Know Your Enemy20 Maalis 2022

The Anti-Trans Agenda (w/ Gillian Branstetter)

Matt and Sam talk to Gillian Branstetter, press secretary for the National Women’s Law Center, about the spate of anti-trans laws sweeping the country: What do these interventions do? Who is pushing them? And why?

The American right has long been invested in policing gender boundaries, but its fixation on trans people — and trans children, in particular — has become more acute in recent years. Over 100 anti-trans state-level measures have been passed this legislative session alone, including athletics bans, curriculum/book bans, religious refusal laws, and bans on access to health care. Perhaps most alarmingly, states like Texas are instituting policies that equate gender-affirming care with child abuse, terrorizing trans kids and their families. With Gillian's help, we explore the conservative forces behind these bills and reveal the ideological fixations, misapprehensions, and contradictions driving this panic. It's a difficult but necessary conversation.

If you'd like to help fight the right's anti-trans onslaught, consider donating to The Trans Justice Funding Project.

Further Reading:

J David Goodman, "How Medical Care for Trans Youth Became ‘Child Abuse’ In Texas," NY Times, March 11, 2022

Melissa Gira Grant, "The Groups Pushing Anti-Trans Laws Want to Divide the LGBTQ Movement," The New Republic, Feb 17, 2022.

Jeremy W Peters, "A Conservative Push to Make Trans Kids and School Sports the Next Battleground," NY Times, Nov 3, 2019.

Judith Butler, "Why Is the Idea of ‘Gender’ Provoking Backlash the World Over?" The Guardian, Oct 23, 2021.

Jules Gill-Peterson "The Anti-Trans Lobby’s Real Agenda," Jewish Currents, Apr 27, 2021.

— Histories of the Transgender Child, UM Press, 2018.

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January 6, Five Years Later (w/ Robert Draper)

For years now on Know Your Enemy, we've taken the January 6, 2021 insurrection as a glimpse of Trumpism unbound—not a few naive Q-anon types and tourists bumbling around, and not an excuse to be black...

12 Tammi 1h 37min

Great Books and the AI Apocalypse (w/ Matt Dinan) [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.We were excited to record and share this conversation with Matt Dinan, a professor who teaches in a Great Books p...

2 Tammi 5min

UNLOCKED: Trump's Big, Beautiful Ballroom (w/ Kate Wagner)

This episode originally aired November 17, 2025 on Patreon — we're unlocking it as a holiday treat. If there's a Trump-era topic that manages to fascinate without being entirely depressing, it's proba...

22 Joulu 20251h 1min

What We Got Wrong (and Right) about the Right in 2025 [Teaser]

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15 Joulu 20256min

One Podcast After Another (w/ Jesse Brenneman)

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8 Joulu 20251h 4min

On Friendship (w/ Andy Elrick)

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.Should you try to improve your friends or leave them be? Do friendship and politics mix? Is friendship about virt...

1 Joulu 20251min

The Furious Minds of MAGA (w/ Laura Field)

Laura K. Field's Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, published earlier this month, is a book we simply had to discuss. Listeners to this podcast will recognize its cast of characters—cons...

24 Marras 20251h 9min

Trump's Big, Beautiful Ballroom (w/ Kate Wagner) [Teaser]

Listen to the rest of this premium episode by subscribing at patreon.com/knowyourenemy.If there's a Trump-era topic that manages to fascinate without being entirely depressing, it's probably the ongoi...

17 Marras 20254min