I don't know anymore

i love you trans men. i love you trans women. i love you enbies. bigender + agender folk. those whose identities are considered complicated or difficult to understand.

i love you trans people of color. disabled trans people. fat trans people. intersex people who choose to id themselves as trans. trans people who don’t pass or simply don’t wish to. i love trans people.

i cannot stress enough how hard we need to love each other. instead of undermining experiences + trauma, we need to open heartedly listen to each other.

>You see a strange creature dart under your car.

>CHECK UNDER CAR.

>You have discovered COTURNIX QUAIL CHICK.

>Side quest "WHY DID THE QUAIL CROSS THE ROAD" available.

>WHY DID THE QUAIL CROSS THE ROAD: Ask your next door neighbor about the COTURNIX QUAIL CHICK.

>NEIGHBOR: I haven't seen that before. Though I hear THE FARMER ACROSS THE WAY caught a strange bird on his property last week.

>WHY DID THE QUAIL CROSS THE ROAD: Ask THE FARMER ACROSS THE WAY about the COTURNIX QUAIL CHICK.

>THE FARMER ACROSS THE WAY: We don't keep birds. But you might want to ask THE FARMER DOWN THE ROAD. He has lots of birds.

>THE FARMER ACROSS THE WAY gave you two SWEET CORN and one CUCUMBER.

>WHY DID THE QUAIL CROSS THE ROAD: Talk to THE FARMER DOWN THE ROAD.

>THE FARMER DOWN THE ROAD: Oh! You found my COTURNIX QUAIL CHICK! He keeps escaping. Thank you so much!!

This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.