BoomerDaCat

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

People speak of online "spaces" but online does not have physical space in it and that is the problem.

It's like if all the conversations people ever had in public had to take place in a huge warehouse-sized room where everyone could hear and see everyone else at the exact same volume and with the exact same clarity no matter where they were standing.

Some people are seriously discussing political action. Some people are goofing off. Someone is panhandling, someone is venting to their friends about something awful that happened to them, someone is giving a speech about a topic that interests them, someone is crying about the pain in their life, someone is just thinking out loud to themselves, a bunch of people just want to watch movies or hang out with their friends. Someone is trying to sell some junk. A bunch of people are passing around newspapers.

And all of these people can hear and see each other perfectly so that they don't even know if they themselves or anyone else is in an intimate conversation with people who sympathize, if they're having a town hall meeting, if they're attending a lecture, if they are behind the podium giving a lecture, if they're hanging out at the bar with friends, if they're in their friend's car, or if they're just in a public park watching the clouds.

If someone who thinks they're in the movie group makes a comment about the movie, the people who think they're in the audience at the lecture hall will think the movie watcher is the lecturer behind the podium. So, they will turn to their friends and say "wow, get a load of that guy, they just said..." but the people who think they are at a town hall meeting will think "wow, this is clearly an important concern," but the person who thinks they are crying to their friends is like "Seriously? We're talking about a MOVIE when my life is falling apart?"

Emotional support... support?

If you don't already know you have issues doing so, squat down real quick. Bend your knees all the way and touch the floor. Just make sure you can do it. Okay? For me? And then stand up all the way and make sure you can balance on one foot.

If there was ever a tumblr post worth sending to your mom, it's this one.

This is the very simple "starting from zero muscles" program I followed, highly recommend it or something similar: