“This dysfunctional town square” with TV producer Stephanie Jacobs

Posted on by suki
The Babblery
The Babblery
"This dysfunctional town square" with TV producer Stephanie Jacobs
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After a long career at CBS as a TV and online content producer, Stephanie Jacobs and her wife came west for a warmer climate, good wine, and proximity to family. She initially connected to the Babblery to speak about her career and her broad experience in American politics, but this conversation took an unexpected turn. Politics, in Stephanie’s case, became deeply personal when she decided to define the California girl that she needed to be.

Although we do start by speaking about the recent election, this conversation is not an election post-mortem. Stephanie’s career started in radio and she rose through the ranks at CBS, ultimately producing CBS.com. Her last election night as a producer was 2000, the year that the election was thrown to the Supreme Court, so she has a well-honed perspective on the political long game. She now works as an advisor and mentor at a tech incubator, and she shares perspectives on gender that she has developed in this role.

“However severe the next four years may be, however vertiginous  and rocky they may be, threatening to large segments of communities, 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.”

– Stephanie Jacobs

Stephanie has a deep faith in American democracy that is optimistic and informed. We hope you enjoy this dive into politics, media, social media, the American character, and our problem with gender. [Click for transcript]

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"This dysfunctional town square" with Stephanie Jacobs

[00:00:00] Voiceover: Hi everyone, a little opening note about the Babblery. We’ve changed, and yet we’re staying the same. We have a new theme based on what we’ve been doing all along in our conversations. Modern humans can seem like the ancients who built the biblical Tower of Babel, cursed by God or nature never to understand each other. My guests, as visiting translators at the Tower of Babel, delve into their work, their research, and their own experiences to try to explain the bits they’ve learned about Earth’s most perplexing species, us.

[00:00:35] And now let’s proceed to this month’s Babblery.

SEGMENT 1: The election and how it happenedIntro
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[00:00:38] Voiceover: I’m your host, Suki Wessling. This month’s episode was recorded exactly one week after the 2024 election. The timing was fortuitous in a couple of ways. First of all, retired CBS producer Stephanie Jacobs was in the thick of it for years, producing election night coverage through the 2000 Bush v. Gore fiasco.

[00:01:18] Her perspective on elections is, therefore, intrinsically interesting. However, the timing was fortuitous in another way. I really needed to talk to someone who could pull me out of the hole that I had tumbled into.

[00:01:32] 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.

[00:02:00] Voiceover: If you listen to my Minibabble, "In which I say things that are true and also not true", you’ll know that the results of this election threw me into despair. I am not actually a highly partisan person. Throughout my voting life, I have been willing to vote for any candidate as long as I largely agreed with their positions and I thought they would be effective.

[00:02:20] That second criterion is why I’ve stuck with Democrats. We live in a two party system, so when you’re voting in national elections, a vote for a third party candidate is like screaming into a void. Votes, in my opinion, are not self-expression. They are a tool that we wield as groups. Since my presidential voting life started with Reagan and Mondale, it’s just a fact that the Democratic candidate, whoever they were, was always a better representative of what I wanted this country to look like.

[00:02:48] So as someone who could theoretically be a swing voter, I’ve seen the other side swing so wildly away from me that I invested even more passion than usual into the outcome of this election. I greeted poor Steph with a rant that included that the election was

[00:03:03] Suki Wessling: a repudiation of all that you and I hold dear

[00:03:07] Voiceover: And then proceeded to point out that the

[00:03:09] Suki Wessling: systematic dismantling of rights and representative government in Republican led states

[00:03:14] Voiceover: poor Steph

[00:03:16] Stephanie Jacobs: oh my goodness, that, that sounds so dire

[00:03:18]

[00:03:19] Voiceover: So I took a breath and started over.

[00:03:21] For those of you who don’t want to listen to yet another rehash of the election, I want to assure you that this conversation is not that. We do start with the election results as a jumping off point, but please stick with us as Stephanie Jacobs and I try to make sense of the political lives of Americans.

