Actual genetic testing for intersex, gnc, and trans people is going to be great because everybody in the workplace is going to shuffle into the break room (”beats workin’” one of the old white guys will say) and we’ll sit down at the plastic lunch tables and management will pass out a little baggie with a tube to spit in and painstakingly go over how to seal it and affix the label. It’s just like drug testing, you did that when we hired you, except you can’t fail! And you get twenty minutes off your workday, right? Great.
I could get lucky at this point. It doesn’t always show up on tests. I wouldn’t say that my body is a fifty-fifty split. But.
Days or weeks later a couple people from management will pull me off the lanes and take me into the nurse’s office. They’ll open the door for me and say “Sorry, buddy, I know this is a hassle” and they’ll say I have to do it again because my sample looked contaminated. (I did like a 23andMe thing once and they kept telling me they thought my sample must have gotten mixed with some else’s – it’s probably just the way these labs work, the checking process for your sample is probably automated.) But I’ll grunt and say “it’s fine” and sit in a chair and spit into another tube while they stare at me. I might have to repeat the process until they figure out I used to be twins, a boy twin and a girl twin, and my genetics reflect that. (”Oh wow I didn’t know that about you,” will the manager say, trying really hard to make encouraging small talk.)
Then I’ll find out that there’s some problem with my paycheck or the ID reader thing won’t let me clock in and I’ll go to the HR desk and spend like ten minutes being bored in line while the people in front of me figure out their parking passes or lost passwords and they say there’s some red tape I have to jump through about my gender, it’s not a big deal, you just have to go get a doctor to sign off on – (awkward pause) – on one or another before I go back to work, it’s a federal regulation thing. I’ll irritably play a lot of phone tag trying to make sure I don’t use my UPT (unpaid time off) hours while I can’t work, and then go to the health center the next town over where I used to get my fillings done. The 21-year-old receptionist will give me kind of a pained look when she calls me to the front and I’ll try to act casual for her sake, or maybe I’ll feel defiant and show her I’m uncomfortable and annoyed just to make her feel bad, because she’s the closest approximate thing to a target. (although I won’t, because I’m too old for that and it’s not her fault). The doctor will give me a tight smile and say “Sorry, I know this is invasive.” Then I’ll go home and bitch about it on Tumblr.
I don’t know exactly what happens next, maybe I’ll lose my job and the state will give me a letter saying that owing to United States regulation they can’t offer Medicaid to (they’ll phrase it in the most neutral possible way, like “those with a gender or sex ambiguity“ – you know, they’re trying to make it sound like they’re still progressive and their hands are tied, all saying that gender and sex are different), and then I’ll bitch about that on Tumblr too, but whatever, I managed bipolar for so long when I was undiagnosed, I don’t need to afford my meds.
That’s about as far as my imagination goes, but even if they decided to straight-up euthanize me it’s going to be boring, and there’ll be a lot of papers to sign and a lot of shuffling around near plastic tables under fluorescent lights, and it’s not going to feel dramatic and it’s not going to feel like something with a clear way to fight. Jackbooted thugs who I can heroically punch or physically escape from will probably not show up at my house in the middle of the night (and if they do I’d really be fucked, but at least I’d get an adrenaline rush out of it).
I dunno, it might come from being a Slav and knowing people who lived under Communism, but I see the future and not only are we all going to lose our rights and die, it’s going to be slow, boring, and really fucking annoying, and because of that it’ll creep up on us.
Of course, the upside of this is that the change we want will creep up on them too. You vote, your friends vote, Republicans lose the majority. You vote (vote, goddamn you) in local elections and get better quality candidates if you don’t like the ones we got. Donation posts go around Tumblr and we can gofundme crack teams of immigration lawyers. (Also, check Charity [Navigator] for charities that work with refugees and immigrants.) (While you’re at it, here are [some] LGBT charities too, including one for intersex rights and those supporting LGBT immigrants and asylum seekers.) The ways that you can help are also not dramatic. When they come you have to notice them.
They are also vulnerable to a death by a thousand cuts. Don’t forget that.
