Quiet, Piggy

Summary

Podcast Summary: Next Comes What — "Quiet, Piggy"
Host: Andrea Pitzer
Date: November 26, 2025

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Overview

In this powerful episode, Andrea Pitzer examines how the rise of authoritarian, strongman politics — exemplified by Donald Trump — is deeply intertwined with misogyny and the erosion of women's rights. Drawing on historical precedent, contemporary incidents, and expert commentary, Pitzer unpacks how Trump's rhetoric and policies are part of a broader pattern shared by authoritarians worldwide. She offers both context and suggestions for resistance, making the episode a clarion call to recognize, resist, and push back against the repackaging of old hatreds in today’s America.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The "Quiet, Piggy" Incident and What It Reveals

• Context: President Trump called a female reporter "piggy" aboard Air Force One when questioned about the Epstein case ([00:46]).
• Analysis: Pitzer and co-guests highlight the shocking lack of pushback from the press and draw attention to Trump’s repeated targeting and denigration of women, particularly women reporters.
  • “It was also shocking because no member of the press seemed to respond to... the glaring violation of basic courtesy.” — Andrea Pitzer ([00:54])
• The comment is presented as part of a broader, sustained pattern of public misogyny.

2. Trump’s Persistent Misogyny and Abuse

• Recapping historic and recent examples of Trump’s attacks on women, from high-profile insults to policy impacts.
  • “This about Jessica Leeds, who accused him of sexual assault... Believe me, she would not be my first choice.” — Trump, quoted by Andrea Pitzer ([01:27])
• Trump’s derogatory comments about women, including noted incidents with Jessica Leeds and the infamous "grab them by the pussy" tape ([04:41]–[05:37]).
• Trump’s attacks especially target women of color, amplifying both racism and sexism cumulatively ([02:54]–[03:27]).

3. Normalization and Consequences of Misogyny

• Pitzer recalls workplace harassment from previous decades, emphasizing the ways such abuse was normalized and how the needle moved post-Anita Hill ([06:25]–[09:49]).
• Sexual harassment statistics improved from 1987–2016 but show signs of reversing in the Trump era.
  • “But there are some indications it’s on the rise again in the last decade.” — Andrea Pitzer ([09:49])

4. Authoritarian Playbook: Control of Women

• Jason Stanley links Trump’s tactics to authoritarian and fascist movements' focus on “strict gender roles.”
  • “Five major themes of fascist education: national greatness, national purity, national innocence, strict gender roles... ” — Jason Stanley ([11:39])
• Authoritarians repeatedly use natalist (pro-birth) policies to control women, a pattern seen in both historical fascist regimes and contemporary movements ([12:56]–[14:12]).

5. Eugenics and Pronatalism

• Discusses the American roots of eugenics and their influence on 20th-century fascisms.
• Examines tech billionaires’ and right-wing Christian efforts to increase birth rates among “desirable” populations as an echo of these earlier ideologies ([14:24]–[15:11]).

6. Legislative Backlash and Rollbacks

• Chronicles the backlash to feminist gains from the 1970s onward, including attacks on the Equal Rights Amendment and Title IX ([16:41]–[17:40]).
• Notes ongoing attempts to restrict abortion rights and even question women’s right to vote, fueled and legitimized by Trump-era discourse ([18:00]–[18:47]).

7. Intersection with Race, Transphobia, and Class

• The show details how attacks on women overlap with broader right-wing projects targeting immigrants, Black Americans, and trans people ([03:27], [21:24]–[22:52]).
• Notes increased vulnerability for Black women, particularly in the workforce and through policy (removal from federal jobs, military demotions, etc.) ([19:05]–[19:20]).

8. Feedback Loops with Online Extremism

• Describes the Trump administration's symbiotic relationship with online misogynists like the Tate brothers; the White House reportedly interfered with investigations into their criminal behavior ([19:39]–[20:20]).
• Trump’s rhetoric emboldens and legitimizes online hate and violence.

