An Amazing Time to be Alive with Sandy Stone

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An Amazing Time to be Alive with Sandy Stone
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Sandy Stone landed in Santa Cruz, California in 1973, looking for a safe place to transition her gender. The Santa Cruz of her generation, as she describes it, was “weirder by orders of magnitude” than the left coast towns of today. She set up a business, the Wizard of Aud, and went about her life.

But something unexpected happened. Sandy, newly transitioned, was embraced by the women’s community, then hired to be the engineer for the nascent women’s music label, Olivia Records. The transition was wider and deeper than gender. She found “ Sisterhood, comfort, mutual aid, good conversation,” a revitalized career, and TERFs—women whose pain she recognized with empathy, compassion, and a strong sense of self-preservation.

In this conversation, we explore two times of Sandy’s life: her personal experience with the women’s movement and attempts to exclude her, and this modern time, when Sandy says we’re hearing echoes of the same old story when it comes to transgender people. In both periods, women who could be trans people’s allies turned on them, but in this period, their message is being amplified by a political movement “mobilizing disenfranchisement and pain.” [Click for transcript]

Allucquére Rosanne Stone, also known as Sandy Stone, is an academic, media theorist, artist, audio engineer, and computer programmer. A founder of the academic discipline of transgender studies, Stone’s trailblazing work created space for trans scholars to unfold the vast spectrum of gender. Stone first gained prominence in the 1970s as a sound engineer for Olivia Records, the first company to produce and distribute music by women artists.

In addition to her work in art, music, and technology, as an academic and public intellectual Stone continues to provoke important societal conversations. Her groundbreaking 1987 essay “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” not only challenged prevailing notions of gender but also laid the groundwork for discussions on transgender issues in academia and beyond.

Sandy Stone at her induction into the Women’s Hall of Fame.
Photo by Suki Wessling

Mentioned in this episode:

Music:

  • “Lonely Blue, Holy Blue” by Patricia Taxxon from the album Ten Skies, 2024
  • “Bones” by Pretty Swans from the album Blackbird Nice, 2020 (read more about the artist, Never Angeline North)
  • “Strong & Free” by Bebe K’Roche from the album Be Be K’Roche, Olivia Records, 1976
  • The broadcast version of this episode also includes “I am Woman” is by Helen Reddy, 1972 from the album I Am Woman, Capitol Records

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An Amazing Time to be Alive with Sandy Stone

[00:00:25] Sandy Stone:And then I realized, no, this is an amazing time to be alive. When all those things we read in the history books about how the people organized against tyranny, we get to live that, not just read about it.

[00:00:47] Suki Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. As a family member, a teacher, and a friend to transgender people, I have watched this last year unfold, not just with personal dismay, political disgust, and absolute righteous anger, though I have felt all of those. I am living with wretched fear for people I love, and for people I have never met.

[00:01:10] My conversation here is with a friend, transgender scholar, activist, and artist, Sandy Stone. I know her as the lead engineer at KSQD, the grandmother of my kids’ preschool buddies, and a fellow seeker of good, unusual food. You should know her as an important thinker of our age whose every word has become an act of political defiance.

[00:01:32] Sandy and I sat down at the station, after a meal of Mongolian food, of course, to talk about two periods of her life, the mid 1970s when she transitioned and found the women’s movement and this modern period, starting with the election of Donald Trump.

[00:01:48] I’ve been talking to a number of women who took part in the seventies women’s movement, a time of revolution whose gains seemed like a feeble echo in 2016. That echo has grown to an absolute din as we see so many rights won at that time clanging loudly against the current decay of women’s rights and the seemingly sudden fascination with making sure that trans people don’t get any rights.

[00:02:11] Sandy points out that this backslide is not sudden. It’s a new iteration of an old and weary cycle that she has worked to counter much of her adult life. Let’s get right to it and drop into the conversation in 1974 Santa Cruz County, where Sandy had landed a year earlier looking for a safe home for her transition.

[00:02:31] Sandy Stone: I actually moved here in 1973 and I transitioned in 1974, so I had a year in which to think about what I was doing. Santa Cruz in 1974 was quite a different place in many ways. It’s the same in some we’re still kinda weird, but we were weirder by orders of magnitude.

[00:02:58] Suki Wessling: And so when you came here, did you have any connections in the women’s movement here?

[00:03:04] Sandy Stone: No, I, I absolutely none. Those were things that developed after I came out and I had no connections whatsoever with the women’s movement anywhere else. That all developed out of my being able to come out in Santa Cruz and feel comfortable.

[00:03:24] Suki Wessling: How did you first become aware of the women’s movement in Santa Cruz, and how did you meet people?

[00:03:32] Sandy Stone: I first became aware of the women’s movement in Santa Cruz because some women started coming in to the stereo repair shop that I was running on the mall.

[00:03:44] Oh, women. Okay. And they turned out to be um, lesbians and part of the, what we called the women’s community, which included both lesbians and straight women and probably other women too. And at that point there were about 50 women that constituted the women’s community. So we could all see each other, you could put us all in one room, uh, which made it very cozy actually.

[00:04:16] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm. So you met these women at the shop, and then how did you become part of their group?

Part of the women’s community

[00:04:23] Sandy Stone: Alright, this is two stages. The first stage was osmosis and I became part of the women’s community because I was there, because I was interacting with women and I, I just seemed to be accepted and that was fine.

[00:04:42] And then there came uh, a time when we get to stage two, which is when some of the radical separatists in town decided that I was not a woman, and they brought that to a head. And we actually had a meeting at which the, the purpose of the meeting among a couple of other things, was to decide whether or not I was a woman and therefore whether I could be allowed into the community.

