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Riley J Dennis is someone I’ve been watching on YouTube for a little while and completely admiring. I adore her passion for anti-oppressive work, talking about feminism, politics, sex, trans issues, and a bunch more.
So, I decided to reach out and invite her on the show. When she said yes, I immediately went to work watching as many of her YouTube videos as I could find. Some of the most fun homework because I spent hours geeking out over the topics and rolling around in her facts and super logical approach to things that a lot of people really hate.
We not only talk about trans identity policing, trans porn, and being visible online, but we also explore what it’s like to be so hated in the online space and why Riley’s sex toy video for trans folks completely melted my heart.
It’s super fun and I can’t wait for you to hear it.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
In this episode, Riley and I talk about:
- Dawn’s delight over Riley giggling in her trans sex toys video. It’s adorable and so honest and sweet.
- Riley’s videos and how she talks about trans issues, politics, feminism, and life. The diversity of Riley’s topics makes for a really enjoyable experience, and I adore her perspective on so much.
- The culture of demanding private information of people who share themselves online or in the media – as if people are owed details about people’s private experiences. This ties in with identity policing and wanting people to prove they’re queer or bisexual or trans.
- People demanding private medical information from Riley to prove she’s trans enough – demanding pictures of her hormone bottles or doctor’s appointments, proof of a diagnosis of her trans identity from doctors. It’s incredibly invasive and gross.
- Why people who have an identity that is considered the norm don’t even know they have an identity because it’s normal or a given. It pushes people who aren’t in the norm to have to constantly prove or validate themselves, and that’s shitty.
- Bisexual erasure and why the only people with straight privilege are straight people. Bisexual folks are denied access and identity left and right, even if they’re in a relationship that reads as straight. Same with trans folks and how their identities get erased.
- This bizarre fear that cis people have around people lying about being trans. Where does this fear come from? And even if it happens, it doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s so weird and unfair to trans folks.
- The phenomena of people who had to fight so hard for their identity or their status and so now turn around and police others in their same situation to try and make things hard for them, like hazing. We see it with trans folks and we see it with immigrants who immigrate and then become fiercely anti-immigration.
- Riley’s amazing video about genital preferences and why they’re transphobic. I love this conversation and I know it will make so many of you uncomfortable.
- Why straight men liking a trans woman is still straight because trans women are women. The end.
- The common narrative is that people know they’re trans from the time they were young, but that’s not always true. Sometimes it takes decades to realize you’re trans, to find the language or the permission to even name it.
- So much of the discourse within lesbian communities is anti-penis as a point of pride. We talk about the difference between rejecting heterosexuality versus rejecting trans bodies. There are women who have penises.
- A woman with a penis does not mean penetration is going to happen, but our assumption that sex is penis-in-vagina means we assume someone with a penis will be doing some penetration. No.
- The stigma of trans porn, the damage of having trans porn being separate than cis porn, and the super gross practices of mainstream porn using slurs and offensive language to even describe the porn.
- People have such a warped idea of what trans sex looks like. We explore what it really looks like.
- YouTube culture and harassment online. Riley has to deal with so much bullshit. Watch Riley’s video on trans & gender dysphoria not being a mental illness here.
About Riley J. Dennis
Riley J. Dennis is a trans, non-binary, gay, polyamorous woman who makes YouTube videos about intersectional feminism, politics, queer stuff, and a whole lot of other topics. She thinks all TV shows and movies should be gayer.
You can follow her on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @rileyjaydennis.
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to (You’re listening) (You’re listening) You’re listening to Sex Gets Real (Sex Get Real) (Sex Gets Real) Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra (with Dawn Serra). Thanks, bye!
Hey, you! Welcome to this week’s episode of Sex Gets Real. I am ridiculously excited for this episode. It is a fun chat and an unexpected chat with someone I think is really smart and putting out amazing content in the world. That is YouTube sensation – I know she’ll kill me for saying that – Riley J. Dennis. We talk all about identity policing, and people wanting trans people to prove their trans enough or that people are bisexual enough. We talk about trans women porn and why straight men loved trans women. We talk about the fears that surround identities that aren’t hetero and cis and straight. We talk about this weird culture we have around demanding private access to people that we see online and in the media, and why that’s really fucked up and weird. And it’s just really fun and sweet and delightful.
Dawn Serra: Also, if you’re listening to this on August 6th, which is the day this comes out, I am running my next “Sex is a Social Skill” group call today, August 6th. The theme is anger. We’re going to be talking about our relationship with anger, when it’s OK to be angry, when we hide our anger, what we were taught about our anger growing up – especially since gender plays such a huge role in our relationship with anger. If that’s the kind of thing you want to dive into and and explore and talk about with other really rad people, then you can check out the show notes for this episode or go to dawnserra.com/ep173 for Episode 173 to get a link so that you can sign up and check it out. The calls are every two weeks. So we have talked about cherishing your partner and feeling cherished. We’ve talked about self-respect. It’s a really fun place that’s live on video, so you can hang out with me and just super geek out around all these things that we don’t actually have a place in the world to geek out around.
Let me tell you a little bit about Riley, and we’ll jump right in. Riley J. Dennis is a trans, non-binary, gay, polyamorous woman who makes YouTube videos about intersectional feminism, politics, queer stuff, and a whole lot of other topics. She thinks all TV shows and movies should be gayer.
One other quick note, I was testing out a new microphone when we were chatting and so my sound is little off. I don’t love it. But it’s the best that I could do with that new mic. Next week, I’m back to my standard one. So here is me and Riley having a blast.
Dawn Serra: Welcome to the show, Riley. I’m so excited to have you here. I think this is going to go amazing places.
Riley J. Dennis: Thanks. I’m excited to be here.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. OK. Here’s where I want to start. Because it was one of the points of just pure delight for me when I was watching all of your YouTube videos.
Riley J. Dennis: Oh, my god.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. OK. You have this YouTube video that’s all about trans, lesbians, and sex. You were talking about all these things that had to do with sex and different ways to have pleasurable sexual encounters, regardless of genitals and penetration. But you got this box of goodies from Adam and Eve. You hold out their wand, and your reaction to the power of their vibrating wand was… It was the purest moment of just you giggling and being shocked. I just had to bring it up because in that moment, I was just like, ”Oh, my god. I’m totally in love with Riley.”
