Ella Yerman
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
It was just really beautiful to talk to like a 20 year old girl and be like, Oh, you're like trans, but it's like, it's like not actually that big of a deal. Um,
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Lex and I are both some of the fastest-talking people I know, and I would put Vivian in that same group of people who can keep up with us or out-talk me.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
She's awesome. So much of our editing was just, like, sort of taking out, yeah, like, little jokes or, like, She's 20, so she is swearing all the time.
Behind the Bastards
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Heart hand emojis. The way edits go is you send in a piece and the editors give you like change some stuff and then I get to look at a new draft and I get to be like, hey, what? Why did you change that? And then we go back and forth over and over again until eventually it's not up to me anymore. But at one point I did have to say, actually, femboy is one word. Correct.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
It's different from fem space boy. And she meant something specific. And I felt really like I was bringing...
Behind the Bastards
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I said, excuse me, Conde Nast. Femboy means something.
Behind the Bastards
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oh my god and and so much ella knows nothing about drag also so that was like a really good combo for all of us that was i i yeah i sat down with her and and we started talking and very very quickly she brought up rupaul's drag race and i would just like she kept calling it rpdr which i'm pretty sure i've i don't even get into this right now my sources garrison is that something you call drag race have you heard rpdr said out loud i've never heard this no okay
Behind the Bastards
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about drag race so clearly it all came together the way it was supposed to i did at the very end of our first call i said you is there anything else you want to say and she talked to me for another 15 minutes about about drag race specifically a classic rules a classic yeah like i know i'm i like sort of meant about your dad or about like any of the important things we talked about this and she's like no so in season 15 of drag race that rules that's so cool she's the best
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
I mean, there's a reason you can sort of tell, and I'm sure this applies to beyond trans people, but you can sort of tell which social media you grew up on, if you were a Tumblr teen or a Reddit teen or a 4chan teen. You can tell because your style of fighting and making jokes changes because it's such a deeply formative part of it.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
And I don't know what online forums the right were on growing up, but they were the wrong ones. Well, a lot of 4chan as well. Sure.
Behind the Bastards
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Horrible style of writing. You have to, like, have, like, 12 prefaces. Exactly, yeah, yeah. So, article one, I am not a racist.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
I think it's downstream of Tumblr. I remain strong on my stance that the Tumblr porn ban ruined the internet.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Yeah, I mean, I think the intro started off as probably an eighth of the piece. And yeah, now it's closer to a half of the piece. And there were so many hands on it. I wrote sort of a... very loose, like, skeleton of what that intro ended up being.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
It was mostly Lex. But part of that is because, I mean, everything Lex said, but also that Musk is currently a high-level government official and is in the news all the time. I mean, when we started writing, the intro said that Musk had 13 children, and that we had to update that totally. Twice. New kid just dropped. Yeah. Over the edit process. Yeah. Things wouldn't stop happening.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
And then also Vivian wouldn't stop posting, which was a little bit frustrating. At one point I had to DM her. I said, Hey, if you get any more information, can you please just tell me and not post it on threads? And she said, Oh, totally.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Poster in heart. For sure. But yeah, I mean, I think, I really love the balance of the piece found in the end. Early on when we were talking about structure, I think I pushed for more of a standard profile, mostly because, you know, then I get to show off my writing skills more and I like to write.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
But after talking to Vivian, even after our early pre-interview, but certainly after the full interview where I sat with her for a very long time over Zoom and a 14-hour time difference, I immediately was like, no, if I write this out, it's going to be mostly dialogue anyway, because her voice, she has, she's so voicey and it's so fun to keep it in, in that voice.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Thanks, Ella. Now everything I write for the next 15 years will be underwhelming. It's all downstream from here. It's not true. Barron Trump, I'm coming for you. You're going to re-enroll at NYU. Exactly. They'll never see me coming.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
No, I don't think so. I don't know. Obama was like into a bisexual she-they and he still bombed the Middle East or whatever.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Okay. I think I got to say most of what I want to say. I mean, I think Vivian's just like a delightful person. And I'm really excited for her that she gets her moment in the spotlight. And that hopefully this like helps her build herself as a public figure outside of and away from Elon Musk. And she has all of these aspirations to perform and model.
Behind the Bastards
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And I hope she gets to do her Anna Wintour drag one day soon. Oh, me too. I love that movie. It's a great movie.
