Can you give me an update on the current trans legislation?
So as I’m sure many of you all know if you follow my stuff, there has been a huge number of anti-trans bills this year in legislatures, many of which have passed, many of which have been horribly heinous.
The good news is the courts have started striking them down.
And I don’t mean liberal California courts with democrat-appointed justices.
I mean Trump-appointed judges have been striking down this shit because it’s fucking unconstitutional.
And like surprise!
Everyone already knew this.
The thing is, almost all of these bills are copypasta from other bills.
There is one small group of people who are on a group chat, I shit you not, there is an article about this, I can send it you if you want to see it, who are just all putting the same bills in every fucking legislature.
They fly.
They are the same anti-trans, special detransitioner people out to every fucking state to say the same fucking things every time and pass the same stupid fucking bills.
Every time.
And they are all unconstitutional because there is no constitutional way to ban drag.
There is no constitutional way to ban the existence of trans people like it is a human right.
It’s a human right according to the United Nations.
It’s a human right according to our Supreme Court.
It’s already fucking established.
It has been established forever.
So the Arkansas Law which was a drag ban got struck down by a Trump judge who fucking roasted them.
It’s a great decision if you have time to read it.
It is glorious.
He says that it is so blatantly unconstitutional that he doesn’t even need to just say like a portion of the law can’t stand that the whole thing gets to just be completely fucking struck because there is no way any part of it can be valid.
And then the drag ban in Tennessee has also gotten struck down by another Trump appointee like great, so good.
And so it’s just – it’s great that we are getting these cases.
And here is the thing.
Right now, where we are at with anti-trans stuff is that they are just shitting out as many anti-trans bills as they can everywhere and passing as many as they can everywhere.
In Montana, they pulled some thoroughly illegal moves to stop Representative Zooey Zephyr from speaking who is the first openly trans representative there.
And then with her being unable to speak, they went ahead and passed the bill.
In Nebraska, a woman had been filibustering the entire freaking chamber for months because she has a trans kid and all of her fellow legislators know that and they ended up removing her again, illegally so that they could go ahead and pass their anti-trans bills.
These folks don’t fucking care about the actual laws.
They don’t care that it’s unconstitutional.
They know.
They don’t fucking care.
They don’t care that what they are doing is all completely illegal, completely not allowed by the exact rules that they have passed, that they have agreed to abide by.
They don’t care.
There’s this great scene in, what’s the name of the movie with Kenneth Branagh about the Nazis?
Where like they are in this room and they are like, “Well, but what about the law?” and he is like, “OK. How many of you in here are lawyers?”
They are all fucking lawyers.
He is like, “The law says what we say it says.”
That’s the thing.
The law says what we say it says.
That is how they are operating.
They don’t care.
They know everything that they are doing is blatantly illegal, that it is all wrong, and they don’t fucking care.
So it’s great that this shit is all getting struck down by the courts, by Trump-appointed judges.
And also, it’s not going to change anything probably.
It’s great to get these victories.
We need to keep getting these victories.
And what we are heading towards – what we are already in is a slow civil war, a cold civil war.
We are already in a place where there is a civil war ongoing in this country and it’s not with like battle lines.
It’s around all of this weird legal bullshit.
It’s around gerrymandering.
It’s around – which gerrymandering has also been recently overturned by several justices you would not have expected.
There is a very real happening in this country where conservatives are just doing whatever the fuck they want to because they can and it seems like most democrats are just hanging out being like, “No! That’s not in the rules. You need to stop. You’re supposed to stop now.”
But not actually doing anything about it.
And so, I’m glad that these laws keep getting struck down.
It’s great.
And also, how many democrats are talking about trans people and how we need to support them?
How many of them are getting on their social media, getting on the news, talking openly about supporting trans people?
How many of them are beating their drum about how this is an on-going genocide of trans people?
The democrats, I don’t think they actually care about trans people.
I think that they don’t like drag bans and it looks bad for these bills to be passing, but I don’t think they are going to actually do anything about it.