[00:03:37] She’s this month’s Visiting Translator on the Tower of Babble, and I hope this conversation enlightens and inspires you.

[00:03:48] Suki Wessling: My question for you is, repudiation of all the advances we’ve made in the last generation?

[00:03:56] Stephanie Jacobs: No, though there is some, you know, valid belief that Trump repealed the law of gravity as it applies to all things elections. Here, despite all the wins that Trump rolled up, including all seven of the battleground states, the fact is, he did not get substantially more votes in 2024 than he did in 2000. So, it’s not like the entire United States went this hard shift to the right. Yes, Democrats lost the seven states. They lost, for the first time in a long time, the popular vote, but the what of the election, before we get to the why, but what of the election is that they lost, but it does not represent the repudiation of all things that you and I would hold dear, like truth, justice, the American way, fair play, kindness.

[00:05:06] The, the thing that, you know, I would point out, two additional things, is that there was a fair amount of ticket splitting, so that in several of the battleground states, four of them to be exact, senators from the Democratic Party were elected, and in four battleground states, voters approved abortion rights measures.

[00:05:31] So, I don’t think any Republican who is claiming a mandate to drive the country back to The Handmaiden’s Tale, um, has an accurate base of facts to stand on.

[00:05:46] Suki Wessling: Well, that’s good to hear. But I know that pretty much everyone I know is concerned that this time it’s different, it was interesting, you, you made, a little slip of the tongue when you said, um, that he didn’t get substantially more votes in 2024 than in 2000. And that slip of the tongue, I thought, that is so indicative because the last time we have had this level of despair was when the Supreme Court called it for George W. Bush in 2000.

[00:06:28] Stephanie Jacobs: Well, I lived through that. And Trump got 74 million votes in 2020 and and 74 million plus votes in 2024. What changed was 10 million voters who voted for Biden and Democrats in 2020 disappeared. And there’s a lot of people writing very intelligent things about the whys and frankly, I’m not as smart as, as they are. But the, you know, the, the reality is, if you look across elections from the last 30 years, if you are an incumbent and part of an administration where inflation has been an overriding concern, and this would be true of the first George Bush and of Jimmy Carter, it’s very hard to win an election where the economic numbers are against you.

[00:07:20] And I, I agree that this has been the most misogynistic, most racist, most anti trans campaign ever. And I think it does speak volumes about what’s happening to our country. And for people who get up in the morning, who are the parents of a trans child, who are the partner of a person who is an undocumented person, of a person who is living paycheck to paycheck, I think there is legitimate concern about the next four years.

[00:07:56] So, while I’m disagreeing in part that this is a violent turn to the far right, I share your concern and those of your listeners to the impact of four years of unfettered Trumpism. And it does suggest something about the essential character of America, that someone who is a convicted felon, um, and the object of multiple suits by special prosecutors is going to be the most powerful man in the world.

[00:08:36] Suki Wessling: You know, it’s interesting. I was talking to a friend who was upset because on the morning after she didn’t receive any calls from anyone and that included me, and I apologized for it, and I said, you know, I, I got up and went to the pool the next morning, and just through happenstance, none of the people that I usually chat with were there.

[00:09:07] And I did the nods and hellos to people, but I was just so happy that I, after my swim, went into the hot tub and I was alone. And all I wanted to do was, was try to process this. And so I guess I’d like to understand what, on what basis people are and aren’t voting and how that, why we have this country that I think pretty much everyone in the country understands at some basic level that we are the most powerful country in the world, but they don’t understand that that power lies in us.

Americans and elections
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[00:09:51] Suki Wessling: And it’s, with power comes this huge responsibility. So what do you think, you were working in the media covering elections for so long. What do you think is behind Americans’ conflicted relationship with, you know, this power we have, but not wielding it because the turnout was about 50 percent this time, right?

[00:10:19] Stephanie Jacobs: Well, turnout in America is historically bad compared to other democracies.