9. Practical Resistance and Calls to Action

• Pitzer suggests concrete ways listeners can resist: call out misogynistic behavior, support women journalists, fund on-the-ground aid, and encourage women's civic participation ([24:43]–[25:53]).
  • “If someone, anyone, were to say anything in the universe of ‘Quiet Piggy’, call them on it...” — Andrea Pitzer ([24:43])
  • “See what kind of mutual aid you can contribute on the ground that treats all women as the ultimate authority in their own lives, irrespective of what anyone else might say or do.” — Andrea Pitzer ([25:50])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On press complicity:
  “It was also shocking because no member of the press seemed to respond... to the glaring violation of basic courtesy.” — Andrea Pitzer ([00:54])

• On the broader significance of Trump’s misogyny:
  “The quiet piggy comment is part of a trend... constant hatred for women that is at the heart of Trump’s politics, how it relates to historical authoritarianism and how it’s shifting US culture around women...” — Andrea Pitzer ([01:52])

• On the feedback loop of online and official misogyny:
  “So it’s a feedback loop between the President of the United States and the worst voices on the Internet.” — Andrea Pitzer ([20:38])

• On resistance:
  “On a small, everyday level, you can support women when they are targeted this way. If someone, anyone, were to say anything in the universe of Quiet Piggy, call them on it.” — Andrea Pitzer ([24:43])

• On the historical playbook:
  “This kind of denigration of women and wish to control them is root and branch part of the 20th century authoritarian playbook.” — Andrea Pitzer ([11:32])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |-----------------------------------------------------|-------------| | Trump’s “Quiet Piggy” and press reaction | 00:02–01:10 | | Pattern of Trump’s misogyny & abuse | 01:16–05:49 | | Historic and recent normalization of harassment | 06:25–09:49 | | Authoritarian playbook and gender control | 10:33–13:12 | | Eugenics, pronatalism, and modern right | 13:12–15:11 | | Backlash to feminism and legislative attacks | 16:41–18:47 | | Intersection: misogyny, racism, transphobia | 18:47–22:52 | | Online hate and political legitimacy | 19:39–20:38 | | Resistance, action, and solidarity | 24:43–25:53 |

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Tone and Style

The episode is sharp, urgent, and historically grounded. Pitzer speaks with clarity and conviction, blending personal narrative, statistics, and deep historical insight, while Jason Stanley and Anita Hill provide incisive commentary and context.

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Conclusion

Andrea Pitzer’s "Quiet, Piggy" is an indictment of the ways in which authoritarianism, misogyny, racism, and the rollback of civil rights are interlinked — and a persuasive, practical guide for resisting their normalization in American life. The episode frames contemporary events not as isolated outrages, but as part of a well-documented historical playbook — and it ends with concrete actions listeners can take to support women and protect democracy.

Transcript

[Andrea Pitzer]

On November 14, President Trump was taking questions from the press aboard Air Force One.

[Anita Hill]

Was it Jeffrey Epstein read in his emails that he said, you knew about the girls?

[Andrea Pitzer]

I know nothing about that. When Bloomberg correspondent Katherine Lucy asked him why he was resisting the release of the Epstein material. If there's nothing incriminating in the file.

[Jason Stanley]

You might remember back in July, the Wall Street Journal released a bombshell report that Trump had given Jeffrey Epstein a creepy birthday card that suggested the two of them had a d dark sexual secret.

[Andrea Pitzer]

In a remark that struck a nerve with a lot of people in the week that followed, the President answered by shaking a finger at her and saying, part of what was striking about the line was that it seemed more likely to come out of the mouth of a kindergartner.

[Jason Stanley]

Yep, he really did call a female.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Reporter piggy, then a sitting President.

[Jason Stanley]

This photograph of the moment shows just how angry the President is.

[Andrea Pitzer]

It was also shocking because no member of the press seemed to respond to. To the glaring violation of basic courtesy.

[Jason Stanley]

Thrusting his finger right in the reporter's face.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And the singling out of a female reporter for an epithet meant to demean her as fat.

