Space Walrus Lady

Yesterday (Feb 9 2023) my home state, Missouri, announced a government investigation into organizations providing care and support for transgender kids.

This is after an administrator at Washington University’s Pediatric Transgender Center came out in a now-viral article about how the Transgender Center was “rushing” trans kids into care and “mutilating” us. She gave away the personal information of many of my trans loved ones who, like me, received care from the center, and she described our bodies as horrifying. Everything she said was a lie.

No goddamn trans person is “rushed” into medical care, especially not trans minors in states controlled by far-right politicians. No one gets medical care for funsies in the only industrialized country without free healthcare.

I received care through this transgender center as a minor and it took over a year and countless doctor’s notes and visits to begin any sort of medical treatment. You can hear this same story from any trans person, especially — AGAIN — minors in Republican-controlled states. I had to see fertility doctors at 16 years old who tried to convince me not to go on T.

My mom, because she’s amazing, joined a support group when I came out. She is now the president. She had to alert the police yesterday after journalists kept coming TO HER HOUSE.

I finally got a call from a Washington Post journalist today to interview me, an actual trans person who received care from the Pediatric Transgender Center. She spoke with me for only 20 minutes and didn’t know the most basic facts about being trans. No doubt my words will be published in a ridiculous thought piece that only adds to the oppression of trans minors.

My medical transition has brought me nothing but joy. I was simply lucky to begin it at 17.

I am so scared. Trans people will be eliminated in the US as this progresses. This is not just a “red state” issue, either. Please extend compassion to your trans siblings and keep up with the trans eliminationist legislation and actions throughout the US.

most of their job is dealing with the kinds of assholes who think black market tiger cubs are a great idea right up until someone gets mauled, except these are even bigger assholes with black market Smilodon cubs that they are even less equipped to care for

this is the most straightforward and therefore relatively headache-free part of their job, because it’s the same “put that thing back where it came from or so help me” song and dance every time

it’s also significantly less depressing than the trophy hunters who don’t even want an alive extinct animal. those are extra annoying because you have to undo the time travel that let them kill that poor Megatherium or thylacine or anklyosaur or whatever, and it’s always so much extra paperwork.

and those people suck, definitely, and have fully earned a stint in Time Jail. no question. but they still do not create anywhere near as much work as the obsessive hobbyists with their exhaustively careful best practices and worryingly good track-covering. also, weirdly, it’s almost always birds with them?

like. the guys who will flagrantly abuse Time Law to bird-nap breeding pairs just long enough to raise one clutch of eggs apiece, and return them seamlessly to their spots on the timeline. who are so determined to keep their pet (ha) projects going that no one even realizes what they’re doing until they have an entire stable breeding population of passenger pigeons up and running. who are now the reason that reps from six different zoos are about to start throwing hands right in front of you over who gets dibs.

You could build a novel around the relationship between the time cop and the rogue bird lover. The time cop caught the bird lover over the passenger pigeons. They went to time jail for 10 years outside the timeline, and then were hired to manage the passenger pigeons by an accredited zoo's. The time cop suspects they're still up to something, but other than the passenger pigeons, all they appear to be doing is raising research colonies of perfectly ordinary birds. Except all the species they're working with were believed to be extinct at one point....

One thing real world zoos do now is...well...something like elven changelings if you think about it. They time the mating of a captive breeding pair to that of an isolated wild breeding pair in places where inbreeding is a serious risk. Then they swap a captive-born offspring for a wild-born--each breeding pair unknowingly raising a foster. Both zoos and the wild population get improved genetic diversity, without the risk inherent in "rewilding" a zoo-born adult. Doing that with birds and time travel would be even easier--grab an egg, take it to the future, raise and breed it, take an egg back to the original nest. The original parents raise their grandchild, not their child.

Or no, the cheetahs were an early legal attempt at extinction reversal that spurred the creation of the laws our rogue bird enthusiast is flouting. Cheetahs were hunted to near extinction by time travelers 100,000 years ago. The reestablished breeding population was so low that it led to the second near extinction 12,000 years ago--and the species's whole precarious existence since. Both hunting safaris and extinction reversal were banned at the same time.

additional worldbuilding:

a good chunk of their job is just accompanying legit researchers on authorized expeditions, which is boring as hell and mostly involves saying “no don’t touch that” every two minutes.

sometimes the authorized expedition is to a place that’s gonna get obliterated by a volcano in 48 hours, and there is at least one member of the department who thinks he should be allowed to bring a dune buggy/parasail/dirt bike/future extreme sport item of choice when this happens. he is not, and he is mad about it.

