@NiveusLepus

🤗 The day after a hard one greets you, dear bun - and so do I.

I hope you find such gentleness in the world as you return to it today, at your own pace and in your own way.

Be kind to yourself always. Humans set the strangest, silliest timelines on healing - when we should definitely take after all the critters in the field, who know that to be here at all is a gift.

(As are you. 💜)

@MLClark For me the 16th of January is the true end of the year. It's officially 2024 for me now, and we're out of the holidays.

The news today has me quite worried. New Anti Trans bills are popping everywhere, and it's quite painful to see.

But on the micro we are on the go. Pushing into the run today was exactly what I needed.

With the cold giving way and things smoothing I'm hoping Ill have a good period of keeping my regular routine.

@NiveusLepus

SCOTUS avoiding the bathroom issue & Vivek tanking when he tried to lean hard into transphobia to offset the racism of Republican voters are teeny tiny reminders that all the recent cruel acts against fellow human beings *can* be made to lose their power again. We have a long way to go, but the chinks in the armour *are* there.

🤗 Welcome to 2024! It's off to a weird start and some have taken bites from the wormy part already, but there are still a few healthful nibbles in it yet!

@MLClark @NiveusLepus Time and time again, we see transphobia is a losing campaign strategy. Even if that's because GOP voters are just sick of hearing about trans people, I'll take it if it gets bigots or if office or keeps them from reaching out in the first place.

@lenaoflune @NiveusLepus

It's still sickening that our cultures pursue political power by testing out different scapegoats, causing so much suffering just to see what will happen to their polling numbers if they do.

We don't talk about the ultimate failure of this strategy as if it lessens the horror of the struggle; we talk about it because we *have* to hold firm to the fact that this violence is a choice. We'd simply go even madder if we let their false narrative of inevitability win.

💜🫂

@MLClark @lenaoflune I am a student of history, it was my minor in college, and seeing these bills is terrifying.

The sheer volume of them is staggering. In 2023, over 500 anti LGBT+ laws were introduced. A statistic I heard this morning said in the first 3 weeks of 2024, 500 have been proposed.

Not all passed, but enough did, and the legislation is evolving from protecting children, to excluding adult TG folk from care, and from public spaces.

1/?

@MLClark @lenaoflune

In West Virigina, they are considering a law that would not only mandate reparitive therapy for Trans individuals, but declare us obscene, and subject us to felony arrest if we got within 2500 feet of a school... Registered Sex offenders, for refrence, only have to stay a 1000 feet away.

Whats more, the conservative "Project 2025" as highlighted the targeting of Trans rights specifically as a core issue

@MLClark @lenaoflune Historically the pattern is clear. It starts with laws like this, and it ends in a far darker space and the conservatives are showing no signs of slowing down. Rather they are escalating in both rhetoric and legislative violence.

@NiveusLepus @MLClark So... I'm also pretty afraid of what those in power can and are doing, and I certainly don't mean to minimize that or put on rose-colored glasses about the courts being our last line of defense. They have power and genocide is on their mind.

But what we're seeing is that when people run on transphobia as their platform, by and large, they lose. This is the part that gives me hope that we can get them out of and keep them out of power.

I may be naively hopeful, however :/

@lenaoflune @MLClark I hope you are right...

The Jewish people intially challenged the limitations of their rights within the 3rd reich in the courts, but a year after the first salvo, the Nazi's politicized the courts and made membership in the Nazi party mandatory for judges.

And they lost the courts as quickly as they lost their initial rights... And that terrifies me.

After that the attacks expanded, they were labeled, pushed into ghettos, and in 41, the "Final Solution" was enacted.

@NiveusLepus @lenaoflune

Shoah is its own historical nightmare.

Before it happened in full, Nazis destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, robbing all of humanity of a wealth of sexual health and trans and queer research in 1933. We don't need to reach for and compare ourselves with the murder of 6 million Jewish peoples; the Nazis came after queer folk on their own, too - and we do not *ever* want that to happen again.

@MLClark @lenaoflune They absolutely did. That's where the pink triangle came from. What we have in common is that we are both minority groups and therefore easily marginalized and targeted.

@NiveusLepus @lenaoflune

💜

Your fear matters. Your despair matters. The anxiety built up from watching day in & day out as the news tells you people want you not to exist matters SO MUCH too.

Lena and I are talking about a form of resistance to hate that involves refusing the despair these wannabe fascists *want* queer folk, women, and other minorities to live with every day.

But that resistance isn't intended to dismiss your despair. It's a way of rising to meet it.

You are not alone.

🫂