GLENN: California is really on. California late last year, someone -- and I want to make sure that I say someone, someone named Star began thinking that it was time for a legal name change. I'm thinking, you know, sure. Teresa might be good.
STU: Sally.
GLENN: Yeah. Star has been going by that name for two years since coming out at the age of 15 to friends and family as a -- what? What do you think?
STU: As a --
GLENN: As a? Come on, say it with me. Non-binary.
STU: Non-binary. Okay. Good. I was worried. I was going to say non-binary, but then I was worried you were going to go somewhere else.
GLENN: At 15 years old, Star decided she was neither a woman nor a man and would not choose the pronouns him or her. She was a non-binary. And so she wanted a plural non-gendered pronoun for her. And she wanted the state to do that. And so by the time she was 17, and the article said stretching to her adulthood, she had -- she had confronted all of the tedious paperwork in California.
Who knew there was even paperwork to be filled out if you wanted to register as a non-binary. But she had her driver's license with the wrong name on it. Then she began applying to colleges, also under the wrong name. And it was a problem. And mostly because Star really liked to follow the rules. And yet, every time she had to fill out an official form -- she -- Star, felt fraudulent, writing down a name she barely recognized on the rare occasion that she ever heard her name said out loud. She's -- she's Star.
STU: I love how the same people who build a giant bureaucracy in which every minor thing involves hours of paperwork, then complain to us that they have to fill out too much paperwork. I love that.
GLENN: Yeah. Non-binary is a relatively unknown term. Sure, for bigots. And non-binary Americans struggle to be taken seriously.
STU: I don't think that's my problem. I don't think that is my problem. Their identifies are questioned. They are told they're either male or female. And there's nothing in the middle.
STU: That was the way it was. I think I'm going to continue to go there. It almost feels like they're changing this word into something else. Like gender -- like you know how the word gay used to mean happy. And then it became an alternative lifestyle, as they used to say.
GLENN: Right. I'm not sure if you can use that word anymore.
STU: I don't think you can say that anymore.
But it changed meanings, right? It just became another thing. And it seems like that's what gender is going on -- I heard Ellen -- Ellen DeGeneres one time explain the whole transgendered thing as what you feel like in your head.
GLENN: That's something different.
STU: And I'm not saying that there isn't a word to describe what you feel like in your head. Like, that might be an important thing to come up with a word for. But gender already had a meaning. So if you want to figure out what someone feels like in their head, we can all come up together and come up with some way to describe your head feelings.
GLENN: And sometimes it matches. And sometimes it doesn't. For instance, the feeling I have in my head is fat. And currently that does kind of exist.
STU: Fact-check: Mostly true.
GLENN: Mostly true. But that doesn't make me less of a man or a woman. Now, I could feel like a fat woman, but that isn't necessarily true. That's how I feel.
We are in this weird era where facts like, oh, I don't know. The missile coming across the sky is kind of something that, I don't know -- non-binary, now, that's something that we really need to discuss.
When you are in a place -- again, I said this yesterday, I'm going to bring you the news that we're not as bad off as everyone -- we're not as oppressed, we're not as poor, we're not as broken -- we're just not. Because if wild missiles are crossing our horizon -- while all of these huge problems are happening, if the big thing we struggle with is, I'm neither male nor female, I'm binary, we have one sweet life.
