The Present Illness

Everybody Pees + Abuse Academy

• Alyssa Burgart & Arghavan Salles • Season 1 • Episode 30

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0:00 | 59:00

Where’s the bathroom?; digital sexual violence; Buck v. Bell turns 99; RFK Jr’s hearings; Bhattacharya is actually fine with censorship;

RFK Jr: Trump Math, glyphosate, “re-parenting,” wants to eliminate chronically ill people

Everyone Just Needs to Pee

Digital Sexual Violence

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Credits

  • Production by Arghavan Salles & Alyssa Burgart
  • Editing by Alyssa Burgart
  • Theme Music by Joseph Uphoff
  • Social Media by Arghavan Salles
SPEAKER_02

Hey there, fellow nerds. Welcome to another episode of The Present Illness, the podcast where two physicians try to make sense of the world that is increasingly febrile and definitely underdiagnosed. I'm Arga Von Solas, a surgeon scientist and your friendly neighborhood gene scroller in residence.

SPEAKER_03

And I'm Alyssa Bergart, an anesthesiologist and bioethicist who tracks news and health law like their EKGs, full of spikes and surprises. The present illness is where we dig into public health, politics, culture, and ethics with a scalpel in one hand and a meme in the other. As a note to new listeners, we often talk about topics that are a little intense. They can be a lot. So you may not want to listen to this with your little ones.

SPEAKER_02

A big thanks as always to those who are listening, with extra love to our subscribers and those who follow us on various platforms, and a special warm welcome to anyone who just stumbled in from RFK Junior's uh hearings, congressional hearings.

SPEAKER_03

He is all over the hill this week, isn't he?

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, he's had, I think, two different hearings, both of them lasting, it seems like a while, um, talking about all sorts of things, um, including, you know, defending Donald Trump's wacky meaning wrong math when it comes to changes in costs. You know how he loves to say he's decreasing prescription costs by hundreds of percentage points when that's mathematically impossible unless you're you're paying people for their prescriptions. Elizabeth Warren says um that, you know, he has his Trump RX, which is supposed to make prescriptions more expensive. And I forget which medication she was looking at, but it was like$200 if you got it through Trump RX and like somewhere in the range of$10,$15 if you got it through Costco.

SPEAKER_03

We talked about this actually on a previous episode. I can't remember which one. About, I mean, the number when he first launched it, it literally had drugs on it that had been taken off the market. It had drugs on it that definitely cost more, um, drugs where there was absolutely generics available that were already really cheap. So what are we gonna do with this fan?

SPEAKER_02

Um there was also a whole section where um he was being asked about glyphosate um and how he had been previously opposed to glyphosates. But then when after um the one of the chemical companies had lobbied basically with the president, then all of a sudden we no longer heard about it from RFK Jr. And he was like, I don't know anything about that. They went to the White House. The White House didn't ask me, I didn't know anything about you know what I'm saying? Like he just denied the whole thing, um, which is fascinating.

SPEAKER_03

Um, did you hear him deny that he had said black children should be reparented and like on a screaming match? That's right.

SPEAKER_02

He he denied it altogether. We can just play the clip where he basically said black children shouldn't be raised by their own parents, which is a disgusting and terrible, uh inappropriate. I mean, like, I don't know, all the bad words that we could use to describe what he's saying. Um racist, obviously, that was wild. There was also the section where um Representative Summer Lee was asking him about Black paternal health, because last week was Black Maternal Health Week, and she was asking him about how do we address the disparities we have in this country with black birthing people being three to four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than our white pregnant people? And how can we address that if we can't use the word black in any grant applications? I do want to share actually the clip of uh Representative Summer Lee uh in her comments to RFK Jr. Cause I think people should hear her in her own words. Um, so here it is.

SPEAKER_01

Your agency told programs to remove a list of nearly 200 words and phrases from their funding applications, including the word black. Um do you have an idea of how we could solve the black total mortality crisis if we can't stay black?

SPEAKER_00

President Trump is trying to end eviction in this country, not just during the last four years. That's what DEI did.

SPEAKER_01

It polarized people. No, no, no, no, no. We're not talking about eviction, we're talking about DEI. We're talking about health care. Yeah, disparities. So what we're asking is is if you attack DE and I and then we have a crisis that impacts one population over another, but you cannot direct the specific spending or research or interventions to that population. How do you solve the problem?

SPEAKER_00

Do you think the federal government should be paying for DEI?

SPEAKER_01

I think the federal government has a vested interest in ensuring that its citizens survive childbirth.

SPEAKER_00

We we are meeting that obligation.

SPEAKER_02

We're not anyway. And then he says, Oh, we are, which and she's like, no, we're we're definitely not. Um, so anyway, kudos to her for holding him accountable for what he's saying. Anyway, it's been fascinating to see how little allegiance there is to truth or reality um in the words that come out of his mouth. Um there's that this is not, you know, this is not new. This is like his whole brand. Absolutely. Yeah. And um Bill Bill Cassidy does talk to him, uh question him again about uh vaccines. And um, by the way, if folks are following, I mean, there's this the another big story. This is not our main topic for today, but another big story is that the there was a paper or an article that the CDC had put together for their morbidity and mortality weekly report about COVID vaccines and how they had significantly decreased emergency department visits and hospitalizations this past winter. And it was set to come out in the MMWR and Jay Boditaria had first delayed it because he didn't like agree with the methods, even though there are methods that are very standard and typically used for these types of data. And then after a delay, it was actually pulled from publication. And this has apparently never happened before, where something had already gone through peer review within the MMWR system and was approved for publication, and someone high up interfered. And it's also worth noting that Bodicharya, who's the one who basically has prevented this from being published, is a person who has complained quite a lot about censorship. Like that's his big cling to fame, if you will, that he was censored because he was, you know, he had a different view on COVID and vaccines and we don't like contrarians. And so his perspectives were suppressed because of censorship. And then now he's he's suppressing actual scientific data that comes out from his own agency. He's currently the acting director of the CDC. Anyway, all that to say, there's been a lot of weird public health stuff going on, as usual. Leaders of our organization saying really wacky and inaccurate and racist and eugenicist and horrible things.

