Plumber Occupied Government feat. Abigail Thorn

Summary

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TRASHFUTURE: "Plumber Occupied Government" feat. Abigail Thorn

Date: May 27, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of Trashfuture—hosted by Sam, Nova, Hussain, and featuring guest Abigail Thorn (of PhilosophyTube)—dives deep into the UK's latest anti-trans policy environment, the farcical and reactionary nature of local governance (with a focus on Doncaster), the state of the British left, and the chilling implications of new Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) guidance. Amid sharp satire, the panel highlights how absurdity and cruelty intersect in British politics—often via bathrooms, billionaires, and bureaucracy—while offering catharsis, critique, and a call to solidarity.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Abby’s Career & Political State of Play

• Abigail celebrates career wins (PhilosophyTube episodes to be preserved in the BFI, new role in House of the Dragon S3), but notes, “Politically speaking… things are not going great. Right. They wheel me out like Hannibal Lecto when shit’s fucked.” (00:35, Abigail)
• Panel jokes about the 'median skewer' of trans employment success embodied in Abby, cynically highlighting the broader reality for trans people in Britain.

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Local Politics Farce: Doncaster, Reform Party, and UFOs

Reform Party’s Doncaster Councillor:

• Doncaster's Reform councillor Kieran Lay pushed for a UFO (UAP) oversight committee at a council meeting because of alleged UFO sightings over his ward.
• The group lampoons this as symptomatic of "generalized institutional distrust" hoovered up into reactionary programs (03:33, Sam & Nova).
• Memorable Quote:
  "If you're a single issue voter and the issue is which bathroom do the aliens use, this is your guy." (03:21, Nova)

Airport Grift & Governance:

• The closed Doncaster Sheffield Airport becomes a metaphor for UK governance, grift, and the absurd parochial focus of reformers.
  • "Small airport stuff is a fantastic grift." (06:30, Nova)
• Council controversies: Some councillors tried to launch a private company to profit from managing the airport they were supposedly overseeing.
• The narrative loops in alien conspiracy as a stand-in for opaque council practices, linked satirically to ideas like secret 'woke' cabals and "budget of pride flags."

Commentary on Political Paranoia:

• The left's exasperation at the normalization of "there’s something going on," whether about migrants or mythical aliens, and how this paranoia gets weaponized (08:28, Nova: "Gay Wef. Aliens.").
• Absurd escalation: Doncaster council as either heroic resistance (XCOM-style) or collaborator government when the aliens land. (10:37, Nova)

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National Disgrace: Andy Burnham, Labour, and EHRC Guidance

Burnham’s Political Opportunism:

• Andy Burnham, once seen as pro-trans, pivots to endorse implementing anti-trans EHRC guidance, echoing Keir Starmer.
• Quote:
  "I think the time has come to take the Supreme Court ruling and the guidance and implement it… in a way that protects those spaces but does not marginalize already marginalized communities. That’s my view." (15:08, Sam quoting Burnham)
  • Met with withering critique: “It’s like saying we’re going to apply Jim Crow, but in a non racist way.” (15:36, Sam/Abigail)

Abby on Guidance & Segregation:

• "The EHRC guidance is calling for the public segregation of a minority. It's deeply authoritarian and deeply anti-democratic... The argument ends when we have equal rights to you and the people who've taken our rights from us are punished." (15:58, Abigail)
• The EHRC's actions and the broader British "trans debate" are described as a monologue of cis people imposing on trans people, not a conversation.
  • "What cis people call the 'trans debate' has been for years cis people lying to each other." (20:40, Abby)

Makerfield Candidate Farce:

• The opponent (Rob Kenyon) positioned as the "feminist" or "anti-trans" candidate is revealed to have written a peculiar self-published Kindle novel (Blood Waltz, about accidental Nazi cosplay time travel romance) and openly sexist tweets.
• The segment satirizes the "biological reality" posturing and the incoherence of right wing feminist branding (22:07–23:54).

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Dismantling the New EHRC Guidance

The “Bathroom Discourse” as Political Weapon

• Nova reflects: “What this is basically about is about bathroom. And everything else is kind of downstream of that.” (27:39, Nova)
• The panel contrasts Britain’s obsession with gendered toilets to practical issues like crumbling public toilets, arguing the real crisis is neglect, not who uses which door (31:46, Hussain).
  • "I wish that like there was some, even like a small percentage of the effort...to actually stop closing public toilets, but also make them better." (30:55, Hussain)
• Memorable Rant:
  "This is a blueprint...to just push out other minorities from public spaces." (33:28, Hussain)

Intersectionality & Power

• The campaign is not about women’s safety or dignity but about control, exclusion, and defining who is 'deserving' of public space.
  • “If my presence is an affront to somebody’s dignity, that person needs to get over themselves… That is a bigoted attitude. They should fix themselves...” (35:17, Abby)

Dismantling Institutions, Rule by Billionaire

• The team indicts the EHRC, Supreme Court, and press as having been "couped"—hijacked by billionaire-funded, elite-driven, reactionary movements.
  • "This is an auto golpe… a self-coup...where you fundamentally change the rules of how it works so that you become cemented in power." (41:17, Sam)
• “Let me just say [gender criticals] absolutely do [have animus against trans people].” (42:16, Abby)

Legal Hopes and Pessimism

• There is faint hope for European courts to eventually overturn UK anti-trans law, but this is neither certain nor timely.
  • “...taking anything to the European Court of Human Rights takes about 25 years… [and] Britain could leave the Council of Europe.” (43:19, Nova)
• The only real solution: new primary legislation to restore and extend rights.

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Call to Action & Community Solidarity

What Next?

• The best acts: trans people to exist and live, cis allies to campaign and protest, especially through unions (44:50–46:17).
• Organizational solidarity: If an institution would have to exclude trans people to comply, better to dissolve it.
• Optimistic Note:
  "As long as there are trans people alive and existing… that's going to change the cultural thing... The best thing you can do as a trans person is to continue to exist and live." (44:50, Nova)

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The Plumber Occupied Government & Satirical Close

Plumber Keynesianism

• New bathroom segregation mandates would mean a billion-pound windfall for plumbers; “It’s some kind of plumber-occupied government.” (47:54, Nova)
• “Toilet Keynesianism” becomes a running joke: This is the one form of public investment Britain will approve (51:33).
• "Fight the real enemy. It's been plumbers all along." (48:52, Nova)

Final Thoughts on Absurdity

• Britain as a "bathroom island" in Europe, poised to become a global laughingstock (53:08–53:27).
• “Our history of LGBT rights is doing them kicking and screaming. It’s like, hello, and welcome to the country that killed Alan Turing.” (53:39, Nova)

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Notable Quotes

• Abby: “The EHRC guidance is calling for the public segregation of a minority. It’s deeply authoritarian and deeply anti-democratic.” (15:58)
• Sam: “It’s like saying we’re going to apply Jim Crow, but in a non racist way.” (15:35)
• Nova: “What this is basically about is about bathroom. And everything else is kind of downstream of that.” (27:39)
• Hussain: “This is a blueprint...to just push out other minorities from public spaces.” (33:28)
• Abby: “If my presence is an affront to somebody’s dignity, that person needs to get over themselves. That is their problem.” (35:17)
• Nova: "This is toilet Keynesianism. ...the single thing that keeps Britain out of the Great Recession is we will be too busy installing toilets." (51:33)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:35 – Abby’s career highlights & state of UK politics
• 02:21–05:59 – Doncaster/reform party UFO council parody
• 12:18–17:00 – Burnham's capitulation and the UK’s anti-trans policy shift
• 27:30–34:14 – Breaking down the bathroom guidance, commodification of exclusion
• 35:17–37:16 – “Safety and dignity” rhetoric, historical echoes, intersectionality
• 39:25–41:17 – Personal defiance and elite-driven imposition
• 41:53–43:19 – Legislative/European Court possibilities and institutional rot
• 44:50–46:59 – Community solidarity & call to action
• 47:54–49:36 – "Plumber Keynesianism" joke, practical impacts of the guidance
• 53:08–54:25 – Britain as international laughingstock; irrepressible trans existence
• 54:41–55:12 – Abby promotes House of the Dragon S3

