The Voice of Karen DeJarnette

Are we recording right now? We are. We have to use it then. I don't know if I told you that as part of my exploring myself and growing, I was diagnosed this year in January of 2020 with having ASD, adult spectrum, AF, adult spectrum, autism spectrum disorder. In other words, Asperger's and ADD. And this explained a myriad of things that I had thought were just eccentricities all my life. Like I'm 58 years old and if you were sitting in the car with me, Sam, and we were driving and I was driving and Sam, you said, OK, Karen, turn left here.
I would have a better than 50-50 chance of not turning left. I can't explain that. I know forward. I know back. I know up. I know down. But left and right, the words, I know this is left. I know this is right. I know your listeners can't see what I'm pointing at. But those words don't compute. I can't explain it. There's hundreds of these little bizarre things. Anyway, I was finally diagnosed with ASD this year.
One of the things I've had trouble with in my past is accepting praise. With the ADD, I did turn off the feed because I really wanted to focus on you. I wanted to focus on what we were doing. I know you had the best of intentions for me. You wanted me to see what was going on. What happened was, is you videotaped me having a growth moment. It was a difficult growth moment.
It was actually very painful for me. It was difficult as hell, because what you did is you pushed me, you escorted me. through a barrier and it was very challenging. It was very difficult. I looked at those comments and there's a core element in me that says I'm not worthy of that. And I have fought all my life. I have wrestled with this concept that I'm not worthy and I'm comfortable with fighting that.
I'm comfortable with breaking that and challenging that, but I'm not comfortable with being on the other side. When you showed me that and I saw all of those incredibly gracious, generous, sweet comments, it literally blew me out. I had sort of like a meltdown, but not in a bad way, but like in this profoundly positive way. But it was still like a mental shutdown. And actually, I didn't attend the second day because of that.
I have it on recording, and I'm gonna go through it. But I haven't even watched my own recording yet, because I haven't gotten the courage yet to watch me go through that. It was that challenging of a moment for me. But the comments I got, you were so kind to give me some guest passes. And because I did this during work hours, I used my guest passes with my manager and to persuade them at work to let me have that time to do this by offering guest passes to people at work.
I got some of the most profoundly positive, generous emails and it touched me. It was amazing. These are the kinds of things, I mean, this was a growth moment to me for one to be accepted. The acceptance in the community was profoundly important to me, but then to be escorted through that barrier. That's why I'm here today. I told you before we had the conference that the biggest challenge I had with me and my own being as a transgender woman was my voice.
I really have a problem with my voice. The lower resonance, the pitch, and everybody says, oh, stop, it's fine. But I view myself through what I think is this pragmatic lens of reality, but it's still clouded in my own biases. And You challenged me on that and that's where it all came from and I'm here doing this podcast because you escorted me through that barrier with such kindness and your community of these gloriously generous women and the few men too told me you're safe, you're fine the way you are and it helped me

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I start to accept that one last little bit of my hang-up, of who I am. I'm here. That's how the conference went for me. That's pretty profound, isn't it? Do you have any more questions for me? And I remember a couple of things about it. And of course, I remember you talking about your voice. And I remember as well, I said something that was incorrect. I said he instead of she. And I was talking about this to somebody recently.
I loved that you called me on it. And they said, well, I love that you were OK about being called on it. And I think that this is. this is important because it was also a growth for me and I think also a growth for, and this was my intention, a growth for many of the people who attended the conference, that they got to experience you. My intention really with bringing you as a speaker was for them.
I want people to be more aware. I want people to understand more, be more accepting. And I love, in addition to that, that you had such growth as a part of it too. I didn't really think about that was happening because you seem kind of so like you've got it together. You've been working on this for a while. You lead within your organization on this. And so it was maybe a little bit of a surprise to me, a good surprise that you had this growth.
Before we go on a little bit more though, share a bit more about your story about when you came out, how you did, why you did it, and what happened as a result of it. How far back do you want to go? Well, I was born and at age two I realized. Yeah, I was born. but my memories of that are less crisp than they used to be. I was the firstborn child and I only had one brother.
I was the oldest of my generation in my family, so I didn't really have any other female peers. My mom was not really, this is going to sound weird, but One's mother is not female. They are the icon. They are the mother. It's not like this would take a psychological dissertation to cut through this. I didn't see my mom as a female. I saw my mom as my mom, as this teacher, this nurturer. any female identity influences.
My dad had some younger sisters. When I was a small child, I remember the smallest of small child, maybe three years old. I remember that I related to them on a level that As a three-year-old child, it's a visceral level. What does a three-year-old child understand? I mean, do they understand gender? Do they understand identity? Do they understand this? I don't know. What I do know is that I never felt right.
And what that earlier bit I was just trying to tell you is that by not feeling right, I didn't know what but I knew that I didn't relate to my assigned role. I didn't feel like I, I never felt like I was one of the guys. I never fit into the role, especially as I got to just about puberty age. I was very confused and I was very angry. I remember this distinct memory, Sam, that when I started having little wisps of facial hair come in, it was horrifying.
I hated it. I remember when my grandfather noticed it. I was embarrassed by it. But he said, look, somebody's growing into a man. I never used the word man with me. I couldn't accept it. And I never put these things together. At that point, I didn't understand why. I remember as a teenager, I actually wrote a story of a boy who woke up one morning and had the body of a girl.
I wrote this story of the process of the mind converting and accepting, first being horrified, but then like, what do I do? What happened? Is this real? Oh my God. And it wasn't a sexualized story at all. Man, I was a teenager, right? But it wasn't a sexualized story at all. It was like, what?

