Tran Girlismo is a weekly podcast about “car culture and living during the decline of empire from millennials who have never known anything else.” Hosted by former automotive journalists Victoria Scott and Jordan Hoffstetter, it might just be the best-named podcast of the year and we’re only one month in. It’s so good it stings that you didn’t come up with it. The first episode popped up on Bluesky this past week and I wanna talk about it.
Spoiler: You should listen to Tran Girlismo.
Packed inside one Gran Turismo pun are the two core components of the show that influence everything else: car nerdery, and transness. While there are plenty of queers in the automotive nerd space, it’s simply a fact of life that the majority of car-nerd spaces – from track meets to the mob of 20-somethings with lift kitted trucks who hang out in an abandoned Walmart parking lot in my town – are not particularly welcoming environments for your local queers.
Take it from me: someone who was first called a faggot while standing next to my 91 Camaro. I’d committed the ultimate sin of wearing a colorful shirt with my maroon sports car, apparently. Nevermind the fact it could effortlessly smoke the rusted-out F150 the west Kentucky bigot was passing by in.
Some of you might be making a face about my having dropped a slur in the third paragraph of a podcast review. If you’ve made it this far, you’ll enjoy Tran Girlismo. While Scott and Hoffstetter aren’t throwing slurs left and right (I found it charming to hear a Pittsburg-based trans person say the phrase “the f-word” like a cautious parent), the atmosphere of the podcast is very much the kind of battle-hardened queer space where it could happen at any moment and nobody’s gonna flinch.
The Format
Functionally it’s a no-frills show. Two hosts chat for a while, occasionally interrupted by cats. The plan is to do the show weekly (when they can) with an occasional bonus of some sort going up on Victoria Scott’s Patreon account.
While they agree on most things, there is a tried-and-true host chemistry between Jordan Hoffstetter and Victoria Scot that will this podcast going for quite some time. Scott historically does not mince words, as long-time listeners of Well There’s Your Problem will recognize from her many appearances as car expert/apologist.
Hoffstetter, meanwhile, provides the necessary pushback to keep the podcast engaging instead of just two people aggressively agreeing with each other for 90 minutes. When Scott gets deep in the paint explaining why Toyota is dead to her thanks to persistent political spending, Hoffstetter swings in with a cheery offering that Toyota can purchase positive comments from her for the price of a very specific ‘yota make and model. It’s a joke, of course, but it still provides just enough levity to the situation to make things palatable.
Such is the dour reality of being trans online. If you’re gonna be a loud queer, you better be a funny queer or you’re gonna fall off the feed quickly. There’s a reason most trans people you follow are funny and as much as I want to believe it’s because we’re just inherently built different, the meme plane photo looms in my mind. But that’s another piece altogether.
The Distribution
Another aspect that truly makes Tran Girlismo special is its independence. It is an unfortunate fact of our current economic model that journalists writing about a specific industry are largely going to rely on advertising dollars from companies related to that industry, if not outright that industry itself. An arrangement that quickly leads to the most insidious kind of corruption: half-truths meant to keep C-suite folks happy. Articles that focus on the positive and conveniently never address plainly evident negatives. In the first episode Scott shares she was blacklisted from Dodge press events because she called the Dodge Challenger what it is: a dangerous icon of the American political landscape. A palimpsest of fragile masculinity that forms into a machine designed to wrap rich 20-somethings around power poles in 700+ horsepower Hellcat-shaped tombs.
Were Tran Girlismo produced on a network or published by an automotive outlet, there would be brands Scott and Hoffstetter would need to pull punches on. The harshest criticism being simply not talking about them as silent protest, unable to actively address negative news/informed opinions for fear of losing advertising dollars or valuable resources provided to journalists. Resources which on paper are to help spread the word about that company’s products, but in practice can be used to create a subclass of haves and have-nots, with the have-nots being any journalist who dare critique them.
Hoffstetter and Scott are fully independent with zero interest in rejoining the fray professionally. They’re photography nerds, spending a few minutes of the first episode geeking out over a (incredibly fascinating) project Scott is doing and what gear she’s using to pull it off. Hoffstetter is helping build and maintain a queer third space in Pittsburgh, as well as organizing regular photo walks and considering getting into zines. Both hosts very much embrace a get-up-and-go-do-it DIY approach to both their hobbies and building up their local queer history. An approach I admire deeply.
Even the podcast’s promotion and distribution has an almost zine-esque quality. On both the website and Bluesky posts put out by Scott and Hoffstetter, they make a point of pushing two things:
1. The show is hosted on Scott’s Patreon but
2. It is a free open RSS feed.
This is thanks a relatively new feature recently rolled out by Patreon in their quest to become a Substack-ian one-stop-shop content platform for creators. An open RSS feed for an audio podcast might seem par for the course, but considering the amount of walled gardens that exist in the industry today… you don’t see a lot of people leading with the idea the podcast is 100% free to access.