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Memorable Moment

Abigail, on filming a key TV scene just after legal news broke:
“No jokes. One of the pivotal scenes was filmed two minutes after the Schemetti decision came down. I was like, ah, no acting required.” (55:17, Abigail)

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Conclusion

The episode closes with the panel affirming dignity, resilience, and community, even in the face of institutionalized absurdity and cruelty. Abby plugs her upcoming role ("House of the Dragon" S3), humorously positioning it as vicarious vengeance, while the hosts urge listeners to stay angry, active, and in solidarity: “The best thing you can do as a trans person is continue to exist and to live.”

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Transcript

[Sam]

Hello, everybody. Welcome to this free episode of tf. Bit late because it was a bank holiday in the uk.

[Abby Thorne]

It's the free one.

[Sam]

It's the free one. And that sound means we got Abby Thorne all the way from across a continent and an ocean. Joining me, Nova and Hussain, who'll be joining in a second. Abby, how is it going?

[Abby Thorne]

It's going mixed, I'd say, career wise. Oh, however, things are going great. Career wise. Things are going great for your girl. Really pleased. Just found out some episodes of PhilosophyTube are going to be preserved in the British Film Institute's National Archive of importance, which fucking rocks. All sorts of awesome career things happening. House of The Dragon Season 3 about to drop too. Politically speaking. Well, listeners, you're hearing from me on tf. So that means that politically speaking, things are not going great. Right. They wheel me out like Hannibal Lecto and shit's fucked.

[Sam]

So what apparently we have decided to do is we have decided to say okay, on average, transgender people are going to be doing okay. We've concentrated a lot of that in the acting career of Abby Thorne.

[Nova]

Yeah, pretty much Spiders Abigail. You know, it's like the average trans woman has zero jobs, but employment, Abigail,

[Sam]

they call her Abby, the median skewer. So, no, we're go. We're going to talk a little bit about the. You know, I just. Can I just say, I. After so many decades of ambiguity and chaos and just like fumbling with the dictionary, I'm so glad that there's clarity.

[Nova]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Sam]

Some much needed clarity.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah. As mud.

[Sam]

Yeah. Oh, of course. Hey, some mud is quite clear, according to the ehrc. However, before we get to that, there is something I need to discuss and that is the aliens. So. Yeah, well, so remember, remember. Yeah, well, maybe clarity for them too. I think we're going to figure out

[Nova]

which bathrooms they should use.

[Sam]

We're going to have to build fourth bath. It's. No, you know what it is? Fourth bathrooms. The entire. It's every single service in this country just converted into bathrooms. And that's all you can do.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah. Men, women, freaks, tentacles. The men in black will enforce it. They're going to be outside the fucking bathrooms with neuralyzers.

[Sam]

So basically, remember, we knew when reform got into a bunch of councils, we would start meeting some of their guys.

[Nova]

We predicted this. They're freaks.

[Sam]

And there are different kinds of reform guys, capital G. And these are some like the people who want to get in there and see where all the money is going who are like, well, the ones we're sure, there's some.

[Nova]

My favorite being the Reform councillor, newly elected, who got up in the council chamber and was like, none of us know what an amendment is or what like a proposition or a motion is or how to do anything help. Which is fair enough to be honest for an outsider party, but kind of funny. This guy, on the other hand, blows that out of the water.

[Sam]

Yeah, this guy is. Look, I don't want to say he rocks because I'm going to be honest, I don't know much else about him.

[Nova]

However, he rocks on one thing.

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Nova]

If you're a single issue voter and the issue is which bathroom do the aliens use, this is your guy.

[Abby Thorne]

These fucking Venusians coming down here.

[Sam]

Because the thing is, right, we know that Reform Hoovers up this random grab bag of generalized institutional distrust, whether experts lying secret woke cabals running the BBC, the budget of pride flags. And they forged this into a reactionary program.

[Nova]

Yeah. And it's people who. People who like, have these grievances because they don't understand that, you know, we need migration in this country. We just flatly do. And if you cut off access to EU migration, it's got to come from somewhere like Venus.

[Sam]

So Reform UK's Kieran Lay, who was actually elected last year, but just burst onto the scene this year in Doncaster,

[Nova]

just through the sternum of another Reform council,

[Sam]

told a City of Doncaster council meeting an overview and safety committee for unidentified aerial phenomena, UAPs. Which I guess is like the Woke way we're calling UFOs now.

[Nova]

Everything's changing these days, isn't it?

[Sam]

You can't say anything anymore. I call them UFOs.

[Abby Thorne]

UAP. Wet ass, pussy.

[Sam]

That's right, yes. Should be established for Doncaster Sheffield Airport, as he had seen UAP activity over his own ward this weekend.

[Nova]

Well, I'm glad that we're getting to a place where sort of anomalous aerial phenomena or whatever can be identified and tracked by the really serious actors globally, like Doncaster and Sheffield Airport. That's the only DSA I support, I'll tell you that.

[Sam]

What? The DSA Terminal 1 Caucus.

[Nova]

Do you think Doncaster Sheffield Airport has multiple terminals?

[Sam]

No, actually, sorry, yeah, the Terminal 2 exploratory caucus.

[Nova]

An optimistically named Terminal 1. You know, Terminal 1, terminals 2 through infinity, TBD.

[Sam]

It's bathrooms, chef. Doncaster Sheffield Airport terminals. Every building, one of those two things. So the thing is because the airport closed in 2022.

[Nova]

No. What? Probably Must have been the fucking Venusians.

[Sam]

Yeah, well, the council's trying to reopen it and then it turned and the Thing is, what always runs through my head about this is that the reform guy who's like, well, we got to talk about the UFO. Sorry, excuse me, UAPs can't say anything anymore. We got to talk about the OAPs flying above the airport, sick of the

[Nova]

Venusians, triple lock on their pensions. Fucking economy.

[Sam]

And I bet they have access to council flats as soon as they land.

[Abby Thorne]

Just imagining this reform council, like, coming into the next council meeting in, like, a skin suit made, like sugar water.

[Sam]

Honestly, it's always the same story, isn't it? It's like, oh, you're so bigoted against aliens and it turns out actually you're really into sugar water. We have the recipe for sugar water. Why do we need the aliens here? Still like this thing in Doncaster Sheffield has been mired in controvers. A bunch of councillors got, like, suspended and had to step down because it turned out they were starting a company called Doncaster Sheffield Airport Services Ltd. That was supposed to deal with the airport that they were overseeing. They're just like, oh, can we start something to funnel money into our pockets?

[Nova]

Small, small airport stuff is a fantastic grift. I think often of the, like, Spanish exurb of Madrid that built a massive airport on the ground so they could kind of steal traffic from Madrid, forgot to build a rail link to got, you know, six months of no flights and then closed again. So, yeah, Doncaster and Sheffield in a sort of similar space, I would suggest, where there's bigger airports close enough to make it completely impractical. But it's this optimistic idea. And you know what, there's a couple of reasons why it could have closed. One is, of course, the business case not being there and a kind of general contraction in the economy. But the other is the aliens.

