Entrevue Martine Rothblatt - Gala Phenicia 2023 (en anglais)

Well, thank you so much for recounting all of those parts of my life and thank everybody here for taking the time from your evening to come and join us today. I apologize for only speaking in English because I have not yet figured out how to find the time to learn French.

Yes. So, my Canadian connection is actually tied very closely to our LGBTQ identity. Back in the 1990s when we came out as a queer couple, the environment was quite hostile in the US and in fact in no state in the United States had there been an acceptance of same-sex marriage or anything like that and no protection against being terminated from your employment due to your sexual orientation or gender identity. But already at that time, Canada was in the vanguard of social progress for LGBT people. And already at that time, there had been protections for sexual orientation and gender identity in both Ontario and in Quebec and I believe in BC as well. So we felt like this is our natural homeland is in Canada. It's a safe country. We felt that way and we still feel that way and maybe we feel that way more with each passing month of news events, you know, I might say. So, we applied to be permanent residents at the Quebec Council in New York. And I remember the gentleman he said to us, you would be very welcome in Canada. We didn't feel any discrimination against us at that invitation. He urged us to learn to speak French to better appreciate the culture of France and of Quebec. And how is that going? My bad. You know, I mean, so still working on it. And I will say that in the intervening years, gradually our permanent residency evolved into citizenship and we're both citizens now. We feel every month, you know, more and more proud to be Canadian. Of course, no country is perfect, but we are just grateful to be Canadian. And when I was invited by the LGBT community here in Quebec and thank you to the RBC ERG. We're grateful to you too as well. It's for me it's a great honor to have a chance to share any aspect of my life with my sisters and brothers right here in Quebec. And it's an honor for me to have this conversation with you, which I told you privately earlier, but I'm doing it now publicly. So we're going to explore two avenues of discussion. Mind you, we had a 15-minute discussion which basically set the plan for the conversation to be like four hours long, but I'm going to try to use my skills as an interviewer to keep it 50 minutes just about. So two avenues of discussion, school and professional life and more personal life. Dealing with not being comfortable with the male gender and transitioning and navigating in societies and communities who are not always welcoming to these issues and how it affects and informs some of the decisions you have to make in your busy professional but also private life. I have to so thanks again for joining us today. We're going to start at your childhood. First of all, were you always this active? Were you a hyperactive child?

I don't think so. I don't think so.

They would say that I was a bit of a bookworm. That I was reading all the time. So, they would say I was always very sociable, that I also liked people. They would say that my spirit in athletics was higher than my ability.

I was good at school but I was not good at behavior. At behavior yes so in the American system we get sort of two grades in every class. We get a grade for the academics and then we get a grade for what's called work habits and cooperation. So I would usually not always but usually I would get the highest grade in the academics and the lowest grade in the work habits and cooperation.

It's better to be good at academics if you they will forgive you for your behavior if you're very good at academics. But, you know, I'm also not really that good on standardized tests. So, for example, again, in the US system, when you finish what we call high school, you have to take these standardized tests. And the standardized tests pretty much determine which college and university you would go to. So, because I missed school a lot, what we would say in colloquial English, I ditched school a lot. The work habits and cooperation were bad and sometimes the teachers will bleed that over to the academics. If you have to write an essay and they don't like you, no matter how good your essay is, they'll mark you down. Yeah. Okay. So, when I finished high school, I went to apply to the best universities in the area and I was not accepted at any of them.

That's right. Yes. So, we have a school in California where I grew up that's called a state college. And these state colleges, they are more or less obligated to accept everybody who finishes the high school. So, they accepted me into the state college because the university did not accept me. The UCLA, University of California, Berkeley did not accept me. I find it kind of funny that like a few decades later the University of California they gave me their highest honor. It was very very kind and nice of them like their Nobel Prize of the University of California even though they wouldn't even accept me as the student upon finishing high school.

No, I didn't. But I'll tell you what I did remind them of because I think it's relevant to the theme that we're going on here. So when I was at that school, I was already a single parent with our son from my first marriage. And as a result of the divorce, I had a full custody of that child. And I was the only quote unquote male single parent in the university's child care center which existed for single students to have their be able to leave their kids while they were in classes during the day. There were a lot of single women there and I was like the only single quote unquote man or presenting as a man. Then the California taxpayers, as happens in the US, they decided they didn't want to pay any more taxes and they passed a resolution that we don't have to pay any more property taxes. So right away, like all the money for things like child care, it like evaporated like water on a frying pan. And the chancellor of University of California, he said, 'Well, we have to save money. We're going to keep football, of course, and we're going to keep the science courses, of course, but no more daycare or child care.' So, I led a student effort to occupy the administration building, the chancellor's building, and it's called Murphy Hall at UCLA. And we occupied it 24 hours a day for a week. And finally, they relented and agreed to restore the funding for the childcare center. I did remind him of that when I got the award. Yes.

