The Goodbye Episode

LEAH:
Hey, friends. It’s Leah. It has been a long while since I came here to talk with you, and a lot of changes have happened. And I’ve been kind of putting this off, if I’m honest, because it’s hard to say goodbye. Earlier this year, I decided that I needed to give myself 6 months to get away from this endless production cycle that something like this podcast requires. I was so exhausted, not exactly from the podcast. I love the podcast. I will always love this podcast.

But I was beginning to understand that I have spent my life trying to convince everybody that I’m okay when I was very, very much not okay. And that is exhausting. There’s a level of energy required to convince people and convince myself of something that just was not true, that it left very little energy for anything else. And so as I’ve taken this time to really just rest, it’s been it’s been really good for me. I can’t I know I’m crying, but it’s not bad tears. It’s tears of sadness for the end of something beautiful. And I’ve never been great at change. Change has always been really challenging for me, especially endings have always been really challenging for me.

So, anyway, not only has it become clear to me that the production cycle for a podcast is more than my energy system and my nervous system can handle right now. The political situation in the United States has altered drastically, and that has played into this decision in a really significant way as well. So I wanna talk a little bit about both of those things. The personal decision, the politics of this decision to end the podcast, and what I’ll be doing next to because don’t worry. I’m not going away. I’m just changing how I do things. Alright. So let’s talk about politics first because that part’s gonna make me angry.

Alright. For those of you outside of the United States who may not be super familiar with what’s going on, I’m sure you’re aware that Donald Trump was elected as the next president. We already know what a Trump presidency looks like, but this one’s gonna be, I think, much, much worse. The first time he kind of came in like a bull in a China shop and broke a lot of stuff, but he didn’t really know what he was doing. He had a lot of people around him who were trying to kind of keep the guardrails. And so there was a great deal of destruction, but there was a limit to how much destruction. This time around, those limits, those guardrails have gone away. This administration is coming in with a very detailed plan of what they wanna do, how they wanna go about it.

They have personnel in place, and their plans are terrifying. If they were able to do everything that they say they wanna do, it would almost certainly be the end of democracy as we know it. In the United States, which portends very poorly for the rest of the world because the United States is generally seen as a leader in democracy. So that’s not great. For me personally, it’s been really scary. It was sometime this summer that I began to understand what project 2025 is. I was listening to a YouTuber, Leija Miller, who I highly recommend. She presents things in a way that really makes sense for my brain at least.

And she talked about project 2025 in a way that got my attention. She talked about how, quote, trans ideology is a huge bugaboo in this and that they were going to try to basically make trans people disappear from visibility. What they would like to do is make peep trans people disappear from existence. That’s not a thing that can happen. There have been trans people all throughout history. There are lots of theories about why and how it happens, but there’s absolute evidence that the trans experience is real. There have been studies that show that a a person who experiences themselves as the gender, not the one that they were born with. So let’s say somebody’s born with a penis and they experience themselves as female.

So let me tell you, let me just be real honest here. I don’t know any of the biology of this. I am I’m telling you what I’ve read in articles and from a completely non biological understanding. But when there’s a person, let’s say, with a penis, who experiences themselves internally as female and they examine their brain, it looks more like a female brain. And when they start receiving estrogen, it’s like the brain calms down for the first time because their brain has been trying to, fit into the male experience while actually having the more feminized structure. Again, totally layperson. Have no idea what I’m talking about biologically, and I may have some of the details wrong. But the basic premise is that there is scientific evidence that the trans experience is real.

Okay. So I’m watching Lija Miller’s video, and she’s talking about the section in project 2025 that specifically addresses the, quote, trans ideology. And in the the sort of excerpt that she puts up on the screen, I saw a mention of librarians and educators and jail and sex offender registry. And that sure as hell caught my attention. To that moment, honestly, I had no idea that any of this was in the works. But I started, as they say, doing my own research. I read that portion of project 2025, and it became very clear to me very quickly that my role as an educator in this space could put me in legal danger because I have done a lot of education around trans issues, trans rights, legitimacy of the trans experience, the dangers that trans people face. All of that, I feel, is incredibly important in my role as somebody who’s talking about issues of sex and gender.

But people who are putting forward this vision for America are saying that anything that has anything to do with transgender people is pornography. Just literally their existence. In my understanding, their existence would be categorized as pornography. And anyone who distributes or creates anything that is, quote, pornography can be jailed and put on the sex offenders registry. Well, that includes me because I produce material that accepts the existence of trans people and tries to help people who have never had any experience with someone who’s trans to understand what that experience might be. So now I’m a pornographer, which means that I could be put in jail and I could be put on the sex offenders registry, which is blatantly ridiculous, but, apparently, that’s where we are right now. Now this is not written into these documents, but seeing how the religious right has been dealing with issues of sex and sexuality. I expect that this prohibition will very quickly morph into any conversations about, quote, non normative sex.