[Sam]

And I just think it's good that we're not getting Railroad it into one explanation.

[Nova]

No, absolutely.

[Sam]

The thing, alien sightings are as old as anything. We just used to call them angel sightings or, like, armies charging through the sky or dragons or whatever. Yeah.

[Nova]

And they were fucking with Doncaster Airport specifically even then.

[Sam]

Yeah. You could never fly out of doncaster in the 1600s for a lot of other reasons. But I think it's like this is what reform was designed to appeal to.

[Nova]

Thinking about a beautiful piece of data visualization you could do that is number of flights leaving from Doncaster per year on, like, a geo. On, like, a geological time scale.

[Sam]

Yeah, it was. In fact, there was a small period in the Anthropozoic.

[Nova]

You get like a pterodactyl bump and Then nothing. And then another bump when they open it and then it's just back to zero again.

[Sam]

Yeah. A lot of flights landing, though, from the aliens from Venus. A lot of these guys. Like, the whole point of Kieran Lay is that he's sure there's something going on, that the money's not going where it's supposed to be, that something. But between, like, Stonewall and Davos is, like, taking all the council tax and that's why, like, his kids can't go to school.

[Nova]

Gay Wef. Aliens.

[Sam]

That's right.

[Nova]

Because, I mean, fair enough. Right. Because as we've seen, not only is a lot of local government money being sort of channeled into various scams and bullshit, but, like, it's not weird to look at the machine of governance in this country and be like, the outcomes here are perverse. This isn't working the way it should do. It's not even weird to be suspicious about why that's happening. It is weird to go because Doncaster Council is doing Men in Black.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah. Yeah. Klaatu Schwab is behind. There's, like, actually a guy who's just like a tiny guy inside another guy's head. He's just, like, sucking up all the money from the council.

[Sam]

The thing is, it's like Dolge. Like the Department of Local Government Efficiency. Doge was the same thing, which is, oh, there's something going on here. We just have to get to the bottom of it. And it's just what's happened is Kieran Lay is not directed by a political program. And this is what happens when a reform guy is not, like, corralled with the rest of. And forged into a unit. He starts going off about UFOs. It is actually the same impulse that all of this is based on.

[Nova]

It's so cool how everyone is insane now.

[Sam]

Yeah. He said, of course, well, that a UAP committee could help coordinate with authorities across Yorkshire on aerospace monitoring and help restore some public confidence in the airport. Saying NASA has recommended that local authorities.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah, that really restores my confidence in the running of local services. It's like, well, are they dealing with the threat from Venus, first of all? What about all these fucking cylinders touching down, man?

[Nova]

Well, if they've got a cylinder, at least we know which bathroom they should use.

[Sam]

They don't even experience time like a proper British person. They experience it all in circles. It's not right.

[Nova]

Abbott is male socialization process.

[Abby Thorne]

Oh, God. Well, if he's male socialization processed, then he's actually protected underneath the generation. If he's proposing to undergo it.

[Sam]

So why would Doncaster not want to lead the way in Yorkshire and the Humber on this issue?

[Nova]

Yeah, everyone else in Yorkshire and the Humber is fucking up. Not guarding against the alien threat.

[Sam]

They're leaving a lot of UFO money on the table.

[Abby Thorne]

The local airport terminal has a departures and an arrival section.

[Nova]

If it comes to this, right, and, you know, humanity is conquered, we're all slaving in the salt mines for our sort of like, many gendered alien overlords. I have faith that Doncaster Council can be a nexus of resistance. You know, I'm glad that if someone is going XCOM 2, it's Doncaster.

[Abby Thorne]

It's like the premise of a Nick Frost, Simon Peg Lost movie. It's like, Doncaster Council has to oppose the alien threat.

[Sam]

Or it could be Doncaster 2. Either could be like the commanding body from, like, XCOM, or Doncaster Council could be like the collaborator regime, because that's just the first government the aliens discuss. Like, neat.

[Nova]

Take us to your leader. And it's like, okay, who's the council leader of Doncaster?

[Sam]

Yeah, it's just reform, guys. It's Kieran Lays. Like I told you. He later then said when people started making fun of him, he was like, I was just joking. Like, I don't think you were. I wanted to lighten the mood slightly, but again, he said he saw me.

[Nova]

He has served to do that for this episode.

[Sam]

Correct. Thank you, Kieran. Lei. The actual thing is right there. Right there is something they're not telling you about the airport. But it's not UFOs, it's just the things they're not telling you is that they're having trouble building it because the finance isn't there, because none of the fucking economy's working.

[Nova]

It was kind of a dumb idea to build an airport serving Doncaster and Sheffield. Yeah.

[Sam]

Could have done trains, but now with the addition of Hussein. Huh?

[Hussain]

Yeah. I arrived in the big cylinder. Then I had to take a train from Doncaster. And actually the train from Doncaster was the most difficult part of the journey.

[Sam]

Yeah, that tracks actually Venus to Earth. Pretty seamless.

[Nova]

Getting a bunch of emails from the train line being like, looks like you're going to Venus, babes.

[Sam]

I want to move on to another locality, which is, of course, Makerfield. Remember how we said Burnham wasn't the guy and then November said, by the time this episode is released, he'll probably have flipped on gender issues. Hey, November, what happened?

[Nova]

Oh, before the episode came out, he flipped. He pushed us in front of a Not publicly owned, but publicly operated bus and. And immediately went, well, the important thing now is that we've got to implement the Supreme Court ruling and the EHRC guidance, you know, next segment. And to be, you know, we've got to stop looking backwards. We've got to sort of, like, learn how to get along with each other in the same way as his sort of, like, change of tone on Brexit has been, which, yeah, I would prefer us to rejoin the European Union, but we've got to stop looking backwards and fighting each other. And whether or not you believe that this is sort of him talking to his constituency, given that the polling is very bad at the moment or not, it is absolutely shameless.

[Sam]

Yeah. And I mean, the thing about Burnham is, as you say, as we could extrapolate from that, is he's a weathervane, right? But he's been a weathervane for his locality. And what he's trying. What we're thinking is that a weathervane in one place, if we move it to a place the winds are blowing differently, we'll stay pointing the way it was originally pointing. Because what's happened is the Manchester weathervane is moving up to national political ambitions, and wouldn't you know it, the winds are blowing differently. And so he now is adopting every position Keir Starmer has. Pretty cool.

[Hussain]

Well, I was gonna say it feels like there's a sort of venom situation, but the symbiote is Keir Starmer.

[Nova]

What's really funny about this is, do you need to put them in a third space, Andy? What's really funny about this

[Abby Thorne]

is that

[Nova]

he's actually losing popularity as he tries to tack to, you know, the sort of the wind. Right. And it's not like the sort of internal logic of that of, like, I should take more popular positions makes him less popular because people correctly view him as being insincere.

[Sam]

Almost as though he's following the wrong wind, you fucking idiot.

[Nova]

Maybe. And I'm not going to say necessarily that he would do a ton better in Makerfield if he got out there and he was like, we should rejoin the EU tomorrow. And also, everyone has to be transgender now. But I think it gives you the sort of measure of the man. I think everyone sort of has a sense of that now, which is, this is. This is not a person. Right. This is a sort of, like, functionally, a large language model almost. This is. This is a collection of polls with, like, a guy attached.