[00:05:09] And I mean that we can look back on that and say, oh, that was odd. And as it turned out, there were two separatists in town who were making all the noise. And of course now we know that, that a minority of um, radical, um, I’ll bless them by calling them radical feminists though I don’t think they are. Uh, a minority is extremely loud and they look like there are more of them. It’s like some bird fluffing out its feathers to look more threatening. And when it came down to it, we actually took a vote. Is Sandy Stone a woman or not? And it was two against 48 and um, that was the last we ever heard of that in, in town, but it was Santa Cruz. So the separatists, the, the radical separatists kind of slunk away, but we’re all in one community. So eventually they came back and, and

[00:06:17] Suki Wessling: were they more accepting of you?

[00:06:18] Sandy Stone: I’m not sure, but at least we were able to be in the same spaces at the same time.

[00:06:25] Suki Wessling: Yeah.

[00:06:25] Sandy Stone: Which is, you know, for practical purposes, that’s good enough.

[00:06:29] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm. What did you find in the women’s community that you were looking for?

What was Sandy looking for?

[00:06:35] Sandy Stone: Sisterhood, comfort, mutual aid, good conversation. Speaking as a trans woman, um, the difference between the men’s community and the women’s community was notable in that, I’m not sure that I could describe this well, but there was a sense of bonding that I called sisterhood.

[00:07:03] And of course at that time the men’s community was just discovering itself and by men’s community here, I mean the gay men’s community. And of course that really came together in the 1980s with the AIDS crisis when the Santa Cruz men’s community really woke up and saw itself as a real community.

[00:07:29] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:30] Sandy Stone: Um, but that’s from, from the viewpoint of the women’s community, it was a time in a way of, uh, carefree, um, bonding over dances over dinners at various people’s homes over the Wizard of Aud, my store, which really became kind of like the GLBT Community Center. We had a couch, which meant people could come in and sit down and hang out. And they did. And a lot of stuff flowed from that.

[00:08:08] Suki Wessling: Like what?

[00:08:10] Sandy Stone: Well among them was the TranSisters, which was the group of women that, uh, were, were working on learning to become recording engineers and be able to, um, repair and eventually build, um, electronic equipment that was an, uh, outgrowth of that.

[00:08:32] And of course there was a lot going on outside of the Wizard. Uh, a group of founding the, um, Women’s Health Center. And other things that I, I wasn’t even aware of. It was a very fertile time. A lot of things were popping.

Empowerment

[00:08:50] Suki Wessling: When women first got together and started talking to each other without men, not as wives getting together the way wives did, but as women getting together, just as women, they started to realize how pervasive the the pain, the abuse, the, uh, marginalization was. Did you see that? And, and how did you feel about that being, how did you feel your place in that being a trans person among lesbian women?

[00:09:24] Sandy Stone: I saw that happening. Most of the women that I interacted with at that time were in their twenties and thirties. There was obviously a community of older women, but they were not primarily what, uh, who I was involved with. But I was able to feel at the periphery that growing sense of empowerment and of, and if I were to describe it in narrative terms, it was, oh my God, who are we? We can do this. It was, in many ways, quite an amazing time.

[00:10:07] Suki Wessling: Were you the only trans woman in town who was out?

[00:10:10] Sandy Stone: As far as I knew, I think as far as anyone knew, I was, yes.

[00:10:15] Suki Wessling: Yeah. And so it’s interesting that you were undergoing your own coming to terms with who you had been who you were becoming, what you were going to be in the world. And all of these cisgender women were too. They were also going through a huge transition.

[00:10:35] Sandy Stone: I could watch that, particularly at dances where I had my own issues going on because I really didn’t understand at that point what it meant to be a trans woman. So I had go out with our group of lesbians and, um, we would, we would get hit on by men and of course they would go, thank you very much but, uh, not now. And I, being dumb and, and experience would occasionally go along with it, which could get me into really sticky situations.

A sticky situation

[00:11:09] Suki Wessling: Do you have one in particular that you could describe?

[00:11:12] Sandy Stone: Sure. Um, I met a man at, uh, one of the dances who called himself Captain Canuck. He was a really sweet, outgoing Canadian guy, and we hit it off and we danced together and we had a drink together and he was staying in the St. George Hotel and he had invited me back to his room and I said, sure. We went back to his room and suddenly I realized, oh my God, I’ve, I have no idea what I’m doing now that we’re down to it, now that he expects we’re going to go to bed. I can’t do that. And we sat on the edge of the bed and he said something like, um, why don’t you fox up a little bit?

[00:12:02] And I said, okay. And I went out of the room and I came back and nothing had changed because I had no idea what to do. And at that point he began to wonder a little bit. And I, I said, Canuck, you’re a really sweet guy, but look, sit down, please. I, I have something I need to tell you. And at that point, it could have gone any number of ways. We were in a room with a door closed in the ratty St. George, and he took it with great humor.

[00:12:37] Suki Wessling: Wow.

[00:12:38] Sandy Stone: He started to laugh. He said, you really had me fooled. Which is A, a compliment to a very young, reasonably early, early out, very, very fresh trans woman.

[00:12:55] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:56] Sandy Stone: And B, um, suddenly terrified and C, suddenly realizing that I have an identity conflict. So he grinned and laughed and was very friendly and open, and I laughed. I immediately went to the crisis intervention center, which, we had one at that time it was in, I believe in the old county hospital building. And I went down there and fell apart. And, uh, they put me back together being very nice, kind, thoughtful people. And that was my very first adventure. And I want to tell you, that was one-trial learning. I never did that again.

[00:13:44] Suki Wessling: Well, the interesting thing, I mean, the wonderful thing about that story is that you fell apart that much, you know? And it was really a very, you’re very lucky, of course. And, and so I’m sure that got you to understand something a lot deeper about your emotional state.