So that would be sex outside of marriage, sex that’s between anyone other than a man and a woman, husband, wife. It might even become a, a limit on anything that’s non vanilla sex. Who the fuck knows? But I expect that we are going to start seeing a crackdown on anything that portrays non heterosexual, nonmonogamous sex as pornography or somehow perverse. I’ve already experienced this to some degree, not really for this podcast, thankfully. But, I think I talked about this at the time. I don’t really remember. With my colleague, Justine, I, published an opinion piece with NBC News. I’ll put a link in the show notes about the importance of age appropriate consent based sex education that begins in the early grades.

And the response to that was viciously anti education because they said we were grooming children for non normative experiences. We were grooming children to be the victims of predators, which is actually the exact opposite of what happens when you give a child age appropriate consent based sex education at an early age. They actually become more resilient and have a lower risk profile for predators. But we now live in a world where logic is no longer necessary. So all of that to say, I’m this been a long explanation of why doing this podcast no longer feels viable. It has the word sex in the title. And, ironically, I know a lot of you found this podcast because it has sex in the title. I’ve heard from so many people who say, I went to the podcast directory and typed in the word sex, and that’s how I found you because I just wanted to learn more or hear more.

And that’s how you got to me. Unfortunately, now that is going to be a danger, which is why I have decided that I’m not going to produce any new content for the foreseeable future with the word sex in it. Because my risk tolerance right now, given how much energy I am putting into resting and healing, my risk tolerance is very low. There are other people who are going to continue doing this work, and they’re gonna keep the word sex on it. And they’re gonna be on the front lines, and fucking hell I support them in every way. But I don’t feel in this moment like I can be one of them. Doesn’t mean I’m gonna disappear. I’m just going to shift the language around what I do.

I’m still gonna be talking about the same stuff, but I’m gonna shift the language so that we’re talking more about, quote, relationships than we are about sex. And we might talk about spicy activities, but we’re not gonna talk about sex. If you’ve been over to my YouTube channel, you’ll already see that I am using the word schmechuality, which is a ridiculous mouthful. But doing anything that I can to keep myself off of the radar of the sensors. Don’t know how long that’s going to work, but we’re gonna work it for as long as we can. This podcast is not gonna go away, by the way. The podcast archives will remain available for as long as that is legally viable. It is entirely possible that at some point, I will need to take these archives down.

So if this podcast is really important to you and you want to know for sure that you can share it with friends or go back and listen to episodes that are really meaningful to you, I would recommend that you download the archives right now and put them somewhere safe. If that feels like a daunting task, I am gonna put a bundle up on my website for a small amount of money. I’m just thinking about this as I’m saying it out loud. So, I don’t know how much it’ll be. It’ll be under $50 for sure. And I’ll just gather up all of the episodes, so that you can purchase them and download them all at once and and be done with it. But I would really suggest that you archive these episodes just in case this podcast has to disappear. And I am so sorry that I have to even consider saying that.

If if it were up to me, this podcast would live in perpetuity forever, but we may not have that option. Hey. This is Leah in editing. When I was recording this, I was just kind of spitballing out loud. Now I’ve spent a week actually creating the things, so here are some specific details. I’ve created 2 options. There’s the audio download for $35. This includes all 160 1 ish, I think, episodes.

A bit less than the full catalog because I rereleased some episodes without adding a lot of new content last year. So I’m not putting those in twice. Now you can also get the audio for all of the episodes free by downloading them yourself. I’ve just made it quicker and a little easier for you. The other option is a full package that includes the audio episodes, the show notes, the resources, the audio extras, and the transcripts. This is the first time that all of this is together in an organized and easy to navigate way. This package is $99, which steal. And I’m not just saying that to, like, try to sell it.

You’re getting close to a 180 hours of audio content, plus the transcript, so you can search for the words and topics that are of greatest interest to you, plus an easy index to find links for the products I’ve recommended over the years, my guests’ favorite toys, and more. Best of all, it’s never been this easy to listen to the audio extras along with the episodes they’re associated with because I never organized that very well. So for $99, it’s like you’re getting each episode for something like 62¢ and getting the transcripts, the resource list, and the audio extras for free. That’s crazy. Because there’s so much material, it’s taking me longer to put this full package together than I had expected. So you can purchase it right now, and I’ll send you the audio episodes immediately. Then I’ll deliver the rest of the package in the next couple of weeks when everything is complete. And I just wanna reiterate why this is necessary.

