episode 10: Michelle Obama’s “Secret Identity”

[00:00:00] CRISTEN CONGER:
So, Lexi, I have to tell you that literally this whole podcast started because, in 2020, you know, it was kind of peak QAnon. A friend of mine told me the conspiracy theory that Joan Rivers was actually murdered by the Obama deep state because she knew Michelle Obama is secretly trans.

At which point, I didn’t even know where to start. But does that conspiracy theory ring a bell to you in your research?

[00:00:47] LEXI WEBSTER:
So, I'm obsessed with that as a narrative. It does ring a bell. It features in my paper as a reason for looking at this as a long-standing phenomenon. I’ve not heard the Joan Rivers murdered part, but that’s the kind of thing I live for in my research, right? Finding out that complete nutty flavor of, “Oh, what is this?”

[00:01:08] CRISTEN CONGER:
Apparently, it’s the kind of thing I live for too. I’m Cristen Conger, and this is Conspiracy She Wrote, Season One Finale.

Grab your red string and follow along….

Back in episode two, I told y’all this podcast’s origin story—me sitting in an adult-sized baby pool, my friend bringing up Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine and just asking questions. But I left out that nuttier flavored conspiracy theory, the one that my friend told me as if divulging a secret.

The way it went was this: she said that Joan Rivers—as in legendary comedian, past pop cultural icon, the inspiration for both The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and HBO’s Hacks, that Joan Rivers—when she died in 2014, my friend told me she was actually killed by the Obama deep state. All because Joan Rivers made a joke a couple of months earlier about Michelle Obama being transgender. Oh, and the Clintons probably helped.

None of it made sense. Joan Rivers? Some dog-whistling bullshit about Michelle Obama’s deep state protected status quo, secretly transgender identity, and a dash of the Clinton cabal. I wasn’t about to engage. I wasn’t even planning on bringing this to Conspiracy She Wrote, which is why I didn’t mention it back in episode two. But then, in the process of making this season, it came up anyway.

[00:03:28] MOYA BAILEY:
I mean, I think we saw this, you know, early on with how people responded to and continue to respond to somebody like Michelle Obama. There’s this idea of her as hypermasculine. There’s a lot of stuff on the right about her really being a man. You know, all of this language and vitriol about her body.

[00:03:52] CRISTEN CONGER:
Did you think we could end season one without a final, final cameo from Dr. Moya Bailey?

When I interviewed her about Beyoncé’s Illuminati mess for episode four, the red string she helped us unravel was the misogynoir of it all. Misogynoir, in case you haven’t listened, is the term Moya coined for the combo of racism and misogyny that pop culture deals Black women. And a big question I had for her was how misogynoir shows up in pop culture conspiracy theories about famous Black women in general.

[00:04:36] MOYA BAILEY:
That made her particularly susceptible to a narrative of her really being the one in control in the White House. Just all kinds of narratives that definitely suggested a distrust, a disbelief, and real hatred for Black women.

[00:04:56] CRISTEN CONGER:
For more on that, go back and listen to episodes four, five, and six.

The fact-checking site Snopes reported that interest in the Michelle Obama conspiracy theory first popped in 2014, then QAnon influencers got it recirculating in 2020, which explains where my Q-pilled friend picked it up and then presented it to me in that baby pool. It popped off even more in 2023 in MAGA Republican circles.

And that is how our Swifty sociologist Brian Donovan ran across this conspiracy theory too. In our conversation, we were talking about right-wing Taylor Swift conspiracy theories, and I’d asked him if he sees any actual harm in them. And he was saying that, yes, in the sense that they’re leading people to doubt what they see with their own eyes.

[00:06:05] BRIAN DONOVAN:
And once they get into the public consciousness, they have a half-life that is far longer than it should be, and it creeps up in bizarre and unpredictable ways. You know, one example of this is the idea that Michelle Obama is trans. That was a popular conspiracy theory among the right wing. Obviously, it’s ludicrous, but it’s still out there. You’ll still see it on social media platforms, and it’ll just kind of crop up as this kind of bad joke that people will make.

[00:06:42] CRISTEN CONGER:
As far as this toxic Michelle Obama conspiracy theory, the only kernel of truth was exactly that: a bad joke, told by an 81-year-old Joan Rivers.