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The story was written in a vacuum. There wasn't any parents. There weren't any siblings. It was the story of this teenager. What do I do? What happened here? My clothes don't fit. I don't have any clothes. What do I do? What's going on? It was the story of figuring out how to cope. What do I do with this, this new reality and this new reality that didn't go away? became living with this life until full acceptance.
Where did this story come from? It came from deep in here, but even then, I didn't even understand it. I started realizing, oh my God, look at all these things that I had gone through. I have this analogy to what gender dysphoria is like. And maybe this might help explain, because it's this pressure in your life. Now, it's this pressure that's pushing you, telling you that something's wrong, but you don't get it.
You don't understand it. And I use this analogy to explain it to people, and hopefully they might understand. What I say is, imagine that somebody challenges you to hold something in your hand and hold it out. In fact, not even hold something, just hold your hand out as if you're holding a handful of air. You're holding nothing. How hard is that, right? And you're holding it out in front of you, a handful of air.
How hard is that, right? Now hold it forever. And when you're young, and you're vital, you're going, I can do this. This is easy. Now hold it forever. So you're holding it. And it's like, I can do this. This is not a problem. This handful of errors, gender dysphoria. And after a little bit of time, you realize this is uncomfortable. This is stressful. This is kind of difficult. So what you do is you say, I'm going to deny that I have to do this.
You'll put this hand out of your sight. You put it behind you, and you go on and live your life. You have friends, or you try to. You go to school, and you live your life. It's still there, but you're strong, and you live your life of denial, but every once in a while, the hand comes back into view because it begins to get tiring. of resisting this. And when it finally gets difficult, you go, oh God, it's drifted back into view.
So you say, no, no, I was dared. I was dared. I cannot let this go. No. So you redouble your effort. You go, no, I'm strong. I'm vital. I will not let this break me. I am strong. I will resist. No. And you say, put it out of sight. You put it out of sight, and you go on. You continue with school. Maybe you graduate from school. Maybe you get a job.
Maybe you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend, depending on your sexual orientation. You live this life, but over time, the handful of air comes back into view again, but it happens more and more often, and every time you redouble that effort to resist, the time in between gets shorter and shorter. And this is getting more and more and more stressful, more and more difficult to resist. And there comes a time, there comes a time in your life when the only thing that you have is this hand in front of your face and the entirety of your life is looking down your arm at this handful of air, this hand holding nothing, but your entire life is seen through this lens of this impossibility of you can't do anything.
It's always there. Always, everything is seen with this because it's always in your mind. It's always there. It's always telling you, can you do this? Can you repress this anymore? Can you fight this anymore? Are you strong enough? Are you tough enough? Your hand begins to shake. Your body begins to quiver because it's too hard. Gravity says, I can't resist this. This gravity is pulling on me and it's just killing me.
What do I do? And you get to a crisis point. When you get to that crisis point and you can't hold that arm out one second longer, you have two choices. If it's just your arm, you have the choice of letting it go. If you're trans. you can let it go and you can decide I'm okay. But the other choice our community makes is to say, I'd rather kill myself than to give in to this.
And over 41% of our community attempts suicide. And that doesn't account for the people who never came out and were successful in committing suicide.

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Those people are not counted among those numbers. It's incredibly hard to go through this. It's incredibly hard. That's, to me, what gender dysphoria was like for me. And you go through all the excuses. If only I get a girlfriend, then I can beat it. If only I get a good job, then I'll feel good about myself, then I can beat it. If only I get that promotion. If only I fill in the blank.
I was sure I was going to go to my grave with this secret. My moment was December 2014. I was told by a kidney doctor, some professor at the University of Washington, that I had five years to live. Six years ago, I had five years to live. Clearly, he was an idiot. I have a genetic disease called polycystic kidney disease, but I have it through a very weird situation called a genetic deletion. but I'm genetically mosaic, meaning that 50% of my body has it and 50% of my body does not.
And because of that, my expression of the illness is very peculiar. But this idiot doctor told me in the most cold-hearted way possible that I was likely, I was probably going to have end-stage kidney failure by the age of 58. He said, I'm 58 years old and my kidneys are still 100%. But I went home from that doctor's appointment in December, 2014. I was alone. I'd been married for a long time, but we got divorced and it really wasn't because of this.
But I think a big part of it was that I hated my body so much that I… I wasn't really a good partner. So that contributed mightily to it. So I guess in a back door, behind the scenes way, it still was a part of it. I sat back and I thought, I'm 99% sure that this doctor's wrong. But what if he's right? What if I only have a few years left?
What would it be like to have one day? living life as the real me. What would that be like? Can you imagine being on your death bed and never having had a chance to experience that? What would it be like to have had a week, maybe a month of living an authentic life? Wouldn't that be exquisite? Then I decided on New Year's Eve 2014, you know? I've been fighting this unknown battle.
And I'm a problem solver by nature. And I've been ignoring this one problem all my life. I've been denying it, repressing it, holding my hand out in the air. I was 52 years old and I thought, Maybe it's time to let one of these, now that I have a second battle and it's real, maybe it's time to let it go, let the first one go and figure out what this is all about.
It's been a process of unraveling this ball of string ever since. As I said at the beginning of this interview, I'm five years into it. I'm still growing. I'm still… I think I will forever be growing and exploring more about who I am. I intend to. I don't ever want to say, I'm none. I don't have any more to grow. What's the best thing about being you and being… ultimately living your authentic life now.
What's the best thing about it? Oh my God, the best thing about it? So I started medical transition, medical transition being AKA hormones in March of 2015, because a therapist, I started seeing a therapist in January of 2015. And the therapist said, guess what? Just what you thought it was. Yes. So hormone therapy, hormone replacement therapy, HRT, one of the very first things it affects is the brain. And it reduces gender dysphoria quite a bit.
And you go through, Sam, I was so sure, you go through the famed second puberty. I remember thinking,

