Trash Fire

Both options are great.

Because the thing is, when bigots pick fights, they are 100% counting on you to get louder than them. Or meaner. They want you to react emotionally and provide fodder for their 'You're Too Emotionally Immature To Understand' cannon.

What they aren't expecting you to do is say one of the following phrases in a polite, concerned tone:

Are you okay?

That's not the kind of language I was raised to use with others.

Do you need a moment to think on why that wasn't acceptable?

This is no way to engage in intelligent conversation. Please try that again in a kinder tone if you'd like this to continue. (I really like this one because it lets you turn their public-shame rhetoric around)

For those of you who'd are spiteful and/or dealing with Fundamentalists/Evangelicals/generally shitty Christians:

What's happening in your life to cause you this much anger? I can't imagine hurting so badly that I need to hurt other people.

Who taught you it was acceptable to treat other people this way? Certainly not the Jesus I remember.

Whatever happened to 'judge not lest ye be judged'?

If I talked like that in front of my parents or grandparents I would be ashamed.

I think there's something you need to pray on before we try and have this conversation.

And my all time favorite:

"It sounds to me like there are some seriously dark and angry forces at work in your heart."

(Nothing stops a Christian bigot in their tracks faster than implying the Devil is causing their bigotry. But you MUST be calm, polite, and gentle with your tone and wording. It is absolutely fair to twist the rules and play them at their own game, but you gotta play hard.)

About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.

The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.

It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.

Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.

They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”

“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”

It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone. 

And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.

So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”

The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.

“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”

When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.

They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.

When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”

After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.

Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.

It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.

We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.

She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”

Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”

“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.

“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”

so i was realizing i was queer and not actually a fan of the conservative party about the same time OP was. i’d been raised conservative and evangelical, in the southwest and also in florida, and everyone i knew for most of my life was that way.

so in early 2005, I hadn’t really followed anything about gay rights or anything like that until extremely recently. I didn’t know much about gay rights, but I knew gay people had gotten AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and I knew that they weren’t able to get married or join the army, and I knew my favorite character in First Wives Club was Annie’s adult daughter who was a lesbian college student and was complete #stylegoals for me in the early aughts.

In fall of 2004, I’d met some other kids who were about a grade behind me at a NaNoWriMo event, and I’d ended up going to see the tour of RENT that came through with one of them. They became, quite quickly, my very best friends, and all three of them were queer (two of them even started dating around when I met them, I think). They weren’t religious the way i was, they were liberal (as much as you generally got in high school in 2005), and they were newish friends but they were kinder and more supportive than anyone i’d ever met through church. They were the ones who’d reach out to me when i was having a rough time to make sure i was okay, they were the ones concerned about my wellbeing when i wasn’t sleeping or something. They were queer but… they were good people and i could recognize that in them. I thought that maybe they shouldn’t be doing gay stuff, but I was also starting to wonder why that was a bad thing in the first place. Literally could not figure out what harm could come from two girls or two boys loving each other.

I remember a month or two before i finally came out to those friends and kissed the girl who is now my wife, my mom and i got in a fight about me being friends with them because they weren’t “appropriate friends”. and i was mostly just tired and annoyed and prepared to go ‘okay mom’ until she was done rather than it being a fight, because I’d heard this before about my friend Willow and done the same thing.

but then she said “people LIKE THAT won’t be there for you when you need them. they will abandon you at the first sign of trouble.” To this day i’m not 100% sure if she meant non-christian or if she meant ~QUEER~ (or both), but either way i went from ‘just wait it out and pretend to agree’ to absolutely incandescently angry in the time it took me to parse what she’d said.