[Anita Hill]

Venezuelan. Sir, you've had a lot of meetings on Venezuela. I know you can't tell us what your next steps will be.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The comment itself was not the worst.

[Donald Trump]

I was able to terminate Roe v. Wade after 50 years of trying.

[Andrea Pitzer]

By far, not the worst. This about Jessica Leeds, who accused him of sexual assault.

[Donald Trump]

Yeah, I'm going to go after. Believe me, she would not be my first choice.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Of those that Trump has offered at various points during his decade as a national political figure.

[Anita Hill]

You've called women you don't like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But it points to something I think we don't address enough about Trumpism.

[Donald Trump]

There was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So I want to talk today about the constant hatred for women that is at the heart of Trump's politics, how it relates to historical authoritarianism and how it's shifting US Culture around women and what we can do about it. Honestly, the quiet piggy comment is part of a trend.

[Jason Stanley]

The President is clearly not happy with all the attention the Epstein scandal is getting.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Just last week, ABC News's Mary Bruce had asked a hard question at the White House during Trump's meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

[Jason Stanley]

He lashed out again today at another reporter for asking about Epstein.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files?

[Anita Hill]

Why not just do it now?

[Donald Trump]

I think you are A terrible reporter. You're a terrible person and a terrible reporter.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Trump doesn't think he should be accountable to anyone, really. Yet while you do sometimes see it with men, he's particularly nasty about women.

[Donald Trump]

They have Jasmine Crockett, a low IQ person. They have AOC's, low IQ.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Women of color in particular have gotten the brunt of this kind of behavior from him. In the past.

[Anita Hill]

You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals, from Nikki Haley to former President Barack Obama, saying that they were not born in the United States, which is not true. You have told four congresswomen, women of color who were American citizens to go back to where they came from. You have used words like animal and rabbit to describe black district attorneys. You've attacked black journalists, calling them a loser, saying the questions that they ask are, quote, square, stupid and racist. You've had dinner with a white supremacist at your Mar A Lago resort.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The hatreds the right is most vocal about are immigrants and trans people, because these are the two groups that they've decided, perhaps mistakenly, the larger US Public is willing to let be brutalized.

[Anita Hill]

So my question, sir, now that you are asking black supporters to vote for you, why should black voters trust you after you have used language like that?

[Andrea Pitzer]

But it's important we don't sleep on some of the other key hatreds that Trump has embraced. Hatred of women and black folks.

[Donald Trump]

Well, first of all, I don't think I've ever been asked a question so in such a horrible manner.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Don't forget his history with The Central Park 5. Taking out a full page ad in the New York Times. He would never express regret for what he had done, even after those men were exonerated.

[Anita Hill]

Two weeks to go until the election, and former President Trump is facing a new legal battle. Members of the Central Park Five are now suing the former president over, quote, false and defamatory statements they say that he made about their 1989 case during a presidential debate last month.

[Donald Trump]

They admitted they said they pled guilty.

[Anita Hill]

They never pleaded guilty. They were cleared of the wrongdoing.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But it's women I want to focus on right now.

[Donald Trump]

I never liked horse face. I never liked. I never. It's just not. It's terrible. That wouldn't be the one.

[Andrea Pitzer]

There is, of course, the open question of just how deep his relationship was with convicted offender Jeffrey Epstein, who ran a sexual abuse network targeting countless girls and young women. Both men are seen enjoying themselves, Trump pointing out women dancing in front of them. But aside from that, Trump was accused in a sworn deposition of marital rape by his wife before she reached a settlement with him. The President is also on tape saying that grab him by the pussy line. I can do anything about women, which he dismissed as locker room talk. Several women came forward to say he had done just that, along with many other forms of sexual assault and unwanted physical contact.

[Anita Hill]

Donald Trump, who has about two dozen accusers at various levels of sexual abuse. He is an adjudicated sexual abuser.

