Tish Hyman sings The Ballad of Old Hags, in C Minor – from The Revisionist History Songbook
On June 2, 2026, Los Angeles will hold its mayoral primary. Tish Hyman will be on the ballot. She will lose. That is the foregone conclusion of a latecomer to the issue she represents and to political awareness in general. It’s unknown whether she will continue drifting and grifting through a decades-old feminist social justice movement, her entrée crafted through four weeks of lobbying other gym members, men and women, to join her in confronting men in the women’s locker room. The confrontation that vaulted her into visibility was, by her own account, weeks in the making. When this election is over and she likely moves on to the next play, what remains will be the bluster of self-promotion, a lot of revisionist history, and the women who enabled her quietly pretending they never did.
This four part dispatch is the record they’d prefer didn’t exist.
Tish Hyman is a Grammy-nominated songwriter from the Bronx who spent the last fifteen years in Los Angeles building, by her own account, an Airbnb empire of 30 units across Hollywood from roughly 2015 to 2019. In the Bronx she led a team at a mortgage lending bank, and once she left New York and moved to Los Angeles, secured a publishing deal with Universal Music Group that paid her despite having nothing on the radio. She tells the story of her arrival proudly, in a December 2025 monologue, one of many that will be examined at length in this dispatch. That particular video was the same one in which she reveals God personally selected her to lead a movement she had been part of for a week, with no previous knowledge of it or of the issues it’s based on, a movement she immediately preached to, scolded, and lectured, despite her ignorance of what the acronym AGP (autogynephilia) meant when women who had been documenting it for years tried to explain it to her.
Those women she dismissed as old ladies who weren’t doing feminism correctly spent well over a decade being doxxed, fired from jobs, physically attacked at protests, lecture events, LGBT Pride parades, libraries, and feminist conventions, their lesbian spaces and rape shelters vandalized and defunded, suspended from all social media platforms, censored by Big Tech, de-banked, threatened with rape and murder with impunity and reported to YouTube by people who belong to the very organizations now coordinating her appearances. They organized, testified, documented, lobbied, and fought without cameras documenting their efforts, sometimes anonymously, and without an establishment network. Tish Hyman’s message to them was that negativity is bad for your body, that middle-aged and old ladies arguing on the internet are pathetic, and that women criticizing her are jealous and probably have kids who don’t visit them and have nothing better to do. She delivered this assessment six weeks into her involvement. God had chosen her. The veterans could manage their stress levels and stay out of her way. They weren’t doing it right. She was here now. Watch and learn.
The latest story Tish Hyman tells about herself begins late October, 2025, in the women’s locker room of a Gold’s Gym, now operated by EoS Fitness, in Los Angeles, where she encountered a man pretending to be a woman who called her a bitch and told her straight women like seeing male genitalia in their spaces when she confronted him. In her own words, in a later video, she states she already spoke to multiple women and suggested emailing them about coming forward before this incident went viral.
In California legislative testimony Erin Friday later recounted that there was not one spontaneous interaction with a man in the women’s locker room at Gold’s Gym, but four different males across multiple visits. In her initial introduction to Tish Hyman in Amy Sousa’s X/Twitter Space, Tish cited six instances: “the universe wanted me to see this malarkey six times in a 30-day span.” In interviews with Dr. Drew Pinsky and Viva Frei, she said, “On four different occasions, I turned around to three different men in the locker room with me as I was naked.” In a single conversation with Adam Corolla, she gave both figures: four occasions with three men, and seven times over the course of a month. We’re told to believe that an independent observer filmed the confrontation and airdropped it to her, and that a private citizen minding her own business was spontaneously radicalized by a single encounter and organically found her way to a movement that happened to be waiting for her with a camera, a network, and a clothing brand. We’re meant to believe that a 42-year-old lesbian, in the year 2025, did not know that lesbian spaces and lesbian identity have been erased and colonized by men. The word lesbian now applied to men like the one she confronted in her gym locker room.
You’ll get a different answer depending on which interview, social media monologue, or post you consult. Gods messenger still hasn’t gotten her story straight. Alexis Black, in his own TMZ interview, confirmed four encounters, but specified they occurred at different Gold’s Gym locations across Los Angeles.
One might assume that after a nationally publicized and humiliating ordeal, one she insisted was unanticipated, a person entering a community built around that very issue would stop, listen, and learn before making demands of it, redefining it, blaming it, or elevating themselves within it. This would be the first of many misplaced assumptions for this community.
Soon to follow this demand was another, pressed with unrelenting eager persistence. The next was to center transsexuals within the movement in opposition to the concept. The “real” trans people, like her incarcerated sister. A common heuristic pattern of the recently peaked, this time coupled with main character syndrome validated by the sudden attention she mistook for authority.
After capitalizing on a victimhood she spent weeks rehearsing, she decided the first thing to do was track down the ex-wife of the autogynephilic man who violated her boundaries, in order to violate the ex-wife’s. Alexis Black took the name of his former wife, a common practice of AGP men, a man who brutally beat her to the point of breaking her jaw. An aside to the psychological and narcissistic abuse women partnered with these men experience. Depending on which video you watch, or deleted tweet you viewed, this self-proclaimed lifelong champion of women and children wanted to exploit not only her own experience but also that of a domestic violence survivor to keep this event viral. Or as her new fan base of eager followers suggests, she’s new here and we’re all just jealous. Could go either way.
Nobody knew who she was. Fifteen years in Los Angeles and a catalog of credits did not produce a recognizable face in the world she was trying to enter. What some of us did know from the start is that Tish Hyman was going to be a problem, and our assumptions did not disappoint.
Her viral moment gave her more name recognition in seventy-two hours than fifteen years of industry schmoozing produced. That’s not incidental to this story. That is the story. A woman who spent a decade and a half chasing fame through legitimate means engineered a locker room confrontation that went viral and made a calculation. It was a vehicle for someone who is very good at identifying leverage and very practiced at using it.
She says it herself. She’s a hustler. Her words.