[00:14:03] Sandy Stone: It did. Although I, I admit, I ended up back at crisis intervention more than I would have liked, and I did go through various periods of feeling suicidal, as many trans people do. Mm-hmm. And in retrospect, I, I’m sad that we had better, better provisions for that then. Not that we don’t now, we have crisis hotlines and so forth, but at that time in Santa Cruz, you could simply drop in and there was a group of people there to, uh, to help you.

[00:14:44] Suki Wessling: Yeah.

[00:14:44] Sandy Stone: But I did learn a lot.

Transgender people in greater 70s society

[00:14:46] Suki Wessling: I I’m, I’m curious because of course, I was a child at this time, so I don’t remember it from adult memory, but did, did everyday people have a sense of transgender people then? Did they have any idea how to help you? Did they have trouble understanding who you were, what you needed?

[00:15:09] Sandy Stone: I don’t think anyone had any idea what trans really was. Uh, I had the advantage, and it’s a considerable advantage that to this day, I’m very grateful for, that I was very passable.

[00:15:26] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:27] Sandy Stone: Um, I, I went from definitely being a dude, uh, to, to being a passable woman without, uh, very, very much intervening time. There was a little intervening time, but, uh, but not that much. And that meant I was protected simply by being invisible. And we could talk about trans and other people in the community could talk about trans and without really knowing anything about the fine structure of it, and particularly not yet knowing anything about the political firestorm, it would become later when everybody had to take sides. And, uh, there’s that.

[00:16:14] Suki Wessling: Yeah, yeah. And, and sticking with then, because we do want to get there, of course. Get here. Do we really want to get here? I’m not sure. But sticking with then, there was also a lot happening. There was more happening for cis women then, and, and perhaps also for lesbians in that lesbians were becoming more able to live their lives out in certain places, of course.

[00:16:46] In those years, the gains that women made were just phenomenal. When you look back, it’s, it’s unbelievable. Um, one person I interviewed, she said, I, I think they just didn’t know what hit them. You know, that going into the seventies, women could not buy their own home. They couldn’t get a mortgage, they couldn’t have their own bank accounts in many places. They could not have credit cards. Um, they often couldn’t get divorced without their husband’s approval. And of course there were no abortion rights.

[00:17:21] And then by the mid seventies all that had changed. What did you see change in in the women’s community?

Women’s power

[00:17:28] Sandy Stone: It was more in the emotional feel. It was that, oh my god moment when people began to realize what was actually possible and the, the power that women actually had to make positive change in their own lives, in the lives of, of women around them. That was, it was palpable. You could see it, you could feel it, you could practically smell it. It was, it was an absolutely amazing time. There is no gainsaying that. And being just fortunate enough, but no other reason in that I happened to be of that age at that time in that place. I got to watch something truly amazing that I won’t get to see again in my lifetime.

[00:18:25] And I will not forget it. It was glorious.

Segment 2: Music, collectives, and TERFs

[00:18:38] Suki Voiceover: Talking to Sandy Stone about her life is a little like taking a tour where she’s a guide who enjoys straying from the path. She introduces hugely important events with statements like

[00:18:49] Sandy Stone: I got involved with Olivia Records by being stupid.

[00:18:55] Suki Voiceover: And then you’re off to the races , transported in a time machine to mid seventies coastal California. Sandy had built and then left a successful career as a recording engineer, famously engineering for Jimi Hendrix. You can hear about that in the 2023 interview on the Babblery, “What is a Woman?” At this point, having transitioned her gender socially, but not completed the medical transition, Sandy gets involved with a now famous collective of women musicians, Olivia Records. What happens next starts the bridge that connects that long ago time to what we are experiencing today.

[00:19:30] Sandy Stone: An engineer in, uh, the Bay Area, um, had been approached originally by Olivia. Olivia was looking for a woman engineer. Olivia at that point had been working with individual women who had some engineering skills, but not really any deep experience in the industry because women at that point couldn’t get into the industry. There were very, very few. When Olivia started out looking for a woman engineer, they went to San Francisco where they found a woman engineer who was too busy to do anything with them. But she mentioned me.

[00:20:13] So they came down to Santa Cruz and the first I knew of anything about Olivia or women’s music or any of that was when I looked up from something I was doing and there were two women standing in front of me in the store and I said, can I help you? And they said, we’re looking for Sandy Stone. And I said, ta-da.

[00:20:36] And they said, we’re from Olivia Records. And I said, oh, good. And they said, we’re, we’re looking for, uh, a woman to engineer, uh, albums with us. And I said, oh, good. Well, I’m a woman. I do engineering. What do we have to talk about? So we sat down, we, we went outside on the mall, there were tables, and we sat down and we chatted for hours, just about our lives and what, what our desires were for the future.

[00:21:09] And, uh, all, all, all kinds of stuff. And I agreed to go down to LA and, uh, check them out. Um, I did that and they, we, we went through this real period of kind of walking around each other and sniffing each other and, and it was good. We, we felt that we were comfortable with each other, and after I went down and visited the collective once, we decided to see if we were really compatible by doing an album that they had in the pipeline called BeBe K’Roche.

[00:21:50] I went into the studio in San Francisco and I was full of my New York mainstream recording vibrations, and it was totally inappropriate. And the other women were really good musicians, but had never been in a studio before, never mind a studio with somebody who was used to working with rock and roll stars, and we had to adjust to each other.

[00:22:18] And that was an amazing and interesting project. We we’re not here really to talk about that very much, but it was a process of discovering what women’s music really meant. And it was not only just women making music, which is what I thought when I first heard about it, but it was women learning from each other, supporting each other, growing together.

[00:22:49] And that involved me shedding a lot of my preconceptions, learning to slow down, to be in the moment and not just to go right, the clock’s running, let’s punch in now, but to go, I want to hear what you have to say. I want to hear what you’re playing and get it right with what we’re doing. And that was our first time. We finished that album, it was a great album. The day we finished, the group broke up and we were standing there going, we, we now, we have nothing. You guys are not going to tour. We’re not going to sell any albums. And in fact, it sank like a rock, which taught us something.

[00:23:38] As a lesbian feminist, as a women’s record company, olivia had been making album contracts with a handshake because that’s what sisterly women did. And shortly after that, we had a meeting of the collective in which we realized that doing the kind of thing was certainly sisterly, but it was probably also stupid and we needed to stop. So from then on it was contracts like everybody else.

[00:24:10] Suki Wessling: What do you think you learned personally through working with women after you had largely worked with men, these sort of big, powerful stars, and now you’re working with women who are building this more community oriented music.

[00:24:28] Sandy Stone: Um, the first word that comes into my mind is humbling. Uh, I, I don’t even know how to break that down very much, but being in the room with a group of women, experiencing that particular kind of oppression in its fine structure at the time, and experiencing the way in which the women reacted to it and built structures around, uh, and through it without, in, in as many ways as they could, letting it affect them and looking to each other for support.

[00:25:11] More than anything else it was that sense of sisterhood that that was really what we were doing, that the slogan, sisterhood is powerful, was real and alive and very powerful. And what we were doing with each other was for us absolutely new. So every day was a day of discovery about how we as women could work together and build something bigger, greater than what we had before, and how we could spread that message, which was really what Olivia was about.

[00:25:54] We did a number of things in what I would call the hinterlands. We did concerts where women came to those concerts who had never, to their knowledge, known another lesbian. And some of them, I, I, I find this hard to believe, even in retrospect, some of them just wanted to touch some of the, the women in the collective as though to say, you are, you are real. You are real, and therefore I’m real. That was, that was an unrepeatable experience

[00:26:31] Suki Wessling: That was a beautiful image. It was just like, it’s making me cry. Um, Did the women who first approached you know that you were transgender?

[00:26:41] Sandy Stone: They did. I didn’t know they did, but I told them immediately. I said, well, one of the things you need to know is that besides being an engineer, I’m transgender. And they said, yeah, we know.

[00:26:55] Suki Wessling: Okay,

[00:26:55] Sandy Stone: so.

 Berkeley Women’s Music Collective

[00:26:56] Suki Wessling:

[00:27:19] Suki Voiceover: You’ve been listening to BeBe K’Roche’s Strong and Free, engineered by Sandy Stone, and with lyrics by previous Babblery guest, Joan Gelfand.

[00:27:27] Sandy has fond memories of being the recording engineer of choice for the seventies women’s community. But in one case, a misunderstanding led to one of Sandy’s first reckonings with the way women’s trauma can influence their feelings about the inclusion of trans women.

[00:27:48] Sandy Stone: Berkeley Women’s Music Collective was great. There were these boisterous, just bumptious young women with very low musical skills, but great determination and, and my job was to make them sound like they could play.

[00:28:04] And, well, I think we all together did a really, really good job. And I went back recently and someone sent me a vinyl of the album, so I had a chance to hear it again. And it was actually a lot better than, than I remembered it being and and all props to them because they were working very hard in a completely novel environment.

[00:28:30] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm. And there was an issue when apparently they didn’t know that you were transgender, and then at least some of them found out and were not comfortable with it.

[00:28:41] Sandy Stone: Well, apparently, yeah. I did not know that anyone who knew anything about Olivia did not know I was trans. We didn’t talk about it. I mean, I, I wasn’t wearing a t-shirt that said I am a trans person, or even I am not a trans person. Um, I was under the impression that everyone in the collective knew, but later Ginny Berson said that it was possible that there were people in the collective who didn’t know. Now I can’t, that’s inconceivable to me. I, I, I made absolutely no secret out of the fact that I was trans.

[00:29:24] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[00:29:25] Sandy Stone: Anyway, yes, after we did the Berkeley Women’s Music Collective album, it turned out that one of the women in the collective did not know and was scandalized and, um, thought rather badly of me as a result of it. And consequently, later, at, at an Olivia meeting with some women’s community in Oakland, I found myself in a position of being opposite this woman, whom I had thought of as, as a pleasant acquaintance, and she was standing on a chair screaming at me about how dare I ruin the women’s community… like that?

[00:30:10] Oh, I think this was a big wake up call for all of us. I think this was a point when Olivia and whatever we represented, having our nose rubbed in, collectively, rubbed in the fact that there was a whole other women’s community that did not share our values. Not only did not share our values, but didn’t want us to share our values, didn’t want us to have our values.

[00:30:41] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[00:30:42] Sandy Stone: That, I think, was an enormous shock. And a number of women in the collective did not take it very well emotionally. They, um, at least one of the women in the collective was quite damaged by that.

[00:30:57] nobody in the collective wanted me to leave. Okay. They, everyone wanted me to stay. Mm-hmm. They thought that the whole thing was ridiculous.

[00:31:05] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:05] Sandy Stone: And the fact that it was at the same time ridiculous, and it was also horrible and dangerous, and painful was a huge wake up call. We, we all went away just stunned from that.

[00:31:22] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[00:31:23] Sandy Stone: And one of the collective, in fact, had a, had a meltdown from which they, they never really, um, they never really got over that. I had something of a meltdown myself, but if I weren’t tough, I would never survive. So, I, I, I think the fact that there was just a limit to how far you had to go before you had to push back was, uh, was new news for several of the women in the collective.