So, we gotta rewind. This is back in July 2014. Joan went mildly viral. She officiated an impromptu gay wedding at a book signing event in New York. And the next day, a pap on the sidewalk stops her.

[00:07:17] CLIP:

REPORTER: And do you think that the country will see the first—the United States will see the first gay president or the first woman president?

JOAN RIVERS: Oh, we already have it with Obama, so let’s just calm down. Got it? You know, Michelle is a t***.

REPORTER: I’m sorry, she’s a what?

JOAN RIVER: Transgender. We all know.

REPORTER: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

[00:07:35] CRISTEN CONGER:
Again, bad joke. There was a mild backlash. Joan Rivers issued a statement being like, “My bad. It was a joke. I am a comedian.” Then, immediately after, she died. Alex Jones’ InfoWars website blasted out an all-caps headline: JOAN RIVERS DEAD TWO MONTHS AFTER CALLING OBAMA GAY, MICHELLE A [T SLUR].

[00:08:07] CLIP: ALEX JONES:
And you’re fair game. And don’t forget, don’t forget, the famous comedian Joan Rivers said, “Of course, everyone knows.” She’s dead serious. No, she’s a man. Dead on arrival. Shoot your mouth off, honey. You will die.

[00:08:22] LEXI WEBSTER:
One of the core features of that conspiracy is just out-and-out racism, right?

[00:08:28] CRISTEN CONGER:
Lexi Webster is the Deputy Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Southampton in the UK.

[00:08:35] LEXI WEBSTER:
I think it’s based on that really idealized standard of what a white woman’s body looks like, and so anything that deviates from that typicalized view of a woman’s body becomes the other and therefore becomes something that’s inherently not womanly. And by being not womanly, it becomes manly. Because we have this binary distinction between femininity and masculinity. If something doesn’t fit an ideal feminine standard, well, by dint of that, it has to be masculine. And that’s why you get the Michelle Obama conspiracy, right? Because she has toned arms, and that’s literally it. Like, because she works out, like, that’s it.

[00:09:14] CRISTEN CONGER:
Truly, it is so cringe to just think back on America’s cultural obsession with Michelle Obama’s arms. But the conspiracy timing is telling. Same-sex marriage was about to be legalized. The second-term Obama administration was expanding federal rights and recognition for trans people. Culture was expanding too. You had popular streaming shows like Orange is the New Black and Transparent. Rolling Stone called 2014 the biggest year in transgender history. The cover of Time magazine hailed trans rights as America’s next civil rights frontier. So in that context, it’s not surprising that this particular Michelle Obama conspiracy theory materialized the same year. But we’ve got a lot of unraveling to do beyond Michelle Obama because nowadays, secretly trans conspiracy theories? They’re a dime a dozen. There is a whole brain-rot conspiracy genre online called transvestigation, and it’s one of Lexi’s academic specialties.

[00:10:46] LEXI WEBSTER:
Well, it’s about truth—about truth and hiding, isn’t it? I guess this assumption that, well, if you were just honest, you wouldn’t mind so much. Well, you just know that’s not fucking true. But this idea that, well, you’re deceptive, you’re a liar, because you never told us what your genitals look like.

[00:11:01] CRISTEN CONGER:
The central premise is simple: all famous people are secretly trans. For instance, here is just an abbreviated list of transvestigated celebrities in no particular order: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, Rihanna, Sylvester Stallone, Jennifer Aniston, Kim Kardashian, Will Smith, Mariah Carey, Britney Spears, Madonna, Orlando Bloom, Emma Watson, Beyoncé, Julia Roberts. Like, there was one hashtag transvestigation post on Instagram that simply said, “Look closer at all your favorite celebrities.” To which I asked, “But what about your least favorite celebrities?”

[00:11:58] LEXI WEBSTER:
So, it’s usually picking on cis celebrities, but it also picks on cis people in that user’s everyday life. And the idea is that it’s kind of an investigation into whether someone is trans or not based on things like skull shape and shoulder size, how they walk and how they talk, which sounds fucking ridiculous because it is. One trick they have is this sort of image of a male skull and this image of a female skull. And they kind of superimpose that on the top of the image of a celebrity’s face. But they completely disregard the fact that you can just resize images, you know?

[00:12:38] CRISTEN CONGER:
If there is one thing transvestigators love, it’s skulls. Human skulls. More on that after the break.

