A Polite Melody

Like yes, treat us with respect, recognize us as men and be normal about it (without stereotyping, alienating, or ostracizing us), but if treating us "as men" means not recognizing us as *trans* men even in contexts where that really matters, if you can only respect our identities when treating us uniformly to how you would *cis* men, then you're not a good trans ally.

Being a good trans ally means actively listening to us to understand how our transness influences our personal experiences, our sociopolitical positions, our interactions with gendered concepts, with manhood itself and what society expects and rejects in us as men- and being individuals who moved away from/rejected the womanhood and traditional femininity expected of us.

To walk into every conversation about trans men with the attitude "well you're a man so I'll treat you just as I would any man (aka cis men)" is obtusely overly simplistic at best, and outright degendering and dehumanizing at worst- denying us recognition without the accusation or implication we are misgendering ourselves when our experiences differ from cis men.

We are men and we aren't cis men, and acknowledging that is not misgendering, it is not insidious to bring up, it is not obfuscating to talking about us as men, it is just actual, literal reality.

Sanding away fundamental aspects of our experience to cram us into the boxes you expect of cis men is not being a good trans ally. It feels obvious but for some reason it just isn't for some people. You can absolutely respect us as men while understanding we are transgender men, and not just 'transgender' as a separate marginalizing qualifier tacked on to someone who would be otherwise identical to a cis man if you took that away.

That's not how this works. These two concepts literally cannot exist without the other, or we would not be who we are. Our transness is not separate or incidental to our manhood and our experiences related to manhood. Our manhood is not incidental to our transness and our experiences related to being trans. You need to respect us in our culmination, as a unique and valid expression of manhood, as a unique and important expression of transgender existence.

Now of course, an individual trans man may not want to be referred to as a trans man, just as a man, and you should respect that. In day to day, a trans man might not want you to treat him any differently than you would a cis man, and you should respect that. That's not the sort of thing I'm talking about here.

It's that when it comes to recognizing how we must navigate society, patriarchy, gender dynamics, and gendered oppression- erasing the reality of our transness to treat us as functionally cis men besides a few quirks is not at all showing solidarity to us, but ignorance. It is a flattening of who and what we are and what we go through.

"someone ended it all before it could even start." - Carlos, Kohen's grandfather.

"Family say the aunt was driving the car and the mother was in the front passenger seat holding her child when the shooting happened."

a mother went to the grocery store with her 1 year old child and. the cops. murdered her baby boy. he was in her arms. in her arms. in her arms.

the cop who did this does not deserve to live. Kohen should still be alive. despicable. beyond words. there are no words anymore. the hatred of Black people is a plague on the world.

may Kohen's spirit find peace and be reborn to his mothers arms in another life. may his family grieve together in peace. fuck the colonial entity known as the United States.

Kohen Wiley, the slain child, was in the car at the center of the shooting on Sunday alongside his mother and her friend, said Marquell Bridges, a local community advocate who is helping the family find legal representation. Kohen’s mother was physically unharmed, but her friend was seriously injured, said Bridges, the president and founder of an advocacy group called the Building Bridges Coalition.

Apparently a community rally was organized in Senatobia (video of protest included at that link) & the family has legal council.

They tear gassed protestors, at a protest over the murder of a 1-year old and the potentially fatal injuring of another woman, and the traumatizing of an entire family.

A preliminary autopsy requested by the family of Kohen Wiley suggested the baby was shot from the side of the car, not the front, civil rights attorney Ben Crump said, disputing officers’ claims that the car was heading toward them. Kohen’s mother, who was holding her baby in the passenger seat, says her friend was driving away from the officers. [...] However, Crump repeatedly emphasized that the pathologist did not have access to complete information. He said the family won’t rest until authorities release the police body camera and dashcam video, as well as Walmart surveillance video. [...] “That’s very important as we try to solve a puzzle,” he explained, adding: “The reason that we’re having to try to solve the puzzle is because they won’t release the video.” In an initial account of the shooting, state investigators said: “Officers attempted to stop the vehicle, but the driver drove in the direction of the officers, almost striking one. An officer then discharged their weapon and the vehicle fled the scene.”

Those records list Hunter Foster, along with Kohen Wiley, his mother Vellesiya Wiley and a third person as people involved in Sunday’s shooting. Action News 5 is working to identify the third person. An incident report from MBI was too heavily redacted to confirm Hunter Foster as the officer involved. Action News 5 confirmed through city records Hunter Foster was promoted as a sergeant in Senatobia in September. Action News 5 went to City Hall and the Police Department, asking Mayor Greg Graves and the police chief to confirm Foster’s identity and involvement. A staffer said both were in a meeting. Any further information must come from MBI, Action News 5 was told.

This article also includes a video of Kohen's grandmother, grandfather, and other family and community members talking about him and demanding justice.

Unfortunately, Kohen's mother has been the target of some truly vile and explicitly racist harassment online, including people claiming she was using Kohen as a meat shield, when she raised him up in the car to show the officer there was a baby in the car, and claiming she is celebrating her son's death and is happy he died. She is dealing with some truly horrific shit from all sides and I hope she is being protected by her family and her community.

From the celebration of life ceremony they held for him:

Raccoons are incredibly dangerous to native reptile, amphibian, rodent, and bird populations in areas where they are invasive. I’m already deeply concerned for Europe’s ecosystem due to the widespread belief that domestic cats need to be outdoors. Which isn’t to say that we don’t have a problem with that here in the states, but humane societies in places like the UK and Germany will literally not adopt out cats unless people let them outdoors. So there is a huge and concerning difference there.

So many small animals are already at risk because of domestic cats, which are also an invasive species, that adding raccoons will exasperate the issue exponentially.

If he was 10% more intelligent I'd think he wants to die but look at this face. This is not the face of a man with a singular thought in his head:

it's not just "that doctor has internalized misogyny" it's that western medicine is, as in so many parts of our culture, deeply authoritarian. the patient is meant to be a passive problem to be solved by the active doctor. there is meant to be a stark harsh line between you and the doctor, where you are pure of any medical knowledge and simply report the raw data & let the doctor interpret it. this is how the system works. it fucks over marginalized groups the most because that's how marginalization works, but even a thin white abled cis man could get fucked over by this shit if he's unlucky.

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

Pilots and other transportation workers have absurd hours of service requirements that start your rest period as “the moment you shut the vehicle down” and can be as short as 9 hours in some cases.

Railroad workers have to be available on-call 6 days a week and be ready within two hours notice. They don’t get sick time.

Retail workers have to keep a veneer of politeness against any and all abuse or they can be fired.

Truck drivers get paid by mileage and rarely see pay for shipper or receiver delays.