Not quite the original TERFed

[00:31:52]

[00:31:54] Suki Voiceover: Sandy Stone experienced the hatefulness under the surface of her loving community when the first trans woman was publicly TERFed, excluded from a community by trans exclusive radical feminists.

[00:32:07] Suki Wessling: There was a woman in the music, uh, business who was TERFed before me, and her name was Beth Elliot. She was very active in the women’s community and held office in a number of, uh, women’s organizations and came to play at, at a conference on women writers at which an extremely small group of radical separatists made so much noise that Beth had to leave the conference. So we had perhaps 10% of the women there generating so much hate that a trans woman with cred

[00:32:56] mm-hmm

[00:32:56] Sandy Stone: in, in, in the community had to leave. Wow. That’s when we first realized how hateful the whole thing could get. And it was such a one off that it didn’t really penetrate, even at that time, even with all the hateful rhetoric that was being thrown around, it still didn’t penetrate.

Separatism

[00:33:21] Suki Wessling: If you had to describe where you think the impulse for separatism comes from, what do you think it, it is?

[00:33:31] Sandy Stone: Okay. This is an individual view.

[00:33:33] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[00:33:33] Sandy Stone: Just mine. These women seemed to me to be damaged, every one of them. They had been hurt, and of course, 90% of women are at one point or another, sexually harassed. I, I felt that these women had been sexually harassed and, and hurt and possibly raped and assaulted to the point where, and made to feel so powerless, so powerless that they had to take that rage out on someone. And here we are with, with targets on our backs. We were in one definition there where that we were men.

[00:34:21] And there are some trans women who accept that identity. Yes, I lived part of my life as a man. I had male privilege. I gave it up in order to be able to be who I felt I really am. And then there are other trans women who say, no, I was never a man. Even though I was living as a man, I was never a man. I was really a woman inside and was just waiting until I could fix that.

[00:34:54] Which is just a way of saying we’re a very diverse community and we were facing up to the fact that it didn’t matter what we said, we were being told who we were by a group of women who felt they knew better than we did, who we were. That was also quite a time. Um, I don’t know really why at that moment, both the lesbian feminist movement in the good sense, and the, the beginning of trans women in that community, and this enormous backlash of hate from a very small, very loud group of people just happen to happen at the same time.

[00:35:47] And of course, later, in my case, we found out that part of it was driven as a business decision. Because one of the loudest of the TERFs happened to own Olivia’s competition record company.

Women’s media

[00:36:04] Suki Wessling: Women, and particularly lesbians because those were the people I was most associating with at the time, were simultaneously becoming aware of the power of the women’s community through the founding of a good many feminist publications. And I might mention, um, as a side, uh, that, and particularly one of them, Sinister Wisdom, was around then and had an absolutely, uh, anti-trans position. And, um, within the last year asked me if I would write an article for them about, uh, what lesbian feminism was like in women’s music at that time. So we’ve, we’ve all come a long way. Sister Magazine hosted the debate on both sides. They were among the first of the, uh, feminist and lesbian feminist organizations, uh, and they were also the host to the first online trans, you know, openly trans discussion of TERF hate on one side, and me specifically on the other. I would say that we all grew for the experience. I’m not sure that everyone grew in a productive way, but we all, we all grew.

[00:37:38] Suki Voiceover: Prior to 2015, although there had been some prominent trans people, trans people living openly were so rare that Americans didn’t really have a social construct of ‘the transgender person.’ All of a sudden, in 2015, a concerted effort on the right started to paint transgender people as a social menace. I asked Sandy about that.

[00:37:59] Suki Wessling:

[00:38:02] Sandy Stone: Okay. First, let me say this in French. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, it’s, everything changes, but everything is still the same. The big thing in the 1970s was male energy, and the thing that kept being said about the visible trans women was that they were loaded, stuffed with male energy.

[00:38:33] Suki Wessling: Male

[00:38:34] Sandy Stone: energy, male energy. Let me speak about that, particularly in the women’s community, because the way that was expressed by the TERFs and spread to, uh, other women. Was that I, I, it’s hard for me to keep from laughing when I, when I talk about this, but it was the way I mixed the drums.

[00:39:01] I mixed drums in a way that conveyed throbbing male energy and I’m serious. This was one of the main things that was held against me at the time, was that I mixed drums that way. And I also, because of that, I was surrounded with the sticky cloud of throbbing male energy. And you could see it in everything I did. This was the line anyway, and, and I had to live with this because it was somebody else’s reality that they brought to the table. So when we would go to confrontations like this, I would go, where’s my throbbing male energy? And you know, and the meanwhile, the collective was going, no, but okay, now we fast forward to the present.

The Present – from throbbing male energy to physical differences

[00:39:56] Sandy Stone: Now it’s about men. Nobody says throbbing male energy anymore, but they mean essentially the same thing. And when they say men, what they say with their mouths is, well, it’s about a physical difference. And, uh, and, um, trans women are inherently more powerful or more faster or, uh, whatever than um, uh, let’s say women born women, if you will, to revive an old expression.

[00:40:30] But what they’re really doing underneath that, it’s the same throbbing male energy argument, which is to say it’s based in pain, it’s based in trauma, it’s based in someone getting hurt badly and needing to take it out on someone else because they can’t figure out any other way.

[00:40:58] And when I find myself in those confrontations. I have, uh, a problem. I have a dilemma. I want to honor that person’s pain, but at the same time, I can’t allow them to hurt me. And that’s, that involves, I would like that to involve an exchange of compassion. It doesn’t, but I hope someday it will. And in the meantime, the way I have articulated this, you know, in know a kind of a formal way, is, um, as fellow humans, we owe TERFs a duty of care, but that duty ends as soon as they attack us.