The problem with what is happening right now is that the systems that would enforce these rulings, the systems that would ensure that we as a country follow our own laws, that we as a country continue to give people human rights that they have already earned because they exist as humans, those systems are deeply fucking broken.
They were designed for the best case scenario.
And what we have instead is people who are willing to do whatever it fucking takes to win.
When you have sociopaths, the only thing that can stop them is sociopathy.
We don’t have anyone on the left who is really standing up and making this shit stop.
The few people we have are like Representative Zooey Zephyr who is a trans woman and therefore deeply invested in it and then a representative from Nebraska whose kid is trans.
But people who are not themselves trans and who do not have a direct close relative who is trans or a partner who is trans, they are doing fuck all about this.
I don’t know how this country comes back from where we are.
Thomas Jefferson himself said that we should be rewriting the constitution every 20 years so that we aren’t governed by dead people.
Our country has not rewritten our constitution since its founding.
There have been amendments but not a ton.
And the last one was a really fucking long time ago.
The thing that we have guiding our country right now is something that is toothless and it is something that we don’t even enforce and it’s something that was not designed for the world we live in.
The second amendment did not anticipate the ability of a regular person to get their hands on an automatic weapon or something that is easily converted to fully automatic.
We are at a time in this country where everything we already have established is so deeply broken and the people who could fix it either would not or can’t or don’t know how to.
And I think that the best thing I’ve seen about this is that what this means for all of us is we need to focus on building our communities of care.
We need to focus on building mutual aid networks.
We need to focus on building the connections we have with each other, the ways that we take care of the people who are our people, that we take care of our neighbors, we take care of the queers and the trans people and the black people and indigenous people and other people of color that we take care of each other because there is no one in this country who is going to stop to fuck up and take care of us unfortunately.
There are occasional outliers for this, but for the most part, we are going to have to just take care of each other.
We are in a country that is falling apart/has already fallen apart and all we are going to be able to do at this point is just watch it go.
And that’s why we need to take care of each other.
It is great that these bills are getting struck down.
And I don’t know that the realities of day to day life for people in Arkansas and in Tennessee have significantly changed because of these court decisions.
Like yes, they can now get a permit for their Pride event but also, that doesn’t mean the cops aren’t going to still come and fucking hassle them.
There are multiple instances recently of cops coming to Pride events or to protests and explicitly helping fascists because it’s the same thing.
They are the same people.
So it is great to have some legal victories.
It is great to be overturning some laws.
And the courts aren’t going to save us.
The police as sure as fuck not going to save us.
We are the only ones who can save us and we need to start showing up for each other.
If you’re a cis person, you need to be doing 10 times more to support trans people.
You need to be buying them dinner and doing their laundry and washing their dishes and talking to every cis person you know who is even a little bit bigoted about it and making sure that they know why that’s a terrible position to have, how that makes them a fascist and that you are not cool with that, because they will not listen to me.
They will not listen to trans people.
They don’t give fuck what we think.
If you are someone who is trans or nonbinary or questioning your gender, find other people who are like you and just dive the fuck in.
We need to be closer to each other.
We need to be taking care of each other.
I’m going to be starting a monthly munch here in Atlanta for trans and nonbinary people.
No cis people allowed, not because we don’t love you but because we need a space that is ours.
And I think the first one is on August 13th.
But find events like that.
Find events in your area for trans and nonbinary people where you can get together, meet more of them, build community, get close with each other, and develop those networks of mutual aid and community care because that is what’s going to get us through.
That’s what we need to survive this time.
That’s what we need to get through this period of upheaval and potential dissolution of all the systems we’ve come to rely upon.
This is not a country that is functioning well.
This is not a country that’s functioning well at all.
This is a country where insurers have sent newborns in the NICU letters about why their care is not going to be covered.
Not to the parents, to the infant.
This is not a country that’s functioning.
So build your plans.
Come up with how you’re going to take care of each other.
Come up with how you’re going to take care of yourself.
Take good care of the people around you.
Focus on that because government is not going to save you, the judges are not going to save you, we have to save us.
