People put so much into seeing Stonewall as this symbol. And at the time we just thought, ‘Oh, I guess it’s just that time of the month when cops raid the bar, so they can make their numbers for arresting fags for the month of June.’ But people get so concerned about the details. I don’t know about all the crap I’ve heard all these years. Sometimes it’s ‘Oh, someone threw a high-heel shoe.’ Sometimes it’s ‘No, gurl, it was a Molotov cocktail,’ or ‘Somebody slugged a cop.’
All I know is that night, they came in, and nobody budged. I guess we were just sick of their shit. And suddenly we were fighting, and we were kicking their ass. The cops had to back up into the bar. We had them cornered. Next thing you knew, the riot squad was there, and baby, it was on. ‘The night of Stonewall’ is how people talk about it, but it was more like a week. People want to know the little details, but what I remember most is being scared as hell. We were fighting for our lives. They’re still killing us; they’re still not giving us the respect we’re due for putting up with their shit all these years. I’m giving you the facts about how shit’s been from the beginning, and what’s gone on, how the law was in our daily lives—the facts! And so with regard to that producer lady, the whole time I just thought to myself, ‘There’s gonna be so much of me on the cutting-room floor.’
—Miss Major, from Miss Major Speaks: Conversations with a Black Trans Revolutionary
the absolute number one thing that you as a cis woman can do to make yourself a better “ally” for trans women in your relationships with them is to learn about transgender medicine.
i was at planned parenthood at the start of december for a gender care follow-up. now, im on bicalutamide, which i get online, instead of spironolactone because spiro sucks and bica is awesome. the GAC clinician DID NOT KNOW WHAT BICALUTAMIDE WAS, which is absolutely absurd given that it is the second most widely used anti-androgen in the US, and because planned parenthood has known for seven months that im on bica (plus my dosage, monthly liver panels, etc). maybe even worse was that she effectively said “if you want to continue being a patient here [and, implicitly, being prescribed estrogen here], i need you to have testosterone labs.” for reference, T labs are useless on bica, as bica does not block T production, it blocks T reception, which means that blood T levels (which is what T labs measure) are much HIGHER than almost anyone, including cisgender men.
if you want to be a good “ally” to your trans girl friends or partners or whatever, learn our medicine. learn the different anti-androgens, their effective dosages, their side effects. learn the different types of injectable, pill, gel, and patch estrogens, their half-lives (if relevant), their dosages, how to use/take them. learn which forms of injectable estrogens are best subcutaneous vs intramuscular, and what the difference in efficacy between the two is. learn what surgeries make up the umbrella of facial feminization surgery. learn about us.
trans women are the only people who know much of anything about our medicine. for most of us, this is one of the most important facets of our lives (if not the most important one). if you want to call yourself an “ally”, if you want to be safe for trans women, if you want to be someone who trans women seek out for advice and companionship, learn about us.
So turns out the US are setting babies up for a lifetime of illness and increased likelihood of liver cancer in Guinea Bissau in the name of “research”
7000 newborns will be denied the neoneatal HepB vaccine until 6 weeks to ‘prove’ that the HepB vaccine is linked to neurodevelopmental disability on the directions of the Department of Health vis RFK Jr and in collaboration with researchers in Denmark, despite the fact that the vaccine’s efficacy rate and best protection is when administered to newborns, and the total lack of correlation between vaccination and neurodevelopmental disabilities.
Guinea Bissau has some of the highest rates of HepB on the continent, and infants are the group at the highest risk of contracting HepB, leading to chronic hepatitis & long term hepatic diseases like cirrhosis and liver failure as well as increased chance of liver cancer.
The study can’t be carried out in the US or Denmark because it fails almost every benchmark for medical ethics — surprising absolutely nobody, it is in fact heinously unethical to expose babies to preventable disease that causes liver failure and liver cancer, but the “study” has been green lit in Guinea.