Riley J. Dennis: Oh, my gosh. I’m like bright red right now.
Dawn Serra: Perfect.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, I had no idea that people who have penises could use massage wands. Just never crossed my mind. Then I got all those things from Adam and Eve. I was like, “Oh, my god. How has no one ever told me this before?”
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. There was some really good toys in that box that they sent you.
Riley J. Dennis: There was. They keep sending me cool things, and now I’m just overflowing with sex toys. I don’t know what to do with all of them.
Dawn Serra: You can start like an installation on your wall.
Riley J. Dennis: Literally.
Dawn Serra: Here you go. All the things that can go places and buzz.
Riley J. Dennis: Exactly. I’ll just have them out, so every time people are coming over, it’s like, “Hey, look. Here’s my entire sex toy wall.”
Dawn Serra: One of my other favorite parts of that video was they sent you a bed restraint system. You were like, “So this tucks under your mattress, then you can attach it to people’s wrists and ankles. You can tuck it onto your mattress or you can just leave it out. When people come over, you’ll be like, ‘Oh, hey. This is where I have sex with my girlfriend.’”
Riley J. Dennis: I mean, yeah. It’s not that subtle.
Dawn Serra: It’s just some people are super into that. Actually, just the other day, I don’t know why I did this, but my husband’s really good with rope. We pretty much just keep rope tied to the corners of our headboard, so that if we’re in the middle of something, he can just tie up my wrists. I had a maintenance person coming over. I looked at the bed and, for some reason, I thought, “Oh! Two ropes on the headboard is way too obvious. So I’ll just take one of them off.” I took one off, and then he came over. Literally, while he’s in there working on my closet, I looked at the bed and I was like, “Why did I think leaving one was a good idea?”
Riley J. Dennis: Amazing. You’re like, “We have kinky sex, but only half on the side.”
Dawn Serra: Right, yeah. Like, “No, this is for my morning stretches.”
Riley J. Dennis: No. I’ve definitely left just a bunch of stuff all over the floor ‘cause I’m messy. People came to inspect my apartment. Just like through the apartment complex, they were checking everyone’s rooms. They just walked into my room and looked around and just walked out. I’m like, “Don’t mind all of that.”
Dawn Serra: “At least you know I’m having fun.” I found you because you do these amazing videos on YouTube. While there might be mixed opinions on YouTube itself, I thoroughly endorse so much of what you put out. You’re welcome. You talk about all kinds of stuff. You talk about feminism and sex and politics and trans issues and identity policing and oppression. For anyone who has never seen your videos, what is the thing you most want people to think about when they first show up on your channel?
Riley J. Dennis: Oh, whoa. You know, I’m not sure. I actually try pretty hard to not have a specific focus. The general theme of my channel is social justice through an intersectional feminist lens. It’s any topic that affects marginalized people and why we should care about it.
But one of the things I try hard to do is to not pigeonhole myself into one thing. I think a lot of people, when they think of my channel, just think of trans rights or trans issues or whatever. I do talk about that a lot. That’s for sure. But I try to not make that the main thing that I do. I try to do a lot of videos on politics and other aspects of my life just because I really don’t want to end up doing one specific little thing for my whole time on YouTube.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, absolutely. I think the diversity of the things that you’ve discussed make for a much richer experience. It’s like there’s lots of little good nuggets and surprises and interesting people that you talk to. So it actually seems like a really fun thing that you get to do.
Riley J. Dennis: I mean, I really like it. I mean, there’s just so many intersections of things that it feels like I’m leaving stuff out, if I’m like, “Here. Let’s talk about this thing,” but pretend that disabled people don’t exist. I want to try to talk about all of those intersections as much as I can.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. You had a couple of videos that just made my heart super happy. We were talking about all the things we wanted to geek out about, which honestly, could probably fill fours.
Riley J. Dennis: It’s a long list.
Dawn Serra: It’s a long list, but we’ll just see where we end up in the next 50 minutes. Then if we just have so much fun, we can always do another one. But I want to start with, pretty recently, within the past couple of weeks, you put out a video that was a little bit longer. It was talking about some of the things that you personally had been going through. One of the themes for that was definitely, there’s this culture on the internet where we’ve, for some reason, decided that it’s OK to demand private information from people who are putting content out in the world. I get this a little bit and I think a lot of people, they’ve been listening to me for three and a half years, and they know so much about my sex life and my marriage, and the things that I’ve tried, that it feels like they have a complete picture of me. But in fact, it’s just a percentage of me or a part of me.
I know you were talking about how you make decisions on what parts of yourself you want to share with the world and what parts are just really for you. But then there’s this culture, especially on YouTube, where people feel like they deserve to know your most private, intimate details and they deserve answers. And if you don’t give them to them, then you’re a liar.
Riley J. Dennis: Exactly, yeah.
Dawn Serra: So I’d love to just talk about that a little bit. I think mostly, what I just want people to know is, you’re not entitled to anyone’s personal information, and you never have the full story. But what’s been your experience in that realm?
Riley J. Dennis: I mean, one of the things I’ve seen a lot of people talk about is the side of when you have fans who demand that information, fans who really, really love you, but they think that they know you, and they think that you’re their best friend. Because, I mean, a lot of the whole YouTube persona that a lot of people have is, “We are friends. Me, the video maker and you, the viewer, are friends.” It’s like an illusion to a large degree. It’s like, you can have a good relationship with your viewers, but they’re not your friends in the sense that they don’t really know who you are in real life. They know the side of you that you put online.
I’ve seen a few YouTubers talk about that in terms of their fans not understanding that they have a life outside of YouTube, and that the creator-viewer relationship isn’t the same as knowing someone in real life. But what I’ve experienced a lot more of is not people who like me and appreciate me thinking that they deserve more information, but people who detest me thinking that I owe them information about my life to somehow prove who I am or what I’m talking about. Usually, related to trans stuff. If I say that I’m trans, they’re like, “Well, show us your hormone bottles, and the times you go to the doctor, and your diagnosis for gender dysphoria, and your plans to have surgery.” I don’t know. It’s just so wild to me that strangers think that I owe them that information. A lot of it is very private medical stuff that I would never demand of anybody. Not even friends, probably.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. Then I think what’s so fascinating is, when you take a step back, what are the identities that we don’t demand proof of, and then what are the identities where we demand proof? Then what does that say? We don’t demand that cis folks prove that they’re cis and that their gender aligns with what they are assigned at birth. We don’t demand proof that someone is cis man or whatever it is. But then to demand proof of someone’s queerness or their transness, I think it just really highlights, I think, where a lot of the oppressive thinking is, in that, “You can’t be trans unless I have proof, otherwise I get to doubt you.”
