Trans Rights Matter: The Erin Reed Interview
In a world awash with disinformation and fear-based politics, what cuts through the noise isn’t perfection; it’s authenticity. As Erin Reed, a trailblazing journalist and trans rights advocate, puts it: the most effective leaders and allies are the ones who show up with sincerity, values, and courage.
Reed knows this from experience. Alongside her wife, Montana state legislator Zooey Zephyr, they’ve faced the harshest forms of political repression, from being silenced in state chambers to watching harmful laws passed in the name of "protecting" sports or children. And yet, their fight continues, fueled by love, clarity, and hope.
So how can you support the trans community in meaningful ways?
Stand Firm in Your Values – Democratic Party leaders especially shouldn't be “Republican-lite” or speak through the filter of 12 consultants. Speak from the heart, like Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, who stood up for trans rights and still won big in a deep red state.
Educate Yourself and Others – Learn the real facts. Trans athletes aren’t “cheating.” They’re barely even represented in elite sports. Medical care for trans youth isn’t a free-for-all; it’s cautious, professional, and consent-driven. And no, no one is performing surgeries in school cafeterias.
Be Visible. Be Vocal. – When institutions cave to pressure and erase diversity programs, allies must speak up. Trans people aren’t always in the room, but you might be.
Build Solidarity – Globally and locally. Anti-trans disinformation spreads across borders. So should our support. Reach out to advocate groups abroad and build an international coalition of support and solidarity.
History is watching. As Reed reminds us, this is our civil rights moment. Whether you’re an activist, a parent, a lawmaker, or a friend, your genuineness, your voice, and your love can help shape a more just future.
All it takes is a spark.
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The song you heard in this week’s Gaslit Nation is “Tear the Fascists Down” by Deena Marie. Check out her music here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2CuUJiaLhVF4x8WlZGLjRJ
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Deena Marie (singing) (00:05):
Tear the Fascists Down (again)
Andrea Chalupa (01:23):
The song you heard was Tear the Fascist Down Again by Deena Marie. Deena Marie submitted this statement: I wrote this song after listening to Woody Guthrie's Tear the Fascist Down. In the 1940s to 1970s, artists created pop songs, political songs. Now artists shy away from that, except older ones like Bob Dylan or Joni or Bruce Springsteen. Oh, you mean this Bruce Springsteen, Deena?
Bruce Springsteen (01:52):
In my home, the America I love. The America I've written about that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years is currently in the hands of a corrupt and competent and treasonous administration in America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now in America. The richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world's poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now and my country. They're taking sadistic pleasure in the pain that they inflict on loyal American workers. They're rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society, the abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American. The America that I've sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we'll survive this moment.
Andrea Chalupa (03:58):
I wanted this to be an anthem about fighting for our country. It ends with I won't give up on thee because I am not going to let this Cheeto steal our great country. Very well said, Dina. Marie, thank you so much to hear more of Dina Marie's music. Head on over to the show notes for this week's episode and to submit your own music to shine your light into the world that needs it so much. Now, submit your song in the link near the top of our show notes. Thank you to everyone who stays creative, who keeps building in this time of mass destruction. That's how we break through. All it takes is a spark.
Zooey Zephyr (04:40):
It's not just our existence that has been forever. It is our resilience that has been forever. It is our joy that has been forever. It is our love that has been forever. And here I am thinking about three kinds of love in my heart right now. I am thinking the love and surety we each have to have in ourselves as we stand up and be ready to take on everything the world has against us and has to offer. The second I think of is communal love. It is moments like this surrounded by all. And the third is interpersonal. It is my partner who I would love to invite out here that think about I could not do the things I do in that legislature without her to come home to every night. You don't need a partner. Oh, you're going to be disappointed. I love you. Hey, I think about love and I think about trans love having been throughout history to the past, to the future and to the present moment. And I am so blessed to have Erin ron by my side through all that. So Missoula, if you could share a moment with me, Erin, will you marry me?
