Transcripts

This week: a clip of an episode that Mara Lazer made for a mini series called "e4e", embodied 4 embodied. In conversations with trans viewers and makers of porn, Mara investigates porn as a healing portal for trans people seeking embodiment.

Find Mara on Twitter @LazerMara

You can listen to the whole episode on The Heart's website or  by searching "stop living on video" by The Heart wherreverrrr you listen to podcasssstsss  (bonus consonants added by Mara, lol)

"stop living on video" was written, sound designed & produced by Mara Lazer, edited by Nicole Kelly & Phoebe Unter, with editorial advisement from Sharon Mashihi and Ari Mejia.

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Transcripts is a production of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project, a program of the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're currently funded by Virginia Humanities. You can learn more about us at bit.ly/transcriptspod. Thanks for listening <3

You might have noticed that we took a short break last week-- we'll be back in your feeds this upcoming Wednesday with an amazing piece by friend of the show and award-winning trans audio producer Mara Lazer. In the meantime, we wanted just to let you know that féi hernandez, the illustrator who did our AMAZING show art, has a new book of poems out called Hood Criatura, and there's a virtual launch party TONIGHT (if you're hearing this on December 5th). Whether you can make the party or not, I HIGHLY recommend that you go check out their work at their website, feihernandez.com.

Hope you have a great rest of your weekend!

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Press description of Hood Criatura:

In this stunning debut collection, Inglewood-raised poet féi hernandez weaves an intricate latticework of stories in the betwixt and between. Hood Criatura explores the intersections of trans and queer resilience, citizenship and belonging, and resistance against gentrification that threatens both city and the body. hernandez’s poems take us through a coming-of-age story that delineates the existential wars of gender, race, sexuality, and im/migration, as well as the pains and joys that bind communities, family, and love. In a world that seeks to simplify and reduce the self to binary boundaries, Hood Criatura serves as a reminder of what it means to exist unbounded, to claim all of the multitudes within us that make us who we are. Masterfully juxtaposed in myriad poetic forms throughout the book, these poems are a love letter to all of us who exist within liminal spaces and who dare to claim one’s true self.

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The Transcripts podcast is a project of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're funded by the TAWANI Foundation
, Virginia Humanities, and the Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab. 

This week, we bring you a small show that's doing an incredible job bringing the voices of incarcerated people, including trans and gender non-conforming people, to the airwaves. It's called Kite Line, and it's based at WFHB Community Radio in South Central Indiana. I love finding shows that are doing crucial justice work in so-called "red states." No one, and no place, is disposable. 

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Original show notes:

Our episode this week is a conversation between Rojas and Cyrus, two advocates with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners.  CCWP is an organization that exists, in their words, to “monitor and challenge the abusive conditions inside California women’s prisons. We fight for the release of women and trans prisoners. We support women and trans people in their process of re-entering the community.” Rojas and Cyrus address the conditions of transgender and gender non-conforming prisoners, or GNC prisoners, in the California prison system. Subject to increased surveillance and retaliation from both cops on the outside and correctional officers on the inside, Rojas speaks out about what they were subjected to while within the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation- or CDCR.

You can find out more about the California Coalition for Women Prisoners at: womenprisoners.org

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The Transcripts podcast is a project of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're funded by the TAWANI Foundation
, Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab, and Virginia Humanities. Check out our website at bit.ly/transcriptspod, and don't forget to rate and review us. Thank you!

This week, an audio meditation that my friend Arlie Adlington and I made about trans care and support across borders. We produced this short piece earlier in the pandemic for Jacobin's podcast The Dig and their series Antibody: thanks so much to everyone at The Dig, and especially Liza Yaeger, for allowing us to share this with you all. 

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you're feeling able to participate in acts of solidarity and care this week, whatever that means to you.

The Transcripts podcast is a project of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're funded by the TAWANI Foundation, the Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab, and Virginia Humanities.

This week, we're presenting a pilot podcast episode from the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ (Plus) Oral History Project, which is based in Roanoke, Virginia, a small city in the Appalachian foothills. Gregory Samantha Rosenthal, a dedicated oral historian and public scholar, is training queer and trans people to collect stories from their peers and elders, and this podcast is derived from those oral histories. I love these voices and I love the spirit in which they're collected. The tape is sometimes gutting, but it's not without bright spots-- especially listen for the tape of "the condom lady" 20 minutes in. 

The Transcripts podcast is a project of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're funded by the TAWANI Foundation
 and the Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab. I'm producer Cassius Adair. 

Another installment in our Fall Anti-Fascist Radio series, this time from the Asheville-based show The Final Straw Radio. I'm so heartened by the work that audio producers are putting in so we can hear the voices of incarcerated trans people-- doing an interview with someone who's in prison takes some different methods, and I'm really grateful that we get to share this interview with you. (PS-- there are two interviews in the full episode, we cut out the second one for time, but I encourage you to listen to both on the website for the original audio!)

Thanks so much, and please rate and review if you'd like to help us out! And donate to your local mutual aid fund. 

