Minibabble: "The California girl I needed to be" -

"The California girl I needed to be"

Stephanie Jacobs on politics and transgender people

[00:00:00] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling, and this is a Minibabble. I was connected with former CBS producer Stephanie Jacobs Through a mutual acquaintance. I knew nothing about her except a brief description of her bio and a hearty recommendation for her conversational skills.

[00:00:39] She responded, and we set a date for a phone call.

[00:00:42] Stephanie Jacobs: Hey, Suki. I’m Steph, and I’m now a resident of Santa Cruz for the last 13, 14 years after spending 26 years in the media capital of the United States, New York City. I had careers as a television executive at CBS News and helped run elections there. I also dabbled pretty extensively in technology and helped run a business unit of the Sony Corporation.

[00:01:10] Voiceover: The call went great. We talked about her career producing election night coverage, politics, the lovely place we both live in, and then Steph dropped the bombshell.

[00:01:21] Stephanie Jacobs: Life was, was grand until I had this epiphany at the age of 67 when I realized that what I really wanted to do when I grew up was to become a California girl.

[00:01:31] Voiceover: You see, I thought I was talking to a 70 plus woman with a sultry, deep voice, and I was talking to a 70 plus woman with a sultry, deep voice, but she didn’t get that voice through hard living. She got it from the 50 odd years of testosterone that dominated her body, while her brain kept saying, Wait a minute here, this isn’t me.

[00:01:51] There’s been a lot of coverage, too much coverage, of opinions about transgender people since the Republicans decided to make this tiny minority their whipping boy, uh, person. And very very few of those opinions have come from people who lived an entire long life, excelled in a career in a very male dominated, high pressure job, experienced marriage and fatherhood and everything else, all while not being the person she knew she was inside. But Steph did. And you can argue many things about transgender people, but when faced with someone who chose to medically and socially transition when most people are way past making big changes,there’s basically nothing you can argue with.

[00:02:34] Because Steph, frankly, doesn’t care about your opinions. She did the right thing for herself, and you can accept it or not. It makes no difference to her.

[00:02:42] Stephanie Jacobs: I’ve, I’ve been jailed for being a busy body and got to travel the world on CBS’s, Amex card.

[00:02:51] Voiceover: Steph said a lot about politics and media, the focus of our conversation. You can find the full episode at Babblery. com. In this mini episode, we’ll start with the contagion theory of gender and then cover three points she made in response to all the horrid chatter that you probably heard during the campaign.

[00:03:08] I hope those who disagree with her will listen carefully. Because remember, this is a person who felt so desperately that she was a woman inside, she risked everything to live her elder years in a changed body. Let’s hear what she has to say.

[00:03:23] Stephanie Jacobs: Not to stand on my soapbox but transgendered people just want to be their authentic self and it took me a long time to reach that point where I was either brave enough to want to be that person or I was desperate enough to renounce white male privilege and say that the thing I can’t live with is regretting a decision that I felt too timid to make. I look at what has happened in almost 25 states with laws that make it very difficult for a child or their parents to get psychological and medical assistance for a child who is gender questioning. I think that is a really, really unwelcome development and hurts children. And frankly, the fact that Trump spent nearly 38 million dollars on anti trans advertising, is just, just awful.

[00:04:49] Suki Wessling: So many people believe that this is some sort of social contagion, that children are expressing gender variance, whether they consider themselves transgender or whether they are just exhibiting gender fluid behavior, a lot of people consider this to be some sort of social contagion, that these, these people wouldn’t have existed. These children wouldn’t have been doing this. What, how do you answer that?

[00:05:18] Stephanie Jacobs: So, here is what I observed. First of all, full disclaimer. I am not a psychologist. And I do not pretend to, to, to be one. And the thing that I am most humble about is speaking, in generalities about the, the transgender community. This is a discussion for parents, for children, for their doctors, for their teachers, maybe in some cases for clerical staff.

[00:05:52] No one I know who has transgendered, and I include trans men and trans women, have made that decision lightly. And that holds true for a couple of teenagers I know who have successfully transitioned. And uniformly, I will say that the people that they have become, are happier, more integrated, more successful, and generally much better adjusted to the world that they’re living in.

[00:06:35] So the idea that this is a social fad is just plain wrong and it’s destructive. Now, this is not to say that every teenager who has questions about their identity is trans. What it suggests is that every teenager who has questions about their identity is a teenager and deserves the support and the love and the counsel, again, of family and friends and therapists and doctors and they get to make their own decision about their own lives.

[00:07:14] They should not have politicians making those decisions for them.

Transitioning from power
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[00:07:19] Suki Wessling: I guess I don’t understand, maybe you do, maybe you can enlighten me how anyone could think that you would do this without serious and sustained thought and consideration.

[00:07:35] Stephanie Jacobs: I could tell you three things that, as I transitioned , I came to recognize. The first one is white male privilege is so strong and so pervasive and white males are so blind to the benefits of privilege that they carry around.

[00:07:55] And it wasn’tuntil I I voluntarily surrendered my privilege that I recognized how, how large it was. The second thing that I would observe is that testosterone is a really powerful drug. It is really, really responsible among genetic males, for the ability to, to, to focus, to form large muscle mass, to be able to lift things that a genetic women in most cases cannot.

[00:08:30] But it also impacts the way your brain thinks. And I know, having gone through puberty a second time, that when I no longer produced testosterone, I was a far better listener. And my conversation, Suki, could be YES AND conversations, as opposed to YES BUT. Because, uh, under the influence of testosterone, you’re all ready with the rejoinder instantly.

