Mel

Made this post about 15 minutes after the repair guy who fixed the pump on my dishwasher packed up his tools and left, as the dishwasher was whirring along doing my dishes from that morning.

because it's genuinely insane the things i've heard americans say 'america doesn't have' when it's just factually incorrect.

for some perspective: during my longest move i did by-car in the u.s., i drove ~3,000 miles. That's ~4,800 km. It took nearly 50 hours drive-times alone. Meaning, if I could have driven without stopping once, it would have taken nearly 50 hours. Of course I split that up over several days.

Driving that same distance here, If there's a ferry+road from Rabat (in Morocco) to Kyiv (Ukraine), I could take it and keep on going another several hours.

So you can understand how silly it is for someone from the u.s. to be asked to answer a question on behalf of the entirety of the u.s.—geographically, culturally, etc.

So now that we've said all that, I need you to know that I listened to a guy from Idaho tell an Irish person today, "yeah, we just don't really get snails much in America."

So are

colostomy bags

Diapers

insulin pumps

Oxygen systems

rollators

hearing aids

compression garments

prosthetics

FREEDOM AIDS

- service animals

- noise cancelling headphones/ear defenders

- wheelchair attachments

- fidgets

IT’S DISABILITY PRIDE MONTH YALL

Everyone I knew went to HB for HRT in Northwest Indiana and many of us on testosterone got completely fucked by doctors afraid of telehealth laws regarding the prescription of scheduled drugs across state lines. I watched two older guys in my life at the time struggle to get their testosterone that they had been getting consistently with HB for over a decade. I straight up fell through the cracks of their system because I had been getting my HRT through their youth clinic and was about to age out. That was the first time I stopped testosterone against my will because I couldn't get my prescription filled.

I was in my early 20's at the time and had a handful of adult trans mentors in their 30's-40's who said "Kid you should get out of here while you can because it's going to get bad here" so I saved and planned. And I did get out. And it did get worse. And I miss my hometown and my local queer community every single day. I miss the people who are still there struggling. My friends. My neighbors. The queer people that took me in and under their wings as my new extended family when I came out as a teenager.

Data from private employers with 100 or more employees showed that, as of 2020, between 50% and 55% of workers who classified themselves as nonbinary were in a low-paying category of jobs, those paying less than $30,679 a year, said the California Civil Rights Department. In comparison, 32% of male employees and 43% of female workers earned less than that amount. And between 35% and 40% of nonbinary workers were in the lowest-paying category of jobs, those paying $19,239 or less, compared with 22% of male employees and 30% of female employees.

2024 data: "5-10% of all reported non-binary workers were reported in the highest pay band, while 40-45% of all reported non-binary workers were reported in the lowest pay band."

Taryn versus Taryn (she/her) versus Taryn (they/them): A Field Experiment on Pronoun Disclosure and Nonbinary Hiring Discrimination

Nonbinary people have a gender identity that falls outside the male-female binary. To investigate hiring discrimination against this group, thousands of randomly generated fictitious resumes were submitted to job postings in pairs where the treatment resume contained pronouns listed below the name and the control resume did not. Two treatments were considered: nonbinary "they/them" and binary "he/him" or "she/her" pronouns congruent with implied sex. Hence, discrimination is estimated against nonbinary and presumed cisgender applicants who disclose pronouns. Results show that disclosing "they/them" pronouns reduces positive employer response by 5.4 percentage points. There is also evidence that discrimination is larger (approximately double) in Republican than Democratic geographies. By comparison, results are inconclusive regarding discrimination against presumed cisgender applicants who disclose pronouns; if discrimination does exist, it is of lower magnitude than discrimination against nonbinary applicants who disclose pronouns.