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah, exactly. I mean, people do it for anything that’s outside of the norm, like any kind of queerness. If you say that you’re bisexual, people usually doubt it to a strong degree, and were like, “What proof that you’ve dated both genders and still are attracted to both genders?” – not both, but multiple. It’s just wild to me. People who have whatever identity is the norm, they act as if they have no identity. It’s just because they’re the default. They don’t have to think about why they’re straight or cis or any of that. So they don’t have to prove any of it. It’s just the mindset behind cis, straight, white, abled, skinny being the default is everything outside of that you have to prove it.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I know that I’ve really, on my own personal level, had to grapple with that a little bit. Where for years, I just assumed I was straight because I had crushes on boys all through college and stuff. But then, in my early 20s, I ended up in a relationship with a cis woman. So I started really identifying with lesbian culture and dyke culture. That felt really good. But then I ended up in a relationship with a trans person. Then I was like, “I don’t think lesbian fits anymore, but I don’t know what does. But I’m definitely still part of the queer community.” Then I ended up marrying a cis guy, and I had a lot of shame around, “How can I prove to people I’m queer if I’m in a relationship with a cis guy?” It was this fear that I was going to lose community, fear that people were going to take my queer card away, fear that people were going to doubt my experiences. Also, just realizing the inherent privilege that comes with being able to be super straight passing. It’s just this weird thing.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. Well, I mean, in that sense, in the erasure of bisexual people, I think it’s super shitty that if bi people end up in a “straight” relationship, that they’re oftentimes not considered queer enough or not accepted at Pride or whatever. I mean, it’s a lot of the same thing. It’s like if a non-passing trans person, if a trans woman passes as a guy, people say that she has male privilege or male-passing privilege. To a degree, she probably does have male-passing privilege, but also there’s a lot of other shit that comes with that. It’s not nearly the same as male privilege. In the same way, I don’t think being a bisexual person in a hetero relationship gives you hetero privilege because you’re not that person. You can’t have straight privilege and not be straight. But yeah. You’re right that there is a degree of privilege and passing, but I don’t know. The need to have people prove is just bonkers to me.
Dawn Serra: I’m glad you used passing because that’s something that I think is another way of forcing people to prove something about themselves. Within the realm of trans identities, there’s very much this obsession with whether or not people pass as if, one, passing is something everyone wants, and two, as if that’s the end goal for all trans people. Then I think there’s definitely this cultural narrative that if you don’t pass, then somehow you’re failing.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah, totally. I mean, it’s so ingrained in us that there’s two groups – there’s men and women. It’s impossible to separate that out of your head because it’s not just some grouping that we have. It’s like we say it all the time. When you say hello to a group, you say, “Ladies and gentlemen.” We don’t have honorifics that aren’t sir or ma’am. It’s so hard to think of it as anything, but two very distinct groups. So when someone transcends those groups or is in between them or is moving between them or whatever, it just blows people’s minds, and they don’t know how to handle it or how to classify it.
Dawn Serra: For people who aren’t familiar – which, what a lovely thing or weird thing, I guess… For people who aren’t familiar with what it’s like to have your identity policed, I know queer folks get policed all the time, if not being queer enough or being too queer or certainly trans and non-binary folks, and then also with folks that have invisible disabilities of like, “Well, you’re not part of the disability community because I can’t see your disability.” So can you just talk a little bit about policing of identities and ways that that shows up.
Riley J. Dennis: As far as trans stuff goes, I think a lot of people who outwardly say that they support LGBT rights and don’t really consider themselves bigoted or whatever, in theory, support trans people. Then in real life, forget that trans people exist, and go about their lives as if they don’t exist. I run into people who just immediately assume I’m a man. It’s not with ill intention. They’re not being mean. But they’re not considering the fact that this person could be trans, and they just make a lot of assumptions right off of that. I mean, that’s just a problem in our culture. I mean, I assume people’s gender immediately, a lot of the time. But I try to use they pronouns and stuff as much as I can to be gender neutral in general.
In that regard, I think a lot of allies accidentally police people’s gender because they’re just like, “Oh. You don’t look like that. You don’t look like the stereotype of a trans person that I have in my head. You don’t look like a man in a dress wearing a ton of makeup on the side of the street,” – which is the depiction of trans women we always see as sex workers. So if you don’t look like that, people are like, “But are you really trans? I support this stuff, but you don’t look like it, you know?”
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think it circles back to that proof of one way that we police people’s identities is a needing them to prove to us in some way that they are who they say they are. For bisexual folks, that if you see a masculine person kissing a feminine person, you might make the assumption that they’re straight, and you need proof that they’re not in some way. It’s not good enough for them to just say, “I’m bisexual.” It’s like, “Oh. Have you ever dated a woman or dated a man and what was that like? How many? I need you to prove to me that you’re bisexual. It’s not good enough for you to just say, ‘Here is my identity.’”
I think that goes to a lot of the stuff you talk about where, ultimately, identity is really about ourselves and how we are experiencing our lives. But in our culture, identity is often used as more of this external validator of, “If I can’t see your identity, then it must not be true.”
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. What I get from a lot of people is I feel like there’s the fear that people are lying. They’re like, “Oh. Well, what if you’re just lying about being trans and I have to use these pronouns for you. It’s wrong,” or whatever. I’ve never actually seen that happen. I don’t know where all these cisgendered people pretending to be trans people are. Even if it does happen on a very small scale, I don’t see the problem of people saying that they’re one thing that they’re not. But also, I mean, I don’t think it is a problem of people pretending to be trans or pretending to be bisexual or whatever. But I don’t know. People have such a fear of just being lied to about that stuff. And I don’t fully understand why,
Dawn Serra: What just totally hit me while you were talking was, you were saying people have this fear that they’re lying about their identity. It’s like needing the proof, even if it’s this super small percentage. That totally made me think about how, whenever you’re talking about rape culture and believing victims, you always get the people who are like, “But some people lie about rape.” And that becomes the entire narrative. Their fear of this tiny percentage of people who lie about being raped becomes the full story. It’s this fear mongering that totally disrupts the conversation. Now we’re not focused on victims anymore. We’re focused on this super tiny percentage of people that often doesn’t have a lot of proof. It’s the same thing around trans identity. The vast majority of trans people aren’t lying.