Andrea Chalupa (06:46):
Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. The film the Kremlin doesn't want you to see, so be sure to watch it. Today's guest is the great Erin Reed, a passionate advocate, educator, and force for justice in the fight for LGBTQ plus rights. You may know Erin from her widely popular TikTok and Substack aired in the morning. She's become one of the most trusted and visible voices tracking anti LGBTQ plus legislation around the world, breaking down transgender rights with clarity and heart. You may have relied on her vital hormone therapy access map used in millions of transitions, or perhaps you've seen her in legislative hearings standing on the front lines of the struggle for equality. Wherever you find her, Erin Reed is building a better future and inviting all of us to build it with her. Finally, she is one half of the dynamic duo married to Montana State representative Zooey Zephyr, who represents Missoula two trans powerhouses working for justice in one of the most conservative states in our country where tech oligarchs also like to congregate and plot AI world domination. First of all, Erin, thank you so much for being here and thank you so much for all that you and your wife do on the front lines of democracy.
Erin Reed (08:04):
Thank you so much for having me on.
Andrea Chalupa (08:05):
We have a question from a listener in Sweden. Her name is Anchor Boda and she asks, I'd like to ask Erin the way forward for trans people as we are all facing this information and impression campaign globally in different stages to varying degrees. The UK is, for example, doing the same repression as Trump Alt-Right under the supposed center left labor banner. And please say hi from me. I'm a big fan. I use her material every day to educate the parliamentarians in my party about this stuff in an easy to understand way.
Erin Reed (08:39):
Absolutely. So that's a really good question and one of the big points that I always make whenever I speak in interviews, go to talk to organizations and more is that this is a global fight right now. This is not something that's just limited to the United States, and in fact, we are seeing attacks on transgender healthcare in Nordic countries like Sweden. We're seeing attacks on transgender healthcare in places like France and Spain and the United Kingdom. And so the most important thing in my opinion and something that I've been trying to encourage international groups to do is to build those cross-cultural, cross border solidarity movements. Very recently I just spoke with a large group of transgender activists and journalists in Japan, and they are starting to have that first wave of anti-trans sort of literature hit their anti-trans activism sphere out there. And so it's important that we all stay knowledgeable about the ways in which these movements are connected internationally.
(09:36):
I'll give you a really good example. There are times where thing is going to be released in say the Swedish language that's like an anti-trans study or something like that. And then it gets cited in the United States and we don't have anybody to translate that. We don't have anybody to help us understand what does this actually say, what does this actually do in Sweden? And so it ends up getting laundered as misinformation in the United States and then we find out a month later that it doesn't say what people say it says. So yeah, it's really important to build that sort of cross-border solidarity.
Andrea Chalupa (10:06):
Wow, absolutely. And are you seeing nodes of disinformation who are the most vile offenders? Do you know if anyone's mapping this is where a lot of the hate and the violence in terms of their legal warfare and disinformation is coming from?
Erin Reed (10:21):
Yeah, so the SPLC, Southern Poverty Law Center released report called the Captain Report and the Captain Report has exactly what you're asking for. It's got a social network map of all of the different organizations, how the money flows and how the documents are signed. And so you can see that some of the major players are groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation here in the United States. They can contribute dollars abroad to other organizations. There you have groups like the SEGM and Gens, spect, which are sort of international groups that oppose transgender healthcare and all of these groups are very interconnected with one another. So I would say that the biggest players in the United States are definitely the Alliance Spinning Freedom and the Heritage Foundation. Some of the organizations that were behind Project 2025 and which used anti-trans activity to try to promote Project 2025
Andrea Chalupa (11:12):
And they have Global impact as well. This is now spreading.
Erin Reed (11:15):
Absolutely. So there's so many groups out there, but for instance, there's this organization called the Women's Liberation Front, and it's not a pro-feminist organization, it's an anti-trans feminist organization and you would never expect a group like the Women's Liberation Front to be working with the alliance defending freedom like a far right Christian conservative group. And yet the Alliance Defending Freedom donated $50,000 to their international campaign just a couple years ago. And so yes, this is sort of this system where groups are donating money to one another and helping stand up different groups to try to hit at this in whatever angle that they can.
