The Condition of the Trans Working Class in America

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "The Condition of the Trans Working Class in America"

It Could Happen Here | Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts
Aired: June 24, 2026 | Host: Mia Wong

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Episode Overview

This episode, hosted by Mia Wong, takes a deep dive into the socioeconomic realities of the trans working class in America. Through analysis of available data—most notably the U.S. Trans Survey (USTS)—as well as personal insights and social context, Mia explores how the condition of trans workers both illustrates and exacerbates the intersection of precarity, discrimination, and organizing in the context of 2020s America. The episode balances a frank assessment of current hardships with a perspective on the transformative potential and collective action of trans people within broader leftist movements.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Trans People and Class in America

• Trans class position:
  • The vast majority of trans people in America are workers, not capitalists or owners of the means of production.
  • This position within the working class brings both unique hardships and specific potential for organizing and resistance.
  • Notable quote:

    “If you are trans, you are, at least broadly speaking, not a capitalist in the sense of you do not own the means of production, you are not the bourgeoisie…we are all almost entirely as a class, like some kind of worker or another.” – Mia Wong [02:30]

2. The Bleak Economic Reality Backed by Data

• Reliance on U.S. Trans Survey (USTS):

  • The lack of dedicated research on trans economic realities, both medically and economically, forces reliance on the USTS—the largest and most comprehensive source, with 92,000 respondents in 2022.
  • Data is already outdated as recent years have seen political regression and increased attacks on trans people.
  • Notable quote:

    “All of the numbers I’m about to tell you about, poverty rates and unemployment and homelessness, it’s gotten worse [since 2022].” – Mia Wong [05:18]

• Staggering poverty and unemployment:

  • 34% of trans people live in poverty (national average: 12%)
  • 18% unemployment rate among trans people (national average in 2022: 3.6%)
  • Historical comparison: The trans unemployment rate in 2022 was worse than the US at the height of COVID lockdowns and comparable to Great Depression levels.
  • Notable quote:

    “It's 18% unemployment. That's like 1937, early 1938, Great Depression levels of unemployment. … If you are trans in America, right, trying to find a job, it is worse than it was for everyone during the lockdowns.” – Mia Wong [07:35]

3. Homelessness and Housing Insecurity

• Disproportionate risk:

  • 30% of trans Americans have experienced homelessness (national stat for general population: 4%).
  • Lack of family support, workplace discrimination, and housing discrimination all contribute.
  • Higher risks for multiple episodes of homelessness and lack of a safety net.
  • Notable quote:

    “Thirty percent of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lifetime. For Americans, it's about 4%.” – Mia Wong [11:00]

    “If you're just around trans people in general, you have met people who have been homeless … the level of precarity is so great … it is so, so easy to move back and forth between having an apartment and being on the street…” – Mia Wong [12:20]

• Intersections with sex work and criminalization:

  • Because of job and housing discrimination, many trans people turn to sex work, which further increases vulnerability to police violence and social stigma.

4. The Trans Refugee Crisis

• Mass internal migration:

  • Intensification since 2024/25 of trans people relocating across state lines to flee legislative persecution:
    • 9% of trans people relocated in eight months (Nov 2024–June 2025) due to anti-trans laws.
    • Equivalent to moving the population of Cleveland, Ohio, in less than a year.
    • Ongoing crisis with tens of thousands continuing to move.
  • Notable quote:

    “In just that eight month span … 9% of the trans population moved… That's over 1% of the total trans population moving per month to a different state specifically because of anti-trans legislation.” – Mia Wong [21:25]

• Impact on class position:

  • Forced migration creates a hyper-precarious underclass concentrated in “refugee” cities (e.g., Portland, NYC, LA, regional centers like Missoula).
  • Narrows job opportunities, amplifies economic insecurity, and further disperses family/social support.