[00:10:25] Uh, countries in Europe routinely have much higher turnout than the United States does. I, I think I have to paraphrase Warren Buffett. When the, the sage of Omaha was asked, if you could go back in history and could change anything, Buffett, who lost millions in airline stocks, said, I’d have Wilbur and Orville crash because the airline industry has destroyed millions and millions of dollars of value. So my view of that is when Mark Zuckerberg was at Harvard, and working with the Winklevoss twins, and they were setting out to create the Facebook, I would have said to, to young Mr. Zuckerberg, Mark, your dad is a terrific dentist in the village of Dobbs Ferry, New York, a New York City suburb. I think you should go into family dentistry. Because unlike the democratic ideal of John Stuart Mill, and the other philosophers of enlightenment, that the truth will rise from a babble of voices, social media has increased the dichotomy among Americans and led to a great increase of tribalism. I don’t want to put all the blame entirely on social media.

[00:12:09] Let’s give some credit to Roger Ailes and Fox News. And I think what has happened is those twin forces are forces that divide rather than unite. So the town square is no longer a place where you find the middle ground. The town square is where you move into opposite corners. And I think that has played a profound and increasing role in American elections and Donald Trump is nothing but an invention of the intersection of social media and mass media.

[00:12:53] And he has effectively played on the alienation and dissatisfaction that social media and Fox News exacerbates. So if, if you are watching Fox News for the last four years and have been told the election in 2020 was stolen and that the Democrats are crooks and anyone who opposes Donald Trump is a horrible human being, that the problem with the United States is that, uh, the immigrants are taking the jobs of whites, that, uh, gays and lesbians represent a return to Sodom and go Gomorrah, and God forbid your child should be on a middle school soccer team with someone who’s a trans kid. And that’s the diet that people have been fed. And I think it is corrosive beyond any, any other social force in in our history. It’s ill, it’s illiberal and it’s illogical.

[00:14:01] It’s ill tempered and it’s ill mannered.

The effect of social media on culture and voting
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[00:14:07] Suki Wessling: To play devil’s advocate here if Zuckerberg hadn’t created Facebook somebody would have created this because you know, so I was involved in the early World Wide Web, both as a viewer and as a participant. I actually had my then boyfriend show me the web when it, in its infancy. And um, just to show you how good of a prognosticator I am, I said, What?

[00:14:42] People can exchange files, why don’t they just use FTP? So I was not, I did not recognize this. But then, um, when the web was in its infancy, I did become a web designer. And, um, so I’ve been watching this happen. And I believe social media was inevitable. So given that it was, let’s assume that, that I’m right, even though I wasn’t right about the web, but let’s assume I am right, and that social media would have happened anyway. What do you think are the problems with the way it happened that led to this, this dysfunctional town square that we’re in?

[00:15:29] Stephanie Jacobs: Algorithms take you down the, the, the doomscape hole, that clickbait for negative somehow drives straight to the pain center of our brains because we believe bad news at some immense multiple more than we believe good news. You know, at, at the point where you are worried. about a flood, it’s really, really good to have the fight or flight response because you protect yourself, you protect your loved ones, you protect your community.

[00:16:11] But having that fight or flight response triggered all the time, I think, leads to a very dysfunctional view of the world. And the fact is that the, the science and the neuroscience of what drives us is every bit as important to, to the people who run social sites as it is to the chemists and the marketer who have, you know, made malamars and pumpkin cookies so attractive when we eat them. I mean, you know, at, at, at some level, Suki, maybe we are all Pavlov dogs and we are part of a giant social experiment and we’re just being prodded all the time. And there’s a conditioned stimulus and a conditioned response and the 2024 election is a result of all that combination of negative energy and of Trump accurately reflecting that people were fundamentally dissatisfied with the Biden administration and that he, a billionaire multiple times over, he, billionaire, represented an agent of change and could more accurately solve the problem of a underemployed 27 year old male whose other occupation is sitting in front of a Twitch screen watching video gamers.

