ContraPoints

On YouTube, there's a right-wing extremism funnel. You start by watching a college student ranting about how dumb feminism is. It's wrong, but it's not especially sinister. And then, three suggested videos later, you're hearing about why we need a white ethno-state to save the race from a third-world invasion.

When I was a prepubescent child, I never really had experiences of gender dysphoria. This is not something that started until adolescence.

That's one thing I learned in my philosophy training - if you're writing a paper on Aristotle, you have to first show that you understand him. Then you can make your counterargument.

I dropped out of my Ph.D. philosophy program at Northwestern in the summer of 2015, in my mid-20s. I kind of had the idea of writing fiction, and so I was working on that for a year but without ever having very much success at it.

A debate is a very specific kind of performance.

The visual elements of the videos, the makeup and the costumes... these things have nothing to do with justice and truth, but nonetheless, it really changes the experience of the video.

I didn't understand how difficult it would be to transition in the public eye and look back at pre-transition videos - it's sort of humiliating and painful.

A ContraPoints video is never going to be framed as 'I'm so offended by this idea.' It's not, 'I'm so intimidated by my opponent's big, masculine brain.' It's more, 'I'm bored of you, and also, you're a dum-dum.'

In grad school, I led a bit of a double life. I don't mean gender-wise - I just mean intellectually.

As a prominent trans person, you hope that someone feels they know you and then thinks of you at the polls; you hope to impact the way they act when they encounter a trans person in real life.

I've been harassed. I've been stalked. I've had every public pre-transition photo of me compiled alongside my deadname with the purpose of never letting me be my true gender.

I don't just want to show how somebody might be wrong;I want to know why people believe the things they believe in the first place. I want to understand the mindset that would lead somebody toward the alt-right.