The Operator
Fifteen years in Los Angeles, with a publishing deal at Universal Music Group that she negotiated, by her own account, from a position of financial leverage rather than artistic track record. She already earned money from the predatory mortgage lending industry, and she got Universal to “pay her more than anybody else that year despite nothing on the radio.” Celebrity parties. Industry credits. Collaborations with names that move units. Outside of this bubble nobody knew who she was. Not in the world she attempted to enter.
This isn’t a criticism of her talent. It is a description of her situation in October 2025, the month of the viral gym incident. In one of her many videos she explains that her Universal Global Publishing deal ended earlier that year, and that her Airbnb empire across Hollywood, five hundred dollars a day from 2015 to 2019, ran in the past tense, perhaps less lucrative once Covid killed short-term rentals. Much like the branch of Universal Music Publishing in Israel, where she was visiting on Oct 7, 2023. The music career that was supposed to be elevated by the industry connections and the financial cushion produced a Grammy nomination and a catalog of credits for others’ hits. She was, by any honest accounting, a hustler between hustles.
The Universal Music Publishing Group deal ran from 2011 to early 2025. Fourteen years. In that time she wrote for Alicia Keys and Kelly Rowland, appeared on records with Ty Dolla Sign, 6LACK, and Musiq Soulchild, and worked Kanye West sessions across what would have been Yeezus II territory, credits accumulating for other people’s catalogs while her own stayed thin. She wrote “City Underground” for the Vultures albums. She refused to clear it unless she received writing credits on a separate track. The song appears on neither album. The negotiating posture was consistent across every phase of her life: arrive with leverage, extract favorable terms, move on. The leverage doesn’t appear to have held.
LA is a company town like many other company towns, and while anyone can play the game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, many Angelenos can name two or three degrees from Kevin Bacon with ease. Your dry cleaner’s brother was a key grip on Footloose. Your best friend’s uncle is an accountant for Village Studios. Locals gossip, but they don’t ogle. Ça, c’est pas de chez nous, that’s not how things are done here. Angelenos knew what Harvey Weinstein was up to while it was happening, which children’s agents to stay away from, that Johnny Depp’s place had a certain reputation, and that P-Diddy was bad news in the 90s. There is always a backstory, and to name-drop is a signal that you don’t know it, and that you can’t keep a confidence of those who wish not to be named. Ça, c’est pas de chez nous.
Many ‘old ladies’ in the feminist movement remember when East Harlem-to-Oakland transplant, West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur was shot in New York in 1994, back when little Latisha was 11 years old. If one must insist that her detractors in the so-called “gender critical” movement are “old hags,” one must concede that they were witnesses and potentially participants in the birth of hip hop and rap, and know which players were blamed for the hits and misses. When Tish Hyman gave her 2015 interview in Vice Magazine, P-Diddy’s conduct was already an open secret. Now that his crimes are officially on the record, the code switches to the audience viewing her, no matter the subject. In a recent invocation of Tupac Shakur, she compares herself to him in a threadbare bid for Angeleno legitimacy, an audience that already understands what self-aware former LA transplant David Cross once called the parade of delusion.
“I’m in the studio with Diddy! To me, he’s like an amazing role model, and more than he was when I was younger, because I looked at him like a role model when I was younger, but I didn’t understand. Now I understand all he’s done. Now I’m like whoa! So it’s crazy to be with Diddy and just have that synergy. He came to my show last month and just came backstage with some love and some good words, and it’s been great” – Tish Hyman 2015
The last documented Kanye session produced a reference track for BULLY. Previous versions of the album carried AI vocals layered over reference tracks from nine artists, Tish Hyman among them. Kanye then went on record denying the album contained AI at all. The vinyl, pressed before the denial, still carries AI vocals. She recorded for BULLY and was replaced by a machine, and then the machine was denied, and then the denial was released and distributed before anyone thought to change the story. The music industry delivered its verdict on her final major session in the specific language of 2025: her voice was cloned, used, discarded and lied about. Contract songwriters now compete with AI that draws upon every song ever written. One can be left on the cutting room floor without evidence to support one’s claims. Revisionist history abounds.
By July 2021 she created a SoundBetter profile. SoundBetter is a freelance marketplace for working musicians between infrastructure platforms, the place you go when the label relationships dwindle and the publishing deals have lapsed and you’re selling your services by the session to whoever finds your listing. Her profile described her as a song doctor. She offers songwriting, vocals, production, and mentoring. “Working with me,” she wrote, “is building a bridge to many superheroes in this industry.” The woman who insisted on her success was offering confidence-building at freelance rates on gig sites in the shadow of a UMG contract that would lapse within a few years. You can find her on Celebrity Talent International for a minimum fee range of $7,500-$14,999. Tish is for hire for your latest event.
Her song Bad Vibes was released five weeks later on EVEN, not Spotify, not Apple Music, a direct-to-consumer platform where the artist sets the price and the audience pays what they want. Amy Sousa’s voice opens the track. The handler is embedded in the product. She plugged it twice during her introductory four-hour X Space, asking the movement to buy it. Every dollar, she said, “helps her keep pushing forward doing this work for myself and for the people.” The audience she spent her entire Los Angeles career failing to reach through the industry was assembled for her in six weeks by a network that needed what she represented more than it needed what she could sing, which was attention to a cause that she ignored right up until she found a way to exploit it.
On February 18, 2026, EVEN signed a multi-year agreement with Universal Music Group, integrating the platform into UMG’s direct-to-fan strategy. The infrastructure she sold her exit narrative on is owned-relationship distribution for the corporation she just left. Three months later, on May 7, 2026, she released Lift Me Up on EVEN. The promotional art framed her in white against American flag iconography. The YouTube description read: “No Spotify. They Rob artists. Buy directly from me. Pay what you want for it.” Her X account, which hosts it, has since been officially designated for campaign use.
Her Instagram page no longer lists her as a musician. It lists her as a candidate, with the aid of scripts supplied by others.