AD BREAK 1

[00:14:02] LEXI WEBSTER:
So, one of the reasons why I question its authenticity is because I don’t believe people wouldn’t consider those differences. Or can I say I don’t believe people would be so stupid as to not consider those differences. Can I say that?

[00:14:16] CRISTEN CONGER:
Yeah. I mean, it seems willfully ignorant at best. Yes. Are there any particular groups that they tend to target?

[00:14:29] LEXI WEBSTER:
There are all sorts—I think it’s fairly well spread. I don’t think there is any sort of particular one group of people that are targeted towards. I did find that they were aiming at primarily cis women more than at cis men, although there are a lot of cis men. So, some of my favorites are Frank Zappa’s Disappearing Bulge. So, this idea that his bulge changes shape on different album covers. And, you know, these people are so interested in people’s genitals. It’s unreal. Clothes or unclothed, they’re talking about genitals. But I guess one of my all-time favorites was actually about Caitlyn Jenner and that she’s detrans.

[00:15:03] CRISTEN CONGER:
Yeah, by transvestigation math, Caitlyn Jenner was assigned female at birth, secretly transitioned to the Olympic star and athlete known as Bruce, and has now detransitioned to Caitlyn.

[00:15:26] LEXI WEBSTER:
Just like, what the fuck, right? It takes you to this, “Okay, I’m gonna need a bit more context,” but of course, it’s social media, so you get like two lines and a picture. And the picture, I think, is also of Caitlyn Jenner pre-transition. She might be wearing like running shorts. And again, people are questioning where her bulge is. Because that’s the important thing.

[00:15:49] CRISTEN CONGER:
It’s like, eyes up here.

[00:15:52] LEXI WEBSTER:
Right? You know, like, why are you always looking? Another one I saw recently was Taylor Swift on a beach, and they said, “What’s she hiding in her swimsuit?” And it’s sort of like a mons pubis? Like, she’s just that genital obsessive.

[00:16:10] CRISTEN CONGER:
Is transvestigation new?

[00:16:15] LEXI WEBSTER:
In terms of transvestigation as a term, I think it’s been attached to social media, but these kinds of things have happened before, right? I think RuPaul’s Drag Race had a segment called Female or She-Male way back in the day.

[00:16:27] CLIP - RU PAUL:
For today’s mini-challenge, I show you an extreme close-up of a famous celebrity. You tell me if she’s a biological woman or a psychological woman. Ha ha ha.

[00:16:40] LEXI WEBSTER:
And do you remember There’s Something About Miriam?

[00:16:44] CLIP - THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MIRIAM COMMERCIAL:
This week, the five guys get set to impress?
I do. Thank you. Miriam? Yes, I’m definitely attracted to the one-on-one. Dates get intimate, but they’re still unaware of Miriam’s secrets. All-new episode…

[00:16:55] LEXI WEBSTER:
It was this Sky TV show about a woman on a boat, and it was kind of like a contest thing, I think. And the big reveal was Miriam was like, “I’m not a woman.” We would not say that nowadays, obviously. She was a woman. She’s a trans woman.

[00:17:08] CRISTEN CONGER:
There’s Something About Miriam is something that never should have happened. Before the reality show had even aired in 2004, Miriam was already suffering its consequences. The six dudes who’d competed for Miriam on the show jointly sued for “conspiracy to commit sexual assault, defamation, breach of contract, and personal injury,” and for psychological and emotional damage. All because, at the end of this competition, Miriam told this group of cisgender straight dudes who’d been super into her that, surprise, she’s trans. And those men ended up winning a settlement. Miriam Rivera died by suicide in 2019.

[00:18:18] LEXI WEBSTER:
So, I imagine there are things that have happened throughout history. I’ve not dug into that in my paper. But certainly throughout television and film, there has been this phenomenon of revelation or of investigation into the “truth”—quote, unquote. Of course, you have even Ace Ventura. The big reveal of the villain is that she’s trans.

[00:18:38] CLIP - ACE VENTURA:
She’s not Lois Einhorn! She’s Ray Finkel. She’s a man. He’s lying!

[00:18:49] LEXI WEBSTER:
And that was the result of an investigation. So these kinds of things have been in the media consciousness for a while, but I think transvestigation as a specific phenomenon is something that we see primarily on social media.

