An Intersex Professor's Memoir of Fraud and Family

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: All Of It
Host: Alison Stewart (WNYC)
Episode Title: An Intersex Professor's Memoir of Fraud and Family
Date: October 2, 2025
Guest: Georgiann Davis, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of New Mexico, author of Five Star White Trash: A Memoir of Fraud and Family

This episode features a candid conversation with Georgiann Davis, discussing her new memoir chronicling a tumultuous upbringing, family secrets, experiences with identity fraud, weight stigma, and her journey as an intersex woman. Davis explores the intersections of class, race, family struggle, and personal resilience, pushing back against familiar narratives about working-class white life (e.g., Hillbilly Elegy) and opening up a frank discussion on medical ethics, cultural capital, and generational mobility.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Meaning Behind the Title: "Five Star White Trash"

• The Title's Origin (02:10)
  • Davis shares that her partner, a woman of color, coined the phrase to playfully, yet pointedly, encapsulate her family's simultaneous poverty and conspicuous consumption.
  • Quote: “She’s like, you’re white trash. No, you’re five star white trash.” — Georgiann Davis [02:13]
• Davis aims to reclaim and reimagine the slur "white trash," challenging public misconceptions.

2. A Response to Hillbilly Elegy

• Davis’s memoir is often positioned as an "unflinching response" to J.D. Vance’s book.
• She recognizes parallels—family struggles, substance abuse, upward mobility—but critiques the way Vance omits the protective power of whiteness.
  • Quote: “What he misses… is that the way whiteness sort of protected him from all of this… I had incredible mentors along the way that saw me as a fat white kid and took me in. …A lot of black and brown folks don’t get that same sort of, I don’t know, respect.” — Georgiann Davis [03:05]
• Highlights how her own race shaped her access to opportunity and support.

3. Growing Up: Parentification, White Flight, and Fitting In

• Davis grew up outside Chicago; her family’s trajectory included moving from a working-class white neighborhood facing “white flight,” to an affluent suburb they could scarcely afford (05:15–06:11).
• She dropped out of school in seventh grade, largely to care for her overwhelmed mother—a phenomenon called "parentification."
  • Quote: “Going to school and… doing multiplication tables or reading chapter books just didn’t seem like a priority to me… I want to be with my family to help my family survive.” — Georgiann Davis [06:34]
• Struggled with being “not the right kind of white,” both racially and class-wise in wealthier settings.

4. Family Secrets and Fraud: Her Mother’s Use of Her Identity

• Davis recounts discovering that her mother used her (Georgiann's) name and social security number to take out loans after ruining her own credit [10:09].
• Reflects critically on larger systemic issues during the predatory lending era.
  • Quote: “She’s the only one who’s being charged in this situation because she’s an easy target… That actually frustrated me on a different level.” — Georgiann Davis [11:45]

5. Body, Medicalization, and the Experience of Being Intersex

• Davis talks about being a large child facing cruelty at school, and then discovering she is intersex after seeking care for abdominal pain as a child [12:23].
  • Doctors withheld the truth about her body, lied about her medical status, and subjected her to experimental, non-consensual weight loss surgery at age 14.
  • Quote: "I was born intersex… inside I was born with internal, undescended testes… They didn’t tell me any of that. They gave me all sorts of lies, like ‘oh, you have cancer.’” — Georgiann Davis [14:31]
• She later gains access to her records, viscerally remembering the difficulty of understanding their medical jargon and what it meant (15:33).
  • Quote: "I want readers to… experience it. Like, how do I... I don't know these big medical terms. I still don't know them." — Georgiann Davis [15:43]
• She describes the betrayal by the medical community and how it led to lasting skepticism of authority.
  • Quote: "That doctor… I want to snuggle you. I don't want to yell. So how could you lie to me?" — Georgiann Davis [16:43]

6. Navigating Medical Gatekeeping

• Davis acknowledges her skepticism in dealing with doctors, emphasizing how having social and educational capital helps her push back—something not everyone can do [17:29].
• Describes how, after being marked as “an experiment” due to her intersex status, she suddenly accessed world-class medical care despite the family’s lack of insurance [19:22].