Before the music industry there was the mortgage banking industry. Before Los Angeles there was the Bronx, before her proclaimed wealth, poverty and living on the streets as a teenager. She describes in various interviews a Jewish family that took her in at eighteen, taught her the business, and remained, in her own words recorded in December 2025, her family to this day. By her mid-twenties she was running a team of fifteen at their lending operation, making, as she puts it, mad bread. One can assume that a fast-talking battle rapper was given a script very much like the ones Erin Friday, Kara Dansky, or Amy Sousa may have provided for her “angry Black woman” performances at political town halls. Back in New York her audience would have been Black homeowners, preyed upon by predatory subprime mortgage lenders, like that of Tish’s adopted family. The years she ran that operation overlapped precisely with the subprime lending crisis that stripped Black and Latino homeowners across Los Angeles of generational wealth at rates that have never recovered. The City of LA was bankrupted from that 2008 financial crisis, while she was still in New York. She doesn’t mention this overlap. She does, however, mention the money she made. With pride.
Through Tish Hyman’s fondness for self-disclosure, the patterns of her life are revealed in endless monologues into the void, while she poses, postures, and brags about achievements that cost others access to housing and contributed to the very failings of Los Angeles she complains about. Identify the available capital pool. Arrive with enough leverage to negotiate favorable terms. Extract. Move on. She now describes this as leadership skills in her new six-month-old political identity. The battle rapper arena provided the bluster. The banking family provided the template. The mortgage bank applied it. The Airbnb operation scaled it. The music business provided the visibility. The TERF movement was the next available vehicle, and it offered something the music industry never had, a guaranteed audience that was desperate, politicized, and primed to confuse notoriety with authority. It already had a network of predatory profiteers, with connections to billionaire-backed think tanks and Trump Administration politicians. Women very much like Tish in a different stratum of life.
Why would she? What’s in it for her? What was in it for Nicki Minaj?
The gym confrontation in October 2025 had done in seventy-two hours what fifteen years of industry hustle could not, and she knew it. In the same December 2025 video, she describes running the calculation: her social media doubled, she could have just taken the clout and kept posting music. Like the music dropped by Universal Publishing Group and Kanye in the same year. She presents this as evidence of her selflessness. It reads as evidence of someone who understood exactly what landed in front of her and chose the higher return on investment.
The Audition
On November 4, 2025, two days after the locker room confrontation circulated on social media, Amy Sousa hosted a four-hour Twitter Space titled “Tish Hyman: When women are banned for standing up to predatory men!” Five thousand two hundred listeners tuned in. The featured participants who matter to this dispatch are Amy Sousa, the host, longtime activist on women’s-spaces issues and TikTok content creator; Erin Friday, the California lawyer, Our Duty USA co-founder, and Genspect Alliance USA director; and former ACLU lawyer Kara Dansky, who still declares herself a lifelong Democrat despite her consulting career for conservative think tanks and influencers in the Trump administration’s orbit. Tish joined as a speaker at the one-hour-forty-three-minute mark.
Tish opened with, “I’m not here to act like I know a lot,” she told the room. “I just know my experience.” At this point she had been part of the issue for less than a week, and she said it plainly: “I don’t know anything about trans.” In the upcoming months we would learn the opposite was true. Later, near the end of the recording, she said it again, and that would have been a delightful self-effacing disclosure: “I am not a researcher and I don’t have that much time. I need bullet point information. I need facts. We got to leave our flags, aka our political parties, outside. I need y’all to arm me with information.” She closed with the operational instruction: “Your job is to furnish me with the stuff I need to speak on.” Which was likely a herculean undertaking for multiple people, considering she did not know what AGP meant and did not know who Erin Friday was before that night. Midway through the call, when Friday began explaining the legislative situation in Sacramento, Tish interrupted to ask who the governor of California was. Fifteen years in Los Angeles. Six weeks from announcing a mayoral campaign. She did not know the name of the governor. Told it was Newsom, she replied: “This Newsom guy sounds insane.” The Space continued with a slight stammer and with a promise to speak in person. Tish mentioned her petition and couldn’t understand the failure of a million views and only 2,500 signatures. We were bestowed a constant stream of unconsciousness that implied this issue began upon her awareness of it and centered on her experience of it, elevating herself above a ‘bunch lumber jack looking middle aged women on keyboards.’ The number currently sits at 51,885, after nearly seven months, traveling across the country, several media appearances, “famous connections,” and a Los Angeles mayoral campaign. The petition that took priority was the much more reachable 500 signatures to qualify for the LA mayoral race.
This is the carpetbagger’s job interview. The performer has identified the platform, requested the script, and named the demands. What remained was the offer. What could we do for her? Supply the script, the costume merch, the marketing, and the issue to launch her next career chapter
Sousa made it. Near the two-hour-ten-minute mark, addressing Tish directly, she said: “You are well poised to be a voice on this. Not only are you already in the entertainment world, you know how to speak and be in front of a camera. You are black. You are a lesbian, frankly, in this world of identity politics, that is incredibly useful and there’s no getting around the fact that that is going to help your story have more power and we women need that.”
The movement that spent over a decade attacking a weaponized identity-based system, in which a demographic asset held more weight than the armament of facts, logic, reason, and righteousness, has repeatedly used this tactic of marketing its response to this oppositional ideological network by mirroring it. The “lifelong democrat” white middle-class women in this women’s rights movement have documented the issue for years and gained genuine professional expertise. They have been suspended from platforms, de-banked, ignored by the mainstream press, and confined to right-wing media when they could get coverage at all. They have also accumulated affiliations that explain why nobody outside the right-wing media ecosystem will give them a microphone: TPUSA, the Manhattan Institute, the Trump administration, Moms 4 Liberty, IWF, the Heritage Foundation, and the Zionist donor network that funds them. Fox News and Megyn Kelly will book them. The conservative podcast circuit will amplify them. San Francisco will not. NPR will not. They perceive that the credential that would move the issue past that ceiling is a Black lesbian newcomer with no traceable footprint in any of those networks. In the upcoming weeks we would witness the role Tish accepted: The Angry Black Lady™ on tour.