SPEAKER_03

He said, um, so I'm gonna put this in context. This week, uh, we're recording on April 23rd, 2026. 99 years ago this week is when the Buck v. Bell case, which is a landmark bioethics case that legalized forced sterilization across the United States. And oral arguments were heard 99 years ago yesterday, and then May 2nd is when the decision came down. And uh essentially, a woman was a teen mom after be she was she was raped by someone in her foster home. She had herself been removed from the home of her parents. So when we talk about things like reparenting, taking away kids from their parents, she was raped in the home of her foster family, became pregnant. Shockingly, you're gonna be very surprised about this. You're not. The the rapist left. He left town rather than marrying her, which is apparently what he had promised to do. And after she had her baby, the family, rather than admitting that she had been sexually assaulted, they uh just had her committed to a mental institution. They said that she was promiscuous and feeble-minded, and she was put into a state-run mental health facility. Calling it mental health is wrong. It was called the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded. And this was a major event in the eugenics movement, and it led to the forced sterilization of, you know, 70,000 people, mostly, mostly women of color, of course, um in America. And, you know, anyway, there's a there's a lot that goes into it. But when I was reading, I was rereading uh Oliver Wendell Holmes's opinion. He was like the most premier uh justice in the court at the time, really respected, known for making sort of piffy statements. One of the statements that he made in the opinion was three generations of imbeciles is enough, because they claimed the the people who made the case, which were lawyers and doctors, that Carrie Buck herself was uh intellectually disabled. They claimed that her mother was also intellectually disabled, and then they claimed that Carrie's baby child was also disabled, which uh none of those things ended up being true. And of course, it's not okay to sterilize people because of disability, regardless. Well, even though that's the statement that's most associated with that case, there's uh there's like two or three other sentences that are much worse. And I won't read all of them, but essentially Holmes says these people, these people, are a scourge on society. And, you know, we should stop them from having children. That's the that's the moral thing to do in order to protect America. And this is one of the cases that the Nazis actually used in the Nazi doctor's trial to justify the forced sterilization that they did of uh people during during the Holocaust, as well as terrible experiments that they did on people during the Holocaust to try to determine the most effective ways to sterilize people that they felt were undesirable. So when I heard, I listened to RFK Jr.'s testimony, and that's why I wanted to give this background on this like super old case, is when RFK Jr. in his uh budget testimony went on and on about how much it costs to take care of children with autism, and he claims that the claims for that care are fraudulent. And he claims that you know, the he he said the re the way that they want to reduce health care spending is to get people basically off the rolls. He wants to take people off of government-supported health care as a way to stop paying for health care. So, as opposed to doing the things that might actually make Americans' lives better, that could make care more affordable, like we we were just talking about, he thinks that what we should do is just not take care of folks who need it. And to me, that says that RFK very clearly does not believe that people who develop illnesses, people who are whether they're born with conditions or develop conditions, that they're not worthy of the economic investment required. And that is the same argument that was made in Buck V Bell was that it was economically unstable to allow people to continue to have children. And while that specific idea has gone out of favor, clearly the idea that providing care is expensive and therefore people who need care are not worthy of care, that idea has not gone away. That has not been dismantled. And I got really mad listening to those hearings about so many things. But um, the eugenics stuff is so loud and clear. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02

And he said before that people who have mental health problems should be sent to farms to perform labor, basically. To be enslaved. State colonies. Yeah. I mean, he has said that. Um he he I mean, obviously, we know he has said all sorts of outrageous and terrible things. Um, but yeah, thank you for giving that context. I I had not know about that case. Um, and it is certainly in line with a lot of what he is saying, which is disgusting for a country that supposedly thinks it's like a leading country in the world, um, that supposedly believes in democracy and human rights and freedom. Freedom. Um, and to have a man like that in charge of our health and human services is really shameful. Okay, shall we get into our first topic?

