Behind the Scenes Minis: Trees and Jennie June

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. As we said, I had John Perlin on the show to talk about trees and the port in the survival of humans throughout the years. But I also had an experienced recently which I'm gonna out myself as very nerdy in a specific kind of way, where I was at a company event and we were in this really beautiful place with this gorgeous courtyard and this beautiful tree growing over it, and one of our colleagues had said to me, like, man, I would give anything to just climb that tree right now. And I was like, not me. And he looked at me like I had said, by the way I eat babies, like I just was like, our trees not alluring. And I was like, I have never climbed a tree, and I have no desires. Tracy, are you a tree climbing child? We had. It's probably clear to long term listeners of the show that my mother was an anxious person. She's less anxious now, but an anxious person. So my mom had specific rules about like how large the tree branch could be if we were going to put our weight on it, and so we had because she didn't want us to step onto a branch that couldn't hold our weight. A lot of my mom's anxieties, honestly, were very sensible, but like, there were a number of things that we had a lot of rules about. And so there were several trees in our yard that we could climb into, but we could not really climb high in them, and I like it's I would not say I've had a pastime of climbing trees, but like that was a thing that I did a lot as a kid, and then like even into college. I went to the University of North Carolina at Asheville, which is immediately adjacent to a botanical garden that had lots of, you know, a couple of trees that were pretty good climbing trees. And so I have not tried to do such a thing in many years. Though, yeah, I'm not a tree climber. We I lived in the Pacific Northwest when I was very young, and I remember we had a tree that had a branch that hung very low that we would swing from that branch once to moderate disaster but I just I had a weird anxiety from the time I was a kid. I don't necessarily have this anxiety now I'm more relaxed about it, but I still don't want to climb a tree, which was that I was convinced as a child that if I did so, I would like get up to a point and all of a sudden, from under the bark, a million bugs would come out and get Okay, Sure, I'm less fussy about bugs now than I used to be, but I still am, Like there's a part of like my base brain function that's still like bugs will climb out and get all that. Do you remember that, Eddie? Is our routine about running, jumping, climbing tree tree and makeup, putting on makeup when I get up there. That was me in a lot of ways as a kid, Like I would I would climb up the tree and then play with my dolls up there. Or I would climb up the tree and then like I had this um this dog that had a radio in its belly, and I would sit there and listen to the radio and like brush the dog's hair. That was kind of stuff that I did. Yeah, I just did that on the ground or indoors um. I mean, I wasn't like a completely indoor child by any means. But I don't know the tree thing. I don't I'm not really scared of heights, so I don't think that was a factor. I don't know, And I never think of myself as particularly prissy, but I was concerned that I would get just irretrievably dirty in a tree. Yeah, I was scared of heights, but the trees in our yard, like the restrictions on how big the branches could be, like they were smaller than that before I would be high enough to be like, oh it's too high. I'm scared, right, So yeah, I to talk about my interview with John a little bit now that we've established our baseline relationship personally with train. It was so interesting to me there was so much, I mean, we talked about it in that interview that so much has happened since he first wrote the book that really informs the history of trees and civilization, and like the rise of Archaeopterus being what's considered the first modern tree, and everything literally coming off of that branching from it. If you'll forgive a really crappy pun because I don't love puns. It's so interesting how much science can of It was indicative to me and gave me a moment of pause later on to think about how much science has evolved just in the last couple of decades, that we have so much deeper understanding of things. This is also a moment that I had recently on a flight where I was watching Bill Nye's masterclass and he was talking about new ways that things have been tested in the environment and regarding climate change, and how like there it's They're just there's so much information that we have now that we didn't even have ten years ago on how the environment is being changed by what people do, And it was really, really wonderful. This interview was so fun, and I kind of felt bad John would have talked for much longer. I was literally trying to prep to get on a flight, or I would have sat here for a long time because he just saws such a long career of study of these topics, and also, as we mentioned at the end, you know his work studying the history of our interaction with solar energy. So I my apologies to him that I couldn't stay for another four hours because I would hear it all and it was very funny. He's always written up as a physicist and having been a physics professor, and I didn't realize that, of course, was in the interview that that was secondary and he had started his ecological work first, and then that had led him to physics, not the other way around. Which, Yeah, can we return to puns for a minute. Yeah. Occasionally we will say something on the show and somebody will ask, why didn't you say and then it's like the really obvious pun, and it's the really obvious puns are like the my least favorite puns. And we're recording this right after recording the roller Coaster episode, and I would just like to say there were so many of the same puns in the research for that. Oh yeah, like please, please, can we not anymore? And I intentionally wrote the outline with no puns about roller Coaster, real