Erin Friday made the working arrangement explicit a few minutes later. “You and I are hopefully going to become fast friends,” she told Tish. “I’ll talk to you offline.” And: “We’re looking for ways to have lawsuits go forward.” This is the lawyer who would, one week later, sit in the audience of Scott Wiener’s town hall while Tish performed what were likely Friday’s scripted questions. Tish wore bestowed XX-XY merch without a clue what those symbols signified to the various audiences who would watch another engineered viral confrontation. More deals would be revealed at opportune events.
Amy Sousa closed the four hours with a content collaboration arrangement. She would record a video listing women who were banned from gyms before Tish, Lette Cormier, Julie Jaman, Patricia Silva, and Rebecca Phillips, and Tish would post it as a collaboration on her own account. With pink-washing merch deals arranged and promoted, the audition closed as a success.y Sousa closed the four hours with a content collaboration arrangement. She would record a video listing women who had been banned from gyms before Tish; Lette Cormier, Julie Jaman, Patricia Silva, Rebecca Phillips, and Tish would post the video as a collaboration on her own account. With pink washing merch deals arraigned and promoted, the audition was a closed as a success.
The Brand Ambassador
On the evening of Monday, November 10, 2025, seven days after Amy Sousa publicly named her as the asset the movement was missing, Tish Hyman flew to San Francisco to meet Erin Friday and a group of California TERFs outside Manny’s, a venue in the Mission hosting a ticketed Mission Local event with State Senator Scott Wiener. They posed for a photograph, the performer in costume: Tish wore an XX-XY Athletics hoodie. One of the women in the group held a placard reading “ALL KINDS OF MALES ARE FINE. NO KINDS OF MALES ARE FEMALE.” The production crew assembled. Time for another spontaneous viral film shoot.
Inside, Friday took the seat next to Wiener with a camera. The angle she needed required proximity to the senator and a clean line on Tish from across the room. Tish took her place in the audience front row, center stage. She wore the hoodie backwards so the logo would catch the lens at just the right moment when she dramatically stood up to deliver her speech to the audience, back turned to Scott Wiener, the man she flew to see, and the camera Erin Friday had centered on her.
“Senator Wiener, as the only black lesbian here, can I please ask you a question because I flew here to do that.”
She led with the credential. Sousa told her seven days earlier that her Black lesbian identity was incredibly useful in the world of identity politics. The first sentence out of her mouth in her first public appearance was that identity, delivered exactly as instructed.
What followed she read from a script, in the disjointed, halting cadence of someone reading prepared text for the first time: punctuating in the wrong places, stumbling on the legal frame, recovering. “As a lesbian woman who was attacked in a woman’s locker room at Gold’s Gym this week by a self-identifying trans woman with a documented history of domestic violence. I’m deeply concerned about women’s safety in female only spaces. What would you say to women who are seeking assurance that their safety will be protected from men who by California law can self ID as women in women only spaces? Sir, please tell me.”
Wiener began to answer. The script ended. Tish improvised. “Senator, you’ve done great things with the bills you’ve passed with the housing. I’ve read a lot of your bills.”
The fifteen-year Los Angeles resident who six days earlier asked the women on the Twitter Space who the governor of California was, the woman who admitted on the same recording that she was not a researcher and needed bullet point information furnished to her, was now in front of a state senator she had flown four hundred miles to confront, claiming she had read his legislation. Dear reader, she had not. She did not know what was in it. She did not know that Scott Wiener has taken more real estate industry money than any other politician in the California legislature, that his “build, baby, build” deregulation bills SB 50, SB 35, SB 423, SB 79, and SB 9 are the legislative scaffolding for the gentrification model her own Hollywood Airbnb empire profiteered from between 2015 and 2019. The senator she was thanking for his housing record built that record by serving the same developer class that fueled the displacement crisis she would, ten weeks later, campaign against as mayor of Los Angeles. The compliment, delivered without comprehension, named her own alignment.
She also did not know what else he had passed. SB 132 places male inmates who identify as women into women’s prisons based on self-identification. Documented sexual assaults of incarcerated women have followed. SB 145 removes mandatory sex offender registration for certain adult-on-minor sex offenses. SB 107 establishes California as a refuge state for child gender medicalization, with state courts able to take jurisdiction over children brought from states with safeguarding laws. SB 357 repeals the loitering-for-prostitution law, the bill currently the subject of a New York Times investigation documenting twelve-year-old girls working what trafficking prosecutors now call the Kiddie Stroll in Los Angeles. SB 866 establishes the legal principle of child medical consent without parental notification, the load-bearing principle for the gender medicalization pipeline. SB 59 seals court records of name and identification changes related to gender transition, undermining background checks and sex offender registry integrity. SB 497 shields the medical pipeline from oversight, audit, malpractice investigation, and law enforcement scrutiny. The full record runs to twenty bills with documented or foreseeable harm to women, children, and other vulnerable populations.
She named none of them. She thanked him for his housing.
She kept going. “I’m here to represent my community because I hear a lot of things about my community in these bills.” Her community was not in his district. Tish Hyman was the last lesbian in California to find out men were identifying as lesbians, and the voters of California Senate District 11 are in San Francisco. The voters of California Congressional District 11, which Wiener is running for, to fill Nancy Pelosi’s seat, are also in San Francisco. Tish lives in Los Angeles. She cannot vote for him. She cannot vote against him. Her “community” was the social media audience she acquired in the seventy-two hours after the Gold’s Gym video circulated, an audience that consisted largely of the same right-wing media ecosystem that had been amplifying the white middle-class TERFs without breaking the issue out of that bubble.
“I want to support you. I have millions of people behind me watching this right now and we want to know are you going to protect women.”
The leverage threat was empty. She had no votes to deliver in his current race, his upcoming race, or any race he would run in his career. What she was actually offering Wiener, whether she understood it or not, was cover. Engage calmly and respectfully with a Black lesbian on women’s safety, and the trans-policy attack on the congressional campaign gets softened with the swing voters in CD-11 he needs to win. Wiener did not take the bait. He gave her “trans women are also brutalized in this country” instead, and got the rehearsed Angry Black Lesbian™ performance in return.
