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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, please ask your MP to sign this.

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:

When signing the Gov.UK petition, DON'T FORGET TO CONFIRM YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS, OR THE SIGNATURE WON'T BE COUNTED

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

(Spoiler Warning)

From the beginning, the state of Pharloom has always been bleak. By this point, you've seen both the Citadel's rotten core and its ruination of the lands surrounding. And now, things are somehow worse--your attempts to free yourself and the people you've come to care about instead personally initiated the apocalypse. You descend from the cradle injured, barely able to stand at points, only to be confronted with enemies many times more powerful than they should be.

You survive the encounter, but you're far from safe. But your attempts to push on result immediately in collapsing amid the rubble of a Citadel that is barely recognizable. The screen fades to black and...

When your senses return to you, you're back at Songclave under Sherma's careful watch--wounds likely patched with the medical supplies that you helped him secure, in what now feels like another life altogether. It's far too grim to call the moment beautiful, but it is a relief, the first that you've had since the god-trap snapped shut.

But what marks this moment as significant to me isn't this spot of safety in the middle of an ongoing apocalypse. It isn't the relief that Sherma has survived, or even the pride at the mantle he's grown into as a leader and caretaker. What's most important to me is how you arrived in Songclave at all:

Many a poor pilgrim has already been lost to the destruction. You might have been too, if not for some fleeing pilgrims who found you fallen and carried you back to us.

Therein lies one of the core philosophies of the Hollow Knight games: that the world is inherently uncaring and cruel, but those circumstances do not create people who are inherently uncaring and cruel.

You survived because some random pilgrims found you, and though they were fleeing for their lives in the middle of a world-ending disaster, chose to carry you to safety.

This wasn't a friend like Sherma or the Second Sentinel; this wasn't a designated rescue crew looking for survivors. This was a group of random refugees, who could have endangered themselves further by rescuing an injured, unconscious stranger.

You never learn who saved you, never get to learn their motives or thank them for their help. The incident as a whole is never mentioned again.

Vetted by:

1. @el-shab-hussein and @nabulsi # 151 on the spreadsheet of Vetted Gaza Fundraisers List]

2. @riding-with-the-wild-hunt Here .

Dear friends of Palestine, friends of Gaza and friends of my family in Gaza!

FINALLY!!! We are at 99% of our goal in our campaign to evacuate the living hell of Gaza and rebuild our life in Ireland!

While people post Eid outfits, food, and family photos, my family in Gaza is trying to survive another day of bombs, hunger, fear, and unbearable heat.

There is NO safe place left in Gaza.

The bombardment continues every single day. The explosions never stop. And now summer has turned the tents they live in into literal ovens.

Imagine trying to sleep inside plastic and fabric under a burning sky while drones and airstrikes continue around you.

This is NOT a temporary hardship. My family has lived through this nightmare for more than two years.

Two years of displacement. Two years of terror. Two years of watching their lives collapse piece by piece.

I am in Ireland, studying and trying to build a future, while every day I fear getting the phone call that my family did not survive the night.

We have already come such a long way thanks to the incredible support from friends of Gaza and Palestine around the world. Truly, we would never have made it this far without you.

And now we are VERY close to reaching our final goal.

Our only goal is to evacuate my entire family from Gaza to Egypt temporarily, and then reunite safely together in Ireland.

Please do NOT abandon Gaza and my family because the headlines got quieter. Please don’t stop caring because the world moved on.

Share this. Reblog this. Donate if you can. Help me get my family out alive before it’s too late.

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....yes absolutely