we're still here

The police ruled it a suicide. The family and local community demanded an investigation. The police refused to change their ruling.

Juliana Nzita, A 16 year old Black girl, was just found hanging from a tree on church grounds in Charlotte, NC. Police have ruled it a suicide, despite hanging ourselves from trees being like the one communally agreed way Black folks ain’t killing ourselves.

Every time I go on Twitter or Facebook I learn about another recent lynching or missing Black person going mostly unreported. Half the reason I keep an active account on either of those sites is because they’re the only place I can find out about the violence happening to Black and Trans people reasonably quickly.

Non-Black and/or non-US based people often wonder why so many left-leaning Black folks in the US try to operate alternate justice systems within smaller community such as restorative justice, transformative justice, etc. when “all over the world, activists and their ancestors have fought for access to legal systems like this” and this is why.

Our legal system is explicitly designed to kill and enslave Black people. Our legal system from the cops to the lawyers and courts (one of the few times we got justice) to the prisons is legalized slavery where prisons are privatized and corporations are encouraged to maximize their profit by incentivizing every part of this system to hold as many people as possible.

Black folks can be proven innocent after years of time in prison or on death row and still killed by the state or dying in prison because the goal was never justice, it was to keep culling and controlling the Black population.

And outside of the system, we are lynched, raped, abused, trafficked, and robbed by those involved in our legal system, lives often irreparably destroyed, entire lives disappeared with no justice because that is the point, not a flaw. It’s almost always those in the legal system or their families and friends doing this, so that it can be ruled a suicide or a runaway or intracommunity issues and swept away.

A census can understand population level trends just fine without storing your assigned sex as part of your legal identity. They can ask for this information in the census. The census tracking population level data is not the same as your assigned sex being permanently part of your legal identity. (At least, the way my country does a census.)

Your doctor can know your anatomy by you communicating it to them if/when it is relevant. There is never a time when they might need to know something that could only be conveyed by your assigned sex being officially relayed to them via government documentation. You can just use your words. The same way you tell your doctor any other part of your medical history.

People respond to "the government doesn't need to store your assigned sex as part of your legal identity" as if they are hearing "no one should ever acknowledge gender or sex at all" but that's not what's being said.

Your birth certificate conveys important legal information about you. Your name, as a designation. Your parents, as they have a legal obligation to you. Your place of birth, as that place has a legal obligation to you. Date and time of birth, since age is important for application of some laws.

And sex. That's on there too. But what is the legal relevance? What laws is the government going to apply to you differently based on what sex is on your birth certificate? I can only think of one thing my government really uses that for, and that is to determine who has to sign up for the draft. And guess what, fuck that shit anyway. The government also used to use this to decide who is allowed to marry who. They don't do that anymore. For now.

“If you're American, you've almost certainly heard about how Indigenous reservations were and are located on whatever land the US doesn't want anyway. That they're just a way to whisk away undesirables until the land becomes useful to the US. That's the two-state solution.”

Two state solution is living side by side with people that tried to exterminate you with land theft genocide ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism When we say land back We mean all land stolen by settler colonizers Not just half of it to appease colonizers or respectability politics

“it’s worth mentioning that the proposal of a “two-state solution” is exactly what was offered to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas by European settler colonizers as a peaceful way to coexist.”

Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.

More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.

This is the equivalent to camp executions the Nazis did. It's exactly the same thing