At one minute fifty-six seconds into the footage Friday captured, Tish stood, turned her back to Wiener, and addressed the crowd. The senator she had come to confront was now behind her. The camera Friday operated from beside him caught the XX-XY logo on the back of the hoodie clean. The cinematic angle was the whole point. The script and the venue and the senator were the production design for former San Francisco resident Jennifer Sey’s new brand of athletic wear, labeled “transphobic” by the community she left.
“We have to protect these women. We cannot be raped in bathrooms by men that want to say they’re women. They’re not women. They’re not women. I’m leaving. It’s okay. But I’m not going to take it.”
She left. On the way out she dropped the closing lines. “Don’t let them use our blackness and our civil rights as a reason to pass weird laws for children to transform. It’s wrong. My sister’s in jail. She can’t get free tampons herself, but she can get free transformation medication. Big pharma at its best.”
You tell him, Sis! Don’t let them use your blackness! Oh no… You can’t let them do that.
What just happened was a film shoot organized by a group of known political opposition to Scott Wiener, Gavin Newsom, and San Francisco Democratic Party politics, in a venue they selected, with an unwitting co-star, captured at the angle Jennifer Sey’s brand needed. The scene closed. The merch was on camera. The script had been delivered, quite badly. The credential in the first sentence and the Angry Black Lesbian™ closing line landed for the at-home audience. Besides a few boos and hisses, the crowd in the room was relatively unimpressed. The novelty of Tish’s weaponized identity was not for the group gathered in San Francisco.
The footage circulated and did exactly what the network hoped. It did something else, too: it began a series of ad spots of Tish Hyman owning the libs and weaponizing her identity, just as trans activists do. Instead of a pink pussy hat or a Defend Trans Kids slogan or even a Levi Strauss & Co Pride shirt, she wore the XX-XY logo. Tish’s back was carrying its own freight into the room that night. The brand is Jennifer Sey’s. Sey is the former Levi’s executive who left the company over COVID school-closure activism, joined the David Sacks-funded San Francisco school board recall, and went on to align herself with TPUSA, the Manhattan Institute, IWF, Moms 4 Liberty, the Heritage Foundation, and the broader Trump-administration network. Riley Gaines, the brand’s most prominent ambassador, was chased out of San Francisco State by a furious crowd in 2023. The Bay Area knows the brand and who it belongs to. The Bay Area knows what it represents.
The role the network recruited Tish to portray was supposed to be a workaround, weaponizing her race and sexual orientation. A Black lesbian newcomer with no traceable footprint in that infrastructure who could carry the women’s safety argument into rooms the right-wing-aligned white middle-class TERFs had been locked out of. That was the operational theory in that Twitter Space in early November. It collapsed the moment the asset put on the costume brand the Bay Area already rejected.
The merch served Jennifer Sey’s bottom line in red states and among those who know exactly who Scott Wiener is but don’t vote in his district. It was territorial and made personal, the “fuck you, Wiener” achieved through customers buying sweatshirts in protest of him, for those who couldn’t vote against him, including Tish. The demographic asset the network had been so eager to use, combined with the script Tish could barely read, produced a poorly trained, ignorant dupe wearing the uniform of the operation she was supposed to be a workaround for. Sey sold sweatshirts. Tish’s reputation absorbed the cost.
The film shoot at Manny’s was the first performance under the guidance of these women. There would be more.
The town hall sportswear marketing tour began with Scott Wiener and continued with Ro Khanna and Eric Swalwell, alongside Fox News interviews, podcast appearances, and a constant flow of videos on X and Instagram. There was the Shakopee Women’s Prison in Minnesota, in protest of men pretending to be women, housed with women despite the danger. There were various state legislative sessions, the CIF Federated Council meeting, and Let’s Go Washington, hosted by Brandi Kruse. Most of these appearances were in XX-XY athletic wear.
Before the scripts and the code switch, there were her demands upon arrival into a movement that had worked for decades against not only the men who pretend to be women, but wave after wave of newcomers who insist on centering those men. Tish Hyman did both. She insisted on centering men, and she adopted the brand of another newcomer who had done the same inside a feminist movement fighting against them: Jennifer Sey. Sey too insisted she knew better, and didn’t, to us or to anyone else. She built a business off our social justice movement, on a narrative that, like Tish’s, began the moment she entered it.
The pushback from the Gender Critical and TERF community was almost instantaneous, though small at first. The California TERFs who promoted her viral event were the same women with a history of elevating every right-wing influencer and think tank that hijacked our cause. The group that welcomed Tish was mercenary in its ability to sabotage the efforts of everyone else, for the sake of child safeguarding while the adult market was left open to the profiteers of the organizations they belong to and promote.
The pushback was earned twice over. First by her manners. She arrived trashing the women who built this, then see-sawed between a performed humility, arm me with information, I’m not a researcher, I need bullet points, and a snarling contempt the moment anyone noted how little she knew. It was Dunning-Kruger with a platform: the less she understood, the more certain she was that God had chosen her to lead, and the women who actually understood were jealous hags who should go do their hair.
The second reason was who held the pen. One of the first women to push back against her ignorant bluster and her degrading demands did so on X, in Substack posts, and in videos. She spent years going after the organization Erin Friday would later come to represent, one many of us wasted those same years trying to diminish. Friday is now the director of Genspect USA, a subject of no small internal conflict, and Tish Hyman was reading her scripts. They made Tish their token, the Angry Black Lesbian who demanded scripts and a sales pitch at every stop, and stood back while she trashed Karen Davis, a woman who wrote her own, years ahead of the pack now adopting those same positions without crediting her.
Davis called out the fraud of Genspect years before Friday arrived and rose to lead the Munchausen moms, the standard-bearers of sacrifice who hold up AGP men while the movement’s children serve as their credentials. Davis named what the others would not: Genspect, she wrote, platforms “pedo supporters… Blanchard, Bailey, and Cantor.” She was right early, and for it she was reported and deplatformed by the founders and friends of the network now writing Tish’s lines.