I lost my temper completely and for once I didn’t and still don’t feel bad about it. I screamed at her at the top of my lungs over this: about how they were the only ones who’d BEEN there for me, about how they didn’t need me to be perfect to be acceptable, about how they loved me even when i screwed up and had never ONCE made me feel like i was unworthy of love because I didn’t live up to some standard I could never quite reach. Unlike everyone i’d ever met through church and ESPECIALLY unlike her and my dad.

and in retrospect while i turned my sexuality over in my head a bit longer to be sure, i think that’s when i knew i was queer and that I wasn’t ashamed of it and was in fact proud of it. I parsed it at the time as pride in my friends, but looking back? It was pride in me. Because i didn’t want to be part of any family that would talk so cruelly about people who’d been so kind, just because of who those people loved and who they did or didn’t pray to. And I knew I DID want to be part of a family of misfits and outcasts who refused to sit down and shut up while people treated others like that.

In 2005 it was scary sometimes even just to openly be an ally of queer people, let alone openly queer yourself. Things had improved in a lot of ways, but it was still scary. You still couldn’t get married, which meant that if something happened to you, your spouse had no legal rights to make medical decisions, keep custody of your kids, keep your possessions, plan your funeral. You still couldn’t come out if you were in the military. There weren’t feel good queer stories that were easy to find - even the well written stories were almost exclusively tragic. (I discovered To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar in late 2005 or early 2006, and it was the only story I had for YEARS where there were queer characters and they got a happy ending. I relished it. I still do.)

The point of all this is that I was proud, I wanted to be queer and to not sit quietly and assimilate but be loud and proud and unapologetic, but by fucking god it was scary and not always safe, so sometimes I did end up hiding it. And then things got better. Not everything, but… I was able to get legally married to my wife. I was able to get a testosterone prescription without needing to be psychologically pathologized. I was able to find a job in the midwest of all places where I can have “he/him” in my email signature but still wear skirts and not have any of the people I work with (at one point they’d all been 40+) question it or push back. We were helping the world keep blooming into someplace that doesn’t suck so much all the time!

But it’s starting to get worse again. My state’s passed legislation trying to dictate public bathroom use based on genitals. The supreme court is overturning many landmark decisions, and I know the moment they can, they’re coming for Obergefell v. Hodges, the legislation that made my legal marriage valid in all states (including the one I currently live in), not just the state I was married in (which is not the state I currently live in).

All trans people in the United States need to operate under the assumption that their care could be effectively banned with as little as 2 weeks' notice. Even if you live in a blue state. Even if you are an adult.

This effective ban in Missouri is a shock and if you are affected, you can find some tips in my planning for the bad bills barreling through in Florida.

Erin tracks anti-trans legislation in the US. Here's her latest risk map

If you’re trans, GET THE FUCK OUT OF RED STATES IF YOU HAVE THE MEANS TO DO SO. If you’re trans in a blue state and/or are trans and have the means after you get out of a red state, help others who can’t afford to do so get out.

All trans people in the United States need to operate under the assumption that their care could be effectively banned with as little as 2 weeks' notice. Even if you live in a blue state. Even if you are an adult.

This effective ban in Missouri is a shock and if you are affected, you can find some tips in my planning for the bad bills barreling through in Florida.

Erin tracks anti-trans legislation in the US. Here's her latest risk map

Reading that emergency order, it is written in a way that presumes the legitimacy of transition.

Don't get me wrong: the motive and goal is absolutely to discourage and frustrate *all* attempts at transition.

But it is written by people who are unwilling to admit that's their goal; they really feel unable to simply come out and say, "I think trans people are freaks who undermine the natural order and I just want them to go away."

Instead, they have to pretend to others, and maybe even themselves, that they are simply safeguarding the health of their countrymen, and ensuring that transition is done safely and in cases of medical necessity.

The rhetorical advantage to the anti-trans right is that they can pull in moderates. The kind of moderate who doesn't want to consider themselves a bigot but who is uncomfortable with the increasing prevalence of trans people can convince themselves that they are merely being cautious about mental health and dangerous physical intervention.

But this has a disadvantage as well, which is that it's very easy to point out a bunch of ways in which the actions being taken aren't actually consistent with the stated goals at all.

