beastly

Dipshit: "That's good parenting. Whatever he did that you're punishing him for by making him wear a dress, I bet he'll never do it again.

Father: "Oh, he's not being punished. He likes wearing dresses."

Dipshit: "And you allow that? You're a horrible father for indoctrinating your son into transgenderism."

--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: June 16, 1944—

In March of 1944, in the small town of Alcolu, South Carolina, two young white girls were found brutally murdered. Their names were Betty June Binniker, age eleven, and Mary Emma Thames, age seven. Alcolu was a working-class mill town, with racial segregation marked by a set of railroad tracks. There was little interaction between Black and white.

The girls had been riding their bicycles, seeking flowers to pick. As they passed by the Stinney house, they asked fourteen-year-old George and his little sister Aimé where they could find maypops. The girls were later found dead in a ditch from blunt-force trauma to their heads. Aimé said George was with her at the time of the murders, but police were looking for someone to pin them on.

The police showed up to the Stinney house while the parents weren’t home. Sister Aimé hid in the chicken coop as both George and his older brother Johnnie were hauled away in handcuffs.

Johnnie was later released, but George was questioned alone in a small room, without his parents or an attorney. Police claimed he confessed to the murders, but no evidence of a confession exists. He was kept prisoner for weeks without being permitted to see his parents. On April 24 there was a two-hour trial. George’s court-appointed attorney had political ambitions and did not question the police, who proclaimed that George had confessed. Neither did he call George’s sister as an alibi. After ten minutes of deliberation by an all-white jury, George Stinney was found guilty. George’s piece-of-shit attorney didn’t even bother to appeal.

On June 16, 1944, George Stinney was murdered by the state of South Carolina. The weapon used was the electric chair. He was only five feet tall and under a hundred pounds; the straps on the chair were too large for his small body, and prison officials used the Bible he was carrying as a booster seat. During electrocution, his bodily convulsions caused the mask to fall from his face, revealing a burned scalp and tears streaming from his eyes. Two additional jolts and eight minutes later, his teeth smoking, and one eye boiled away, he was finally pronounced dead. He wasn’t just murdered; he was tortured to death.

Seventy years later a circuit court judge proclaimed that George Stinney had not received a fair trial and vacated his conviction.

It may, however, help to explain why Gandalf never got married and why Merlin was a man. Because this is also a story about sex, although probably not in the athletic, tumbling, count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two sense unless the characters get totally beyond the author's control. They might.

This is a form of backdoor bigotry from both normative facts (there are more straight than gay relationships) and well represented bigoted beliefs (men are superior to women).

I am begging the UK trans community and its allies to attend the Mass Lobby at Parliament on June 25th, 11am-4pm, organised by Trans Solidarity Alliance.

The new EHRC Code of Practice pushes trans people out of toilets, hospital wards, and community spaces. It normalises gender policing based on appearance and stereotypes. It becomes statutory guidance in the UK by the end of June.

Trans people are now legally their assigned gender at birth and must join gendered spaces accordingly, but if they are perceived as their lived gender, they can also be ejected from those spaces. The guidance says: either break the law, or don’t pass too well.

A mass lobby is where you invite your MP to discuss your concerns with you in-person. Ask your MP to:

Demand full parliamentary scrutiny, debate, and use their free vote on the EHRC Code of Practice.

Support any motions rejecting the EHRC guidance. As of June 4th, Labour MP Nadia Whittome has submitted a prayer motion - Early Day Motion 240.

Write to Bridget Phillipson, the Minister for Women and Equalities about our concerns

Your MP does not have to be an ally, they do not have to respond to your email for you to show up and greencard them (details below the cut.) What matters is that as many people as possible show up.

I cannot stress this enough: Showing up in person matters. It is much more effective than petitions, emails, and letters.

It is a horrible, stressful time, and I am so sorry if you're trans and live in the UK. But I was at last year's mass lobby and the line for greencarding alone stretched around the back gates. It was a record breaking mass lobby and made us impossible to ignore. Let's do even better this time. Details under the cut:

Homicide rates across Europe and the United States

Gunpowder, Treason & Plot (2004)

For the first time in their marriage King James I tentatively reaches out to his wife Anne after he overhears her telling their children about her homeland Denmark.