Whose Baby is That?

i got the first dose and almost immediately fainted. they had to call in a whole medical team and it was a huge fucking deal

i was kicked out of the study and got a phone call later where they were supposed to tell me what the drug was, so i could avoid it in the future. they told me it was saline water. a placebo. i fainted from the placebo effect.

anyway, it's been a few months and i just got an email from the same department asking me to be a research participant in a new study: testing the effects of open-label placebo.

open label placebo is when the subjects and the researchers all know it's a placebo. they're testing the power of my mind. my power to imagine anything.

We are just another type of woman, like white women, or black women, or Scottish women, or blonde women, or curly-haired women, or Southern women, or loud women, or literally any other kind of woman that you can think of. If you can understand why it's wrong to write it "canadianwomen," then you understand why it's wrong to write "transwomen."

BUT

It wasn't that long ago that banks and companies would refuse to serve gay people. People are going all the way up to the Supreme Court to enshrine the right not to serve LGBTQ people in their business. Rainbow capitalism showed which companies were safe to do business with and it pressured other companies to do the same.

Likewise, companies did and do try to discrominate against LGBTQ employees. Rainbow capitalism let employees be open about their identities and feel safe. The 50 year old gay man marching with Bank of America may have hidden his sexuality for decades because it wasn't safe to come out at work.

It helped set top down societal values and norms that LGBTQ people are a welcome part of society.

It pressured companies to adopt nondiscrimination policies and DEI policies.

It made companies donate to pride celebrations and LGBTQ causes.

with mixed success, it provided powerful and visible allies for political change, like the Respect for Marriage Act. Businesses pulled out of North Carolina and forced it to go back on a bathroom bill.

The drawdown of rainbow capitalism has real consequences. Pride celebrations losing corporate sponsorships means they are not able to hold those celebrations. DEI programs are being rolled back. Companies are buying less from queer owned businesses. Support for gay marriage is actually decreasing in polls.

Are these all cause and effect? No. Is it sometimes just a lagging indicator? Yeah. Are fair weather allies like big corps really not great? Yeah.

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

We're asking our community to stand with us in protecting the animals, habitats, people and future of Nashville Zoo.

A proposed 69,000-square-foot data center is planned for property directly adjacent to the Zoo. While developers claim the facility will have no impact, no environmental studies or impact assessments have been conducted to evaluate potential effects on our animals, visitors, staff, or the surrounding community.

Data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity and water; straining power grids, depleting natural resources, and damaging our watershed. With nothing more than the word of a profit-seeking developer, how are we to know this new data center will not lead to irreversible damage to the animals we exist to protect?

We cannot afford to find out years from now how this facility has negatively impacted our 1.4 million annual visitors, our local community, or the 3,000 animals entrusting us with their care. We are calling on the Nashville community to join us in our fight to stop this data center from being built, now.