Andrea Chalupa (11:50):
Wow. And so in terms of here at home, we just had in the 2024 election, Trump his TV ads, all the money he was pumping in, I was in a bar in Brooklyn and I saw that anti-trans ad by Trump saying that Kamala Harris uses they them pronouns. Trump cares about you and it's just like your jaw drops. And meanwhile you had the Democratic party hiding from even addressing this issue. And there's all this genocidal rhetoric and lawfare that Republicans are pumping into the states. Democrats just don't even want to talk about trans issues. If you could sit down with a Democratic party establishment and advise them, it's like how would you advise them to basically cut through all the disinformation and just stop hiding from it? I mean, Andy Beshear, governor of Kentucky who is vocal on this and he does a beautiful job speaking with empathy. So why do you think the Democratic Party establishment is hiding and what would you advise them to do in terms of combating the disinformation out there?
Erin Reed (12:50):
I'm really glad that you brought up Andy Beshear. Andy Beshear vetoed a sports fan twice. They ran ads against him and he won in a Trump plus 30 state. Andy Beshear has never been afraid to stand up for LGBTQ people and especially transgender people in the state of Kentucky. And he's been a good ally there. And I think that in the moments after the election, he wrote a really, really good op-ed that basically said the reason why he's able to do that is because despite maybe some of the voters not agreeing with him on this particular issue, they know that he's genuine about what he cares about and that he isn't just doing things for political points. I think that the genuineness is actually something that a lot of Democrats could hold onto, not just on transgender issues, but just more broadly being a genuine candidate that legitimately speaks from the heart about issues that you care about.
(13:41):
I think too much too often we see candidates try to become a mishmash of 12 different focus groups, and that's not going to feel genuine to your voters. Voters want you to disagree with them sometimes they want you to have different opinions and whatnot. And so I got to watch Zooey, my wife in the Montana legislature, 2023 whenever she stood up for transgender youth and she was censured and they kicked her out of the legislature for a little while and they didn't allow her to speak and they had people trying to take her seat and whatnot. I remember in the aftermath of that, we were driving to Glacier National Park and just behind us, they had this F two 50 pull up guys came out and camo. They walked up to us, they looked at Zooey and they said, I want to let you know I'm a Republican through and through. And it's like, yeah, I guess we could have guessed that. But then he said, and I would've sat on that seat for you. Thank you for doing what you do. And it was just, it's those kinds of interactions that make me realize that that voter is not looking for Republican light. That's not what he's looking for. He's not looking for somebody to just be with him on everything. He liked her genuineness. He liked the fact that she was willing to stand up for what she believed in. And I think voters see that.
Andrea Chalupa (14:49):
When we hear the news talking heads talk about how the Democrats have a communication problem. They say that over and over again the Democratic brand is toxic and what the Democratic party establishment doesn't understand or is unwilling to understand because too many people are making money is that the Democratic party, the national leaders, when they run, they sound like you said, like 12 different consultants talking out of their mouths. And there's this consultant industrial complex that goes around trying to gin up money jobs from all these different candidates. I'm the one that needs to be in your ear. And these candidates, they raise money and they pay these guys to polish them up and all that. And it's such an insidious industry that the reason why Trump has run for president so many times over the years and going back, I think the eighties, nineties because he's had so many of these consultants trying to recruit him to run so that they can get jobs for themselves and make money. And so what you said is everything these Democrats just need to come out and just have values and speak from those values and understand that you're not going to win over everybody because no one can. That's impossible, but you are going to win over people just for having basic respect and decency.
Erin Reed (16:02):
Well, and look, we have a really good comparison in the state legislative fight just this last year. So I covered state legislatures for a long time and in Montana the year after all of her fellow Democrats, my wife's fellow Democrats is always fellow Democrats stood up for her in that hearing. In that fight, four trans people, not a single one broke on transgender rights. The Montana Democrats gained 10 seats in the house. It was the largest gain of any state. Meanwhile, that same year, just this last election in New Hampshire where they had a chunk of Democrats break on sports, they said, okay, yeah, we're going to go ahead and give up sports, transgender sports issues. We're going to vote against that and we're also going to vote against some healthcare and stuff like that because they wanted to try to find a moderate compromise. They lost 20 seats, they lost the most seats of any state in the house, and now the New Hampshire Republicans are pushing every anti-trans rule you possibly can. And so that's just a really good case in point here. If you stand up for what you believe in, if you hold strong on the values of equality, I don't think that that is a negative for you. And if anything we've seen in some places it's a positive.