Karen Davis spent that same stretch warning the TERF community about Buck Angel, a woman and a pornographer who promotes cosmetic medicalization to lesbians. Jennifer Sey’s first move on entering a community she had spent her Levi’s career working against was to reach for Angel. “We’d love to work with you,” Sey wrote. “You’re a shining example.” Sey and Friday, among others, represent years of wasted energy, pragmatic compromises struck with entities that work against the movement at large. The token demanded her scripts, and the people writing them had a documented record of undermining the very women they claimed to lead, just as Tish’s first instinct dictated.
The whole community watched the code switch: from neglected Bronx foster child in squalid, criminal conditions to untouchable Malibu denizen unaccustomed to being held accountable for her aggressive assertions, or, as she put it, disrespected.
By the time Tish Hyman landed in Washington DC, much of the movement she exploited was done with her. But she decided on her political aspirations before she ever arrived. DC was simply the venue she chose to announce them. That launch into the Trump universe of think tanks, law firms, and influencers began with one last exchange with Davis.
In her December 5, 2025 interview with Dr. Drew Pinsky, the two agreed upon the acceptance of autogynephilic performance of womanhood at the 30:07-30:14 mark, what many women call womanface. “This is not an attack on men who want to wear dresses,” she told Drew. “The truth is these are men. They want to wear dresses. Cool.” Drew affirmed: “you want to support people to be whatever they want to be.” She didn’t know what the nature of autogynephilia was then, and by mid-January had still not done the research she had already told the November Twitter Space she would not be doing: “I am not a researcher and I don’t have that much time. I need bullet point information. Your job is to furnish me with the stuff I need to speak on.”
Tish Hyman’s political career began before she got out of bed, and she launched it by burning the bridge to the movement that built the issue, with the full applause of the women who exploited her. From here the weaponized identity categories quietly fell away, the transsexual crusade and the four-box taxonomy among them, likely on the counsel of a new mentor: an influencer who ran her own hopeless campaign for political office.
The Pivot
The week of January 13, 2026, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., the two cases that would decide whether states can bar trans-identified males from female school sports. This was the issue. The movement’s signature fight, the one the veterans built over a decade, was finally in front of nine justices. Everyone serious was watching the Court.
Tish Hyman went to Washington to sing and to network.
She sang the National Anthem at the Alliance Defending Freedom gala. ADF is the legal operation arguing the states’ side of those very cases, and it is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, not for opposing gender ideology but for a documented quarter-century spent trying to put gay people in prison. ADF filed briefs in Lawrence v. Texas defending the criminalization of gay sex, called the consensual conduct of gay men a public health menace, and when the Court struck the sodomy laws down, called the ruling devastating and carried the fight to criminalize homosexuality abroad. So here is the self-proclaimed lesbian who flew across the country as a voice for women, delivering the anthem for the organization that worked for twenty-five years to make people like her into criminals. As a Black lesbian. She did not appear to know this. By now you understand that she rarely does.
Outside the Court, on the day of oral argument, the America First Policy Institute held its #SaveWomensSports rally, and Frank Murphy spoke. Murphy makes sense there. Former Tampa Bay Buccaneers player, chairman of AFPI’s Athletes for America coalition, a man who amplifies the women’s-sports issue as a matter of routine. Riley Gaines, the XX-XY ambassador chased out of San Francisco State, is his vice chair on that same coalition. AFPI is a Trump-administration think tank, founded by Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow, so the rally was network infrastructure. Tish was photographed across those days in Washington with Murphy and others.
Angela Stanton King attended both, the rally outside and the event inside. She is not an athlete. Her trans-identified child is not an athlete. She has no history at events about this issue, because this is not her issue. So I have to ask what she was doing there, on sports-cases week, standing beside the newcomer. From my perspective she was not there for the cases. It appeared to me she was there for Tish.
Angela Stanton King and Tish Hyman Stacey Schieffelin Chair, America First Women’s Initiative & Chief External Affairs Officer
I want to explain how I know Angela Stanton King, because her presence here is one more in an accumulation of coincidences.
The first time I watched this pattern assemble was not Tish Hyman. It was Stanton King, years earlier. She appeared at the beginning of right-wing identity weaponization that intersected with the TERF community. She crossed my path through a viral video she posted from a South Beach LGBT club, children present, a drag performance, her bleeped commentary, the clip carried outward by the right-wing media apparatus that was the only place this issue lived in 2020 and 2021. She was reported as a homophobic Trump supporter who, by her own account, has a trans-identified child she rejects. At the time my impression was that a woman like Angela Stanton King doesn’t wander into a venue like that at midnight with a camera by accident. She went with purpose, and the purpose was the footage. I perceived it as an operation. I read it as the Trump sphere testing whether this issue could be picked up, amplified, and made theirs, fishing for the pushback that feminists had been documenting for years, with nothing like this kind of media elevation. The scourge of the right-wing culture is White liberal pro choice female academic feminists, and by and large that’s who TERFs are.
Then came WiSpa. Another viral incident just a few months later, another Black woman, a complainant calling herself Cubana Angel who objected to a naked male in the women’s side of a clothing-optional Korean spa in Los Angeles. White women came forward after the fact, filing police reports weeks later, but it was Cubana Angel who created the media firestorm. Within days the incident was not an incident anymore: it became an international event, and there was a press conference at the Ambassador Auditorium, hosted by a church, staged by an outfit called Cure America Action, with a conservative attorney named Marc Little fielding the legal-threat questions and pitching a coalition. Little is a pastor, attorney, and political strategist who runs it, an anti-abortion 501(c)(4), and chairs Star Parker’s Center for Urban Renewal and Education, with direct access to Donald Trump. Days after that event, Cubana Angel sat beside him on Newsmax.