[00:19:03] CRISTEN CONGER:
And is the conspiracy theory piece novel to what we’re seeing now on social media?

[00:19:12] LEXI WEBSTER:
The conspiracy part is what I find the most interesting because it is so tied into antisemitic tropes. It’s so tied into that kind of Nazi propaganda of, if somebody looks a certain way, then they’re this, but that’s tied to them being part of this elite cabal that controls certain aspects of the world. One part of the transvestigation phenomenon that I explored in my journal article was what they call elite gender inversion. This idea that there is a specific group of elite trans people who are hiding the fact that they’re trans as a means of controlling certain institutions. One example is Jill Biden. So you see that as being, for example, at the very pinnacle of U.S. politics, the First Lady is a trans woman. And of course, that ties back to exactly the same conspiracy around Michelle Obama. And there’s no coincidence that that links there, right?

[00:20:09] CRISTEN CONGER:
Same conspiracy, different tone. A user on X, for example, posted a zoomed-in headshot. Jill Biden’s eyes are obviously droopified, to make up a word. Extra saggy eyelids and prominent under-eye crinkles. Her eyebrows are sloped up as if her face is just kind of smushing in on itself. Oof. Like, it’s obviously a photoshop. The caption reads, “First Lady Jill Biden has a man neck and the wonky eye.”

[00:20:51] LEXI WEBSTER:
The wonky eye. This idea that if you have a wonky eye, I think it just means asymmetry between your eyes because I didn’t see any pattern between posts that talked about the wonky eye. I didn’t think anyone’s eyes looked wonky. But that, again, harks back to the eye imagery of the Illuminati and that kind of New World Order, which itself is wrapped up in anti-Jewish conspiracies. But it also ties into looking at the size of shoulders and even the direction of the clavicle and how many fingers’ width there is of a shoulder, which indicates sex assigned at birth. Or even, for example, the position of the hips. So if a person’s feet cross in a photo, that means they were assigned female at birth. That’s how ridiculous this is. It’s based on all of this nonsense science, and it’s all built around this conspiracy that these trans people aren’t telling us that they’re trans people, and they’re controlling certain aspects of the world—particularly world politics in some way. But of course, Hollywood.

[00:21:57] CRISTEN CONGER:
Oh, of course. Of course. And it also requires such a suspension of disbelief that, I don’t know, just body diversity exists? And look, that’s just one layer, you know?

[00:22:14] LEXI WEBSTER:
This is exactly the thing. It’s such a simplistic way of looking at bodies, but it’s also complete bullshit.

[00:22:22] CRISTEN CONGER:
Lexi’s research identified three key myths behind said bullshit. There’s the myth of transgender ubiquity—you know, that all celebrities are secretly trans. There’s the myth that being trans is a social contagion—it’s something you can catch. And finally, Illuminati alert, the myth that trans people are part of some elite cabal out to enslave the entire cisgender population. Now, why did you want to study this?

[00:23:02] LEXI WEBSTER:
Because it’s fucking ridiculous, right? So, as a trans person, I’ve been doing research on the politicization and mediatization of antagonism towards trans people, looking particularly at X —Twitter at the time, wouldn’t want to deadname a platform.

So, I was teaching how to do a particular approach to media analysis, and I thought, this is a fun thing to talk about—fun because it’s serious, but interesting enough to teach about because it’s a serious moment to talk about how humor can be found in really difficult things. But I also did it because I wanted to highlight that in a context of hate, in a context of really growing and growing regression when it comes to trans recognition, there’s this weird part of the internet where you can’t actually tell if people are being, like, very online people and taking the piss out of everything or if they’re being deliberately and authentically hateful. And I just wanted to pick apart that phenomenon.

Also, as a trans person, I find it hilarious because it’s so ridiculous that I think that having a bit of a laugh at people who may be wanting to make out that I’m some kind of monster Illuminati person—I just wanted to tear that apart as well and say look at how ridiculous this is. As in, is it people who really believe that trans people are everywhere, that we’re this elite subset of people that have infiltrated Hollywood and, you know, the political system?

So, are they really transphobic, or are they really kind of wackos that are saying it because they know that it generates attention, or they know that it’s so ridiculous?

[00:24:50] CRISTEN CONGER:
So, obviously, transvestigation is total bullshit. You know, to put it in academic speak, I think that’s the term for it. So, why does it matter?