During the campaign, the next US administration tried to pretend they had no ties to project 2025. But the incoming president has now named multiple people who are instrumental in the creation of project 2025 as appointees for his administration. So it’s clear now that project 2025 or at least some parts of it are going to be put into action. One of the dictates of that document is that any material that, quote, promotes the transgender ideology, which basically means acknowledging that trans people exist and deserve basic rights, will be categorized as pornography and pornography will be made illegal. That means that any episodes in which I have talked with transgender people about their lives or where I have done education about the gender spectrum could put me in legal danger. The text of project 2025 says that I could go to prison and be put on the sex offender registry for sharing this information, which means that I and all of my colleagues in the field of sex education are now on high alert. We’re talking furiously behind the scenes about how to keep ourselves safe. For me, that may include having to take this podcast down.

To be clear, that is not a step I want to take. This podcast will remain freely available for as long as it can. But we can’t predict the future right now. And if legislation is passed or executive orders are signed, it will already be too late to make sure you have the audio in hand. That’s why I’m making this push right now to get it to you while there’s no legal issue. And to be clear, I don’t think there will ever be a legal issue for you having it in your collection. The legal danger is on my end for providing it. And I’m not gonna lie.

If you can afford it, this would be a great way for you to support me financially for creating this huge body of work over the past 5 years. So 2 options, audio only or audio as I’m calling it with all the trimmings. It’s ready for you to purchase at www.leahcarey.com/audio. That’s www.leahcarey.com/audio. That link is in the app you’re listening on now. Okay. That’s quite enough yammering. Let’s get back to the episode.

In addition to changing the way that I language things, I’ve also changed all of my handles on social media. So to this point, I’ve been good girls talk. I actually, at the very beginning, my handles were good girls talk about sex because I wanted it to reflect the podcast. And very quickly, I realized I couldn’t do that because all of my posts were being taken down. So I changed my handles to good girls talk, and then I was able to interact like normal with the caveat that a lot of my posts were still, taken down or I was shadow banned because of the content of my post. But, at least, it wasn’t because of the name of my account. And, yes, there are some accounts that do very well with the word sex in them, and, my understanding is that small accounts are held to different standards than large accounts. So it is much harder for a small account to get away with something like having the word sex in the title.

Anyway, because I have decided to, as they say in the industry, sunset the podcast. It’s just such a weird term. But because I’m ending the podcast, I have decided that I wanna change my social media handles so that they’re a reflection of me rather than a reflection of a podcast that I’m no longer producing. So all of my social media handles are now xoLeahCarey. Think of it as hugs and kisses, Leah Carey. XoLeahCarey. So that is currently Instagram, YouTube, blue sky, TikTok. I’m not yet actively using all of those channels, but I certainly hope to build up to that.

I am already producing some YouTube content, and I’m putting in place a structure so that I can be producing more YouTube content hopefully around the beginning of the year. My goal is once a week. We’ll see how it goes. But I do have to say that ironically, production of YouTube pieces is going to be a lot less work and a lot less expensive for me than producing this podcast, and there are a bunch of technical reasons for that. The biggest being that it has always been incredibly important to me to protect the identity and the safety and the privacy of any guest on this podcast, which meant that it took a high level of production. I couldn’t just record an episode and then put it out, without a ton of editing. And that just was a lot of has always been a lot of work that becomes a lot easier when I’m doing YouTube and not talking about people’s personal stories. Wow.

I am all over the place today. Okay. So changing handles, xoLeahCarey, changing my public facing language. Archives will remain as long as that is viable, nonnormative. Sex. I have also decided to close the Patreon. There are, again, a bunch of reasons for this, but one of them is that the Patreon has the word sex in the title. I am so grateful to all of you who have supported me over at Patreon whether it was for a single month or 5 years.

And I know that there are some of you who have been with me the whole time. And, god, I am just so grateful to you. I do expect to reopen some new means of community support. I haven’t quite decided what that will look like yet. It may be another Patreon, but I I may choose some other platform instead. We’ll see. But there will continue to be a way for you to support my work, and I appreciate that. So I told you at the beginning of this episode that I’ve been putting off doing this recording for a while because I’m not great at endings because it makes me really sad to say goodbye to this podcast that has meant so very much to me.

But today is the day. I didn’t know when I woke up this morning that today would be the day, but today is the day because I just had a conversation with a listener who reached out and wanted to tell me how big an impact this podcast has had on her. She said things like, you’re my hero. And, she said that she wanted she was looking for a podcast like Dan Savage, and mine popped up. And she said, yours is nothing like Dan Savage, but that it has opened up a new world for her in terms of thinking about and talking about sex. And, honestly, that means so much to me. She’s from an Eastern European country originally. She told me that in her mother tongue, there’s no word for bisexual.