[Sam]

I have the quote here. In fact, he said the full quote, which you've referenced Nova. I think the time has come to take the Supreme Court ruling and the guidance and implement it.

[Abby Thorne]

It.

[Sam]

Good luck doing that based on when we talk about the guidance. Yeah, but to do it in a way that protects those spaces but does not marginalize already marginalized communities. That's my view. What view is that?

[Nova]

In terms of the kind of like, level of detachment from reality that we're talking about here. This is a little bit like saying, I think the time has come to take Doncaster council's view on UFOs and implement it, but do it in a way that's sensitive to not being completely fucking insane.

[Sam]

Yeah. It's like we should build quite a bit of UFO defenses around Doncaster Sheffield Airport, but no more than are warranted by the genuine threat posed by UFOs right now. This is a perfectly consistent position because, I mean, Abby, this is something you pointed out to me. This was prompting you to almost. This is because it's a segregationist document. It's like saying we're going to apply Jim Crow, but in a non racist way.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah, that's one of the strangest things. Well, strange to be on the receiving end of about this EHRC guidance is that it is calling for the public segregation of a minority. It's deeply authoritarian and deeply anti democratic. But to have someone like Burnham turn around and say, oh, we need to do that fairly and compassionately, it's like, first of all, that's impossible. And second of all, fuck you. Actually, I'm reading his quotes here and he says we all need to get on. We need to stop arguing with this. No, actually the argument ends when we have equal rights to you and the people who've taken our rights from us are punished. It does not end until that point, I'm afraid.

[Sam]

And the last person I heard articulate that kind of segregationist system in the way Andy Burnham has. Fucking Hendrik Vorwer.

[Nova]

It's a deep cut. Was he like a Manchester guy as well?

[Sam]

He's the main architect of apartheid who was like the Bantu stands that we're creating. It's actually about us developing in our own ways and, you know, and we have different needs and. Oh, but we're doing this in a very. We're actually quite egalitarian because we're all just apart.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah, it's Hendrik Voord, not Hendrik backward.

[Nova]

I actually prefer to go into the Venetian bathroom.

[Abby Thorne]

Venetian.

[Nova]

Venetian. Well, the Venetian bathroom is like. It closes.

[Abby Thorne]

It's lovely, actually. Yeah.

[Sam]

We could say as promoters of trans rights, that if we were to Seize the sort of levers of power in this country. We would say, yes, different bathrooms for all trans people. But they're all the Venetian bathroom, and they're very nice.

[Nova]

I feel like the Venetian bathroom is more like a sort of like, hole over a canal. I don't know that it's necessarily better.

[Sam]

The bathroom from the Cipriani. Yes.

[Nova]

Chasing into a gondola like the Dave Matthews Band tour bus.

[Abby Thorne]

I think this quote from Burnham is also a pretty sure sign that he does. He doesn't understand the issues at play here. The fact that he's talking about this as if it's normal guidance that has come down in a normal way from a normal government. It's like, no, this has been a campaign by right wing billionaires, one in particular, to undermine democracy in the uk. And the fact that he's talking about this as something that we all just kind of have to deal with is a sign that he doesn't understand the issues. I think he's not a serious person living in reality. No, in my opinion, he would be

[Sam]

a serious person living in reality if he was not trying to also appear progressive. You know what I mean? Where he's like, no, you would understand that if you're trying to mask sort of, you know, hateful authoritarianism as much as possible. That's what you would do for, like, if you were running for the Tories. But if you're trying to be like, I'm the progressive labor candidate, unlike Starmer, you are not living in reality if you think that you can just gloss this verbally.

[Nova]

Yeah. In particular, what you're looking at is a sort of transphobic movement that is so dedicated to the elimination of trans people from public life that all of this kind of like, we've got to turn the temperature down stuff just becomes a nonsense. Right. Because it's always intended to be like, well, we want, you know, politeness. We want to, like, talk to each other and understand each other. But when one side is saying, your existence is a huge problem for a sane society, we want you to detransition or die, basically, or, you know, maybe have some kind of, you know, pitiful, you know, like, closeted crossy experience. That's not a problem of tone anymore, not that it ever was. But that's not something that you can then go, this is something where we just need a little bit more humanity here, a little bit of compromise. Because there is no compromising with that. The compromise to you should die or detransition is, no, I'm not going To

[Abby Thorne]

I reflected on this a while ago when Keir Starmer said something like, we need to take the heat out of a conversation. And those sentiments are often repeated. And it's like, okay, so nobody voted for this. This was not in Labour's manifesto. Parliament will not have any chance to scrutinise or vote on this new guidance. The Supreme Court refused to hear from any trans people during the case. The case funded by a billionaire. I think to date, no British court has taken up the question of whether this is compatible with Britain's human rights obligations, which it's not. The EHRC has ignored that question too. Bridget Phillipson appointed the new head of the EHRC against the Select Committee's recommendations. The press are pretty much going along with this or saying it should go even further. And of course, every single member of every single one of these institutions is CIS and always has been. And so when people like Salma say we need to take the heat out of the conversation, it's like, what conversation do you imagine has been taking place? There's been no conversation. There's been CIS people telling us what we have to do. To which the answer is not, oh, we're all just going to get on and like, hold hands and be kind to each other. The answer is fuck you.

[Sam]

Actually, yeah, it's because, as you say, right, it's a monologue.

[Abby Thorne]

What CIS people call the quote unquote trans debate has been for years. CIS people lying to each other. That's all it's ever been.

[Sam]

And I mean, if you want to talk about more lying. Right. Just a final thing on Makerfield before we get to the new guidance, sort of in detail, is that Burnham, for being Pro Trans in 2019, you know, some years ago, is now being described as the anti woman candidate in Makerfield by like the express and stuff. When his opponent. I know, look, it's just baffling to see this in front of you. It makes you feel like you're going crazy.

[Nova]

Yeah. I mean, just at this point, out of spite. Thank you, Andy, for your trans allyship. Thank you for helping crowdfund my hormones. I really appreciate it. Thanks for everything you do, really. We're just happy to have you as an ally.

[Sam]

So his opponent, who's being called now like the feminist vote in Makerfield, was connected to a Twitter account that once posted. I'm very sexist. I'm sorry, but I am. Women can't ref drive or give direction.

[Nova]

Yeah, but that guy, that guy is in tune with like biological reality and all of those things. Are statements of biological reality. If you're a feminist, yes. Right.

[Sam]

Mitochondrial level, I guess.

[Nova]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Sam]

It's very funny that Rob Kenyon, the opponent is. He's just a Twitter like thread guy who will post like, I love sexism. In Another post for 2019, the account criticized the use of women as pundits on Sky Sports, saying the women on the panel aren't up to the job and only there to tick a box.

[Nova]

It's brutal the stuff that this guy's been through in his life, you know, like, those are serious problems to have to contend with.

[Sam]

But what I think is most interesting that's been uncovered by some of the stuff about this guy, which I know, I know it's important that we get to the guidance and we talk about

[Nova]

it, but I really don't want it.

[Sam]

It's also important that we talk about the book written by Rob Kenyon.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Get rid of the fucking women from Venus.

[Sam]

Yeah, well, they're all in Doncaster.

[Nova]

Men are from Mars, Women are from Doncaster.

[Abby Thorne]

Doncaster.

[Sam]

This is a book written by. Hey, if he's an MP Nish, we're ready when you are. But this is a book written by Rob Kenyon, the Blood Waltz.

[Nova]

I'm sorry, uh huh.

[Sam]

It's available on Kindle for 99 cents.

