This episode parachutes you down into a conversation between friends, in the style of sh*t talking they’d usually do off mic.

Rachel and Akiva discuss Akiva's listenership of Stone Butch Disco during Season 1 (episodes from which are now trickling back out to the public), gently alighting upon the matter of the project’s namesake — and everything the world needed that one bad book couldn’t give.

They discuss the MANY social groups who frame femininity as sex signaling for men (in queerland, this is whether the men are air-quotes “trans” or “cis”) and stifling lesbian sexuality so much as to make male identification seem like the only option — as well as other myths that stand in the way of perceiving butch-femme as the persistent, stable thing that it is.

Rachel asks Akiva about the role lesbian sexuality played as she reentered public womanhood after socially transitioning. The conversation crescendoes into Akiva’s trenchant diagnosis of queer lying, and the dull-eyed praise that drives people to it.

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