7. Relationships, Mobility, and Cultural Capital

• Discusses her first marriage to a white Jewish man from the North Shore of Chicago, and how cross-class relationships provide access to “cultural capital” (e.g., how to navigate college) [20:54].
  • Quote: “He gave me a lot of what we call in sociology, cultural capital, which is really just like, hey… let me walk you to the community college… take you to the bookstore… I had no idea.” — Georgiann Davis [21:08]
• Reflects on the intersectionality of race, class, and gender, both in her current interracial marriage and her past.

8. Legacy and Purpose of Telling Her Story

• Davis shares that revealing her secrets (for her mixed-race children, for others who feel alone) is ultimately freeing and can uplift others to do the same [04:18, 23:50].
  • Quote: “Holding secrets… about my body have been really hard. And they actually caused me a lot more pain and suffering than letting them go. It's kind of like holding a bird. Like, just let it go.” — Georgiann Davis [04:19]
  • On the power of shared experience: “It’s not just my bird. It’s just seeing all the birds fly together… That actually is what uplifts me the most.” — Georgiann Davis [24:55]
• Critically reflects on social mobility, emphasizing that her progress was shaped by whiteness in ways not accessible to black and brown people with similar backgrounds [22:22].
• Ends by encouraging others from marginalized or secret-laden backgrounds to speak out and reject shame.

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Notable Quotes & Moments with Timestamps

• “You're white trash. No, you're five star white trash.”
  — Georgiann Davis, on partner’s description [02:13]
• “I felt a lot of obligation to my mother… Psychologists call this parentification, where children parent their parents.”
  — Georgiann Davis [06:21]
• “What he misses… is that the way whiteness sort of protected him from all of this…”
  — Georgiann Davis, about J.D. Vance [03:05]
• “She’s the only one who's being charged… That actually frustrated me on a different level.”
  — Georgiann Davis, on predatory lending & her mother [11:45]
• “They lied to me about my body. They encouraged my parents to do the same. …We have to start looking inward, look at yourselves in the mirror, because… some of these folks do some not so great things.”
  — Georgiann Davis [16:43]
• “When a doctor tells me something, I have to stop and think, well, why? Like, what for? And doctors don’t like that pushback.”
  — Georgiann Davis [17:34]
• “He [her ex-husband] gave me a lot of what we call in sociology, cultural capital… I had no idea [about college processes].”
  — Georgiann Davis [21:08]
• “We need to not be afraid to share secrets... because if I do, then other people won’t be so ashamed by their family secrets.”
  — Georgiann Davis [24:55]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:00–02:09 — Setting up the interview; background on the book/guest
• 02:10–03:45 — Title meaning, response to Hillbilly Elegy
• 05:13–07:47 — Growing up: Chicago, parentification, dropping out
• 10:09–12:05 — Family fraud; mother’s identity theft
• 12:23–15:27 — Childhood weight, bullying, intersex diagnosis
• 15:33–16:43 — Accessing and interpreting medical records
• 17:26–19:31 — Medical mistrust, gatekeeping, “experiment” status
• 19:49–22:15 — First marriage, cultural capital, cross-class relationships
• 22:22–23:37 — Structural advantages, reflections as a sociologist
• 23:50–25:14 — Importance of sharing secrets, uplifting others

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Tone & Style

• Open, candid, and warm; Davis uses humor to soften difficult admissions and analogies (“bird” motif, jokes about looks).
• Critical but compassionate; evaluates personal, medical, and societal failures and privileges.
• Empathetic, especially toward young people and marginalized backgrounds.

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Summary for New Listeners

This episode is a nuanced, deeply human exploration of the meanings of whiteness, class, and survival in America. Georgiann Davis traces her path from a dropout in suburban Chicago—parenting her own parent, subjected to medical and familial betrayal—through adulthood as an intersex academic and parent herself. Her testimony challenges the boundaries of so-called “white trash,” interrogates dominant narratives about poverty, and insists on the radical, communal power of shared secrets and stories. For those interested in memoirs, identity, sociology, or ethics, this conversation offers both personal resonance and sociological depth.