Riley J. Dennis: Exactly, right. Even if they were, I don’t feel like that hurts anybody. Like, “Oh, no. You have to use different pronouns.” I’m so sorry, that’s so hard for you. I just don’t feel like it’s that much of a burden on other people. Even if it were to happen. One of the things, I mean, when people… I get it a lot from actually trans people themselves is, “You can’t speak on this because you’re not actually trans.” I feel like there’s a lot of intra community policing in that aspect that trans people often feel like they earned their spot. They had to suffer. They had to do all of this stuff. They were treated like shit by everybody. So now they’re there. They’ve made it, and they have to do that to everyone else. It’s like a hazing thing. I’ve made it, and now I have to treat you like shit until you prove that you’ve made it as well.
Dawn Serra: That’s fascinating. I just finished reading this book called “The Remedy: Queer and Trans Voices on Health and Health Care” by Zena Sharman. It’s an amazing book. I actually just had Zena on the show a couple of weeks ago. But one of the essays in the book is called “Trans Grit” by Cooper Lee Bombardier. It’s this wonderful little essay about Cooper’s experience of becoming a trans curmudgeon.
Riley J. Dennis: A curmudgeon?
Dawn Serra: Yeah, a curmudgeon. Cooper became trans at a time when you had to go to Mexico to get illegal hormone doses and people were using silicone from the Home Depot to give themselves fillers in their cheeks and in their ass so that it passes trans women in this very, very terrible time for trans folks. Cooper’s talking about how they were sitting around a fire and all of these, out of this camp, and these younger trans guys were talking about their struggle with their transness was not being able to find clothes that fit and not always having their gender pronouns recognized. Cooper was talking about how their knee jerk reaction was this, “You don’t know how good you have it. I fought so hard and so many friends died. You don’t know where we’ve been.” Then the very end of the essay ends with, “What a luxury that I get to be a curmudgeon because it means we’ve had progress.”
Riley J. Dennis: Absolutely. Oh, yeah. There’s such a generational gap. I mean, I see that all the time from older trans women. I mean, I know a lot more trans women and trans men, but older trans women who are particularly detestable of non-binary people. Because they transitioned in a time where transition had to be very binary. To get the hormones and surgeries that you wanted, you had to say, “I am a man who wants to become a woman.” That’s what you had to tell your therapist. It’s like what you had to do. Our views have evolved over time. But these people had to go through that really traumatic experience, and feel like everyone else has too as well now. But it makes me happy that we’ve come that far, and the people don’t have to go through that anymore. I don’t think that minimizes the struggles that people still have to go through today. They might not be as bad as they were before, but I mean, shit is still happening.
Dawn Serra: Right, exactly. I think it’s just such a wonderful thing for us to recognize there is still tremendous suffering in parts of the world, in certain communities. There was tremendous suffering in the past. Those are such valid traumas and terrible things that no one should have to go through. Yes, some people had to fight tooth and nail for decades and decades and decades to get recognized. There’s no erasure of that. And can we celebrate that, for a lot of people, it’s not this huge suffering experience anymore? That it’s not something that they feel like they have to go all in on because there is that opportunity to stay in an ambiguous place or to be trans that doesn’t take hormones or get surgery or whatever it is. To me, that feels like a wonderful movement. But I think people have trouble holding space for multiple truths.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, it’s difficult, especially when you feel like you’ve been hurt and other people don’t have to go through that. It happens in all sorts of communities. There are gay people who feel the same way. They see young gay people coming out and having no problem with it and feel resentful about it. There are people who immigrate to the United States, and then become very anti-immigration because they’re like, “Well, I got here. Fuck the rest of you.” It happens in all sorts of marginalized groups, where there’s certain people who just have a strong backlash against it.
Dawn Serra: I would love to take what we’re talking about and shift just a little bit to show a video that you did that I will just say up front, that for people who are new to asking some of these questions or who don’t have a lot of queer and trans people in their lives, this may make you super uncomfortable. I want you to be fucking uncomfortable. So let’s just be uncomfortable and love that it’s uncomfortable because you did this great video around genital preferences and transphobia. This is something that I’ve touched on a couple of times in the past. It’s certainly something that I’ve lived my way into as a truth. I loved what you said in a video. I was wondering if you would just share maybe a quick recap of what you said in that video or a high level how you feel about it?
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, there are so, so many aspects to it. I can’t cover it all because people come up with all sorts of questions about it. But basically, my first argument– I made a few videos about it, and my first general argument was that discriminating against trans people in your dating life is just pretty shitty. Like saying, “I would never date a trans person because trans people are so diverse and have different genitals and different secondary sex characteristics and all this stuff.” You could never know what a trans person looks like without actually meeting them.
Then the pushback I got from that was, “Well, I just don’t want to date people with a penis,” or “I don’t want to date people with a vagina.” It was very tied into sexual orientation. A lot of people were saying, “If you’re a straight man, you are not attracted to trans women because they have a penis.” Well, not all of them. You know what I mean? “If you’re a lesbian, you’re not attracted to trans women because they have a penis or other male characteristics.” Vice versa for trans men, but most of the discussion has been around trans women. I don’t know, in general, in trans discussions, trans women are centered more than trans men. But, yeah.
Riley J. Dennis: In that, it became very tied into sexual orientation. Straight men and lesbians feeling very defensive and saying, “I don’t like trans women. Keep them away from me.” I push back against that because I think it’s possible that a large chunk of our socialization is transphobic to a degree or it’s cis sexist. It places cisgender as the ultimate and the perfect and the goal, and anything deviant from that is unattractive and gross and dirty. In the same way that that happens with so many other aspects of our lives, like how we place whiteness above dark skin, how we place being able to above being disabled, how we place thin bodies over fat bodies. All that kind of stuff is socialized to a large degree.
I was making the argument that it’s often the same thing for genitals. Kind of what my argument got misconstrued as is you have to like penis or you have to like vagina. Which is not something that I’ve ever said. It’s something that people claim I said a lot, but I never said that. I just think, a lot of the time, people don’t actually detest penis to the degree that they do. They just think they do because they’ve been socialized growing up that women don’t have penises, so any woman who has a penis is gross. They’ve just never tried to question that or move outside of that.