The idea of two (former) journalists with decently-sized online followings starting a legitimately free podcast is novel. Hell, I got to feel like I had a fraction of contribution to the cause purely on the fact I was the first person to add the feed into Pocket Casts so others can find it by searching the name.
They are two experts of the automotive industry at large while also being in no way beholden to the machinations of the industry designed to disincentivize discussing the bad decisions of that industry that range from boneheaded business decisions to outright funding the rise of fascism.
The First Episode
I’ve made some references to moments but I’ve not spoken much about the pilot episode specifically. Unsurprisingly, given everything you just read, I liked it. Scott and Hoffstetter kick things off by describing where they’re at automotive-wise. Scott shares the details of a traumatizing crash that brought her driving career to a standstill, with her heavily making use of Seattle’s bus system. Hoffstetter talks about her and her wife’s shared car situation and how she bikes to work.
A big topic tackled in the first episode is that of car culture’s country club-ification. News of a track near and dear to Scott’s heart being shut down so the land can be used to build a data center kicks off discussion of a larger evolution of people-who-like-cars. Tracks that aren’t being shut down to sell the land they sit on aren’t serving your 20-something budding motorsports fan with a beater Miata. Many are retooling into bespoke country clubs for cars courting a handful of hyper-affluent clients who can treat the track like a horse stable for their toys.
Which indicates a larger problem in car culture: the buy-in price. Reliable older cars at decent prices that someone getting into for-fun driving don’t really exist anymore. From Scott’s domain in Seattle to the wastelands of southern Indiana where I’m at, good car listings are hard to come by.
Affordable cars have gotten worse and more actively boring to operate. Fun/reliable cars have gotten more expensive or have been muscled out of the American market by a political climate that values toddler-mulching F-150s over hot hatchbacks (which the hosts agree the latter is seen as “gay” but the guys who buy the former).
Oh, and fans of Well There’s Your Problem will feel right at home as, continuing a long-running tradition with lefty trans podcasting, there’s a couple instances of legally-actionable comments against politicians being bleeped for the safety of everyone involved.
The Journalism
What I am about to say is going to raise eyebrows so please bear with me, especially if you are/directly know one of the hosts:
Tran Girlismo, even accounting for the fact they aren’t directly reviewing cars, is spiritually filling the gap in my soul left by the death of Top Gear. For its many faults, the sheer size and privilege of Top Gear put it in a situation where they could be real with you on occasion. Now, of course, a lot of that sincerity and negativity about automotive giants stemmed from Clarkson, Hammond, and May lobbing insults from a BBC ivory tower protected by an army of lawyers. Still, Clarkson was one of the first people to outright talk shit about Tesla as a company during his Roadster review that made it look so bad Tesla tried (and failed) to sue the BBC over it.
Let’s not mince words: Jeremy Clarkson was a dickhead many a time while heading Top Gear. And a lot of that was fueled by being an affluent white man with the entire BBC legal department at his beck and call. Hell, his feel-good Amazon farming show is built around a farm he purchased purely to have an asset he could leave his kids that wouldn’t involve inheritance tax. Something he’s tried to walk back now that Clarkson’s Farm has a cuddly environmentalist and pro-small-farmer premise that’s antithetical to his own farm being a tax ploy. Eyeroll emoji here.
I bring all this up to say the best pop culture instance I can think of involving automotive journalists entertainingly giving a middle finger to the industry at large is that Top Gear reboot that ended over a decade ago. Something that could only really be done with a huge crew, sizeable budget, and decades of bona fides providing connections. As evidenced by the fact that 99% of YouTube road trip videos trying to capture the energy of Top Gear’s cheap car challenges always fall flat in delivery. Oft-imitated, never replicated.
Tran Girlismo is not trying to be the Top Gear of trans podcasting. But it’s punk enough, funny enough, and sincere enough that it slots perfectly into that general vibe of car entertainment that I never can quite find.
Hoffstetter and Scott are coming at cars from the complete opposite angle. Instead of a show led by a troll car nerd who thrives on angering people for attention, Tran Girlismo is championed by two women who love cars in spite of it all. They can call it like it is because they have nothing to lose in the automotive space and nobody to please besides each other. I deeply enjoy it.
The Conclusion
I say this as someone who works in podcasting, and thus has very little ear-free time to listen to podcasts anymore: Tran Girlismo is immediately a part of my weekly media diet and I eagerly await episode two.
That said, I have to fulfil something for my WTYP nerds out there reading. Train good, car bad.
It’s just that… sometimes… car fun.
Creative Writing, Podcasting, and Love of Media 