[00:17:57] Voiceover: It does seem like right now because of the, the magnitude that our technology is, you know, it used to be that if someone in your village invented a really great cookie it wasn’t going to bring down the human race. But, but now when somebody creates something, whether it’s social media or whether it’s a really great cookie or anything, it’s magnified by the, the power of our technology. So, you know, how could we have reined this in? Is there anything that you think would have changed what has happened that was really within our capability? Because asking Facebook not to use algorithms is probably, you know, not going to happen. When we return, Stephanie Jacobs weighs in on how journalism has changed in the information age.

[00:19:02] Stephanie Jacobs: And it was a lot easier then because journalism’s credibility was very, very high. It was the opposite of where journalism is today. And I think that the respect that people used to have for the facts, a central core set of facts, has largely disappeared in the last 20 years, because of social media.

SEGMENT 2: Journalism’s changing roleJournalism is not an antidote to misinformation
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[00:19:49] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. Stephanie Jacobs has retired from the media, but she hasn’t lost interest in how it’s been changing. In this second part of our conversation, we talk about misinformation, facts, and how to get Americans back to understanding their role in the decisions we make as a nation.

[00:20:05] I started by asking Steph what will help us remedy the situation that social media has put us in, where there is a general lack of agreement on the very facts that we depend on to make decisions.

[00:20:19] Stephanie Jacobs: I can tell you, Suki, what I think won’t work. I’m not sure what will. Um, I think this election gave lie to the hope of many journalists, including myself as, as a recovering journalist, that better information, more critical coverage, less acceptance of, of lies would enable the truth to emerge. So there’s a, uh, a wonderful column by Wallace Baine a couple of years ago about illusions that were shattered after the elections.

[00:20:58] And one of the illusions that he correctly points out is that journalism is the antidote to misinformation. over the 30, 40 years of elections that I’ve been covering, the politics of fear generally work better than the politics of hope. And I think the, the one concrete thing that would have changed the course and maybe is the antidote for this tribalization is, is a return to civics. And by that I mean the government courses that kids used to have in the fourth grade and the fifth grade through middle school and requirement for U. S. history, the accurate U. S. history taught in high school. And I think that we have seen both the, both good effects of democracy with the election of Barack Obama.

[00:22:01] I think we have seen the good effects of democracy with Joe Biden, who is certainly, I think, will go down as one of the most productive presidents in history, as well as someone who made a decisive decision late in his career. Historians will argue about should he have made that decision far earlier.

[00:22:27] And I think we have seen the destructive impact of the lack of civics being taught to children in the attacks on librarians, on the attacks on officials, and the attacks, frankly, on the gay and the trans community.

[00:22:51]

Laws of physics as they apply to human behavior
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[00:22:51] Suki Wessling: I’ve been thinking a lot about the law of physics of an equal and opposite reaction. And feeling like a lot of what is happening has something to do with echoes of very good things that were done in our culture. That, that also because they were good, they also had the equal and opposite effect.

[00:23:18] And so when I think about the 1960s and the question authority movement, this was good. We needed to question authority. We don’t want civics to mean you know, it shouldn’t be blind adherence to the status quo because there might be something very wrong with the status quo.

[00:23:38] And in the 60s there were many things that were very wrong, like every era there’s something very wrong with the status quo. So then I look at that and I think, well here we have it. You know, this is, this is the 60s child that now we have people who are questioning every authority. You know, we have the possibility of having someone who is, I think, verifiably insane, you know, dictating some of our health policy in the United States, that being RFK Jr., that he, some of his beliefs are beliefs. They’re, you know, so against science. they’ve, they’ve been made up. And people who follow him, a lot of them are lefties who question authority. Mm

[00:24:27] Stephanie Jacobs: You know, it’s really, really a useful analogy to the laws of physics. Objects tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by forces that, that oppose them. And I think what we have now is the, the Trump movement, which started in a denial of the establishment and a denial of process. And there were people in the failure of Hillary Clinton’s election campaign, who believed that she was part of a child prostitution ring run out of a pizza joint in Washington that I think was firebombed.