I did this last year and inexplicably turned out to be eligible for Medicaid in WV, which I STILL have. Absolute and total lifechanger that’s letting me go to school instead of having to work full time.
An anguished question from a Trump supporter: “Why do liberals think Trump supporters are stupid?”
The serious answer: Here’s what we really think about Trump supporters – the rich, the poor, the malignant and the innocently well-meaning, the ones who think and the ones who don’t…
That when you saw a man who had owned a fraudulent University, intent on scamming poor people, you thought “Fine.”
That when you saw a man who had made it his business practice to stiff his creditors, you said, “Okay.”
That when you heard him proudly brag about his own history of sexual abuse, you said, “No problem.”
That when he made up stories about seeing muslim-Americans in the thousands cheering the destruction of the World Trade Center, you said, “Not an issue.”
That when you saw him brag that he could shoot a man on Fifth Avenue and you wouldn’t care, you chirped, “He sure knows me.”
That when you heard him illustrate his own character by telling that cute story about the elderly guest bleeding on the floor at his country club, the story about how he turned his back and how it was all an imposition on him, you said, “That’s cool!”
That when you saw him mock the disabled, you thought it was the funniest thing you ever saw.
That when you heard him brag that he doesn’t read books, you said, “Well, who has time?”
That when the Central Park Five were compensated as innocent men convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and he angrily said that they should still be in prison, you said, “That makes sense.”
That when you heard him tell his supporters to beat up protesters and that he would hire attorneys, you thought, “Yes!”
That when you heard him tell one rally to confiscate a man’s coat before throwing him out into the freezing cold, you said, “What a great guy!”
That you have watched the parade of neo-Nazis and white supremacists with whom he curries favor, while refusing to condemn outright Nazis, and you have said, “Thumbs up!”
That you hear him unable to talk to foreign dignitaries without insulting their countries and demanding that they praise his electoral win, you said, “That’s the way I want my President to be.”
That you have watched him remove expertise from all layers of government in favor of people who make money off of eliminating protections in the industries they’re supposed to be regulating and you have said, “What a genius!”
That you have heard him continue to profit from his businesses, in part by leveraging his position as President, to the point of overcharging the Secret Service for space in the properties he owns, and you have said, “That’s smart!”
That you have heard him say that it was difficult to help Puerto Rico because it was the middle of water and you have said, “That makes sense.”
That you have seen him start fights with every country from Canada to New Zealand while praising Russia and quote, “falling in love” with the dictator of North Korea, and you have said, “That’s statesmanship!”
That Trump separated children from their families and put them in cages, managed to lose track of 1500 kids. has opened a tent city incarceration camp in the desert in Texas – he explains that they’re just “animals” – and you say, “well, ok then.”
That you have witnessed all the thousand and one other manifestations of corruption and low moral character and outright animalistic rudeness and contempt for you, the working American voter, and you still show up grinning and wearing your MAGA hats and threatening to beat up anybody who says otherwise.
What you don’t get, Trump supporters in 2018, is that succumbing to frustration and thinking of you as stupid may be wrong and unhelpful, but it’s also…hear me…charitable.
Because if you’re NOT stupid, we must turn to other explanations, and most of them are *less* flattering.
Basically, my take on the voting thing is that, while strategic voting may be a low impact strategy for most important issues, for a great many of us it’s also a low cost strategy – and the fact of the matter is that low cost, low impact actions are the foundation of political activism. High impact actions may be more satisfying, but trying to engage exclusively in high impact actions – to the point that you’re willing to dismiss low impact actions as frivolous distractions – typically just means that you end up taking no action at all.
Disabled people shouldn’t be expected to be ridiculously talented or have savant-like abilities that ‘make up’ for their disability in order to to be respected. It’s become such a common trope that people forget how unrealistic of an expectation it is. We’re human beings, not inspiration porn for neurotypical/able-bodied people to consume.
