ContraPoints

What really excites me is the prospect of making people actually enjoy thinking about difficult topics, to laugh even while seriously engaging these very unpleasant subjects.

I carry with me from my male upbringing a sense that femininity is forbidden. So when I appear on YouTube with forty butterflies glued to my body and glitter all over my face, I have a sense that I'm getting away with something I'm not supposed to. I'm being decadent. I'm enjoying a forbidden pleasure. And that's fun, and it's funny.

I was looking at YouTube and seeing things really heat up again in terms of the popularity of talking about serious political or philosophical issues and almost no one doing leftist content that engaged with the other side in any way. I was like, 'I bet I can do this,' so I gave it a shot, and it's worked out better than I expected.

More than 40 per cent of my viewers are female. When I do meetups and events, oftentimes the majority of people who show up are LGBTQ+. So I'm looking forward to better serving that community of fans.

It's quite difficult to get through to the people who are really committed to these anti-progressive beliefs.

It's going to take me less time to wreck Ben Shapiro than it took me to curl my hair.

Almost as soon as I came out as trans, there was a spike in online harassment more vicious than anything I'd experienced before. It turns out there are many people who spend a good portion of their spare time making life as miserable as possible for trans people.

There's this artistic drive or something in me that impels me to sympathize with villains, but it's maybe not a great impulse as someone who wants to do activism as well.

Politics is always antagonistic and tribalistic. But social media puts us in isolated information bubbles. We're not just disagreeing on politics. We're disagreeing on reality in very fundamental ways.

I try to swim against the current as much as possible when it comes to the tribalism that defines the way people do politics on social media, and I try to present myself as an individual and humanistic voice. I'm interested in people, not just factions.