#i get a bucket of kitty litter for my classroom

[twilightown]

*

[nokingsonlyfooles]

It follows you...

Yep. There it is. Bound to happen. This is still not as bad as Arizona - which, my followers should know, I fled due primarily to the concentration camps for tots, but this BS was ramping up as I got out and continued after I left. And, yes, the "children are identifying as kitty-cats" lie, baby-talk and all, has made its way here too.

Do you want to know why there's cat litter in some US classrooms, Canada? Because I know, and I'll tell ya.

It's so they can make an emergency bucket toilet in the event of a lockdown during a shooting. Children in the States go to school every day knowing they may die in any number of fun ways, and being shot is just one of them. To make them - and the rest of us - feel a bit better about that, ha-ha, we tried to make an absorbent material available for them to pee in while they're waiting for an active shooter to break down their door and kill them.

Now, you have much less of a gun problem, Canada, but that's a goal you can shoot for if you so desire! Ha-ha! I don't know what it is about the disintegration of American conservativism and the Republican party and democracy itself you find so attractive, but if you feel like you need that in your culture, you can have it! Your system has similar vulnerabilities to exploit! Adopt, adapt and improve!

We knew that, probably, we weren't going to find a safe place to land, just a relatively safer one. It's been good for me. I am finally getting healthcare - though it took a shitton of luck and perseverance. And I'm gonna need even more of it to keep fighting for a space for myself and others like me.

Canada, you are repairing the broken body of an anarchist who is willing to burn property and politicians to the ground to protect people. I don't want to show up to a protest and take attention away from others who need it by having a health emergency, so I'm relatively quiet right now. That will change (if my luck holds!). And, by god, you couldn't resist giving me a reason to get back out there, couldja?

Nobody is bothering to attack these "no gender or sexuality in school" liars on the basis of language. Which, inasmuch is they're trying to pen legislation, is the only way to go. If they get what they say they want, cis and het need to go in the trash right next to everything queer. That's... most of the curriculum. Everything referring to boys and girls, moms and dads, even the concept of children (where do children come from, again?). If nothing else, that should be rejected on the basis of how expensive it is.

But everyone in politics and the media seems willing to accept the comfortable fiction that cisgender isn't a gender and heterosexuality isn't a sexuality. It's implicit that we're only having a conversation about whether or not to teach the weird ones, but that is not what these people are saying. The protest signs and the rules and laws they write do not make exceptions. Well, that would look like discrimination! Because IT IS, motherfuckers.

I'm not ready to get out there and start making noise yet. I still got medication woes. Increasing the estrogen dented the amount of thyroid I'm able to absorb - as expected. I'm doing a little Flowers-for-Algernon and monitoring my symptoms so I can give the thyroid guy more information, probably I'll get back to him next week.

May I add that my hormone specialist does not deal with estrogen at all because, although it is a hormone, estrogen is gendered? I have to go to the lady doctor to manage my lady hormone, and then run back to the other guy for the rest of me. Conservatives, I would support a little less gender in society, if that was really what you wanted. I have a vested self-interest here.

Gotta make at least one more lap - gynecologist to endocrinologist and back - and then we'll see. Fingers crossed for a new angry NB in the new year! In the meantime, Godspeed to everyone out there trying to make a difference for the better.

[jediplinth]

Here's a weird birthday request - but read to the end first.

Let's talk about nut allergies. Somewhere between .5% and 1% of the population has a nut allergy. As a result, a lot of food establishments are very clear about what food may contain nuts. But what if that wasn't the case. What if instead, for example, schools (just to pick one) said "we won't do anything about nut allergies and if you have one, you have to deal. No going in the cafeteria. Should it matter? Epipens exist, so if the kids have an exposure then too bad, they just need their Epipen. OK - what if we said that Epipens, one of the key things that makes nut allergies non-lethal won't be available to kids under 18. What do you think will happen? I mean obviously, kids will die - but you know it's only .5% or so. One or two out of every two hundred. What if now people in power decide that it's not enough to keep them out of the cafeteria but we're going to out and out demonize anyone who has a nut allergy. Politicians will run on platforms where they spew hate about people with nut allergies and do everything they can to try to erase them from society. That would be pretty awful.