5. Systemic, Deliberate Precarity

• Political intent & social reproduction:
  • The episode posits that part of the right-wing, capitalist project has been to enforce gender control and social reproduction norms to sustain class power (historically via evangelical mobilization and, in other contexts, policies like China’s one-child policy).
  • Notable quote:

    “What has been produced here is this incredibly precarious class of like down the remobile workers. And it's also worth noting that like to some extent this is a deliberate strategy of the right. Like this is, this is what the right wants.” – Mia Wong [32:45]

6. Trans People as Social Movement Linchpins

• Unifying the working class:
  • The unique experience of precarity fosters solidarity among trans people across occupational and housing strata, bridging divides often maintained in the broader working class.
  • Despite intense discrimination, trans people are overrepresented in social movements, unions, mutual aid, and protests (Occupy, anti-ICE, 2024 student encampments, etc.).
  • Notable quote:

    “Trans people have also … been overrepresented in just every leftist social movement for the past, like, two decades. … There are trans people in all of these social movements in extremely key roles. The only real way for this not to happen is when trans people are specifically driven out.” – Mia Wong [33:40]

  • Notable example:

    “Friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil was the facilitator of the first Occupy meeting in New York. Right. We're just, we're just always there.” – Mia Wong [35:10]

7. Fighting From Necessity, Not Choice

• Precarity as Motivation:
  • Mia argues that for trans people, survival is inherently political; the only way to exist, seek healthcare, and achieve dignity is through struggle.
  • This has fueled the overrepresentation of trans workers in unions and organizing.
  • Notable quote:

    “…if you are going to be trans, especially now, you have no choice but to fight. If you want to exist, if you want to have access to your healthcare, if you want to be upgraded to the status of mere proletarians… you have to fight.” – Mia Wong [36:40]

8. Radical Potential & Hope

• Marxist parallel:
  • The precarity and collective struggle create the very class consciousness and organizing power that could overturn capitalist and reactionary systems.
  • Notable quote:

    “What the bourgeoisie produce above all are its own gravediggers. And if you look out at the world in 2026, right, you can see the graves being dug. The question is, who is going to be buried there? … If we're going to put something in that grave, better it be the class system itself. And that's a world worth fighting for.” – Mia Wong [37:40]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “God fucking bless them, these people are doing the transgenders work. It’s an invaluable resource…” – Mia Wong on USTS [04:11]
• “Thirty-four percent is really bad. Even looking at other demographics and other poverty rates, that’s really, really, really bad.” [06:21]
• “You are living through the Great Depression, and they are living through a normal economy. … You are living in something that is not the same as theirs.” [09:40]
• “If you're a trans person, you are, you know, X number of days away from being that person on the street.” [32:10]
• “We have always been there. We’ve been there everywhere. And we will continue to be there in all of these movements.” [35:45]
• “And that world [where trans people are free] is winnable. All that is left is to fight for.” [38:05]

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Timestamps of Major Segments

• [02:30] — Introduction to episode theme; overview of trans class position
• [04:00–07:50] — Data challenges & USTS findings (poverty, unemployment)
• [11:00–15:00] — Homelessness among trans people; consequences
• [20:30–22:10] — Internal migration and the trans refugee crisis
• [31:20–33:25] — Precarity, deliberate policy, and right-wing aims
• [33:40–36:00] — Trans people’s centrality to leftist organizing
• [36:40–38:05] — Necessity of struggle, class consciousness, and hope for a new world

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Concluding Thoughts

Mia Wong closes by reframing the bleak picture through a lens of agency and hope: the systemic marginalization of trans workers, while devastating, is also a catalyst for solidarity and revolutionary potential. Trans people have become, through necessity and collectivity, "the gravediggers" of the capitalist system and are poised at the heart of a fight for a more just and livable world for all.

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For those who haven't listened:
This episode is a compelling, data-driven, and personal account of the trans working class’s condition in 2026 America. It’s essential listening for anyone wanting to understand not only the scope and depth of trans precarity but also the energy, resilience, and organizing power burgeoning within trans communities—against all odds.