[00:25:11] Suki Wessling: Yeah.

[00:25:13] Stephanie Jacobs: So, what is it about this generation of Americans, that we are willing to believe absurd conspiracies that our parents or our grandparents would say, um, what, what’s wrong with you? And, and Robert Kennedy, you know, it’s, uh, having spent a lot of time on the East Coast, Robert Kennedy was the former river keeper and responsible for campaigns to help clean up the Hudson River. And then he became enamored of conspiracy theories and to think that he will have any role in determining health policy… My daughter and her wife are both pediatricians, and among the many issues that they face is vaccine anxiety. And they’re seeing an increase in severe complications because children are not being vaccinated against measles, mumps, rubella.

[00:26:25] And these are preventable diseases and yet we have a vaccine denier who will play a potentially critical role in health policy. So I share your concern, but moving broadly back, did the questioning of authority and responsibility have a significant impact? maybe you’re right.

[00:26:52] Suki Wessling: So I want to go back to when, when did you start your career?

[00:26:56] Stephanie Jacobs: I started life originally planning to be an electrical engineer. And it was the early seventies, and I fell in love at Cornell, where I was an engineering student. I fell in love with student radio and found that the immediacy, simplicity, and power of radio journalism spoke to me in ways that I had never, never, never anticipated.

[00:27:25] And I landed my first job in Montgomery, Alabama in 1974, where the then George C. Wallace, a, a populist and a demagogue, um, before Donald J. Trump was halfway through his first housing development. was an amazing character to, to watch up close and personal. And, you know, I was a, a, a young whippersnapper then, um, um, only slightly less a whippersnapper now, but certainly no longer young. Um, and it was just fascinating to watch him wield power and to hold sway over, the body politic. And I’ve been fascinated with the intersection of power, journalism and politicians ever since then.

[00:28:22] Suki Wessling: Interesting that it’s, it was student radio, it was community radio in a sense that got you into this.

[00:28:28] Stephanie Jacobs: Absolutely. I, I think that the best writers in broadcasting are those who write for the ear. And Charlie Osgood was my idol when I was working a 5 a. m. shift in Montgomery, Alabama. And, you know, later in my career, I would get to work on the same floor with Charlie at CBS News and we’d see each other, you know, pretty often. And, you know, he, he died last year and, and with that, uh, radio lost one of the great wordsmiths. Not, not that there are not wordsmiths now, but, you know, Charlie really influenced a whole generation of journalists, the same way John Dickerson’s mom, Nancy, and Connie Chung influenced, and my pal Susan Zarensky, who became president of CBS News, influenced a whole generation of female journalists.

[00:29:27]

Journalism’s role in society
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[00:29:27] Suki Wessling: So when you were a young journalist and throughout your career, journalism had a really primary role in our society. Can you explain what it felt like to be involved in news when you knew that that was, you know, people had two major sources of news and that would’ve been print and television, radio, you know, they didn’t have social media.

[00:29:53] You know, there were the conspiracy theorists among us always, but they, they had to find each other by little mail order zines and stuff like that. So what was your role in, in mainstream media at that time?

[00:30:08] Stephanie Jacobs: Well, it certainly was a kinder, gentler time in some respects, and it was a, more stratified, less equal opportunity time as well. Uh, I was originally a reporter and then a television producer, and a television producer for those in your audience who, never watched Broadcast News or Mary Tyler Moore, uh, the broadcast producers acts much like an editor of a newspaper.