SPEAKER_03

I, you know, I've been planning for us to talk about uh bathroom bills and specifically anti-trans bathroom bills for for a while. And the other thing that I want to talk about is disability justice. And the other thing I want to talk about is just like everybody's gotta pee. You know, like everybody's gotta pee. I'm a small bladder. I feel like I have to pee often, actually. Um and if you've ever been in that situation where you like can't find a bathroom, it can be really stressful. Um and I was on a trip recently where I was traveling uh with a person who needs a specific kind of bathroom, and it was very stressful. And one of the places that we ended up stopping was um was a park. We were on a driving trip and needed to pull over. And there was no public bathroom at this park, which was very disappointing. But it did smell like pee. So like the parking lot had this like you know, a malodorous scent about it. And you can tell that like there's people, there was like a main road nearby, and you could tell that like people didn't have a place to go to the bathroom, and so that's where they were peeing. Um so just been thinking so much about bathrooms and how finding a place to a hygienic place to go to the bathroom should not in 2026 be so hard to find. Like it just shouldn't. We should have public bathrooms, it should be you shouldn't have to pay at a Starbucks to go to the bathroom, shouldn't be denied a bathroom because you are an unhoused person. Like all of these things. And so I say all of that as like lead up to the fact that um there are so many, you know, conservative forces that seem to be determined to make the lives specifically of transgender people as miserable as possible. And one of the things has been to push these miserable anti-trans bathroom laws. And for folks who haven't heard about these things before, there are a number of states that have specifically made laws or regulations, um, oftentimes in public spaces. They don't want for a person who has a gender that does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth to be able to use the bathroom that feels most appropriate to them. They want to force people to go to specific bathrooms. And this is very dangerous for many reasons. And of course, so many of these uh laws are couched as though like women are unsafe if they're around trans people, which is an outrageous, transmisogynistic, terrible thing to say, which is also false. I mean it's not exactly not supported by absolutely any evidence at all. But if you want to make trans people miserable, this is one of the ways that conservative politicians are choosing to do this and using trans people as a wedge to try to create this outrageous, I hate to even call it a moral panic because there's nothing moral about trying to make other people miserable to achieve their bodily functions. Trans people already experience harassment, physical assault, other forms of assault at a much higher rate than the general public. Much higher. And forcing people, especially trans women, to use bathrooms that are meant for men is especially dangerous and very exclusionary.

SPEAKER_02

I mean, it's also nonsensical. What I want to say is that if you look online, there are plenty of people who are trans who will talk about like, I look like this, like let's say it's someone who is a trans woman, and you want me to walk into a men's bathroom? That's weird. Why would I do that? Or trans men, you know, who look like any other man and they're like, why would I walk into a woman's bathroom? Why would women want me to be in a woman's bathroom? Right. It doesn't make any sense. And it opens up the door, some kind of inspection of people's genitalia, right? Because what if I don't look feminine enough and I'm walking into a woman's bathroom? These bills empower people to police my body, regardless of whether I'm cis or trans or whatever. But like, why are we normalizing that? That we should have a right to inspect other people's genitals. Why is anybody, why are people so obsessed? Why are people conservative people obsessed with other people's gonna tell you?

SPEAKER_03

And so, and the other issue that I do not hear getting talked about enough is there are a lot of people who are non-binary. They don't identify as either gender. And so to say that that person just doesn't have a place to go to the bathroom, because you know, the social norm in the United States is that if you have two bathrooms, one is for men and one is for women. Now, there's a lot of like architectural reasons why these are this is also stupid. And this is why like there's always this like long ass line out of the lady's bathroom because there's the same number of places to pee in both places, which is totally inefficient. But additionally, for people who don't identify as either gender, there's oftentimes no op no place for them to go to the bathroom. What folks do look for is a family bathroom. And so oftentimes, if there is a non-gendered bathroom, it is usually a family bathroom. And the reason why this is so important, and I this is part of why I said I wanted to also draw this back to um disability justice. You know how did you have to take oral boards when you were to become a surgeon? It's the worst. It's the worst. So we have to do it in anesthesiology as well. You have to like travel across the country and spend all of your money to go have the worst 90 minutes of your life where you get like grilled on how you're maybe not smart enough to be a doctor. Um I passed. Um, but I remember that um I was a I was uh finishing my fellowship in pediatric anesthesiology, and I had to travel from California all the way to North Carolina, which is where the American Board of Anesthesiologists decided to put this monstrous building that we all had to go to to take this exam. And I had to take three flights to manage to get all the way to Raleigh, North Carolina. In my last leg of my flight, I ended up sitting next to this woman named Tawana Williams. And Tawana, she goes by, she calls herself the Hope Coach. Um, I met her and her husband. Um, and Tawana is somebody who was impacted by thalidomide. Um, and for folks that don't recall thalidomide, it was a medication that was prescribed widely to people who were pregnant to deal with all sorts of symptoms uh of pregnancy, including nausea. And unfortunately, when that medication was taken early in pregnancy, it caused some really specific birth differences. So folks who were born with limbs in particular, legs and arms that were significantly shorter and not developed in the way that we would expect typically. And so Tawana um was born with incredibly small arms. Um, she calls herself uh, well, back back then she told me she was um unarmed and dangerous. She ended up telling me her whole life story. It was lovely. She's she's a motivational speaker. She talks about, like, you know, the the troubles she's been through in her life and the things that that she's done to try to make people's lives better. And um, she told me a story about how hard her and her husband had worked to make it so that there would be family bathrooms in airports because she's a motivational speaker. She needs some assistance with uh activities of daily living, like going to the bathroom because of her physical condition. And it's, as you mentioned, it's weird for a woman to walk into a man's bathroom or a man to walk into a woman's bathroom or whatever. Well, they're a man and a woman and they need a bathroom stall. And so they were constantly having trouble finding places where she could go to the restroom and he could help her. And so every time I see a family bathroom, I think of Tawana. Um because and just what an and I probably would never have really thought about it. But then when I had my own kids, you you need a place to change their diaper. You need so many men's bathrooms don't have a place to change a baby's diaper because the assumption is that women are doing it. So there's there's all of these gender norms that are mixed into bathrooms that are, that are actually really not making it helpful for people to live their lives. And so finding a family bathroom, whether it's whether it's labeled as a family bathroom or it's labeled as a gender-neutral bathroom, this is something that's really important for a unique cross section of the population. Um and so when I'm traveling with somebody who needs a non binary bathroom, I have to like do all of these like searches to make sure that the route we're taking is going to have the right bathroom and we can make sure that this person can go to the bathroom. And Then I feel guilty when I'm like, oh, well, I can go to the bathroom here, but there's no place for this other person to go to the bathroom. So it's like, I want it to be that's such a weird thing to have to think about about where you're gonna pee. And yet, people who are trans and people who have disabilities and need support have to think about this like all the time.