[Andrea Pitzer]

A jury found Trump liable for his defamation and sexual abuse of writer Eugene Carroll.

[Anita Hill]

Some 200 plus survivors of sexual assault or abuse, including several who have accused Donald Trump of sexual abuse and misconduct, joined advocates and community leaders in posting a full page ad in the New York Times.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Together, they wrote and added to the damages that they had awarded after his subsequent additional defamation.

[Anita Hill]

A second Trump term would pose multiple dangers to our democracy, not least of which is the dangerous daily message it would send through his presence and his policies that sexual or gender based violence of any kind is normal, unavoidable, and something the American people should accept.

[Andrea Pitzer]

For those who weren't around in the last decades of the last century, it may be hard to imagine how normalized this so called locker room talk was in everyday life. Even around women. In my case, bosses who were not my peers in terms of age, income or power would regularly ask me sexual questions as if it were all light hearted banter that I had asked to engage in. They would often do it in front of other people at first and then privately. One boss was obsessed with whether and how I had lost my virginity. Another one said about my pants that he would like me to come over to his house and take my shoes off and walk all over his back while I was wearing them. A co worker at another place left an extraordinarily explicit and crude letter for me on my desk, which I turned into my female boss who happened to be on the committee handling harassment issues. It was a law firm and they took the matter very seriously. Yet it was left to me in my early 20s and in a support staff role at the firm to make the choice on whether the guy should be fired or not. Did I mention that he had a wife who was at home with their newborn child in 1991, the nation was riveted.

[Anita Hill]

My name is Anita F. Hill.

[Andrea Pitzer]

When a University of Oklahoma law professor was reluctantly thrust into the spotlight, Clarence Thomas ran into trouble today and what had seemed to be a certain confirmation.

[Anita Hill]

As a Supreme Court justice, information that.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Anita Hill had given confidentially to a.

[Anita Hill]

Senate aide had been leaked about the sexual harassment she said she had endured.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Years earlier as an employee of Thomas at the EEOC. Most women I know over 50 have several of these workplace stories and worse ones.

[Anita Hill]

I thought he respected my work and that he trusted my judgment. After approximately three months of working there, he asked me to go out socially with him. What happened next and telling the world about it are the two most difficult things. Experiences of my life.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Did I move beyond the reach of these guys, or did some workplaces really change?

[Anita Hill]

I thought that by saying no and explaining my reasons, my employer would abandon his social suggestions. However, to my regret, in the following few weeks, he continued to ask me out.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Perhaps a little bit of both. But some evidence indicates there was a societal shift.

[Anita Hill]

His conversations were very vivid. He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes. He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts involved in various sex acts.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The country saw a dramatic decline, for instance, of sexual harassment of women in the workplace between 1987 and 2016.

[Anita Hill]

Because of Anita. I knew that sexual harassment in the workplace shouldn't happen. And that sounds simple in some ways, but you could imagine I'm going into the workplace as a 21 year old, and I think that I'm not supposed to be sexualized, that I'm not supposed to be harassed, and I'm supposed to be treated with equality and fairness and justice, and that's because of Anita.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But there are some indications it's on the rise again in the last decade.

[Donald Trump]

I shouldn't say this because it's politically incorrect. She said she's beautiful, and you are beautiful. I'm not allowed to say that you. That could be the end of my political career, but I said anyway.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And my sense is that Trump is actively shifting the window of how women are seen and treated at every level of American society, rolling back the timeline of half a century in terms of public discourse, even where institutions are more resistant to his efforts to undo progress women have made in my lifetime. One of the most important things to recognize is that this treatment of women is. Is not just because Trump is retrograde and disgusting. Trump is an aspiring dictator.

[Donald Trump]

He's a dictator.

[Andrea Pitzer]

He's a dictator who has seized an unprecedented amount of power for a US President.

[Donald Trump]

So a lot of people say, you know, if that's the case, I'd rather have a dictator.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But who is still faced with tremendous popular resistance.