Transcript

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[Mia Wong]

Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is often about being trans in America and living under a regime that is actively hostile to our mere existence. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we're going to take a somewhat broad view and look at what it means to be trans in America. From a class Standpoint. Now, I think if you are trans, you are, at least broadly speaking, not a capitalist in the sense of you do not own the means of production, you are not the bourgeoisie. There are so few of us at all who can be said to own the means of production. We are all almost entirely as a class, like some kind of worker or another. But there is a lot of specificity to the specific trans experience of class and where we fit into the broader American class structure that I want to talk about today. And I want to simultaneously get people an actual understanding in one place of just kind of the outskirts of how bad it is, but then also talk about how good it is, isn't maybe the right term, but want to give people a sense of what this class position means for our place and ability to fight back. Because that is also a critically important part of not just being trans, but, but a critically important part of every leftist and liberation movement in the US for the past, you know, decade has been long. Over the decade you get like two decades has been us. And obviously there have been a lot of trans people who are involved in a bunch of shit before then. But the extent to which trans people have been involved and have been central to every social movement you've ever heard of in the modern era is exceptional. And I want to talk about why that is. I want to start talking about why that is by looking at some of the data that we have on what it's like to be trans in the US and this is one of the things that's very difficult when you're writing about trans people because, you know, we all have our experience of transness. And anyone who's tried to get trans healthcare, I think, is aware that there is so much research that has just not been done about us. This is medical research on like the effects of specific, like hormone regimens and like what kinds of medicines do window to help and what the effects are. A lot of the information that you do get from doctors is based on really, really old studies that aren't applicable to what actually exists. And this is also true when you're trying to look at economic data where there just aren't that many studies of what it's like for trans people in the US and the ones that do exist. And there are people who have done some, they're very reliant on data sets that are not specifically designed to be of trans people. And that's a problem because a lot of what you end up with and the reason why, like, there are some things that I've read that are just not going to be in this episode is that they are very reliant on things like, okay, we know this person has gender markers have changed or their names have changed, and that's fine, kind of if you want to sort of get a sense of what's going on. But like the percentage of trans people, the sort of demographics of trans people who have officially changed their gender markers is not reflective of trans people in general. So we're going to be using a lot of data in this from what's called the U.S. trans Survey. It's USTS, it's run by advocates for trans equality, and God fucking bless them, these people are doing the transgenders work. It's an invaluable resource, I don't know of a better sort of repository of information about trans people that has been collected. So these surveys are run fairly infrequently. There was one in 2015 and one in 2022, but in the 2022 one, they got 92,000 trans and non binary respondents, which is unbelievable. That is a staggering sample size. But the information they got from it is in a lot of ways extremely bleak. I mean, you know, you can look at the positive stuff, which is that, yeah, people who transitioned to say that, yeah, their lives are happier now. They transitions like they, they like, they like transitioning. It's, it's good, it's, it's. I don't know, do the thing, it will make you happier. However, comma, the economic numbers. Jesus Christ. Oh, boy, oh, boy. Now, as I've said, right, the people who work on the US Trans survey, they do astonishing work. But as with all trans people, they're doing astonishing work with not that many resources, and it takes them a long time to put their studies together. So again, the information that we're using is from 2022. So this means a couple of things. One, this is during the Biden administration, right, A regime that is significantly less hostile to trans people than this current one. Even though there was a bunch of bad shit going on then, some of it done by the Biden administration. Dear God. Is Trump administration significantly, significantly more hostile to trans people? So the conditions that we're seeing now are going to be worse than the ones that we have data for. So all of, all of the numbers I'm about to tell you about, poverty rates and unemployment and homelessness, it's gotten worse. The second thing is when the US Trans survey writes reports, I mean, they released recently. Yeah, they released in June. Health and well, being a report of the 2022 US Transgender Survey. It is 110 pages long, so they do very, very good and detailed work. However, what that means is that we still, for example, don't have like, like a granular economic report, and we don't have just the full report that they write on this stuff. And we also don't have really the sort of granular reports that they had from the 2015 numbers on the experience of trans people of different races. So those are sort of what I would say are the limits going into this that we have. However, what we do have from the early Insights report is just horrifying. So one of the sort of defining conditions of being trans is dispossession. And you can look at dispossession in a whole bunch of different ways. You can look at, for example, the poverty rate. The poverty rate from the US trans survey among trans people is 34%. The American poverty rate is 12%. So that's almost three times higher than the general population's poverty rate. And 34% is really bad. Right. Even looking at other demographics and other poverty rates, that's really, really, really bad. The trans unemployment rate is, I think, in some ways, even worse. The US trans unemployment rate is 18%. The US unemployment rate in general in 2022 was 3.6%. So let's try to get an understanding of what it means. Unemployment rate is a weird number. There are some groups of people. It doesn't count in terms of people who have stopped looking for work, Right. But to put this into perspective, during the peak of the lockdowns in 2020, the unemployment rate in the US was 14%, and that was the highest it's been in ages. For trans people, it's 18%. So if you are trans in America, right, trying to find a job, it is worse than it was for everyone during the lockdowns. 