I will be reblogging a lot of posts about the attempts to defund/tarnish/etc. AO3/the OTW that have fucking amazing important content FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE. (tag http://redshoesnblueskies.tumblr.com/search/censorship if you want to find a pile of them)
…frankly if y’all aren’t doing the same, I’m boggled as to WHY NOT – but hey, maybe not everyone gives a shit that fandom would lose our homebase and be instantly opened up to actually quite really large quantities of legal action against us from all sides if AO3 goes down.
Reblog this shit people – we can’t do very much other than vote when it comes to current politics BUT WE CAN SURE AS FUCK DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS.
STEP UP. Name the truth about why the attacks on AO3/OTW’s ‘finances’ are happening – it’s fundamentally the same attack made against every fandom space ever: “I find your story-content preference to be amoral and I will take the whole archive down to Defend Purity.”
Name the real reason. Keep naming it.
If we don’t defend AO3 with every means we have, we don’t deserve to have it.
____
fandom history links – read them. this is why we need AO3. this is why we made AO3.
what fanfic, fanworks and fandom were like before AO3, before we had that home, before we had the safety of owning our own spaces (’We have to own the servers’!), and before we had the freakin’ legal help that AO3 gives (can you defend yourself against a ‘fanfic isn’t fair-use’ lawsuit from a motion picture company? cause I know I sure can’t….).
Redshoes has been around the fucking block. So have I. This is the first and probably last time I’ll do this, but I also remember what fandom was like before AO3, and it was much much MUCH MUCH worse.
Don’t be a dumbass who would rather burn your fields to ash before any fruit you might bear gets problematic.
Also? Don’t ever ever EVER, E V E R tell other people how to process their trauma. God knows htp fic is scary as hell, and I tagged it for others’ safety, but I wrote it that way on purpose. I WROTE IT THAT WAY ON PURPOSE.
A guy just came to my house while I was home alone to ask if I was single why are men like this
Okay y’know what I’m gonna soapbox for a hot minute
When I was in high school, a man who I’d thought was the parent of a school friend followed me out to the grocery store parking lot greenhouse where I worked. It was dark, and late, and it was me, alone, in a chain link enclosure with one exit and a register full of cash. He called me up to the fence and asked if I wanted to get dinner, or go dancing. I was scared and shaking and told him no several times, and he only left when I falsely said I had a boyfriend. I was very aware that if he were to come over the fence, or just wait at the exit until I eventually had to leave, I could do nothing about it.
When my hair was very short, a hairdresser sent me to the barber’s side of the store so they could get the back of my head with clippers. The barber followed me out to my car to ask me out afterwards. I was very aware that we were the only people in the parking lot when it happened, and that the lot itself was tucked behind the building with no clear visibility to the road.
Today, a man I’ve met once made it very clear he knows where I live, and used that knowledge to express a romantic interest. If he ever decides that he’s unhappy with how I responded, he knows where I live. He knows what my car looks like. It is impossibly easy for him to determine when I’m home alone, and now I have to live with that knowledge.
Every woman I know has at least one story like this. My roommate had to be escorted to her car every night when she was a waitress, in case some man was waiting for her or a coworker’s shift to end.
If the person you want to ask out cannot physically run away from you when you are asking, YOU CANNOT ASK THEM OUT. You cannot ask someone out if they are at work. You cannot ask someone out if you’ve followed them to a remote/unoccupied/enclosed area. You cannot GO TO SOMEONE’S HOME UNINVITED to ask them out. You are not being romantic. You are not “taking initiative”. You are terrifying the person you want to woo. If they say yes, it is not because they want to, it is because they are terrified of what might happen if they say no.
I’m so tired of being terrified by men who think they’re being romantic.
“Every woman” you say. Do you personally know every woman in the world? Don’t presume to speak for others, and don’t make this a gendered issue either.
Actually every woman in the world is in one big group chat and they’re all telling you to fuck off
I’ve never actually seen what it looked like before Mt. Rushmore…it’s so saddening.
P r e a c h
More shit i didn’t know til literally just now. Jesus fuck. I had no idea mt rushmore was a sacred mountain desecrated so we could see a bunch of big ass white dude faces.
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