[Jason Stanley]

Look at this. Trump's net approval rating, second term Lows. And I got five numbers for you going across the screen. The best is the Marquette University Law School poll. 14 points underwater. Then it gets progressively worse. 17 points underwater in Fox, 17 points underwater. Maris, 22 points underwater in Ipsos. And then rounding out, we have the AP north poll. Donald Trump is 26 points underwater. My goodness gracious.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And however organic and longstanding his mistreatment of women is, it would be a mistake to see him as some solo driver of this phenomenon.

[Jason Stanley]

Joining me to discuss his books Erasing How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future and how Fascism works, the Politics of Us and Them is Professor Jason Stanley.

[Andrea Pitzer]

This kind of denigration of women and wish to control them is root and branch part of the 20th century authoritarian playbook.

[Jason Stanley]

Five major themes of fascist education, national greatness, national purity, national innocence, strict gender roles, vilification of the left, strict gender roles. Why is that so important?

[Andrea Pitzer]

And I'll remind you, it's not necessary to directly emulate fascist movements in order to repeat history, although I do see some of that going on.

[Jason Stanley]

First of all, you tell the dominant group that they're under existential threat of being replaced by people who are not in the dominant group.

[Andrea Pitzer]

But remember that if the goals are the same, the behavior and actions will tend to mimic those past models intentionally or unintentionally.

[Jason Stanley]

Madison Grant's 1916 book the Passing of the Great Race sort of lays out great replacement theory. Hitler reads that in prison and it has an enormous effect on him.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Thus we see women disempowered as political actors in daily life today and instead treated as baby machines in the tradwife movement.

[Jason Stanley]

I won't go into the weird details of the conspiracy theory that Hitler bought.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Into in Italy, in Nazi Germany. This invented social phenomenon, phenomenon that was quite similar to the tradwife phenom, involved a focus on women as responsible for children and the home, freeing men for their assigned political and military roles.

[Jason Stanley]

But the idea was he thought that, you know, the liberals, the Marxists, were backed by global Jews, by the global Jewish conspiracy to bring in non whites into the country and overwhelm the Aryan population.

[Andrea Pitzer]

This was made clear through government actions and extensive propaganda over years.

[Jason Stanley]

So if you're a white supremacist, you want the women of the dominant group to be having babies.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And all this is just the flip side of the coin of the trans exclusion and the attempts to ethnically cleanse the country of immigrants that we're seeing today.

[Jason Stanley]

The Nazis weren't. It wasn't in Germany, at least as opposed to Romania. It wasn't a Christian movement, but they got huge buy in from the Christian right, from the old right, because they were natalists. They were saying women should be in the home having babies.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The spurring of white people to have babies via natalist fixation is often reported without the context of how these movements take root and are furthered in authoritarian states.

[Jason Stanley]

And that's a very powerful coalition. White supremacists plus Christian conservatives hard to.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Beat eugenics is both the elimination of populations deemed undesirable from the gene pool and the expanded reproduction of the ethnicities and races that are deemed superior.

[Anita Hill]

4 kids under 5 years old and Malcolm and Simone Collins say they're just getting started.

[Andrea Pitzer]

They run a foundation to support pronatalism, a movement mostly populated by religious conservatives and immigration opponents. And Most of those 20th century Natalist arguments in fascist countries have roots in the writings of US Eugenicists of the era. The movement's ideas have also garnered support from a few tech titans, including Elon Musk, father of 12, who has said civilization will crumble if people don't have more kids. We as a country have a long history of this, and I would argue that no natalist argument should be considered by a journalist today without mention of the roots of these movements and who is funding them now.

[Jason Stanley]

In the past, we could rely upon, you know, simple limbic system rewards in order to procreate.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And it's not just 20th century fascist movements that we're echoing. Decades of family planning policies from China to Russia reveal how the particularly warped desire of a nation's leaders override the consideration of women as people.

