Trans Madness Is For Anybody

Saneism will not make them love you. Plus: what HIPAA protects + a tour of baby's first garden

Greetings slugkind,

I posted my first YouTube video this week and I’m working on some more! Marta and I are collaborating on a channel called The Spiral Lab (subscribe! subscribe!) and we’re both making a series of vlogs to teach ourselves video editing.

I’m calling my vlog series Garden Wisdom, because it’s going to be part documentation, part musing on the bigger lessons I’m learning in the garden. I simply cannot seem to make anything without turning it into an unnecessarily deep metaphor for something else! Episode 1 is about starting seeds, but it’s also about why its so hard to start seeds (emotionally) and how I’m getting through it.

Buck Angel’s Dangerous Insecurities

[CW: Lots of transmedicalism + binary gender bullshit in this section, also talk of vaginal health issues. Scroll to the next header if you need to skip this today.]

Apparently when you watch any trans content on Youtube, the algorithm likes to recommend a side of some super hateful shit, just in case! Normally I ignore this stuff, but this time, I was offered an interview with Buck Angel, aging porn star and high-profile trans elder who calls himself “Tranpa”.

My only prior knowledge of Buck was the uproar that occurred when Contrapoints asked him to voice-over a line in one of her videos, which threw Trans Twitter into a rage. Most of the critiques had to do with Buck’s identification as a “transsexual” (something I have zero issue with, because people should use the labels they like) and some things he said that vaguely implied he did not respect non-binary gender identities.

It appears he has gotten far less vague since then, and is now just openly an asshole. What sucked me into the world’s worst rabbit hole was a reaction video with Arielle Scarcella, a lesbian Youtuber who has recently embraced anti-trans content (presumably, as Kat Blaque has speculated, for the clout).

In the video (which I am loathe to link to, but feel I must, for journalism reasons), Arielle and Buck sit down to comment on a Reel by non-binary influencer @justsaysk called “A Celebration of Post-Op Body Diversity” (they refer to it as a TikTok, but I’m pretty sure it was reposted there and then harvested by the reactionary account @libsoftiktok, because I follow SK and saw the original).

Before they watch it, Arielle makes a point to tell Buck she wanted to do this video with him because he is “one of the sanest trans people on the planet.” (Keep that statement in mind, we’re going to come back to it.)