there is a tropical fish enthusiast working in the department. her home aquarium setup has completely flawless paperwork for every species, and anyone who says any of them were ever extinct is a filthy liar.

one of the sergeants is a Neanderthal. his name is Dave. technically he doesn’t need a job because he could live off the massive lawsuit settlement he won for being abducted from the Upper Paleolithic as a toddler by a well-meaning bioarchaeologist, but he likes to keep busy. he’s not complaining about having indoor plumbing and vaccines and all, but jeez, people, there are limits, y’know? he has a minnesota accent and this is never acknowledged or explained.

So, we now know on a direct statistical level that Dollar General is literally making the Vimes Boots Theory of Economic Unfairness into a part of its core business model.

Do not buy anything, literally*anything* from Dollar General without checking the expiration date.

In a two week period, I pulled $800 worth of expired product off the shelves, and personally crossed out all the barcodes and placed giant Xs on the packaging to prevent my coworkers or Store manager from “accidentally” putting them back on the shelf.

The store manager*literally* told me “hey stop pulling stuff from the shelf, I’m in trouble with the DM for having this much $$$ in damages”

So I looked at him and said “If I find expired product, I am pulling it. If you don’t want that to happen you need to actually rotate things.”

To which he blustered a bit and walked away, waving his hands.

Did you know that Baby products, such a formula, medicine, etc, all have to get pulled from the shelves a full month before their expiration date, to ensure that anyone buying it has time to use it all before it expires to avoid poisoning infants?

The second Dollar General I worked at (transferred with a move) had Baby formula and medicine on the shelves that had expired –

Wait for it!

Two. Fucking. Years. Previously.

Two YEARS. Two years ago! And they’re required by state law (in pa at least when I worked retail up there) to be pulled one month BEFORE it expires, and these fuckers were trying to sell baby products that expired 24 months ago.

And let’s not forget to mention they resold Returned Product which is very much illegal in the United States ! This includes everything from FOOD to goddamn fucking medicine. They slapped a 25% off sticker on the product and stuck it on the clearance rack so people would just assume it was on clearance instead of literal food or medicine that could have been tampered with.

Vendors such as Pepsi and Tastykake regularly “forgot” to rotate their displays because they knew no one at the store would notice or care that their products were expired two months ago.

I regularly pulled an entire displays worth of Pepsi and Tastykake products off the shelves because they were expired and put them in the back room to be collected in the proper ‘vendor return’s area…. Only to come in the next day and see the vendors had deliberately put them back on the shelves, because they make commission and they don’t want to take the hit of losing so many $ in sales.

So, that’s when the Sharpie made it’s first appearance. A big old X across every single Pepsi bottle cap and across the biggest logo , and a giant X across every single individually wrapped Tastykake package.

They stopped putting expired product *back* on the sales floor after that– didn’t stop them from trying to sneak in new expired crap though, because literally no one else at the entire store would ever, ever check dates, let alone pull product from the sales floor.

Dollar General is literally the shittiest possible job you can have. You are part of a staff of like. 5 employees total if you’re lucky and if one person misses a shift you’re there from open to close. You can be promoted to a key holder but you’re only making $2 over minimum wage of $7.25 and you’re not getting any benefits or sick days or literally anything to make up for the unparalleled stress that working their full time will give you when you have to pull 12 hour shifts., While people scream and throw shit at you across the registers.

If you currently work at a Dollar General and any of this sounds familiar, first of all next time someone says keep the receipt, use it to take the survey and exclaim about how much expired shit is in the store without giving it away that it’s an employee complaining, take a LOT of pictures and find a job somewhere else that actually pays you and gives you benefits for your work. If you work at Dollar General doing register and stocking and closing/opening manager duties congrats, you can go to literally any other retail job and have 90% less stress and 50%+ more pay.

We just moved into a new place and I brought my cat over today, she is most displeased. Shes a bit scared so she’s spent all her time under pillows. If I try to bring her out she just crawls right back into them

We took the drunk train home.

They were all absolutely infatuated with him and whispering about how much they wanted to pet him and then shushing each other saying “no that’s rude you can’t! just leave him alone!” so I told them they can pet him if they want and they were absolutely overwhelmed with happiness, while simultaneously being very concerned for his well-being, continually asking if I was very sure that it was okay and that I should please please tell them if I need them to leave him alone.

finally got it