Workplace Experiences of Nonbinary Employees

The majority of nonbinary adults in the workforce are under age 35 (87%), and half (51%) are people of color. About three-quarters (74%) of nonbinary people in the workforce are making less than $50,000 a year. Our analysis [n=163] indicates that employment discrimination against nonbinary employees is persistent and widespread. At some point in their lives, about six in 10 nonbinary employees (59%) reported experiencing discrimination or harassment at work (including being fired, not hired, not promoted, or verbally, physically, or sexually harassed) because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Many nonbinary employees reported recent experiences of discrimination and harassment. Within the past year, 16% of nonbinary employees reported that they had been fired, not hired, or not promoted because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, and 20% reported experiencing harassment at work. One in four (26%) nonbinary employees reported experiencing adverse treatment because of their LGBTQ status at their current job. Many nonbinary employees also reported engaging in actions to avoid discrimination and harassment, including hiding their nonbinary identity and changing their appearance or behaviors. Nearly half (45%) of nonbinary employees were not out to their current supervisor, and 17% were not out to any of their co-workers. Two-thirds (67%) of nonbinary employees reported downplaying their LGBTQ status at work by doing one or more of the following: changing their speech, mannerisms, appearance, or how they dress at work; avoiding work social events; or not talking about their outside activities at work. Nearly six in 10 (58%) nonbinary employees have looked for another job because of how they were treated based on their sexual orientation or gender identity at work, and half (50%) reported leaving a job because of such treatment.

The labour market outcomes of transgender individuals

I do not trust non-Native, American goyim who claim the title of antizionist but question or recoil at the idea of landback in the United States.

I do not trust non-Native, American goyim who claim the title of antizionist but do not engage with and support their local Native and Indigenous communities.

I do not trust non-Native, American goyim who claim the title of antizionist but question the idea of granting Hawai'i, Puerto Rico, and US occupied land in the Caribbean sovereignty. Who go on vacation to the "US Virgin Islands" and Hawai'i.

I do not trust non-Native, American goyim who claim the title of antizionist but ignore the way our government actively starves and kills the people who live on reservations.

I do not trust non-Native, American goyim who claim the title of antizionist but do not think about repairing the damage done by our own genocides, our own ethnic cleansings, on the land we currently reside on.

If you are a non-Native, American goyim who claims the title of antizionist can you name the peoples who stewarded the land you live on before settler colonialism murdered and displaced them?

Israel's ethnostate and genocide against the Palestinian people needs to end. Palestinians deserve peace, and prosperity, and reparations for the atrocities committed against them. But have you also looked in your own backyard recently? Because you are actively living in Isreal's end goal.

Wipe out the "inconveniences" and "prosper" for so long your own descendants hardly feel the aftermath beyond the "boons" while the descendants of the people you attempted to wipe out struggle and suffer under the effects of your colonization for centuries.

Question and rally against your own government's homegrown atrocities too because if you're not, you might just be looking for a convenient avenue for your own antisemitism instead of being genuinely anti-colonialist. If you really were against settler colonialism and the long term effects of genocide and ethnic cleansing you'd be rallying behind your Native neighbors too.

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.

I was vaguely openly queer, as in, I hadn't told my parents I was trans yet but I had an online girlfriend when I was 14 that they knew about, I was publicly identifying as pan, and was involved in my high school GSA, etc. and I needed a private space outside of school and the internet where I could process my traumas while being out as trans. As such it was really important to me that I had a queer or queer friendly therapist. Now that was hard to come by in Indiana even in the 2010's (especially bc a lot of the ones advertised were covert conversion therapists) but we did finally find one that took our insurance. A middle aged, married cis lesbian, who advertised as having experience with trans clients*.

I didn't know this until my early 20's when my mom and I were reconciling her poor reaction to my eventual public coming out as trans at 18, but my therapist was very convinced that I was not trans when I came out to her. She shared the fact that I told her I was trans to my parents and explicitly told all four of them she doubted me in her sessions with them about me.

I'm thinking about this all because the anniversary of my dad's passing was recently and I've been doing a lot of reflecting on my conflicting feelings about the ways he treated me as a teen (that was part of why I was in therapy, and why my parents were having sessions with my therapist without me). Then the memory of a day where he took me to Barnes & Noble and made me pick out several fashion magazines because "he thought I needed to be more feminine" came to mind and it clicked.

My therapist probably told him to do that.

It always struck me as very odd that my dad did that because while he was always kind of a "girl dad" with me growing up, he was also the first parent to fully embrace me when I publicly came out and never had any issue with my general lack of femininity when I was younger - in fact he often encouraged it and was very progressive about my upbringing... Until I started seeing my therapist and suddenly he was very concerned about me being a young woman and not being "feminine enough".

If that isn't a perfect example of transandrophobia, anti-trans masculinity, the gendered correction young people perceived as young women experience when exploring our genders/gender expression, and the private violence cis queer adults in positions of power can inflict on trans youth - particularly that adult cis women can inflict upon trans masculine youth, I don't know what is.

“Native people used to live in this National Park” No. They still do.

“Native people used to tell these stories-” No. They still do.

“Native people used to use this plant as a natural remedy-” No. They still do.