Andrea Chalupa (17:06):
Could you explain the issue of transgender athletes in sports? Simone Biles just went viral for a tweet where she was calling out disinformation weapon athlete. What is her name? Riley something.
Erin Reed (17:20):
Riley Gaines, yes,
Andrea Chalupa (17:21):
Riley Gaines who has made it her career to try to fight trans athletes in sports. And Simone Biles wrote a well-meaning tweet saying, you're wrong, they should be included or at least have their own category. And then others pointed out to Simone Biles, well, they can't have their own category because there's just not enough trans athletes to then compete and they're left out. Could you just basically walk people through why does the trans athlete issue matter and what are we missing from that conversation?
Erin Reed (17:45):
That's a really good question, and actually one of my favorite things to talk is transgender participation in sports because it's something that is, I think so base level, it's the place where Republicans have been able to peel off the most support and I think it's become something of a, it's a given that people are going to oppose transgender athletes or something like that. And I actually like to talk to people about it because you can really surprise people whenever you talk about it. So let me give you a good example about this. Trans-sports. The whole trans sports fight. First started in 2019. It was from a group who basically advertised against Kentucky governor Andy Beshear who said, if you vote Andy Beshear, he's going to let trans people in sports, and then all of a sudden you're going to have men competing in your sports and stuff like that.
(18:29):
And that ad failed, but they used the sports fight to then pass all the other legislation because if they could get you to accept an asterisk on our gender identity in one place, they can get you to accept it in other places as well. So then this becomes a big issue if Fox News starts blasting every trans athlete that they can see, and now you've got half the states in the country with transgender sports fans. Now let me be clear that there are certain sports where certain regulations make more sense, like maybe something like swimming and track where you have to be on hormone therapy for a certain amount of time, whereas there are other sports that maybe they might not, that people don't think about. So for instance, transgender sports bans right now have been used to ban transgender women from darts, from disc golf, from pool, from competitive Irish dancing from the hotdog eating contest.
(19:15):
That was recently a thing. A transgender woman was targeted in the hotdog eating contest and even the incredibly athletic and gendered sport of chess, we literally saw an international ban on transgender women participating in chess. So Democrats have taken up a very good stance on this, I think, and it's that every sport has their own regulations and every sport should be able to regulate themselves in a different way. And so a regulation that makes sense for swimming might be different from a regulation that makes sense for throwing darts, and yet the sports fans sort of treat them all as the same thing. I think that ultimately whenever it comes to participation, I think that most transgender women that are participating in sports, especially at the high school level, are doing so because they're trying to be with their peers and with their friends, and that's what we see. Trans athletes are so rare these days anyway. It's so hard to become an athlete who is transgender. If you imagine the fact that we've got a few hundred thousand if not a million transgender people in the United States who are trans, and yet we only have, according to the NCAA 10 trans athletes at the NCAA level, that goes to show how hard it is to even get your foot in the door to play a sport much less dominate in a sport or something like that.
Andrea Chalupa (20:26):
What would you say to Republicans favorite talking point that a man might pretend to be trans like in the TV show Mash, where you had that character that pretended to be trans in order to avoid the Dodge or whatever. That was a very sort of anti-trans phobic sort of trope, but that's where Republicans are pushing is like you're going to have men pretending to be women just to win medals.
Erin Reed (20:51):
If you are a man and you are willing to go on two years of hormone therapy, which is what it takes to get into at least a number of these sports that we've talked about, I highly doubt that any man is going to be willing to put themselves through that as somebody who is trans. One of the best ways that you can elicit gender dysphoria in somebody is to give them the wrong hormones for a long time. And that's the case for cisgender men as well. If you give a cisgender man estrogen for two years and he starts growing breasts and starts experiencing strength loss, he's not going to like that very much.