SPEAKER_02

So I mean, I think one of the things that that comes up a lot, you see this um discourse online is where people like Nancy Mace is well known for being so hateful about um trans people using bathrooms. She is like taking pictures of herself next to the little, you know, the symbol for a woman next to a bathroom, being like, see, this is who this is for. Um, with her implication being that trans women don't count, right? She doesn't, because she's a terrible bigot. You you see comments like that, and then you see people saying very common sense things, which is like, don't you have an all-gender bathroom in your house? Like, why are you so worked up about or on an airplane? I mean, I just was flying, you you're not home, do you just took a flight? Like, we all use all gender bathrooms all the time. So why are we making such a big deal about who goes into these bathrooms? And also the people who are most likely to harm women physically are men, cis men. It's definitely not trans women. And as you said, requiring trans women to go into a men's bathroom is really dangerous for trans women. Uh, the life expectancy in this country for trans people is lower, significantly lower than it is for cis people. And that's in large part due to violence, but also due to the mental health impact of being treated so horrifically by the rest of society.

SPEAKER_03

I was just gonna say, I just got an uh email. There's an anesthesiologist shortage in this country, so I am constantly being either texted or emailed by people being like, come work in this random place. And I got one from a recruiter who was like, I have a great opportunity in Oklahoma. Do you want to come to Oklahoma? And I was like, no. And here's all the reasons why I'm not gonna come to Oklahoma. And Oklahoma is where Nex Benedict was assaulted. He was required to use a girl's bathroom, and it was a girl, a group of girls that beat him up, and he ended up dying at home the next day. And there still has not been an independent investigation into his death. And so, people of Oklahoma, you all deserve great care. You all deserve to live in a place where you actually have the liberty to live your lives, and yet it is a place that is so eager to prevent trans people from literally having a place to pee, that it is putting people in the situations where it is incredibly dangerous to even pee.

SPEAKER_02

I understand how that is pro-life. I don't understand how that is protecting anyone. It's, you know, like none of the things that they say that are the reasons for this are true in any way or are grounded in reality. It's just about this hateful agenda. Trump did this in his one of his first executive orders was basically saying trans people aren't allowed to exist. He's like, you only you can only be female or male. And obviously that's not true, even if you're talking about sex and not gender. We've talked before about the existence of intersex people. Um, and so that was one of the very first things he did was say, we we don't allow this. This isn't real. These people don't exist, even though they obviously do, they always have, they always will. And now, um, I don't know if folks have seen Caitlin Jenner, who is a conservative woman, has appealed to President Trump. Caitlin Jenner has now had to face what this administration is doing, which is again to erase trans people. So one of the things they've done is say that you can't have a passport that has a sex uh indicator that is different from what you were born with. So Caitlyn Jenner was assigned male at birth and is a trans woman, and so had gotten a passport that had female uh marked on it, and is my understanding. And then when they went to renew her passport, now she's being told she can only have one that has a mail marker, which it's better.

SPEAKER_03

It it arrived and it says M on it, and she was a- Oh, yeah, that's right. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, so this is someone who has supported this administration, and the administration has not been quiet about their um attacks on trans people. And now she's making a personal appeal so that she can get an exception. But what about everyone else who's also trans and is in the same position of, you know, imagine you're going through security at the airport and the person, TSA person, is looking at your passport and it says mail, and they look up and you look like Caitlin Jenner. Do you know, like it doesn't make any sense? And now you're outing people who are going through just security lines at the airport. No one should have to be outed against their will in any circumstance.

SPEAKER_03

And I think that's the point. They want to make it so that it is miserable for trans people, since they do exist, to actually go through the process of existing in such a toxic environment. So I did want to talk briefly about there's sort of the the states you would expect to have anti-trans bathroom laws are out there, but there's also uh other laws that try to mitigate this to a degree. So, for example, in California, if you have your business and you have a single stall bathroom, it has to be gender neutral. And that change just happened, I don't know, a handful of years ago. And that has certainly made things a lot easier. And so many places they had two single-stall bathrooms, one for men and one for women. And now both of those are gender neutral. I was at a restaurant in, I can't remember if it was Mountain View or Sunnyville, but what they had done is they had taken, they had redesigned their bathroom when they updated their restaurant, and they made it so that there was uh one area for everyone to wash their hand, and then there was just four single stall bathrooms. Um, and so they had actually taken like the footprint, which would have in the past only fit two bathrooms and actually were able to increase the number of bathrooms available by making it so that everyone could wash their hands in the same long. It was like a big long um sink. So that was kind of cool. Um the downer is that if you we still have many public restrooms, or you have places where they have multi-stall bathrooms. And so they have, you know, let's say four, four bathrooms in the women's stall and I don't know, four bathrooms and four urinals in the men's area, but there's actually no gender-neutral space. And so not every place has a family bathroom or a gender-neutral bathroom. And so I think that's gonna be something I I hope we're gonna start to see more, and I assume that new businesses would need to bring their buildings up to code at various times. So I'm hoping to see that.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, but we've also seen this playing out in schools, as you were mentioning, next Benedict. I mean, there that's another even more challenging environment because kids are at school. They are there the whole day. They can't just go somewhere else. Um, you know, not that it's great if you're on a road trip, they have to go searching for a bathroom, but when you're at school, you don't even have that option. You're you're stuck with what's there. And it's um these kind of rules are are definitely placing really vulnerable people at high risk of of being, as we saw in in the case of Next Benedict, being assaulted. I think it's unconscionable that school districts are doing that to their own students. And um, you know, libs of TikTok is pegging them all on. Um it's I I don't know, I wish I knew I mean, obviously we can vote for candidates who who are who pose those kinds of bathroom bills, but other than that, are there other things that you suggest or you might recommend for folks to do um to try to minimize the impact of these bathroom bills?