[00:30:37] He or she decides the, the, the content, the treatment, the duration. And my specialty, as I rose through the ranks of CBS News was helping to run the special event unit. And I was responsible, along with my colleagues, for handling the elections through the late 80s, 90s, and I think my last election was Bush v. Gore in 2000. And it’s, it’s a great career for people who are tension junkies and who like doing interesting things every day. I got to go to China -unlike Tim Walz, I was in China in 1989. Um, for, for real. I got to witness the fall of the Soviet Union up close and personal. I spent time in Japan and in Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War.

[00:31:34] I’ve, I’ve been jailed for being a busy body. And got to travel the world on CBS’s, um, Amex card. And, and, and it was a lot easier then because there weren’t all these multiplicity of information sources and the, the credibility of the news media, especially in the wake of the Watergate episode involving Woodward, Bernstein, Judge John Sirica, Washington Post, and the Nixon administration, journalism’s credibility was very, very high. It was the opposite of where journalism is today. And I think that the respect that people used to have for the facts, a central core set of facts, has largely disappeared in the last 20 years, to go back to a point I made earlier, because of social media. You know, the cliche is that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but facts are facts.

[00:32:43] And now we have diametrically opposite view of what a fact is. And I, I think that that’s one of the things that makes that town square coming together so impossibly difficult these days because people do not see facts the way they used to.

How the Internet and Web have changed journalism
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[00:33:11] Suki Wessling: So one of the things that I think the early people who were creating the internet and the World Wide Web, many of them, they are largely, or were at least, largely liberal, believing in free speech, believing that more speech is always good, believing that empowering people to put their ideas out in the world is always good. But your career, even though it was in television, which was a new medium, was really the same career that journalists had for, now that I look at it, it’s a pretty short time, right?

[00:33:53] Um, you know, say a hundred years of journalism where we defined it as, as bringing the facts to people, helping them understand the world. What were some ways in which, you felt that you were able to help people understand what was happening, and do you have any memories of things that you felt that the media didn’t, that they dropped the ball on, that, that the media could have educated people in more?

[00:34:24] Stephanie Jacobs: Yeah, my, my last job at CBS News was executive producer of cbsnews. com. And, among the things that I take pride on was that we tried to bring a television like experience to people who were watching the then very young Internet across a dial up modem line. No one of course has those anymore and broadband has revolutionized everything with people having not merely 20 megabit downloads, but gigabit downloads, everything of course, that makes our consumption of streaming media possible was then just on the horizon.

[00:35:07] I think journalism’s major fault is that for all its attempts to explain, it’s better at talking than listening. And I think to, to sort of circle back to the campaign that we just witnessed, I think that the Harris campaign was very good at promoting its messages and failed to appreciate just how angry people were at the economy. And a number of other issues. But that deep felt anger, I think, grows out of a sense of either dissatisfaction or perhaps entitlement or there were certainly losers in the globalization of the last 25 years.

[00:36:11] And I think journalists under reported those key economic drivers of what we say in terms of behavior. Certainly in the 80s and 90s, mainstream journalism did a lousy job covering the feminist revolution. And my former wife was a first generation feminist, the product of an Ivy League education and then a career after Georgetown Law and raised two very aware daughters.

[00:36:44] But I think the largely white male executive leadership is guilty of missing large social trends, large economic trends, and doing an adequate job of explaining them. So, the dissatisfaction that led to that 10 million Americans not to vote Democratic in the last election, the dissatisfaction that helps explain why Trump’s messages landed so significantly among, among others, white women and Latinx males, I think the media does a better job talking and needs to do a better job listening.

[00:37:34] Voiceover: When the Babblery continues, Steph’s life takes a hard turn after she lands on the West Coast.

[00:37:41] Stephanie Jacobs: White male privilege is so strong and so pervasive and white males are so blind to the benefits of privilege that they carry around. And it wasn’tuntil I I voluntarily surrendered my privilege that I recognized how, how large it was.

SEGMENT 3: Gender and our society
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[00:38:01]

[00:38:17] Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. Retired CBS News producer Stephanie Jacobs and I were connected by another programmer at our community radio station, KSQD.