Andrea Chalupa (21:21):
There's just so much that it's just ignorance. People don't know they don't have this information, and Republicans are taking advantage of that with these catchy little ads. I feel like we're in just such a dark place on this issue because you don't have the Democrats really willing to stand up and fight.
Erin Reed (21:37):
It's that, and it's also, it's not just in the political sphere, it's also in the journalism sphere. As a transgender journalist, one of the things that I have had to battle and all of the trans journalists that I know have had to battle is the fact that our voices are not platform. We are not able to tell our stories in the New York Times. We're not able to tell our stories at the Atlantic and the Washington Post. I think that these papers that I just mentioned, they get a lot of a bad rap for the sort of both sides journalism, but we're not even getting both sides journalism, we're not able to make our case. We're not able to write. I've been writing on my newsletter, it's a top 20 substack newsletter for the last three years now, and I've got quite a readership, and yet I have trouble placing things in the New York Times. I have trouble placing things at the Washington Post. They won't platform trans journalists. It's something that we have repeatedly seen.
Andrea Chalupa (22:28):
Well, you always have a home. You and Zooey always have a home here at Gaslight Nation, and that's just, I mean, they're getting a lot of things wrong. And I was reading the New Yorker article on Trump being an oligarch in chief. The New Yorker just came out this sweeping look at the breathtaking levels of corruption that far outdo any other chapters of corruption. And you're reading this and you go back to the 2016 election when Neiman lab at Harvard had this damning investigation looking at how mainstream media amplified right wing disinformation in the 2016 election, including the Bannon project, that book Clinton Cash, Maggie Haberman in the New York Times was gleeful about one of her colleagues getting Clinton cash and reading it and amplifying these Clinton cash, Hillary Clinton just raking in all this money, and now here we are and that entire operation brought oligarchy finally did us in with oligarchy in America, and now they're repeating the same mistakes as you just pointed out on this human rights crisis of the genocidal rhetoric, disinformation and lawfare against trans people in America when it's basically an education matter. We just need to have these conversations and demystify everything for people and just normalize talking about trans issues. That's step one.
Erin Reed (23:48):
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the thing that that's a big part is it is education. It is education, and we do need that education and we also need representation. And I think that representation is a way to help educate people. I saw, and I'm going to continue to refer to my wife because she's really good at what she does, but I saw what Zooey was able to do in the Montana legislature. I saw what she was able to do with Democrats who don't quite understand transgender issues, but now that they have somebody in that room who can speak to them from the heart, it mattered. It doesn't only matter just for the Democrats in that room either. I saw Republicans learn in that room in Montana. There was one bill, the drag ban in Montana where Zooey, she spoke and it was a really good speech and the relationships that she's built with some of the Republicans in that room, immediately after she finished speaking, the Republicans stood up and spoke against the drag ban and then 13 of them crossed the aisle and the drag ban died.
(24:45):
As somebody that's been tracking legislation across the United States, that's not something that you see very often. If an anti-trans bill goes to the floor, it's usually going to get voted on. It's usually going to get passed by Republicans. And then even if it doesn't, you're never going to see somebody stand up and speak out against it. And yet that's what we saw. And I think that that kind of representation is really important and we need it at every level of government. We need it in our state legislatures, we need it in Congress. And I'm glad that we've got Congresswoman Sarah McBride up there, look at what's happened to her. I mean, look at the ways in which she has been brutally attacked by Republicans in that room by Nancy Mace, for instance, and the slurs that have been used against her and banning her from bathrooms. I think that that's a real shame that that's going on. And also I think that in the case of Congresswoman McBride, democrats have a prime opportunity to stand up for their colleague and to use that as an educational moment for everybody. Absolutely. I kind of wish they would a little bit more, to be completely frank with you,
Andrea Chalupa (25:52):
They can't find their courage. They really can't. Just so many people are pre surrendering right now, and this is, I see the trans issue as not just a canary in the cold mine issue, but it's sort of like we're witnessing history, we're living in history, and there's going to be a free and fair future one day where students in America are going to study textbooks of this moment and just see where people fell on the side of history when it came to trans rights. And it's going to be just like how we in states that actually prioritize education. We learn about the Civil rights movement in America.