[00:41:53] That’s why my current articulation of this. And that kind of represents what I think the larger situation is. I think that’s what trans women, and to a lesser extent, trans men face. And the fact that that is asymmetrical, which is to say trans women face a lot more hatred than trans men do, is an indication of the driving engine behind the whole thing, which ultimately is patriarchy.

[00:42:28] And ultimately is the fact that women with a capital W are the objects of oppression. And that that fact has distorted social relationships so badly that among the many, many toxic fallouts of that is the fact that trans women are getting the pushback that we get. And I don’t think we deserve it. Um, but it’s a fact of life and we’re going to have to put up with it any more than women in general deserve what we get from the patriarchy.

[00:43:09] Suki Voiceover: Coming up, we’ll cross our time bridge to the present day, a time when so much of the progress made from the seventies onward seems to be eroding. But listen to Sandy Stone: all is not lost.

Segment 3: The more it changes…Growing pains for queer people

[00:43:26] Suki Voiceover: This is your host, Suki Wessling. The last year has been devastating for transgender people, all trans people, but especially the most vulnerable: trans women because they are more visible and triggering than trans men, and trans children because they depend on adults to make decisions that will affect them for the rest of their lives. We started with the seventies because that was a time of positive growth for this country, when women made huge leaps that affected everyone. They could control their fertility, they gained the right to control their finances, they entered the workforce at all levels, and they asserted themselves in American culture in a new and exciting way. At the same time, we saw modest but steady improvement for queer people. Being gay was no longer listed as a mental illness. Then queer people’s lives in many places normalized so that they could live openly with their spouses. And finally, a conservative Supreme Court first gave its blessing to same-sex marriage and even said that queer people couldn’t be fired simply for being queer.

[00:44:26] But transgender people were on a different trajectory. Despite a few prominent trans people like Sandy Stone, most Americans had no sense of transgender people. There was no generally held social construct, because of the tiny numbers of trans people and the still tinier numbers who had publicly transitioned. That all changed in 2015 with the public transition of Kaitlyn Jenner and MAGA’s targeting of this tiny minority with sudden vilification. We pick up the story again after the 2016 election, which Sandy was on the sidelines of as she sat at the bedside of her husband, Cynbe Ru Taren, who died soon after.

Marriage equality

[00:45:05] Suki Wessling:

Trump, Brexit, and how the flow of capital influenced the demonization of trans people

[00:45:07] Sandy Stone: First of all, there were several things happening at that same time, and as it turns out later, they were not accidental.

[00:45:17] One of them was Brexit, which happened at the same time virtually, and the other one was the election of Trump. They both represent to a fairly known extent now, the operation of larger forces that were not really visible, that had to do with flows of capital. The thing that was added with a guard to Trump is that Trump was able to mobilize a section of the country, a a particular demographic that had absolutely been ignored by everybody forever and had been bottling up that rage forever.

[00:46:03] And Trump was able to successfully turn that anger and fury into a political force. Um. Nobody had ever been able to do that before. Um, and the reasons for that are complex, but it happened to be a particular failing on the part of the Democrats. Um, I won’t go into that detail lots of other people have. But that idea of mobilizing di disenfranchisement and mobilizing pain in kind of a mirror image of what happened with TERFhood was a transformative moment.

[00:46:50] Nobody knew how to deal with that. I mean, nobody on the general liberal side knew how to deal with that. Hillary Clinton, I think in her shock and disbelief called this whole group, which we now know as the MAGA people, a baskett of deplorables because that’s what they looked like. And from their view, we’re just sucking up all the resources and, uh, living a life that they can’t imagine because none of the, in our position, sort of the middle of the pile, although we’re going gradually toward the bottom of the pile, we get some of the resources still, although that’s diminishing. But the people at the bottom get none of the resources and they have a legitimate claim on being angry and they have a legitimate claim on wanting change. And that’s how, unfortunately, that’s how fascism comes about. And that’s where we are now.

The visibility of trans people

[00:48:02] Suki Wessling: But then there was the involvement of trans people, the use of trans people, this tiny minority and in this outsized way. And it’s so interesting because, you know, people of course are making the comparison to Nazi Germany, but Jews were an important, small but important, segment of society that was very visible in Germany and, um, financially successful and, and visible, whereas trans people were at the time, 2016, still you know, just tiny, but getting more visible.

[00:48:39] Do you think that visibility had to do with part of why they, they grabbed that issue?

[00:48:45] Sandy Stone: Uh, part of it, but not entirely. Um. They needed, and I’m going to use they, and without bothering to define it here, um, they needed some kind of wedge issue in order to open up eventually, uh, taking away the rights that women had won uh, and since the 1920s. Um, that’s, uh, when you look at it from a strategic way, starting with trans people or in particular trans women, is, is a brilliant tactic because it then opens you up to going after queer women because they’re different, then going after women of color because they’re different and then eventually going after white women, which they will, and which I think we can all see coming now.

[00:49:40] There, there was a lot of noise about, oh, we’re never going to be, become the nation of Gilead. Um. Robert Heinlein the 1940s was writing about this happening. Because if you look at the long arc, you see that eventually the conservative forces are going to start pushing back. You, you don’t know when, but you know what it’s going to look like because there, there are only so many options in the world for how, uh, you retake power.

[00:50:11] So it’s unfolding pretty much as that, and of course as Margaret Atwood, uh, predicted, and I have to say, um, Margaret Atwood’s books make excellent entertainment, but they’re also turning into a very grim reality. And trans women have the honor, if you will, of being at the forefront of that. We’re taking the energy of the first assault, and I personally have been telling people in my talks and lectures and whatever, that this is coming and we need to get ready for it.