[Nova]

I would hate to have a bloodworts. I feel like it'd mostly be a lot of like sploshing, you know, like you're just like, you know, it's like singing in the rain.

[Abby Thorne]

This is the guy who's being positioned as the alternative to Burnham and Megaville. This is the feminist candidate. He's written.

[Nova]

The feminist reform candidate is the Bloodworlds.

[Sam]

Also written the Blood Waltz. British soldier Bradley Clyde has accidentally time traveled back to northern France in 1940.

[Hussain]

Happened to my buddy Eric.

[Sam]

Yeah, sort of Wiping angels got him

[Nova]

approaching, approaching the Wehrmacht, being like, thank God, at least you guys know what a woman is.

[Sam]

British soldier Bradley Clyde is accidentally time traveled back to northern France in 1940 just as the Dunkirk evacuation is happening. After discovering a device in a dormant Nazi bunker in the German countryside. A dormant Nazi bunker. One that's no longer admitted.

[Nova]

Sleep mode.

[Sam]

In an attempt to survive, he tries his best to disguise himself as German officer. He falls in love.

[Nova]

Sorry, sorry. This guy has written a book in which his protagonist is like having to go undercover as announcing.

[Sam]

It's crazy, you know? While trying to find World War II memorabilia in Northern France.

[Nova]

No, you don't understand. For plot reasons, I have to wear this Indiana Jones wore it.

[Hussain]

I was gonna say it's a very creative excuse. Like if you ever get caught with like a swastika or something, it's to be like. No, I actually, I time trapped research from my novel.

[Sam]

He falls in love with a high ranking Gestapo investigator's wife, vows to kill the man who killed his best friend. So I guess he gets a best friend in 1940. Like he travels back in time, makes a best friend, falls in love and teams up with a secret agent trying to help the Allied war effort. Despite his good intentions, things take a dramatic turn for the worst. Plans thrip through his fingers as he desperately tries to hold things together and remain in control.

[Nova]

Yeah, I love, I love Auslander do

[Sam]

souse the Blood Welch is an epic journey of one man's attempt to readjust an alternate future. Wrestling with his moral compass, lust and ego, all while practicing the art of self preservation. Rob Kenyon, you will have your book read on this podcast one day.

[Nova]

Magical. Magical.

[Abby Thorne]

I wish this guy had stuck to writing this if. I wish he'd found every success and not tried to enter politics. Because of course, when have successful British authors ever influenced politics to the far

[Nova]

right as an author history enjoyer. You know what? Fuck it. I'll read this. I'll read this for the episodes.

[Sam]

Yeah, I think, I think I'll read

[Abby Thorne]

it and I'll leave you a positive good review if you drop out of the race. How about that?

[Sam]

Oh yeah. How about this? How about this? Kenyon? We're going to up the ante on Abby's offer. We're going to encourage the tens of thousands of people who listen to this to absolutely goose you on the Amazon algorithm. You're going to be number one goose. Like you're, you're juiced, you're, you're, you're boosting what?

[Abby Thorne]

Rob Canyon, I know a lot of movie producers. You, if you want to drop out of the race and make us feel I could make some intros. You know, let's get this on the screen.

[Nova]

Here's the thing. If, if we have him drop out of the race in Makerfield off of this, that guarantees Burnham prime minister. You know, so it's really, it's kind of a thorny issue here and I'm not sure that there's a good answer here.

[Sam]

November. I think with an issue this thorny, we need clarity and to turn the temperature down on the debate of whether or not Rob Kenyon should be rescued from politics by being turned into a successful author by us as a kind of Bribe?

[Nova]

I would say so, yes.

[Sam]

So the goddamn guidance I don't want to.

[Nova]

I don't like. Apart from anything else, like, there's. It's a kind of. It's a series of things at the same time, right? Where it's like. It's terrible, it feels terrible, it's going to have a lot of material consequences. At the same time, it isn't going to have a lot of other material consequences. And a lot of the people pushing it are going to be really mad that it doesn't. But mostly I think about the Toni Morrison thing, about how racism is primarily a waste of time, because anything else that you could be doing, you spend litigating it, feeling bad about it. It's just you have to sort of justify yourself and your own existence, even your own head, and you could be using that time so much more productively. And just on a personal level, I sort of resent using, you know, this. This shitty thing that is being done to us. You know, being in a position where it's like, yeah, I guess. I guess there's content here, I guess, or worse still, that I have some kind of role for the community here, to be some kind of a spokeswoman when I have really not much to contribute other than this fucking sucks. And it's terribly, you know, sort of like, offensive thing that is also gonna not do what it wants to do very well.

[Abby Thorne]

It's deeply insulting. It's deeply insulting. It is to us as human beings that we have to waste our time even considering this trash.

[Nova]

Yeah. And in terms of the sort of personal outlook of this, I'm sure there are some things that it will affect me very profoundly on, but, like, what this is basically about is about bathroom. Right. And everything else is kind of downstream of that. And so there's this kind of nightmare transphobic idea of like, oh, my God, I might see a tranny in the women's room. We have to ban this somehow. And so now the guidance has finally come out to that effect. I've used women's bathrooms for as long as I've been trans. I've never had anything happen, but I'm keenly aware that I'm sort of like. I'm sort of. I'm drawing a card every time I do that. Right. And I'm drawing it from a deck that is being stacked further and further against me. So as much as that's a sort of privilege on the one hand, and I can generally not worry about it too much in that sense, I know that that won't always be so. And it's a very perversely affirming thing to be like, man, I really am a woman because this completely everyday activity, I have to be on my guard all the time because, oh, I could just get assaulted, I could get arrested doing this. Any number of things could happen if someone decides that they don't like my face. So that's, you know, it's nice to feel included, I suppose.

[Sam]

I mean, one of the things that's very apparent about it is, you know, given that trans people have been around basically for as long as people have been around, and the transphobia is a relatively recent invention, especially political transphobia in this way. It's very, very important.

[Abby Thorne]

New in this form.

[Sam]

Yeah. And it's. What these guidance seems to be trying to do is retrofit this lunacy onto a previously perfectly functional system. Yeah.

[Nova]

Well, we had an Equality act that had a sort of pretty unambiguous statutory basis that trans women are women and that trans men are men, that there's no such thing as biological sex and that gender reassignment is a protected category that then also changes your gender. That is also a protective category. Right. Besides that, we had a sort of like functional everyday settlement that most people just did not care. And, you know, we've succeeded in sort of displacing one of those, but probably not the other. But it's. I don't know that's going to be so. So individual and so unpredictable and so stochastic. And, you know, that's. That's the part that I'm worried about more than I am about the sort of formal legal stripping of my rights because Britain as a state barely has any way of upholding those for anyone at this point.

[Sam]

Yeah. And I mean, the whole thing contains numerous contradictions. And I think that the contradictions are kind of the point because they create the opportunity for that. Stochasticism.

[Abby Thorne]

Absolutely.

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Abby Thorne]

This is the naked rule of insane power over people who can't resist it. It's not meant to make sense. I mean, we could bash on and on about how unworkable it is and how stupid it is, but it's not meant to. It's to meant. It's meant to express contempt for us that these people didn't even need to bother putting a coherent program for our segregation in place. It's just the kind of like, well, the strong will do what they can and the weak will suffer what they must. And it's like, well, I think you're going to find that many of us are not as weak as you thought

[Hussain]

I was going to say, because this feels like a bit of a dumb observation. So apologies if it comes across as such, but I've always sort of found the bathroom discourse to sort of be bizarre because, you know, and I've said this a few times on the show, which is I wish that, like, there was some, like, even like a sort of small percentage of effort that is put into, like, the policing of who can use public bathrooms and who can't to actually contribute to making. To actually, number one, like stop closing public toilets, but also to sort of make them better.