[00:25:03] LEXI WEBSTER:
It matters because it’s reflected in politics right now. This new political discourse around trans people is just a dilution of the kind of point of transvestigations, or what looks to be the point of transvestigations, right?

So, it’s a dilution of the scientific underpinning; it’s a dilution of what people think is the extent to a problem. So, it gives people this eye for looking at people’s bodies and trying to determine whether somebody is X or Y. And that wasn’t supposed to be a chromosome sort of joke, but it’s looking at people to try and figure out if they’re trans, to figure out if they’re lying, because if you’re trying to sort of look at someone’s clavicles and whether they’re angled downwards or whether they’re flat as being an indicator that they’re trans, you’ve probably also swallowed the pill that says they’re dangerous to you. So, there’s the very real physical threat to trans people.

But it also kind of trivializes and normalizes people wanting access to your body in certain ways. It’s all rooted in the same kind of misogyny as wanting to know what women look like, particularly female celebrities, right? For a long time, the media have been obsessed with seeing women’s bodies. And this kind of stuff really means that people care for all the wrong reasons.

[00:26:14] CRISTEN CONGER:
And people are caring a lot. That’s why it can be hard to tell if transvestigators are trolls.

[00:26:26] LEXI WEBSTER:
It’s just—it’s the new enemy of the time, right? The same cycle of behavior as it just attaches itself to a new enemy. So, when you’re looking at the mid-20th century, you’re looking at wartime Europe, for example, you have antisemitism because the enemy was the Jewish person.

[00:26:43] CRISTEN CONGER:
And that mid-century anti-Semitism was chock full of conspiracy theories alleging that prominent public figures and politicians were secretly Jewish. It was like the original transvestigation, except in lieu of transphobia, you have anti-Semitism.

[00:27:27] LEXI WEBSTER:
You sort of see the same things rolling around. There was a time, particularly in the UK, where there were huge swathes of Islamophobia that were simply accepted in politics in a really ridiculous way. But the new enemy for a lot of people that actually some on the left and some on the right seem to agree are the enemy is the trans person, right?

And, you know, we’ve got other queer people, we’ve got gay people, lesbians, bisexual people, pan people, you know, they’re all tarred with the trans brush unless they specifically kind of disentangle themselves from trans people in their politics. So, you also get that resurgence of homophobia that comes up from this new enemy of the trans person. Because, of course, people can’t extricate sex or gender from sexuality. And this idea, again, this oversimplified, under-nuanced version of reality is something that kind of fuels this conspiratorial thinking and the weaponization of hate for political ends.

[00:28:27] CRISTEN CONGER:
Transvestigation is a two-circle Venn diagram. One circle is shitposting. The other is what our next guest, Fran Amery, calls organized transphobia.

[00:28:42] FRAN AMERY:
We get people who become very alert, I suppose—very vigilant for signs of gender nonconformity. Or people not conforming to what they see as being the norm for that person’s sex.

[00:28:54] CRISTEN CONGER:
Fran is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of Bath. A lot of her research focuses on the relationship between reactionary politics and transphobia.

[00:29:05] FRAN AMERY:
And you also see it’s something that happens a lot to cisgender women who speak up for trans rights and for trans people on social media as well. Suddenly, people are scrutinizing their profile picture, saying, “Oh, you know, this person’s clearly a man.” And all they’ve found is just some really kind of normal feature that’s very, very common for cis women to have. But the combination of this person speaking up for trans liberation and having some barely discernible feature that somebody’s decided looks like a masculine feature is enough to have them painted as a man. And it’s seen at the moment, like, it’s almost like a gotcha, like, once you’ve proved this or you think you’ve shown that somebody’s trans, that’s like, well, that makes your argument invalid.

[00:29:45] CRISTEN CONGER:
Well, what have you found as far as the role of news media in all of this? And obviously, you’re, you know, focusing on UK media.

[00:29:57] FRAN AMERY:
Yeah, so, particularly in terms of the volume, we’re now getting to the point where there are really multiple, I would say, moral panic articles about trans people a day in the UK press. Just the quantity of it has changed massively. So, we still do get some nice, kind of feel-good, “Oh, trans person, first ever person to star in this soap” or whatever. You still get those articles, which I think have always been there, or at least for the last couple of decades or so.

