that seems so all of that is a way of sort of setting the groundwork for today's conversation today's conversation is about trans rights in America at this particular political moment.

But the background context I think to that is actually thinking deeply about the nature of gender the nature in which political and social systems construct gender and use gender in all sorts of ways both in capitalism for marketing in.

In social orders for hierarchy and the kind of in some ways really profound challenge that transgender folks and trans rights pose to this entire system that is constructed this entire system in which the universe is cleaved in two and that's just the way everything is.

And I think that understanding that kind of conceptual turn which I think is easier for younger people who have been more immersed in the notion of gender performance than it is for older people who were more immersed in the idea of like there's these two categories and they're in the universe that that's a key conceptual way of sort of thinking about.

The challenge from a social justice perspective of trans equality in this moment and one of the most righteous.

I don't know like one of the most righteous warriors I want to say for trans rights both sort of in the way he talks about it and in the courtroom is today's guest chase trans.

Chase is an incredible person.

He's a trans man who has a very rare ability to sort of speak both at 30,000 feet and in granular detail about what's going on like he's pursuing cases that he will be arguing.

He's part of a case that's going to be argued before the Supreme Court, but he also has just an incredible sense of history and context and is constantly sort of troubling some of the most profound concepts even in his own work of what you can do in the law and how you can achieve rights to the law and all the compromises you have to make.

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