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Second puberty, how hard can this be? First puberty you go through when you're so, so young, you have no life experience. It's going to be a different experience. I am decades older. Life experience, I will be fine. I can intellectually, life experience wise, manage this. I'm going to be good. Nope. Going through the power of hormones is an amazing experience, challenging experience. Trans men report this amazing experience going on testosterone for the first time and trans women report their own experiences.
I'm not going to say all trans women go through what I went through, but I will say that what I experienced is not uncommon. What I experienced is that I felt feelings for the first time, which is not to say that I was incapable, but women don't understand that men don't have Testosterone does not enable men to have emotionality like women do. Trans men often report when they're on testosterone that they lose the ability to express themselves by crying.
They can't cry like they used to be able to do. gained this ability to feel this heart. And that's been the greatest gift of my whole life. As much as I was sure before I went on HRT, this was just my absolute stamp of, yes, I am home, I am here, I am me. I mentioned, I think, in the conference, that we did, the interview, of having that driveway moment of hearing a song that I had heard innumerable times before.
But it hit me, the lyrics of this beautiful song written by a friend of mine, Sarah Hickman. Sarah is about my age. And she wrote about growing up in the South and spending summers with her two aunts. And it reminded me of my young summers too, growing up in the South, the American South. And then at the end of the song, she is talking about, the song is called Sister and Sam, about looking through photos of this with the implication that both of her aunts had passed on and that she's clearing out the house.
And these are all memories of these two women and what these women meant to her. And I heard that song differently. And wham, I started bawling my eyes out. Does that feel like you're living in the dark ages? I mean, I'm just saying that because As I'm listening to you, I have a talk about emotions. It's an emotional rollercoaster as I'm listening and I'm sure as many people will be listening when we publish this as a podcast, but I mean, you're completely inspiring and I love the story and I know that you will inspire many other people as they listen to it and also you're just sort of really increasing the level. of awareness and education.
I'm going to use the word education for people about what's needed. But I mean, maybe we are ahead of our time or something, Karen, because I'm looking as I sort of understand your life story. My main thought is this shouldn't have happened. It's just so bloody stupidly wrong. And I know it does. And of course, there's all the reasons for it. But so much of this is systemic attitudes that are so medieval to me.
And if these attitudes were different, this wouldn't have happened. And maybe it should have happened for your life and all of that, and I get that. But I think now for, I feel now for all of the transgender kids out there, teenagers, young adults, older adults, older people who are still in that place of hating themselves or denying this because of basically social norms. And I want to give you a bit of an example on this because it really struck me yesterday.
So my oldest son's jumping up and down on the trampoline and he has what we call right now YouTube education. And I can't stand it, but this is what's happening to our young kids. I'm getting a lot of what they hear about through YouTube. And there's good and there's bad. And you can have an old debate on YouTube, right? But anyway, for some reason, he says, and he must have seen some kind of video, he's talking about male and female bathrooms.
And he said, and he's sort of a bit shy, sort of saying, well, there shouldn't be bathrooms for everyone because there's a reason that boys need their own bathroom. and as he's jumping up and down the trampoline. And I think, whoa, stop there, kiddo. Let's have a conversation about this. And we ended up having this very, I think, hopefully informative conversation for him about all people and all gender bathrooms and what it means to be male, female, transgender, and you know, age 12 and him being my son, I guess, as well, because this is just how we are in our house.