Riley J. Dennis: I just get such pushback from that because people are so defensive and think that I’m trying to destroy lesbianism and make lesbians have sex with trans women. I really don’t care what you do. I’m not trying to get lesbians to have sex with me. I don’t care. I’m just telling you that you might have some internal bias. You might have some implicit bias. You might have some stereotypes about trans people that aren’t true.
One of the things that makes this the most obvious to me is that when people talk about straight men, and they’re always like, “Straight men don’t like trans women. If you like a trans woman, you’re gay,” or whatever. First of all, when you say that… There’s a whole discussion around gender and sex because if you’re a straight man and you’re dating a woman, that seems pretty straight to me, even if it’s a trans woman, So people get into this whole thing of, “Well, your sexual orientation is just based on the genitals of the other person.” Like, “That it’s a gay man.” I just find that to be ridiculous. We always talk about it in terms of gender. Like women liking women is pretty lesbian. Men liking men is pretty gay. Until you bring in trans people, and they’re like, “Oh, no. It’s females attracted to females, and males attracted to males.”
Riley J. Dennis: But one of the things I always see is that every trans woman I know has tons of straight guys who will, publicly to their face, and be like, “You’re so gross. You’re disgusting. I’d never be gay and have sex with you.” Then they all slide into their DMs, and they’re like, “Hey, do you want a hookup this weekend?” Straight men fucking love trans women. I don’t know how to say that any clearer. There are so many in my inbox constantly, and I don’t even like dudes. I make it pretty clear that I’m not attracted to men, and yet men constantly message me. With straight trans women – trans women who are attracted to men or bisexual trans women – they get that so much more. But these same men, when asked publicly about it, will be like, “Eww. No, that’s gross dude. I’d never do that. That’s a gay.” We have so many documented instances of men sleeping with trans women in secret. Then the moment it’s public, they flip, and they murder her or they beat her or whatever. And that happens all the time, all the time.
Very recently, there was a guy who stabbed a trans woman 119 times because their relationship was revealed or because he found out that she was transgender. People just have such a visceral reaction to trans people, and no one’s willing to confront that. But because I know that straight men will hate trans women publicly and then want to have sex with them privately, I know that there’s socialization behind that. There’s a reason you think that this is socially unacceptable, but also you kind of want it. I find it hard to believe that that doesn’t happen for lesbians either. I know lesbians who are attracted to trans women. It’s not a myth. So I don’t think that asking people to examine their internal biases and try to tease out if what they think is based on a stereotype or socialization or a bias is a bad thing in any way. I think it’s actually all of our responsibilities to constantly be examining our own biases.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, that’s something I’ve talked about on the show a couple of times. I actually had this super rad queer fat sex worker named Kitty Stryker on the show last year. She was talking about how we have a responsibility to examine our attraction preferences and also our sexual fantasies in that we don’t need to have shame around them. But if our sexual fantasies are all about reinforcing really harmful narratives, then let’s just start gently asking questions about why, where’d that come from, what’s that mean because we have a responsibility to do that.
I think what you’re saying is exactly that of, you don’t have to decide either one, you’re a terrible person or two, that you have to change something. But what if we just started asking where did some of this come from? Maybe the fact that you don’t like fat bodies is because everything you’re surrounded by, in media and TV and culture, tells you that fat bodies are jokes and unwanted, and you only see thin bodies as sexy.
Riley J. Dennis: Exactly. That happens all over the place with fat people and trans people. The only depictions of trans people I’ve ever seen are as sex workers. They’re on a cop show after they get murdered by a John or whatever. Just the fact that there’s never a trans woman depicted as being attractive, I feel like has to play some sort of a role. If you grew up and you’re like, “Oh. Look at these trans women. They’re so hot,” I feel like when you grew up, you’d have a more positive reaction towards trans women.
Dawn Serra: Or the handful of trans women that we do see as very popular and visible in the media, like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, are ultra feminine and super passing and have talked about their surgeries. It’s almost like they tick all the boxes to suddenly become acceptable.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah, they’re good trans. They’re an exception. People always like to have their– Whenever people discriminate against a group, there’s always exceptions, so that they can say that they’re not whatever. People who are extremely racist will always have one black friend and be like, “Well, I can’t be racist because I have this black friend.” People do the same thing with trans people. They’ll be like, “Oh. Well, I have this one trans person who agrees with me or who checks all the boxes or whatever.” That’s what a trans person is and not you.
When it comes to sexual preferences, like fantasies and all of that, people just seem to be so defensive about it to the degree where it’s like, “I could never question my sexual preferences.” It’s just so innate. It’s inside of me since the moment I was born. And trying to change that is horrible to me. People have accused me of advocating conversion therapy because they think that’s what it is – trying to change their sexual preferences. I mean, I’ve been pretty clear that conversion therapy is really fucked up and a form of torture and not cool. But this isn’t conversion therapy. It’s just asking people to examine their biases.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think what is making so many people really uncomfortable is, for instance, I get a lot of emails from people who are in their mid to late 40s, sometimes late 30s or early 50s, who have been married for 20 years and have two or four kids They’ve just realized, “I think that I’ve been queer and just trying to deny it,” or “I think I might be gay.” There’s a tremendous amount of pain in realizing that, “Maybe the identity that I’ve had for 40 years doesn’t fit me anymore.” I think it comes from a lot of these social stories that we have around, “You’re born a certain way, you stay that way. Your identity is your identity. If it changes, then you are lying or you’re hiding from something.” Instead of recognizing that actually, a lot of the things that contribute to our identities are so based on the experiences we have, the people we know.