[00:38:27] Normally, I’d try to cut out the local references, but in this case, this place where we live is at the center of what comes next for Steph. You see, I talked to her on the phone, and it wasn’t until after we’d discussed much of her career that she casually dropped in the information that really shouldn’t be important at all.

[00:38:44] But this year’s election ripped a private part of Steph’s life into the public sphere and has laid bare how much misunderstanding and fear Americans have over the changing views of gender in our society.

[00:38:56] We take up Steph’s life after she and her wife move West for good weather, good wine, and proximity to their adult daughter.

[00:39:04]

Becoming a California girl
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[00:39:08] 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.

[00:39:19] So that was a major sea change in my life that, uh, has helped shaped the, the last seven, eight years of my life.

[00:39:30] Suki Wessling: Can you explain that in more detail? What was the California girl that you needed to become?

[00:39:35] Stephanie Jacobs: Well, one of the least attractive parts of the Trump campaign has been the demonization of people in the LGBTQ and particularly the trans community. And 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. And I, 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.

[00:41:15] Suki Wessling: How do you think that your life would have been different if you, when you were a child, had known, I’m assuming you probably didn’t know about transgender people, very few of us did. How, how would your life have been different? Do you think that you might have transitioned earlier?

[00:41:35] Stephanie Jacobs: You know, that’s a really, really good question. And I spent a lot of time in therapy trying to come to grips with the duality of my personality. Certainly, there were no words to describe how I felt in the 50s and 60s and growing up and when I realized that I was different because that was how I viewed myself, I spent a lot of energy, trying to tamp that down and, repress it.

[00:42:10] Uh, I was afraid for myself, for the impact of my family, the, the impact on, on my career The one thing that I can say about the blue bubble that we live in is that Santa Cruz writ large has got to be among the best places in the world to transition at, at any age, whether you’re a 67 year old grandparent or whether you’re a gender fluid, gender questioning teenager trying to understand who you really are.

[00:42:48]

Transgender as a social contagion
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[00:42:48] Suki Wessling: Yeah, it’s hard to go back and try to figure out, would I have done anything different? But I’m, I’m interested because of the question of so many people believing 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?

[00:43:26] Stephanie Jacobs: Um, can I use the word bullshit on your podcast?

[00:43:31] Suki Wessling: On the podcast, yes, I’ll cut it on, or I’ll beep it on radio, but go ahead.

[00:43:35] 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.

[00:44:09] 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.

[00:44:52] 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.

[00:45:31] They should not have politicians making those decisions for them.

[00:45:36] So I, I disavow very strongly the contagion theory. What I do acknowledge is that with consciousness of gender issues, in this particular era, being so strong and so upfront, it does present a unique set of challenges that did not exist in the 50s or 60s. If you were a gay child in the 50s or 60s, you were, chances are, a closeted gay child until you went away to college.

Transitioning from power
—

[00:46:12] 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.

[00:46:28] Stephanie Jacobs: You’re asking the right question, and I’m not enough of a sociologist to answer the societal question. 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.

[00:46:56] 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.

[00:47:31] 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.

[00:48:03] 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.

[00:48:33] And back to the question that you raised, why are trans people the sudden whipping boy? And the only comment that I can make is that fundamentalists lost the battle over same sex marriage and found through polling that the trans whipping child, the trans whipping point, could produce the same amount or greater of engagement and ire.

The value of labels
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[00:49:11] Suki Wessling: You said three things that I’d love to follow up on. So, one was the privilege that you realized you had after the fact. And the second one was the influence of testosterone. And the third one is labeling. And I’m going to start with the third because 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 you just described a community that is, well, was strongly liberal progressive, i, the returns are that one in five people in the strongly liberal and progressive place did vote Republican for president, but outside of that. In this liberal progressive place, you said that you interact with people and that they don’t see the label first. So how, why the disconnect?

[00:50:16] Why is there’s this sense that the labels have caused the problem, yet your sense of having taken on the label, having transitioned and become the person you needed to become is more acceptable amongst the people that are now being demonized for labeling people. I know you’re, she, Stephanie’s making a face right now.

