Author: jennanddavevonebers

Married couple in the Chicago area in a mixed orientation relationship.
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Episode 22: Let Them Play

How do we go from The Masters to the rights of trans athletes in the span of half an hour? Well, it wasn’t easy but we did.

The conversation winds from birdies and eagles and albatrosses to high school gym class, with a few odd detours (European team handball?) along the way, until we settle on last week’s announcement that the US Department of Education proposed new rules on trans athletes’ eligibility to play elementary, high school, and college sports under Title IX. 

As an important caveat, it’s critical to understand that these are only proposals at this point and we do not know what the final rules will look like, but there are some legitimate concerns over the government giving sports leagues too much latitude to make the rules. For example, leagues may say that trans women and girls cannot play until they’ve undergone hormone therapy for a period of time. While this might seem like a reasonable compromise to some, in practice it would mean that league officials could effectively force trans young people to make decisions about gender affirming care that they are not prepared to make — kind of odd, given that there’s so much (likely fake) outrage about … kids undergoing gender-affirming care too soon.

And more than that, let’s face it: Youth and college sports organizations don’t really have the best track record when it comes to making decisions for kids. Think USA Gymnastics. Penn State. Ohio State. USA Volleyball. Do we want these folks dictating who should play or what gender affirming care kids should get at what age? 

They can’t police themselves; why should they police trans athletes?

In any event, there’s more to our conversation than that, but you’ll have to listen in to hear the rest! The bottom line is, our view is the same as it always has been: Let them play.

So, please enjoy to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 21: Reflecting on Trans Day of Visibility

Since we recorded our last episode, Transgender Day of Visibility happened (it was March 31) and we would be remiss if we didn’t share our thoughts. According to GLAAD, only about 30 percent of Americans personally know someone who’s trans. At the same time, legislators around the country introduced more than 400 bills attacking LGBTQIA rights in the first three months 2023, and over half of those bills specifically targeted trans people. But you can help! Please consider filling out this form on GLAAD’s website and sending it to the political leaders in your state.

But Trans Day of Visibility is more than an opportunity to rehash negative things, no matter how aggravating they are or how important it is to confront them. It’s just as important, if not more so, to celebrate trans and nonbinary people for who they are and what they accomplish. While we have to address negative things like harmful legislation, we can’t let trauma define the community. Like our own daughter who’s living a great life, trans and nonbinary people are making their way in the world and achieving greatness, and they are not defined by the horrible things the bigots visit upon them. Case in point: Jeopardy! champion Amy Schneider, who schooled the world in trans excellence over the past year.

We then talk about Kansas’ legislature overriding their governor’s veto of a bill that bans trans girls from participating in sports consistent with their gender. Barbara Wasinger, one of the bill’s sponsors, reportedly said the state would enforce the bill by requiring girls to undergo sports physicals to confirm their biological sex … which most critics interpret to mean genital inspections. 

Aside from the utterly disgusting idea of the state forcing inspections of kids’ genitals, this leads to a broader conversation about sports and how they’re really not the level-playing-field meritocracy that people imagine them to be.

And from there, we tackle yet another deceptive story about the Washington University health clinic that provides gender affirming care for trans youth, this time by Emily Yoffe on Bari Weis’ Free Press blog … er, website? No, we’re not going to link to the offending article, but we will say what we’ve said all along: Utterly unqualified folks like Jesse Singal, Bari Weiss, Matt Walsh, Bill Maher, and the rest of those weirdos need to keep their noses out of the health care decisions other people make for their kids.

So, please enjoy to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 20: What Level of Dante’s Inferno Is This?

Well, we started out on a light note, talking about watching a certain game show only old people watch and setting up our cat “daycare” so we can work from home in relative peace …

And then we went on at some length about podcasting and making videos for our Instagram page and our YouTube channel, talking about the complexity of recording audio and video separately and trying to sync them up (which is why, ultimately, we settled on podcasting).