blessings upon you. Yeah. I don't know why I don't like puns. They make me angry irrationally. Yeah. I feel like a really ever pun can be great. Yeah, but a lot of puns are not. They're clunky. Yeah. I did have a moment. I was having dinner with my husband recently and I made a punny joke and he just looked at me because he loves them and was like so much. I was like, can you only get one? Yeah, see again in ten years. On the pun front, they're also like, I know, I know folks who are just great at having a clever pun in their mind. And that's just that's not how my mind works at all. That's not the kind of language that my brain is tuned to. Yeah, I don't, I don't know. I've never liked them. And I remember the first time that I was like angry that someone thought I was making a pun when I wasn't. I was in eighth grade, don't know. Okay, I was in eighth grade and I had taken a science test and my science teacher, mister Smith, a pair of brothers who taught science at our school who were both great teachers, had said like, hey, you can't have any notes out during even if you finish your test and turn it in, you can't have any notes out because like, I don't want any other students accidentally looking at, you know, your notes. And I was looking at a piece of sheet music that I was studying for my band class, and I said you would not count these as notes, would you? And he was like, huh because their notes on the page, And I was like, shut up, mister Smith, like I was instantly angry about it for no logical, complete irrational I love this story, I really do. It stuck with me all these years. I think it was eighth grade. I had mister Smith one or the other a couple different times in school, because I think I may be misremembering. One definitely taught in my junior high and one may have taught like we switched over from one system of class schedule to another, and I think I had one of them twice. But anyway, they were honestly both wonderful teachers and very kind and dealt with me being irrationally freaked out about him suggesting I would make a pun. This week, we talked about the autobiographies of Jenny June, who also used the names Ralph Werther and Earl Lynde Man. I had such a hard time with this episode because so many of the things that she wrote about echo the things people are saying now about what it feels like to be forced to detransition because the law in your state is banning your necessary medical care or because you're insurance has decided not to cover it anymore. So much. I was just so angry and upset the whole time that I worked on this. Yeah, it's super hard. It's so interesting to me to read through this, and other than changes in language that we talked about as like the terminology has evolved, this could have been written today, So much of it could have been written today. Yes, yeah, I think there are a lot of different folks who can see their own lives reflected in Jenny June's life. Like as I was reading this, I read the accounts of like a cis gender gay man who had discovered this autobiography when he was young and had never like read a first person an account of a historical figure who was like somewhere in the LGBTQ spectrum, and like how much that meant to him as a gay man. And then I have read other people who are tramped and have had similar experiences reading this for the first time and realizing that like people have been saying this pretty clearly for more than a century in the United States, that it feels awful to be forced to live as a gender that is not what you feel is true in yourself. When we were recording this, I had intentionally written it so that I was the person explaining the pronoun choice, because that was like my choice. I originally had plans to follow the example of Channing Gerard Joseph because, like, before having read these works, I was like, this explanation aligns with how we generally handle these decisions and how we generally talk about things. And then as I was reading it, and I was reading all these stories about like wetting her pants because going to the boy's bathroom was too traumatic, I was like, I can't. I can't use he him pronounced for you. That feels bad and wrong. So there were a couple of things that I sort of saved to talk about on the behind the scenes. One Channing Gerard Joseph. If you're like, why does this name ring a bell, I feel like you have talked about this person before. Channing Gerard Joseph is the person who wrote the biography of William Dorsey Swan, who has come up on the show a couple of times before. As far as I know, that book has not come into print yet, and I don't know what the status of it is, But there was an article about William Dorsey Swan that went viral a couple of years back, somebody who is sometimes described as like the first drag queen, was enslaved from birth and then came to play this like very prominent part of like the drag and ball culture of the time that they were living. So I am still eager for that book to come out, and I'm not sure what the status of it is. The Other Thing is or Another Thing is. I had a piece in here from one of the books that I wound up taking out because it I was trying to make sure that this episode came in. We have some guidelines at our job about like how long episodes are, and I was trying to stay within those guidelines, and I just wanted to read Jenny June's discussion of Walt Whitman. Yes, please quote Walt Whitman stands foremost among American and regines, but he was of the mild type. Many passages of leaves of grass and drum taps exist as proof. He never married, although closely pursued by even wealthy women desiring him as a husband. In middle age, he spent his hours for recreation in the society of adolescence, as I was informed by Whitman's so called adopted son, that is, he courted them as a normal man, or it's a woman. Chance made me intimate with the adopted son in his seventies. All three of us happens to belong to New York City, So I really I want to read some kind of like novel or for there to be a play or something about Jenny June and Peter Doyle, who I'm assuming is who Jenny Dune is