I didn't understand how difficult it would be to transition in the public eye and look back at pre-transition videos - it's sort of humiliating and painful.
— ContraPoints
That's one thing I learned in my philosophy training - if you're writing a paper on Aristotle, you have to first show that you understand him. Then you can make your counterargument.
Politics is always antagonistic and tribalistic. But social media puts us in isolated information bubbles. We're not just disagreeing on politics. We're disagreeing on reality in very fundamental ways.
I try to swim against the current as much as possible when it comes to the tribalism that defines the way people do politics on social media, and I try to present myself as an individual and humanistic voice. I'm interested in people, not just factions.
There are things you can say in the voice of a fictional character that you could not explore any other way.
What really excites me is the prospect of making people actually enjoy thinking about difficult topics, to laugh even while seriously engaging these very unpleasant subjects.
In grad school, I led a bit of a double life. I don't mean gender-wise - I just mean intellectually.
I've been harassed. I've been stalked. I've had every public pre-transition photo of me compiled alongside my deadname with the purpose of never letting me be my true gender.
I listen to a lot of standup comics.
I dropped out of my Ph.D. philosophy program at Northwestern in the summer of 2015, in my mid-20s. I kind of had the idea of writing fiction, and so I was working on that for a year but without ever having very much success at it.
I'm actually very timid and nonconfrontational.
The visual elements of the videos, the makeup and the costumes... these things have nothing to do with justice and truth, but nonetheless, it really changes the experience of the video.
On YouTube, there's a right-wing extremism funnel. You start by watching a college student ranting about how dumb feminism is. It's wrong, but it's not especially sinister. And then, three suggested videos later, you're hearing about why we need a white ethno-state to save the race from a third-world invasion.
There's this artistic drive or something in me that impels me to sympathize with villains, but it's maybe not a great impulse as someone who wants to do activism as well.
A debate is a very specific kind of performance.
It's going to take me less time to wreck Ben Shapiro than it took me to curl my hair.
I watch a lot of YouTube makeup tutorials. I also watch a lot of channels where all they do is eat inhumanly huge amounts of food. I'm trash, basically, is what I'm saying.
I'm not really the type of person who is going to make heartfelt, 20-minute vlogs. That's just not really who I am.
I kind of hate the fact that I feel like people expect you to announce what you are, and then you become it. I would rather become the thing and then name it.
As a prominent trans person, you hope that someone feels they know you and then thinks of you at the polls; you hope to impact the way they act when they encounter a trans person in real life.
It's quite difficult to get through to the people who are really committed to these anti-progressive beliefs.
I don't just want to show how somebody might be wrong;I want to know why people believe the things they believe in the first place. I want to understand the mindset that would lead somebody toward the alt-right.
I carry with me from my male upbringing a sense that femininity is forbidden. So when I appear on YouTube with forty butterflies glued to my body and glitter all over my face, I have a sense that I'm getting away with something I'm not supposed to. I'm being decadent. I'm enjoying a forbidden pleasure. And that's fun, and it's funny.
More than 40 per cent of my viewers are female. When I do meetups and events, oftentimes the majority of people who show up are LGBTQ+. So I'm looking forward to better serving that community of fans.
A ContraPoints video is never going to be framed as 'I'm so offended by this idea.' It's not, 'I'm so intimidated by my opponent's big, masculine brain.' It's more, 'I'm bored of you, and also, you're a dum-dum.'
Almost as soon as I came out as trans, there was a spike in online harassment more vicious than anything I'd experienced before. It turns out there are many people who spend a good portion of their spare time making life as miserable as possible for trans people.
I was looking at YouTube and seeing things really heat up again in terms of the popularity of talking about serious political or philosophical issues and almost no one doing leftist content that engaged with the other side in any way. I was like, 'I bet I can do this,' so I gave it a shot, and it's worked out better than I expected.
When I was a prepubescent child, I never really had experiences of gender dysphoria. This is not something that started until adolescence.