This order contains a truly bizarre grab bag of information that people must be told during transition, for example, patients must be informed that,

"Multiple observational studies conclude that nearly all children prescribed puberty blockers for gender dysphoria have later been prescribed cross-sex hormones."

First off, yeah no shit. Second of all, that's the kind of thing you dig up if you're looking for alarming news articles about the rise of transition, I cannot imagine how it would make me more informed as a patient, other than... Like... As a suggestion of another procedure I might like to try?

Patients must also be told:

"A study of 1,655 parental reports found that 'parents tended to rate their children as worse off after transition' and 'that parents believed gender clinicians and clinics pressured the families toward transition';"

I'm not going to debate that study but rather point out what a completely batshit thing that would be to tell a 40 year old who wanted to transition. If I came in for a medical treatment as an adult and they told me that a survey of parents said that they didn't think the treatment was good for their children I'd ask what the fuck the doctor was smoking.

The emergency order also says that patients who are transitioning must be told that

"The FDA has issued a warning that puberty blockers can lead to brain swelling and blindness"

Wow, that sounds super dangerous! I assume that the emergency order requires every child who is prescribed puberty blockers to get that warning?

"(1) Covered Gender Transition Intervention” or “Intervention” means the provision or prescription of any puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, or surgery, for the purpose of transitioning gender, decreasing gender incongruence, or treating gender dysphoria, and does not include: ... (B) treatment for precocious puberty;"

Oh, got it. I guess all parents agree that precocious puberty is worse than "brain swelling and blindness" so there's no particular need to warn those patients.

Etc. etc.

My point is, if you assume that the MO Attorney General is only doing what's necessary to protect the health of people seeking transition, this order is utter nonsense.

But *even in Missouri* the AG feels the need to pretend that's what he's doing.

Blue states could turn at any moment thanks to a few bad actors inspired by what is being piloted in Red super-majorities - it's especially wild the overreach we're seeing at the court and AG level. And anti-trans bills or executive orders could enact quickly on a national level in a GOP-led federal administration. Not comforting given how close we are to a presidential election.

But, I love your energy to write off the red states as an uneducated, separate country. How progressive! Do you also think those of us who live here (especially those who don't want to move, despite the danger) deserve what we get? Because a lot of folks sure do and love telling that to our faces! 😆

There's a huge density of marginalized people living in red states, did you know that? But who cares, right?

But humor me a moment. Here's a map showing how the majority of Black folks live in the South.

And let's take a look at the density of trans folks - interesting how so many Southern states have a higher density than liberal coastal strongholds like California!

The folks passing this hateful legislation are neither inbred hicks nor stupid. Or even always in the majority. Roughly eight-in-ten Americans say transgender people face at least some discrimination. But gerrymandering and voter suppression are gonna do their things despite public opinion.

This is all a coordinated, national (one could argue international thanks to tactics-swapping with the UK) effort to suppress trans rights as part of a larger scheme to destroy bodily autonomy.

There's emails that prove this coordination is planned rather than uneducated "barbarians" being randomly reactionary. (One of the major players here operates in Idaho, a famous Southern state, as you all know.)

Yes, it's overwhelmingly white Christo-fascism, but it's foolish to assume this is a Southern phenomenon. Or even a rural one -- I can't tell you how many "upstanding" small business owners and Instagram wine moms are the current faces of hate.

With over 400 anti-lgbt bills being proposed or in motion across the country, there's hate to combat in every state, even Blue ones! Have a click around the ACLU's state-by-state breakdown!

But yeah, calling the South a bunch dumb hicks and fantasizing about the burning of and military occupation of cities that also included (and still include) huge concentrations of marginalized people is an amazing strategy, you keep at it, sweetie. I love when Northerners have a boner about the Civil War as if they personally ended slavery and remind us poor Southern folks how backwards we are.