Transcript

[A]

This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on tomorrow's show, we'll preview a new exhibit at the New York Public Library that celebrates the creative legacy of Puerto Rican comic book creators both on the island and mainland usa. We'll also be joined by two personal finance experts behind the new book Rich Retirement, a Gen X Guide to securing your financial future. I will be bringing a notebook. We'll also talk to two different documentary filmmakers. Raoul Peck has has filmed the film Orwell two plus two Equals five and will speak with a director of a new documentary that follows librarians from across the country who are fighting to protect the First Amendment and our freedom to read. That is in the future for tomorrow. Now let's get this hour started with Five Star White A memoir of Fraud and Family. In a candid memoir, sociology professor Georgianne Davis writes that she grew up tough. She dropped out in the school of school in seventh grade. Her brother faced a criminal case for stabbing a bully and her mom stole her identity. And that's not even the half of it. She details these experiences, experiences and a whole lot more in her forthcoming book, Five Star White Trash, A Memoir of Fraud and Family. But she also, she lived a life where she learned lessons and some of them hard, like how to ask questions, like when doctors talked to her about her weight. She underwent weight loss surgery at 14 years old and hidden secrets about her body that she wouldn't know until later. The book is out tomorrow, Tuesday, October. Wait, not tomorrow. The book publishes on October 7th. That's next week.

[B]

Next week.

[A]

Next week. It's really nice to have you.

[B]

By the way, thank you so much for having me here.

[A]

Joanne Davis is an associate professor of sociology at the University of New Mexico. By the way, the title, five Star White Trash, how did you land on that?

[B]

Well, my partner gave it to me. She is a woman of color and she says she's like, you're white trash. No, you're five star white trash.

[A]

A lot of people think white trash is a derogatory term.

[B]

It can be. I think I like to reimagine what that could be like. I think there's a lot of misconceptions about white trash and a lot of misinformation about white trash. And I think this ideal about where she was coming from and I think what reflects my upbringing is that we didn't have a lot of money, but we borrowed money to sort of get what we needed to sort of project that we did have money.

[A]

It's interesting in Sort of the press for this and the push for this. People have been saying this is a, quote, an unflinching response to J.D. vance's Hillbilly Elegy. First of all, do you agree with that?

[B]

Yes, I do agree with that in part. And I think part of it is because I think when you read hillbilly Elegy and, you know, I have a lot in common with him, a family sort of surrounded by drugs and alcohol and sort of aspirations to do better than my family or try to crawl myself up out of that life, lifestyle. So I think in those particular ways, we're very similar. And I think what he misses or what he. I don't know if he misses or ignores is that the way whiteness sort of protected him from all of this sort of terrible things that he was plagued with. And, you know, I often get asked about, how did you go from a middle school dropout to now teaching college students? And, you know, I teach statistics when I never took an eighth grade math class. How did that happen? And while I like to think that I'm just incredibly innately intelligent, that's not true. I think a lot of it. I had incredible mentors along the way that saw me as a fat white kid and took me in. And a lot of those people that took me in, I think embraced me more because of who I was and who they saw me as. Maybe they could see me as maybe a daughter or a sister. And I think a lot of black and brown folks don't get that same sort of, I don't know, respect.

[A]

Why did you think your story was worth telling?

[B]

Well, one is because holding secrets I found in the past about my body have been really hard. And they actually caused me a lot more pain and suffering than letting them go. It's kind of like holding a bird. Like, just let it go. And I felt like it was really freeing. And then on a other level, I have two brown kids and my partner carried our kids. And, you know, they were conceived with a brown sperm donor. And I look at them every day and I want them to know the truth about whiteness and white privilege in particular. And, yeah, they know their mama's white. And yes, I went through a lot of stuff. I know I lived it. A lot of tears were shed, and it wasn't easy to crawl out of what I did. But I think it's important for them to know that and for others like them that whiteness does protect us and act like a shield.

[A]

Where did you grow up?

[B]

Chicago, just outside of Chicago.

[A]

And how would you describe the neighborhood you grew up in?