Behind the Bastards
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I'm on Instagram and X The Everything app as Ella Yerman or Ella.Yerman on Instagram.
Behind the Bastards
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I'm on Blue Sky. I just forget about it. We can do it. Can we? I suffered through 2012 Tumblr once. I don't need to do it again.
Behind the Bastards
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you can also find my show at going down tv on instagram going down the show on youtube uh going down show on patreon i don't know i make a transgender daily show you guys know about it new studio looks great it's so fun we gotta get you on there we gotta get you to come hang out hey well i will i will i will be in town shortly so hell yeah oh fun i go to the taping so i can crash that'll be fun you should do it hell yeah okay are we did we do it yeah we're done
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Instagram, nice. I would never use threads. My God.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Yeah, that's true. Right, so she did that one NBC interview after... after Elon went on Peterson. And I do not work at Teen Vogue, but Lex and I know each other because you're contractually obligated to know everyone else who's part of the, you know, deep state Illuminati doing trans politics online club.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
The pronoun council, yeah. We're all established members. We swear allegiance once a year. There's a whole ritual. Don't worry about it. So when I got in touch with Vivian last... fall, which I got in touch with her initially to see if she would come on Going Down. And I reached out to her and I said, do you want to come on my live comedy show?
Behind the Bastards
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And she said, no, I'm actually not sure live comedy is for me. I'm a little worried I'm not funny enough. And since then, she has changed her mind. She's told me repeatedly that she regrets saying that to me, that she has decided she actually is Funnier than everyone else alive. All of the things that a prolific 20-year-old poster might say. Absolutely.
Behind the Bastards
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So I got in touch with her, and then she said no, and I was like, okay, well, at least I have this mutual now. And then a few months later, I mentioned to Lex that I'd gotten in touch with her, and Lex said, okay, so she doesn't want to do a live comedy show that nobody... That nobody knows about.
Behind the Bastards
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What if instead we did a really fancy photo shoot and put her in Teen Vogue, a legacy journalism magazine, and I said, honestly, I think that's a better sales pitch. And it was.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I just want to second what Lex has been saying. I think the work Teen Vogue has been doing is really important. So many... Garrison, you know so much trans media is independently distributed and DIY, and I love us for that, but it is always really heartening to see mainstream media institutions uplift trans voices the way Teen Vogue has been doing.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Yeah, I mean, I think Vivian, one of the things that drew me to the story in the first place is that Vivian's sort of case is such an interesting microcosm of the transphobia experience as a whole. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
She's incredibly talked about for something that is not her fault and not under her control at all, in the same way that right now on the national stage, like, transfemininity, and transness at large, but specifically transfemininity, is... the problem to be spoken about, especially by conservatives. Butler calls it a phantasm, the gender nonsense. I read that book.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
I'm almost certain I do. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. Almost certainly. That's The Trouble with Gender, right? Gender Trouble, yeah. No, that's the original book. It's Who's Afraid of Gender.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
Thank you very much. I have your book, but I haven't looked at it in a long time, except for to remember the word phantasm. And so, yeah, I totally agree with what Lex said. It's really exciting to sort of take her out of being used as a prop and give her own voice back. I think one of the most exciting moments in the piece to me is...
Behind the Bastards
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The moment where I ask her about sort of the allegations that Ilan like shifted rightward because of her. And she pushes back against sort of that narrative very strongly. And I think that is the way we've seen her being used both on the left and the right as sort of a this is why he's doing this. It's clearly the fact that he has this 20 year old trans girl.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
And she's like, actually, that's a crazy thing to say about it, about a 20 year old.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
I will say, I think, yeah, I think it's so important that that's talked about, and I'm glad she did. I'm also really glad, as someone who covers trans politics and news all the time, it was such a breath of fresh air to be able to frame this piece as a look into what the joy of transition looks like, and looking at how her transition has brought her closer to the life she wants to be living.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
And I'm not that old, but talking to someone who's a few years younger than me and who transitioned at an earlier stage in life gave me such a beautiful vision of what the future could look like if we fix some of the bullshit that's going on these days. Yeah. All right. I'm being, I'm being clowned on in the chat. I'm not that much older than Vivian is what I meant.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 177
And now I'm peeking my microphone and the podcast is going to sound terrible. Look what you've done. Um, I'm not that much older than Vivian, but she started transitioning at a much younger stage of life than me. And to see like what that has done for her and like the way, I don't know.