I mean, you might think you’re straight, like I did, until you meet a woman, and then you’re like, “Holy shit! Someone that has a vulva is pretty rad.” Then like, “OK, so now I have to question some things.” Our identities can be a lot more fluid. But I think that’s scary for people because then that means we have to live in a place where we’re comfortable with uncertainty.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. No, you’re totally right. I mean, people never think about those who come out super late in life. There’s so many people who don’t come out as gay or bisexual or trans until 40s or 50s or 60s. I’ve heard of some trans women who transitioned very, very late in life. They’ll say that the very common narrative is, “Oh. I knew it from when I was four or whatever.” But so many people are just like, “I didn’t know what was wrong. Something felt weird. Something felt off, but I didn’t know. Or, just had no idea until they were exposed to this is an option, and they were like, “Whoa, shit. That’s an option? Are you serious? I can be that?” It’s just wild.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, it is. Circling back to the genital preferences, I think so much of that also goes to everything that we’re told in our culture and everything we learned is about very specific kinds of sex being acceptable. When we start breaking that apart, which is 90% of what I do on the show, of like sex is not penis in vagina intercourse. It is one of 10,000 different things. I think that that also makes people uncomfortable because now they have to start rewriting the stories about what sex even looks like. So if I’m rewriting the stories around sex, then maybe that starts rewriting some of the stories around genitals and what role they play. I think that those are some really big, scary questions for people sometimes. But you’re so right that when we’re talking about being attracted to men or women, usually what we’re doing is saying certain types of genitals are acceptable for me and other types of genitals would label me something I’m not comfortable with, so I have to reject them.
Riley J. Dennis: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so much of the discourse within lesbian communities is just anti-penis as a point of pride because penis equals man. I get that. I get rejecting heterosexuality and taking pride and being hella gay. But I think there has to be recognition that there are women who have penises, and that kind of language can be very harmful to them.
What you were talking about with sex, I think one of the the best analogies that I could find when I was trying to talk to people about examining their own biases is how a lot of straight guys won’t put anything in their ass because they think it’s gay. They just believe that so vehemently. They’re like, “I would never like it. That’s disgusting. Keep it away.” Then if you tell them that it feels good and you talk about it, eventually they’re like, “OK, I’ll try it.” A lot of straight guys really enjoy it, like really enjoy anal. And that wasn’t conversion therapy. You didn’t convert them into enjoying anal. It’s just you got them to examine their biases and to try it, and then they liked it.
Riley J. Dennis: The exact same thing could be happening with trans women. You could be despising trans women, and then if you actually tried getting with a trans woman who you found attractive, you might actually enjoy it. When you talk about kinds of sex that we have, you’re right, everyone assumes that sex is just penis and vagina. If I’m having sex with a trans woman who has a penis and means that she’s going to be penetrating me, and I’m like, “No!” a lot of trans women don’t like penetration and have very different kinds of sex. That just doesn’t seem like an option to people. They think penis equals penetration. So I think if we could even just rewire how people think about sex, that would help so much. Exactly like you were saying in people’s need to have a certain genital.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, ‘cause hands, mouths, and toys work for all kinds of bodies. I mean, even only when we go beyond that. Insisting that sex is penis and vagina intercourse is also super ableist and ageist. Because that’s just not accessible to us when we’re in certain ages with certain bodies that have certain things that have happened to them over the years or because of surgeries or because of whatever kind of capabilities our bodies may or may not have. I mean, there’s just so many people for whom that kind of sex does not work. Yet, it still the presiding definition for sex in our culture, which is just bonkers to me.
Riley J. Dennis: Oh, yeah. It’s just extremely heteronormative. Gay people and lesbians and bisexual people are out here having sex without penis and vagina all the time. All the time.
Dawn Serra: Right. Studies show that lesbians have way more orgasms than heterosexuals.
Riley J. Dennis: Exactly, yeah.
Dawn Serra: Let’s just think about that.
Riley J. Dennis: Exactly.
Dawn Serra: Just going back to, you might be like… If you’re a cis dude and you find out that this woman that you’re dating is trans, I almost feel like it’s less about the individual needing to decide that they’re OK with trans women, and more about the individual feeling terrified of their social currency changing.
Riley J. Dennis: Oh, absolutely. That is such a factor.
Dawn Serra: I think there’s so many people out there who would be like, “Oh, my god. This woman I’m dating is amazing.” Then if they found out she was trans, maybe would be like, “Oh. What’s that mean for me? Does that change things? Do I need to do things differently?” And that’s a very internal experience. It’s the same with fat people, of like, “Oh, my god. If my friends find out, what are they going to say? I’m not going to be popular anymore. Everybody’s going to make fun of me. I’m going to become bullied.” It’s like, “Well, you’re describing the way that this other person experiences their life and saying, ‘I can’t handle that.’” But then that fear of the social rejection and currency drives people to all kinds of terrible, traumatic behaviors, including up to violence and murder.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. Now that happens all the time. Exactly a social currency thing you’re talking about, trans women get murdered for that. Yeah, I forgot where I was going. Just you’re right. You’re right. Yeah.
Dawn Serra: Well, I like being right, so I’ll take that.
Riley J. Dennis: There’s one other thing in this realm that I want to touch on with you and it is, there’s a couple of places I’ve gone with this in the past, but I’m really excited to go here with you. I periodically get emails from cis guys who, their email, you can feel it’s this whisper in the dark that they’re hoping no one will ever know they sent. It’s this like, “Hey, I like shemale porn and trans women porn. What does that mean?” There’s this deep distress in liking porn with trans bodies.
Now, in the past, I’ve definitely talked about how mainstream porn that’s labeled shemale is super problematic. It’s so, so problematic and just reinforces so many of the really, really harmful trans stories and narratives that we have. To me, it’s a little bit different if you’re watching mainstream “shemale” porn on Pornhub, versus if you’re watching trans women in Crash Pad series or Chelsea Poe or something like that. That’s a little bit different. But you were talking about how if you’re dating a trans woman, that’s a woman so you’re still straight. Can we just unpack this a little bit because there’s so many people out there who were like, “Oh, my god. It must mean something.”
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, in terms of porn and fetishization, just the very fact that all of the porn that’s about trans women uses slurs against them, like shemale or tranny or whatever. That’s always what the porn is called, and those are like the literal slurs. Just the very fact, to look it up, you have to use a very insulting, demeaning, dehumanizing word, I think says a lot about it and puts certain thoughts in your mind when you’re looking it up – “These people are worse than “normal” people. That kind of porn, like all mainstream porn, it’s made for a very specific audience. It’s made for straight dudes. So it’s shown in a very specific way. Exactly like how you were saying, if just two trans women were having sex, it’s probably much different than how mainstream porn is depicting a trans woman and a cis guy having sex.
Porn warps our realities in a lot of ways around sex, even just around heteronormative sex or lesbian sex or whatever. But when it comes to trans people, the fact that they have to go into their own section… You could never look up lesbian sex and have a trans woman in there. People would just fight against that so hard. Or you couldn’t have gay male sex and have a trans man in there because people will be like, “Ugh.Why is there a vagina in gay male sex?”