[B]

Well, when I was young, it was a kind of white, working class neighborhood, you know, and then a lot of black and brown folks started moving in to the neighborhood. And that's when my family, like a lot of white people, they decide they're gonna move out, which sociologists call like white flight. So we fled out of there and they're like, there's no. I want my white kids to go to school with black and brown kids. So we moved to this neighborhood we couldn't afford in the suburbs of Chicago. We had an elaborate three bedroom, or, I'm sorry, four bedroom home with three car garage. We always had flashy cars, Mercedes, Cadillac with the gold fake trim. And we didn't last very long there. I dropped out of middle school. I was white, I said, but not the right kind of white. And my brother ended up stabbing someone in the hall, being expelled.

[A]

It was interesting. You just said, I'm not going to middle school. You said, no, I'm not going back there. Do you remember why you didn't want to go back?

[B]

Yeah. You know, looking back, it's a lot easier to reflect. But when I, in the moment when I was, you know, 11, 12 years old and this started happening where I didn't want to go to school, it was because I felt a lot of obligation to my mother and to my family. And the obligation was, I kind of. Psychologists call this parentification, where children parent their parents. And my mother was going. We were going through a lot of hard things. Utilities would be cut off, we couldn't pay the mortgage because we couldn't afford the home we moved to. And in that particular situation, I needed to be there for my mom, much like you would need to be there for a partner. Right. Or you would want to be there for a sibling. And I needed to be there. So I felt this draw to be there and like process things. Like my mother would process things with me about, like, what can we do? How do we get the electric turned back on? How are we going to take a shower? So going to school and, I don't know, doing multiplication tables or reading chapter books just didn't seem like a priority to me. It's like, no, I want to be with my family to help my family survive. And you know, truant officers, all this stuff got involved and they threatened that, you know, I would be in trouble. But I never was honest or open with them because I didn't want to sort of, I didn't. I wasn't comfortable to want to talk about those things that I was going on at home. But at the same time, yeah, I don't think I was ready as a, obviously as a child to wrestle with those things either. The difficulty of parenting your parent, when.

[A]

Did you get comfortable with that idea?

[B]

I'm still not comfortable with it. I'm trying to be, but like, I think that's where sociology and my path to sociology and what this memoir came to be is really using the sociological tools that I was taught not to do this type of work. But it offered me an opportunity to sort of analyze my lived experiences. And I felt it was so important, especially where I teach. I've always taught at universities that are primarily first gen college students, people of black and brown background, white working class kids. And I want them to know that I see you and I know where you are and where you've been. And I think that's what I just felt compelled to sort of use my tools to make sense of those lived experiences to reach broader audiences.

[A]

You write about your family being Greek and you changing your own last name. Did being immigrants affect how you were treated? Did it affect the way that they went after the American dream?

[B]

I think, I mean, I think it makes sense why my mother in particular and my family more broadly were really interested in chasing that American dream, because how do they give up their. Why would they want to leave a country and a culture that actually was kind of a much easier life? When I go back and visit, I'm like, it's chill here. Yeah, Greek. It's like they were. Greece is just like, chill. Like the small little village. Like, people work like five hours a day. They take their little siestas and they have their, like, you know, Luca madas and they eat their chicken kebabs and they're just all like, chill. But then to go to the US and like, want to chase that dream and. And reach for it, like, it takes a certain person to probably desire that. And I think when they got here and they found, like, options sort of limited for them, then they were going to sort of my mother in particular, to do whatever she could to reach those dreams. I mean, that's the hardest part to navigate is I love my mother, we're very close. And it's like, well, how do you manage this with someone has these aspirations but doesn't actually have the tools to reach those aspirations?

[A]

Well, she found her tools.

[B]

She did find them. Well, or my tools. Her tools. She stole my tools. I mean, or tools. Yeah, there we go.

[A]

Let's talk about that you discovered that your mom had used your name to take out a lot of money.

[B]

She did. I mean, so folks who are familiar with Greek culture know that we often typically name after our family members, like our parents in particular. So I was named after my mom, and we had the same name, first and last, essentially the same. And, you know, she decided that, you know, after she kind of ran her credit through the ground, that she was going to use my name, my social, and my date of birth, which that was always the most shocking to me. It's like, girl, you do not like. I called these bankers. I'm like, wait a second.