[00:50:50] First of all, I’m not going to be able to get enough people to get ready, ready for it, to be able to push back when it first happens. But I want you to at least be ready for the fact that you’re going to get socked right in the head and we’re going to lose a lot of what we gained. And a lot of people are going to hurt and people are going to die because of this, and you better wake up and get used to it. Mm-hmm. Because once enough people realize that it’s real, that we’re actually under attack like that, and that is not just trans women, that we’re going to start to organize better pushback, which we are, we’re late off the mark,

[00:51:36] Suki Wessling: mm-hmm.

[00:51:36] Sandy Stone: But we were always going to be late off the mark.

The progression of fascism

[00:51:38]

[00:51:42] Suki Wessling: I’ve seen plenty of people talk about the murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Goode, as, you know, oh, well people only paid attention because they’re white and they’re, but in a way you’re saying that’s what was going to happen. Yeah. That we were going to wait. It didn’t matter how many immigrants and brown people were hurt, or trans people, anyone who wasn’t in the dominant group wasn’t going to make that wave

[00:52:16] Sandy Stone: yeah.

[00:52:17] Suki Wessling: crest.

[00:52:17] Sandy Stone: Yeah. This is, this is very old news in, in the political community. Um, Black trans women are murdered every day. You never hear about it. Women of color are murdered every day, and particularly men of color are murdered every day and you never hear about it. That’s an unfortunate effect of living in what is now and effectively have, has always been a white Christian nationalist country. It’s just, it is a white, up until now, it’s been a white Christian nationalist country at a very low level. It expresses itself in terms of things like the Breen office, the Hays office, um, the seven words you can’t say on the air. They don’t appear out of nowhere. They’re part of a preexisting culture that if you follow back far enough, you see where it came from. I’m not, I’m, I’m not even going to elaborate on that, but you, you can traced it all the way back to the 15th century.

[00:53:25] It’s

[00:53:25] Suki Wessling: uhhuh

[00:53:26] Sandy Stone: the same thing.

How can we get our culture back?

[00:53:27] Suki Wessling: So in this particular time, is there, should we just be planning for what we need to do to get our culture back? I, I agree with you about the basis of this country being white Christian nationalists, but I feel like we have had, if you look at the wider arc, a positive trajectory.

[00:53:55] Sandy Stone: Absolutely.

[00:53:55] Suki Wessling: We, we have our big setbacks. I like to think, I don’t know if you’ve ever climbed a sand dune, but you take this one huge step and you take another huge step and by the time you’ve taken the second huge step, you’re almost back where you were. Uhhuh.

[00:54:09] Sandy Stone: Yes.

[00:54:10] Suki Wessling: Um, and, but you make your progress, you get to the top of the sand dune eventually maybe. So I feel like there’s two things going on right now. There’s fighting against the individual injustices, the way that trans people, since we’re talking specifically about trans people right now, are being treated, the, the removal of rights, the removal of the right to medical care, the all out assault on trans youth. I mean, there’s, it, it’s,

[00:54:47] Sandy Stone: it’s appalling. Let’s put,

[00:54:48] Suki Wessling: it’s appalling. And as a teacher and a parent, I, I just can’t understand how anyone could think that parents make decisions for their children, life-changing decisions for their children, lightly. So we have all these fires. They’re not little fires, enormous forest fires burning in, in trans rights with, trans youth, with the disenfranchisement of trans adults in our society, you know, the, the bathroom bills and, and I don’t even want to get into sports because frankly, I think eventually that sort of stuff works its way, you know, sports, sports rules they get contested, they, they work their way through and it’s the political sphere, getting involved in sports rules, that is the problem. Because of course they were going to have to figure out how to deal with having trans people in sports is just, that’s obvious, right? Um,

[00:55:55] Sandy Stone: yeah,

[00:55:55] Suki Wessling: but, and they were making, they were making strides and, and you go too far one way, you go too far the other way, whatever. But we have this huge problem now. There’s just too many problems. Should we be organizing in some bigger way to push our culture back forward? Should we be focusing on these rights that have been taken away, these individual hurts that are being done to people?

Where do we go from here?

[00:56:25] Suki Wessling: What do we do now and where do we go from here?

[00:56:29] Sandy Stone: I think we have to take this in stages. One of the things that I think is happening now, and I think it’s a very positive thing with regard to social media, which gets put down a lot. Uh, social media is not only rotting the brains of our youth, it’s also an unprecedented way to organize. And the people in in Minneapolis understand this better than anyone. The people in the Arab Spring understood it pretty well, uh, and we’re understanding it more today, that the solution to our present day situation may be radically different from what we’ve done before because we can now do things that we couldn’t do before.

[00:57:17] And the main one is this decentralized, acephalous way of building a community with the same goal. We’re using that now as a way of fighting ICE, but it can be equally effective in getting the first part of the resistance to what’s happening with, with regard to trans rights today. The, the political fine structure of that is that politicians, particularly politicians in, uh, central and uh, deep south, uh, find that they can make a great deal of political hay by mobilizing trans hate. Uh, in that they’re responding to their communities’ ignorance.

[00:58:04] So if you want to deal with that, you go down to the, the very, very grassroots level. There are people who have never seen a trans person. They only know the propaganda they hear. How do you counter that? You counter that with greater visibility, but not on the national stage. because that means nothing. You have to do it door to door. You have to do it by showing up at public meetings. You have to do it by being visible in the streets. As dangerous as we may think that is, or as dangerous as it may be for individuals, it’s death either way. So which one are you going to choose? The one with the chance of moving forward, or the one with no possibility of moving forward. That’s one of the grim realities we have to face. That’s the way the world works.