But the articles talking about record numbers of children transitioning, or “Could your child be accessing hormones on the internet?”—those kind of articles, yeah, they are just coming through thick and fast, where actually there was really very little media interest in those kind of questions, even, I would say, you know, six or seven years ago.

We’re also seeing this kind of splashback hitting other marginalized groups as well. We know that a lot of women, especially butch lesbians and other women who perhaps don’t fit stereotypical ideas about what it means to be a woman—it’s not just about picking out individual trans people and kind of going after them as people, it’s also about these broader ideas about what men and women should be, and almost kind of punishing everyone who doesn’t fit those quite restrictive norms.

[00:31:22] CRISTEN CONGER:
But word to the wise: do not call these gender vigilantes transphobic or trans exclusionary. For one thing, they’re really litigious. And two, anything you say can and will be used against you because you’re obviously brainwashed by the trans agenda.

AD BREAK 2

[00:31:48] FRAN AMERY:
So, when we talk about organized transphobia, what we’re really trying to get at is that transphobia, to an extent, is an organized movement. So, we’re not just talking about individual people who might have prejudiced or transphobic beliefs. We’re talking about some really well-organized and often really well-funded campaigns as well that are really quite systematic in how they operate.

[00:32:14] CRISTEN CONGER:
Fran’s research is focused on the UK, but a U.S. example of this that I am all too familiar with is the Alliance Defending Freedom banning trans girls from school sports. Yeah, that’s kind of their thing. And that’s also where they found support from a more baffling faction.

[00:32:40] FRAN AMERY:
There is a lot of coalition-building going on between both liberal and radical feminists and people who wouldn’t call themselves feminists at all—people who are conservatives or even, in some cases, people on the far right.

[00:32:54] CRISTEN CONGER:
Gender-critical feminists and TERFs are different terms for the same group—self-identified feminists who support trans discrimination in the name of protecting women and girls. The acronym TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists.

[00:33:17] FRAN AMERY:
There is a history of transphobia in radical feminist activism going back to at least the 1970s. I wouldn’t say it’s all radical feminism. I don’t like the idea that radical feminism is synonymous with transphobia.

[00:33:30] CRISTEN CONGER:
This is an oversimplification, but radical feminism didn’t just aim to smash the patriarchy. It wanted to divest from men entirely. To some, that extended to a no-contact policy with anyone they even suspected of being men. Because this was the 1970s, outside of a few academic circles, nobody was out here distinguishing between biological sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. It was all just conceptually smushed together at that time.

So, in some radical feminist circles, there was no separating the anatomy of a penis, patriarchy, period. And some pivoted their radical feminist energies towards disavowing trans identity and treating trans women especially as dangerous intruders. By the 1980s, some of the most outspoken anti-trans feminists had allied with conservatives to block funding for transgender healthcare.

Trans exclusionary radical feminism was actually coined in the early 2000s by a trans-inclusive radical feminist as a way to kind of reclaim radical feminism from that legacy.

[00:35:13] FRAN AMERY:
So, in a sense, this history goes back quite a long way. What is new, I think, is, first of all, how prominent the movement is, especially here in the UK, and the extent of coalition-building we’re seeing, and how successful it has been in terms of bringing transphobic ideas to the general public.

[00:35:34] CRISTEN CONGER:
And you’ve pointed to this, but these coalitions are counterintuitive at first glance. How do you get these, you know, scare quotes, gender-critical feminists teaming up with anti-feminist right-wingers, you know?

[00:35:54] FRAN AMERY:
Yeah, I think something that is really worth drawing attention to is that it’s a fairly white movement. It’s not an exclusively white movement, but it’s fairly white. It’s fairly kind of comfortably middle class, and that very much inflects how it views the world and how it views the struggle that it feels it’s involved in. So, very much seen in kind of black-and-white terms as a struggle of women versus men, and there’s essentially no other axes of power that need to be taken into account, which is, of course, the exact same critique that Black and women of color feminists have always been making about white feminism as well.

So, I think Black feminist thought, in particular, has been really helpful for me in terms of understanding the movement really as an attempt to shore up power for women who are already privileged.