[00:50:44] Stephanie Jacobs: Yeah, it’s a good thing we’re not on video. 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.

[00:51:20] 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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[00:51:37] Suki Wessling: Yeah, we started our conversation talking about that activation of the lizard brain, the sense of our political sphere and our social media sphere drawing on this, the power of fear. Um, 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.

[00:52:11] And that that’s not fair. Um, first of all, I will just say that this hardly happens. There have been a couple of very well publicized cases, but for the most part, most transgender girls are not, you know, making, um, great strides in sports and, and shoving, uh, cisgender girls out of sports. But 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.

[00:52:57] 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.

[00:53:31] 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.

Male privilege and the role of gender in society
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[00:54:34] Suki Wessling: Yeah. And the last thing that the, the first thing that you mentioned, 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. And I think, you know, this is somewhere, I guess, I’d like to finish up our conversation talking about the role of gender and privilege in our society and where we are, because I feel like in a sense, we are, gender is the inflection point of this time.

[00:55:09] It is the thing that, the Trump campaign spent so much money on, not because transgender people are in any way numerous enough to make major changes in American public life. But because people, even people who are denying it, are being affected by this change in perspective about gender.

[00:55:37] 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.

[00:56:06] What is the work they need to do?

[00:56:08] 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.

[00:56:34] 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.

[00:56:59] 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.

[00:57:41] 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. The exception to the rule is here in Santa Cruz,

[00:58:18] Suki Wessling: You’re after, after I broadcast this, there’s going to be a flood of people saying, wait, can I actually afford to live there? Oh, darn.

[00:58:26] Stephanie Jacobs: Well, the, You know, to be fair, I don’t mean to, to suggest that Santa Cruz is, is nirvana for every member of the L-G-B-T-Q family, but the, fact is that in a liberal society, you value people because of their ideas and their conduct. The principles that make their character define them, not some dumbass label.

In the long run, the good guys win
—

[00:58:58] Suki Wessling: And that brings us back to civics, which brings us back to trying to understand each other, shutting up and listening and I guess trying to move forward from a really difficult place that we’re in. I know that a lot of people right now are fearful.

[00:59:18] Given your experiences in media that worked, however imperfectly, and now, an atmosphere where media isn’t working quite in the way it was, what do you think that we can do?

[00:59:33] 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?

[00:59:45] Stephanie Jacobs: What I learned from one of my therapists was the value of taking a breath.

[00:59:53] Take a breath. It’s not as bad as you fear, though your fears are justified.

[01:00:02] I don’t mean to be Candide ish, but 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.

[01:00:48] And there will be a revision to the mean and a reckoning that will bring out the better parts of our human nature and the character of Americans, regardless of the impact that Trump and his acolytes have. And that’s it. You know, I’m, I’m now 73. The major part of my life is, is over. The part where I helped shape a national agenda is in the rear view mirror and increasingly hard to see.

[01:01:21] I look at my children, I look at my grandchildren, I look at those who are my friends and their kids, and the kids are certainly not immune to picking up the stresses that their parents feel. But I think in the long run, the next generations will revert back to the essential characters that have made the United States a success as a pluralistic nation, one whose imperfections loom large, but every generation is committed to making it a little bit better, a little bit more democratic, a little more filled with the opportunity.

[01:02:09] 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 for years the pendulum will, will shift.

[01:02:38] Otherwise, how do you get up in the morning? If, if you get up believing that there is no opportunity for improvement, for, for bringing a little bit of joy and, alleviating some of society’s ills, then it’s, that’s a very bleak place. 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.

[01:03:14] 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?

[01:03:40] 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.

[01:04:35] The song Blue is from Komiku on Loyalty Freak Music. American Song is from Maya Solovey on Bandcamp.

[01:04:44] Thanks for listening.

[01:04:47]

END
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