talking about here, which is who Walt Whitman spent like the latter part of his life with. I think I think that's who's being described here. I was really kind of entranced by this whole kind of name drop of all. And by the way, Walt Whitman's adopted son I've hung out with before, this of course all makes me think of Bram Stoker, who, oh yeah, as we talked about, was kind of in love with Walt Whitman from Afar and wrote him that very raw and kind of um. It's almost embarrassing to read it because it's so emotionally raw, like you feel like you're eavesdropping on someone letter about how he's not very attractive, but he is strong and really loves what Whitman And I'm like, oh, if he could meet up with these two, yeah, what a wild time. They might have a great party. Maybe, although since bram Stoker was very repressed, probably not. Uh, while Whitman, I have the impression not very repressed. No. So anyway, I got the impression from reading these autobiographies that by the time she wrote the autobiographies Jenny June felt kind of settled within herself and um, not carrying so much shame about herself, to the point that there are moments in uh, in the introductions and Herzlock's introductions, um, where he's he seems kind of scandalized that she could feel pride about anything. Right, But so much of the books relates times that she did feel so much shame and stigma that it's like, it's hard to come away with the sense that her life ever did become just a little bit a little bit less full of just feeling so ashamed about her life. Right, makes sense. I'm glad you mentioned her song because, you know, in talking about his introduction in his commentary on it, it's so fascinating to me because in some ways it seems like he wanted to be, for lack of a better word, something of an ally but was also very bad at it, which I think happens a lot still. Yeah, right, Like, that's the tricky thing about an outsider's ally ship is that often like you mess up because you just do not understand the experience and you're trying to like parse it through your yeah, your personal lens of how you understand the world, and that's not that's part of the problem. Yeah. Well, and the part of what he wrote that I feel like is really laudable given the time, especially was how definitively he was, like, these are just people who are trying to live their lives and they're not hurting anybody. He even dispels the idea that there is a contagion involved, that like somehow people like Jenny June would recruit other people and that like is a damaging stereotype and falsehood that like still exists today, that there's some kind of contagion that's causing people to be trans definitively was like, no, like this is inborn in this person, and the people who we're talking about like don't deserve to be harassed, don't deserve to be murdered, do deserve to live full lives without being you know, stigmatized or imprisoned or driven to suicide, But at the same time was like, I think it's gross though, was sort of his undertone of the whole thing, and was really I don't know, loud and making sure everyone knew that he thought it was gross. Right. It reminds me a little bit of have you ever had that friend who is very I mean I have had definitely straight male friends who are comfortable having gay friends feel really really compelled to let other people in their lives know, but I'm not gay. Yeah, and it's like, dude, nobody cares. You're fine. I know you accept these people. I don't care about yourself, you know what I mean. It feels a little bit like that. Yeah, yeah, uh yeah. Before we close out this little behind the scenes, I just want to say definitively, like, transgender people are not new. We've not by alone. Yeah, we've been talking about people who like don't fit within the like gender or sexual orientation binary going back way farther than this on the show, And this, to me is just such a clear example of somebody, you know, even though the term transgender didn't exist at the time, and even though there are nuances to how she seems to have envisioned her own life, like just so clearly saying like, I'm a woman, and it feels bad that I have to live as a man. Likes it's there and it's been there for more than a hundred years. And in a lot of ways, it felt like we as a society here in the US, we're making progress, and now feels like a lot of that progress is being rolled back, and I hate it and I'm furious. And there were times and recording this that I was crying because I was so mad. So I don't call your legislators, Yeah, I um, it's I kept finding myself thinking about, particularly in the passages where she was talking about having to after growing up wearing the same you know, clothes as other little kids, which is pretty like what we would categorize as feminine, and then having to switch to boy clothes and how much that was just painful. I started to really think about how that division has become greater and greater for a long time, right, Like if you go back to my man, Louis katurs very problematic, very interesting, like there have been times in history where straight men were encouraged to dress in very flamboyant and fancy and you know, kind of feminine ways. Yeah, and yet we have now gotten to this point where I mean, I think we're Knockwood, still working and fighting for it, shifting out of that kind of you know, only binary system of shure masculine and feminine style. And I'm like, if we could just all get to a point where everybody could wear whatever they wanted, that'd be great. It would be amazing, and no one would have to feel weird about being put in anything because it would be what they wanted to wear. The post but yeah, okay, yeah, angle in it from clothing. Yeah, so trans rights is what we say. If you want to send us a note about this history podcast that iHeartRadio dot com, we're all over social media miss in History and we'll be back tomorrow for the Saturday classic and Monday was something brand new Stuffy. Miss In History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcast asks from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.