But then it got weird. We could not, of course, let the week pass without commenting on the principal at Tallahassee Classical School who got fired for showing students the statue of David, as the school had done every year in recent memory. The bright spot, of course, being that just about every news outlet that covered the story, including NPR in the story we link to here, had to show the … uh … Full Monty, so to speak. 

And there’s an even weirder angle to this story: According Peter Schorsch on Twitter, school board chairman Barney Bishop III, the guy who asked for the principal’s “resignation” over the statue of David, has some rather interesting, er, garden statues of his own.

Finally, we couldn’t avoid the other awful story of the week: another school shooting, this time in Nashville, where a semiautomatic-rifle-wielding maniac killed three young children and three school staffers at a private Christian school. We’ve talked about this before — because, of course, these incidents happen so frequently — but, as parents, we and our kids have lived with this insanity almost nonstop since Columbine in 1999. 

And as awful and inexcusable as this latest school massacre was, there is yet another awful twist. According to Nashville police, shooter might be transgender, though that’s not yet confirmed according to Reuters, so, naturally, the worst people in the world are blaming the trans community as a whole for the murders of these innocent kids. They claim that there’s some alarming uptick in trans or nonbinary people committing mass shootings, citing this incident, the December 2022 shooting in Colorado Springs where the murderer may or may not be nonbinary, and a couple of other incidents over the past few years. But here’s the thing: even if those incidents involve trans or nonbinary people, the number of trans and nonbinary people who commit crimes like this is infinitesimally small compared to the endless stream of mass shootings that happen in schools, churches, synagogues, grocery stores … and nearly everywhere else in America.

So you have to ask yourselves: What level of Dante’s Inferno is reserved for the kinds of monsters who use the killing of innocent children as an excuse to promote bigotry and hate against marginalized people? 

Anyway, please enjoy this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast. 

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Episode 19: March Madness

On this week’s episode, we give a long over due (LONG OVERDUE) shout-out to our friend and podcasting mentor, Tim Corrimal of The Tim Corrimal Show, whom we’ve known for years and who helped us considerably when we got started. Tim gave us great advice about podcasting … though we can’t say we’ve always followed it, which is our fault, not his. Check out his (much more professional) show, and follow him on Mastodon and Spoutible (@timcorrimal).

From there, we talk about our very own March Madness, which does not, much to Dave’s chagrin, mean we discuss the University of Illinois’ storied men’s basketball program and the many, many injustices that have been visited upon them. Nope. This March Madness includes our wedding anniversary, our oldest child’s 27th birthday, and our youngest child coming home from college for spring break.

Then, despite our promise to be more uplifting this week, we provide an update on the Jesse Singal Fiasco. Jesse, as many folks have reached out to tell us, is off Twitter … sort of … but it’s not Dave’s fault. We swear.

Returning to more positive things, we introduce you to Ronnie Angelique Young, a successful Black Latina trans woman who testified in Florida against laws targeting the LGBTQIA community. You can watch her remarkable testimony here and follow her on social media (@Dncndiva on both Twitter and Instagram).

Segueing from that great story, we talk in more general terms about the scrutiny LGBTQIA people face these days, especially trans and nonbinary people, and how the enemies of the community look for any perceived mistake on the part of queer people, their healthcare providers, and their supportive parents and allies, to paint a negative picture of the community as a whole. 

Finally, we talk about young people and how, when anti-LBGTQIA say “let kids be kids,” they overlook the fact that kids often know about their identity and orientation early in life — just like straight kids do! So when we say “let kids be kids,” that includes queer kids!  

Please enjoy to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 18: “A Tale Told by an Idiot”

We’re not comparing ourselves to William Faulkner, who borrowed a phrase from Macbeth for the title of one of his most famous novels — life, he says, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” — but we’ve dealt with our share of numbskulls in recent weeks.

Not the least of whom is one Jesse Singal, a Brooklyn-based Substacker (that is, blogger), podcaster, and self-professed Twitter addict. No, we won’t link to his various online platforms because we’re not going to give him any more oxygen, but this week’s episode describes a wild ride we recently took through his anti-transgender fever dreams, and let’s just say … that’s some weird, uncharted territory.