SPEAKER_03

Yeah, I mean, one, I really encourage everybody who's listening who if you I mean, obviously if you're a person who is experiencing the lack of access to a bathroom and the lack, they the basically exclusion of public life through bodily functions. I I am sorry that that is happening to you and you deserve a place to go to the bathroom. Um, and for people that are listening who identify as either a man or a woman, um, start paying attention to your bathrooms. Like I just hadn't really thought about it until, you know, I have a bunch of friends who are trans, but I've started to have more friends who are non-binary. And it's just, I just hadn't had to go through the functional process to understand what that was really like. And um, there's a there's a really helpful um app called Refuge Restrooms. And so, you know, if you're going to a place and you're curious where they also rate like whether they think the bathroom's like in good condition or safe, is it disability accessible? Is it a family restroom or is it a gender-neutral restroom or what is it? Um, so I really like supporting that app. Um, I send them a little bit of money every week or every month, sorry. And because I depend on that to make sure that when I take people that I love and care about to a place, I want to make sure, like, I'm not gonna pick a restroom that doesn't have a place for my friends to go to the bathroom. I'm just not going to do that. I don't need to give that business my business. Um, but to your point about voting for candidates, it's really important for actually local like city and county elections, people, you know, they're not as exciting. People don't tend to get out to vote the way that they do for a national election. But this is actually something that needs to change on a like in our actual communities and in our neighborhoods. And so I really recommend that you reach out not just to your like, you know, your state representatives, but who are the people that you can in your in your town and in your county to say, hey, it's really important to me that we have access to this. It's really important to me that everyone in our community has a place to go to the bathroom. And they need to hear this from people who are not just people who hate trans people. Like it's I I know that the conservative movement has specifically gone after trans people because it is a very small group of people. They are mighty, they're important, and because it is a small group that is already marginalized, this is a way that the and especially then when you make it trans kids, right? They're kids that don't vote, they're kids that don't have places to, you know, they don't have jobs yet because they're kids. Um and and this this very population is being used as a political wedge. And what I say to you, if you think that trans people go into the bathroom is not important, if you do not think that people having the place to just do regular bodily functions, I want you to think about that the next time you need to pee, you can't find a bathroom. Um, I don't want to live in a neighborhood where people pee on the streets. And I'm not saying that that's what trans people are gonna do, but I'm saying that when I got out of my car at that park and the first thing I smelled was urine, I was like, people who are unhoused in this community have no place to go to the bathroom. And I think about that when I walk into, you know, any sort of a coffee shop or a cafe, and they say, you know, bathroom is only for paying customers. Well, it's because that's because that community has no place for people to go to the bathroom. Like we need public bathrooms, period. And we need them to be accessible to everyone in our communities. Yeah. Absolutely. So, Argumon, uh, since we only talk about things that are really light and airy, what are you gonna talk about today?

SPEAKER_02

What I was uh hoping to talk about for today is about digital sexual violence and the normalization of sexual violence that occurs by enabling and um and normalizing digital sexual violence. So there's been multiple stories, and I'll just do a brief summary uh that I want to touch on. So one is folks may recall um Giselle Pellicot is a woman, a French woman who had a very public uh trial that got a lot of media attention um when her husband, Dominique Pellicot, had been for years recruiting men to come and rape her, his wife, in their home while he recorded after he had drugged her. So that was the whole deal. He would drug her so she was knocked out. These men would come over and uh and they would rape her and he would record it. And he had, you know, I forget the exact number, but thousands of videos and photos um that they found when they figured this all out. They figured it out because he had been um filming up skirts at a local grocery store. So anyway, that story uh was really concerning for many, many people, incl especially I think women, that the person who you trusted the most, your own husband, could be doing this to you for years. Um, and in case folks don't know, yeah, she did have questions about what was happening to her. She even confronted him. You know, it's not like she had no clue. We can not that there's any we should never be blaming a victim in this circumstance anyway, but I know a lot of people have questions about how could this be going on. And she was seeing doctors, he was accompanying her to see doctors. She she did all that one could be expected to do. And again, there's no expectation. There's no, we have no right to put demands on victims in terrible situations like this. I'm just saying that because a lot of times people do, just naturally, people have questions about what happened. Anyway, so all this happened because of a specific website that he was able to use to recruit these men. And it was called without her knowledge, and it was hosted on a platform called Coco.gg. After months of collaboration across different European agencies, that website was removed. And now it's basically back. There's a, it's called something else. It's called cocoland.cc instead of cocoa.gg. Um, they say that they have used some code that was available on a GitHub repository to make the website look similar to the previous one, but that they're not the same people and that they're not gonna allow illegal things to happen on their website. Supposedly, yeah, we're supposed to believe that.