(As a side note, Missouri is a red state, yes. Historically it was the South, but its contemporary identity is more the Midwest. But yeah, let's all piss on Red states, they're irredeemable, amirite?)

Oh, btw, here's a Bug Bunny gif just for you, since Florida is where I currently live (and have lived all my life) and we're also a shit stain on America. Lol, Florida Man!

(Did you know that the Florida Man phenomenon is an artifact of our "Sunshine Laws" that give the public broad access to public records, including arrests & mugshots, and that weird shit happens in every state, it just isn't as visible. And wrt our lack of education -- a lot is due to the phenomenon of rich Blue state conservatives coming to retire here and deprioritizing school funding, which only contributes to the battles over education down here.)

Ha ha, Bugs Bunny, what a wacky little guy.

Anyway, love your helpful input for the cause and reinforcing the myth of both the coastal elite and the North being post-racism/queerphobia! This definitely helps poor trans people, especially those in red states, plan for the escalating genocide! We love being collateral damage! 🥰

(I hope I don't have to make it obvious I agree that Reconstruction was bungled and a huge part of why the United States is how it is, but holy shit, knock off this ignorant, blanket anti-South bullshit. You're only hurting the marginalized people who live here with that attitude.)

------------

THAT OUT OF THE WAY

I am going to re-link my advice for trans folks in Florida, as much of it will apply to what's happening right now in Missouri. The only extra nugget I'd suggest - given the immediate HRT emergency - is for folks on testosterone to consider HRT pellet implants, in case you need something longer lasting and are worried a gel/injectable Rx might expire soon.

And my partner at the end of this post wrote an excellent list of things allies can do to help, even if you're short on cash.

I genuinely wish I could see inside Musk’s head or at least get an explanation for how he was thinking his plans would work out.

Back when I was at SpaceX, Elon was basically a child king. He was an important figurehead who provided the company with the money, power, and PR, but he didn’t have the knowledge or (frankly) maturity to handle day-to-day decision making and everyone knew that. He was surrounded by people whose job was, essentially, to manipulate him into making good decisions.

Titan - 5x7″, watercolour, gouache and gold ink. 

This is my submission for the Month of Love topic “Metamorphasis”. 

also tumblr:

they’re just here to play with us.

COMMERCIAL bots suck.

My roommate recently came home pale-faced, like he’d seen a ghost. More like witnessed a massacre. Mass-firings were just done at his company. His job, he’d been assured, was safe. All of his coworkers weren’t so safe, and he had to get texts and phone calls from his work-friends, people he’d worked alongside for years, people he‘d gone out to have drinks with, learn they were no longer employed. To say he had survivor’s guilt would not be hyperbole.

Was this because the company had fallen on hard times? The pandemic has been rough for a lot of industries. No, actually, the company had turned a very nice profit both last year and previous, even in such a troublesome market.

The problem was, you see, the company’s stock price hadn’t risen quite as high as had been projected. They’d made money, sure. Quite a lot of money, in fact. But too many people had projected, i.e., bet the company would do better.

How did the company offset this “loss”? Easy: fire people. Quickest and easiest way to pad the numbers.

No but you don’t understand stock had fallen a percentage point! There was no other way!

We see it all the time. Hugely successful companies reporting ‘record-breaking’ profits then fire huge segments of their workforce - the very people responsible for those record-breaking profits. Why? The money “saved” on personnel costs can boost the stocks even higher!

If your company is struggling, not turning a profit, losing money, people expect layoffs. But to work hard, be successful, your company churning along strong and healthy, and you still lose your job? For what? Because half a percentage point that was dictated by speculation, guessing, by gambling that things would go up or down a certain amount on a graph of rich-people feelings?

I wonder how next year’s speculations will be affected with the information that the company laid off a lot of the people responsible for last year’s profits? Probably not much because the workers are just the components at the company; it’s the leadership that drives the ship, that makes the successes.Those leaders whose bonuses are coincidentally decided by, among other things, the stock price.