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you know, his view is changing, his view is evolving. But if he's left to sit in front of YouTube and I'm a parent that doesn't really get it, or is it even worse in the hate place around it, then he's going to grow up and be an adult who is really anti-transgender or anti anyone who's different. And that, you know, that's something I nip in the bud whenever I possibly can. I was talking to my husband about you and I was saying, it's just so wrong.
I was like, can you imagine if one of our sons said, I'm transgender and I believe my identity is female, what would you do? Would you be all like? Oh my God, the world's ending. My child is not who they said they were. You know, they handed him to me and said, congratulations, it's a boy. But actually it's not a boy, it's a person. And who gives a fuck? I mean, it really makes me so mad that we even, you know what makes me really mad, Karen?
That we even have to do this fucking podcast. We even have to do it. that we're even having this conversation because you and I could have all sorts of really interesting conversations about leadership, about diversity, about how we change the world. But instead, we have to go through your story. We have to go through all of this stuff because so many people won't even listen to this. Probably even the people that will listen to this will be the more converted.
True. But it just makes me so mad that we even have to do it. I know we do, and I know it's important, and your story is phenomenal and all the rest of it, but doesn't it drive you mad about this? I mean, it's just so behind the times. And of course, I've been working in the quality field for 20 years, and I believe in many previous lives, even as a kid, I was like, this is not fair, this isn't fair, I used to drive my parents berserk.
But we're starting to go backwards in this country and globally. Yeah, starting to. We've had some unfortunate influences. We'll see if that continues. Does it drive me mad if I dwell on it? But at the same time, I think about Rene Richards, 1976, 77. I remember reading the newspaper and hearing about Transsexual tennis player Richard Raskin is now known as Rene Richards. I remember reading that and thought, what? Is that a thing?
Is that real? No, I'm so old that there was no internet back at that time and I was not about to go to the library. and ask a librarian, can I get more information on this, please? Because for one, I would have to have my mom drive me to the library. And I certainly wasn't going to go to the school library and ask about it because no, no, no, no, no, no.
That was in the days of the very strong repression. So no, you don't do that sort of thing. So it was all if I found it in the newspaper. I stand on the shoulder of giants, of incredibly brave people who said, I can't do this. They put their hand down and they said, but I'm not gonna kill myself. I came out just a couple months before Caitlyn Jenner did. I remember when I came out and I…
I told my dad about it and my dad said, are you doing this because of Bruce Jenner? I said, dad, of course. I always follow the lead of all B level celebrities. Don't you know this by now? I mean, of course I'm a smart ass. So of course I'm going to say something stupid like that. Of course this is the father who abandoned me shortly after that. He didn't abandon me for being a smart ass because I've been a smart ass for way too long. he abandoned me because he couldn't understand that his child would do something like this.
Yes, he hasn't spoken to me in years. That's dark ages. That sucks, and that still hurts. I remember when I came out at work, one of the vice presidents in the business who I came out to told me, I am so sorry for you. that you didn't have a life when you were a teenager has led to this point. I actually have this philosophy in my life that my life, here's another one of my crazy metaphors.
I look at my life as a windshield or a windscreen, as I say in the UK, on a rainy day, the drop of water at the top of the windscreen. is it starts dripping down and then all of a sudden it may go sideways. You ever notice when the drips of water just sort of like goes horizontally and then they might start dripping down again, you know, it goes sideways to the left and then it starts dripping down and then it may stall and then another drip goes into its path and it gets momentum and it goes again then it may drift to the right.
And then it starts, you know, then it'll start going down again. And it just these jags and these, you know, other gets other energy from other drips. And finally, when it gets to the bottom, it's not really very close vertically to where it started. But every, place and every little bit of additional energy that it got led it to that point. That's my metaphor for my life. Those jags were decision points.
They were pivot points. Those extra bits of energy were people who came into my life, who gave me momentum, gave me an opportunity.

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everything that I learned, everything that I am today is a result of all of this energy and momentum and all of that from the beginning. So when that woman, VP, in her kindness, trying to tell me with, she tried to be sympathetic telling me, I'm so sorry that you didn't have a life as a teenager. I was like, well, I did, and I'm here. That's just my story. Every trans person out there has their own way of surviving this.
And unfortunately, there's a lot of trans people, probably the vast majority of trans people, have not been as fortunate as me. They are facing unemployment, they're facing housing issues, their homelessness is horrid. The economic disadvantage of the community is profound. I am beyond fortunate to have survived, to have not been afflicted by horrid abuse. And it is just ridiculous that I've been abandoned by people who used to love me, but then decided, ooh, icky.
This person I knew decided they wanted to be authentic, and I think that's gross. So I don't want to talk to them anymore. I think that's stupid. That really happens. Maybe I'm just being ignorant, but I mean, I just… That happens to all… common, common, common story for all transgender people, especially though for transgender women, especially for transgender women with male, cisgender friends and family. Yep. It is incredible. What needs to be done?
I mean, I know that you are active within Expedia where you work. You are leading project. You were the first person. to the projects with regard to this. You said that you didn't want anyone else to go through what you had been through. Let's look at it a few different ways. Three things I'm thinking. The individual perspective. So people that are listening to this will fall into different areas of thinking, right?
There's going to be people that are just listening to this going this is really inspiring and wow and I feel I know more now and I'll have a better attitude and you know we're kind of increasing that awareness with certain people which is great. There's going to be other people listening to this hopefully that were you a younger age perhaps or are you now and maybe haven't transitioned or haven't you know are not really addressing their most authentic self.
So there's sort of that individual perspective. Yes. There's also an organisational perspective because I know that you work at that level and what is it that organisations need to do and why should they do it? Why should it be up there in terms of their agenda? Then even bigger than that, I mean, we could do a whole other podcast on this, I don't expect you to give me, you know, like masses of answers, but it's kind of what your gut responses are, sort of from a policy level. from a systemic level as a country or even as a planet, we need to be making some changes here.
And so if I give you my magic wand and I say, abracadabra, magic, magic, magic, you can do anything you want, what would you have people do? What are some of the solutions, do you think? The difficulty in the D&I world. is to get past people's personal biases, which affect their policy-making decision process. Institutional racism, institutional misogyny has been something that people have been working on for a while, with not a whole lot of success.
What we've seen this year with the focus on racism has brought to light a lot of the lip service without real action, the growth of women's roles in business, and how that's actually taken a hard reversal this year because of the burden of taking care of children while working from home. is going to be a very difficult thing to deal with going forward if these vaccines don't prove to be super effective.
And there's already been a new variant of COVID discovered in the UK. And apparently that variant is a variant in the spike protein. And the spike protein is what all the vaccines are based on. So, This is a very concerning development. So it brings into question how viable are these vaccines in the long run if in fact this RNA virus, this is the first time there's ever been a vaccine for an RNA virus.
So it brings into question how effective are these vaccines going to be in the long run? We'll have to see. But then again, they were pretty quick in turning these around, so maybe they can in fact continue to develop. new iterations. We're going to have to wait and see. In the meantime, death rates in the US are going crazy. Working from home is going to be a continuation of this issue, and women are going to continue to be burdened with the childcare issue much more than men.
Working on institutional misogyny because businesses don't trust putting women in power because they're going to go out and get pregnant.

