David Forbes
speaker
31 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
David Forbes’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I'll go ahead and start. I've been a journalist for over 20 years. And for those who might be wondering, since you referred to trans femmes, I am a trans woman. I use she, they pronouns. I also like the name David. So, but... I have seen it kind of wax and wane. I've seen it go up and down.
And to some degree, what we're facing now, it is a much worse and escalating version, but it is also some of what I've seen trans journalists face, period. I came out publicly in 2016. I started my transition in 2015. And Immediately, my freelance career basically died overnight. And it wasn't like I was writing for, you know, right wing outlets or something.
And, you know, honestly, the fact is, and this is, I think, unusual among among trans journalism, because a lot of it admirably focuses on, you know, national and international level stuff, because what we face is so vast.
But if it had not been for the local support, because a lot of the Blade subscribers are local, though we certainly welcome people to subscribe from wherever they are, I would be homeless. And there's a good chance I wouldn't be talking to y'all right now.
But at the same time, in this kind of what I kind of call the quiet purge, which I think has been escalating in recent years that you talked about, about, you know, just we've got trans journalists who used to write for national magazines living out of their cars now. That is the reality we face. Yeah. Our publication's all working class trans people.
And, you know, we've had journalists arrested twice. Yeah. Oh, my God. For doing their jobs. Two of our journalists were taken to trial in 2023 on a minor trespassing charge, which is almost unheard of in the U.S., as bad as the U.S. often is. As you mentioned also, this was like trespassing for fucking reporting on the cops doing a homeless encampment sweep.
They don't actually take you to trial. This is one of those kind of welcome to Asheville moments, because I think people buy the marketing sometimes and think we're this super progressive city, and actually it's an incredibly repressive, like, tourism fife.
And that's this kind of really still point, though, like the city government city council here is six Democrats and one kind of like Bernie Sanders type independent, though even more tepid. And the D.A. is a Democrat. And still, you know, they were hell bent.
to persecute trans journalists yeah um one of our one of our journalists matilda bliss was openly mistreated and misgendered based on her gender during that so to some degree what's happening now is certainly a worsening but it is also an extension of what's been going on for a very long time so okay like it is getting worse i don't know where we're going to be in a two three even one year but also like this is not a new fight
The extent of it is actually telling on the local level, too.
Here, the Blade did a number of reporting, and we also featured some really well-thought-out and pretty sharp opinion columns, which is one thing we kind of specialize in, because I think they're really good for raising issues on the local level, about how awful the Tourism Development Authority is, which is this hotelier cartel that takes every dime of all the local hotel tax, every bit of it, and then uses it to market the place to more rich people and
push crackdowns on pretty much everyone else so we push this it became a widespread public demand a lot of organizing happened around it and there was zip zilch zero mentioned that like spurred by investigations and editorials in the ashfield blade even one of the one of the people who wrote that editorial it was a local um resident activist who dealt with some tourism stuff
was literally being quoted the fact she'd written a piece for the blade and that you know was just not mentioned and actually became kind of a running kind of grim joke because we're all working class trans people and you know half of us are trans femme is just the Asheville blade does not exist and. And some of that was for liberals, but honestly, Asheville has a massive trans misogyny problem.
We think we were the first media outlets to do like a quick guide to trans misogyny, which we did kind of like a slideshow about it in our Patreon and stuff because it was that extensive. But even the left in Asheville has some real problems with trans misogyny.
So, and it's applied to everything, not just from trans issues, but even to bread and butter kind of local stuff, which we also do a lot of reporting on. You know, it's, we can't admit that trans leftists and anarchists are shaping the discussion in any way, shape or form.
That's absolutely true. And I should note, the Blade's a co-op. We've been one for for half a decade now. And part of the reason for that was we'd seen how unfairly like income was treated just in the press in general. And also, I'm an anarchist. And while I love being an editor, I don't want to be a boss. I want to like work with other people. Yeah. And it's made us a lot more effective.
I would say we wouldn't exist if we hadn't become a co-op. But also when we do hit a difficult financial spot, we operate in a shoestring budget, especially post to lean, as sadly, a lot of folks have been driven out of Asheville by the refusal of various governments to do anything about rental aid by the resumption of like very quick resumption of evictions and a lot of other horrible stuff.
Like it's a struggle. We all are working class folks. We all work other jobs and face trans discrimination, trans mythology and transphobia. So it's it's difficult. And even with being a co-op, we do the best we can. And we do, unlike other places, pay freelancers fair rates. But sometimes it's legitimately difficult to divide up our tiny budget.
And at some points we say, hey, look, we can't cover this right now or we have to say, OK, in some cases I've done it before. Certainly I'm covering this, but I am going to literally have to split up payment for it over multiple months because we just don't have the money in there. But I feel it does need it does need to get out there. Yeah.
And even if those decisions are made more fairly, it is still a real problem that we are dividing up a fairly small pool of resources. We do a lot with that, but it is a real limitation.
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