Captainclovey

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:

I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study

after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines

et voila

GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!

bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata

birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female

BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus

genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??

Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis

my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on

this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg 🙏

BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos

the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise

ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!

aaaand another one bites the duck,

we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos

power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,

the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis

and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day 😭😭) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.

Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp

Bird number 14 out of 14,

The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius

thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.

That's bad enough!!!!!!!! But the entire idea of needing permission from state authorities to access anything labeled mature by our friendly AI overlords is some fucking Boll shit. Die Gedenken Sind Frie baby. This is all a reaction to people getting uppity about their lowly lowly rights and is being propped up by the same bad actors tht have made life unlivable. Fuck that shit.

"Well it's only being rolled out in Brazil and UK" Yeah, to start. "Well they're being forced to do this by laws." YOu know it's always really funny when these tech giants (Or whatever you call owning tumblr dot com) get really antsy about laws considering they pick and choose which ones they abide by.

tumblr just added an update that requires you to verify your age in order to view "mature content". I'm not sure how they do the verification (haven't yet checked), but given recent similar updates from things like Discord, it most likely involves sending them a photo of either your face or your ID.

In addition, over the past few months, and also years in the long-term, tumblr has been incorrectly marking things as mature content. These include:

Notifications about missing persons and requests for help

Posts about youth liberation

Posts about sex education

Posts about how the mature content is poorly implemented

Posts about being trans, more specifically about trans women and transmisogyny by both tumblr and users on tumblr

Non-sexual selfies by trans women/transfems

Trans womens'/transefems' ENTIRE BLOGS even if the blog contains no sexual content

Reblogs made by various blogs, mostly trans women, which add no additional content but somehow are marked as containing mature content, when the original post is not

Posts talking about racism and antiblackness both on and off tumblr

Posts by black people, especially black trans people, that are non-sexual

And likely many more I haven't seen

In essence, this update has mandated that a majority of users (within the UK and Brazil) must either a) submit their personal information to tumblr, a website whose moderation has been EXTREMELY biased against marginalised people and who I would not trust with my ID, or b) be excluded from absolutely all conversations tumblr decides are "mature content", whether they are actually sexual in nature or not. Furthermore, anyone not over 18 will also not be allowed to take part in these conversations, or even see them, or interact with many trans women or people of colour on this site, as tumblr decides.

This update is complete bullshit designed to censor and exclude marginalised people, poorly hidden under a guise of "protecting teenagers from sexual content", and they know it.