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And we can't trust that they'll be there. Institutional racism because, well, you know, they're not like us. This whole BS that was out there for a while of let's hire a cultural fit was all about let's hire someone like us. That was something that people are finally recognizing as that's actually the worst thing you can do. You want alternative voices, you want alternative ways of thinking. Well, when you start thinking that way, okay, that's good, okay.
One of the biggest challenges though is LGBTQIA because people have this people. I would say more so than not cisgender men because of toxic masculinity. Do you get comments on your podcasts? Because this might cause some stir. I don't know. I hope not. Oh, I like stir. Don't worry about stir. Stir's fine with me. Okay. Homophobia and transphobia are real issues. And I believe they're interrelated. I don't think transphobia occurs without homophobia.
I think they are connected. I think they're deeply connected in one's heart because I think transphobia is connected to being homophobic because you see somebody as their former male self when it's a trans woman. You see somebody as having the male parts. If you're interested in a trans woman, perhaps that means you might be gay. Heaven forbid! You might be gay! Ick! As opposed to just falling in love with a human being who is a beautiful person and loving their soul, loving their mind, loving everything about them.
It's this bias that we have that there's a guy and there's a girl and they have these parts and they're always separate and they connect the way they connect. Having two parts that are the same or two parts that are the same, that's just not right. That's bullshit. There's documented homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom. There's at least 500 documented examples of homosexual behavior in the animal kingdom. It's out there. It is natural.
We haven't documented transgender behavior in the animal kingdom because we don't understand the ability of animals to speak, but we can document it throughout the history of humans. There's amazing stories. going way back in time. Anyway, when we look at the biases that people have toward the binary and toward the heteronormative standards, these biases that people are taught, they're taught. These are used by adults. in business, they're used by adults in politics, and these standards are pushed out by people, quite often they're pushed out by fear because they're afraid of the people they don't know.
I think that's massive. The fear aspect of it is huge. Do you know what you're making me think about as you're talking, and I asked you about individual organizational and political societal, that actually they're all completely interlinked. And if somebody is making a policy decision within their organization, or they're making a policy decision about the country, or they're making a policy decision about their family, then And it depends on what's going around in your brain.
It depends on your values and your aspirations and your biases and how you grew up. And if you grew up thinking that transgender was a sin and a terrible thing and it was icky, then that's going to inform your decision-making. Whoever you are, whatever you're doing, whatever age, social background, race, or whatever you're in. And so that seems to me to be the place to be really working on, expanding people's worldview.
Yeah. I mean, back in my younger days, transgender wasn't even a term. It was transsexual. And most of the time what people visualized were using the turf language of men and dresses. They saw drag, they saw cross-dresses, they saw porn, they saw prostitution, they saw elements of society that were, quote unquote, the dark side.

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And that equation, that connection, that association was what to them was, oh, that's what that is. So that's bad, right? Yeah, okay, now I get it, right. Okay, that's freaky stuff. That's the stuff that those people do. So in the trans world, What's interesting is that brain studies have shown that transgender women's brains are structured. Well, first of all, cisgender women, cisgender being the opposite of transgender, cisgender women's brains are different than cisgender men's brains.
Transgender women's brains are basically the same as cisgender women's brains. Something happens. in our fetal development. They don't really know yet what happens. They're thinking that maybe there's something, the science is still working on this. They're thinking that maybe when there's supposed to be a splash of testosterone in utero, super, super early in the development of the fetus that… It's missing or it's underdone or something. And this is before the development of the genitalia.
Something happens or doesn't happen. It's unsure, but the brain is identical to the cisgender. But you can't change the brain. Therapy doesn't resolve it. That's why actually what used to be called gender identity disorder as a mental health issue was actually stricken Because that's not a mental health issue. It's not something that can be treated. It's not something that can be cured there's no pill to take to resolve it other than hormone treatments and Instead of changing the brain because the brain structure is what it is You can change the body to reach congruence as best as you can.
When you do that, then you realize, well, then you have someone, well, then you have me, and I was never in porn. I was never a prostitute. Now, that's not to put down sex workers, because I'll tell you what, because of the economic disadvantage of people in my community, There are people that, unfortunately, that's the only way they can survive. Otherwise they're going to die of starvation on the streets. And it's a horrible life for so many of those in my community.
There are trans people who start out in drag because they don't, they're exploring, who am I at heart? And they may start out as gay males who do drag. and realize this compulsion to do this actually is more of the life. But then again, you get drag performers like RuPaul, who are just hardcore anti-trans, who write us off. They are just like, so RuPaul's an asshole. Sorry, RuPaul. You're a jerk. I'm not a…
I'm not one of these people. I never went out of the house when I dressed. I never went out of the house. I was so ashamed. I was so profoundly ashamed because I was caught when I was like four years old with my mom's stuff. I was caught and I was scolded. This is like 1966. I was scolded. Now, I was probably scolded because my family wasn't wealthy and my mom was probably more afraid I was going to ruin some of her stuff. as a clumsy kid.
But the lesson I learned was, don't get caught. Don't ever get caught. Never do that again. I never was caught again. That's why I buried that secret. I figured I'd go to my grave with that secret. But anyway, no, I wasn't one of these dark side people that people are so afraid of. And when I came out, people were like, what? What? They had no idea. Really? They had no idea. And people said, we had no idea.
And I said, and my, my, I remember my dad and my stepmother said, this is so hard for us. We had no idea. And I said, yeah, but you had no idea. I had kidney disease and you didn't abandon me for that, did you? What's the difference? You mentioned earlier about the LGBTQI community. And I have a question and you're going to tell me that's not an appropriate question or you're going to educate me.
I was thinking about this and I was trying to sort of fathom it and get my head around it and whether it even is a good question, but here we go. So it strikes me that the majority of that acronym is about sexual orientation. Yeah. apart from the T, which is about gender identity, which seems to me, I get that they can be linked and you talked about that link, but aren't they completely different things?
Why are they all grouped together into one? Shouldn't it be the lesbian community, the trans community, the gay community? Why is everything together? Is this just a bit old fashioned or am I looking at that the wrong way? Well, you also have the I. Yes. I is intersex, which is

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That's about physicality. That's about the I as intersects or DSD. I had to say a DSD. I forget the definition right now. I need more caffeine. In the old days, the old pejorative term that we no longer say is hermaphrodite, it's where you have undeterminate genitalia. And those are folks who, up until the early 2000s, when a child was born and the doctor, instead of saying, congratulations, Mrs. or Ms., doesn't have to be married, you have a, hmm, what is that? what they would do is they would rush that child and they would say, we have a medical emergency and we need to take your child to surgery.
And what they would do is they would do a sex change operation on the child because there may be a child which has a penis, but the scrotum didn't close. Or they may have an enlarged clitoris that they may think, well, that is more akin to a penis, so we'll tie up the vulva and make it a scrotum. What they will do is they'll give the newborn infant a sexual binary surgery.
They used to do that up until the early 2000s in the United States without the parents' consent. And so that's what intersex is. So they wrap all of our communities together. LGBTQIA, meaning lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual. It's the entire community of people bundled together And there are people in the sexual orientation community that would be happy to dump the trans community, because for the very same reason, they don't feel that we fit in.
Indeed, at Stonewall in 1969, the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States, big event that happened. It's always credited with being founded by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, who were two trans women of color, Marsha P. Johnson being a black woman and Sylvia Rivera being a Latina trans woman. They identified in the terminology of 1969 as cross-dressers because they didn't use the language of transgender, but they dressed all the time.
Behaviorally, it's understood that yes, they would be what we would call today transgender. In 1970, when they held the first pride parade, about the gay rights movement. Both Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were banned from participating because they were told, we don't allow your types. This is a gay rights event. We don't allow you folks to participate. So even within our community, our larger community, there is this challenge of whether we belong or not.
We group together. to be a larger coalition so we can have a stronger voice. It's not my decision. This is my assumption of why we are all together. We are a stronger voice of the gender identity and sexual orientation community to speak to the bigger world about rights, about education, about all of these issues, because there's a lot of intersectionality. If you're transgender, that just speaks to your gender identity, but it doesn't identify you at all in your sexual orientation.
Are you straight as a transgender woman? Let's take the word transgender out. You're a transgender woman, so take the T out, so you're a woman. Okay, are you straight? Are you lesbian? Are you bi? Hey, maybe you're pan. You can keep going. And if you're trans, are you trans because maybe you were actually intersex and you were assigned your identity when you were born because of the way things used to be and you decided no, no, that actually they made the wrong guess. and I'm actually the other way.
And thus your I and T, and it's still, you have to also figure out your sexual orientation. So you can actually have intersectionality within that whole entire community. It's a big, broad spectrum of people that affects so many of us. And the younger kids of today are growing up in this world where they can say,

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feel I belong here. I can't imagine having had that kind of freedom when I was the age that these kids have today. I think it's phenomenal. I think it's amazing. I actually just can't imagine it. I just can't imagine it. But I'm so pleased that they have this ability and it warms my heart when parents say to their children, you are my child and I support you figuring out if you want to be a teacher, if you want to be a doctor, if you want to be a social worker, if you want to do this in your life.
I also support you if you want to love a woman, if you want to love a cisgender man. If you want to love someone who identifies as queer, I will love you if you identify as how you were identified when you were born or if you want to explore a different gender identity because you are my child and I love you and I will support you and you are an adorable human being as whoever you are, whoever you identify as.
Oh, in that spirit, I was going to say to my child, who's standing next to me right now, I love you and support you. And here's my answer to your question. It was very appropriate that you were saying that. As we're completing this and I think that we're realizing that we could talk for a week and cover only a fraction of what we need to cover. What's your message? for people listening, what do you want them to do or think or feel as a result of listening to this podcast?
Well, as you said, we're probably most likely preaching to the choir, right? Most likely. So I would love it if everybody had the opportunity, and I mean beyond the choir. had the opportunity to think, to challenge their own biases, to say, I think instead of thinking trans means this, this person that I saw, this individual that I read about, trans could mean a lot more just as being a black person. could mean anybody in the world.
Barack Obama, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela, to somebody that you would meet in an office, to someone you would come across in your neighborhood, in your school. They're just human beings. They are people who were born. to a family. They were children who they needed love. They wanted to be loved. We can hope that they got some love. They need to be cared for. Hopefully they're getting that care. They have feelings. They may, they will certainly, every single person out there will have their own every single trans person out there, if they're trans, I can guarantee that they've had a challenging life.
They've had difficulties, especially if they're children, because the kids today have, most of the time, have parents these days. If they're out, if the kids are out, they're probably doing fairly well. because their parents are probably supporting them, unless the kids are on the street, then those kids are like people in my generation that they had to fight to survive. So you can assume that they're fighting against a lot of social pressure and they have been treated poorly.
They have had a lot of struggles. They may not trust initially. They may be angry. They may have some concurrent issues. Remember, I mentioned I have Asperger's. The typical rate of the general population for Asperger's is less than 2.5%. It's very low. In the trans community, it's closer to 50%. Asperger's affects your communication style. It affects the way you think, which is not negative. Quite often people with Asperger's are very bright.
I'm not claiming that for me. I'm just saying that quite often people are very bright. They can be very creative. They can have ironic and clever senses of humor. They can be funny. They can have funny senses of language and speak in different, they can have like just humorous accents and they can play with language and they can have all kinds of little clever aspects to their minds. Special gifts. Don't prejudge.
Don't prejudge. Every single one of us is an individual.

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We come from all walks of life. We come from all backgrounds, wealthy and poor, but a lot of poor. Even when we come from a wealthy background, we may end up poor because we're rejected by our wealthy parents. We've had a lot of struggles. I don't think I would be representative of a typical because of my privilege. I'm white. college educated. I had a decent life. I am very, very fortunate. And one of the reasons why I am so committed to doing this kind of stuff, talking to you, Sam, and doing this kind of diversity work is because I know that so many others in my community have it really hard.
They struggle so profoundly hard. and I want to give back. I want to affect policy. I want to affect opinion. I want people to realize that we're not predators. We're not evil. In fact, the violence that's attributed to us is actually the opposite. It's committed against us. We are the victims of fire. My one ask is to not look at us and say, Oh, look at that person. I know what they're all about.
I bet you don't. I bet you don't. And if you get the opportunity to work with someone, to meet someone, talk to them. Ask them how they're doing. But I'll give you one caveat. Don't ask them questions that you wouldn't ask your mother or your manager at work. Don't ask them, have you had the surgery yet? Did you get your dick cut off? Believe me. You've been asked that? No, you don't ask shit like that.
No, but have people asked you that? Have people said that to you? I'm going to take that as a yes. You just don't go there. Yeah. I mean, if you wouldn't ask your manager at work or you wouldn't ask your mother questions about incredibly personal, private issues, then don't ask a stranger. Don't ask a coworker who is really a stranger you're put in the same environment with. Now, if you have a very close friend who's coming out, think about this.
If you feel uncomfortable because you don't know what to say, here's what you can say. Tell them this, I don't know what to say. other than I am here to support you and I won't abandon you. Let's please remain friends. Because what happens, Sam, is that people… I knew you were going to make me cry eventually. Oh, Sam, I cried last time. But what happens is people go, I don't know what to say.
And they're so afraid that they walk away. But it's so wrong. It's so, so wrong. I can kind of get people that say, have you had your dick cut off yet? Because people are stupid. And they ask stupid questions when they're in fear, and it's completely new. When I adopted my daughter, people say to me all the time, like, where's her real parents? How did she get here? And I sort of, oh, you know, she came via Amazon.
What do you think? You know, people ask stupid questions. And you just got used to the stupid questions and you find your bog standard answers and the rest of it. But to actually be so much in fear to abandon somebody because of this seems to me to be the epitome of stupidity. It really does. So when you said that, it really struck me, I don't know what to say and I support you and I will not abandon you is powerful beyond measure in many realms.
And I'm so happy to have my new friend. Yes, me too. I am so grateful to you, Sam. You've helped me grow. You saw it happen in real time on camera and that was a challenging moment for me because I normally go through this very privately at home talking with my partner. talking with my therapist and going through these moments of exploring my ASD, my ADD, and my personal challenges and working through them.
But you pushed. No, you didn't push. You escorted me. You held my hand and walked me through something that I had never encountered before, mass acceptance. That was not something that I had ever. I mean, I'd done, I had done sessions at work, but, and I'd gotten the, hey, that was amazing. Thank you. But nothing like that. And it blew me out. Yeah. So. We'd have to do it again sometime soon.
I'm here. I love that it did. I want to acknowledge