SPEAKER_03

They're copycat rapists? I mean, I'm confused. Is that the defense?

SPEAKER_02

Their defense is we just wanted to, they literally said like that they wanted to look similar so that it'd be easier for people to use, but no, we're not gonna have allow that kind of content. Yeah, they're they're trying to walk this ridiculous line, pretending that it's not gonna be what it was. So it's a um, as one of the legislators said, a slap in the face that this is allowed to just pop right back up. It took so long to get the previous site removed, but just like that, there's a new site up that could do exactly the same thing. In addition, um, so that news came out this week. In addition, folks may have seen the CNN reporting on what they call the Rape Academy, which is a website where men, similar to what coco uh.gg was hosting, the Without Her Knowledge website, where men um can post about how to drug and rape the women in their lives. Um, and they give tips on medications, dosages, timing, um, encourage each other. Um, they have you know screenshots of these various messages in the CNN article. Oh god, oh God. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03

They're teaching, I mean, and I just, you know, as an anesthesiologist, like I just give people sedatives for good. You know, I like to use medications to alleviate anxiety, to take away pain. It makes me happy. It makes me happy to make sure my patients are having a safe experience. Just it makes me so angry in like a different way than other kinds of assault. Like they're they're all terrible.

SPEAKER_02

Understandably. And again, these are these are women who are close to these men. I think that's part that for me makes it so hard to hear. It's we already know sexual violence exists out in the world, um, going on a first date or a second date, you know, someone you you don't know that well. Um, but to have it be people who have been in your life for a long time. Like one of the stories in this um CNN article was a man who would make his wife tea at the end of the day, and then he would drug her using that tea. And she had thought, wow, what a nice thing. Like, I'm so tired. I love that he's making me tea. It's so nice. And in fact, he was drugging her so he could abuse her.

SPEAKER_03

That's that's like the grossest version of princess treatment I've ever heard.

SPEAKER_02

And the betrayal that that women are feeling from learning that this has been happening to them um is is really hard to wrap my head around. So that's uh a more recent story that came out um at the end of March. I do want to remind folks though that back um months and months ago, actually, I think it was last year, there was a German investigation into various telegram channels, one of which had like over 70,000 men in it doing the same thing, just teaching each other how to drug and rape the women in their lives. So my point is that this is I can't speak for anyone else, but when I learned about Giselle Pellico's case and what her husband Dominique had been doing to her, I was astounded. I had not heard about that specific kind of behavior, that drugging, raping, uh having other people rape your wife, like and recording. I I had not heard of that, certainly not on that scale. I was astounded. And then we find out that there's these telegram channels where it's just happening all the time. And now we have this rape academy. And to remind folks, in um January, just a few months ago, we had the normalization of sexual, digital sexual violence on Twitter via Grok, right? They enabled um Grok's editing of photos using AI. So there were, I think, hundreds of thousands, if not more, images that were created by users with the aid of Grok, which is the AI um chatbot on Twitter, to remove women's clothing, remove their hijab, put them in scanty, scantily clad outfits. They did this to children as well. It wasn't just women, it was women and children. And this went on for a while. Um and now and there's and there's a bunch of apps. There's a bunch of apps that are like on Apple and Android, right? Right. So, so we you know, had this whole thing happen with Grok. There was this a severe reaction to it, understandably, from a lot of women in particular. And there has been some legal action taken in Europe. Um, I believe Elon Musk is being asked to testify there. But anyway, so that happened. And then the Tech Transparency Project has reported that there are actually numerous apps on both the Apple App Store and Google Play that are what they are calling Nutify apps that allow users to edit the photos and videos of other people to remove their clothing or put them in scantily cut outfits, et cetera. Now, some of these apps have been removed, but the Tech Transparency Project did an update recently. And what they found, just searching for things like Nutify uh or undress in these um stores, was that there are still 46 apps like this on Apple and 49 on Google. They have been downloaded 483 million times and generated$122 million in revenue. And the kicker really is that these apps violate the policies of both Google and Apple, yet they remain on these platforms because the platforms are able to make money off of them. So I will just read to you, let me just read to you real quick what Apple says. It says Apple prohibits apps that are offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust in exceptionally poor taste or just plain creepy, including overtly sexual or pornographic material, which is what this would be, right? Removing women's clothing. The Google Play Store bars apps that contain or promote sexual content or sexually suggestive poses in which the subject is nude, blurred, or minimally clothed. Google Play also prohibits apps that degrade or objectify people, such as apps that claim to undress people or see through clothing. So that's what I mean when I say these apps violate their own policies. Yet the uh folks at the Tech Transparency Project found not only do these apps exist on both of these stores, but they are promoted. Um, so they the both companies are selling ads for these apps and they are allowing them to be sponsored in search results so that they appear higher up in the search results. And they are enabling autocomplete to help you find even more. They they will they say that they have removed some apps and that when they become aware that they they do remove them. But so then the question is well, then how did you not know when you approved these specific. Apps, these 46 on Apple and these 49 on Google. When you approve these apps, what went wrong in your process that these got approved? And also, are you going to remove all of them now? By the way, I don't think I mentioned 31 of these apps were marked as appropriate for minors. And we know, yeah, and we know that we have a problem in schools now with students using these apps to harass and bully each other. Um, but yeah, so 31 of them were were thought to be appropriate for minors. So Apple and Google, as somebody reminded me in my comments, were quite swift to remove the apps that allowed people to identify where ICEs, right? When Pam Bondi said they can't have those. They just clicked the button. Mm-hmm. But this, this is, this is worth keeping because it's making them money. The money that they're making from this is more important to them than the safety and security of women and children. And they should face accountability for those choices. These are all choices that are being made by people largely who are safe from the harm that's being done, right? It's mostly not Tim Cook and people like him who are going to be harmed by these apps. Uh, I know that he just stepped down, but still he's been there for several years. I'm gonna hold him accountable uh at this moment. And then we had, um, I know I gotta wrap it up because we were always running over as I as you said earlier, but I want to, in this context, also mention that Colleen Fernandez, who is a TV presenter and personality in Germany, recently found out that the person who had been making digital videos and altered digital videos and photos of her to sexualize her and send those to her colleagues. This had been going on for years. She just found out that it was, or recently found out that it was her husband. Again, her own husband was doing this to her to humiliate her and to impact her career with their colleagues because he felt that he owned her. That's what he said, that she was like his property. And okay, I really am gonna wrap it up. In the meantime, the T app, do you remember the T app? Remind me. A T app is an app that came out to allow women to share with each other about men who they've gone out with, who, you know, whatever, any number of things. You could you could say they were just rude, you could say they assaulted you, like whatever it was that happened, you could share. And you can no longer get that through the Apple App Store. And in the background, so we have all of this happening in the digital realm, whether it's on Twitter or these apps or the Telegram channels or all these websites. And then we have in real life, like 3D, we have folks like Eric Swalwell, the massive um revelations that came out about him and his sexual harassment and assault of people who were um far more junior to him, like interns and staffers, who for in which cases he was obviously taking advantage of his power over them in in really disgusting ways. And then we have Kevin McCarthy, who is the former speaker of the House. So Eric Swalwell was a representative from California until all this came out, and he was also a gubernatorial candidate here in California until all of this came out, and now has resigned uh from his seat in Congress and also has withdrawn from the California governor's race. Although not quickly, I mean, he initially denied, deny, deny, um, you know, about talking about how he never did any of these things um until there was just so much evidence against him that he he finally caped. But in the meantime, Kevin McCarthy goes on the news and says, well, everyone knew about Eric Swalwell. And I want to play you just a very short 10-second uh clip of what he said here.