18% unemployment is like 1937, early 1938, Great Depression levels of unemployment. It's almost one in five people. And again, these are the numbers from 2022 between the Biden administration when the situation was better for trans people. We don't have more recent numbers for the US at sort of any kind of scale. And even back then, four years ago, when things were better for us and the economy in general was running a little bit better, it was, again, 1938 Great Depression levels for just a regular trans person. Right. This has a really, really broad array of effects, right. In terms of, you know, just the experience of the world that you have. If you are trans because you are fundamentally living in a different world than an economic world than cis people do. Again, the cis people's unemployment rate in 2022 was like 3.6% and yours is 18. You are living through the Great Depression and they are living through a normal economy. And that means that just fundamentally from a class position, you have a different experience of reality than they do. You are living in something that is not the same as theirs. I also want to talk about homelessness numbers because, you know, queer homelessness has always been really, really bad for reasons that kind of obvious reasons that we'll get into here. But it's also related to, for example, the unemployment rate and the poverty rate because, you know, having an apartment or just any place to stay is expensive. We got a report recently that was a joint effort between advocates for trans equality and the national alliance to End Homelessness, who did a report using the USTs data. And they, they talked about how 30% of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lifetime. For Americans, it's about 4%. For Americans at large, right? So, you know, just like cis Americans in general, it's about 4%. So that is a homelessness rate of eight times the rate of the general population. And again, that is the 2022 numbers, which are now worse. And this is something that I think is borne out by if you are around any, like, I mean, not even working class trans people, if you're just around trans people in general, you have met people who have been homeless, right? Like just, you're just constantly around people who have been homeless. And this is one of, I think the defining elements of what being a trans worker is, is that the level of precarity is so great and the odds that through some kind of employment discrimination or just some bullshit happening with your employer or just like, I don't know, the employer is doing layoffs. It is so, so easy to move back and forth between having an apartment and being on the street in a way that to some extent the general American population has. But again, the rate for the general population if they've been homeless in their lifetime is 4%. And for trans people it's 30%. And this rate, this 30% rate of people, of trans people who've experienced homelessness, and also, by the way, a lot of the people who've experienced this have experienced it more than once. And, and you know, there's a lot of just people who are trans who are homeless right the fuck now. This is why I say, like, put a trans girl on your couch at the end of every executive disorder. Because there aren't like, widespread solutions to this right now. It's something that we have to figure out for ourselves and we just don't have the resources to do it. Now this discrimination is intensified both in the housing market, right, by just general anti transdiscrimination, by, by poverty and this. This is also sort of a cyclical process, right? Like, part of what's difficult about me writing this is that I, like, I haven't been homeless and I haven't been a sex worker, which means that I'm missing experiences that a lot of trans workers have. What I can say about it is like, obviously being homeless makes it harder to get even just an apartment afterwards, because it has a whole bunch of negative effects on a whole bunch of shit. Including, for example, like, it like, you know, obviously, like fucks with your credit score. It fucks with just like, oh, do you have like previous landlord references that you can use? There's a whole bunch of different sort of spiraling effects of this. There's obviously, there's health effects, there's safety effects. So what you're facing is on the one hand, you're squeezed out through discrimination at the workplace, through the fact that also, and this is another fairly common thing, trans people make significantly less money than CIS people do, just on the dollar. It's way, way worse. So you have lower income when you get a job, you have less access to jobs, and you also just have housing market discrimination. And also, trans people have weaker access to family support networks that function in a way to subsidize social reproduction for CIS people. A lot of trans people's families and parents don't accept them and they just get kicked out or if they are able to access resources from them, it's under conditions of extreme violence. And that has a massive effect on homelessness, right? Like a whole bunch of homelessness is caused by queer youth getting kicked out of their houses. And because you also don't have places you can go back to, right? You don't have the kind of, like, family, like familial safety net that a lot of CIS people have access to, and you're less likely to have access to it, this intensifies the rate of homelessness and it intensifies the consequences of it and how difficult it is to get out. All right, we are gonna go to ads and then we are going to come back and talk about some more bleak shit. But also, this is not just the Things Fall Apart podcast. 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[Mia Wong]