[A]

Excuse me.

[B]

I'm like, listen, no, today I'm gonna be 45 this month. But I'm like. Then I was like, you are my mother. She looks young. My mom is hot. Okay? My mom looks good. But she did not look 25 years old. Like, or 30. Whatever. It was. 25 years old. I'm sorry you're laughing, but it was true. I was like, how did you. So I knew that that actually sort of led me to know that they were actually being fraudulent. Yes. Like, there's no way. And I'm sure a lot of people listening now, or you, your, yourself, like, we. If we buy homes and whatever, we all have, even a car, like, they need to see three IDs. They want to know what color underwear you're wearing. Right. And so I'm like, how did she do this without fraudulent folks? And that actually is what led me. When I discovered this, I, you know, stood in front of. And you can read about it. I stood in front of a federal judge. And I try to argue for my mother. Like, yeah, she victimized me and she was wrong. And trust me, we had all this sort of fallout and everything. But you. She's the only one who's being charged in this situation because she's an easy target. And this was in the what, the 2000s? Earlier 2000s, where, I mean, that was when predatory lending was happening. Like, if you place it in a cultural context, people were just giving out loans like Jolly Ranchers, and that they should be held responsible. So that actually frustrated me on a different level.

[A]

The new memoir is called Five Star White Trash, A Memoir of Fraud and Family. It's by Georgianne Davis. She's with me now in studio to discuss. A good part of the memoir is about your weight. When you were a little kid, how did people treat you?

[B]

They treated me horribly, especially when I moved to that more affluent white school district. When I Was in the white working class school. It was different. I used to go by the name Missy, which I say in the book that's my nickname. My family still calls me that because we all had the same names, so they had to give nicknames to people. But yeah, like I, you know, when I moved to that school district, they just looked at me like I was, you know, not right. I was almost. I was £300 by fifth grade. I mean, I was a big kid. I'm also very tall, though. So I mean, I am trying to perpetuate anti fatness here, but I don't know if I really. I mean, you look at people and people are like, oh, what do you weigh? Like, it's hard to know. And also all this, like false information that fat equals unhealthy. That's all wrong. And we know that. But they treated me poorly. Like kids would make fun of me for not being able to run. And I'm like, I just don't want to run. I don't see the point in it. But yeah, they treated me really badly. And then when I was, gosh, around 11, 12 years old, I was running around outside, which I, I just said I don't like to do. And I was getting abdominal pain and my mother was scared because I was holding the side my abdomen and she called me in and she thought, you know, at that age, okay, maybe you're getting your period and is it okay if I talk about this?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Okay. So she said she thought maybe I was getting my period. And so she called me in and she brought me into a bathroom and she was menstruating or about to menstruate at that moment. And I'm going to be like, what Roxane Gay says a bad feminist here. I was like. When she was like, is this what's happening to you? My mom said, I'm like, oh, God, no, yuck. Because, you know, I was a kid and okay. She's like, all right, we'll go play. And I kept running around, kept having the pain, and she thought that maybe I had an ovarian cyst because she had an ovarian cyst or something like that. So she was scared. And I knew, I knew that she was because we didn't have health insurance. So she took me to urgent care, which meant she was really worried. And there they did all these scans and that's when they discovered that, you know, inside, instead of ovaries, a uterus, fallopian tubes, that I was born intersex, which means I Was born outside, I have a female appearance, like a vagina, what have you. And inside I was born with internal, undescended testes. Now, they didn't tell me any of that. They didn't say that to me. They gave me all sorts of lies, like, oh, you have cancer. Somehow that was going to be more or less harmful. I mean, they said that. They said, oh, there was moments they said I had mono, which I'm like, what is mono? I was a kid. They did tell me that time I would never be able to have biological kids, which, you know, as a tween, that was like the last thing on my mind. I wanted a dog. Like, not kids. But, yeah, I mean that in the process of doing it, they thought maybe we just can't see her ovaries because she's so fat. I mean, they probably said obese or something, you know, and they thought maybe that was what it was. But then that, like, spiraled and then that sent me down this path of what I like to think of as medical fraud. They lied to me.

