Today’s show had a tough start: Lawrence showed up bruised from the week — a breakup, his mom’s upcoming surgery, the ongoing emotional whiplash of living under Trump — and the chat wrapped around him immediately. We traded notes on Medium boosts, Substack quirks, and my own Facebook Dating AI horror story making the rounds as we warmed up the virtual room and waited for everyone to join.
And then we brought on our guest:
, a nonbinary trans community-college professor, rhetoric scholar, and community organizer who has unexpectedly become one of Substack’s most vital storytellers.From the moment they joined, the entire show shifted.
weirdo talked about teaching women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in a rural red community — and what it means to be the only out trans professor across an eight-campus system. They’ve become the go-to person for every trans or trans-adjacent student who needs safety, resources, or someone to take their experience seriously. They shared the email from a former student who wrote to say that seeing a trans adult for the first time — them — changed the trajectory of her life.
And then the conversation deepened: what it means to do this work under Trump’s second term.
weirdo walked us through the federal lawsuit they landed in after advocating for trans students, how their main campus is now trying to push them out, how they’ve been forced to teach remotely for safety, and the moment their neighbors alerted them that Christian nationalists were outside their house. They’ve already had to relocate once. They may have to again.
The chat went silent — the way a room does when everyone is listening.
That’s when they gave us the line we’ll be quoting for years:
“Fascism is domestic violence at scale.”
And suddenly everything snapped into focus.
Fascism isn’t abstract — it’s personal. It’s targeted. It’s meant to control money, movement, autonomy, and bodies. It relies on shame, silence, and neighborly complicity. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
From there, weirdo laid out something astonishingly clear: the antidotes.
Solidarity: protecting vulnerable neighbors, building community safety plans, offering spare rooms and safe houses, refusing to let anyone be isolated.
Agency: giving each other what the state tries to take — care, information, healthcare, safety, hope.
We talked about grief — theirs, ours, the collective kind — and what it means to lose your home, your neighborhood, your sense of rootedness, and still keep going. I offered them our basement apartment in Seattle if they ever need it, and suddenly people in the chat were offering their homes too. It turned into one of the most moving and practical conversations we’ve ever had about what community really means.
And then we closed the way we always do: laughing, dreaming ahead, scheming about 2026, and promising to amplify the voices the country most needs right now.
Replay recommended.
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