For background, this article describes Singal’s descent over the past few years from a superficially neutral writer wondering aloud about the experiences of trans people to a (possibly childless?) man who’s appointed himself the leading expert on the healthcare of … other people’s children. Notice, in particular, the article’s description of Singal’s bizarre and completely inappropriate tweet-storm from March 2021, where raises questions about another person’s gender diverse child. Here’s a guy taking to Twitter and demanding to know whether a complete stranger’s child was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, as though that’s something he, or anyone else, is entitled to know!

But Singal’s intrusion into the healthcare of other people’s children didn’t end there, and that’s what led to our recent interactions with him. Lately, Singal injected himself into the Missouri Attorney General’s politically motivated “investigation” into a clinic affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis that provides care and advice to trans youth and their parents. Then, last Saturday, he posted a piece on his Substack in defense of the Attorney General’s “whistleblower,” a woman named Jamie Reed, who provided details of the clinic’s alleged “mistreatment” of children under its care. (Spoiler alert: as we explain on this week’s episode, Reed does not appear to qualify as a whistleblower under the Missouri Whistleblower Protection Act, and it does not appear the clinic did anything illegal).

So that led one of us — you’ll never guess who! — to tee off on Jesse on Twitter. Not because he or Reed broke any laws (we’re not HIPAA experts and we don’t claim to be), but because Singal’s post included completely unnecessary, salacious details of what minors allegedly told their therapists and caregivers. Of course, he wasn’t quite ghoulish enough to identify the minors by name, but any person with a whit of common sense would realize that detailing confidential information that minors gave to therapists is a patently disgusting thing to do. 

In any event, while Jesse reacted to criticism of that post in the way that any well-adjusted, responsible grown up would do — by lashing out at and mocking anyone who dared to question him — he then did an odd thing. He invited us to appear on his podcast, presumably to make himself look super level-headed and rational to his troll followers. 

And that’s where the story gets really bizarre. As we explain in this week’s episode, he basically ignored multiple emails from us, lied to his followers by saying we never emailed him, and otherwise sabotaged our attempts to confront him in person on his own podcast. Whether it was an intentionally deceptive ploy or the predictable incompetence of a 40-year-old Substacker-podcaster-troll, we finally told him that we were done wasting our time. 

But not without explaining the whole sordid affair to our listeners, of course.

So, please enjoy to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 17: Being Part of the Conversation

We’re back after a long hiatus because, as we explain in this week’s episode, there is a conversation going on in the world, whether we like it or not, and good people have to be part of it.

It’s been a long time, and, frankly, after recording our last episode, we thought we might never come back. Last year saw one tragedy after another in a country that seemed to be increasingly polarized and defined by anger and extremism, especially on the right. From mass shootings to the Supreme Court overruling decades of precent and stripping away individual liberties to the ever more hostile environment in which marginalized people, and especially LGBTQIA people, find themselves, the stress at times was overwhelming. 

Fighting this fight takes a toll, and trying weigh the stress of fighting it against the cost of ignoring it seems to present an impossible dilemma.

But, as we say, the conversation about individual rights and fundamental human dignity goes on with or without us, and without us, the voices of the lunatic fringe not only become louder, they become normalized and mainstream. Whether it’s Michael Knowles talking about “eradicating transgenderism” at CPAC, Matt Walsh and his fellow travelers obsessing over and spreading lies about gender-affirming care for trans people, or random unhinged Twitter users casually hurling the vilest accusations imaginable at parents and others who support LGBTQIA youth, there are times when decent people just have to speak up.

And so we’re back, and we hope to connect with good, decent, likeminded people who will join the conversation, too. Because we know they’re out there.

We may never strike the right balance between fighting back and living our lives in peace, but we’re not going to go quietly.