SPEAKER_00

Every member in Congress knows not to not to let any young staffer get around Swalwell or Matt Gates. It it it's it's not a secret thing.

SPEAKER_02

Matt Gates, folks may remember, was nominated to be attorney general in this administration uh until there were public revelations about his relationship, whatever his abuse of a 17-year-old. Um so then he eventually stepped down. But Eric Swalwell, who remained in office until just very recently, Kevin McCarthy is saying everyone knew. And I'm raising all of these together to say these telegram channels, the place where Dominique Pellico was recruiting men, the Rape Academy, what's happening with the app stores, there are many people seeing these things. So these 70,000 men on that telegram channel, how many of them never did anything to a woman in their life, but they were just there and they were like fine with it? They didn't report the channel. Nobody, going back to Giselle Pellico, not a single man who had a conversation with Dominique Pellico about what Dominique was trying to do to his wife reported him. Not a single one. There were some men who showed up at his house and then did not go through with it. Even they did not report him. Not a single one. And Kevin McCarthy saying all these people knew about Eric Swalwell. Who did anything? Obviously, not a single person until what eventually led to these um this news getting out about him was two women, independent people on social media who other women reported to and felt safe reporting to. And then all of a sudden they put together that it was happening multiple times. And that gave the women a sense of greater safety to be able to say, to come forward, whereas they had always thought it was just them. And what are the men doing? That's what I want to know. And I'm not saying in an accusatory way, but I think that there are a lot of men who who I mean, yes, some men are complicit for sure, but there are a lot of men who think this is disgusting, who are ashamed that this is what men are spending their time doing, who want to support women, who want to see a safer world. And I'm not sure they all know what to do about it. You know, I've seen some men posting videos on social media, which is great, much appreciated. And what I really wonder is what is happening in the real world? What are the conversations that men are having with other men? What are the conversations that they're having with their sons? Because I can talk about this till I'm blue in the face, but the men who are engaging in this type of behavior are not going to care what I think because I am an object, right? As a woman. I'm not a person with values and meaning uh in their eyes. And we talked about this a little bit with the manosphere, right? So it's not women who are going to be able to change this behavior among men, with the exception of mothers and their sons, you know, how we raise our children obviously matters. But adult women out there talking on social media is not going to change how boys and men view us. So it's really going to take men to stick up or stand up and talk about why this is not right, talk about what human rights means mean and talk about why women, I mean, it's just so absurd to say, but why women deserve to be treated as humans and not as objects. We exist beyond sexual satisfaction or being someone that you're going to wield power over or someone who's going to bear children. We are much more multifaceted than that. And it's not until men are the ones who are overwhelmingly putting out that message that I think we'll see a change. So that's what I would like to know. So if there are uh any men listening, which I know there are some of you out there, uh, and would like to let us know what you're doing, we would love to hear about it. Genuinely speaking, we have a number you can text. Um, it's on the notes, uh, the show notes for the podcast. And I would love to stop having to talk about this. I would love to not have to keep making video after video about the horrific things that mostly men are doing to mostly women. And the last thing I'll say on this is that obviously it's not just women who are um affected by sexual violence. People of all genders can be impacted. Um, and we will do an episode on physician sexual violence um against patients. One of the ones that I'm thinking of is a urologist at Cornell who was assaulting boys and men who were his patients. So just a note to say we understand, I understand that it's not just women um who are affected by this, although it's the majority of cases. Um and that's why I I tend to frame it that way. Um, but sexual violence is a scourge to use your word from earlier on our entire society. Yeah. There are some men, for sure, again, on social media talking about this, but I think it the if you look, their audience is mostly women. So they're talking to us. What that's why I'm asking about offline. What's happening in real spaces in the locker rooms, if you will, um, in the boardrooms where there are no women, you know, when when the guys go out to play golf or or to get a beer or whatever, whatever. Hiking, biking, whatever it is that you engage in. What are, how are men talking about this? Because my sense is probably they're not at all. But until they are, it's not going to change, honestly. And it it's a very um kind of helpless feeling that I have because as a woman who cares very much about this problem and wants to see a change, there's only so much I can do because again, the people who need to hear it are not going to hear it from me. Um, so anyway, that that's I think about this a lot. Um, and I do appreciate again the men who are talking about this publicly. And I really would like to know what's happening face to face, offline. How are these conversations going? Are people bringing up these topics when it's just them, when it's just boys and men, are they talking about this? Um, and are they calling each other out when they make even inappropriate comments? Because that's how it starts, right? Inappropriate comments objectifying women and girls, and those are normalized. And then you can go on to inappropriate behaviors and you go on to sexual assault. And it's gonna take other boys and men holding each other accountable for that to change. Agreed, agreed.

