Willow Defebaugh

We all love nature.

I mean, it's fascism 101 to try to divide people so that everyone's too busy pointing fingers at each other.

It's that Spider-Man meme.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, we live in this world where everything, this artificial world we've constructed where everything is built on binaries, right?

Left, right, conservative, liberal, right?

And I think, again, about this duality that you're holding of, like, drag queen and environmental activist.

Did one come first?

Or was Patti sort of inseparable from both?

I'm so happy that you shared also about your experience when you came out because I think it's really something that's not talked about, particularly probably outside of the queer community.

But I think about this really often because especially being trans, there's this very interesting thing that happens where you come out and then the goal, quote unquote, kind of becomes to erase yourself, to quote unquote pass, to never be

visibly trans right that's like the goal that sort of gets implanted in your head is like I want to meet someone on the street and for them to just see me as a woman first not a trans woman and I remember like the early years of my transition it was a lot it was this strange duality of like

I've come out, but then also I'm trying to still fit into a box or a mold.

And that was really, it took a lot to get past.

And I think there tends to be perhaps like a straight vision of what the coming out narrative looks like.

That's sort of like you come out and that's it.

But the reality is it's like, it's a years long process of shedding the internal, um,

voices in your head that's like okay you can be trans but no one can know you're trans or you can be gay but not paint your nails right and it's like all of that shedding is to me such a part of the chrysalis of like the metamorphosis that i think all queer people go through and it's just again i don't even think it's really queer specific it's like

I think if you are wanting to live a life of authenticity, a life where you are getting to know yourself, then you are shedding the expectations that society has placed on you, that your family has placed on you, whatever it is.