Carmen Maria Machado! Tobin Low! Hot Hot Hot!

Hey friends,

Hope you’re all hanging in there. It’s 100° here but only 89° inside (lol), and my roommate is hanging out with their partner in one room, and my other roommate is hanging out with her friend in another room, and I’m sitting in front of a fan, trying to make y’all a podcast, but my brain is liquified so instead I keep inserting myself into my friends’ conversation about Jeff Rosenstock, and also everyone involved in this sentence is trans because obviously.

(Everyone involved in this sentence except for me is also at least temporarily unemployed, which my friend just pointed out to make me feel better instead of jealous that they were all hanging out w/o me, so I guess this is the part where I thank you, 946 people on the internet, for employing me. You’re all a great boss!)

Anyway, we’ve got two episode for you this week and they are both bangers!!!!!!!!!

Photo ID: A headshot of Tobin wearing a light pink t-shirt and round, thick-framed black glasses, smiling at the camera in front of a green backdrop.

On Monday, we released our chat with Tobin Low, co-creator of the podcast Nancy. You may know Nancy from being (inaccurately, as we discuss) heralded as basically The Only Gay Podcast back in like 2017. Nancy was one of my big inspirations in starting Gender Reveal — I literally talked to Kathy about the show like the day I decided to make it — and it meant a lot to me to be able to take the whole journey full-circle by interviewing Tobin about what he learned making Nancy and what he would improve in the future. (I was grateful to also have the opportunity to talk about what I hope to do better in the future!)

It was a joy to talk with Tobin about representation in podcasting as well as a range of other topics: racial preferences in dating, Asian masculinity, Fast & the Furious masculinity, whether we even care about masculinity, whether we even care about marriage, etc etc. As I said on twitter, my favorite part is when he says he did "boring cis gay stuff” in quarantine, “like, I bleached my hair when there was trauma.”

Photo ID: A studio photo of Carmen sitting at a wooden table with her arm draped on the back of a nearby chair. She is wearing all black, including a black blazer, in front of a black backdrop. Her face looks stern.

Today, I am thrilled to share our conversation with one of my favorite writers, Carmen Maria Machado. I’m obsessed with this interview for so many reasons. One is that it’s low-key a gender reveal! (Kirby texted me “people love to go on your show to like figure out they’re trans in realtime” and they’re not wrong.) Another is that we talk about vampire cunnilingus in a way that I think will solve a lot of problems for everyone. For all of the other reasons, you gotta tune into the episode I guess!!!!!

We’ve only got one episode left in this weird, experimental chaos season, and it’s that remake of Gender 101 that I mentioned last week. But that episode is 0% interview and 100% scripting and did I mention that my brain is the consistency of a melted slurpee. (WOW a slurpee sounds good right now, which is not a sentence I typically say.) So, I frankly have no idea when that episode will go up. This coming Monday? The Monday after that? Just a random day of the week when it is done? 

Most of y’all will probably want to skip it because you already know about gender so I suppose it doesn’t matter much. (Wouldn't it be messed up if you cared so much about this podcast that you gave us your own money but you still didn't have a working definition of dysphoria? Sorry if true!)

BTW, we also still have August merch, and we’re probably not stocking most of these items again after this month so grab them while you can! bit.ly/gendermerch as always.

I keep hoping my brain will offer more words and updates but it simply is not, so that’s it for this week. Here’s your weekly Rhubarb, which I just took a second ago.

Poor little Ruby has melted into a puddle, so I moved the fan so that it’s blasting straight at her instead of me because that’s what a good parent does probably :) :) :) :)

Stay cool, stay safe, wear a mask, ily. 

Xo,
Yr resident gender detective