[A]

In the book, you know, you actually see what they wrote down. You found out later.

[B]

Yeah, I got the records and I decided to really, like, put exactly what they wrote, like, copy verbatim my medical records, because I think it sort of reveals what it was like as a dropout when I got my hands on those records, a middle school dropout at that, to read that and what that must have been like to. I want readers to kind of experience it. Like, how do I. I don't know these big medical terms. I still don't know them.

[A]

Early when you read it for the first time, what went through your.

[B]

Your mind that I must be wrong? That was initial. Like, what is this? Like, again, as a middle school drop, I'm like, XY chromosomes. Like, I'm like, I dropped out of middle school. I'm like, wait, I kind of remember from years ago before I dropped out, XY is male. What? Like, I don't have a penis. And then quite quickly, I started going through it and I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm a freak. Like, I was like, oh, am I a man? And then of course, the doctors who I actually, like, looked up to, right, we go to the doctor. I mean, now I have a different relationship with doctors. I love them, don't get me wrong. But.

[A]

But, but.

[B]

That's a big but. So. But at that moment, I was like, how? That doctor was like, he looked like an old, cuddly, like, white man with gray hair. I was Like, I want to snuggle you. I don't want to yell. So how could you lie to me? And that's where I think I had to wrestle with the most, is that the doctors lied to me about my body. They encouraged my parents to do the same. And, you know, I know this might be a leap, but, you know, we think of these societal superheroes, like doctors, like teachers, all of this. And, I don't know, I mean, you know, we have to start looking inward, look at yourselves in the mirror, because I think some of these folks do some not so great things. They're not somehow outside of these problematic ideologies that we talk about every day.

[A]

Do you trust doctors now?

[B]

I do. When I'm sick, when I get my vaccines, I do, but I. I'm skeptical. Yeah. So I, I, you know, I. I do. I'm. But I'm critical, and I think that's where I like to be. Like, when a doctor tells me something, I have to stop and think, well, why? Like, what for? And doctors don't like that pushback. And I will say it's a lot easier for me now with a PhD, whatever that means. And as a sociologist, doctors are more open to those types of conversations. They'll come down, they'll talk to me about the latest study in the medical exam room, but I mostly worry about people who don't have that level of education, who don't have that sort of societal. Societally granted, sort of respect and prestige. So, like, those are the folks I worry about. But also, I mean, sometimes I can't even push back on doctors because I, too, feel intimidated by, for lack of a better phrase, like, their white coats. Like, I don't want to say it.

[A]

And you had experiences with doctors when you were a teenager. They put you through weight loss surgery in the middle. In the middle of all of this.

[B]

Yep. And they did it without my consent. I mean, I was a kid. I was 14, and it was like 1995. At the time, pediatric bariatric surgery was very rare. And they did it, and I didn't want them to do it. I had no abnormal medical markers. Like, I wasn't diabetic. I didn't have anything, like, wrong. It was just they were so stuck on commenting on my size, and they being endocrinologists. And. You know what's funny, Alison, is that we didn't have health insurance, as I said, but the moment they discovered I was intersex, it was like, oh, you're an experiment. Like, you're a monstrosity. I'll see you for free and bump your appointment up till tomorrow.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And that's where they just went. All these sort of surgeries and exams. I started having some of the access to the best doctors in the country or world.

[A]

That's wild to think about.

[B]

Right?

[A]

My guest is Georgiana Davis. The name of her book is Five Star White Trash, A Memoir of Fraud and Family. There's so much we can talk about in your book. And one of the things I did want to ask about was you got married.

[B]

Yeah. To a man.

[A]

Charlie. Charlie seemed like a nice guy.

[B]

He was a nice guy. He is a nice guy. We're still friends. I don't know if I put this in the book, but. Can I say it, Allison?

[A]

Sure.