[Jason Stanley]

But once you have birth control and, you know, abortions and whatnot, now you can still satisfy the limbic instinct, but not procreate.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And they show that these ideas never really went away. The words quiet piggy said by a sitting president to a working reporter. Likewise, tap into this resentment about women's real job being to stay home and and raise children. As with everything, Trump is continuing and making pre existing undercurrents in the Republican Party worse. We'll talk about all these things with Phyllis Schlafly. Would you welcome Mrs. Schlafly? As Notre Dame Professor Christina Walbrecht noted in her interview with the 19th news after rush Limbaugh's death, the Republicans supported the Equal Rights Amendment since the 1940s, but that all changed in the 1970s. We reject the anti family goals of the Equal Rights Amendment. The American women do not want abortion, they do not want lesbian privileges, and they do not want universal child fair. That changes because there's a backlash to feminism.

[Anita Hill]

She understood how to manipulate the media. And the idea of framing herself as a wronged housewife who'd kind of been flushed out of the kitchen where she really wanted to be, was absolutely brilliant.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So many gains for women have happened in my lifetime. When my mother got divorced in the 1970s, it was just before women could get credit cards and loans in their own name, and just after no fault divorce became widespread. Title IX in sports shifted a lot as well.

[Anita Hill]

You might think Title 9 is this.

[Andrea Pitzer]

1970S law about women's and girls access to sport, but it is about so much more and in my opinion, played a key role in girls being understood as competent, skilled, and fully human. It is about sexual violence. It's about transgender rights. It's a piece of legislation that affects children, parents, professors, coaches, and it has transformed the world that we live in today. These advances arrived institutionally in the 1970s, but were met with a counter force by the evangelical movement in the United States in that same decade. And going forward, we're currently seeing attempts to roll back all those gains. Across the country. The Trump administration attempted to gut Title nine, but was met with massive opposition. That seems to have stemmed their attack. For now, the nationwide right to abortion has already been gutted. That Fight was a 50 year project in the US by the religious right to gain power. After black Americans gained electoral protections, segregation began to crumble, and racial animus ceased to be as effective at garnering votes as it once was. More recently, some in government have questioned women's right to vote. Others in the manosphere are bemoaning women's rights to divorce their husband. While this kind of talk has been around since long before Trump, it's now amplified by loud voices on big platforms.

[Jason Stanley]

Hi, I'm your Republican Congressman.

[Anita Hill]

It's your body, my choice.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And the President has been doing what he can.

[Donald Trump]

Good job.

[Anita Hill]

Okay, thank you.

[Donald Trump]

Thank you.

[Andrea Pitzer]

To make these visions real, between February and July, hundreds of thousands of black women were removed from the workforce at disproportionate rates.

[Jason Stanley]

Many economists point to Trump's massive cuts to the federal workforce as the driving factor. This is interesting. Black women alone make up over 12% of federal employees. That's nearly double their share of the labor force overall.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth regularly denigrates women's combat readiness and has removed or blocked women from key leadership positions in the military.

[Anita Hill]

Last week, Hegseth reposted a video about a Christian nationalist church that included various pastors saying women should no longer be allowed to vote.

[Andrea Pitzer]

The Trump administration furthered its denigrating messaging on women by reportedly intervening in Andrew Tate's prosecution in Romania. Tell me about what you discovered regarding the Tate brothers. Where Tate and his brother were under house arrest as they were being investigated for sex trafficking and other crimes.

[Jason Stanley]

They come into Fort Lauderdale. CBP seizes their electronic devices. We're talking phones and laptops. And HSI Homeland Security Investigations begins investigating the contents.

[Andrea Pitzer]

And we recently learned that the White House interfered directly with the attempts by law enforcement in the US to seize the brothers phones when they flew to this country.

[Jason Stanley]

A White House official reaches out to senior DHS officials, chides them for using the agency's time and resources on this issue, and asks them to to return the devices back to the Tates.

[Andrea Pitzer]

So it's a feedback loop between the President of the United States and the worst voices on the Internet.