It just doesn’t exist. She’s living in the US now and she said that as messed up as things are in the US, we are still a front runner in terms of human rights and women’s rights, etcetera. And so for those of us who take that responsibility seriously, who want to be part of the solution, We have to we have to keep showing up. But we have to show up in a way that respects our nervous systems, that respects the way that we are able to process things without blowing out our own processing systems. Because if I were to work on the forefront, you know, I said that there are people who will be doing this work in a very visible way, and I support them wholeheartedly, and I need to pull my visibility back a couple steps because my risk tolerance level right now is lower. That is a result of the fact that my nervous system can’t process a ton of extra stuff right now. That may be different in 6 months or a year or 3 years. I might be able to stand up in front of the world and say, we need to be talking about sex.

We need to be talking about the realities of life for trans people and how they are the ones in danger in a bathroom, not the cis people. But right now, my nervous system can’t handle that, and doing that would taut my nervous system out to the degree that I would have to stop doing all work. And that doesn’t help anybody. So that’s why I’m finding this middle ground where I can still be doing the work that’s important to me. I can still be reaching the people who want to hear the message, but I can do it in a way that I feel like my risk tolerance is being respected. I know, for instance, that I can’t go to protests and marches as much as I want to, as much as I have made plans many many times and, you know, made my signs and then it had gotten to the morning of the March and I’d have a panic attack because my nervous system can’t handle that level of noise and the crush of humanity and just the general chaos of a protest or a march. I know that about my system. So I wanna encourage you as you think about what is what is the thing or the things that you can do to actively resist if that is what you feel called to do.

What can you do in a way that respects your nervous system that doesn’t blow you out so that you then have to do nothing? Do a little bit. Do something. Do something that is within what my therapist calls your window of tolerance. And, you know, every little, every once in a while, your window of tolerance may grow. And then it might shrink back a little bit. That’s fine. It’s perfectly normal, and then it might grow again. But do what is within your window of tolerance now, understanding that you may have more in the future, or you may not.

So we’ve gotten to the end of this stuff that I wanted to say, and I don’t know how to say goodbye. But it’s not goodbye. It’s goodbye to this particular form and format. But this is not goodbye because I hope that you will come find me, see me, talk to me in other places, primarily YouTube, xoLeah Carey. In fact, it’ll be easier for us to communicate there because it’s so much easier to leave comments on a YouTube video than it is on a podcast. So I hope that you will come find me there. For the time being, I’m going to be doing Dear Dear Abby episodes. Over time, I expect that to grow, but these are the least production heavy for the moment.

So that’s where I’m gonna start. And I will keep you up to date with other updates. Please join my newsletter. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Whatever I am doing in any given moment, I will make those announcements in my newsletter. But for now, come find me on YouTube. Come find me on Instagram, xoLeahCarey. You’re welcome to come find me on Blue Sky.

I don’t know what you’re gonna find there. Twitter has never been something that I was great at, and so we’ll see. I actually have some ideas that I think will be really fun for TikTok. So please come find me there as well, xoLeah Carey on TikTok. I will let you know when I figure out what the replacement for Patreon is. If you feel like now is the time for you to do some coaching, you know I’m here for it. You can find all of that information at leahcarey.com. I also have, by the way, xoLeahCarey.com, forwarded to that just so that all the bases are covered, and you only have to remember one thing.

So you can find all of the information at xoLeahCarey. And, I also have a bunch of things, for sale. I’ve never been great at promoting them, but I have prerecorded classes. I have some written material. I’m going to put together the bundle of episodes so that you can download everything in one go. So you can find all of that at leahcarey.com/shop. Again, information in the show notes. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for all of the love and support you have shown me over the last 5 years. This has been an incredible ride, and I would not give up or change a single thing about it. I love you. I love you even though I don’t know who you are. I love you so much for showing up for this conversation, for participating in this conversation to whatever degree you have, for sharing it with your friends, sharing it with people who are important to you, for learning the concepts and taking them into your own life, for taking the concepts maybe into therapy, so that you could really learn how to live a life that feels most authentic to you. That more than anything in the world is what I want for you to live the life, gender, sexuality, orientation, relationship style, all of it, to live in the way that is most authentic and fulfilling for you no matter what it looks like for anybody else. And so I will continue to have these conversations in other places. So please come join me because you are worthy of love, And I’m gonna help you get there one conversation at a time.