From the outside these events were imperceptible; from the inside, new actors were testing the anti-transgender market. Chris Elston, AKA Billboard Chris, was part of this new era of the conservative hijack of our cause. The TERFs got nothing. No coverage, no support, censored everywhere, dismissed, confined to the fringe or called ‘right-wing Nazi bigots.’ Years of documented work, and Tucker Carlson was one of the few media outlets who platformed our issue. Then a woman who did not register to me as a regular at that spa in Korea Town, as a known destination of men who breached the sex based boundaries into the women’s section, who showed up, and the full machine materialized in a week, a press conference, an attorney, a Newsmax hit, a coalition. The labor produced silence. That one incident produced an entire apparatus. I was at the first WiSpa protest myself, and the people on my side were not right-wing as reported. To me that protest seemed “off” as well, for many reasons I will not go into here. Justice was not served in many respects and serial criminals reoffend.
Stanton King is the first in a series of curious coincidences, and she is worth understanding, because she is what this pipeline produces. Convicted in 2004 for her role in a car-theft ring, she served state prison time, then rebuilt herself through reality television and self-published memoirs, one of which got her sued for defamation by a Real Housewives of Atlanta cast member. Along the way she met Alveda King, the anti-gay, anti-abortion niece of Martin Luther King Jr., who became her mentor and godmother; she took the name King. In February 2020 Donald Trump pardoned her. Weeks later she announced a campaign for Congress, running against John Lewis, the civil rights icon then dying of cancer, for his Atlanta seat. Her campaign manager was Trevian Kutti, the former Kanye West publicist later charged alongside Trump in the Georgia election case. She pushed the Qanon Wayfair child-trafficking rumor, and when a reporter confronted her she said, “You know they are. You saw it.” She lost to Nikema Williams by roughly 85 to 15.
The loss didn’t matter. That’s the point. The campaign was never the destination. It was the credential after the audition. After it she became a Black voice for Trump, part of the surrogate circuit, and built her public profile attacking gay people: comparing gay men to pedophiles, captioning a photo of Dwyane Wade’s trans-identified child “PEDOPHILIA,” casting Lil Nas X as what black culture pushes to children. In 2021 she went on Dr. Phil to confront her own trans-identified child, then posted a tirade from the studio lot, “my son is a man,” “the perverts can’t have him,” and threatened genital mutilation against the Black trans activist the show brought on to support him. Twitter suspended her within hours.
The way she got from there to a Kennedy paycheck ties this whole network together. She met Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2022 at the Defeat the Mandates rally in Los Angeles, an anti-vaccine event whose lineup included his own Children’s Health Defense, introduced through her self-described “really good friend” Simone Gold, the America’s Frontline Doctors founder and January 6 figure. Her medical-freedom vehicle, a project she called Stop Medical Apartheid, run through her American King Foundation, was the entry point. Its press release read, “Medical Apartheid is Population Control… Vaccines, Abortions, Mass Incarceration, and Perverted Sexual Agendas targeting children.” Kennedy later visited her crisis pregnancy center, Auntie Angie’s House, and said his position on abortion shifted there. By December 2023 he hired her as his campaign’s Black voter outreach director and paid her thirty thousand dollars for consulting. On The Daily Wire he called her “kind of a relative of Martin Luther King’s family.” She is the goddaughter of his niece. The King Center stated flatly that it “is not in any way affiliated” with her events. As RFK’s outreach director she posted, then scrubbed, an attack calling a Black Trump ally “an open flaming Feminine closet Gay.” Defeat the Mandates is the room where this medical-freedom network converged, and it is worth remembering that name, because it is the same world where Jennifer Sey reached a national audience, and Tish has spent this campaign promoting Sey’s brand.
That is the woman standing beside Tish in Washington. Stanton King ran, lost, and got something better than a seat: a permanent role as the Black face the MAGA movement could point to. Tish was watching how it’s done, and likely got some advice, considering how much her delivery has changed since she began campaigning on her own behalf. Tish standing between Stanton and Kennedy is the new clout, chased all the way to DC. She arrived a scorned infiltrator, came to collect new names and new opportunities, and left with both.
The lesbian credential had a job. “As a black lesbian.” She said it at the town halls, again and again, through the fall, because that was the expectation, the role the white women required of her. They needed a Black lesbian to carry what they could not, and Amy Sousa said so plainly on the Space, that the identity was incredibly useful. A user named Miriam said the quiet part with her own fingers: we needed a black lesbian woman to do this, otherwise no one would have listened. Karen Davis, a Black TERF who was clocking it in real time, named the mechanism for what it was: a group of white women using a Black woman as their blackface, a very specific kind of Black woman, valued for the surface and not the substance. It was a performance of a Black stereotype staged for a white audience, the rage furnished on cue, the Angry Black Lesbian the movement could unleash and consume. Black observers could see the performance for what it was, because the people being caricatured recognize the caricature. I saw it at Gold’s Gym. And then it stopped after her trip to DC.
Since declaring for office she has traded the Angry Black Lesbian performance for a more polished delivery, and she has started saying her sexual orientation is not relevant to her mayoral race. The identity that opened every door to a new market was set aside the moment she failed its minimum requirement. My read is that someone pointed the act out to her, and that the someone was Stanton King, who ran this exact arc and knows precisely when the act stops being an asset and starts being a liability, knows it the moment you cross into the Trump and ADF sphere where a loud lesbian identity is friction, not currency. The white women weaponized that identity for their own purposes, and it ended in DC.
The point is what comes after the expected loss on June 2. There is a name for what that room in Washington was, and it is the same thing Stanton King became: Black people for Trump, the surrogate circuit, the paid influencer economy that an insider just described in detail. Ashley St. Clair, a former Turning Point USA brand ambassador, has spent this spring documenting how that machine works from the inside, alleging that Republican operatives built platforms where right-wing influencers log on, take scripts, push petitions and messaging, and get paid per click or by flat rate, the whole apparatus dressed as organic, independent support. She backed it with screenshots, and a Georgetown researcher confirmed she is saying out loud what people tracking the space had long observed. Tish is posting in support of Nicki Minaj’s turn toward Trump, amplifying the same influencer content on X and Instagram, and calling herself independent, the same word Stanton King used for the RFK operation that was a Trump on-ramp all along. DC was the introduction. The campaign is the demo reel. She is not running to be mayor of Los Angeles. She is auditioning to be an influencer, and the audition is already underway.