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Original Show Notes:

First you’ll hear Jennifer Rose. Jennifer, formerly known as Jennifer Gann, is a member of the Fire Ant Collective which just released it’s 6th issue and is due to put out another very soon. She is a trans woman who came up in the southern California punk scene, became politicized and began organizing inside of prison since the late 1990’s. Read the transcription below. You can learn more about Jennifer Rose’s case by visiting BabyGirlGann.noblogs.org where you can find out how to donate to her legal fund. You can read issues #1-5 of Fire Ant Journal up at Bloomington ABC’s website & #6 at Blue Ridge ABC’s website. And you can write to Jennifer at:

Jennifer Rose E – 23852

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The Transcripts podcast is a project of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're funded by the TAWANI Foundation
 and the Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab. Find out more about us at bit.ly/transcriptspod. 

Next up in our "trans anti-fascist Fall podcast series," an episode of Rustbelt Abolition Radio about how queer and trans struggles are linked to abolishing prison and detention centers. It's difficult stuff, but timely and important. Some of this audio is hard to hear: you can use the episode transcription to follow along or as an alternative method of engaging this material. 

Quick note: since this episode was first released, some things have changed-- Dr. Treva Ellison now works at Pomona College, and the scholar-activist Tourmaline was referred to in this episode by a former name. 

This episode contains descriptions of physical violence and abuse in detention.

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ORIGINAL SHOW NOTES:

In this episode we examine the relationships between carcerality, gendered and sexual violence on the one hand, and on the other: queer and trans liberation and the abolitionist horizon.

Josue Saldivar and Karolina Lopez from the Arizona-based organization Mariposas Sin Fronteras discuss the ways that migrants fleeing heteropatriarchal and transphobic oppression in their home countries are re-subjected to this abuse through the gendered and sexual operations of the U.S. carceral state and its militarized borders. We also speak with abolitionist scholar and activist, Treva Ellison, who examines the ways in which racial capitalism has continuously reproduced queer criminality, and how queer abolition may fundamentally shift our understanding of the geographies of carcerality.

To learn more about Mariposas Sin Fronteras and ways to support their work, click here.

Image credit: Abby Gordon

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The Transcripts podcast is a project of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're funded by the TAWANI Foundation
 and the Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab. You can learn more about us at bit.ly/transcriptspod. Thanks for listening. 

We're gonna make it through this fall, y'all. 

To inspire us to keep up the good fight, this episode kicks off a short series of shows about combatting fascism from a trans perspective. First up, from History is Gay, a Nazi-fighter from a century ago. (Note: this episode is slightly abridged for time.) 

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Original show notes:

Claude Cahun's name might not be well known, but their work as an artist has been hugely influential in the lives of many Western pop culture icons (David Bowie, for example). But the line between life and art wasn't always so clear for Claude Cahun and their life partner Marcel Moore. Whether it was fucking with gender norms in self portraiture or fucking with Nazis during World War II, Claude never did things in a straightforward manner. We'll say it again, "Nazi punks, f*ck off!" Now with surrealism! Longer notes and some extremely classic trans images here. 

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The Transcripts podcast is a project of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're funded by the TAWANI Foundation
 and the Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab. 

This week: an amazing piece of trans experimental audio, plus a big announcement during the end credits. 

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Slow-Burn Seeking, is a short work of audio fiction inspired by text from dozens of 80's & 90's era personal ads drawn from an archive of the On Our Backs women's erotica magazine. Using only remixed text from these ads and from their own contemporary dating profile, Ariana Martinez composed this heart-to-heart conversation between a lovesick queer, nonbinary person still finding their footing and a benevolent queer ghost (voiced by Casey Orozco-Poore). This re-imagined conversation makes space for more expansive readings of gender than were present in the original archival material and lays bare some of the questions and anxieties that come with seeking love and physical intimacy as a nonbinary person. 

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The Transcripts podcast is a project of the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project at the University of Minnesota Libraries. We're funded by the TAWANI Foundation
 and the Minnesota Humanities Innovation Lab. 

On today's Transcripts, we're bringing you an episode of Tuck Woodstock's show Gender Reveal. Recently, Tuck's been on the front lines of the uprising in Portland, Oregon, reporting on racial justice in the midst of tear gas and police abuse and federal agents snatching people up in vans. But in their other life, Tuck is an amazing podcaster and overall good trans media-maker. We're especially excited to share this epsiode because Transcripts is about centering trans activism and its many histories, and you'll get to hear Tuck's interview with the amazing Alyssa Pariah (she/her), a Black trans activist and one of the smartest liberation thinkers out there. 

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Content warning from Tuck: "today's episode includes frequent discussion of murder, police brutality, and death, as well as brief explicit descriptions of sex. So please take care of yourself."

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This is Transcripts, bringing you both original programming and a round-up of the best and brightest in trans audio. We're a program of the University of Minnesota Libraries. To learn more about us, go to bit.ly/transcriptspod. See you in two weeks for more trans activist brilliance. Thanks for listening!