Riley J. Dennis: That, I think, plays a part, at least, in our othering of trans people, and being like, “Well, they’re not like these normal people over here having sex. They’re like over there in that gross, dirty category.” I mean, I think it reinforces the whole guys being into this and not being able to admit that they’re into it. Because there’s such a stigma around that kind of porn. That they can’t accept or say out loud that they like that stuff because they know that it’s socially wrong. That it makes them deviant and weird or whatever. And I hate that it’s that way. If trans people were respected and thought of as a normal part of society, it would just be a normal thing that you like.
Dawn Serra: Right, right. It would be like… I went to this queer porn film festival a couple of years ago. Yeah, it was in Brooklyn. It was totally like a DIY festival, where we all just sat on the floor, and then they just streamed porn up on the wall. A whole bunch of rad people were there, like Jiz Lee and Stoya.
But the thing I love the most about that was, they literally just showed a film, talked about it a little bit, showed a film, talked a little about a little bit, and it wasn’t broken into these arbitrary categories. Because of that, one film would be two trans men having ridiculously gay male sex. Then in the next film, Chelsea Poe was there and answered questions. It was amazing. In another film, it was this super sweet lesbianic porn that took place at San Francisco Pride. These two super cute girls were totally touching each other under their clothes, and then they went upstairs and fucked. Then you find out that Chelsea Poe is a trans woman. But it wasn’t like the narrative revolved around her being trans. The narrative revolved around these two lesbians having super rad lesbian sex. It was just film after film was presented in that way the people were allowed to simply be who they were, in their bodies, exactly as they were, with their gender identity honored as it was. Maybe their genitals were a little bit different than you thought they were once the pants came off. But then you were like, “Cool. The sex still seems super hot.” It wasn’t like a special category thing. I still want more of that.
Riley J. Dennis: Me too. I mean, that kind of queer porn would do so much to just normalizing it. I think, if people who hated the idea of sex with trans woman actually saw trans woman having sex in porn, in a way that they naturally would… Yeah, yeah. In the way that they actually would instead of in a way that’s for men, I think they would see that it’s actually much different and actually something that they would probably like. It’s just like sex between, for instance, a trans woman and a cis woman, I think is much more similar to sex between two cis women than it is between sex between a man and a woman. It’s so gay.
Dawn Serra: It’s so lesbian!
Riley J. Dennis: It really is. People just have this really warped idea of what it looks like. If you actually see it, it’s clear that it’s very queer and very lesbian. Yeah, I don’t know how else to put that.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. That even just ties too when we’re thinking about mainstream lesbian porn versus porn made by lesbians.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah, exactly.
Dawn Serra: It’s not to say that there aren’t lesbians out there who aren’t super high femme with long nails, who fuck each other the way that you see in Pornhub-type lesbian porn clips. But that’s such a small part of a much bigger story. I often think people are so shocked when they go to something like Crash Pad, for instance, where it’s lesbians and queer folks filming lesbian and queer sex just however they have sex, and there happens to be a camera there, and a little bit of a story around it. It looks really, really, really different.
Riley J. Dennis: Absolutely, yeah.
Dawn Serra: That’s one of the reasons why I am constantly espousing ethical and feminist and queer porn on the show, and pay for your porn because I think for people who are interested in trans porn, if you’ve only ever seen trans porn in one of the big aggregator sites, then you’re not really seeing trans porn. You’re seeing straight people making what they think trans people look like
Riley J. Dennis: Oh. That’s so true. So true.
Dawn Serra: Right?
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. It really is. You’re right. People don’t think about how strongly porn affects us in that manner. Oh, my god. Not everyone, lots of people watch porn. The amount of people who watch porn is ridiculous, and it influences our sex education in so many ways.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, yeah. It really does. I think it also influences what we start to see as normal representations of how we should be behaving in the bedroom.
Riley J. Dennis: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think most people would get their idea of what sex should look like before they’re even having sex from porn. There’s no other way to get that information.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, exactly. Because we have terrible sex ed. Enter this show among others. Get your information here, folks.
One of the other things that I just wanted to touch on because I think it’s really interesting, and it’s not something I’ve ever talked about on the show before is, when you first started making YouTube videos, you really just wanted to make videos about TV shows and culture and politics. You didn’t want it to be like, “Hey, I’m this trans expert,” kind of thing.
Riley J. Dennis: Well, yeah. No, I didn’t even– When I started videos, I hadn’t come out yet. Even to myself, I think I was still questioning my gender at the time. I forget exactly the timeline of it, but I came out early on into my channel. I never made a coming out video. I just started talking about it. And those videos, in particular, seemed to strike a chord with people. So I talked about it more and clarified more things, and found things that people weren’t talking about and tried to talk about them. It just expanded into that. But by no means was that my goal. I wasn’t like, “I’m going to go be a trans educator now.” It just happened to be a thing going on in my life that I wanted to talk about, while I was making videos about my life.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. I think that’s so important. Just like there’s 200 groups of people who are feeding that. One is, even though it seems like there’s lots and lots of conversations happening around trans and queer issues these days, just generally, in the world at large, there are still so many people who are in communities and in places where they feel super isolated. To know that there’s someone like you out there who’s very visible and public and articulate and talking about your experience, for them, that feels like this life raft that they get to cling to, that they’re not alone.
But then there’s this cultural weirdness, that I think we talked about a little bit in the beginning, of people, all of a sudden, they’re like, “Oh, my god. There’s a trans person.” So now we have to just make it all about their transness and not just like they’re a person that talks about cool things. It’s like this centering of your most visibly marginalized identity.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah, I definitely talked about this in the beginning. But I try so hard to not be just a trans person on YouTube. I really want to be known for other things. I’m like, “I have insight on things that aren’t trans stuff guys.” But when you’re talking about people in small communities or whatever, where they don’t have any access to this information except maybe through my videos or some other stuff they find online, I get messages every once in a while that are like that. That are like, “You’ve helped me so much. You’ve helped me come out or transition,” or whatever it may be. And that just makes me so freaking happy. But compared to the amount of shit that comes in every day, they’re few and far between. They’re not uncommon. I get emails and messages like that, relatively common. But it just pales in comparison to all the rest of the shit.
