Kai Cheng Thom! Happy birthday to us!

Hey everyone, 

Hope you're all hanging in there. What a W I L D week, huh? If you feel like the world is collapsing a little bit more every day, you're not alone. But that's all the more reason to listen to this week's episode with Kai Cheng Thom, author of (among other titles) I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes from the End of the World. 

You probably know by now that I'm a little bit obsessed with this episode. In it, Kai Cheng speaks beautifully about the ways that we as a community have failed in our pursuits of transformative justice, and how we can learn from those mistakes to move toward a better world. 

As if that's not enough, we also talk about:

- how the labels "femme" & "transsexual" have evolved in the last decade
- how binaries like abuser/victim and problematic/good are, in some ways, just as harmful as the gender binary
- how class solidarity ties into the future of trans kids
- why Kai Cheng left her job as a therapist...
- ...and what it's like being maybe the only trans woman therapist in Canada
- trans memoirs that we don't actually like (oops)
- gender as a magic spell cast by a coven of witches
- Kai Cheng's secret other life in the white lady Goop world  
- navigating the stresses of being a queer microcelebrity

AND MORE, SOMEHOW. 

This is hard to read, but it's Kai Cheng's book "Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir."

As it turns out, this episode with Kai Cheng is perfectly timed. Not only is it the 100th release in the podcast feed — not our 100th official episode; that's coming later and is gonna be wild — but it's also a wonderful ep to celebrate the THIRD BIRTHDAY OF GENDER REVEAL! 

That's right... we're three years old today, babyyyy. (Technically I started working on the show in fall 2017, but we'll call that the gestational period.)

As I've said before, I know a lot of people start the show chronologically, and I always cringe a bit when I think about it. I don't remember most of the first four seasons of the show, to be honest, but I know that I think about gender more or less completely differently than I did when I launched the show. So, who knows what wild things I said in 2018? 

Forgive me, I guess. We're all learning all the time. All of the terminology we use to talk about gender right now is probably going to be uncool and maybe even offensive someday. All of the gender thoughts that seem so new and exciting now are going to seem painfully obvious soon. (Actually, Kai Cheng does a great job talking about this in the recent episode.)

Recently, a couple of academic folks have praised Gender Reveal as a sort of unintentional trans oral history project. It helps to think of it like that. Not the ultimate up-to-date guide on gender wokeness. Just a record of where we're been and what we want the future to look like. 

I'm going to head out, but please check out the new merch in the shop if you're into that, and listen to Kai Cheng's episode if you're able to, and maybe wish us a happy birthday on the internet if you're up for it. 

Thank you so much for being here for three years or three months or three days or however long it's been for you. I know some of y'all have been here since before the very beginning, back when I made a different show with my roommate in my living room for ~300 people. Thank you for supporting me and believing in me and encouraging me to take time for myself. I love you.

xo,
Yr resident gender detective

PS: Here's your weekly Rhubarb.