SPEAKER_03

Don't you think we should talk about something good? Listen, I I want to know your prescription. Take two, call me in the morning. What are we doing? So uh have you heard of Merlin the Pig?

SPEAKER_02

You know, I I think so. I don't remind me. So this is a pig who lives in somebody's house. I don't know their names. I have not followed these people for a long time. I don't know them well, but this is essentially a domesticated pig, and they have these buttons that the pig can press to express uh, I think it's a him, express himself. Um and so, like one of them is she asks, you know, what Merlin, what do you want? And he presses this button that says Al Capone. Well, Al Capone is a bird that they have. Um, and so she goes and gets Al Capone and puts Al Capone on Merlin's head because he wanted to hang out with Al Capone, you know. Um, there's a few I've seen where she's writing things on a little whiteboard, like sit, and then Merlin will sit and she'll write shake and Merlin will will shake. Um, I don't know how many tries, like I don't know if it's edited videos. Like I don't know if he if he's that good or if she just captures the one time it actually worked and then makes the video. I really don't know. But it's very cute and it's funny. Um, and the the people who um Merlin lives with have a good sense of humor. And so it's fun to see Merlin expressing himself with these little buttons um and and he and he'll complain. Um, and he'll one of the buttons says child abuse or something like that. Like that's abusive. I want fruit. And then she's like, it's not time, and he goes, abuse.

SPEAKER_03

Um anyway. I wonder how many people are gonna feel a little less comfortable eating bacon.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah, yeah, they should. I mean, didn't we all read um Charlotte's Web anyway? Mm-hmm. I mean, I say this is a non-bacon eater. I think you're also a non-bacon eater.

SPEAKER_03

Same, same. You and I are already off the bacon train. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_02

Um, anyway, so yeah, I'll put a link to at least one of the Merlin videos. Um, how about you? What do you prescribe for folks?

SPEAKER_03

I just recently started watching um Margot Has Money Troubles on Apple TV. Uh, it's based on a book by a woman named Rupee Thorpe. And I had I had just read the book pretty recently, and then the show just came out. Only the first few episodes are out, but it's it's fabulous. It's a great show, great cast. And it's about a young woman who's in her first year of college, her English professor uh gets her into a relationship, which is clearly unethical and inappropriate, and then she ends up getting pregnant, decides to keep the baby, and it the all the things that come through there after that. Um, but the cast is fabulous. Michelle Pfeiffer plays her mom, and I haven't seen Michelle Pfeiffer in anything in a while, and she's just perfect. So the cast, uh so the cast is fabulous. Um, so Michelle Pfeiffer plays uh the main character's mom. Uh Elle Fanning plays the main character uh named Margot. Nicole Kidman plays like an ex-wrestler. Uh Nick Offerman is an ex-wrestler, and he plays um Elle Fanning's dad. Um, and then there's a woman named Um, I actually don't know how she pronounces her first name, Fadia, Fadia Graham, um, who I really have loved in a couple of other shows, plays, plays her roommate. Anyway, it's a great cast. I loved the book, and I'm enjoying the beginning of uh how the show is coming out.

SPEAKER_02

Thank you for the recommendation. I think that's it for this week's episode. If you didn't like what you heard, this has been the Megan Kelly show. If you liked it, don't forget to subscribe to The Present Illness, leave us a review, and tell folks in your life.

SPEAKER_03

We know that you like us more than you like Megan Kelly, so follow us on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube at The Present Illness and stay on top of all of our TPI-related news. We will be back next week with more headlines, hot takes and doom scrolling, hopefully wrapped in some laugh. Until then, agitate, hydrate, take a nap, and I'll see you next time on The Present Illness. Production by Argivon Salas and Alyssa Berghart, editing by Alyssa Berghart, social media by Argivon Salas, original music by Joseph Uphoff. Please don't take medical advice from random people on a podcast. This show is for informational purposes. It's meant to be fun, and it's certainly not medical advice. Please take your medical questions to a qualified professional.

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Alyssa Burgart, MD, MA

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Arghavan Salles, MD, PhD

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