[Nova]

Yeah, this idea that, like, the sort of the bathroom is like some holy, you know, single sex place. It's like, no, we as a nation are deeply embarrassed to need one in the first place. And like, you see us as, again, as a nation of cisgender people as well. We fucking scurry in there and just like scurry back out and we're terrified the whole time. So I think one of the funniest

[Hussain]

things that I've seen on like, Reddit, it's like, from Japanese tourists. So not Reddit, but like, some, some website for like, Japanese tourists, like, visiting London. And like, almost all the advice in Japanese that is given is do not go to, do not, do not use any of the public toilets in London because they're all fucking disgusting. And this is like coming from a country, coming from a place where there is a lot of kind of care and effort put into the fact that anyone can use a public bathroom in these types of spaces. But I think partly my issue is. Okay, well, we've sort of really missed the point here. But in a lot of ways that is the point of all this because it's not like, really, if you ever sort of bring this up to like, well, what is the point of kind of like implementing any of these types of punitive measures when the reality is, like, most people can't use public bathrooms because, like, the doors don't have locks on them and there's no toilet seat and like, it's disgusting and unhygienic. And also, like, the toilet roll has not been kind of refilled for a week. Right. Like, there are so many sort of structural. And like, this is like a genuine public health issue as well. Like, I think there was an FOI that was made a couple of years ago and it did sort of say there was like a. Not an insignificant percentage of people that like, had to go seek medical help because they needed to go pee in London, and they could not find anywhere to be able to do it. And obviously this affects people who have disabilities, who have diabetes, for example, where regular toilet access is kind of, it's really, really important. But I guess the point I'm trying to get to is that so much of the ways in which minorities are kind of being pushed out of public spaces and are sort of being told that whatever public spaces are left that you currently can use, you're going to be heavily surveilled in them up until the point where, because I think this is very much a blueprint for just pushing out other minorities from public spaces.

[Nova]

Right.

[Hussain]

And this is the instructive point. And this is like, this isn't like this is about trans people. I don't want to diminish any of that. This is a continuation on one of the most sort of awful and pernicious attacks on the minority group in modern history. And it's something that I hope that we look back on with deep shame and deep regret. But I think it's also important to bear in mind that this is a blueprint and the reason why, why so many people have gotten behind it, it's not because they have all sort of rallied behind the cause of like, you know, only sort of so called biological women can use these disgusting toilets. It's like, no, this is a way that we can push out undesirable people of which there is an expansive number from like, what remains of public space in this country.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah.

[Nova]

Also, just institutionally, it's a fight for the sort of like, title of feminism. And I think it's very instructive that you're sort of like, your terfs did not get a lot of support from even your sort of like most sort of politically facile, like, feminist institutions is why they had to make their own right. And even within the sort of like, LGBT community, part of the point of this is to, you know, put a leash on Stonewall, for instance, or to ensure that, like, the arbiters of feminism aren't the vast majority of CIS women who support trans rights. But, you know, Sonia Sota in the observer, for instance. And so it's this again, it's this kind of power grab in that sense. And it's not enough for them, it's never going to be enough for them. And so this is why you start seeing these op eds where it's like, yeah, this is insufficient and this is still endangering women. Because I, I don't know, maybe we could assume our sort of like, tentacle form and get in through the air vents and start fucking raping women feminine there.

[Abby Thorne]

Somehow, I think to both of your points, one of the most insulting to our intelligence rhetorical features of this entire campaign has been the placing alongside one another of safety and dignity. We are told that this segregation and the stripping of our legal rights is necessary for the safety and dignity of women and girls. Now, anyone who says that trans people being included is a threat to women's safety is lying. There is evidence from dozens of countries, countries where we are fully included and not segregated, where there's no threat to CIS women at all. So anyone who says that we're a threat to women's safety is lying. Any journalist that allows someone to say that without pointing out that it's a lie is misleading the public. But to put dignity alongside that, to say that our presence is an offense to the dignity of a cisgender woman, invites the quite blunt response that if my presence is an affront to somebody's dignity, that person needs to get over themselves. That is their problem. That's prejudice literally prejudging us. They need to get get over themselves. That is a bigoted attitude. They should fix themselves and it has absolutely no place in a modern democracy at all. And Hussein, I think you're absolutely right that how long before we've already seen people saying that the presence of migrants is a threat to the dignity and safety of women and girls. We've already seen tiffs literally lining up on the beach staring moodily at France, saying all these men, these military aged men coming over in small boats is a threat to the safety and dignity of women and girls. And it's like it's never going to stop. It's never going to fucking stop until you tell these people, shut up and get over yourselves.

[Sam]

In effect. I mean, it's like the fact that this is like a threat to a minority is enough. But as you said, this is also a threat to what remains of liberal democracy. Genuinely, it's a huge threat to what remains of liberal democracy because it is any if you're, you know, sort of patch of black mold piloting a billionaire, you've been able to do that this one, right? But the next billionaire is going to be able to just say, okay, we're going to Astroturf, kind of the same number of institutions we're going to get, hook up the same networks of American fascist dark money.

[Nova]

It's already kind of either disfigured beyond recognition or seriously imperiled. The WI and girl guiding, which are the sort of totemic pieces of sort of like, you know, middle class feminism in society. So again, if they can do this to us, they can do this to anyone. For one thing.

[Abby Thorne]

Thing.

[Nova]

Again, it is profoundly undemocratic. I think a lot about. Just recently there was. I think it was a confederation of rowing clubs that voted to exclude trans women on a 98% to 2% vote in favor of allowing us to continue participating.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah, this was Oxford, where we'd just been banned from participating in women's rowing in Oxford, despite the fact that, I think of the 55 captains who were asked to vote, 49 voted in favour of exclusion, five abstained and one voted in favour of segregation. And that one got their way.

[Nova]

I can't really explain how it feels to just sort of get up of a morning and sort of open the news and find out that just in case you wanted to start a career as, say, a professional cricketer or whatever at the age of 35, just in case you wanted to do that, that is now impossible. That's illegal legal now. It's just. It's like. I don't know what it's like. It's an experience that I can't even really analogize to anything other than to say that it's profoundly surreal, I think,

[Abby Thorne]

to use the phrase that a lot of these public institutions live in fear of. What it's done is bring these institutions into public disrepute. I think the Supreme Court and I have already been criticized publicly in the Times for saying this. I think the Supreme Court has disgraced itself. The fact that it did this without hearing from any transgender people, the fact that one of the judges in this case, I believe it's Lord Hodge, and I apologize if I've got the name wrong, has previously written homophobic documents for the Church of Scotland. The fact that he was allowed anywhere near this kind of judgment is a disgrace and undermines the law in the eyes of the public. The EHRC similarly has disgraced itself. There is no solution to this now. There's no way to restore public trust in those institutions other than by sacking the people responsible for this, which I very much doubt Andy Burnham is going to do.

[Nova]

Yeah, crucially, as far as the sort of coercive value goes, I'm not going to stop transitioning no matter how illegal it is. So, you know, the way that that goes is if you want to stop me from being trans in public, you have to arrest me and imprison me forever or kill me or I guess, sort of bully me into killing myself. And, you know, God willing, none of those things happens. But that's essentially the confrontation that they're trying to engender.

[Sam]

And we talk about a number of things, right? Number one, this confrontation is, when I say artificial, I mean it's highly elite driven.