[Jason Stanley]

It's indisputable that the diversion of federal agents to immigration enforcement, both at the FBI and dhs, has taken investigators off of child predator cases.

[Andrea Pitzer]

All these nonsensical arguments about child rearing and women and relationships are not really about families and children at all. They're about controlling women and women. Choosing not to bear children or being unable to makes women less vulnerable to those who would like to control them.

[Jason Stanley]

I'm just a girl standing in front of the world asking for a president.

[Anita Hill]

Who isn't a rapist.

[Jason Stanley]

Request denied.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Indulgence of this worldview shows up in a variety of places in opinion pieces and whole corners of YouTube. The New York Times opinion page recently asked whether women were ruining the workplace. The anger over women refusing to date reactionary white men is wild. The underlying idea seems to be that we have to give these guys power or else they will commit harm to get it. While I would say it's a good idea to give every kind of person paths to engage politically and culturally in productive ways, there is no reason to pretend that what Tate and even those making softer arguments about accommodating grim misogyny are doing anything but trying to extort status and power through violence or the threat of it. They are fueling men to rage. And make no mistake, the attack on trans folks is part of this assault on women. It's trans women on whom the paranoia about transness focuses most.

[Anita Hill]

Does a trans ban give more power to women athletes or less? Or does it give power to people over them to check their bodies?

[Andrea Pitzer]

Trans women who are portrayed as even a danger to other women. But the transvestigators who believe they can reliably parse others identities by relentless visual examination are just the next step in Rush Limbaugh's decades of feminazi comments and denigrating the appearance of women on the left as undesirable and not real women.

[Anita Hill]

You are giving power over female athletes to men who check their vagina and if you think anything other than that will happen, you just don't want to know the truth.

[Andrea Pitzer]

We see the rigidness of gender in the Trump administration with Caroline Levitt in her dresses and cross.

[Anita Hill]

What did the President mean when he called reporter piggy look? The President is very frank and honest.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Or in its middle aged corollary form with the plastic surgery concubine look that appears to be mandatory for billionaire wives and heads of agencies alike. These are the people who would deny medical care to trans people while gender confirming surgeries become more and more de rigueur for leading Trump supporters. Meanwhile, the actual treatment of the most vulnerable women worsens. NBC News just announced the horrific treatment of pregnant women in U.S. jails. She was in custody for five days. When did you realize that she was pregnant? During the autopsy report. Meanwhile, unauthorized surgeries, including forced hysterectomies of immigrant women in detention, have been reported by whistleblowers for years. It's easy to think of all these as separate actions by nasty human beings, but I wanted to talk about this today and underline that this is what authoritarian countries do. Their treatment of women is a sign of their larger intentions, and the Trump administration is making its intentions clear. On a small, everyday level, you can support women when they are targeted this way. If someone, anyone, were to say anything in the universe of Quiet Piggy, call them on it. If women are regularly talked over in meetings at your workplace, call attention to it or champion their good ideas directly if they are discussed behind their backs, refuse to engage in it. If you're a woman, don't sit silent if you see this kind of behavior just because you might be exempt from it for now. As someone once asked on social media, I wish I could remember who it was. Ask yourself if you're always responding to women by calling their opinions or or their statements into doubt, you might be doing it and not even realizing it. Support reporting at the intersection of gender and politics, like 19th news, which I quoted earlier in this episode, or solo independent women journalists who are doing an incredible job breaking news about this administration. People like Marissa Kabas, who astounds me every week with the shoe leather reporting that she does on vital issues closer to home. Abortion funds and diaper banks can help women keep their sanity as well as control of their own lives. If you're a woman, see what you can run for in your community, or find a woman that you would like to run for something. See what kind of mutual aid you can contribute on the ground that treats all women as the ultimate authority in their own lives, irrespective of what anyone else might say or do. And that's it. And Happy Thanksgiving. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what?

[Anita Hill]

Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this mess. To support this podcast, please become a.

[Andrea Pitzer]

Paid subscriber at andreapitzer. Com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.