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you sharing your story. I want to acknowledge your gracefulness as you describe the challenges, the ups and downs, the good and the bad of your life story. I want to acknowledge the evolution of it and the windscreen story and going each way. I love that so much that actually it wasn't that you had this terrible life and suddenly you came out and your lives were happy. an evolution throughout life and it's a journey of authenticity is what i heard from you and and that's never it's never ending it you're 58 and and it's going to carry on you keep evolving but you keep evolving because you're pushing yourself yes you're challenging yourself you you you were pretty adamant with me that you were very unsure about doing a podcast.
Yet here we are. This is the longest podcast I've ever done, by the way. We're into nearly two hours. But it's not like you're like, OK, I'll do it. Maybe I'll do half an hour and then I'll quit. You are such a… One of the terms that came out from the conference was real model as opposed to role model, a real… person, everyday person sharing your story, which others can relate to in so many ways.
And I just think that it's phenomenal. As I expressed, it's irritating that we still have to have these conversations when I think about this on a global scale as well. I know there are many countries which are really still in the dark ages with regards to transgender. So there's so much more work to be done. I'm happy to work with you on this and create that future that I think we're all aspiring towards.
So thank you so much, Karen. Thank you. And I should go and wipe my eyes and get rid of the mascara flowing down my face. But it's also put, for me, really front and center. the challenges of gender and transgender and gender identity, and it's really forced me into a place to explore it much more. And I know that I will be, if and when it happens, I want it to be a sort of non-moment in some ways.
If one of my kids came out in this way, I would want it to be a non-moment. and not a sort of like, this is happening to me. How do you do this to me? And I'm going to, you know, it's my, you know, which I think many, many people go through. I really do want it to be a non-moment. And I, you've really encouraged me to talk about this with my kids.
And they've all watched your interview and we've made it, we actually made it part of our homeschooling. So they watched it and, you know, we've talked about it and. And kids being kids, they're so open anyway. But they had, I noticed, already been exposed to some ideas which really, let's say, needed to be nipped in the bud. So thank you for doing that. You've made me a better parent. You've made me even more passionate about the future of equality. and particularly with the intersectionality of being a woman, being trans woman, being a woman of color, being a woman with learning differences and the way that our brains operate.
All of these things were coming together in such exciting ways right now. And you're such a great example of that. So I look forward to more. Absolutely. Let's keep the conversation going. I'm sure that you and I could just… talk for hours, and I would love it. I would love it. There's this chemistry here that we roll, we just go. Yeah, yeah. Need to get us in the White House or the Senate or something, right?
We have something to say. Yes, there is that too. One last thing I was going to say about the non-moment issue. If one of your kids did come to you, make it a non-moment about you, but don't make it a non-moment about them, which is not to say to make it a, oh my God, put banners up in front of your house and woo, woo, woo, and set fireworks off. But at the same time, realize that they didn't just wake up that morning and say, hmm, I think I'll do this.
They took time. They've been dealing with this. It is a milestone. I would say give it the appropriate amount of, this is big, this is a big moment in your life. I am very, very grateful to you for sharing that with me. And after I do that, I will call you. Okay, we're going to have some conversations here. You're absolutely 110%. right, this is a moment and it's a moment to be acknowledged and thank you for that.
So, Karen, sending you so much love and peace and happiness and health and all of those good things and happy holidays, as they say in America, happy holidays. What is happy Christmas? We say happy Christmas, yeah, we're very set on our Christmas. Christian beliefs. I prefer happy holidays. It's way more inclusive, right? So we'll go with happy holidays. So happy holidays. And yeah, I aim to get this podcast out next week.
I think we shouldn't wait. You know, it's so long. Maybe you break it up into two pieces. Yeah, that's a good idea. That's a good idea. Maybe we'll do that. But also people will think we'll get pretty hooked. I mean, they can listen to it in two pieces, right? Yeah. However it works out. This is my first ever thing like this. I mean, I'm just thinking, who has time for a two-hour commitment to listen to this?
Well, that's what the pause button's for, right? Pause and then go back to it. Who has time? Oh, hold on a second. I know what's happening. What's that? What, what, what, what?

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It's happening again. What is this? Am I worth it? Am I worth it that someone will listen for two hours? This is my pragmatic brain going through for a marketer. My pragmatic marketing brain is going, you put out a two-hour podcast and your audience is going to go, two bloody hours? I don't have that kind of time. So if you put out… one hour in the first week, and they listen to it, and if it's interesting, they're going to go, ooh, I want to hear out.
You're right. Of course you're right. Of course you're right. You've got your marketing hat on, don't you? Maybe I'll do five minute segments they listen to, five minutes a day, like a daily kind of meditation of what you need to remember for 2021. There's all sorts of things we could come up with. I mean, at the end of the day, I mean, I did this podcast because I just really wanted to have these kind of conversations.
If they last for five minutes or they last for two hours, it doesn't matter. And it's about the feeling of it and the energy of it. And if people think it's too long, then people think it's too long. People are smart. They'll make their own decisions. They'll say, okay, I'll watch half now and I'll listen to half later, whatever it is. We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out because I think that this is, there's so much here that is critical.
It's going to be really damn hard to edit and tell you that. Okay. I'm really, really grateful that You gave me this chance and you know, I like to talk because I really believe this story for the community is important. I believe it's so damn important that this becomes normalized. The whole thing that you said about why do we even have to do this? My goal is that eventually we don't. But as we go through this societal transition, this is what we do.
Could we have done this 10 years ago, 15 years ago? I don't think we could have done this and not been, I think it would have been maybe even too leading edge. So this is the right time, the right place to do this. You're the right person to drive this. And I think it's all just perfectly set up. I really do. I agree. Well, in the words of Gloria Steinem, who said recently, we have to be less grateful, more rebellious.
I like that. You do. Yeah. Yeah, she was asked recently about that, and that's what she said. All right, my love. Thank you so much. Sending you love and health again, again, again. So I'll see you soon. I'll speak to you soon. Happy holidays and lots of love again. All right, bye. So just finishing off now the conversation with Karen. Two hours, over two hours, two hours and 10 minutes, which is the longest podcast I've done.
She's brilliant. You know, once she gets started, she is amazing at sharing her stories and she's so articulate and insightful about her evolution and so forgiving. I think something really sort of struck me she doesn't seem angry at all about it and if she is she has managed it very well or has worked through it very well in order to be in a place where she's living her life and she's doing her thing and she's giving back and she's making a difference and she recognizes the challenges that she's been through and she recognizes the privilege that she has at the same time and she basically wants to make a difference like me so it's It's so interesting and I don't say this in, I hope this is probably not politically correct thing to say but it's so exciting for me to have a friend who is transgender and who is somebody who I really can have just these in-depth conversations with and really get into some of the issues and I think we've skated on so many of the issues that we could go into in so much more depth but maybe more importantly about what some of the solutions are. because this has to change and it has to change incredibly fast because we can't as a society we can't go on like this it's absolutely bloody ridiculous so I'm really grateful to have had this this conversation with her and but also as Gloria Steiner would say rebellious too there's a rebelliousness in me that's brewing around this and I'm excited to be able to partner with her and and make a difference so yeah watch this space.

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