Erin Reed (26:27):
Absolutely. And it's also similar to the gay rights movement in the nineties, in the early two thousands, how you look back then and some of the same arguments were being levied against gay people and against Democrats that would stand up for gay people. And you've had Democrats arguing on arguing against gay marriage back in 2004. I remember that this was a big issue back then, and many people were like, Democrats should drop the gay marriage issue. This is hurting our party. And what ended up happening is that those who showed leadership on this issue today are now able to say, I've always been for LGTQ rights. I've always been for civil rights. And when you look back at that time and the Democrats who were anti-gay are now in many cases, it's been an albatross around their neck. And so I think that Democrats who are looking to the future for either for positive altruistic reasons to aid in the cause of equality or who are looking for non altruistic reasons who are trying to save their own careers, should realize that that's how equality marches forward. We're going to see eventually our rights embraced, and I just hope that they can show that leadership now rather than waiting.
Andrea Chalupa (27:43):
Exactly. The textbooks are watching, history is watching. Exactly. What are some of the most dangerous misconceptions people still have about transgender people and the laws affecting them?
Erin Reed (27:54):
Yeah, I think trans youth is a big issue where there's a lot of misconceptions and just like trans people in sports, transgender youth, there's something that republicans often use to try to peel away support or to try to make it seem like there's some crazy things going on. For instance though, during the election, Trump said that, I mean this is clearly false, but this was said many, many times. He said that you send a kid to school and they come home with a sex change operation, and it's like, we don't even pay our school nurses enough to have school nurses in many places in the United States. What do you think they're doing? We don't have operating rooms in schools. And yet this line was used multiple times by Trump and you had people repeating it. It was something that popped up in the far right ecosystem.
(28:41):
And there's a lot of issues around what does it mean to have a trans kid? What does it mean to care for, you're a trans kid. Most of the parents of transgender youth that I know care so deeply for their kid and many of them, it's quite surprising how many of them started off as right wing conservatives until they had a trans kid and realized I got to do what's right for my kid. And that's something that I've seen. I've known a few parents that have gone through that most transgender youth who know that they are trans or who come out as trans, the transition process is something that takes a long time. You have to speak to multiple therapists, you get the consent of the parents. And for the longest time, transition for a transgender youth is nothing more than a name, a haircut and pronouns, and that's it.
(29:36):
Like trying their identity in school. And then whenever it comes to medical care, I think Ohio, governor DeWine said it best whenever he vetoed the transgender medical care ban in Ohio, and he basically said that nobody knows their kid better than their parents. And regardless of what you think about transgender youth and medical care and things like that, I think ultimately people should realize that when we have questions like this, the person who is the best equipped to answer them is the parent and the kid's doctor, not the government. And I think that that's what we're seeing hopefully in some of these places.
Andrea Chalupa (30:16):
In your experience, what makes someone a truly effective ally or advocate for queer and trans communities, not just in words but in action
Erin Reed (30:25):
Right now? There are ample opportunities for allyship. If you had asked me this question a couple years ago, my answer would always be to find the room that you can do the most good in. But right now in this era where a Trump executive order says that if you even mention the word transgender, your nonprofit could be stripped of funding. If you have diversity programs, then you can't work with the government. And so what we're seeing, and you mention mass compliance earlier, we are seeing mass compliance across the board. We're seeing groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children basically be told that they have to use a transgender kid's dead name, their old name, and their old pronouns and their missing posters. That doesn't help find a trans kid who's missing if you're using their old name, that's not going to do you any good.
(31:17):
And yet they just sort of rolled over on this. And we've seen a number of nonprofits do the same thing. There was a certain federally qualified healthcare center in my city that I had to put on notice and I had to write an article about because they removed all information about transgender care from their website. And this healthcare center was established as an AIDS and HIV clinic for L-G-B-T-Q people. So we're seeing this sort of mass erasure of trans and queer people, and then even places that aren't affected by this at all, private companies that don't get federal dollars are starting to remove their diversity programs. They're starting to remove any reference to transgender people. And if somebody wants to be a good ally, now whenever those decisions are made, like these compliant advanced decisions, these going the extra mile just to make Trump happy sort of decisions.
