correspondence

hey y’all.  

i started this gofundme to help me make the transition from massachusetts to maryland in the next few months.  

i’m starting nursing school at johns hopkins in june, but was not expecting to get in and thus have to relocate so quickly, so i haven’t had a chance to save money for moving expenses.  

i’m a trans person, and going into nursing with the specific goal of making medical situations as comfortable and non-traumatizing as possible for queer and trans people.  it was the nurses who i had contact with when i first started transitioning who helped me the most, and if i could do that for just one person i would feel like i’ve accomplished something.  but hopefully i can do that for a lot of people!  i’m lucky enough to feel comfortable and safe as an out trans person, and i fully plan on using that privilege to try to educate the other people in my program about how to interact with queer and trans people in an appropriate and comforting way.  

please post this far and wide!  seriously anything helps.  

Could everybody who works at McDonalds have your jobs? Is that something that’s possible? And if they did, who would work at McDonalds? The economy isn’t like a video game where we’re all competing individually for a high score and if we all worked hard enough we’d all be billionaire CEOs… or even we’d all be at above minimum wage jobs.

That’s not something that can be happened. The economy is structured like this. It has to be structured like this or it won’t work, because our society is based around division of labor. If there weren’t people picking crops, you wouldn’t have food. If there weren’t people cooking food, you couldn’t get food that you didn’t cook yourself. If there weren’t people digging ditches and laying asphalt, you wouldn’t have roads to drive on.

It is necessary and thus inevitable that there will be people in these kinds of jobs, and more people in these kinds of jobs than say working in a gun store (Family business? Or maybe you knew the owner, I bet. Some kind of personal connection. But you worked hard for everything you have, right? Just a shot in the dark.), and more people with good retail jobs than high-powered executives. 

Hard work by an individual can’t change that.

Things don’t need to be structured so that the people who will inevitably be in the entry level service jobs—people doing jobs that we need—are working starvation wages, and in fact, the current state of affairs is unsustainable and causing a slow death spiral. The fact that we’re paying people who do necessary work less than they need to live is putting enormous strain on them—that necessary workforce we depend on—and on society’s tax base, because… well… they can’t just not live (except the ones who do actually die from poor health brought on by lack of medical care and poor nutrition), right?

So we end up paying the stuff their lazy, mooching, parasitic employers who are getting fat on the public dime won’t.

I mean, that’s welfare, right? If McDonalds or Wal-Mart pays its employees less than they need to live and society has to make up the gap with public spending… McDonalds and Wal-Mart are effectively pocketing our tax dollars, aren’t they? Weird how no one complains about that. The people who are using food stamps to eat aren’t getting rich off food stamps… they spend them and gone. Their employers? Every $1 of food stamps their employees need is $1 that according to all economic law, common sense, and basic decency, their employer ought to be paying them. That we subsidize the greed of corporations and then blame the victims of that greed for their laziness is just a sign of how much most of us don’t understand about how jobs work.

It should be impossible for an employer who can’t pay a living wage to stay in business. They have failed to meet the basic operating costs of a business that depends on human labor.

Last week I had a lovely conversation with a journalist from the Washington Post who is looking to interview non-binary identified people in non-urban areas in the US. It sounds like she’s doing lots of research beforehand and taking a personalized approach.