We are back. Now there's another factor, something that's becoming increasingly a factor of trans life that has existed obviously for a long time, but has been enormously exacerbated by the current regime. And that is the trans refugee population. There is in the US a massive trans refugee population. These are, you know, what you would call, I guess, internally displaced people. The Movement Advancement Project, or MAP, did a study in 2024, 2025, looking at trans people who moved from one state to another because of anti trans legislation. Right. And they found, and this is just between November and June of 2025, they found that 9% of all trans people had moved in just that eight month span. Right? That's 9% of trans people had just, just in the span between November 2024 and June 2025. Right. Just in that span, 9% of the trans population moved. That's over 1% of the total trans population moving per month to a different state specifically because of anti trans legislation.

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That's really bad. If you look at sort of the general population of trans people in the US that's 400,000 people in just that eight month span. That's the entire population of Cleveland, Ohio and then 35,000 more people. Right? I mean that's like obviously it's not like the complete metropolitan, it's like the actual just like city of Cleveland. Right? But like again, that's in the span of Eight months we moved the entire city of Cleveland. And it's definitely gotten. Almost certainly has. Like there have been more people who have moved, you know, since June 2025, because the anti trans discrimination, anti trans crackdowns from the state have only gotten worse. This is a refugee crisis, right? And the things that they're fleeing from are also things that are just, you know, conditions of what, of what being trans is in the U.S. right, which they're fleeing. Restrictions on healthcare, access from the national level, from the state level, also as we talked about, like from religious hospitals who can also just like, even if, even if you're in a so called blue state, can just be like, fuck you, eat shit, we're not gonna give you healthcare. They're fleeing. Bathroom bills, they're fleeing. Don't say gay bans. They're fleeing. Also just an increase in social violence, right? Because the thing that this, that this all legitimizes, right, that anti trans rhetoric legitimizes, that anti trans state action legitimizes, is just getting assaulted for being trans. A thing that has always happened, but is now happening more than it did before. And yeah, that, that not being, you know, assaulted and this happens at work, this happens like coming back from work, this happens in other places too. Is also, you know, a part of the condition of your labor when you combine the fact that trans people were already, and I want to point this out, right, the homelessness rates, you know, the 18% rate of unemployment, the 30% rate of experiencing homelessness in their lifetime, right? That was before the refugee crisis like really, really intensified into what we're seeing now, right? It was not as bad in 2022 as it is right now, when again, like we were seeing for a period of eight months, we were seeing over a percent of the population per month, the trans population per month. Moving all of the unemployment numbers and the poverty numbers and the homelessness numbers, those were all pre, the sort of real intensification after the election of the mass migration and refugee sort of status of trans people. And this has had an effect on trans people's class position, right? What this has created in the places that trans people are fleeing to. And this is places like Portland, this is places like New York, like la. There's a lot of sort of like regional centers too, right? I mean, obviously Chicago is like the other sort of big one, but you know, they're like places like Missoula, right? For people who don't know what Missoula. Missoula is a city with, you know, like a Pretty large university population in Montana that has a fairly large trans population because it collects trans people from a whole bunch of the region around it. And there's also a bunch of people who go there for college and realize that they're trans. But what this has done, right, is it's forced a bunch of people to move, leave their homes, which is expensive, right? And then you have to find jobs in these new places. And it's already really difficult to find jobs in the places that you were. And so, you know, what you're facing just in general, right, is you're facing this trade off between can you survive in the place that you are with the life that you have, or do you need to pick up and go to another place where it's less illegal for you to be yourself? And what this has created is this sort of mass underclass of trans workers that is especially large in places with large refugee populations. These workers are of any subgroup that like trans people are in. The trans people in that group are the most marginalized and the most just absolutely fucked of everyone in that group, right? You know, you can look at like, the violence rates for black trans women particularly is appalling, right? There's a lot of disabled trans people and among disabled people who already have it really, really bad in the U.S. right. Like you look at disabled trans people and it's, it's even fucking harder. That's especially an issue with, you know, something that's been affecting a whole bunch of people, which is the Medicaid work requirements, which have been just unbelievably harmful to a whole bunch of disabled trans people who suddenly are being like forced to work, who just can't, right? And what, what, what, what this has created is this incredibly, incredibly precarious class of workers all over the spectrum of the working class, right? There are a lot of trans people, unbelievable number of trans people working. And like the lower end and shittier the service job, the more likely you are to find trans people there. There's always been a lot of trans sex work because a lot of times that's the thing you can do, right? And this is sex work across the entire spectrum of what sex work is of sort of like greater and lesser degrees of risk. This also is the thing that contributes to the criminalization of trans people because there's a bunch of criminalization of sex workers in ways that gets trans people targeted by the police and subject to even more police violence than they are already, which they are also subject to extraordinary amounts of police violence. I don't know, every trans person has seen some shit.