The Candidate
On January 16, 2026, the day after the photograph in Washington, Tish Hyman announced she was running for Mayor of Los Angeles. The June 2 primary was the finish line, and the result was never in question. She would lose. Everyone watching knew it, and on some level so did she.
The Los Angeles Ethics Commission keeps the numbers, and the numbers are not close. As the primary approached, Karen Bass had raised more than three million dollars. The fourth-place candidate raised over three hundred thousand. Tish Hyman raised roughly thirty-three thousand, most of it from people who do not live in Los Angeles and cannot vote for her, and her total barely moved across three reporting periods. She was not a contender. She was a name on a ballot, and the campaign was doing a different job than winning.
Her X account carries the line “This account is being used for campaign purposes by Hyman for Mayor 2026.” The link in that bio does not go to a campaign donation page. It goes to even.biz/r/lift-me-up, a page selling her single. EVEN is a direct-to-fan music platform built on a pay-what-you-want model, the buyer sets the price. So a supporter who arrives through the campaign-designated account is routed to a personal commercial platform where a “song” can be purchased for any amount. She has posted that two people bought a single copy of an earlier track for a thousand dollars each. The official campaign filing reports one number. The music platform takes in another, at prices the buyer sets, and the public filing does not appear to account for it. The blend is not incidental. It is the design. EVEN is heavily placed more often than her actual campaign web page.
The official campaign did have a consultant: Ronald F. Kroell, a Senior Political Advisor paid $4,000 from campaign funds across two payments in March and April 2026. Kroell listed the official campaign donation page on his Facebook posts in support of her campaign. Her own X and Instagram accounts linked to her EVEN artist page. The person she hired to run the campaign was pointing donors one direction. She was pointing her audience somewhere else entirely.
All of Tish Hymans Campaign marketing is color coded and coordinated, indistinguishable from artist donation and candidate donation. Her EVEN artist page is listed for her X account, NOT her campaign donation page.
She saw the question coming and answered it before it was asked. “The money isn’t drying up,” she posted. “There was never money in it to begin with. It was never about money.” A candidate who raises thirty-three thousand dollars and routes her supporters to a pay-what-you-want music store does not generally need to insist, unprompted, that it was never about money.
There is a pattern to the platform she sells. She tells artists not to be slaves to the labels, she tells her fans and supporters to buy directly from her, to escape the corporate machine. EVEN is the engine for that pitch. On February 18, 2026, EVEN signed a multi-year agreement with Universal Music Group, the largest label corporation on earth. The independent escape route is now owned infrastructure of the industry she claims to have left, which is fitting, because she never actually left anything. The campaign is the latest version of the same move.
The run does one more thing, and her own followers named it to her face. She is not winning. She cannot win. And she sits in the race pulling from a candidate who might. Spencer Pratt is the figure her supporters keep telling her she is bleeding. “If you stay in the race, you will siphon votes away from Spencer Pratt, please drop out now,” one wrote. She has denied it more than once, unprompted, which is its own kind of confirmation. “I’m not taking votes from Pratt. It’s opposite.” “I’m not running against him or to dilute the votes. I am running because GOD is telling me to.” When another account suggested splitting the vote might be the aim, she answered that she decided to run before Pratt announced. The denials accumulate. The arithmetic does not change. A candidate who cannot win and will not leave is doing work for someone, whether she frames it as God or not.
And then there is what she is running on, which is the part that closes the circle. Her platform is housing and homelessness. She does the photo ops with homeless Angelenos. She talks about drug treatment, fair enough. She promises to lower housing costs by “working with developers.” She does not mention how she came to understand housing.
She came to understand it from inside the machine that broke it. She has told the story herself, in Vice, in 2015. She left the Bronx at eighteen, sleeping in crack houses, until a wealthy Manhattan woman named Hope took her in and moved her into an apartment. Hope’s brothers gave her a job selling mortgages. She ran a team, made what she calls mad bread, and did it up until the crash. A teenager with no qualifications, placed inside the subprime mortgage business in the exact years, working the exact instrument that detonated in 2008, the collapse that bankrupted the City of Los Angeles and stripped Black and Latino homeowners of generational wealth that has never returned. She does not mention the overlap. She mentions only the money.
Then she came to Los Angeles and did it again in a different key. The thirty-unit Airbnb empire across Hollywood, 2015 to 2019, was the same extraction scaled into a new market, housing converted from shelter into a leveraged commodity, units pulled off the long-term market at the precise moment the city could least afford it. Los Angeles never recovered from 2008, and it is unaffordable today in part because housing stopped being where people live and became something investors hold, short-term rentals and hedge funds treating homes as assets. She was a small operator in that class. She profited from the machine in the Bronx and again in Hollywood.
Now she campaigns to fix the wreckage by working with developers, the same financialized housing apparatus that produced the wreckage, offered back to the city as the cure. She is photographed with the displaced while belonging to the class that displaces. The cause and the proposed solution are the same hands. They always were.
She also posted, on International Women’s Day 2026, that she was proud to have worked closely on AB 1998, a bill to restore sex-based definitions to California’s public accommodations law. The law she was helping to amend through testimony is the Unruh Civil Rights Act, on the books since 1959 and extended to cover gender identity in 2005, the same statute that governed every gym, salon, and commercial space she entered during fifteen years in Los Angeles, including the one where she had been working out, for years, five days a week, sometimes twice a day, before her sudden and spontaneous discovery of the issue that launched her new career opportunity.
The campaign was never a bid for City Hall. It is a revenue funnel, a vote-splitter, and a profile-builder, and the profile is the point. After June 2 there is a role waiting, the one Stanton King already occupies, the one her own supporters are already nudging her toward when they tell her to bow out and “align for the greater good” to “garner goodwill for the future.” She is not running to be mayor of Los Angeles. She is running to be hired. The next vehicle is already idling.