(32:10):
Stand up and say something because I can tell you that if there's a trans person in that room, they'd stand up and say something, but so often there's not a transgender person in that boardroom. There's not a transgender person in that meeting. And so I think that the opportunity for allyship is growing right now. And then the other thing is get to know about trans issues. Whenever you're talking to somebody about transgender participation in sports and they talk about Leah Thomas or something like that, mention that, yeah, I understand, but they're banning trans women from chess. This is getting kind of ridiculous and try to stand up for trans people. It's really important right now because right now it's hard. It's hard for a lot of trans people. People are reasonably nervous and scared right now.
Andrea Chalupa (32:53):
So many young trans and queer people look up to you. Listeners are so thrilled that you're coming on the show. You have no idea. What message do you most want young people especially to hear right now?
Erin Reed (33:06):
Keep fighting, stay alive. That's the biggest thing. I will say that as hard as things are right now and things are hard, I grew up as a queer kid in southern Louisiana in a time in the 1990s where it was impossible to be out and queer, and it was very, very hard for me back then. But I stayed alive and I pushed forward, and I am happy that I did. I'm happy that I made it to adulthood, and I'm happy that I'm able to be myself now. And I do think that young people right now, they have it hard. Young queer people have it very hard right now because for me, I grew up in a world where that was a given where your rights are nothing and where queer people were spat on basically, they didn't grown up in a world where there has been acceptance.
(33:58):
And to see that acceptance pulled away is very hard. It's very, very hard for them. But I do want to tell them that in the early two thousands, things were hard for gay people too. We saw 34 states pass constitutional amendments against gay marriage, and it looked just as bleak then as it does now. But 10 years later, we had our first Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage. We had the Obergefell decision. And so I just want to encourage all of my younger listeners to stick around and this fight's not over. It's going to be hard. And I'm sorry that you've got to be in that position. I'm sorry that none of us asked to be on the vanguard for rights for ourselves and for l lgbtq people, but this is where we are and this is what we've been handed, and it's up to us to make the best of it.
Andrea Chalupa (34:46):
What projects do you have coming up? Do you have, obviously Erin in the morning is an essential podcast. I was reading about your wedding to Zooey. I was crying. It was so romantic. You're at the White House and Sam Smith was singing, and could you describe a bit about that? And I'd love to hear what projects you have coming up, anything that you're working on that you want to share?
Erin Reed (35:08):
Yeah, so it's interesting that you mentioned the wedding. And the wedding was beautiful. It was just a gathering of queer and trans people from across the world and friends that we've made along the way. And it was just in Missoula was beautiful. It was in the place that she proposed me on Queer Prom just days after the legislative thing happened with her in 2023. And we captured this moment of happiness. And so as far as what projects I'm working on this summer, I'm planning on taking a little break from projects because Zooey and I are going to be going on our honeymoon. We got married in December, but immediately after getting married, she had to go into the legislature. And so we didn't want to rush our honeymoon just for the legislature, so we said we're going to save it for the summer. We're just going to hold onto it and save it for the summer. And so in just a few weeks, we are going to be going to France, going to Paris, going to the mountains in Eastern France, and then going down to the Riviera. And it's just going to be three weeks of us getting away from everything and breathing and unwinding and being in the presence of each other without having to worry about the political attacks that we're constantly in, the political battles that we're constantly fighting. I'm very, very much looking forward to that, and that's going to be the big thing this summer.
Andrea Chalupa (36:20):
Good. Thank you so much. Erin Reed, you are an American hero and so is your wife. And I hope you put in a good word to her to have her come on the show too and share some of that hope with us because you are both icons, not just obviously for trans people, queer people, but for anyone who cares about democracy and winning the war against oligarchy.
Erin Reed (36:40):
Of course. Thank you so much for having me
Deena Marie (singing) (36:47):
Tear the Fascists Down (again)
Andrea Chalupa (38:09):
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