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War is the largest event in human history.

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[Mia Wong]

But I'm not just saying this to be like the trans class position is bad, but what this has done is create this class of trans workers that moves between parts of the class that don't have contact with each other very much. There's a whole bunch of movement between being housed and being unhoused in a way that is at a significantly broader scale than it is for the rest of the rest of the population. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of trans workers who are able to unify around being trans and have contact with each other and who organize with each other and who fight alongside each other. Right. From different parts of the working class that don't often particularly get along. And in particular, in terms of like, you know, service workers and unhoused people, there is a really systemic effort by the state and by the right and even by the Democratic Party too, to pit these groups against each other. But also with trans people, it's like, well, I don't know, like there's also an extent to which, yeah, like if you're a trans person, you are, you know, X number of days away from being that person on the street. And so this has created a fairly unique class position, right. Of unbelievable precarity, you know, state enforced precarity. It's obviously not the only right class position in the US of like legally mandated precarity. You can look at undocumented workers who have even more genocidal shit happening against them right now in terms of just like. Yeah, no, yeah, there's just ice rounding people up. But what has been produced here is this incredibly precarious class of like down the remobile workers. And it's also worth noting that like to some extent this is a deliberate strategy of the right. Like this is, this is what the right wants. You know, if you look at like the rise of neoliberalism, you look at Reagan, you look at Thatcher, right? One of the big things that they are about in this era is control over gender and control over social reproduction. This is one of the things, you know, if you look at how these people come to power, they come to power on the back of very, very right wing social movements, right, that are, you know, in the US it's like, you know, the sort of like the rise of the evangelicals who. One of their big things, right? One of the things that they're interested in is suppressing queer people specifically, right. But you can look at this in other contexts too where, you know, you can look at China in the 1980s as the beginning of sort of the reform period is starting. When you start to see the return of capitalism to China in 1980, you get the one child policy. And we're going on a little bit of a tangent here, but something I don't think is really acknowledged in the way that people think and talk about China, which is that the one child policy was not a thing from the Maoist period. This was the reformers, right? Deng Xiaoping is in power when this goes into effect, right? And when it's like written into the constitution like this is Deng Xiaoping, this is the sort of pro capitalist reform movement that is imposing the one child policy on people in the U.S. you also have restrictions on abortion are sort of part and parcel of the right's attempt to expand capitalism because control over the family, control over social reproduction, the production of new workers and the ability to, for people to continue to be workers for the capitalist system. That's something that is important to them, right? And the maintenance of right wing gender roles is something that is important for them to be able to reproduce their ideology and also reproduce capital in general. And so they came after us. But on the other hand, right, you know, as much as we have been targeted by the right, trans people have also, as I sort of talked about a bit at the beginning of this episode, been overrepresented in just every leftist social movement for the past like two decades, right? Everything from union organizing to mutual aid, to who shows up in the street to protest, to blocks from Occupy to the uprising. There are trans people in all of these social movements in extremely key roles. The only real way for this not to happen is when trans people are specifically driven out of these movements. And that happens a lot, right? Like that's, that's also like one of the things that you