[00:09:01] You’re, you’re cruising for a bruising, as we used to say in, in Boston. The third point is, in Santa Cruz, people care about the person, not the label, which is decidedly different in other parts of the country. So there is acceptance of gender and sexual diversity here that does not exist in other parts, and I am the beneficiary of that.

The value of labels
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[00:09:31] Suki Wessling: So many of the, self anointed pundits in this post election period have said that Democrats, liberals, progressives, they have turned everyone off with all of this labeling and that people don’t want to be labeled, yet in this liberal progressive place, you said that you interact with people and that they don’t see the label first. So why the disconnect?

[00:10:02] Stephanie Jacobs: When Will Ferrell’s best friend transitioned and made a documentary called Will and Harper, they spent a road trip going across America rediscovering their friendship and discovering the person that Harper was. In some places, people with whom they interacted could not get beyond the label of Harper as trans, and criticized them broadly, mercilessly, callously on social media.

[00:10:35] I think that represents fear. I don’t think that Santa Cruz is a fearful community in the way that where they visited in Texas evidenced and surfaced a great deal of fear and a great deal of antipathy.

Thoughts on testosterone and sports
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[00:10:52] Suki Wessling: Another thing that you mentioned was testosterone and one of the touch points, which, you know, we know by the numbers, this is ridiculous, but one of the things that people cite is they’re afraid that their girls will have to play competitive sports against genetic boys and that that’s not fair. What do you say to people about the question of fairness and how there’s a sense of, in a sense that, that by transitioning, it seems like these people that are fearful of transgender people are saying that what you’re doing is unfair. It’s not right. It’s not fair to us.

[00:11:34] Stephanie Jacobs: You know, this is a really complicated decision, but the two points that I would make are, one, for the vast majority of student athletes and athletes in general, they are not performing at Olympic levels or even Division One levels and whether a person is genetic or trans is not primarily the major predictor of success.

[00:12:08] Now the second thing I would say is that different athletic bodies have come down on various sides of levels of sex hormones and distance under hormone treatments. I’m not smart enough to figure that one out myself. I’m not a high performance athlete. But, you know, what I was taught a long, long time ago is if you’re going to make generalizations, make sure the generalization fits the area under the curve and whether it’s 90%, 95 percent or 97 percent of children playing soccer at age seven and eight, will still be playing soccer with the same kids when they’re 17 or 18, and I suspect if one of the children turns out to be trans, it’s not going to make a significant difference.

[00:13:10]

Male privilege and the role of gender in society
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[00:13:10] Suki Wessling: The last thing that I’m going to bring up is you talked about how much you recognized male privilege that you didn’t recognize before.

[00:13:19] So talk about the cisgender white male and what he can’t see and what he could possibly see. if he were willing to do what it takes to see. And this is not all, of course, not all white cisgender males because there are those who have done the work. And they, I’m, I’m so glad they exist. But I’d say you’d probably agree with me that most men haven’t done the work or at least have only done some of the work.

[00:13:48] What is the work they need to do?

[00:13:49] Stephanie Jacobs: Sit down, shut up. You know, go back to when you were in the fourth grade, and you were sitting in math class, and the teacher asked a question, and all the boys raised their hands and saying, call on me, call on me, call on me, call on me. And for the most part, the young girls who knew the answer with greater accuracy than the boys were sitting on their hands.

[00:14:16] Society rewards that kind of initiative, even if the initiative is a false one. And I think as we go through business and careers, men are rewarded consistently for their boldness, even if the foundation underneath is somewhat lacking.

[00:14:41] I know the first time I was in a pitch meeting at the accelerator that I mentor at, as a transitioned person, my opinion was not solicited. And when I have discussions, the kind of privilege that I was awarded or gifted as a white male former media executive, the holder of multiple patents, the winner of eight broadcast Emmys for their work.

[00:15:23] When you’re a trans woman, uh, sorry, we’re not calling on you. So every woman knows the cliche about having to work twice as hard in order to be perceived as half as good. And I don’t know what the multiples are as a trans person, but they’re a lot closer to, to that algorithm than the former position that they, um, they, they held in society.

[00:15:55] Suki Wessling: What do you think that we can do? What do transgender people, what do women and, people who are racial minorities, cultural minorities, how can they feel their own power in this current society that we live in?

[00:16:09]

[00:16:09] Stephanie Jacobs: What I learned from one of my therapists was the value of taking a breath.

[00:16:16] Take a breath. It’s not as bad as you fear, though your fears are justified.

[00:16:26] I do believe in the long run the good guys will win. And however severe the next four years may be, however vertiginous and rocky they may be, threatening to large segments of the communities you identified, however dangerous they may be, there will be a time in which the pendulum of politics will swing back to the center, that the essential character of Americans will turn out to be not misogynistic, not racist, not anti trans.

[00:17:08] And, you know, I, I guess I’m an institutionalist to view that despite the setbacks, but you have to believe in the essential goodness of, of human beings. And whatever significant changes the election, this cycle have given us, however crummy it is, I think that four years the pendulum will, will shift.

[00:17:37] I’ll tell you one last thing that has to do with transition. The first time I told people that I was transitioning, it took me 25 minutes to get to the punchline.

[00:17:48] I was busy telling stories about all these things growing up and how I was balancing and regretting not being able to have an honest conversation with them. And I would get almost to the punchline and the person would say, yeah, we know you’re trans. It’s like, what took you so long?

[00:18:14] Voiceover: Thanks to Stephanie Jacobs for sharing her life and insights with us. You can access more information and links in the show notes for this episode on Babblery. com.

[00:18:51] The song Blue is from Komiku on Loyalty Freak Music. American Song is from Maya Solovey on Bandcamp.

[00:19:00] Thanks for listening.

[00:19:03]

END
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Minibabble: “The California girl I needed to be”

A transgender elder reflects on the election

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