And then, of course, in some cases, that has led some figures in the movement into closer alliances with some quite overtly extreme right—even neo-Nazi, in some cases—figures. You know, there have always been racist feminists. There have always been overtly white supremacist feminists. It’s not a well-enough known fact that after their campaign to get the vote in the UK, some of the suffragettes actually went on to join fascist movements. So, I really think, to some extent, we’re seeing an extension of that here within organized transphobia.

[00:37:15] CRISTEN CONGER:
How does organized transphobia square the circle that there is some kind of all-powerful, secret trans lobby when trans people are a minority group? Like, where’s all this power allegedly coming from?

[00:37:33] FRAN AMERY:
I think sometimes that contradiction is almost part of the point because if you have this belief system that has contained a contradiction like that, it’s almost like you can cover all of your bases, right? So, when it suits you to talk about how trans people are a tiny minority and we shouldn’t pander to them because that’s going to completely uproot and ruin society for the overwhelming majority of average, quote, unquote, “normal people,” they can use that kind of argument when it suits them.

But when it suits them for trans people to be this really powerful, sinister, shadowy lobby that’s controlling all of our institutions that we need to stand up and resist, then they can also use that argument. So, I would say that it probably doesn’t bother them too much that there’s a big contradiction there because actually, they can just draw on whichever bits of their argument suit them for whatever purpose. So, they can be all things to all people, essentially.

[00:38:24] LEXI WEBSTER:
I don’t want us to talk about trans people like we’re a political idea because that’s what we’ve gotten to. As soon as you politicize trans lives, you stop thinking about trans people as people, and you start to think about them as this kind of political fodder.

[00:38:42] CRISTEN CONGER:
I want to be conscientious and careful with how we present this and talk about it. How should we talk about it? Transvestigation specifically—or should we?

[00:38:57] LEXI WEBSTER:
I mean, I hope you do. Otherwise, I’ve wasted an hour.

[00:38:59] CRISTEN CONGER:
No.

[00:39:02] LEXI WEBSTER:
So, when I first talked about this, it’s in a guest lecture to an academic skills course at the University of Southampton, and I presented it with a caveat: there is transphobia in this talk. We will be discussing things that may make people uncomfortable, that may make people feel retraumatized by experiences they might have had. And some of this will be disturbing to some of you, but it’s important to talk about because it’s exactly that kind of experience that trans people are having right now.

Now, as a trans person, I give myself permission to laugh at this sort of stuff because, I don’t know, someone could just ask me, “Are you trans?” and I’d be like, “I’m not gonna say, ‘Well, actually, my clavicle’s straight, so you decide.’” So, I give myself permission to laugh at this—I’m not giving other people permission to laugh at this, you don’t need my permission, but that’s how I see it, right?

So, you know, we can take this thing out of the seriousness of its manifestation by laughing at what we see in front of us without ignoring the fact that there is inherent racism attached to people calling Michelle Obama trans. There’s inherent transphobia in calling people liars or deceptive if we accept that they’re trans. Remember that we can take the piss out of this ridiculousness. We do not have to accept that everything is misery. We can feel joy, we can feel beauty, we can feel success, and we can walk around metaphorically with our middle fingers raised at all this nonsense that wants to eradicate us. Because it won’t happen, we’ll still be here, and, you know, we can still live in optimism for a future where we just get to be.

[00:40:52] CRISTEN CONGER:
In her memoir Becoming, Michelle Obama wrote, “I’ve smiled for photos with people who call my husband horrible names on national television but still want a framed keepsake for their mantle. I’ve heard about the swampy parts of the internet that question everything about me, right down to whether I’m a woman or a man. A sitting U.S. congressman has made fun of my butt. I’ve been hurt, I’ve been furious, but mostly I’ve tried to laugh this stuff off.”

. . .

Thank you so much to Lexi Webster. You can find Lexi on LinkedIn, or if you wanna check out her research, go to lexiwebster.co.uk.

Thank you as well to Fran Amery. You can follow Fran on X at @Fran_Amery. Fran is also a founding member of a new research network, the Reactionary Politics Research Network. They are doing very important work. You can find out all about it at reactpol.net. That’s reactpol.net, or just click the link in the episode description.

This has officially been Season One of Conspiracy She Wrote.

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It is executive produced, written, and hosted by me, Cristen Conger. Lushik Lotus-Lee is our producer. Engineering and post-production is by Marcus Hahm. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions, and our theme song is “Tarana” by RGift.