experience being, being a trans worker is that, you know, people who are transphobic in the left will run you out of the shit that you're doing. Usually I say usually because some, sometimes they are. You are explicitly pushed out for being trans. Usually there's like some other excuse that's, that's found to do this. But you know, even with how much, you know, like persecution of trans people there have been in these social movements, like trans people still show up for it, right? You know, the. Take just sort of a random example, right? Friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil was the facilitator of the first Occupy meeting in New York. Right. We're just, we're just always there. We have always been there. We've been there everywhere. And we will continue to be there in all, in all of these movements, in the anti ice movements, in I say movements because like this is true in like the 2018 anti ICE movement, it's true in the current anti ice movement. It is true in the student encampments in 2024. And there's a reason for this. And the reason for this to a large extent is that very precarity, right? If you are going to be trans, especially now, you have no choice but to fight. If you want to exist, if you want to have access to your healthcare, if you want to be upgraded to the status of mere proletarians, if you want your life to just merely, merely be the life of a CIS worker, which is significantly less fucked than your life is, you have to fight. And this is something that is also spread to some extent by sort of trans culture, I would say broadly, but also just like the kind of social groups that form. And also it's spread. And this is particularly something you see in unions a lot, right? We've talked a lot on the show about trans people being overrepresented in unions. It's like, well, we're overrepresented in unions because we're workers, right? And this is in some sense the potential of what the right has wrought, right? Which is that they have created this extremely large population of trans service workers and trans refugees who have nothing to lose but their chains and a world to win slightly. Elsewhere in the Manifesto, Marx writes, what the bourgeoisie produce above all are its own gravediggers. And if you look out at the world in 2026, right, you can see the graves being dug. The question is, who is going to be buried there? The capitalist class would very much like it to be us. I for one thing, don't want to fucking be buried in a mass grave. And if we're going to put something in that grave, better it be the class system itself. And that's a world worth fighting for. A world where there are no gravediggers, where there are no mass graves, where the state and the landlord don't throw you on the street in the night, where you can live in your community and not be run out, where you have your health care and you are able to be the person that you want to be. And that world is winnable. All that is left is to fight for. Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

[Jenny Garth]

This is Jenny Garth from I Choose Me with Jennie Garth. History is full of mysteries like how people ever survive before modern laundry detergent. Luckily, tides here with boosted stain fighting for cleaner, whiter, brighter and fresher laundry versus Tide. Simply no wonder it was America's number one detergent in sales last year. If it's gotta be clean, it's got to be Tide. Tide is a proud sponsor of the Elton John Impact Awards, honoring those who have helped shape a more inclusive and compassionate world with their artistry, advocacy and unwavering commitment to equality. You won't want to miss the Elton John Impact Awards podcast, available on June 1st on the iHeartRadio app. And everywhere podcasts are heard.

[Tom Hanks (Narrator)]

The Second World War is the largest event in human history.

[World War II Documentary Announcer]

A 20 part documentary series with Tom Hanks.

[Tom Hanks (Narrator)]

No part of the globe was untouched, no life unchanged.

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Experience. The ultimate account of World War II.

[Tom Hanks (Narrator)]

Every single person had a story. These are the stories that make us who we are.

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World War II with Tom Hanks new episode Monday at 8. Part of history honors 250 only on the history Channel.

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No idea.

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