This is ridiculous, right? Totally. Except this is not about nut allergies. This is about people who are trans. They represent roughly the same percentage of the general population. And everything I wrote is happening today: they are being denied access to bathrooms. They are being denied access to medication. They are being demonized by politicians who are running on platforms that include fomenting hate.

Let's go back in time to the 70's and 80's. Very similar things were happening to gays and lesbians. The rhetoric was the same. "What if my kid's teachers are gay? They shouldn't be around kids!" Teachers who were gay were being outed and fired because people were sure - totally sure - that they would groom their kids and MAKE THEM GAY. Or that they will ABUSE OUR KIDS. Sound familiar? It should. It's the same playbook.

If you think I'm wrong, I will offer you a challenge. Find me cases where someone has legitimately been arrested for grooming a kid to be trans or a trans person abusing a kid and for each one I will post 8 cases where priests/pastors/police officers/politicians have been arrested for actual sexual abuse of minors. This is, unfortunately, very easy on my side.

The playbook works. Why? Because parents are terrified that their kids will be, heaven forbid, different from other kids. They are terrified that their kids will be made pariahs so it's easy to convince them that it must be grooming or books. And in doing so, they're making it worse for all people who are trans.

"But Steve, trans doesn't exist! It's SIMPLE BIOLOGY! You get either two X chromosomes or an X and a Y! I learned that in high school." And you're right. You learned *simple* biology in high school. What you didn't get is that those XX and XY chromosomes aren't all the same and that there are pairs of genes in them that turn on/off all kinds of interesting things that affect you and your gender. For example, sometimes the genes in an XX pair turn on tetrachromacy, which allows the person *incredible* color vision. Some people say that gender is a spectrum and not a binary. I don't think this is quite right. Gender is a spectrum that is weighted heavily towards cis. This weighting makes it easier for people to assume that anything that isn't cis is somehow wrong.

"What about that thing in Virginia where they put buckets of kitty litter in classrooms for a student who identifies as a cat?" You fell for that bullshit story? The buckets of kitty litter are in classrooms for a very different reason: in case there is a school shooting and there is a lockdown and you have a room full of people all stuck in one place for *hours*. Let me say that again: the kitty litter story you heard is DISINFORMATION about gender identification. It's actually about school shootings and the NEED for that is a far worse indictment of society.

For the most part, you know what trans people would likely prefer to do? Live their lives as their best selves.

As of today, I have traveled around the sun 57 times. In that time I've worked with 4 people who are trans and hired 1 as a nanny. Do you want to know how it affected our work relationship? Not at all. Never came up except in one case where for an allyship program at work, I asked this person if I could ask them questions so that I could be a better ally. In the process, I found out just how challenging it was for them to go get actual treatment and now we're making it actively harder.

We are on a cusp here. I don't say this lightly. In May of 1933, the world's first clinic for trans people was broken into and occupied by Nazis and their entire library of research was burned. (ref: https://www.scientificamerican.com/.../the-forgotten.../ ). How far are we from this? Schools throughout red states are removing books. How long until the book burning starts? How long until people are isolated in ghettos? How long until people have to register as queer? How long until concentration camps? Because right now, we're at the fomenting hatred stage and book banning stage. We're at the stage where it's apparently easy for people to buy up cases of Bud Light and shoot them with guns to show how much they hate that Bud Light did a promo with a trans streamer. Yes, I know that I'm making a slippery slope argument, but I will say simply that history doesn't repeat itself. It rhymes, though.

So here's my birthday request: if you are in a position of privilege (I know I am - white cis het man - in the words of John Scalzi, I'm playing life at the lowest difficulty setting), use your privilege to speak up. Call people on their bullshit. If you're worried about confrontation, there are ways to do that non-confrontationally. For example, ask questions. Be a 4 year old and keep asking what might be obvious questions. How does that affect you? Where did you where this? Why is this an issue? Who told you that? Did they have an agenda? Wear them down but don't let them get away with it.

That's what I want for my birthday.