[Nova]

Yeah. And those elites have a fantastic way of just shutting the door on these things. And I think Burnham's statement is that par excellence, right? Where you just go, okay, well, that's the way it is now. That's what sensible politics is now. And we just sort of draw the line under it. And what frightens me, I suppose, about that is that there are a lot of people who do not pay a lot of attention to news. I almost guarantee you if you pull someone off the street, they will not really be able to articulate what the guidance says. And not just because it's confusing or the Supreme Court judgment said most people do not know anything about trans people, but if they are told by these elites that the debate's been settled, you know, and it's been sort of won unambiguously because of this kind of elite cast rapture, then most people just sort of go along with that. I don't expect most people to care, and I wish they would, but I don't expect it at all.

[Abby Thorne]

I don't expect they will either. I'm continually shocked and dismayed by the arrogance of cisgender people who are so determined to stew in their own ignorance that they'll allow this to happen.

[Sam]

And institutionally, I think that the way the reason I bring up the elite nature of this particular sort of, you know, segregationist political movement is, I think it has to be understood as an auto golpe, as a coup from the top of a huge number of British sucking yourself off. That's when the state does it. Oh, wow.

[Abby Thorne]

What does it mean? Go on.

[Sam]

An auto golpe is a self coup. It's a coup from the top, where you, as someone who's like in control of an institution, fundamentally change the rules of how it works so that you become very cemented in power. And even if it's not about like Baroness Quecia Faulkner or whatever, cementing herself particularly in power, the way that the Supreme Court, the ehrc, these different institutions, institutions and these papers have worked together, is that the ideology of transphobia has couped a great deal of these places, making them utterly unrecoverable. If we are going to want to have a liberal democratic society at some point in the future.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah, yeah. I think a big Part of this was the four starter decision which gave, quote, unquote, gender critical beliefs protection under the Equality Act. And this new guidance from the EHRC also explicitly says that people with gender critical beliefs do not necessarily have negative animus towards transgender people. And to treat them as if they do might be discrimination. So let me just say they absolutely do.

[Sam]

That's good news. I didn't know that. I thought it was another thing. Oh, cough. Well, episode over, I guess.

[Abby Thorne]

I think it's worth talking then about how we get out of this. At this point, the only fix to this is primary legislation to restore the rights of trans people. And I would say I would welcome that guidance and I would prefer it to go even further. I would love to see a Freedom of Sex act that establishes the right of British person to change sex without hindrance at all. That would be great. And I also think we do need to remove gender critical beliefs as a protected belief in this country, because it's clear now from the last several years of lawfare that this has been a fucking nightmare for the entire country. We've been embroiled in this stupid argument funded by mad billionaires, and it's time we drew a line under it and say trans people are part of Britain. If you don't like it, there's the fucking door. You can go back to Venus.

[Nova]

Yeah, well, the thing is, I think a lot of the sort of quietest view on this is this is so nakedly incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights that we wait until this gets to the European Court in Strasbourg. And bearing in mind that this is how we got the trans rights and sort of like queer rights that we have in Britain is because Strasbourg forced the Blair Ministry to sort of give them in the first place, is we wait until it goes to Strasbourg, they rule that this is a nonsense, and the whole thing gets overturned. Now, the flaw in that is, well, there are two. One is that taking anything to the European Court of Human rights takes about 25 years. But the other. Another is that it is entirely possible that before that time Britain leaves the Council of Europe and thus the ECHR and the European Court, making the whole thing futile. But there are still a lot of people who are putting their hope in this. And by people, I don't necessarily mean trans people so much as, like the more tepid sort of ally, right, the kind of soft left Labour Party. If I had to guess at Andy Burnham's private convictions and heavy air quotes, I think he probably knows that this is mental shit and probably feels Some kind of instinctive sympathy that is worth nothing and probably kind of has that same view of like, this will get sorted out eventually in Europe and until then we just have to wait for this to blow over. Right. Clearly that is insufficient and I think it is deeply, deeply naive to put any faith or any hope or any trust in that happening. So, yes, it has to be primary legislation. Who is going to to do that? Other than a Green Party or remarkably more left wing Labour Party leadership than seems possible at this point.

[Sam]

Yeah. And what do we say? Optimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I guess it'll all go fine in Achr. Burnham.

[Nova]

Well, look, I don't want to be a sort of like monetized optimism dispenser. Right. Again, like I say, I profoundly resent that. But if you want me to come up with a kind of optimistic button to put on this so people don't kill themselves, first of all, don't kill yourself. Second of all, this is ultimately premised philosophically, if you like, on the idea that, like, okay, great, all we have to do is establish a completely immutable concept of sex or gender. Right. And it has to hold sway forever. That is not a vision that's compatible with the laws of physics, let alone biology. Entropy takes care of that. And so long as they're all are trans people alive and existing. Right. And as we know trans people existing and knowing trans people is like one of the biggest drivers of, like, having more liberal attitudes towards us, then that's going to change the cultural thing to the point where the law will be absolutely flouted or ignored, and then at some point maybe it will catch up. I don't want to seem like that's inevitable, because it isn't. And there's a lot of deeply annoying, humiliating, dangerous bullshit that we all have to get through. And there are certainly ways that this could turn out very much for the worse. But the best thing you can do as a trans person is to continue to exist and to live. The best thing you can do as a CIS ally is to be, I suppose, extremely vocal about this. And what that means in practice is to get campaigning and to get protesting,

[Abby Thorne]

particularly through your unions. If you're a member of a union, that's a good way to go.

[Sam]

Yeah.

[Nova]

Within any group that you're involved with. Because this is designed to stack the deck against any kind of. Of institution, any kind of organization, to force them into the surrender that the women's institution has had to do, the Girl guiding has had to do. And I Think it's a perfectly valid thing for any kind of institution, any kind of group that wants to make a stand on this to go, okay, well, we are going to. We would sooner have the thing dissolve than allow it to be segregated. And I think it's a profoundly decent thing to do. So be like, if we would have to do this in a way that excluded trans women, then we're just not going to do it. And I think that's the ultimate kind of level of allyship that we would, we would ask for.

[Sam]

Really?

[Abby Thorne]

Yes, absolutely.

[Sam]

And I mean, some of the things just before we close out, I think it's worth just going a little bit into some of the things that these organizations are being asked to do because further to nova's point, right, that you can't put walls around this thing. You can't, because you were trying to legislate away humanity effectively saying, hey, if you operate some kind of a service provider, university, courtroom, hospitality industry, whatever, and you reach like certain thresholds of like, largeness and you must begin building out to segregate. And again, I'd never want to make the claim that this is bad because it's unworkable. It's bad because it's bad. But if you look at the practical implications of what you would have to do in order to make this statement of ambition in the guidance match reality, it would require like over a billion pounds of capital expenditure to reshape the world in the way that this quite radical, like American funded group wants and has managed to do through hijacking legislation.

[Nova]

Riley, the problem is that we said that the only way out for the British economy was a massive program of public investment and a monkey's paw curls. It turns out it was all toilets. Yeah, okay, fine, listen, there's a real like the reform guy, right, who, who is like, you know, women can't referee rugby games or whatever, is a plumber. Like the most recent green candidate in Gordon and Denson, Hannah Spencer is a plumber. We're about to invest a billion pounds in segregating the toilets. This is some kind of plumber occupied government.