People who like you and appreciate you will reach out every once in a while, and people who hate you will reach out every day. It’s such a disconnect in how you perceive how people perceive you. There are days where I’m like, “Everybody hates me. Everybody hates me.” Then I’ll get a bunch of messages being like, “Thank you so much for this video. It helped me so much.” It’s like, “Whoa, I’m actually helping people.” It’s so hard to gauge how other people are responding to you.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. That’s something we talked about a little bit before we actually hopped on. I just want to mention it for everyone listening. I personally, and I’m not saying everybody has to agree with me, but I personally and Alex, when I was watching your videos, I was so excited by your perspective and how intersectional you are, and the conversations you have, and the ways that you’re really making space for a variety of experiences. You’re not forcing everyone to be in these binaries. And you’re also highlighting a lot of the ways that our cultural narratives and myths reinforce really harmful things.
So I’m watching your videos feeling so excited by these really smart, interesting conversations that you’re having. Then noticing that there’s 1,800 likes and 20,000 thumbs down. Then when I read the comments, it’s just there’s one kind comment for every hundred shit talkers. One, that breaks my heart because I don’t want that to be a reason that you stop doing this because it’s so great. But two how do you keep going when that’s the shit that you’re swimming in. I saw that, and I got so angry on your behalf. I was just like, “Who the fuck are these people are?”
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, my strategy has been to ignore it completely. I mean, I used to, I think a little over a year ago, I was still reading every single comment on my channel and replying to most of them. I was so accessible. You could comment on any of my videos at any time, and I would go reply to you. I loved that. And it was great.
Then people would make response videos to me and out of nowhere, I’d wake up and 300 comments on a video. I’m like, “I can’t. That’s too many for me to go through.” But then I feel so compelled to go through it, and I’d sit there for hours reading all 300 of these comments, and arguing with a few of them or just having sassy responses to a few of them. It continued like that. And it just drained so much of my time and emotional energy because I just feel like shit afterwards that I just had to stop – stop looking at the comments, turning off my notifications on all my social media things where people were constantly sending me shit messages and whatever.
Riley J. Dennis: And that has helped a lot. Like a lot, a lot, a lot. Because so much shit happens online about me that I just don’t know about. I’m like, “Great. Just yell into the void.” Those videos that are mass disliked have thousands and thousands of comments that I’ve never seen. I enjoy that people write essays, and then I never see them. People will email me and be like, “Well, did you see my response video? I made all these videos about you,” I’m just like, “Bro, I don’t know who you are. Just no idea who you are.” I really enjoy not giving them the power of me even acknowledging their existence.
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
Riley J. Dennis: But yeah. It’s just YouTube has created a culture of that, of response videos do really, really well and making people angry and sending them to a video is a very reliable way to get views. If you make a video about genital preferences, it probably won’t give you that much. If you make a video about genital preferences responding to Riley Dennis, you’re going to get a shit ton of views. YouTube is made for it. It’s just engineered specifically for that kind of community.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, I noticed you had done this really great, thoughtful… I can’t even tell you how many facts you included in this video around transgender and gender dysphoria and howtransgender is not a mental illness. It was so thoughtful and you had, I don’t know, 100 facts in this video, and it was pretty much not even your opinion. You’re just reading definitions and sharing the APA definitions from the DSM and all this kind of stuff. And you have, I don’t know, 30,000 views, which in my mind, that’s a lot. But then, in the little YouTube thing on the side, there was a response of, “Transgender is a mental illness,” and it had 600,000 views. It’s like, “What the fuck?”
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple things there. But one of them is that I get messages from people all the time who are like, “I love your videos, but I hate watching them because the whole sidebar is just like, ‘Why Riley Dennis sucks? Why being trans is the worst?’” YouTube’s recommendation algorithm makes it so that if you want to watch my content, you have to be exposed to all of this shit to some degree. And that can be very harmful for little trans people who are just trying to watch my channel.It makes me so mad that I can’t do anything about that. I’ve complained about YouTube about this many times, and they haven’t done shit. But anyways, that’s the thing.
But also, with my videos, I’ve leaned much further into research. I would always cite a couple things, but I would mostly just be talking what I thought and believed about a certain topic. Then people will be like, “Oh, we can’t prove that,” blah, blah, blah. So I’m like, “OK,” and I’d make a 15-minute video citing 20 different actual scientific studies. And people are still like, “I don’t believe it.” It’s frustrating that no matter how much I cite and no matter how many facts I use, people are just going to be like, “Nah.” There are literally people on that “Trans isn’t a mental illness” video that are just like, “Yeah, but isn’t it though?” I’m like, “Did you watch the video?” You’re not responding to anything in the video. It just blows my mind. You can’t argue with some people and those people seem to be concentrated on YouTube.
Dawn Serra: Yes. Yeah. I think they live on YouTube and Twitter. And that’s their life. So I just want to tell everybody who’s listening, one, please go watch Riley’s super amazing videos. One of the other things that’s really cool about your channel is you’re regularly collaborating with other people, like Kat Blaque or other trans folks or non-binary folks. It’s an opportunity to just see lots of YouTubers that are doing really inclusive, cool content.
But I also just want to name, I’m always telling all the listeners pay for your fucking porn, pay for your porn, pay for your porn, pay for your porn. Please, Riley also has a Patreon. So if you want to make sure that this kind of inclusive intersectional, thoughtful content is getting out into the world, please go to Riley’s Patreon and throw $1 or $5 or however much feels good. Just to help make sure that this kind of content keeps happening.
Riley J. Dennis: Thank you so much. Yeah, that’d be great.
Dawn Serra: I would love to end if you could just share with everyone how they can find you online and stay in touch.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah, I’m just everywhere as Riley J. Dennis – J spelled out like JAY. That’s pretty much me everywhere. I’ve got YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, all the things. You can come find me.
Dawn Serra: Awesome. Well, I will link to, of course, your YouTube and your Twitter and all those great places on dawnserra.com for this episode. If you’ve got any thoughts, questions about our chat or anything that you’d like to share with me about other episodes, there’s a contact form there. Riley, I want to thank you so much for being here with me and just geeking out. This is so much fun.
Riley J. Dennis: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This was great
Dawn Serra: Good. To everybody who listened, thank you so much for joining us. I will talk to you next time. I’m Dawn Serra. Bye!