Even as before I was in really full adolescence. So, as a young kid before I was a teenager, I knew that I was not male and um Did you articulate it consciously or it was just more of an instinct and feeling? I think it was an instinctive feeling. Although in my mind I would role play that I was female. Yeah. But it was only in my mind because I was very scared of the sanction, the harsh reaction that I knew 100% certain would come from everybody around me.

Starting with my father.

Yes.

I don't think I would say it I think it could have been unsafe if I had come out. Okay. But I was aware enough that there were certain like red lines I wouldn't cross because I knew I would get I mean my father didn't spare corporal punishment and you know so there would be like things much smaller I could get like beaten for. So, I definitely knew that like, you know, inside the adults, they'd make jokes about gay people. They didn't there were they didn't even get as far as like transgendered people, but even gay people were like ridiculed. So, you don't have to be a genius as a kid to know like you better not come out as gay, you know?

I do. I have one sister.

No, because I didn't trust her.

She's younger. She's younger than you are. And your mother? She's very she's passed away, but she's very sweet. And I should hasten to add that my parents you know came around a million%. And later on later on, but I wouldn't have I would have been afraid to tell my mother. Probably I'm now like trying to think back a few decades, but probably because I'm 100% certain she would have told my father.

Whoa. From my family.

Yeah. Not necessarily because No, because I was out to my community before I was out to my family. So after I came out to the community after I'd already been working postgraduate of school for several years and at that time I was working on the east coast of the US. Yeah. So I was out to my community in my 30s. Okay. So, my it was actually our kids who outed me to my parents because our kids especially our older daughter, she found like Martine's clothes versus Martin's clothes. And she's pretty smart and they saw Bina and I, you know, going to I mean the our kids are like pretty smart and yeah, so when we were out of the house, they just go looking through the whole house and they find everything they want to find and then the next time my parents came from California to visit us in Maryland, they said, you know, Martin dresses up like he's a woman and goes out with Bina at night. And they're all like shocked.

I kept it a secret from my community even in like my teenage years, my 20s until I kept it. Then the 30s was complicated because I had a LGBT community that I was out to, but I also had a straight community that I was not out to. Yeah. I mean, and there were literally instances where I was I'd put on like nail polish in the morning, okay, and like, you know, be pretty much femed up to go to a consulting job that was out as a woman and I'd be like driving with one hand and like taking everything off going to like my afternoon job where I was not out as a woman. It was crazy.

And people and when I did start coming out to people in the straight community, people begged me. They said, 'Don't do this, Martin. Go just stay male. You'll regret this.' Really? Oh, yeah. Like, you know, best work friends. They begged me. Especially when I brought up surgery. It's like, 'Don't do this. Don't. Please, I beg you. I've been your friend for 10 years.' You know, but that's later on when you were in your early 30s. Early 30s. Okay. Okay. And I'll just one last question for your more youthful life. You didn't even have like a confidant like someone you can confide, someone you can talk to because it's you have to keep this in your mind for years and years.

The first confidant I had in my entire life is my soulmate for eternity. My best friend Bina.

Yes. From the state. From the state college. Sonoma State College.

Yes.

Yes. And in the summer of '74, correct me if I'm wrong, you landed in the Seychelles Islands.

It was very transformative. If I mentioned that I like to read. So one of the magazines I used to read every week was called Newsweek. And it was really just an article in Newsweek that described a kind of utopia on Earth where there was you could catch fish with your hands in the water. Bread fruit fell from the trees. There was coconut milk. And I was so disgusted with really the concrete jungle of Los Angeles and the whole industrial civilization and a war in Vietnam and whatnot. So I just said, 'Okay, I'm just getting out of here. I'm going to go and like live my life in this utopic place.' So it's just from a stupid magazine article that I travel halfway around the world very slowly because I had no money. So on the way I taught English in Tehran and did odd jobs in Turkey and in Europe and finally I get down to East Africa and then from there to the Seychelles and I'm an amateur musician piano and flute. So there was a Seychellois band playing in some of the hotels there in Seychelles and they offered that I could play a keyboard. They had a keyboard there. So I played that in the band and I found a bungalow to live in. And one day the band's leader, he said to me, do you want to see the NASA tracking station? And these guys were really cool. They didn't even really know their exact age. If you ask them how old, they didn't keep track of their birthday. So I said, 'Sure.' And so we drove around and around to this one big mountain in Mahé, the main island of the Seychelles. And there was this thing like out of the future. It was like this gleaming sphere, a radome. I didn't really know that word then, but a gleaming white sphere. And now mind you, the bungalow I was living in, it had a dirt floor. Every night if you turned on any light, there would be a gazillion flying insects coming into the room. I mean, a gazillion. And if you turned off the light, then you could hear cockroaches as like big as your hands scampering all over the floor. So, it was no longer really my vision of utopia at all. And the hotels we played in were full of South African tourists. And it's like it was just kind of disgusting to me actually. Like you know these poor Seychellois guys, they were really being exploited in many many different ways. Not to mention the other people who really worked in the hotel by what was at that time an apartheid South African system. So this whole thing that I thought was a utopia was turning out to me to be the farthest thing from it. And we get up to this gleaming white sphere and my friend knocks on the door. They opened the door and there was a very clean-cut looking guy and my friend said, 'We'd like to have a tour.' And he was very friendly, the man working inside the satellite station. He said, 'Sure, come in.' He spent like two hours explaining everything inside this white radome as big as three houses, like huge. And I began asking more and more questions. And I said, 'What are you doing here?' and he explained to me that they were keeping track of space probes going out to Jupiter and Saturn. And I had asked him why is this thing so huge? Because it was as big as three houses. And he said to me, 'Oh, because the space probes we're communicating with are so small they could fit on this little table here.' And I said, is it possible for these small probes to transmit music to everybody on the Earth? And I don't know why I asked that question, but it came to my mind. And he said, well, only if the space probe was as big as this big ground station that we're using to keep track of a tiny space probe. If the big ground station as big as three houses was in orbit, then everybody could have something as small as a deck of cards to listen to music. And I kind of had an epiphany that this satellite technology could unite the whole world, that all the different people who were and are fighting each other could be united behind music. And it became to me kind of like a utopia transformation. I never really until this moment actually thought about it that way, but I think maybe my brain is like hooked on a utopia meme. And so I just was totally blown away and we left and I got fixated on the fact that I'm going to build a space station like I visited in Seychelles and put it in orbit and unite the world with satellite communications. I mean that's some crazy right?