[B]

He emailed me and he said. He said to me a while ago, like, maybe two years ago, he's like, hey, I just want to reach out to you and say that you're one of. He said, you're one of the top five people who changed my life. Wow. And I said, oh, my gosh, thank you. And I thought, like, oh, my gosh. I was a little nervous, like, are you okay? Because this seems like a weird. Are you. Are you. Did you get a diagnosis? And my partner, because I'm now remarried to a woman, and my partner, who's hilarious, she was sitting. I mean, she gave me the title of the book, right? She was sitting next to me and she said, well, ask him who the other four are. And she put a swear word in there. But I know I can't say, so I did. But, yeah, so like, we stay in touch over email, and we moved along. I mean, part of it was that we met really young, and he was a white Jewish guy from the North Shore of Chicago. Very different family background than my own.

[A]

How did those two different family backgrounds react to each other?

[B]

Well, there was a lot of. I mean, I hate to admit it, but lies and deception on my family's part, that sort of connected. I thought you were gonna ask, how did you all connect? And then I was gonna give a joke. Alison. I was gonna say, well, do you see how good looking I am? No, it's a joke. That's a joke. I'm just for. Cause I know it's radio, you know, I'm not that good looking, let's be clear. No, but that's. But that's. I mean, I just think that we connected on that level. And, you know, he and I actually, he gave me a lot of what we call in sociology, cultural capital, which is really just like, hey. He would call me missy, like my family. He's like, let me walk you to the community college. Like after I got my ged, he's like, let me walk you through and like, take you to the bookstore. That's where you get your textbooks. And I was like, what? They have bookstores and colleges? Like, I had no idea. And he's like. And he told me, he's like, you know, I think you would really like sociology because of the way you think and talk and, you know, argue with me about how servers should be treated better and this kind of thing. So, you know, I credit him actually with a lot of where I am today. And also, you know, inspired me and gave me, shared me some, shared with me some of those not five star white trash resources that he had access to.

[A]

What do you know now, as an educated sociologist, about the way you grew up?

[B]

Oh, that's a deep question. I think I know now that it's difficult to crawl out of what I did. But I also know how so many other black brown folks without access to those resources would not be able to do it because there's people who work just as hard as I did who have some of the same backgrounds and they're not able to achieve those same types of mobility, the same type of mobility that I did. And I think all of it, I mean, it's. I mean, it's not to take away from my. I'm not trying to say I didn't work hard. I did. I tried to teach myself algebra. I did everything, you know, but I think it's important to acknowledge where we, where I came from. And, you know, even with Charlie in the book, you know, would he have, Would I have gotten access to his cultural capital if I was a black fat woman who was lied to about their body, like from doctors? Like, probably not. I mean, we know, you know, interracial relationships. I'm in one now. My partner is a woman of color. I mean, I think we know that it's complicated. There's a lot of difficulties in those relationships and great growth for both people.

[A]

Too, given the times we're living in. What's important to you? What's important for our leaders and our officials to know about anything?

[B]

I would say it's important to know that we're here and they need to know the facts. And I think people like me who are intersex or marginalized in any different way, we need to not give up. And I think we need to have our voice and not lose it. And we need to not be afraid to share secrets because, you know, and I know a lot of therapists will tell you this, but it's been my experience of letting go of things. I can't tell you. Alison, how many people have reached out to me when I've exposed a little bit about this story, or I told this professor friends of mine that have shared their experiences or students come up to me and said, wow, my mother was incarcerated, my brother was. Or I was. Or I've been dealing with this. I have these family dramas. I have a ged. And I'm just like, that's the bird. It's not just my bird. It's just seeing all the birds fly together. And I'm sorry, that analogy is a bad one, but you get just, I'm not that funny. It was, yeah, but I was just like, you see them? And that actually is what uplifts me. It's serious. It uplifts me the most. Like, I'm like, that's why I do what I do. At the expense of like some people say, like, why do you put yourself out there? Like, we all have family secrets, but why are you, like, wanting to hang them out on the street? And I'm like, because if I do, then other people won't be so ashamed by their family secrets.

[A]

The book is titled Five Star White Trash. I've been speaking with its author, Georgianne Davis. It'll be out October 7th. Thanks for taking the time.

[B]

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[A]

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