Fuck the US imperial project in Africa, fuck RFK Jr and the US Department of Health, and fuck every single collaborative researcher in Denmark. This is some nightmare Tuskegee Study shit and every single individual involved deserves to be in The Hague.
obviously the fact that you can intentionally astroturf a public scandal against a transgender person and completely ruin her career for the crime of Doing Her Job is the real story here and i by no means want to underplay the severity of that. but i do think it’s interesting in the context of the larger debates around academic integrity in the wake of chatgpt cheating scandals that these institutions are openly revealing how little academic integrity actually factors in to how they operate, and who is allowed to succeed within them. It’s difficult to make me believe that the thing posing the biggest threat to The Sanctity Of The College Essay is that people might cheat their way out of doing them, when we have just witnessed an instance of someone turning in a barely coherent screed written with a sub-highschool level grasp of the english language and filled with blatant hatespeech and receiving zero academic consequences for doing so. Not only that, but attempting to hold this student to a standard of intellectual honesty you all seem very convinced is innate to higher learning is something that was structurally punished. I think we are all learning a lot these days about how exactly the US higher ed system functions, and what sort of people it is designed to serve, and what sort of purpose it serves for those people. Because it’s not for learning.
ALT
hey i think you have more or less completely misunderstood what kind of point i am trying to make with this post to the degree that i feel like it pretty much undermines everything you’re saying you believe in right now. this post is not about chatgpt use in schools at all. it’s about how higher education institutions exist primarily to uphold the status quo, reify pre-existing class boundaries, and mete out pathways to upward mobility under the guise of an intellectual meritocracy that does not hold up to even the slightest bit of actual scrutiny. if you care about reading and writing and believe in hope and betterment and love i think you’d benefit from less shadowboxing against the specter of ai-poisoned anti-intellectual teens, and more focusing on the way our education system has failed to foster an environment where these things are the priority by design.
i promise im not trying to be a dick and Clap Back here or anything, but surely you can understand why it’s kind of frustrating to have someone tack on a complaint about how “nobody reads” that seems to stem not from reading what i actually wrote as much as latching on to the singular mention of chatgpt and automatically assigning to it a stance i do not actually hold based on your preconception of where mentions of AI in the context of academia usually lead.
Y'know, I dislike AI art and hate the concept of DC and Marvel or other similar visual arts based companies ruining industries by getting into it. It’ll happen, and it’ll suck.
But I am fucking terrified of AI being used as a management tool for things like welfare or disability systems man.
That is, the Australian welfare dept. implemented an automated system that falsely flagged a lot of welfare recipients as in debt to the welfare dept., often to the tune of more money than these people had seen in their lifetimes, but because being in debt means your payments are cut off until the debt is settled $10, 000, 000 and $1, 000 were functionally the same for a lot of these people. It drove a lot of ‘em all the way into absolute poverty and many to suicide.
Then you see stories stating that future disability claim assessment will be “AI assisted,” or that AI will be used to calculate how much funding disabled people will receive on the disability system,
Oh they’re going to murder people through poverty and they’re going to blame a robot for it to escape legal consequences.
And then finally, you see all these fucking ghouls acting like, “oh but AI allows people with no hands to create pictures when they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to hold a brush.” Man
as someone who remembers the patriot act and all the conversation surrounding it, it’s a bit… of an experience being able to remember how many people pointed out that Terrorist was a politically convenient term which could be used to dehumanise and legally strip the rights from someone and that eventually all this would be used internally. and the response was ‘nuh uh only browns with funny headgear are terrorists’. and then two decades of 'fighting age males’ being blown to pieces at weddings because they might have, maybe, looked at a terrorist once. A week ago a head of state is black bagged in the middle of the night by the US for being a 'narcoterrorist’. And now an unarmed, random woman - white, citizen - is gunned down by jackboot thugs and before her body is cold she is, of course, a domestic terrorist.
If you are reading this, you need to know that the moment the US state needs to kidnap you, the moment a drone pilot decides you’re in the wrong place, the moment you are bleeding to death on the sidewalk, you will be a Terrorist. Because anything can be done to a Terrorist.
If you use your synagogue as an outpost for Israel, your synagogue deserves to be protested. If your synagogue is selling stolen land it deserves to be protested.
The Synagogue that was protested last night in Queens was hosting a real estate event.
They were selling stolen Palestinian land.
You’re gonna hear a lot about how this protest is “antisemitic” or how it hurt people’s feelings but I need you all to know that the counter protestors were chanting “We love ICE”
Fuck these fascists, fuck their synagogues, and fuck their feelings. Keep protesting the selling of stolen land.
ALT