That's what I did first. So I began to I made a beeline back to UCLA. I was previously there undeclared major.

So when I went back there I found out that you could create your own major, your own discipline. So I created one called communication studies and from that point onward I was the best student good work habits good cooperation straight A's I graduate from there with the highest marks you can get they call it the summa cum laude in Latin highest possible marks I was already publishing articles in satellite communications and I just became an obsessive person about uniting the world with satellite communications.

No, no, I didn't. I didn't. But I did some good. The world is not united. In fact, it's disunited. Well, I think the last name I meant to take and music is it would be beautiful if everybody could get behind the same music, but it's not the case. And we just have a bunch of people dancing to music all night long and then being like murdered like you know, whatever in the morning. So it's not but what has happened I was able to improve a lot of people's lives especially in North America and fewer people outside North America but especially in North America. I'll tell you a quick story and I'll shut up. I'm sorry if I'm talking too long but because I'm in Canada this story tells me the good that I feel I have been able to do. Sorry mic guy. Bina and I were driving across the border from Vermont into Quebec one day and there was a border guard. They asked to see our passports. It was in fact before we had Canadian passports and she was wearing a bulletproof vest. Okay. And she had like a gun on her holster and she goes away into her little booth. It's a very small border booth at the Vermont Quebec border. And she comes back and she asked me if I could step out of the car. Of course, I'm like kind of nervous like what I do. So I step out of the car and she said, 'Would you mind if I hugged you?' And I'm like, 'Wow.' Like no cop ever asked that to me before of any sort. And she and so I like I was like this and she said I want to show my appreciation to you for SiriusXM. She said I was born in the Caribbean. I am here now in this remote outpost that I don't know anybody. I don't have any family or anybody with me. And if it wasn't for SiriusXM I would go crazy. So we hugged I hugged at like a border guard with a bulletproof. Very rare. So I did not unite the world with Satellite Communications, but I will say that more people have come up and thanked me for SiriusXM than have thanked me for the literally life-saving medicines that I've been, you know, privileged to make and save a lot of people's lives with.

SiriusXM was founded in 1992.

1990. 1990. It's not as I mean today it's sort of banal, right? It's satellite communication and we're pouring how about streaming pouring data in our phones and in our cars. But in 1990 it was really it was illegal risks. There were risks. Oh yeah. Everybody everything was a risk on it. At first nobody thought it would work. Okay. All the government engineers said it cannot work because all satellite dishes were parabolic shaped and they pointed at the satellite. Okay. And you can't have that in a car obviously. So first people said it wouldn't work. I had to make test systems to actually prove it work. Then they said it was illegal because all broadcasting was local broadcasters like the broadcasters you like in Boston and New York. And all of these local broadcasters said if it's not fair for somebody to broadcast to the whole country at the same time because they'll have many more listeners than we would have in just one little city and we'll go out of business. We won't have anybody listening to us. So they said it's not fair. Contradictory to that the investment people from Wall Street and the people who have to pay for all these satellites they said there's no business here you're going to it's going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build these satellites how many listeners are you going to have the day you launch the satellite I said I'll listen one listener they said how are you going to ever like make any money to pay back all these so it's the contradiction of the people who thought I would put them out of business where the Wall Street said there was no business. Yeah. So, and then there's a bunch of actual laws that said like no one company in the US can control more than one channel in one city at the same time. And with Sirius XM, we had over a 100 channels in every single town, hamlet, village, city. Yeah. So, it was I had nothing but opposition. Solid wall.