[00:58:56] So we’ve got politics on one hand we might as well for the moment, let, let that one go. We are working through our national political and legal organizations, particularly through Lambda Legal. There are other very big transgender and queer legal organizations, and of course the ACLU that push back politically against these many, many anti-trans bills as they come up, beat ’em back in the ground. If they get passed, they get appealed. Frequently, they’re overturned on appeal. So far, the Supreme Court has avoided, um, a really critical, critical decision on this. We aren’t crossing our fingers because some of these people are on the Supreme Court, are really far out there, but we have a very interesting thing going on, which is not exactly unprecedented, but that no one has seen in our generation, which is when the law comes down, simply disobey, which is what the Trumpists are doing. It’s what, it’s what the entire MAGA uh, administration is built on. You go to a court of law, they say you are off the wall, stop it, and then they go away and just keep doing it.

[01:00:23] That works both ways. We can do that too.

[01:00:27] Suki Wessling: Uh, so, so what should we do?

[01:00:30] Sandy Stone: Well, one thing that we can do, and this is kind of silly, because the, the pressure that’s coming from above is on things like you can’t use bathrooms. Come on. I mean, first of all, there were conflicting laws. One of the laws that was reasonably passed, and I believe it was Tennessee, but I could be wrong, uh, allows, allows people to photograph trans women in the bathroom and then.

[01:00:56] Post those photographs with, with doxing information. Okay. Number two, there is a countervailing law that says you cannot photograph any one of bathrooms that’s a felony. So that a lot of this stuff is just inchoate. It’s totally chaotic. When it gets sorted out, a lot of it will just turn out to be crap.

[01:01:20] Um, the rest is real, you know, the rest we will have to deal with. There are areas of the country in which very angry, very hate filled. People will go out and try to collect bounty from, uh, hunting down trans people and doxing them. Okay. The world is not a perfect place. We need to accept that that’s going on, and that may be at that level in some corner, some little dark, hateful corner of the country, we can’t yet fight against that. We’re going to just have to cut our losses. And people, trans people are dealing with that by when they can moving. There are many people who are attached to where they are. They don’t want to move because they have roots there. They have their own unique problem that we’re still developing ways to deal with.

[01:02:18] In the larger picture, we’re organizing as we never have before. In some ways, we have our heads down, because it is going to get worse. But the fact that this is a dynamic situation makes a big difference. I mean, what you read a lot in print quote, because most people read it online, is, oh my God, this is horrible. Here’s the trajectory of what the bad guys are doing, and it will inevitably lead to this terrible outcome. Trans people are going to be erased from history and erased from our country and, uh, da da. No. Because this is a dynamic situation, as the pressure increases to erase us, we are learning new and creative ways to push back.

[01:03:13] I can’t tell you what they are because we’re inventing them and there are a lot of people who are inventing them faster than I am, and I’m playing catch up to try to find out what they are. I can tell you the general outlines, and I’ve already said part of them are legal, part of them are grassroots. Part of them are, are something that we can’t even identify yet that’s partly social, partly political, and partly financial that I can’t even, I, I, I can’t even put a word on mm yet, but that’s happening with, with the larger community as well as a way of pushing back against the fascist regime.

[01:03:56] Suki Wessling: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:56] Sandy Stone: We don’t, we are, we’re on that incline, you know, we’re, we’re kind of sliding down toward fascism, but saying we’re going to get there doesn’t allow for the fact that on my side, we’re ornery. We are tough, we are angry, and we are better organized than we have ever been before. And those things are going to weigh very heavily in our favor over the next few years. I, for one, when, when I first saw this coming down when Trump was first elected, and then when he was elected again, there was a minute when I said, oh no, no, this is hopeless. We’re doomed. And then I realized, no, this is an amazing time to be alive. When all those things we read in the history books about how the people organized against tyranny, we get to live that, not just read about it. What an incredible time to be alive.

Reaching out to the next generation

[01:05:12] Suki Wessling: You are 88, you’re seeing this through the long arc of a life and my heart is breaking for trans youth right now, and I know some, I mean, in my family, amongst my friends, and they are growing up, you know, you grew up with not knowing even what you were, because you had never read about, heard about a trans person.

[01:05:45] They’re growing up knowing all these terrible things that are being done to trans people. So they’re growing up with this knowledge. What can you say to them to help them feel that that big excitement that you had about living through this time and persevering and, and that they are going to, that they can go out and grab the life that they want?

[01:06:09] Sandy Stone: I want to say, as a person who’s watched this unfold over a long, long time, you will survive. You’re going to feel a lot of pain in the meantime, but you will survive. This is my phone call to you from the future. You will be okay. I know it looks terrible now. But it will pass. You have to learn that what you’re seeing is a very small segment of time, a very small segment, and you happen to be right in the middle of it.

[01:06:49] And it’s a terrible time for you, but it’s a little slice of time and it will get better because we will make it better. We will reach out. We are here for you. I want you to hear that. There are people out there for you. We want you to grow. We want you to flourish. And if you think back a little bit, perhaps when Biden was president, you were too young to remember, but Kamala Harris, his vice president, representing the administration of the President of the United States of America, said, “Trans people, I want you to know, we want you to know we see you, we recognize you. We have your backs.” And that time will come again.

End interview

[01:08:35] Suki Voiceover: Many thanks to Sandy Stone who not only offered me a couple of hours of her time, her wisdom, and the story of her life, but also paid for the Mongolian food. I owe you lunch, Sandy, and so much more. Thanks to KSQD and Matilde Rand for help using the prod room. The song Lonely Blue, Holy Blue is by Patricia Taxxon. Bones is by Pretty Swans. Find both artists on Bandcamp. Strong and Free is by Bebe K’Roche, 1976.

[01:09:03] Find links and information about everything we discussed in the show notes, including a link to my 2023 interview with Sandy, What is a Woman?

[01:09:11] Thanks for listening.

[01:09:12]

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