I Am So Important

uhh

dennys

what are you playing

I–

Handmade Leather Bags by Benny Bee Leather on Etsy

This is what happens when conservatives restrict the rights of transgender students and it does not go the way they expect: 

At this year’s Texas state wrestling championships, a boy won the girls’ contest. That’s because 17-year-old champion Mack Beggs is trans; he’s banned from competing in the boys’ league. In Texas, wrestlers are required to compete as the gender they were assigned at birth, and so Mack beat the girls in his weight class (again, in the girls’ championship, even though he is a boy) and he went on to win. Whoops. 

Some parents of female wrestlers have vocally objected to the fact that Beggs, who has been taking testosterone as part of his gender transition, is wrestling girls. One parent even filed a lawsuit against the league that organizes public school sports.

The controversy has been heightened because his victory arrived on the heels of President Trump’s decision to rescind Obama administration guidelines on trans students’ rights in school. […]

“He wants to compete against boys,” Merritt says. But under Texas rules, boys can’t compete against girls, and students must compete as the gender marked on their birth certificate. That meant if Beggs wanted to wrestle, he had to do it in the girls’ league. Which he did, with great success — he had an undefeated season.

Not sure what to tell you, Texas. This is what will happen if you don’t respect transgender students for who they really are. Let it also be known that Texas is considering a bill similar to North Carolina’s HB2, which would force students like Mack to only use facilities matching their birth-assigned sex, leading to even more situations like this one.

this is something white supremacists and neo-nazis say. it mirrors almost perfectly the lie they’ve been disseminating for centuries: jews are the orchestrators of our own oppression; antisemitism is a jewish scheme. (take this cartoon from stormfr*nt for example). this is the type of rhetoric holocaust denial is built on.

The Austin music industry isn’t whole. The business underlying “The Live Music Capital of the World” stands bifurcated between its lucrative festivals (SXSW principally, but Austin City Limits, Fun Fun Fun Fest and others, too) and, as studies have found, a dwindling local music scene. Austin didn’t become the self-styled “Capital” solely by hosting a handful of gargantuan events, which were first born from and since have capitalized handsomely on Austin’s brand to increase their now-global footprints, drawing outsized attention to the city. These large events and a rapidly expanding population have put an unintended strain on the infrastructure of the local music scene which helped create them and on which they still rely — it’s hard to throw innumerable shows, as during SXSW, in a city with fewer and fewer venues to put them.

Pressed Leaf and Flower Wall Hangings and Coasters by kmpressed on Etsy

Schwertner, the Republican chair of the Texas Senate’s Committee on Health and Human Services, spent Wednesday morning introducing and defending a bill that would ban most women from donating fetal tissue from their abortions to science. His legislation was bundled with two other anti-abortion bills — one to throw out the safest abortion procedure for second-trimester pregnancies, the other to mandate all abortion remains are buried and cremated — penned by two other GOP senators, Charles Perry and Don Huffines. After discussing the bills amongst themselves, the committee opened the floor to three hours of public testimony — which started with a bang. “I’m here on behalf of all absent women, families and doctors across the state whose lives will be negatively impacted by this bill,” began the testimony of Maggie Hennessy, a UT student and intern with NARAL Pro-Choice Texas. She was the fourth person to speak (of more than 50). Hennessy verbally shredded Sen. Huffines bill against second-trimester abortions. Her voice shook with anger as she scolded lawmakers for openly putting women in danger. “Ms. Hennessy —” Schwertner interrupted a minute into her testimony. “Your time is done.“