So, please enjoy to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQIA people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 16: Another School Shooting; Keeping the T in LGBTQ+

In this week’s episode, we share our thoughts on the latest school shooting, this time in Uvalde, Texas. As parents, we have lived through this nightmare over and over again since the Columbine murders in 1999. Perhaps it’s the cumulative weight of these mass killings, or the fact that the Uvalde murders occurred so soon after the racist murders of Black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, but this incident haunts us even more than the many, many school shootings that have come before. 

After the recent public hearings into the Uvalde massacre, what are we to do with the information we now have about what happened to these kids? And even more, what are we to do with the knowledge that none of this — not the gravity of these killings nor their gruesome details — will move some of our fellow Americans? None of this will affect how they vote or change their views of gun control at all. So, what are we to do with that? 

We then turn our attention to Pride month, and, in particular, the ever-increasing attacks on transgender and nonbinary people coming from the right and the left. Given that even so-called allies openly question whether trans and nonbinary people are entitled to the same rights as the rest of the community, we trace the history of the Stonewall uprising and the integral role trans and nonbinary people played and continue to play in the movement, including trans heroes Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. For more information on the history of the movement from Stonewall to the present, check out the documentary Stonewall Forever on YouTube, produced by The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Center in New York.

Please enjoy to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQ+ people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 15: Anger Can Be Power

In the punk rock manifesto “Clampdown” from the Clash’s London Calling LP, Joe Strummer wrote, “Let fury have the hour/Anger can be power/D’you know that you can use it?” 

A lot of us have been feeling anger lately, for a lot of good reasons. The Supreme Court appears to be on the verge of overturning Roe v. Wade. Craven politicians attack the LGBTQIA community incessantly and call us “groomers” or worse. They and their media allies push racist tropes like “white replacement theory.” And just last week, a racist gunman in Buffalo, inspired by this hate, murdered ten Black people using a gun adorned with racial slurs. 

So, your anger is justified. The challenge is how to express it effectively and constructively. Because we have to express it, especially those of us with privilege.

We don’t have all the answers, but a Michigan state senator, Mallory McMorrow, provided valuable insight when she pushed back against a colleague’s vile attacks. Listen to her speech, which is a little less than five minutes long. This is the anger and honesty we need more of, not just from politicians, but from all of us. 

Please enjoy to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQ+ people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast.

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Episode 14: A Week in Ireland

In this episode, we talk about our trip to Dublin, Ireland last week to celebrate David’s 60th birthday, and reconnecting with our cultural heritage as Irish Americans. We spent most of our time south of the River Liffey in the city center, where many of the major cultural attractions are located (including the seat of the city and national governments, the National Concert Hall, the National Library, Dublin Castle, Trinity College, the National Art Gallery, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the National Museum of Archeology, St. Stephen’s Green, and Grafton Street). 

What was most striking, though, was witnessing firsthand the way Ireland’s cultural identity survived through centuries of oppression and intense efforts to erase it. While it’s moving to us as Irish Americans to see the culture thrive, we could not help but think about people around the world who do not have the luxury of reconnecting with their culture and history the way we do, including the modern ancestors of enslaved Africans, the indigenous people whose languages, cultures, and traditions were nearly eradicated by colonialism and imperialism, and the victims of the Holocaust. 

It was an exceptionally moving experience, and we recognize how lucky we are to have had it.

So, please listen to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQ+ people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast. 

Along the River Liffey
Brian Boru’s Harp, Trinity College, Dublin

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Episode 13: Making It Work

In this episode, we talk about managing a successful mixed-orientation marriage in difficult times when the rights of the LGBTQ+ community are increasingly under attack. Although as a community and a country we’ve made tremendous strides over the past 30 years or so, progress is never smooth and linear, and when society backslides on our fundamental rights, there is no guarantee we will eventually get back on track. So now, more than ever in our lifetime, it’s time for unity and solidarity with everyone across the LGBTQ+ community.

Please listen to this week’s episode, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and, as always, support the rights of LGBTQ+ people everywhere! And if you’re new here, you can also follow our Twitter account, @itsotetPodcast. 

Programming note: We will be off the week of April 25, 2022. We will be back with new episodes after that!

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