[Hussain]

Well, also like, you know, there's a lot of like politicians who are basically saying that, oh, like we need more plumbers. Like, you know, young people, they're too busy doing gender studies and you know, with a minor in kind of like, you know, basket weaving, whatever. They still use those examples, which is like really fascinating to me considering there's so many more bullshit degrees that you could sort of cite. But their solution is, oh, we need more plumbers. Right.

[Nova]

Yeah.

[Hussain]

And so, okay, fine, this is it.

[Nova]

Fight the. Fight the real enemy. It's been plumbers all along.

[Abby Thorne]

Yes. Big pipe.

[Hussain]

We need more plumbers because we need more public toilets.

[Abby Thorne]

And.

[Hussain]

Okay, fine, if you want to do the whole, like, segregation thing, I'm not. I'm not saying I support it, but if you are going to go down that route, then, like, you know, you should fly for. You should fight for, like, better toilets.

[Nova]

You know, gonna need a bunch more of them. And that's.

[Hussain]

Yeah, it might be nice if, like, the toilet roll was replaced maybe once every two days or maybe once every three days. I'm not talking about, like, major things. I'm not saying that you need to have, like, nice heated toilet seats or, you know, a little bit of, like, oud and hinoki, like, you know, like, essence in the background. I'm not saying that you have to, like, have, like, the background music, you know, that you can get in most, like, Japanese, like, shinka kunsen toilets. Like, let's go basic, right?

[Nova]

I think the way that this might be heading, right, in an attempt to extricate some sanity from this, is that most bathrooms just become gender neutral. And then TERFs, like, you know, just complain about it endlessly and try and, like, you know, sue a couple of places into oblivion. But de facto, I think that's the only thing that, like, people are gonna do for the most part.

[Hussain]

The other outcome is that, like, you know, you have. You have companies that are just. Or you have, like, places that are just, like, it's worth having a toilet

[Nova]

because you're just getting all this, like, Britain year 2026. Just hold it.

[Hussain]

Yeah? There is no place for you to pee in shit. And you can thank, like, every British columnist for that, I suppose. And then when one of these columnists, like, shits themselves in public, they can then begin a campaign of, like, we need public toilets. Because, you know, this is. This now is a problem, right?

[Nova]

Oh, my God. It's literally all been building to the J.K. rowling thing, where it's like, wizards just shit and piss themselves and then magic away the evidence.

[Abby Thorne]

They laughed at me for writing it, so I did.

[Sam]

By the way, I looked into this just because I'm me and I had to do this. I looked up if there were any Freedom of Information requests made of public bodies about how much was spent on adding unisex toilets, and I found one. Devon County Council in 2023 responded to a FOIA request about this. They said, we can confirm that to deliver three gender neutral data WCs to stairwell BE at County hall has cost approximately £39,000 pre VAT, noting this was delivered as part of a wider toilet refurbishment scheme.

[Nova]

That's money that they could have spent on UFO defense.

[Sam]

Yeah. So if you assume it's about 13 grand per unisex toilet because they have to have like full doors, not cubicles and whatever. Full locking doors, not cubicles, whatever.

[Nova]

Yeah. Just, just in case anyone sees any like tranny ankles.

[Sam]

So let's like multiply that out by every covered hospital, university, courthouse, hospitality premise, all those things I listed and so on and so, so on and so on. Like do like a management consulting interview, see if you can estimate it.

[Nova]

This is toilet Keynesianism. I'm telling you. Like this is going to be the single thing that keeps Britain out of the Great Recession is we will be too busy installing toilets.

[Sam]

Yeah. We've created modern monetary theory by routing it through a sort of lunatic right wing panic. We have restored Keynesianism in a way that appeals to almost everybody.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah. Am I not right in thinking that Kemi Badenoch made it illegal to build gender neutral facilities? Was that not a regulation that she introduced? And the last government.

[Sam]

Maybe what she's doing is she's fighting against the plumber occupied government.

[Nova]

Yeah, she's doing degrowth.

[Sam]

Yeah. It's like, it's. Look, the arc of history is long but it points towards the toilet, the expend of history.

[Abby Thorne]

Thank you.

[Sam]

And you know, it's like we have this pretty huge capex build out now. Maybe not enough to rival AI, but like bathrooms really.

[Nova]

The thing is we're going to build them all out of reinforced aerated concrete and then every single person in Britain is eventually going to get killed by a toilet collapsing in on us.

[Sam]

I think there are lots of ways to look at this. Right. There's something Nova said in a previous episode which is we need to bring back sneering. And I think that the fact that the government has issued, or at least is endorsing by not voting it down, an official guidance document that says a whole bunch of extremely capital stretched industries need to spend about one and a third billion pounds immediately on the toilets that J.K. rowling's moldy wall to demanded is laughable. It's genuinely fucking laughable. The response should be really toilets. That it is pure chaos and it should be treated with utter contempt.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah, yeah.

[Nova]

It's notably I think as well how much of an outlier this makes us in Europe.

[Sam]

Oh, I'm such a Fun laughingstock.

[Nova]

The idea that, like, you can sort of, like, get the train from a normal country to Bathrooms island is. I think we're supposed to be hosting

[Abby Thorne]

Idaho, but next year and under these regulations, all the trans representatives who'll be coming to the country to celebrate Britain's history of LGBTQ rights will be required to be segregated whilst they are here. How do you think that's going to go?

[Nova]

I mean, our history of LGBT rights is doing them kicking and screaming. It's like, hello, and welcome to the country that killed Alan Turing.

[Sam]

Like, at least, hey, at least sex matters are still unsatisfied.

[Nova]

Well, that's. The important thing is that they will. They have chosen a path that means that they will never be happy. And the fun thing is that that's what they accuse us of. And I'm feeling actually pretty good despite this is a kind of endorsement of transition that you don't really get to hear is that, like, you can have the actual government, the guys you pay your taxes to, the people in charge of the police and everything, like, redefine you as a man and ban you from ever taking up rowing for whatever reason.

[Abby Thorne]

And.

[Nova]

And go, yeah, this is still good enough that I'm gonna keep doing it.

[Abby Thorne]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sam]

Well, I think that's a pretty good note to end on. Abby. I want to thank you, of course, for coming and talking to us all the way from sunny California.

[Abby Thorne]

Thank you so much for having me. Thank you very much. May I get an A Cheeky plug?

[Sam]

Plug away. Is it for your bathroom renovation business?

[Abby Thorne]

No, it's actually my interplanetary business. Flying people from Doncaster to Venus, listeners, how's it? House of The Dragon Season 3 comes out on HBO Max on 13 June. If you would like to see me playing a blood soaked, furious, polyamorous lesbian pirate on a mission of vengeance against the politician who has ruined her life. Punching and killing and hacking her way through everyone in her way. If that is something that would be cathartic to you, you should watch House of the Dragon Season 3.

[Sam]

I hope someone at a con asks you like, hey, where do you find your motivation?

[Abby Thorne]

No jokes. One of the pivotal scenes was filmed two minutes after the Schemetti decision came down. I was like, ah, no acting required.

[Sam]

Actually, we're just gonna. Can you stop swinging the sword so hard? Anyway,

[Nova]

a lot of stuntmen didn't come home to their families after that.

[Sam]

Anyway, anyway, look, thank you very much for listening. Thank you, Abby, for being on Check Out. We're gonna give House the Dragon a little plug you know, we like to help up and come give me walking around money, you know, maybe we can lend a few. A few ears that way. But thank you, of course, for listening. And we will see you on the bonus episode in a couple short days. Yes, don't worry. We know SpaceX has released its IPO documents. We're getting to it. See you then.

[Nova]

Fine.

[Abby Thorne]

Bye,

[Sam]

Sam.